Macon Fry - They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans
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They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans: summary, description and annotation
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They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture. For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as Macon Fry have raised shantyboats on stilts, built water-adapted homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river teaches.
Until now the stories of this way of life have existed only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in 2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers, fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river.
They Called Us River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and Louisianas most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching.
Today Fry is among the senior generation of River Rats living in a vestigial colony of twelve camps on New Orleanss river batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the other side.
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RIVER RATS
The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans
MACON FRY
University Press of Mississippi / Jackson
The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.
www.upress.state.ms.us
Designed by Peter D. Halverson
Frontispiece photograph by Macon Fry
The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.
Copyright 2021 by University Press of Mississippi
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2021
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fry, Macon, author.
Title: They called us river rats: the last batture settlement of New Orleans / Macon Fry.
Description: Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020048224 (print) | LCCN 2020048225 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3307-5 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3305-1 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3308-2 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3309-9 (pdf) | ISBN 978-1-4968-3306-8 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Community lifeLouisianaNew OrleansHistory. | New Orleans Batture (La.) | New Orleans (La.)History. | New Orleans (La.)Social life and customs. | New Orleans (La.)Social conditions.
Classification: LCC F379.N5 F79 2021 (print) | LCC F379.N5 (ebook) | DDC 976.3/35dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048224
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048225
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
Chapter 1
The Shack
Chapter 2
Mile Marker
Chapter 3
Becoming a River Rat
Chapter 4
Batture Wilderness
Chapter 5
Ghosts on the Shore
Chapter 6
American River
Chapter 7
Shantyboat People
Chapter 8
Broken Levees, Big Shots, and Bird Men
Chapter 9
Miracles
Chapter 10
Floods
Chapter 11
The Other Side of the Other Side of the Tracks
Chapter 12
River Gypsies
Chapter 13
Batture Row
Chapter 14
Batture Apocalypse
Chapter 15
Keep Your Heads Down
Dedicated to my ninety-three-year-old father Ernest William Fry, who embraced a son who built a house not just on shifting sand, but on a flooded and fragile fringe. Dad wisely realized this story might be as endless as the flow of the river. He always gave the same adviceWrap that thing up!
During twenty years between inspiration and book I was buoyed by the kindness and support of hundreds of people, but my greatest debt is to the dozens of old river rats and batture folks like Joe Judd and Georgie Dumser who told me their stories. They are the heroes of this tale.
The memories of batture folks would never have been published if not for the guidance and encouragement of Dr. Martha Ward. She convinced me that the stories were worth telling, showed me how to ferret them out, and most importantly how to find the heart of those narratives. Long after tapes and notes were consigned to a crate in my loft, Martha never lost faith that I was the person to write this.
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