When Death Arrives With Wet Feet

In the brackish wetlands and marshes of South Louisiana, there exists a natural organic substance that is neither solid earth that can be guaranteed to hold your weight if you step on it, nor freely, flowing water headed surely and obstinately toward the open Gulf of Mexico. The Creole French word I’ve heard used in sentences thick with Yat accents in reference to these objects sounds like “flota” pronounced “flow-TAU” and the English words I’ve heard from buttered Southern lips to describe them are “floatin’ marsh grass.” When there are miles of nothing but floating mats of marsh grasses attached to no soil, the people of Delacroix Island, LA, a town about an hour southeast of New Orleans, called that landscape a prairie. I used the past tense of the word call because the Delacroix Island of which I write was swept away with the roar of the wind and water on August 29, 2005 when Hurricane Katrina leveled almost every man-made structure on the island. Hundreds of years of culture and traditions that had begun when their Spanish Canary Islander ancestors stepped off 18th century boats onto the barnacle-encrusted docks in the port of New Orleans in what was then New Spain was washed away along with their homes and the marshes the day Katrina reeked havoc on Louisiana and Mississippi.

While the history of the Creole Spanish families of Delacroix Island are both heart-rending and fascinating, in this story I want to tell you about one family, one person in particular, who was both as large as the sky above the prairie, and as solid as an anchor mooring a vessel in place. His name was Joseph Alfonso a.k.a, “Shine,” he passed from us yesterday morning, June 11, 2021, at the age of 93 years old. This is how he came to be a fixture to my family.

In 1976, my dad, Robert, was working construction for AMAX Nickel Refinery Plant in Braithewaite, LA. My mom and dad gotten married in 1976, already had a place in Purvis, MS where dad was born and raised but during the work week, they had a place in Chalmette, LA closer to the plant where they lived at the time. Diddy is a welder by trade, a redneck by genetics, and a bullshitter by choice so when he heard man after man at AMAX walk up to an older gentleman who worked there that he didn’t know yet and ask him when he was gonna take them fishing, his country boy ears perked up. He watched day in and day out as that man told each young upstart that he wasn’t taking them fishing, that they could forget it, and he began biding his time while he got to know the man everybody called Shine from Delacroix Island.

Shine got his nickname from shining for deer around the Mississippi River at nighttime, which is and has been illegal for a while, but having come from a culture that trapped and traded furs, what the law didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them and would feed his family. Delacroix Island was a small and insular community of shrimpers and fishermen who had been living from and on the bayou the way their father and their grandfathers before them did for generations. They supplied the greater New Orleans area with the seafood it needed to feed the ever growing population, travel, and tourism industry; if you’ve ate seafood in a New Orleans restaurant from 1900 – 2005, chances are you’ve ate seafood harvested by one of the families from Delacroix. The island is nothing more than a thin whisp of land, around which the bayou is curled like hand around a cheek and the highway that runs along the bayou crumbled off into the water back then, studded with old dock pilings from long-rotted piers and a sign that read “THE END OF THE WORLD.” Standing on the asphalt looking at the water, the diving pelicans and ducks, floating pads of grass waving in the breeze as far as the eye could see, you would be prone to believe the sign and think that perhaps you’d reached the end of civilization.

Across that highway, in front of each house on the island, clinging to what spare earth was left on the shoulder of the road that the water had not claimed yet was a mailbox, a pier, and at LEAST one boat owned by the homeowner. Sometimes, if the person was fancy and well-off, there were many boats and the boathouse on the bayou across the highway was painted in the same colors to match the person’s house. As you traveled that one and only highway onto the island, you were closely watched by the families who were busy bringing in the day’s catch or otherwise working on those boats and docks. Everybody knew everybody back then and by the time you made it to your destination, the whole island knew you were there because there were no outsiders on the island.

