POINTE A LA HACHE, La. — Way down in the delta, just south of the Belle Chasse Ferry at Beshel’s Marina here, black men with work-worn hands and several generations of fishing in their blood sat around on old milk crates, hoping for a piece of the oil cleanup action that seems to have bypassed their little stretch of the bayou. Nearly all of them have taken BP’s courses on oil cleanup, but few said they had been called to work; their little skiffs remain moored and forlorn, tied side-by-side like wretched sardines. “The little guy loses again,” one of them lamented. There was Hurricane Katrina five years ago. And now the great spill. But even before those two blows, the fishermen in Pointe a la Hache and other small, historically African-American fishing towns and villages that dot the east bank of the Mississippi River in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, have long had to fight hard for every dollar, every oyster and every opportunity they could drag out of the bayou. In decades past they have dealt with the red-lining of leases on the richest oyster beds and waterways. In the 1970s and ’80s they said they fought the laws against hand-dredging ...
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