Should the Waters Take Us Summary, Characters and Themes
Should the Waters Take Us by Stephanie Soileau is a multi-generational novel about families living along the rapidly disappearing Louisiana coast. Moving between the 2010 Gulf oil disaster and earlier periods of migration, expulsion, petroleum development, hurricanes, and family conflict, the story examines what it means to belong to land that may eventually cease to exist.
Its characters inherit not only property and family names but also guilt, disputed histories, cultural memory, and unresolved grief. Water repeatedly threatens homes and lives, while oil provides employment even as it damages the communities that depend on it. The novel ultimately asks whether survival means remaining, leaving, remembering, or learning when to release what cannot be preserved.
Summary
The story begins with an act of violence buried deep in the history of the Terrebonne family. In nineteenth-century Chenière Disparue, fisherman Noé Terrebonne sometimes assists Chinese shrimp merchant Li Shan in secretly transporting Asian immigrants into Louisiana, but when inspectors threaten to discover them during one journey, Noé and his sons throw occupied barrels into the water, causing the people hidden inside to drown.
Later that year, a catastrophic hurricane strikes the vulnerable coastal settlement. Noé’s house unexpectedly becomes a refuge for dozens of neighbors, and he risks his life with Jean Guidry to rescue people during the eye of the storm, creating a sharp contradiction between the lives he previously sacrificed and the lives he now struggles to save.
More than a century later, Wilford “Boy” Broussard lives in the disappearing Louisiana marsh by hunting, fishing, trapping, salvaging, and frequently ignoring laws he considers less legitimate than generations of local use. He resents his uncle Jacot and aunt Rosa Terrebonne because they legally control marshland that Boy believes should have passed through his mother’s family.
Boy’s unstable existence changes when his former girlfriend Mandy arrives with Lee, their twelve-year-old daughter, and leaves her in his care while she works offshore. Boy has never been a conventional father, and his first attempts at caring for Lee expose how poorly his independent, risk-filled life fits the responsibilities of raising a child.
At the same time, seventy-five-year-old Rosa Terrebonne is dying from uterine cancer. She has concealed her illness until the pain becomes impossible to hide, leaving her husband Jacot and grandson Jamie to confront the fact that the woman who has long held much of their family life together will soon be gone.
Rosa’s approaching death makes her reconsider the property, possessions, and stories accumulated across her lifetime. In particular, she feels that disputed family land should be returned to Boy, and she hides handwritten instructions among papers in her Bible in an attempt to correct what she sees as an old injustice.
While Rosa is dying, an offshore drilling rig explodes in the Gulf. The catastrophe connects nearly every major character because petroleum has shaped their jobs, land, family history, and environment for generations, and Boy becomes terrified when he realizes Mandy may have been working aboard the rig.
He tries to hide the news from Lee while secretly contacting hospitals and offshore workers. When Mandy is finally confirmed alive, Boy and Lee travel to meet her, but her return does not restore the life she had before the explosion because she comes back physically injured and psychologically shaken by what she witnessed.
The oil disaster has another meaning for Father Fabian Dakolo, a Nigerian priest serving the Louisiana parish. Fabian grew up in the Niger Delta, where petroleum leaks, pipelines, gas flares, contamination, and corporate neglect were ordinary parts of life, so the Gulf catastrophe reminds him that communities separated by oceans can be damaged by the same industry while receiving very different levels of public attention.
Fabian also carries guilt concerning Rosa and Jacot’s dead son Robbie. Before Robbie took his own life, he had spoken with Fabian about despair and the point of continuing to live, and Fabian remains troubled by the possibility that his conventional reassurances failed a man who needed something more substantial.
Jamie carries Robbie’s death differently. Anxious since childhood and deeply frightened of losing the people he loves, Jamie relies on rituals, familiar objects, his grandparents’ house, and memories of his father to create a sense of safety.
Rosa gives Jamie one final responsibility by asking him to call a mysterious telephone number after her death. He eventually discovers that she has arranged to donate her body to an anatomical gift program, a decision that reflects her refusal to be buried in coastal ground that may eventually be consumed or exposed by the Gulf.
