Written account by Joseph Russel Broussard
(Dr. Mark Randall Broussard’s Additions in Italics)
(June 26th and 27th, 1957)
(The Broussard Family)
Joseph Russel Broussard, 28 years old
Lurlie Mae Broussard, 26 years old
Francis Kirk, 4½ years old
Mark Randall, 3½ years old
Richard Blane, 2½ year old
Lisa Reyne, nine months
(Visiting us at the time)
Hendrid (Faulk) McGill, 25 years old
JoBeth McGill, 5 years old
THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LANGUAGE THAT MAY BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME READERS. THIS STORY IS A HISTORY LESSON, AND BEING SUCH, NO CENSORSHIP WILL BE USED TO ALTER IT.
Through the night of June 26, 1957, and into the early morning hours, my neighbor, C.J. Stoute and I were moving things into my family’s new home that was just a few hundred feet down the road from the little rental house where we were staying.
The final move-in date was still two weeks away. The new house had been built mainly by the labor of friends and family. It was financed through a bank loan that was insured by a builder’s risk policy that my banker required that I carry.
I did not evacuate my family from Cameron before Hurricane Audrey, because like many others that I knew, I was also of the opinion that storms had come before with little harm. C. J and I intended to have our two families weather this storm in the roomy new house and this is why we were bringing in water, food, blankets, bedding, and other supplies that we felt would be needed.
It was 3:30 AM when we finished and left the new house. On walking back to the rental house, we noticed that the wind had increased dramatically and that it was raining much harder. There was still no water was on the road. When I entered the rental house, I found that my wife, Lurlie, was awake and asked her to make coffee. I knew we would not sleep, and both C. J and I were wet and cold and needed a coffee boost.
As we sat waiting for the coffee to brew, I heard the gurgling of water and realized that the sound was coming from rushing water lapping-up against the floor joists under the house. I told C.J. and Lurlie to, “Grab the kids; the water’s rising!” Dad is not naturally a quiet person, and when he is excited even less so. So, I was half awake when he and C. J. entered with their loud talking, but when he said these words, I was instant on and remember them well. They woke everyone and led them to the car including our visitors from Georgia, Lurlie’s cousin Hendrid McGill and her daughter JoBeth. We had a beautiful Collie named Rex that was left untied. Some woman from Beaumont reportedly found Rex, but by the time Dad got to her home to pick him up, he was either stolen or had run away. I went outside and waded through about twelve inches of water to get to the car. I jerked open the hood and cut the fan belt with the thought that in high water the turning of the fan would splash water on the spark plugs and kill the engine. With the belt cut, the fan could not turn, so perhaps this would help the engine run long enough to get us to safety.
It took about five minutes for everyone to dress and load, and by that time, the water rose another six inches to about twenty inches over the top of the oyster shell road. I jumped into the car and drove us down the street. We stopped at C.J.’s house to pick up his mother and father Louie and his brother Louie, junior. C. J. mother forgot her purse, and instinctively ran back into the house to search for it. Dad was fit to be tied with C. J.’s mother. He was terribly worried about the car drowning out and this delay made it more likely. In reality, all the cars that eventually made it to Busters drowned out, so that if it were not here it would have happened shortly. This delayed us another fifteen minutes. During this short period, water began to rise quickly up the side of my car, and the car stalled. From then on, we had to push the car towards the main road for a distance of about six city blocks. I let Lurlie drive, while C. J. and I pushed. The car was easier than normal to push since it began to float. We picked up more people as we went along, first the Peshoff family then the Authements and then the Savoys. We had eighteen children in the car with four adults to help keep the children calm. The rest of the adults were outside helping to push. The atmosphere in the car was hushed with kids on best behavior. I think that the faces of the adults probably hinted to the children of the danger. My son Mark and his brother Kirk were on the floor in the back seat and remember that it was odd, and somehow wrong, to see water leaking in from the outside through cracks in the doors. The adults on the outside were wading through flowing saltwater. A friend and neighbor name Gordon joined in the pushing (neither Dad nor Aunt Velda could remember Gordon’s last name). By the time we made it to the main road, the water was waist high. There, in front of Buster Roger’s home, a large number of people had assembled. The main road had an elevation of about three feet above the surrounding land, so that it was not yet flooded. The rain kept us all wet, and the wind was blowing at about thirty miles per hour.
