Chapter 1

The Atchafalaya River flows south from a small Louisiana town called Simmesport, where, in the fifteenth century, it branched off the Mississippi. The river runs to the Gulf of Mexico, traveling 137 miles through a triangle of Louisiana locals call Acadiana. The name recalls Acadia, the bygone French colony in northeastern North America. There, starting in 1755, thousands of French exiles were driven from their homes. They began, nine years later, to settle along a Louisiana river two thousand miles to the southwest.

No locks or levees or dams yet harnessed the young river. And the Acadians—as those early Americans would be called—though they dug furrows and ditches beside the river and set their huts atop blocks of cypress, often found themselves in water. If the river flooded, it also bore crawfish and silt, the sediment feeding crops of soybean and indigo. More crops followed: tobacco, cotton, maize, molasses, sugar. The Acadians soon owned plantations and people, too—Africans working their fields, breastfeeding their young. Their community grew; by the early nineteenth century, there were roughly five thousand Acadians in Louisiana. They gave its marshes and bayous and prairies French names: Prairie Basse, Prairie des Femmes, Prairie des Coteaux.

Francophone and Catholic, the Acadians took to the South—to its fiddles and faith healers, its Spanish moss and slavery. By 1860, forty-nine Acadians owned more than fifty slaves each. But they were no patriots. Flags changed; the Acadians had already seen the French, Spanish and Americans govern this land. When the Confederate Army conscripted their men, the Acadian soldier was all but indifferent to the cause. Some surrendered. Some deserted.

When the war ended, the Acadians had lost their slaves and infrastructure, and many became fishermen or trappers or lumberjacks. But having previously filled steamboats and trains with produce for export, they now struggled to feed their own. Poverty took hold. Starvation was endemic. Alcoholism, too. More and more, as historian Carl Brasseaux noted, Acadians came to be thought of as primitive, as ignorant, as “Cajun”—the word a derisive variant of “Acadian.”

Reconstruction did little to lift the Acadian parishes. They remained in a deep recession well into the twentieth century.

AMONG THE FIRST to leave Acadia for Acadiana was a newlywed from the Nova Scotian community of Grand-Pré named Amand Gautreaux. He arrived in Louisiana in the 1760s and began farming along the Mississippi. His son Jerome moved to the banks of the Atchafalaya, and it was there that generations of his progeny remained: Jerome’s son Joseph and Joseph’s son Jerome and Jerome’s son Francois and Francois’s son Emar—who in 1922 was suddenly in a fix.

Emar worked on a plantation just east of the river, tending at age twenty-three to fields of cotton and corn and sugarcane. His foreman, a diabetic French-Canadian named Joseph Chenevert, had a wee, brown-eyed daughter named Bertha who fed the farmhands, beans and rice mostly. But she gave Emar more. And she had just turned seventeen when she found herself pregnant.

It did not occur to the young couple to prevent the birth of a child. Both were Catholic and knew well the disallowance of contraception. Besides, abortion was not safe. Those tonics and hairpins that could end a pregnancy could also end the life of a prospective mother. And when on January 12, 1923, a black midwife named Mary Posey helped to deliver a fair girl with blue eyes named Mildred, the baby was born to a man and woman who had been married just six months. Neither would ever confess to Mildred their indiscretion.

The young family settled on the west bank of the Atchafalaya, renting the first floor of a shack in a bean field that passed for a town called Woodside. A Pentecostal preacher named Brother Richmond lived upstairs. It wasn’t long before the family Gautreaux was Pentecostal too, leaving behind the sacraments of their church for the ecstasies and ululations of a movement no older than they. A couple come together in sin had been born again.

Emar had to follow the crops, to move with wife and child to those farms where there was cotton to be picked. And in every block of cypress and cement in which they lived, he and Bertha made sure to do as Brother Richmond had: to host prayer meetings, nights of speaking in tongues, of receiving the Holy Ghost, of ridding them and their fellow Pentecostals of demons while the children hid behind the door.

The young couple beseeched Jesus for rain—and, in 1927, for the rain to stop. The Mississippi had flooded, and Emar and Bertha hurried to higher ground, pitching a tent atop a levee for themselves and their three kids.

The 1927 flood displaced more than half a million others, too. Dense as cities, their camps fostered disease and pregnancy. “Many illegitimacies,” one priest noted. “Relatives take the child and then compel the couple to marry.” Emissaries from the American Social Hygiene Association, come south from New York, spoke to the displaced in the language of the land, likening the consequences of indiscretion to those of a leaking levee. The Catholic church was not pleased. As one local priest put it: “We hope this is not anything on birth control.”

