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INTERVIEWS

Henry Amato

Paul Arceneaux

Francis Chauvin

Kathia Duran

Pete & Clara Gerica

Wayne Schexnayder

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Interviews and photographs by Laura Westbrook, director, Louisiana Regional Folklife Program

Pete & Clara Gerica

Fishermen/Seafood Purveyors - New Orleans, LA

“There's an abundance of seafood right now. I mean, the samples I was taking out in Lake Pontchartrain it—it's insane that, if the bottom wasn't as bad as it is right now with debris, you could go out there and you could make a lot of money quick…But there's so much debris and there's no place to sell; you don't have enough ice to handle the volume of shrimp.”

— Pete Gerica

Listen to this 2-minute audio clip of Pete Gerica talking about how Hurricane Katrina affected his boat and equipment. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Date: November 3, 2005
Location: The Gerica’s home – New Orleans, LA
Interviewer: Laura Westbrook, University of New Orleans
Length: 1 hour, 48 minutes
Project: Gulf Coast Foodways Renaissance Project/Hurricane Katrina

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Laura Westbrook: I’m with Pete and Clara Gerica in their FEMA trailer at the site of their former home on Bayou Sauvage in New Orleans East. Pete and Clara rode out the storm in their home with their daughter Chris, who was home from LSU, and Pete’s mother Mrs. Gerica. The interviewer is Laura Westbrook and it’s November second. Clara, you were talking about what this neighborhood was like before the hurricane. What was it like to live here before the storms happened? What are you going to miss?

Clara Gerica: Oh, before the storms, to me this was heaven; that's what I tell everybody. I'd go home and lock my gate and shut the rest of the world out. Right now, you can see the pelicans are starting. We're going to get about fourty to fifty pelicans on our back pylons. We have a pet egret that comes all year long. She's been looking for us 'cause she's hungry. Blue heron sit on the back pole; it's just—it's beautiful—it was beautiful out here and it still is. I'd say probably seventy to eighty percent of the people out here is going to rebuild, because it's so beautiful here.

You think?

CG: Oh yeah; well Charlie and Mary is already back. They've got a trailer on their lot so they can clear their land and rebuild. The next lady is not; we own these two and then the gentleman over there owns those two and he's definitely coming back, you know. He's in the construction business and he loves it out here.

Pete Gerica: The guy on the other side is a policeman and he was going to sell, but now if he gets his insurance he's going to build a little camper and keep it.

CG: And then Hutch—Hutch ain't leaving; his is the one with the barge across the front of his house. [Laughs] You know, until he's gone and in his grave, he's going to stay out here. He's got a house in town and he had a trailer out here. The Lombards are staying.

PG: Jay with Parkway Bakery is going to stay.

CG: Yeah; his is the only house standing. He's got a house and it looks like it had very minimal damage.

Isn't that amazing, how it just touched down like that?

CG: Right! That's what gets me; how can the insurance company say it's water? You mean the wave parted when it hit that house? [Laughs]

All: [Laugh]

PG: The two houses on the other side, and half the back of the house directly next to it, is gone. Skip that house and then go next to the brick houses. They're gone. Wiped out. Nothing there.

CG: And they were solid, like our house; we framed it in two by sixes, wrapped in plywood and bricked. Our top floor was thirteen feet above the center of the street, and the water didn't get that high. But then we lived through it besides, so for them to say, “Water took your house down”— Plus, we had a building back here by the fence and we had a fourty-foot container over here blocking any wave action that would have hit my house. You know, it—it's just unbelievable—these insurance companies. If it was flood, they'll pay it off 'cause that's the government. If it's them they don't want to pay it. But they take your money! [Laughs] They don't argue about that one!

How did y’all get started and how did you develop your business? Was it something that you did from childhood and that your parents did?

PG: My father was an oyster fisherman.

Where was he from?

