Blessed Rejection

Five Year Old Stephanie, Our Lady of Fatima, 1950s 

In his article entitledThe Great Gift of Rejection, lawyer Gerry Spence gives an account of the clubs, fraternities, and competitions from which he was eliminated or experienced outright rejection. He now views that rejection as the gift that shaped him into a fearless legal advocate for underdogs. I can't say that the rejection I experienced netted advancements for mankind. But, I made a lot of progress in the discernment of absurdity in my life.

My initiation was the day I entered first grade at aged five. I didn't have the the privilege of kindergarten. I couldn't write my name, recite the alphabet, or read. I didn't show up with money for lunch. What I did have was a new, hand-sewn emerald green dress and polished saddle oxfords. My mother, low on the concept of preparation for school, yet high on the notion of readiness for the fall fashion season, had made it. Within half an hour of entering the classroom, Sister Benignus assigned me to the "Blackbirds." It didn't take me long to realize that was the F Troop of Our Lady of Fatima. The sassy dress with shiny buttons didn't soften down-the-nose stares coming from the first-teamers, the "Bluebirds." 

Lunch break was a huge relief, until I realized it took a quarter to get it. The nun who found me hiding in the hall brought a sandwich and carton of milk. That day dealt a serious blow to the confidence of this girl who stood outside the front door, hands firmly planted on her hips ready to take on the world. Eventually, I worked my way out of blackbirds and into the blue. 

Within six years, I became an A+ suck-up to nuns. I felt ready to join their tribe. My private Catholic school offered ten girls the opportunity for a one-month trial period in the convent at Our Lady of the Lake in San Antonio. I enrolled in the journalism track and entered the convent on a trial basis. The test drive turned out to be a quick trip to Hell. I cleared the chastity and poverty bars with no effort. In 1958, not many twelve-year old girls were prostitutes who owned property. Silence and obedience were far more difficult for me, a motor-mouth.

Each evening in our dormitory, we gathered our toiletries and headed down to a cavernous bathroom banked by ten sinks on one side and five showers on the other. No nuns accompanied us. Bright lights and ten girls constituted a party in my mind. I made folded fans with wet paper towels and passed them out with all the charm of a cigarette girl in a New York bar. "Here, honey, take one. They're lovely. It's hotter than hell in here. Unconditioned air is a bitch." Pretty soon, most of the girls in the dorm heard about the gathering and joined in. And then out of nowhere, there she was, Sister Quintilla. Quintilla the Nun. Standing at the door, her glare screamed, the Devil always manages to ensnare souls. I knew it would be you.

My last day at Our Lady of the Lake was as auspicious as my first day of school. The "Inquisition" huddled around a table in a room with no windows, behind a closed door. Each girl was taken in for her private conference for the nuns to consider her vocation. When it was my turn, the murder of crows recounted my shortcomings as novitiate. There were gilding the lily. I knew I hadn't passed their muster. "You don't have a calling, dear. Consider yourself passed on by the Sisters of Divine Providence." 

I walked out into the clear light of summer and sat in the small bus waiting to take of us back to Louisiana and eighth grade. I sucked in the warm air and let out an audible sigh. Never had losing felt so right. In the battle for souls, I was the misshapen bullet at the artillery factory. There were worse things at which to fail, like having compassion, empathy and a sense of humor. 

Beauty Play

"Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder,"
at the Christian LaCroix Runway Show

When I was in fourth grade at Immaculate Conception, I really wanted to play the role of Mary in the school's annual Christmas play. I could sing, dance, look piously upon the Baby Jesus, and rock that costume.The nun in charge of our music and theater program had passed me over for the prized role the previous year. Her standards were mysterious, as it seemed by my calculation that I 'measured up' on all counts.
   
After the last year's disappointment, I mustered enough courage to ask "why not me?"

Sister Angelle looked down with her best you-know-I'm-right countenance and said, "you're a brunette and everyone knows our Mary is blonde."

What? Your Mary is a blonde? My mind flipped wildly through limited biblical knowledge: Mary and Joseph leave Nazareth on a donkey for a rocky ride to Bethlehem to be counted with other Jews. They were born in the Middle East. Joseph is a senior brunette. What am I missing here? You don't want me for this role because your ideal of virtuous is blonde?
   
I remember feeling ugly before this confrontation, but at that moment, I was ashamed of eyes like coals, curly chestnut hair, and khaki skin. By the time I was twenty-five, I launched a full blown frontal attack on my appearance: short stature, fleshy thighs, square feet, flimsy nails, American Indian nose, prominent leg veins, short neck, and hair that frizzes in humidity. When a friend of mine stated flatly, "we need longer toes for great foot cleavage in stilettos," I became convinced that beautiful was the search for the Holy Grail.

Abruptly, the fashion industry shifted 'ideal women’ to unconventional: crooked noses, electrifying halos of crimped hair, sunken chests, and heroin-addict circles under the eyes. I got it. This beauty thing was a moving target, arbitrary, contextual, and fabricated by Madison Avenue salesmen as capricious as Sister Angelle's standards of perfection.

I decided to go with what I had. I needed to define my beauty, not theirs. If I shape myself to please someone else, I abandon the core of who I am. As I type this story, I look down at my sixty-six year old hands at the computer keys. They are the threshold into an oozy slide, to the invisible stage of womanhood. With some savings, I could fix a saggy chin, the upper arm sway, thicker belly, gray hair, roadway map thighs, the whatever-else-is-not-in-style-for-the-moment beauty. But, I'd rather work on what's inside and have something to say.

Love what you see in the mirror right this very minute. You've only got one life and you can waste it wanting to be a young blonde virgin mother, or you can embrace what you have and direct your attention to all that is real and lasting. It's a beautiful world that you can own on your own terms. This is one thing you can change.

