Dalmatia on the Mississippi

Adam S. Eterovich

In 1944 Harnett T. Kane wrote the book, Deep Delta Country, one chapter was entitled Dalmatia on the Mississippi. This is perhaps the best description of Croatian oystermen and fishermen in the Bayous of Louisiana. They are credited with the development of the Oyster Industry.

Kane, Harnett T. Deep Delta Country. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944.

Dalmatia on the Mississippi

As early as 1825 or 1830, seamen and ship captains of Dalmatia were finding their way up the Mississippi. The crews went ashore in prospering New Orleans and thought of their lovely, poverty pinched country, and some did not return to their ships. A few became merchants and traders, but most of them transferred to vessels of Louisiana. Moving, down the river, they marveled at the superb residences surrounded by their green banners of cane. But this scene, they knew, was not for them. Farther south they went ashore and watched the French. It seemed like home, this place and climate, these men whose living was along the waters.

The first arrivals took ridges that no one else claimed and set up small cabins. A few countrymen joined them and they held apart, a quiet people, little inclined to chat, almost morose. When they did talk, their thick, guttural tones perplexed the French.

Beside their neighbors they seemed hulking men, with broad faces, high cheekbones and, always, the wide handle-bar mustaches that made their neighbors grin.

One would take a barrel on his thick shoulders and lift it over the levee with the same ease that others would show in rolling it. With a single lunge they poled their vessels astonishing lengths through a canal. Frenchmen nudged one another as the big fellows passed. Before long they were further amazed at the attraction that work of all sorts seemed to have for these people. You look at them at dawn, and you look at them at night-late, late and Nom de Dieu, you know they haven' stop' at all between. I see it with both these two eye', I tell you. The Dalmatians kept this up, whether their fingers turned blue with cold or sweat darkened their garments from throat to ankle. Only occasionally did they take a glass of wine at the store; and then, before they had time for their last swallow, they were off, not caring if it were the heaviest of rains, or the most scorching hour of the early afternoon. The French, who thought they knew how to live as this climate dictated, were perplexed. What sort of behavior was that.

When one Croatian met another, his greeting was "Kako ste?""How are you?" The answer was "Dobro"-" Good." The amused French called them "Kako ste's"; eventually the word became "Tocko," and it has never been lost. The Dalmatians themselves have. taken it over and use it of each other, generally in friendliness or in light joke. (The well-advised stranger will exercise care in applying it.)

The Tockos fished, they tried shrimping, they hunted. Then they turned to oysters-and some of the commercial history of lower Louisiana was changed. Man had met job. The Delta is the New World's greatest potential center for this shellfish. The oyster will develop neither in fresh water nor in the sea; it requires certain combinations of the two elements. The steady outpouring of the Mississippi makes possible a succession of mixtures, spawning grounds of peculiar suitability. The Gulf winds force the river water into the grass-fringed bays and inlets east and west of the river mouths, where it mixes with the brine. The silty Mississippi flow is packed with minute food particles; the saline waves provide additional elements, and the mildness of the Gulf permits the oyster to multiply through long productive seasons.

The earlier Deltans had found the oysters readily accessible in low, thick, natural reefs along the shores and about the river passes, cool bits of fleshy nourishment in their rocklike protections. For years the gathering of the shellfish had continued in haphazard fashion. Men waited for low tides, or felt about at the water edges, and there they were for the easy taking. Depleting one area, the diggers moved to another. They gave a few of the cool months to the enterprise, then turned to more inviting seasonal occupations. If the oyster' were hard to find one year--eh bien, the nex' would be more better.

The oyster, she was a funny thing, said the French. A small break in the river bank-others looked sad, but the oyster gatherer smiled. The new yellow tide, reaching across the broken bank to the low places along the shore, would feed the oysters until they were fat and juicy. But then sometimes a storm came, and look, the little things were dead or dying, smothered in mud and sand. More than that, in one bay the oysters would be swelling with health; in the next, unaccountably, they were anemic, "jus' a bladder of water." Gradually, for miles, what had once been the best of reefs were producing poor, almost worthless growths.

Now the Tockos advanced upon the oyster beds with determination. They ripped at the stony clusters until they had torn them apart. Their palms and their wrists poured blood; when it got in their way they doused their hands in the salt water, shook them and went back to work. They experimented, they tried new locations and, most important, they devoted all of the year to the operation, turning it into a kind of continuous farming in the water. They developed tools to fit their purposes that were a pair of hinged rakes eight feet long, operated with both hands like awkward scissors to draw up the oyster clumps. And they built a special luacrer, low-hung, wide-beamed, with a deep hold for large hauls.