When Rosa dies, Jacot is devastated not only by her absence but also by the fact that she has denied him the traditional funeral rituals he expected. He is left in their old house with Jamie while his own neurological condition worsens, causing lapses in memory, movement, orientation, and judgment.
The conflict over Boy’s disputed land also survives Rosa. Boy believes his long use of the property gives him a moral claim stronger than the paperwork that supports Jacot’s legal ownership, while Jacot believes he preserved the land through taxes, documents, leases, and financial management.
Their disagreement is complicated by Jacot’s own past. As a young man during Louisiana’s petroleum boom, Jacot acted as a translator between outside landmen and French-speaking or Native residents, sometimes reassuring people about English-language documents whose full consequences they did not understand.
Over time, Jacot became part of a system in which familiar local trust helped outside businesses acquire valuable rights and property. Although he did not begin with full knowledge of what he was enabling, he eventually understood enough to make his continued participation morally troubling, giving Boy’s resentment a historical basis.
The novel repeatedly places this modern conflict beside older stories of migration and dispossession. The Terrebonne and Guidry ancestors cross oceans, lose children, survive colonial uncertainty, experience the Acadian expulsion, scatter across unfamiliar territories, and eventually establish themselves in Louisiana.
These historical episodes weaken any simple idea that land permanently belongs to one family because its ancestors lived there first. The people who later defend deeds and inheritance with such certainty are themselves descended from communities that were displaced, dependent on Indigenous assistance, scattered by governments, and forced to begin again elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the Gulf spill expands. Mandy attempts to rebuild her life by returning to offshore work in Mexico despite her trauma, largely because economic necessity gives her few easy alternatives, while Boy increasingly becomes Lee’s primary parent.
Lee forces Boy to see himself differently. His poaching, drug use, casual relationship with guns, distrust of authority, and willingness to break rules no longer affect only him because a child is watching and learning from everything he does.
Jamie responds to the growing crisis almost oppositely. His friend Holly turns oil contamination into public outrage and political activity, while Jamie withdraws from publicity because the spill intensifies his belief that the world is too unstable to control.
Even the Terrebonne house, which Jamie has treated as a sanctuary, becomes part of the larger environmental problem. Maps show that levees, canals, saltwater intrusion, oil development, erosion, and the loss of sediment are transforming Louisiana so rapidly that familiar distinctions between marsh, property, and open water are becoming increasingly uncertain.
Jacot discovers this instability when a lawyer explains that some of his marsh property may legally become state water as erosion widens industrial canals and destroys solid land. The revelation attacks the foundation of Jacot’s worldview because deeds and boundaries cannot protect property if the physical ground described by those documents disappears.
As hurricane season approaches, Boy’s anger becomes increasingly destructive. After an oil-company meeting leaves residents furious about compensation, cleanup, fishing restrictions, and continuing contamination, he learns that Jacot may sell the disputed property, making him feel that something already stolen from his family is about to be sold away permanently.
Boy then causes a much more personal crisis. During stormy weather he strikes Father Fabian with his vehicle and, overwhelmed by panic, drives away rather than stopping to help, horrifying Lee and exposing the moral limit of Boy’s belief that rules can simply be ignored whenever they conflict with his instincts.
Fabian survives the collision. He also learns that complaints within his parish concern not one terrible offense but a broader belief that he is too distant, foreign, or difficult to understand, forcing him to accept that devoted service will not necessarily make the community see him as fully belonging there.
A major hurricane now moves toward the parish. Jacot, carrying Rosa’s returned ashes, enters the marsh alone because he wants to scatter them in a secluded place associated with their youth, even though both his memory and the landscape have changed so drastically that he can no longer reliably find it.
Boy also enters the marsh before evacuating and destroys an abandoned oil wellhead in an angry attempt to strike back at the industry he blames for much of the region’s destruction. When he later encounters Jacot, who fires a gun to attract his attention because he is lost, Boy misreads the shots as hostility and leaves him behind.
