A Heritage That's Slipping Away

Last week my job took me to a small community called LeBleu Settlement where I ran into a guy who grew up in the town where our family farm is.  We got to talking and before you knew it an hour and a half had passed.  I would pay for that long visit later that afternoon trying to catch up with my work, but it was an enjoyable conversation, and it brought back many memories, talking about the old times. 

The gentleman commented that things were so simple back then.  Since Benjamin moved back in with us as he convalesces, we've been watching old episodes of "The Wonder Years" together.  Tonight after we turned off an episode, Benjamin made that same comment.  "Things seemed so simple back then."  Those words, to a nostalgic like me, are like amphetamines to an addict.  I began to reminisce. 

We talked about how all the old folks talked Cajun French when we were young.  My grandfather would wear his Stetson straw cowboy hat and go sit on the porch with a neighbor at the farm named Mr. Roy.  They would drink coffee and talk in French.  Same thing with another guy down the road, Mr. Carrier.  They appreciated the ability to speak it.  See, as kids, when they went to public school, the teachers would punish them for speaking French.  They wanted to get the Cajun out of them.  It was low class, made you appear stupid and besides, everyone needed to become Americans.

Growing up, when we were sitting around the table and my grandma and grandpa's house and they wanted to talk about something private, they would start talking in French.  We didn't have a clue as to what they were saying.  We learned a few vocabulary words (and the cuss words), but mostly, the language is dying out.  My grandma and grandpa spoke it fluently.  My dad understands a bunch of it but doesn't speak it.  I know some vocabulary and a few phrases.  C'est tout.

When I managed the family grocery store, there was a man named Johnny Vidrine who worked there.  On his lunch breaks, he would get a plate lunch from the deli and go sit behind the store under a big oak tree to eat his rice & gravy.  He would bring a little transistor radio with him and would tune in to a station from Eunice, Louisiana that played French music.  I would sit down and listen with him while he ate.  I remember one song he liked called "Blacktop the Gravel Road" by Jackie Caillier.  One day I was sitting with him and he started laughing in the middle of a song.  I said, "What are you laughing at, Johnny?"  He said, "The words to this song."  "What is it talking about?" I inquired.  He said, "Well, the words don't translate just right into English, but the words he's singing says, "Dancing with you is like pulling a sled through some tall grass!"  I laughed until my stomach hurt.

I stumbled across this interesting video on the subject of the Cajun heritage and language.  A lot of it centers around a gentleman who lives about 45 minutes from us.  It explains his resolve to maintain his culture and teach it to his kids.  Click below.  I think its a 16 minute video.

"For me, it's about being like my grandmother, like my grandfather, living the culture."  -Jourdan Thibodeaux

I like that ol' boy.  He's swimming against the stream.  Doing his own thing.  He's comfortable in his skin.  So how do you learn Cajun French if you don't have an old timer nearby to teach you?  Well, there's an app for that!  On your Apple phone in the App Store, search for the LearnCajun App.  It's free.  Here's a newscast from Lafayette that talks about it:

I've been using it a lot lately.  Bon soir, mon amis!

 

Truth in Advertising - Cajun Edition

A few weeks ago I went to the Piggly Wiggly in our town.  Actually, 'the Pig' changed its name to Lyons' Market.  It is a local supermarket, we know the owner, and I like doing business locally.  Although, I'll go, I'm not a fan of the size and of the crowds of Wally World and honestly, I do less than 2% of our family's grocery shopping.  Anyhow, I was looking for some charcoal.  Lately, I like using real lump charcoal, rather than the briquettes.  

After looking down the charcoal aisle at the different types of lump charcoal.  This non-descript brown bag of charcoal caught my eye:

A Little Goes a Long Way, it says.  Check.  Efficient.  Thrifty.  Economical.  My kind of product.

Environmentally Friendly.  Check.  We want to take care of God's creation.

No Chemical Additives.  Check.  We don't want our food cooked over chemicals or poison obviously.

Quality Cajun Products, it boasts.  Excellent.  Boudreaux & Thibodeaux have a business making charcoal.  As I like supporting local, this purchase seemed to be a no-brainer.  I carried the 10 pound bag to the check-out, paid for my purchase, and was on my way.

Once home, I unloaded it in the garage.  I flipped the bag over.  Wait a doggone minute.  The instructions for the charcoal were in English and Spanish.  Cajun Products in Spanish.  Que?  It would seem that Boudreaux and Thibodeaux would have instructions in Cajun French, no?

And then, I noticed it, in small print at the bottom of the bag:

Product of Mexico.  This was a scam!  Cajuns, in the diaspora, migrated (were exiled) from Nova Scotia to South Louisiana, not Mexico.  Here I was trying to support my people, and they just slapped the Cajun name on it to fool me.  No Truth in Advertising on this purchase, unfortunately.  I'll read the fine print while I'm in the store next time.  This was pas bon!

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