Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
The Cajuns: Still Loving Life By Griffin Smith, Jr.
4 views
Skip to first unread message
Alice Chauvin Bradshaw
Oct 18, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/18/00
to
The Cajuns: Still Loving Life
By Griffin Smith, Jr.
Photographs by William Albert Allard
He was a bearded, stocky, hearty Cajun papa, treating three
generations of his family to a pizza after the Krewe of Hyacinthians
parade on Sunday afternoon in Houma, Louisiana. They were planning a
party for Mardi Gras, just two days away. And while I couldn't catch
every French-accented word, one admonition came through firm and clear.
"I don't wanna run out of beer," he said, "an' I don' wanna run
out of crawfish."
With a chuckle I realized that after six weeks in south
Louisiana, I'd found him at last. Here was the Cajun as the world
imagines him to be: the easygoing, hard-drinking, seafood-loving
denizen of the bayous, brimming with joie de vivre and always ready for
a good time. And what was he eating? Pepperoni.
Along the course of those six weeks I'd had a lot of my
expectations about Cajun country turned upsidedown. I'd met Cajun
lawyers, bankers, professors, and captains of industry; I'd been
welcomed into the homes of crawfish farmers and cattlemen, rice planters
and musicians. Except for an occasional French-language sign, the
legendary Evangeline country looked pretty much like the rest of the
Gulf coast south. There were no fiddlers in the streets, no pirogues on
the bayous. It took me a while to be persuaded that it was more than
just a tourist come-on, that a proud Cajun subculture does indeed still
thrive in the eddies of the American mainstream. Pepperoni yesterday,
crawfish tomorrow: The genial Cajuns may be the country's prime example
of an ethnic group that celebrates its own distinctiveness while
remaining comfortably a part of 20th-century America.
Cajuns are the descendants of 17th-century French colonists who
settled along the shores of Canada's Bay of Fundy in a region they
called Acadie. Expelled by the British in a series of deportations
beginning in 1755, more than 2,500 Acadians eventually found refuge in
Louisiana. As the years passed, their neighbors softened the edges of
the French "Acadien" into "Cadien" and finally "Cajun." Many neighbors,
including those of German and Spanish descent, were gradually absorbed
by intermarriage into the Cajun milieu.
Today's Cajun country is a roughly triangular section of south
Louisiana reaching from the outskirts of New Orleans to the Sabine
River. It laps over the Texas line for a few miles past Port Arthur--"
Cajun Lapland," as Louisianans sometimes say to needle their Lone Star
relatives. Despite popular belief, New Orleans is not Cajun country.
Nor is Baton Rouge. Nor is a great deal else that seems French in
Louisiana, since a goodly number of French Creoles--a term that was
originally used to describe people born of European parents in the New
World--settled in the territory both before and after Cajuns arrived.
In 1971 the Louisiana Legislature designated 22 of the state's
64 civil parishes as Acadiana, remarking on the "strong French Acadian
cultural aspects of said region." Mostly rural, and with a population
that is by no means entirely Cajun, Acadiana centers around two
unofficial capitals, Lafayette in the west and Houma in the cast.
Despite the dogged misconception that most Cajuns live in swamps,
Acadiana actually divides into four geographic areas: the bayou country,
consisting of fertile levee lands slowly built up by natural processes
along the Mississippi River and lesser waterways; the coastal marshes,
rich with oil and gas deposits but eroding now at an alarming rate; the
inland swamps like the great soggy wilderness of the Atchafalaya Basin,
virtually uninhabited; and the prairies of southwest Louisiana, an
agricultural breadbasket of rice, cattle, and soybeans.
In one of those unexpected twists that keep life interesting,
something about the Cajuns captured people's imagination a decade or
more ago. Paul Prudhomme, a celebrated chef from Opelopsas, was in part
responsible. In 1980 he created an instant classic called blackened
redfish and spread the gospel of Louisiana cooking from New York to San
Francisco. Cajun cuisine, with its exotic ingredients and its
reputation for high-octane seasoning, spawned legions of imitators.
The energetic fiddle-and-accordion songs like "Jolie Blonde" and
"The Lake Arthur Stomp" set toes a-tapping far beyond the prairies of
Acadiana. Cajun musicians found enthusiastic new audiences. Songwriter
D. L. Menard, in real life a chairmaker in the tiny town of Erath,
traveled to 42 states and 21 countries, from Thailand to Egypt, playing
his guitar and singing his modern-day Cajun hit "The Back Door." For
the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit conference in Moscow, chef John Folse
was invited to bring Cajun cooking to Mother Russia. He set up a
temporary restaurant that required 16 tons of imported food, and artist
George Rodrigue's hauntingly evocative paintings of turn-of-the-century
Cajun life went on display there. By the end of the decade you could
walk down Main Street in Canada's Moncton, New Brunswick, and have a
choice of Cajun jambalaya or spicy shrimp at not one but two
restaurants. You could bear a French Cajun band play the old Louisiana
standards in Paris and kick up your heels at the monthly Cajun dance in
London's Cecil Sharp House. Or you could just stay home and wash down
your Amazin' Cajun potato chips (from Dallas) with Original Cajun
Flavored Beer (from Milwaukee).
All this commotion has been fun. But Cajun purists like Barry
Jean Ancelet fret that it may have gotten out of hand, giving the world
an exaggered caricature of the people he holds in affectionate regard.
"There's good news and bad news" were the first words I heard from this
lanky, droopy-mustached folklorist at the University of Southwestern
Louisiana, who probably knows more about today's Cajuns than anyone
else. "The good news," he deadpanned, "is that Cajun is hot. The bad
news is that Cajun is hot."
Like most Cajuns, Ancelet winces at implications that Acadiana
is full of fire-eating swamp dwellers who communicate in archaic French
and have not yet joined the modern world. "It's ludicrous, " he says.
"In the movies Cajuns have replaced hillbillies as a people among whom
heroes can get into exotic trouble." Businessmen trying to restore the
area's oil-depressed economy worry that the tales of Cajun carousing
will prompt prospective industries to dismiss south Louisiana.
For the rest of us, the only bad news may be that Cajun chic has
left the best part of an amazing tale untold. That tale is the story
not only of who the Cajuns are but also of who they were--and how they
got here. Today's zesty south Louisianans are just one chapter in a
nearly four-century saga of heartbreak, struggle, and perseverance
against all odds. Many Cajuns know the story, as do their modern-day
kin in Canada, New England, and France, because each of them has in some
way lived it.
Set aside for a moment what you remember of Evangeline, Hnery
Wadsworth Longfellow's sentimental account of an Acadian maiden's
separation from her fiance', Gabriel, during the exile of 1755, because
Longfellow's characters and many of his important details are now know
to be fiction.
Early in the 17th Century, settlers from western France came to
what is now Nova Scotia's Annapolis Basin, a fertile land of orchards
sheltered from winter winds by mountains to the north. They spread into
rich land in the Minas Basin and along the Isthmus of Chignecto.
Fishermen and farmers, they always hewed close to the shore,
constructing elaborate dikes to claim new cropland from the Bay of
Fundy's 50-foot tides.
Their new homeland of Acadie lay squarely athwart the rivalry
between France and England for mastery of North America. The Acadians
declared neutrality, but the English, who had won control over their
lands in 1713, demanded loyalty. When, in June l755, the English
overran France's Fort Beausejour, and captured some 300 Acadian
conscripts inside, the fate of Acadia was sealed.
The English claimed treachery. Within months Acadians of the
Minas Basin were being boarded onto British ships bound for the American
colonies, their land and homes in flames. Others either capitulated or
fled into the forests. For years the roundup continued. Of an
estimated 15,000 Acadians, 10,000 were captured, deported, or detained
before the war between France and England ended in 1763.
Those who came to the American colonies faced wartime hostility
and grew quickly destitute. Virginia's allotment of 1,500 Acadians was
actually refused entry and shipped to England as war prisoners. At
least seven hundred Acadians drowned when their overloaded ships sank in
a storm on the way to Europe. The odyssey went on for years. In one
chronicler's words, "the wretched exiles cropped up like driftwood along
the littoral of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea." They made
their way to France, Quebec, and the French West Indies, Saint Pierre
and Miquelon, French Guiana, and the Falkland Islands. By 1765 a few
hundred had settled in Louisiana.
More than 2,500 impoverished Acadians congregated in French
maritime ports, living on a dole from the Fmnch crown. For most,
Louisiana was what destiny had in store. A plan was devised to reunite
them with their kinsmen.
Spain had gained control of Louisiana in l762, and the king needed good
Catholic settlers to bolster his domination against English-speaking
neighbors. He supported the plan, and from May to October of 1785,
seven ships set sail from France, bringing their cargo of about 1,600
Acadians to Louisiana.
It has been called the largest single transatlantic migration up
to that time, the end of a 30 year exile. Today, in hundreds of Cajun
homes whose families are descended from those long-buffeted souls,
someone can unfold a dusty, fan-shaped family tree and tell you not only
the names of their ancestors but also the name of the very ship they
took long ago.
Instinctively trying rebuilt their former life, the Acadians
retreated into isolation along the bayous and in the open prairies west
of the Atchafalaya Basin. In the passionless language of social
scientists, many of them "resisted acculturation" well into the 20th
century. "Before the Civil War," historian Michael Foret told me,
"Cajuns were not as poor as people think. But the war caused a
depression in the South that lasted until the 1940s." And on the social
ladder Cajuns were near the bottom rung. Many led a subsistence living,
and many still remember it: Paul Prudhomme, sitting in the test kitchen
of his reknown New Orleans restaurant, described how his family "had
bartered butter and eggs for other things." When Louisiana began to
require school attendence in 1916, most Cajuns were illiterate. Their
indifference to education lingered: "If you went to college," said
Weldon Granger, a successful attorney who now lives in Houston, people
thought you were lazy." As late as the 1930s observers commented on
Cajuns'"rude shacks" and their "chronic aversion to waering shoes."
By 1950 three major things had changed all that: the oil and gas
demand, which brought jobs; new roads, which ended rural isolation; and
World War II, which thrust thousands of Cajun youths into the outside
world.
