In June 2011 fire destroyed a three-story Masonic lodge in downtown New Iberia, leaving a vacant lot along Main Street. Although I drove past this site for years, it wasn’t until the lodge’s destruction that I noticed an old advertisement painted on the neighboring brick building — an advertisement whose existence had been hidden by the former lodge building.
The remains of a Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco ad on a New Iberia building, 2012. Parts of the words "Genuine" and "Smoking" are still visible above and below the brand name. (Photo by the author)
No, not the 1988 movie featuring Kevin Costner, but a tobacco company and brand based in Durham, North Carolina. The National Park Service, which has recognized the Bull Durham tobacco factory (also called the W. T. Blackwell and Company tobacco factory) for its historical importance, has referred to Bull Durham tobacco as “the first truly national tobacco brand” and “a part of American industrial history and folklore.”
In a larger context, the barely visible advertisement is an example of what historians, architects, and others refer to as a palimpsest.
A Bull Durham advertising poster, 1910 (Source: Duke University per UNC-Chapel Hill)
The word palimpsest descends from the Latin palimpsestus, which in turn comes from the Greek palimpsēstos, meaning “scraped again.” This refers to the ancient practice of scraping the writing off a piece of parchment or vellum so that it might be reused.
Likewise, the remains of old painted advertisements are referred to as palimpsests because of their resemblance to old, scraped manuscripts that here and there, beneath their surfaces, reveal traces of earlier words.
Palimpsests for N. J. Breaux's furniture and appliance store, New Iberia, La., 2012. (Photo by the author)
A look around New Iberia revealed other palimpsests, such as that for N. J. Breaux’s furniture and appliance store. Despite its timeworn appearance, the Breaux advertisement cannot be that old because it refers to “Television,” which only became a common appliance after World War II and particularly after 1950. Indeed, as I point out in my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, in 1950 less than 1 percent of households in rural and small-town south Louisiana had television; but by 1960 the percentage had jumped to about 80 percent — an amazing increase in only a decade.
More palimpsests in New Iberia, 2012. (Photo by author)
Addendum of 22 February 2012:
The below images are unrelated to the subject of palimpsests, but I post them here because they nonetheless relate to the history of downtown New Iberia.
These are two sets of "Then and Now" photographs, showing the New Iberia railroad station (taken ca. 1905) and the early twentieth-century site of Taylor's Drug Store (also taken ca. 1905).
~ Page 65, "During the late 1960s Fender teamed up with Joe Barry and went on in the mid-'70s to record such enduring swamp pop classics as ‘Before the Next Teardrop Falls’ and ‘Wasted Days and Wasted Nights’ (the latter covered by Johnnie Allan in alternating English and Cajun French lyrics).”
Correction: "Latter" should be "former."
~Page 115, "Cookie — renowned vocalist on swamp pop classics like 'Mathilda,''Belinda,''I'm Twisted,''Got You on My Mind,' and 'Betty and Dupree.' . . ."
Correction: Cookie did not sing vocals on "Betty and Dupree"; rather, his bandmate Shelton Dunaway handled the vocals.
~ Page 254, the index entry for "Creole" says "See also Black Creole; Creole of Color; French Creole"— but there is no index entry for "French Creole."
From The Cajuns: Americanization of a People (2003):
~ Page xi, "Regardless, when I visited my Cajun grandparents on Crochet Street in Opelousas, I heard Cajun French."
Correction: "Crochet" should be "Crouchet."
From Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History (2008):
~ Page 29, "The next year, a group of about three hundred exiles arrived in Louisiana under the guidance of a daring Acadian leader named Joseph Broussard did Beausoleil."
Correction: "About three hundred" should be "about two hundred."
*Source: Donald Foster, Professor of English, Vassar College, as quoted in William S. Niederkorn, "A Scholar Recants on His 'Shakespeare' Discovery,"New York Times, 20 June 2002.
New research has confirmed the use of the word "coonass" as early as 1940. In addition, the word was clearly used at the time as an ethnic slur (unlike in the "Cajun Coonass" airplane images from 1943, when the word was apparently used as a badge of ethnic pride).
"Coonass" continues to be a controversial word in Cajun country. Its origin remains a mystery.
My source for this documented 1940 use of the word "coonass" is "In the Matter of Shell Oil Company, Incorporated[,] and Oil Workers International Union, Local 367," Case No. C-1858, Decided 23 August 1941," in Decisions of the National Labor Relations Board, Volume 34 (1942), pages 866-[892].
This labor dispute centered around a verbal altercation between one W. O. Ventura, a union member, and one Alec Vincent, a former union member, both employed at a Shell Oil facility located in Texas, evidently in or very near Houston. (Local 367 was active in the Houston area; in addition, the National Labor Board report on this dispute refers more than once to Harris County, Texas, where Houston is located; and, finally, the report gives Shell Oil's location as Houston, next to which the company did operate at least one petroleum plant in 1940, namely, at Deer Park.) [Note of 28 March 2012: I have now confirmed that the incident in question occurred at the Deer Park refinery near Houston.]
Angered that Vincent had dropped out of the union, Ventura approached Vincent during their lunch break on January 10, 1940, and berated him for refusing to pay his union dues. When Vincent asked to be left alone, Ventura — according to Vincent's written statement to Shell Oil of five days later — barked:
"I'm through with you, you coon-ass son-of-a-bitch, I'll meet you at the gate at 4:30. I want to whip your God-damned ass."
An excerpt of Vincent's statement from the original document.
Ventura himself recalled the phraseology this way:
"Why don't you just admit that you are just a damn coon-ass and too tight to pay the two dollars . . . Vincent, it is 12:30 now. Either now or at 4:30 you can come out to the gate and you can either whip my God-damn ass or I'll whip yours or we can go out and talk it over or settle it any way you want to . . . [sic]"
An excerpt of Ventura's statement from the original document.
Eight days after this incident, Shell Oil asked an eyewitness, employee and union member Leo L. Fullerton, to record his recollection of the incident. Fullerton stated:
"Bill [Ventura] said, 'Well, if that is the way you feel about it, Coon ass [sic], just wait until 4:00 and we will argue about it on the outside of the gate."
Fired for his verbal assault on Vincent, Ventura appealed to the National Labor Relations Board, asserting that Shell Oil had terminated him not because of his disparaging language, but because he was an active union member. In his defense, Ventura demonstrated that Shell Oil had not fired other, non-union coworkers for similar offenses.
The Trial Examiner of the National Review Board ruled that although Ventura had called Vincent a "coon ass son-of-a-bitch," Shell Oil had terminated him unjustly. In fact, the National Review Board observed, "We also find . . . that the language used by Ventura on this occasion was used frequently among the respondent's employees. [Shell Oil coworkers] Benson, Nelson, Ventura, Vincent, and Robison, all testified that employees at the plant often cursed and called each other 'coon ass' and 'son-of-a-bitch' when arguing over various matters." The Trial Examiner then ordered Shell Oil to reinstate Ventura as an employee and to pay his lost wages.
What is important about this incident to Cajun history, however, is not the labor dispute itself, but its documentation of the word "coonass"— now the earliest known use of this word by a little over three years.
Moreover, the word was used in this 1940 incident as a derogatory term for "Cajun," because it's reasonably clear that Vincent was indeed a Cajun.
I say this for several reasons.
First, the incident appears to have taken place in or near Houston, a city to which many Cajuns have emigrated since the first half of the twentieth century, primarily to work in its petroleum facilities. Second, "Vincent" is a Cajun surname, sometimes pronounced in the Anglo-American way (VIN-SENT), but even today said by some in the Cajun French manner (VAH[N]-SOH[N]). Third, and most importantly, one of Vincent's coworkers, M. L. Roller, noted in his statement about the incident that Vincent's nickname was — "Frenchy."
A "coonass" sticker on a hard hat. (Photo by the author.)
Addendum of 28 March 2012:
I returned to the history of the word "coonass" a couple of weeks ago or so because state media outlets have been covering south Louisiana attorney Warren Perrin's outcry over local radio stations playing "RCA (Registered Coonass)," a song by Cajun musician Jamie Bergeron. See, for example, "KBON Radio Could Face FCC Complaint over 'Coonass' Lyrics" and "'Coonass' in Lyrics Draws Ire of Perrin".
I've noticed that many Acadian- and Cajun-related websites refer to Acadian frontiersman, guerrilla leader, and exile Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil as bearing the middle name "Gaurhept." Even the self-policing online reference Wikipedia.org refers to Broussard as "Joseph Gaurhept Broussard" [accessed 3 April 2012].
No one knows what Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil looked like, but I often imagine him looking somewhat like militant abolitionist John Brown in this famous painting. (Source: Wikimedia.org)
In my opinion, however, it's doubtful that Broussard actually used this name; in fact, as far as I know the name was used only once in reference to him and apparently in error.
The sole contemporary historical manuscript that refers to Broussard as "Gaurhept" is an official Louisiana colonial document dated April 8, 1765. In that document, acting provincial commandant Charles Philippe Aubry appointed Broussard "Capitaine de Milice et Commandant des Acadiens." (That is, captain of the militia and commandant of the some two-hundred Acadian exiles who settled with Broussard along the Teche.)
It is in this document that Broussard is referred to (and more than once) as "Gaurhept Broussard dit Beau Soleil."
Or maybe he looked like this? (Source: Frederic Remington, 1880 [public domain])
But, rather than "Gaurhept" being an alternate or middle name for Joseph, the word appears to be a clerical error — a common enough occurrence in historical documents.
Evidence for this assertion is the absence of any other contemporary historical documents referring to Broussard as "Gaurhept."
Furthermore, the document in question does not even refer to Broussard as "Joseph." It calls him only "Gaurhept." The omission of Broussard's actual first name in itself suggests an error, and it is only through historical context that we know the document concerns Joseph at all and not, say, his brother Alexandre or some other, previously unknown Broussard.
I am not the only historian who regards "Gaurhept" as a mistake.
In his book Acadian Redemption: From Beausoleil Broussard to the Queen's Royal Proclamation(2004), Warren A. Perrin observes that "Beausoleil's first name was incorrectly listed [in the document] as 'Gaurhept.'" Elsewhere in the same book Perrin repeats, "In this document, Beausoleil's first name, Joseph, was improperly listed as 'Gaurhept'" (pp. 41, 147 n. 58).
Cover of Warren A. Perrin's Acadian Redemption, showing Cajun artist Lucius Fontenot's depiction of Broussard.
Likewise, historian Carl A. Brasseaux, author of The Founding of New Acadia, Acadian to Cajun, and "Scattered to the Wind" (among many other books), has referred to "Gaurhept" as "A clerical error — evidently an error in transcription." [Source: Carl A. Brasseaux, e-mail to the author, 2 April 2012.]
Pending any contemporary primary-source discoveries to the contrary, genealogists and others might do well to disassociate "Gaurhept" from the memory of Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil.
Addendum of 4 April 2012
Carl A. Brasseaux and genealogist Winston De Ville have both recently suggested to me that perhaps an error in transcription did not occur in 1765 (when Aubry appointed Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil a captain and commandant), but more recently.
This now seems a more likely explanation.
The original 1765 document is missing, so the next earliest known reference we have to this document is in the 1891 book Southwest Louisiana Biographical and Historical by historian William Henry Perrin (no relation to present-day historian Warren A. Perrin). In that book Perrin states that "The Broussard family traces its origin to Gaurhept Broussard dit Beausoleil." He explains the origin of the Broussard nickname "Beausoleil" ("This name was given [to] him . . . because of [his] cheerfulness. . . ."), but he does not discuss "Gaurhept" (despite the fact that it is an unusual name for an Acadian, or anyone else for that matter). Nor does Perrin associate the name "Joseph" with this "Gaurhept Broussard dit Beausoleil."
An excerpt from William Henry Perrin's Southwest Louisiana Biographical and Historical, with highlighted references to Gaurhept Broussard dit Beausoleil. (Click to enlarge)
Nevertheless, Gaurhept Broussard dit Beausoleil clearly is Joseph dit Broussard dit Beausoleil, given Perrin's description of the former as a military officer, commandant, landowner, livestock breeder, and "the great ancestor from whom the whole Broussard family in Louisiana is descended."
Perrin himself, however, did not personally transcribe the source material on which he based his research and writing. Rather, it was J. O. Broussard, a Lafayette-area descendant of the original Broussard, who copied the document for Perrin, as Perrin himself notes.
Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil as imagined by artist Herb Roe (www.chromesun.com). (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
If a transcription error occurred, resulting in "Joseph" becoming "Gaurhept" (a real possibility given the sometimes bizarre calligraphy of the French and Spanish colonial era), it therefore was J. O. Broussard who likely made the error. And if it was an error, it nonetheless inspired him to name his own son "Gaurhept"— an amazing irony if such a name never previously existed.
Indeed, another piece of evidence in this matter is the fact that "Gaurhept" does not appear to have existed as a name for anyone until J. O. Broussard gave it to his son in the late nineteenth century.
I say this because if one enters the word "Gaurhept" into Google.com and searches the entire Internet, one receives about 2,250 positive responses. But if one again enters "Gaurhept" and this time instructs Google to omit all websites that also refer to the words "Broussard,""Beausoleil,""Beau Soleil," and the misspellings "Beausoliel" and "Beau Soliel," one is left with only four positive responses — and all four of these websites contain nothing but alphanumerical gobbledygook. (A similar result happens if one uses the more discriminating Bing.com search engine: it returns zero positive responses.)
Another excerpt from William Henry Perrin's Southwest Louisiana Biographical and Historical, with highlighted references to Gaurhept Broussard dit Beausoleil. (Click to enlarge)
In other words, in all of cyberspace (including, by the way, the massive scanned digital library known as Google Books) the word "Gaurhept" exists in a meaningful sense only in reference to the Broussard family. Or to put it more succinctly, outside the Broussard family "Gaurhept" is not a real name; and it only became a real name inside the Broussard family when J. O. Broussard gave it to his son, based on his apparent misreading of "Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil."
Unfortunately, this theory (and that is what it is) cannot be tested at present because, as noted, the original 1765 document is missing. Unless that document — or a facsimile of it in French or Spanish colonial records — is found we may never know for certain if J. O. Broussard correctly transcribed it or mistook "Joseph" for "Gaurhept." Yet I believe we can say it's likely that the word in question was not "Gaurhept," but "Joseph," and that someone — either an eighteenth-century scribe or J. O. Broussard — made an error in writing or transcribing it.
