The Best American Travel Writing 2013 (31 page)

Pierre was not as good-looking as his brother—smaller and bigger, shorter and fatter, with a round face and thick brown hair. Here’s how he was described on a wanted poster put up in the city in 1814: “Five feet ten inches in height, stout made, light complexion, and somewhat cross-eyed.” Pierre had a stroke when he was 40 and suffered occasional trembling fits as a result. He had a lazy eye, which explains the description in the poster.

The Lafittes opened a blacksmith shop in the French Quarter. You can still visit: 941 Bourbon Street on the corner of Saint Philip, dilapidated in the best way, a hymn of sagging wood and brick, nondescript on the outside, a crayon drawing done by a child, warm on the inside with uneven floorboards and a staircase leading to unknown recesses. Now called Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, it’s said to be the longest-operating bar in the United States. For the Lafittes, it was a front. The brothers were in a tradition that includes the Bonannos and the Gambinos: criminals in the beginning, middle, and end. Jean and Pierre were go-to guys: If you were a thief with something to sell, they would find a buyer and take a cut. If you were a consumer looking for a hard-to-acquire or possibly illegal product or piece of property—they could help there, too. They had connections to the black marketers and pirates of Barataria, most of whom, like the Lafittes, were French. In 1808, they went into the business of African slaves. First as a fence. The guy who knows the guy, could arrange the thing. Then, more and more, as a dealer: the guy who had the thing. That’s where the money was.

For a minute, it looked like the Lafittes would get rich. Then it didn’t. The chaos of the trade—the competition among privateers—was bad for business. The violence and crooked dealing in the swamp had driven away customers. You cut a deal with a pirate, load the cargo, set sail, but don’t make it beyond the channel before you’re hijacked by another pirate. It’s a question of ethics, the integrity of the marketplace. When a man can’t make a deal with a criminal without being robbed by another criminal, well, that’s the end. Jean Lafitte must have waited for a strongman to step forward, some Arnold Rothstein who, understanding what was at stake, would impose order. When none emerged, he set off to impose order on the islands himself.

Lafitte had been a sea captain. He understood how to sail, pursue, take a ship. He was well known in the criminal dives, was familiar to the important underworld players. Yet this was still a mad plan, a defining gesture. Charlemagne reaches for the crown. Gotti heads for Sparks Steak House. It took two days to reach the big islands of Barataria. He traveled by pirogue, through bayous and swamps, where the crocodile smiles on the sun marsh. It reminds me of the trip the boy takes in Maurice Sendak’s
Where the Wild Things Are
. His name is Max. He misbehaves, is sent to his room without dinner. While wearing his wolf costume, he lies in bed. His room grows over with weeds. It turns into a jungle as he sleeps. It resembles Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana. He wakes to find a small boat on the shore of an ocean. He crosses the water—small boy, big sea. He lands on an island populated by wild things, who are nothing but pirates. When they try to scare Max, he tames them with a cold, steady eye. He has soon subdued the monsters, secured his rule. That’s when the wild rumpus begins, the pirates dancing, parading, swinging from trees, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, a party that goes from can till can’t. In the end, depleted by his exploits, Max sails away, leaving the island just as he found it.

I will now tell you exactly how the adventures of Jean Lafitte mirror those of Max:

As Lafitte dozes in his blacksmith shop on Bourbon Street, the bayous grow over with bad men, become wild. When he wakes, he finds a boat waiting at an inlet. He sails across the water. After two days, he reaches Grand Terre Island, where wood huts face the open sea. He is met on the shore by the wild things. In Sendak’s story, the monsters have dagger nails, tangled manes, huge eyes. In Lafitte’s story, they have pointy boots, hoop earrings, peg legs. There were a few hundred men living on Grand Terre when Lafitte arrived: crooks, runaway slaves, fugitives, privateers, deserters, traders, trappers, and smugglers who were in a state of war. Several had served in the armies of Napoleon, fired artillery at Austerlitz, stood beside big field guns. The most notorious were Vincenzo Gambi, Dominique You, and Louis Chighizola, known as Nez Coupé, or “Cut Nose.” In the way of Max, Lafitte fixed them with his cold, calculating stare. He told them he’d come to bring order to the wild places. No more stealing what’s been stolen, no more selling what’s been sold. From now on, the pirates will work under a single flag. It’s about the greater good. Most of these men had known Lafitte for years: as a fellow traveler, the fence. Most liked him; others feared him. Those who neither liked nor feared began dying soon after Lafitte crossed the water: dead in a crick on the edge of the settlement; killed by a boom swinging across the quarterdeck.