When Weldon Granger invited me to attend his family's Christmas
reunion in Erath, I was prepared for a good time. I found it,
certainly, but I also found a microcosm of many Cajun's upward climb
from lower class to success.
When Weldon's father, Willis, joined the Navy in 1943, he spoke
not a word of English; 20 years later ha had 11 children, nine of whom
went to college, several to graduate school.
For years, Willis Granger and his boys were sharecroppers on
nearby lands of Thibodeauxs and Broussards, farming with a mule. His
wife, Edith, born an Hebert, cooked and washed without running water.
In the offseason Willis eeked out a living trapping nutria and muskrat.
"When Dad got a job in the salt mines on Jefferson Island," Weldon
recalled, "it was a real step up. We could live in town."
Today, basking in his children's achievements (all have done
well, and three sons are internationally known physiologists), the
68-year-old Willis runs a horse farm squarely across the road from where
he used to sharecrop. With a white fence and a modern home, it looks
like a bit of Bluegrass Kentucky. Weldon bought the tiny four-room
house in Erath and moved it to the farm, a memento of the family's past.
Willis has a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud now, a whim of his lawyer son ("He
uses it to go buy groceries," Weldon grins). But he still prefers his
pickup.
At Christmas a hundred or so Grangers and Heberts came together
at Erath's American Legion Hall from far away as Venezuela to eat boudin
(sausage) and dance to a Cajun band. Grandmothers en banc watched the
doings; the men discussed the merits of the latest deer hunt; the
children all behaved; and (surprise!) a well-stuffed Cajun Santa arrived
to lead the two-step at the head of a conga line.
At his plush law office, Weldon Granger tells why a painting of
a man and boy picking cotton hangs in the place of honor behind his
desk. "That's my dad and me," he says. I had an artist take an old
black-and-white photo and make it into portrait. When I get a little
cocky, I look back at that. I'm very appreciative of all that's
happened."
That blend of simplicity and success typifies many Cajuns today.
I never met a Cajun who put on airs. Composer-saxophonist Richard
Landry, whose radiant "Mass for Pentecost Sunday" was commissioned for
the opening of the Menil Collection, a sophisticated museum in Houston,
wrote the work in his family's high ceilinged old house in Cecilia, not
far from where he once picked cotton for a dollar a day and played the
saxophone in Otis Redding's band. Baseball pitcher Ron Guidry, one of
the best the game has seen, was hanging a cypress cabinet in the kitchen
of his new party barn on a 75-acre rural tract near Lafayette when I
caught up with him. It's a place for dances," he said--and for his bass
boat. "This whole area is close, tight knit," the ex-Yankee told me,
explaining why in retirement he came to Cajun country. "I can walk ten
square miles around here and know everybody."
With all the attention given to the Cajuns, Frenchness, it's
easy to forget they are Southerners too. Ron Guidry's love of hunting
an fishing, typically Southern, is mirrored all across Cajun country.
"Everyone's got hunting camps," said Terry Perrin, who grew up almost
within of Avery Island, the home of Tabasco hot sauce.
There is a special Cajun twist to this southern image. Perrin,
a semi-retired cook, explains, "Cooking is a man's thing. To cook your
first gumbo while your friends are playing bourree, a Cajun card game,
well--it's sort of a rite of passage. As we talk, he spinkles Tobasco
on his popcorn between sips of beer.
Music is the single most distinctive element in today's Cajun
cultural revival. Originally for at-home listening, it soon became an
accompaniment for dancing. The vocals, usually in French, are nasal and
shrill enough to be heard over the sound of dancing feet; to the
outsider they are an acquired taste. But the music itself--fiddle,
triangle, accordian, guitar, and the more nodern drums--is irresistibly
infectious. There is nothing of the woeful history of Acadie in these
cheerful melodies.
Cajun music had nearly died by the 1940s, absorbed by country
music and "western swing," when a half-blind accordionist named Iry
Lejeune made the old sounds fashionable again. A god in the Cajun
pantheon, Lejeune, who died young, would be amazed at today's
proliferation of retaurant dance halls like Mulate's in Breaux Bridge,
where Cajun bands play for hours every day. The shoes on the dance
floor tell the story: cowboy boots, Adidas, dock shoes, slippers, dress
shoes, sandals. In south Louisiana Cajun music crosses all divides of
age and class.
At the Savoy Music Center near Eunice each Saturday, morning
Marc Savoy, master of the accordion, hosts a jam session. When I came
in, the heavens were ringing with the sound of nine fiddles, four
accordions, three triangles, a piano, and an upright bass. Stacks of
boudin and six-packs of beer (the official "admission charge" for
first-time onlookers) lay all about.
"My idea is, let's make a party, let's make a barn dance," says
Savoy. In an era when some Cajun musicians are edging into rock, he
firmly he firmly upholds the classic sound. "I don't want to play all
this noveau music. The earliest style, the purest style, that's the
sound I've always tried to capture and pay tribute to."
In most respects the main features of today's Louisiana Cajun
culture hardly go back at all to old Acadie; furthermore Cajun life
differs sharply from that led by their now distant cousins in Canada.
Some 300,000 people proudly calling themselves Acadian reside in
Canada's Maritime Provinces, mostly along the eastern shore of New
Brunswick. (Another 25,000, a special breed of American Acadians live
across the St. John River in Maine's Madawaska region.) I went there
expecting to find the other half of a seamless Cajun-Acadian world,
separated from Louisiana's 500,000 Cajuns in distance but not in spirit.
But what I found suggested that 200 in Louisiana made Cajuns there a
separate people, bound to their northern kin more by sentiment than by
substance.
Consider what sets today's Cajuns apart. Their food, with its
cayenne pepper, roux, and mingled aromatic flavors of onion, celery, and
bell pepper, owes more to the Indians, the Spanish, and the slave cooks
of the antebellum South than to the salted, oily foods of old Acadie.
Rice is a Cajun staple, and well-loved ingredients like crawfish and
alligator play a part in Louisiana as nowhere else. Only in the one-pot
cooking style do the Cajuns share a culinary inheritance with the
Acadians - but a gumbo or a jambalaya is a far different experience than
the Acadian chicken-and-dumpling stew called fricot. Today's favorite
Acadian dishes are poutine (a doughball containing salt pork) and rappie
pie (a casserole of grated pota- toes with the starch pressed out).
Both are bland enough to put a Cajun palate fast asleep.
Classic Cajun music owes its heart and soul to the fiddle and to
the diatonic accordion, something old Acadie never saw. Introduced to
Acadiana by the Germans about 1850, it reshaped the old Cajun fiddle
dance tunes, eliminating those that could not fit its limited range.
For the most part, only waltzes and two-steps survived. Today's
distinctive Cajun sound has few real counterparts in Canada.
The status of the French language is a fighting matter in New
Brunswick, which in 1969 became officially bilingual. In Louisiana a
smattering of French lingers, but the generation now in its 40s is the
last to have grown up speaking it at home. With some exceptions - such
as the French-language news program read by a Cajun accordionist every
night on Lafayette's community TV channel - French is no more than a
grace note in Cajun life, although efforts have begun to preserve it.
The Cajuns, one Louisianan told me, "have a sense of wrong
without an attitude of militance." In New Brunswick the bold,
single-starred Acadian flag flies proudly in front of homes and
buildings, at times higher than the Canadian flag: in Louisianaan
attractive flag of Acadiana was designed some years ago, but it has not
become the same sort of political symbol. In a perfect illustration of
Cajun moderation, a Lafayette lawyer named Warren Perrin recently
petitioned the Queen of England to bring an official end to the Acadian
exile by admitting that it was a violation of English and international
law. "I wanted to do this, he told me, "so when my children ask why
their ancestors came here, I don't have to say they were 'criminals.'
It's never too late to correct a wrong."
The deepest difference between today's Cajuns and Acadians may
be one of temperament. When the Cajuns celebrate who they are, they
mean who they have become; when the Acadians celebrate who they are,
they mean who they have been. One honors change, the other endurance.
When T asked Acadians what qualities distinguished them from their
English-speaking neighbors, they always mentioned the closeness of their
family life, just as Cajuns did, but unlike Cajuns they never mentioned
joie de vivre.
Joie de vivre: It may be the richest nugget of wisdom at the
core of Cajun being-keeping in mind Cajun author Trent Angers's
observation that joie de vivre is "not a state of euphoria that can be
induced by the consumption
of alcohol," but rather "a way of looking at things. . . . a condition
of the mind and of the heart."
Despite all the differences, the personal ties that bind
Acadians and Cajuns are deep and warm, I think of the two Don Heberts,
one in Port Arthur and the other in Madawaska, who met at a family
reunion and have exchanged friends and friendship by the busload since.
And I think of Carl Brasseaux, a young Cajun historian, who told me of
the uncanny sense he had of "being among my own people" when he went to
New Brunswick. "The rhythms of speech, the way they related to their
children, so many things were so much the
same."
How much, I thought, depended on the roulette wheel of exile
more than 200 years ago: on who went where, and what they then became.
Late one September afternoon at the Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette,
after a stroll through food stalls where vendors sold crawfish tamales
and alligator sausage po'boy sandwiches and chicken jambalaya, I
listened while a popular band called Beausoleil brought the crowd to a
joyous frenzy with its swirling Cajun tunes. Sunlight backlit the
Spanish moss in ghostly gold. The dust from dancers' feet and smoke
from family barbecue grills rose around me. If the original Acadians
came back just now, I wondered, would they recognize the Cajuns? Would
they say, in them we overcame our loss? Or would they say, part of our
punishment was for our descendants to become a different people
we no longer understand?
With a twinge of regret I supposed it was the latter: The exiled
Acadians might find a part of themselves in Canada or Maine, but Cajuns,
bless their souls, would simply baffle them. So be it. Cajun culture
is
happy with itself.
