Atchafalaya Basin People: Chapter 24

DATE:                        December 26, 1995 

INTERVIEWER:      Jim Delahoussaye

LOCATIONS:           Residence of Joe Sauce, Jr., and his wife Florence Anslem Sauce, 208 Easy Street, Franklin, Louisiana, 70538.  Then, on page 36, change to the house of EJ Daigle and his wife Blue, at 1400 Milling St., Franklin, Louisiana,  70538.

COOPERATORS:   Joseph Sauce, Jr., Florence Sauce; then EJ Daigle, Blue Daigle

 [Continuation with Joe Sauce at his house]

Joe:    We’d do that when we’d rig up lines in the house…

JD:      You’d rig em up fresh?

Joe:    Yeah, we’d just tie em on the main line and we’d stick em onto, into the knot.

JD:      Bury the tip of the hook into the knot…

Joe:    Bury the tip of the hook the first time you put out [fresh line]. 

JD:      I never heard that, y’all never showed me that.  [laughs]

Joe:    We not givin you all the secrets!  [laughs].  It wasn’t handy when you were pickin up lines.  To stop…it would take you forever to pick up lines.  So we’d just let the hook fall where it may and you’d have to be just a lil bit more careful, but if you never…if your coils were good you could just…you’d hook up now and then but [makes a motion to throw outward] throw the line out, always keep a situation where you weren’t getting tight on yourself, you know, keep the bow of your boat up the current and idle it slow and throw out till you get enough, and run [to the next place you needed to tie off the line], you know, never get yourself in a bind.

JD:      If you got in a bind that was the end of it. 

Joe:    Keep a knife close by, you know, so you can cut it, that’s your best bet.

JD:      ‘Cause once it hangs up in that tub, the whole thing’s gone [can lose all the line in the tub, it gets dragged out by the force of the current]. That ever happen to you?

Joe:    Oh yeah.  [laughs]  it’s amazing…

JD:      [laughs] That’s how you learned to keep a knife close by?

Joe:    Yeah.  It’s amazing how, how, how uh, how well you could put out that line and how fast it goes out.  When you get the knack of it, you know?

JD:      I, I got to where I could do that after a while.  You pick up one hook and throw as many as four at a time out, when you throw that hook.

Joe:    And you, you know, you wouldn’t throw it too hard where it would….

JD:      If it would hang up, it would just stop…

Joe:    Make sure you had, your first, initial throw wasn’t too close to [?].  Throw off of one, and it it hook a little it wouldn’t tangle nothing. 

JD:      Right. You could just reach down and grab that hook [the tangled one] and throw it. 

Joe:    But sometimes two or three would come out, you know?   Sometimes two or three…some get hooked…unhook that one and throw it again.  Out it goes.  We did good.

JD:      People…people don’t believe you can do that.  You try to tell em that, they don’t believe it’s possible to do that.  They think it’s necessary to have something like you’re talking about that box, with the rig, and the hooks all put separately so they didn’t hang up.  I would have thought that’s the way it was too, not seeing y’all do it. 

Joe:    I still got a tub of line in the shed, practically new line hardly used, about 1200 hooks in a tub.  Last time I tried to do a lil fishing, about four or five winters ago.  Didn’t have nothing to do so I went and put out a, a few lines.  It wasn’t much.  It was in the winter months, I just had some fun for a while.  [laughs]

JD:      Just playing with it, huh, more than anything else?  OK, we talked a lil bit about motors, especially about inboard motors.  We talked about the Lockwood Ash, you’re telling me, and what was that brand name…of those,  some of the brand names if you can remember, of those air-cooled motors?  When they first came out.  Briggs and Stratton, did you say?

Joe:    Yeah.  Wisconsin was used mostly by the Myette Pt. clan. I dunno, maybe daddy could tell you, I think maybe Coleman and Becnel [local store?], maybe they bought em from them, seems to stick in my head, I’m not certain, or they order em out of a cat catalogue, whatever.  But you’d have to…Daddy could tell you more about em.  My first one, I got…Arthur Sanders gave it to me, it was one that was stuck .  An air-cooled, Wisconsin, he had used and discarded, and I took it and kind of fixed it up and got it goin.  That was my first air-cooled engine.  He had given it up.  It needed a…some work on the ignition system.  The coil box in the back of it, uh, had some points and stuff in it, and uh, it needed a lil work, but uh, the bearings rattled a lil bit in it but it was still good.  It rolled, you know, it just was a lil rusty and made noise.  Anyway, Wisconsin and Briggs and Stratton were used.  There may have been some other brands, but uh, maybe some other folks can tell you more about those, I don’t know.  

JD:      And then the outboards came, what do you remember about the first outboards? 

