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8 Bonfires on the Levee: Place, Memory, and the Sacred in River Road Catholicism
- Indiana University Press
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8 Bonfires on the Levee place, memory, and the sacred in river road catholicism Justin D. Poché In June 1988, members of a local historical society in St. James Parish, Louisiana , traveled to Alsace, France, to uncover the roots of the annual Christmas bonfire celebrations atop the Mississippi River levee. For decades, residents of this largely French and German Catholic community along the “River Road” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans embraced the practice even as they held conflicting views about its origin and purpose.1 Some argued that Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia as early as the 1780s brought the fires to welcome the arrival of “Papa Noël,” or Santa Claus. Others traced its roots to the New Year’s celebrations of early French settlers who later moved it to Christmas Eve to light the path to midnight Mass.2 Explanations ranged widely. Yet for over a century, as Catholics created a distinct religious and multiethnic culture along the River Road, they assigned their own place to the bonfires. For one woman growing up on the west bank of the Mississippi in the late nineteenth century, the nighttime glow reflecting across the river advertised the prestige of wealthy plantation families on “l’autre bord.” Leading into World War II, the building of fires atop the levees offered young men a rite of passage. As boys spent weeks gathering wood from the riverbank to show off to friends and family, shared stories of strong currents and destructive floods offered a sense of mastery over the river.3 But in the 1950s, this modest smattering of fires to gather the community on the levee developed into a major tourist attraction. Hundreds of fires, many as high as twenty feet, lit up the river through the Christmas season.4 162 | Justin D. Poché Local business and industry promoted the event with unprecedented fervor over the next two decades, drawing tourists from around the region to participate in the ritual. In 1975, the state of Louisiana even declared St. James Parish the “bonfire capital of the world.”5 The bonfires continued to bolster a struggling tourist economy through the next decade even as some residents expressed concern over the effects of smoke pollution and bonfire construction on the wooded riverbanks that protected levees from erosion. By the time the historical society traveled to Alsace, the ritual offered a vague connection to the Old World. The group discovered similar fires along the Rhine, rooted in early pagan and Christian practice. Yet in describing a scene “richer in symbolism” than their own, they reflected an anxiety over the ritual’s meaning.6 In their efforts to reclaim the public memory of the annual rite and redefine the levee as an ethnic space, the society joined a centuries-long conflict over the meaning of the river and the land that has struggled to contain it. From the early settlement of the lower Mississippi valley to the twentieth century, outside investors and longtime residents brought competing visions of an economic, cultural, and social order to bear on the river and the surrounding landscape. Man-made levees prevented annual flooding and empowered sugar cane planters with access to the river and the global market that it connected. But the river, as both a natural and socioeconomic current, continuously challenged the social and economic boundaries that defined the plantation South. Constrained by the levees, it channeled faster and higher water over the decades and threatened entire communities with destruction. It also brought into contact a variety of peoples that would interact and transform the River Road after the Civil War. Slave emancipation forced white landowners to accommodate black mobility while maintaining a steady labor force in the region. Northern investment in lumber, sugar, and tobacco industries created a new landscape of towns and small farms flanked by river and railroad. The growth of commerce through the first half of the twentieth century paved the way for the emergence of the petrochemical industry, which dramatically altered the environment and reconfigured the human and cultural landscape of the River Road after the 1950s. As fires of a different kind lit up the river on a nightly basis, offering vigils to a gospel of prosperity that gripped southeast Louisiana, the contrasts between old and new worlds impressed regional promoters and critics alike. “On the trip up the Mississippi River from New Orleans, one is struck by two developments,” one analyst noted. “First, the burgeoning industry on the riverbanks, and second, the...