I promised some time ago that I would discuss the origin of the Nike-Cajun rocket, used as a sounding rocket by the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and other organizations during the Cold War.
Cajuns have further demonstrated their ability to adapt to the modern world by pursuing high-tech careers. A few Cajuns, for example, became veritable rocket scientists, among them J. G. Thibodaux [sic].
Born in a lumber camp in the Atchafalaya swamp, he helped to develop the Nike-Cajun rocket in the 1950s, whose second stage, a sounding missile used for testing the upper atmosphere, was named in honor of his ancestry. He went on to serve as chief of the Propulsion and Power Division at Johnson Space Center, assisting NASA with the Apollo moon missions and later with the space shuttle (p. 147).
Interviewed in 1999 for the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, Thibodaux (full name Joseph Guy Thibodaux, Jr.) described his own origins as follows:
I was born in the Louisiana swamps. . . . I was born at the F.B. Williams Lumber Camp in the Atchafalaya swamp on the west side of Lake Verret. It is certainly a swamp. It was a big cypress logging organization. My father worked there.
My birthplace was registered as Napoleonville, Louisiana[,] which is twelve miles north of Thibodaux, Louisiana[,] on Louisiana Highway 1 which parallels Bayou Lafourche. . . . [W]e left there and moved to New Orleans when I was about five and I went to high school in New Orleans and later on I went to Louisiana State University.(1)
Elsewhere, Thibodaux noted, “I consider myself a Cajun[,] both on my mother’s and father’s side.” He added, “My grandmother was an Hebert.”(2)
Logo of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA.
Thibodaux graduated from LSU in Chemical Engineering in 1942 and served as a U.S. Army officer from 1943 to 1946, including wartime service in Burma. On separation from the military he went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), forerunner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), for whom he ultimately worked. Stationed at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory/Langley Research Center at Langley Field, Virginia, Thibodaux aided NACA first as a propulsion engineer in its Pilotless Aircraft Research Division before moving on to a number of other posts under both NACA and, beginning in 1958, newly created NASA.(3)
Logo of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
It was while working for NACA that Thibodaux helped to create the Cajun rocket. Mated to a Nike first-stage rocket, the resulting two-stage rocket was known as the "Nike-Cajun" rocket. As I have observed elsewhere in this blog, "The name evoked a strange combination of ancient Greek mythology and rural south Louisiana folklife."(3)
According to a NASA report, Origins of NASA Names, the Nike was "a solid-propellant first stage . . . an adaptation of the Nike antiaircraft missile. . . . The name ‘Nike’ was taken from ancient Greek mythology: Nike was the winged goddess of victory. In NASA's sounding rocket program, Nike was used with Apache, Cajun, Tomahawk, Hawk, or Malemute upper stages. . . ."
A Nike-Cajun rocket preparing for liftoff, ca. 1960; the man in the truck bed is handling the Cajun stage. Note the NACA symbol at upper left. (Click to enlarge) (Source: National Archives and Records Administration)
As for the Cajun rocket itself, Origins of NASA Names notes:
The Cajun solid-propellant rocket stage was designed and developed under the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics' Langley Laboratory (later NASA's Langley Research Center). The project's manager, Joseph G. Thibodaux, Jr., formerly of Louisiana, suggested the new motor be named "Cajun" because of the term's Louisiana associations.
The report continues, "Allen E. Williams, Director of Engineering in Thiokol Chemical Corporation's Elkton (Md.) Division, agreed to the name, and later the Elkton Division decided to continue giving its rocket motors Indian-related names."(4)
Liftoff of a Nike-Cajun rocket, 1957 (bottom) & 1958 (top). (Click to enlarge) (Source: National Archives and Records Administration.)
In a 1969 letter to noted science writer William R. Corliss, NASA’s Assistant Director for Flight Projects Eugene C. Draley likewise observed:
With regard to the naming of the Nike-Cajun rocket, the story [I will relate] involves [the naming of] the Cajun only. Mr. J. G. Thibodaux, for many years Head of the Rocket Group at Langley and now Chief of the Propulsion Division at Manned Spacecraft Center, Houston, Texas, was responsible for the name Cajun.
When Langley contracted with the Thiokol Chemical Corporation in 1955 for a higher performance version of the Deacon rocket, Mr. Thibodaux, a native of the Cajun country near New Orleans, suggested the name Cajun for the new motor and Thiokol so named it.(5)
Thibodaux himself, however, remembered a slightly different version of events, "[Thiokol’s] Chief Engineer was Bryce Wilhite, also from Louisiana. He was familiar with my Cajun background and it was his original suggestion that we name the rocket ‘Cajun.’ I agreed."(2)
Yet in a 1996 interview, however, Thibodaux gave himself partial credit for naming the rocket, observing, "We use[d] to name all the rockets that I had developed, give them a special name. One of them I named after my Cajun heritage—we—Bryce Wilhite, Thiokol’s Chief Engineer at Elkton [Maryland], also from Louisiana, and I—called it Cajun."(6)
In any event, the rocket was named for Thibodaux’s ancestry.
Envelope cover commemorating a Nike-Cajun launch, 1963. (Author's collection)
Thibodaux was not the only Cajun to work for NASA, either directly or, through a subcontractor, indirectly. For example, Doug Ardoin of Eunice, Louisiana, graduated in physics from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (USL, now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) and went to work for NASA in summer 1967 on the Apollo moon missions. Later he worked on the space shuttle program.
And my own uncle, Oscar Bernard of Opelousas, Louisiana, also graduated from USL in physics and went to work for NASA through its Boeing subcontractor. Like Ardoin, Bernard worked on the Apollo moon missions, assisting with (among other things) the design and construction of the first stage of the mammoth Saturn V rocket. (Interestingly, Ardoin and Bernard both performed in the 1950s as swamp pop musicians — Ardoin as lead singer and guitarist of the original Boogie Kings band and Bernard as guitarist for The Twisters, backing group for his brother, singer Rod Bernard.)
At least one other Cajun (I’m sure there must be more) worked on the U.S. space program, namely, Chief Master Sergeant Patty Dupuis of Cecilia, Louisiana, who, according to a May 2000 news report, “played a major role in the development of . . . [a defense satellite perched atop a Titan IV] rocket, which has been dubbed the Rajin’ Cajun [sic], in honor of Dupuis.”(7) As an article by SPACE.com's Jim Banke noted at the time:
"The Ragin' Cajun roared off the pad, marking the return of Titan operations here," Air Force Titan launch director Lt. Col. Tony Goins said Monday, making reference to the booster's nickname. "It's a great boost for us here at the Cape to successfully place an operational satellite on orbit to support the warfighter."
Goins and his colleagues named this Titan 4 the "Ragin' Cajun" in honor of Chief Master Sergeant Patty Dupuis, a Titan manager from Louisiana who supervised maintenance work at Launch Complex 40 and is moving on to a new assignment.(8)
Notes:
1. J. G. Thibodaux, interview by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Kenneth J. Cox, 9 September 1996, Clear Lake, Texas, Space Stories: Oral Histories from the Pioneers of America's Space Program, http://www.nal-jsc.org/Tibby-ED.pdf, accessed 6 April 2012.
2. J. G. Thibodaux, [Clear Lake, Texas?], to Shane K. Bernard, [New Iberia, La.], 6 May 2000, e-mail correspondence, computer printout in the possession of the author.
3. J. G. Thibodaux biographical data sheet, NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project, 7 April 1999, www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/oral_histories/ThibodauxJG/JGT_BIO.pdf, accessed 6 April 2012.
4. Helen T. Wells, Susan H. Whiteley, and Carrie E. Karegeannes, Origins of NASA Names, The NASA History Series, Scientific and Technical Information Office, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Washington, D.C., 1976, http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4402/SP-4402.htm, see Section V: Sounding Rockets, http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4402/ch5.htm, accessed 6 April 2012.
5. Eugene C. Draley, [Langley Research Center, Hampton, Va.?], to William R. Corliss, Glenarm, Md., 14 February 1969, TLS [copy], Records of NASA Langley Research Center, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
6. J. G. Thibodaux, interview by Robbie Davis-Floyd and Kenneth J. Cox, 10 September 1996, Clear Lake, Texas, www.davis-floyd.com/joint-oral-history-interview/, accessed 6 April 2012.
7. “Cajun Rocket Liftoff,” news program teletype script, 8 May 2000, photocopy in the possession of the author.
8. Jim Banke, "2000 Ragin' Cajun (Titan 4) Delivers Its Payload," SPACE.com, 8 May 2000, reprinted on http://www.raginpagin.com/louisiana/showthread.php?1157-2000-Ragin-Cajun-(Titan-4)-Delivers-Its-Payload&p=2692, accessed 7 April 2012.
I remember Aunt Elodie as an elderly, white-haired woman, thin and gaunt. She seemed a stranger to me because, for whatever reason, Elodie never came to family get-togethers, whether for Christmas or Easter or what have you. Only rarely had I heard her name mentioned, and while I have no reason to believe there was any schism that kept her apart from us, it seemed odd to me that the extended family on my father's Cajun side of my family was hardly as close as the extended family on my mother's Anglo-Saxon side of the family. I am by no means making a sweeping implication about Cajuns: on the contrary, Cajuns, if anything, are known for the closeness of their extended families. It just seemed odd that Elodie never showed up at our family gatherings and that I really knew nothing about her, so much so that as a child I barely knew her name, much less what she looked like.
When Aunt Elodie gave me this photo, she explained that it depicted some of our ancestors. She explained to me that it showed my paternal great-great grandparents. It certainly did not show my paternal great-grandparents, for my grandfather's father was the splitting image of his son and I would have recognized him instantly. I recognized no one, however, in this image.
I remain uncertain who is shown in the image and if they are even really my relatives. So I thought I might analyze the photograph and try to determine who these people are.
Often mistakenly called a daguerreotype (including by me), the image is actually a tintype, which the Library of Congress describes as a "Direct-image photograph . . . in which the collodion [a viscous or syrupy solution] negative supported by a dark-lacquered thin iron sheet appears as a positive image." This process, notes the Library, was "Popular [from the] mid-1850s through 1860s" but still "in use through 1930s." (Source: Library of Congress Thesaurus for Graphic Materials, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/tgm010835/, accessed 18 April 2012)
The tintype overall is in fair condition, with some chipping of the layer of collodion around the edges and some scratching and aging apparent on the image itself. The section of the image showing the subjects, however, is in fair to good condition, with none of their faces obscured or badly damaged, though some bear scratches.
The image shows two men and two women, dressed formally, and their physical pose, with one of the women touching both men, suggests a comfortable familiarity.
The writing in ink in upper left corner of the image, which presumably identifies the subjects, has faded, but by "tweaking" it in PhotoShop I've been able (tentatively) to discern these words:
Bringing out the faded words using PhotoShop. (Click to enlarge)
Of these words, only "Uncle Homer" rings a bell with me, since my great-great grandfather was named Homer Bernard — Homer being pronounced "O-MARE" in the Cajun French manner. I know nothing about him offhand, except that his father, Joseph Desparet Bernard, fought as a Confederate in the Civil War. I have Homer's vital statistics somewhere in my files, however, in genealogical material I collected in high school (an interest that played a major role in directing me toward a career as a historian). I believe Homer would have been from St. Landry Parish, possibly from the town of Opelousas itself, because that is where my Bernard family has lived for many generations.
Incidentally, I find it interesting that all the common nouns written on the photo ("Aunt,""Uncle,""Grandma") are English words, not French. Because my family spoke French as its primary if not only language in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the words must have been added later, after my family adopted English as its primary language — perhaps in the 1920s or '30s. (My grandfather, L. V. Bernard of Opelousas, told me that he did not really learn French until he married my grandmother, Irene Bordelon of Port Barre — indicating that despite his small-town Cajun heritage he was raised speaking English, not French. L.V. would be the grandson of the persons in the photo, if they are in fact Bernard ancestors as Elodie stated.)
I will check if Homer Bernard had a brother named Richard or a sister named Marie, or in-laws with these names. Or could "Aunt Marie" be the wife of "Uncle Homer," and not the wife of "Uncle Richard"? I will report back with my findings.
In the meantime, if anyone knows who these people are (all Cajuns pretty much being related to each other one way or another), please let me know. . . .
Addendum of 18 April 2012
According to my genealogical research — which, admittedly, I am unsure I entirely trust, since I conducted it as a teenager in the 1980s — my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Homer Bernard, was born 6 March 1864 in Opelousas. He had two sisters named Marie— Marie Lelia, born 20 July 1861, and Marie Lydia, born 25 October 1868 — either one of whom could be the "Aunt Marie" in the photograph. Homer did not have a brother named Richard, so perhaps the "Uncle Richard" in the photograph was the husband of one of these two Maries.
Homer himself was married to Louise Alma La Morandiere, who cannot be the other woman in the photo, else the person who wrote on the image would have identified her as "Aunt" (to his "Uncle") and not "Grandma." This other woman in the photo is possibly another of Homer's sisters, either the second Marie or his sister Josephine, born 2 March 1866.
But now I am speculating too much.
Still, if I can prove that one of Homer's three sisters had a husband named Richard, it would go far toward suggesting that the persons in the tintype might indeed be my ancestors.
(My source for this genealogical data is Reverend Donald J. Hebert, Southwest Louisiana Records [Eunice, La.: Hebert Publications, 1978], multiple volumes.)
I'm pleased to announce that my 2008 book, Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History, will be available in May 2013 in a French translation by Faustine Hillard.
J’ai le plaisir d’annoncer que mon livre intitulé Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes sera disponible en mai 2013 en version française, traduite par Faustine Hillard.
Cover of the English version and the French translation. Couverture du livre en anglais et la traduction en français.
Published by the University Press of Mississippi and funded in part through a translation grant from the Quebec Ministère des Relations Internationales, the book, retitled Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes, is aimed at middle-school and high-school readers — though it is useful as an adult primer — particularly students in French Immersion and other French education courses.
Publié par la Presse Universitaire du Mississippi et financé en partie par une subvention du Ministère des Relations Internationales du Québec, le livre, intitulé Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes, cible le jeune lecteur collégien ou lycéen, surtout celui des classes d’immersion en français ou ceux qui apprennent le français langue seconde.Il s'avère toutefois une introduction enrichissante au lecteur adulte voulant s’initier à la question.