Joe:    Oh, that was every boy’s dream.   [laughs] To have an outboard that get up on a step.  Couldn’t wait to have a boat and a outboard motor, I remember that.  My first outboard was an old, Mercury with the…it had the…it had the…the handle, the shift was on the end…made into the throttle where the handle…

JD:      Like the ones now, the new ones?

Joe:    Well, well it’s similar, on the handle, but what they had was a…it was…in the lower unit they had some kind of spring and a cylinder that would control the shifting.   And, and uh, it was bad because they tore up, …that cylinder out, the springs would tear up.  It had a, a troll, t r a w l, I guess, not trawl, like a shrimp trawl.  Obviously made for sport fishermen, you know.  Had a troll setting, had a lever, you put it on troll, start, on the throttle, whatever, and uh, use that handle for that.  But uh, that was my first outboard motor, and uh, …

JD:      Did it run?

Joe:    Yeah, it ran well, and uh…be good…where I had taken my first air-cooled boat and converted it…fixed a squarer stern for a outboard motor.  And that’s the boat…

JD:      Now that’s a different thing, you say the boats…when they shifted from the inboards, even the air-cooled, to the outboards you had to come with a square stern.  The stern was slanted in on the other ones?

Joe:    Yeah.  Slanted in.  Because the put the… sometimes they put the rudder thru the deck and it would come thru the stern up high where there was no need for any kind of stuffin box or anything, for the water to come up the…

JD:      Oh, ok, so that’s why those stern boards were…

Joe:    Or they’d have a pipe, or they’d have a pipe, if it was in the boat, they’d have a pipe.  That’s the reason I think mostly the old boats with the Lockwood Ash was like…had a lot of slant, and they kept that idea…the air-cooled there was no reason to have a square stern, you know, it had the slant.  Course you could put a pipe all the way to the top.  I’m sure that’s what they had, thinking about it, but most time they was from the bottom thru the “lean” [?] if I remember right. 

JD:      When you say there was a pipe, you talking about something that was bolted to the bottom…?

Joe:    Yeah, on a flat plate, and a pipe that came…

JD:      Umhm.  And the, the rudder shaft would come up thru the pipe?

Joe:    Yeah, right. And you’d have a lil, stiff, uh, piece of steel or butt… it was uh, your rudder lines would attach with pulleys all around, on the air-coolers. 

JD:      OK. So…and it had…did it have a front and back stick?  For your rudder control?

Joe:    Yeah, we put a stick, uh, on the air-cooleds we got away from the stick and just had the chain…and we’d use the chain for the…pull the chain. 

JD:      Just a chain, you could push it and pull it, it would…

Joe:    Use a lil rudder chain, around the pulleys and that would work, but um, on the old Lockwood Ash they had that stick.

JD:      That’s where Myon got that idea of, uh, putting a front and back stick to steer an outboard motor with instead of a, a, steering wheel?  He rigged that up one time, with a front and back stick?  He didn’t know how to use it…[laughs] he tells the story about how he ended up on bank…

Joe:    He turned one way and …

JD:      That’s right, goin the other way…he was up on the bank, he had three…three deer hunters and five dogs in his boat with him, he was high and dry on the bank, and so they got it off the bank and they went and he put em down in the canal and everything and put the dogs…he was gonna go put the dogs off somewhere else to run and no sooner than he got back in the canal there was a Christmas tree in the middle of the canal..he was comin down the canal…he turned that thing the wrong way…he hit that Christmas tree [laughs] and he went in the water, the boat kept goin up on the bank.  He said a brand new Evinrude on it, he went up on the bank, he said all he could think of…he was in the water…like 30 degrees…he said the motor was up there goin poppoppoppop on the bank and uh, and Albert Jr. yelled at him, he said “Daddy, you all right?”  He said “Yeah I’m all right, go turn that motor off, it’s gone burn up!”  He wasn’t worried about him, he was worried about the motor. [laughs].  So, that’s how I remember that front and back stick, it’s opposite of what you think it is!

Joe:    Yeah, I recall my first experience as a lil boy tryin to drive a outboard motor, and I turned in the direction I wanted to go and [went] in the opposite!  I couldn’t understand that at first, you know? 

JD:      [laughs]  Ay, yi.  OK, oars…that would be about…

Joe:    We talked about that on the tape.  Course, we uh, we kept a paddle in the boat..  I like the old oar-type, uh, paddle, you know, it was strong. 

JD:      The long, round…

Joe:    Nowadays, those plastic paddles, I don’t care for em too much.  I got one, plastic paddle now, I bought for my crawfish skiff, but it…it has a…it has a metal handle and so it’s pretty stiff.  But, uh, the old ash-type paddles, you know, buy it at the hardware…

JD:      About five feet long?

