Peter J. Boyer: Biloxi Reinvents Itself Again After Katrina
Mississippi is among the red states, which supported President Bush in the last election, and the Mississippi coast, which is where I grew up, was the most pro-Bush region of the state. When Bush visited Biloxi, on the Friday after Hurricane Katrina, he was greeted warmly by friendly politicians, including the state’s two United States senators, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, who are Republicans; and Governor Haley Barbour, an old friend, who was the head of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Barbour thanked Bush for coming, and, as the President picked his way along streets littered with the splinters of destroyed houses, he encountered hurricane victims who actually seemed glad to see him. One man assured Bush that he had survived Hurricane Camille, in 1969, “and we’ll go through this storm.” New Orleans was Bush’s next stop, and he seemed almost to dread having to leave Mississippi, for all its wreckage. “You know, there’s a lot of sadness, of course,” he told reporters. “But there’s also a spirit here in Mississippi that is uplifting.”
My guess is that the President could sense in Biloxi, Gulfport, and other coastal towns something of Midland, Texas, a boom-and-bust oil town that, unlike New Orleans, was forever reinventing itself, with an eye on the next big deal and, more important, a capacity for finding opportunity in misfortune. In Midland, disaster is an oil bust; on the coast, it’s a direct hit from a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Now the coast has endured two in thirty-six years.
In a place where hurricanes are the local calamity, one might expect history to have a tenuous grip. On the coast of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the past was a treasured, if superficial, asset—an adornment more than a way of life. The coastline was strikingly beautiful, not only for its stark white beaches but also for its fine old houses, many of them painstakingly maintained antebellum structures, situated along the twenty-five miles of beachfront between Pass Christian and Biloxi. These were summer homes, built by Delta planters and wealthy New Orleans merchants and their successors, and they lent the coastal Highway 90 an aspect of elegance, like a grand esplanade. The best known of them was Beauvoir, a building in the raised cottage style, which was the final residence of Jefferson Davis. After Davis’s death, it was operated as a home for Confederate veterans, and in the nineteen-fifties it became a museum.
Beneath the coast’s moonlight-and-magnolias veneer was a restive spirit that reflected both a heterogeneous population and the fevered ambition that occasionally seizes small-time tourist centers. By the fate of geography, the coast had its own sociology, unbound by the feudal arrangements that locked much of the rest of Mississippi into its melancholy past. The alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta fostered an agrarian culture of fabulous wealth and aristocratic conceits, which depended upon the labor of slaves and, later, of freed blacks effectively consigned to indenture. The soil in the southern portion of the state, from the piney woods down to the coastal plain, was sandy, meagre stuff, incapable of growing much more than scrub. Nor were there vast marshes, like those which sustain the rice plantations of lowland Carolina, or cane fields, as in Louisiana. Although Mississippi has been a black-majority state through most of its history, blacks are distinctly a minority in the south, particularly along the Gulf Coast.
The people of the coast were formed by the maritime influences of the
Gulf: first, when the French made Biloxi the capital of eighteenth-century French Louisiana (before New Orleans); and, later, when the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm. The warm waters of the Gulf, rich in oysters, shrimp, and marketable fish—snapper, Spanish mackerel, speckled trout—supplied a seafood industry based in Biloxi that boomed in the early part of the last century, with the arrival of railroad refrigeration. Canneries and seafood factories sprang up all along Biloxi’s waterfront, and the demand for labor was met by Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War, and by Cajuns, forced from Louisiana by failures of the sugarcane crop.
The new workers inhabited a world that was more Steinbeck than Faulkner.
They lived in shotgun houses provided by the companies that owned both the boats, which were crewed by the men, and the canneries, which were worked by the women and children. These Biloxians lived in neighborhoods like Point Cadet, the edge of land that curled into the Back Bay, and developed a culture, and even a manner of speech—a clipped sort of Cajunized Southern English—that was unique.
The coast’s fishing industry, along with its tourism ambitions, shaped a population that was diverse, and ever open to the next big prospect. A new development boom or foolproof tourism strategy was always on the way, and in the meantime the impulses of the present were generously indulged. The Mississippi coast of my youth was constantly being “cleaned up” by crusading authorities, politicians (backed by church groups) who would raid the night clubs and underground casinos and make a show of dumping slots and pinball machines into the Back Bay. Yet eventually the gracious highway would once again bear the interested back to the Peacock Club and other vice and clip joints. Our psychic tides were pulled equally by New Orleans and the Bible Belt. We had Catholics and revellers, and a Mardi Gras celebration that was older than the one in New Orleans, but we inhabited a state that was ruled by Southern Baptist mores.
The last once-in-a-lifetime storm to strike the Mississippi coast was Hurricane Camille, which came ashore at Pass Christian the night of August 17, 1969—Woodstock weekend for the rest of America. Camille, still the strongest recorded hurricane to strike the continental United States, bore hundred-and-ninety-mile-per-hour winds and dropped swarms of tornados all along the coast and for miles inland. Camille was, for anyone who lived through it, the gauge by which all other storms are measured. I remember Camille, though, as something of an adventure, partly because I missed the worst part of it. My father and I were returning home to Gulfport from California, and didn’t arrive until the day after the storm. Coming into town from the north on Highway 49, we were stopped just outside Gulfport at a military checkpoint, established to keep all but local residents out of the area. Inside the perimeter, I saw scenes of such wreckage, a sort of perfect disorder, that they remain in my mind’s eye still. Freighters had been tossed over Highway 90, snakes dropped from the trees, making you flinch when you saw a downed wire, and there were even carcasses of dead cows that had apparently blown in from Cat Island, one of the barrier islands to the south. More than a hundred and forty people had been killed on the coast, and scores more inland....
