Daniel Fromson

Before the asphalt era, the roads of Pass Christian, Mississippi, were paved with oyster shells. Remains from the Gulf Coast's largest oyster reef still coat the white-sand beaches along the scenic route into town, if not the streets, and oystering is a multi-million-dollar industry in the region. But it now coexists with casinos and Walmarts and car dealerships—and with neon-vested oil cleanup workers. They were still working last weekend while this historic shellfishing town of a few thousand held its first annual oyster festival, the same week that the 2010-2011 oyster season began. I visited last Saturday.

The main-festival planning meeting occurred on April 20. That was the day the oil rig exploded. "We thought, 'God, this is crazy,'" Renee Brooks, Pass Christian alderwoman-at-large and the organizer of the festival, told me. She was selling t-shirts to the crowd that had gathered for the festival, which was held in a parking lot next to the harbor. They were there to eat not only Mississippi oysters but also standard fair food and other specialties like crawfish pie and alligator on a stick.

Brooks explained that the disaster raised the stakes, transforming the festival into a much-needed opportunity to dispel the fears of impure seafood that have plagued the Gulf oyster industry. It's an industry that was already ailing. During my visit, I saw just how hard locals are working to replace fear with optimism. Still, it was difficult to ignore that the industry is suffering, and that no matter how many safe oysters are out there, Gulf seafood is still laced with the imagined taint of oil—even, I learned, in the region itself.

The weekend featured the "first annual shuck and run" fun runs, a children's fishing competition, and the crowning of 11th-grader Lauren Jenkins as the first Pearl of the Pass beauty queen. But the main staging area in the oyster awareness battle was a booth manned by the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (DMR), sandwiched between the state-fair-style rotating swings ride and a stall selling bacon-wrapped jalapeños, with the deep blue Gulf right behind as a backdrop. Jessica Rankin, "Seafood Officer I" in the department's Seafood Technology Bureau, presided with colleagues over an ample spread of pamphlets and poster boards—including one, about oyster reef reconstruction, that made it clear that an oil spill was the last thing Pass Christian needed.