top
US
US
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Hidden Louisiana: Bayou St Malo

by wtul news / eustatic / Breonne Dedecker
Clean reading of Hidden Louisiana: Bayou St Malo by Breonne Dedecker

read with permission

http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2015/03/hidden-louisiana-bayou-st-malo/

A visit to a long abandoned Maroon colony evokes an echo of desolation of past struggles.
Listen now:
Copy the code below to embed this audio into a web page:
HIDDEN LOUISIANA: BAYOU ST. MALO
by Breonne DeDecker Published March 2015
antigravity_vol12_issue5_Page_14_Image_0001“If you didn’t want to be found, this would definitely be the place to go,” says the pilot of the small boat, laughing. We turn around again. It’s a bright and chilly Sunday morning. I am surrounded on all sides by narrow ribbons of water that slither throughout the marshes of lower St. Bernard parish. Winter has rendered the marshgrass a pale gold, and the wind rattles the dry stalks together. The boat is captained by a friend: he’s a native of Plaquemines parish, and spends most of his days boating through or flying above the lower Mississippi delta around New Orleans. But even with his knowledge of the ins and outs of the meandering waterways between the city and the Gulf, a computer tablet running Googlemaps, and a navigational chart bought at the Hopedale marina, we’re a little lost.

We’re weaving northeast towards Bayou St. Malo. In the late 1700s, during Spanish rule, Bayou St. Malo was the territory of the largest band of escaped slaves in the region. They were known as Maroons, a term derived from the French word marronage, which more or less means “to run away.” The inhabitants of St. Malo lived off of the land, hunting and fishing in the marshes. They worked in the cypress mills that spread like fractals in the swamps. They built permanent settlements along the southern shore of Lake Borgne, and defended their territory from incursions with weapons stolen from the plantations they had escaped. “Woe to the white who would pass this boundary,” was purported to be written next to an axe buried deep into a cypress tree on the edge of their autonomous zone.

The band of Maroons on the shores of Lake Borgne were led by Jean St. Malo, an enigmatic man whose presence in history books is limited to a folk song extolling a man who organized revolution against the planters, and his execution date.....

http://www.antigravitymagazine.com/2015/03/hidden-louisiana-bayou-st-malo/
§Hidden Louisiana: the German Coast
by Dedecker / Acosta
Listen now:
Copy the code below to embed this audio into a web page:
The southwestern rim of Lake Pontchartrain, commonly referred to as the German Coast, is a composite of landscapes both real and imagined, their details spread across plat maps, sunken concrete, and digital artifacts. The landscape of today is a broken swamp, like many others in South Louisiana. The cypress of Maurepas has been heavily lumbered, leaving strange radial patterns etched into the earth where the trees were felled. The once robust bottomlands of Labranche were similarly gouged in order to construct the Interstate 10 highrise that passes from Kenner to LaPlace. These channels have introduced saltwater, and a familiar process of erosion has played out across the region.

antigravity_vol13_issue11_Page_09_Image_ Source: Esri, DigitalGlobe, GeoEye, Earthstar Geographics, CNES/Airbus DS, USDA, USGS, AEX, Getmapping, Aerogrid, IGN, IGP, swisstopd, and the GIS User Community

In the 1970s, as residential demand in St. Charles Parish increased, private real estate developers envisioned an opulent lakeside suburb that would bury this denuded wetland, complete with tennis courts, shopping malls, and broad tree-lined boulevards. They began purchasing tracts of land deep in LaBranche, with a belief that the Army Corps of Engineers would build a hurricane protection levee along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, thus making their properties eligible for federally subsidized flood insurance.

One of these developers, the Walker Land Company, sold many parcels in an unimproved stretch of cypress swamp they designated the “LaBranche Industrial Park.” Soon after, the company was under investigation by the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for withholding certain particulars of the development before selling the properties, such as omitting major details in the property report to HUD, including plans for the construction of a marina, boat-town, golf course, tennis courts, motel, and regional shopping center—all promised in advertising. They were also cited for failing to address who would be responsible for draining lots below sea level, as well as neglecting to detail how access to these lots would be achieved, since there weren’t any streets or roads.

Ultimately, wetland preservation policies forced the Army Corps to reroute the levee, which now runs roughly parallel to Airline Highway, less than a quarter of a mile north of the road. This has made development of the wetlands financially infeasible. Individuals who bought property from the Walker Land Company and other developers now own parcels that are submerged beneath as much as 15 feet of water.

