DATE: December
10, 1995
INTERVIEWER:
LOCATION: Edward
Couvillier’s house on Oxford Loop, Oxford, St. Mary Parish,
COOPERATORS: Edward
Couvillier, Lena Mae Couvillier, David Daigle
[CONTINUATION OF THE INTERVIEWS AT LENA MAE AND EDWARD COUVILLIER’S HOUSE
JD: Oh, you supposed to be babysitting?
Edward: No, I do not babysit.
JD: Me either, Edward. So, it would be nice to go up the lake here and see what we can find what we can find [talking about going back to the area of Grand Lake where Bayou Catfish, Smith and Cowan used to empty into it. They are blocked off by sediment filling in now].
Edward: Yeah. I can find…I can find…
JD: You think you can still come all the way up past Lil Pigeon…
Edward: Once you get in there you can come all the way up.
JD: You don’t suppose in high water you could find this channel that Catfish is….
Edward: No. No, I think that’s closed completely off.
JD: In high water…
Edward: I don’t think…the only way you can go into Catfish would be, come, come, thru this, the other side, get in there. ….you can still get in there or not. You don’t know anybody with a helicopter or seaplane, eh?
JD: Not right off hand. Not right off hand.
Edward: I thought a man in your position would have something like that at your disposal.
JD: I can have, if it’s for state business, but this….[laughs]
Edward: This is state business.
JD: Tell em it’s state business, eh? OK, so you got two of the communities set up right here. Where was the one in Catfish, you say right here, [this] was another community?
Edward: Yeah, right there…
JD: Would you say there was a bunch of boats tied up there?
Edward: Yeah. Back when I was livin there they had four, five families.
JD: Well, you could actually think about this, maybe, as all one community.
Edward: Well, I dunno.
JD: I mean, didn’t all these people talk to each other all the time and…
Edward: Yeah, we used to go visit…Momma…every now and then we’d go all the way down these canals down here and visit. Take you all day to do it….
JD: Did y’all know, did y’all know when y’all were livin here, who lived all up and down…
Edward: Aw yeah!
JD: Y’all knew all these people?
Edward: Umhm. Yeah.
JD: How about at Lil Pigeon, was there any…was there a community at Lil Pigeon?
Edward: Yeah. Lil Pigeon…uh, the Burns’s used to live right at the mouth of it over there – Doozie Burns.
JD: Right here?
Edward: Yeah. And Jesse Burns lived up in this corner up here.
JD: More than one person? Or just one person?
Edward: No, just one person. Just one family.
JD: More than one? Just one.
Edward: Yeah. Him and his brother. They lived in Bayou Smith for years, you see, that where they used to live.
JD: [Bayou]Smith over here.
Edward: OK. That’s where they used to live for years. Then they moved to Bayou Pigeon. To Lil Pigeon.
JD: But
that’s just one, one campboat.
Edward: Yeah. One campboat there on the corner. Well I say one, his daughter, his daughter lived there by em for a while – Berta Mae, and Leroy Sauce used to live by em.
JD: Sauce?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: Who?
Edward: Leroy Sauce.
JD: He’s not on that sheet anywhere? He’s not kin to…
Edward: No, he’s not kin to Agnes. Agnes’ first cousin, I believe.
JD: OK, so that musta been…that would be Blaise’s brother’s kids, or sister’s kids.
Edward: [to Lena Mae] How’s Leroy kin to your Momma?
Lena Mae: Uh, Leroy was, uh, Bruno Sauce’s son.
Edward: That was Brad Sauce’s, uh, brother.
JD: Bruno?
Edward: Bruno was Blaise’s brother, eh?
Lena Mae: I dunno.
Edward: Oh, yeah.
JD: I don’t have em down as brothers.
Lena Mae: Uhuh, they wasn’t brothers.
JD: No, I don’t have em as brothers, but now, to say no, I can’t say that cause…
Lena Mae: They was cousins, Bruno Sauce, and uh, …
Edward: Agnes would know that.
Lena Mae: Momma’d know that, yeah. But that was cousins.
JD: But Blaise had 14 brothers and sisters.
Edward: Fourteen!
JD: So uh, so uh, so you know…
Lena Mae: You got all his brothers and sisters?
JD: No, I only have, I only have four of em down here.
Lena Mae: Ok, I got…
JD: I got Joe, Milton, Bill and Gayon.