FOR ALL the good-natured qualities of Cajun life, south
Louisiana still has its share of troubles. Erosion of the state's
coastal wetlands, which account for 40 percent of the production of U.S.
fisheries, is occurring at the rate of one acre every 15 minutes. The
process has been going on for centuries, as the Mississippi River has
changed its course every few hundred years, whipping across Louisiana
like a garden hose, but levees and canals have worsened the loss of land
to the point where much of Terrebonne Parish - it means "good land" -
could be gone in 50 years.
Cajun shrimpers along Bayou Lafourche bemoan rising costs and
new environmental laws that require TEDS, or turtle excluder devices,
funnel-like attachments that, in theory, deflect endangered sea turtles
while shrimpers trawl. "The shrimp are supposed to go in," says Linwood
Cheramic, a little wiry man whose ready smile fades when the subject is
TEDS. "But if anything gets caught in the opening, like paper, you lose
all your shrimp." Cheramic has worked as a shrimper for 53 of his 67
years. "I didn't expect to make a fortune, " he says in the kitchen of
his modest home in Golden Meadow, as his wife serves us coffee and
crusty French bread from Dufrene's Bakery a block away, bread fresh
enough to please a Parisian. "I'm doing it because I love to do it.
"You know what's pretty?" he interrupts himself, unfolding a
sheaf of snapshots of his boat decorated with hundreds of colored flags
for the blessing of the fleet each August. He invites me aboard his
well-kept pride and joy, and he starts the motor. It purrs like Willis
Granger's Rolls-Royce.
"It loks like the shrimp industry is a thing of the past,"
Cheramie muses. "Your expense is $15,000 a year to catch $25,000 worth
of shrimp, if you work hard. If a young man had to go out and buy a
boat like this, he couldn't make a living. But, "he pauses, and that
irrepressible smile breaks out again, "it's still fun to go outjust with
'frans' to go fishin'. What's
30 gallons of diesel fuel for frans?"
Broad and open, lined with hundreds of boats, the long reach of
Bayou Lafourche at Galliano and Golden Meadow will surprise anyone who
thinks that "on the bayou" means a moss-hung, dark, tree-shaded,
slow-moving way of life.
By day a busy waterway, it glitters at night with thousands of mercury
vapor lights. There is a bustle to the place that belies its isolation.
The few remaining swamp Cajuns, by contrast, lead a Faulknerian
existence that is fast disappearing. In the Atchafalaya Basin more of
the deep swamp is silting up each passing year. Almost all the
residents have moved to more comfortable quarters outside the levees; a
90-horsepower Yamaha can zip them into their fishing grounds and back
out in an hour or two, so the traditional houseboats that people like
Annie Blanchard remember from childhood are long gone - or are turned
into casual weekend retreats.
Annie and her husband, Roy, live in what could pass for a
typical suburban home down a gravel road on the levee south of
Catahoula, but their hearts - and their livelihood - are still in the
swamp. Competition from crawfish farms, though, has cut their income
badly. "Used to be, you'd make a living so easy it was free," Roy says
as we sit in their living room, the television playing wordlessly beside
us. "But they started these crawfish farms, and that makes it hard." The
worldwide crawfish craze has not made Roy and Annie any richer.
"If I had to leave this place and go farther," Roy says, "I'd be
like a sick dog. I can still hear the wood ducks and the little green
frogs."
Annie nods in agreement. "That's the music of the swamp." PERHAPS
THE BIGGEST BLOW to Cajun country was the oil bust of the
1980s, which shattered the economy of south Louisiana and left places
like Lafay-ette reeling. "It was a grotesque specter," says developer
Dwight Andrus. "You were lucky to catch your breath on the way down. I
will never forget it. Fear. Fear. Fear." So massive was the exodus,
U-Haul shipped loads of automobile trailers into Lafayette on railroad
flatcars. Hardest hurt was what another Cajun called "our false middle
class that oil produced." jobs came so easily during the boom, he said,
"you could make good dollars and not even finish high school." When the
bust came, "people had to leave the area, and their families, to find
work. It was the final exile, or
maybe I should say the latest exile."
Later I went to see Dave Petitjean, a popular Cajun humorist.
He and Justin Wilson, the teller of Cajun tales, have surely made more
people laugh than any other Louisianans. One of Petitjean's favorite
bits of Cajun wisdom
lodged in my memory. "Love life," he said, "and life will love you
back." So I ask him: After all the adversity the Cajuns have known -
working
in salt mines, suffering in the oil bust, picking cotton for a dollar a
day, getting expelled from Acadie and sailing the seas in search of
home, watching their bayous silt up and their coastline wash into the
Gulf - how can anyone
say that life has loved them back?
He smiles the smile of someone who just may have been asked all
this
before.
"We have a saying: 'Lache pas la patate - Don't let go of the
potato,'" he says. "It means 'Hang in there.' What Cajuns have is our
mystique, our outlook on life. Cajuns don't let things destroy them.
Not even our odyssey could destroy us."
A few days later the great Cajun accordionist Marc Savoy echoed
those words as we sat on his back porch. "What's Cajun?" he mused.
"It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever happens, it's for the best.
It's the outlook about everything. How do you see the things around you
.. how do you work ... how do you play ... how do you sin? It's not
about speaking French. It's what you got right here under your chest.
That's what's
Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I
think we've had some permanent influence on American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved the
Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps decades
from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast words as we sat on his back porch.
"What's Cajun?" he mused. "It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever
happens, it's for the best. It's the outlook about everything. How do
you see the things around you ... how do you work ... how do you play
.. how do you sin? It's not about speaking French. It's what you got
right here under your chest. That's what's
Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I
think we've had some permanent influence on American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved the
Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps decades
from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast foods we cannot now even imagine, then
there will still remain, like a lingering smile of grace from the bayous
and the prairies, that disposition of the mind and heart.
the original Acadians came back just now, I wondered, would they
recognize the Cajuns? Would they say, in them we overcame our loss? Or
would they say, part of our punishment was for our descendants to become
a different
people we no longer understand?
With a twinge of regret I supposed it was the latter: The exiled
Acadians might find a part of themselves in Canada or Maine, but Cajuns,
bless their souls, would simply baffle them. So be it. Cajun culture
is
happy with itself.
FOR ALL the good-natured qualities of Cajun life, south
Louisiana still has its share of troubles. Erosion of the state's
coastal wetlands, which account for 40 percent of the production of U.S.
fisheries, is occurring at the rate of one acre every 15 minutes. The
process has been going on for centuries, as the Mississippi River has
changed its course every few hundred years, whipping across Louisiana
like a garden hose, but levees and canals have worsened the loss of land
to the point where much of Terrebonne Parish - it means "good land" -
could be gone in 50 years.
Cajun shrimpers along Bayou Lafourche bemoan rising costs and
new environmental laws that require TEDS, or turtle excluder devices,
funnel-like attachments that, in theory, deflect endangered sea turtles
while shrimpers trawl. "The shrimp are supposed to go in," says Linwood
Cheramic, a little wiry man whose ready smile fades when the subject is
TEDS. "But if anything gets caught in the opening, like paper, you lose
all your shrimp." Cheramic has worked as a shrimper for 53 of his 67
years. "I didn't expect to make a fortune, " he says in the kitchen of
his modest home in Golden Meadow, as his wife serves us coffee and
crusty French bread from Dufrene's Bakery a block away, bread fresh
enough to please a Parisian. "I'm doing it because I love to do it.
"You know what's pretty?" he interrupts himself, unfolding a
sheaf of snapshots of his boat decorated with hundreds of colored flags
for the blessing of the fleet each August. He invites me aboard his
well-kept pride and joy, and he starts the motor. It purrs like Willis
Granger's Rolls-Royce.
"It loks like the shrimp industry is a thing of the past,"
Cheramie muses. "Your expense is $15,000 a year to catch $25,000 worth
of shrimp, if you work hard. If a young man had to go out and buy a
boat like this, he couldn't make a living. But, "he pauses, and that
irrepressible smile breaks out again, "it's still fun to go outjust with
'frans' to go fishin'. What's
30 gallons of diesel fuel for frans?"
Broad and open, lined with hundreds of boats, the long reach of
Bayou Lafourche at Galliano and Golden Meadow will surprise anyone who
thinks that "on the bayou" means a moss-hung, dark, tree-shaded,
slow-moving way of life.
By day a busy waterway, it glitters at night with thousands of mercury
vapor lights. There is a bustle to the place that belies its isolation.
The few remaining swamp Cajuns, by contrast, lead a Faulknerian
existence that is fast disappearing. In the Atchafalaya Basin more of
the deep swamp is silting up each passing year. Almost all the
residents have moved to more comfortable quarters outside the levees; a
90-horsepower Yamaha can zip them into their fishing grounds and back
out in an hour or two, so the traditional houseboats that people like
Annie Blanchard remember from childhood are long gone - or are turned
into casual weekend retreats.
Annie and her husband, Roy, live in what could pass for a
typical suburban home down a gravel road on the levee south of
Catahoula, but their hearts - and their livelihood - are still in the
swamp. Competition from crawfish farms, though, has cut their income
badly. "Used to be, you'd make a living so easy it was free," Roy says
as we sit in their living room, the television playing wordlessly beside
us. "But they started these crawfish farms, and that makes it hard." The
worldwide crawfish craze has not made Roy and Annie any richer.
"If I had to leave this place and go farther," Roy says, "I'd be
like a sick dog. I can still hear the wood ducks and the little green
frogs."
Annie nods in agreement. "That's the music of the swamp." PERHAPS
THE BIGGEST BLOW to Cajun country was the oil bust of the
1980s, which shattered the economy of south Louisiana and left places
like Lafay-ette reeling. "It was a grotesque specter," says developer
Dwight Andrus. "You were lucky to catch your breath on the way down. I
will never forget it. Fear. Fear. Fear." So massive was the exodus,
U-Haul shipped loads of automobile trailers into Lafayette on railroad
flatcars. Hardest hurt was what another Cajun called "our false middle
class that oil produced." jobs came so easily during the boom, he said,
"you could make good dollars and not even finish high school." When the
bust came, "people had to leave the area, and their families, to find
work. It was the final exile, or
maybe I should say the latest exile."
