Poems About Ironton, Louisiana

The Ironton-Lucy Ferry: A Free Crossing on the Lower Mississippi

In a region shaped entirely by water barriers, the Ironton-Lucy Ferry is something rare and specific: le bac, the free crossing, connecting the east bank community of Ironton to the west bank without a toll. It is one of the last free public ferries operating in Louisiana, a flat-decked vessel running on a cable across the Mississippi River, carrying trucks and cars and people back and forth across a river that everywhere else in Plaquemines Parish requires a bridge or a long drive around.

The significance of a free ferry in this landscape is not sentimental. The lower Mississippi River delta is a place where the geography of water has always determined what communities could reach, what work they could do, and how quickly they could respond to crisis. A free crossing between east and west bank means that the families on this corridor are not isolated by the river. It means the hospital on the other side is reachable. It means the market is reachable. It means that the east bank of Plaquemines Parish south of New Orleans has a connection to the wider world that the river itself would otherwise deny.

Ironton sits along Highway 39 in Plaquemines Parish, one of the small east bank communities in the long corridor that runs south from Braithwaite toward the mouth of the Mississippi. The highway runs close to the levee, with the river on one side and the marsh on the other, and the landing for the Ironton-Lucy Ferry is one of the fixed points in the daily geography of this community. The ferry has been crossing here for generations. That is not incidental to what Ironton is.

Life in Ironton: The Delta Working Life, Katrina, and the Families Who Stayed

The working life of Ironton follows the shape of the east bank: citrus groves on the alluvial soil behind the levee, shrimping families running boats south toward the passes, the oil and gas industry that has always been part of the lower delta economy. The satsuma trees and navel oranges of Plaquemines Parish grow here on the same ground that le fleuve has been building for centuries, depositing the rich black soil that makes this land farmable even as the rest of coastal Louisiana subsides around it.

Katrina came over the east bank levees in August 2005 and the water stood in the houses of Ironton for days. The lower Plaquemines Parish communities took some of the worst flooding in the metro area: the levees that protected the east bank overtopped and the river water and the storm surge came together in the streets. Families lost everything. Some left and did not come back. The ones who came back crossed the river on the ferry and started rebuilding in place, on the same ground, because this was their ground and the east bank was where their lives had been built.

The tight community of Ironton is not an abstraction. It is the network of families who know each other across the citrus harvest and the shrimping season and the school calendar, who attend the same churches, who load onto the ferry together in the early morning to get to work on the west bank and come back in the evening across the same free crossing. The ferry is part of that network. It is infrastructure in the most basic sense: the thing that makes the community connected to everything it needs to function.

Featured Poem: The Ferry at Ironton

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the Ironton-Lucy Ferry running its cable across the Mississippi before sunrise, the shrimping families and citrus farmers who cross every morning, the east bank community that Katrina nearly took and that rebuilt in place because this is where their lives are. He writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same calculus holds: the water defines everything, and the crossings are what make a community possible.

The poem closes on the two lines that hold the whole meaning of this community: The ferry still runs. / That means something here. It is not a metaphor. The Ironton-Lucy Ferry is a real crossing, running right now, and the fact that it is free and still operating on the lower Mississippi is a fact about what the community of Ironton chose to maintain, even after Katrina came over the levee and the water took everything it could reach. The poem does not explain this. It locates the ferry in its actual context and lets the crossing stand for itself.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Ethos of Endurance

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the working water is the center of daily life and the question of what endures is always present. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the small communities of coastal Louisiana, from the bayou parishes to the east bank of Plaquemines Parish and the Highway 39 corridor. Ironton fits directly into the concerns of that work: the water as the defining fact of geography, the ferry as the connection that makes community possible, the families who stayed after Katrina as the people who understand what it means to hold a place.

The coastal community ethos that Dulac and Ironton share is not about picturesque landscape. It is about the specific knowledge required to live and work in a place where the water is always present and always threatening and always the source of livelihood at the same time. The shrimping families of the east bank and the fishing families of Dulac share the same inheritance: generations of work on difficult water, the accumulated knowledge of tides and currents and seasons, the willingness to rebuild after storms because the place itself holds something that cannot be found elsewhere. The Ironton-Lucy Ferry is part of that inheritance. It is a public good that the community has held onto because losing it would mean losing something essential about what Ironton is.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: the Gulf Coast poetry of endurance and staying, written from inside the communities that most American poetry has never mentioned, from a poet who knows the difference between observing a place and being from one.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If the east bank of Plaquemines Parish holds you: the Ironton-Lucy Ferry running its cable across the Mississippi before sunrise, the citrus groves and shrimping families of Highway 39, the communities that Katrina nearly took and that rebuilt in place because this is where their lives are. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside. Written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to staying holds: the water defines everything, the crossings matter, and the community that keeps the ferry running is telling you something true about what it means to belong to a place.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank, the Ironton-Lucy Ferry, and the Gulf South communities that endure.

Find more poems about east bank Plaquemines Parish at Happy Jack, Naomi, Phoenix, Jesuit Bend, and Braithwaite. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from the east bank community of Ironton, Louisiana, in Plaquemines Parish on Highway 39, where the Ironton-Lucy Ferry still runs a free crossing on the lower Mississippi and the families who rebuilt after Katrina hold the east bank together. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.