Boy’s own attempt to escape soon ends when police connect him to Fabian’s hit-and-run. He is arrested, and Lee is separated from him, forcing Boy to recognize that the outlaw independence he has long celebrated has made him incapable of protecting his daughter when she most needs stability.
Jamie takes responsibility for Lee while Jacot remains missing. Instead of immediately evacuating, they return to the old Terrebonne house, where Jamie tries to comfort her by explaining the complicated family relationships that connect Broussards, Guidrys, and Terrebonnes.
The hurricane eventually floods the house that generations have treated as a symbol of endurance. Jamie and Lee retreat upward as water rises, proving that neither family history nor confidence in the past can guarantee physical safety in a changing environment.
Father Fabian reaches them during the storm despite his injured arm. Unable to stop the hurricane or solve their family problems, he simply stays with them, making companionship itself a form of rescue.
Eventually the leaking Gulf well is sealed, but the damage already caused cannot be reversed. Fabian prepares to return to Nigeria, Boy faces legal consequences, Mandy continues trying to rebuild her life, and the families remain connected to a coast whose future is deeply uncertain.
Before leaving, Fabian swims into the Gulf and briefly feels the temptation to continue outward, but he deliberately turns back toward shore. In a story repeatedly marked by drowning, disappearance, grief, suicide, migration, and communities threatened by water, his decision to return becomes an affirmation that survival can sometimes consist simply in choosing to come back.
The closing movement returns to Rosa before the main events, when she travels with Esseline in search of Acadian ancestry in France and Nova Scotia. What she finds is not perfect historical certainty but reconstructions, missing graves, doubtful stories, and places that no longer recognize the family names she hoped would connect her directly to the past.
Rosa gradually understands that ancestry cannot provide complete possession of history any more than a deed can guarantee possession of disappearing land. What remains are partial stories, remembered people, uncertain locations, and the human desire to say that someone lived here once, even when the sea continues changing what “here” means.
Characters
Wilford “Boy” Broussard
Boy is one of the most contradictory figures in Should the Waters Take Us, combining deep knowledge of the Louisiana marsh with an almost deliberate refusal to live according to ordinary social expectations. Hunting, trapping, poaching, salvaging, drinking, smoking marijuana, carrying weapons, and ignoring property boundaries all support his idea of himself as someone who belongs to an older system of survival rather than to laws written by distant authorities.
His resentment toward Jacot is therefore about more than acreage. Boy believes continuous use, family memory, and the knowledge passed to him by Mr. Hubert create a form of ownership more legitimate than deeds, taxes, leases, and legal transfers.
Lee changes the meaning of his choices because she turns private recklessness into parental responsibility. Actions Boy once regarded as harmless defiance become lessons observed by his daughter, and her reactions gradually force him to recognize that independence without accountability can damage other people.
His hit-and-run involving Fabian marks his clearest moral failure. By fleeing, Boy discovers that there are situations in which distrust of authority cannot justify refusing responsibility, and his eventual arrest destroys the self-image of the untouchable marsh survivor who can always improvise his way around consequences.
Lee
Lee serves as both a child caught inside adult disasters and a moral witness to the behavior of those adults. At twelve, she must confront her mother’s near death, long separations from Mandy, Boy’s unconventional parenting, environmental contamination, a major hurricane, and eventually Boy’s arrest.
Despite these pressures, Lee is not written simply as helpless. She observes closely, questions Boy’s assumptions, adapts quickly, and often responds to danger with a directness that makes adults uncomfortable.
Her presence is particularly important to Boy’s development because she evaluates actions that he has long justified without explanation. Poaching, guns, drugs, injured wildlife, reckless driving, and lawbreaking look different when he has to explain them to someone who has not inherited his code of survival.
Lee also becomes part of the larger family story when Jamie explains their genealogy to her during the hurricane. At that moment, family history becomes less about proving possession and more about telling a frightened child that she is connected to other people.
Mandy
Mandy represents the human cost of dependence on offshore petroleum employment. She survives the rig explosion through extraordinary circumstances, but survival leaves her physically battered and psychologically changed.