Inside the French version. (click to enlarge) L'intérieur de la version en français. (Cliquez pour agrandir.)
Of the English version, the Times-Picayune noted:
Au sujet de la version en anglais, le quotidien de la Nouvelle Orléans, The Times-Picayune, remarqua:
Bernard takes just 85 pages to provide a concise history of one of the unique peoples that make Louisiana special. It is a brief but delightfully engaging account of who the Cajuns are and how they got that way, a narrative as informative as it is easy to navigate. . . . [The book] fills an important gap on the Louisiana history bookshelf, and its value can be appreciated by the not-so-young as well.
Bernard nous raconte l'histoire abrégée d’un des peuples qui contribue à l'extraordinaire mosaïque démographique de la Louisiane en un récit de moins de 85 pages. Ce bref mais charmant compte rendu entraîne le lecteur à découvrir le peuple cadien et suivre son évolution dans un récit qui informe tout en restant facile à naviguer. . . . [Ce livre] comble une lacune importante en ce qui est de l'histoire de la Louisiane. C'est un livre qui s'apprécie à tout âge.
In 2008 the Louisiana Center for the Book, located in the state library, selected the English version of Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors to represent Louisiana at the National Book Festival's Pavilion of the States in Washington, D.C.
En 2008, LesCadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes (version langue anglaise) fut sélectionné par le Centre du Livre en Louisiane, qui se trouve à la bibliothèque de l’état, pour représenter la Louisiane au Pavillon des Etats du Festival National du Livre à Washington, D.C.
Inside the French version. (click to enlarge) L'intérieur de la version en français. (Cliquez pour agrandir.)
If you wish to be notified of the French translation's release, please e-mail me at: inf...@cajunculture.com [Click on the "..." to reveal the full e-mail address]
Pour être averti de la date de sortie de la traduction en français, veuillez m’envoyer un message électronique à l'adresse suivante: inf...@cajunculture.com [Click on the "..." to reveal the full e-mail address]
As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, I discovered a photo in the National Archives and Records Administration showing a U.S. World War II transport plane (a C-47, to be precise) with the nickname Cajun Coonass painted on its fuselage. I also found motion picture footage of the same plane. (See my previous article on the Cajun Coonass.)
The Cajun Coonass C-47 transport plane, Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, 1943. (National Archives and Records Administration)
Not only did this discovery lead, in my opinion, to the debunking of the alleged etymology of the word "coonass" (a controversial term meaning "Cajun"); it also led to my interest in collecting images of Cajun-themed warplanes.
For example, I purchased at auction an original B&W print and negative of a B-29 bomber named the Cajun Queen.
The Cajun Queen B-29 bomber, different nose art, ca. 1945. (Courtesy Randy Colby)
Could this be the same plane, but repainted? Or a replacement plane bearing the same name? In any event, each of the images shows a plane belonging to the 678th Bombardment Squadron, 444th Bombardment Group — the emblem of the 678th being a cobra spitting a bomb, both superimposed against a spade inside a circle.
I recently met a US Air Force pilot who told me he knew of a B-52 bomber named the Ragin' Cajun. After returning to his airbase he sent me a photo of the plane in question. I show it here, but blot out the pilot's face for privacy's sake. (By coincidence, the phrase "Ragin' Cajun" was used as a nickname as early as 1950 by U.S. Marine Corps Reserve fighter squadron VMF-143. See my previous article on this subject.) Note that the neanderthalic (and stereotypical) Cajun is whacking an alligator over the head while a crawfish bites him on the toe — alligators and crawfish being symbols of Cajun ethnicity.
The Ragin' Cajun B-52 bomber, no date. (Source: Anonymous)
Likewise, a search of the Internet turned up the image of another Cajun-themed B-52 bomber: the Cajun Fear. Like the Ragin' Cajun, the Cajun Fear shows a rampant alligator, in this case seemingly bursting through the plane's fuselage. (Note the image of the state of Louisiana at lower right corner.)
F-4C Phantom jet with "Coonass Militia" emblem, 1983. (Click to enlarge; courtesy Gerrit Kok)
According to the Times-Picayune, the group changed its name in 1992 (no doubt because of complaints about the word "coonass," which some consider an ethnic slur against Cajuns). (Source: Ron Thibodeaux, "'Coonass' Carries Baggage Some Prefer to Leave Behind,"Times-Picayune, 17 July 2001, accessed 1 June 2012.) It now goes by the nickname "Louisiana Bayou Militia," whose current emblem incorporates French fleurs-de-lis and traditional Mardi Gras colors, symbols associated with the state of Louisiana.
"Bayou Militia" emblem on jet fighter's vertical stabilizer, 2011. (Photograph by author)
Here is one more Cajun-related, if not Cajun-themed, warplane: A full-scale replica of the P-40 Flying Tiger flown by Cajun fighter pilot Wiltz P. Segura.
Replica of Cajun pilot Wiltz P. Segura's P-40 Flying Tiger warplane, USS Kidd Veterans Memorial, Baton Rouge, La., 2012. (Photograph by author)
Hailing from my adopted town of New Iberia, Segura joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942 as an aviation cadet and received his commission the next year as a second lieutenant. As his U.S. Air Force biographical sketch notes:
During his World War II tour of duty in China . . . Segura flew 102 combat missions, destroyed one Japanese bomber and five fighter aircraft, and was credited with damaging three more. He was shot down twice by ground fire but each time parachuted to safety and successfully evaded enemy capture behind the lines. . . . In October 1965 he was assigned to England Air Force Base, La., as vice commander of the 3d Tactical Fighter Wing, and retained that position when the wing was transferred in November 1965 to Bien Hoa Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. During an extended absence of the wing commander, he assumed command. . . . Segura flew more than 125 combat missions in the F-100, and F-5 aircraft, and was the first pilot to check out in the F-5 in the combat theater. (Source: Wiltz P. Segura biographical sketch, U.S. Air Force web site, accessed 31 May 2012)
By the time of Segura's retirement he had attained the rank of brigadier general.
Close up of Wiltz P. Segura's P-40 fuselage. (Photograph by author)
If you have photographs of other Cajun-themed warplanes — I'm sure there must be a very finite number of such aircraft — please let me know. I'd like to add them to my collection.
Incidentally, a few years ago I designed a faux Cajun-themed-World War II-nose-art T-shirt. Actually, I mixed bits and pieces of pre-existing art from around the Internet with my own art to create this T-shirt. Here is the design. . . .
Of course, "Jolie Blonde" (French for "Pretty Blonde") is a famous Cajun song, considered by many to be the "Cajun national anthem." If there was never a warplane by this name, there should have been!
Last night I was grocery shopping near my home in New Iberia when a woman I know came up to me and said, "Yesterday I was watching the History Channel and saw the episode of 'Cajun Pawn Stars' that mentioned your father."
I shook my head and replied that I didn't know what she meant. Surprised I was unaware of the program, she explained, "On the show a man went into the pawn shop with a battered little booklet, and inside the front cover was written 'My autograph book, Rodney Bernard, Opelousas, Louisiana, 1950.'"
Dad around the time he met Hank Williams Sr. (ca. 1950). (Author's collection)
"Well, yes," I replied, "that's my father's name and he did have an autograph book when he was a kid."
"And in the book," she continued, "were the autographs of Hank Williams Sr. and all the members of his band, the Drifting Cowboys, and also the autographs of Hank Snow, Ray Price, Grandpa Jones, and other Grand Ole Opry stars."
"That's right, too" I responded, amazed at the unfolding story. "My dad did have such an autograph book."
In fact, I explained, I kept it for him for many years. But about four years ago he asked me to sell it on eBay, so I put it up for auction for approximately $5,000. No one bid on it, so he asked me to return the book to him. Dad ended up trading it to a friend for something or another. This friend is a Hank Williams' fanatic and, last Dad saw the autograph booklet, it was framed and hanging on this friend's wall in Lafayette, its pages opened to Hank Williams' autograph.
Hank Williams Sr.'s signature in my father's autograph book.
The woman told me that the pawn shop owner estimated the value of the book — mind you, I'm getting all this second-hand, and have not seen the show for myself — at $15,000 if the book were kept together, $18,000 if it were cut up into individual autographs. "The man with the book offered to sell it then and there," she told me, "but the pawn shop owner thought the price too high. So the man left with the book." [I've now seen the episode, and — if I remember correctly — the prices were $15,000 if cut up and sold as individual autographs and $10,000 if kept together.]
Interestingly, this man was not the person to whom my father gave the book.
During the episode the show properly identified my dad as a south Louisiana singer and mentioned the need to authenticate the autographs.
If "Cajun Pawn Stars" had contacted Dad, however, he could have explained that he met Hank Williams Sr. backstage at the Yambilee Festival in Opelousas around 1950, and got the autograph of Williams and his band at that time. As Dad told me in 1991, and as I quoted him in my book Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues (University Press of Mississippi, 1996):
I met Hank Williams Sr. when I was about eight years old, I guess . . . no, I was probably about nine, 'cause he died, what, 1950? [Williams died in 1953.] It was probably about a year before he died. He played at the Opelousas High School gym. . . . Mr. Dezauche [a local businessman] took me backstage and Hank Williams was standing there in his underwear. I'll never forget that. And I walked up to him and that was my god at the time — or a god, it was like Elvis later on. Man, to see Hank Williams Sr. in person standing there! And he shook hands with me and I had an autograph book and he signed my autograph book and I found out later that he never signed many autographs, that he didn't really like to sign autographs. . . (p. 146).
Dad also could have explained that as a member of the Cajun swing band the Blue Room Gang, he visited the Grand Ole Opry around the same time and collected many of the other autographs in the book.
Dad (at front center) with members of the Blue Room Gang, ca. 1950. (Author's collection)
Regardless, how Dad's childhood autograph book ended up on national TV remains unknown at present.
There is, however, a companion autograph booklet that belonged to Dad as a child, and that one I still have in my possession.
Addendum of 15 June 2012:
A number of websites have picked up on the autograph book's appearance on 'Cajun Pawn Stars,' including The Huffington Post, where you can see a video clip from the episode.
In addition, here is a list of all the notable signatures in Dad's autograph book:
Hank Williams Sr. & His Drifting Cowboys, including band members Floyd Cramer, Don Helms, Jimmy Day, Tommy Bishop and Jerry Rivers Chet Atkins Roy Acuff Eddie Hill Hank Snow June Carter (Cash) George Morgan (signed twice; Lorrie Morgan's father) Goldie Hill and Tommy Hill Red Sovine Ray Price The Duke of Paducah (comedian) T. Texas Tyler Little Jimmy Dickens (signed twice, once in pencil, once in pen) Ott Devine (WSM Radio Grand Ole Opry MC) Oswald (comedian) Faron Young Marty Robbins Cowboy Copas Webb Pierce Mother Maybelle Carter Carl Smith Grandpa Jones Martha Carson Moon Mulligan Autry Inman Hank Williams III (2001 autograph in same ca. 1950 autograph book)
Finally, I learned late today that the autograph book is still in the possession of my father's friend and that it was never really up for sale. How it ended up on the "Cajun Pawn Stars" show, however, is a complicated matter and one I don't want to discuss here. Suffice it to say, the book is safe and in no danger of being dissected and sold off piecemeal . . . at least, not for now. ____________
*Yes, I know, technically the network's name is not "the History Channel," but simply "History." No one, however, calls it that. Who says, "I was watching History last night"?
The following serves as a good example of how history can be found right around the corner, literally, if you look for it.
In my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People I wrote:
As occurred elsewhere in the nation [during World War II], wartime anxiety sometimes escalated into wartime hysteria. When a highly contagious disease wiped out hundreds of muskrats in the coastal marshlands and spread to nineteen south Louisianians, killing eight, rumor circulated that the outbreak had been caused by Japanese germ warfare. Fearing widespread panic, the federal government moved in, quarantined all possible disease carriers, and asked the media to refrain from reporting the incident. The disease was eventually identified as psittacosis, or "parrot fever," a viral infection transmitted by birds (p. 13).
As it turns out, a residence only a block from my house served as a quarantine house for some of those who contracted the disease. As the Baton Rouge Sunday Advocate reported eighteen years later in 1961:
On March 3 [1943] the focus of the epidemic shifted from Ville Platte and Rayne to New Iberia. Miss Antoinette Bourgeois, one of the nurses from New Iberia who had volunteered to help at Rayne, felt a pain at the base of her neck. Miss Antoinette Bonin, also a nurse who had helped, felt the same pain plus a headache. They were returned to New Iberia and placed in quarantine in a duplex at 142 Pollard Avenue. Dr. Edwin L. Landry attended them and five women volunteers entered the house to care for them, knowing that their chances of ever leaving alive were about fifty-fifty.
142 Pollard Avenue, New Iberia, Louisiana, as it looks today (July 2012). (Photo by the author)
The article continued:
The volunteers were Miss Cecile Bourgeois, a sister of Miss Antoinette Bourgeois, two sisters of Miss Bonin, Miss Helen Hobart and Miss Remas Gerhart. The physicians and Miss Katherine Avery, Iberia Parish Public Health nurse, entered the house frequently, always taking elaborate, almost ritualistic precautions. The townspeople, however, were deathly afraid of the disease. Some crossed to the opposite side of the street before passing the house. When groceries were delivered they were left on the sidewalk. Dr. Landry and Miss Avery were shunned.
The disease, however, was a potent one, taking the lives of both nurses Bourgeois and Bonin in March 1943.
Katherine Avery, one of the five nurses who entered the quarantine house on Pollard Avenue. (Source: Avery Island, Inc., Archives)
"Back in the house on Pollard Avenue," recorded the Sunday Advocate , "the five women were hopefully waiting out their 21 days quarantine after the deaths of the two nurses." However, one of the five, Gerhart, contracted the disease. "But the people of the community then decided that they had assumed more than their fair share of the risk and an old plantation home six miles outside town was obtained. Three of the women were put in quarantine out there. . . . The [two remaining] women on Pollard Avenue waited out their 21 days and the quarantine was broken." (Gerhart survived after "repeated transfusions from recovered patients" under the supervision of Dr. Landry.)