C.J., Timmy Leblanc and I walked down the road to a Phillips 66 station where we found an electric line repair truck. Not having the keys, we hot-wired the ignition and got it started. With the truck, we decided to scout out conditions by making a run into town with the intention of going all the way to the center near the courthouse. We picked-up C. J.’s father Louie at Buster’s. We made it as far as the Methodist church which was a quarter mile out of town. There, the water was too deep, even for a work truck. We were scared of going further, because if we killed the engine, we might not get it restarted. We decided to turn back. This meant that the option for getting everyone to the Court House was out. Louie Stoute was out of the truck, wading in the water and heading toward town. We assumed he was just checking the water depth, so we called to him to come back. He said was going to check his ferry boat, the ‘George Hamilton’ located on the other side of town. In hindsight, this was not something that Louie should have done, even though it was aimed at preserving his job as ferry boat captain after the storm if he insured his boat survived. The real danger here was that electric power lines were down in the water and were live. One such line is what stopped his propeller. Fortunately, it must not have been live. He would later safely ride this boat back through town and down Main Street during the storm in an attempt to get back to check on his family.
We turned back to Buster’s house and hooked up five cars each filled with people and towed them all down the road like a train. Now that the Court House was out as a shelter, the best option for survival was for everyone to stay in the largest home in the immediate area. This was a civil war mansion built by George Wakefield in 1844 but known to locals as Austin Davis’ house where the elderly Mr. Davis still lived. Once we arrived with a load of people, the adults carried the children through the water and into the house. C. J and I returned to Buster’s house to pick up more people. We made three trips in all. After the third trip, we had to give it up, because flood waters were beginning to wash cars off the road and into the yard at Austin’s house. We went inside and made a head count. We counted 152 people, including, to my surprise, my mother Louise and father Claudy who had made their way from their home near the eastern edge of town.
The Austin Davis home was built by George Washington Wakefield (Peter, Thomas, Joseph, John, John, John of Boston b. abt. 1615 prob. in Gravesend, County of Kent, England).
George, with first wife Emily and their very young family, traveled by raft down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers from Lawrence County, Ohio to New Orleans, and then by sailing sloop to Calcasieu Bay, arriving in 1844 at Leesburg, renamed Cameron (from the book Wakefield Memorial by Homer Wakefield). George built several homes in Cameron, one from lumber purchased in Lake Charles, Louisiana with which he first constructed a large raft which he poled seventy miles down the Calcasieu River to Cameron where he dismantled it and then used the lumber to build his home. The last Wakefield home reportedly completed in 1876, survived numerous hurricanes, including Hurricane Audrey in 1957 when it was credited with saving an estimated 152 thankful souls. The home, which had become known as the Wakefield-Davis (Austin Davis was the owner during Audrey) home, was finally destroyed beyond repair in 2005 by Hurricane Rita.
The weight of the people in the house might have aided in anchoring the building. Maybe it was the large oaks in the front that shielded it from other houses colliding. Perhaps, the jumble of cars formed a bulwark barricade which diverted flood waters and floating debris around it. Certainly, the order given by Mr. Davis’ to open all the bottom windows helped relieve the pressure of the wind, and more importantly allowed water to enter and prevented the house from floating like a boat. Whatever the cause, the result was that the house never left its foundation. They don’t build houses like that anymore.
We estimated the wind was now about 130 to 140 mph. All women and children were sent upstairs in two rooms. I remember getting hungry, because I was offered nothing to eat but a bag of raw okra and reported cottage cheese which was really clabber from the soured milk in my Sister Lisa’s baby bottles. (Lisa and another baby Jamie Guthrie spent the night in shoe boxes in a closet in the attic) I remember watching the storm from the dormer window of the room that I was in. The sky was dark, and you could only see clearly during lightning flashes. I saw houses float by and waves with mangled debris in them. I remember the strangeness of seeing our 1951 Pontiac bob up and down and drive itself away. All the men were downstairs for a period until later in the storm when the water got too high even though the first floor had sixteen-foot ceilings. The idea was to form a human chain to catch people as they floated by. C. J. and I tried to catch a man and his wife, but the attempt failed. Dad thought that the man survived but the wife died. C. J. was swept away, and I was flung back into the house and through a window by a wave. The window had jagged glass. As I clutched the window frame to keep from being drawn back out by the return flow, the glass cut my left arm badly. C.J. was able to swim to the rear of the house and climb to the top of a big pecan tree. He related later that he spent the storm there in the company of a blackbird and a big dog1.
