Grand Isle: From Chopin’s Day to Today
Grand Isle, early August. Bathed in golden light, dozens stand waist-deep in the calm Gulf waters. Spread across the beach behind them march families — children, parents, grandparents. They carry fishing rods, shrimp nets and crab lines. Between calls of sea birds, an occasional statistic floats on the morning breeze. One fisherman says he’s catching speckled trout on every other cast. Another boasts of three dozen crabs in 40 minutes. On the beach, where chatter tilts more toward “good luck” than “have fun,” no one sunbathes or throws a Frisbee.
Fourteen years after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and three years after Hurricane Ida sent many residents into exile for nearly a year, only to return home and persist on generators for even longer, locals say that things are getting back to normal on Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island. For Heidi Cheramie, that means feeling crabs brush past your ankles as you step into the Gulf. In late 1979, Cheramie became Grand Isle’s first full-time public health nurse. There was no doctor on the island and no permanent medical facility at the time, so she made house calls, often in the company of someone to translate her patients’ Cajun French.
Cheramie now works with Chad Willingham and Dominic Santiny in the new Grand Isle Library. The old library stood on the beach, as did the medical facility that the town built in 1980. Both are gone, destroyed by storms. Also gone are many of those Cajun French speakers. Even longer vanished is the once-thriving resort of Grand Isle that Kate Chopin describes in her novel “The Awakening,” a book long considered a classic of American literature, which this year celebrates its 125th anniversary.
“What’s that infamous book set in Grand Isle?” asks Santiny, posing the question that he and the other librarians sometimes hear from patrons. “It’s got women’s liberation, adultery and suicide,” he says, listing some of the reasons that “The Awakening” has been banned or challenged since its publication, in 1899. Its main character, Edna Pontellier, visits the resort with her apathetic husband and two children. Deeming her marriage an “accident,” ambivalent about her children and often left in solitude or among enticing bachelors in an idyllic setting, Edna begins to imagine another life, one in which others don’t define her merely as a housewife and mother. “That summer in Grand Isle she began to loosen a little the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her,” writes Chopin, whom many critics condemned upon the novel’s publication for what they regarded as an amoral treatment of adultery.
Cheramie has lived on Grand Isle for nearly fifty years and can only imagine where the long-destroyed locations in Chopin’s novel once stood, such as the resort house and smaller cottages that surrounded it, each with their own bath house, all connected by bridges. In “Unveiling Kate Chopin,” Emily Toth describes Grand Isle as a world of dining and dancing halls, complete with a sleeping quarter for the hundred employees to serve visitors to this “tropical paradise.” All of that disappeared six years before Chopin published “The Awakening,” when the hurricane of 1893 — the one that locals still call “the great hurricane” — ravaged the area, killing an estimated 2,000 people. Before then, says Santiny, “It was the Cajun Catskills.”
It’s fitting that one of the great Louisiana novels revolves around the Gulf, its allure, yes, but also its looming threat. Disaster scars memory, and absence permeates daily life here. Residents know their storms. They know what they lost and which storm stole it from them. “You live your life like a clock,” says Santiny. “Football, Mardi Gras, crawfish and hurricanes. You almost become an amateur meteorologist when you live here.”
Louisiana’s only inhabited barrier island, Grand Isle, comprises seven miles of public beaches, including the beachfront along Grand Isle State Park, which offers nature trails and overnight camping. The island is a breakwater between the Gulf of Mexico and the inland channels that connect to the Mississippi River’s bayou tributaries.
Willingham nods. “You learn that from your parents,” he says. Although he can see the beach from the library’s windows, Willingham hasn’t touched sand in years. He notes that life on the island becomes more difficult each year. Rent and insurance rates continue to rise. Many homes remain destroyed or abandoned after Hurricane Ida, constant reminders, as though residents need such a thing, that the next storm may be the one to end the only way of life they’ve ever known.
“You can’t live your normal life in these circumstances,” Willingham says. But he and Cheramie find it difficult to imagine living anywhere elsewhere. “Here, you get up in the mornings and you can see the dolphins,” she says. “There’s nothing like it.” Santiny agrees. “My dad always used to say, ‘There’s a price for living in paradise.’”
Location
Jefferson Parish
Did You Know?
Born in St. Louis, Kate Chopin (1850-1904) married Oscar Chopin, a native of Natchitoches Parish, in 1870. The couple settled in New Orleans and, later, Cloutierville, where Oscar owned a general store. When Oscar died in 1882, he left Chopin widowed with six children. She returned to St. Louis and began publishing books with Louisiana settings, including the story collections “Bayou Folk” (1894) and “A Night in Acadie” (1897) and the novels “At Fault” (1890) and “The Awakening” (1899). Penguin Classics, the Modern Library, and the Library of America continue to keep Chopin’s work in print.