Lena Mae: OK, you ain’t got none of the girls.
JD: No.
Lena Mae: OK, there was, uh, Bill, I dunno, I dunno…
JD: I have Bill
Lena Mae: You got Bill
JD: I have Bill.
Lena Mae: OK. There was, uh, …Tante Nini, I don’t even know her name.
Edward: She was a Mayon, hunh?
Lena Mae: She was, uh, Nini Mayon.
JD: Mayon, Mayon, that would be…that…
Edward: That wasn’t her real name.
JD: That would be, that would be her grandmother’s, maybe, her grandmother’s sister. That would be Rosalee Mayon’s sister, maybe?
Lena Mae: Her brother.
JD: Her brother, what was his name? I thought it was a girls name…
Lena Mae: Uncle [?] , we used to call him.
Edward: ….no, uh,
Lena Mae: I don’t know they real names. I don’t know…
Edward: All them people, them days, went with nicknames.
JD: That’s ok, what were the nicknames?
Lena Mae: Buny[?],
Edward: Alvin Mayon.
JD:
Lena Mae: Well, his nickname was Buny, but his real name’s Alvin Mayon.
JD:
I have
Lena Mae: OK. And uh, on his granpa’s side there was, uh, uh, Alvin Mayon’s wife.
Edward: That was my nanan.
JD: They was first cousins.
Lena Mae: No, not Tante Nini. Kadi was…
JD: No, that’s marriage…
Lena Mae: We don’t have none of them.
JD: Well I’ll get Agnes….you know Agnes will probably remember a lot of those people.
Lena Mae: Yeah. Nini, Aunt Kadi, Aunt Kadine, that’s three sisters.
JD: OK, I can get those from her then. I think. Whew, that’s a lot of stuff!
Lena Mae: Daddy [Edward]… you want to start warmin the dinner now so y’all can eat?
Edward: Whatever.
JD: Y’all got somethin for dinner?
Edward: Got some ducks.
Lena Mae: Got a little bit of everything, mostly leftovers.
JD: Ducks!?
Lena Mae: Got some ducks…
Edward: Kinda tough, but they ducks.
JD: Ducks. They homegrown?
Edward: David killed them.
Lena Mae: Duck spaghetti.
JD: This, uh, this is an interesting thing, right here.
Edward: What is that?
JD: Uh,
shows the English speaking
Edward: Grosse Tete.
JD: Grosse Tete, that’s what they called it, right here?
Edward: Bayou Grosse Tete.
JD: OK, and they hit Bayou Sorrel from there.
Edward: Yeah.
JD: But look at this, as soon as they got to Bayou Sorrel all of this crosshatch right here is English speaking, all of this is English speaking right here, so it looks like they came in on Bayou Sorrel and they spread out from Bayou Sorrel.
Edward: Naw, that there’s, uh….
JD: This right here is where there’s a lot of English and French both.
Edward: Yeah.
JD: But this is pure English. And that takes in all that Bayou Chene area…
Edward: All this was French, here…
JD: All of that’s French, the whole rest of the Basin is French speaking. Just that little piece around Bayou Sorrel was English.
Edward: That’s where I was from.
JD: You were from this area?
Edward: Well, I was in Keelboat and all them places there.
JD: Yeah, and you didn’t grow up speaking French.
Edward: No, none of them people, hardly, up there spoke French.
JD: Your
Momma
Edward: Momma
JD: Well, there’s very few French names in there if you think back at it. You know, Couvillier is one of the few French names, but Lena Mae’s [name] is not French.
Lena Mae: And they all spoke French.
JD: And they all spoke French. Now they went the other way… they were originally… probably spoke French and they, I meandidn’t speak French, and they ended up goin to places where they had to learn. Y’all went the other way, y’all spoke it and went to a place you didn’t have to.
Edward: Yeah.
JD: But, this fellow did some good work when he put this book together. That all comes out of this book right here. These maps.
Lena Mae: See,
both of my gr
Edward: Them suckers used to make me so mad, get together…
JD: Really?
Edward: They get together and go to talking French and I’d get up and walk out.
JD: They didn’t want you to know what they were sayin.
Edward: It wasn’t that, that’s the way they talk…
Lena Mae: It wasn’t that, they was just used to talking that way, Jim, and they’d forget.
