"BENEATH THE SURFACE"*

This morning as I watch the flickering images of flooding in North Carolina and South Carolina on television, I remember the catastrophic storms that have inundated parts of my home town, New Iberia, Louisiana, throughout the years. Two years ago I published a book of poetry entitled A Slow Moving Stream (the Bayou Teche that flows through New Iberia and southwest Louisiana) and included a poem about the great flood of 1927 that inundated Acadiana. Since that time, New Iberia has endured many hurricanes and floods, but this 20th century storm caused incalculable deaths and damage in Teche country.

Karen Bourque, master glass artist in Church Point, Louisiana, captured in glass the cover for A Slow Moving Stream, the Bayou Teche near Arnaudville, Louisiana, which became a torrent of water during the flood of 1927. I acquired the glass piece entitled “Beneath the Surface,” and it now hangs in one of the dining room windows of our home in Sewanee, Tennessee. 

Karen always provides a text to accompany her glasswork, but rather than writing a text about the inundations of the Teche, Karen wrote that the glass piece for A Slow Moving Stream symbolizes Spring, “the dominant seasonal reference in the piece…and is symbolic of the time of renewal. Spring, either as time measure or metaphor, marks that time when the soul awakens inside the crossing of a water barrier, that time when unconscious mind and conscious mind surface and co-exist in the balance of renewed beginnings…”

Karen’s words constitute hope this morning. As I look up at the glass piece, her text helps to dispel my angst about the devastation due to storms and floods now battering the Carolinas, and I pray more fervently for those who are enduring this natural disaster.

In the last verse of “The Flood of 1927,” I describe the responses of those Acadians who migrated from Pisiguit, Nova Scotia, site of my ancestors who survived the great inundation of that century:

“They could not believe a levee had existed,

the land returning to a muddy geography

into which they climbed,

marveling at the ease of light,

declaring they’d never go back to Pisiguit

even if rocking tide caused the land to tilt

and the sky to become an ocean.

What had been green would be green again."

*Title of glass piece rendered by Karen Bourque, Church Point, Louisiana glass artist

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

WINTER II.

So the ice and snow have melted, and temperatures have climbed to Louisiana “normal” in the 50’s and 60’s — even Limestone, Maine, which I wrote about in the first “Winter” blog a few weeks ago, will experience temps above freezing for an entire day before dropping to 3 degrees tonight. I wrote about the most severe winter of my life when I lived in Limestone, Maine during the 1950’s, and last week I experienced a deja vu when temps here dipped to 17 degrees. We in Teche country anticipate spring in March; however, Mainers won’t see fair weather until May or June.

Today, rain is on the horizon. With the poet Shelley, we sigh and say, “O wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” The inclement weather changes have caused an acceleration in cases of humans experiencing that phenomenon called “winter sadness,” and with respect to Maine lore, I’m wondering whatever happened to the machines Wilhelm Reich, a Maine crackpot? genius? invented to control the weather. When I was doing research for my novel, The Maine Event, (which I mentioned in Winter I.) I came upon an entry about this eccentric psychologist who studied for a while under Sigmund Freud. Reich migrated to Rangeley, Maine in 1948 and began carrying out experiments to prove his theory that “orgone” controlled the energy in the universe. He constructed these machines for harnessing the power of orgone, including a destructive cloudburst machine that he claimed could cause storms. He started selling his machines throughout the U.S., but the Interstate Commerce arrested and convicted him of fraud, and he died in a federal penitentiary.

I didn’t get to visit Orgonon, the estate where Reich is buried, but it’s a tourist spot in Rangeley, Maine, and a museum there features Reich’s machines that supposedly created and controlled the weather. As I said earlier, he was either a crackpot or a genius, and he had access to fertile winter landscapes in the State as far north as Madawaska, not far from Limestone where I sojourned for nine months. 

Although there’s no permanent connection between Maine weather and Louisiana weather, I’ve mentioned in previous blogs the connection between Acadians who settled in the St. John Valley of Maine -- near where I lived the harshest winter of my life -- and Acadians here in southwest Louisiana. The Valley still has the highest concentration of French people in the U.S. and also has the highest percentage of French spoken in their homes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, these small homes once held extended families, sometimes as many as 30 people under one roof! 