Later I went to see Dave Petitjean, a popular Cajun humorist.
He and Justin Wilson, the teller of Cajun tales, have surely made more
people laugh than any other Louisianans. One of Petitjean's favorite
bits of Cajun wisdom
lodged in my memory. "Love life," he said, "and life will love you
back." So I ask him: After all the adversity the Cajuns have known -
working
in salt mines, suffering in the oil bust, picking cotton for a dollar a
day, getting expelled from Acadie and sailing the seas in search of
home, watching their bayous silt up and their coastline wash into the
Gulf - how can anyone
say that life has loved them back?
He smiles the smile of someone who just may have been asked all
this
before.
"We have a saying: 'Lache pas la patate - Don't let go of the
potato,'" he says. "It means 'Hang in there.' What Cajuns have is our
mystique, our outlook on life. Cajuns don't let things destroy them.
Not even our odyssey could destroy us."
A few days later the great Cajun accordionist Marc Savoy echoed
those words as we sat on his back porch. "What's Cajun?" he mused.
"It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever happens, it's for the best.
It's the outlook about everything. How do you see the things around you
.. how do you work ... how do you play ... how do you sin? It's not
about speaking French. It's what you got
right here under your chest. That's what's Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I think we've had some permanent influence on
American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved
the Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps
decades from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast foods we cannot now even imagine, then
there will still remain, like a lingering smile of grace from the bayous
and the prairies, that disposition of the mind and heart.
Return to the Cajun/Acadian Articles Page
Return to the CHS Cultures of Acadiana Home Page
By Griffin Smith, Jr.
Photographs by William Albert Allard
He was a bearded, stocky, hearty Cajun papa, treating three
generations of his family to a pizza after the Krewe of Hyacinthians
parade on Sunday afternoon in Houma, Louisiana. They were planning a
party for Mardi Gras, just two days away. And while I couldn't catch
every French-accented word, one admonition came through firm and clear.
"I don't wanna run out of beer," he said, "an' I don' wanna run
out of crawfish."
With a chuckle I realized that after six weeks in south
Louisiana, I'd found him at last. Here was the Cajun as the world
imagines him to be: the easygoing, hard-drinking, seafood-loving
denizen of the bayous, brimming with joie de vivre and always ready for
a good time. And what was he eating? Pepperoni.
Along the course of those six weeks I'd had a lot of my
expectations about Cajun country turned upsidedown. I'd met Cajun
lawyers, bankers, professors, and captains of industry; I'd been
welcomed into the homes of crawfish farmers and cattlemen, rice planters
and musicians. Except for an occasional French-language sign, the
legendary Evangeline country looked pretty much like the rest of the
Gulf coast south. There were no fiddlers in the streets, no pirogues on
the bayous. It took me a while to be persuaded that it was more than
just a tourist come-on, that a proud Cajun subculture does indeed still
thrive in the eddies of the American mainstream. Pepperoni yesterday,
crawfish tomorrow: The genial Cajuns may be the country's prime example
of an ethnic group that celebrates its own distinctiveness while
remaining comfortably a part of 20th-century America.
Cajuns are the descendants of 17th-century French colonists who
settled along the shores of Canada's Bay of Fundy in a region they
called Acadie. Expelled by the British in a series of deportations
beginning in 1755, more than 2,500 Acadians eventually found refuge in
Louisiana. As the years passed, their neighbors softened the edges of
the French "Acadien" into "Cadien" and finally "Cajun." Many neighbors,
including those of German and Spanish descent, were gradually absorbed
by intermarriage into the Cajun milieu.
Today's Cajun country is a roughly triangular section of south
Louisiana reaching from the outskirts of New Orleans to the Sabine
River. It laps over the Texas line for a few miles past Port Arthur--"
Cajun Lapland," as Louisianans sometimes say to needle their Lone Star
relatives. Despite popular belief, New Orleans is not Cajun country.
Nor is Baton Rouge. Nor is a great deal else that seems French in
Louisiana, since a goodly number of French Creoles--a term that was
originally used to describe people born of European parents in the New
World--settled in the territory both before and after Cajuns arrived.
In 1971 the Louisiana Legislature designated 22 of the state's
64 civil parishes as Acadiana, remarking on the "strong French Acadian
cultural aspects of said region." Mostly rural, and with a population
that is by no means entirely Cajun, Acadiana centers around two
unofficial capitals, Lafayette in the west and Houma in the cast.
Despite the dogged misconception that most Cajuns live in swamps,
Acadiana actually divides into four geographic areas: the bayou country,
consisting of fertile levee lands slowly built up by natural processes
along the Mississippi River and lesser waterways; the coastal marshes,
rich with oil and gas deposits but eroding now at an alarming rate; the
inland swamps like the great soggy wilderness of the Atchafalaya Basin,
virtually uninhabited; and the prairies of southwest Louisiana, an
agricultural breadbasket of rice, cattle, and soybeans.
In one of those unexpected twists that keep life interesting,
something about the Cajuns captured people's imagination a decade or
more ago. Paul Prudhomme, a celebrated chef from Opelopsas, was in part
responsible. In 1980 he created an instant classic called blackened
redfish and spread the gospel of Louisiana cooking from New York to San
Francisco. Cajun cuisine, with its exotic ingredients and its
reputation for high-octane seasoning, spawned legions of imitators.
The energetic fiddle-and-accordion songs like "Jolie Blonde" and
"The Lake Arthur Stomp" set toes a-tapping far beyond the prairies of
Acadiana. Cajun musicians found enthusiastic new audiences. Songwriter
D. L. Menard, in real life a chairmaker in the tiny town of Erath,
traveled to 42 states and 21 countries, from Thailand to Egypt, playing
his guitar and singing his modern-day Cajun hit "The Back Door." For
the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev summit conference in Moscow, chef John Folse
was invited to bring Cajun cooking to Mother Russia. He set up a
temporary restaurant that required 16 tons of imported food, and artist
George Rodrigue's hauntingly evocative paintings of turn-of-the-century
Cajun life went on display there. By the end of the decade you could
walk down Main Street in Canada's Moncton, New Brunswick, and have a
choice of Cajun jambalaya or spicy shrimp at not one but two
restaurants. You could bear a French Cajun band play the old Louisiana
standards in Paris and kick up your heels at the monthly Cajun dance in
London's Cecil Sharp House. Or you could just stay home and wash down
your Amazin' Cajun potato chips (from Dallas) with Original Cajun
Flavored Beer (from Milwaukee).
All this commotion has been fun. But Cajun purists like Barry
Jean Ancelet fret that it may have gotten out of hand, giving the world
an exaggered caricature of the people he holds in affectionate regard.
"There's good news and bad news" were the first words I heard from this
lanky, droopy-mustached folklorist at the University of Southwestern
Louisiana, who probably knows more about today's Cajuns than anyone
else. "The good news," he deadpanned, "is that Cajun is hot. The bad
news is that Cajun is hot."
Like most Cajuns, Ancelet winces at implications that Acadiana
is full of fire-eating swamp dwellers who communicate in archaic French
and have not yet joined the modern world. "It's ludicrous, " he says.
"In the movies Cajuns have replaced hillbillies as a people among whom
heroes can get into exotic trouble." Businessmen trying to restore the
area's oil-depressed economy worry that the tales of Cajun carousing
will prompt prospective industries to dismiss south Louisiana.
For the rest of us, the only bad news may be that Cajun chic has
left the best part of an amazing tale untold. That tale is the story
not only of who the Cajuns are but also of who they were--and how they
got here. Today's zesty south Louisianans are just one chapter in a
nearly four-century saga of heartbreak, struggle, and perseverance
against all odds. Many Cajuns know the story, as do their modern-day
kin in Canada, New England, and France, because each of them has in some
way lived it.
Set aside for a moment what you remember of Evangeline, Hnery
Wadsworth Longfellow's sentimental account of an Acadian maiden's
separation from her fiance', Gabriel, during the exile of 1755, because
Longfellow's characters and many of his important details are now know
to be fiction.
Early in the 17th Century, settlers from western France came to
what is now Nova Scotia's Annapolis Basin, a fertile land of orchards
sheltered from winter winds by mountains to the north. They spread into
rich land in the Minas Basin and along the Isthmus of Chignecto.
Fishermen and farmers, they always hewed close to the shore,
constructing elaborate dikes to claim new cropland from the Bay of
Fundy's 50-foot tides.
Their new homeland of Acadie lay squarely athwart the rivalry
between France and England for mastery of North America. The Acadians
declared neutrality, but the English, who had won control over their
lands in 1713, demanded loyalty. When, in June l755, the English
overran France's Fort Beausejour, and captured some 300 Acadian
conscripts inside, the fate of Acadia was sealed.
The English claimed treachery. Within months Acadians of the
Minas Basin were being boarded onto British ships bound for the American
colonies, their land and homes in flames. Others either capitulated or
fled into the forests. For years the roundup continued. Of an
estimated 15,000 Acadians, 10,000 were captured, deported, or detained
before the war between France and England ended in 1763.
Those who came to the American colonies faced wartime hostility
and grew quickly destitute. Virginia's allotment of 1,500 Acadians was
actually refused entry and shipped to England as war prisoners. At
least seven hundred Acadians drowned when their overloaded ships sank in
a storm on the way to Europe. The odyssey went on for years. In one
chronicler's words, "the wretched exiles cropped up like driftwood along
the littoral of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea." They made
their way to France, Quebec, and the French West Indies, Saint Pierre
and Miquelon, French Guiana, and the Falkland Islands. By 1765 a few
hundred had settled in Louisiana.
More than 2,500 impoverished Acadians congregated in French
maritime ports, living on a dole from the Fmnch crown. For most,
Louisiana was what destiny had in store. A plan was devised to reunite
them with their kinsmen.
Spain had gained control of Louisiana in l762, and the king needed good
Catholic settlers to bolster his domination against English-speaking
neighbors. He supported the plan, and from May to October of 1785,
seven ships set sail from France, bringing their cargo of about 1,600
Acadians to Louisiana.