Edward: Jim, you could put five hundred English speaking people in a pile and you have a Frenchman over here and a Frenchman over there and it wouldn’t be long, well, them two Frenchmen gone find one another and they gone be talking French. That’s the way they was. They could find one another.
JD: They were more comfortable I guess…
Edward: I guess.
JD: You
know something else that shows up nice on this map, that’s interesting, it
shows up on that, uh, on that, uh, on this here also – is where, which one did
I have marked Edward? This one? Yeah.
Myon talked where his people were all from
Edward: I don’t.
JD: What was a skidder camp?
Edward: People
used to, uh, pull them logs out the, uh, woods with a, them pullboats, well
they lived on them skidder camps. They
go out there
JD: It was like a quarter boat?
Edward: Yeah. People used to… man used to go out there and live on it.
JD: Cause
Myon
Edward: Maybe so.
JD: They were telling me about a fight he had there one time. Where, uh, Agnes thought that…, I mean this boy thought that Agnes was his girlfriend…his name was V.A. Daigre.
Lena Mae: Oh, [?] V.A. Daigre, Shorty, or Wayne Meacom [sp?], knows him real well. And he say he sees him often cause he runs around with his son. I believe he said he was 83 years old.
JD: V.A. Daigre is? 83 years old?
Lena Mae: And every time he see that man, he want to know about Momma. Momma went out with his Daddy.
JD: Yeah, I know, that’s what she said.
Lena Mae: When she was real young.
JD: He gave her a ring.
Lena Mae: And he always…Shorty was telling me that the other day at [?]. He said he’d love to see Momma.
JD: V.A. would?
Lena Mae: Yeah. Shorty say that’s all he talk about every time he sees Son, he ax him if he heard about Momma.
JD: Is that right?
Lena Mae: Heard anything about Momma, from Shorty.
JD: Yeah. Well, apparently he gave her a ring. It was a silver ring with a green stone in
it. And they were at this dance
Lena Mae: He’s 83 years old.
JD: You know what I want to do, Lena Mae? I want to, uh, after I talk to Agnes a lil bit about these maps, particularly this one right here…
Lena Mae: This is your coke, Jim?
JD: That’s mine, yeah.
Lena Mae: Want some more ice?
JD: No, that’s alright, I’m fine. I would like to, if she wants to do that, I’d like to do it anyway, and maybe y’all would like to do it, but I would like to…if I could come by and pick y’all up, and pick up Agnes at the same time in the car, and take a ride around here thru Morgan City up here….
Lena Mae: Thru Fourmile Bayou and all?
JD: Well, not by boat. Talking about first of all by car. And I’d like to come down this road, 401, by car and see if we could find that cemetery, and see if we can find the old gravestones. And, uh, and I’d just like…has Agnes been back there lately?
Lena Mae: Momma ain’t been back there in years! And I was a…was a young, young kid the last time we went.
JD: You shoulda said something, we coulda went today.
Lena Mae: I never have been [as an adult].
JD: Well,
I’m available to plan it. What I’m
saying is I’m off for…I’m takin off some of the Christmas holidays, between
Christmas
Lena Mae: Oh, Momma’d love to go!
JD: Well, why don’t we do that? The five of us, Carolyn and I and y’all three. And go take a ride over there and take a ride down this highway 401, see if we can find that old cemetery. Down at the end of this road down here where they used to have that restaurant and a great big dancehall, down here. That’s what Myon says…a big dancehall down there…of course all that, I’m sure, all that’s gone. But I’d like to see, maybe Agnes would like to see where it used to be.
Lena Mae: [low voice] been there in years and years and years.
JD: But that’s something, if y’all would like, to see what day y’all are free during those holidays.
Edward: We free any day!
JD: You are? Well let me give y’all a call then, and we’ll make sure Agnes doesn’t go anywhere, and we’ll come and pick y’all up. That sounds good. That sounds good. Anyhow, kind of interesting maps, hunh, what you can see on those things?
Edward: Yeah, umhm.
JD: What
I want to do is, like we plotted where these houseboat communities were here,
I’d like to get a bigger map
Edward: Yeah, right.
JD: Below Big Pigeon. And I’d like to be able to…put that one down [?]…
Edward: Bayou Boutte.
JD: Bayou
Boutte too, like
Edward: Yeah, Bayou Fisher, yeah
Lena Mae: We lived on Bayou Fisher.
