WHAT BIG EARS YOU HAVE

A few years ago, I attended a lecture delivered by David Haskell, a biologist at Sewanee, Tennessee, who spent a year observing life in a square meter patch of Tennessee forest and writing a book about his observations in The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature. I thought about him this morning as I arranged the books and papers on my desk to write about a plant that appears in a small patch 570’ x 130’ beside the door of the rental apartment adjoining our carport. It's an elephant ear, among my favorites in the plant world and one about which I’ve written numerous poems. I don’t know the plant heaven into which all the elephant ears in my garden by the glass porch disappeared. Still, I felt significant sadness for their departure — the absence of these friendly faces of former plants in my garden when I saw the one struggling elephant ear beside the renter’s door.

I consoled myself by reading about the giant elephant ears at Melrose Plantation memorialized by Francois Mignon in one of his columns and included in Plantation Memo: Plantation Life in Louisiana: 1750-1970. The latter is a collection of Mignon’s columns written for The Natchitoches Enterprise, Natchitoches Times, Alexandria Town Talk, Opelousas World, and the Shreveport Times during the thirty-year period Mignon spent at Melrose. The book is a kind of chronicle about “The man who came to dinner” — Francoise Mignon appearing at Melrose following WWII and taking up residence in Yucca House at Melrose for three decades. Cammie Henry, the Mistress of Melrose, welcomed writers and artists during that period in Louisiana history if they produced art of some kind…if they didn’t work at their writing or art, they couldn’t stay. However, Mignon produced his columns almost daily and earned the right to remain.

During Mignon’s residency at Melrose, he wrote numerous columns about the plantation gardens. I found several passages about elephant ears in which he explained that for thousands of years the South Americans were in sole possession of “God’s gift to the New World, the plant everyone endearingly described as the elephant ear, and all its countless relatives embracing the caladium family…”

Although Mignon regarded the elephant ear as a “Divine gift,” he often entertained his readers with anecdotes about the plant and animal life at Melrose, relating a vignette about the large elephant ears planted at Melrose.

A hard-headed neighbor who visited Melrose between rain showers one day questioned the value of this “divine gift.”

“‘What earthly good is this thing called the elephant ear?’ the neighbor asked.

‘None whatsoever,’ Mignon replied, straightening up the great leaves sagging onto the gallery, greener, in fact, than Montezuma’s emeralds, its spindly, foot-long flower brighter than Inca gold.”

When the rain began again, and the visitor decided to depart, Mignon snipped off one of the huge leaves (three feet wide and four feet long) and handed it to the visitor to use as an umbrella, somehow putting Mignon’s mind to rest since the ear “really did prove to have some pragmatic virtue if only to keep someone dry.”*

The weatherman says we’ll have rain today, but alas, my renter’s elephant ear isn’t large enough to put into use as an umbrella. However, just across Darby Lane near our home, I know where there are several of “God’s gifts to the New World”…hmmm.

*Plantation Memo: Plantation Life in Louisiana: 1750-1970 by Francois Mignon, 1981.

 

Photograph by Victoria I. Sullivan

 

 

I GIVE A FIG

During the month of November every year, for at least 20 years, I initiated a hunt for fig preserves made here in Louisiana to send to my youngest daughter, Elizabeth, in southern California—not smushed ones sold commercially in a grocery, but whole ones with the stem still on the fruit and steeped in lots of sugar like Elizabeth’s grandmother once served up on hot, buttered biscuits. For years, I talked to many food faddists in New Iberia, Louisiana who knew where I could find this homemade preserved fruit but they wouldn’t divulge the source (xenophobia at its worst)!! However…last year when we went to purchase grass-fed beef at GLC Meat Market in Loreauville, Louisiana, voila! I discovered an entire table of fig preserves, stems included, swimming in syrup, in Mason jars with gold tin lids. I saw more of the same product just last month, and I'm assured Elizabeth's Christmas gift is available.

When I first spied those preserves in GLC, I became as excited as I had been when I found a bottle of McIlhenny’s Tabasco sauce on the table of a small supermarket in Ahwaz, Iran where I lived in the oil patch for two years. “Hey la bas, hot sauce,” I exclaimed, startling a few shoppers clad in chadors who already thought Americans too boisterous. I couldn’t contain my joy when I saw those little red-capped bottles of sauce because I was in a three-months cultural shock phase and homesick for Teche country. At the time of this outburst, I envisioned a large black pot similar to the one owned by Big Mac in New Iberia, Louisiana, 100 lbs. of crawfish, a case of McIlhenny’s Tabasco, some strands of Spanish Moss waving in the hot desert breeze, and a crowd of expatriates gathered for a crawfish boil in my front yard. I left the supermarket with a half dozen bottles of the sauce and displayed one of them on the dining table for dinner guests to view for the entire two years we spent in Iran. It was a good conversation piece. 