But the church had little need to worry. The homeless, among them some 100,000 Acadians, heeded its proscriptions. It did not matter that uncontrolled birth was impoverishing or that, all through the coming decade, the Acadian community would remain, as the historian Brasseaux noted, “too poor to notice the Great Depression.” In the Acadian home, birth was often biennial, and by 1938, Emar and Bertha had had eight kids in sixteen years, contraception as taboo as the mere suggestion of sex. “You wouldn’t even say someone was pregnant in front of the children,” recalls their daughter Sandra Guilbeau. Adds her niece Velma Gross: “when a girl had her monthly, you stayed in your room till that time was done.”

BACK IN 1897, Theodore Roosevelt had asserted that American schools ought to conduct classes in “English, and no other language.” The idea gained traction with the start of the First World War. Wanting to Americanize its Acadians, Louisiana banned French from its schools in 1921. And so, in their classroom atop a levee in little Innis, the Gautreaux kids learned to read and write in English. Their parents spoke French and were illiterate; both had left school by the second grade. It fell to Mildred, their eldest, to read for her mama and papa—a passage from the Bible, a letter, or a contract, as when the family bought a bay mule for $125 with the written understanding that it was not warrantied “against sickness, accident and death.”

Mildred was a happy child—“outgoing, laughing, cutting-up,” says her childhood friend Julia Saucier. But after sixth grade, she had to leave school for the cow and plow, the fields of corn and cotton. Her light brown hair plaited in pigtails, Mildred learned to pull those fibrous white puffs from the sharp open bolls that bled her fingers.

Her brothers were also in the fields—Milbin, Murphy, Hilman, L.F. and Freddie, dusting acres of cotton, from atop their black mare, with fertilizer and 3–5-40 that killed the boll weevil and burned their legs, too. They worked hard. But not as hard as their father, who also picked cotton and drove a gravel truck and captained a ferry and raised a garden of tomatoes and snap beans and cowhorn okra. And not as hard as their mother, who made meals from those vegetables along with the chickens she killed and the fifty-pound sacks of rice and beans she bought and the coffee beans she ground and the rice kernels she stripped and the blocks of yeast she turned with warm water and strong forearms to biscuits and bread. Bertha also had to mind the broom and mop and slop bucket and washboard. And, of course, there were the ten bodies she had to clothe with the cotton she sewed and starched and ironed and washed and recycled—flour sacks turned to aprons, clothes turned to quilts after too many scrubbings of dust and mud left them threadbare.

The dust blew through the windows, a fine brown mist. And the mud, gray and wet with water risen from the Atchafalaya, was underfoot. It softened the Louisiana sod and clay, the fields and forests of palmettos and pecans and oak and hackberry. Everywhere, it pooled in slate puddles—in the sunken gutters of dirt roads, in the riverine tracks between lines of crop, around the blocks and tires that held up home and car, Emar stepping in rubber boots from his yellow Ford after every long day.

It was a hard life. Still, the tall and thin farmer was God-fearing and sober save his taste for muscatel wine. Wife Bertha, meantime, was strict, ready with a switch of sycamore to “burn our legs,” says daughter Sandra, if, say, Sandra and her sisters neglected to scrub the holed plank in the outhouse. But Bertha was also warm. She saw to it that, come 1940, the family still spent its days together, mama and papa and the kids gathering Sunday afternoons beneath the sycamore and chinaberry trees to scoop ice cream from broken mugs. Says Sandra: “It makes you want to cry.”

ON APRIL 25, 1940, a woman named Ruth Lambert arrived in little Lettsworth, at the Gautreaux home. The house, on State Lane, was like any other along the Atchafalaya—of cypress and cement, kerosene lamps and moss mattresses. It cost four dollars a month to rent, and the family made it pretty, adhering a floral paper to the walls with a homemade paste of flour and water.

Lambert was a census taker, and Bertha told her about her husband who’d worked all fifty-two weeks that year and earned fifty-plus dollars, and about the eight children aged three to seventeen who filled their home.

But then, suddenly, there were nine children. For Mildred, seventeen and unmarried, was pregnant. And something had to be done.

Mildred did not want to be pregnant. But whether a woman wanted to be pregnant was immaterial in 1940. Abortion was illegal throughout the country.