Edward: We lived on there too. I say, we lived, phew, all over.
JD: What made y’all move?
Edward: Man, I don’t know Jim. We just…everybody did that. They’d live a while in one place, first thing you know….lived for years, and first thing you know they’d move around, you know.
JD: It wasn’t because the fish would bite better in one place…
Lena Mae: No.
Edward: Well, sometime maybe you might hear the fish bitin somewhere, they’d move, you know.
JD: So they just moved just cause they got the envie…
Lena Mae: We the only one that really didn’t move around too much, until we moved on this side the lake.
JD: Y’all didn’t move as much as a lot of people did?
Lena Mae: Uhuh. We stayded right there at the canal, all them years.
JD: On, uh, Blaise’s Canal. And all the time y’all fished….
Lena Mae: Fished
over there
Edward: Trap, pick moss, or whatever you had to do…
Lena Mae: You could run across here in ten, fifteen minutes.
JD: In what kind of boat?
Lena Mae: Two horse Lockwood.
JD: It would only take ten or fifteen minutes to cross the lake?
Lena Mae: Or maybe a six horse or a four horse.
Edward: I believe that bird trying to come out of that cage.
Lena Mae: But,
uh, it didn’t take to run over here,
JD: So, he’d run over here with those inboards. Would he run the lines in the inboard boat?
Edward: Umhm. Oh yeah.
JD: So the boat wasn’t too big, then.
Edward: Uhuh. Well…
Lena Mae: He had a old bateau, like they got in here [Comeaux book].
JD: I imagine a lot of people had boats that were the same.
Lena Mae: Yeah, they was all about built the same.
Edward: They thought they was a good looking boat in them days. [laughs]
JD: All built out of cypress?
Edward: Aw yeah. Frog grabs [in the book]
JD: Did
people ever use frog grabs like that? [the mechanical grabs that were sold
commercially. Trigger in the middle
Edward: Umhm. Yeah.
JD: To me you never could catch as many as you could catch with your hands
Edward:` No,….[they would] kill a frog, too, you know?
JD: Well, if it was illegal.
Edward: Yeah.
JD: File the trigger down it would cross over like that.
Lena Mae: I
had one that belonged to
Edward: We had them suckers, go clean across [the frog gig]
Lena Mae: See what kind of boat we had….
JD: That was the kind of bateau y’all had?
Lena Mae: The kind of boat we had, two horse Lockwood on it. Some of em had a six.
Edward: Now that push skiff there, I seen…, used to do that a lot.
JD: [to the tap] They talking about page 43 in the Comeaux book.
Lena Mae: See, that push skiff there? That’s what we had to make a livin in, me and Edward, when we first got married.
JD: they talking about figure one in the Comeaux book, the pointed skiff with the oars on it. Y’all had to make a livin in that, how did y’all make a livin in that?
Lena Mae: Fish.
Edward: Push and bait lines in it, that’s what you did.
JD: You’d stand in the front and bait lines?
Edward: Yeah, umhm.
JD: They didn’t have any lil deck on it in the front…?
Edward: Oh, yeah. They had a deck. That’n there got a deck, you can see it.
JD: Where would you put your fish?
Edward: Just throw em in the boat.
JD: Loose?
Edward: Umhm.
JD: Just throw em loose in the boat?
Edward: Some of em had bulkheads in em.
Lena Mae: Some of em had bulkheads to keep em live, cause we couldn’t sell em every day.
Edward: These boats here that they used to raise nets in…
JD: They had live wells in em, eh?
Edward: Yeah.
Lena Mae: They didn’t have no, uh, no icebox, no ice or nothing to keep that. We had to put em in a wellbox.
Edward: Would be nice to have a, a, place that had a, like a museum… that woulda kept all that old stuff that you had back in them days. But, they got an old boy in Patterson got them Lockwoods.
JD: The old motors?
Edward: He brings em for that sawmill stuff [festival?] every year, run em.
JD: Oh yeah?
Edward: Got
em hooked up, and they run. And I been
wantin to go see it, and I missed it, been missin it, never did go.
