SEABROOK, Texas -- 'Galveston Bay is just like a fine woman,' said James Stanfield, a shrimper who boasts of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. 'If you rape her, she's never any good anymore.'
Because of the influx of Vietnamese refugee fishermen, Stanfield contends, one of the world's finest shrimping areas is being ruined by too many shrimpers going after too few shrimp.
Stanfield, 40, is one of a group of native-born fishermen and klansmen under a May 14 federal court order halting violence and intimidation of the Vietnamese fishermen on the bay.
A burly man who prides himself on being part Indian, Stanfield has something in common with the smaller Col. Nguyen Van Nam -- the man who brought the suit that won the preliminary injunction which protects the Vietnamese shrimpers -- besides their straight, coal-black hair.
The klansman and the colonel, who spent 22 years in the South Vietnamese army, both hate communists.
'The last two years have been a disaster for me,' said Nam, 47, a shrimper who leads the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association, 'but there has been no trouble since the injunction, which I hope will solve the problem.'
In ordering a halt to the boat burnings, assaults, armed boat patrols and cross-burning rallies detailed during four days of hearings in her court, U.S. District Judge Gabrielle McDonald said, 'The Vietnamese fishermen have a right to be here.'
Texas, in an effort to close Klan paramilitary training camps in the state, has decided to intervene in the case before the black jurist.
Lawyers for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is financing the suit on behalf of the Vietnamese, will seek to make the injunction permanent.
'We just want to earn a living,' said Nam, who fled Saigon in a South Vietnamese navy vessel on April 30, 1975, the day his country fell to the communists.
'We obey the law.' said the colonel. 'They should not use guns and violence to force us out. I sued to have a chance to discuss these things in court. This is better than fighting on the water.'
Nam, who has a wife and two children, said he will leave if someone will pay him $30,000 for the boat in which he invested $35,000 two years ago. The colonel said his organization represents 116 Vietnamese and 68 shrimp boats.
'We wanted a chance to re-establish our lives,' Nam said quietly in an interview in his modest frame house on the waterfront.
Nam scoffs at Klan charges there are communists in the Vietnamese Fishermen's Association.
'I challenge the Klan to point them out,' said the colonel, who added that he and some other refugees 'hope we can go back to Vietnam some day to fight the communists.'
Nam, who is having trouble making payments on his boat, would like to leave the bay area and operate a gasoline station or 'do carpentry or plumbing.'
'I'm glad I came to the United States but I regret coming to Seabrook,' he said. 'The American fishermen don't want competition. We work harder and eat less than they do.'
Nam got up from the kitchen table and opened the door of his refrigerator.
'You don't see any meat in there,' he said. 'One small fish is enough to feed my family.'
Eugene K. 'Gene' Fisher, 35, president of the Seabrook-Kemah Fishermen's Coalition formed to oppose the Vietnamese, takes a decidedly different view of the controversy.
'This is not their country,' Fisher said. 'They're guests in this country. They migrate here. Through sheer numbers, they're going to shove us out. This is my town and I don't see where they have the right to take it over in the name of competition.'
Fisher, 35, a former Marine who said he was 'shot six times' in Vietnam during the war, said it was he who invited the Klan into the controversy.
'I personally went to the Klan and asked them to come in,' he said.
Of the violence that followed -- including the burning of four boats owned by Vietnamese -- Fisher said, 'The news media blew it all out of proportion.'
'I think the Vietnamese burned the boats themselves to get public sympathy,' said Joseph 'Jody' Collins, 34, a shrimper having lunch with his wife Marilyn at the Dutch Kettle, a Kemah restaurant where fishermen hang out.
'I think this is the last generation of American fishermen,' commented Mrs. Collins.
'It's okay for the government to limit car imports but when we try to stop the import of cheap labor we get called bigots and racists,' her husband said.
Louis Beam, Grand Dragon of the Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, minced no words in an interview at a restaurant at nearby Angleton.
