They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New
Orleans is the previously untold story of perhaps the oldest
outsider settlement in America, an invisible community on the
annually flooded shores of the Mississippi River. This community
exists in the place between the normal high and low water line of
the Mississippi River, a zone known in Louisiana as the batture.
For the better part of two centuries, batture dwellers such as
Macon Fry have raised shanty-boats on stilts, built water-adapted
homes, foraged, fished, and survived using the skills a river
teaches. Until now the stories of this way of life have existed
only in the memories of those who have lived here. Beginning in
2000, Fry set about recording the stories of all the old batture
dwellers he could find: maritime workers, willow furniture makers,
fishermen, artists, and river shrimpers. Along the way, Fry
uncovered fascinating tales of fortune tellers, faith healers, and
wild bird trappers who defiantly lived on the river. They Called Us
River Rats also explores the troubled relationship between people
inside the levees, the often-reviled batture folks, and the river
itself. It traces the struggle between batture folks and city
authorities, the commercial interests that claimed the river, and
Louisiana's most powerful politicians. These conflicts have ended
in legal battles, displacement, incarceration, and even lynching.
Today Fry is among the senior generation of ""River Rats"" living
in a vestigial colony of twelve ""camps"" on New Orleans's river
batture, a fragment of a settlement that once stretched nearly six
miles and numbered hundreds of homes. It is the last riparian
settlement on the Lower Mississippi and a contrarian, independent
life outside urban zoning, planning, and flood protection. This
book is for everyone who ever felt the pull of the Mississippi
River or saw its towering levees and wondered who could live on the
other side.
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