Salsa Gumbo

N’onc Sosthene

2009-07-15T12:07:00.000-07:00

(For Writers' Group reading only: Submitted to Oxford American Magazine, July 28, 2009)

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

2009-06-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

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

2008-02-24T12:16:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-26T09:48:00.000-08:00

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

2007-07-21T11:47:00.000-07:00

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.

Uncle Snaky

2007-07-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

No one ever knew what to do with Uncle Snaky when he came to visit our home in Louisiana. He stormed down the gravel driveway in his always immaculately polished Chevy, bolted from the car with Aunt Hilda dutifully following, struggling to keep up with him. Then, he stood inside the hurriedly slammed door, ready to go home as he entered our house. He shifted from foot to foot, cleared his throat, mumbled to no one in particular, and glared at Hilda. It was the signal to spend the next 17, not 18 minutes, getting the most she could from a visit with my mom, her sister. As Hilda began to settle in, Snaky, still standing, would turn his fedora in his hands, his eyes darting from side to side as though the ‘big deal’ might be breaking somewhere in his world and he was missing it.

Snaky was tall and lean, physically unattractive, if all you did was glance at him for a moment. But, he had an indescribable appeal and perhaps an untold story or two. He was a dapper dresser, crisp white shirts with risky ties, summer weight wool suits and spectator shoes, polished so well you could feel the shine before he entered the room. He often carried a boater or fedora from which he focused an unblinking stare and often wore snuggled down on his forehead allowing a quick getaway without eye contact. Eraste Doucet had one of those gaunt craggy faces with dark shifty eyes that make children stiffen in fear. He loved to tell graphically dirty jokes, his only meaningful contribution to a conversation with my family. Snaky was a Pied Piper of bad little boys. My brothers adored him, and well, so did I.

There was something intoxicating about riding with him in his car as he made his stops along the rural backwater routes of Southwest Louisiana, collecting liquor orders from the barkeeps of his territory. Snaky was a sales rep for Mr. Nathan, Nathan Levy’s, the largest liquor wholesaler in Church Point. He had every novelty item that Black and White Scotch ever produced and kept them enshrined on a sideboard in his kitchen. Big and little, black and white, plastic ‘Scotty’ dogs perched in various sassy diorama-type settings as though the purchase of scotch makes the drinker as tough as the breed.

Aunt Hilda, my mother’s shy funny older sister, shamelessly indulged Snaky by manicuring his house and clothes and cooking his favorites: chicken gumbo and rice, watermelon pickles, and grits and grillades. All of Aunt Hilda’s family, Mother included, scratched their heads and gossiped about what Hilda saw in this slippery, odd dude. We knew. Snaky had cool. He was people reduced like a rich Bordeaux sauce down to a basic, thick glace′. He didn’t have time for bullshit, polite exchanges, or a public veneer of niceness. Even though he spent the majority of his time on his wheels and wardrobe, Snaky was the real deal. He was disreputable and disagreeable and he knew it. He was James Dean, Stanley Kowalski, and Snidely Whiplash all buttoned up in a coarse elegance. Snaky often disappeared from home, several weeks at times, never explaining his absence to Hilda. When I got older, I asked Hilda where he went. “I don’t know, chere,” she whispered. “It’s just something Snaky has to do.”

On one memorable visit to our home, Snaky came limping rather than blasting through the door. One of my intrepid brothers nervily asked, “Hey, Uncle Snaky, what happened to you?” Snaky blurted out, “those damn doctors cut on my balls.” “You ever had your balls cut on, huh?” None of us stuck around for the details.

Snaky and Hilda never had children. So, whenever he could stand for us to visit, Hilda invited us to stay and sleep on the bed and pallets she made on the floor of their extra bedroom. We jumped at the chance to explore the drawers and cabinets of this mystery man. Aunt Hilda let us keep the gum and change we excavated. We had the feeling it made Snaky edgy, but Hilda never stopped our exploring every crevice of their neat little home. The first nude pictures I ever saw hung on the back door of Snaky’s bathroom. There she was, Marilyn Monroe, shamelessly spread on a red satin sheet. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. A vague thrill sneaked into my imagination as I envisioned being her.