PG: He lived in New Orleans. He was born in a little settlement called Alban in Plaquemines Parish and his mom and his father were from Ston, which was Yugoslavia at the time and now it's Croatia. And they built boats and fished oysters, so he got in the oyster business. His dad died when he was kind of young and he fooled with racehorses and that's what he did all his life until he died; he fooled with oysters and racehorses. I didn't like oysters, so I got into the shrimping end, and eventually I got into fin fish and gave up shrimping when they started with the turtle excluders and everything else. Then the fin fish became another ordeal. What happened was the tree huggers and everybody else decided they didn't like gill nets anymore, so they got rid of us with that. But we lived through all that and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars because of it—I mean equipment that was deemed illegal, you just had to let it rot because nobody would pay you for it. And then now we got this; so.

CG: [Laughs] Fun—fun, but he would catch it; before the storm he caught shrimp, crabs, and fish and then I would process it and then sell it at the Farmers Market. So I enjoyed—I didn't thoroughly enjoy it—it was okay processing, [laughs] but I thoroughly enjoyed selling to the customers 'cause they appreciate it. You know they weren't used to getting the crabmeat. The crab guy would pass in front of my house. He's in Alabama and he'd pick my crabs up on a Saturday, and then Monday morning he'd process and pick the meat and bring it to me Monday at twelve o'clock. Then I'd turn around and sell it at the Tuesday market, so the crabmeat was one day old. You know you can't buy that; anything you get in a grocery store is going to be five to seven days old, you know. The flavor is just, mmm—and he does such a beautiful job; the flavor is terrific, you know. Then the shrimp was hand-peeled—no chemicals, no machines, no bleach, strictly hand-peeled. My daughter would help me, or my sister-in-law. The fish was all cut fresh after he caught it—beautiful packaging. You'd buy pure meat—no bone, no skin, no blood line—you can cut the blood line out, you know—beautiful meat. So the whole shrimp I sell too, but yeah; I enjoyed it 'cause they would enjoy getting a good product. People who thought they never liked fish started eating fish and got hooked, you know. [Laughs] They were saying, “It's so easy and it tastes good and it's healthy too.” You really can't say that about much.

Yes.

CG: But yeah; they really got hooked on the fish, especially the drum fish. That was one of the biggest sellers. Speckled trout, when I could get it, you know, 'cause there's a limited season and a limited time you can catch it, but drum was a real popular fish.

Let me ask you this. With all the aggravation, the ways the guidelines change and so on, what is it about this life that makes it worth it to you—that makes you still want to do this?

PG: It's a labor of love.

Yes?

PG: I've been basically fishing since I can remember.

CG: It's in his blood.

PG: And I got hooked by some old friends of mine in defending the fisheries, so it's kind of like a little thing I do sixty days every year—lobby for the fishermen.

CG: It's not just sixty days a year; it's a full-time job in between.

PG: But sixty days a session.

CG: Yeah.

PG: So I got involved in that and I met a lot of good people in Baton Rouge—and I've met a lot of bad ones, but I met a lot of good ones—and you can create a real long line of friends.

Like when the storm hit, we had people praying that we was all right from the Carolinas all the way back to Texas.

CG: Yeah; and that's what saved us. [Laughs] That's all I can figure anyway.

PG: You know, you get to meet these people with other organizations that's doing the same thing you're doing—fighting for people's way of living, and the lifestyle, and trying to see that the heritage stays there. There's a group of guys in Delacroix Island that mostly come from the Canary Islands; they all direct Spaniard immigrants, you know, third or fourth generation fishermen, here in Louisiana, not counting the ones that was transplanted here.And they know nothing but trapping and fishing, and they want to hold onto their land.

Now this is going to be a big deal, because who knows if they're going to let them rebuild?

CG: You see, when we first started fighting for the fishermen—it has to be about twenty, twenty-five years ago—when we went to the legislature I'd have to fill out the cards for them on whether they're for or against the bill 'cause they couldn't write and they would just put their “X.” A lot of fishermen who are hard-working and make good money, but had no education, they didn't know how to fight for themselves. So how can you not fight for them? You know, especially when it's something you want to do anyway; so I'd go up there with other women who had their educations and we'd fill out all the cards and we'd pass them out—“Put your X; Put your X,” you know, so that they could say they were for a Bill or against a Bill. And now they're better; you've got more that have a high school education, you know. More can read and write.