Lafitte soon had the pirate islands under control. Business would now be conducted in the efficient way of the marketplace. The pirates took to sea, scouting for targets, bringing captured ships through the channel into Barataria. Crew and passengers were held captive in comfort until a ransom was paid. Stolen goods were inventoried and stored in island warehouses. If the pirates were lucky enough to come across a slave ship—the big prize, easiest pickings with the best return—the cargo, which was human misery, was moved to slave quarters built on Grand Terre. After arranging matters with Pierre at the blacksmith shop, plantation owners sailed out for the weekend. They would stay for two nights, drinking and eating, a party, a feast, before walking the aisles, saying,
That one looks sickly, but I will take that one, and that one, and that buck over there
. A few days later, the pirates would load the slaves onto pirogues and flatboats and carry them to plantations up the river.

If the pirates came into possession of an especially large cargo of African slaves, an auction was held, the location kept secret until the last moment. These events—the biggest took place at the temple, the huge pile of clamshells—were advertised in handbills scattered around the quarter: “Come One! Come All! To Jean Lafitte’s Bazaar & Slave Auction. Tomorrow at the Temple, for Your Delight, Clothing, Gems and Knick-Knacks from the Seven Seas.” On one such occasion, 400 Africans were sold. Within a year of Lafitte’s arrival in Barataria, even the wildest pirates were calling him Old Man, Boss, Governor. To friends, he was Fita, the king of the badlands. Grand Terre became a kind of city-state, a capital of a pirate nation. It was egalitarian, each criminal taking an equal share of the loot and sharing in the responsibility of guarding the channels and the bay.

Lafitte set up a court of admiralty, where he judged the legality of each mission and the fate of each prize. As in the case with most underground economies, this one existed with the silent consent of the nearby population—it existed, in fact, because of that consent.

The majority of New Orleanians believed the ban on African slaves was foolish, and thus saw Lafitte less as a pirate than as a businessman supplying a desired product. What’s more, Lafitte was a Frenchman in a French city that had recently come under American rule. He became a popular hero. Like Jesse James in the vanquished South, he personified the fantasy of defiance. Many of his practices—the comfort in which he held hostages, the return of runaway slaves—were followed with this reputation in mind. Like all dictators, he wanted the love of the people.

Lafitte remade Grand Terre, turned it from a mean camp into a criminal metropolis, the nightmare city of buccaneers. (When you were a kid riding Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney World, shuddering as an animatronic Blackbeard pulled a woman screaming into a house, did you know that all the animatronic women were being raped?) By 1809, perhaps a thousand pirates were living on the island, a sandy barrier, its back to the bayou, its face to the sea. Six miles long, three miles wide, five feet above sea level, a swell covered by scrub trees. The wind never stopped blowing, leaving the island gloriously free of bugs. If you had gone in 1810, you would have found a well-planned town in the middle of a swamp: dirt streets lined with thatch houses; mansions on stilts that seemed to float when the sea surged; clapboard storefronts, markets, hotels for plantation owners; bordellos, taverns, a casino where men sat 10 to a table; warehouses filled with merchandise—carpets, cotton, grain, gin; a scaffold where slaves were auctioned. It was strangely temporary, makeshift and ramshackle, blown together by the trade winds, a mirage, a trick of light, a driftwood empire, a parody of New Orleans reflected in the black water.

Ships traveled to Grand Terre on a regular schedule. To people in New Orleans, it was a vacation, a week at Sandals. The best house belonged to Lafitte. Built around 1808, it sat on high ground overlooking the channel. It was Spanish-style, made of pulverized oyster shells, the windows crossed by iron bars. From the veranda, dozing in his red hammock, Lafitte could keep an eye on the incoming ships.

