Interviewer(s): T. McGuire. Golden Meadow, LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

After several failed attempts to see Harrison Cheramie, Sr., proprietor of the Port Fourchon Marina/Motel, I drove down there one Saturday. He was there, tending the bait shop he operates at the marina. He asked me who I had been talking to and who else was on my list and scoffed at most of the names (either they didn't know anything, or that they had crossed him over past Port Commission business). He gave me some names but told me to start with his uncles, Abraham Griffin and his younger brother, Jarvis. These guys, he said, actually worked their way up in the fields. So I called Abraham, 79 years old. He told me to meet him at his boat; I met him there, and we went back to his house, about a block away. He had just returned from buying a gallon of paint. His wife was on the boat; Abraham told her to stir the can awhile, or just quit and come home. It was a hot afternoon, too hot to work on the boat - a Lafitte skiff he was preparing for the opening of the skimmer shrimp season in August.

Abraham Griffin quit school at 12 to work on a shrimp boat; he "retired" in 1985 from a career that intertwined contract drilling and shrimping. After that, he only shrimped. While drilling, he worked for a number of contractors; he preferred the old steam rigs to the power ones - they were cleaner. He, like others, was involved in the 1938 shrimp strike that Glen Pitre recreated on film [Norbert Bouziga's wife, 10 years old at the time of the strike, was one of the actors/extras in Pitre's film. She was paid one penny for her work and still has the penny.