Above, the Hurricane Katrina Memorial at Shell Beach commemorates the 163 St. Bernard Parish residents, many of them Isleños, who perished as a result of the 2005 storm.

[Today, Oct. 31, is the opening of James’ first-ever solo photography exhibit, held in Tenerife, Spain, featuring 60 curated images he has taken over the years of the annual Isleños Fiesta and the storied Isleños of lower St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana. For James the exhibit, sponsored by the Spanish government and made possible by Los Isleños Museum manager Bill Hyland, is a professional milestone. It is also a welcomed opportunity to exhibit a collection of images of a people and culture close to his heart. The following post is his story of his experiences with the Isleños. -- Cathy Jacob Gaffney]

It was nearly 25 years ago. I was sloshing through ankle-deep mud at the ruins of Fort Proctor, the never-completed, 19^th-century American fort that rises like a ghost above the marshes of Lake Borgne and which today, due to saltwater erosion, is accessible only by boat. My guides were St. Bernard Parish historian and Los Isleños Museum manager Bill Hyland, and the late Frank “Blackie” Campo, the venerated Isleño marshman, angler and unofficial “mayor” of Shell Beach.

A time capsule of a long-ago yet still working fishing village, Shell Beach is framed by neatly stacked crab traps, modest shrimp and oyster boats, and a hodge-podge of trailers and raised wooden homes, all tucked like a secret along the tree-shaded banks of Bayou Yscloskey. Within spitting distance are the relative newcomers in the form of half million-dollar weekend perches for affluent city dwellers, whose spacious second-floor balconies overlook Shell Beach’s dreamy, Prince of Tides-like marshscapes.

I could not have asked for two better storytellers that afternoon a quarter-century ago at Fort Proctor when I met Bill and Blackie, my first Isleños of lower St. Bernard Parish. It wasn’t long before this L.A. transplant and newspaper reporter, still a bit wobbly in his first-ever pair of white shrimp boots, found himself awash in a tidal surge of tales of life growing up on the water’s edge.

Blackie was well into his 70s, but as he spun his stories from childhood I could look into his still youthful, piercing blue eyes and almost see the drunken Russian artillery soldiers, who had trained at a nearby military range during World War II, marching home and singing at the top of their lungs while trading swills of hootch. As for La Luz de Lago? Blackie claimed to have actually seen the glowing green “light of the lake,” a ghost according to long-time Isleño legends. Others insist La Luz de Lago is more likely the result of naturally ignited swamp gas.

Of this I was certain: the oranges Blackie swiped as a kid from his neighbor’s tree tasted as sweet in his memory as they did in his youth.

Clockwise from top-left: lifelong St. Bernard Parish resident and Isleño Paul Lagarde; interior view of the Esteves House at Los Isleños Museum; Isleño cultural folk arts coordinator Donna Mumphrey-Martin (left) and volunteer Debbie Serigne at Los Isleños Fiesta; and the museum's Coconut Island Barroom, a 1920s structure dubbed "the bucket of blood" due to the frequency of fistfights that broke out weekend nights back in the day. 

MARSH CAMPS AND GROCERY BOATS

In lower St. Bernard Parish, located a half-hour’s drive from New Orleans but worlds away in terms of culture and disposition, time marches to the beat of a different and certainly slower drum. Especially for the Isleños, the modern-day descendants of Louisiana’s first Spanish Colonial settlers, who began arriving here in the late-1700s after France sold the Louisiana Territory to its Iberian neighbor. Even in the 21^st century the humble, hardworking people of Shell Beach still live life mostly through the senses: the briny taste of freshly shucked oysters; the sound of chugging shrimp boats plying nearby bayous; the sight of mercilessly beautiful sunrises peering above marshscapes that stretch to the horizon; the balmy caress of a seductive West Indies tradewind in the nearby Gulf of Mexico.

 Above: left, freshly shucked Louisiana oysters; right, shrimp and oyster boats line Bayou la Loutre in Shell Beach at dawn.

Newspaper assignments over two decades routinely took me south to what I began affectionately calling “Isleños Country,” to churn out feature stories about this insulated, tight-knit community’s uniquely colorful culture and folkways. Pre-dawn proved the best time to photograph boats from the kissing-cousin villages of Shell Beach and Delacroix Island, en route to the marsh-enveloped waters where local fishers trawl for oysters, shrimp and crab – a triple crown of local seafood favorites, which also helps set the table at New Orleans as well as national and international restaurants.

Elsewhere, generations of Isleño-American boat builders, duck hunters and decoy carvers, charter captains, trappers and tradespersons, as well as school teachers, merchants, politicians and physicians continue to leave an indelible legacy on this culture’s long storyline. So long, in fact, that many Isleños can point with pride to the St. Bernard Catholic Cemetery, established in 1785 and the oldest in the New Orleans area, where above-ground tombs and crypts bear the names of their ancestors who began arriving here nearly 230 years ago from the Canary Islands (hence, “Isleños”).

