The Story Behind SHOULD THE WATERS TAKE US

I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana, raised by a single mother (I didn’t meet my dad until I was fourteen, and when I did, he was a man very much like my protagonist Boy Broussard in temperament if not in occupation) and an extended family of aunts and uncles and – significantly – my French-speaking Cajun grandparents, Maudrie and Herman Soileau.  I adored them.  My mom and I lived with them (along with two aunts and an uncle – very Old World!), in a house my grandfather built, until I was 8 years old.  They had come to Lake Charles after World War II, from the tiny villages north of Lafayette, where their families were sharecroppers.  My great-grandmother, as I remember her, spoke almost no English at all, and my grandparents spoke English with a heavy Cajun accent.  Mostly, to each other, they spoke Cajun French.  My mom’s generation speaks and understands only the littlest bit. Having been whipped in school for speaking their native tongue, my grandparents didn’t especially see the point in passing it on, especially since at the time – before the Cajun cultural revival in the 70s and 80s – French speakers in Louisiana were roundly discriminated against. Cajun pride, back then, was not a thing.  Growing up in that household, with elderly grandparents whose language and culture was very much in danger of dying out, I carried a sense of dread, a heavy pre-emptive nostalgia and grief, and that feeling, I think, has been the animating force behind this book. 

When, years later, I came across Bayou Farewell by Mike Tidwell, a 2004 exposé of the environmental disaster that is south Louisiana, I started to see my personal sense of dread in a larger context.  Unchecked erosion, exacerbated over the past century by human interference with natural processes, has brought the coastal ecology – and consequently, the coastal culture – to the verge of collapse.  Fishermen find open water where there was once land.  Coastal communities watch their cemeteries slip below water at high tide and reappear at low tide, sometimes short the bones of an ancestor.  And yet they stay, despite the threat of floods, hurricanes, and the irrevocable sweep of erosion, because their rituals – secular and religious – are tied to the ecology of this place.  They have written their history upon this landscape, although it may as well have been written in disappearing ink.  It is not so simple to leave it behind.

Much of the blame for this ecological disaster falls on the careless environmental policies of the oil and gas industry, whose relationship with Louisiana culture is complicated, to say the least.  While the oil and gas industry has destroyed the wetlands, it has also allowed wetlands culture to continue, at least temporarily; for example, fishermen are able to work offshore part of the year and return to their boats during shrimp and oyster seasons, sustaining a lifestyle that is no longer economically viable on its own.  In any case, over the past century there has been a conflict in these coastal fishing villages between the traditional way of life and the economic and ecological realities that have been steadily erasing that way of life.  The Deepwater Horizon disaster and the many devastating hurricanes (Katrina, Rita, Laura, Ida) of the last few decades were just part of the same exhausting cycle.  Louisiana, to me, is a place emblematic of global environmental change and decay, of the ambivalent relationship between the oil industry and the people whose land gives up the oil, of “solastalgia,” a neologism for the psychic ache that comes from living in a home-place that has undergone an irreversible transformation.  Louisiana is Nigeria, is New South Wales, is the Aral Sea, etc. etc. etc.

I’m not from a fishing family.  I didn’t grow up in the coastal parishes of southeast Louisiana, where erosion has presented the gravest threat.  According to a DNA test, I’m 5% “Acadian” (for whatever that’s worth), but most of my family lineage is from-France French.  At a family reunion one year, someone trotted out genealogical records tracing the Soileaus and Fontenots back to the ur-Soileau/Fontenot, and to be honest, I don’t remember the details.  They’d been in Louisiana a long time, is all I know.  Since the 17th Century, I believe. But for the last twenty years (!) that I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve learned everything I can about Louisiana land law, culture, history, ecology, and environmental issues, with a little side salad of Niger Delta history, etc.  I’ve talked for hours with fishermen, land owners, poachers, indigenous people and Cajuns and Nigerian priests, whose experiences informed the characters and plot points of the novel.  And I tried to represent the place and its people with the respect and subtlety they very much deserve. They inspired me with their warmth and their stories, as I hope this story inspires you. Thank you for reading!