The River Rats of New Orleans
On the other side of the levee from the city, there is a small community called the batture that few people ever see. Macon Fry has lived there for 30 years.
They are there along Southern back roads and byways, in fallen sharecropper shacks and derelict farmhouses, and in old churches covered in wild blackberry vines. Look at the small towns and abandoned depots and boarding houses that sprang up as the railroads rushed westward.
This is where our Southern origin stories are. These places were once the front of our communities, where the heartbeat of the South was strongest before speed and convenience lured folks away and before we abandoned the countryside for the financial promise of our cities and suburbs.
My family made the move just before the Second World War, leaving farms in Essex County, Virginia, for the suburbs outside Washington, D.C., where my parents raised me. But each summer, my father drove us south out of the suburban sprawl and deposited my mother and us boys at the old family cabin on the Rappahannock River.
On the hundred-mile drive south, my parents swooned over antebellum homes and rich bottomland estates, while I scoped every run-down cropper’s shack and overgrown farm along the way. Drawn by the stories buried under vines and below rotting timbers, I prophesied, “Someday I will live here!”
My “someday” arrived one cool fall night in 1985, not on the Rappahannock, but on the Mississippi. I had fled the encircling noose of the Capital Beltway and the sprawling miles of suburban wasteland to land in the warmest place and easiest economy my old car could reach — New Orleans.
I sat, beer in hand, at the Maple Leaf Bar, a neighborhood watering hole a few blocks from my house. Local soul singer Johnny Adams had just finished a set when a stout guy in an aviator hat, maybe 23 years old, leaned back on a stool and began spooling theories about local mafia ties to Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I bought him a beer and he paused to introduce himself.
“I’m Rob. Where are you from?”
Now I’m a river rat of over 30 years, and I’ve spent much of that time looking for the stories of the place I call home. I never guessed how hard that quest would be.
Quick to disown my suburban heritage, I replied, “I pretty much grew up on the Rappahannock River in Virginia.”
Rob grinned and downed his beer.
“Really? I live in a camp just over the levee here on the Mississippi.”
Four years in New Orleans, and I had heard of no one living on the big river. I dumped my beer in a go cup and followed Rob six blocks up Oak Street. We went through a cut in the levee that separates Orleans from Jefferson Parish. We ascended a shell driveway. And there it was, that familiar, faintly sulfurous, fishy smell. The river.
A clutch of 13 stilt houses floated among willow trees in a chill November fog. At the end of a plank walkway, Rob pushed open an unlocked door and lit an oil lamp. There were no sashes or screens in the windows, and fog swirled in the flickering lamplight. The single 12-by-14-foot room contained a sleeping pallet, a crate of bike-repair tools and a wooden-spool table served by one rusty lawn chair. A plywood countertop supported an unplumbed sink and a two-burner Coleman stove. A tiny, unworking gas oven had no supply line. No electricity. No water. No gas. No toilet. Perfect!
We walked through another door and there, just past the edge of a sagging deck, was the Mississippi itself. Lights from a grain elevator across the way and the “whomp-whomp” of a ship’s propeller penetrated the billowing fog.
The deck was falling off, the windows were gone, and I could see a glimmer of lamplight through the cracks in the wall. But here I was on this guy’s deck breathing rich river air. No levee, no dock, no warehouse, nothing between us and the supertankers except fish to catch and driftwood to fashion into furniture. There was no street and thus no noise of traffic or glare of streetlamps. There was no mailbox for unwanted utility bills; but then there were no utilities either.
Rob agreed to surrender his board-and-batten shack to me. And my life in the last settlement on the lower Mississippi River began that damp fall night.
Now I’m a river rat of over 30 years, and I’ve spent much of that time looking for the stories of the place I call home. I never guessed how hard that quest would be. The 12 stilt-houses that comprise my colony rest directly on the river shore, on a scrap of silt known locally as the batture. The towering levee that keeps the city dry hides our community from the adjacent urban traffic. Every spring, when the river rises, our homes become islands, attached to the levee by long catwalks.
The settlement doesn’t appear on city maps because it is a river place. Batture dwellers don’t appear in city histories because those trace the flow of money, power and progress. Many people who live only blocks away in Uptown New Orleans don’t know the place exists. To solve the mystery of how these places came to be — and how they came to be forgotten — I had to look on the river itself, to find the journals and personal accounts of those who traveled and made their lives on the water.
By 1895, the batture had its own economy with notaries, tailors, tinkers, photographers and every type of tradesperson. One could get drunk, get religion, get married or get divorced without ever going ashore.
The Mississippi River was the nation’s first superhighway, and during the Colonial and early American periods, travel was primarily southward. The river carried frontiersmen and adventurers, family farmers and sometimes entire families west and south from the Appalachian frontier. They floated on homemade barges called shantyboats and tied up along the shore by river outposts from as far north as St. Paul, Minnesota, to the last practical stop — New Orleans. By 1895, over a thousand souls lived outside the levee in New Orleans. The batture had its own economy with notaries, tailors, tinkers, photographers and every type of tradesperson. One could get drunk, get religion, get married or get divorced without ever going ashore. A few of the rickety shantyboats began to pull onto the batture and grow legs.
These batture dwellers weren’t lured to the river edge by colonial land grants. There was no land rush among river folks seeking a fortune on the wave-swept silt. They took root in the same manner as the seeds of willows and button bush, carried by the current and the winds of the river valley. They wafted over the levee, drifted from the wintry north, and fled the storms that rolled across the Gulf of Mexico and the Cajun Prairie. Today’s 12 batture camps became my window into the untold story of New Orleans’ 140-year-old outsider community. It is a tale of wharf rats and river gypsies; of shantyboaters and stilt-house people; of frontiersmen and refugees fleeing fires, floods and economic hardship. At its zenith during the Great Depression, the river and its shores were home to tens of thousands of people.
Now, like those Virginia backroads I traveled with my family, the Mississippi has lost its cachet. Few people imagine it as a place to live. It is armored with concrete levees and floodwalls and burdened with fears of flooding. The Mississippi seldom carries adventurers, but instead carries the aggregate agricultural waste and chemical pollution from over a third of the nation. Life spins past as our cars and phones tell us the quickest routes to the most popular places.
There is a certain quality, however, to the Mississippi River, an irrevocable wildness that flood fighters fear but the remaining batture folks love. I realized it when I retreated to my cottage in Virginia for a few weeks after Hurricane Katrina. I returned to the Rappahannock in 2005 to find power lines strung across the river. The dirt road winding in had been paved and was lined with Titans and Denalis and Yukons hooked to jet-ski trailers. A two-story brick home with manicured yard stood where woods once surrounded my decaying cabin. Central air conditioning droned; weed trimmers, lawnmowers and leaf blowers whirred, whined and chattered. The place that was my childhood refuge was gone.
People who visit me now on the batture point out the proximity of those same things — power lines, wealthy neighbors, big cars and a paved bike path on top of the levee. But for two centuries on the Mississippi batture, wildness has lived beside industry and commerce. River shrimp and blackberry vines and catfish and batture dwellers have made a deal with the river powerful enough to hold wildness, industry and commerce.
Today’s batture dwellers, like countless “river rats” before them, still look out on a wild and irrevocable frontier, a place on the margins where a sunrise as promising as the first day of spring climbs over an open levee and melts in the west into a wide and wet horizon.
Macon Fry is an author, writer and educator who has lived on the New Orleans batture for more than 30 years. His book about life in the batture, “They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans,” was published in 2021.