Bertha had been in the same strait eighteen years before. She did not want the daughter she had birthed out of wedlock to do as she had, to marry in shameful haste. Nor did she want her to deliver a bastard to be homilized by Brother Deshotels, a preacher who rode through town on horseback. No. She wished for her daughter to leave.

“If a girl got pregnant, she’d go away—they wouldn’t let you stay home,” remembers Mildred’s friend Julia. “It was a hush-hush thing.”

Mildred went off to her aunt Odessa and uncle Kaiser in Baton Rouge. “It seemed like [she left] overnight,” recalls Julia. “She’s gone.” As her belly grew sixty miles southeast from all who knew her, Bertha and Emar told folks that their eldest had moved to the city to earn a better wage. Mildred did indeed get a job, working as a cashier at a Walgreen’s right up until September, when she gave birth to Velma Jean and brought her home. Emar and Bertha met them on a Saturday at the bus station in New Roads.

Bertha was thirty-five years old. She was now a grandmother. But a secret had to be kept. The standing of the family depended upon it. And so, grandparents became parents, mother became sister, an only child became one of nine and then ten when, three years later, Bertha gave birth to her daughter Sandra.

A day would come when Bertha would almost confess the truth. She would, recalls Velma, tell her granddaughter: “ ‘I can tell you something that would hurt you but I won’t tell you.’ ”

But secrets emerge over time. And Velma’s aunt turned sister, Esther Rae, would one day tell her of the afternoon she, Velma, had arrived as a baby from Baton Rouge, wrapped in blankets. Mildred would come clean, too. She told Velma that when she was pregnant, Velma’s biological father had followed her to Baton Rouge, but Uncle Kaiser had turned him away while she hid under a bed.

Those reckonings, however, were decades away. For now, mama and papa would say nothing. They would confide only in the Bible—writing in the Good Book the dates and names of the family births and marriages, testaments to unions both holy and profane.

Emar kept the Bible in the armoire and forbade all from touching it. Only after farmer and housewife had died did a daughter-in-law open its black leather cover.

FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS, through flood and poverty and communal neglect, the family Gautreaux had remained intact even as it grew ever larger and moved from shanty to shack. But sex had done what crisis and poverty had not. It had separated a piece from the whole. Mildred remained apart. Cast off, her maternity erased, she soon boarded a bus back to Baton Rouge. “That pregnancy changed her whole life,” says Velma. “She was the only one who left and left in shame.”

Mildred wished to be reborn. And just as Pentecostalism had rid her parents of their premarital sin, the teenager now reclaimed the virginal name given her at birth—Mary. She also took a job waitressing at a bus station. Soon after, at a sandwich counter in a Walgreen’s, she met Olin Nelson, an electronics repairman with a drawl and black hair and a wide smile. He went by “Jimmy.”

Nelson was twenty-two, the eldest of four from a broken home in a small Texas town. His father, William, had been estranged from his family when he died a decade before, and his mother, Alma, was a palm reader whose business peaked every fall when the grounds opposite her home in East Dallas welcomed the state fair. Alma had divorced a second time when, in 1941, her son Olin said goodbye to his girlfriend Mary and enlisted in the military. Alma was readying to marry a fourth time when, two years later, on March 6, 1943, her son, a sergeant on leave from his station in Panama, wed Mary in a double ceremony in Baton Rouge on the west bank of the Mississippi.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would soon determine that the river’s flow to Baton Rouge (and, just downriver, New Orleans) was in jeopardy. The river’s distributary, the Atchafalaya, had begun to absorb the Mississippi, widening and deepening at its expense. If nothing was done, the Atchafalaya would capture the Mississippi, the river from which it flowed, at Simmesport—the little Louisiana town where the two rivers parted, and where now Mary settled with Olin.

One year later, in 1944, Mary got pregnant. She now had a husband and a new name, and so stayed in Simmesport. There, one month after the radios Olin fixed told that the war was over, Mary gave birth to a boy she named Jimmy.

Mary, though, was not at peace. Her firstborn was just over the river. Though Mary doted on her—Velma “always wondered why,” she says—Mary could not call her her own. It wasn’t long before Mary began serving drinks in the local bars, and then began to drink, too, the waitress partial to whiskey.

Mary was soon pregnant a third time. On September 22, 1947, she entered the door reserved for whites at the clinic of her doctor, Winfield Plauche. At ten o’clock, Norma Lea Nelson was born, four ounces shy of seven pounds.

It was the last night of summer. Mary would never forget the storm that raged as she labored, wind and rain beating the Atchafalaya.