Blue Highways (19 page)

“Where’d you learn to make them?”

“Ole color man, he work on da rayroad. He got nuttin’ but he love music so he play da bones. He play dem in da ole minstrel shows. He da one day call ‘Mister Bones,’ and it Mister Bones hisself he show me carvin’. Now people say, ‘Come play us da bones in Shrevepoat.’ But da bones just for fun.”

“DeePaul flies kites,” Seipel said. “Wants in the
Guinness Book
.”

“My kites day fly for time in da air, not how high. Someday I want people to be rememberin’ Duhon. I want ‘Duhon’ wrote down.”

“I can play the musical saw,” Seipel said and called to the barmaid, “Got a saw here?” She pushed him a saltshaker. “What’s this?”

“That’s the salt you’re yellin’ for.” Seipel and I laughed, holding on to the bar. Duhon went home. Everybody went home. The barmaid watched us wearily. “Okay,” she said, “come on back for some hot stuff.”

“Is this where we find out why they call themselves ‘Coonasses’?” I said, and we laughed again, holding on to each other.

“All right, boys. Settle down.” She led us not to a bedroom but to a large concrete-floor kitchen with an old picnic table under a yellow fluorescent tube. We sat and a young Cajun named Michael passed a long loaf of French bread. The woman put two bowls on the oil cloth and ladled up gumbo. Now, I’ve eaten my share of gumbo, but never had I tasted anything like that gumbo: the oysters were fresh and fat, the shrimp succulent, the spiced sausage meaty, okra sweet, rice soft, and the roux—the essence—the roux was right. We could almost stand our spoons on end in it.

The roots of Cajun cookery come from Brittany and bear no resemblance to Parisian cuisine and not even much to the Creole cooking of New Orleans. Those are
haute cuisines
of the city, and Cajun food belongs to the country where things got mixed up over the generations. No one even knows the source of the word
gumbo
. Some say it derives from an African word for okra,
chinggombo,
while others believe it a corruption of a Choctaw word for sassafras,
kombo,
the key seasoning.

The woman disappeared, so we ate gumbo and dipped bread and no one talked. A gray cat hopped on the bench between Seipel and me to watch each bite of both bowls we ate. Across the room, a fat, buffy mouse moved over the stove top and browsed for drippings from the big pot. The cat eyed it every so often but made no move away from our bowls. Seipel said, “I’ve enjoyed the hell out of tonight,” and he laid out a small shrimp for the cat. Nothing more got spoken. We all went at the gumbo, each of us, Minnesotan, Cajun, cat, mouse, Missourian.

S
OMETIME
in the darkness of morning, the rain started. It pecked, then pelted, then fell in a steady, soft patter on the steel roof of Ghost Dancing, and my sleep was without shadows.

At six-thirty the sky was still dark, the rain falling steadily. An hour later: rain. Two hours later: no change. I got up, washed, ate some fruit and cheese. I draped across the bunk and read, occasionally looking into the gray obscuring rain, listening to thunder (puts the sugar in the cane), watching Spanish moss (a relative of the pineapple) hang still in the trees like shredded, dingy bedsheets. At ten-thirty the rain dropped straight down as if from a faucet; I was able to leave the front windows half open. I didn’t know then, but in April in coastal Louisiana you don’t wait for the rain to stop unless you have all day and night. Which I did.

Reading my notes of the trip—images, bits of conversations, ideas—I hunted a structure in the events, but randomness was the rule. Outside, sheltered by a live oak, a spider spun a web. Can an orb weaver perceive the design in its work, the pattern of concentric circles lying atop radiating lines? When the mystical young Black Elk went to the summit of Harney Peak to see the shape of things, he looked down on the great unifying hoop of peoples. I looked down and saw fragments. But later that afternoon, a tactic returned to me from night maneuver training in the Navy: to see in deep darkness you don’t look directly at an object—you look to the left; you look at something else to see what you really want to see. Skewed vision.

At five-thirty the rain stopped; it didn’t ease, it just stopped. I walked through the west side of Lafayette where I’d parked for the night—and day as it turned out. The wetness deepened the tones of things as if the rain had been droplets of color. Azaleas dripped blood-red blossoms, camellias oozed carmine. The puddly ground squelched under me. The overcast moved east like a gray woolen blanket being pulled back, and the sun came in low beneath a wrinkling of clouds. Then a sunset happened, a gaudy polychrome sky—mauve, cerise, puce—so garish I couldn’t take my eyes away.

