Poems About Pointe-à-la-Hache, Louisiana

Pointe-à-la-Hache: The Name, the Ferry Crossing, and the Parish Seat at the River's Edge

The name is French, as most of the old place-names in lower Louisiana are. La pointe: the point, the promontory, the place where the river bends and the land juts out into the current in a shape the early settlers recognized and named. And la hache: the hatchet, the axe, the tool the first French settlers used to clear the cane and timber from the riverbank when this stretch of the Mississippi was new territory and the work of making a place meant chopping through the growth that already owned the ground. Pointe-à-la-Hache. Point of the Hatchet. The name has been here since before the state existed, since before there was a parish to seat here.

Pointe-à-la-Hache is the parish seat of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on the east bank of the Mississippi River about fifty miles south of New Orleans. That sentence contains a quiet strangeness. Most of the parish lives on the west bank, and to reach the parish seat from the west bank you take the ferry. There is no bridge at this point. The Plaquemines Parish Courthouse sits on the east bank, accessible to most of the people it serves only by crossing the river. It is one of the smallest parish seats in Louisiana, a courthouse town and a government town in the fullest sense, the kind of place whose entire identity is built around the fact that the official records are kept here, the filings happen here, the government of the parish is anchored here even as everything around it keeps moving and flooding and eroding.

The ferry is the connection. A free public ferry crosses the Mississippi at Pointe-à-la-Hache, east bank to west bank and back, the diesel engines turning in the brown current, the crossing taking minutes and covering the distance between where most people live and where the government sits. It is one of the last free Mississippi River ferry crossings in Louisiana. Someone decided the crossing should be free and that decision has outlasted storms and flooding and all the other pressures that reshape life in this part of Plaquemines Parish.

Life in Pointe-à-la-Hache: The Ferry, the Courthouse, the Flooding, and the Paradox of the Smallest Parish Seat

The ferry is not a convenience here. It is the only road connection between the east bank and the west bank at this point on the river. For the families and workers who live on the east bank below Pointe-à-la-Hache, and for the parish employees and attorneys and families who need to reach the courthouse from the west bank communities, the ferry is the infrastructure. You plan your day around it. You know the schedule. You know what happens when the river runs too high or when the weather shuts the crossing down. The free crossing is part of what holds the parish together across the river that divides it.

The Plaquemines Parish Courthouse has stood here since 1909. It is the center of gravity for an entire parish government: the offices, the records, the filings, the courtrooms. The courthouse holds everything official that happens in a parish that stretches south from the suburbs of New Orleans to the Bird's Foot Delta at the Gulf. Plaquemines Parish is one of the longest, narrowest parishes in Louisiana, and the seat of its government is near the middle of the east bank, on a stretch of ground that floods regularly and has flooded as long as anyone has lived here. The courthouse has been threatened by the river and by storms every decade it has stood. It keeps standing.

The community around the courthouse is small. This is not Belle Chasse or even Port Sulphur. The population is thin, the services are limited, and the economic base is the same working-water life that defines lower Plaquemines Parish: shrimping families, oystering families, and the fishing communities that have worked the bays and channels on both sides of the river for generations. The citrus groves that once ran along parts of the east bank levee road were another piece of the economy, the same Plaquemines Parish citrus tradition that built the west bank communities from Belle Chasse south to Buras and beyond. When the groves were producing, the east bank had its own agricultural rhythm alongside the water.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005. The east bank of lower Plaquemines Parish took catastrophic damage. The courthouse was flooded. The dome that had topped the 1909 building, the architectural feature that had announced institutional authority above the flat delta landscape for nearly a century, collapsed. The rebuilt courthouse stands without it. Government returned to Pointe-à-la-Hache after the storm, but the form of the building changed. The dome is gone. The building and the function it serves are still here.

The paradox of Pointe-à-la-Hache is this: it is one of the smallest places to hold the seat of a Louisiana parish, a courthouse town with no real downtown, with a resident population that was never large and that the storm reduced further, and it is also the official center of everything administrative and governmental in Plaquemines Parish. The records are here. The filings happen here. The parish government is anchored here. The river floods it and the storm took the dome and the population is smaller than it was, and none of that has moved the seat of the parish. The courthouse still stands.

