ABOUT ORIGINS AND LANGUAGE…

Eternal flame at Acadian Memorial, St. Martinville, LA

After Easter Vigil on Sunday, we met for lunch with the Sisters at St. Mary’s Convent, Sewanee, and I sat across from a woman who had once enjoyed the joie de vivre of Cajun country. The conversation about the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival and her adventures in gastronomy made me a bit homesick for New Iberia, my other home.

This winter when I sojourned in Acadiana for my half-year stay, I engaged in a whirlwind of lunches, dinners, poetry readings, and visits with old friends. I also investigated more fully my own roots in Acadiana through research and tours of places like the Acadian Memorial in St. Martinville, Louisiana where I found my Vincent ancestor’s name on the Wall of Names. The Vincents were among the first families to follow Beau Soleil, Joseph Broussard, during the Grand Derangement from Nova Scotia to Cajun country. Although these exiled people endured many hardships, I discovered that the colonial population, beginning in 1699 when Iberville and Bienville explored and formed the colony of Louisiana, had also struggled to settle the Louisiana colony, enduring fights over land and other resources with Indians, surviving floods and hurricanes, and striving to establish profitable agriculture.

Later, under Spanish rule, the Spanish expanded the Louisiana population with citizens from Quebec, Switzerland, the Caribbean, Alsace-Lorraine, Normandy, etc. These people became known as Creoles. In the late 1700’s Acadian refugees were sent to bayou country and intermingled with Creoles and Native Americans, African and Caribbean slaves, British, Germans and Italians. Two of my New Iberia friends are descendants of Lebanese and Syrian families who were members of early migrations to Louisiana and who added to the wonderful cultural mix of this unique part of the world.

During one of those migrations in the late 19^th century, my great-grandfather, Samuel Marquart, who was of German descent, joined the German population in Lake Arthur, Louisiana, and my grandfather, E. L. Marquart, married an Acadian woman, Leila Vincent, a descendant of the Vincents who came down from Port Royal, Nova Scotia.

My father, Harold Marquart, learned to speak Parisian French, but he wasn’t allowed to speak the Cajun French my grandmother knew because she had been brought up under the Louisiana laws that were passed to mandate “English only” public schools – laws that resulted in a weakening of the culture in south Louisiana. According to Christophe Landry, author of “Francophone Louisiana, More Than Cajun,” (Louisiana Cultural Vistas, Summer 2010), “between 1920-1960, usage of French or Creole was forbidden in virtually all aspects of life in south Louisiana…often students violating the language restriction were required to write ‘I will not speak French on the school grounds’ one hundred times!” Today, through the efforts of CODOFIl (Council for the Development of French in Louisiana) and other state organizations launched to preserve an endangered language, Cajun French is alive and well.

My friend Darrell Bourque, former Poet Laureate of Louisiana, speaks and writes in Cajun French, and on several occasions I have read alongside him at poetry readings. On both occasions, he read verses of poems in which he had used French. Following one of those occasions I lamented about my French deficiencies in a poem that I included in my book, Alchemy, which I include below:

TO DARRELL:

It is good to read poems with you,

the ultimate poet leading the ultimate life;

I like that our ancestors have common roots

that were entwined in boats

rocking on the wave of exile,

their coming disturbing a halcyon world,

wilderness and deliverance in one place.

By right of poetry

we became friends in a friendlier world.

I am looking at your face,

one that has known lost battles

and lately won even more;

it is a face more French than the French,

the sharp incline of your nose

framed by gray curls,

reading words that sound to me

like “pwis and jer, may jahmay,

der swashay, dit swa, dit swa.”

Your wife looks up at you

crooning those soft inflections,

mating with your eyes again;

knowing she does not have to remember

the romance of first years,

every day it is reflected

in your voice and eyes.

I am sorry that part of my ancestry

cannot match yours,

the speaking of an ancient language

aroused my Scots mother’s disdain,

eclipsed my father’s perorations

  in Parisian French,

  in Cajun French,

doubling the language he never passed to me,

or I would be able to parley with you,

tell you in like patois

your poetry is elegant and delivers us,

immerses me in occasions of shared ancestry

where we recite anthems,

chants of the Grand Derangement,

come upon this place

of tangled vines and brown water, singing

it is good to be a poet with you,

it is good to be a poet with you,

it is good to be a poet

  in this new world.