On a front porch threatened with a turbulence of blooming vegetation, a man stood before his barbecue grill, the ghostly blue smoke rising like incense. His belly a drooping bag, his face slack, he watched the coals burn to a glow. He’d built many briquette fires. The man’s numb stasis disturbed me.

Got to get moving, I thought, and hurried to my rig and drove to Breaux Bridge, “the crawfish capital of the world.” I was looking for a crawdad supper. Breaux Bridge, on the Bayou Teche, stirred slowly with an awakened sense of Acadianism. Codofil, an organization working to preserve Cajun traditions and language, had placed signs in the dusty shop windows, things like
SOYONS FIERS DE PARLER FRANÇAIS
or
PARLEZ FRANÇAIS—C’EST DE L’ARGENT EN POCHE
. I asked a man locking his store where to eat crawfish. He sent me east across the bayou, through banks of willow and hanging moss, past little fencepost signs advertising Evangeline Maid bread, past front-yard shrines to the Virgin, past lots piled with fishing gear. At Henderson I found a wooden building hanging over Bayou Peyronnet just below the massive west levee of the Atchafalaya River basin; the heavy air of increase smelled of marine creatures and mud and hot peppers. On the roof of Pat’s restaurant sat a six-foot, red plastic model of the Cajun totem: a boiled crawdad.

The menu claimed the catfish were fresh because they had slept the night before in the Atchafalaya. All well and good, but it was little crustaceans I was after. As journalist Calvin Trillin once said, the Atchafalaya swamp is to crawfish as the Serengeti to lions. The waitress wore threads of wrinkles woven like Chantilly lace over her forehead and spoke her English in quick, rounded Cajun measures. She brought a metal beer tray piled with boiled, whole crawfish glowing the color of Louisiana hot sauce. I worked my way down through the stack. The meat was soft and piquant, sweeter than shrimp, but I had no stomach for the buttery, yellow fat the Cajuns were sucking from the shells.

The waitress said, “Did they eat lovely like mortal sin?” and winked a lacy eyelid. “You know, the Cajun, he sometime call them ‘mudbugs.’ But I never tell a customer that until he all full inside. But the crawfish, he live smilin’ in the mud, he do.”

“They’re just miniature lobsters. Are you Cajun?”

“Don’t you know that now,
cher?
”

“Do you use your French?”

“Time to time, but not like my old aunt. She don’t speak English except death’s at the door, and then it sound like her French. People you age understand but don’t speak it much, no. And the kids? They don’t tell French from Eskimo. Schools, they hire a hundred teachers to give little ones French. But teachers they teach Paris people’s French. Hell, we speak Cajun, us. The teachers, they look down at their noses on Cajun, so we don’t care. I’m afraid for Cajun. Us, we’re the last. But when I was a girl on the schoolyard, when they open the day with raisin’ Old Glory, we sing the Marseillaise—we thought it was America’s song.”

In the warm night that came on to relieve the colors of the day, I went down through the rockless, liquid land, down along the Bayou Teche to St. Martinville, a crumbling hamlet where the past was the future.

T
ALK
about your three-persons-in-one controversies. In St. Martinville a bronze statue of a seated young woman in wooden shoes, hands folded peacefully, head turned toward the Bayou Teche, commemorates—at one and the same time—Emmeline Labiche, Evangeline Bellefontaine, and Dolores Del Rio. The monument sits in the Poste de Attakapas Cemetery behind the great Catholic church of Saint Martin de Tours. After the bayou, the cemetery and church are the oldest things in town. The cruciform building, full of flickering candles, bloodied crucifixes, anguished representations of the Stations of the Cross, and plaster saints with maces and drawn swords, contains in one wing a twelve-foot-high replica of the Grotto of Lourdes. Although mass is now celebrated in English, the place, with its ancient torments, remains quite French in the old manner.

The bronze woman sits, literally, above the eighteenth-century grave of Emmeline Labiche, who, Cajuns say, wandered primitive America in search of her lover, Louis Arcenaux, whom she was separated from during the forced Acadian exodus (
Le Grand Dérangement
) out of British Nova Scotia. At the army outpost on the Teche, she finally found Louis—engaged to another. Emmeline, exhausted from her wanderings, went mad from the shock of his faithlessness and died shortly later. They buried her behind the church. That’s history.