Later, we noticed that on the roof of Frankie Henry’s house next door to Austin’s were three people, a Black man and his two children. We decided to attempt to rescue them, since we did not believe that Frankie’s house would remain intact. The plan was to knock a hole in Frankie’s roof and bring them into that house and then back along the rope to Austin’s house. Frankie’s house had drifted to within about thirty feet of Austin’s house. They tied a rope around my waist, and I tried to swim to make it to Frankie’s kitchen door. The wind and current were strong, and I would get halfway and be slung back. Even after the saltwater numbed my bad arm so I could swim full out, I could not fight the current. We had to finally give up the effort.
Later, when the wind subsided, Frankie made the statement that he had a camera loaded with film in one of his kitchen cabinets and asked me if I thought we could try making it across. Again, they tied me with a rope, and this time I was able to make it. I tied the rope to Frankie’s house, and Frankie came across and entered his kitchen.
Now humor can creep into even the worse catastrophes. In the kitchen we found the man and his two children. Somehow, they were able to get them off the roof and were standing on the kitchen counter tops. Upon recognizing Frankie, the man said, in an embarrassed manner, “Mr. Frankie, I sure hope we didn’t scratch the top of your cabinets.” Frankie had to laugh. His house had no walls, and the roof was held up only by studs, so at this point, he was not really concerned about the condition of his cabinets. We returned to the Austin’s House with the man, both children and the camera.
I find it hard to understand how people partition their thoughts to risk their life to save Black men, women, and children in the water that they later would barely even acknowledge because of race relations of the time.
The storm subsided, and the flood water started going down until blacktop on the road was exposed. We formed a line of men, and like a bucket-brigade passed children and women from the house over the debris and water and onto the road. We figured we could walk safely towards the courthouse which was about a mile and a quarter. As we progressed toward town, the debris was horrible. A path had to be scouted and the way cleared. When we passed the Methodist church about two to three city blocks toward the city, I decided to go inside and check for survivors. To my surprise, there inside was my sister Velda, her husband Ashburn Roux, their son Barkley and daughters Jessye, and Bobby along with our neighbors Doris and Agnes Leger and Gilbert LaSalle, and a young man by the name of Ernest Mathis who worked as the clothes presser at Ashburn and Velda’s cleaners nearby.
My sister’s family had originally been in their house in the center of town. Their house was also a civil war mansion built around the same time as Austin’s house (There is a disagreement on whether Austin’s house is older or younger with Aunt Velda insisting that her mansion was build twenty years before by import export traders from New England) and which got only about 48” of water and comparatively slight damage in that it was knocked off its pillars. The repair after the storm raised the house another 48” perhaps in anticipation of future storms. They decided to leave their house about 7:00 AM and wade to the eastern edge of town near Broussard’s Motel to the home of my parents, Louise and Claudy. I have not asked, but they probably drove their car. They intended to alert my parents, but my father insisted that the water would not rise any more. What really happened is that once they were able to wake Popi up, he thought that this storm was nothing to be worried about. He then told everybody. “I’m going back to bed.” Uncle Ashburn concurred and added, “Well if you’re going to bed then so am I and he laid out on the couch.” As a result, they delayed leaving for an hour, and when the water finally got too deep around the house, they had to flee. They decided the closest place was Austin’s house, so they all headed east, but got separated a block away at the Methodist Church. My parents went in back of the church where the water was lower and not too swift and were able to make it another three blocks to Austin’s house. My sister’s family went in front the church where the water was high and flowing fast enough to tear clothes off. Actually, the water tore off Aunt Velda panties. She was laughing when she told me the story of spending the storm and its aftermath without panties. This was not funny to her then. With the children in tow, they decided to go no further but to shelter in the church. They said that, in the church, they had to share a bathroom with a snake and a rabbit since neither wanted to leave nor made any threatening move. Jessye Roux their daughter had a lovely voice and would later become a professional singer, sang songs to the people gathering to lighten the mood. The song she repeated several times was Elvis Presley’s “You Ain’t Nothin but a Hound Dog.”