Interestingly, those early Acadians in the St. John Valley settlements seldom saw a priest but they devotedly practiced the Catholic religion. A White Mass was often said by an elder,(sorta’ like a deacon) with the exception of the Eucharist. When priests began to enter the Valley to convert Indians, the Acadians benefited from their mission. In 1792, Catholics who were members of the Acadian colony actually traveled 100 miles to receive Communion from a priest on Easter Sunday. The churches they built were barn-like and were scattered throughout northern Maine. During my sojourn in Limestone, I remember that, rather than attend services at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Presque Isle, I attended Mass on Easter Sunday in a huge, drafty Roman Catholic church near Limestone. 

For those readers who wish to read more about the history and culture of the north woods of Maine, a book in America the Beautiful Series entitled Maine is an excellent reference and good winter reading. 

MORE MEANDERING

In a blog last month, I mentioned that Darrell Bourque, former poet laureate of Louisiana, was interested in finding the location of the settlement that Joseph "Beausoleil" Broussard established with some of the first Acadians who fled in the Grand Derangement to Louisiana. Broussard led a group of exiles to Saint Domingue (now Haiti), then on to New Orleans in 1765, and eventually to south Louisiana where the exiles settled somewhere between New Iberia and St. Martinville, Louisiana.

In a recent issue of La Louisiane, the magazine of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, I discovered that Dr. Mark Rees, an archaeologist and anthropology professor at ULL, Warren Perrin, co-founder of the nonprofit Acadian Heritage and Culture Foundation, and Adam Doucet, a senior majoring in anthropology, have begun working on a project to locate the site where Broussard and his band of Acadians settled. Rees is a descendant of Alexandre Broussard, brother of Joseph Broussard, and Perrin is also a descendant of the renowned "Beausoleil" Broussard.

The researchers seem to think that the Acadians in the Broussard party settled near Loreauville and are certain that they established three sites along the Bayou Teche. They're looking for areas of high ground where the Acadians could have found a habitable site. Doucet has begun interviewing Loreauville residents who may have information about gravesites of early settlers that would possibly indicate the position of homes in the early settlement.

The first time I heard about the possibility of Broussard settling near Loreauville, I was told that the site could have been at Lake Fausse Pointe, which is located about eighteen miles east of St. Martinville near the Atchafalaya Basin. Tuesday, as we were again visiting the Gonsoulin Meat Market, we decided to proceed to Lake Fausse Pointe State Park from Loreauville, about ten miles east of the town, to take a look at the place that had been mentioned as the possible settlement, or entry point of Broussard's party.

Lake Fausse Pointe State Park is approximately 6,000 acres in size and was once known as the home of the Chitimacha Indians, but today it is largely the habitat of whitetail deer, black bears, snakes, alligators, and armadillos. After we arrived, we started out on a trail that must have been Armadillo Ridge because we disturbed one of these gray armored creatures that wouldn't sit still for a photograph.

We stood on a bridge over the lake near the Interpretive Center and took one photograph of an American Egret who assumed a sedate pose for us momentarily, then became spooked at the sound of our footsteps. Much of what I glimpsed were sloughs and swampland, hackberry and cypress trees, and I vetoed the idea that Broussard and his party might have settled in this low ground area even though today the scenery is unspoiled wilderness and the wildlife is abundant.

When we consulted the GPS on our return trip, we were mistakenly directed to take a right turn toward Bayou Benoit, scattering a flock of killdeer as we turned, and traveled a gravel road eighteen miles through scantily inhabited land. The levee loomed on the left side of the corduroy road, and trailers teetered on the right side of the road in the low areas beside Lake Fausse Pointe.