I was similarly delirious riding in Snaky’s car. Each one of us, my brother’s and I, would take turns sitting in Snaky’s lap while he fired up the Chevy. As he pumped the accelerator to 55, we forced the suicide knob on the steering wheel as far to the right as it would go. Then, releasing our hands quickly, let is spin freely as we hurled around the corners of the streets in Church Point. The irresponsibility of it all collided with the deepest values my parents held and made us giddy.

Many years later, when Snaky was 80 years old, I sat in Aunt Hilda’s kitchen and watched tears pool in her eyes as she told me that Snaky’s driver’s license had been taken away by the police. It seems his driving had become hazardous to the general public of Church Point. I never got to see Snaky sitting at home, in his starched white shirt, polished brown spectators and fedora pulled just above his furrowed brow, with no place to roam. I could only imagine what it must have been like, his free spirit harnessed by age. But if he were still here today, he would smile that signature serpentine leer if he knew that his crazy heart had taken up a new residence. Like a hermit crab which moves to new digs when his home becomes too small, I welcome the hint of the spirit of that rogue that now resides in me.

Saints and Traiteurs

2007-05-20T16:33:00.000-07:00

The most common image one conjures up of Southwest Louisiana is a plantation laden, majestic oak-covered, Spanish moss landscape tossed about by humid Gulf breezes. But, what is most remarkable about the place is the invisible and imagined, as you visit with its people and walk about its cemeteries. During a trip back home several years ago, I asked to see where my mother’s parents, J’Mama and J’Papa had been laid to rest. Mom and Dad drove my sister and me to the community of Richard, near Church Point. Their homestead, long ago demolished, lay near a locale called Point Noir. On the front row of their graveyard in Richard, near St. Edward’s Church where all are buried above ground, is a prominent white marble crypt of Charlene Marie Richard. Charlene, dubbed the “Little Cajun Saint,” died of leukemia at the age of 12. During her arduous treatment, she never complained and prayed for the priest and staff who tended her care until she died. Non-believers who were placed in the room where she expired, converted to Catholicism and many who visit her gravesite are miraculously cured of their afflictions. At the foot of her grave is a glass box whose top opens easily for visitors to place a small personal memento so that they too can become the recipient of an interceding miracle. While my mother kneels to pray at Charlene’s grave, my sister and I scramble to find something personal to leave in the glass miracle box. No one wants to be left out of the promise of a miracle.

As we dig through our purses, my mother scoffs at our gesture. “I go directly to God, now,” she states flatly. “Charlene refused to help Anthony (my brother) when he was dying of pancreatic cancer.” My sister ignores her and leaves a metal angel she carries in a neatly organized purse. While my purse holds an entire world of personal papers, cards, coins, and possibly angels, it always throws up the detritus of a life in disarray. I have two settle for two of my favorite aspirin, the bright orange, Maalox-covered ones. This is the ‘personal item’ I leave for Charlene work with. I assume my sister asks for a man; my guess is that I’m going to get stuck with relief from headaches, but I hope instead for some revelation about my grandparents. I dare not tempt faith by asking for some real miracle. It seems to have soured my mother on Charlene. After the requisite litany of prayers at Charlene’s grave, we amble around the big white graves looking for the ones holding J’Mama and J’Papa. I nearly laugh out loud as I finally see them side by side with their last name spelled differently. My mother explains that wherever the literacy rate of the faithful is low, the priests fill out the paperwork and spell names they way they choose. It does not seem remarkable to my mother that the priest in this parish chose to spell the names of people married to each other for life as “Olivia Jeanise” and “Alus Jeannies.” Mother always thought her name was spelled “Jeannis.”

The trip to my grandparents’ graves reminded me that the treatment arsenal for ailing bodies and spirits in Louisiana goes beyond what we think of as real medicine. Traiteurs are still abundant and dispense, often at no charge to the suffering, a combination of first aid, herbal remedies, Catholic prayers, somatic hand movements, voodoo, and white magic. As a child, Mother suffered from frequent ear aches and the traiteur was summoned to my grandparents’ home for treatments with herbs, garlic, chanting, and hand movements.