Besides checking the church, I also examined a small two-story cinder block building a block away. Here I found a man calmly sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. Dad was a three-pack-a-day Salem cigarette guy and was dying for a smoke. He noticed that the man had a dry pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He looked the man in the eye and said in a tongue in cheek manner, “If you don’t, loan me a cigarette, I’m gone to whip your ass!” The man was happy to see someone else alive and gladly complied.
According to Aunt Velda, she asked Dad to check her cleaning and pressing shop to see if money she left was still there. He did not find any. When he returned, he decided to check Maw-Maw and Popi’s house and found her zippered business pouch. She the remembered had put it there in the kitchen drawer because she thought that looters might get to the shop. She had forgot this in the excitement.
We then all joined in the procession to the courthouse. We could not go directly down the main street, because the water was still too high, so we wound our way-down side streets passing mountains of debris mixed with mud.
At the courthouse, Uncle Helaire Hebert and Aunt (Alta Richard) Poon greeted us. Dr. Cecil Clark came to check my feet. I had lost my shirt and my shoes. Pushing the car on that shell road with no shoes cut my feet to ribbons. Dr. Clark cleaned my feet with alcohol, and I was in pain. Uncle Helaire gave me a shot of whiskey to prop up my spirits. I was not a whiskey drinker, but it sure helped. We spent the night at the courthouse where people were sleeping in offices and even in the prison cells.
My brother Blane was 3 ½ years and too young to remember much except that our cousin Pat Cheramie was talking to my parents and smoking a cigarette on the steps of the courthouse. He suddenly threw the lit cigarette down and in a loud voice said to Blane, “It’s on fire! Quick stomp it out.” My brother instinctively listened to the commands of this supposed adult and burned the bottom of his foot. Blane remembers that his food hurt the entire time on the boat ride north up the channel from Cameron to Lake Charles.
The next day, we boarded a small cargo vessel and proceeded to Lake Charles. The assigned captain was not familiar with the channel and asked me, since I was a licensed boat captain and knew channel conditions, to pilot the vessel into Lake Charles. The boat offloaded at the Port of Lake Charles and a school bus took us to McNeese State University’s arena on campus. Lurlie was terribly worried about her parents. She had resigned herself to the reports that they were in the worst place to shelter from the storm and had probably been killed. On arriving at the McNeese Arena, as Lurlie took her last step off the bus, the first person she recognized was her father, Paw-paw Éloi Broussard. She burst into tears of joy. He was tall at six foot two inches. She saw his distinctive straw Stetson hat above the crowd. He had his grandchild and our nephew Jimmy Broussard beside him (as well as his father called Paa-Paa and mother called Maa-Maa).
It was not long before a good friend of mine, Sam Martin, arrived and took us to his house along with Terry Theriot and his wife. At the time, Sam’s wife was pregnant with her eighth child. Sam and his wife were true friends to take us all in when their house was already full of their own children. Sam was the best harmonica player that I have ever heard, and at night he would play for us to provide entertainment that we sorely needed. Sadly, Sam’s wife would very soon die in childbirth giving life to the baby she was carrying.
While staying as Sam’s, Terry Theriot asked me to go to the docks to help search for the bodies of his three children. I knew their faces and agreed. We looked through all the bodies of young children there. This sight was the most horrible and sad thing that I have ever had to view. Unable to locate Terry’s children, we returned to Sam’s house. As we walked into the living room, someone said that coffee was ready. Terry continued to the kitchen, and the phone rang. I answered it and the gentleman on the line identified himself as calling from Burke Hammer Funeral Home. He said that he was trying to get in touch with a Mr. Terry Theriot and to pass on to him that they had his daughter. I was shocked, and before I could respond, the caller hung up.
