✍The Huey P. Long Bridge / August 2024
~ Fiction ~
Roman à clef, cher.
Created A. I. free
by Leonard Earl Johnson
of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana
© 2024, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
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August 2024
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⭐ The Huey P. Long Bridge ⭐
Continuation of the Red Women Warriors Series
✍BY Leonard Earl Johnson
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© 2024, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved
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The Sunset Limited blows its whistle.
The Conductor lifts onboard his little yellow stoop, clicks shut the door, and we are off.
Ole #1 rolling West ontime at 9a.m., over tracks gleaming in the morning sun. A ribbon of Union Pacific Railroad's wobbly old 1894 Iron Road ~ passage today profitably leased to Amtrak.
Amtrak 🚅
We circle wide. Starting from the profoundly named New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, on Loyal Avenue near the Superdome. We are rolling out through a part of New Orleans that was shabby before the winds of '05, and is still a bit shabby twenty years later. Here and there colorful flags and painted porches declare a day care centre. Nearby a four story brick apartment building still shows a waterline.
The Huey P. Long Bridge hoves into view on the offing. Rising from Sea-level up a long curved grade.
Seabirds the size of my bicycle fly overhead, while off our starboard a mast-broken yacht ~ with a long faded name ~ continues its two decade drift through gunnel high sea oats. Forever off keel. Forever forgotten. Like us, post-Katrina flotsam seen from this train's windows since 2006, the year rail service reopened in coastal Louisiana.
☝ photo credit:
Photo credit:
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The Bridge Huey P. Long built,
one of one hundred and eleven.
The train is bound for Los Angeles and points between. Our destination is Lafayette, 117 train miles across the Great Atchafalaya Basin.
The Sunset crosses the Mississippi River at Westwego, first so nicknamed by train workers as,"west we go," for being the spot where early ferry boats dropped disjointed trains to be re-
complemented on the West Bank, in the days before Huey P. Long (construction began in 1932, completed 1935). This bridge and others were funded by taxing Standard Oil.
Standard Oil has never forgiven Louisiana for this sin of taxation, and Louisianans have never stopped lusting for the pennitant's lash.
For a few years Huey P. Long, a.k.a., The Kingfish built a dynasty, from Railroad Commissioner, to Governor, to U. S. Senator and threat to the powerful throne of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal.
The Kingfish called his reform program, SHARE THE WEALTH / EVERY MAN A KING, Randy Newman sings a stellar ballad or two about this.
Long built more bridges, roads, schools, and a tall Yankee-looking skyscraper for our state capitol in Baton Rouge. Where in 1935, he was assassinated behind a blinding cloud of gunsmoke.
Though the only entity in the state with a motive, we all agreed Standard Oil need not be investigated and hung the assasination on a passing physician with a parking dispute.
Slowly the Long Dynasty faded away, populism got rebranded by Republicans as nothing-needed but lining up the pigeons.
Again we stand empty pocketed at the voting booth making sure such future expenses for bridges, roads, and schools are redirected to prisons, football gambling, and Texas/Middle Eastern style colonial government. Making us the Nation's biggest harvester, refiner and shipper of its most profitable product, oil and gas. While leaving us the poorest population of all the fifty states, with the possible exception of Mississippi.
The train reached its apex atop The Bridge Huey built and paused for a backward glance. Then whistled off to Lafayette, our Texas-governed Hub City of Cajun French Louisiana.
~ to be continued ~
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Lagniappe du Jour
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They are posted on the first of each month and polished for the next few years. .JPG) ~ ~ ~ LEJ's Louisiana, Yours Truly in a Swamp is a monthly e-column @ www.LEJ.world, Hosted by GOOGLE BLOGGER, and historically at Les Amis de Marigny, New Orleans publication of the It is written by Leonard Earl Johnson of Lafayette and New Orleans, Louisiana |
posted by LEJ's Louisiana | 2:45 AM
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