Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers

By Emma Christopher Lirette

In recent years, shrimpers on the Louisiana coast have faced a historically dire shrimp season, with the price of shrimp barely high enough to justify trawling. Yet, many of them wouldn’t consider leaving shrimping behind, despite having transferrable skills that could land them jobs in the oil and gas industry. Since 2001, shrimpers have faced increasing challenges to their trade: an influx of shrimp from southeast Asia, several traumatic hurricane seasons, and the largest oil spill at sea in American history.

In Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers, author Emma Christopher Lirette traces how Louisiana Gulf Coast shrimpers negotiate land and blood, sea and freedom, and economic security and networks of control. This book explores what ties shrimpers to their boats and nets. Despite feeling trapped by finances and circumstances, they have created a world in which they have agency.

Lirette provides a richly textured view of the shrimpers of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, calling upon ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, interdisciplinary scholarship, and critical theory. With evocative, lyrical prose, she argues that in persisting to trawl in places that increasingly restrict their way of life, shrimpers build fragile, quietly defiant worlds, adapting to a constantly changing environment. In these flickering worlds, shrimpers reimagine what it means to work and what it means to make a living.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Aug 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496841421

Emma Christopher Lirette

Emma Christopher Lirette is a writer and independent scholar. After growing up on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, she earned an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University and a PhD in American studies from Emory University. She currently works in the field of user experience research.

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Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers

Last Stand of the LOUISIANA SHRIMPERS

Emma Christopher Lirette

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

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2022 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging Number 2022017525

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-4140-7

Trade paperback ISBN 978-1-4968-4145-2

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-4142-1

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4141-4

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-4143-8

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-4144-5

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

for

Myrian Blond Lirette & Marie Eschete

my Granny and Mawmaw

who in life fashioned a world worth living in

Figure 1a. Rand-McNally New Commercial Atlas Map of Louisiana. From Commercial Atlas of America (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1913). Courtesy of the US National Archives.

Figure 1b. Detail of Terrebonne Parish from Rand-McNally New Commercial Atlas Map of Louisiana. From Commercial Atlas of America (Chicago: Rand-McNally, 1913). Courtesy of the US National Archives.

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

UNMOORING FOR BEGINNERS

Lesson One: Making Space

Lesson Two: Stories and Scholarship

Lesson Three: A Brief History of the Pre-Bust Louisiana Shrimp Fishery

Syllabus

BLOOD

Bloodlines

Blood Magic and Cruelty

Ecology and the Body

WATER

Bodies of Water

Names of Water, or the Idea of Order at Mare à Clay

Bodies on the Water

Land’s End

Oil and Water

Gulf

NETS

Ghost Nets

Miraculous Draught of Fish

FISH STORIES: A METHODOLOGICAL APPENDIX

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Figures

Figure 1a: Rand-McNally New Commercial Atlas Map of Louisiana

Figure 1b: Detail of Terrebonne Parish from Rand-McNally New Commercial Atlas Map of Louisiana

Figure 2: Value of the Dulac-Chauvin Port, 2000–2019

Figure 3: Kim Guy

Figure 4: George and ChaCha Sevin

Figure 5: ChaCha Sevin

Figure 6: Glynn Trahan

Figure 7: ChaCha Sevin culling shrimp from pogy

Figure 8: The Daddy Bucks in the 2015 Boat Blessing

Figure 9: The Boat Blessing from the shore of Lake Boudreaux

Figure 10: Area around Robinson Canal, 1894

Figure 11: Area around Robinson Canal, 1941

Figure 12: Area around Robinson Canal, 1964

Figure 13: Area around Robinson Canal, 1994

Figure 14: Area around Robinson Canal, 2015

Figure 15: Lake Quitman, 1894

Figure 16: Lake Quitman and Lake Boudreaux, 1941

Figure 17: Lake Quitman and Lake Boudreaux, 2015

Figure 18: Quitman’s Lake and Impassable Swamp, 1856

Figure 19: Department of the Gulf Map No. 10, Military Approaches to New Orleans

Figure 20: Chad and Angela Portier

Figure 21: David Chauvin

Figure 22: Decercelier’s Carte du Missicipy ou Louissiane depuis la Baye de lascension jusqua la pointe de la Mobille

Figure 23: John Ross’s Course of the River Mississippi, from the Balise to Fort Chartres; Taken on an Expedition to the Illinois, in the Latter End of the Year 1765