N’onc Sosthene

This short story is the intellectual property of Stephanie M. Chambers. 

J’ai passé devant ta porte.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!

I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.

No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts! I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.

Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!

(Credit for Cajun Folk Tune, “Jai Passe’ Devant Ta Port,” given below;
Photo credit: Stephanie Chambers, "Ooh La La Oak" ULL Campus 2008)

A cadmium yellow biplane swooped low across the hazy azure sky over Oncle Sosthene’s (pronounced Uncle So-stan') soggy rice field. The pilot looped back over Sosthene’s property to dust the flatland fields of Sosthene’s neighbor for insects that invade these crops. Sosthene had his 12-gauge Remington steadied on his shoulder and took direct aim at the crop duster. He fired several shots before dropping the gun in his field and shaking his burly right fist at the pilot, “goddammit, git outta here; you scarin’ ma chikins’!” This occurs several more times. Later in the day, a dusty Ford pickup drove up to the gate of Sothene’s property and hesitates. Thinking it better not to enter, the driver honked and waited for Sosthene to appear at the gate. The pilot scrambled out of the truck and walked hurriedly to the gate, politely confronting this stooped over, leathery-tanned crazy Cajun farmer. “ Comment c'est va? Were you trying to shoot me down? What the hell is wrong with you, man?” the pilot screamed to Sosthene. “As long as you scare ma chickins wit dat airplane, dey don lay no eggs!” Sosthene bellowed back in his distinctive gravelly thick Cajun burr. “So, ever tom you fly ova ma fiel, I gonna shoot yo ass.” “But, sir, how am I going to go back and forth across the land nearby, if I can’t pass over your field? I need to use this space to dust your neighbor’s land for rice borers.”

This logic was totally wasted on the seemingly simple Cajun rice farmer. Sosthene began his lecture on property rights, familiar to all who have heard him speak in the Duson and Mire town hall meetings. He pointed down the gravel road going south with both arms outstretched, “you see dat road down dere? Dat’s ma property.” Then, he pointed again, both arms outstretched to the road going north, “and ya see dat fence down dere? Dat’s da end of ma property.” Sosthene pointed to the ground with hands clasped as though in prayer, “and below dis gravel road to middle of da earth, dat’s ma property.” And then to the pilot’s astonishment, Sosthene directed both arms high in the air and hollers, “and up dere to God, is ma property too! And as long as you fly in any direction on ma property, I shoot you down in front of da whole worl.” I was not told the pilot’s reaction to this declaration of ownership of the sky, the clouds, the sun, and the air above his land. I only know that Sosthene's chickens happily laid eggs for years to come. No crop dusters were ever heard or seen over his field again.

Oncle Sosthene was Tante Swit’s husband. Together, they had four self-sufficient, hard working children and many grandchildren. It was not an option to fail in their home. Tante Swit was Mamam’s sister. Mamam was the woman I grew up thinking of as my grandmother. Mamam and Tante Nola, the other sister, married very strong Cajun men, too; Tante Swit married a character. Sosthene was known by both the laborers and the governors, and most all of the folks in southwest Louisiana. His arrival to any occasion was unmistakable. He drove a pickup at a heady speed and stopped just as quickly in Mamam’s driveway when invited to dinners where I got to be with him and all of my cousins. Sosthene always wore denim overalls and short-sleeved faded plaid shirts. And, due to some back injury, which I never understood, walked with his body bent at a 45-degree angle. He led with his head, an almost chocolate-creviced countenance half-hidden under a woven straw hat gently stained with perspiration. You could hear the booming voice before you saw the figure. I often wondered if bits of gravel from the roads on his property had somehow ended up tumbling in his vocal cords and the characteristic yell helped to keep the sound flowing. As children, we delighted in his appearance. We knew he would regale us with colorful stories. Like the one about the 8-ft. snake that stood on its tail in a darkened rice field one humidity-heavy evening and prompted more rounds of shotgun fire from Sosthene. My parents, on the other hand, groaned and shifted at the first explosion of that voice. Sosthene had important politics to discuss and even more important persuasion to do with his audience. Every gathering he attended was an opportunity to amass a following, and even better, a vote for his side of the current issue he drove.

Even Louisiana’s former Governor Edwin Edwards was a recipient of one of Sosthene’s fiery verbal assaults. Not far from Sosthene’s property, his perceived gift from God, was a two-lane asphalt road with four stop signs. For years, Sosthene could hear the familiar screech of drivers hitting the brakes and skidding down the narrow highway. The state installed stop signs at the intersection of the two free-wheeling country roads near Sosthene. Farmers often flew down one of the roads, the one everyone had decided was the Cajun ‘main’ road. The only problem was that out-of-towners and strangers didn’t know which one was the main road; both appeared equally traveled and important, and both had stop signs. But, the local Cajun rice farmers knew which set of drivers needed to stop. And in Duson and Ridge, that’s all that mattered. Laws there are decided upon informally by the locals; everyone knows to only abide by the commonly accepted traditions. But, Sosthene, the supreme arbiter of law around his property, deemed it unreasonable to place signs where there must be light. His cause du jour became a lobby for a light of some kind at this intersection. Lives were in danger, the lives of those ignorant of the informal law. Sosthene had a duty to protect them.