Regularly the Tockos went up the Delta to New Orleans with their oysters. Using ingenuity and muscle, they followed the backwaters as far as they could. The sailboats strained and creaked over their curvina paths, through waters that rippled with silver in a good wind, through others the color of wine, motionless and spotted with lilies, or across deep bays in which the boats rocked and tossed. At certain points they came upon shallows and had to stop a few hours until they deepened. When the wind was dead, they cordelled or pulled themselves with ropes along shore. Every delay worried them; every hour that the oyster w,as out of water counted heavily. On clear days the Tocko could hear small clicks; the shellfish were still alive in their piles. A warm, foggy period, and he muttered imprecations. "Fog same like smoke; then you work like hell. Inside pile, they living; outside, die fast."

Emerging from the rear passages into the Mississippi, the small vessels of the oystermen could not make headway against the current. They hailed towboats moving up the river. To the towman these were small fry, but they helped reduce the cost of his trip. For a total payment of twenty-five dollars he would take them. If he asked too much the Tockos shook their heads and waited for the next. Arrived at the city wharves, they went promptly to the dealers. Good oysters, yes. They could sample' them. The dealers usually did not bother. The Tockos had a reputation for reliability.

At intervals they met with bad news. Too many others had come at the same time; the wharves were packed with oysters. A Tocko then called a boy, gave him a bottle of wine, and let him shovel all of his produce into the river. Perhaps the fish would enjoy them. Generally, however, the oysterman received a good return; and soon he was back in the Delta, investing it in expanded holdings.

For years they lived lonely, grueling lives, these men without their women. They moved out to the places where the oysters were most plentiful, along the back bays and lakes, in lines of settlement along canals that they dug. Their places were camps, cabins on birdlike wooden legs, five or six feet in the air at windswept edges, over which the water piled high during stormsspecks in the immensity of grass and sky. The men rose just as a glow of pink was beginning to show in the east. A crimson radiance soon lay over the shells, the roofs of their cabins, the flowers among the waving meadows. But the Dalmatians had no eye for the loveliness about them. They had "job to do." They worked in open boats through fog and rain, wading in water up to their waists for hours, sitting in the wet vessels for the rest of the day. The incandescent sun beat down upon them, the waves of heat crawled like living things, and the sea birds gathered in raucous flights.

The Tockos were away all of the day; when they returned they were often too tired even to talk. They had little to keep them awkke. Their huts, primitive even to their humbler fellow Deltans, held only beds, ropes, clothes hanging from the rafters, and tins of food. Night after night the Tockos guided themselves back to their homes in the distances. To be in these marshes after dusk is to sense a vast serenity such as 1, for one, have known nowhere else. The moonlight strikes the edges of the grasses, like the blades of spears. The stars glimmer against the fathomless black; all about us is a living darkness, many-tenanted, creatures stirring, chirping, bellowing, calling softly. In our watery tunnel between hummocks of heavy growth, the paddles lift and fall. A sudden turn, and before us, ghostlike in the moon rays, stands an oysterman's cabin, its walls a duH brown smudge, the shells about it gleaming in the cold licrht. From within, a lamp is lit to greet us after our hours in the marsh.

Sometimes death awaited the return of the Tockos from their labors. Every few years the waters rose suddenly to trap the occupants of the cabin, and others died in blasts that tossed their camps aside in btoken pieces. Those who lived repaired the wreckage as best they could and went on as before. It was not long before the French were assuring each other: "Those Tocko', they work so hard to earn their money that when they get it, they don' know how to enjoy it."'

Their honesty matched their frugality. The camps remained open at all times, without latch or lock. When a man found himself out of tobacco or rope, he did not want to make a special trip to the front-the river edge. He went to the place of another Tocko and took what he needed. His friend, returning, understood; the borrower would be back with a repayment. Eventually, enterprising members of the group established themselves as small wholesalers, handling supplies at a saving for their people. A benevolent medical and burial organization was formed, which became one of the oldest in Louisiana. Through it all, though they toiled without letup, they remained men of moods, brooding on their troubles, killing themselves in times of sudden disappointment. A French Deltan sighed and waited for the tide to change. The Tocko took a gun and rowed to the end of the shell ridge, where they found him later.

