Elise Blackwell, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish

Elise Blackwell

Unbridled, Apr 2007, $23.95

ISBN: 1932961313

The skies are darkening as the weather service predicts a huge, type-4, maybe even 5, hurricane to hammer the gulf coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi. The media focuses in on what Katrina might do to New Orleans, but ignores the impact on some of the other locales like Cypress Parish. Nonagenarian Louis Proby waits for the perfect storm to come ashore from his home as he reflects on the storm of the previous century that destroyed Cypress Parish in 1927.

He was seventeen years old, one of four offspring of Cypress Parish's lumber company superintendent, wheeler dealer William Proby. Louis understood that his dad's position meant he ran the Parish also. Louis, at his father's coaxing, planned to become a doctor, but currently was making money chauffeuring lumber company official Charles Segrist to and from New Orleans; he got the job because of his dad, but enjoyed the side benefits of partying at the clubs. However, though a teen, it is the plan and execution that his father condoned for a fee that haunts him most eight decades later. The plan included blowing up the Cypress Parish levee to release the floodwaters there that will destroy that backwater in order to keep New Orleans safe, but the teen begins to believe the destruction of his home is unnecessary, but only money matters.

Using Katrina as a hook, THE UNNATURAL HISTORY OF CYPRESS PARISH is a fabulous look back to Bayou politics and history during the Huey Long era through the filter of a senior citizen waiting out the latest storm of the century. The storyline is character-driven as Louis knows what he lost when the levees were dynamited besides a home; he thinks back to Nanette and what could have been if only the power brokers including his father were not greedy. Readers will appreciate his reflections on life in 1920s Louisiana.

Harriet Klausner