His reasoning, as recorded in his journal, was practical. The proposed rail line ran directly through the parcel of land on which the compound sat. Any legitimate survey would require him to document the presence of existing structures and inhabitants. He was in the strictest sense doing his job.
But his journal also reveals a second motivation, one that speaks to something deeper than professional obligation. Callaway wrote, “I cannot walk past this place and file a report that says nothing. A man who sees what I have seen and says nothing is no better than the swamp water which covers everything and reveals nothing.” Callaway approached the compound from the south in plain view carrying his surveying equipment and wearing the canvas vest that identified him as a railroad employee.
He walked directly toward the main hall. He was met as Greer had been 50 years earlier by the patriarch. The man emerged from the double doors and stood on the packed earth in front of the building, watching Callaway approach. This time, however, the patriarch spoke.
According to Callaway’s journal, the man’s first words were, “You are not the first to come. You will not be the last, but you will leave when I tell you, and you will not come back.” The voice, Callaway wrote, was calm. There was no threat in it.
There was no anger. There was only certainty, the kind of certainty that comes from absolute authority, exercised without challenge for so long that it has become indistinguishable from natural law. Callaway identified himself, explained the railroad survey, and asked permission to document the compound's location and structures for his report. The patriarch studied him for a long moment.
Then he nodded once and said, “You may look, you may write, but you will not take anything from this place. Not a stone, not a board, not a person.” That last word, person, is the one Callaway underlined in his journal twice. What Callaway saw over the next two days as he moved through the compound, measuring, sketching, and recording, forms the core of the sealed document.
And the details taken together describe a world that operated by rules so alien to the society that existed just 11 miles away in the town of Kiln that it might as well have been located on a different continent. The first thing Callaway noted was the population. He conducted what amounted to an informal census counting every individual he could see and estimating ages based on physical appearance. His final count was 67 people.
Of those 67, he classified 41 as adults over the age of approximately 16 and 26 as children under that age. Of the 41 adults, he estimated that 28 were women and 13 were men. This ratio disturbed him. In any normal settlement of 67 people, the ratio of men to women would be roughly equal or slightly weighted toward men in a frontier environment.
The Pardio compound had more than twice as many adult women as men. Callaway noted this discrepancy and initially attributed it to the dangers of bayou life, assuming that men might die at higher rates from accidents, snake bite, or disease. He was wrong. The reason for the imbalance was far more deliberate than natural attrition, and he would discover it on his second day inside the compound, when the patriarch's eldest son, a man Callaway refers to in his journal only as the second, took him on a guided tour of the structures that the patriarch had specifically forbidden him to enter on his first day.
The second was a man of about 30, powerfully built, with the same oversized hands as his father, and a scar that ran from his left ear to the corner of his mouth. He spoke in short declarative sentences, rarely using more than five or six words at a time, but he answered Callaway's questions with a directness that suggested either complete transparency or complete indifference to what Callaway might think. Callaway asked him about the ratio of men to women. The second’s answer, recorded verbatim in the journal, was this: “Boys that cannot lead are sent away.
Girls stay. We need mothers more than we need mouths.” Callaway asked what sent away meant.
The second looked at him with what Callaway described as genuine surprise, as though the question were absurd. Then he said, “The bayou takes them.” Callaway pressed the point. He asked whether the bayou takes them meant that the boys were expelled from the compound to fend for themselves in the swamp.
The second said nothing. He turned and walked toward the next building, and Callaway understood that the conversation on that subject was over. But the surveyor's mind was not still. He wrote in his journal that night that he believed sent away and the bayou takes them carried a meaning darker than exile.
He wrote, “A boy of 8 or 10 turned out into this swamp with no provisions and no knowledge of the trails would not survive 3 days. And I believe the family knows this. I believe the family counts on this. The bayou does not take them.
The family feeds them to it.” The second also explained in his clipped manner the compound system of marriage. Marriage as the outside world understood it did not exist inside the compound. There were no ceremonies, no vows, no rings and no celebration of any kind.
Instead the patriarch assigned pairings. When a girl reached what the second described as readiness, a term that Callaway estimated corresponded to an age of approximately 13 or 14, Le Père would designate which man she would live with. The designation was permanent and could not be questioned. Callaway asked whether the women had any say in their pairings.
The second looked at him with what Callaway described as pity, not contempt. Pity, as though Callaway were a child, asking why the sun moves across the sky. The second said, “Le Père knows. The women do not need to know.”
Callaway asked what happened if a woman refused a pairing. The second said nothing. He glanced toward the trap door that covered the underground hole, and that glance was answer enough. The birth records inside the compound were maintained by the patriarch alone.
There was no midwife from the outside world, no doctor, no assistance of any kind beyond what the women themselves could provide for each other during labor. Callaway observed two women in what appeared to be advanced stages of pregnancy during his visit. Neither of them had been excused from their work assignments. They hauled water.
They bent over the grinding stones. They dug in the garden. And when the time came, as the woman's notebook would later confirm, they went to a designated cabin and delivered their children with the help of the older women. And then they returned to work within days.
The children who were born in the compound belonged in every practical sense to the patriarch, not to their mothers, not to the men they had been paired with. The patriarch named them. The patriarch assigned them to cabins. The patriarch determined as they grew which ones would stay and which would be sent away.