We traveled eighteen miles on this circuitous route, emerging on a paved highway near Charenton, Louisiana, at least thirty minutes away from home ground of New Iberia. And so much for uninformed researchers who have time to spend on wild goose chases! We'll leave the "New Acadia Project" conducted by Rees and Perrin to those who have mapped the area and know what they're looking for. And, by the way, the New Acadia Project is attempting to raise $100,000 for the research needed to find the site of these first Acadian settlers. The site could become a draw to Acadiana for tourists.

FAMILY TIES

Beausoleil Broussard

Last week before the action between the Ravens and the 49ers football teams took place in the New Orleans Super Bowl, New Iberia, Louisiana buzzed with news about the famous singer Beyonce’ who would perform at the Super Bowl halftime and who mentioned having family ties here in the Queen City on the Teche. It seems that the famous songstress’s lineage on her maternal side dates back to Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, the leader of the first Acadians to come to the Attakapas area, which includes St. Martinville, a town approximately seven miles up the road from New Iberia. The mother of Beyonce’, a Louisiana Creole, descended from Beausoleil Broussard, so-named because his smile was as brilliant as the sun and whose courage was unequaled among his kinsman in Port Royal, Nova Scotia, the place of his birth.

Broussard Coat of Arms
in Meditation Garden

In Nova Scotia, Beausoleil led an armed resistance movement against the British in the War between England and France, and his superior shooting skills gained him widespread fame. However, he was eventually imprisoned with other Acadians in Halifax, Nova Scotia and wasn’t released until the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, ending the war between England and France. In 1764, Beausoleil traveled with a group of Acadians on a ship bound for the West Indies. These Acadians became part of what is known as the Grand Derangement. In the West Indies, the 200 Acadians, who were unaccustomed to the relentless heat, decided to sail from Santo Domingo to New Orleans Louisiana, eventually settling in the Poste des Attakapas, now known as St. Martinville, Louisiana. At this post, Beausoleil signed a contract with Antoine Bernard d’Hauterive for cattle and land and was designated militia captain and commander of the Acadians of the Attakapas. Unfortunately, shortly after his arrival, the intrepid leader died of yellow fever before he could witness the remarkable growth of this Acadian settlement in the New World.

Pierre Vincent, back turned

Today, the arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana has been memorialized in a huge mural in the Acadian Memorial and the Museum of the Acadian Memorial/Cultural Heritage Center at St. Martinville. The mural, painted by Robert Dafford, contains figures that represent actual documented Acadian refugees who arrived in Louisiana with Beausoleil. Among those depicted in that mural and on the “Wall of Names” at the Museum, is one of my own antecedents, Pierre Vincent, a cattleman who, for some reason, has his back turned to the world in the mural! According to a chart of my family history, Pierre Vincent, Sr., born in Port Royal, came to St. Martinville and occupied a tract of land with fourteen arpents frontage. He owned seventy semi-wild beef cattle and thirty tame cattle and was married briefly to Agnes Broussard, who died, shortly after the marriage, in St. Martin Parish.

Vincent Coat of Arms
in Meditation Garden

Today, we visited the Museum of the Acadian Memorial, and I viewed the wonderful mural, “The Arrival of the Acadians in Louisiana,” for the third time, still pondering the reason that my ancestor has his back turned in the painting. We also walked in the Meditation Garden on the Bayou Teche, the backdrop for the Eternal Flame where a life size replica of the Deportation Cross of the exiled Acadians and mosaics of Acadian family Coats of Arms are featured. I’ve included photographs of the Dafford mural, the Deportation Cross, and the commemorative mosaics of the Broussard and Vincent family Coats of Arms.

Acadian Deportation Cross

An eighth generation descendant of Beausoleil, Warren A. Perrin of Lafayette, Louisiana, petitioned the British Crown in 1990, seeking an apology from the Crown regarding the expulsion of the Acadians from their native Nova Scotia. It was resolved on December 9, 2003 through the signing of the Queen’s Royal Proclamation. Beausoleil and his band of Acadians have been redeemed!

I don’t know if any of the Broussards in St. Martinville were musicians who passed on a singing gene to Beyonce’, but we think it’s great just to know that she has roots in our rich Acadian culture.

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan