Season of the Swamp
A review of one of our Fall/Winter Reads by author Yuri Herrera.
Yuri Herrera’s description of New Orleans in 1853 through Benito Juarez Garcia captures the essence of the city. From the different Spanish, English and French accents in New Orleans to the feeling of the sweltering heat, Benito and his brother-in-law Pepe get the New Orleans experience firsthand.
Benito, originally from Mexico, is on a trip with Pepe and a mafia group to gain information about Mexican leaders to start a revolution. While in New Orleans, Benito learns about the culture of the city and how people are treated. Early on in Benito’s journey, a police officer mistakes him for a slave but one of his fellow mafia members explains to the officer that he is Mexican. Benito does not speak English very well, but he manages to find people who speak Spanish in New Orleans to connect with.
Benito finds his first job after talking to a man named Cabanas, who owns a printing press in the city. Benito often describes the stories he sees in the newspaper throughout the book. Benito in in disbelief at how slaves are being treated in New Orleans, and he later finds out through Cabanas that the white people are the ones who have the most rights.
“Doesn’t it bother you to print this sort of thing?” Cabanas seemed confused by the question. “Ads for the capture of enslaved people.” “Well, I’m merely the printer, and that’s the law, it’s not like anyone’s capturing them in order to take away their freedom. They never had it to begin with. Officially, there’s no more importing of slaves, so with very few exceptions, they were born into it.” “They were still captured,” he said. “Worse: captured by birth.”
Benito has multiple encounters with slaves being mistreated. The first time is when he sees a slave auction live.
“A man lay broken on the floor, moaning, almost imperceptibly stirring and then recollapsing, as if attempting to escape the touch of his shirt,” Herrera writes to describe the horror that Benito sees at the Gravier, the site of the auction.
One of the slaves is pregnant and the seller markets her as a good deal because she is going to produce offspring that could be later used as a slave.
“Three for the price of one: worker, fertile, and- not for long- virgin!” the trader says.
During the auction for the woman, one man tries to buy a slave with all of his money, and the people cheer when he is successful.
The next encounter Benito has is in a small bar, when suddenly three Black men are chased by policemen and beaten. The policemen search for more to see if any are hiding but are unsuccessful. Benito is experiencing the ugly truth of New Orleans that people outside the country know nothing about.
Herrera does a great job of describing both the characters and the setting of the book. He writes the book in the third person, as if we are following Benito and his experiences in New Orleans. This gives a good perspective of how it was being a foreigner visiting New Orleans.
One of Benito’s earliest experiences in New Orleans is Mardi Gras. “There were parades, spontaneous parades that poured into the streets and sometimes merged and headed off into the same direction and sometimes squeezed to one side of the road and pressed in their initial direction,” he describes.
Herrera focuses on the summer heat in New Orleans and has people falling into the canal and drowning because they are so overheated. At one point, Benito and Pepe are sick during the summer and can’t get out of bed. This leads to Benito having two strange dreams, which Herrera describes as if you are in them with the character.
Season of the Swamp paints each setting on a journey through the city with Benito … from the Hotel Cincinnati to Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras. While the abrupt change of scenes is a little confusing at first, it keeps the reader on their toes waiting to see what Benito will encounter next.