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My guess is that the President could sense in Biloxi, Gulfport, and other coastal towns something of Midland, Texas, a boom-and-bust oil town that, unlike New Orleans, was forever reinventing itself, with an eye on the next big deal and, more important, a capacity for finding opportunity in misfortune. In Midland, disaster is an oil bust; on the coast, it’s a direct hit from a once-in-a-lifetime storm. Now the coast has endured two in thirty-six years.
In a place where hurricanes are the local calamity, one might expect history to have a tenuous grip. On the coast of Faulkner’s Mississippi, the past was a treasured, if superficial, asset—an adornment more than a way of life. The coastline was strikingly beautiful, not only for its stark white beaches but also for its fine old houses, many of them painstakingly maintained antebellum structures, situated along the twenty-five miles of beachfront between Pass Christian and Biloxi. These were summer homes, built by Delta planters and wealthy New Orleans merchants and their successors, and they lent the coastal Highway 90 an aspect of elegance, like a grand esplanade. The best known of them was Beauvoir, a building in the raised cottage style, which was the final residence of Jefferson Davis. After Davis’s death, it was operated as a home for Confederate veterans, and in the nineteen-fifties it became a museum.
Beneath the coast’s moonlight-and-magnolias veneer was a restive spirit that reflected both a heterogeneous population and the fevered ambition that occasionally seizes small-time tourist centers. By the fate of geography, the coast had its own sociology, unbound by the feudal arrangements that locked much of the rest of Mississippi into its melancholy past. The alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta fostered an agrarian culture of fabulous wealth and aristocratic conceits, which depended upon the labor of slaves and, later, of freed blacks effectively consigned to indenture. The soil in the southern portion of the state, from the piney woods down to the coastal plain, was sandy, meagre stuff, incapable of growing much more than scrub. Nor were there vast marshes, like those which sustain the rice plantations of lowland Carolina, or cane fields, as in Louisiana. Although Mississippi has been a black-majority state through most of its history, blacks are distinctly a minority in the south, particularly along the Gulf Coast.
The people of the coast were formed by the maritime influences of the
Gulf: first, when the French made Biloxi the capital of eighteenth-century French Louisiana (before New Orleans); and, later, when the seafood industry attracted an ethnic mix that was sharply distinct from the Mississippi norm. The warm waters of the Gulf, rich in oysters, shrimp, and marketable fish—snapper, Spanish mackerel, speckled trout—supplied a seafood industry based in Biloxi that boomed in the early part of the last century, with the arrival of railroad refrigeration. Canneries and seafood factories sprang up all along Biloxi’s waterfront, and the demand for labor was met by Slavonian immigrants, dislocated by the First World War, and by Cajuns, forced from Louisiana by failures of the sugarcane crop.
The new workers inhabited a world that was more Steinbeck than Faulkner.
They lived in shotgun houses provided by the companies that owned both the boats, which were crewed by the men, and the canneries, which were worked by the women and children. These Biloxians lived in neighborhoods like Point Cadet, the edge of land that curled into the Back Bay, and developed a culture, and even a manner of speech—a clipped sort of Cajunized Southern English—that was unique.
The coast’s fishing industry, along with its tourism ambitions, shaped a population that was diverse, and ever open to the next big prospect. A new development boom or foolproof tourism strategy was always on the way, and in the meantime the impulses of the present were generously indulged. The Mississippi coast of my youth was constantly being “cleaned up” by crusading authorities, politicians (backed by church groups) who would raid the night clubs and underground casinos and make a show of dumping slots and pinball machines into the Back Bay. Yet eventually the gracious highway would once again bear the interested back to the Peacock Club and other vice and clip joints. Our psychic tides were pulled equally by New Orleans and the Bible Belt. We had Catholics and revellers, and a Mardi Gras celebration that was older than the one in New Orleans, but we inhabited a state that was ruled by Southern Baptist mores.
The last once-in-a-lifetime storm to strike the Mississippi coast was Hurricane Camille, which came ashore at Pass Christian the night of August 17, 1969—Woodstock weekend for the rest of America. Camille, still the strongest recorded hurricane to strike the continental United States, bore hundred-and-ninety-mile-per-hour winds and dropped swarms of tornados all along the coast and for miles inland. Camille was, for anyone who lived through it, the gauge by which all other storms are measured. I remember Camille, though, as something of an adventure, partly because I missed the worst part of it. My father and I were returning home to Gulfport from California, and didn’t arrive until the day after the storm. Coming into town from the north on Highway 49, we were stopped just outside Gulfport at a military checkpoint, established to keep all but local residents out of the area. Inside the perimeter, I saw scenes of such wreckage, a sort of perfect disorder, that they remain in my mind’s eye still. Freighters had been tossed over Highway 90, snakes dropped from the trees, making you flinch when you saw a downed wire, and there were even carcasses of dead cows that had apparently blown in from Cat Island, one of the barrier islands to the south. More than a hundred and forty people had been killed on the coast, and scores more inland....