On the day of his visit to Governor Edwards, Sosthene laid out his newest pair of overalls and best short-sleeved plaid shirt. When dressed, he polished his lace-up boots and then he placed his unstained Panama straw hat right on the line of his forehead, the line between the white of his bald head and the dark from his work in the fields. Ready for business, he jumped in the freshly washed white pickup and pointed it toward the hour-long highway to Baton Rouge. The capitol building in Baton Rouge has a history with a bit of controversy. It was built by Governor Huey P. Long, and by his order, is taller than any other capitol in the U.S., including the capitol building in Washington, D.C. Never feeling the need for an appointment with those he elected, Sosthene showed up to the 4th Floor of the Capitol Building, unannounced, in the anteroom of the Governor’s office. The secretary begged to differ that Sosthene had single-handedly elected Edwards to serve the state, but upon hearing the distinguishing heavy brogue, Edwards popped out of his smallish office and invited Sosthene to take a seat in the oversized leather chair near his desk. “What ya got on your mind, Sos?” Edwards queried. “Guv, the people are dying at da corner of ma property and you da only one dat can fix it.” Governor Edwards tried in vain to let Sostene down gently. “I can’t put a stoplight on a tiny lil’ ole road in Ridge like dat, Sos.” At this perceived dismissal, Sosthene stood up fiercely, began to pound the governor's desk with his right fist and roared “but, Guv, people dying and dey gonna keep dyin’ and is gonna be yo faul!” Within months, a very short period in the time frame of Louisiana road work, a flashing yellow and red light was installed on Ridge Road at the intersection of it and the smaller road on the corner of Sosthene’s property.

As children we went to church every Sunday and knew Sosthene when was walking up the aisle to receive communion, even though we might be seated many rows ahead of him. We never mistook the sound of his leather boots banging the wide pine planks of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church floors for anyone or anything else. Newcomers might have thought a horse had wandered into the sanctuary and was loping toward the altar; we knew Sosthene was bolting to the rail. His hairless white and café au lait-striped head led the way atop the signature bend of his back. His hands were held tightly together in prayer, but pointed downward to the floor. My guess is that if he couldn’t lower his head, at least he could express his reverence by bowing his hands.

The most colorful Sosthene story concerns his religious zeal. On many occasions, he would bring along a Times Picayune, the New Orleans newspaper, when he came to Mamam’s. With the availability of such a captive audience, he would read from the paper and espouse his outrages of the day. This was the Sixties and the hippies, one of the many scourges that the devil sent to the Crescent City, were taking over Jackson Square. They slept on the park grounds, scrounged for food from the public trashcans, and the worst of their behavior was not smoking pot, but fornicating on the benches. One day the Times ran a feature, below the fold on the front page of the newspaper, about a statue of the Virgin Mother Mary that was secreting condensation out of her eyes and had begun to draw the usual crowd of rapturous believers. Another item was a picture, above the fold, of a scruffy long-haired tie-dyed couple making love in Jackson Square. The crowd gathered at Mamam’s seemed more interested in the weeping Virgin and some expressed interest in taking the drive to view her. Sosthene, never one to suffer fools, felt compelled to scream at the idiots who failed to get the point of his sharing the newspaper with our group and demonstrating this unfortunate juxtaposition of photos, he exclaimed:, “no wonder da blesset Mary is crawing, dey’s hippies foking in Jak-son squir. What dju gonna do ‘bout dat?”

Tante Nola and Mamam worked hard that evening and every other, cleaning the kitchen until 9:00 p.m., after cooking and cleaning since 5:30 a.m. for the farm hands. Late at night, freshly laundered napkins were folded and laid out for the next day’s shift. Each day, regardless of whether it was a weekday or weekend, the women’s hands and feet never stopped their stirring, measuring, rolling, patting, and washing. Tante Swit labored just as hard, but not in silence. She was the bookend to Sosthene’s bluster, and while she often scared me, she loved as hard as she screeched. When Sosthene was ready to leave Mamam's house, he would bellow to Tante Swit, "Swit, we leavin' dis house, now." Swit, usually gave us a knowing look and turned to Sos and stated bluntly, "Sosthene, you sit down rat dere and don you move, chere. Swit not ready to go."

She was a stalwart woman with enormously bulging forearms and biceps, the upper right arm sporting a large tattoo that I can still see. In those days, I didn’t know any women with a tattoo, in particular not a nice one. Her very lengthy auburn hair was braided once a week in two long braids that wrapped twice around her robust scarlet face. Tante Swit didn’t perspire; she was often wet with sweat around her neck, between her monumental breasts, and in a band circling her ample waist. My clearest memory of her is of the many nights I spent with Nelly, my cousin and Tante Swit's youngest daughter. We often sat to eat freshly popped corn from large porcelain bowls in front of a 13” flashing black and white television set in the evenings during the early 1950s. There in the dark, on a large sofa, Tante Swit sat with a glass gallon pickle jar half-filled with fresh top cream collected from their cows’ milk. Her colossal muscular arms wrapped the jar in towels and for several hours she would shake and twirl the cream until it became a lump of pale yellow sweet butter piled at the bottom of jar that she whipped into submission. I knew we would have this to spread on her toasted homemade bread with blackberry jam for our morning breakfast. My attempts to milk their goats and cows so that I could make my own butter failed miserably. Nelly could milk the animals, but neither of us had the strength and grit to will cream into butter with the rocking bough of our arms. Her New Years Day lunches were legendary: cornbread lobster dressing and roasted turkey, oyster dressing, sausage–stuffed ducks, fruit ambrosia, and so many sweet dough pies I couldn’t decide whether to begin with the vanilla custard, lemon, blackberry or all three.

