The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish
By Elise Blackwell
Unbridled, 210 pages, $23.95
‘The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish,” the second novel by Elise Blackwell, a Louisiana native and professor of English at the University of South Carolina, is the story of a community south of New Orleans wiped off the map by the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. The events are recalled by Louis Proby, gazing back across many decades to his late adolescence and the birthplace where one “might identify a few stands of trees with the exact mix of cypress, oak, and pine that could be found before the logging companies bought, used, and then left this land . . . [to] the spotted salamanders that have lived there since before people and that live nowhere else in the world.” A vast swath of St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes downriver from New Orleans flooded needlessly in 1927 after metropolitan business leaders ordered the levee destroyed by dynamite to divert the swollen Mississippi away from the city. The flooding that ensued was examined at length by John M. Barry in his authoritative history “Rising Tide.”
The massive destruction and the refusal of New Orleans leaders to compensate those who suffered losses, after it was learned that the diversion of the river had been unnecessary, is a touchstone for Blackwell’s novel, set in a fictional Cypress Parish. A sense of fate foretold shadows the characters and hovers over the story.
This is also a bittersweet coming-of-age story. Louis, at 17, is writing a natural history of the immediate world around him. He discovers cruel lessons of class and race as he studies his father, a lumber baron and potentate rooted in the feudal way of life. Yearning to study at an Ivy League school, Louis broods that his “strong affinity for the trees and birds I could name without a reference book” will lead him to “move away to a place that was colder, a place with fewer insects and snakes, a place of higher ground and less water.”
Louis is drawn to Gaspard Anderson, a painter whose character is based on the late Gulf Coast artist (and mad genius) Walter Anderson. As Blackwell draws a constellation of characters around Louis, she inserts digressions of Louis’ reflections on ancient Rome, the river and matters of levee building well after 1927. These passages meant to chart the reach of Louis’ mind retard the plot momentum while offering little in the way of deeper currents of character.
As news of flooding upriver filters down to Cypress Parish, the realization hits those in control that they have lost to powers greater than themselves. Louis reacts with an existential resignation. Despite the telegraphing of Louis’ future by flash-forward passages, one follows his search as the flood begins for his beloved Nanette as if she and the ethereal Gaspard were real.
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Jason Berry, distinguished writer in residence at Tulane University, is the author, most recently, of the novel “Last of the Red Hot Poppas.”