My own experience with a traiteur was remarkable. Out of curiosity about the trade during this same visit, I asked Mother for a referral (they aren’t listed in the local Yellow Pages). She came up with Helen Higginbotham about whom my mother had only heard but didn’t know. “I don’t even know if she’s for real” Mom said. But, I called her anyway, skeptical that her name wasn’t French nor did she sound African American on the phone. I drove to the outskirts of Lafayette where much of the large machinery and oil drilling equipment is sold and stored. My expectations for an authentic experience now reduced immensely. Several small trailers lined a short street where Mrs. Higginbotham was waiting outside her little white frame house with an overfed Basset Hound dragging its belly around the yard. I was startled to see this heavy set weathered 70-ish woman who looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t connect her to any time or place. As I followed her and entered the back door of her trailer, the stench of oily dog overcame me and I asked myself if I could spend more than five minutes here.

My first attempt to find a place to sit was foiled. “The sofa belongs to Minnie,” she said so quietly I didn’t connect the name to the dog. The only chair I was allowed was near the window. Not knowing what else to say when I called for a treatment, I told Mrs. Higginbotham I had a headache and that my aspirin was lying on the grave of Charlene. As I sat, Helen began to assess my condition. “Do you have a lot of stress in your job?” she questioned. “No, but I have lots of allergies,” I said concealing that dust and animal dander are my primary triggers. “Well, then I have work to do,” and her face took on a more serious look. I tried to read the room for the herbs and talisman of the traiteur. But she used no accessories of any kind. Rather, she began to speak soft prayers in French as she moved her hands rhythmically across the top of my head and down my neck and back. After three cycles, she smiled and proclaimed them, “gone.” She had such a sweet and inviting countenance that I forgot the reeking animal odor and found the courage to ask for more information. “When did you start treating people?” “I’ve always had the gift,” she said with a startled look as though most everyone should know this. “But” she continued, “I received real training when my three year old son almost died from asthma. An old black man named Michael Thomas had treated me as a young girl with asthma by cutting a lock of my hair and burying it in the hole of a tree in his yard. Years later, I brought my son to him, and he taught me how to use my gift on my son.” She then announced to me that I would need three treatments. When I told her I was headed home for Dallas the next day, she studied my face and said, “well, I’ll just have to put three treatments together for you now.”

She began another cycle of prayers and rhythmic movements, this time asking me the questions. “Who is the family you are visiting here?” Their names meant nothing to her, so she pressed on by asking where they were born. “My mother was raised in Church Point,” I began. “What was her maiden name? I was raised in Church Point,” she interrupted. I went into a chronicle of the Jeannis family and began to see surprise in her eyes. “I’m a Jeannis from Church Point,” she stated with more excitement now. “I’m really from Pont Noir. All of the Jeannis’ around Point Noir are related.” She began the story of the family. Her great grandfather fought in a battle in France and was on the losing side. After that, he moved to Nova Scotia and was thrown out of the Canadian province because of his Catholic beliefs. They moved to New Orleans, but quickly set out in flat boats through the bayous landing near Point Eglise, or Church Point. They burned old persimmon trees to clear an area for houses on land they claimed and named it Point Noir for it’s charred appearance. My Mother and Helen are cousins.

By now, the hair on my arms is standing up and I can’t take in any more information. I can’t decide if the smell of dog is finally getting to me or I am stunned by all of the coincidences. I drive to my parents home and tell them about Helen. Mother immediately remembered Helen’s father as Lovensti “Beebe” Jeannis, the Church Point Justice of the Peace. She laughed as she recalled an ‘accident’ that Beebe had one night when he searched outside for suspected intruders. “As he crept around outside in his long johns, shotgun in hand ready to fire, Beebe’s dog sniffed at his ass, as dogs like to do,” Mother is now laughing and unable to go on with her story. “His shotgun went off and poor old Beebe crapped in his long johns.” How this story made it around Point Eglise, I’ll never know. But, this I do know, Cajuns will tell anything on themselves and others if they know it will entertain a crowd.

