Interviewer(s): D. Austin. Grand Bayou, LA

Affiliation: University of Arizona

Myrtle Phillips learned about the history study during a festival in Plaquemines Parish and agreed to be contacted to participate. Grand Bayou can only be reached by boat, so when I called her we arranged to meet at the boat landing. The morning of our meeting, however, it was raining very hard. We decided to meet at the Bayou Kitchen Café to talk. We started out in the café but then moved into Myrtle's van so we could be with her aging poodle and also have some privacy. After a couple of hours of talking, the rain stopped, so we went in to have lunch and then decided to take the boat to see the community. We rode first to one end of the Grand Bayou community and then the other; at one point we watched dolphins jumping in the bayou. Then we went out into the marsh and canals behind the village. When we returned to the village, we stopped in to see Maurice Phillips, Myrtle's 80-year old uncle. Maurice agreed to be interviewed, and his interview continues on the same tape as Myrtle's.

Myrtle was born in 1961 in Grand Bayou. Her family was the first to settle in Grand Bayou in the 1920s when her grandfather and several others went into a deal with Louisiana Land and Exploration Company to swap land on the chenier located behind the community with land along the bayou. At the time of the swap, the bayou was lined with cypress trees and the land supported vegetable gardens and orchards. When oil and gas were discovered in the area, the companies that came in to find and produce it dug canals to place rigs and then dredged pipeline canals in the marsh around the community. Residents believed that their community would be included within the levee that was constructed, but it was not. By the 1970s, saltwater intrusion had killed the trees, and the residents established oyster beds in the bayou. Erosion in the area continues, and most of the homes were flooded in October 2002 during Hurricane Lili. Myrtle's husband works offshore, and she is now working to find resources to raise the remaining homes in the village so they will not flood again.