While Walker Land Company and other LaBranche developers were mired in this controversy, similar swampland suburbs were being constructed elsewhere along the lake, such as the subdivisions of LaPlace that now reach deep into the shoreward floodplains. The line between Jefferson Parish and St. Charles Parish is stark. Jefferson Parish, protected by the levee system, is thoroughly developed, with neighborhoods and shopping centers pressed tight to the parish line. St. Charles remains a wetland from Airline Highway to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

The fast and loose nature of development throughout the postwar era reflects the general amnesia that our culture often experiences with regard to natural disasters. A few generations before this rampant speculation, in 1915, a hurricane came out of the West Indies that hit the Gulf Coast with force, spared New Orleans, and cut a line across Lake Pontchartrain. It built a surge as it bore toward the west side of the lake and exploded onto the German Coast with indescribable fury, annihilating the small settlements of Frenier and LaBranche. Survivors describe their elevated homes and fishing camps crumbling in the face of overpowering wind and persistent surges of water that climbed as high as 20 feet. Many sought refuge in a train passing along a nearby track en route to Harahan. The train moved slowly as it made its way east, blowing its whistle to gather survivors. Residents from all parts of the swamp struggled toward the vehicle in whatever manner they could, whether by boat or by swimming through the devastating waves. Soon, however, the eastern stretch of the track washed away with the onslaught of the storm. As the train began backing up in the direction of Hammond, the western track blew away as well, leaving the asylum seekers stranded on an island of track bed, huddled in the train cars, some kneeling in prayer with their knees submerged as the water continued to climb.

They waited there through the long night as the squall lashed the world around them, until stillness slowly settled with the dawn. Those who were able to survive outside the train did so by hanging onto rooftops and trees that weathered the force of the elements. These lucky few gathered in a daze and ventured into the swamp to assess the absolute devastation of their homes, digging through submerged refuse to uncover body after body. They floated the corpses on improvised rafts to a graveyard in the forgotten village of Waggram. A small band of residents walked to New Orleans to alert a public that was completely unaware of the tragedy unfolding to the west. No structures in Frenier and surrounding communities were spared by the disaster. Over 275 Louisiana residents were killed, a large number of the casualties concentrated in St. Charles and St. John Parish.

In 2012, Hurricane Isaac, following an almost identical course to the 1915 storm, deluged the German Coast again. We visited the Wetland Watchers Park on the shore of the lake a day after the storm passed. This was the very place where the small community of LaBranche once stood, and where the Walker Land Company envisioned their Bayou Beverly Hills. The sky was utterly clear as it often is in the wake of a major hurricane. The lake was still, the air sweltering and alive. Whole ridges of mud and detritus covered the landscape. Parking posts from the nearby boat launch had come ungrounded along with their concrete anchors and lay like helpless automatons paralyzed by the heat. We witnessed a more exaggerated version of this phenomenon a few days later while visiting Plaquemines Parish, where entire concrete tombs ungirdled themselves from the flooded earth and tumbled with the force of the waves, landing in unbelievable postures, some standing lengthwise against oak trees or jumbled in a heaping mess on the river road, half a mile from the cemetery. The concrete wasn’t enough to fasten these structures. The ground absorbed the water like a sponge until there was no easy distinction between ground and water.

The subdivisions of LaPlace that reach into the floodplains of the lake were badly flooded as well. Piles of sheetrock and furniture lined each curb that we passed. Being that the land is a literal floodplain covered in concrete, the water stood in the streets for at least a day. We drove gingerly through the streets to avoid causing a wake. The aftermath was sodden and ugly, and possessed the familiar stench of Katrina, but a thought persisted in our minds, and in our conversations, and even in our footsteps as we crossed haphazard barricades of filth with heads pointed in deference to the exhausted residents that we passed. The ghosts of 1915 were with all who tread through the lingering atmosphere of Isaac, begging us to ask: what would the shores of the lake have looked like had the speculative housing developments of LaBranche been built?

by Dedecker / Eustis
Listen now:
Copy the code below to embed this audio into a web page:
a field report from the Louisiana Civil War Museum on the deification of Confederate Officials. art by Erin Wilson AntigravitySeptember2015WEB_Page_14_Imag

Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall is the oldest operating museum in Louisiana. Originally opened in 1891 as the Confederate Memorial Hall, the museum served as a meeting space for Confederate veterans and a repository for the personal effects of soldiers after they passed. In the early 2000s, during a legal battle over the museum’s right to remain in the space, despite losing legal title to the Foundation of the University of New Orleans, a deal was struck that included the renaming of the museum. Regardless of the change in name, the museum’s main focus continues to be the Confederacy, and only a small piece of its history at that.

