This Month's Story

I dug two slices out of that wonderful loaf of fluffy white bread and put three pieces of baloney carefully on one piece… Then covering it with the second piece, I bit into the resultant sandwich where the round part meets the straight part. In seconds the sandwich was gone and I was making a second.

We were still busy icing down our catch of shrimp, so at first I didn’t notice the small group of people standing on the dock when we tied up. When I realized they weren’t moving, just standing there quietly, just watching us, it struck me as a little strange.

“Who are those people, Bob?”

Bob, never one to waste words, glanced over at them, grunted and kept on shoveling ice. Duddie came out of the pilot house and picking up a hose, started hosing things down. I asked him the same question.

He looked over at them.

“Ask them.”

“Can we help you folks?”

“Yes!” “Yea!” “How much are your shrimp?” “Can we look at your catch?”

Bob stood up from his icing and answered the last, “Come on aboard and look, be careful of the lines.”

Soon we had about seven men opening ice chests, looking at the shrimp, at the boat and then sort of standing still again, looking at us as we worked around them. It was quiet for a minute or so.

“How much are your shrimp?”

“Well, we don’t know. We just got in.”

Bob for the first time took a good look around. There was another boat sitting several slips away with a similar group of people around it.

“How much is Miss Mary Jane asking?”

“They want three dollars a pound”

Bob snorted and Duddie stopped, looked over at the Miss Mary Jane, muttered something, shook his head and kept hosing. There was a rivalry between the two boats that I had heard brought up several times while we had the boat out in the Sound.

Bob didn’t hesitate.

“If they’re charging you thirty dollars for ten pounds, we’ll sell them at thirty dollars for eleven pounds.”

We had instant takers and soon we were filling Wal Mart bags with ice and shrimp and even threw in a nice Speckled trout that we had caught in the last haul.

A woman and her small daughter wanted only ten pounds, but Bob, not wanting to make change, insisted she take eleven or nothing. She fussed for a minute, but when Bob started to go back to his icing, grudgingly agreed to take eleven.

I had been helping with all this as cashier and wondered about the fuss, but then I realized that Bob was just being Bob. I had already noticed he had given one man twelve pounds instead of eleven just so as to fill the man’s bag. Bob just didn’t want to mess with the small stuff.

Actually, the price he and Duddie were quoting was to me, an outsider, a little strange. Nearly thirty years ago when Stella and I first came down to the coast, the price of shrimp from the boat was about the same price as Bob was asking. It doesn’t seem to me that the public realizes that the cheap price that they were paying for their shrimp was driving shrimpers out of the business. There is a lot more to it than that, but the basic fact is that we are losing a rich, almost vibrant, heritage that is distinctly ours, just so we can buy shrimp at less than three dollars a pound.

It had been a good day for us. The shrimp were a good size, a mean of about a thirty or so count, the weather was perfect, a little rain to cool things down, lots of cloud cover and steady work with no real problems.

Well, not quite ideal.

I had to get up at three to get to help rig the boat at four. But Duddie had it all rigged when I got there and Bob brought me breakfast at the Waffle House and then we were out in the Sound by five-thirty. We started the first cast at six on the dot at a place Duddie “knew about” a good two miles away from the huddled mass of boats that had been waiting for the same six o’clock opening time.

As a person, Duddie was an archaism from the way things were and still barely are. At seventy-two he had been shrimping all his life (“since I was fourteen”). He knew where to shrimp, how to shrimp, and when to shrimp. He did everything with a soft, economical way of moving that belied the years that went into developing the skill. He would tell us the name of almost every boat that moved around us that day and many of their stories.

When the first “lift” (haul) was in, there began a of discussion about the whereabouts of the salt-barrel scoop (“Didn’t you take it home?” “No! Didn’t you?” “Me? Why would I want to take it home? Lord, I live in Picayune!!”).

So, we couldn’t salt our hauls.

I’m a layman so bear with me while I explain this. The idea is to dump a basket of the shrimp and by catch (fish and stuff) in a barrel of brine. The shrimp would sink to the bottom and most of the by catch would float to the top. This then would be paddled off with the now-we-realized-had-been-stolen-off-the-pilot-house-roof scoop. Since we didn’t do it, this is the best I can describe it.

So, we had to cull the shrimp from the by catch by hand. A backbreaking, time consuming, catfish finger-jabbing job. I didn’t care for it one bit and we caught a lot of shrimp.

After about four hours, Bob called for a break for lunch.

Bob is from Texas. This explains why when I sat opposite Duddie in one of the green plastic lawn chairs in the pilot house, I should not have been surprised when Bob whipped out some Winn Dixie baloney and a loaf of Bunny Bread and said “Eat up.”

I have no idea what Bob expected, but what he got was not it.

I dug two slices out of that wonderful loaf of fluffy white bread put three pieces of baloney carefully on one piece (after roughly peeling the casing off. I always do a poor job of peeling as this leaves some baloney to peel off the casing with your teeth, a sort of lagniappe). Then covering it with the second piece, I bit into the resultant sandwich where the round part meets the straight part. In seconds the sandwich was gone and I was making a second.

Duddie, sitting with a large brown bag in his lap, gapped at me,

“You like baloney sandwiches?!?”

“Born and bred on Bunny Bread and baloney sandwiches.”

And with that I started, a little slower, on the second sandwich. I took smaller bites, I was going to relax and enjoy this one. Bob smiled proudly at me over his baloney sandwich and handed me a Barq.

Duddie shook his head in wonder at the both of us and reached in his lunch sack and pulled out a container of tuna salad. Taking the loaf of Bunny Bread from Bob, he proceeded to heap gobs of tuna salad on his sandwich and taking a Barq from the cooler joined us in lunch. I noticed that like us, however, he did not slice his sandwich in two.

What I am getting at is that there we were out in the middle of the water trying to catch shrimp, three completely different people, with widely separate, completely different upbringings. Duddie was from Biloxi, Bob from Picayune and I from Waveland and yet we were all equally eating sandwiches made from slices of delicious, fluffy white Bunny bread!

I’m sure if Normal Rockwell were alive, he would have immediately set up his easel and painted an all American picture of the three of us sitting in that old shrimp boat pilot house chomping on our Bunny Bread sandwiches and the following Saturday we would have seen ourselves gracing the cover of Collier’s Magazine.

But it was a good day and I took home to Stella a nice ice chest full of shrimp, including a few fourteen-counters (that the people on the pier couldn’t buy). Stella will butterfly them, season them with some garlic and olive oil, put them on the grill and, with a salad and some po’boy bread, enjoy our little bit of the good life.

During the long trip home from Biloxi, I could see boats still working out in the Sound - big boats, little boats, single haulers, two boom haulers.

WLOX-TV later said there were about eleven hundred boats going after the shrimp on this year’s opening day. By any count that’s a lot of boats.

That night, when I took Jennie out, I stood in the dark of the porch and looked at the panorama of lights of boats waiting to start again in the morning what they had done all that day.

I was tired, but in all, it was not a bad way to spend a day in one’s life’s time.