It has been called the largest single transatlantic migration up
to that time, the end of a 30 year exile. Today, in hundreds of Cajun
homes whose families are descended from those long-buffeted souls,
someone can unfold a dusty, fan-shaped family tree and tell you not only
the names of their ancestors but also the name of the very ship they
took long ago.
Instinctively trying rebuilt their former life, the Acadians
retreated into isolation along the bayous and in the open prairies west
of the Atchafalaya Basin. In the passionless language of social
scientists, many of them "resisted acculturation" well into the 20th
century. "Before the Civil War," historian Michael Foret told me,
"Cajuns were not as poor as people think. But the war caused a
depression in the South that lasted until the 1940s." And on the social
ladder Cajuns were near the bottom rung. Many led a subsistence living,
and many still remember it: Paul Prudhomme, sitting in the test kitchen
of his reknown New Orleans restaurant, described how his family "had
bartered butter and eggs for other things." When Louisiana began to
require school attendence in 1916, most Cajuns were illiterate. Their
indifference to education lingered: "If you went to college," said
Weldon Granger, a successful attorney who now lives in Houston, people
thought you were lazy." As late as the 1930s observers commented on
Cajuns'"rude shacks" and their "chronic aversion to waering shoes."
By 1950 three major things had changed all that: the oil and gas
demand, which brought jobs; new roads, which ended rural isolation; and
World War II, which thrust thousands of Cajun youths into the outside
world.
When Weldon Granger invited me to attend his family's Christmas
reunion in Erath, I was prepared for a good time. I found it,
certainly, but I also found a microcosm of many Cajun's upward climb
from lower class to success.
When Weldon's father, Willis, joined the Navy in 1943, he spoke
not a word of English; 20 years later ha had 11 children, nine of whom
went to college, several to graduate school.
For years, Willis Granger and his boys were sharecroppers on
nearby lands of Thibodeauxs and Broussards, farming with a mule. His
wife, Edith, born an Hebert, cooked and washed without running water.
In the offseason Willis eeked out a living trapping nutria and muskrat.
"When Dad got a job in the salt mines on Jefferson Island," Weldon
recalled, "it was a real step up. We could live in town."
Today, basking in his children's achievements (all have done
well, and three sons are internationally known physiologists), the
68-year-old Willis runs a horse farm squarely across the road from where
he used to sharecrop. With a white fence and a modern home, it looks
like a bit of Bluegrass Kentucky. Weldon bought the tiny four-room
house in Erath and moved it to the farm, a memento of the family's past.
Willis has a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud now, a whim of his lawyer son ("He
uses it to go buy groceries," Weldon grins). But he still prefers his
pickup.
At Christmas a hundred or so Grangers and Heberts came together
at Erath's American Legion Hall from far away as Venezuela to eat boudin
(sausage) and dance to a Cajun band. Grandmothers en banc watched the
doings; the men discussed the merits of the latest deer hunt; the
children all behaved; and (surprise!) a well-stuffed Cajun Santa arrived
to lead the two-step at the head of a conga line.
At his plush law office, Weldon Granger tells why a painting of
a man and boy picking cotton hangs in the place of honor behind his
desk. "That's my dad and me," he says. I had an artist take an old
black-and-white photo and make it into portrait. When I get a little
cocky, I look back at that. I'm very appreciative of all that's
happened."
That blend of simplicity and success typifies many Cajuns today.
I never met a Cajun who put on airs. Composer-saxophonist Richard
Landry, whose radiant "Mass for Pentecost Sunday" was commissioned for
the opening of the Menil Collection, a sophisticated museum in Houston,
wrote the work in his family's high ceilinged old house in Cecilia, not
far from where he once picked cotton for a dollar a day and played the
saxophone in Otis Redding's band. Baseball pitcher Ron Guidry, one of
the best the game has seen, was hanging a cypress cabinet in the kitchen
of his new party barn on a 75-acre rural tract near Lafayette when I
caught up with him. It's a place for dances," he said--and for his bass
boat. "This whole area is close, tight knit," the ex-Yankee told me,
explaining why in retirement he came to Cajun country. "I can walk ten
square miles around here and know everybody."
With all the attention given to the Cajuns, Frenchness, it's
easy to forget they are Southerners too. Ron Guidry's love of hunting
an fishing, typically Southern, is mirrored all across Cajun country.
"Everyone's got hunting camps," said Terry Perrin, who grew up almost
within of Avery Island, the home of Tabasco hot sauce.
There is a special Cajun twist to this southern image. Perrin,
a semi-retired cook, explains, "Cooking is a man's thing. To cook your
first gumbo while your friends are playing bourree, a Cajun card game,
well--it's sort of a rite of passage. As we talk, he spinkles Tobasco
on his popcorn between sips of beer.
Music is the single most distinctive element in today's Cajun
cultural revival. Originally for at-home listening, it soon became an
accompaniment for dancing. The vocals, usually in French, are nasal and
shrill enough to be heard over the sound of dancing feet; to the
outsider they are an acquired taste. But the music itself--fiddle,
triangle, accordian, guitar, and the more nodern drums--is irresistibly
infectious. There is nothing of the woeful history of Acadie in these
cheerful melodies.
Cajun music had nearly died by the 1940s, absorbed by country
music and "western swing," when a half-blind accordionist named Iry
Lejeune made the old sounds fashionable again. A god in the Cajun
pantheon, Lejeune, who died young, would be amazed at today's
proliferation of retaurant dance halls like Mulate's in Breaux Bridge,
where Cajun bands play for hours every day. The shoes on the dance
floor tell the story: cowboy boots, Adidas, dock shoes, slippers, dress
shoes, sandals. In south Louisiana Cajun music crosses all divides of
age and class.
At the Savoy Music Center near Eunice each Saturday, morning
Marc Savoy, master of the accordion, hosts a jam session. When I came
in, the heavens were ringing with the sound of nine fiddles, four
accordions, three triangles, a piano, and an upright bass. Stacks of
boudin and six-packs of beer (the official "admission charge" for
first-time onlookers) lay all about.
"My idea is, let's make a party, let's make a barn dance," says
Savoy. In an era when some Cajun musicians are edging into rock, he
firmly he firmly upholds the classic sound. "I don't want to play all
this noveau music. The earliest style, the purest style, that's the
sound I've always tried to capture and pay tribute to."
In most respects the main features of today's Louisiana Cajun
culture hardly go back at all to old Acadie; furthermore Cajun life
differs sharply from that led by their now distant cousins in Canada.
Some 300,000 people proudly calling themselves Acadian reside in
Canada's Maritime Provinces, mostly along the eastern shore of New
Brunswick. (Another 25,000, a special breed of American Acadians live
across the St. John River in Maine's Madawaska region.) I went there
expecting to find the other half of a seamless Cajun-Acadian world,
separated from Louisiana's 500,000 Cajuns in distance but not in spirit.
But what I found suggested that 200 in Louisiana made Cajuns there a
separate people, bound to their northern kin more by sentiment than by
substance.
Consider what sets today's Cajuns apart. Their food, with its
cayenne pepper, roux, and mingled aromatic flavors of onion, celery, and
bell pepper, owes more to the Indians, the Spanish, and the slave cooks
of the antebellum South than to the salted, oily foods of old Acadie.
Rice is a Cajun staple, and well-loved ingredients like crawfish and
alligator play a part in Louisiana as nowhere else. Only in the one-pot
cooking style do the Cajuns share a culinary inheritance with the
Acadians - but a gumbo or a jambalaya is a far different experience than
the Acadian chicken-and-dumpling stew called fricot. Today's favorite
Acadian dishes are poutine (a doughball containing salt pork) and rappie
pie (a casserole of grated pota- toes with the starch pressed out).
Both are bland enough to put a Cajun palate fast asleep.
Classic Cajun music owes its heart and soul to the fiddle and to
the diatonic accordion, something old Acadie never saw. Introduced to
Acadiana by the Germans about 1850, it reshaped the old Cajun fiddle
dance tunes, eliminating those that could not fit its limited range.
For the most part, only waltzes and two-steps survived. Today's
distinctive Cajun sound has few real counterparts in Canada.
The status of the French language is a fighting matter in New
Brunswick, which in 1969 became officially bilingual. In Louisiana a
smattering of French lingers, but the generation now in its 40s is the
last to have grown up speaking it at home. With some exceptions - such
as the French-language news program read by a Cajun accordionist every
night on Lafayette's community TV channel - French is no more than a
grace note in Cajun life, although efforts have begun to preserve it.
The Cajuns, one Louisianan told me, "have a sense of wrong
without an attitude of militance." In New Brunswick the bold,
single-starred Acadian flag flies proudly in front of homes and
buildings, at times higher than the Canadian flag: in Louisianaan
attractive flag of Acadiana was designed some years ago, but it has not
become the same sort of political symbol. In a perfect illustration of
Cajun moderation, a Lafayette lawyer named Warren Perrin recently
petitioned the Queen of England to bring an official end to the Acadian
exile by admitting that it was a violation of English and international
law. "I wanted to do this, he told me, "so when my children ask why
their ancestors came here, I don't have to say they were 'criminals.'
It's never too late to correct a wrong."
The deepest difference between today's Cajuns and Acadians may
be one of temperament. When the Cajuns celebrate who they are, they
mean who they have become; when the Acadians celebrate who they are,
they mean who they have been. One honors change, the other endurance.
When T asked Acadians what qualities distinguished them from their
English-speaking neighbors, they always mentioned the closeness of their
family life, just as Cajuns did, but unlike Cajuns they never mentioned
joie de vivre.
Joie de vivre: It may be the richest nugget of wisdom at the
core of Cajun being-keeping in mind Cajun author Trent Angers's
observation that joie de vivre is "not a state of euphoria that can be
induced by the consumption
of alcohol," but rather "a way of looking at things. . . . a condition
of the mind and of the heart."
Despite all the differences, the personal ties that bind
Acadians and Cajuns are deep and warm, I think of the two Don Heberts,
one in Port Arthur and the other in Madawaska, who met at a family
reunion and have exchanged friends and friendship by the busload since.
