Wednesday, February 19, 2014 – Lafayette, Real Cajun Country

Wednesday, February 19, 2014 – Lafayette, Real Cajun Country

We arise and leave our hotel somewhat disgusted by our room, handicap-accessible in theory only. Perhaps I am too demanding of a cripple. The room has high beds that swallow me whole, a bathtub that I can’t get into without a crane, replete with a bathroom door opening out and into the room that Sven and I can barely maneuver around. Generally exceedingly careful, Sven bashes into the bathroom door unintentionally and repeatedly.  Surveying the damage – dented door and spattered paint chips, neither of us feels too much guilt.  The bathroom has bars by the toilet which I suppose in the hotel’s mind provides sufficient handicap-accessibility.  What else could I possibly want?  

We make the car-wash today’s first stop.  An automatic car-wash would demolish Pearl’s hat, so we opt for the tall bays of the manual.  Poor Pearl feels excruciatingly dirty, still wearing Colorado’s magnesium chloride.  She whispers her disgrace to me.  “I’m downright embarrassingly filthy,” she cries.   The boys appease us both by washing her twice, removing most of the road grime and salt from her flanks.  Floating through the South’s ceaseless warm humidity, we find it hard to remember Colorado’s cold and snow.  Pearl pearlesces, looking down both her sides with unabashed joy.

On to Jiffy Lube for Pearl’s first oil change!  She has now reached the 5,000-mile mark, seasoned but still young.

Clean and sparkly, cruising along with new oil, we head toward Lafayette, driving our sole hour today.  We pass many towns with names of French origin. The French, in a part of our history untaught and forgotten, marched across the New World, from the St. Lawrence down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.  Follow the names they left: Québec, Montreal, Detroit (the straits), Eau Claire (clear water), Des Moines (the monks), St. Louis, Baton Rouge (red stick) and finally New Orleans.

I catch a good nap, relaxing as my hair puffs and curls in the humidity.  Around 1PM we find our Airbnb house, indeed in the center of Lafayette, just as advertised.  Like all older Lafayette houses, ours sits on blocks, a simple, effective, yet inexpensive answer to periodic flooding. 

We meet some delightful fellow travelers moving out as we move in.  They wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend the gumbo at Don’s Seafood and Steakhouse.  Eternally seeking distinctive regional culinary experiences, we file that tidbit for later use.  But for now, we’re famished and our new Airbnb palace has a kitchen.  We make chicken alfredo, sharing our late lunch with our host Toby.  Toby proffers pertinent advice about what to see and do in Lafayette. During our stay, as a Cajun himself, he graciously shares his knowledge of Acadian culture and history with us.

By 3PM, we begin touring Lafayette, starting with the Jean Lafitte National Historic Park, stuffed full of Acadian history.  What?! A national park dedicated to a pirate?!  After collecting the all-important stamps in our passports, we learn a bit about Jean Lafitte and a good bit more about the Cajuns.

First, Mr. Lafitte:  In 1807, responding to English and French seizure of both merchandise and people from US ships, Thomas Jefferson enacted a trade embargo against imports from the UK and France.  Jefferson wanted to cripple the continental economies but only managed to shoot himself in the foot.  The States, a small player in global affairs, now refused to trade with the day’s great European powers, rather like Liberia refusing to trade with us today.  By preventing our things from leaving the country, Jefferson greatly harmed nascent American commerce.

Enter the Lafitte brothers.  The embargo proved unenforceable as Pierre smuggled much needed manufactured products into Louisiana, which Jean distributed through his New Orleans warehouse.  At this time in the States, no options existed besides imported stuff; in our archaic colonial economy, we supplied raw materials to Europe and purchased their manufactured items.  Heroes to the common people, the Lafittes brought in desperately needed merchandise. 

As the Lafitte brothers continued to expand their criminal empire, blockade-running proved to be just their gateway drug. Moving on to outright piracy, they retained their heroic stature even as they attacked and stripped ships – following the larceny, the Lafittes, acting like gentlemen, would return the ships to their owners. (At this time, a sailing ship reflected a far bigger, life-or-death investment than its contents.) For good reason, the fledgling federal government branded the Lafittes outlaws.

Their fate changed with the War of 1812.  Andrew Jackson arrived intent upon defending the vital port of New Orleans from the British.  Jackson mustered a local militia, desperately in need of help and supplies.  Lacking any ships to deal with the British fleet, Jackson recruited the Lafittes and their pirate armada to the US cause. The outlaw navy served admirably, helping the States win the War of 1812. After the war, pardoned but unreformed, Jean Lafitte returned to piracy, ending his days as a pirate off Galveston.  Pierre became a successful New Orleans merchant. 

So, I still don’t understand the national park designation. The boy was eternally an outlaw pirate, albeit in the Robin Hood vein. Does our culture consider all French people basically crooks and corrupt and Lafitte the best of the bunch? Why not a Lafayette or Rochambeau National Park? Both are certainly more unabashedly heroic, but as upper-class Frenchmen do lack the common touch embodied by Lafitte’s pirate flair.

On to the Cajuns, this National Park’s primary subject.  Originally from the coastal regions of France, the Cajuns (Acadians) emigrated to the Canadian Maritimes (primarily Nova Scotia) in the 1600s. Fleeing religious wars, bad harvests, rapacious nobility and plague, the Acadians farmed, fished, trapped and prospered in their new home, eventually numbering around 15,000 souls. 

