River Music: An Atchafalaya Story

Chapter 3: Wildlife

c h a P t e r 3 Wildlife B efore Earl and his parents moved to Robicheaux Street, they lived behind Adam’s barbershop on the Atchafalaya’s west bank in Berwick.The shop, on Front Street, was one block from the river, near the railroad bridge, so close you could hear the dusky foghorns and smell the fishy water, the pungent catch on the docks. One afternoon Earl and I took a walk along dilapidated Front, whose once-thriving businesses had collapsed years ago after shopping centers claimed U.S. 90. Earl wildlife 35 remembered learning to fish with his father close to a crab-processing plant on the river, at a dumping spot for refuse. “It was catfish heaven,” he said. “In thirty minutes, we could catch about fifteen fish.” Marvin Hardee, a shrimp wholesaler Earl interviewed for an oralhistory project, made catfish traps of two-by-fours, chicken wire, and screen, filling them with crab hulls and catfish heads scrounged from Casso’s, the catfish wholesaler next door. Several times a day Hardee winched up the traps, shoveled piles of catfish into buckets, and, completing the cycle of life and profit, sold them to the catfish wholesaler. “That’s how plentiful things were in the river,” Earl said. To harvest shrimp, which are filter feeders, Earl and his father employed an old Indian technique Leroy Burgess also used in the basin: cut a willow or wax myrtle branch and sink it in the river for half a day. “When you pull it out,” Earl said,“It’s full of shrimp, and you shake it in a tub. You got seven or eight pounds of shrimp that way, back then.The river doesn’t have those delicate life-forms any more, though; there’s the boat traffic and so much diesel in the water. Plus the flood of seventythree drove a lot of shrimp away.” When Earl was around eight years old, he went to work for his father , shining shoes in the barbershop. His rates depended on “how bad it was.” “If a guy came in with Gulf oil on his boots, it could be really hard to get it off. But I had a friend who shined shoes there a long time, and he taught me all his secrets when he left.” The formula for Gulf oil, he said, contained alcohol. “And then, a lot of saddle soap.” The town’s gentry dropped in regularly for shaves and haircuts and to discuss politics and LSU football with Adam, who, according to Earl, “knew everything that was going on.”But once in a while,the usual drone was broken by a citizen running in to exclaim,“You oughta see what they caught at Casso’s!” and Earl would drop his shoe brush and race down to the dock. Often, the catch was an outsize catfish, or a huge bloody turtle, freshly decapitated, lying on a drain on Casso’s cement floor. Earl knew how the beheading was done: when the turtle poked its 36 chapter 3 head out of its shell, one man would jam the end of a broom handle down the throat to steady it, and another would chop it off with an axe. “We’re talking loggerheads that weighed two hundred,three hundred pounds,” Earl said. “Little monsters. Big as a car. They sold the leg and tail meat for different dishes.” You didn’t just grab a turtle like that and fling it into a boat. “They would set up a trotline of chain underneath the bridge, with big alligator hooks at intervals. They’d put things like a dead coon or cat on them, sink the stuff, and run the line with a crew boat that had a winch on the back.” Living along Berwick’s main business street, Earl also observed the town characters. There were the evangelical preacher and his wife who set up a podium across the street from the bar and pronounced everyone in the vicinity to be possessed of the devil. There was Sheik Nini, the police chief who routinely stopped by Adam’s shop for the full deal: a shave, a haircut, and a shoeshine. Another police chief customer who went simply by “Cherry” was, Earl said,“your old Southern police chief.” If word came of a scuffle, “Cherry would just sit back in my dad’s chair and say ‘hey, let ’em...