Above, old photographs of generations of Isleños provide ancestral links for many visitors to the annual Los Isleños Festival, held in March at Los Isleños Museum in St. Bernard, La. Below (left), lifelong Delacroix Island resident Lloyd "Wimpy" Serigne, president of Los Isleños Cultural and Heritage Society; (right), Travel Channel celebrity Andrew Zimmern chats with Isleño cultural folk arts coordinator Donna Mumphrey-Martin while taping a segment on Isleños cooking traditions, which aired on Zimmern's popular "Bizarre Foods America" TV series.    

As a boy, Lloyd “Wimpy” Serigne, 74, president of Los Isleños Cultural and Heritage Society, grew up without electricity or indoor plumbing. He recalls how his family would spend several months each year at a ramshackle camp in remote swamps four hours by boat from home. Time there was spent fishing, trapping and hunting to eke out a living and awaiting arrival of the weekly grocery boat that brought food staples to Isleño families hunkered down in the marshes for the season. No matter how austere this life might seem to outsiders, Wimpy, a Delacroix Island native and lifelong resident, is quick to point out how the picturesque bayous and marshes of his childhood provided a playground of natural beauty for a young Isleño boy who knew next to nothing of the outside world.

“It was my backyard,” he said fondly. “Everything I needed was right there.”

That backyard was fated to change.

DISAPPEARING ACT

Older Isleños attest that their rugged individualism and survival instincts, tested and tempered through the centuries by hurricanes and epidemics, are strengths forever woven into the tapestry of their centuries-old history. But they also readily admit their culture, environmentally and demographically, is slowly disappearing. Younger generations of college-educated Isleños are seeking opportunities outside lower St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans and elsewhere. Many families relocated to other cities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, never to return.

Wetlands meantime are disappearing at an alarming rate due to hurricanes and unstoppable erosion from saltwater intrusion. “Right here in Delacroix, when you come down the road, the only land you have (today) is right where the houses are, and the road. That’s it,” Wimpy told dailyyonder.com. “The land’s not there, the woods are not there, and the local people — they only have about five local people after Katrina that came back. In 20, 30 years, I don’t see this land being here. I think it will be all gone.”

“Another hurricane like Katrina,” said another local familiar with the area, “and this place is finished.”

As a journalist the rich, hidden patinas of this multi-layered world would not have been as accessible to me as they have been through the years without the longtime help of St. Bernard Parish historian Bill Hyland. As manager of Los Isleños Cultural and Heritage Museum (www.losislenos.org), his life’s work for three decades has involved in part acquiring and relocating historical and architecturally significant Isleño homes and other buildings to the museum grounds where they have been renovated and preserved for generations to come.

Clockwise from top-left: St. Bernard Parish historian and 11th-generation Louisianian Bill Hyland, manager of Los Isleños Cultural and Heritage Museum; the main museum building, which required complete reconstruction following damage caused by Hurricane Katrina; and the museum's noteworthy collection of historical and architecturally significant Isleño homes and structures which have been acquired and relocated to the museum grounds for renovation and restoration during the past three decades.

Charming and succinctly comported as befits a quintessential Southern gentleman, Bill possesses a statesman’s gift of language and oration. Yet it is Bill’s empathetic, generous manner that perhaps best honors his roots as an 11^th-generation Louisianian and descendant of one of the state’s oldest founding families. More to the point, over the decades he has taught me – and no small number of local, national and international journalists who have come to Isleños Country on assignment -- much about the resilient people who continue to call this swath of Southeast Louisiana home.

All of which is why it was truly a great honor last August when Bill reached out and asked me to submit a collection of photos I had taken of the Isleños Festival and the community’s culture -- this for an exhibit to be held in the Canary Island of Tenerife in Spain. Bill approved the images from my archive and also served as liaison and translator for the Spanish government’s representative for the Isleños exhibit. To him I owe my deepest gratitude.

At the dead end of a twisting two-lane blacktop called Yscloskey Highway that wends through Shell Beach is a large bronze plaque that memorializes the 163 names of St. Bernard Parish residents, many of them Isleños, who perished in Hurricane Katrina. From here I look out across the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet to Fort Proctor in the distance, the late-afternoon horizon intersected by the occasional shrimp boat, its port and starboard nets hoisted at the 10- and 2-o’clock positions, heading home from a day of trawling.

I linger at this cultural crossroads to soak in the uncomplicated poetry that awakens the senses, keenly aware this land is slowly disappearing -- and, along with it, a centuries-old way of life.