Down on the Batture

Acknowledgments

- 181 Acknowledgments A book like this comes from many people, some of whom I’ve seen over the years out on the levee and have never known by name. Others like Ricky, Paggio, and Alcide Verret have contributed their part just by living out their lives on batture ground. Still others took the time to sit with me and tell their stories in much richer detail than I could capture here. They include Mildred Fossier, who told me about a childhood evening when she was peeping into a church off the batture while a preacher rocked the congregation with the awaiting terrors of hell, when a sudden crash of thunder came so close it seemed to fulfill the prophesy and sent everyone fleeing into the night; Connie, the bicycle man who still rides down the levee to watch the fishermen and who in his youth would row out in his skiff with his “two whores,” as he says, making rowing motions with his hands, being sure I get the pun; Louis Otto, a skilled wood carver who grew up on Oak Street by the levee and performed antics with his young buddies in front of the new plate-glass window of the jewelry store; Ashton O’Dwyer, who told me about the Original Southport Club, the aviary on Monticello Street, and the sixteen-cylinder Cadillac in his grandfather’s garage; Vic Landry, who has been in the New Orleans levee business for more than thirty years and told me about the the old Corps buildings with their waste pipes to the river; Joan Exnicios, the official river navigator for the lower Mississippi, who provided me with narratives of the Ames Crevasse; Larry Powell, a Tulane historian who lent me his interview with Ellis Marsalis on - 182 Acknowledgments the old Marsalis Motel; Rich Campanella, a historian and cartographer who led me to reports on the slave insurrections; and Sigrid Bonner, a former student who lived on the levee and with whom I have mused that, after all, we are all on borrowed ground here in southern Louisiana, the batture of our lives. In addition, I need to recognize the work of Jane Johnston, who assisted in the preparation of this manuscript and drew the designs for several chapter headings. Lastly, I would like to acknowledge the patience of my wife Lisa, who has come to accept my batture wanderings as a part of our rhythm, of my son Cyprian, who has developed a keener eye for birds, and of my son Gabriel, who, in a much better story of his own, inspired me to write this book. I would also include my dog, Ms. Bear, were she able to read. On the other hand, her sense of smell is uncanny. ...