I have tried to redeem my Cajun background (which my grandmother Vincent actually tried to “disappear”) by writing middle-grade and young adult novels based in New Iberia and other communities in south Louisiana: Martin’s Quest, Martin Finds His Totem, Kajun Kween, Flood on the Rio Teche, and a forthcoming middle-grade/young adult novel, Martin and the Last Tribe. The last title should be published by the end of April. Meanwhile, on my next stay in Louisiana, I hope to learn how to “parlez vous” so the “tatailles” (monster cockroaches) won’t get me because my Grandmother Vincent denied her roots!

SOME CHATTER ABOUT CLABBER

Grandpa Paul – Clabber enthusiast & 
grandchildren not so fond of the drink

Yesterday morning after preaching a Pentecost sermon at St. Mary’s, the Episcopal Convent here on the bluff at Sewanee, Tennessee, I went into the refectory to breakfast with the congregants and Sisters and got into a conversation with Henry Hamman, publisher of Plateau Press. Henry had begun searching for his wife Kathy because he said that he had to get home and build a fence around his tomato plants – the ubiquitous deer on the Cumberland Plateau had been sniffing around his garden. I immediately went into a déjà vu about homegrown products; namely, the tomatoes that my Grandfather Paul used to grow in his backyard at Franklinton, Louisiana (the town where I was born)… and the memory lengthened into one about supper feasts in the “country.”

When I visited my grandparents during summers of the 40’s, the supper table often contained simple fare of thick slabs of Big Boy tomatoes, sliced cucumbers that I helped my grandfather pick, butterbeans left from lunch and warmed up, fried cornbread, and clabber. My grandfather’s supper consisted of only a tall green glass filled with clabber and crumbled cornbread, a concoction he drank throughout the summer.

At the age of nine, my appetite centered more on the vegetables than the strange concoction Grandfather Paul drank because I thought that clabber was a medicinal food he endured as a remedy for his condition of Bright’s Disease. Years later, I tasted clabber and agreed with the moniker it acquired through the Ulster Scots in the Appalachians – that of “bonny clabber.”

Clabber is simply curdled milk, or unpasteurized milk that has been allowed to turn sour at a specific temperature -- room temperature. As the milk curdles it develops into yogurt-like consistency. In this age of pasteurized milk regulations, the drink isn’t too popular anymore, and the pasteurization process kills the bacteria necessary for it to sour. The closest we can get to a clabbered drink is buttermilk. I’m told that if you heat clabber a little, the curds in it separate and become cheese.

Some farmers use clabber to feed their chickens as it provides calcium and protein for the chickens – the farmers claim that if chickens are fed this concoction, their meat is softer and they become better layers.

I have no idea where my grandfather got his raw milk because he didn’t own cows, but Washington Parish abounds in dairy farms, and he may have obtained milk from the owner of a cow that grazed on an open lot on 10^th Avenue in Franklinton, one that I skirted on the way to visit my Aunt Kathryn who lived about a block away from the cow. I’d get off the sidewalk and wade through weeds to avoid the harmless cow who kept her head lowered and had no interest in a frightened, nine-year old girl. My mother had a phobia about cows and passed on the fright to me, along with fear of lightning, tramps, and a host of other senseless anxieties. A contradiction to this phobia was my liking for the verse in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verse about the “friendly cow, all red and white/I love with all my heart…”

A few decades ago, perhaps a thousand dairy farms abounded in Washington Parish, and I understand that today there are less than two hundred; however, the three parishes of Tangipahoa, St. Helena and Washington parishes have the largest concentration of dairy farms in Louisiana. I don’t know how much of the milk is used for curdling purposes, but in many rural areas, people still enjoy their milk soured to the stage of a firm curd. Remember the old nursery rhyme, “Little Miss Muffet /sat on her tuffet/ eating her curds and whey?”

I recently read an article highlighting Russel Creel, who owns a dairy farm five miles east of Franklinton. Creel received the title of “Dairyman of the Year” from the LSU Dairy Science Club (once known as the Cow and Cream Club!), and I bet he knows how to make a good bowl of clabber since he has been in the dairy industry for over forty years.