Tante Swit and N'onc Sosthene continued to live in the big farmhouse near the flashing light on Ridge Road for many years. All of his hard work had provided them with a very comfortable lifestyle. One summer, around midday, Sosthene was away from home. Tante Swit was working in the back of the house. Thinking the home deserted for a while, two men entered the side door of her carport looking for stashed cash that they presumed the couple had, so they could steal it to purchase drugs. The police say that Tante Swit was murdered with one shot to the back when they moved to the bedroom to go through their things and surprised her. When my mother called to tell me the circumstances of her death, I was at home in Dallas with my young son and another baby was on the way. I didn’t travel to the funeral. But, I cried when I hung up the phone. I wished that Sosthene could have been there with his Winchester to protect her like he did his chickens and the Ridge Road drivers. I knew that it probably broke his heart that he was not able to save her. He died a year, almost exactly to the day, of Tante Swit's death. The Virgin Mary wept that day, too.

J’ai passé devant ta porte.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!

I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.

No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts!
I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.

Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!

One of the oldest songs of the Cajun repertory is "J’ai Passé Devant Ta Porte." It is a very popular old song about a lover who discovers that his sweetheart has died.
Credit: Harriet J. Bauman, "Cajun Music: the Voice of the Cajun Family," Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.

Amazing Grace

La Grâce du Ciel est descendue

Me sauver de l'enfer.

J'étais perdue, je suis retrouvée,

Aveugle, et je vois clair.*

Grace from heaven came down

And saved me from hell

I was lost, I am found

Blind, and I see clearly

It was hard to ignore Mama’s grim face staring across her now cold cup of coffee. I was outside, near the ocher rose bushes, and could see her through the sliding glass door. From her perch on a stool at the breakfast bar, Mama sat staring through the glass with saggy eyes and a deeply drawn mouth looking toward the farm where the people that I grew up thinking of as grandparents lived. There was no barrier to this unvarying view of the dairy farm situated a half-acre away from our home in the southwest Louisiana countryside. Mamam and Papop Alleman owned and worked the dairy farm, along with acreage of cotton, soybeans, and produce that provided most of the food for their sizeable table of three boys and farm hands. Only when the hurricanes fired up in late summer did the landscape rise and fall. “Juanita is coming to be with Daddy again tonight,” Mama sighed. “I’ll be spending most of the evening in my bedroom.”

It was 1967. I was visiting my home during spring break from my junior year of college. Years of traveling with a military family made me discontent to live on an acre of flat marshland near my grandparents, their dairy cows, horses, dogs, chickens, and everything that edged its way up onto our hammock of land suspended above sodden ditches. Consequently, I found scholarship money at a Texas school and left Louisiana at the end of my sophomore year. Mama didn’t pull on me to stick around like so many Cajun families do. But, she still depended on my counsel in all things linked to relationships. And, in particular, she lacked an understanding about her marriage to my dad. I could see that there was a new impasse with him to sort through, so I invited Mama to talk.

She began to tell how my dad’s fervor to discover his natural family was rapidly collapsing the normal that Mama came to expect. Daddy was now in his mid-forties and restless about really belonging to no one. He was rummaging through the scraps of his memory about how he came to live at the dairy farm across the clover pasture. And then, he made a relentless commitment to follow the leads about his early life wherever they shifted in order to replace the fairy tale that he always carried around as the truth. Mama was uneasy about what he might find. She was wholly unprepared for what unraveled.

I already knew some of Daddy’s past, but hadn’t heard much more than that he was a foster child of Mamam and Papop Alleman who arrived at their farm around the third grade. He left them when he was 17 to join the Army. That was pretty much all we wanted to know. As children, we always felt as though we were the lucky ones who escaped southwest Louisiana to see the world. We didn’t envy our adopted cousins from the dairy farm. That Daddy longed to be one of them wasn’t ever said out loud. Mama never wanted to return to that acre of mud near Highway 95 and the farm. But, an unfortunate investment in a meatless wiener scheme, promoted by a close friend while Daddy was still in the military, left my parents with few options. After we left Germany and the military for good, Mama fashioned a commanding case that she made to the Alleman’s and wrested the acre near Highway 90, north of their dairy. Papop signed over the land to them. His three sons and their wives were resentful that this happened quickly, without their consent, and vowed to get even with Daddy and Mama’s because of their conquest.

Mama continued with her story of Daddy’s newly unearthed discoveries, “Your dad was given to the Alleman’s when he was eight years old because he had no other place to go.” The Alleman’s had older cousins who lived on a farm in Jennings, located down Highway 90, east of the Duson dairy farm. The elderly Alleman cousins removed Daddy from third grade because “he found school too difficult.” He worked in their fields. But, soon after his arrival, they became too frail to maintain their farm and gave away the eight-year old boy to the Alleman’s. Mamam and Papop’s three boys milked the cows before and after school, but there was still cotton to pick, and corn, soybeans, and potatoes to be harvested. Daddy fit the job description to work all day by Mamam’s side. No one on the farm worried about Daddy’s ability to read or add numbers. He stayed at home with Maman and they gradually shaped an alliance as he shielded her from Papop’s temper and increasing demands.

Days passed as Daddy and Mamam the hung bed sheets on outdoor lines, snuggled eggs into baskets they collected from restless hens, and poured cream that floated to the top of milk into bowls to make a crème fraiche called “clabber.” At other times, he wrung chickens’ necks, plucked fluffy feathers from fleshy bodies in hot water, and burned the deeper pin feathers on the hens over fire on the kitchen gas stove. They kneaded bread dough and laid it to rest under softly worn towels made from used bags of flour. As Daddy moved into the kitchen and showed his prowess as a chef, he earned the privilege of sitting in the kitchen each day after the older farm hands ate their midday meal. There he sipped Mamam’s inky thick coffee that dripped in the white enamel pot on the stove and lightened it with fresh cream sweetened by two teaspoons of sugar, accompanied by gooey blackberry sweet dough pies. Daddy became Mamam’s closest and only confidante. They shared stories with each other to carve through the tedium of caring for Papop and her three sons.