Figure 24: Kurt and Claude Lirette

Figure 25: Steve Billiot as Cajun Elvis

Figure 26: Steve Billiot aboard his boat, the Lady L

Figure 27: Dawn on Lake Boudreaux

Figure 28: Chad Portier

Figure 29: Brett Lirette

Acknowledgments

The story goes that the scholar—solitary, lonely—lives a life devoid of human contact. Rather than taking refuge in people, the scholar seeks out the smell of old books, the reverb of tiny sounds (a pencil scratching, a page turning) in cavernous libraries and reading rooms, the cozy swaddle of a cluttered office. After a period of time—say, five years, the suggested duration of a doctoral program in the humanities—a work of original research springs forth, proof at last that the scholar has thought deeply and critically about a topic and is capable of documenting those thoughts in a book-length text. Instead of conversation and companionship, the scholar has interlocutors. If you are impatient to know who they are, you can flip to the end to read an alphabetized list of scholarly works that the scholar has read and engages with—at least in theory.

In my case, this story has some truth: after five years of graduate study, I emerged with a dissertation in hand. After another five years, I emerged with a book. You can see my scholarly interlocutors by flipping to the end. I spent hours reading old and new books, writing by hand and keyboard, curled over a desk in a cluttered but sunny office. But on the whole, this story is false and dangerous. This book would not have been possible without a vast network of people, opportunities, and support. This section is a small way to recognize that constellation.

Foremost, I want to acknowledge the heroes of Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers: Steve Billiot, David Chauvin, Kim Guy, Claude Lirette, Angela Portier, Chad Portier, ChaCha Sevin, George Sevin, and Glynn Trahan. These men and women entrusted me with their stories, their hope, and their practices of labor. I hope I did right by them. I thank them for their openness and for trying to make a world more survivable. Also for the shrimp, crabs, crawfish, and squid.

Thanks also to others who let me interview them, allowed me to hang out on their boats and docks, and provided me with information crucial to this research: my pawpaws, Dudley Eschete and Clyde Lirette; Joseph Doan and the shrimpers moored in Intracoastal City; Carla Ghere; Mr. Harris; Mr. Houston; Trudy Luke; and Carolyn Tillman.

Thanks also to the following contributors to this project: Lindsey Feldman, who helped me shape my research when I was a fledgling ethnographer; Anne Dugas and Thu Bui of Louisiana Sea Grant, who helped me gain access to the community of Vietnamese shrimpers in Vermilion Parish; Jason Theriot, historian and fellow child of coastal Louisiana, who shared boudin and beer with me at his camp in Cocodrie; Shanondora Billiot, scholar of social work and fellow child of coastal Louisiana, who traded stories of scholarship and ethnography in southern Louisiana; Thurston Hahn III of Coastal Environments, who tracked down old, rare maps of the coast; Laura Ann Browning, who shared key historical ephemera and publications from Terrebonne Parish; and the special collections staff at LSU’s Hill Memorial Library and at the Louisiana Research Collection of Tulane University’s Howard-Tilton Memorial Library.

I thank the late Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts, which counted me among its final cohort of doctoral students. The ILA, founded in 1952, was among the oldest interdisciplinary programs granting PhDs. For more than sixty years, it housed experimental scholars and artists whose imagination and curiosity crossed the boundaries of traditional disciplines. I was one of those lucky enough to be part of its community, which remained vibrant, creative, and rigorous even during the final days of the graduate program. I thank Martine Brownley, advocate for orphaned doctoral students; Katie Rawson and Jesse Karlsberg, who let me work with incredible freedom for my three years as an associate editor and creative technology strategist at Southern Spaces; David Morgen, David Fisher, and Joonna Trapp, who invited me to be a part of Domain of One’s Own and the Writing Program; Abe Mohammadione and Vikas Shah, who gave me a chance to work on film sets and join the phenomenal creative and production team at Ideas United; and Peter Wakefield and Kim Loudermilk, who provided me with classes to teach and the mentorship to teach them well.

I have been lucky in this life to be a student to phenomenal teachers. Thinking that went into this book was first cultivated in courses taught by Tanine Allison, Jonathan Goldberg, Lynn Huffer, Sean Meighoo, Michael Moon, Bobbi Patterson, Bobby Paul, and Elizabeth Wilson. These teachers modeled both rigor and enthusiasm, and I am grateful that I could work out my preliminary theoretical agenda under their tutelage. A special callout to Anna Grimshaw and Allen Tullos. Anna provided the gift of an engaged practice of anthropology and a model of experimental scholarship that can nimbly navigate disciplinary convention without sacrificing artistic vision. Allen has been an emphatic supporter of my writing on Louisiana and has shown me how to balance empathy and critique when analyzing the often-frustrating places we are from.