By the way, clabber can be eaten with brown sugar, nutmeg, or molasses. However, my grandfather was a purist and ate it unsweetened, flavoring it only with fried cornbread (no sugar added). A Greenlaw, of Scots lineage, Grandfather Paul thought it was “bonny clabber.”

RICE TALK

Marquart homestead in Lake Arthur, Louisiana

While we enjoy cool nights and mild temperatures during the day here on the Cumberland Plateau, friends in New Iberia, Louisiana, my second home, tell me they’re experiencing warmer temperatures at night in Cajun Country. One of the bad aspects of warm night temperatures in Acadiana is the effect that they have on the rice crops, which are a large part of the agricultural economy in this part of the U.S.

According to news passed on to me by friends, rice farmers are already facing low market prices, and last year they had to struggle with too much salt in fresh water used to flood their rice fields. This year, the night temperatures of 60 – 65 degrees in early April, awaken bacterial panicle blight, which infects the flowering parts of the plant and abort kernel formation. According to an article in The Teche News, when bacteria overtake the plant, it destroys the grain, and the farmer does not notice this infection until the plant reaches a height of a few inches. If the days are hot, a plant has to use more energy to produce photosynthesis, but at night it normally rests and the cooler the nights, the better the plant grows. If nights are warm, the rice plant is not able to relax, and this stress triggers the bacterial panicle blight in seed. The article concludes with the startling words: “There is no chemical on the market to kill the panicle blight.”

Rice at every meal

Now, rice is not only part of Acadiana’s agricultural economy, it’s a staple on the average south Louisianian’s table. It is said that Cajuns eat anything with rice – gumbo, gravy, rice dressing, rice pudding – the dishes are myriad and delicious. The latest joke in Cajun Country about rice, and its accompanying sauce or gravy, features, of course, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux. Boudreaux and Thibodeaux are walking through the woods one day when a flying saucer lands near them. A door opens, and two little green aliens climb down out of the spacecraft. Thibodeaux asks Boudreau, “Mais, look at dat. What you tink dat is?” Boudreaux, aiming his shotgun at the space critters, tells him, “Thibodeaux, I don’t know, but you hurry back to de camp and start making a roux and put on a pot of rice.”

Rice in Acadiana is usually rotated with pasturage for cattle every second or third year. The crop has been grown by farmers along levee lands since 1719, according to Malcolm Comeaux, writing in The Cajuns, Essays on Their History and Culture. When grown on the prairielands of south Louisiana, it was called “providence” rice as the success of the crop depended upon rain or watering by Providence. The early settlers on the prairie planted rice in coulees and ponds, and it was cut, threshed and hulled with primitive tools. During the late 19th century, rice production was revolutionized. Midwesterners turned it into a highly mechanized venture, using pumps, harvesters, threshers, and gangplows. Comeaux explains that except for the fact that the farmers at that time were growing rice, it “was literally an extension of the wheat belt into South Louisiana.”

My Great-grandfather Samuel Marquart, a farmer in Fontenelle, Iowa, brought a band of Midwesterners to south Louisiana and formed a land company with his brothers, buying the land on which the town of Lake Arthur stands. At one time, he and his brothers owned the entire town, and he made a large profit from land sales. He also had land near Lake Arthur that he thought would be good for rice production, and after my grandfather Emerson Lavergne married Leila Vincent and had three sons, Emerson and Leila left their teen-aged sons to fend for themselves while they tried to establish a rice farm. Unfortunately, The Depression caused the farm’s demise, and the failed rice venture became the legend of my grandfather’s career as a farmer. I remember him as a short, bald-headed man sitting in a cracked leather recliner in the dining room of my grandmother’s boarding house operation, reading or smoking a pipe, and rising from the chair only to shop for groceries for the boarders’ meals, or to do an occasional plumbing job. He seldom spoke to anyone except my father when we visited, and my father later spoke of him as one of the victims of a rice crop failure and The Great Depression.

One of the successes in rice history is the Conrad Rice Mill in New Iberia, Louisiana, the oldest rice mill in the U.S. Originally built in 1914, it’s an example of a factory that uses a belt-driven power transmission. P.A. Conrad founded this company in 1912, calling it the Conrad Rice Mill and Planting Company. He cut rice by hand and allowed it to sun dry on levees before placing the rice in threshers, after which the rice was put into one-hundred pound bags and taken to the mill. The business grew steadily, and Conrad began to package rice in smaller bags. Mike Davis purchased the mill in 1975 and has steadily improved the operation, as well as expanded the rice inventory. The old mill still produces fine quality rice that is marketed worldwide.