Joe:    Yeah, five foot long.   With round…

JD:      You could almost make em into oars if you wanted to.

Joe:    Yeah, they used to make em, uh, they used to make they paddles out of cypress.  Daddy used to have a cypress paddle, but they’d carve em out themselves. 

JD:      Make em out of those pieces of floating cypress you find…piece of stumps, and stuff?

Joe:    Umhm.  I made a couple paddles, uh, probly out of ash, already.

JD:      You had to dry the wood first? 

Joe:    I remember makin one or two.  Makin one out of an old piece of cypress, already, too.  When I was younger.  We talked about oars; I didn’t use that.  It was about gone…comin off the scene by the time…

JD:      The skiffs, push…push skiffs?  That what they called those things? 

Joe:    Yeah, either bateaus or skiffs was it, yeah.

JD:      They put…they put those oars on bateaus too…the flat fronted boats?

Joe:    I’m sure they did, uh, but uh, it was more of a bigger thing for skiffs.  I don’t know why.  Maybe there’s a reason behind that …you might investigate…

We talked about the rake nets.

 JD:      We did that.  Umhm.  Stobs, we talked about stobs, uh, shrimpnet…that’s what I’m talking about, really, what you dip in uh…dip shrimp dips with.  Anything special about them? 

 Joe:    No, just uh, made similar to the way we made uh, bug nets that we talked about.  Only thing, the thicker steel, you know, 5/16s steel, and I still got some.  If ever you need a piece.  Yeah, every now and then somebody comes and get some from me.

 JD:      You have much left?  Off that piece of coil?

 Joe:    Enough to make several rims.  We don’t hardly use em [laughs].  I got one out there…the handle rust… rot on the ends.

 JD:      The handle rotted…well, you still have the rim. 

 Joe:    Yeah, the last time I fished, I had to put a new net on it.  Probly rotten by now.  But I got all that stuff inside, in my shed, so it keep a lot longer.  The biggest thing with the size of the steel for a shrimpnet…used it both for dip shrimp or lil crawfish along the levee and in the holes in the swamp with.  And a stiff handle so it didn’t bend or break, bend back, those bushes, well, you know.  You can speak to that, put together the same way as the, uh, the way I drew…

 JD:      The bugging net.

 Joe:    Yeah, the same principle.  You might bend them a lil bit.

 JD:      You do that too, a lil bit? 

 Joe:    A lil bit, not as much as the buggin net.  [you] want a good curve on the front of the buggin net, like a spoon.  The hardest hardship on the shrimp or crawfish net was crawfish, draggin it thru the grass.

 JD:      You ever put any kind of…run any kind of uh, heavier line along the front like that?  You know like you do for shrimp trawl?

 Joe:    No, I never… never did, but uh, it would …when you dip crawfish a lot.. would wear out the hangin [line used to attach the net to the rim].   We uh, on the boat, the shrimp boat we use, uh, a lil net…well, it’s a square net, and it drags the bottom of the boat…we sew a lil net on it to…to dip the fish out and [then] you dip the shrimp on the bottom, you know to clean your shrimp catch.  And uh, what’ll happen…the line will wear on the bottom.  So, we learned how to get another lil piece of aluminum…weld it in front…all the way…another lil rod, in front of that...so to protect the net, the hanging from wearing out, or you use wire…Or use a piece of hose.  … water hose, and put on the end.  Wear the hose out.  And it lasts a lot longer [before] wearing the line out.  Could a did something like that, l don’t know, we didn’t. 

 JD:      It was obviously never necessary. 

 Joe:    Nah, change the hangin.  And the nets would wear out.

 JD:      If it hadn’t of worked, y’all would have done something else.

 Joe:    Yeah, I mean the bottoms were soft, didn’t wear out that bad.  So, it wasn’t a necessity… to worry about.  [back to the interview items] Uh, sinkers, we talked about that.  Anything you could get…iron…

 JD:      It pretty much had to be iron, though, didn’t it?

 Joe:    Yeah, a lot of guys tried bricks and, and uh, stuff like that.  That just didn’t work in the strong currents…

 JD:      It just wouldn’t hold it down, would it?

 Joe:    Yeah, slack water, it worked, you know… to hold line down, but …anything cement, brick, didn’t work too good.  And, talking about anchors, you know, which we didn’t talk about…

 JD:      …at the beginning. 

 Joe:    We didn’t talk about, like in the channel, we use anchors in the deeper water, so either…that would work, you get a piece of…heavy piece of granite rock off of one of those pipelines, or something like that, you know, and you could tie a line to [it] for an anchor, and tie a jug to it and run your main line…

 JD:      That would work?

 Joe:    That would work.  Cause it was plenty heavy enough.

 JD:      Probly if you got something like that it would have to be bigger than it would  if it was steel. 