'I'm a racist,' said Beam, a door gunner on a helicopter during the Vietnam War. 'Being a racist means loving your own culture, your history, your children. I'm not anti-Vietnamese. I'm pro-American.'
Am My Doi, 11, a pretty fifth-grader, left Vietnam three years ago on a boat which after a dfficult passage made it to Malaysia.
A year ago, her father -- who had owned a bus company in Saigon -- bought a shrimp boat and a fish house, where Am My's mother buys seafood from fishermen and resells it to American customers on the Seabrook waterfront.
Am My helps her mother in the fish house.
She and the other Vietnamese children on the waterfront have seen the white-robed klansmen in the armed boats used to intimidate the Vietnamese fishermen.
Am My, who fears for her father's safety, said in fluent English, 'When there is trouble on the water, my father stays at home.'
'When South Vietnam fell, our government was obligated to help these Vietnamese,' acknowledged David Collins, 32. 'We could have stood 15 or 20 boats. I sold them a boat myself. That was 3- years ago. But they bought boats all over the place and congregated right here.'
Collins said the Vietnamese did not want the suit.
'This Southern Poverty Law Center is just using the lawsuit to bust the Klan,' said Collins, who claimed the coalition already has had to spend $38,000 to fight the suit. 'I'm going to have to sell my house to pay my share.'
Morris Dees, the attorney who heads the Center headquartered at Montgomery, Ala., does not believe that.
'They could not have spent that much,' said Dees, who said his life was threatened by Grand Dragon Beam during the federal court hearing in Houston. 'Anyway, it wasn't the Vietnamese who started the problem.'
Dees, a veteran civil rights activist, said non-Vietnamese still hold about 90 percent of the commercial fishing licenses in the bay area. He claims the injunction is a victory.
'We've accomplished what we set out to do,' Dees said. 'There has been no violence since the injunction. The injuction has the Klan scared.'
David Berg, a lawyer working with Dees on the case, said the injunction 'will spell the beginning of the end of Louis Beam's Ku Klux Klan in Texas.'
Beam does not sound like a man running scared.
He said Judge McDonald, whom he described as 'this Negress masquerading as a federal judge,' handed down the injunction 'to show sympathy for the Vietnamese. She was just showing sympathy for her people of color.'
Grace Crow, 61, a widow who runs a used-book store near the waterfront, blames the government for the controversy.
'I dont think the government had any right to plop the Vietnnamese down here on people already having a hard time making a living,' Mrs. Crow said. 'If they don't move out, there'll be trouble simply because people won't accept them.'
'The Ku Klux Klan is not helping a bit,' said Mrs. Crow. 'I think they should mind their own business.'
Klansman Stanfield, for his part, professes not to understand why the Vietnamese filed their suit.
'We're not saying none of them have a right to be here,' Stanfield said in an interview at the shop where he repairs shrimp boats for other shrimpers, including some Vietnamese.
'We're just asking the government to control immigration,' said Stanfield, who said he objects only to the large influx of new fishermen.
'It would have been the same if they was niggers, honkies, Indians or anything else,' he said.
'The only reason the Klan got into this was to focus attention on the problem,' Stanfield said. 'Our publicity wasn't going nowhere until the Klan came in. Why, we even had TV from France over here.'
Stanfield said that it was not until after the Klan held rallies that the state limited commercial licenses.
'We had got what we wanted before they filed the lawsuit,' he said. 'There's no trouble now. Why, the Vietnamese bring their boats in here to be repaired. Does that sound like they're afraid of the Klan?'
Stanfield describes Grand Dragon Beam as 'one of the greatest Americans who ever walked ths earth. I put him up there with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Louis Beam is a true patriot.'
Commenting on the Klan's paramilitary camps, Stanfield said, 'They're survival camps. We're not taught to kill Vietnamese or black people. We're taught survival.'
Stanfield, the part-Indian who sees the bay as a fine woman threatened, tried another analogy.
'The Indians were pushed back onto the reservations,' he said. 'Now it seems like this is what's happening to us American fishermen.
'The American Dream,' Stanfield said indignantly, 'is for Americans.'