Yet they knew a few pleasures: those visits to New Orleans, calls on relatives there and on some of the friendly girls about t6e waterfront. To their camps they brought back red peasant wine, cheap and strong. They diluted it with water as was the custom in the old country, and drank it in the morning before they left and at night when they returned. The mixture must be a proper one-"too strong, no good taste. Too little vine, taste like not'ing."

And on special occasions, in their badly heated huts, as the flames of their candles shook with the winter winds, they took out the accordion and the gusle, the long, single-stringed instrument of their people, and played and sang. Perhaps it was "Maritza Moya," a love story of a Croatian Mary waiting on an Adriatic beach. More often it was an epic, a composition from the hearts of their fellow countrymen, a part of their ancient, tragic history. In interminable stanzas it described guerrilla warfare aoainst the Turks, battles in which warriors were slain one by one but never gave up until the last man collapsed with a shouted message of resistance. Another had the picaresque touch, its heroes Robin Hoods who met bejeweled Turks, walking globes of fat and malice, and sent them away naked, bellies bouncing as they scurried. Or the words were grim, telling of conquerors who liberated Croatian babies by tossing them in the air and catching them on upthrust bayonets. These were the themes that brought tears to the Tocko in his Delta isolation, that saddened and then eased the pain that they evoked.

The Dalmatians prospered; collections of camps thickened back in the bays, and a number of the settlers moved to the river bank. Along the Mississippi appeared Olga, Empire, Ostrica, Oysterville, and others. To the Legendres, the Robichaux, and the Bourgeois, were added the Zibiliches, the Jurisiches, and the Popiches. The French told their friends: "If it don' got an 'itch,' it ain' Tocko." Into Buras moved more Tockos, for this was a central point from which scores of camps fanned out.

Ultimately, some felt themselves sufficiently established to send home money for a bride. Seven or eight years had passed; the girl that one remembered-was she still single? If not, his family would know of another proper, obedient maiden, who wor'ked hard. Infrequently a Tocko, feeling that this was one or time to spend his money, made a trip back to the old country, and was received like a small millionaire. His cousins importuned him for loans, and the rulers tried to impress him into military service. He re turned to Louisiana with his new wife, to stay.

If the sturdy, large-boned Croatian mother found the ways hard to understand in this far-off home, she did not protest. She was more stoic even than her husband, and she lived only for him and their children. To the French women she was polite but she did not tell much, as she did not ask much. Neithcr the goings-on along the levee nor the wares of the boat-merchant drew her attention. Of these hard-hewn housewives some remarked, "You could grate cheese on the ridges of their palms." When she was needed, the Dalmatian wife dug for oysters with her husband. She helped build up the shells at the base of their hut-on-stilts, so that she and the young ones had a few feet of firm ground. She acquired several cans of paint, and among the bird-bordered pools of the marsh the homes shone neatly. Doors were splashed with bright yellows or light blues and greens; about the walls colored friezes depicted flowers, ships at sail, and peasant girls. And the children grew up to Croatian songs and instruction in the native tongue.

But as the boys and girls reached seven or eight years old, a sharp change was made. The children must have an education; to that all agreed. Facilities were meager in the Delta; the mother and children stepped aboard one of the luggers to be taken to New Orleans. There they remained for months of each year; the father could join them only from time to time, for a day or an evening.

A steady procession of Croatian youths came to the Delta, brought over by relatives or friends. They made "bargains"; a relative in Louisiana would pay for the passport and transportation, and in return the apprentice agreed to work for him, say, for four or five years. He would receive food, clothing and expenses, and he would earn a few dollars a month, at a slightly higher rate each year. It was not until the newcomer was not so new that he began to wonder. Others, at lighter tasks, were earning far more.

Cousin, this was not right. Under tightening immigration laws, Cousin stood as sponsor, guaranteeing that the new arrival would not become a pauper. Would the young man want to go back to the Adriatic? (In some cases, it is said, the Croatian was a stowaway, or had violated some other rule to reach this better land, and that made him more or less amenable to Cousin.) But competitors, spying a hefty, energetic boy, sought him out. How much did he say he earned? They were willing to give double. Cousin would charge that his friends were "stealing" from him when his back was turned; in the end he usually met the offer.

By degrees the Dalmatians were changing in the Delta atmosphere. Tocko girls married only Tocko, men; Tocko boys now and then took French brides, and their children grew up French in most things, but with the high cheekbones and something of their father's stolidness. The older Croatians, though they never entirely lost their accent, took on a bit of the speech of their Gallic associates.