I went to the kitchen and informed Terry about the call. I told him that I would take him to the funeral home, and we left Sam’s immediately. Upon entering the funeral parlor, I realized that the man was correct; they did have Terry’s daughter, but she was alive!
According a detailed account1, during the fury of the storm, Terry’s family and that of his neighbor Jules Miller’s ended up on Jules’s rooftop. Terry’s family included his wife Peggy, seven-year-old daughter Gail Anne, four-year-old Keith and five-month-old Brian. Jules’s family included his wife Lucille and his seven-year-old daughter Jo Ann. The roof flipped in the waves and people were scattered in the water. Terry had hold of his daughter, Gail Ann. Jules grabbed some boards as they flew by to keep him afloat, since he could not swim. A lightning flash revealed that Jules daughter Jo Ann was some distance away, but then she was pulled under the water. Terry saw this, and he knew Jules could not swim. He decided to swim over to Jules and handed him his daughter Gail Ann. He quickly swam to where Jo Ann had been, dove down and found her. She climbed on his back, but as he surfaced, they were pulled under by another wave. He clutched her briefly in his arms, but she was torn away by the tremendous current and she drowned. Terry turned his attention to saving others and swam over to Jules wife and his son Keith who were floating on a board. He found that they were already dead. He then found his wife Peggy to be alive, but she was numb and in shock. She had just found their baby son Brian to be drowned. They floated together on a pile of boards in tremendous waves and ended up twenty miles north of Cameron near Hackberry where a tug traveling on the Intracoastal Canal finally rescued them. Jules and Gail Ann floated four miles north and ended up behind the Cameron Courthouse in the top of a hackberry tree. The wind was so fierce that flying debris ripped Jules shirt off, but he protected Gail Ann. She was scared and crying for her parents, but he kept her alive. After twelve hours in that tree, the storm subsided, and he was able walk to the courthouse to hand her to her grandmother, Theresa (nickname Doux). The grandmother assumed that the rest of Gail Ann’s family had perished. She brought Gail Ann with her to Burke Hammer Funeral Home in Lake Charles to look for their bodies.
We stayed at Sam’s for about a week longer and then located a rent house in Greenwich Village.
Bill McGill, Hendrid’s husband, and Maw-maw Anna Broussard returned from Columbus, Georgia the day after the storm. Just before the storm, Anna had accompanied her grandson Curtis Thibodeaux to Columbus so that she could visit her daughter Ena. Curtis intended to make money selling candy by helping Ena’s husband, Terrill Adams, in his candy business in Columbus. Once they heard news of the storm, they drove all night to make it back. Anna wanted to go back home, but her son Alpha told her that there was no home left to go to. Bill McGill quit his job in Georgia with his father’s plumbing business to help the people of Cameron with their upcoming plumbing work.
Anna’s husband, Paw-paw Éloi Broussard and Jimmy, Jimmy’s father Hubert and Éloi’s parents, who we called Maa-Maa and Paa-Paa, were caught on Little Chenier. This area was on the worse side of the storm for both winds and high water. They saved themselves in Éloi’s wooden house whose diagonally braced walls remained intact after the wall of water from the tidal surge hit the house and knocked it off its pillars. The house floated like a raft northward through six miles of marsh where it hit ground on south levee of the Intercoastal Canal. The float trip only broke a single windowpane and one board on the side of the house. During the ordeal, a foot of water covered the floors, but the mattresses on the iron beds never got wet! In fact, Maa-Maa, Éloi’s mother spent the whole ride lying in the bed and never got wet.
On returning to Cameron, we found that our beautiful new home, which I had designed and worked on steadily for three years, was completely gone! All that was left on the lot were a few of the pillars on which it had stood, and a toilet in its crate ready to be installed. I found the few other remains of the house about a mile north on a stretch of highway. I recovered the bathtub with bath items still on the rack and a sink. I also found a shelf from the kitchen that was upright with an undisturbed souvenir plastic salt and pepper shaker from a trip to New Orleans and a silver candle stick that was a wedding gift which we kept with Audrey’s mud inside to remind us.