 Joe:    Yeah, and a piece of iron, it wouldn’t have to…well, the size…  Net fishermen developed some…a lil rod anchor they used, uh, just a sucker rod, they just weld a piece of sucker rod to a lil cross…a lil cross bar The just drag it till it would hook on something, put their nets on it.  We never did use that for lines, but…like we’d get any, any old junk we could, you know.

 JD:      Outboard motor?  An old motor? 

 Joe:    Old motor, pieces of something, another pipe…worked good. 

 JD:      Piece of pipe?

 Joe:    Yeah.  I found, uh, we’d fish old crossings in the channel sometime, but sometimes what we do…we’d put a couple anchors in the middle and use bridles like we did for poles.   One time I divided the channel, in one wide part, into about four bents, about three anchors in the middle, and that worked pretty good…only thing, you had to have extra long, long bridles…hundreds, maybe a couple hundred foot long cause of the depth of the water, so it would be easier to raise.  [if you didn’t] you would get to the bridle [and] it would be hard to raise.  But, we used also…I’d tie a milk jug at that particular point, make it come up easier.

 JD:      Oh, but you had enough weight to sink the milk jug.

 Joe:    Definitely, it would sink itself with the current in the channel.  [even] when the channel was low it was a hard place to fish, always hard to fish in the deep water.

 JD:      So, you actually did…did put bentlines across the channel?  Did you ever get any of those anchors back up?

 Joe:    No, I wouldn’t worry about getting em…. that’s why when you get ahold of old rope, and use…you’d save a lot of money cause if you use main line [for the long bridles], you know it was four, five, six dollars a shot, for about two bridles off of it [one pound ball of nylon]. 

 JD:      So, you’re saying that y’all actually did use main line for bridles when you didn’t have any of the rope…

 Joe:    Yeah, I used main line a lot because, uh, that was a lot of pain to unravel rope all the time, and we wanted to put out line quick, so, you’d spend extra money and use…get 42 [number] or something like that, main line…sometime I’d use 36, but I used a lot of.  A lot of the guys took their time and liked to do those kind of things, but I was impatient kind of guy.  I wanted to do something, I wanted it now, and so I spent a lil bit more.  [laughs] I call myself conservative but I don’t know sometimes I’m liberal [laughs].

 JD:      You and Mike, huh?

 Joe:    Mike?

 JD:      Foster.  [the governor]

 Joe:    Oh, Mike Foster!  We can hope the best for him.

 JD:      OK, snaghooks, I don’t suppose you can talk too much about that? 

 Joe:    No, I just heard Daddy and the old people talk about it.  They used it somewhat, and uh, they’d put the hooks real close, that’s all I know.  And they’d just snag a fish with lil sharp hooks, I understand.  Very inconvenient thing to fish. 

 JD:      I can imagine.  So, OK, stageons. 

 Joe:    That was usually two pieces of number 15, nylon, usually, I believe, sometime twelve, but mostly 15 nylon was used.  Uh, and after you tie em together you…it would be about six inches, but the time you tied your knot [the loop].  You need to…probly cut about a 18-inch piece of line.  Use a wooden block and wrap it and heat a knife on the stove…whatever…cut across.  And uh, your stageons, by the time you tie [the loop] be six to…different, your particular desire, you know, how long you wanted your stageons.  Ours ended up usually…total about maybe fourteen, sixteen inches, something line that [total length of the tied stageon, loops, hook and swivel].  And, you had your swivel in the middle, which gave you an inch, and your hook, on one end.  And uh, course that’s how it was put together, your two…after your line [loops] was tied together…then you attach your swivel in the middle, hook on the end.  That was your stageon.  Another way of doin it also…

 

 JD:      Did everybody always use swivels in your memory?

 Joe:    No, we did, even way back before they come out with the brass, you know, with the bent wire.   And the Charenton fishermen, again, you know I keep referring to em, seem to do things different.  Maybe they were more conservative, didn’t want to spend as much money, lazy [laughs], I don’t know, but uh, you find they…didn’t use swivels.  Used long stageons, light line, and…like I said, with just the hook on the end.  Didn’t spend much into it, and those guys, lot of times would put out line [and] just leave em, never come back to em. 

 JD:      Are you talking about…did you ever know them to use bentlines? 

 Joe:    Uh, some of em, but I guess they did…

 JD:                  [they mostly used?] ightlines.

 Joe:    Yeah, lotta tightline type fishing.  I don’t know if they ever…some of em did, because uh, that I know of, did like we did.  Some of the Persilvers knew about the way we did it, and they kind of adapted…Higgins, uh, course I seen what they use…they were used to no swivels, lines like that you know…

 JD:      I’ve even seen em take, number 15 white line and to make the stageons they just come along and tie a knot in it…two feet or three feet long.

 Joe:    Well, that’s what I got in my mind, that’s what I’m talking about, that’s how they make it…with just the hook on the end.  And, and, uh, they pile em up in this box, you know.  Make it right off the main line, just tie a knot, use long, long stageons.  White line.  And it was cheap.  They go put these things out and they, in Lake Fausse Pointe, just leave those things and never pick em up.  Be dangerous.

 JD:      The hooks just stay there.

 Joe:    I seen that out in the bay, I seen toward the other side of the river, leave trotlines with long stageons out the water just about that high, just about neck [high]…

 JD:      Hooks actually four feet out of the water?  [he actually means the main line is that high, but the hooks are in the water on the long stageons]

 Joe:    Yeah, yeah, dangerous, dangerous.  [whistles]

 JD:      Well, that’s the kind of thing that gets people who don’t do that in trouble.

 Joe:    We never did fish like that, even when we fished tightlines we fished em about level with the water where it couldn’t hurt anybody.  What’s the purpose, I mean?  I don’t have no idea.  White Lake, White Lake and, uh, Grand Lake, and all, the guys that do it, that’s the way they do it.  They, they fish fifteen hooks in one lil place, with stageons just like that, have a pole on each end with about 15 hooks, here and there.

 JD:      Short, short, short pieces of line. 

             We getting close, Joe, [to the end of the topics for interview], swivels we’ve already talked about.  Uh, the 12-volt battery…

 Joe:    Well, uh, battery, used to use…buy…used it for night fishing you know, for the headlights, but used a lil, uh, lil six-volt battery with the lil…

 JD:      The round ones?

 Joe:    No, lil square ones, you know?   We’d carry around…we’d burn  one a night, you know.  Sometimes two a night.  And that got to be expensive, and so we adapted, we got some sense…used storage batteries with long wires. 

 JD:      So those were six-volt, square….  Were they metal or paper when y’all first started using em? 

 Joe:    I can remember some paper, uh…with the tar [on the outside of the battery holding the paper on]…I can kind of recall that.

 JD:      And then it came to the metal ones.

 Joe:    Came to the metal ones.  And Daddy might be able to tell you, some of the old people, probly…done told you more…Edward probly…

 JD:      No, I haven’t gone over this list with Edward [Couvillier] yet.  This stuff… just in pieces.

 Joe:    So, you gone pick up a lot more information from someone else.

 JD:      Different people…

 Joe:    You know, about those things that were a lil bit before my time, things I could faintly remember.

 JD:      Sure, sure.  And there’s things that you would remember if you were…if you were triggered to it, uh, there’s stuff that you know that you’re not remembering. 

 Joe:    And things “hand me down”, you know, stories and.

 JD:      Sure, well what I’m going to do with this eventually is…I’m talking to you about these things…I want to get at least two more, three more people to tell me about the tools, cause they…most of the stuff they gonna repeat what you’ve said…but some of it will be somewhat different, and then I’ll be able to include that.  Once I get all this done, I’m gonna write it…write it up…and then I’m gonna give it to y’all to read.  And if you would read it then, and tell me “Aw, well you forgot this”, or “Aw, well that’s not right”, or “I remember something like…”, then it will trigger a…maybe a new set of memories and I can include those too.

 Joe:    You gonna find that uh, each family was a…might be a lil unique.  Did things just a lil bit different, you know, nobody’s the same, you know?

 JD:      Variable…variability, within the community, a variability.  I’m not gonna talk about the white line [and] three-foot long stageons, cause that’s not part of the tradition on the Myette Pt. community. You see, that’s something else.  I might point it out as, as, other people did.  But that’s not part of what I’m gonna focus on, which is what y’all did. 

 Joe:    Most of em [Myette Pt. people] always did it with the tarred line and the swivel stageons, and even way back when they made em themselves, you know? 

 JD:      That’s what makes it possible for me to do this, cause I can tie it to just that one period and people.

 Joe:    And of course other people used the swivels too, cause they used to come from all over to buy swivels, I remember, from Aunt Ida [Daigle]. 

 JD:      They did?

 Joe:    People from Morgan City, and you gonna find some similarity in the way some of the people in Morgan City did it [fished] and the way we did it.  [if you would] investigate anyway, but a lot of it was done the same way.  Course a lot of it was because, the…the roots came out of the same tradition. 

 JD:      That’s right…exactly…

 Joe:    Branched off different. That was unique too, because of the pole under the bushlines…the Sauce boys in Calumet fishing the delta area retained that, and we didn’t.