The friendship between my transplanted Mississippi Diddy and Shine continued to grow the longer they worked together at AMAX until one day that year in 1977, Shine looked at my Diddy and said, “Hey Robbit, you wanna go fishin’ wid me?” The long-awaited day had finally arrived and my Diddy thought he had died and gone to Redneck Heaven. Shine took him out in his 17 and ½ foot homemade, wooden, flat-bottomed boat with a 75 horsepower Evinrude long past the marsh grasses of the prairie, into the deep blue, open saltwater of the Gulf around the oil rigs. There they caught so many bull redfish, Diddy came home sun-burnt with blisters and bruises all over his torso from bracing the butt of his fishing rod against his stomach to reel the fighting fish in close enough for Shine to get them with the net. Now he knew why all of the men wanted to go fishing with Shine.

Shine not only knew where to fish during what season of the year, he knew what was biting at what depth on what day, what to fish with, and he also knew how to get there with no GPS, using no equipment other than a lifetime of living on the bayou and a boat with a working outboard motor. He could hold a crab in his hand and from the weight of the crab, divided by its size and in addition with his decades of knowledge, could tell you with a twinkle in his eye, “Dat one’s a good one. Eat dat one.” He was right every time. He needed no scale or gauge, no barometer or compass for the South Louisiana wetlands ran through his life like blood through his veins.

Shine and his wife Helen were among the first generation of islanders who were taught in public schools provided by the parish therefore were the first generation to be bilingual and speak fluent English on the island. Helen’s mother only spoke the Islenos dialect, a mixture of mostly 18th century Creole Spanish and some Louisiana Creole French phrases passed from her ancestors to her which was spoken no where else on the planet. The dialect has now been recorded and studied by academic researchers from around the globe.

Shine and Helen quickly became family friends and folded us into their lives on the island. While Mama was pregnant with me in ‘77 and ‘78, the only thing her pregnancy hormones had her craving was crabs and luckily, the bayou and Shine kept her stocked up on them. Mama and Diddy would call him and let him know they were coming down so he could bait the crab traps in time and by the time she got out of the truck, the crabs were boiled or fried, depending on what kind he’d caught that day, the kitchen table was covered in newspaper, with a roll of paper towels for drips, and a five gallon bucket sat on the floor beside the table for the shells and castoffs. Mama would tuck in and Shine would grin from ear to ear watching her enjoy the fruits of the bayou he loved so much while giving her tips on how to pick the best ones or peel them without leaving one piece of precious meat behind.

After I was born in April of ‘78, with a strange and abiding love of crab legs, Diddy found a welding job in Purvis so we moved for good back to Mississippi but our trips to the island were frequent. As the years went by, we came to know and love Shine and Helen’s extended family and friends and grieve their losses as our own. Shine became a sheriff’s deputy for St. Bernard Parish in between crabbing and fishing. He was an asset to the force because he knew the bayou so well, if they needed to locate a missing person in the prairie, Shine knew where to look. He told stories of helicopter rides and bodies recovered from cars that had ran into the water in halting and solemn sentences which often trailed off unfinished as he remembered things too sorrowful to be resurfaced. He’d seen plenty of life on his bayou but Death knew the island even better than Shine and unfortunately needs no navigator to find its way.

My first childhood memories of Shine and Helen’s house gratefully contain no such sorrow and going to the island for me was like visiting another planet even for a child who was no stranger to water. I’d spent a large chunk of my short life in boats on the Pascagoula River or ankle deep in creek mud, covered over in briar scratches and mosquito bites, but crossing over that bridge and seeing boat after boat, dock by dock, shrimp net after shrimp net like butterfly wings on double- or multi-rig boats, Spanish moss weighted Live Oak limbs overhead...this was different. This habitat was wild and right-at-hand.

I wanted to explore and poke everything I found with a stick but Mama rightfully wouldn’t let me get too far from her sight. There was a LOT of rules about the edge of the water and don’t cross the highway and boat docks and piers and snakes and alligators and how is a kid supposed to keep all of that straight in her head? It was all RIGHT THERE, just let me go poke it with a stick and find out what it would do myself. Jeez O’Pete! I was the weird white girl with blonde hair running around with the tanned brown- or black-haired island grandchildren of Shine and Helen and they showed me a little more than I was able to see under the watchful eye of Mama. There also happened to be a pen of alligators in Shine and Helen’s back yard that she didn’t want me anywhere near. When alligator populations had declined from over-hunting, Shine would catch baby alligators and raise them in the backyard until they got big enough to have a better chance of surviving, then he would release them back into the bayou.

