Delacroix settlers found themselves in an opulent natural bazaar: Part three of four

on August 03, 2010 at 6:00 AM, updated August 04, 2010 at 9:16 AM

Lloyd Serigne was 10 when his mother took the family on a trip to New Orleans to shop for items the natural bounty of their bayou home couldn't provide.

delacroix_camp_tricycle.JPGView full sizeThis Spanish muskrat trappers' camp near Delacroix was photographed in 1940 or 1941.

The city was just 30 miles away, but among the forested ridges and thick marshes of eastern St. Bernard Parish, their life was so complete, if isolated, that they only needed the city every year or two.

At the Woolworth's on Canal Street in the late 1950s, young Lloyd turned the faucet to wash his hands, and yanked them back, baffled.


He turned the faucet on and off several times to see if it would happen again. It did, and he left the bathroom thoroughly confused. Only a few houses on Delacroix Island had indoor plumbing at the time, and even they had to heat water over a fire.

He asked his mother: How does the hot water get in there?

She stared at him for a few seconds before dismissing him, in Spanish -- "Oh, don't bother me with things like that!"

She didn't know how the water got hot, either. The water heater, invented some 60 years earlier by Edwin Ruud, had yet to infiltrate life on the Island.

"It was a different world on the Island back then," Serigne said, recalling the story . "We did things the old ways."

Old timers, new times

Now 70, Serigne and his lifelong buddy Henry Martinez, 67, page through memories from a Delacroix childhood in the 1940s and '50s with smiles of amazement. Such "in-my-day" stories are the stuff of cliche in most places, but they are hardly hyperbole in the case of the bayou communities surrounding New Orleans. Their worlds didn't merely change in a generation: They disappeared.

delacroxi_camp_wide_boats.JPGView full sizeThis trapper's camp near Delacroix was photographed between 1939 and 1941.

The Delacroix of today resembles those childhood memories in name only. The dense, rich wetlands that provided sustenance and livelihoods have become a crumbling salt marsh with yawning open bays leading right to the Gulf. The thriving village is gone, replaced by a thin line of mostly sport fishing camps and the temporary chaos of the BP oil cleanup army.

But the original name of this barren landscape provides a clue to the natural bounty that once thrived here: Terre aux Boeufs, or "land of the buffalo."

"The name was given by Bienville," said William de Marigny Hyland, president of Los Isleños Heritage and Cultural Society and St. Bernard Parish historian. "The wild cattle were buffalo -- bison -- that he saw in some numbers all over this area."

It was high land, some of the most fertile on earth, with thick bottomland hardwood forests extending from the bayou ridges, followed by cypress swamps, then freshwater marshes. The salty Gulf was still many miles away.

Serigne's ancestors pioneered the landscape after the Civil War. Their forebears were Spanish immigrants from the Canary Islands who arrived in New Orleans between 1778 and 1779 and worked on plantations along the northern end of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, which flowed from the Mississippi River. When the war destroyed the plantation culture, they migrated down the bayou, where they found unsettled property owned by the absentee French landlord Francois du Suau de la Croix. The untamed land had plenty to offer.

The Islanders, as the new residents were called, had settled in one of North America's greatest natural shopping malls. The vast delta of the Mississippi was still growing into the Gulf of Mexico, a vibrant ecosystem building plenty of high ground for farms and settlements, and also producing enormous volumes of seafood, ducks and geese, upland game such as deer and elk, cypress and oak for boats and houses, and fur bearers such as otter, mink and muskrat. What Los Islenos didn't need for home consumption, they exported to the city for manufactured goods and cash.

delacroix_island_1961_aerial.JPGView full sizeThis aerial photo of Delacroix Island was taken in July 1961.

By the 1950s that lifestyle, like the wetlands, had changed little. Life -- commercial as well as social -- followed nature's calendar, moving from shrimp to trapping to fishing and back to shrimping again -- with crabbing throughout.

The wetlands had been healthy not just for survival, but for growth. The Delacroix of Serigne's childhood featured houses three and four deep, shaded and sheltered by oak, hackberry, maple and sycamore trees. As many homes and businesses were constructed on the west side of Bayou Terre aux Boeufs as the east side, which is the only settled bank today. The community bustled, and grew.

"We had three dance halls, churches, small groceries -- everything we needed," Martinez said. "It was a great place for kids. We had woods to play in, the bayou to swim in. We could go fishin', and huntin', and trappin'.

"And it was a very, very tight-knit place. Everyone knew everybody else. For kids, it was like you had 700 parents," so closely knit was the community of the 1950s. "If you misbehaved on one end of the bayou, your parents knew about it before you got home."

A world apart

Children and teens in nearby New Orleans, like other American kids, may have been worrying about the latest TV show, which fashions to wear to the Saturday hop or how to convince their parents to let them drive, but Delacroix kids were still connected to the land. School came only between seasons. Classes started in September, but when trapping season started in December most of the kids moved with their parents to distant cabins in the marsh, where they helped harvest muskrat, mink, otter and nutria. They seldom left before April. Serigne, his eight siblings and parents lived in a one-room cabin about 12 feet wide and 24 feet long -- about the size of a FEMA trailer.

"The boys old enough would help my daddy run the traps and fish crabs, and the younger boys, the girls and my mother, we would skin the rats, and put the skins on (frames) for drying," Serigne said.

They'd pack the meat in barrels to use for crabbing, which started when they got back to Delacroix in March.

"Our camp was on a bayou with several other families," Serigne said. "And the marsh back then was solid enough to walk on, so you didn't have to spend all your time in a pirogue."

And they had other visitors. Fur buyers made the rounds to purchase pelts, and grocers steered their floating markets to the outposts so families could restock their staples.

Formal education suffered, of course, but with marsh life so successful, a lack of book knowledge wasn't considered a handicap.

"Most of us didn't speak English until we went to the first grade, and that was something we needed to learn if we traveled to the outside," said Martinez, who still crabs commercially. "But most kids became fishermen and trappers like their daddies, got married to local girls and raised their own families there -- just like it was always done."

Trapping season was followed by a spring shrimp season that was profitable, but dangerous.

Fisherman stayed out weeks at a time back then, because shrimp dealers would meet them out in the bays, buying their catch straight from the boat.

"Well, to stay out, you needed to carry plenty of extra gas," Serigne recalled. "We'd have it in barrels tied to the boat, and it was always leaking, and of course guys were smoking or engines were sparking."

One or two boats would explode every year, he said.

"You'd hear this big boom and see a red glow, and you knew someone was in trouble," Serigne said.

delacroix_rented_cabin.JPGView full sizeOnly a dozen or so families still live on Delacroix Island full-time. The other homes and cabins are for recreational fisher such as bowfishers Jake Kerstetter, right, of Ohio and his buddy Gary Fogle, photographed returning to their rented cabin in Delacroix after a long night of fishing July 16.

'Chivos' coming down

Summer was crabbing time, but also the season for the "chivo" migration.

"We called the sports fishermen from the city 'chivos,' which is Spanish for goat," Serigne recalled with a laugh. "They would come down on the weekends and hire our fathers to take them out fishing.

"Visitors from the city always seemed to like to stand on top of the boat cabin or on boxes, probably to see across the marsh. So they were always wobbling like goats and often fell over.

"Look at that silly chivo," one of the locals would say, or "I got some chivos coming down."

Serigne and Martinez remember the security they felt on the bayou, the confidence that life would always be that way.

But change was coming, and at a pace that would stun them. They can pinpoint now what set the demise in motion: the arrival of hard surface roads and canal dredging.

Bob Marshall can be reached at or 504.826.3539.