As we sat in rocking Lazy-Boys that afternoon, I wasn’t thinking about how old Beebe soiled himself that night or about any of the other Church Point characters of renown my parents recalled that day. I was musing, and still do, about how my family shapes their existence. How their beliefs and customs form them and create a colorful lifestyle where storytelling, traiteurs, the Catholic Church, food and wine co-exist in a savory mélange. Where my mother hedges her bets by consulting card readers, but asks God for forgiveness for all of her transgressions and prays for healings, both of the body and spirit.

The next day I left on a small airplane for Dallas. The combination of dry air and altitude usually gives me a headache. It didn’t escape my notice that I didn’t have one. But, my mind still throbs to contemplate the coincidence that Steve, my husband, has a mother with the maiden name, “Beebe.”

Bargain Hunting

2007-04-21T16:45:00.000-07:00

Left: My former bedroom, one of Mom's nine closets in her Louisiana home. Dad has 1/2 of a closet, for which he had to fight and continues to maintain a vigilant watch.

I don’t know what was more fun growing up an Army brat—going to the Post Exchange to make out my Christmas toy wish list or going by myself with Mom each fall to buy the new winter coat. As much as I loved the PX toy department, the annual shopping trip downtown by bus, in whatever city we lived, will remain the high point of my youth. Mom and I would get all dressed up, gloves and hats were mandatory. We would alight from the bus, chase through the magnificent department store doors, and feel our way down the aisles touching every scarf, glove, and stocking on the first floor. Eventually we would arrive at the place of magical metamorphosis, the hat department. There we would play for at least an hour lifting each hat from its form and running to a mirror to assess out transformation. “No, Mom, that’s too severe.” “Not that one either, you look like a stork has made a nest on your chimney.” “Oh God, too much hat, not enough body.” We would take turns exacting appraisals from each other and make imaginary life trades with movie stars and celebrities. Eventually, one of us would find The Hat that made us the woman we wished to be. Mom often delayed buying new curtains for the house so one or both of us could renovate our look from top to bottom. We’d finish off hunting day by collapsing at the department store lunch counter to order up chicken salad sandwiches and super large cherry cokes. The red leather swivel stools on stainless posts allowed just enough room for us to squeeze in with our new coats draped in department store zipper bags, hats carefully laid in important-looking spherical boxes, and a shoe box or two. It was a divine day on which I felt like a princess.

Over the years, fashioning just the right outfit for each important event became an even more consuming activity as Mom learned to sew and design for me and my sister, Danielle, who somehow escaped the shopping gene. An informal contract slowly evolved: Mom would sew; I would cook for the crew. It often took three weeks of night time sewing and eighteen dinners of spaghetti, meat loaf, and fried chicken for Dad and the boys to acquire a Chanel-like boxy suit fashioned from velvet with a matching or contrasting satin lining. A blue-dotted Swiss Easter dress took many bivouacs in fabric stores to piece together three separate patterns, acquire the fabric, confer over a strategy, and build the masterpiece. Standing still, in a tissue paper form, was a ritual so holy and prescribed that I dare not wiggle or interrupt it once it was underway. My mother, once possessed of the vision we designed together, bent herself over her sewing machine and plunged the pedal to the floor as though she was in a race for her life with a driver in the next lane threatening to overtake her. Pit stops were infrequent, but copious profanity-laced explosions were commonplace when the thread broke or the machine took the wrong path along a jacket sleeve. But, holed up like a monk in our laundry room, Mom persevered in her mission to shape a dream.

The men in our family were the unwilling victims in this ritual. My brothers traded many hours crawling under the garment racks and in fabric stores for time they longed to be in the yard blowing up plastic Army men with Black Cat firecrackers. Mom and I conspired how to keep the pack stable. As long as there was the hint, promise, or predictability of warm food, the little wolves remained contained and rarely bit or snarled at either of us.