When we would spend the night, I would lie in bed at night and listen to the cacophony of frogs and insects on the other side of the wall outside and think to myself, “This is even louder than camping.” One night after I got older, I was walking out to the truck in the driveway to get something and I heard an animal make a noise in the darkness of the prairie that I had never heard before and the sound was so startling there alone in the dark, I froze in my tracks on the grass. My eyes fruitlessly scanned the inky blackness for a glimpse of what creature continued to make that unearthly growling roar as my brain kicked back in, I got what I came for and my white ass got back inside the house. I had just heard my first bull alligator but I didn’t know it at the time. It wouldn’t be the last such rumble from the water in the velvet darkness and it terrified me less each time it happened but I was still happy for electricity and four walls around me at night.

Shine as a storyteller surpassed even my own Diddy who is an established raconteur by his own right, so betwixt the two of them and the natural environment almost inviting shenanigans, the effervescent tomfoolery was constant, the entertainment top-notch, and the food and company was delightful. Shine and Helen came to stay with us a few years back during a hurricane and when Shine began to practice his art and weave stories in my living room, I thankfully started filming him. I’ll include the links at the end of this so that you can be as entertained as we were.

During one visit to the island when I was about 12 years old, I told Shine I wanted to go out with him and Diddy on the boat that day. He said, “You wanna go out on da boat wid us? You wanna fish or shrimp?” I told him I wanted to shrimp because I’d done plenty of freshwater fishing by that point but shrimping was something new and different. Saltwater fishing is an entirely different animal than freshwater fishing but I was 12 at the time and didn’t have my sea legs yet. Shine took us out in his TINY flat-bottomed boat and by the time the 60-something-year-old man had made his 4th turn down yet another bayou surrounded by marsh grass that all looked identical to all of the other turns down the other bayous before it, I began counting turns and looking for “landmarks” so I could reverse them in my head in case something happened to him. About 45 minutes later, we’d made it out of the prairie and into the open water which I didn’t know we would do, but I'd lost count of the turns and was then wondering how in the world he even knew where he was going because it was nothing but water and grass. By the time he finally cut the engine on the boat to cast a net to shrimp, I’d decided the Coast Guard would never find us if he had a heart attack because even if I DID manage to remember all of those turns by some miracle, there was no way I could get us back to the “safety” of the prairie because I couldn’t even see it anymore. It was nothing but water as far as I could see and we were all three gonna be fish food if he croaked. We were IN THE OCEAN in a 17 and ½ foot boat, 2 paddles, and some ice chests. No radio, nothing. Holy Moses, I did not know what I’d signed up for back there on the land when I was so loud mouthed and demanding but it was too late now because here we were and he was bringing up things from the bottom of the boat.

He stood balanced in the boat and cast the net into the water with a turn and twist of his upper body without rocking the boat more than inch from his efforts. The net hesitated in the air over the water like musicians responding to a conductor’s upraised arms before an opening note then gravity took hold and sunk the net into the ocean. We trawled slowly along in the boat about 10 or 15 minutes before Shine brought up the shrimp net and dumped the catch in the bottom of the boat around our feet. Aside from the sight of sea creatures I’d never seen alive and flopping or crawling before this moment, up close and personal, the amount of garbage and stinking, mud-covered trash that came up with the catch shocked me. Glass bottles and plastic, fishing line, corks, Styrofoam, and all manner of man-made snack bag was intermingled with the animals flailing about around our feet.

Shine began tossing the garbage out of the boat back into the water and I involuntarily hollered out, “NO!” before I even knew what was happening. He froze mid-toss and eyed me for an explanation of this outburst. I grabbed one of the empty buckets to put the garbage in and shoved it in the middle of the boat within easy reach of all of us. He began throwing garbage in the bucket with a half-grin on his face at this weird child making him save trash in his own boat.