My work would also have been impossible without my experience in Cornell University’s creative writing MFA program. I am so grateful to my advisers and teachers there: Alice Fulton, Ken McClane, Ellis Hanson, Bob Morgan, Jane Juffer, and Jonathan Culler.

A first-generation college graduate, I am also greatly influenced by my earliest experience in higher education at Loyola University New Orleans, especially the mentorship of Katie Ford and Marcus Smith. Marcus opened the door to studying Louisiana, both in class and out, when he hired me as a personal assistant to recover his archive of New Orleans material flooded during Hurricane Katrina. Katie was my poetry teacher and thesis adviser. Chapter 3 of this book, Water, begins with an extended close reading of The Idea of Order at Key West, a poem I memorized and recited for her Introduction to Poetry course. Both during and since my undergraduate years, Katie has supported me with encouragement, advice, and friendship.

Angelika Bammer, a mentor, adviser, and friend, has had a tremendous impact on this work. It has been the greatest privilege of my life as a scholar and writer to work with her, and she has the rare talent to turn doubt into passion, fear into hope. I aspire to her generosity, curiosity, and sophistication. Angelika reminds me that I am a writer when I forget. And when I’m feeling adrift, she helps me find my moorings (and release them, one by one, if need be).

During the process of editing and transforming this book, I left academia to pursue a career in technology. It might be gauche to talk about my own work (in this, my book about work), but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the stability and financial security that made creating this book possible and decoupled it from the urgency of the job market. Thank you especially to Abby Johnson, UX Research Manager at the Home Depot, for recognizing my value and giving me opportunity after opportunity.

Id also like to thank the amazing team at University Press of Mississippi: Vijay Shah, Joey Brown, Courtney McCreary, Todd Lape, Laura Strong, Ellen Goldlust, Kathy Burgess, and Carlton McGrone. I'd especially like to thank Jackson Watson for helping me navigate the publication process, Shane Gong Stewart for helping me finalize the manuscript, and Craig Gill for your support and editorial guidance over the last few years.

My friends have served as my first readers, critics, coconspirators, teachers, and cheerleaders. They have endured my improvised bits, complaints, jeremiads, baroque cooking, and shifting obsessions. Thanks to them, I have maintained something like optimism throughout this journey. Jay, Trish, Nasim, Sarah, Sasha, Rachel, Mael, Stu, Jesse, Laura, and Sally. Anne Marie, Danielle, Jameel, and Christian. Lindsey and the ethnographic adventure of 2013 taught me how to do anthropology—and made it fun. Fahamu Pecou, the shit. Clint Fluker, scholar, impresario, and confidant: I could not have made my way through writing this book without his friendship. To my podna, Brady.

My family has been unwavering in their love and support during the writing of this book. My dad, Kurt, makes an unnamed and heavily fictionalized appearance in the Water chapter. I thank him for being the mayor of Chauvin, for founding a cultural nonprofit with me, for teaching me the value of place and work and land and sea and kin and story. My mom, Sandra, makes only a cameo here but has nevertheless brought my world into being. She still teaches me to savor life, to appreciate the gift of others, and to love and serve with my whole being. My brother, Brett, played an integral role in my fieldwork. He accompanied me on interviews, kept me company between them, and served as my production assistant, key grip, gaffer, best boy, 1st AD, 2nd unit photographer, and sound engineer. Without him, my fieldwork would have been neither successful nor fun. Thanks also to my sister, Sydney, my sister-in-law, Annika, and my in-laws—Chris, Cindy, David, Christine, Daniel, and Joseph. Their support—whether manifested as childcare, food, conversation, drinks, jokes, mourning, or celebration—has been invaluable.

Since writing this book, I have come out as a trans woman, which has been my own practice of unmooring and of trying to make a world that is survivable. I guess it makes a little more sense why my book about Louisiana shrimpers returns again and again to queer theory to make sense of nonce worlds and the practice of self-elaboration. At a very practical level, coming out has forced me to reckon with my own ideas about naming, remembering and forgetting, and the fixity of identity. I have chosen, for better or worse, to have my birth name as my middle name for this book as a nod to the continuity of my publication history and as an homage to who the world thought I was for most of my life. My actual middle name, X, a variable, will take its place going forward.

My coming out has been fraught, especially here, in this age of stochastic terrorism directed at trans people, of the dissolution of rights to bodily autonomy, and of the machinery of governance mobilized to exclude people like me from public life. On a personal level, I have lost small portions of my network of care and belonging as some people, including some named above, have faded out of my life. But besides the loss and this dark age, this dark future coming to pass, I have found joy and love and hope and community. I have found life. Not the good life of the American Dream, but something better, something sustaining and experimental and, most of all, livable.

