Cajun Country

We slept well at the Saint Francisville Inn, despite the garishness of the room’s decor. After a fairly filling breakfast, we left town. To see a little more of the state, instead of going back towards Baton Rouge, we took the ferry across the Mississippi.

We came first to the town of New Roads. It had little I could see to recommend it other than the False River, an old oxbow lake created when the Mississippi changed course at some point. We continued on the highway towards the small city of Opelousas. John was in a pretty cranky mood by the time we came there, so after a brief stop at the information center and its small cluster of old Acadian buildings, we went to the Palace Cafe opposite the courthouse where he had some coffee and a piece of cheesecake topped with crushed pralines.

Despite its historical significance – Opelousas was the capital of Louisiana in waning days of the Confederacy – and its importance for Cajun culture today – it is the hometown of Paul Prudhomme and the site of the celebrated Cajun joke telling competition – it really does not have that much to offer a visitor. So we pushed on a little further to the town of Grand Couteau.

Grand Coteau is an odd little place. The name itself refers to a hill formed by a river, a kind of natural levee. It is one of the few rural communities with a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places. The Catholic Church dominates the town. One of the first Academy of the Sacred Heart schools in the country was established there in about 1820 and about 15 years later the Jesuits established their first seminary in the South in Grand Coteau. The town is mostly black, though almost all the students we saw at both Sacred Heart and Saint Ignatius school were white. The students at Saint Ignatius were having some kind of religious assembly using the steps of the church as a stage. As it was breaking up, John saw one of the students who had a cross to bear (quite literally).

After Grand Coteau, we went on to Lafayette. Almost everyone in Louisiana loves Lafayette, and I am sure it probably has an appealing “laissez les bons temps rouler” quality of life. But as a casual visitor, the city is not particularly appealing. Like so much of Louisiana, it is dominated by hideous commercial development along long streets. Lots of parking, lots of billboards, and not a lot of charm. We were stuck in some miserable traffic to equal what you can find in Los Angeles other large cities. We finally made it to our destination in town, the Acadian Village.

This was interesting, but probably not worth the long trip in bad traffic. It is a collection of historic buildings from the area arranged around an artificial bayou. It was almost deserted when we arrived there. The information provided on the handout and in the buildings themselves was reasonably informative.

John liked some of the folk art we saw there.

As we walked around, we saw this man doing maintenance work. As a Californian, I was appalled both by the quantity of herbicides he was spraying on every stray weed he saw and also by the message he had sprayed on his cart. Just looking at him I knew that he liked Sarah Palin.

John, of course, can’t resists a cheap kitschy souvenir like this alligator head.

We left Lafayette and went east to Breaux Bridge. Now this is the kind of small, charming town that immediately appeals to a tourist. We were not immediately charmed, however, with our accommodations. The bed and breakfast was charming enough, but it was located in a fairly commercial neighborhood just up the street from the water treatment plant. We did like the back yard of the building, however, which has a little deck overlooking the bayou.

We walked around town. There are a lot of antique shops here, just as there were in Saint Francisville, though I wonder how many people are really buying “junque” these days. The local Roman Catholic parish was an odd building which vaguely looked like it had been a converted synagogue (though apparently it was not). Next to the church was the cemetery. This was the almost the Chelsea Flower Show of fake flowers, and the graves themselves were also fairly entertaining. I liked this one where the monument to the Champagne family seemed to turn into the suggestion that bubbly wine was the beverage of choice for the discerning Messiah who liked a fine last supper.

Speaking of suppers, we had perhaps our best meal of the trip at the Cafe Des Amis. We enjoyed live music as you can see in the picture below. John invited Gordon and Judy, two retired teachers from Michigan who are also guests at the hotel, to join us for dinner.

On the way home from dinner, John snapped this shot of the bridge that gives the town its name.

Good Times on the Old Plantation

After the wretched evening, I did not particularly sleep well nor was I looking forward to breakfast with Connie.  She was fortunately both sober and in a pretty cheerful mood, so our breakfast went by well enough. The food was also a bit better than the night before. However, I am starting to get a fondness for grits, and I am not sure what to make of this!

I had a much better feeling for Madewood by the time we left. We walked around the grounds some more a explored the old cemetery on the property. There were quite a number of Pugh graves, though these seemed to disappear by the late nineteenth century, leading me to think that at some point there were no male heirs. And that made me doubt even more Connie’s claim to be some kind of relative to the original owners of the plantation. Oh well, this is a woman who think she may also be a druid and speak in ancient Celtic incantations in her sleep.

We met the current owner of the estate, Keith Martin, as we were leaving. He was pleasant and gregarious, and John in particular had no trouble engaging him in conversation. We knew from some pictures on the wall that he had been to Oxford with Bill Clinton when both of them had been Rhodes Scholars. John somehow tested the waters on politics, and we were relieved to learn that he and his wife are staunch Democrats. In fact, she had just been on a cruise with Rachel Maddow.