The Tocko wis making his own contributions, including his food tastes. His dishes made the French shake their heads in wonder, then sample, then adapt with extra seasoning. The French told each other: "When you say Tocko, you mean oil."' Into practically every dish he poured his olive oil. Some drank it with salt added. (Doctors found that the first Dalmatians warded off intestinal disorders with this lubricant.) He stirred a cup or so into his oyster soup. He introduced his neighbors to the oyster salad. To the cooked oysters and their water he added grated onion, black pepper, "yusta bit vinegar" and a heavy dosage of the oil. Thoroughly mixed, served cold, the preparation has a flavor that neither the French nor the American oyster dish can duplicate. After the Tockos arrived, olive oil became one of the main imports to the Delta. From the old country, from Cuba and other places, heavily laden schooners brought the commodity. When large American duties were adopted, it was smuggled in. Vessels with "hot" olive oil slipped into the lakes and bays, and the saving was not a small item.

Gargantuan men of gargantuan appetites, the Tockos were inviting their fellow Deltans to their homes. A Frenchman, his eyes wide, told me of one occasion. At the door he stumbled against two barrels of red wine. A heavy goblet was shoved into his hand; he was led to a table. In a wide dishpan were twenty or thirty heads of lettuce, over which oil, warm vinegar, and other mixtures had been poured. Each guest took a whole head. Next to the lettuce was a large pig, freshly cooked. Each man cut off as large a hunk as he wished; to the astonishment of the visitor who had seen the size of the first portions, most went back for second and third helpings, and made additional trips to the salad. Everybody enjoyed himself; but at the height of the evening, the Frenchman noticed that one of the lustier participants now sat in gloomy thought. The guest asked him what was wrong. The answer was plantive: "I yust realize-if I hadn't come here, I would have another reef finished."

But on one day of the year every Tocko indulged without stint or regrets. This was St. John's Day, June twenty-fourth, an occasion w4ich his people made one of the great festivals of the Delta, next to Christmas and Easter. The observance went far back into the early folkways, its oricrin lost in the pagan period. In the old country the elders led their sheep to the Adriatic for immersion; all bathed; men leaped over bonfires; the priests held Mass for thousands who knelt at the water's edge. In the Delta the old custom was modified; the day was celebrated by visits from camp to camp and bathing on the shores of the lakes, by joke-telling, eating, and dancing. Tockos, French, and others traveled by boat to the back sections for the wine, beer, and the rest. Out came the accordion and the gusle; a climax was invariably a chant of home, the ranges and the hearths of Dalmatia. When it was over, a silence would fall and some of the older people, weeping, would say that they must manage somehow, before God, to get back to the Adriatic where they died. Then an elderly Tocko called out, "Boys, let's marchl" Brisk, semimartial music rang out, ranks formed, and shells along the beaches scattered with the thumping of the ground. The gulls and the terns swept down for the bits of food, and the memory of far-off Dalmatia was strong again.

Though they remained at peace with outsiders, the Tockos wrangled among themselves. Highly individualist, they differed especially in their oyster marketing. Feuds were common. In one instance, after years of operation, a quarrel arose within a profitable organization and the holdings had to be split seven ways. They were divided into more or less equal parts, designated by letter, and slips of paper were dropped into a hat. The members drew, nodded their heads sharply, and most of them never spoke to each other again. The French have laughed at such disputes, and said, "If those Tocko' ever really got together they'd be king' down here."

KING OF OYSTERS

Kings or no kings, the Tockos had converted oyster production into what is probably the most efficient of the Delta gathering enterprises. The French remained in the business, but it expanded all about them, and the expansion was Dalmatian. Between the Frenchman and the Tocko, little friction developed; the French shrugged and concentrated on their trapping and their various other callings. When a Dalmatian oyster man needed extra help, the French did not object to digging and tonging, though they complained that he was a hard driver. But occasionally a Tocko would find oysters missing from his reef and accuse certain of the earlier Deltans of stealing. The reefs until now had been more or less public property; and among some it was not regarded as a mortal sin to draw out a few shellfish. A man moved his pirogue into low water, slipped over the side, and felt for the oysters with his feet and his rump. When he dumped his catch at home, he rubbed his trouser-seat and said, "I worked for them;" and the family knew what he meant. Gradually, however, the poaching decreased. The Tockos, were willing to kill for their oysters.

On each side of the river the Dalmatians had evolved a different type of operation. To the east rise most of the natural reefs. Here the molluscs multiply at a quick rate; as a matter of fact, they grow too fast. The Dalmatians have found that the oysters overcrowd and starve each other until they become -stringy, lacking in favor. So the farmers thin out older reefs and encourage new ones in which conditions are better. These beds provide the "cooking oysters."