And I think of Carl Brasseaux, a young Cajun historian, who told me of
the uncanny sense he had of "being among my own people" when he went to
New Brunswick. "The rhythms of speech, the way they related to their
children, so many things were so much the
same."
How much, I thought, depended on the roulette wheel of exile
more than 200 years ago: on who went where, and what they then became.
Late one September afternoon at the Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette,
after a stroll through food stalls where vendors sold crawfish tamales
and alligator sausage po'boy sandwiches and chicken jambalaya, I
listened while a popular band called Beausoleil brought the crowd to a
joyous frenzy with its swirling Cajun tunes. Sunlight backlit the
Spanish moss in ghostly gold. The dust from dancers' feet and smoke
from family barbecue grills rose around me. If the original Acadians
came back just now, I wondered, would they recognize the Cajuns? Would
they say, in them we overcame our loss? Or would they say, part of our
punishment was for our descendants to become a different people
we no longer understand?
With a twinge of regret I supposed it was the latter: The exiled
Acadians might find a part of themselves in Canada or Maine, but Cajuns,
bless their souls, would simply baffle them. So be it. Cajun culture
is
happy with itself.
FOR ALL the good-natured qualities of Cajun life, south
Louisiana still has its share of troubles. Erosion of the state's
coastal wetlands, which account for 40 percent of the production of U.S.
fisheries, is occurring at the rate of one acre every 15 minutes. The
process has been going on for centuries, as the Mississippi River has
changed its course every few hundred years, whipping across Louisiana
like a garden hose, but levees and canals have worsened the loss of land
to the point where much of Terrebonne Parish - it means "good land" -
could be gone in 50 years.
Cajun shrimpers along Bayou Lafourche bemoan rising costs and
new environmental laws that require TEDS, or turtle excluder devices,
funnel-like attachments that, in theory, deflect endangered sea turtles
while shrimpers trawl. "The shrimp are supposed to go in," says Linwood
Cheramic, a little wiry man whose ready smile fades when the subject is
TEDS. "But if anything gets caught in the opening, like paper, you lose
all your shrimp." Cheramic has worked as a shrimper for 53 of his 67
years. "I didn't expect to make a fortune, " he says in the kitchen of
his modest home in Golden Meadow, as his wife serves us coffee and
crusty French bread from Dufrene's Bakery a block away, bread fresh
enough to please a Parisian. "I'm doing it because I love to do it.
"You know what's pretty?" he interrupts himself, unfolding a
sheaf of snapshots of his boat decorated with hundreds of colored flags
for the blessing of the fleet each August. He invites me aboard his
well-kept pride and joy, and he starts the motor. It purrs like Willis
Granger's Rolls-Royce.
"It loks like the shrimp industry is a thing of the past,"
Cheramie muses. "Your expense is $15,000 a year to catch $25,000 worth
of shrimp, if you work hard. If a young man had to go out and buy a
boat like this, he couldn't make a living. But, "he pauses, and that
irrepressible smile breaks out again, "it's still fun to go outjust with
'frans' to go fishin'. What's
30 gallons of diesel fuel for frans?"
Broad and open, lined with hundreds of boats, the long reach of
Bayou Lafourche at Galliano and Golden Meadow will surprise anyone who
thinks that "on the bayou" means a moss-hung, dark, tree-shaded,
slow-moving way of life.
By day a busy waterway, it glitters at night with thousands of mercury
vapor lights. There is a bustle to the place that belies its isolation.
The few remaining swamp Cajuns, by contrast, lead a Faulknerian
existence that is fast disappearing. In the Atchafalaya Basin more of
the deep swamp is silting up each passing year. Almost all the
residents have moved to more comfortable quarters outside the levees; a
90-horsepower Yamaha can zip them into their fishing grounds and back
out in an hour or two, so the traditional houseboats that people like
Annie Blanchard remember from childhood are long gone - or are turned
into casual weekend retreats.
Annie and her husband, Roy, live in what could pass for a
typical suburban home down a gravel road on the levee south of
Catahoula, but their hearts - and their livelihood - are still in the
swamp. Competition from crawfish farms, though, has cut their income
badly. "Used to be, you'd make a living so easy it was free," Roy says
as we sit in their living room, the television playing wordlessly beside
us. "But they started these crawfish farms, and that makes it hard." The
worldwide crawfish craze has not made Roy and Annie any richer.
"If I had to leave this place and go farther," Roy says, "I'd be
like a sick dog. I can still hear the wood ducks and the little green
frogs."
Annie nods in agreement. "That's the music of the swamp." PERHAPS
THE BIGGEST BLOW to Cajun country was the oil bust of the
1980s, which shattered the economy of south Louisiana and left places
like Lafay-ette reeling. "It was a grotesque specter," says developer
Dwight Andrus. "You were lucky to catch your breath on the way down. I
will never forget it. Fear. Fear. Fear." So massive was the exodus,
U-Haul shipped loads of automobile trailers into Lafayette on railroad
flatcars. Hardest hurt was what another Cajun called "our false middle
class that oil produced." jobs came so easily during the boom, he said,
"you could make good dollars and not even finish high school." When the
bust came, "people had to leave the area, and their families, to find
work. It was the final exile, or
maybe I should say the latest exile."
Later I went to see Dave Petitjean, a popular Cajun humorist.
He and Justin Wilson, the teller of Cajun tales, have surely made more
people laugh than any other Louisianans. One of Petitjean's favorite
bits of Cajun wisdom
lodged in my memory. "Love life," he said, "and life will love you
back." So I ask him: After all the adversity the Cajuns have known -
working
in salt mines, suffering in the oil bust, picking cotton for a dollar a
day, getting expelled from Acadie and sailing the seas in search of
home, watching their bayous silt up and their coastline wash into the
Gulf - how can anyone
say that life has loved them back?
He smiles the smile of someone who just may have been asked all
this
before.
"We have a saying: 'Lache pas la patate - Don't let go of the
potato,'" he says. "It means 'Hang in there.' What Cajuns have is our
mystique, our outlook on life. Cajuns don't let things destroy them.
Not even our odyssey could destroy us."
A few days later the great Cajun accordionist Marc Savoy echoed
those words as we sat on his back porch. "What's Cajun?" he mused.
"It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever happens, it's for the best.
It's the outlook about everything. How do you see the things around you
.. how do you work ... how do you play ... how do you sin? It's not
about speaking French. It's what you got right here under your chest.
That's what's
Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I
think we've had some permanent influence on American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved the
Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps decades
from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast words as we sat on his back porch.
"What's Cajun?" he mused. "It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever
happens, it's for the best. It's the outlook about everything. How do
you see the things around you ... how do you work ... how do you play
.. how do you sin? It's not about speaking French. It's what you got
right here under your chest. That's what's
Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I
think we've had some permanent influence on American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved the
Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps decades
from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast foods we cannot now even imagine, then
there will still remain, like a lingering smile of grace from the bayous
and the prairies, that disposition of the mind and heart.
the original Acadians came back just now, I wondered, would they
recognize the Cajuns? Would they say, in them we overcame our loss? Or
would they say, part of our punishment was for our descendants to become
a different
people we no longer understand?
With a twinge of regret I supposed it was the latter: The exiled
Acadians might find a part of themselves in Canada or Maine, but Cajuns,
bless their souls, would simply baffle them. So be it. Cajun culture
is
happy with itself.
FOR ALL the good-natured qualities of Cajun life, south
Louisiana still has its share of troubles. Erosion of the state's
coastal wetlands, which account for 40 percent of the production of U.S.
fisheries, is occurring at the rate of one acre every 15 minutes. The
process has been going on for centuries, as the Mississippi River has
changed its course every few hundred years, whipping across Louisiana
like a garden hose, but levees and canals have worsened the loss of land
to the point where much of Terrebonne Parish - it means "good land" -
could be gone in 50 years.
Cajun shrimpers along Bayou Lafourche bemoan rising costs and
new environmental laws that require TEDS, or turtle excluder devices,
funnel-like attachments that, in theory, deflect endangered sea turtles
while shrimpers trawl. "The shrimp are supposed to go in," says Linwood
Cheramic, a little wiry man whose ready smile fades when the subject is
TEDS. "But if anything gets caught in the opening, like paper, you lose
all your shrimp." Cheramic has worked as a shrimper for 53 of his 67
years. "I didn't expect to make a fortune, " he says in the kitchen of
his modest home in Golden Meadow, as his wife serves us coffee and
crusty French bread from Dufrene's Bakery a block away, bread fresh
enough to please a Parisian. "I'm doing it because I love to do it.
"You know what's pretty?" he interrupts himself, unfolding a
sheaf of snapshots of his boat decorated with hundreds of colored flags
for the blessing of the fleet each August. He invites me aboard his
well-kept pride and joy, and he starts the motor. It purrs like Willis
Granger's Rolls-Royce.
"It loks like the shrimp industry is a thing of the past,"
Cheramie muses. "Your expense is $15,000 a year to catch $25,000 worth
of shrimp, if you work hard. If a young man had to go out and buy a
boat like this, he couldn't make a living. But, "he pauses, and that
irrepressible smile breaks out again, "it's still fun to go outjust with
'frans' to go fishin'. What's
30 gallons of diesel fuel for frans?"
Broad and open, lined with hundreds of boats, the long reach of
Bayou Lafourche at Galliano and Golden Meadow will surprise anyone who
thinks that "on the bayou" means a moss-hung, dark, tree-shaded,
slow-moving way of life.
By day a busy waterway, it glitters at night with thousands of mercury
vapor lights. There is a bustle to the place that belies its isolation.
The few remaining swamp Cajuns, by contrast, lead a Faulknerian
existence that is fast disappearing. In the Atchafalaya Basin more of
the deep swamp is silting up each passing year. Almost all the
residents have moved to more comfortable quarters outside the levees; a
90-horsepower Yamaha can zip them into their fishing grounds and back
out in an hour or two, so the traditional houseboats that people like
Annie Blanchard remember from childhood are long gone - or are turned
into casual weekend retreats.