Lena Mae: We went one time…
Edward: Like these shrimp bushes, [page 44 in the Comeaux book]
JD: Yeah, he’s got a good picture of the way those shrimp dips, the shrimp bushes are lined up down the canal…
Edward: …not the same fishermen we are but….[means they didn’t do it that way]
JD: …didn’t have, didn’t string em loose to the rim like that…you strung em tight.
Edward: Naw, uhuh.
Lena Mae: Where’s the shrimp bush?
JD: That’s them in the water right there, and also y’all’s shrimp bushes don’t have a pocket in em like that, his net goes way down, yours is shallow. [nets?, not bushes]
JD: That’s one of the old outboards.
Edward: Yeh, he got a outboard on there.
JD: Talking about Figure One.
Edward: I remember these too. Catch shrimp with that.
JD:
Lena Mae: Oh, I’m sorry, Jim . Put that fan on right there.
JD: I took medicine before I came because I knew I would get a headache. Getting it anyway.
Edward: Yeah.
JD: This was a, a, a shrimpbox, a old wooden shrimpbox, hunh?
Edward: Yeah, that’s how they catch shrimp with em.
JD: Y’all made em like that too?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: All out of cypress?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: There was no wire in that, all the throats and everything was all made out of wood.
Edward: Yeh, that catch shrimp good cause it was dark and that’s what the shrimp want, something dark.
JD: They get inside…
Edward: Umhm.
JD: Did y’all bait that at all with cottonseed cake and stuff?
Edward: Naw, well sometimes, most times you just throw an old gou or piece of garfish in it
JD: Piece of meat, fish…of some kind.
Edward: And they would catch. Course, mostly big shrimps, you know.
JD: Well, that’s what I was about to say, if they caught mostly big shrimps, and today when you bait your lines you never use a big shrimp to bait a line. Did y’all use big shrimp in those days?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: You must have.
Edward: Yeah, well, you catch goujons on big shrimp, goujon bite on…
JD: That’s what y’all were tryin?
Edward: Yeah. That’s what you wanted, goujons. Yeah…
JD: That’s what you were tryin to catch all the time, was goujons?
Edward: Naw, not all the time, but, uh…
JD: That was the bigger fish.
Edward: It was bigger fish, it weighed more, you see?
JD: Did they also live better in the livebox?
Edward: Yeah, goujon live good. Your gaspergou and buffalo don’t live long nowhere.
JD: They don’t? They hard to keep alive
Edward: Yeah. …… [looking further in the book] Jiggerpole, now, you see, these days we got aluminum jiggerpole
JD: I know, I see that.
Edward: [laughs] [talking about page 53 in the Comeaux book] Yeah.
JD: Yeah, well, they went from the jiggerpole like that to, uh, what y’all usually took – ash, didn’t you? You cut ash for, for…Now there’s a jiggerpole right there, set up.
Edward: Yeah. [page 55 in the Comeaux book]
JD: They got some pretty good drawings in here, I think we can do better, but he’s got some pretty good drawings of some of this stuff. Cause, I’m going to have to put stuff like this in that book too. What the jiggerpole looked like, and, and how it worked.
JD: Now, this is not right. ….got this drawn right.
Edward: Naw, usually the hoop net is left in the boat.
JD: Well, that’s where it….it says that, OK…Cause it shows the hoop net…to set it like he is you’d have to come back and set the net up and stretch it back.
Edward: It tells you right there, usually the hoop net is set in the boat. But, it also shows, in them days when they fished them hoopnets they had a buoy on em.
JD: Did they actually do that, you think, they had a buoy on the tail?
Edward: Yeah, everybody had a buoy…
JD: Cause nobody stole em?
Edward: Aw naw, they didn’t steal em and they didn’t run em.
JD: Nobody ran em in those days either?
Edward: Very seldom, you know? But, uh, you do that these days, you go back and you wouldn’t have no net left
JD: Yeah, I know. I know.
Edward: They got either more thieves, or whatever, I don’t know you call it.
JD: What? More thieves?
…. I want to talk to y’all more,
more, about certain pieces of this. Ah,
one of the things I’d like to do is what you’re doin right now…go thru the
books
Lena Mae: All leftovers, Jim.
JD: Sure looks good.
Lena Mae: Can’t throw it away.
JD: Sure looks good.
Edward: Old time boat. Getting a lil better built, back in here, you know how…
JD: He’s talking about Plate 15, page 69 [in Comeaux], you say they’re better built than those?