Her decision to work offshore again can initially seem impossible to Boy, who cannot understand why she would return to an environment associated with terror and death. Yet Mandy’s choice reveals the economic trap facing workers whose dangerous jobs are also among the few reliable ways of supporting themselves and their families.
Her distance from Lee after the disaster complicates her role as a mother. Mandy sometimes appears restless or selfish, but her actions can also be read as attempts to rebuild a sense of identity after an experience that has made ordinary domestic life difficult.
She therefore challenges any simple division between responsible and irresponsible parenting. Mandy loves Lee, yet trauma and economic need repeatedly pull her away from the stable maternal role that others expect her to occupy.
Rosalie “Rosa” Terrebonne
Rosa is one of the intellectual and moral centers of the book. Her lifelong habit of reading, annotating, investigating genealogy, questioning inherited stories, and reconsidering ownership makes her unusually willing to challenge the assumptions that have shaped her family.
Her cancer forces her to examine what should happen to everything she leaves behind. The disputed land troubles her because she recognizes that legal possession does not necessarily settle the moral question of whether Jacot and she should have controlled it.
Rosa’s attempt to give the property to Boy is therefore an act of restitution rather than generosity in her own mind. Boy’s refusal exposes the limitation of that gesture because returning something as a gift still allows the giver to claim the authority of ownership.
Her choice to donate her body is equally revealing. Rosa rejects the idea that burial can guarantee permanence in a region where cemeteries themselves can disappear, and she accepts physical dissolution with greater calm than Jacot can manage.
Jacot Terrebonne
Jacot embodies the complicated relationship between ambition, petroleum, property, and moral compromise. As a young man, his ability to speak both French and English makes him useful to outside landmen seeking agreements with local people who often cannot read the legal documents placed before them.
His early involvement can partly be explained by youth, poverty, admiration for educated businessmen, and incomplete understanding. The moral problem deepens once he begins to recognize that the documents can take far more from people than they realize and continues participating anyway.
By old age, Jacot has built his identity around legal ownership, paperwork, leases, and the belief that careful management saved property that others might have lost. Boy’s accusation of theft threatens not merely his estate but the story Jacot has told himself about the meaning of his life’s work.
His relationship with Rosa reveals a gentler side. Their long marriage contains affection, frustration, secrecy, memory, and mutual dependence, and his final journey with her ashes shows how desperately he wants geography to preserve what death has taken.
Jamie Terrebonne
Jamie experiences danger primarily through anxiety rather than physical aggression or activism. From childhood onward, he tries to control the possibility of loss through rituals, prayer, familiar objects, repetitive actions, and attachment to his grandparents’ home.
Robbie’s death intensifies those tendencies but does not fully explain them. Jamie had already feared death deeply as a child, making his father’s suicide part of a much older pattern in which love and the fear of separation become nearly inseparable.
Rosa’s death removes one of his strongest emotional anchors, while Jacot’s neurological decline forces Jamie to recognize that the remaining adult structure around him is also failing. His instinct is to preserve the old house and withdraw from a frightening world, yet coastal destruction makes even withdrawal impossible.
His care for Lee during the hurricane shows meaningful growth. Responsibility gives him something more concrete than fear, and he becomes capable of offering another person the reassurance and belonging that he has spent much of his life seeking for himself.
Father Fabian Dakolo
Fabian occupies a unique position in Should the Waters Take Us because he recognizes similarities between coastal Louisiana and the Niger Delta that many of the Louisiana characters cannot see as clearly. Petroleum has transformed both regions by providing jobs and money while also producing contamination, damaged ecosystems, corporate power, and communities forced to live beside risks they did not create alone.
As a Nigerian priest in a Louisiana parish, Fabian is simultaneously responsible for the community and excluded from full belonging within it. His accent, nationality, race, manner, and cultural assumptions are repeatedly interpreted by others before his actions are considered on their own terms.
