Poems About Davant, Louisiana

Davant, Louisiana: Highway 39, the East Bank, and the River That Runs Behind Everything

Highway 39 runs south along the east bank of the Mississippi River through lower Plaquemines Parish, and for most of its length it is the only road there is. The east bank is a narrow corridor of land caught between two kinds of water: the levee to the west holding back le fleuve, and the back swamps and marsh to the east giving way by slow degrees toward the Gulf. There is no crossing to the west bank except by ferry. There is no way inland except north, back toward New Orleans. The communities along Highway 39 exist in this corridor, defined by the river on one side and the marsh on the other, and defined above all by the road that connects them to each other and to everything above.

Davant is one of those communities. It sits on Highway 39 south of Pointe-a-la-Hache and north of Ironton, an unincorporated stretch of Plaquemines Parish east bank that most maps either skip or mark with nothing more than the name beside the road. There is no downtown, no courthouse, no structure that would announce it to someone passing through. The community is the land and the families that have worked it, and the river is always present even when you cannot see it. On flood stage, when the river is high and the towboat traffic runs heavy, you can hear the current from the road. The levee is the only thing between Highway 39 and the water.

The east bank of Plaquemines Parish is more isolated than the west bank, with fewer services and less infrastructure, the ferry the only connection across the river at most points. That isolation is not incidental. It is the condition of life here. The east bank communities have always been defined by what the road provides and what the river threatens, and Davant sits in that definition as fully as any community along this corridor.

The river shapes everything here, even when it is hidden. The levee determines where you can build and where you cannot. The flood stage determines how much of the growing season you can count on. The direction of the current on the east bank and the set of the tides in the bays below determine when the boats go out. Davant, Louisiana: east bank Plaquemines, Highway 39, the river close enough to hear when the water is up.

Life in Davant: Shrimping Families, Citrus Groves, and the East Bank Way of Working Water

The families of Davant have worked the same ground and water for generations. Shrimping and oystering are the core of the working-water economy here, as they are through all of lower Plaquemines Parish: the boats going out before light to the bay waters south of the east bank community, the oystermen working the reef beds in flat skiffs, the shrimpers running trawls through the channels. The citrus groves are another thread. The east bank had its own citrus tradition, satsumas and navel oranges coming in through the fall, a second economy alongside the water that gave the families here another reason to stay on the land.

The land layout along this stretch of the east bank follows the old French system: les arpents running perpendicular to the river, the long lots that gave each parcel its share of river frontage. You can see it in the way the property lines run, back from the levee road toward the swamp, each parcel narrow at the road and deep behind it. That system was designed for the river, for a world where access to the water was the measure of everything a piece of ground was worth. The arpents are still here in the plat lines, the same geometry the first settlers used to divide up this corridor of east bank land.

The levee is a daily presence. You live with it in view from almost every property along Highway 39, the earthen bank running parallel to the road, separating the community from the river it lives beside. In flood season, when the Mississippi is high and the water pushes against the levee face, the fact of that barrier becomes immediate and personal in a way that is hard to explain to anyone who has not lived beside one. The levee is what keeps the east bank dry. Every family here knows that. The river is not background scenery. It is the condition of survival.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The east bank of lower Plaquemines Parish took catastrophic damage. The storm surge overtopped levees at multiple points along the east bank corridor, and Davant and the surrounding communities were among those hardest hit. Floodwaters reached rooftop levels in some areas. The agricultural infrastructure took damage that took years to assess. Many families left. The return was slow and incomplete. Some who left did not come back. Those who did found the ground changed, the groves damaged, the structures that had stood through previous storms now gone or rebuilt in diminished form. The east bank below Pointe-a-la-Hache was among the last parts of Plaquemines Parish to recover anything close to what it had been, and in some respects that recovery is still ongoing.

Featured Poem: Davant

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the river that runs behind the levee and shapes everything on Highway 39 without being seen from the road, the shrimp boats setting out before light, the long lots running back from the water, the families who have worked this east bank ground for generations. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a Gulf Coast bayou community that understands what it means to live beside water that defines your life and could end it, and to stay anyway.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold everything about this community: The river is behind the levee. Everyone here knows which side they're on. The levee is not metaphor. It is the actual embankment of dirt and clay that separates the east bank corridor from the Mississippi River. Knowing which side you are on is the daily fact of life in Davant, the knowledge that the river could come over and that the levee is what stands between the community and that. The poem earns that close by spending its lines on the specific details: the tide, the landing, the arpents, the satsumas, the storm. Then it returns to the beginning, and the beginning is always the river behind the levee.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf South Voice That Knows the East Bank

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the water surrounds everything and the distance between a working life and a lost life is measured in weather and levees and the decisions families make about where to stay and where to go. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the landscapes of coastal Louisiana with the specificity of someone who has grown up knowing the difference between the east bank and the west bank, between the tidal bays below and the river current above, between the communities that came back after Katrina and those that did not. Davant belongs to this world as fully as Dulac does.

The themes of Dulac Poetry are the themes of Davant: working-water life, the endurance of families on difficult ground, the faith that holds when the structure around it is gone, the love that is expressed not in declaration but in the act of going out again when the season opens. The Gulf South voice does not reach for significance. It finds the precise physical detail and stays there. The shrimp boat engine before light. The arpents running back from the river. The satsuma smell in October. These are not images imported from outside. They are the textures of a life lived in this corridor of the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

Plaquemines Parish east bank poetry is not a genre that the national literary world has filled. The communities along Highway 39, from Braithwaite south to Venice, are among the most specific places in Louisiana and among the least documented in verse. Parfait's work from Dulac, Louisiana reaches toward them because the working-water Gulf South is one continuous world, and the people who know Dulac know what Davant means. The book is available on Amazon as paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99).

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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Explore Dulac Poetry on Amazon

If the east bank of Plaquemines Parish holds you: the river running behind the levee on Highway 39, the shrimping families who have worked the bays below Davant for generations, the citrus groves coming south along the levee road in October, the storm that came over the bank in 2005 and the slow return of the families who stayed. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the Gulf Coast and the bayou life share the same understanding of water and what it costs to build a life beside it.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank levee road, the shrimp landings, and the working communities of Plaquemines Parish and the Gulf South.

Find more poems about the east bank Plaquemines Parish corridor at Pointe-a-la-Hache, Myrtle Grove, Triumph, Buras, and Empire. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Davant, Louisiana, east bank Plaquemines Parish, where Highway 39 runs south and the river stays behind the levee. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.