Annie and her husband, Roy, live in what could pass for a
typical suburban home down a gravel road on the levee south of
Catahoula, but their hearts - and their livelihood - are still in the
swamp. Competition from crawfish farms, though, has cut their income
badly. "Used to be, you'd make a living so easy it was free," Roy says
as we sit in their living room, the television playing wordlessly beside
us. "But they started these crawfish farms, and that makes it hard." The
worldwide crawfish craze has not made Roy and Annie any richer.
"If I had to leave this place and go farther," Roy says, "I'd be
like a sick dog. I can still hear the wood ducks and the little green
frogs."
Annie nods in agreement. "That's the music of the swamp." PERHAPS
THE BIGGEST BLOW to Cajun country was the oil bust of the
1980s, which shattered the economy of south Louisiana and left places
like Lafay-ette reeling. "It was a grotesque specter," says developer
Dwight Andrus. "You were lucky to catch your breath on the way down. I
will never forget it. Fear. Fear. Fear." So massive was the exodus,
U-Haul shipped loads of automobile trailers into Lafayette on railroad
flatcars. Hardest hurt was what another Cajun called "our false middle
class that oil produced." jobs came so easily during the boom, he said,
"you could make good dollars and not even finish high school." When the
bust came, "people had to leave the area, and their families, to find
work. It was the final exile, or
maybe I should say the latest exile."
Later I went to see Dave Petitjean, a popular Cajun humorist.
He and Justin Wilson, the teller of Cajun tales, have surely made more
people laugh than any other Louisianans. One of Petitjean's favorite
bits of Cajun wisdom
lodged in my memory. "Love life," he said, "and life will love you
back." So I ask him: After all the adversity the Cajuns have known -
working
in salt mines, suffering in the oil bust, picking cotton for a dollar a
day, getting expelled from Acadie and sailing the seas in search of
home, watching their bayous silt up and their coastline wash into the
Gulf - how can anyone
say that life has loved them back?
He smiles the smile of someone who just may have been asked all
this
before.
"We have a saying: 'Lache pas la patate - Don't let go of the
potato,'" he says. "It means 'Hang in there.' What Cajuns have is our
mystique, our outlook on life. Cajuns don't let things destroy them.
Not even our odyssey could destroy us."
A few days later the great Cajun accordionist Marc Savoy echoed
those words as we sat on his back porch. "What's Cajun?" he mused.
"It's the spirit, the attitude of whatever happens, it's for the best.
It's the outlook about everything. How do you see the things around you
.. how do you work ... how do you play ... how do you sin? It's not
about speaking French. It's what you got
right here under your chest. That's what's Cajun."
But will it endure in mainstream America, where the Cajuns so
clearly have decided to be? Michael Foret, the historian, thought so. "I
think there'll always be something about the Cajuns that will be at
least marginally different from people in Ohio or Utah or Michigan. And
it works both ways: Maybe the 'Americans' are catching some of our joie
de vivre. I think we've had some permanent influence on
American ways of thinking."
From what I had seen, each of them was right. Life has loved
the Cajuns back, not least because they willed it so. And perhaps
decades from now, when the French language is barely a memory in south
Louisiana, when the lilting Cajun music is kept in a cupboard for the
delight of connoisseurs, when the gumbo and the crawfish and the
jambalaya have given way to fast foods we cannot now even imagine, then
there will still remain, like a lingering smile of grace from the bayous
and the prairies, that disposition of the mind and heart.
Return to the Cajun/Acadian Articles Page
Return to the CHS Cultures of Acadiana Home Page
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 18, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/18/00
to
Alice, isn't that the article that appeared in the National Geographi in the
early 90s (92-93 I think)? I tried following your source but I couldn't find
it....If it's the one I'm thinking, the author is a lawyer in Texas.
early 90s (92-93 I think)? I tried following your source but I couldn't find
it....If it's the one I'm thinking, the author is a lawyer in Texas.
Thanks
CKS
Asteur, la gazette du monde cadien
http://www.asteur.org
P.O. Box 686, Maurice, LA, 70555
Tel: 337-893-2100
Fax: 337-893-8162
TSHACK
Oct 18, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/18/00
to
> In 1971 the Louisiana Legislature designated 22 of the state's
> 64 civil parishes as Acadiana, remarking on the "strong French Acadian
> cultural aspects of said region." Mostly rural, and with a population
> that is by no means entirely Cajun, Acadiana centers around two
> unofficial capitals, Lafayette in the west and Houma in the cast.
> 64 civil parishes as Acadiana, remarking on the "strong French Acadian
> cultural aspects of said region." Mostly rural, and with a population
> that is by no means entirely Cajun, Acadiana centers around two
> unofficial capitals, Lafayette in the west and Houma in the cast.
I didn't realize Houma ranked so highly in Acadiana. OK, its an oil boom
town like Lafayette, but we certainly didn't have the musical tradition like
south western Louisiana.
Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
Houma and its area have a very lively French-speaking population, even today.
They call it the "second" French capital of Louisiana; Lafayette being first.
The Houma Natives of "Pointe-aux-chiens" (please correct my spelling if I'm
wrong) adopted the French language as theirs (because of their relations with
Cajuns and French-speakers of the area), which makes the area doubly
interesting.
They call it the "second" French capital of Louisiana; Lafayette being first.
The Houma Natives of "Pointe-aux-chiens" (please correct my spelling if I'm
wrong) adopted the French language as theirs (because of their relations with
Cajuns and French-speakers of the area), which makes the area doubly
interesting.
I had an excellent time last summer meeting the people of Houma while on an
asignment with Radio-Canada, the French-canadian national TV network.
Mais il faut que je dis quelque chose. J'ai pas rencontrer un seul Cadiens dans
cette place qui nourrissait sa famille avec des "pepperoni" et qui pensait
juste à pas manquer de bière! Ils semblaient plutôt inquiet de voir leur
culture disparaître et pis ils travaillaient.
Note: the article did appear in the National Geographic, October 1990. And I
remember Dr. Robert Buckman, a journalism professor at UL, telling me that the
author is a lawyer in Texas.
Je me demande où il a prit l'idée qu'il était aussi un journaliste!
Brian Gabriel Comeaux
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
C'est Pointe-aux-chênes au lieu de Pointe-aux-chiens.
BGC
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
Merci Brian. Je savais que j'étais pas loin... :-) Mais j'ai surtout entendu
des gens le dire en anglais so.....c'est parfois difficile à "figure out."
des gens le dire en anglais so.....c'est parfois difficile à "figure out."
Boudreaux Thibodeaux
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
On 19 Oct 2000 14:52:37 GMT, laca...@aol.com (Chantal K. Saucier)
wrote:
wrote:
>The Houma Natives of "Pointe-aux-chiens" (please correct my spelling if I'm
>wrong)
>
Too lazy to look it up? My, how things have changed since college.
>adopted the French language as theirs (because of their relations with
>Cajuns and French-speakers of the area),
>
I'm sure M. Viroux would say this was just another case of French
language imperialism.
>which makes the area doubly interesting.
>
If the Cajuns and French-speakers of the area had adopted the native
language of the area, that would have made the area trebly
interesting.
>Radio-Canada, the French-canadian national TV network.
>
I guess Rail-Canada must be the French-canadian national airline, eh?
>Mais il faut que je dis quelque chose.
>
Actually, no, it is not necessary at all.
>Je me demande où il a prit l'idée qu'il était aussi un journaliste!
>
Maybe he's got a Master's Degree in Communications?
Alice Chauvin Bradshaw
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
You're on target:)me
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
>>
>Too lazy to look it up? My, how things have changed since college.
>Too lazy to look it up? My, how things have changed since college.
Nah, just too busy having too much fun!
>I guess Rail-Canada must be the French-canadian national airline, eh?
It's actually Air Canada for the airline and CN or Canadian National for the
railroads.
>>Mais il faut que je dis quelque chose.
>>
>Actually, no, it is not necessary at all.
>
Et pis qui c'est qui va m'en empecher?
>Maybe he's got a Master's Degree in Communications?
Et toi, quoi c'est que t'as?
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
You're on target:)me
Merci Alice! :-) moi
Eric d'Entremont
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:26:57 -0400, Boudreaux Thibodeaux
<maudi...@angelfire.com> wrote:
<maudi...@angelfire.com> wrote:
>On 19 Oct 2000 14:52:37 GMT, laca...@aol.com (Chantal K. Saucier)
>wrote:
>
>>The Houma Natives of "Pointe-aux-chiens" (please correct my spelling if I'm
> <snipped>
>>
>I guess Rail-Canada must be the French-canadian national airline, eh?
Mr BT... Rail Canada ???
I suppose that was your attempt at humor... you dick!
TSHACK
Oct 19, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/19/00
to
I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20001019105237...@ng-cr1.aol.com...
> Houma and its area have a very lively French-speaking population, even
today.
> They call it the "second" French capital of Louisiana; Lafayette being
first.
> The Houma Natives of "Pointe-aux-chiens" (please correct my spelling if
I'm
> wrong) adopted the French language as theirs (because of their relations
with
> Cajuns and French-speakers of the area), which makes the area doubly
> interesting.
>
> I had an excellent time last summer meeting the people of Houma while on
an
> asignment with Radio-Canada, the French-canadian national TV network.
>
> Mais il faut que je dis quelque chose. J'ai pas rencontrer un seul Cadiens
dans
> cette place qui nourrissait sa famille avec des "pepperoni" et qui pensait
> juste à pas manquer de bière! Ils semblaient plutôt inquiet de voir leur
> culture disparaître et pis ils travaillaient.
>
> Note: the article did appear in the National Geographic, October 1990. And
I
> remember Dr. Robert Buckman, a journalism professor at UL, telling me that
the
> author is a lawyer in Texas.
>
> Je me demande où il a prit l'idée qu'il était aussi un journaliste!
>
>
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
>I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
>suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
>suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
From your previous post:
> Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
I don't know the answer to the question but does one have to be a legend to be
a musician, Cajun or otherwise?