 JD:      Well, anyway, uh, I…you have to start somewhere with something like this [the writing of the story] that’s why I’m trying to hold it to one community and one group of fishermen.  It could be branched out afterwards, you know, to talk about different techniques of how people elsewhere did…those various different techniques.  I don’t know enough about net fishing to… to do much in the way of net fishing, so I’m not…I’m not including that in this.

 Joe:    You might want to mention [it] in fact, because uh, the boats…like we seen, like we determine in here, the boats…the way the boats were built because of the different type of uses.  All that had a bearing on…

 JD:      What do you think came first, netfishing or linefishing?  Cause you know this netfishing, this hoopnet’s not used anywhere else in the world [found out later that this is not so, they came from the upper Mississippi]…that I know of.  The hoopnet evolved right here in the Atchafalaya Basin, it’s not…you don’t find hoopnets used anywhere else.  If you go to Texas or Mississippi, people will tell you they got…they came from here, or they got the pattern from here.  It originated right here in the Basin, as far as I can tell.

 Joe:    They adapted and figured it out here, you know, somebody…

 JD:      Somebody…maybe they used it in Europe.  The idea came, maybe, from someplace in Europe.  I have no idea.  You might be able to go the Rhine River in Germany, or something, and find people using these things...even today.

 Joe:    Somebody, somewhere along the line knew a lil bit something about it maybe.  Either that or it was invented here, but…

 JD:      So, this was a six-volt…and the 12-volt battery, later.  We talked about the gaff hook and we talked about the unhooker thing, whatever you call that thing, already.

 Joe:    Have to ask…I don’t know if it was ever named [laughs], but…

 JD:      We’re going to stop right here for a second.

 [resumes with another conversation]

 JD:      Go ahead.  I knew he had a brother that died…drownded.

 Flo:     …fell in a fish cage. 

 JD:      Talking about Russell and EJ’s brother. 

 Joe:    I’m not certain…no, he was in a boat runnin lines and…or something…and.  I don’t know if he drownded or something happened to him or what…the way I understand there wasn’t no water in his [lungs?]

 Flo:     …a kid.

 Joe:    He was.  He was a teenaged boy, maybe 12, 14 years old something like that. 

 Flo:     Yeah, he was young, like that.  It’s hard to believe that fishermen don’t know how to swim.

 Joe:    And Aunt Ida also could be one that could tell you a lot. 

 Flo:     Russell [?] don’t have a birth certificate.  He has a, um, he doesn’t have a birth certificate.  What he has is a, um, [?]. 

 Joe:    Jim, you want to eat?  We got plenty…

 JD:      I have to be at EJ’s at 1:00.  So, I thought I was gone to pick up a hamburger in town or something, just to eat something quick. 

 Flo:     We got plenty food. 

 JD:      You sure?  Y’all gonna eat right now?

 Joe:    Rice dressing, microwave some stuff up.

 Flo:     Yeah, whenever y’all finish…

 JD:      Well, we not finished but we gone stop.  I wrung Joe out, here, for four hours straight [laughs]. 

 Joe:    I didn’t know I had that much in me. 

 JD:      Ok…oh, you got a lot more than that in you, believe me, and I’m gone get some of it [laughs]. 

 That’s the end of this session with Joe [Sauce]

 JD:      We gone to start over right now, start here with, uh, with EJ, uh, Daigle, at his house.  Still on the 26^th of December, 1995.  OK?  Uh, the reason I started this was to be able to trace back a, a family, and then I want to do others as much as I can.  [referring to a chart with family lineages on it] But starting with Lena Mae and going up to her parents.  Her parents were Myon and Agnes.  We followed Agnes’s up where we got Blaise Sauce and Rosalie Mayon, for her parents.  And then each of their parents…these are the two that came, we think, from Spain, and France.  These two, we don’t know where they came from, that would be Agnes’s mother’s family – Mayon and Mason.  On the other side, with Myon, his parents were these two people.  I don’t know if this Daigle is kin to you. 

 EJ:      That’s my grandmother. Myon and Daddy were half brothers.  See, Myon’s daddy died and then she married my daddy…my grandfather. 

 JD:      OK, I’ll get to that in just a minute.  The second marriage, Homer Daigle?  That’s it.  That’s your grandfather.

 EJ:      Charles Homer Daigle. 

 JD:      Charles…that was his first name?  See, I get a lil piece of information everywhere I go.  So, that was your…your grandmother, and her mother was Leah Hebert, and Joe Daigle.   And then, on the other side, Myon’s daddy, which wouldn’t be kin to you, would be Albert Bailey was Myon’s daddy, and Victor and we don’t…can’t find her, Catherine’s, last name, right now.  But that would have been Myon’s grandmother.  And then, under each one of these, what I tried to put is for this person I put their brothers and sisters, for this person their brothers and sisters, the same thing…Edward, everybody’s brothers and sisters.  All the way through here, like this, and I also tried to put who they married.  And this is not because it’s gonna end up in this history anyplace necessarily, but I…every time somebody refers to somebody…

 EJ:      You have to know where it’s comin from in order to talk about it.  Or put it on paper the way it…

 JD:      Exactly!  To know what the connections were.