Featured Poem: Pointe-à-la-Hache

In Mitchell Parfait's voice: the ferry engine turning before the light, the courthouse on the east bank where the government has stood since 1909, the name's origin in la pointe and la hache, and the annual argument between the river and everything the people of this parish have built at the water's edge. The poem opens on the ferry at first light and closes on the three lines that hold the oldest truth of Pointe-à-la-Hache.

The poem closes on the three lines that carry the whole weight of this place: The courthouse still stands. Every year the river argues with that. Every year the courthouse wins. The river's argument is not metaphor. It is the annual flood level, the storm surge, the slow subsidence of the delta ground beneath the foundation. And the courthouse winning is not metaphor either. It is still there. The records are still kept. The parish government is still seated at la pointe.

Mitchell Parfait, Dulac Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Voice That Names the Unmentioned Places

Mitchell Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, a bayou community on the Gulf Coast where the relationship between working water and the structures built against it is as immediate and daily as it is in Pointe-à-la-Hache. His collection Dulac Poetry moves through the communities of coastal Louisiana that define themselves by what they catch, grow, and hold on difficult ground. The bayou parishes, the lower Plaquemines Parish corridor, the east bank and west bank towns that the national literary world has not often stopped to name: these are the places this work is for. Pointe-à-la-Hache belongs exactly to this world.

The Gulf Coast voice that shapes Dulac Poetry does not reach for significance. It finds the physical detail that holds the meaning and stays there. The ferry engine turning before light. The brown current of the Mississippi on the crossing. The courthouse without its dome. These are not symbols. They are the facts of the place, and the facts of the place are what a poem about Pointe-à-la-Hache needs to hold. Parfait writes from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same discipline is required: the ground is too real and too difficult to treat as backdrop for ideas that could have been written anywhere.

The east bank Plaquemines Parish world that Dulac Poetry speaks to is one where the land and the water are not separate categories. The shrimping and oystering families who worked the bays below Pointe-à-la-Hache knew the river and the back bays as working grounds, not scenery. The courthouse sitting on the flooded east bank is the same kind of persistence as the shrimp boat that goes out after the storm. You go back because this is where the work is, because this is where the life is, because the records are here and the ferry still runs and the river has not yet won.

Dulac Poetry on Amazon is where this work is collected: poems of working water and working land along the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the bayou communities and the lower river corridor, the courthouse towns and ferry crossings and east bank parishes that have held their ground through storms and flooding and the long pressure of living at the edge of a delta that keeps moving south. Written by a poet from Dulac, Louisiana, who knows what that holding costs and what it means.

From the bayou. By Mitchell Parfait.

DULAC POETRY — Available on Amazon

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If Pointe-à-la-Hache holds you: the free ferry crossing the brown Mississippi at first light, the courthouse that lost its dome and kept its purpose, the name that carries la pointe and la hache from a time when this bend in the river was the edge of everything the settlers knew, the annual argument between the river and the courthouse that the courthouse keeps winning. Mitchell Parfait's DULAC POETRY captures that world from the inside, written from Dulac, Louisiana, where the same commitment to staying in the difficult place holds: the ground defines the life, the crossing matters, and the people who come back after the water know what the place is worth.

DULAC POETRY by Mitchell Parfait. Paperback ($12.99) and Kindle ($3.99) on Amazon. Louisiana poetry from the east bank levee road, the ferry crossings of the Mississippi, and the Gulf South communities that hold their names through everything the river and the storms have brought.

Find more poems about the Plaquemines Parish corridor at Myrtle Grove, Triumph, Buras, Empire, and Port Sulphur. Read about the book on the book page or learn about Mitchell Parfait.

Poems from Pointe-à-la-Hache, Louisiana, the east bank parish seat of Plaquemines Parish, where the free Mississippi River ferry still crosses and the courthouse has stood since 1909. By Mitchell Parfait from Dulac, Louisiana.