There were shreds of this story that Harold Moroux, my father, pieced together long ago. The rest, he fabricated for himself. Possibly, he had two beautiful young parents who were killed suddenly in a car accident and there were no relatives ready to step in and take him. Or perhaps a woman was suddenly widowed and couldn’t put her life back together with a young energetic son. Maybe his family was looking for him, becoming separated during a catastrophic incident. In the 1920’s and 30’s, children were sent to orphanages or foster homes for many reasons. It was not unusual to have one’s family nearby, but unable to care for some of them.

Not once did he consider what really happened to be his story. A Syrian high school girl, the daughter of a prosperous Opelousas baker with the last name of Moory, fell in love with an older German man, named Fuchs. Disapproving of a cultural intermarriage, and even more so of their out-of-wedlock child, the girl’s mother sent her to a New Orleans’ convent to give birth to her son among the community of nuns. Celeste Moory left her baby in New Orleans and went home to finish high school, recapture her reputation, and regain the approval of her unsympathetic mother. Harold received the last name Moroux, a frenchified contraction of Moory and Fuchs, leading him to believe that he was an authentic Cajun.

The orphanage in New Orleans where Daddy lived burned to the ground before he was five years old. His mother, now out of school and by this time working in the family bakery, kept track of Daddy and drove to New Orleans to get him. On her return to Opelousas, she managed to place him away from town with a black family who bought weekly from her on her bread route. Nothing thrilled Celeste more. She could see Harold frequently while she made deliveries for her family bakery. Daddy never realized it was his mother who came to see him the two or more years that he lived there, tucked safely nearby. But, eventually, the parish sheriff had other ideas. White children did not live, share meals, and take baths with black families and their children in southwest Louisiana. Daddy was removed by the police and taken to a priest in Jennings who placed him with the Alleman cousins who had no children. He was a bastard from an orphanage. Children like him couldn’t expect a better life. They were often passed from home to home, still too serviceable to abandon entirely. Celeste eventually had to give up on him.

Once Daddy pieced his story together and started contacting people, it didn’t take long for an odd caravan of characters to appear at our home. Celeste married a legitimate Syrian suitor and bore Aunt Juanita and Uncle Sid. Uncle Sid became a French chef of some renown in Lafayette. Sid drank much of the wine that went into deglazing his sauces. He skin was the color of a skillfully reduced Bordelaise Sauce.

Around 5:00 p.m., Aunt Juanita hauled up and turned into the gravel drive of our home. She appeared to be an olive in the process of turning from green to a deep purple. She was a short, slightly barrel-shaped woman with creamy gray green skin and mid-length coal colored curly black hair. Her stuttering husband, Tom, while tall and stocky, was battered to find a chair and stay for a while. Juanita and Daddy sat together on the white sofa and stared into each other’s eyes like lovers reunited after years of disengagement. Tom and Mama stared at each other too, in disbelief.

I wondered how long my mother could engage Tom as he falteringly spoke about his failed career as a drummer? And how long before Mama was released from Aunt Juanita’s orders to fix her afternoon coffee, two spoons of sugar, a quarter-cup of cream and to make dinner for her? Mama retreated, after a while, to her room. Two years of tears, arguments, and sleepless nights, passed before Mama’s purgatory came to an end. She forced Daddy to take his visits to Juanita’s house and leave her alone. It took another years for the crack in my parents’ marriage to mend. When Aunt Juanita took to showing up at Mamam’s house, unannounced, for her own coffee and blackberry sweet dough pies, it was the line in the sand for Mama. She told Daddy he had to choose between her and Juanita. Daddy couldn’t face being abandoned by Mama; the visits to Juanita became more infrequent.

The way I see it, Daddy didn’t make out so badly. He found a way to leave the Allemans’ home and become one of the youngest sergeants in WWII. He received his GED in the military. He still reads slowly and frustrates us all at his inability to follow a movie plot, but there is nothing wrong with what he values. Daddy continued to walk over every afternoon to the house on the dairy farm to sip coffee with Mamam. She made him cornbread and yeast rolls; he gave her someone with whom to share her thoughts again. When Papop died, Mamam was taken by her three sons to live at the Sunshine Cottage in Lafayette. The estate was carved up among the three boys. My brother, Anthony, a lawyer at the time, was asked to draw up the papers, with specific instructions to exclude Daddy. It was the only time I ever saw my grown brother cry. Anthony decided to complete this transaction and charge them a towering legal fee, which he gave to our father. Daddy was reluctant to take the money; my brother was insistent that Daddy had earned it.

Daddy never found Celeste or her German lover before they died. Aunt Juanita, Tom, and Uncle Sid danced in and out of our lives with little dramas until mother shook them off like the lint that clung to her carpets. In time, Daddy found himself and an amazing grace. This constant love is what he passed on to five children and their children and their children, a family to whom he really belongs.

Quand j’aurai chanté dix mille ans

Dans Sa chorale des Anges,

Je n’aurai fait que commencer

À chanter Ses louanges.

When I will have sung ten thousand years

In His choir of angels

I will only have begun

To sing his praises

De tous les dangers de la vie,

La grâce est mon abri.

C’est cette même grâce qui m’amènera

Aux portes du paradis.

From all the dangers of life

Grace is my shelter

It is this same grace which will lead me

To the gates of paradise.

