Read Blue Highways: A Journey Into America Page 14


  “Jukebox is our music tonight,” she snapped.

  A man called Walt, with dark hair oiled and slicked back in the style of an older time, squeezed in beside me. “If you’re lookin’ for French music, you need to get yourself to laugh yet.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Means haul your butt to laugh yet. Biggest Coonass city in the world.”

  “Lafayette?” I made it three syllables.

  “You got it, junior, but we don’t say Lah-fay-et.”

  “Where should I go in Laughyet?”

  He drew a map so detailed I could almost see chuckholes in the streets. “Called Eric’s. That’s one place. In Laughyet they got whatever you want: music, hooch, girls, fights, everything.” He passed the bar peanuts. “By the way, junior,” he asked casually, “ever had yourself a Cajun woman?”

  His question silenced the bar. “Don’t think I have.”

  “Got some advice for you then—if you find you ever need it.”

  It was the quietest bar I’d ever been in. I answered so softly no sound came out, and I had to repeat. “What advice?”

  “Take off your belt before you climb on so you can strap your Yankee ass down because you’ll get taken for a ride. Up the walls and around.”

  Now the whole bar was staring, I guess to surmise whether my Yankee ass was worth strapping down. One rusty geezer said, “Junior ain’t got no belt.”

  Walt looked at my suspenders and pulled one, letting it snap back. “My man,” he said, “tie on with these and you’ll get zanged out the window like in a slingshot.”

  The men pounded the bar and choked on their Dixie beer. One began coughing and had to be slapped on the back. Two repeated the joke.

  Walt shouted to the barmaid, “Let’s get junior another Jax.” To me he said, “Don’t never take no offense at a Coonass. We’re all fools in God’s garden. Except for bettin’. Now that’s serious. These boys’ll bet on anything that moves or scores points and even some things that don’t do neither. Charles, here, for example, will bet he can guess to within four how many spots on any Dalmatian dog. I bet on movement because I don’t know dogs and not too many things score points. But everything moves—sooner or later. Even hills. Old Chicksaw taught me that.”

  10

  IF you’ve read Longfellow, you can’t miss Cajunland once you get to the heart of it: Evangeline Downs (horses), Evangeline Speedway (autos), Evangeline Thruway (trucks), Evangeline Drive-in, and, someone had just said, the Sweet Evangeline Whorehouse.

  I found my way among the Evangelines into an industrial area of Lafayette, a supply depot for bayou and offshore drilling operations. Along the streets were oil-rig outfitters where everything was sections of steel: pipes, frames, ladders, derricks, piles, cables, buoys, tanks. Crude oil opened Acadian Louisiana as nothing in the past three centuries had, and it seemed as if little could be left unfound in Cajun hamlets once quite literally backwaters.

  Eric’s, on the edge of the outfitters’ district, was a windowless concrete-block box with a steel door and broken neon and a parking lot full of pickups, Cadillacs, and El Caminos (“cowboy Cadillacs”). But no French music.

  I drank a Dixie and ate bar peanuts and asked the bartender where I could hear “chanky-chank,” as Cajuns call their music. She, too, drew a map, but her knowledge gave out before she got to the destination. “It’s called Tee’s. It’s down one of these roads, but they all look alike to me out there.”

  “Out there?”

  “It’s in the country. Follow my map and you’ll be within a couple miles.”

  When I left she said good luck. The traveler should stand warned when he gets wished luck. I followed her map until the lights of Lafayette were just a glowing sky and the land was black. I wound about, crossing three identical bridges or crossing one bridge three times. I gave up and tried to find my way back to town and couldn’t do that either.

  Then a red glow like a campfire. A beer sign. Hearty music rolled out the open door of a small tavern, and a scent of simmering hot peppers steamed from the stovepipe chimney. I’d found Tee’s. Inside, under dim halos of yellow bug lights, an accordion (the heart of a Cajun band), a fiddle, guitar, and ting-a-ling (triangle) cranked out chanky-chank. The accordionist introduced the numbers as songs of amour or joie and the patrons cheered; but when he announced “un chanson de marriage,” they booed him. Many times he cried out the Cajun motto, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!”

  While the good times rolled, I sat at the bar next to a man dying to talk. My Yankee ass and his were the only ones in the place. His name was Joe Seipel and his speech Great Lakes. I asked, “You from Wisconsin?”

  “Minnesota. But I been here seven years working for P.H.I.”

  “What’s P.H.I.?”

  He put down his bottle and gave me an exaggerated, wide-eyed, openmouthed look to indicate my shocking ignorance. “You gotta be kidding!”

  “About what?”

  “Petroleum Helicopters Incorporated!” He shook his head. “Jees!”

  “Oh, that’s right. What kind of helicoptering do you do?” I tried to talk between numbers, but he talked through it all.

  “I don’t fly. I’m a mechanic. But Stoney here flies out to the offshore rigs. Delivers materials, crews. You know.”

  The pilot, in his fifties, wore cowboy boots and a jaunty avocado jumpsuit. He was applying a practiced Bridges-at-Toko-Ri machismo to a hugely mammaried woman who had painted on a pair of arched, red lips the likes of which the true face of womankind has never known.

  Seipel said, “I was just like you when I came here—dumb as hell. But I’ve read about Louisiana. Learned about Coonasses from that yellow book.”

  “What yellow book is that?”

  “That one comes out every month.”

  “National Geographic?”

  “That’s it. They had a story on Coonasses.”

  “Did they explain the name ‘Coonass’?”

  “I think they missed that.”

  A small, slue-footed Gallic man wearing a silky shirt with a pelican on it dragged an upturned metal washtub next to the band and climbed on. I think he’d taken out his dentures. A mop handle with baling twine tied to it projected from the tub, and he thrust the stick about in rhythm with the music, plucking out the sound of a double bass.

  “That’s DeePaul on the gut bucket,” Seipel said. “He’s not with the band.”

  After a couple of numbers on the tub, the small man hopped down and waltzed around the floor, quite alone, snapping his wrists, making sharp rapid clacks with four things that looked like big ivory dominoes.

  “Those are the bones,” Seipel said. “Sort of Cajun castanets.”

  When the band folded for the night, the little fellow sashayed to the lighted jukebox, drawn to it like a moth, and clacked the bones in fine syncopation, his red tongue flicking out the better to help him syncopate, his cropped orb of a head glowing darkly. Seipel hollered him over.

  He showed how to hold the bones one on each side of the middle fingers, then flung out his wrist as if throwing off water and let loose a report like the crack of a bullwhip. “Try dem in you hands.”

  The bones were smooth like old jade. I laboriously inserted the four-inch counters between my fingers and snapped my wrist. Cluk-cluk. “Lousy,” Seipel said. I tried again. Cluk-cluk. Wet sponges had more resonance. Seipel shook his head, so I handed them to him. He got them mounted, lashed out an arm, and a bone sailed across the room.

  “You boys don’t got it,” DeePaul said, his words looping in the old Cajun way. DeePaul’s name was in fact Paul Duhon. He had cut the clappers from a certain leg bone in a steer and carved them down to proper shape and a precise thickness. “You got to have da right bone, or da sound she muffle. And da steer got to be big for da good ringin’ bones.”

  I tried again. Cluk-cluk. “I work at dis forty years,” Duhon said, “and just now do I start gettin’ it right. Look at me, gettin’ ole and just now gettin’ goo
d. Dat’s why only ole, ole men play da good bones.”

  “Where’d you learn to make them?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  11

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Don’t you know that now, cher?”

  “Do you use your French?”

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

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

  12

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

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

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

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