 EJ:      You gotta have a reference point somewhere.

 JD:      Exactly right.  So, that’s why I’m doin this [family lineage chart].  And, what I’d like to do, if you could hand me that blank one, right there.  If you could give me…I want to try to sketch your family, on here.  So, we can go to Ernestine Daigle, and Charles Homer [Daigle]…now, they weren’t related by blood, or were they related by blood? 

 EJ:      They say no.  Lot of skeletons in the closet as far as that thing there went [laughs]. 

 JD:      And you don’t know how close the skeletons were either, they might not have been very close.  OK, so you have those two people, as your grandparents.  Now, your parents were Ida Daigle, and Jesse [Daigle].  Ok, now, their kids were, now wait a minute, let me get this straight, these would have been Ida’s parents?

 EJ:      No, that’s Jesse’s parents.  Blaise [Sauce] and Rosalie was momma’s parents. 

 JD:      OK.  Jesse and Ida, who’s…was the oldest Russell of you?

 EJ:      Umhm.

 JD:      And he married…?

 EJ:      Gail.

 JD:      Gail, I couldn’t think of her last name.  Was it G a i l?  Guillory?

 EJ:      Umhm. 

 JD:      Ok, are you next?

 EJ:      No, there was one between me and Russell, that drowned when he was about 10 years old, Jesse junior.

 JD:      OK, Your …your name is actually EJ [not initials] isn’t it?

 EJ:      Umhm, EJ Felix Daigle.

 JD:      Felix is your middle name?  From…from Blaise [Felix Blaise Sauce].

 EJ:      I suppose so.  And then when I Confirmed, the Church put Joseph between Felix and Daigle [laughs].  Man I had a handle…I got a handle!  [laughs].

 JD:      Anslem, right?  Blue…[EJ’s wife]?

 EJ:      Yeah.

 JD:      OK.  All right.  Uh, can you list Russell’s kids for me? 

 EJ:      Well, Russell had two wives, so, first wife, oldest son named David.

 JD:      What’s her name?

 EJ:      Helen Anslem. 

 JD:      Was she kin [to Blue’s family]?

 EJ:      Umhm.  Cousins, third cousins or so.  Son named David, David and Janet…a boy and a girl.

 JD:      Ok, and with Gail?

 EJ:      Uh, Paul… Paul, Louis and Mathew.

 JD:      And let me list yours.

 EJ:      I only had one wife [laughs], so,  Leland, Weldon and Joan. 

 JD:      OK, and theirs [children]?

 EJ:      Leland has a oldest daughter named April.

 JD:      What’s his wife’s name?

 EJ:      Lisa Chauvin.  Their two children, two lil girls, April and Amy.  Weldon married Kacy Louviere, got one son named Drake.  Joan married Kory Champaigne, that’s as far as she’s got [laughs].

JD:      That’s Leroy and Wayne [EJ and Russell’s two brothers]…could put on there.  They’re not part of all…they’re not directly part of the fishing thing, but let me get em anyway.  Leroy would be next?  Gil [wife], g i l ?

EJ:      Gail is his first wife.  Gail, Gail Landry.  They had, four children, Chris, Kurt, Elwood, and Blake.  His second wife was, Gil Monroe.

Blue:  Gillian.   She well says, we call her Gil, but her name is Gillian.

JD: Monroe

EJ:      Scottish Monroe.  Had one daughter named Gillian.  [laughs].

[Switch now to Wayne Daigle]

EJ:      First wife he had no children with.

JD:      What was her name?

EJ:      Uh, Benefield, uh, Bonny Benefield.  And second wife is, uh…what’s Wayne’s wife [laughs], I forget her name now.  [laughs]

Blue:  Lynne, her name is Lynne.

EJ:      Lynne Jacobs.  They’ve got two boys, Casey and Josh.  [spelling on Casey?].  Josh, Joshua, I guess. 

Blue:  Kasey spells his with a K.  He spells it with a K.

EJ:      People don’t know how to spell?  Casey starts with a C. 

JD:      That’s right, you would think they would know by now, huh? [laughs]. Kasey and Joshua.

 EJ:      That’s it. 

 JD:      That’s it.  Ok.  That…you tie into this through here…Ernestine Daigle. 

 EJ:      …because Ernestine had, another six kids.   There was Daddy [Jesse Daigle], Uncle Ike [Isaac], Uncle Norman, Aunt Nine [Elmira], Aunt Odelia, Aunt Eula…seven kids.