It’s a museum centered on belongings, the things that Confederates owned. Yet, the museum does not talk about the ownership of human slaves; the founders of the museum were instead more interested in creating a clubhouse dedicated to a defeated oligarchical cult. The awkward exhibits housed within the museum today illuminate how hard it is to update public memory when such an insufficient narrative has been dominant for so long.

The Confederate Memorial Hall was the brainchild of Frank Howard, who used some of his considerable family fortune to build the Romanesque church-like rectory on Camp Street. His father, Charles Howard, chartered the Louisiana State Lottery company in 1868. It was a sinkhole of corruption, launched and maintained by corrupt state legislators. Charles hired two Confederate generals, P.G.T. Beauregard and Jubal Early, to pick the winning numbers. Each month they dressed in their Confederate uniforms and presided over the drawings. The generals were paid handsomely to lobby the state legislature on the lottery’s behalf.

Charles Howard was a notoriously strong-armed political operator who held his grudges dear. Upon being refused entry into the prestigious Metairie Jockey Club, he vowed to turn it into a graveyard. When the club went bankrupt, Charles bought the land, razed the club, and turned it into Metairie Cemetery. His own tomb is built on what was once the racetrack. Within Metairie Cemetery, there is a monument to the Army of Tennessee, Louisiana Division, which Charles claimed to have served with. This proved to be untrue; records indicate that Charles never fought in the war.

Today, the Civil War Museum is akin to a reliquary of a church displaying the personal objects owned by saints, offering tangible objects for veneration by worshipers. It is not a museum, it is a sanctuary—down to the beautiful stained glass window depicting the “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy,” Reverend Abram Joseph Ryan, dressed as a monk and levitating above the Confederate flag.

Many of the objects are indeed relics. A large amount of space is dedicated to the personal possessions of Jefferson Davis. One of the most curious items is a hand-woven crown of thorns gifted to Davis while he was imprisoned for treason following the war. According to a woman I spoke with at the museum, it was either woven by his wife, Varina, or by Pope Pius IX. While he may not have sent Davis the crown, the Pope had sent Jefferson a portrait of himself, also on display, with the inscription, “Come to me all ye who labor and are heavy burdened and I will give you rest, sayeth the Lord.”

A tremendous amount of space is dedicated to the personal possessions of Davis’ daughter, Winnie. There’s a tea set she played with as a child and a collection of ostentatious baubles and jewelry she wore when she was crowned Queen of Comus during Mardi Gras of 1892. An oil portrait of Winnie hanging high on the wall commemorates her coronation.

In fact, more space is given to Winnie Davis’ toys and jewelry than is given to any mention of slavery. Winnie Davis was not even born until after the war was over. Although the majority of the items on display are artifacts of Confederate soldiers, from uniforms stained with blood to solemn daguerreotypes, the museum serves as a temple to an aristocracy whose glaring flaws are erased by omission. The fact that the war was fought to preserve slavery—an institution from which the Davis family, like so many other prominent families of the South, made their money—is absent.

thought about the Louisiana Civil War Museum as I sat in New Orleans’ City Council chambers for the first public meeting on whether or not four statues should be removed from prominent display. Up for debate were statues of two Civil War generals (Lee and Beauregard), another of Jefferson Davis, and a monument commemorating the White League, a group of white citizens who killed Black police officers during Reconstruction. Those against the removal of these monuments, almost entirely white and over the age of 40, kept griping about history—that if we remove these statues we would be erasing history and doing the public a disservice.

But history cannot be fully understood through singular, monumental depictions. The problem is that the monuments have no historical context, and this is partially because we exist in a culture that finds it permissible to tell the story of the Civil War through Winnie Davis’ knicknacks. Recently, the school board of Texas approved new history textbooks that diminish the role of slavery in the causes of the Civil War, preferring instead to focus on the much less offensive concept of “states’ rights” as the underlying cause.

This is a despicable re-telling of history, one that deletes the Confederate government’s own declaration that “Our new government… foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

That the Confederacy was racist is inarguable and it is an injustice when that fact is not engaged, discussed, taught, and tied irrevocably to the Confederacy. It is an injustice that we do not scrutinize the oligarchy that continued to exist following the war, raising money to build monuments to commemorate their fallen heroes. It is not just the Confederacy that these monuments represent, but the power structure that was able to shape how the public would understand the context of the war in generations to come. The slogan “heritage not hate” derives from that ability to control context.

The fetishized aristocracy lovingly doted upon by the Civil War Museum was fueled by gains made at the expense of their human chattel. Public memory is created and maintained by such things as monuments. By the end of the public meeting, the Historic District and Landmarks Commission recommended that all four of the statues be removed, with the vague promise that they will be placed in museums.