Shine began sorting the catch with an expert eye to what was big enough to eat or too small to fool with and held up a large shrimp to me, saying, “Trow de ones dat’s smalla dan dis back in the wada.” He didn’t know it yet but the only shrimp I had ever touched before that very second was a dead one and the sight of all the appendages protruding from the front of that critter’s moving face didn’t instill in me a longing to snatch one up barehanded right then. I looked at all of those roving whiskers and antennae, then at him and asked, “Do they bite?” “DO DEY BITE?” he repeated in surprise and fell out laughing, “No, girl, dey don’t bite,” he replied. But he was still smiling and watching me. I didn’t trust him; he was grinning too broadly and watching me too closely. I looked to Diddy and he said, “They won’t bite you, handle the back end, not the front,” so I did even if it made me slower at sorting.

Shine genuinely enjoyed and was fascinated by all sorts and ages of people, extrovert that he was, and the same curiosity that made him grin as he watched a 12 year old kid handle a live shrimp for the first time sent him out time after time on cruises to Spanish-speaking countries. I’m not sure how many cruises he went on before diabetes caused his eyesight to deteriorate to the point he had to stop but once he went one the first one with a couple of friends of his, he was hooked. Endless food, dancing, food, drinking, food, stories, food, people, food, parties, food, and places on the water? He had himself a ball and found that he could communicate to modern-day Spanish speakers using his Islenos dialect which served as a conversation starter and along with his larger than life personality, earned him friends in every port along the way. He brought back sequined covered sombreros for Mama and Diddy one time, hot pink for her and black for him, presented them with a flourish and a story about his friend in the port where he always stops for hats who gives him a special price.

After Katrina hit, we could not locate or get in touch with Shine and Helen. Of course their phone wasn’t working, they didn’t have a house anymore, so none of the phone numbers we had for their friends or family worked because the island was basically gone. The hurricane destroyed our infrastructure so completely, even we didn’t have a working land line here in Mississippi until Thanksgiving that year and we were an hour inland. We could only imagine how bad it was in the unprotected marshes of the island. Whatever we’d imagined, it was worse. We were so afraid that Shine had dug in his heels and refused to leave his home as he had with hurricanes in the past. We had no way of tracking them as they could have gone to Texas or somewhere in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Alabama, anywhere, and it was over a year before we heard word that they were alive and with their daughter.

They didn’t rebuild on the island for many reasons but one of them being the new flood codes required them build 30 feet in the air which would cost $50,000 at the time just for the foundation and pilings alone, not to mention the cost of the house itself on top of those pilings. Very few of the other Delacroix Island families came back to build either. Shine and Helen sold what Katrina left of their property and settled in Braithewaite. The bayou life the island families had built their lives around for generations was gone and commercial fishing charter companies snapped up all of the property. Shine actually went out in a boat one on the prairie after Katrina to see how badly the storm had damaged the marsh and he got lost. The last time we visited them, which was too long ago, we asked if he wanted to ride down to the island with us and he shook his head. It hurt too much to go back.

When we got news that Shine had passed away, I began thinking of all the stories, all of the visits, the jokes, the things I’d learned from him, his family, or the island. I realized that Shine and Helen had taught me how to extend hospitality to friends that are chosen family. Being invited so completely into the lives of people who were so different from us and yet so similar at the same time educated me on how I wanted to be a friend to others later in my life. The first time my parents met Helen’s mother, she greeted them not with impersonal handshakes or side-hugs but in the continental style with a kiss on the cheek. I was given an example of open-hearted, full-throttle friendship and acceptance that never wavered or changed over the years and seeing it unknowingly molded how I extend myself to friends who are my chosen family now. It can only be described as a complete enveloping and it’s how I try to be a friend to this day.

Shine would not want our tears or mourning so do not weep for the loss of his life. He lived it well and was ready to go when he went. Shine would welcome an adventure, a plate of good food, a drink, a dance, a cigar, a story, or a joke but not our tears so if you feel inspired by his story, do one of those soon in honor of my friend. We would both thank you for it.

Shine, I know you can hear me when I tell you to leave some of the good crabs for Mama and me.

Shine Story Telling- Alligator Hunting

Shine Story Telling- Henry Saves the Day