Alligator mississippiensis: the American alligator
leucistic alligator: the rare and beautiful white American alligator, distinguished from the albino by touches of pigment and brilliant blue eyes; cannot tolerate strong sunlight; believed to be incapable of surviving in the wild
Summer 1947
Raphe Broussard was just a boy when he first saw it—glimpsed it, at least. Mostly hidden in the sawgrass and canes of Bayou Chene, it had temporarily left the tip of its long alabaster tail exposed in the sunlight—a rare mistake. The streak of white offered only a hint of what lay hidden, the promise of what might be revealed. Raphe had watched silently, reverently almost, as the tail thrashed back and forth just once before disappearing into the green, leaving him to wonder if he had truly seen it at all. He told no one.
A full decade later, just a few days past his twenty-first birthday, Raphe would have his second encounter with the great reptile. His parents and many of their kin had been lost to the hurricane of 1940. A few years after that, his older sister fell victim to a storm of her own making as she drank herself into oblivion with her sorry excuse for a husband, both of them abandoning their only child for what they thought would be the high life in New Orleans. The high life ended them, quickly and without mercy. And though there was plenty of family willing to help, they had children of their own to feed, and the orphaned Iry, a boy of four, seemed to feel safe and content with no one but Raphe, who now had a decision to make.
The choice was weighing on him that day as he paddled deep into the bayou, gliding across remote but familiar waters where the pines and cypress trees towered above. They cast this solitary pool in perpetual shade as if a veil had been tossed over the sun, not blocking its hot rays entirely but reducing them to a warm softness. The water was glassy, carpeted around the edges with water hyacinth and duckweed. Floating here on still waters, in a canoe built by his grandfather, Raphe could quiet his mind and think. He could come to a decision about a thing.
Should he give up a young man’s freedom and become a father to his nephew, or listen to the Baptist missionary?
Most of the evangelicals who had come into the Atchafalaya Basin seemed to be good people who meant well, but there was a particularly strident one—a Brother Lester—who was determined to make Baptists of all the Catholics in Louisiana. He had somehow gotten wind of Raphe’s plight and urged him to give Iry, blood kin, to a “good Christian family”—strangers. The child needed a mother and father, the missionary said. A single young man like Raphe—Cajun, Catholic, and therefore prone to drink—would surely be a bad influence.
Raphe imagined himself as a young father with no wife, sacrificing his freedom and praying he didn’t make some horrible mistake that ruined his nephew’s life. And then he pictured a choice he found completely unbearable—trying to live with the expression on Iry’s face, the one that would haunt Raphe forever if he let strangers take the boy away.
That heartbreaking image—of a child realizing he had been abandoned by the one person he trusted—was burning Raphe’s brain when the alligator appeared. It came out of the tall canes at the water’s edge and silently glided in. What a sight! The alligator had to be twelve feet long and pure white except for a single swirl of pigment trailing down its back like curled ribbon. It passed so fearlessly close to Raphe that he could see the piercing sparkle of its blue eyes. On the far bank, it climbed onto a fallen cypress in dappled light, taking in as much sun as its pale skin could tolerate.
Raphe had never put much stock in the swamp legends that some of the old-timers told stories about. He loved the tales themselves, but they were just campfire entertainment, nothing more. Still, he was comforted by the notion that the snowy gator was keeping watch while he wrestled with Iry’s fate and his own conscience.
As he sat silently in his canoe, the massive white head slowly turned, almost in his direction but not quite. In the soft light, Raphe could see one side of the alligator’s face, one of those sapphire eyes. Only a few seconds passed before it turned back, gliding slowly across the fallen tree and silently disappearing into the canes.
The fishermen and hunters along the river called the white alligator Fantôme du Bayou—“Ghost of the Bayou.” It was strange—all of them knew about Le Fantôme, repeating stories they had heard for years, but very few had actually seen it. While the others speculated about the high price such a rare hide would fetch, Raphe found it impossible to believe that anyone who actually saw something so extraordinary could bring himself to kill it. Still, he kept his sightings to himself.
Raphe looked up at a darkening sky. Rain was coming. He sat in his canoe, listening to the wind stir the trees overhead and watching ripples begin to wave across the mirrored surface of the water. His choice was clear.
He would never tell a soul about his rendezvous with the white alligator. And he would never send Iry away. Some things belonged right where they were.