The history of the Confederacy is a difficult one. The narrow focus of Louisiana’s Civil War Museum on the belongings of Civil War soldiers fails to wrestle with the full scope of this deeply troubled past. If New Orleans’ monuments are placed in a similar ahistorical vacuum as the lost cause detritus littering the Civil War Museum, it will only further replicate a whitewashed and idealized past that fails to account for its true origins.

Last July, I went to the Whitney Plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish. The Whitney is a private museum that seeks to elevate the narratives and daily realities of those who were enslaved on its grounds. It is a contemplative space where you are taken on a walking tour through the physical landscape of plantation slavery. The objects on display include work tools, beds, and a terrifying set of metal cages where Black men and women were held prior to being auctioned off. A carved marble wall in the fields holds the names of the many enslaved men, women, and children that were held on the Whitney. One inscription is a record of a debt settlement wherein the planter’s son settled a personal gambling debt totaling in the thousands with a payment entirely composed of living human bodies.

The people I walked through the Whitney Plantation with were almost entirely Black. The people I walked through the Civil War Museum with were almost entirely white. That the Whitney is the newest museum in Louisiana and the Civil War Museum is the oldest speaks to how desperate the need is to rectify the narrative of how the South tends to be depicted. The fetishized aristocracy lovingly doted upon by the Civil War Museum was fueled by gains made at the expense of their human chattel. This underlying truth should not be excluded from historical sites. Its grave omission only makes the Confederacy, and their modern apologists, more of a disgrace.

by Breonne Dedecker
Listen now:
Copy the code below to embed this audio into a web page:
antigravity_vol13_issue10_Page_12_Image_art by Ryan Blackwood

Coastal Louisiana’s intricate mazes of marshes and bayous have long been safe havens for bandits. Perhaps the most known is the pirate Jean Lafitte, a much celebrated local legend, and the namesake of a bar on Bourbon Street, a national park on the West Bank, and a pirate-themed festival in Lake Charles called Contraband Days. His career of attacking merchant ships, establishing colonies of outlaws, and selling slaves has largely been romanticized into acceptability. Lafitte is seen more as a quaint local character, part of Louisiana’s colorful past, rather than one of the first in a long line of successful smugglers dealing in illegal goods.

For much of modern times, New Orleans’ role as a port city surrounded by swampy, rural areas provided prime opportunities for the establishment of large networks facilitating the flow of contraband. During prohibition, New Orleans was the wettest city in the United States, stemming from massive rum running operations funneling the Caribbean liquor into the States, as well as domestic moonshine operations that ran stills from Opelousas to the Mississippi line. When Governor Huey P. Long was asked what he was going to do to crack down on the booze flowing through New Orleans, Long, known for his love of gin fizzes, replied, “Not a damn thing.”

While the end of prohibition meant that much of the black market for alcohol dried up, other substances soon took its place. Marijuana was perhaps the first illegal drug to wind its ways in through the bayous of Louisiana in large quantities. An Associated Press article from February of 1981 quotes a Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent as saying increased federal focus on Florida as a major drug conduit meant that trafficking moved westward into Louisiana. The vast coastal swamps of the state, along with the strong local maritime economy, offered multiple inroads for traffickers. Barges were a particularly lucrative way to bring in pot, considering their capacity and ubiquity in the region, although certainly not foolproof. One bust in New Iberia in 1980 found 70 to 80 tons of pot on board a barge. In 1982, a wealthy New Orleans oilman named L.J. Balliviero was indicted for planning to import 185 tons of marijuana with an estimated worth of $83 million dollars. Barges weren’t the only mode of transport. Some shrimp boats hauled in catches of dope instead of shellfish. Small airplanes hopped from Latin American farms, dropping sealed bushels of marijuana into the bayous to be scooped up by boats, a technique said to have been pioneered by pilot Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal.

Seal was a native son of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Described as an adrenaline junkie, he once said, “You can’t sit in Baton Rouge and go to work from 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, go to the LSU football game on Saturday night and church on Sunday morning and have an exciting life. That may be exciting to 99.9% of the population, but to me it’s not. The exciting thing in life to me is to get in a life-threatening situation.”