We took off for Saint Francisville with the help of the GPS. It took about an hour and a half to get there driving by the outskirts of Baton Rouge. Our first stop was the Rosedown Plantation. This is a state historic park and it is most famous for its garden, one of the oldest in the country. The garden was planted about the same as the house was built in the 1840’s and has been continuously maintained since then. Like the house, the garden is basically done in a neo-classical style.

Despite temperatures which hovered near 80 today, this is still fairly early spring in this part of the world. The camellias and azaleas were coming into bloom, and there were nice displays of tulips and narcissus. I knew most of the plants, though there were a few, such as the ilex below, that were unfamiliar. 

The guidebook we read had suggested that the house was not particularly memorable, but both John and I were quite taken with it. The house was still in the original family until the 1950’s, and it had most of its furnishings intact. One of the best parts was the entryway. The wallpaper here is not original, but is from the same company and era. The floor is also historically accurate:  canvas painted to look like some kind of marble or linoleum. Most of the other rooms had floors covered in woven grass mats. The guide explained that these would have been covered with carpets and rugs in the winter, but that in the humid summer the rugs would have been put away and only the matting would remain. Bare wood floors, however, were not considered proper.

We found this offensive picture on the wall of one of the rooms. It is surprising how much of the “Old Folks at Home” mentality still survives in the South despite so much evidence that the “darkies” were hardly happy.

 

In the picture below, there is another one of the fans used to keep the insects off the food which we had seen earlier at Oak Alley. The guide said that these were first used by the British in India and then came to the South later. The child of the butler was normally the one who pulled it back and forth during the meal.

The nursery would have been home for all the children until they were roughly 14. Unlike the Creole homes, there was apparently no tradition of a “garcionierre” where unmarried males would live away from the rest of the family until marriage. However, they apparently did get their own rooms in the home at this point.

 

After we finished the tour, we continued on into the town of Saint Francisville. This part of Louisiana is historically closer to Florida and the rest of the South and has little French influence. It was West Florida and was a British holding for a while. It was not part, therefore, of the Louisiana Purchase. In 1810, West Florida  declared itself an independent republic for some 70 odd days until American troops came in and summarily annexed it to their new state of Florida. For those couple months. Saint Francisville was its capital.

Since this was a British and then American town rather than a Creole French one, Protestant churches dominate rather than the Roman Catholic. The most imposing church in town, built on the highest spot over the river, is Grace Episcopal Church. It is done in the typical Gothic Revival of the early 19th century, but only brick instead of stone is used.

The rest of the town is pretty. It looks more like a well-to-do New England or Midwestern town than what we saw in the other parts of the state. This is the front of our hotel, the Saint Francisville Inn. It is really not as nice as the picture suggests:  the rooms are in back in a motel-style structure behind the house. The house itself is used for the breakfast room and as the personal quarters of the owners’ family. Still, this house is pretty typical of homes in this little town.

We had a mediocre but inexpensive dinner at the only restaurant – more of a diner, really – open in town. I think that tourism boomed here a few years ago, but that things have been hard recently. Tomorrow, we go back to the heart of Cajun country.

Plantations

I awoke to discover that we were famous. Well, not really, but there on the front page of the Times-Picayune was a picture of the parishioners of Saint Anna’s marching down Esplanade, and there on the left side of the picture was John. I pointed it out to Leigh, one of our hosts, and she seemed equally excited. She laughed, “You’ve only been here one day and you’ve already made the front page of the paper!” John was even happier - well, he was after he had had his first cup of coffee.

We packed up and called a cab. We were scheduled to pick up a car from the Hertz office in downtown New Orleans. Leaving town was surprisingly easy and it took us only about 45 minutes to arrive in Vacherie. We were going to explore the River Road, the home of some of the great antebellum plantations of Louisiana.

Our first stop was probably one of the most historically typical plantations, though miles removed from the image implanted in childhood imaginations from Gone With the Wind. This plantation was called “Laura” and it billed itself as a “Creole” plantation. The narration from our guide here was really interesting. He pointed out a couple things about the house itself. First, he noted how brightly it was painted in garish colors, more typical of the West Indies than our idea of southern living. The French-speaking planters, still the majority for a hundred years after the Louisiana purchase, sought to distinguish themselves as culturally as possible from their English-speaking neighbors, and bright colors were useful to immediately proclaim that this was a Catholic and French-speaking home. Secondly, he pointed out how small the house was. The Creole planters lived in New Orleans as much as possible, and certainly did so during the winter social season. This was more a working farm than a house, and the family only lived here when it was necessary to plant and harvest the sugar cane crop.