Edward: Well, they must be later on in here, but that’s a Mercury you see.
JD: Yeah. They’re goin more to the outboard-get up on top.
Edward: This is after the [19] 50’s. And them Mercurys like that didn’t come out until after….that look like one of them, uh, Super Tens…
JD: Like a 20?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: But, the boats, the boats, the old, the old bateaux were built to go through the water and by the time you got to these outboard motors they were tryin to build em to get up on top. Huhh?
Edward: Yeah. Crab fishin [still looking at the Comeaux book]. See, that’s what they used to call a fly line right there.
JD: He’s on Plate 16.
Edward: That’s a fly line. I used to fish one like that.
JD: The line went through this box right here?
Edward: Yeah, that was a roller.
JD: OK, and the bait would just keep goin…
Edward: You tied, you tied your bait right on the line…you didn’t have a, like, hook or nothing.
JD: No stageon or anything on it.
Edward: Use mostly it was bull lip.
JD: A bull lip, that’s what you used? Tough, tough.
Edward: Tough, tough. You could use it, use it like today and tonight and fish and when you come in you take it off and put it into some brine, salt. And you had another barrel.
JD: You could use it over and over like that?
Edward: Over and over and over. Just keep usin it.
JD: How long you think?
Edward: You just use it till it gets so rotten you couldn’t hardly stand the smell of it.
JD: Is that right? And the crabs would still bite on it?
Edward: Aw yeah.
JD: Now, that’s mostly fresh water you talking about.
Edward: Yeah. And you’d run that, you’d run that boat…see
when we did it we had air cooled motors.
It wasn’t a outboard, it was a inboard, was a air cooled. And the lake was, aw, three or four miles across well you could
just stretch it on out. And you didn’t
have to put too many stakes on it, you know, you just run it for maybe two,
three thous
JD: Gaalee. Where did y’all fish lines like that?
Edward: Over
there in
JD:
Edward: Yeah.
JD:
Edward: Below
Big Pigeon, they had that
JD:
Edward:
JD: Y’all did that for money, or for just for y’all?
Edward: No, money. People didn’t boil crabs too much in them days like they do now. Like boiled crawfish? People didn’t do that.
JD: What did they do with the crabs you sold em then?
Edward: They’d
take em to the factory, factory in
JD: Ohhh, factory, crab meat.
Edward: And they peel em. Yeah, you don’t see no more of them.
[Angel Sauce, asking about Agnes, comes into the house, short conversation,]
Edward: You see, that’s one thing you never did see, a cane loader to pick the moss up.
JD: Is that what they’re usin there?
Edward: That’s what they usin there. A cane loader bein used to work the moss. Work it, turn it over, whatever, you know
JD: Yeah, yeah. Did y’all used to pick it and cure it too?
Edward: Yeah.
JD: When y’all lived on the bank?
Lena Mae: Picked what?
JD: Moss.
Lena Mae: I guess so!
Edward: Yeah. Put it in the water and leave it soak in the water about a week or two. It soak in that water and it start turning…
Lena Mae: I got a scar on my knee where I can show where I stuck the pitch fork in it.
JD: You what?
Edward: ….turnin brown. You put it on the bank and it [?] dead. And then that sun get to it and get…talk about get hot!
JD: It gets hot? It rots all that, uh,
Edward: Every now and then you got to turn it over, you know, turn it over and keep, keep that moisture down in it.
JD: Then what’d y’all do with it?
Edward: Hang it on a line. We had moss lines…just run a line out, just hang it on it and let it dry. Once it’s dry you pick it up and bail it. Had a box made that was 12, 14 inches wide…it might a been three foot long, maybe three foot deep. You put you wire…you had a wire, go down, like over here, one over here, all the way around. And you put one thisaway. And we used to put that moss in there and get in there and jump on it. Just jump on it.
JD: Jump on it, pack it down.
Edward: Pack it down, pack it down, when you get it just as tight and you can get it you take that wire and you twist it.
JD: Like bailing wire.
Edward: Bailing wire, that’s what it was. And you get there and push it out, you had that thing made on a lil slant, you know?
JD: [talking about the box made to pack the moss down in] So it …so it…so it would come out like, uh, so it would slant up…
Edward: Right, it wasn’t much , just enough, you know, where, where, where you could get it out. Once you’d get it going, well it’d come right on out.
