FICTION
"The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina" by Ken Wells. Yale University Press, 245 pages. $25.
Bottom line: Off-the-beaten path Katrina story is one of the best.
Readers with Hurricane Katrina fatigue might be tempted to pass by Ken Wells' new book. That would be a mistake.
In the glut of works about the devastation Katrina caused three years ago this week, Wells has found a fresh, compelling story. As a bonus, he is a superb reporter and accomplished stylist. Of the dozen Katrina books I have read so far, I am guessing "The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous" will stay with me the most vividly.
It seems Wells was born to write his Katrina book, because he came of age on the banks of Bayou Black in Louisiana Cajun country. Not all that distant from New Orleans geographically, but a world away culturally, Wells already knew about the unusual customs and language of the water-bound Bayou territory of shrimp and oyster fishermen. After Wells left the bayous, he became an accomplished reporter/writer at the Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal. But he could not forsake his place of origin, writing four novels set in the Cajun bayous. (Wells writes for Portfolio magazine and lives in New York City.)
After Katrina devastated New Orleans, Wells traveled there to write about the calamity for the Wall Street Journal. He realized he could find new angles by breaking away from the herd of journalists to follow rumors that the bayou country south, east and west of the big city had also been devastated, but without the fanfare and the rescue crews.
The "good pirates" of Wells' title received the appellation because some are descended from pirates who terrorized the Louisiana shipping trade centuries earlier. By the early twenty-first century, the pirates struggled to make a living from shrimp and oyster boats, often selling their catch to high-class New Orleans eateries. Katrina wiped out their way of life within a few hours. Day after day, it seemed nobody cared. The politicians and rescuers swarmed to New Orleans, not the helpless bayous.
Wells cared. He reported for days in the aftermath of Katrina, then returned to write newspaper features and gather material for what became this book. Wells acknowledges the "many fine books" that deal with government failure during Katrina. His is different, "a narrative of the human spirit ... about a decidedly blue-collar, ruggedly independent people whose decisions to face down Katrina lay in deep cultural anchors. It is a story of people who—-when they realize no one is coming to save them—-rise up to save themselves and their neighbors in the face of raw peril."
Wells constructs the narrative primarily around several intertwined families in alternating chapters.
He gives the reporting a you-are-there quality, succeeding so well at conveying the struggle that I felt wrung out.
The individual survival stories make for adventure storytelling of the first order. But even though most of the protagonists found the means to remain in the bayous, their pre-Katrina world had disappeared.
Ultimately, Wells presents readers with a story "about the longing for home, and the determination of a proud bayou people to reclaim, against formidable obstacles, a sense of home in a place where the world has been forever rearranged." Readers with a glass-half-full attitude toward life might feel uplifted overall by the survival sagas. I closed the book profoundly depressed, however, because so much death and property damage could have been avoided.
Wells' expose fills in the details of the travesty, dating back many, many decades.
Steve Weinberg's newest book is "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller."