I would like to thank the people who have given me a supportive and affirming environment: my cis friends who have shown up, the moms of my eldest's Girl Scout Troop, my colleagues at Meta, my Chauvin family. I've reconnected with several people who are deeply important to me, whose love has been fun and comforting and has sustained me in the past year: Zee, Sydney (my sister), Louis, CeCe, Beth, Christian, Laura, and Catherine. But most of all, I've found my people, my community, my network of care and joy and queerness. To trans twitter and all my reply girls. To my comrades in activism. To my queer and trans community in Atlanta. Especially to the amazing, gorgeous women who have been with me in despair and celebration, who have helped me and allowed themselves to be helped by me: Jordan, Anna, Victoria, and my new bestie Lyra. And most of all, to Violet, who came into my life exactly at the right moment, rejuvenating me with love and creativity and brilliance and queer utopia.

For my wife, my partner, my friend (the second body for our single soul), Linda, I reserve the most profound gratitude. This was not easy, but you made it survivable, and it is a privilege and pleasure to share life with you, to author a world in which we can live together, to grow a family, to hope for a tomorrow better than today. You have gifted me with your hope, trust, and love, and I return the same with joy. You were there as I shattered, and your love has helped me rebuild myself, to become who I am. After I returned from fieldwork, Linda and I welcomed our firstborn, Phoenix Claire, into this world. Phoenix, like her namesake, has burned away an old world and created another one from its ashes. We welcomed our second child, Bernadette, in 2018. I am lucky to take part in the expansion of both of your universes. Over the past few years of plague and quarantine and transformations, we've built a little world together, something durable but flexible, a life worth living, a life full of love and closeness and absurdity and adventure.

Finally, thanks to Chauvin, Louisiana, a small hamlet on Bayou Petit Caillou, an hour southwest of New Orleans, a thirty-minute drive from the end of the road at the Gulf of Mexico. I am lucky to have been born there. I hope that Chauvin prevails so that others can be so lucky.

Last Stand of the Louisiana Shrimpers

UNMOORING FOR BEGINNERS

This book deals with nothing other than hoping beyond the day which has become.

—Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope

Over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shrimping played an important role shaping the south Louisiana imaginary. It moored people to a cultural past. It was a way to make a living. It offered freedom on the sea. Shrimping, the lifeblood of bayou and marsh communities along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, fed generations of children who grew up to be shrimpers. Yet the twenty-first century has seen the decline of the shrimp fishery because of a rough slate of economic crises, a market flush with imported shrimp, the worst marine oil spill in history, and several calamitous hurricane seasons. As the shrimp fishery declines, so too do shrimp fishers. Why do they cling to this way of life?

◆ ◆ ◆

Say you have a ship. Say it is propelled by sails. Say you need it to be parked in a single spot for a while. You need to moor it: you drop several anchors into the water to keep the boat from drifting out to sea or tipping over. You anchor from bow and stern or perhaps use two anchors from the bow, one 180 degrees from the other. If you have a mooring, such as a pier or jetty or anchor buoy, you can tie up your boat from different locations along a side. In this case, we are talking about a ship, a sailboat, that is moored just off a coast in, let us say, the Gulf of Mexico. We use two bowers, anchors dropped from the bow, one heavier than the other. We position the ship in such a way that keeps it equidistant from the two anchors, one ahead of the bow, the other abaft the stern. This is what mooring is: to secure a boat by one or more anchors.

Say you want to sail away somewhere. The first thing you must do is unmoor. Today, to unmoor means a lot of things. It means to be adrift. It means to be cut loose from the things that anchor us. We use the word unmoored to describe a person or an idea that has slipped free from a kind of social, ideological, or imaginative bondage: it is a way of saying that a person disregards conventions of propriety or reason, that a person has gone off message or off script, or that an idea has taken on a life of its own and cannot be controlled by its fashioners. But for a sailor, to unmoor does not mean to loosen all anchors. It is a set of actions a crew takes before unfurling sails and sailing. To unmoor is to reduce the number of anchors to one so that after the sails are ready, the last anchor can quickly be hauled up and stowed for travel.¹

It is easy to understand why we use unmoor to mean unanchored. For the nautically disinclined, it may be unclear why one would even want to reduce anchors to only one when the goal is to sail away. That final anchor does get hauled in before the voyage. Imagine, however, a sailboat, floating just offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Waves rock the vessel, pitching it this way and that. Without an anchor (or a drogue, which does not reach the seabed but exerts drag on the boat), it would be nearly impossible to steer the boat to make the sails catch the wind. Unfurling the sails without regard for wind direction is extraordinarily dangerous. The last anchor gives the captain of the ship a chance to control the ship’s orientation.