Translation for Cajun "Amazing Grace:"

La Grâce du Ciel

Les Amies Louisianaises

(Amazing Grace) (Traditional, French words by D. Marcantel)

Musique Acadienne Pub. Co. BMI and Pocahontas Music BMI

Les Femmes de Mamou

Les femmes de Mamou

Qu'elles boivent comme les trous secs

Elles sont aussi fortes que des ours

Et elles fart comme les mules

The women from Mamou

They drink like dry holes

They are as strong as bears

And they fart like the mules

We drove an hour and a half north on Interstate 45 to just outside Alexandria to visit Uncle Albern. My family calls him ‘Uncle’ but he’s really my cousin on mother’s side of the family. This happens a lot in Louisiana. Uncles are called “brother,” sisters are “tante so-and-so,” and my mother’s last name is spelled four different ways. My maternal grandparents lay side-by-side in a small cemetery near Richard. J’Mama’s gravestone reads “Olivia Sonnier Jeanis”; J’Papa’s reads Alus Jeanise. I grew up thinking of my mother as Clarisse Jeannis Moroux; her nephew is John Albern Jeanise. Other versions of the name in this same family are spelled “Jeanisse.” It just doesn’t matter. But, you better get their names right when you’re visiting them, whatever they are. You just can’t switch out your uncle for a cousin, even if he is.

I hadn’t seen Albern since my brother’s funeral fifteen years ago. And I was too disturbed by my brother’s death to focus on any one person that day. Before that, I was very young when we visited our cousins, so I missed getting to know that Albern is one of the most entertaining people in our family. When he found out last year that I was staying with my parents for a week, Albern invited us to his home for gumbo, pickled okra, and croissants. It was in the fall, so all of the things he had planted in the little garden behind his house were ripe for a celebration. But, even if it had been winter and nothing was on the vines, Albern would have canned and frozen fresh vegetables ready for his gumbo, maque choux, or anything else we might want.

He was loaded with family stories the moment we entered the door. “Oh, Chere, you still look the same,” he shouted to me. “You got you daddy’s eyes.” Albern works as a printer, but his original calling is as raconteur et chanteur de divertissement. “You know the Jeanise’s, if they couldn’t find anyone to fight with, they would fight with themselves,” as he brings life to the cantankerous Jeanise boys, sent home from elementary school for beating each other up on the playground. The story that follows tells us about Mozine Sonnier, my grandmother’s sister and illuminates the unique reasoning that defines Cajuns. Mozine is riding to church one Sunday with her friend, Jacque, in the black canvas-covered buggies so prevalent in early 20th century Louisiana. Mozine finds it difficult to make the journey to church without going to the bathroom. “Jacque.” Mozine demands, “pull over to the side and let me out. You tell me when I pull down my pants if a car comes. “OK,” replies Jacque. As soon as Mozine lifts her skirt and pulls down her panties, a car passes their parked buggy on the road. “Jacque,” Mozine shrieks, why you don’t tell me about the car?” “Well,” Jacque provides, “I didn’t think there was anybody in it.”

To illustrate the strength that Albern feels all Cajun women posses, he picks up the accordion lying next to his brown, over-stuffed Lazy Boy and beings to sing, “Les Femmes du Mamou,” a song J’Papa sang to him before bedtime every night he stayed with his grandfather. Albern’s lanky frame dances in the easy chair, providing a rhythm line for his solo. He smiles broadly when he reaches the phrase, “elles fart commes les mule.” The French speakers in our family audience erupt into spasms of laughter. Albern is encouraged to go on. He shares the genealogy of our family he spent five years assembling. I am so excited at the sight of this enormous document that he gifts me with the 24 x 30-inch poster of fifteen generations of Amiraults, DeGrandaires, LaFleurs, Jugnacs, Marchands, and Poiriers.

Albern proudly details our heritage originating from Alsace-Lorraine and ends by saying, “you know J’Mama was very well-educated. She could read and write in French and English. She came from a family of self-employed business owners and was in possession of valuable property when she married our grandfather.” These facts contradict the woman I knew to be a poor tenant farmer’s wife living in a wood frame house with no indoor plumbing, heat or electricity. “How did she evolve into the woman I saw slopping pigs and chasing after chickens in her drab cotton dresses and muddy shoes?” I asked incredulously. “J’Papa lost her inheritance in a failed deal to parlay her money into rice-producing land.” They became just another casualty of the drought around the time of The Great Depression.

I thought about this and other stories Albern sang and delivered so deliciously to us as we wound our way back to Lafayette that day. I was still analyzing the mettle of our gentle, incredibly humorous grandmother the next evening as I spoke with my brother, Greg, about our family. “No wonder our mother is so headstrong,” I remarked to Greg and shared with him how I didn’t understand our mother as I was growing up. “Don't you remember the story about Mama and the chicken under her arm?” Greg asked. “J’Papa told Mama to take a live chicken to the country store to pay for groceries for which they had no cash. Along the gravel road she used to walk barefooted to the store, a carload of young boys zoomed past her spraying dust and laughing as they hung out of the windows. Some threw rocks at this diminished girl. “Isn't that really all you need to know about Mama?” Greg pleaded to me for understanding. When Mama told Greg this story, he said she demonstrated how she shielded the chicken under her arm, protecting it from the dust as they blew past her. And how humiliated she felt by them as she bartered with the grocer for flour, oil, and other supplies. She was given "change" for whatever she wanted after the groceries were paid for, for her trouble. “Isn’t that an incredible story?” Greg repeated several times.

I don’t know why it took Mama so long to tell me her story. I had only just heard this one a couple of years ago, as I begged her for background about our family. After she shared it with me, I wrestled with how I could make her know I was so proud to be her daughter. She could have trusted me with the fear and shame long before I dragged the details out of her. I already knew that she could drink like a dry hole. I now believe her to be as strong as a bear, no matter how her name is spelled. And the other, well,

Papo and The Hippies

If you knew Papo in the 60’s, you would think that the greatest scourge the earth ever had to endure was Hippies. My dad commanded a tank in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, liberated the concentration camp, Munchausen, got blown from his jeep by a land mine, survived a winter in Asia in the Korean War, and bivouacked for weeks in the Bayreuth snow while waiting for Germans to raise the Berlin Wall. But, I never saw him plan for an all-out onslaught, until he talked about Hippies.