Robbie’s suicide creates a private crisis inside Fabian’s public religious role. He worries that conventional spiritual reassurance was inadequate, and that experience gradually changes his understanding of ministry from providing explanations to remaining present when explanations fail.
His decision to reach Jamie and Lee during the hurricane represents that mature understanding. Fabian cannot control the storm, but he can refuse to leave vulnerable people alone, and his later decision to turn back while swimming into the Gulf expresses the same commitment to continued life.
Robbie Terrebonne
Robbie is absent from the main present-day action because he has already died, yet his influence remains everywhere. His suicide shapes Jamie’s anxiety, Boy’s guilt, Fabian’s doubts about his ministry, Rosa’s grief, Jacot’s sense of family loss, and the emotional atmosphere of the Terrebonne household.
Different characters remember different versions of him. Jamie protects intensely private memories of his father, Boy remembers the final night on the shrimp boat, and Fabian remembers the despair Robbie expressed before his death.
This fragmented remembrance matters because Robbie cannot be reduced to a single explanation. The people who loved him repeatedly wonder whether they missed signs, failed him, or could have prevented his death, but none possesses a complete account of another person’s suffering.
Robbie therefore becomes an example of the limits of retrospective certainty. Memory can preserve someone after death, but it cannot always explain why that person made a final, irreversible decision.
Noé Terrebonne
Noé introduces one of the story’s earliest moral contradictions. His willingness to throw occupied barrels overboard to avoid detection makes him responsible for deaths that become part of the hidden moral inheritance of the Terrebonne family.
The hurricane later places him in the opposite role. His house shelters dozens of neighbors, and he risks himself in floodwater to rescue people whose homes have collapsed.
These actions do not cancel one another. Instead, Noé demonstrates how the same person can be capable of cowardice, violence, courage, and communal responsibility under different forms of pressure.
His story also questions the neat moral narratives created after disasters. Later observers may blame the destroyed community for failing to prepare, while the actual circumstances show how little warning people had and how survival often depended on chance.
Mr. Hubert
Mr. Hubert is Boy’s true formative parent in many respects. An elderly Houma-Cajun healer, he teaches Boy how to understand the marsh, survive within it, and interpret belonging through knowledge and use rather than paperwork.
Because Rosa and Jacot did not take Boy into their household during his difficult childhood, Hubert’s care gains additional emotional importance. The camp and land associated with him become proof, in Boy’s mind, that inheritance can exist through lived experience even when legal documents say otherwise.
Boy’s attachment to Hubert also helps explain his resistance to institutions. What he trusts is knowledge transmitted personally through people who lived on the land, while courts, wildlife authorities, corporations, and title records appear to him as later systems imposed from outside.
After Hubert is gone, Boy continues to treat the old camp almost as a moral reference point. Yet his later destructive behavior there suggests that preserving a mentor’s values is not the same as merely preserving the mentor’s possessions.
Holly
Holly responds to catastrophe through visibility, political language, documentation, and public engagement. Where Jamie removes social-media tags and tries to withdraw from frightening information, Holly records the spill, criticizes institutional responses, and seeks evidence of environmental damage.
Her activism gives Jamie access to places and realities he might otherwise avoid. Contaminated beaches, cleanup operations, tar, political visits, and public arguments become harder for him to treat as distant events once Holly insists on seeing and documenting them.
At the same time, Holly’s certainty contrasts with Jamie’s discomfort about simple explanations. Jamie increasingly understands that petroleum companies, government policies, levees, local employment, family leases, and ordinary economic choices all contribute to the coastal crisis.
Their friendship therefore brings two legitimate but different reactions to disaster together. Holly needs to speak, while Jamie needs time to understand how anyone can assign responsibility within a system in which nearly everyone is connected to the problem.
Esseline
Esseline plays an important role in Rosa’s understanding of ancestry. Their genealogy travels begin with the hope that geographical locations, names, graves, and preserved sites might provide direct access to the past.
Esseline is often more skeptical than Rosa about claims of authenticity. Her willingness to puncture romantic assumptions helps Rosa recognize that reconstructed sites, uncertain records, missing bodies, and incomplete stories cannot provide the absolute historical connection she initially desires.