Old street identifications in the pavement, New Iberia, Louisiana (July 2012). (Photo by the author)
Much of this story transpired, commented the New Iberia Daily Iberian in response to the Advocate article, in "a house that still stands on Pollard Avenue"— as it stands today on that quiet suburban street . . . a quaint reminder of wartime heroism on the Cajun home front.
Nurse and patient Remas Gerhart, seated, with additional nurse volunteers; photo taken at 142 Pollard Avenue. (Note house with tell-tale eaves in background.) (Source: Sunday Advocate; original source unknown)
Sources: James H. Hughes, Jr., "Strange Malady Spread Terror through the Marshlands," (Baton Rouge) Sunday Advocate, 1 October 1961, p. 1-E; Jim Levy, "Talk of the Teche [column]," [(New Iberia) Daily Iberian], ca. 1 October 1961, n.p.
An acquaintance of mine, former Avery Island salt miner and sometimes sculptor Lonny Badeaux, recently showed me a photograph of one of his marble sculptures: a young woman washing laundry on her knees, with the annotation in Greek "Déjà Vu" (or so Lonny told me — I can't read Greek).
Lonny also showed me the inspiration for this work. As it turned out, I knew it well: An 1866 A. R. Waud engraving from Harper's Weekly showing Acadian (Cajun) women washing their laundry in Bayou Lafourche.
The entire 1866 Harper's engraving, titled "Washing-Day among the Acadians on the Bayou Lafourche, Louisiana."
In that book Brasseaux wrote of the engraving in question:
Waud included with his short article [about the Acadians] a woodcut showing two Acadian washerwomen, their legs exposed to mid-thigh, a clear message of cultural and moral depravity to Victorian America. The image also featured prominently a woman smoking a corncob pipe and an idle (and thus manifestly lazy) man holding a small net used for recreational fishing, watching the women work nearby.
Brasseaux refers to the washerwomen engraving as Waud's "most notorious Louisiana illustration," adding that Waud "was perhaps most responsible for creating the negative national stereotype of the Cajuns, because of his dark sketches which emphasized his personal revulsion for the region's strange landscape and its even more exotic inhabitants." Furthermore, Brasseaux called Waud's accompanying article forHarper's "perhaps the most notorious" of negative Acadian stereotypes created by Northern journalists in the post-Civil War period. Here is an excerpt of that 1866 article:
These primitive people are the descendants of Canadian French settlers in Louisiana; and by dint of intermarriage they have succeeded in getting pretty well down in the social scale.
Without energy, education, or ambition, they are good representatives of the white trash, behind the age in every thing. The majority of all the white inhabitants of these parishes are tolerably ignorant, but these are grossly so — so little are they thought of — that the niggers, when they want to express contempt for one of their own race, call him an Acadian nigger. . . .
To live without effort is their apparent aim in life, and they are satisfied with very little, and are, as a class, quite poor. Their language is a mixture of French and English, quite puzzling to the uninitiated. . . .
With a little mixture of fresh blood and some learning they might become much improved, and have higher aims than the possession of land enough to grow their corn and a sufficiency of "goujon" [gudgeon, a type of freshwater fish]. . . .
Cover of Brasseaux's Acadian to Cajun. Note that Waud's engraving serves as the book's cover art.
Waud himself noted of his engraving:
Washing day is a sketch from life. These simple folks have no acquaintance apparently with the wash-board, nor do they employ their knuckles. Placing their clothes upon a plank, either on the edge of a pool or the bayou, they draw their scanty drapery about them with the most reckless disregard to the exposure consequent, and squatting, or kneeling, beat them with a wooden bat. The approach of a stranger does not disconcert them much, if at all.
Badeaux knew of Waud's negative view of the Cajuns, having photocopied the author's vituperative article along with the engraving. Himself a Cajun, Badeaux nonetheless chose to use Waud's engraving as a model for his work of art. The finished sculpture now sits in Badeaux's yard in New Iberia; but with his permission I might try to find another home for it, so that the public can enjoy his modern interpretation of Waud's condemnatory original.
This reminds me of another nineteenth-century engraving, namely, of two women standing in the doorway of a St. Martinville hotel.
"Doorway of St. Martinville Hotel," 1887 Harper's engraving.
This image illustrates an 1887 article, also in Harper's, by author Charles Dudley Warner, whose depiction of Cajuns was a bit more complimentary than Waud's. Which is to say that when Warner's article denigrates Cajuns, it is not Warner himself who does so, but a local interviewee:
My driver was an ex-Confederate soldier, whose tramp with a musket through Virginia had not greatly enlightened him as to what it was all about. As to the Acadians, however, he had a decided opinion, and it was a poor one. They are no good. “You ask them a question, and they shrug their shoulders like a tarrapin — don’t know no more’n a dead alligator; only language they ever have is ‘no’ and ‘what?’”
What I find intriguing about this 1887 engraving is that it shows a doorway that still exists; indeed, it is still a hotel doorway. It is the front door the Old Castillo Hotel, now known as La Place d'Evangeline, located in St.Martinville on the east bank of Bayou Teche next to the Evangeline Oak. (I have never stayed there, but the late Colonel Wallace J. Moulis, St. Martinville native, World War II veteran, and career military man formerly assigned to NATO, once treated me to an excellent dish of crawfish bisque in the hotel's dining room.)
The same doorway as it looks today, 125 years after it appeared in a Harper's engraving. (Photo by the author, June 2012)
As Warner wrote in his Harper's article, titled "The Acadian Land":
I went to breakfast at a French inn, kept by Madame Castillo, a large red-brick house on the banks of the Teche, where the live-oaks cast shadows upon the silvery stream. It had, of course, a double gallery. Below, the waiting-room, dining-room, and general assembly-room were paved with brick, and instead of a door, Turkey-red curtains hung in the entrance, and blowing aside, hospitality invited the stranger within. The breakfast was neatly served, the house was scrupulously clean, and the guest felt the influence of that personal hospitality which is always so pleasing. Madame offered me a seat in her pew in church, and meantime a chair on the upper gallery, which opened from large square sleeping chambers. In that fresh morning I thought I never had seen a more sweet and peaceful place than this gallery. Close to it grew graceful China-trees in full blossom and odor; up and down the Teche were charming views under the oaks; only the roofs of the town could be seen amid the foliage of China-trees; and there was an atmosphere of repose in all the scene. It was Easter morning. I felt that I should like to linger there a week in absolute forgetfulness of the world. . . .
To research my history of Bayou Teche I resolved to paddle the entire length of the waterway. Friends found this humorous because they knew me to be an “avid indoorsman.” But how could I not paddle it? Had I not paddled it, someone, somewhere — at a book signing, during an interview — would inevitably ask me, “Have you ever been on Bayou Teche?” to which I would have had to answer, “No — but I drive across it every day on the way to work.”
The paddlers for stage one, at the Courtableau landing. Back row: Jacques, Preston, and me; in front, Keith. (Click images to enlarge them; photograph by author)
So I decided to explore the entire bayou and to do so not by motorboat (which seemed like cheating), but the old-fashioned way, by canoe — all approximately one hundred twenty-five miles of it. It just seemed the thorough thing to do, if I were going to write a book about the Teche. And this proved correct, because there was no substitute for seeing for oneself, from a canoe, where the Teche springs from Bayou Courtableau, meets Bayou Fuselier, zigzags at Baldwin, juts out at Irish Bend.
I would not canoe the bayou all at once, however, but in stages over many months. And I would do so slowly, stopping to take ample notes, photographs, GPS coordinates. This journal is based on that data.
Preston and Jacques heading into the Teche from the Courtableau. (Photograph by author)
I drafted two friends to assist me in the trek, both recent archaeology graduates from University of Louisiana at Lafayette: Preston Guidry and Jacques Doucet. Preston’s father, Keith Guidry, made up a last-minute addition to the team. And while Preston and Jacques ended up sitting out several stages of the trip, Keith became my one constant: we, the two older guys in our forties and fifties, would be the only two members of the canoe team to complete the entire journey.
Ben Guidry filled in for brother Preston on a couple stages; and my fellow history enthusiast Don Arceneaux joined Keith and me for one stage.
I was the least experienced paddler of the group, but the others made up for my greenness. Together, an Arceneaux, a Doucet, three Guidrys, and a Bernard, we would seek an answer to the weighty question, “How many Cajuns does it take to paddle Bayou Teche?”
Aerial photograph of Stage 1, Port Barre to Arnaudville. (Source: Google Maps)
Stage 1: Port Barre to Arnaudville
We began our trip around 9 a.m. on October 23, 2011. The temperature that morning was cool (about 56 °F), but grew warmer in the afternoon (about 81 °F). The sky was mostly clear. We chose that day to start our trip because it fell shortly after the annual Tour du Teche canoe race. We didn’t want to get in the way of the racers and so let them go first. Preston, Jacques, Keith and I put in at the public boat ramp at Port Barre [30.558367, -91.954874], on Bayou Courtableau. Port Barre — the town whose speed trap the swamp pop band Rufus Jagneaux sang about in the early 1970s:
All of y’all know about Port Barre. (If ) they catch you there it’s half of your hide. You might as well gone to Tucumcari. It costs you that to leave there alive.
In all fairness to Port Barre, the song was actually written about a speed trap in nearby Krotz Springs; but “Port Barre” just sounded more lyrical to the composer.
It was in Port Barre that the Courtableau Inn, a nightclub owned by my great-grandfather, Oscar Bordelon — first name pronounced OH-SCARE in the French manner — stood right across the bayou from the boat ramp. In fact, it stood on the lot now occupied by the Squeaky Clean Car/Boat Wash. It was there, in that nightclub in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, that my father heard Cajun musicians like Papa Cairo and Nathan Abshire. Dad recalls slot machines lining the walls, even though the devices were illegal at the time. But those were the days of legendary St. Landry Parish sheriff “Cat” Doucet, who tolerated gambling and certain other prohibited vices.
My great-grandfather's nightclub; at far right you can see Bayou Courtableau behind the club. (Source: The Johnnie Allan Collection, UL-Lafayette)
Within minutes of embarking we were paddling on the Teche itself. At Port Barre the bayou is narrow, varying from about 75 to 95 feet wide (not much larger than a sizable coulée, our regional word for a ravine). Dense tree canopies reached toward the opposing banks and pressed in on our canoes. Before it was dredged around 1920 this stretch of the Teche was navigable only during high-water season (each December to June) or if a sizeable flood had recently occurred.
On the Teche near its origin at Port Barre. (Photograph by author)
The current at Port Barre was swift and strong that day even though bayous are known for lethargic, even nonexistent currents. With casual paddling it carried our two canoes downstream at a decent clip. This fooled us into thinking we would make similarly fast headway the entire length of the bayou; but farther down the current slowed and, eventually, reversed, reducing our progress until paddling became a more laborious task. By the fourth or fifth stage it took us ten or twelve hours to accomplish what we had originally achieved in roughly half that time. But this lesson would not be learned for several months, finishing, as we did, a stage every month to month and a half.
Shortly after leaving Port Barre we spotted a coyote running along the east bank — our first sight of wildlife. We soon saw a number of large bleached bones on the west bank, probably from cattle. Right before that we caught a strong scent of cattle dung and must have passed a ranch (or vacherie, as our ancestors would have called it). We would pass other ranches during the several stages of our trip. On one occasion Keith shouted an insult to an insolently staring bull. In response the bull took a step toward us and stomped a hoof. That much is true, but the story became more elaborate with each retelling, and after several months Keith had the bull jumping in the bayou to pursue us.
Grazing land along the Teche south of Port Barre. (Photograph by author)
There would be plenty of joking on the trip, including recurring riffs on Deliverance (explanation unnecessary).
One time that day Keith and I stopped our canoe beside a bridge to wait for Preston and Jacques. As we floated there, someone threw a bottle from a passing car: clipping the rail, it shattered in its anonymous paper bag and splashed in the water beside me. Who knows how much trash has ended up tossed in the Teche like that?
Not too long after seeing the coyote, Preston and Jacques spotted a water moccasin swimming in the bayou. Surprisingly, It was the only snake we saw during the many stages of our trip. Likewise, we saw only one alligator, and it was dead. Actually, make that two alligators, because we spotted a large one of our final leg of the journey. I will describe that incident later.
An old car along the Teche. (Photograph by author)
I noticed much less garbage on the bayou than expected, certainly a tribute to the efforts of the TECHE Project, Cajuns for Bayou Teche, and the Tour du Teche. The largest quantity of garbage I saw that day lay inside the city limits of Port Barre, where someone used the banks of the bayou as a private garbage dump. Outside of town, however, the garbage became less frequent. Some of it was vintage, which gave it a certain respectability: no one wants to see a late-model clothes washer or automobile half-submerged in the bayou or protruding from its banks; but a rusty Depression-era clothes washer or vintage 1950s coupe are more interesting, and even appealing in their antiquity.
Another old car along the Teche. (Photograph by author)
Paddling down the Teche that day we passed the mouths of a few Teche tributaries — so minor that my canoe team and I missed them entirely. Or if we saw them, we must have disregarded them as mere ditches. In any event, the first of these small waterways we passed was Bayou Toulouse, which flows into the Teche where the Union Pacific (formerly Missouri Pacific) railroad spans the bayou just below Port Barre. The next tributary was Bayou Little Teche, formerly known as Bayou Marie Croquant. Then came Bayou del Puent, formerly spelled Bayou del Puente — meaning “Bayou of the Bridge” or simply “Bridge Bayou.” Bayou del Puente appears in historical documents as early as 1812, and the name strikes me as unusual because it’s Spanish and perhaps a remnant of Spain’s nearly four-decade rule of Louisiana (1762-1800).
As for Bayou Little Teche’s earlier name, Bayou Marie Croquant: its been rendered Bayou Marie Crocan or Bayou Maricoquant, and during the Civil War it was called the Barri-Croquant. As one historian noted, a Union general “committed a minor error which was to baffle civil war scholars for generations,” namely “On all the Union maps, the letter ‘M’ in Marie Croquant was so blurred as to render interpretation all but impossible. [General] Franklin read it as a ‘B,’ possibly thinking of Barre [as in “Port Barre”], and all Union correspondence thereafter refers to the bayou as the Barri-Croquant.”
Even the name Bayou Little Teche is confusing, because the uppermost stretch of Bayou Teche was itself sometimes called the Little Teche. In 1886, for example, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers officer commented, “From here [Leonville] up the stream is called the Little Teche. . . .”