Our shopping trips eventually terminated when the harmonic shopping bond between Mom and me broke. Not long after the birth of my second child, mother came to Dallas armed with her usual itinerary of stores to hit, but equipped with less than her usual stamina. Two weeks before her trip to Dallas, Mom fell in a deep hole in the bayou and broke her ankle while laying out crab nets to catch the swamp dwellers for a cookout. She appeared at my door in Dallas on crutches, my Dad following her with a wheelchair in tow that Mom had rented for her Dallas shopping extravaganza. Out first sortie took us to NorthPark Shopping Center where I pushed my other through Lord and Taylor, Titche’s, and more of her regular targets. One of the wheels on the chair didn’t line up with the other three so that movement down aisles of clothing was like pushing a boat through mud. This obstacle would shoot down whatever fantasies the average hunter had about bagging the perfect kill. Mother was not deterred, however. “Push, Dear, there’s a skirt over there I have to see.” “Right across that aisle, over there, the perfect blouse.” “I need a smoke, let’s go outside for a while.” My last vision of this excursion is still burned in memory. Mother is in her wheelchair, planted halfway between the doorway of the Neiman Marcus dressing room and the ready-to-wear blouses department. Ladies are shopping all around her. There she sits, stripped to the waist in all but her bra, trying to wrestle a new catch over her head. The wheelchair didn’t go through the door into the tiny dressing room so I left her to look at racks near the dressing room. Mom is oblivious to frustrated shoppers lined up behind her awaiting their turn at a fitting room. She has blocked the flow with her chair, but can’t resist a try-on of yet one more blouse. The look on her face is undeniable. With this garment, she has a chance to be somebody.

Bless Me, Sister

2007-03-25T10:54:00.001-07:00

J’ai ete-z-au bal au soir
Tout habille en noir
Je fais serment de ne plus boire
Pour courtiser la belle.

I went to the dance last night,
All dressed up in black.
I promise never to drink again
To court my beautiful girl.

Poem by Ivy Lejeune from the Les Acadiens d’Asteur

The only path to grace, a momentary state at best for me as a young Catholic schoolgirl, was to raise enough money every Lent to buy at least one pagan baby. It was an endless struggle of impure thoughts, unkind words, and wasteful actions locked in a battle with unattainable ideals. Little white paper boxes came to the Catholic classrooms the week before each Lenten season. Sister Benignus began distribution from front to back, each dirty soul grabbing his chance at redemption as the cardboard coin receptacles passed to the edges of the room. I vaguely knew where in Africa the money might be going as I struggled to visualize the face and body of paganism. For me, it took the form of dark, wet and unclothed people. I could feel a mother’s agony in a grass hut as she enveloped an unwanted infant in her saggy, empty breast. Years of National Geographic, a Catholic’s Playboy magazine, probably painted these images for me. All I knew was that I could put rice in bowls and milk in chests by giving up Saturday morning trips to Mr. Biddle’s candy store. Five dollars was all it took to feed one African baby and baptize him into a new life. All I had to do was stare down my depravity for 40 days.

It seemed simple at first. If I didn’t get on my bike and ride to Mr. Biddle’s with my brothers Anthony and Greg, I wouldn’t see the layers of boxes and colorful rows of B-B Bats, Turkish taffy, ruby red wax lips, peanut butter-flavored Mary Jane’s, day-long Black Cow suckers, and firesticks. Pretty soon, however, I felt left out of the lazy day ritual and rode along “just to read” recycled comic books stacked in the store corner, ten cents apiece if you wanted to bring them home. Walking along the counters, as my brothers loaded up on the three for a penny and two for a nickel treats, my torture was shoved to a conscious level. But, I quickly basked in piety and reasoned that eternal salvation was within my grasp. I could almost smell the soapy, clean scent of my spirit receiving its saintly bath. I was evolving into Holiness. Sister Benignus was going to be so proud.