They have long hair, bathe infrequently, sleep around in the open air, and smoke pot—which makes them bathe less, forget to cut their hair, do more sleeping, and smoke more pot. Then, in a final tragic chapter of their worthless lives, they gather in groups to protest anything and piss away the college educations their parents slave to provide them on any platter they can scrape up. Papo’s theory is that most Hippies don’t hatch out of poor folks, unless the Hippies need recruits to locate more munchies or drugs. They are the product of guilt-ridden, affluent, middle-class parents who feel the need to subsidize soul-searching behavior. And soul-searching just isn’t worth the paper its take to write books about it. Hippies, and Yippies, must know where their next meal is coming from because they wear the luxury of wallowing in their own filth and liberal ideology like medals. So, Papo’s rage came as no surprise to any of us when my brother Anthony decided to grow his hair below his ears in 1966.

As it was, Anthony and Greg emulated dirty rotten scoundrels. When they were six and eight years old, respectively, they loved to ‘pretend-play’ poker and spit chewin’ tobacco like Wild West saloon cowpokes. On one occasion, when my mother entrusted their care to me at a barbershop, they blew each other away in a floor-scraping shootout. Their final death scenes took them over tables where magazines were neatly stacked and across hair strewn on the floor to lay in bleeding agony at the front door where patrons stood aghast as they tried to enter.

Being in each other’s constant company allowed them both to sink to the lowest common denominator. The combination of their superior intelligence couldn’t mitigate the urge to collect their own methane gas in glass pickle jars in futile efforts to accelerate fires. Even into their 30s, after the acquisition of law degrees with honor, finding women who would adore them and bore their children, our family gatherings would suffer many memorable holiday dinners at the mercy of our two brothers. On one Thanksgiving, my mother realized that the one dining room table at which we had all sat for dinners in our childhood, could not seat the blistering growth of our family. It was then that she made the unfortunate decision to bring a smaller, somewhat lower table and place it two feet away from the larger, more prominent table in the dining room. As the Thanksgiving dinner was being laid out on a buffet, she said, “Greg and Anthony,” take all of the grandchildren and go THAT table,” pointing to the now, baby table. It wasn’t long before my brothers engaged the grandchildren in “We’re Indians, They’re Pilgrims.” I don’t remember who started it, but immediately after chocolate and pumpkin pie slices were placed in front of the ‘Indians,’ the food fight erupted. No one can recall if the walls got by with being washed down or had to be repainted, but it reminded me that the boys never left these men throughout their lives.

Long hair was the true harbinger of the decline of our family’s ability to laugh off such antics, however. The most searing memory was the night my brother, Anthony, returned home during his college years after sleeping off a hangover for days on the sofa of the Kappa Sig fraternity house. His all-expenses paid four-year college education, already endangered by a below-2.5 grade point, appeared to vanish. Earlier in the semester, he had been arrested for sticking his bare buttocks and spreading the cheeks out the window of a speeding automobile as his fraternity brother blasted the car of the Lafayette cops. And though my parents’ home was never the same after he rode one of our grandfather’s horses into the front door of our sun porch, my Dad drew the line in the sand when Anthony’s hair met his eyebrows. As my brother slunk through the glass sliding door of our kitchen, post-hangover, my Dad barked, “Get a haircut or you’ll never sleep in this house again!” By this time, my brother’s fraternity and girlfriend had anointed him with the name, “Tony.” Tony shot back, “I don’t have to do what you say anymore.” This was not the response my Dad was holding his breath for. Tony never saw the shove he got from my Dad coming, hurling him against the sliding glass door. Years of anger and disappointment washed over both of their faces. Both recognized it was time for my brother to leave home, his way. Dad wanted a haircut and respect for his values. Neat hair was proof of reverence and spoke to him of this. A trim top means a soldier is ready for battle. His boots are shined, his rifle is prepared to shoot, and his soul is clean enough to meet God. The Army can trust him to go onto foreign soil, remember who his enemy is, work hard to stay alive, and keep harm away from those back home. Long hair drags all virtue down with it. To my brother, long hair meant freedom from the cookie-cutter expectations of a father's unrealized dreams for himself.

My brother subsequently did lose his scholarship, flunked out of school, and allowed the military to draft him into the Vietnam War. He became a code breaker in an Intelligence Unit in Korea. He smoked pot, but found an opportunity to break the latch on Dad’s tight, shut heart. Tony was decorated for being a model soldier. He was honorably discharged and put himself through LSU law school and into a successful litigation career in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The severe photograph of Tony with lowered ears, his pink scalp peeking beneath his Army cap still hangs on the ‘honor wall’ of my family’s home. I suspect it’s one of Papo’s most prized possessions. It may even rank above the hand-built barbeque pit, his Cajun microwave, the seasoned gumbo pot, tall peach trees, carefully-tended blackberry bushes, and maybe even the riding lawnmower (a seat for his own soul-searching, though I doubt he calls it this). It takes a powerful life to erase the memory of Hippie hair. But, the little rascal did it.

