After the Storms: Tradition and Change in Bayou La Batre

Abstract

About once a century in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, a catastrophic storm comes roaring from the Gulf of Mexico. Ninety-nine years before Hurricane Katrina there was the hur ricane of 1906, a mighty wind that lasted for more than twenty-four hours, long before these events had names. The memories of it are present even now in the oral history of the Bayou?in the family stories handed down for generations in this coastal fishing village. Alma Bryant, a girl of thirteen in 1906, and later her community's leading educator, re membered being separated from her family in the storm, as the tidal surge tore her house from its moorings. Rain, the coldest and heaviest I have ever felt, pounded me relent lessly, she said. Then the vicious wind picked me up and immersed me in one of those craters made by an uprooted tree. I clutched the limb . . . and held on for dear life, barely conscious of the weird noises all around me?the shrieks of frightened birds, the woeful cry of a drowning calf, the dying moans of Mr. Deakle's old white mare pinned beneath the demolished barn.1 Bryant, in the end, was one of the lucky ones. She managed to swim and clamor through the floating debris?the limp, dead chickens, bloated hogs, writhing snakes? toward the flickering light of a house in the distance. At least 135 others did not make it, and the Mobile Register, the morning newspaper in the nearest city, carefully recorded the details. Two Bayou women lining up the bodies, covering them with shrouds; a fright ened family emerging from the woods, where they had drifted all night in an open skiff; a writer's description of those who survived: Most . . . resembled great chunks of liver colored beef, so badly were they battered and bruised.2 This now is a part of the lore of Bayou La Batre, a place where residents freely acknowl edge that life on the edge of the continent is hard. The hurricanes come and the hurri canes go, requiring resilience of those who survive. So it was in 1906, and so it is after Hurricane Katrina. But there is another understanding more subtle and elusive, more difficult for many people to explain. When the truly massive storms hit the Bayou, those once-a-century calamities, they have often changed the course of local history, much as they might alter the course of a river.