 JD:      Wait a minute…now…let me see how I got this working.  Alright, so, she had…

 EJ:      This is her first husband…[Bailey]

 JD:      Umhm.  And she had…she didn’t have all these kids with, with, uh…probly these are your uncles [from first husband].

 EJ:      Angelina, Rudolph, these were Baileys.  Marie, Odelia, Eula, Norman, uh, Aunt Petit, Uncle Ike and Aunt Nine…that’s all with Charles Homer [Daigle].

 JD:      Those were all Daigles, OK, see, this is what I’m trying to keep…OK and I have it like this…I have… these are all halfs, with Myon, that is, and they’re all Daigles?  Um, did you say your…you said your father? 

 EJ:      Jesse, he’s not on there.

 JD:      Well, that’s what I’m sayin, he’s not here though.

 EJ:      Daddy was, older than all of these [referring to chart].

 JD:      Was Myon his half brother?

 EJ:      Umhm.  Jesse Benoit Daigle.  Jesse B.

 JD:      I have Ida here, with Jesse Daigle over here, and I needed to…look at that.  Agnes’ sister married…

 EJ:      There’s three sets of Daigles in there.  Daigles and Baileys.  See?  Aunt Nine and Cleo, Momma and Daddy’s brother and sister, and Agnes and Myon, so that’s three sets.

 JD:      And Jesse and Ida, three sets.  How about that?  Ok, so, you got an idea what I’m trying to do with these?  Um, some of this that…some of this that I’m kind of goin over with you right now…try to give you an idea of where I’m trying to go, because what I would like to do is…I’m taking these tapes and I’m transcribing these tapes at night, whenever I have time, into actual “he said – she said” stuff, like this, and then it doesn’t matter what we talk about, I can go back and pull out various pieces of it to go with various places that it needs to be, so we don’t have to do anything in any kind of order or anything, or for any length of time…whatever I get is useful somewhere.  Um, this is the basic outline that I can anticipate right now that I can follow. It’s not written in stone anyplace, I can add things to it…probably won’t subtract anything necessarily from it, but I can always add things to it as we find out more things need to be included.  The people, the families that congregated at Myette Pt., how they got to be together, what the houseboats were like that they lived on, what kind of life was that, movement of the houseboat communities back and forth in the Basin, why, how, how they moved onto the land at the levee, and then eventually away from the levee to Oxford, and what it’s like now.  Just describing how this community came to be, and in fact, is disintegrating, basically.  Comin apart, natural process…the way things are.  Then I’m going to talk about the river cycle, and an area description.  The river cycle about how it was before ’27, what the high waters were like before ’27.  What happened in ’27?  After…how they built the levees, how that affected the way the water acted in the Basin, um, the sources of water in the river, because that has to do with different qualities of water…all the way from the Tensas, you know that Ouachita water nobody likes to fish in, and whatever.  And then the area description of the overall Basin, the physical…The fishes that, that line fishermen catch, the catfishes, gaspergous and all these various gamefishes, and so on.  This is where I am right now.  I started with something I knew something about, that’s the tools.  Everything, anything that’s underlined on here I’ve already written about what I know about those things, but I need to address each one of these things from a historical point of view:  what was it like when y’all first remember using these tools, add tools to this if I’ve forgotten anything, and what it’s like now…what it came to be now.  All of these tools, Joe added two this morning, he added uh, gaffhook that he said people sometimes used to use.

 EJ:      Never used to use a dipnet on big…great big fish, couldn’t dip em.  Big 60, 70-pound fish you gaff em.  Soon as he came up, you had him, you didn’t have to fight to get him in the net.

 JD:      And he called to my attention that there were six-volt batteries used for headlight before y’all started using the 12-volt car batteries. 

 EJ:      Matter of fact, we used to use the old dry-cell batteries first.

 JD:      I think that’s what he was talking about, those six-volt…those old…he said you used one a night, or maybe two a night even sometimes.

 EJ:      Yeah, well it used to be you could get two nights out of em, but all these new modern miracle batteries wouldn’t make a night [laughs]. Better stuff?  You know?  Won’t make a night.  But we used to also use the 1.5 volt batteries, that we’d get about a week out of. They were this big around, about this long.

 JD:      Round, or square? 

 EJ:      Round, about that long. 

 JD:      About 12 inches tall.  The tape recorder can’t tell how far “this” is [laughs]. 

 EJ:      Yeah.  The women, the women used to…like the mothers would build a shoulder pack, and it would fit on your back, four of those big batteries on your back, Lug that thing around…I guess it weighed about 12, 15 pounds, by the time you finish with it.  Each battery weighed three or four pounds I guess, and, you had a load on your back all night.

 JD:      And what did you do with that?

 Continued on Chapter 25