On the west bank of the river, however, Tocko persistence has brought the Louisiana mollusc to its high point. The waters are saltier; drainage seems to concentrate the brine to produce an oyster of richer flavor. Yet too much salt interferes with ready reproduction. And so the Tockos have created a cross-river culture. From the natural reefs on the east side they take the well-grown molluscs and transter them to selected bedding grounds of the west bank for final, improved taste. The result is an oyster for the raw, halfshell trade, combining the advantages of both locales.

Unwieldy to handle, likely to die at any stage, the oyster requires unending attention. The fisherman collects his shells, loads them on a large lugger, approaches a shallow bedding ground east of the river, moves the shells to a small oyster skiff and then scatters them in wide outward sweeps. The young .,. spat," floating about in the water, find the shells, "set," and grow there. Development takes about two years. Going to the scene from time to time, the oysterman tongs up the shellfish. He finds heterogeneous masses, the molluscs beoinning to cluster thickly. Squatting in his boat, he uses his hatchet for culling, removing the dead from the living, clearing away additional, undesirable incrustations, taking care not to crack the shells of the maturing oysters. Now he separates them into two piles, ready and unready. The latter are dropped back in the water for further improvement. The others are shifted across the river, to imbibe the brine that is there.

Months pass; the oysterman samples the product in the saltier beds. When he decides that they are right, he tongs them up, reculls them and shifts them once more, to a last, temporary bedding spot near - his camp.. Freight boats arrive; the oysters are brought up, placed in sacks, and started toward New Orleans. They arrive at the French Market or one of the many wholesale places that line old Rampart Street, a few squares from the river front; and the purchaser begins to worry over his profit.

The grower also has a number of things to disturb him. When the river is high in the spring, sudden infusions of fresh water bring injury or death to his crop. When the water is very low it is equally bad. "The oyster, he can take change, but not when they come too fast." The oysterman must keep guard also for boring clams, boring sponges, and the conch or drill, which digs a tiny circular hole and enjoys the mollusc, like any connoisseur, in its own shell. Worse than any of these are the drumfish. The owner wakes frequently from startled dreams that a school of these hungry predators are tearing away at the beds, eating him into ruin. It is not a baseless nightmare. Within a few hours, a man has been known to lose a property that took a year to build. The sixty-pound poachers move in heavy formation, equipped by nature to chew through an oyster shell in a minute or two. In calm weather they can be heard over the water, their powerful jaws crunching through the beds. When a grower learns that the drums are over his reefs, he drops everything else and yells to his friends to join him aoainst the common foe.

Thousands of acres of Delta shallows are fenced about by galvanized wire, laboriously installed along stakes in the water. They have been found the only effective protection against the drums. The Tocko watches the brine; if it grows stronger than usual, he may have to cope with these saltwater enemies. And when the Delta wife, Tocko or French, wants to convey the thought that her husband has a hearty appetite, she assures you: "'That man-he eat' oyster' like a drumfish."

As the Tockos prospered, some moved "inside" to the river bank, and sent their relatives or employees to the camps. Eventually they discovered that even their vigorous constitutions were unequal to the burdens placed upon them. Long work in the rain and cold had left them rheumatic, subject to ailments of the bones and of the chest. Various better-to-do Dalmatians have gone to New Orleans to become oyster wholesalers; others have opened restaurants there and acquired a local fame for skills matching those of the Creole cooks. In recent decades the French Market has had a definite Slavic or, as the natives call it, "Austrian," influence. A leading "French coffee stand," at which countless thousands of natives and visitors have drunk the rich beverage, was established by a Tocko.

With the years, certain of the sons did not wish to return to the Delta when they finished school; it was "country," the way of the old people. They went into business or professions. Even the elders are giving up what had once been their most prized distinction-their brci or walrus mustaches. They had been marks of masculinity, of honor. He who did not grow one back home would find the small boys hooting, at him on the street; he might hear his smooth face referred to as a Turk's backside, not a complimentary remark to a good Croatian. The brci had made the Tockos convenient bogeymen for the French mothers: "You behave, all of you, or I'll call a Tocko with a great big mustache to get you."' Today when a Deltan wants to disparage a Dalmatian neighbor, he snorts, "Him, I know him when he wore a mustache."

Kane, Harnett T. Deep Delta Country. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944. Dalmatia on the Mississippi.