New Iberia Blues

I've talked in the past about my commute to work.  It's not that bad but construction for the past year and a half has turned a 40 minute commute into a grueling 1 1/2 hour drive on some days.  At first I listened to talk radio to pass the time until I began to realize that I didn't need that stress and blood-pressure rise on my drive home.  I had enough of that by simply gazing into the red tail lights in front of me and the glare of the bright LED headlights on the jacked up Ford behind me that was burning into my eyes through the rear view mirror with the brightness of a thousand suns.

To mitigate that, I got a library card and began listening, once again, to audiobooks.  Ahhhhh...  Now on the drive home I listen with interest to books by some of my favorite authors.  Sometimes, now, I'm so into the book, I sit in the parking lot at work or in the garage at home until I can get to a good "stopping point."

I listen to a number of different books with different genres, authors, etc.  I want to talk to you today about one of my favorite novelists, James Lee Burke.  He lives about 60 miles from me in New Iberia.  If you aren't familiar with his writing, I highly recommend it.  I would describe him as a "Cajun John Grisham."  He writes, among other things, crime novels set in Louisiana.  Burke is a terrific story-teller.  His is an absolute master with using metaphor and his descriptive writing moves you from being a reader to being there at the scene, seeing the sights, smelling the aromas, hearing the sounds.

The protagonist in many of his books is Dave Robicheaux.  He has a side kick named Clete Purcell.  They are imperfect guys, with flaws and warts, but are trying to do what is good and right.  The latest installment to the Dave Robicheaux series I read (listened to) was "The New Iberia Blues."  Will Patton narrates many of Burke's audiobooks and does a great job with the accents of the characters and the passion of Burke's writing really comes through.  I enjoyed it and was sad when the Cajun French music played Jolie Blon at the end, signaling the end of the book.

Dave Robicheaux (and Jame Lee Burke) loves his State, the beauty of the live oaks and the Spanish Moss-laced Cypress trees on the bayou and the love affair with the way "Louisiana used to be."  Such melancholy nostalgia really got to me in an excerpt from "New Iberia Blues" I cut and pasted below:

“We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.”
― James Lee Burke, The New Iberia Blues    

I listened to the quote above from disc 4, program 4 on my way home the other day and paused it and then rewinded it and listened again.  I got home and googled "best quotes from New Iberia Blues" and wouldn't you know the above quoted section came up.  (I wasn't the only one who thought that was a good piece of writing!)

But why is that?  Maybe you have to grow up here or live here for a while to read between the lines to get at what he's saying.  It's a lament, a mourning, a sadness for a slow demise of a people, their customs, language, land and culture.  Often we in Louisiana find our state ranked first in everything that is bad and last in everything that is good.  I often scratch my head as I see a contradiction of a state so rich in natural resources (oil, agriculture, forestry, seafood, Mississippi River and deep water ports, etc. etc.) and yet so poor in so many metrics.  It's maddening.

Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell, are fictitious characters, but I can identify with them.  They are all around me.  They are imperfect, yet heroes.  They see tragedy and heartbreak all around them, but never give up in doing their best, trying to do good, putting the bad guys away, and enjoying a simple, unpretentious life on the Bayou.  In weaving suspenseful tales of Good versus Evil with thoughtful commentary on the our state, Burke has made the time spent on my commutes much more enjoyable - and time is the most valuable of commodities...

“Age is a peculiar kind of thief. It slips up on you and steps inside your skin and is so quiet and methodical in its work that you never realize it has stolen your youth until you look into the mirror one morning and see a man you don't recognize.” - James Lee Burke