JD: So, you put those wires in there kind of like the chains in a sugarcane truck. Lay em down in the bottom and pack on top and come right over with em.
Edward: Tighten em down just as tight as you can get.
JD: What’d those bails weigh, usually?
Edward: Some of em, aw, just depends how big you build your boxes. You build it, you can make em weigh a hundred, but there ain’t nobody wanted a hundred pounds. It might be fifty, sixty pound bails, you know.
JD: You remember about what y’all would get by the pound?
Edward: I think it was about three cents.
JD: Three cents a pound?
Edward: Two, three cents a pound.
JD: Two, three cents a pound?
Edward: I know there’s a lot of em sold it for a cent a pound.
JD: Is that right?
Edward: Oh yeah. And a lot of em traded moss for groceries.
JD: Just direct trade, when the boat would come?
Edward: Umhm.
JD: You would trade a bale for so many…pounds of coffee or whatever?
Edward: Yeah.
Lena Mae: That’s what we did.
JD: That’s what y’all did?
Edward: Well, we did it too, you know? Yeah, that’s plenty moss!
JD: Well, that’s what I kept wondering. And I kept wondering about that, you know, they…everybody talks about how they did do a lot of gathering moss…it seems to me that moss doesn’t grow that fast. Did y’all have to keep going further and further back, further and further…
Edward: It grows, Jim, moss grows fast. But you don’t have the cypress trees, and, and, uh…
JD: Oak trees?
Edward: Well, not oak trees so much, you didn’t get too much out of oak trees. Oak used to grow on land…them cypress trees and all, in water, well that’s where you’d go, where you could put your barge under the tree in the water, you see?
JD: Yeah.
Edward: And they had, uh, worlds and worlds and worlds of cypress. I mean you could pick moss forever and never, never get back hardly in the same cypress.
JD: OK.
Edward: And that’s what it was.
JD: So you could pick a …you didn’t have to go very far to pick a load? On you boat, I’m talking about, like, one tree?
Edward: You get that pole…you had a hook on it and you stick it up there and you’d twist it, wrap it around the pole and pull it. When you’d pull it, well the moss would come aloose. And just drop…and you had that deal on that barge and you just start putting it in there…
JD: Like the sides on the barge, you talking about.
Edward: All the way up to the top of that scaffold. And you get that sucker full, you come home with it.
JD: How long did it usually take to fill up a barge?
Edward: Aw, it wouldn’t take two, three hours.
JD: Oh, so one day…
Edward: Oh yeah.
JD: Go out and come back in one day…
Edward: You can maybe make three trips in one day, if you want to.
JD: You could?
Lena Mae: Get a load, come home, throw it on the bank and bed it. They you could go back and get anoter one.
Edward: We used to…we used to put it overboard and let it soak awhile, then bed it. I used to love that, that’s where you get to swim.
JD: Oh, really?
Edward: Yeah,
when you get that…get ready to get that moss out that water, well Momma
JD: Yeah? Y’all would get in the canal or wherever and you would walk it up to the bank and somebody would push it up…? Did they ever have anything living in that moss, in that water…?
Edward: Aw yeah, snakes and all that sometimes, but we didn’t worry about that. Wasn’t no poisonous snakes.
JD: Why you say you like that? Cause you like to go swimming? Y’all didn’t go swimming for fun?
Edward: They wouldn’t let us swim.
JD: Why?
Edward: Very seldom they let us swim.
JD: Why?
Edward: They always said [for instance], in May it’s bad for boils, and at certain time of year it’s bad for typhoid fever, and different kind of sickness in the water.
JD: So they would warn y’all that there was sickness in the water and they wouldn’t let you…even if you could swim? I mean you could… y’all could actually swim?
Edward: Aw yeah. Swim like a fish.
JD: But they didn’t want to let you get in it.
Edward: We used to run off, take off and …
JD: Run off and go swim?
Edward: Go down the bayou or somethin…did that a lot. But, that’s where we’d get to swim. They’d let you get out there and swim then.
JD: They had little sayings like “May is bad for boils” or…
Edward: Not May, never could swim in May, that was, that was a nono to Momma and them. You get full of boils, they claimed. That’s bull! You know? Course, I could understand…stagnated water, you might could catch the….
