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Trespass/How I Got There
An essay by Valerie
It was 2004 and, for some mysterious reason, I was thinking about war. I’d finished my novel Property, a dark excursion into the interior life of a 19th century slave-owning woman in Louisiana, and I wanted to leave the past behind and try my hand at something contemporary, something that wouldn’t require, I promised myself, so much research. I knew I didn’t want to write about terrorists, because they are single-minded and don’t make for rounded characters, but I was interested in how Americans responded to terrorism, which is very different from the way Europeans respond.. Expressions like “the war on Terror,” bandied about in the press struck me as peculiarly American and made my hair stand on end. It seemed, apart from our freedoms, language itself was under attack.
At that time I lived in an old farmhouse in upstate New York with seven acres of neglected woods behind it. When I bought the house these woods seemed inviting – I pictured myself walking around communing with trees, building a writing studio where I would have no phone or even electricity. Before long I understood that these things would not happen. I couldn’t afford to build the studio and walking in the woods was unpleasant because of the underbrush, also it was full of deer who were embroidered in Lyme ticks and every excursion into their territory carried the threat of winding up like my neighbor down the hill, who shook hands with her left hand because a bout of Lyme disease had left her right hand paralyzed. In the woods, trees were continually falling down – who knew how many trees fall down regularly? In the fall of our first year, the property was invaded by a darker tenant than the deer and the endlessly amusing turkeys. The occasional sound of gunfire disrupted our serenity. We heard it at odd, dim hours, 5 am, or just before dark. We had a poacher.
For awhile I tried to ignore it – but in conversations with the neighbors I learned that several of them were mighty annoyed and gradually I became annoyed too. One day as I was standing in the yard, I heard gunfire very near. That does it! I thought and charged into the woods where, in short order, I came upon first the dog and then the man himself. He wasn’t a very threatening looking fellow and I spoke to him politely at first, informing him that our land was posted. His reply was something not quite English and his action was to slink away into the underbrush. I turned back thinking two things at once, first, that he could shoot me if he felt like it, and second, that I couldn’t identify his accent. For some reason by the time I got back to the house I had decided he was Lebanese. I had also made up my mind that I wanted him off my land.
Off my land. Get off my land. Until I owned a wood thoughts like these had never crossed my mind. Who does this guy think he is, shooting rabbits on my land? Those are my rabbits! What if he shoots the cat! And so on. Listening to myself gave me a headache. Was it possible that owning land I didn’t use put me in a morally compromising position, one that left me puffed up with anger and self-righteousness?
I no longer live in that house, but in my novel Trespass, the Dale family, Chloe, Brendan and their son Toby do live there. Chloe is an artist with a comfortable studio in the woods. The Dales have various problems, one of which is a poacher.
This was the first strain of experience and observation that led to my novel. The second came to me indirectly, through a chance remark that led to an excursion. The remark was made by my companion John Cullen, who spent several years working as an abstractor for the oil companies in Southern Louisiana. This job required him to drive about examining property records, wills, and leases all over the state. I don’t remember what led him to make the observation, perhaps we were talking, as we often do, about New Orleans food, but he said that the oyster fishermen down the river in Plaquemines parish were mostly Croatians. Croats in Louisiana? How did they get there? I spoke to another friend who had grown up in that area and she said it was true, that when she was in school they had called the Croats “bohunks,” presumably because they were believed to be from Bohemia. A little research revealed that the first wave of Croatians arrived on those marshy shores in the early part of the 20th century, just before The Great War, and that they had maintained their connection to the motherland, receiving another wave of refuges in the early 90’s, when the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart.
I had been exhausting myself reading about the civil war in Lebanon, imagining a novel in which a refugee from that struggle turned up in Dutchess County, but the more I thought about these Croat fishermen, the more I became convinced I was researching the wrong war. If you’ve ever tried to understand what happened in the Lebanese civil war, a 15 year struggle that resulted in the total ruin of the once beautiful city of Beirut, you know that I was up to my ears in Phalangists, Shiites, Christians, and Druse, not to mention Syrians and Palestinians. I have a good imagination, but I just couldn’t seem to get there. Yugoslavia, I told myself, would be more comprehensible. The Serbs were Orthodox and the Croats were Catholics, they spoke the same language and thought of themselves as Western. The war happened on Europe’s frontier. If you know anything about the war in Yugoslavia, you know my fantasy that it would be more comprehensible was the product of absolute ignorance and naiveté.
But before I switched wars, I wanted to make sure this refugee community in Louisiana really existed and that the people there held onto their language and national identity. So on a visit to my home town of New Orleans, I persuaded my friend and fellow writer Christine Wiltz to go on a little research trip down the river. Her husband, Joe Pecot, a Cajun who spent his spare time in those waters pulling up fish and shooting down ducks, approved our mission and suggested which towns we would want to see. On a cool, gray, November day, we set out to explore the hamlets of Pointe-a-la-Hache (which I had always been curious about as it was the town where my maternal grandmother grew up), Bohemia, Empire, and, if we got that far, Venice. I hardly need to tell you that these towns are simply gone now.