But the name on the statue above Emmeline’s tombstone is Evangeline. Cajuns believe Longfellow patterned his wandering heroine on Emmeline, and probably he did, although the poet never visited Louisiana, relying instead on information furnished by Nathaniel Hawthorne and a St. Martinville lawyer once Longfellow’s student at Harvard. To visualize the land, he went to Banvard’s “Moving Diorama” of the Mississippi—a three-mile-long canvas painting of a boat-level view. Longfellow said the river came to him. He filled in with details from Darby’s
Geographical Description of Louisiana
and his own imagination, changing the outcome so that in old age Evangeline at last finds her love on his deathbed in a Philadelphia almshouse. That’s the poetry.

Then there’s Hollywood. The face on the statue, smooth and beautiful and untouched by madness or years of wandering the wilderness, is that of Dolores Del Rio, the Mexican-born actress who completed the trinity by playing Evangeline in the 1929 movie filmed nearby at Lake Catahoula. To thank the townspeople, the cast presented a statue of Evangeline-Emmeline that Miss Del Rio posed for. The actress, cynics said, saw a chance to have her beauty immortalized in something more durable than celluloid. If many citizens no longer know the name, they all know the face.

St. Martinville was pure Cajun bayou, distinctive and memorable in a tattered way. Wood and iron galleries were rickety, brick buildings eroded, corrugated metal roofs rusting. The church stood on the square, the courthouse down Main Street. On the upper side of the square that morning, Maurice Oubre’s bakery turned out the last of the day’s pastry, and on the west side at Thibodeaux’s Cafe & Barbershop, Mr. Thibodeaux had been cutting hair since five
A.M.
Across the street, taverns got swept out, and the smell of last night’s beer mixed with Thibodeaux’s thick
café noir,
Oubre’s croissants, and the damp air off the Teche.

In the
Petit Paris de l’Amerique
Museum gift shop next to the church, a powdery old lady asked the priest to bless a souvenir candle she’d just bought; he waved his hand over it and said, “May God bless this candle and all who use it, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Above his head, on the Coke machine, a sign:
SHOPLIFTING IS A CRIME AND SIN. GOD SEES ALL AND REMEMBERS
!!! Sin was underlined three times.

B
ECAUSE
of a broken sealed-beam headlight and Zatarain’s Creole Mustard, an excellent native mustard, I met Barbara Pierre. I had just come out of Dugas’ grocery with four jars of Zatarain’s, and we almost collided on the sidewalk. She said, “You’re not from St. Martinville, are you? You can’t be.”

“I’m from Missouri.”

“What in the world are you doing here? Got a little Huck Finn in you?”

“Just followed the bayou. Now I’m looking for the Ford agency.”

“Coincidences. I work there. I’ll show you the way.”

She was a secretary at the agency and took classes at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette when she could. I asked about St. Martinville, but she had to start working before we could say much.

“Here’s an idea,” she said. “Come by at noon and we can have lunch at my place. I live in the project on the other side of the bayou.”

I picked her up at twelve. She asked about the trip, especially about Selma and how things were as I saw them. “A white man griped about changes, and a black said there weren’t enough changes to gripe about.”

“That’s us too. What we want is slow coming—if it’s coming at all. Older blacks here are scared of whites and won’t do much for change if it means risk. Others don’t care as long as everything gets smothered over with politeness by whites. Young blacks see the hypocrisy—even when it’s not there. But too many of them are juked on drugs, and that’s where some of this town wants us.”

“Don’t any whites here try to help?”

“A few, but if a white starts helping too much, they get cut off or shut down by the others and end up paying almost the price we do. Sure, we got good whites—when they’re not scared out of showing sympathy.”

On Margaret Street, she pointed to her apartment in a small one-story brick building. Standard federal housing. As we went to the door, a shadowy face watched from behind a chintz curtain in another apartment.

“See that? Could be the start of bad news,” she said.

“Maybe I should leave. I don’t want to cause trouble for you.”

“Too late. Besides, I live my own life here. I won’t be pushed. But it’ll come back in some little way. Smart remark, snub. One old white lady kicks me at the library. Swings her feet under the table because she doesn’t want my kind in there. I could break her in two, she’s so frail. She’ll be kicking like a heifer if she gets wind of this.”

Barbara Pierre’s apartment was a tidy place but for books on the sofa. “You can see I still use the library even with the nuisances. The kicking bitch hides books I return so I get overdue notices and have to go prove I turned the book in. I explain what’s going on, but nothing changes. Simplest thing is trouble.”