Green Dragon Jitterbug

Sometime around 1920, J’Papa and several other rural real estate hopefuls, pooled what money they had to buy Louisiana rice farmland. J’Mama came to their marriage with means, so J’Papa used her money to make the deal with his cronies. It’s hard for me to imagine the barb-wire thin, rough hewn 6’4” man I knew as my grandfather having friends under any circumstances. The gaze I remember from the 1950s was so stern, he couldn’t even summons a softened smile for his energetic grandchildren. But, by the time I met him, he had lost all of J’Mama’s money in the plantation investment due to weather conditions that could not support his dream of rice crops. By now, he and J’Mama were living as sharecroppers in an unpainted wooden three-room house with no electricity, water, or indoor plumbing. Occasionally, it was fascinating to visit the house in Richard that lay near the winding gravel roads far off the crudest highways of Southwest Louisiana. We’d roll out of the car that Daddy had parked under the shade of a grand bank of twisted oaks, draped in low-hanging moss cast carelessly about by moist breezes. Beyond these trees that seemed to congregate like a gossipy gathering of wise old women, lay a contradiction of raw landscape. Hard sandy dirt clods supported a squeaky, rusty, iron fence absent of elaboration. Sometimes, after a hard rain, it was just a mud pit. The two-holer outhouse was off to the left. A few equally uninviting pigs forced their snouts through the wire fence at the right and snorted for attention. We usually dealt with my mother’s discomfort during these visits by kicking away approaching chickens and fighting with each other over who could be first to pump water from the well and get a cool drink. Dust was still flying on the wind as we ran from the pump to take our places on an uncooperative wooden porch swing. We were never successful with our first approach to it. It usually dumped one of us off the back or front.

Once we were on the porch, J’Mama rumbled over to dispense giggly squeezes all around and then disappeared into the kitchen to fire up the iron wood-burning stove. We soon caught coffee smells bursting through her open windows and ran inside to see what else she might be making. Sometimes she let me turn the shiny black beans in the grinder and help her drizzle quarter-cupsful of water over the fragrant brown powder until it wept into an inky brew. J’Mama’s warm embraces erased all the fear we shared about the few snaggly teeth that remained in her generous smile. Once the coffee had been dripped, she pulled out freshly baked yeast rolls and a bowl of cane syrup. Her banquet helped us ignore oily-smelling kerosene lanterns that cast sooty black shadows onto the walls and ceiling.

As we dipped the warm rolls in the gooey syrup, I mined the shack for remnants of my mother’s childhood. I never could find the young barefooted Clarisse sitting alone for hours shaping dolls out of discarded paper. Nor could I see the young girl trailing J’Papa through his shared fields to collect vegetables for dinner. Much later, Mother told me that only occasionally would J’Papa turn around to see if she was still following him. He never smiled or took her hand to reassure her that she was welcome to accompany him. What none of us knew was that J’Papa couldn’t provide the basics, like meat, for his family. Most of the neighboring farmers could pool their money to participate in the boucherie of cow. Cajun families often slaughtered an animal together, cooking and canning as much of the meat as they could harvest, then divided it equally. Mother’s family got the leftover suet and lard to flavor their vegetables. Any money there might have been for meat usually bought staples. When mother was old enough to be trusted, she walked barefooted along the winding gravel road to the grocer to negotiate a trade of one of their chickens for flour, cornmeal, or milk. With the limp neck of the animal hanging form her hand, she made her way from the store, often sprayed by dirt flying off a laughter-filled car filled with neighboring children. Over the years, this humiliation and shame moved into the crumpled cottage with her.

J'Papa didn’t live much past the age of 50, but managed to save enough money to buy the unpainted three-room farmhouse and land beneath it. After he died, J’Mama used money from the sale of the property to move to Eunice to a tiny white frame house with naked light bulbs hanging from wires and indoor plumbing. She started to frequent the Green Dragon nightclub to dance with the men who hung out there. She cut her hair and wore rouge for the first time. Some of her friends and relatives thought she'd become a harlot. On one of my visits to her new old house, the recent object of her desire was propped against the kitchen wall in a cowhide stick chair. I knew it wasn’t polite to stare, but I couldn’t help myself. It wasn’t that Ernest didn’t have any teeth; J’Mama only had a few. And it wasn’t that he was wearing a tight white sleeveless undershirt with baggy khakis. It was that he was so young—about thirty years younger than J’Mama. When he didn’t smile, he was almost handsome. His jet black hair, wet dark eyes, and tan skin, were seductive in their own way. Sadly, he was dimmer than J’Mama’s kitchen light bulbs. He had but a few laughs in response to our efforts to tease a dialogue out of him.

Still, I understood her attraction to him. I imagined J’Mama showering behind the rag curtain in the corner of her bedroom from which a raw piece of plumbing dispensed water. I could hear her sweet humming of Cajun tunes as she dusted her ample body in “Evening in Paris” powder bought from the dime store. I imagined her broad smile as she slipped into her best handmade cotton dress and readied her dancing legs for a night at the Green Dragon. Ernest, for all of his shortcomings, could make dance. He could scoop J’Mama into his arms and jump like lightning with Cajun accordions and fiddles. Just a few nights of Cajun two-step could erase years of stinky pigs, outdoor toilets, and whatever else hurts in your heart. These two souls found each other and became one. J’Mama married Ernest Prejean.

Not long after this visit to Eunice, I started college and immersed myself in the drill team, modern dance classes, books, and finding a boyfriend. I never visited J’Mama again, until I saw her in the funeral home. My mother said she died of a heart attack, complicated by the diabetes she fought so long. She looked so strange lying there, all frothed up in a pink nightgown, far away from the house with Ernest and forays to the Green Dragon. Her immense chiseled face with its cafe au lait American Indian features and her tight gray braids were still tucked neatly around her head, but all the bubble and wiggle of that squat fluffy body were gone. Yet, as hard as death tried to steal it, the hint of her welcoming smile lay there with her, faintly concealed under the waxy application of burial makeup. There was nothing wrong with her heart, I thought. She just used most of it on loving and dancing. The fiddler and accordian players may have taken a break, but the music would always be with her.