Misery returned when Britain realized the strategic importance of the Maritimes during the French & Indian War (1754-1763).  In 1755, the English Crown settled 7,000 Protestants in Nova Scotia and expelled the Acadians.  French and Catholic, unwelcome in the English Protestant colonies, many Acadians returned to France, where Louis XV pitied them, granting them land near Poitiers.  Unfortunately, the land proved a useless barren rocky waste.  Unable to coax a living from the unforgiving soil, many set out for Louisiana, crossed the ocean again and became Cajuns.

What a different life to lead! Farmers in Nova Scotia and France grew cold hardy crops like wheat, rye, millet and cabbage. Adapting to Louisiana’s heat, the Cajuns learned to grow rice and sugarcane. The park mentions nothing of the enslaved Africans. Since we are so late, we have very little time in the park, but enjoy every minute of it.

We return to the house so that BLOODROOT can take a nap, not me for once!  While Bloodroot sleeps, we spend a congenial hour listening to Toby expound upon both Lafayette and Cajun culture.

Unfortunately, we learn, the persecution of the Cajuns did not end with the British.  Around 1920, the Louisiana authorities mandated school attendance while outlawing speaking French in schools. Although conceived with the best of intentions – that of bringing all Louisianans into the American melting pot – the policy had the effect of decimating the ancestral Cajun language.  Before its demise, Louisiana French had evolved into a language completely separate from the French spoken in Canada or Europe today: a creole of mixed African languages, Choctaw, Spanish and English overlaying the original 17th century French. A bit of the language survives in cuss words Toby learned from his parents and the patois found in Cajun songs. 

As a late recompense, today Louisiana has French immersion schools with high French taught by Parisians and the Québecois, two rather different languages in and of themselves. With my limited French training, I can pick out Parisian French, but find the French of the Québecois completely unintelligible. I wonder what the Louisianans hope to achieve by teaching two different varieties of French, neither of them remotely similar to the original Louisiana French? Sadly, we will never reproduce the unique evolutionary chain that shaped Louisiana’s inimitable, lost verbal landscape.

From Toby, we learn about “real” Mardi Gras parades. The traditional parades require masked marchers.  With Mardi Gras revelry providing a much-needed excuse to ridicule authority, masks provided safety for the participants, probably saving lives.  In old-fashioned parades, all marchers contribute food to a huge gumbo concocted at parade’s end. Paraders provide music - accordions, fiddles, singing and absolutely no radios!  Tired after their marching exertions, paraders beg the soup-makers for just the tiniest bit of the gumbo. In recent town history, Mardi Gras parades became huge revels involving too much liquor and loud bad music (courtesy of those evil radios!) with too many people running about trashed.  The purists moved in, banning radios while restoring masks, gumbo, real music and legitimacy. They forbade glass beads, considering them pure tourist trash.

After Bloodroot wakes and rises, we venture out to the highly recommended Don’s, as a bowl of soup sounds mighty good to us.  We’ve learned that time-honored Louisiana food includes red beans and rice, crawdads, cracklings, gumbo and boudin (sausage).  Ever hopeful of finding a genuine Louisiana meal, we expectantly order Don’s gumbo with hush puppies (fried cornbread dough).  Our server brings Land O’Lakes margarine, providing our first hint that we may not be in gustatory heaven.  My, would our parents have loved this place!  We have just enough Louisiana to be slightly different, yet feature the familiar comforts of margarine and salt.  Flavored only by salt, I find my gumbo both atrocious and inedible.  Bummer! Another restaurant failure, our high hopes for distinctive local dining once more cruelly crushed.

Next we visit the Blue Moon Hostel/Bar for the Wednesday’s open mike night.  Primed by Toby, we know that real Cajun music involves fiddles, and accordions, and singing in Louisiana French.  We hear one accordion, nine fiddles, two guitars, and various unmiked singers play some amazingly wonderful music.

Contrary to the song I’d heard for so many years, bars do indeed close in Louisiana. [1] Each parish sets its idea of the appropriate bar closing time, unsurprisingly tending to later hours down south than up north.

We love hearing genuine Cajun music.  We can’t understand the singers singing unmiked in their unintelligible French patois, but we bask in the music’s flavor.  (Even Bloodroot, with two years in Paris under his belt, can’t make heads or tails out of whatever has survived of Louisiana French.)  The much smaller Lafayette, with only 125,000 residents, has become a music town on par with Austin and Nashville, cities four times as large. Fortunately, success has not yet devoured Lafayette.  Everyone seems to know everyone else here, and all the local bands feel very authentic. 

We worry, noting that any act making it big seems to be bought out by the Nashville/Hollywood Music Complex, losing the flair that made it unique in the first place.  Case in point: compare the Oak Ridge Boys performing Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight on what appears to be a Dukes of Hazard TV episode[2] (or perhaps lip-synching since the music doesn’t match the singing) with the Emmylou Harris heartfelt, soulful, fiddle-filled rendition of the same song.

Entranced, we drink beer while the music surrounds us, becoming our whole world.  Sadly, our bodies began to scream for sleep, forcing our departure. Were we immortals, we may have spent years here enraptured, not leaving until beer consumption exhausted all of our funds. Mere mortals and also old people, we leave long before closing time, whenever that is.

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[1] Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight (Rodney Crowell) “This is down in the swampland, anything goes.  It’s alligator bait and the bars don’t close.”

[2] Ok, I’ll admit it.  The Oak Ridge Boys are so bad that I couldn’t bring myself to watch the three and a half minute You Tube video. I obliged my ears screaming for relief after about one minute.