Trips to the Saturday afternoon twenty-five cent movies were a little more of a challenge. Mom dropped the three of us off and I was in charge of two ungrateful scoundrels, my younger brothers, who of course, had money to burn on Dots, Junior Mints, and Milk Duds. I could get a dill pickle the size of a small refrigerator but the esthetics of it was all wrong for me. The retrieval of the rubbery, frog-like object from a jar of green swill with swirling seeds usually resulted in shriveled hands and lips, squinty, tearing eyes and a soggy napkin, the side effects of over-vinegarization. This seemed like way too much suffering for a continent I’d never visited. Popcorn was the usual substitute. As we took our seats close to the screen and prepared to watch black and white newsreels and serials featuring walls that move to squash beautiful women trapped in rooms with handsome heroes in dark suits, smacking sounds emitted from my two brothers. It was interminable anguish to watch them suck the life out of the fragrant boxes crammed up against their faces and dislodge caramel from their stuck teeth. I began to question my choice of suffering. Why didn’t I give up movies, Indian Baseball, Red Rover, Four-Square, Hopscotch, or Jacks. Sister Benignus said to give up something that’s difficult to live without. Candy met this criterion and still allowed me recess with my friends at school. And, the biggest payoff was how much money I saved. It would go into the white box with the cross on it!

I won my engagements with evil by becoming fortified through a Monday classroom ritual. Each morning, we stood by our desks, faced the American flag, recited the Pledge of Allegiance aloud, and then sat and listened to Father read prayers over the intercom. On Lenten Mondays, Sister Benignus lit fires of passion for more pain. There she stood, her squatty body swathed in yards of black fabric. Her pinched, pale face poked through a starched, white, bib-like construction of selflessness. Her enormous black belt supported an oversized rosary and leather strap (weapon), which she alternated with a wooden yardstick to strike reluctant readers. She pontificated eloquently about the needy around the world and restated how each child’s $5 was the hand needed to snatch souls from those muddy huts and thrust them into the comfort of God’s waiting arms. Circus carnies, take lessons here. She was so good at selling God that I never questioned the method, even when repeated requests from my classmates and me to go down the hall to the bathroom were cruelly ignored or rebuked. This often resulted in at least one child per classroom wetting the schoolroom floor during arithmetic at the board or choral reading, including me. We were extruded through the church’s purification framework, nuns crafting the die into which we were cast. Spunk, individuality, and creativity were the broken cookies in this factory.

Visits to the confessional provided another opportunity to stay the course of self-righteousness. I built up a large cache of mercy as I usually got credit in the confessional for larger sins than I actually committed. I discovered this quite by accident one day in a clumsily worded divulgence. A priest got the impression that I actually had sex with a boy when my description was only meant to cover unchaste thoughts. The result was a mere extra two or three “Hail Marys” and “Our Fathers” penance and a bona fide bonanza of a redemption strategy. It was a simple way to keep secret reserves in the event of Complete Conscience Collapse, which I sensed was in my future.

After a series of stockpile confessions, rosaries, and graphic tours around the church tracing the Christ’s steps through the Stations of the Cross, Easter came and we indulged our greed, gorging ourselves into a sugar-induced stupor. We all became like Uncle Brud, my grandmother’s youngest brother. Brud, a corruption of “baby brother,” still looked like the infant name he bore as an adult. He was over six feet tall, weighed in at around 300 pounds and sported a red round angelic countenance. He visited Mamam’s home every Easter and Christmas but we never had verbal exchanges with him. He usually plowed through the door with his compass set on "dining room table" uttering only grunts if young ones blocked his path. He heaved his corpus load onto fragile, cane back, homemade chairs and we held our breath and privately saluted the furniture. Brud emptied serving bowls of potato salad, jambalaya, pork roast and gravy, and mache choux. And with utensils ready for battle, he dispatched the next round of fresh, coconut cake, sweet dough pies, and fudge. Brud beat the food in his mouth with the precision of an electric mixer. And then, as if the breaker to the home's light source had been flipped, he froze, wide-eyed and motionless. My brothers and I caucused in hushed whispers about how much food was still lodged in his cheeks, waiting for retrieval and more chewing later in the day. His next move was to the living room sofa where he took root and stared off with no hint of delight or satiation. I watched Brud and marveled at his endowment--this child-man sibling of Mamam, Tante Nola, and Tante Swit had three tireless women in service to him.

I still stand in awe of the messy mysterious courtship of Catholic Louisiana and springtime. In February, the strict, Catholic ritual and kaleidoscopic celebration culture escort each other arm in arm at masked Krewe balls and noisy street dances. Each wretched sinner waltzes in a delirious trance with his own greedy excess. And by design, the transgressor recognizes his defects, gives them a costumed form, and ushers them out through the dogma and liturgy of the church that is Lent. Easter provides each ragged spirit with a rehabilitated soul and the promise of Love for eternity. Sinners call this grace. Cajuns call it living.