She also matters to the land dispute because Rosa believes possessions or property should have passed differently through the family. Rosa’s late-life concern about what belonged to Esseline and her descendants becomes part of the broader moral question of whether inheritance can be corrected after decades of legal possession.
Through Esseline, genealogy becomes less about celebrating a pure line of descent and more about confronting the uncertainty surrounding family narratives.
Li Shan
Li Shan appears only briefly, but his role reveals that the Louisiana coast has never been culturally isolated. His work as a Chinese shrimp merchant and his involvement in smuggling Asian immigrants place Chinese and Asian histories inside a region that is sometimes described primarily through Cajun ancestry.
His association with Noé also exposes the violence that can occur when vulnerable migrants are treated as cargo rather than human beings. The immigrants hidden in barrels are dependent on men whose fear of legal consequences eventually outweighs concern for their lives.
Li Shan therefore expands the novel’s treatment of migration beyond the Acadian experience. The descendants of one displaced population can themselves participate in systems that exploit another displaced population.
Jean Guidry
Jean Guidry appears during the nineteenth-century hurricane as Noé’s partner in rescue. Together they enter dangerous floodwater during the temporary calm and help bring stranded people toward the Terrebonne house.
His presence reinforces the importance of collective survival in coastal communities. Individual households may carry different histories and conflicts, but catastrophic weather quickly turns neighbors into people whose lives depend upon one another.
Jean also establishes the Guidry name within the novel’s deeper family history. Later generations will debate ancestry and ownership, yet his role reminds readers that survival often depended less on legal categories than on immediate cooperation.
Martin Dupré dit Terrebonne
Martin belongs to the distant European ancestry later generations attempt to reconstruct. His migration from France to New France becomes part of the family’s origin story, but the account refuses to present migration as uncomplicated opportunity.
The Atlantic journey involves uncertainty, hardship, and the death of an infant. Martin and the young woman traveling with him eventually survive and have more children, but their later descendants inherit a story already shaped by loss.
His importance lies partly in the uncertainty surrounding him. The novel questions how much later generations can truly know about distant ancestors and how easily incomplete lives become simplified into founding legends.
The Young Terrebonne Ancestress
The unnamed young woman who migrates with Martin gives the ancestral story an emotional cost that conventional genealogy might hide. She leaves a life already damaged by fire, enters a marriage and migration filled with uncertainty, and gives birth during the Atlantic crossing.
When her infant dies because she cannot nurse it, the ocean becomes not simply a route toward a new future but a burial place. Her inability to release the dead child immediately emphasizes the private grief concealed inside larger historical narratives of settlement.
Her story challenges later descendants who want ancestry to provide pride, certainty, or justification for belonging. Ancestral history contains suffering that cannot fairly be reduced to a necessary sacrifice made so future generations could prosper.
The Unnamed French Settler at Port Royal
The imagined French settler at Port Royal unsettles the idea that colonial history can be reconstructed entirely through official records. His dependence on Indigenous knowledge, attraction to a Mi’kmaq woman, and eventual decision to remain when other French settlers depart place his possible future outside the written archive.
At first, his approach toward the Mi’kmaq woman reflects the entitlement of a newcomer who does not understand the people already living there. His later behavior suggests a movement toward greater humility, although the novel deliberately refuses to provide a complete or comfortable resolution.
His uncertain fate matters because descendants often build confident identities from beginnings that were never recorded with equal confidence. Family origins may contain encounters that documents omitted, misunderstood, or deliberately ignored.
The Mi’kmaq Woman
The young Mi’kmaq woman represents a history that European genealogies cannot simply absorb into their own narrative. Her initial fear of the French settler emphasizes the imbalance and uncertainty created by colonial arrival.
She also reminds readers that European settlement did not begin on empty land. French survival depended heavily on Indigenous knowledge and assistance, even while European accounts often positioned colonists as discoverers and namers.