And they have grandchildren and networks of people that can help with that now.

PG: Now you got the sons and the grandsons that's fishing, and you got more of them that's got at least a high-school education. Some of them have degrees in college and they'd still rather fish. I've got a friend of mine that's in Bucktown; he's getting a little old now but he was an engineer and he just didn't like it, so he went back to fishing. I got another friend of mine that was a draftsman and he worked for twenty years as a draftsman and got off a shrimp boat and wound up getting back on a shrimp boat and building the boat that he could go travel the world when he retired, and that's what him and his wife is doing right now.
So that's where his expensive education went—into making a permanent vacation for himself?

PG: Yeah; he sold his house. His kids thought he was nuts and last I heard they were going through the Panama Canal.

That's great. Well that's what I hear from everybody I talk to—Isleno, Cajun, or any fishermen—is that the thing they love about their life is that they have so much control over their life—

CG: Right.

—They decide when to get up and get out; of course the fish decide that, too. And they have so much experience that they can make or fix anything they need.

CG: Right!

PG: Right!

CG: Well that's what they used to say to me, “Why do you have so many tools?” Well, because he does all his own work. Right now, his big boat is split in half with holes in the bottom and the deck is all gone, and the cabin. But as soon as he gets a chance to get it on the trailer, he'll put it back together since he built it, and redo it, you know. Yeah; you have to be able to fix everything 'cause you can't afford to pay anybody.

PG: It's cheaper to fix than build another one—and quicker.

CG: Right; and then you know what you got, 'cause you did it yourself.

Yes. Well, when did you all hear that the storm was on its way and what did you think? You were just saying you've been through them before.

CG: Yeah; we've been through Betsy, been through Camille—

PG: And they kept saying it was a Camille type storm—a twenty-foot tidal surge—that would have been three inches of water under my slab—no big deal. We had that for (Hurricane) Georges, we had that for a couple other ones since then. So you just pick everything up that you could get up. I had shelving downstairs to lift everything up—welding machines and all the rest of the stuff.

CG: I bought food for at least two to three weeks. I had drinks. I had water.

PG: Make sure you got cash, you know, and we—

CG: Yeah; we even had everything prepared, in case the roof went off, to protect everything. We had tarps; we put all the pictures and everything in containers. I just didn't expect the roof to go with the ceiling, too! [Laughs]

PG: You did the normal preparing and you always thought about your exit plan, in case things happened. And none of what we planned—I mean the big boat got torn apart; the little boat—one of the little boats stood. And I kept tying it up—and my friend's big boat—and moving them around, making sure that everything was all right with them until I couldn't go outside anymore and, you know, the plan we had was that if things got real bad you'd just get in the big boat and you'd go drive up to a tree and ride it out.

How did the storm manifest itself here? How did it start—it was raining a little bit at first, but—.

PG: It was, like, an on-and-off, like a rain, sheets of rain from three o'clock in the morning until daylight. Around daylight I went and took my little hike around and threw more ropes on the big boat for my friend and threw more ropes on mine and walked around and gave it one last go-round and saw that the water was getting over three inches downstairs. It was probably about eight inches of water downstairs and figured that was still all right 'cause it wouldn't hurt the trucks. And everything was high enough that it could handle that; I figured it would go down. I came upstairs and then I said, “I'm going to go downstairs one more time.” So I went out the last time, and when I came back in I heard a sound, like a rumbling, and the door had kind of pushed in in the hallway, so I kind of nailed that with screwdrivers together to keep the air from coming through the center of the house. And then I looked out the window in the little room and I saw the houses next door going to pieces—and my little greenhouse.

CG: We didn't know that. He just told us to move to the hall.

PG: And the yellow two-story house that was already three foot off the ground and two stories— just saw them just blowing to pieces, and I said, “Well, get to the center of the house,” 'cause I figured it was the strongest point of the house, and then it didn't take long until you heard—something that sounded almost like cattle, like a stampede rumbling, and we looked up and the sheetrock, the ceiling, the roof—everything went off at one time.

CG: Ceiling fan—everything gone; all you saw was sky.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.