Down on the Batture

Fight

- 134 Fight Bicycling up the river one summer morning, a year after Katrina, I rounded the bend by the old village of Kennertown and plunged into a painting drawn a century ago, or maybe two centuries ago. American history condenses in the mind. The women were dressed in bright, calico gowns that stretched from high collars around their necks to the tops of their thick-soled shoes. The men wore Sunday outfits of dark cloth with long tails and white shirts puffed out the front. A few had shed their coats and were holding onto their suspenders like the poles on a moving bus, talking to each other, but not to the women, who were on the banquette grass, opening wicker picnic baskets and sorting out the food. The children, and there were many of them, were miniature copies of their elders, the same dresses and formal coats, the same decorous manners. None of them were rolling on the grass. None were even sitting on it. I stopped my bike and walked in. It seemed discourteous to blow by them. I asked where they were from, and I think they said Ohio. They were Mennonites. They had come down for a month or so to help rebuild. I talked with them for a few minutes about the Ninth Ward, where they were volunteering, and then I saw the statue behind them. I had passed this monument many times, but it was the first time I’d really looked at it. Down at the base of the levee, towards the road, two life-sized and nearly naked men in black iron were doubling their fists and preparing to assault each other. This was - 135 Fight not a Mennonite thing to do. And yet, here on this one spot that these gentle and committed people had chosen to picnic, back in 1870, shortly after the Civil War had come to its bloody end, on a hot May morning with crowds streaming up from New Orleans, down from Baton Rouge and places still farther away, tiny Kennertown hosted the first heavyweight championship prize fight in America. It was a thriller. Kennertown was an unlikely location for the first of anything, much less the boxing championship of America. This was the Cannes Brulees, where the rosacane grew so thick along the batture that natives burned it to drive out cougars and bears.William Kenner came up from New Orleans in the early 1800s to settle here, married a fourteen-year-old, and gave her seven children before she died. When his business partner absconded with the business fortunes,William died, too, leaving a string of riverside plantations behind. Over time, Kennertown’s major asset became the New Orleans railroad, and that’s how they all got here, the two heavyweight boxers, the several dozen promoters, the newspapermen, artists and journalists, bankers and lawyers, mule skinners, pickpockets, theater managers, saloon keepers, Union army generals and Confederate army privates, gathering two hours before dawn at the Jackson Street Railroad Station to jostle their way onto the waiting cars and ride upriver to the biggest fighting event in American history, a bare-fisted ten-rounder between two Englishmen, one of them an adopted American. Pride and money were on the line. The purse was two thousand, five hundred dollars, doubled by official side bets, no record of the unofficial ones. I think of Mohammed Ali versus Sonny Liston, in Africa. Jem Mace, at age forty, had achieved God-like status in English sport for his fighting trim, athleticism, and debonair grace. Schooled in the “boxing sciences,” he had only lost two fights in his life, both to opponents he later destroyed, and had owned the English championship since 1861. Tom Allen, described as “strong as a Bashan Bull,” was taller and heavier and had also been an English champion before coming to America to put on performances - 136 Fight of “living statuary,” a popular entertainment of the time. With the body of a“Hercules” he was a physique to behold. The smart money was on Mace, however, one hundred dollars to seventy. Even those odds found few takers. It is a little sobering to appreciate what “heavyweight” meant back then. Jem Mace was five foot six inches tall and weighed 165 pounds. Tom Allen, at five foot nine, went all of 170. Men smaller than this carried their blanket rolls and forty pounds of equipment...