CHENIERE DISPARUE, LOUISIANA, 1893
The inhabitants of Cheniere Disparue had a reputation for sloppy living. They ate whatever, married whomever. On Sundays, they sometimes went to sea or danced or gambled. Too lazy, it was said, to go up the bayou for wood, they had cut down the protective oak trees on their barrier island, cleared a path for Gulf winds and storm surge. They were Cadiens, the French-speaking descendants of the rollicking, complacent Acadians expelled from New France more than a century before, and also, as legend had it, of Caribbean pirates who had hidden themselves in the shifting mazes of the saltwater marsh that surrounded Cheniere Disparue and had given the wooded ridge its name: It was a place for lost men, disappeared men, or those who wanted to be.
The proclivity for piracy lived on. In hard years, Noe Terrebonne, the great-great-grandson of Acadian exiles, would do a bit of smuggling for Li Shan, the Chinese proprietor of a shrimp-drying platform on Bayou Andre, in the marsh north-west of Cheniere Disparue. From time to time, Li Shan would offer Noe a sum impressive to a fisherman to sail his lugger—a forty-foot vessel made for the shallower waters of home into the Gulf to meet a ship bound for New Orleans. Noe and his sons would take on cargo from this ship, barrels that they would stow in the hold among the hills of oysters or shrimp, padded all around with damp palmetto leaves to keep them cool. In these barrels: men and women from China, the Philippines.