Seal began flying at age 15, and at 26 joined TWA as a pilot. In 1972, he was busted for trying to fly military explosives out of the United States, the weapons supposedly bound for anti-Castro fighters in Cuba. He was fired from TWA, and by 1974, running marijuana full-time. But more money was to be made in cocaine, and by the early ‘80s, Seal was flying for the Medellin cartel. Based out of Colombia, the Medellin cartel was a massive operation that controlled roughly 80% of the world’s cocaine market. The cartel brought in an estimated 70 million dollars a day. Facing mounting pressure from law enforcement in Louisiana, he relocated his operation to a regional airport in tiny Mena, Arkansas in 1982. Within a year, he had flown in nearly 56 tons of cocaine and made an estimated 60 million dollars.

The epigraph on his tombstone is an elegy invoking comparison to idealized folk heroes like Jean Lafitte: “A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great.”

But Seal soon ran into trouble. He was caught smuggling Quaaludes into Florida in 1984 and became an informant for the DEA to avoid prosecution. Seal was the first person with major access to the Medellin cartel to provide information to law enforcement. The DEA was not the only federal agency Seal was involved with. He was also supporting the CIA’s work spying on and undermining the communist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. In October of 1986, Seal’s plane, the Fat Lady, crashed in the remote jungles of Nicaragua. The plane was carrying arms to the anti-Communist Contras, a collection of vicious paramilitary groups that committed countless human rights violations, including the rape, torture, and murder of civilians. Congress had banned US support of the Contras in the early ‘80s, but the Reagan administration continued to support the Contras illegally. The resulting quagmire of corruption, commonly referred to as the Iran-Contra affair, involved selling Iran weapons in violation of an international arms embargo. The money would be funneled to the guerillas in Nicaragua. Iran would then pressure for the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by revolutionary Islamic groups with close ties to the Iranian military.

The Medellin grew suspicious of Seal’s loyalties following the disappearance of a massive cocaine shipment under his care. The cartel was aware there was a leak in their organization following a story run by the Washington Post in the summer of 1984, which explicitly mentioned that one of the cartel’s pilots was providing information to the DEA regarding cocaine trafficking through Nicaragua. Seal had covertly taken photographs of several of the leaders of the cartel, including the notorious founders Pablo Escobar and Jorge Luis Ochoa, meeting with representatives from the Nicaraguan government to broker a cocaine trafficking deal. Ronald Reagan, eager to turn public opinion against the Nicaraguan government in order to boost popular support for the Contras, went so far as to show the photographs on live TV in 1986. It was a rather hypocritical move, considering the level of clandestine arms-dealing his administration was entangled in.

The resulting media frenzy ended up helping expose the Iran-Contra affair and the CIA’s role in cocaine trafficking in the United States, triggering a series of indictments against 14 high-level US officials, including the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and National Security Council member Oliver North. North famously testified before Congress that he had destroyed documents related to the scandal, lied to Congress regarding the administration’s illegal support of the Contras, and altered official government records relating to the scandal.

Inevitably, the unfolding of this scandal revealed that Seal was an informant. As his involvement with the DEA and the CIA became public, he was on trial for charges related to a 1984 arrest in Louisiana for trafficking marijuana. His previous plea agreement in the Florida Quaaludes case made him exempt from serving jail time. The judge instead sentenced him to to six months probation at a Salvation Army Halfway House in Baton Rouge. Seal declined federal witness protection, but was shaken when the judge ordered him to dismiss his armed personal bodyguards. The Medellin cartel offered $1,000,00 to anyone who could capture Seal alive and transport him to Colombia, and $500,000 to kill him on the spot. “If I have to report every day at a certain time to the Salvation Army and I have no way of protecting myself, I’m a clay pigeon,” he told friends.

On February 20th, 1986, Seal reported to the Salvation Army. As he was sitting in his car, two assassins drove up and sprayed Seal’s car with bullets. He was struck 11 times in the head and chest, and died instantly. The three gunmen were arrested the next day in Mississippi, and all were sentenced to life in prison. One of the triggermen, Miguel Velez, recently passed away at Angola Prison, where he was known for his love of painting.

The Medellin cartel continued to operate for almost a decade, until internal power struggles, assassinations, and competition from new organizations caused it to collapse in 1993. The Drug Wars, already brutal in the 1980s, ravaged communities from the jungles of Colombia to the border towns of Mexico and city streets of the United States. Barry Seal was just one body out of an innumerable pile of the dead. The epigraph on his tombstone is an elegy invoking comparison to idealized folk heroes like Jean Lafitte: “A rebel adventurer the likes of whom in previous days made America great.” Perhaps there is little difference between the 19th century pirate and the 1980s drug trafficker. And maybe, with enough time, Barry Seal, the Iran-Contra affair, and the Drug Wars will seem similarly anachronistic and quaint, with parks and festivals named after them as well.

We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network