The good and the forgotten

Ken Wells is an optimist. So when the Houma-raised novelist and Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist got his chance to be airlifted into the heart of Katrina’s darkness, he did not hesitate. “I can drop you off, though I can’t promise you a ride back,” a National Guard Black Hawk helicopter pilot told him. Fair enough, Wells thought. I’ll pack some food in case I get stranded.

In the fall of 2005, Wells took leave from the Wall Street Journal to spend three months in St. Bernard Parish recording more than 150 hours of interviews and taking 1,800 digital photos. His subject: the Robins, a family of true-grit shrimp boat captains and oyster men, and their friends and neighbors in a nest of bayou-bred working folks who found their entire world drowned by a hurricane and a levee and government that failed them.

Out now through Yale University Press, The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous is Wells’ extensive account of St. Bernard residents weathering the storm of their lives and doing all they can to hang on. The author details their intimate story of hardship and redemption, and he unravels the misconception that all who stayed to ride out Katrina did so because they were trapped, ignorant or worse.

“It wasn’t hubris on their part,” Wells says. “Detailed stories of survival are woven in the fabric of their existence. The Robins use the same boat their grandfather used to survive storms.”

Growing up near Houma, Wells could affect a decent enough Cajun accent, which got his beleaguered subjects to open up. “I feel it in me sometimes—the pirate blood in my veins,” Ricky Robin tells him early on. Robin would later meet George W. Bush when the president toured St. Bernard Parish, but Wells’ account is not really about the government’s response—or lack thereof—to Katrina.

In the week after the storm, while most journalists chased the latest FEMA controversy, deconstructed Gov. Blanco’s tears or second-guessed the re-election of New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and the dutifulness of the Army Corps of Engineers, Wells, like Robert Frost, chose the road less traveled—the road of personal loss. The result is a stunning record of perseverance.

“I’m a bayou guy,” Wells says. “I felt a compelling urge to get down there. For these people, this was the aftermath of war.”