For Paw-paw’s house, a house mover was contracted to load it on a flatbed trailer (probably a barge since this was out in the marsh and no truck could down the levee because of the trash) and carry it back to Little Chenier. One of the things that needed to be done after setting it back on its pillars was to pry cracks at the bottom of the outside wall boards to let snakes out from the inside wall spaces. A hose was attached to the tailpipe of an idling car, and the other end of the hose was placed in the wall. The snakes would migrate away from the smell of the exhaust and slither out the open crack. After the snake dropped to the ground, someone would cut the heads off the small ones with a shovel and shoot the large ones with a shot gun.
On returning to Lake Charles, we started putting our life back together. Even though none of our immediate family had been killed by the storm, very shortly after, and while we were still in the shock of it all, Lurlie’s brother, Hubert, who had survived the storm, was killed when the driver of the car in which he was a backseat passenger tried to beat a train at a rail crossing.
Having no home in Cameron to go back to, we decided to sell our lot to C.J. Stoute and make a life in Lake Charles. Had we officially moved into the new house before the storm hit, we would have not only lost everything but perhaps been in debt for the house. Standard homeowner’s insurance did not normally cover hurricane damage by water. Nevertheless, builder’s risk insurance did cover it. With the insurance money, I was able to pay the remaining loan on the home in Cameron and place a small down payment on the home we purchased on 3349 Swanson Lane in December 1957. There, we remained and prospered. We raised all of our seven children as best we could with the help of God, family, and friends.
Thinking back on the storm, I believe that life becomes sweeter when all seems lost and is then given back.
DR. MARK BROUSSARD’S MEMORIES OF THE STORM:
I seemed to remember taking a bath with my brothers the night before. In the morning, my father who had been organizing things across the street in our new house before our planned move in a week, rushed in the rent house and in a sober voice said to my mother “Get the kids the water’s rising.” The group of children at the time included my older brother Kirk at four and a half years and myself at three and a half, my younger brother Blane at two and my oldest sister Lisa at six months.
I remember stepping off the front steps of the house into what for me was knee deep water. I knew then that this was strange and that something was amiss. The wind was blowing, and it was raining hard. We got into our 1955 Pontiac with my father driving, my mother in the front passenger seat trying to keep the children in the back-seat calm. I remember that the kids were calm in that we expected our parents to be able to cope with anything. As the car headed down the water covered oyster shell road, we picked up our neighbors since we were the only ones with a car of their own. The car was filled with children and women while the men walked outside alongside. The road of our settlement was about a mile from the main road. Some of the children were whimpering, but I do not remember a lot of crying. I think that as children we could not fully realize the imminent danger we were in, so we were really not terrorized.
About a half mile from the main road, the car began to float. The engine quit running so the men pushed the car like a raft on a canal. Water began to seep into the doors and on the floor in front of the back seat. This startled me. I began to realize that the situation was different than a normal storm.
The men pushed the car up on the main road, which was elevated from the surrounding land by about three feet. Cameron is about two feet above sea-level, so the road was only five feet above sea level. They pushed the car for about another half-mile until water started coming on the road. A decision was made that the car would not make it for the three miles necessary to reach the four-story brick courthouse, the largest building in Cameron Parish. Instead, we continued about another quarter mile to the mansion of Austin Davis. This home was built around the Civil War. Austin Davis had inherited the mansion from a man named Wakefield whom he cared for during Wakefield’s sickness late in his life. The ceilings of the home were twelve feet.
Within about another half-hour, the water was just below the floor of the top story of the mansion. I remember looking out the window at water and waves. Through the lighting flashes, I could see the goings outside. I remember watching our car bob up and down then drive itself away. My father was not with us. He was downstairs helping other men pull people into the house. One man got swept out of the house and my father attempted to rescue him but was swept out too. As he drifted, he grabbed the first windowpane he could. The jagged glass cut his arm but stopped his progress. He able to work his way back into the house with blood gushing from the cut. The man that was swept out survived by spending the storm in the top of a tree along with crazed varments and snakes.
Cabinets
Towards the end of the storm, my father and his friend Frankie Henry went to see how Frankie’s house had faired since it had floated nearby. They waded through the muddy water to the house which had one wall completely missing. As they entered the house and saw a Black man and his family crouching on top of the kitchen cabinets.