 

There are apparently more documentation for this history of this house than there are for most Creole plantation houses mostly because Laura, the last and most reluctant family owner, wrote down the history for her children. She was apparently appalled by Gone With the Wind and she wanted them to know what plantation life was really like, and particularly how brutal it often was. In the basement of the house there are full-size statues of the various early family members. It is a little cheesy, but it helped as the guide told about the beginnings of the farm.

There house itself is no more than 1600 square feet, smaller than an average American tract home today. Although furnished with period antiques, you could tell that it was not particularly fancy furniture for its time.

The best part of this tour was its frank discussion of slavery. It is pretty typical in Louisiana to hear about how the Code Noir was more humane that the typical southern slave law and that there were more free people of color here than anywhere else in the south. This may have been true in theory, our guide noted, but who was really enforcing these laws? There were a number of extant slave cabins on this property, many of which have been destroyed on other plantation. Each building below houses two families, at least 5 people sharing an 8 foot by 8 foot room. “Laura” was a sugar plantation – the soil below Baton Rouge is not dry enough for cotton – and it was both an extremely lucrative crop for its owners and one which required intense and crushing labor for its production.

Our next plantation is probably the most famous on the River Road, Oak Alley. It has been featured in many films particularly Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. This was also a plantation built for French-speaking planters, but it was built in the late 1840’s as the craze for Greek Revival architecture had hit New Orleans. It looks more typical of the plantation homes that the Americans built. It takes its name from the allee of Virginia Live Oaks which run from the house to the River. These had been planted perhaps a century earlier by an unknown first resident.

Our tour guide here was Gilda, shown below. We liked her. She had the perfect hard inflections of the Cajun accent and a gravelly voice which sounded like she had spent more of her life on a bar stool. But she did a good job with her script. Oak Alley is more a monument to the gracious Confederacy myth of Gone With the Wind.

The most interesting part of the narration discussed all the different ways they built the house to stay cool. The house is basically made of brick, and the walls are 18 inches thick in spots. This, of course, helps keep it cooler. The veranda shade every window completely. Incidentally, the columns are also made of brick covered with wood and plaster. The rough wood floors were originally covered with marble.We could not take pictures inside the house, and there was not much of interest there except a huge fan which hung over the dining room table and which would have been swung back and forth during the meal to keep the insects away.

We stopped by Thibodeaux to see the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center. It was a big disappointment, and we did not stay long. The town itself is pretty ugly. I sometimes read a blog by a woman who lives in Thibodeaux. She never made it sound particularly wonderful, but I somehow thought it was a bit more picturesque. There are a couple cute blocks downtown, but the pointless commercial sprawl reminded me of Biddeford, Maine.

We continued on to Napoleonville where we are staying the night. John had read about Madewood, one of the plantation homes which is operated now as a bed and breakfast. Madewood is on one of the major bayous, not on the river itself. Like Oak Alley, it is done in a Greek Revival style. It is an American plantation, not a Creole one, and its original owners came from Wales through North Carolina.

We were greeted by fellow guests who introduced themselves as Connie and Herb. Connie asked us where we were from and pointedly said she hoped we were not from “the Northeast”. She laughed loudly as she made these comments. I noticed that both she and Herb were drinking.

John and I found our way to our room and looked around the place. It was not quite as wonderful as it seemed in the guidebook. Our room was clean and neat and had two large antique beds. We walked around the house – it was sort of neat to have the run of the place – and looked in all the rooms. It just did not have that kind of Tara feel that I guess I expected. It seemed more like the place that the rich people in town live in a Faulkner novel or a Hellman play. There seemed a real sense of trying to recapture and preserve a past that was irretrievably gone, no matter how much Spanish Moss you hang on the trees.

Still, this is hardly unique to Madewood. It seems to be the story of almost all the plantation houses we have seen, and it is certainly one of the great cultural narratives of the South.

The downside of staying in any kind of bed and breakfast is that your experience largely depends on your fellow guests. If I had been staying at Madewood with a large group of interesting people, I would have had a great time. Unfortunately, our only other guests were Herb and Connie. The rest of the evening was a nightmare.

Connie had only just started drinking when I met her on the patio. John and I dressed for dinner, as requested, and went down to the parlor for wine and cheese. Connie and Herb were still looking like they had just left a NASCAR event and both were drinking the wine pretty freely. I looked at the two of them and just saw John’s cousin Diane and her husband Jim. As Yogi Bera famously said, déjà vu all over again.

We managed to stay off politics for most of the evening, though I do vaguely remember some reference to “goddamn Obama” somewhere.  They apparently did fairly well flipping houses before Katrina, but they lost most of what they had made when the hurricane destroyed a couple of properties they were preparing to sell in New Orleans. As long as we stayed on the hurricane or their adventures living somewhere on the outskirts of San Diego – the trailers by the Salton Sea were all that I could visualize though I am sure it was better than that – we were safe. The conversation took some strange turns. Connie announced that she was a Pugh and therefore related to the people who had originally owned this place. She also confided in us that the Pughs were witches and warlocks in Wales and that sometimes in her sleep she spoke in the ancient Welsh language. Herb tried to quiet her every time she moved into this topic.