At that time they weren’t exactly thriving. Pointe-a-la-Hache was a burnt out court house and a dozen houses, Bohemia was a closed up country store, but Empire was a real town, with a charming neat white church on the lawn of which Our Lady of Medjugorje stood contemplating her own patiently folded hands. This was it. We were in the land of Yugos.
We looked around the library and the Catholic high school, then, heading south out of town, stopped at a roadside café. It was dark inside and a table of men were talking excitedly over beers in a language I knew I hadn’t heard before. But no sooner had we seated ourselves than another man came in, hailed the group and they all switched to English. We ate ham sandwiches and coffee and went back on the road. Joe had told us there was a marina outside of Empire where the oysterman unloaded the bounty of the Gulf of Mexico.
It took not long to find it and as we pulled into the shell strewn parking lot, Chris pointed to a barge-like fortress of a boat pulled up at the dock and said “That’s an oyster lugger.” And so it was. We got out and wandered into the dingy tackle shop, which sold all manner of snacks and sported a wall of beer, but the few men in the place hardly looked at us, intent on their conversations, which were in English and about football. We went out, and stood near a truck, discussing whether we should go to the dock and try to strike up a conversation. But before we arrived at a strategy, a very large man carrying a canvas sack came sauntering towards us, clearly intent on throwing the bag into the open bed of the truck.
“This is our chance,” Chris said, and I agreed. He eyed us closely as he approached, clearly curious as to what two older ladies were doing in such a place – we hadn’t seen another woman since leaving Empire – and as he threw the bag into the truck he gave Chris a shrug that could have been a greeting. “Excuse me,” she said, pointing toward the dock with an expression of hopeful ignorance. “Is that an oyster lugger?”
“Yah,” he said. “That’s a lugger.” He had an accent as thick as a board. “Do you like oysters?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “We’re from New Orleans.” He pulled a small knife with a curved blade from somewhere near his waist and cut the heavy string on the canvas bag.
“You will try these, fresh from water.”
And so began an amazing conversation during which I asked questions and our informant answered, all the while opening shell after shell and pouring the slimy contents down my dear friend’s throat. Louisiana oysters are big, and as she smiled and swallowed and encouraged him to open yet another, all I could think of was those oysters hitting the ham sandwich. She told me later she’d never tasted anything like them; they were cold from the water and tasted of brine. Meanwhile I learned that our oysterman’s name was Josef Major, not, you might think, a Croatian name, but it turned out it was spelled m-a-g-y a-r, the name of the fierce nomadic tribes that swept down upon medieval Europe from the Eurasian plains. At one point I asked, “Are you Croatian,” and he replied, somewhat taken aback “How do you know this.” He told us all about the oyster business, the leases he held where the oysters were “seeded” until they were ready to be harvested, and he waved his big paw toward the water just as a cattle rancher might indicate his bellowing herds; there were his underwater pastures, where the oysters roamed and the shrimp and the pompano played. He also told me he had a daughter in college in Dubrovnik. “She tells me, Papa, why are you there in Louisiana, you should come back to your country, but I say, I must stay here and make money to pay for your college.” He was touchingly proud of his daughter.
After Chris had turned a little green and I knew a lot more about the pending lawsuit between the state and the oystermen than I really wanted to know, we thanked him heartily and stumbled to the car. “Are you going to be sick?” I asked Chris as we drove away.
“I hope not,” she said. We made our way back up the river going over the various bits of information we’d gotten from Josef Magyar. “He’s the one,” I said. “He’s the Oyster King.” A complex history began to unspool in my imagination, a history of refugees and solid American citizens, of a recent war and an impending one, of a bright world in which the threat of the unknown, of the foreigner, the stranger, forever lurks in the shadows, threatening the fragile security of those fortunate enough to live in the realms of light.
In my novel I named the oysterman Branco Drago. He fled Croatia during the war, bringing his son and his daughter with him, but his wife died in the war. His daughter’s name is Salome and she is in college at NYU. Toby, the Dale’s only son, meets Salome at a student gathering organized to protest the start of the war in Iraq. They fall in love. The story opens with Salome’s introduction to Toby’s mother, Chloe Dale, the artist with the comfy studio in the woods behind my former house. This meeting takes place at an upscale restaurant in New York in the fall of 2002. Chloe dislikes Salome on sight, and after that, it just gets worse. This is the first sentence of the novel
“Dark hair and lots of it, heavy brows, sharp features, dark eyes, dark circles under the eyes, dark looks about the room, at the maitre d’, the waitress, the trolley laden with rich, tempting desserts, and finally, as Toby guides her to the table, at Chloe, who holds out her hand and says pleasantly, though she is experiencing the first tentative pricks of the panic that will consume her nights and disrupt her days for some time to come, “Salome, how good to meet you.
Valerie Martin