J’ai ete-z-au bal au soir
Tout habille en noir
Je fais serment de ne plus boire
Pour courtiser la belle.

One Yellow Plate

2007-03-23T06:27:00.000-07:00

My brother Greg is past fifty years old now. I’m older than he, but I’m not telling by how much. Greg remembers ‘the yellow plate incident’ like it was yesterday. You will want the plate, too, when you hear the story. It happened at one of our big Sunday lunches when we were children. Mom set the table with Melmac, the hot consumer dinnerware item of the 1950’s. Public bus seats were made out of it. Kids couldn’t break it. You could toss it like a Frisbee. It wouldn’t come back. But if it did, you could lose your nose. No cracks in the Melmac, though. Like its now higher brow vintage cousin, Fiestaware, it came in bright colors—coral, lemon, and turquoise. At this particular lunch, at the place where Greg always sat, was placed a lemon-colored Melmac plate. Before this day, the yellow plate had no real value in our family. Greg raced to his place with great dispatch and announced loudly, “Ooh, I get yellow today!” We all fixed our gazes on him and searched our brains to assess what this could mean. My sister, Danielle, no slacker as a scorekeeper of our parents’ love, grasped the monumental significance of the plate before Anthony, Marc, or I did. Though billed by reputation as indestructible, my mother had managed to burn and shatter all but one yellow Melmac plate. There were still multiples of the blue and red. You could see the horror on my sister’s face as she realized that Greg, four years older than she, was given the only yellow plate in the house by Mother. My sister burst into spasmodic sobs, “he has the yellow plate!”

Mother snatched at the most expedient solution and barked, “Greg, switch plates with Danielle.” Greg quickly seized control, “No, I want the yellow plate.” Mother, wanting lunch to go on as planned, urgently pleaded with Greg to give my sister the plate. Greg said “no” more defiantly this time. He was going down with the plate. Grasping the plate tightly against his chest, Greg decided Danielle should back off. Mother then gave Dad ‘the look” we all know so well. It had “make it happen” written all over it. If Mother was the Court of First Instance, Dad was the Court of Appeals and Supreme Court. He only stepped in when a grenade was necessary. While he rarely spanked any us, we saw him frequently in a military jeep, dressed in his uniform loaded with World War II and Korean War medals on his chest. We all assumed he was capable of barehanded assault on any enemy target. Dad moved to stand over Greg and boomed, “Greg, give your sister the plate.” He then snatched the plate from Greg’s clutch and planted it in front of Danielle. “The plate goes in this spot.” My sister then did something no graceful victor should do. She turned to Greg with an impishly smug smile and waited for a reaction. Greg left the table and, as far as I can remember, didn’t eat that day.

We all recently gathered on Memorial Day for another Sunday lunch around the same table in my parent’s home. This time, Marc, our youngest brother, told a story to the group about a recent trip to the hospital emergency room to be with Mom. My Dad fell unconscious from his chair to the ground at an outdoor barbeque cooked by the Mire Fire Department at their headquarters. After the ride in the fire department ambulance to the hospital, Mother called Greg, now our oldest living brother, to discuss what happened. She wrongly assumed that he would sense her panic and rush from Lafayette to be by her side. He, on the other hand, hearing no urgency in her voice, laid down for an afternoon nap. My brother Marc, the recipient of the second call, hearing panic mixed with the disgust about Greg in Mother’s voice, drove quickly to support her. Recounting this story at our Memorial Day lunch, Marc ended with self-satisfaction by saying, “After this, I’ll probably get the keys to the safety deposit box.” Greg fired back losing no time, “I already have it.” Then he dangled the little gold key in front of us all. My sister Danielle, now registering the same expression Greg wore on the day he lost the yellow plate, sputtered in disbelief,” I didn’t know. I didn’t even know there was a safety deposit box!” Later, from her home in Florida, she mailed Greg the yellow plate. Some people know when they’ve lost a war.