I am hoping for cooler nights in Cajun Country so that the crop that contributes to south Louisiana’s economy as well as provides an important part of Cajun meals can escape the bacterial panicle blight. Mais, Boudreaux and Thibodeaux need their pot of rice for exotic stews and gumbos!

FINDING SERENDIPITY AT ANTIQUE ROSE VILLE

Monday of this week we joined author Morris Raphael, his wife Helen, and daughter Rose Anne at Antique Rose Ville near New Iberia, to celebrate the occasion of Morris completing the first draft of his book containing Civil War vignettes. Publication of the new book will coincide with the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War in April, 2011, but the holidays presented a chance for us to meet with the Raphaels for a book celebration at our annual Christmas get-together.

Antique Rose Ville is one of those unique dining experiences prevalent in Cajun Country, and proprietor, Linda Freyou, is equally unique. The restaurant and tea room, known as the Renoudet Cottage, was a home once owned by the Picard family, and later by William Weeks II (son of David Weeks, who built the famous National Trust property, Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia). The cottage was moved in 1995 from St. Peter Street to Freyou Road and restored by Linda and Simon Freyou.

The restaurant, surrounded by cypress trees, irises, fresh herb plots, and the antique roses for which it is famous, sits alongside "Anastasia," an early 20th century home which the Freyous moved fifty miles by barge down the Intracoastal Canal from Berwick, Louisiana. Antique Rose Ville, and the four acres of carefully groomed gardens are complemented by an open pavilion area behind the Renoudet Cottage and Au Jardin which accommodates large groups for wedding receptions, retreats, and other occasions.

We were greeted by Chef Linda and treated to a five-course meal that included homemade bread, salad, pork roast, beef, “dirty rice,” a shrimp casserole, steamed broccoli, and the piece de resistance, bread pudding, followed by dark roast coffee. After we had eaten from “the groaning board,” Linda appeared and sat down to talk with us. She had taken off her chef hat and put on her raconteuse one, entertaining us with memories of her early family life that included eleven siblings. She also told us about her father’s many occupations, the most notable one being his ownership of The Sunset Game Club where cock fights and Cajun music, complete with accordion and fiddle, took place. Linda grew up with music, and her parents entertained family, friends, even strangers, continually during her childhood. “We traveled in a time when people of our means didn’t take trips, but we were always going to Mexico,” Linda said. “One summer my father brought an entire Mariachi band from Mexico home with us and they stayed a month, entertaining folks at the Game Club. People were always welcome at our home, and maybe that’s why I was inspired to open a place where people are continually coming in and out.”

Linda is devoted to her family and waited until her children were out of the nest before she began working on her college degree in music education at ULL. She excelled in Voice and won a national voice competition held at ULL while studying there. After Linda discovered that Morris’s daughter Rose Anne sings, she asked her to perform for us. Rose Anne studies voice and has often sung a capella for us on Christmas occasions. She stood in front of the fireplace and sang a beautifully-rendered excerpt from a German opera. When she finished, we asked Linda to perform, and she said, “I have a big voice so I’ll  have to go into the next room to sing.” She entered the adjoining room and stood, hands folded, in the far end of the room. We had no notion that we’d hear the gifted and finely-trained operatic voice that suddenly filled two rooms with jubilant sounds. She sang two versions of “Ave Maria” -- one from Bach and another from Schubert, followed by several arias and a rendition of “O Mio Babbino Caro” from Puccini. It was an amazing professional performance from an amazing woman who told us as we left: “if you have a gift, you’d better use it, or one day you’ll have to answer for not using it.” Linda still uses her gift by singing at church functions, in community musicals, and for people like us who ask her to perform.

Life in Teche Country, Louisiana is never dull, nor will you ever eat finer cuisine than the food you’ll find most anywhere in Acadiana… not to mention the serendipity in the form of professional entertainment you may discover “right in the middle of a cane field,” as Linda laughingly describes the locale of her fine dining restaurant, Antique Rose Ville.