Bayou Nwa

[Koko]

"There was one thing that the white South feared more than negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency."

― W.E.B Du Bois

 

 

Bayou Nwa, Lemoyne Creole for the Black Swamp, is not a place for the faint of heart. Stretching from the centre to the east of Lemoyne, it's an inhospitable place that stands just beyond the encroaching civilizing touch of Saint Denis. Thick blankets of Spanish moss drape from the gnarled trees, obscuring the path ahead and concealing the dangers lurking beneath the surface. Superstition and folklore weave themselves into the very fabric of the bayou, where locals speak in hushed tones of curses and hexes, and of a ruthless land best left for the predators infesting its darkened waters. It is now the stomping ground of moonshiners and fugitives, or anyone wanting to best be forgotten by the world around.

At the heart of Bayou Nwa lie   several forgotten settlements  , such as Lagras, built of ramshackle tin-roofed homes, half-sunken into the mire, their windows boarded up against the encroaching darkness. Here, the remnants of a bygone era cling to life: age-old lineages of Maroons, or escaped slaves, who settled the outskirts of civilization in small communities that lived off of trade and barter of wood and other resources from the swamps. A mysterious people, of many names: Maroons, Creole, Gullah, Night Folk. Their very name conjures images of West African ancestry, and of old ways lost to the master’s whip in a bygone age.

 

 

"Nor must Uncle Sam's Web-feet be forgotten. At all the watery margins they have been present. Not only on the deep sea, the broadbay, and the rapid river, but also up the narrow muddy bayou, and wherever the ground was a little damp, they have been, and made their tracks".

― Abraham Lincoln

 

The population of the Bayou is Negro in its majority, with white Cajuns conforming to the life in the swamp in smaller numbers, with both groups often intermixing or living alongside one another. A variety of Creole languages are spoken there additionally to English, taking from Lemoyne’s French ancestry and African roots. Lemoyne Creole has given us several words of African origin, such as 'gumbo' borrowed from the Angolan 'kingonbo', meaning 'Okra'.

The so-called Night Folk are local Negro populations that have become a boogeyman to Whites around the county in popular culture, maligned as murderers, cannibals, and practitioners of witchcraft. In reality, these settlements emerged as far back as the early days of French colonial slavery, when Maroons (slaves escaped from nearby plantations) began to take to the Bayou for safety and in pursuit of freedom, congregating around small, often temporary settlements. 

These escaped slaves would stay at the fringes of society,  knowing that if found and delivered to their masters would mean a certain and excruciatingly painful death, often living close enough that they could travel to nearby plantations and into Saint Denis to trade (or steal), or otherwise to offer a variety of services at cheaper rates than freemen, often using subterfuge and their ability to pass as merely another slave in a household’s stable. While in the Bayou, they would often use pungent concoctions on their feet to lose tracking dogs, and create alarm systems to warn them of slavecatchers, by using canes or other sound-based alarms around their communities.

From the start of the 19th century, Haitians fleeing the revolution brought in the teachings of Haitian Vodou, and in Lemoyne and especially the Bayou Nwa they mixed with the prevalent Roman Catholic and other Christian practices taught by their slavemasters, shrouding the area in a mist of mysticism and wives tales, which in reality is mostly a work of fiction and fearmongering from the days predating the Civil War, as the Gullah peoples continue to live simple lives in their communities, often engaging in trade and commerce with their neighbours, while preserving their history and heritage in a world that threatens to devour their history and struggle.

The Gullah and other Creole cultures have continued to survive in the depths of the Black Swamp, even if the days of slavery are over, and they use their expertise and knowledge of the land to carve a life for themselves, with a sense of independence and connection to their ancestry. They continue to be a testament towards active resistance, and the will of the downtrodden to live free or die in the pursuit of freedom, which ironically puts them at the heart of the American Spirit.

((Thank you to @The Glossary for format inspiration!!))