And what if this ship were moored at a wharf among other boats? A sudden tide or wake or wind on an unanchored boat might crash it into other boats, a mistake amplified into mayhem. The last anchor limits the reaches of human error or meteorological chance. The captain can control the unmoored boat through the anchor before canvas and wind and rudder can be used.

The kind of unmooring that was practiced when most large boats required sails to get anywhere lends itself to a much more limited, nuanced metaphorical application than the way we use unmooring to mean cut adrift. This kind of unmooring is not adrift at all: it is a stage of cutting ties to go on a journey. It is a controlled freeing, a shift from one type of control (anchored) to another (commanding sails). Instead of using unmoored to describe, say, a politician whose ramblings eschew political convention, accepted fact, and reason, we might use the word to describe the act of a politician whose utopian thinking never loses connection with the material and political conditions of a recognizable world, a politician whose unmooring is a thought exercise on the way to substantive policy change. Instead of using unmoored to characterize a population that feels ignored and unsupported by a dominant culture, we might use it to characterize a small group of people who live experimentally but in conversation with a mainstream culture. The metaphorical usage of unmooring implies something bad: being lost at sea, unable to find purchase on solid ground. But it can also mean a type of freedom: being unfettered by restrictions, able to move through the world without obstacles. In the United States, this unmooring is idealized. It is the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness that we want to believe are not only unhindered by regulation but also entirely unshaped by government and tradition. We want our freedom to be original. We want to be born equal to pursue that freedom. But our freedom is neither unregulated nor original. We are not born equal, at least not in terms of ability to exercise freedom of self-determination. The nautical usage of unmooring explains this tension between competing forms of freedom and control. Instead of endless possibility, events are anchored in preparation to shift control from one agent to another. Instead of absolute control of these agents, all we have are a series of complexly engineered but imperfect safeguards against the threat of accident and chaos.

Say, now, that it is 2014 and you have a boat moored just inshore of the Gulf of Mexico in the state of Louisiana. Say you are a fifty-year-old white man dressed in a ratty t-shirt, torn jeans, and white shrimp boots. Your skin has taken on the permanent hue of skin just before a sunburn, but darker, with the texture of a leather welding glove. You need to finish attaching large nets tied to twin outriggers before you are ready to begin the May shrimp season. You tried working onshore at a machine shop and as a truck driver, and it didn’t stick.

You’ve yoked your work to something you call freedom. Shrimping affords you something a job onshore does not. The trajectories of your life—the confluence of family and finances, of the hope to survive and the desire to be left alone, of the menace and comfort of a nautical disposition—have unmoored you. This unmooring is the unmooring of using the final anchor to reposition. It is an unmooring that does not drift too far from the networks of power relationships that have, you believe, left you high and dry. Being autonomous is the hallmark of your work ethic, but that autonomy does not prevent you from seeing yourself as part of a network of blood relationships, from feeling that an uncanny past is reemerging to steer you into a future that you hope will be somehow better or at least more or less the same as a present wherein you can provide for your household by dragging the waters near your home and divesting them of some of their sea life.

Say you cling to this work, the work of fishing, an industry that has been endorsed by no less a god than Christ himself. Say you cling to this work even when a handful of food inspectors let through a pink tide of foreign shrimp bred in fetid ponds on a diet of stiff antibiotics. You cling to this work even as your brothers quit it, finding fortune in oil and machines. When your children were small, they could not be pried from the gunwale on the secondhand skiff you got from your dad. But now, none of your progeny wants anything to do with a life of trembling marsh grass, brackish water, and crustaceans. But you cling nevertheless.

Why shrimp when there is no future in shrimping? Why persist in a job when you know, because you are not stupid, that there will come a time when there may be no more trawl boats moored in the bayous across coastal Louisiana?

I went to Louisiana, to my hometown, Chauvin, and asked shrimpers why they kept shrimping. I interviewed people who either made their livings on the water or used to do so, and I interviewed them at the beginning of a shrimp season that for many of them was shaping up to be the worst in recent memory. The dockside price of shrimp bottomed out to forty cents a pound for medium-sized shrimp during my fieldwork in spring 2015.

Even then, at the nadir of the shrimp price crisis that extended throughout that year and the next, the shrimpers I interviewed would not consider retiring their boats