When the Black man saw that it was Frankie, he said,
“Mister Frankie sir, I’s sorry but this is the only place that was dry. We tried not to scratch the cabinets.”
This house was a dilapidated wreck, but the Black man was still self-conscious about damaging a white man’s property.
I remember that what I imagined as a child to be the worst part of the storm was the thought of having to eat raw okra. Also, I remember the rancid smell of my baby Sister Lisa’s baby bottle of sour milk. My mother used to make cottage cheese from raw milk, and I hated that smell. I guess at my young age and with limited understanding at the time, smells made more impressions than the horrid happenings.
We remained in the house for about a day until the water receded. We left the mansion. I remember some of the walk amid debris to the courthouse near downtown Cameron.
“I hain’t goanna give my kid to no nigger”
During Hurricane Audrey, the men stayed on the first floor of the Austin Davis home. They formed a human chain to stretch out into the raging water and waves and grab people as they floated by. When the water receded enough to allow women and children to leave the top story, the men formed a chain from the stairs to hand them along over the flood water and onto the now dry road for the walk to downtown.
A Black man reached up to get a white girl child.
The mother holding the girl said in a loud voice, “I hain’t goanna give my kid to no nigger.”
My dad stepped up to the woman who he knew and said,
“Doris, I know where you live. I can tell you that there is nothing left, because we caught some of your neighbors as they floated by and that’s what they told us. Now this Black man was part of the chain that helped to catch them.”
Then, he looked at her intently,
“Now tell me Doris, if you had stayed in your house and were in that water with your little girl in your arms, would you have handed her to this Black man.”
She looked down then up and said defiantly, “Shut up, Russel.” Then, she turned and handed the girl to the Black man.
The town of Cameron was devastated by the storm as was our family. The new home we had built across the street from our rent house was gone. Nothing was left on the lot, but a few bricks, an oven in its crate and a pink toilet. The latter item was perhaps an extraneous comment from mother nature. My father had builder’s insurance that covered the material cost of the house but not his labor or any contents. The insurance payment was enough for a down payment on a house in Lake Charles.
My mother’s parents’ home was in middle of the march on a strip of land on Little Chenier. The house was wooden and sitting on concrete piers. It was strongly built with solid board walls on the inside and outside. In the hurricane, it floated like a raft fifteen miles inland until it hit the levy of the intercostal canal.
“We Have Your Daughter.”
My father tried to help people locate their loved ones after the hurricane. A friend had lost his wife and two little girls and was trying to locate their bodies. The man found the body of the wife and one girl. Finally, Hixon’s funeral home called while my dad was visiting and said that they had the other daughter. My dad accompanied his friend to the funeral home. When they got there, it was the daughter, but she was alive. The funeral director had failed to tell them about this detail on the phone call.
The story for the girl during the storm was that a neighbor and his daughter were floating on their roof. They noticed long blond hair in the water. The neighbor grabbed the hair and pulled in the attached girl saving her from certain drowning.
Even though our new home in Cameron was destroyed by the storm, the fact that it was still under construction, meant that my father could collect on builder’s insurance. This was a stroke of good luck since he did not have flood insurance. In addition, his normal house insurance would not have covered flood damage.
Dad built the house in Cameron with the labor of friends and family. As a result, he had a little money remaining from the builder’s insurance after paying the material cost of the destroyed house. Even so, the payment was enough down payment for the house on Swanson Lane. The Lane was named after Captain Swanson, a sea captain that originally owned this land. Captain Swanson had a big house that became the home of the Bells across the street. The Bells farmed the land next to ours. They used part of our land as a source for topsoil. The depression created allowed the back portion of our lot to flood when it rained. It made a pool and a great place to sail wooden boats. The house my parents bought had was one-story with two thousand feet of living area with outer walls of red brick. The previous owner had rebuilt after a fire destroyed part of the northern section. The size of this house was a mansion in comparison to one in Cameron. The house cost seventeen thousand dollars. The area and house were a perfect setting for three boys and a girl (child count at the time) to grow.