It was not long before the authorities—tax officials, shore patrol—decided Lafitte had to be stopped. Though he would rule for a decade, Lafitte spent half those years in battle with Governor Claiborne. At times, this struggle took on the spirit of a comic opera. You chase, he runs, we laugh. Again and again, Claiborne sent ships to chase the pirates, but each time the pirates vanished into the channels, only to reappear hoisting the black flag. Claiborne finally arrested Pierre on July 2, 1814. He locked him in the old colonial jail. Jean hired two attorneys to defend his brother, but their arguments failed. And so Pierre simply escaped. Vanished. Walked through the bars. The governor plastered the city with wanted posters. It offered $500 to anyone who delivered Jean Lafitte to the sheriff of New Orleans. It was signed, “By the order of William Claiborne.” It was posted at dinnertime. Before breakfast, a second sign had been placed beside the first: “A One-Thousand-Dollar Reward is offered anyone who can deliver Governor Claiborne to Cat Island for Trial,” signed Lafitte. It was the sort of gesture that turned the pirate into a cult figure. Crimes make a criminal; style makes a criminal hero. Lafitte was nothing but style. He knew how to dress, how to carry himself. History is not what’s remembered, but what remains when everything else is forgotten: the kidnappings and the killings, the slave trading, the smoke rising from the plundered coastal towns.

Lafitte knew he could not win forever. He depended too much on luck. Even the king of hearts knows the ace of spades is somewhere in that deck. He was looking for an escape, a ladder to the street. He spotted it on September 3, 1814. That morning, HMS
Sophie
, a British warship, dropped anchor off Grand Terre. Lafitte rowed out in a canoe. He was greeted by Nicholas Lockyer, captain of the
Sophie
. The men exchanged pleasantries before Lafitte, unrecognized by the British, asked the captain the nature of his business.

“I have a message for Mr. Lafitte.”

“Get in the canoe,” said Lafitte, “I’ll take you to him.”

The captain and a few of his men climbed in. Lafitte talked as he ferried them across the bay. He had a florid manner of speech that worked a kind of magic. He spoke of sea battles and fog, of man’s fate and treasures worth pursuing in this too-short life. The conversation turned to the terrific battle then underway. Later called the War of 1812, it pitted the British against their former American colonists. For the British, New Orleans would be a great prize, economically important and weakly defended, with a large French population whose loyalty to America was questionable. As Lafitte ran the canoe aground, he reintroduced himself with a flourish, saying,
“Lafitte c’est moi!”

The British were surrounded as pirates came down to the shore to greet their leader and his guests. Several men in the crowd wanted to kill the British, run ’em through, string ’em up. The British navy was hated. No, said Lafitte, these men have come on parley, as our guests. We don’t hang guests.

The men sat on the veranda of Lafitte’s house, eating lunch within sight of the sea. Red snapper, oysters, wine. After much drinking, the British captain stated his business: he wanted Lafitte and his men to join the British in an attack on New Orleans. If Lafitte agreed, he would be rewarded with 30,000 pounds and a captaincy in the Royal Navy. If he refused, the British would destroy Grand Terre. Carrot, stick. The specifics were explained in letters that were left with Lafitte: the first included the promise (money, rank), the second included the threat (cannonball, ruin). Lafitte said he needed time—he would have to explain the offer to his followers. As a Frenchman in the age of Napoleon, Lafitte hated the British. He was, in fact, something of an American patriot, had come to love his adopted country, though he lived outside its laws. To him, the British offer was just an opportunity. He’d recently heard the U.S. Navy would dispatch an armada to destroy Grand Terre. Here was a way to save his island.

The next morning, Lafitte sent a message to Governor Claiborne, including the letters from the British. These had great intelligence value, as they spelled out Britain’s plans. This resulted in a correspondence between Lafitte and Claiborne, in the course of which Lafitte offered the services of his men in the defense of New Orleans in return for a pardon, which Lafitte described as “an act of oblivion for all that has been done hitherto.” “I may have evaded the payment of duties to the custom house,” wrote Lafitte, “but I have never ceased to be a good citizen; and all the offence I have committed I was forced to by certain vices in our laws.”

When Governor Claiborne discussed the proposal with city leaders, the response was mixed. Some feared the British more than they feared the pirates. What’s more, as Lafitte and his followers were French, such a pardon would help unify a town that was an uneasy mix of French and American. In making this case, Claiborne—he was married to a French native of New Orleans—quoted a passage from Lafitte’s letters: “I am the stray sheep, wishing to return to the sheepfold. If you were thoroughly acquainted with the nature of my offences, I should appear to you much less guilty, and still worthy to discharge the duties of a good citizen.” But the final decision had to be made by Andrew Jackson, the general responsible for the defense of New Orleans—he would soon take over as military governor. Jackson was already on record regarding Lafitte and the Barataria pirates, whom he described as “hellish banditti.” The proposal was rejected.