I met Cajuns who played Cajun music in the Houma area. They said they loved it,
but I doubt that alone would qualify as "legends," from what seems to be your
perspective.
Then again.....I may be reading it wrong. After all, English is not my first
language.
TSHACK
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
news:20001020092414...@ng-fl1.aol.com...
> >I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
> >suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
>
> From your previous post:
>
> > Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
>
> I don't know the answer to the question but does one have to be a legend
to be
> a musician, Cajun or otherwise?
>
> I met Cajuns who played Cajun music in the Houma area. They said they
loved it,
> but I doubt that alone would qualify as "legends," from what seems to be
your
> perspective.
>
> Then again.....I may be reading it wrong. After all, English is not my
first
> language.
> >I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
> >suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
>
> From your previous post:
>
> > Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
>
> I don't know the answer to the question but does one have to be a legend
to be
> a musician, Cajun or otherwise?
>
> I met Cajuns who played Cajun music in the Houma area. They said they
loved it,
> but I doubt that alone would qualify as "legends," from what seems to be
your
> perspective.
>
> Then again.....I may be reading it wrong. After all, English is not my
first
> language.
That's ok. Somebody will eventually answer the question.
Jean-Clovis Collette
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
Would Waylon Thibodeaux qualify?
"Waylon Thibodeaux is a French speaking Cajun originally from Houma,
Louisiana.
He started his career at the age of thirteen playing drums in a country
band, but soon switched to fiddle. He was only sixteen when he won the title
of Louisiana State Fiddle Champion in 1984. Since then he has toured France,
Central and South America and worked in Canada."
Waylon Thibodeau co-authored the theme song for Congrčs Mondial
Acadien-Louisiane 1999 with Roland Gauvin of New-Brunswick Canada.
"TSHACK" <TSH...@SILVER-BAYOU.COM> wrote in message
news:8spjn3$1r4s$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com...
Darrel Toepfer
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
TSHACK wrote...
: Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote...
: > >I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
: > >suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
: >
: > From your previous post:
: >
: > > Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
: >
: > I don't know the answer to the question but does one have to be a
legend
: to be
: > a musician, Cajun or otherwise?
: >
: > I met Cajuns who played Cajun music in the Houma area. They said they
: loved it,
: > but I doubt that alone would qualify as "legends," from what seems to
be
: your
: > perspective.
: >
: > Then again.....I may be reading it wrong. After all, English is not my
: first
: > language.
:
: That's ok. Somebody will eventually answer the question.
: Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote...
: > >I'm not sure, but I think I asked about Houma musical legends, and it
: > >suddenly got changed to French language. Funny how that happens.
: >
: > From your previous post:
: >
: > > Who are some of the musical legends from the Houma area?
: >
: > I don't know the answer to the question but does one have to be a
legend
: to be
: > a musician, Cajun or otherwise?
: >
: > I met Cajuns who played Cajun music in the Houma area. They said they
: loved it,
: > but I doubt that alone would qualify as "legends," from what seems to
be
: your
: > perspective.
: >
: > Then again.....I may be reading it wrong. After all, English is not my
: first
: > language.
:
: That's ok. Somebody will eventually answer the question.
With Chantel, every Good Thing© revolves or came into existance through
French language. Musical legends is a Good Thing© and therefore a parallel
is drawn. If you would have mentioned French musical legends, that would
be an even Better Thing©. If you would have somehow been able to mention
French Immersion, that would be considered Best Thing© and that would have
brought extasy to both her and Brain. And in addition, it would probably
get you featured in the rag publication, which probably isn't all that
much of a Good Thing© to begin with...
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
>With Darrel, every Good Thing© revolves or came into existance through
>English language. Musical legends is a Good Thing© and therefore a parallel
>is drawn. If you would have mentioned English musical legends, that would
>be an even Better Thing©. If you would have somehow been able to mention
>English Immersion, that would be considered Best Thing© and that would have
>brought extasy to both BT and Johan Viroux. And in addition, it would probably
NOT get you featured in the rag publication, which is probably a Good Thing© to
begin with...>
>
>English language. Musical legends is a Good Thing© and therefore a parallel
>is drawn. If you would have mentioned English musical legends, that would
>be an even Better Thing©. If you would have somehow been able to mention
>brought extasy to both BT and Johan Viroux. And in addition, it would probably
NOT get you featured in the rag publication, which is probably a Good Thing© to
begin with...>
>
moi ;-) <grin>
Darrel Toepfer
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote...
: >With Darrel, every Good Thing© revolves or came into existance through: >English language. Musical legends is a Good Thing© and therefore a
parallel
: >is drawn. If you would have mentioned English musical legends, that
would
: >be an even Better Thing©. If you would have somehow been able to
mention
: >English Immersion, that would be considered Best Thing© and that would
have
: >brought extasy to both BT and Johan Viroux. And in addition, it would
probably
: NOT get you featured in the rag publication, which is probably a Good
Thing© to
: begin with...>
: >
:
: moi ;-) <grin>
Showing us your poor editing skills or excellent copyright infringment
abilities?
Original message provided below:
: From: Darrel Toepfer
: Article: <01c03abd$167a07e0$fb569d26@whodat>
: Newsgroups: alt.culture.cajun
: Subject: Re: The Cajuns: Still Loving Life By Griffin Smith, Jr.
: Date: Friday, October 20, 2000 12:40 PM
:
: With Chantel, every Good Thing© revolves or came into existance through
: French language. Musical legends is a Good Thing© and therefore a
parallel
: is drawn. If you would have mentioned French musical legends, that would
: be an even Better Thing©. If you would have somehow been able to mention
: French Immersion, that would be considered Best Thing© and that would
have
: brought extasy to both her and Brain. And in addition, it would probably
: get you featured in the rag publication, which probably isn't all that
: much of a Good Thing© to begin with...
In response to:
: From: TSHACK
: Article: <8spjn3$1r4s$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>
: Newsgroups: alt.culture.cajun
: Subject: Re: The Cajuns: Still Loving Life By Griffin Smith, Jr.
: Date: Friday, October 20, 2000 9:23 AM
: > From: Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com>
: > Article: news:20001020092414...@ng-fl1.aol.com
: > Newsgroups: alt.culture.cajun
: > Subject: Re: The Cajuns: Still Loving Life By Griffin Smith, Jr.
: > Date: Friday, October 20, 2000 8:24 AM
: > > From: TSHACK
: > > Article: <8snvs2$2re8$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com>
: > > Newsgroups: alt.culture.cajun
: > > Subject: Re: The Cajuns: Still Loving Life By Griffin Smith, Jr.
: > > Date: Thursday, October 19, 2000 6:38 PM
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
I'm sorry if I broke any law, copyright or otherwise but I didn't know one
could own the rights to "Good Thing"
"Better Thing", "Best thing". People say that all the time and they are quoted
saying it too, like headline: "Dr. Z Says Desegregation is a Good Thing". Is
that "copyright infringment" too?
could own the rights to "Good Thing"
"Better Thing", "Best thing". People say that all the time and they are quoted
saying it too, like headline: "Dr. Z Says Desegregation is a Good Thing". Is
that "copyright infringment" too?
Alice Chauvin Bradshaw
Oct 20, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/20/00
to
I don't understand..why is it "not a good thing" to try any way they can
to save a peoples language?
I don't have the French my family had, likely never will...but I pray it
will be there for Children Here and Now, to have a chance to Learn, to
Have and to Hold..never ever be Lost again:) me
to save a peoples language?
I don't have the French my family had, likely never will...but I pray it
will be there for Children Here and Now, to have a chance to Learn, to
Have and to Hold..never ever be Lost again:) me
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
>I don't understand..why is it "not a good thing" to try any way they can
>to save a peoples language?
>to save a peoples language?
Because "they" think we "should" all just speak English: it's easier, faster,
and cheaper! It reminds me of McDonals, except "they" don't like to see you
smile, especially if you smile "in French." <grin> moi ;-)
Darrel Toepfer
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
Alice Chauvin Bradshaw wrote...
: I don't understand..why is it "not a good thing" to try any way they can
: to save a peoples language?
: I don't understand..why is it "not a good thing" to try any way they can
: to save a peoples language?
They aren't saving anything, they are killing the cajun french language by
importing anything that speaks something simular to french...
: I don't have the French my family had, likely never will...but I pray it
: will be there for Children Here and Now, to have a chance to Learn, to
: Have and to Hold..never ever be Lost again:) me
Exactly the point I made above... What you will have, will be something
else, that will be different...
Darrel Toepfer
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote...
: I'm sorry if I broke any law, copyright or otherwise but I didn't knowone
: could own the rights to "Good Thing"
: "Better Thing", "Best thing". People say that all the time and they are
quoted
: saying it too, like headline: "Dr. Z Says Desegregation is a Good
Thing". Is
: that "copyright infringment" too?
Bwahahahahaha, its probably a second language problem for you...
TSHACK
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
Jean-Clovis Collette <jcl...@nbnet.nb.ca> wrote in message
news:VLZH5.2841$iY1....@sodalite.nbnet.nb.ca...
> Would Waylon Thibodeaux qualify?
>
> "Waylon Thibodeaux is a French speaking Cajun originally from Houma,
> Louisiana.
Thanks. That's one. Who else?
TSHACK
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
news:8sshuc$tmj$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com...
What about Vin Bruce? Is he from the Houma area?
TSHACK
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
news:8ssi8k$uss$1...@nntp1.ba.best.com...
I just found a bio on him. He's from Cut Off, La, currently living in
Galliano, La., both down Bayou Lafourche, in Lafourche Parish, but a stones
throw from Houma.
Chantal K. Saucier
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
>Bwahahahahaha, its probably a second language problem for you...
Is that your way of saying you don't know the answer to my question? It was a
serious one, by the way....
Darrel Toepfer
Oct 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM10/21/00
to
Chantal K. Saucier <laca...@aol.com> wrote...
: >Bwahahahahaha, its probably a second language problem for you...:
: Is that your way of saying you don't know the answer to my question? It
was a
: serious one, by the way....
When you get a, most "serious one", pass it my way...
0 new messages