[People come in and there is conversation about me being Santa Claus, and David killing some ducks, and people being invited to eat…]
Lena Mae: [turned the tape off for awhile, she resumes talking about life on the houseboats] there was no meat, you know? …meat, porkchops unless you kill a hog.
JD: It was hard to kill a hog if you was livin on a campboat, moved around a lot.
Lena Mae: We always had hogs.
JD: On the campboat?? Moved em?
Lena Mae: Sure he’d move em, we had a big dock. Like I say, we never did move that much.
JD: Aw, that’s right. [to Edward] Y’all moved a lot.
Edward: We had, uh, we had hogs too. Chickens. And uh, you’d kill a hog, you had them crockpots. You’d salt the meat down.
JD: Yeah. When y’all moved, what did you do with em.
Edward: Take em with us.
JD: Put em in pens?
Edward: Umhm.
JD: You had barges to put em in, or something?
Edward: Umhm. Yeah.
Lena Mae: See, we had a big old dock built with logs.
JD: A floating dock?
Lena Mae: Yeah. And we always had grandmaw’s camp on one end and ours on the other. Well, when we’d move, we moved the whole thing.
JD: Dock and everything?
Lena Mae: Yeah.
Edward: You didn’t move fast [laughs].
Lena Mae: One time we move to Lil Bayou Long, and uh, we pulled the two camps and the dock with us. Grandma had chickens and all on there.
Edward: You’d very seldom move up the lake on a high water. [laughs] It was always down [downcurrent]
JD: I guess that was always pretty fast, when you were going down. One of your problems could be stopping it once you got to where you were goin.
Edward: Yeah.
Lena Mae: We stayed there a long time with no bank at all.
JD: Where? Lil Bayou Long?
Lena Mae: Umhm.
JD: No bank because the water was high?
Lena Mae: Umhm.
JD: The chickens, pigs and everything lived on the, lived on the dock?
Edward: …had a log crib. Logs made…back in them days you could go, man you could go anywhere…find them big old cottonwood trees…suckers float half outhe water, man, make you a big…
JD: Down? They were already down? Or you cut em down?
Edward: They’d be down. Driftin down.
JD: You found em driftin, in other words.
Lena Mae: Yeah, you look in the lake sometimes you see a big old cottonwood comin down…
JD: You’d go out and catch it, and tie it to the bank, even it you didn’t need it, I betcha, hunh?
Edward: Umhm. Oh yeah, they had plenty of them for logs [to make cribs out of, rafts]…
JD: …that’s good food Lena Mae! Thank you David for killin it too [ducks].
Lena Mae: ….this is a treat.
Edward: That rice is hard, though.
JD: [Laughs] Those of us with teeth don’t worry about that.
Lena Mae: Me either.
Edward: Don’t let it happen no more.
[lots of dishes sounds, and meal sounds, some conversation in the background that is hard to understand]
JD: I’m goin to have another piece. I sure don’t get that very often.
Edward: Eat it all!
JD: Can I have the neck, y’all don’t fight for the neck?
Edward: You can eat it all, if you want.
JD: Oh, there’s the gizzard. Y’all don’t eat that either? I love that.
Edward: Oh yeah. I eat gizzard.
JD: Want this one?
Edward: Uhuh, I done had one.
JD: I love that.
[Edward talks about regulation of chemical plants in Louisiana, and they ask about my job at LDEQ]
David: Yeah, we go in the ground with all our water.
JD: All your produced water [from oil wells], all your brine? It’s all goin in the ground.
Edward: Boy,
I tell you what, Amarada put many
JD: Put all that produced water in the river?
Edward: They were supposed to put it in a…they had a well had to pump it in.
JD: Injection well?
Edward: But
most of the time that thing wasn’t…they couldn’t get it in there. They’d put it…
JD: Yeah.
David: …goin in with 18,000 barrels a day.
JD: In what? In a…? overboard? Just overboard?
David: No, in the ground. You see, see when that compliance [regulation] come out, we was a year ahead of schedule. Had to have it in, I think ’94, and we had it in ’93.
JD: Did y’all have to [tape goes off here for some reason, resumes with a different conversation, same time and people]
Edward: ….fifteen
pounds of undersized fish with five, six hundred pounds of fish [legal], well,
that ain’t no problem. When you come in
with eight, nine hundred pound of small fish
JD: That’s
right, it’s not worth it to him anymore [side one on tape ends]
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