At the end of Swanson Lane was the “Woods”. This was about a thousand acres of pine forest, swamp (now the site of two casinos a golf course and several hotels). It had sand dunes that were created from dredging activities from the port of Lake Charles. This was a setting for boyhood adventure. My mother felt confident to send us there in the morning to be out of her way so we could frolic to exhaustion. She knew that would religiously return at eating times. I like to say that we were raised as free-range chickens to develop and independence streak. We were always in a pack of at least three (the three brothers, ages one a year apart) and maybe more if the neighborhood boys joined. Our outings in the “Woods” were mostly self-supervised. We hurt ourselves some but not much. No snake bites or near drowning in bayous or falling from trees or sinking in quicksand-like mud or burials from collapses of extensive underground tunnels. Blissful ignorance is a blessing.
Storm Game
My grandparents spent Hurricane Audrey in 1957 with their parents and their son Hubert floating like a raft in my grandparent’s cypress home on Little Chenier. My great-grandparents and my grandmother were in their bedclothes lying in wrought iron beds. They did not even get their feet wet. My great-grandfather knew that a storm was happening, but he did not understand that the house was floating. My grandfather would purposely walk to one end of the house and his weight would sink the house at that point. My great grandfather would say, “Mon dieu! De Water’s rising.”
Then my grandfather would shift his position and level the house so the water would go down and my great-grandfather would say, “De Waters down.” My grandfather repeated the process, and his father would respond by saying “Here it goes again!” This game amused my grandfather helping pass the stressful time.
Many people rode out the storm on the roofs of their houses, no lights, lots of snakes, alligators, nutria, and other creatures looking for something stable to cling to.
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After the water receded, my grandparents’ house was brought back south 12 miles to its lot in Little Chenier. A marsh buggy was used to tow the house from its stopping point on the Intercoastal levee a mile to the main road. The house was then loaded on a flatbed truck and delivered to Little Chenier. I remember on event when the men were repairing the damage, one man would stand with shotgun ready at one end of an outside wall and another would pull the lower board at the other end. When snakes hiding in the walls slithered out, the man with the shotgun ended them. I think that I remember this because, as a young boy, it was shocking to see snakes slithering from walls.
From the Cameron courthouse, we were boated 90 miles inland to the big town of Lake Charles, population 50,000 at the time. We stayed at the Martin’s house, friends of my parents, Sam, and his wife along with their seven children. Lake Charles was 30 miles from the Gulf and 13 feet above sea level. It is more protected from hurricanes than Cameron’s location (on the gulf and three feet above sea level). My parents bought a house in the wooded outskirts with an acre of trees. Lake Charles had greater opportunity for growth than the small town of Cameron where people typically become shrimpers, cattlemen or roustabouts on drilling rigs. These are noble professions but not a good use of my talents. I know this by having done all these activities. I like science better.
Snakes in the Walls
My grandparents’ house was towed back to their farm by marsh buggy before the water receded. While the house was floating in the water, snakes had crawled underneath and lodged between the inner and outer walls. I remember when men were repairing the damage. One man would inject a hose attached the exhaust of an idling auto exhaust at one corner of the building. Two men at the opposing corner, one would stand with shotgun ready. One would pull the lower wall board away so that the snakes could get out. It was very exciting and impressionable to see snakes slithering from walls.
The storm was terrible. It killed six hundred people, maybe more since even now a few skeletons are discovered in the marsh. It did millions of dollars in property damage. The event changed my life’s direction. All my immediate family members could have easily died during that storm. We were on the road as water rise above to the black-top level. We were lucky to find shelter in a civil war mansion. Many families we knew lost loved ones. Our family lost distant relatives as well as close friends and acquaintances. I consider the storm life-threating, but it still offered new possibilities. With a little bit of survivor’s guilt, I was determined to live life as if I had died then. I call this perspective the dead man’s eye, viewing the future as gratis to appreciate. The move from Cameron changed my destiny. Cameron was a small town with small-town ideas. I probably would have respected those ideas. By custom, I may have chosen a profession of punching cattle in the marsh or commercial fishing or laboring in the oil patch. Instead, I ended up with a science career.