Kirk Wallace Johnson - The Fishermen and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century

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This is a book about a racist backlash against refugees fleeing a ruinous war. As you can imagine, the Ku Klux Klan and their allies used racist and vile language in the pursuit of their goal to drive newly resettled Vietnamese refugees out of the fishing industry along the Gulf Coast.

Precision and truth are the lodestars of any nonfiction author, but, sensitive to the toxic legacy of this language, I have no interest in tearing at old wounds or inflicting fresh ones. In presenting this account, I wrestled with how to treat the incendiary words that appeared routinely in documentary footage, print coverage, and my own interviews with many of the individuals behind this campaign. I have subjected each instance in the book to a test of essentiality (Why is this important to include?), in the belief that you dont need to be subjected to the fortieth time the Grand Dragon of the Klan or his supporters used the N-word or G-word.

At the same time, I didnt feel morally correct cleaning up their language in order to avoid troubling my readers, for two reasons. First, the Vietnamese on the receiving end of these epithets enjoyed no such luxury. Second, this is a book about racism and the Klan; it struck me as impossible to write in a way that doesnt trouble. Deleting language from the past doesnt undo the hideousness of what those deploying it sought to achieve. Accordingly, the only instances of these slurs appear in direct quotations.

The house style of Penguin Random House is to capitalize the B in Black when referring to a person. I have similarly capitalized the W in White, persuaded by professor Kwame Anthony Appiahs argument in favor of it in an essay for The Atlantic. I have not altered these descriptors when using quotations from contemporaneous accounts.

Along the Texas Gulf Coast, White interviewees routinely used the word Anglo to refer to a White person and Mexican to refer to someone of Latin American descent, even if they were longtime American citizens (or their ancestors lived there prior to Texas becoming a republic or its annexation as a state). First-generation Vietnamese interviewees regularly used the word American to refer to a White person. For reasons of clarity and consistency, I have opted not to use such terminology.

After discussing it with author and professor Viet Thanh Nguyen, I have also eschewed the term boat peopleused for a generation to describe the mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees in the mid-to-late 1970sfor the principal reason that it reduces them to their experience as victims, stripping them of personal agency. To Nguyen, the term is objectifying and dehumanizing, and masked by pity... people without control over their own stories.

In a similar vein, I have minimized use of the term refugee, especially after the Vietnamese arrived in the United States. These were men, women, children, fathers, mothers, siblings, and grandparents who heroically stood their ground against a campaign of hate and exclusion to assert their rightsboth moral and constitutionalto pursue life, liberty, and happiness in America.

Nht ph sn lm, nh m h b

Slash the forests, destroy the waters

VIETNAMESE PROVERB

Prologue

The navy-gray paint of the trawler was faded and chipped, spattered with the excrement of gulls that jostled and shrieked overhead when the catch was still good. The Cherry Bettys engine was ancient, coughing up black diesel fumes as the boat motored slowly down the channel toward the dark water of Galveston Bay. Blue, rainless sky that March morning. A perfect day for a ride.

On the southern side of the narrow channel, which separated the fishing towns of Seabrook and Kemah, a Vietnamese fisherman was sitting in his living room with a friend, making plans for the upcoming season of shrimping. Their conversation was interrupted by the sight of a trawler, overloaded with passengers, growling past.

They shot to their feet and ran to the window. Most of those on board were dressed in white robes, with rifles slung over their shoulders.

There was a cannon on the stern.

Something was hanging from one of the outriggers.

What is that? the Vietnamese fisherman asked his friend nervously. Is that a sack of shrimp?

---

David Collins grinned as he piloted the Cherry Betty ahead. Earlier that morning, soon after the Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had given them the go-ahead, the boat was swarming with passengers, some in hoods, others in army fatigues and black ku klux klanrealm of texas T-shirts. The Confederate flag hanging from the boats mast whipped in the wind as they passed the boatyard that White fishermen of Galveston Bay had come to refer to as Saigon Harbor.

The drawbridge connecting Seabrook and Kemah lowered, blocking their forward progress. Collins threw the engine in neutral and the boat drifted alongside the Kemah boardwalk, which was thronged with tourists and locals. John Van Beekum, a photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle, was on his day off, tucking into a shrimp sandwich, when he caught sight of the Klan boat. He sprinted to his car, praying he had enough film in his camera and that he could get back before it disappeared.