Because her later relationship with the settler remains uncertain, she cannot be turned into a convenient ancestral symbol. That uncertainty protects the story from falsely claiming knowledge that the historical record cannot provide.
Marie Guidry
Marie grows up closely connected to her brother François after their mother dies. Their early family life gives them a sense of security rooted in kinship and Acadian community rather than individual property.
The Acadian expulsion destroys that security through political authority. Families that believed themselves established suddenly discover that another government can redefine belonging, remove them from homes, separate relatives, and scatter communities.
Marie’s experience contributes to the novel’s broader challenge to claims of permanent possession. Later descendants who defend land as inherited certainty come from people whose own relationship to place was violently broken.
François Guidry
François becomes one of the most important historical figures in the Guidry line because displacement eventually carries him toward Louisiana. Separated from family during the Acadian expulsion, he must survive among people whose language and customs are unfamiliar while searching for information about relatives who may be dead.
His eventual movement south shows how migration can preserve a community without restoring what has been lost. Louisiana becomes a place of survival, but it cannot return the people, homes, and certainty destroyed in Acadia.
The land associated with François’s descendants later becomes part of disputes involving ownership and inheritance. This creates a powerful irony: people descended from someone dispossessed by government authority eventually rely on another system of legal authority to defend exclusive possession.
Jean-Baptiste Guidry
Jean-Baptiste is defined by devotion to family and by the destruction of the stable world he attempts to maintain after his wife dies. He raises Marie and François within a close Acadian community, giving them a sense of belonging that seems permanent until deportation begins.
His disappearance during the expulsion and shipwreck represents the unresolved losses that migration histories often leave behind. Descendants may know that a person existed without knowing exactly when, where, or how that life ended.
His absence becomes part of inherited uncertainty. Family history preserves his name and relationships, but not a complete account of his final fate.
Vince
Vince provides Fabian with companionship in a community where the priest often feels culturally isolated. Their interactions give Fabian space for ordinary conversation rather than forcing him always to perform the formal role expected of a priest.
At the same time, Vince cannot erase the broader social distance Fabian experiences. Friendship with individual parishioners does not automatically produce full acceptance within the parish.
His support after Fabian is injured becomes especially important because Fabian is accustomed to being the person responsible for others. Vince helps reveal that the priest who serves everyone else also needs care.
Alton Bourgeois
Alton Bourgeois helps Jamie understand the physical processes behind Louisiana’s disappearing coast. Through maps and explanations, he shows how levees, sediment loss, industrial canals, saltwater intrusion, and erosion have altered the land.
His importance comes from refusing simple answers. Oil companies contributed enormously to environmental destruction, but local residents also accepted leases, dug canals, worked petroleum jobs, and depended on the economy those industries created.
Alton’s philosophy that people may have to save what can still be saved and accept the loss of the rest deeply disturbs Jamie. For someone whose life has revolved around preventing loss through vigilance, that idea feels almost unbearable.
Vicar Nakate
Vicar Nakate represents the institutional structure within which Fabian must operate. The complaint reaching the diocese fills Fabian with anxiety because its vague language allows him to imagine almost any accusation.
When the issue becomes clearer, Fabian discovers that the criticism concerns parishioners who see him as distant, foreign, or difficult to understand. Nakate therefore becomes the person through whom Fabian must confront the possibility that institutional approval and sincere service are not the same thing.
His role contributes to Fabian’s eventual maturation. Rather than defining his priesthood through whether every parishioner approves of him, Fabian increasingly defines it through whether he remains present for people who need him.
Themes
Water, Land, and Impermanence
Water repeatedly exposes the weakness of human claims to permanence. Hurricanes destroy settlements, people drown, cemeteries disappear, marsh becomes open water, coastlines retreat, canals widen, and property boundaries that appear permanent on documents become meaningless when the physical ground no longer exists.
This instability gives the title Should the Waters Take Us its larger significance. The question is not limited to whether individuals survive floods; it asks what happens to identity when houses, graves, ancestral places, livelihoods, and landscapes can all be taken or transformed.
