The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish
By Elise Blackwell
Unbridled Books 2007
ISBN 1-932961-31-7
210 pages

With The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, author Elise Blackwell has crafted a lyrical novel about life in southern Louisiana prior to the flood of 1927. By creating a fictional parish to represent those actually affected by the flood, she allows her characters to meet each other and the rising danger that is coming their way without the burden of nonfiction to weigh them down. Able to freely wander in and out of each other’s lives, Blackwell gives us one family in particular, the Probys, and all of their shifting alliances among the black and white residents of the town of Cypress. Nothing is what it seems there, just as the Mississippi River itself is hiding all manner of turbulent secrets as it closes in on the Louisiana borders. Rather than an epic narrative, though, Blackwell insists on peeking in behind all those curtains in Cypress, all the closed doors and locked hearts. She gives us life in a small town that is destroyed by a flood and fear at a time when no one thought the river was mean; when no one could imagine that men would be so greedy that they would destroy the lives of hundreds just to avoid the risk of damage to their own.

I want to say that life was simpler then, but Blackwell proves that to be a lie; she proves a lot of things in Unnatural History and will leave her readers guessing at what more she could have written.

Louis Proby is 17 years old in 1927, and it is through his eyes that the end of his world is seen. His father is the “superintendent” in Cypress, which means he is the power of the logging company that makes the town exist. He worked his way up to the position and is well respected by everyone who works for him. In his position, he interacts with both the whites who supervise and the blacks who man the crews and is known as a man to be both fair and wise. Mr. Proby wants Louis to be a doctor, and it is toward that goal that he is aimed. When Charles Segrist, the company representative in the region, hires Louis to drive his car on trips back and forth to his home in New Orleans, the Probys see it as an opportunity for Louis to gain the experience of important men. The job does send the teenager into a rarefied circle of small Southern power, as he sees backroom deals and agreements that affect the lives of thousands. It is with Segrist that Louis learns about the vulnerability New Orleans has to potential flooding and that destroying levees upriver and thus sacrificing other communities is considered a viable solution to save the city.

It is with Segrist that Louis grows up and learns what is right and wrong, and just how horribly small powerful men can be.

But really, as much as Unnatural History is about the 1927 flood, it is really about many other things as well. Louis is hopelessly and silently in love with his classmate Nanette Larson. His quiet pursuit of her is all things teenager and yet also sublimely adult and sophisticated. Their trysts seems to be about far more than the fumbling of first time sex; they yearn instead toward some greater understanding of what it means to belong, to be part of something other than yourself or your life. Louis wants to be everything for Nanette, but he is barely able to be there for his own family. When her older brother is taken away as a suspected victim of leprosy, the history of Cypress Parish careens in a whole new direction. Blackwell leaves the major storyline and diverts to gorgeous passages about the history of the disease and its infection, which is limited in the continental U.S. to Louisiana and southern Texas. The victims, she explains, found their way to a colony at Carville, a former sugar plantation near New Orleans. There they were encouraged to change their names, to separate themselves as completely as possible from families they would likely never see again.

“Decades later,” writes Blackwell, “when amateur genealogy overtook the country with the enthusiasm of any fad, in Louisiana even earnest researchers had great difficulty tracing relatives who had been interned in the Carville facility. Many a carefully drawn family tree had a stunted limb, a truncation bearing only the first name of an aunt or uncle or cousin who — though everyone had known where he or she had been taken — had disappeared as if forever into the mysterious word Carville.”

In passages like this, Blackwell’s diversions serve to illuminate further just what the world around Cypress is like and its people were about. She also takes time to mention how the levee system was created and that the rising tides in 1927 were rarely covered in local newspapers. As Louis has a deep interest in natural history, she writes about Pliny the Elder and his sole surviving work, Historia Naturalis. It is to Pliny that Louis reaches at night, alone in his bedroom: “…I settled into my room to read the book that was absorbing me: an illustrated translation of Pliny’s notebooks, a book I hoped would guide my own project and that had me plotting an occupation other than the one my father had marked out for me. Though my own project focused on natural history as we now think of it — botany, zoology, geology, meteorology — I was at that time reading Pliny’s seventeenth book, which focuses on cultivated trees.” Louis is secretly recording a natural history of Cypress Parish, a record of every plant and animal with detailed descriptions of appearance and habits just as any scientist would note. He would only learn later, though, that what he sought to bring permanence to through pen and paper was never in danger of vanishing: “…it is the other world, with its precise and unrepeatable configuration of human relationships and man-made things that I pain myself to remember because I failed to record it, even to myself, as significant. It is the human world that was proved ephemeral by the shimmering sea that had been land.”

By including passages about Pliny or Carville or the departure of Marcus Garvey from New Orleans in 1927, Blackwell does not stray from her story of the period leading up to the flood; she meanders through the history of Cypress Parish and southern Louisiana in a way that more resembles an artifact of historical consequence than a popular novel. She tells the story of people who lived and died in Cypress, and she tells the story of what went on around it, before it and beyond it — of what made the town that was Cypress exist on levels far beyond that of society or region.

There is the river and there was the town. The people who lived there are counted and studied — they are good and bad, liars and heroes, thieves and victims. In the glass case that is Blackwell’s collector’s cabinet, they exist as no more or less importantly than the ground they walked on, the pressures they succumbed to, the hopes that were fueled and destroyed. Louis studies his town as a budding naturalist, and Blackwell forces her readers to study it as well, as a collection of men and memories that stretches across a riverbank destined for destruction.

Ultimately, you almost feel the author lift each layer in the fictional lives she has created; you almost hear the sound of tweezers, of magnifying glass pressed to an eyelid, of hinges opening, of records made and kept. Blackwell tells a story that Louis Proby is bound to follow, but she also reaches beyond the limits of a novel into a place that includes history, geography, art and memory. In the voice of Louis as an old man , she writes, “If you were to place, side by side, the historical account of something that happened, a painting of it, and a scientific explanation of how and why it occurred, you might still not understand it unless, maybe you lived through it yourself. Even then, you’d succumb to forgetting. An old man may remember the facts of his youth, but he cannot always remember what they felt like.”

After turning the last page of The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, you will know who lived or died, who suffered grave consequences and who remained blissfully unaware. What is left unsaid is the depth of what was lost, the full knowledge behind the costly sacrifice to doom one town in an unnecessary attempt at saving another. Greater good versus foolish need and yet no one could have understood just how devastating the river would be, how great the damage a wall of water can bring down upon the land.

Close the book on Cypress Parish, and it is New Orleans that you will see and questions about its natural history that will haunt you long after.