Dinner was OK. David, our cook, had put some time into it, but it had been served up in the kitchen and was already cold by the time we had it. After dinner was over, we retired for coffee and brandy to the parlor. This was when I could not stand it any more and I left for me room. John hissed “Coward” at me and stayed around for longer. I just dread breakfast tomorrow.

Dixieland Sunday

Our first full day in New Orleans started with breakfast. We were greeted by Zeke, the owners’ dog, taking a nap just outside the door of our room. I think Zeke takes lots of naps when he is not eating.

We had a pleasant – and reasonably low-calorie, I hope – breakfast of yogurt and granola in a parfait glass. I read the paper and John chatted with the other guests.

We then went off to Palm Sunday services. I figured we would just go to the local Episcopal church for this area. I heard that they did a big procession for this last Sunday in Lent, but I was really delighted by what we found. We had the Storyville Stompers, a Dixieland band, leading us!

We marched up and down Espanade Street, the area which divides the French Quarter, the Faubourg Marigny, and the Treme districts. Along the way parishioners – there were about 100 of us – handed out extra palms to neighbors and others who had come out to watch.

We had a few stops along the way – stations, if you prefer your terminology correct – for psalms, songs, and prayers. The music was not particularly “Episcopal”. The band played “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” and “In the Sweet By and By.” But it was fun.

The service was not as much fun as the procession. The rector preached a passionate sermon about the passion continuing with victims of violence in modern times. There were particular reference to a family here in New Orleans who were senselessly shot by a young relative earlier in the week. This has been the big story dominating the news here as it really illustrates how the social fabric of this city seems to have disintegrated in the aftermath of Katrina.

We stayed for coffee and chatted with some of the people. We had a particularly interesting talk with several young white guys who had come here to be part of the post-Katrina reconstruction effort. One was with Teach for America and the others were working for similar kinds of organizations. They talked about the “brain gain” which has characterized New Orleans in recent years. I hope it continues.

After Mass we went to Jackson Square where we took a walking tour of the French Quarter. It was a bit of a dud. The group was quite large and it was hard to hear the guide at times. There were a few things she pointed out that I had not seen before but not much.

Hardly disappointing, however, was the Stanley and Stella screaming contest which concludes the annual Tennessee Williams festival. Here a number of volunteers try their hands at doing a Marlon-Brando style yell. It was fantastic. There was even a mime who did it silently!

We did not quite know what to do after this, so we decided to do our own walking tour of the garden district. On our way to catch the Saint Charles Avenue streetcar, we saw one of the “Mardi Gras Indians.”

The Garden District is one of probably my favorite neighborhood in the city. (I like my urban environments clean, green, and affluent. I am just not cut out for India.)

We were disappointed that the Lafayette Cemetery was closed, but we did get a snapshot over the fence.

The Garden District is famous for its collection of homes from the 1840’s and 1850’s, many, like the one below, in a Grecian Revival style. They are all beautiful.

We had dinner at Luke (it’s supposed to have an umlaut over the u but I can’t figure out how to do that in HTML), a restaurant owned by local celebrity chef John Best. I had this amazing dish of local prawns in a spicy sauce over grits.

The Fabourg Marigny

I think on a previous trip I observed that no stories about air travel are interesting. I suppose crashing on a deserted island in the middle of the South Pacific is the exception to this rule, but that is another story, and one, I hope, for someone else to tell.

It is also true that no trip from the airport to the center of a city, no matter where that city is in the world, is attractive. That is certainly true for the bleak trip from Louis Armstrong Airport to the downtown New Orleans. As we turned off Interstate 10 onto Elysian Fields Boulevard all I could think of was, “Well, Elysian Fields is hardly Champs Elysee, no matter what the Larouse dictionary may say.” Getting out of our cab in front of our small hotel, looking at the surrounding vacant lots, the cyclone fencing, the police cars parked on the corner I just thought to myself, we have made a terrible mistake.

A little background here. We decided to stay in the Fabourg Marginy, the new trendy bohemian section of New Orleans, just east of the French Quarter. Based on the reviews in Trip Advisor, we picked the Elysian Fields Inn. As I said, standing there on the street, I was sure this had been a dreadful decision.

But it was not. Once we were inside our bed and breakfast, I liked it right away. It was bright, it was clean, and the innkeeper was very friendly. We had a room on the main floor of this renovated New Orleans house. Like most homes in the city, the main floor was actually the second floor of the house.

 

Our big event for the evening was a staged reading of A Confederacy of Dunces. John had read this book when it had been posthumously published some 20 or 30 years ago.