Different characters respond by trying to preserve something. Jacot protects deeds, Jamie clings to the family house, Rosa researches genealogy, Boy insists on inherited use of the marsh, and entire communities build stories around places that water may eventually erase.
The novel does not dismiss those efforts, but it repeatedly demonstrates their limits. Survival cannot always mean keeping the physical world unchanged because the Louisiana coast is already changing faster than memory can follow it.
Fabian’s final decision to turn back toward shore offers a quieter understanding of survival. Permanence may be impossible, but choosing life, returning to others, remembering responsibly, and helping people endure can still have meaning even when the land itself cannot be kept forever.
Ownership, Inheritance, and Dispossession
The conflict between Boy and Jacot asks whether legal possession and moral ownership are necessarily the same thing. Jacot has deeds, tax records, contracts, and decades of professional knowledge supporting his claim, while Boy has continuous use, family memory, Mr. Hubert’s teaching, and the conviction that paperwork was used to take what others already understood as theirs.
Jacot’s history as a translator makes the problem more serious. His familiar face and ability to speak French helped outside landmen secure signatures from people who did not always understand English legal documents, showing how legality can produce injustice without technically violating the formal system that created the documents.
The historical sections widen the question. Acadian ancestors are themselves expelled from land they considered home, and their descendants eventually receive land elsewhere through another government’s authority.
This cycle makes exclusive claims of permanent ownership difficult to defend with complete confidence. The family that once suffered dispossession can participate in another form of dispossession generations later.
Rosa’s attempted restitution to Boy reveals another difficulty. Even returning land can preserve the hierarchy involved in taking it, because calling the act a gift suggests that the current owner possesses the authority to decide whether the claimant receives what he already regards as his inheritance.
Petroleum, Survival, and Complicity
Petroleum is both destructive and necessary to the economic life of the communities shown in the story. It contaminates water, destroys vegetation, contributes to coastal erosion, kills wildlife, causes industrial accidents, threatens fisheries, and leaves workers physically and psychologically damaged.
Yet the same industry pays wages, provides leases, supports families, creates professional opportunities, and gives people such as Mandy a way to earn substantial income. This contradiction prevents the story from dividing its characters neatly into innocent victims and outside villains.
Jacot gains status and money through oil-related land work. Mandy returns offshore after nearly dying because she needs employment, while Boy condemns the industry even though his family, friends, community, and personal economy remain connected to it.
Fabian’s Nigerian background expands the issue beyond Louisiana. His childhood in the Niger Delta demonstrates that petroleum extraction has imposed similar costs on communities elsewhere, particularly when distant corporations and governments treat local environmental damage as an acceptable price for energy production.
The theme therefore becomes one of collective implication. Characters can criticize corporations without pretending that their own lives are completely separate from petroleum, and the novel asks how people should respond when the system damaging their home is also the system supporting their survival.
Memory, Ancestry, and Belonging
Memory gives the characters continuity, but it never provides perfect truth. Jamie protects private memories of Robbie, Boy interprets the marsh through what Mr. Hubert taught him, Jacot remembers landscapes that no longer physically exist, and Rosa searches archives and ancestral locations hoping to understand where her family came from.
The historical narratives repeatedly question whether inherited stories are factual, symbolic, incomplete, or partly imagined. An unnamed ancestor may have acted differently from the version preserved by descendants, genealogical records contain gaps, graves disappear, reconstructed historical sites imitate originals, and distant villages may feel no connection to people who arrive claiming ancestral belonging.
Rosa gradually understands that genealogy cannot restore the past in a complete form. Knowing an ancestor’s name or locating a historical place does not recreate that person’s private life, grief, motives, relationships, or understanding of home.
The same principle applies to Robbie. The people who loved him remember different versions of him, but none can assemble those memories into a complete explanation for his death.
Belonging therefore becomes less about possessing an unquestionable historical claim and more about acknowledging connection without pretending to absolute certainty. People belong through care, responsibility, memory, relationship, and shared experience, even when history remains incomplete and the places anchoring those memories are changing or disappearing.