More confusingly, early nineteenth-century land maps sometimes referred to the Marie Croquant as the main channel of the Teche and showed it winding toward and under the town of Washington to become what is today Bayou Carron. Worse, some historical documents referred to these same waterways as “Bayau [sic] Catereau or Teche” or “Bayou Grand Louis or Teche, or Carron” — indicating disagreement over what to call these tributaries, none of which, in any event, should be confused with the Teche proper that is the subject of this book.
Paddling along, we saw only a few houses lining the Teche between Port Barre and the next bayouside community, Leonville [30.473495, -91.98005]. Interestingly, this area was known during Prohibition as a hotbed of moonshining. In fact, the entire triangular region between Leonville, Arnaudville, and the nearby unincorporated community of Pecanière was well-known for its bootlegging. This being said, I have found no evidence of rum-running on the Teche itself during Prohibition. The narrowness of the bayou would have afforded little if any secrecy and, thanks to the coming of modern roads, automobiles would have provided a faster, and more elusive, means of distribution.
On the outskirts of Leonville we encountered enough suburban-style houses to remove the illusion of paddling through wilderness. We reached Leonville at 11:45 a.m. to the sounds of a church carillon (or at least it sounded to me like a carillon).
Just south of town, as my team and I headed back into countryside, we spotted a nutria rat on the bank. With a flash of its pumpkin-orange teeth and long hairless tail, it scurried away to hide from us. Within the hour, just below the Oscar Rivette Bridge [30.447948, -91.924641], we saw a large owl. Five minutes later we passed under high-voltage transmission lines, whose audible hum and static made me nervous to sit between them and a body of water.
Keith and me (in front) on the Teche. (Photograph by Jacques Doucet)
We observed pecan pickers here and there just north of the next bayou community, Arnaudville, as well as a large bird I recorded as an “anhinga.” I’m no ornithologist, however, but it was large, sported dark plumage, and had black legs — perhaps not an anhinga, but a little blue heron? We would see many brilliantly white herons, or egrets as they are also called, on our trips, often individual herons whose hunting we repeatedly interrupted, spurring him farther and farther downstream ahead of our canoes.
View of the Teche from my canoe. (Photograph by author)
At 1:45 p.m. we arrived in Arnaudville [30.397596, -91.930761], our terminus for this stage of the trip. We put ashore at Myron’s Maison de Manger (excellent burgers), right below the junction of the Teche and Bayou Fuselier.
On this side of the Teche and Fuselier sat the vacherie of my colonial-era ancestor, Lyons-born planter Gabriel Fuselier de la Claire. It’s an extravagant name, but if he had been a big wheel in France I doubt he would have chosen to brave the south Louisiana frontier. With its heat, humidity, mosquitoes, alligators, pirates, and potential for slave and Native American revolts, the French and Spanish colony was no paradise despite its idealized portrayals in literature (à la Evangeline).
Late eighteenth-century map of the Teche ("Teichte") showing location of Fuselier's vacherie (red arrow). Waterway labeled "Fourche du Vermillon" [sic] is Bayou Fuselier. (Source: St. Martin Parish Courthouse, courtesy Don Arceneaux & George Bentley; colorized by the author)
Fuselier de la Claire prospered in Louisiana, however, as did his heirs — but somewhere down the line, probably during Reconstruction, the Fuseliers lost their fortune and ended up marrying into my clan of subsistence-farming Cajuns. The same went for the de la Morandières, de Livaudaises, and other formerly affluent French Creoles who by twist of fate became my ancestors. A generation or so after marrying into the Bernards little remained of their previous culture, though my late Cajun grandmother recalled her elderly grandmother-in-law, the last de la Morandière of the line, speaking “that fancy French.”
My favorite photo from that day on the Teche, October 2011. (Photograph by author)
A folksy hand-painted sign hung beside the bayou near the landing at Myron’s, erected by the local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter (or “encampment,” as they call it). Placed for the benefit of boaters, the sign identified this as the spot where, in April 1863, Confederate forces fleeing General Banks’ invaders scuttled the supply steamboats Darby, Louise, Blue Hammock, and Cricket.
Sign listing steamboats that sank on that spot during the Civil War. (Photograph by author)
The Official Records of the conflict indicate that the five vessels had been scuttled by the Rebels to keep them from falling into enemy hands. As a Union officer wrote in April 1863:
I was there [Breaux Bridge] informed that the steamboats Darby, Louise, Blue Hammock, and Uncle Tommy had passed up the bayou the day before — that is, the evening of the 16th instant — . . . having valuable stores belonging to the enemy. . . . I sent forward a man up the Bayou Teche to ascertain the position and condition of the boats. He reported next morning that all of them had been burned at the junction [of bayous Teche and Fuselier] as soon as the enemy learned of the arrival of my command at Breaux Bridge. . . . [At] the junction I examined the wreck of four steamboats. The water having risen after the rains of Saturday night and Sunday morning, 18th and 19th instant, I was unable to see any names on the boats, or the guns reported to have been left on the Darby. Their smoke-stacks and part of their machinery only were above water. From all the information I received I have no doubt of their being the Darby, Louise, Blue Hammock, and the Crocket. The Uncle Tommy is burned higher up in the Bayou Teche, and the wreck of this boat is high enough out of water to see her name. Cargoes of beef, rum, sugar, and commissary stores, cloth, uniforms, and large quantities of arms and ammunition were destroyed in these boats. Some barges took off portions of the cargoes of ammunition and arms from these steamboats before they were set on fire. (Source: The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series 1, Volume 15, Part 1 [Baton Rouge-Natchez], 343-44.)
Burning steamboats. (Source: Harper's Weekly [1869]; colorized by author)
How many bullets, swords, balls of shot, and other Civil War artifacts sat right there at the bottom of the bayou, only a few feet beneath our canoes? Similar thoughts came to me repeatedly as I descended the Teche. I imagined bones, swords, cannons, revolvers, doubloons, and all sorts of other artifacts passing underneath me, perhaps within reach. Who knows what the mud and muck of the Teche is waiting to reveal?
After 19 miles of paddling we were exhausted, and of the four of us I was by far in the most miserable. My arms hurt as though I’d lifted barbells all day, and my palms stung with blisters and glistened with a metallic sheen from handling the aluminum paddles. “Next time,” I noted to myself, “bring gloves.” By the time I reached home, I hurt all over. My bones seemed to ache to the marrow. No matter in what position I sat or lay, I could not ease the discomfort. This was my penalty for undertaking the trip without any physical preparation. I swallowed some aspirin and slept horribly, but by morning the pain had disappeared except for vague aching in my upper arms. Fortunately, this pain did not return after future stages. I needed this first stage to break myself in.
The remainder of my canoeing diary will be published in my forthcoming book, Teche: A History of Louisiana's Most Famous Bayou, due out in 2016. This book examines the Teche from its geological formation through its prehistoric and colonial settlement to the coming of sugar and cotton, steam-driven riverboats and sugar mills, and slavery. It surveys the Civil War on the Teche, as well as the impact of floods, yellow fever, and postwar violence on the bayou. Finally, it looks at modern efforts to redesign the Teche using dams, locks, flood gates, and other structures, and the recent push to clean and revitalize the bayou. To receive an e-mail when the book is released, please e-mail me using the address in the margin at upper right (directly under the Facebook button). ~ Shane K. Bernard, July 2015
About two years ago my friend, genealogist Winston De Ville, sent me a hand-drawn colonial-era map or plan of a fort. I wasn't sure why he sent it to me, because the plan was unrelated to any of my research. In retrospect, he isn't sure why he sent it to me, either. The other documents he included with the plan concerned Bayou Teche, a subject on which I was (and am still) conducting research. Perhaps he got the fort plan mixed up with the Teche material and sent it to me by mistake?
The plan of a colonial-era fort. (Source: Winston De Ville, FASG; colorized by the author)
Regardless, he sent me the plan of the fort, I put it in my files "just in case," and I forgot about it.
Two days ago I was looking through my files and pulled out the plan of the fort. It occurred to me that another friend, archaeologist Dr. Ashley A. Dumas of the University of West Alabama, might find the plan of interest. She is presently excavating colonial-era Fort Tombecbe, located in rural Alabama. Surely it's not the same fort, I thought, but perhaps it will be useful for comparison with Tombecbe.
So I scanned and e-mailed the plan to her, stating in my cover note, "Don't know if this is of interest to you or not."
To which Dr. Dumas replied, "Holy cow, that is Fort Tombecbe!!!! The fort I work on now! Any date associated with it? Did you find it yourself or is it online?"
Close up of the fort in the plan. (Source: Winston De Ville, FASG; colorized by the author)
I didn't respond immediately as I was off doing research. A short time later Dr. Dumas wrote back again, "Can you get a higher resolution image? Can I get one? I can't read all the writing. It looks like a draft plan of the fort, possibly by Lusser. Or maybe shows changing alignment of the palisade wall? Do you see that funny little rectangle with the circle attached in one corner of the fort? That's the bread oven. I excavated a portion of that structure and that bastion corner this summer."
Still I didn't reply, spurring another e-mail from Dr. Dumas: "Shane! you're killing me. Do you know if I can get a better copy?"
When I returned to my office I did not read Dr. Dumas’ e-mails in order. I therefore was unaware she had already identified the fort in the plan as Tombecbe when I wrote back:
"What, is it a helpful map??? That's the best copy I can scan from my photocopy, which in itself is crappy. Anyway, does the map mean anything to you? (I saw ‘tombe’ in the French at top, and for a second thought it might be ‘Tombegbe’ but I don't think so; I think it's just the [French] verb ‘tomber.’)”
To which Dr. Dumas quickly responded, "No, no. It's Fort Tombecbe. Where'd you get the copy? Is there a catalog number or something that I can use. . . ?"
I finally understood the relevance of the plan and told Dr. Dumas where to find the original. (It's in Spain.) I then re-scanned in higher resolution the archaic French writing, "inverted" the scan's color in Photoshop to generate an easier-to-read negative, and asked Dr. Dumas, "Does this help to read the French (see attachment)?"
Unfortunately, I forgot to attach the scan, prompting Dr. Dumas to e-mail me back, "There's no attachment. I think you're trying to give me a heart attack."
I eventually sent Dr. Dumas the color-inverted image (the next day when I returned to my office).
Some of the French text on the plan of the fort. (Source: Winston De Ville, FASG; colorized by the author)
On examination of the plan, Dr. Dumas observed that "The scale is at the bottom and goes up to 60 toises [one toise = 6.396 U.S.feet]. I think that the strange little geometric drawings above the fort represent [early Louisiana colonial governor] Bienville's encampment of April-May 1736. The timing of this map is interesting because it coincides with Bienville's first arrival at Tombecbe to meet with Choctaw chiefs." She added, "Desperate to get a good copy!"
Despite the unintended humor and fumbling around on my part, this is a good example of "interdisciplinary cooperation" among scholars — in this case, a historian helping an archaeologist. And of course it works in reverse, too. (Oddly enough, I tend to work more with archaeologists than with other historians.) And yet the incident also serves as a good example of serendipity: Had not Mr. De Ville accidentally sent me a plan of a fort unrelated to my own research, and had I not kept it, filed it away, and stumbled across it a few nights ago while looking for something else, I might never have thought of sending it to Dr. Dumas. And even then I did not think it would turn out to be the fort she'd been excavating.
Sometimes research and discovery happens this way: I can't tell you how many things I've discovered in my own research by accident. (Take, for example, the Cajun Coonass airplane photo about which I've written previously.)
This is so trivial a matter I'm unsure why I wrote it up . . . but I did. And so here you have it:
A friend of mine sent me a link to one of those "remember-the-days?" websites that feature images of a younger America. This particular collection of photographs focused on gas stations across the country from the 1920s through the 1960s. You can see the site for yourself here.
One of the images captured a California gas station and what I believe to be a 1962 Ford Galaxie at the pump. (Correct me if I'm wrong about the make or model — I originally thought it was a 1960 Chevy Impala.)
Behind the car stands a sign for a bowling alley, restaurant, and coffee shop called the Escondido Bowl. Thus, judging from this sign and the Galaxie — as well as from the other cars in the image — the photograph was taken in Escondido, California (located below Los Angeles near San Diego), in or shortly after 1962.
What really caught my eye, however, was the marquee below the Escondido Bowl signage. It read:
For those who don't know, Johnny Preston had an international number one hit single in 1959 with the song, "Running Bear," written by J. P. Richardson (aka The Big Bopper, who died in the same plane crash that killed Buddy Holly).
In 1996 I published my first book, Swamp Pop: Cajun and Creole Rhythm and Blues, about the swamp pop musical genre of south Louisiana and east Texas. Swamp pop is a combination of New Orleans-style rhythm-and-blues, country-and-western, and Cajun and black Creole music. It was invented by Cajun and black Creole teenagers in the mid- to late 1950s, and its heyday stretched from 1958 to 1964, ending with the advent of the British Invasion.
Among the pioneer swamp pop musicians I interviewed for the book was Johnny Preston— real name Johnny Preston Courville. As his tell-tale ethnic surname suggests, he was a Cajun, hailing from the Beaumont-Port Arthur area of east Texas (to which many south Louisiana Cajuns migrated during the early to mid-twentieth century). I assumed "The Cajuns" was the name of Johnny's band — though I'd never heard of him fronting a band by this name.
I told my father, swamp pop musician Rod Bernard, about Johnny’s name appearing on the marquee. He replied, "Well, I toured with Johnny on the West Coast around that time. A bunch of us from around here toured with him out west."
Newspaper ad for a 1960 tour out west featuring Dad, Johnny Preston, Jivin' Gene, Benny Barnes, and Skip Stewart. (Source: Tucson Daily Citizen, 30 January 1960)
Dad and I suddenly had the same thought: What if he had been there, with Johnny, at the Escondido Bowl when the photograph in question had been taken? Perhaps "The Cajuns" referred to the other singers in the tour group, all but one of whom, Benny Barnes, were indeed Cajuns? The other singers were Dad, Jivin’ Gene (real name Gene Bourgeois) and Skip Stewart (Maurice Guillory); Dad’s band, The Twisters — some of whose members were Cajuns — served as the backing band for the tour group.
