Down on the Batture

Property

- 9 Property The boy is coming straight towards me on the levee path, pedaling like a bandit, eyes wide, but I have no sense that he sees me. I am already stepping to the side to make way when he turns abruptly and plummets pell-mell down the concrete apron towards a fifteen-foot mountain of dirt at the base of the levee. His bike bucks with the impact and then surges up a path beaten into the side of the hill, tops the crest, and soars into thin air, rearing back in space like a rodeo horse, disappearing on the far slope. I hear a jolting crash, and then he reappears, circling out on the flats, his face in a victorious grin.“Yeah!” yell a couple of his friends on the levee top, one of them already gliding his bicycle away down the path to turn, get momentum, and make his run. It is beautiful and dangerous and exactly what kids do. It will not last long here. Every spring as the high waters recede, somebody sends out a bulldozer which works over the flats near the power lines, blading and scraping the accumulated sediment into a large pile. Over the next several weeks dump trucks will come and take the dirt away. The hill will diminish. The dirt bikes will move on. The wild grasses will grow back. By fall they will turn into cover in which you can lose a small dog. Nothing seems harmed, but I am struck by the anomaly that if the authorities are worried about the strength of their levee at this critical bend of the river, they are letting some good protection go. Less than a quarter mile upstream someone is paying someone a lot of money to moor barges loaded with heavy rocks against the - 10 Property batture, to buffer it against the action of the current. Which leads me to wonder whose dirt this is. For a long time this was the most crucial question in Louisiana. If you mention the word“batture” to a New Orleans native, if you look the word up in the library, you will find but one meaning: a flaming lawsuit that chartered the future of the waterfront for the most important port city of its time. The Mississippi River batture is unique. Here we have a place that is neither water nor land; it is both. It depends on the time of year. Spanish and French traditions going back to the time of Rome recognized public rights to public things. The civil code declared that rivers and their banks were public, which would have closed the matter. But in the late 1700s along came a New Yorker with an American notion of private property, a keen legal mind, a nose for money, and an ambition as big as the Ritz. He would claim the batture. His brother would claim the river.Together, they would run the entire show. Edward Livingston was about as close to genius as a Louisianan has come, at least one in public life. He was an accidental Louisianan, fleeing the North under several clouds including his support for the notorious Aaron Burr against Thomas Jefferson, and a serious money scam. He remade himself, adding a second marriage to a nineteen-year-old belle whose beauty is said to have been no impediment to his career. Livingston’s accomplishments in the courthouse and the legislature remain monuments today, but the case that made him famous was about silt on the banks of the Mississippi. The silt was no different in any way from the dirt accumulating under the power lines by Ochsner Hospital where the bicycles now play, except that this dirt was at a prime location, at the foot of Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans. Livingston and his client who claimed the dirt stood to make a fortune. Indeed , Livingston declined a fee in the case. Instead, if he won he would get a piece of the victory, the most valuable real estate in New Orleans. The American notion of property was not popular in New Orleans , whose people were accustomed to using the banks of rivers - 11 Property to beach their boats, promenade, fish, swim, rake mussels, and even take fill for their front yards. By precedent rising from centuries, the Mississippi batture was common ground. In a city oppressed by heat and the septic odors...