Left to right, Benny Barnes, Jivin' Gene, Dad, and Johnny Preston, ca. 1960. (Source: Author's Collection)
I checked a few online newspaper archives and found that Johnny Preston toured the West Coast, including the Escondido area, with a band called "The Cajuns" in 1964 and 1965— a few years after he toured the West Coast with Dad and the other swamp pop artists. In other words, Dad was not with Johnny when the gas station photograph was taken. Not that it matters. Still, it would have been a neat coincidence. In any event, the gas station photograph captures a moment in time when swamp pop music was young and often performed by its pioneers far beyond its homeland. Swamp pop still exists today, but its pioneers are slowly passing away (Johnny himself died in 2011), and the genre is largely confined to the dance halls and honky tonks of south Louisiana and East Texas.
Addendum: In retrospect I think I wrote this as nothing more than an exercise in historical detection (which I enjoy).
I recently read about astronomer Johannes Kepler, who spent years forging a theory about the operation of the Solar System — only to admit to himself eventually that the data simply did not support his idea.
Johannes Kepler: Never canoed on Bayou Teche. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
So I suppose I should not feel too bad about spending the past five days fleshing out a theory about the origin of the word Teche, only to have to toss it after realizing it just didn't stand up to scrutiny.
I ought to explain that in my forthcoming book about the history of Bayou Teche, I grapple with the alleged origins of the word Teche. One of these etymologies — the one cited most commonly in popular and academic literature — holds that Teche derives from the Chitimacha word for "snake." The problem with this claim, I observed, is that there is no known Chitimacha word for "snake" that even remotely resembles Teche. (Some popular sources claim that the Chitimacha, or even the Attakapas, word for snake is "tenche," from which derived Teche; but there is no known evidence to support this assertion.)
Bayou Teche, photographed by the author, autumn 2011.
In short, I found this etymology dubious and searched for other explanations. And for the past five days I thought I'd found one — a good one.
Last week I drove to Louisiana State University to visit its Museum of Natural Science. I made the two-hour trip to examine Chitimacha Indian baskets, some of them a century old. All came ultimately from the Chitimachas' ancestral lands at Charenton, Louisiana (now inside the Sovereign Nation of the Chitimacha), located about 25 miles southeast of my home.
While scrutinizing the baskets, the museum staff showed me a booklet of handwritten notes compiled by Mrs. Sidney Bradford, née Mary Avery McIlhenny, daughter of Tabasco sauce inventor E. McIlhenny. An avid basket collector, Bradford used the booklet around 1900 to record traditional basket pattern names.
Tesh as the Chitimacha word for "worm" (top); The "T" may look like a "J," but note how Bradford makes her "T" when writing "Taught" elsewhere in the booklet (bottom). (Courtesy Museum of Natural Science, LSU)
Previously I'd been unable to find a Chitimacha word that sounded like Teche. I'd consulted Daniel W. Hieber's Chitimacha-English dictionary (a work in progress accessible here via the Internet), Morris Swadesh's 1950 Chitimacha-English dictionary, and the published research of noted anthropologist John R. Swanton. But I did so without success. This confused me because according to any number of present-day sources Teche is supposed to mean "snake," and its application to the bayou is said to derive from a well-known tribal legend:
Many years ago . . . there was a huge and venomous snake. This snake was so large, and so long, that its size was not measured in feet, but in miles. This enormous snake had been an enemy of the Chitimacha for many years, because of its destruction to many of their ways of life. One day, the Chitimacha chief called together his warriors, and had them prepare themselves for a battle with their enemy. In those days, there were no guns that could be used to kill this snake. All they had were clubs and bows and arrows, with arrowheads made of large bones from the garfish. . . . The warriors fought courageously to kill the enemy, but the snake fought just as hard to survive. As the beast turned and twisted in the last few days of a slow death, it broadened, curved and deepened the place wherein his huge body lay. The Bayou Teche is proof of the exact position into which this enemy placed himself when overcome by the Chitimacha warriors. (Source: Chitimacha.gov)
Yet Bradford had translated Tesh not as "snake," but as "worm." Perhaps, I thought, the word Teche didn't come from the Chitimacha for "snake"; perhaps it came instead from the Chitimacha for "worm." A snake and a worm are similar in shape: both are writhing, legless, elongated creatures. Perhaps someone long ago garbled the original story in translation and in doing so the worm became a snake?
Chitimacha basket maker Christine Paul (ca. 1900). (Courtesy McIlhenny Company Archives)
Swanton's published writings seemed to support my budding hypothesis. Aware of Bradford's interest in Chitimacha basketry, Swanton wrote in 1911 about some of her specimens, "All of the designs are tci'cmic, or 'worm-track' designs. . . ."
Here, Swanton rendered the Chitimacha word for "worm" not as "tesh," as Bradford did, but as "tci'c," and elsewhere "tciic."
Well, I thought, tci'c and tciic still vaguely remind me of Teche.
I sensed I remained on the right track when I read Swanton's note that "[the letter] c in Chitimacha words used in these [basket] descriptions is pronounced the same as English sh."In other words, tci'c and tciic were pronounced "tshesh" and "tsheesh"— extremely close to the modern pronunciation of Teche!
I believed I had just about nailed down the origin of Bayou Teche's name. I had strong evidence, I felt, that the name came from tci'c and tciic, the Chitimacha words for "worm," which Bradford had rendered as Tesh. Moreover, tradition held that a giant snake had formed the Teche, and does not a worm twist and turn like a snake? Could not someone have confused the two creatures when translating the myth into English? Finally, was not the winding shape of the bayou reflected in the very "worm track" pattern of the Chitimacha baskets?
Chitimacha basket with "worm track" pattern. (Source: Swanton, Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley [1911]; colorized by the author)
Then my hypothesis unraveled. Consulting noted linguist Jack Martin of the College of William and Mary, who specializes in Native American languages of the South, I learned that Swanton had used "Americanist phonetic notation" when writing out Chitimacha words. This phonetic system did not correspond to the present-day phonetics taught in elementary schools or used in standard dictionaries. In fact, when Swanton wrote tci'c and tciic, I found out, he meant for them to be pronounced not "tshesh" and "tsheesh," as I thought, but "chesh" and "cheesh." This, I had to admit, didn't sound so much like Teche anymore.
Still, I countered, why would Mrs. Bradford have written Tesh in her booklet as the tribal word for "worm"?
I double checked the booklet: Yes, it definitely read Tesh. But as I leafed through the booklet's other handwritten pages I saw that she had rendered the same word elsewhere as chi, chie, chis, and chish. These sounded little like Teche, but very much like "cheesh," the correct pronunciation, as Professor Martin had explained to me.
Indeed, Swadesh, using a different phonetic system when he compiled his Chitimacha dictionary in 1950, wrote the word for "worm" as ǯi•š. When translated into easy-to-read phonetics (for non-linguists like me), ǯi•š would similarly be pronounced "cheesh."
Chitimacha basket maker Clara Darden (ca. 1900). (Courtesy McIlhenny Company Archives)
In addition, Swanton, the professor told me, had noted in an unpublished paper that the Chitimacha name for the Teche was qukx — a word that sounded nothing like Teche.
In fact, the Chitimacha phrase for "Bayou Teche" was qukx caad.
I already knew the phrase qukx caad. Indeed, it was the very fact that qukx sounded nothing like Teche that caused me to question the popular etymology in the first place. Frankly, I had suspected that qukx caad was a recent folk etymology — that is, I thought perhaps someone, hearing that the Chitimacha had traditionally called the bayou (albeit in their own language) "Snake Bayou," had consulted a Chitimacha dictionary (perhaps one of those I myself was using), looked up the tribal words for "snake" and "bayou," and assumed that Chitimachas in earlier times must have used the same words, qukx caad, to indicate Bayou Teche.
Now, however, I knew my hunch was wrong: Swanton's unpublished paper from the early twentieth century proved that the Chitimacha had indeed traditionally called the waterway qukx caad — Snake Bayou.
But — and this is important — if the traditional Chitimacha name for Bayou Teche was qukx caad . . . then how did the word Teche fit into the story?
Chitimacha baskets (ca. 1900). (Courtesy McIlhenny Company Archives)
I was back where I started: qukx and Teche bore no resemblance to each other, either in pronunciation or appearance. So where did the word Teche come from? And if the Chitimacha had not used the term, had it come from the early French or Spanish pioneers and cartographers? And if from them, where did they get it? Perhaps from the Attakapas, or the Houma, or the Choctaw? The latter seemed possible, for other nearby place names derive from Choctaw — for example, Atchafalaya and Catahoula.
What if Teche came to the region from the Afro-Caribbean world, I wondered, perhaps even from West Africa itself? Certainly there is precedent in words like yamand gumbo. (See my previous articles about the Afro-Caribbeanorigin of the word gumbohere and here.)
As I’ve previously stated, I enjoy historical detection. It's what drew me to my career in history. And while the detective work sometimes pays off, other times it leads nowhere — such as in this instance. Although my pursuit of this lead yielded no positive results, it serves nonetheless as a case study in how history is sometimes done. Historians must do away with wishful thinking and, viewing their own work through the lens of objectivity, admit their errors, throw out their findings, and start over. As one educator noted:
"No one who cannot rejoice in the discovery of his own mistakes deserves to be called a scholar."
But I have another hypothesis, one I won't discuss here, that remains feasible. And so I fall back on that idea, even as I keep looking for alternate explanations for the name of the bayou.
A couple months ago or so Cajun fiddler David Greely sent me a link to a 1968 film on YouTube. The film showed elderly Cajun couples dancing to late Cajun accordionist Aldus Roger (pronounced RO-ZHAY in the French manner).
Aldus Roger and his band perform for dancers. Source: La Louisiane (1968)
The video captivated me because moving images of Cajun musicians from the late 1960s or earlier are rare. I was not alone in my interest — the video caused a momentary stir among others interested in Cajun culture.
I say "momentary" because almost as soon as David spread the word about this YouTube footage, the original poster suddenly yanked it from the Internet. This is quite possibly my fault, because when I saw the film I immediately e-mailed the original poster to ask, "Where did you get this? Do you know where I can get a copy? It is extremely important to those who study Cajun culture, and I would like to obtain dubs for preservation and research purposes." (I paraphrase.)
Within a few hours the YouTube video was gone and the poster never answered my query. Indeed, with the video removed I had no way to contact the poster, even to ask the name of the film.
Today I decided to see if I could track down the documentary in question. And, by Googling the words "cadien,""documentaire,""musique," and "1968," I was able to find the film.
Actually, I found three films (and there are perhaps more), all shot between 1968 and 1969 by the Office de radiodiffusion télévision française(ORTF), operated by the French government.
That year, 1968, was remarkable nationally and internationally. The Tet Offensive marked a turning point in the Vietnam War. LBJ announced he would not seek reelection to the presidency. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. Campus rallies erupted into violence amid cries of “Revolution!” Police bullied protestors and innocent bystanders at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. . . .
Acadiana [i.e., Cajun Louisiana] also witnessed incredible events of its own during 1968. Besides the creation of [French education group] CODOFIL, it saw the passage of several laws that bolstered the status of French in Louisiana. The state legislature mandated that public elementary schools offer at least five years of French instruction, and that public high schools offer the subject for at least three years, along with at least one course on the history and culture of French America. It required state colleges and universities to offer teacher certification in elementary school French, and it approved the publication of legal notices and other public documents in French. It also demanded that state-funded educational television be bilingual, showing French programming in equal proportion to its French-speaking viewers. Finally, the legislature authorized the establishment of a non-profit French-language television corporation in conjunction with [local university] USL, to be called Télévision-Louisiane.
Other events contributed to making 1968 an astounding year for the French preservation movement. USL committed itself to becoming “a world linguistic center” by establishing an Institute of French Studies and by expanding its role in training French educators. Civic leaders opened cultural exchanges with other French-speaking regions, symbolically pairing Lafayette with the city of Longueuil, Quebec, in what became known as a jumelage (twinning). Business leaders conducted a trade mission to Quebec in order to develop commercial ties. Educators started a summer student exchange program, sending Cajun children to Quebec, and hosting French Canadian children in south Louisiana. An International Acadian Festival took placed in Lafayette, attracting over one hundred governmental and media visitors from Canada and France for two days of receptions, lectures, exhibits, films, tours, and other events that highlighted the region’s French heritage.
Cajuns quickly grasped the significance of this amazing period. “Historians will circle calendar year 1968,” announced Acadiana Profile, a new bilingual magazine, “as the time when the . . . French Renaissance took form and shape and direction in Louisiana.” . . .
Shot in 1968, two of the films appeared in a French series called "En Couleur des U.S.A" ("In Color USA"). Both are available for viewing in their entirety per the website of the Institut national de l'audiovisuel (INA), or National Audiovisual Institute, of France.
La Louisiane : Fête de l'écrevisse, May 1968 (14 mins. 31 secs.)
One of the two films, titled "La Louisiane : Fête de l'écrevisse" ("Louisiana: Crawish Festival"), features the 1968 Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival. It originally aired in May that year and its summary reads:
Reportage sur le festival de l'écrevisse à Breaux Bridge, en Louisiane, dans le pays cajun, avec de nombreuses festivités : course d'écrevisses, fanfares, danses, concours d'épluchage d'écrevisses et parades (une pour les blancs et une autre pour les noirs, alors qu'en théorie la ségrégation n'a plus cours).
Translation:
Report on the Crawfish Festival of Breaux, Bridge, in Louisiana, in Cajun country, with many festivities: crawfish races, bands, dances, crawfish peeling contests, and parades (one for whites and another for blacks, even though segregation is no longer acceptable).
The absence of black people among the festival goers struck me as peculiar, even as the film itself depicts a black parade and a white parade. This was, of course, 1968, about a year before south Louisiana finally integrated its elementary and high schools (despite the fact that fifteen years earlier the Supreme Court, per the case Brown v. the Board of Education, had declared "separate-but-equal" education to be unconstitutional).
A crawfish float on Bayou Teche, Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival. Source: La Louisiane: Fête de l'écrevisse (1968)
On a less serious note, the film depicts a boat parade on Bayou Teche, a crawfish race, and, in one scene, a van decorated to promote Cajun musician Happy Fats LeBlanc's live Saturday TV program, Mariné, which aired on KLFY-TV 10.
The other film, titled "La Louisiane," was originally released in September 1968 and documents French culture in general in and around Lafayette, Louisiana. It begins with Cajun fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico and, later, includes that priceless footage of Cajun musician Aldus Roger playing for elderly Cajun dancers. It appears to me that the Roger footage was shot at KLFY's studio, originally located on Jefferson Street near its intersection with Pinhook Road. I assume the event is Roger's weekend live Cajun music TV program, which aired on KLFY from the mid-1950s through the 1960s. (I'm unsure when it fell from the station's lineup.) The only reason I doubt we are seeing Roger's weekend program, however, is the inclusion of news in French — unless that was actually part of Roger's program. (The show might be one of KLFY's other long-running local programs, Passe Partoutor Meet Your Neighbor, but I've never heard of either having live studio dancers.)
Intriguingly, this second film includes an interview in French with future Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards and a rare interview with former U.S. congressman James "Jimmy" Domengeaux (pronounced in the French manner as DUH-MAZH-ZHEE-O, much like the surname of baseball great Joe DiMaggio). (I mention Domengeaux in previous articles here and here.) The same year this documentary appeared, Domengeaux became president of the newly created Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) — a group that in coming decades would spearhead the teaching of French in Louisiana public schools. It was a revolutionary idea, for less than a decade earlier Louisiana children had been punished in schools for speaking French.
The summary of this film reads:
Ce reportage en Louisiane du sud part à la découverte des habitants francophones du pays acadien, dans la région de Lafayette : les trappeurs (piégeurs) des marécages du bayou Vermilion, les pêcheurs de crevettes (descendants de bretons ou normands installés d'abord au Canada) dans le port de Delcambre, les noirs descendants de créoles de Saint Domingue et Haiti. A Lafayette, une chaine de télévision et une station de radio émettent des programmes en français. James Domegeaux (un avocat de Lafayette), un représentant du Congrès et le gouverneur de Louisiane témoignent de leur volonté de sauvegarder le français en Louisiane.
Translation:
This report on south Louisiana sets out to discover the French-speaking residents of Acadian country in the Lafayette area: trappers of the wetlands of Bayou Vermilion, shrimp fishermen (descendants of Bretons and Normans who first settled in Canada) at the port of Delcambre, black descendants of Creoles from Santo Domingo and Haiti. In Lafayette, a television station and a radio station broadcast programs in French. James Domegeaux (a lawyer from Lafayette), a congressman [Edwards, who was not yet governor], and a governor of Louisiana [John McKeithen], show their desire to preserve French in Louisiana.
Jimmy Domengeaux interviewed. Source: La Louisiane (1968)
A third film, shot the next year, is available per the INA website, but only as a short preview: it is titled, "Les Enfants de Francien : En Louisiane," which I suppose could be translated as "The Children of Old French: In Louisiana." It originally aired in June 1969 and according to the summary it asks:
Comment peut-on être de culture française sans être français ? Ce reportage présente la communauté acadienne située dans les marais du delta du Mississippi.
Translation:
Can French culture exist without being French? This report presents the Acadian community located in the marshes of the Mississippi delta. [I suspect the geography is off slightly.]
I re-post these videos because they afford a fascinating glimpse into the state of south Louisiana’s Cajun and Creole culture in the late 1960s, right at the birth of the French revival movement — as perceived at the time by the French media.
Addendum of 12 February 2013 A third south Louisiana-related film is available for viewing in its entirety through the INA website. Shot in 1976 — eight years after the above two La Louisiane films — it depicts, among other subjects, Louisiana schoolchildren singing "Frère Jacques"; Cajun radio-and-TV personality (and sometimes Cajun singer) Jim Olivier giving a weather forecast in French (another KLFY reference, possibly from the Passe Partout morning program); a second interview with Jimmy Domengeaux (whose group, CODOFIL, is mistakenly called the "Comité du defense du français"— unless a distinct group by this name existed, but I've never heard of it); and a glimpse of Michael Doucet and a few other Cajun musicians performing for the camera. (The musicians may comprise an early version of the band BeauSoleil or perhaps another of Doucet's groups, Coteau.)
Earlier today I learned of a two-part, roughly thirty-minute black-and-white silent film from circa 1925 documenting the daily operations of a south Louisiana cypress company. (I later realized that, purely by coincidence, an old high-school classmate of mine put the digitized film online.)
The movie shows lumberjacks in pirogues (small flat-bottomed boats) cutting down ancient cypress trees in or around the Atchafalaya Basin; a pull boat drawing the logs onto a canal using a chain and windlass; a dredge boat armed with a steam shovel extending the logging canals into a cypress swamp; a locomotive pulling flatcars of logs to the mill; a "towboat" (actually the full-fledged steamboat Sewanee) pulling a "boom" of logs to the mill; "overhead electric cars"— presumably state-of-the-art technology at the time — carrying logs around the lumberyard; "mechanical electric stackers" piling lumber; and early gas-powered trucks pulling wagons of lumber.
The film in question was shot by L. K. Williams, a member of the Williams family of Patterson who operated the massive F. B. Williams Cypress Company, located in that same town on or near the banks of Bayou Teche. The waterway from which L. K. Williams filmed the cypress mill (seen on reel two) is quite possibly the Teche itself, but it's difficult to say because there are many man-made canals around Patterson. The scene in question just as easily could have been shot from one of those canals.
Advertisement for F. B. Williams Cypress Company, Patterson, La. (Source: The Lumber Trade Journal, 15 Sept 1914)
Note the industry-specific terms* that appear in the film’s captions:
Boom, n. Logs or timbers fastened together end to end and used to hold floating logs. The term sometimes includes the logs enclosed, as a boom of logs.
Crib, n. Specifically, a raft of logs; loosely applied to a boom of logs.
Float road[, n.]. A channel cleared in a swamp and used to float cypress logs from the woods to the boom at the river or mill.
F. B. Williams Cypress Company, Patterson, La., as shown in the ca. 1925 film.
I cannot find a definition for a run, another term used in the captions, but it is presumably the same as that for gutter road, which is "The path followed in skidding logs"— skid meaning "To draw logs from the stump to the skidway, landing, or mill." In turn, a skidway is "Two skids laid parallel at right angles to a road, usually raised above the ground at the end nearest the road.” The same source adds, "Logs are usually piled upon a skidway as they are brought from the stump for loading upon sleds, wagons, or cars."
This film provides a valuable insight into a now dormant Teche country industry: once lumber mills dotted the lower bayou, drawing on the nearby massive cypress swamp that is the Atchafalaya Basin, as well as on other, smaller cypress swamps in the region. Whether or not this turn-of-the-twentieth-century industry represented responsible stewardship of Louisiana’s natural resources or an environmental disaster (or something in between), I leave to viewers to decide. I myself do not weigh in on the issue because I have not researched the matter, and while it would be easy to deem it an "environmental disaster" I do not know this as a matter of fact.
The steamboat Sewanee, as shown in the ca. 1925 film. It tows a "boom" of logs behind it.
*Definitions are quoted from: Bureau of Forestry, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Terms Used in Forestry and Logging (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1905).
The recent explosion of a meteor (or "bolide") near Chelyabinsk, Russia, reminded me of a similar incident that took place over south Louisiana in the late 1950s.
A meteor streaking through the atmosphere. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
In my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People I used this incident to illustrate how atomic-age anxieties had infiltrated Louisiana's traditionally French-speaking parishes — a region that at one time had been fairly isolated from the currents of mainstream American history. Some fellow historians bristle at the suggestion that south Louisiana was ever particularly isolated: but "isolated" is a relative term, and compared to, say, contemporary downtown Peoria, suburban Cincinnati, or midtown Manhattan, or any number of other mainstream American places, it was without doubt relatively isolated during the pre-World War II era.
This changed on a rapid, widespread basis with the coming of World War II, an event that finally immersed south Louisiana in mainstream American culture. As such, I demonstrated in The Cajuns that when a meteor lit up the region's night sky in the late 1950s, many Cajuns suspected they had just been attacked by the Soviet Union. As I concluded about their terrified response to the meteor, "Obviously, Cajuns were as susceptible to Cold War anxieties as other segments of American society."
Given the present interest in meteors, I excerpt here the section of my book dealing with that astronomical event over south Louisiana:
Around 10 p.m. on March 15, 1957, a fiery meteor emitting a shower of red sparks hurtled over south Louisiana, turning darkness to broad daylight before slamming into West Côte Blanche Bay. Windows rattled, some shattered, and police throughout central Acadiana [the Cajuns parishes of south-central Louisiana] fielded calls from hundreds of frantic citizens. No, they replied, it wasn't a mid-air collision, an oil-rig blowout, a "space ship from Mars," or "la fin du monde," the end of the world. It was only a chunk of rock from outer space.
Significantly, some Acadiana residents assumed that what they had witnessed was an incoming missile and the flash of an atomic blast. They believed that the Soviets had launched a nuclear attack on Baton Rouge or New Orleans. According to the Abbeville Meridional, for example, a local resident "who prefers not being identified" said he thought the meteor was a guided missile . . . sent to this area by the Russians for some destructive purposes." The same article cited Vermilion Parish resident Preston Broussard as describing the meteor's impact as "like the explosion of weapons used in warfare." Lafayette's Daily Advertiser stated "Some thought it was . . . 'an atomic bomb dropped over New Orleans.'" In the rural community of Kaplan, school teacher Earl Comeaux was putting his daughter to sleep when he observed "the yard light up as in daytime." At first the event puzzled him, but as he recalled, "It dawned on me that that was the flash of an A-bomb exploding. Since it was in the east, I immediately thought of Baton Rouge, a prime target of the Russians. They would be after the petroleum plants there."
Newspaper article from March 1957 about the meteor. (Source: Altus [Okla.] Times-Democrat/Google News)
Comeaux knew more than most locals about atomic warfare: a few years earlier he had served with Strategic Air Command, flying on B-50 bombers that carried nuclear warheads targeted for Moscow rail yards. Waking his wife anxiously, Comeaux told her about the mysterious flash, and explained that if the capital had indeed been bombed, the resulting shockwave ought to reach Kaplan at any moment. "Well, no sooner was that said than a great boom shook the house," he recalled. "I was convinced that we had been attacked by the Russians." Gathering their children, the Comeauxs huddled around their television, awaiting official word of doomsday. After a long night they learned about the meteor that had crashed nearby. "How terrified I had been for my family and myself!" he recalled. "How ridiculous my reaction to a natural occurrence." . . .
A follow-up note: I have tried unsuccessfully on occasion to coax both scientists and treasure hunters into searching for the meteorite in question. A large chunk of the object reportedly fell to Earth just off an easily identifiable spot on the Louisiana coast — the amusingly named Point No Point, which sits directly between East and West Côte Blanche bays. As I told a journalist in 2007:
I once spent a good deal of time researching this meteor, and three fishermen from Baldwin [in St. Mary Parish] reported that the meteor (or at least an automobile-sized part of it) crashed between their boat and the shoreline, which was located only a short distance away (a hundred yards or so, I recall). . . . They had been fishing near the division between East and West Côte Blanche Bay[s] at a place called Point No Point. The impact of the meteor hitting the water was so loud that their ears were still ringing days later, and they felt fortunate to be alive. Another, smaller chunk of the meteor landed on an inland oil rig near Houma, and the oil-field worker who saw it fall out of the sky and roll up against some equipment took the rock home as a keepsake. Who knows where it is now?
Approximate reported impact site of meteor off Point No Point. (Source: Google Maps)
The three fishermen in question drew a map showing precisely where this large chunk of space rock crashed into the water near Point No Point. This map still exists, and it seems to me that someone with an underwater magnetometer might use it to find the meteorite — assuming the meteorite is made of iron or some other easily detectable metal — and raise it to the surface.
Location of Point No Point (aka Marone Point). (Source: Google Maps)
But what do I know about such things, really? I'm not a geophysicist, but a historian. And for all I know the rock, or what is left of it after possibly rusting beneath the waves for over a half-century, is buried under fifty feet of sludge.
Now available online from Amazon.com (click here to purchase in English or French)!
Maintenant disponible en ligne à Amazon.com (cliquez ici pour vendre en anglais ou française)!
I'm pleased to announce that my 2008 book, Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors: A Young Reader's History, has now (as of April 1, 2013) been released in a French translation by Faustine Hillard.
J’ai le plaisir d’annoncer que mon livre intitulé Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes est maintenant disponible (1 avril 2013) en version française, traduite par Faustine Hillard.
Cover of the English version and the French translation. Couverture du livre en anglais et la traduction en français.
Published by the University Press of Mississippi and funded in part through a translation grant from the Quebec Ministère des Relations Internationales, the book, retitled Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes, is aimed at middle-school and high-school readers — though it is useful as an adult primer — particularly students in French Immersion and other French education courses.
Publié par la Presse Universitaire du Mississippi et financé en partie par une subvention du Ministère des Relations Internationales du Québec, le livre, intitulé Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes, cible le jeune lecteur collégien ou lycéen, surtout celui des classes d’immersion en français ou ceux qui apprennent le français langue seconde.Il s'avère toutefois une introduction enrichissante au lecteur adulte voulant s’initier à la question.
Inside the French version. (click to enlarge) L'intérieur de la version en français. (Cliquez pour agrandir.)
Folklorist and linguist Barry Jean Ancelet writes:
"Shane Bernard's book . . . is an excellent addition to the database that is being developed on the history and culture of Louisiana. And this accessible French edition offers a perspective essential for any student (child or adult) who seeks to understand the Cajuns."
Le folkloriste et linguiste Barry Jean Ancelet écrivit:
"Ce livre de Shane Bernard . . . est une excellente addition à la banque d'information qui est en train de se développer sur l'histoire et la culture de la Louisiane. Et cette édition en français facilement abordable offre une perspective indispensable pour tout étudiant (petit ou grand) qui cherche à comprendre les Cadiens."
And historian Carl A. Brasseaux states:
"Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestorsby Shane Bernard provides students — and young adults generally — with a perfect introduction to the history of one of North America's most distinctive, and most misunderstood, ethnic groups. Concise and highly readable, this book is an essential resource for every Louisiana classroom."
Et l'historien Carl A. Brasseaux déclara:
"Les Cadiens et leurs ancêtres acadienspar Shane Bernard fournit aux étudiants--et aux jeunes adultes en général--une parfaite introduction à l'histoire de l'un des plus distinctifs et des plus incompris groupes ethniques en Amérique du Nord. Concis et facile à lire, ce livre est une ressource essentielle pour chaque salle de classe en Louisiane."
Of the English version, the Times-Picayune noted:
Bernard takes just 85 pages to provide a concise history of one of the unique peoples that make Louisiana special. It is a brief but delightfully engaging account of who the Cajuns are and how they got that way, a narrative as informative as it is easy to navigate. . . . [The book] fills an important gap on the Louisiana history bookshelf, and its value can be appreciated by the not-so-young as well.
Au sujet de la version en anglais, le quotidien de la Nouvelle Orléans, The Times-Picayune, remarqua:
Bernard nous raconte l'histoire abrégée d’un des peuples qui contribue à l'extraordinaire mosaïque démographique de la Louisiane en un récit de moins de 85 pages. Ce bref mais charmant compte rendu entraîne le lecteur à découvrir le peuple cadien et suivre son évolution dans un récit qui informe tout en restant facile à naviguer. . . . [Ce livre] comble une lacune importante en ce qui est de l'histoire de la Louisiane. C'est un livre qui s'apprécie à tout âge.
In 2008 the Louisiana Center for the Book, located in the state library, selected the English version of Cajuns and Their Acadian Ancestors to represent Louisiana at the National Book Festival's Pavilion of the States in Washington, D.C.
En 2008, LesCadiens et leurs ancêtres acadiens: l'histoire racontée aux jeunes (version langue anglaise) fut sélectionné par le Centre du Livre en Louisiane, qui se trouve à la bibliothèque de l’état, pour représenter la Louisiane au Pavillon des Etats du Festival National du Livre à Washington, D.C.
I first learned about the short film Cajuns of the Teche, directed by André de LaVarre and released in August 1942 by Columbia Pictures, while researching my book The Cajuns: Americanization of a People. This find occurred by accident in the late 1990s, while looking for something else in the National Archives and Records Administration. (Serendipity often happens when I’m conducting historical research. I think it’s a perfectly valid form of discovery.)
Title cards from Cajuns of the Teche. (Screen grabs by author)
In short, a reel of film labeled Cajuns of the Teche sat in the National Archives and had not yet been dubbed to videotape (much less had it been digitized; that technology was not yet at hand for most people). A student at the time, I didn’t have the $250 or so that the National Archives wanted to transfer the film to video, so I contacted my friend, Lafayette attorney Warren A. Perrin. Back then Warren served as president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana and owned, as he still does, the Acadian Museum in his hometown of Erath.
Warren agreed to fund the film’s transfer to video through his museum, so I filled out the pertinent paperwork, mailed it off, waited, and a few weeks later a VHS dub arrived from Washington, D.C. I watched the film, found it delightful, but ultimately did not use it as research material for my book. Moving on to other projects, I forgot about the dub for about fifteen years, but recently pulled it out of my files and digitized it so that I can present it here:
(Click to play video)
Two thoughts come to mind when I watch Cajuns of the Teche: First, after seventy years the images are crisp, clear, well-composed, and in my opinion extremely valuable as a record of the Teche region around World War II; second, the narration is often extremely misleading and in some instances downright wrong.
I’ll catalog these misleading and incorrect claims. The narrator repeatedly refers to the Cajuns’ ancestors as “Arcadians,” when the proper term is “Acadian.” Moreover, the Acadians did not arrive in Louisiana when it was “a colony of the kingdom of France,” as the narrator asserts, but a colony of Spain (albeit one administered for a time by French caretakers — Spain only slowly assumed full control of the formerly French colony).
The scenes of grandiose “Cajun homes” (see timestamps 3:19, 4:45 and 5:13 to 5:21 on the video) never fail to elicit snickers from other Cajuns to whom I’ve shown the film privately. The narration is entirely misleading when it states, “In the past we built many grand and spacious mansions, for our families were large and our attendants were many.” The dwellings in the film were far too luxurious for average, ordinary Cajuns, most of whom lived as subsistence farmers — and who certainly did not have many “attendants” (apparently a euphemism for “slaves”). Granted, a very few “genteel Acadians” managed to rise to positions of wealth in antebellum south Louisiana — mainly sugar planters with enslaved workforces — but they were the exception, not the rule.
In addition, the narration refers to the Louisiana colony as “a land with freedom of religion.” While it is true that the Acadians freely practiced their Catholic faith in Spanish-held Louisiana — the Spanish, after all, were Catholics, too — the colony was hardly a bastion of religious toleration. The Spanish, for example, forbid Protestants from holding public worship and they expelled all Jews from the colony.
The “Cajun garden” shown in the film at 5:27— featuring a centuries-old Buddha statue, if one looks closely enough — is actually Jungle Gardens, owned and operated by Scots-Irish Tabasco sauce manufacturer E. A. McIlhenny (hardly a Cajun).
Some of the narration is drivel. I do not believe, as claimed at 9:47 in the film, that an appreciation of “fine silks and soft satins” represented “one of the strongest traits of French heritage” among Cajun girls. Equally nonsensical is the narrator’s reference at 5:55— made over the image of fancifully dressed Cajun men and girls enjoying an elegant ring dance — to “slippered steps of old Acadia.” Acadian men and woman alike generally wore moccasins, living as they did on the rugged North American frontier.
Historically inaccurate Norman milkmaid costume. (Screen grab by author)
Fortunately, the images themselves are infinitely more valuable than the narration. This is not to say that some of the images are not misleading. For example, the Norman milkmaid costumes worn in the film by some Cajun girls and women (0:45and 8:05) were unknown to their Acadian ancestors. An example of what anthropologists and other scholars call “fakelore,” these costumes were probably introduced to more upwardly mobile Cajuns through mass-produced, illustrated volumes of Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline (which follows the fate of an Acadian maiden exiled to south Louisiana). I say “upwardly mobile” because the mass of ordinary Cajuns never read Evangeline.
Circa 1890 depiction of Evangeline. (Colorized by author)
Criticism aside (at last, you say), I made these other observations while watching Cajuns of the Teche:
The shot of boats moored along a bayou (1:43) seems to show some other waterway besides the Teche, perhaps Bayou Lafourche. I could be wrong — perhaps it is the Teche.
The stern-wheeler shown early in the film (1:50), the V. J. Kurzweg, is despite its appearance nota steamboat. As Carl A. Brasseaux writes in Steamboats on Louisiana’s Bayous, the Kurzweg“is widely — albeit inaccurately — remembered along Bayou Teche as one of the stream’s last steamboats,” but it “was not technically a steamboat” because “it was propelled by diesel motors.” Note the Kurzweg has no towering twin smokestacks as found on most steamboats: as a diesel-powered vessel it did not require them.
The V. J. Kurzweg on Bayou Teche, ca. 1942. (Screen grab by author)
The fishermen at 2:35do not seem to be on Bayou Teche, but rather in a cypress swamp. (A bayou is a slow-moving, muddy, usually smallish river, while a swamp is a wooded wetland.) If I had to guess, I would say the swamp in question is the Atchafalaya, if only because of its proximity to the Teche. But there are many patches of swamp in the region that are not in the Atchafalaya. In any event, the swamp in the film was clearly experiencing a flood, as indicated by the swift current.
Sugar cane field workers in Cajuns of the Teche. (Screen grab by author)
Another scene depicts a mounted white overseer (3:55) supervising a work crew as it weeds young sugarcane shoots. I cannot tell if the work crew is black or white or both. A shot of three male field workers reveals one with black hands (also 3:55), but work gloves mask the race of the other two workers. A wide shot appears to show two white female field workers at far left (4:13). The other field workers in the shot, however, cannot be seen clearly enough to establish their races.
It is tempting to draw a lesson about race or race relations from this scene. But it is impossible to do so without really knowing the workers’ racial makeup. Regardless, the shot does illustrate the region’s dependence on manual field labor in 1942. It would take the ongoing war and resulting labor shortages to spur south Louisiana agriculture to mechanize. What I observed about rural Lafayette Parish in The Cajuns no doubt held true for much of Cajun Louisiana: Despite the findings of a 1942 survey “that ‘tractors are not thought to be necessary or even desirable,’” Lafayette parish farmers “had almost universally adopted mechanization within a decade. ‘The old days of the plow and the horse are gone,’ observed a 1951 survey.”
A ring dance on the banks of the Teche. (Screen grab by author)
The reference to “giant spiders” (4:09) alludes to the legend of the Durand wedding, which allegedly occurred at Oak and Pine Alley on the outskirts of St. Martinville. As journalist Jim Bradshaw records:
It was only to be expected that [Durand] would throw the finest wedding ever when two of his daughters decided to get married on the same day. . . . [A]s the romantic legend is told, he ordered a million spiders sent from China and sent couriers to California to fetch hundreds of pounds of silver and gold dust. (A less romantic version of the story says the spiders came from nearby Catahoula Lake, but I like the China version better.) . . . Shortly before the wedding day, the spiders were set loose to spin millions of yards of delicate webs among the limbs of the oak and pine alley. On the morning of the wedding, servants armed with bellows filled with the silver and gold dust sprayed the cobweb canopy to set it glittering in the sunlight like something from a fairy tale.
Of this legend Brasseaux states, “Most southern Louisianians are familiar with the stories of the spiders imported from China for the Oak and Pine Alley wedding.” Yet it along with similar local legends, he notes, have been “proven unfounded by recent historical research.” (To Bradshaw’s credit, he concurs with Brasseaux that the story is a legend.)
Elsewhere, the narrator observes (6:08) “We Cajuns speak French among ourselves, and some of our children do not learn English until they reach the classroom.” Where they will have the French whipped out of them, I thought. I was being only slightly facetious, for south Louisiana educators often punished Cajun children for speaking French at school. More than any other factor, this practice accounted for the rapid decline of Cajun French during the early to mid-twentieth century. (See my previous blog article about tracking this decline.)
Quilters with garde-soleils. (Screen grab by author)
Finally, although the Cajuns’ dress is not “authentic” (that is, historically accurate) in the spinning wheel scene at the beginning or in the ring dance scene, the clothing shown in other scenes does strike me as authentic. See, for example, the field workers (Cajun or otherwise) shown from 3:55 to 4:29; and the school children from 6:05 to 6:24. (Note the students in question attended an all-white school: segregation did not end in much of Louisiana until 1969 — about fifteen years after the U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education struck down separate-but-equal schooling nationwide.) See also the churchgoers at 6:38 and 6:45; the corn husk weavers at 7:05; and the quilters at 7:42(complete with their garde-soleils, or sunbonnets). In addition, see the weaver at right, but not at left, at 8:04, and, conversely, the same weaver at left, but not at right, at 8:10; and the wedding goers at the end of the film (9:40 onwards). The apparel in these scenes looks very authentic to me. Perhaps the subjects had no time or compulsion to dress for the camera?
Horse and buggies leaving Cajun wedding. (Screen grab by author)
Now to address an issue other than the film’s accuracy: Was the film wartime propaganda?
I found Cajuns of the Teche in the National Archives collection of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Founded in 1953 during the Cold War and still active today, the USIA, as its website notes, “explains and supports American foreign policy and promotes U.S. national interests through a wide range of overseas information programs . . . [and] promotes mutual understanding between the United States and other nations by conducting educational and cultural activities.” Created prior to the advent of the USIA, Cajuns of the Teche sat in a section of the USIA collection regarding an earlier organization, the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI). Established in 1942, the OWI, as the Library of Congress explains, “served as an important U.S. government propaganda agency during World War II.”
Why would a travelogue film issued by Columbia Pictures be found in a collection pertaining to the OWI?
The answer might be found in a pictorial “feature” (pre-packaged photo essay for overseas consumption) issued by the OWI in 1944 and titled “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” This feature consisted of a four-page typewritten essay about the Cajuns along with many captioned black-and-white still images. These photos depicted “everyday” Cajun culture, activities, and places.
Intriguingly, at least four of these black-and-white still images depict events also shown in Cajuns of the Teche. Moreover, these black-and-white images were clearly shot at the exact same moment as the corresponding images in the film — albeit from slightly different angles. See the below image comparisons: Those at left are “screen grabs” from Columbia Pictures’ Cajuns of the Teche, while those at right are still images from the OWI's “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” As you can see, the paired images are almost identical (click to enlarge):
The OWI’s “The Bayou French of Louisiana” was clearly wartime propaganda. Its purpose was to show overseas audiences how American society could support an ethnically heterogeneous population, yet still be undeniably “American.” As the OWI essay accompanying the images put it, “The persistence of Cajun French traditions in the United States, as those of other national groups, is encouraged in the belief that such diversity enriches and strengthens democratic institutions. The various population groups of the United States are encouraged to perpetuate their folkways so that each may contribute to the homogenous but broadly variegated culture of the United States.”
But was the earlier Cajuns of the Teche also wartime propaganda?
The federal government created the U.S. Office of War Information in June 1942; Columbia Pictures issued Cajuns of the Teche the next month. This would hardly seem enough time for the fledgling OWI to produce an eleven-minute film shot on location in south Louisiana and to arrange for a major Hollywood studio to distribute it. And while there are examples of the OWI and Columbia Pictures teaming up later to release wartime propaganda films (such as the 1943 film Troop Train and the 1945 film The True Glory), there is no known evidence of OWI involvement with Cajuns of the Teche.
Back of OWI print indicating when and from whom it had been purchased. (National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.)
A key to understanding the actual, tenuous relationship between the OWI’s propagandistic “The Bayou French of Louisiana” and Columbia Pictures’ Cajuns of the Teche may be found on the back of the original B&W prints used with “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” Data there indicates that the OWI licensed the images from a commercial entity named “Screen Traveler, from Gendreau.” Presumably a stock photo vendor, Screen Traveler may have sent a photographer to Louisiana in 1942 alongside Columbia Pictures’ film crew. This would explain why some of the images in Cajuns of the Teche and some of those in “The Bayou French of Louisiana” correspond so closely.
Ultimately, I do not believe — given the current evidence — that Cajuns of the Teche was a product of OWI wartime propaganda; but I do believe that still photographs taken during the filming of Cajuns of the Teche ended up in the wartime propaganda project “The Bayou French of Louisiana.” I make this assertion because we know for certain that the OWI, a government entity charged with producing wartime propaganda, issued “The Bayou French of Louisiana”; and we know that some of the images used in “The Bayou French of Louisiana” closely match scenes in Cajuns of the Teche.
Still, the question remains: why is there a reel of Cajuns of the Teche in the OWI section of the USIA's archival collection?
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