I digress. My daughter Elizabeth could probably find fresh figs in California, but she hasn't located a source for fig preserves. I doubt if she knows how rich in minerals and anti-oxidants they are, as her sweet tooth usually takes precedence over foods that I’ve told her are good for her, so she’s getting nutrition without my having to counsel her about diet. She also doesn’t know that Buddha achieved enlightenment while sitting under a fig tree or that the fig tree was the first fruit tree mentioned in the Bible.

According to Francoise Mignon,* one of my favorite Louisiana authors, fresh figs taste better with a “dab of sugar and a spot of cream,” but he also admitted that he could possibly “respond to the sweetness of the preserved  variety …as it would carry with it a nostalgic reminder of the foregoing July when the gathering of the product was in full swing and figs for breakfast, dinner and supper were the order of the day…” He writes about the Ficus carica in Plantation Memo: Plantation Life in Louisiana, 1750-1970 And Other Matter.

Mignon mentioned that fig leaves have “served as models for more sculptors working in marble than any other device for de-sexing statues all over the Western world…” He was also amazed that Eve would have chosen the fig leaf to create clothes for herself and Adam since it has such a fuzzy, prickly texture. I might add to this comment that the smoother leaf of an elephant ear plant would have been a better sartorial selection as this large plant leaf wouldn’t have driven her to find thread and needle to create covering for the couple’s private parts.

P.S. And just as a piece of trivia, in case readers have warts, fig juice is supposed to remove these unsightly skin eruptions. I don’t know how many Cajun traiteurs still use this remedy in their practices.

*Francois Mignon, the author of Plantation Memo, published his columns first in the Natchitoches Enterprise and in The Natchitoches Times; later, the columns appeared in The Leesville Leader, The Shreveport Journal, Alexandria Town Talk, Opelousas Daily World, and The Shreveport Times from 1957-1970. He was the famous house guest at Melrose Plantation in Robeline, Louisiana who was invited to visit Cammie Henry, mistress of Melrose, and stayed in Yucca House on the grounds of Melrose for over thirty years! I’ve been considering writing a non-fiction book about him. His columns about Melrose are outstanding.

Photograph of fig leaves by Victoria Sullivan

LOUISIANA WOMEN: Their Lives and Times

In the mail this week, a gift arrived from good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson: the second volume of Louisiana Women, a book that records the contributions of outstanding Louisiana women from the eighteenth century to the present. Essays by southern scholars include the history of women who struggled to not only sustain their sense of self-worth but to “follow their bliss” in art, politics, and cultural pursuits. Edited by Mary Farmer Kaiser and Shannon Frystak, the volume covers four major aspects of Louisiana women’s history that have affected the cultural, social, and political progress of the bayou state: Women and the Politics of Identity; Women and Work; Women and the Arts; and Organizing Women.

Louisiana Women is one of those bedside table books that provides a look into rich histories that have often been overlooked or hidden, such as the profiles of Lulu White, infamous Storyville madam, and voodooienne Marie Laveau, as well as well-researched essays about famous female artists, writers, musicians, and supporters of the arts.

I was particularly interested in the essay about Cammie Henry, a supporter of the arts in Louisiana, a woman who intrigued me and about whom I wrote in my own version of outstanding Louisiana women, Their Adventurous Will. I was grateful to Lucy Gutman and Shannon Frystak, authors of this essay, for citing “The Mistress of Melrose,” my essay about Henry, and I learned new information through the authors’ insights about Henry being an embodiment of the Lost Cause movement in a region that sought to recapture a lost heritage. She is described as being a woman who “used the leverage of a revered cultural movement that celebrated the Confederate tradition to emancipate herself from the restrictions of a gender-prescribed position, while simultaneously sustaining and expanding her status as a revered traditional southern lady.”

In the essay entitled “The Evolution of a Plantation Mistress and Chatelaine of the Arts,” the authors credit Cammie Henry with the revival of native crafts, for hosting writers, artists, and photographers through the Natchitoches Art Colony and for preserving the history and heritage of the Cane River and the Isle Brevelle Creoles of color. Among the notables who sometimes lived and worked at Melrose: William Spratling, a Tulane University professor of architecture; artists Alberta Kinsey and playwright Natalie Scott; Lyle Saxon, an author Henry described as “magnificent and knit into my soul;” authors Sherwood Anderson, Harnett Kane, and Francoise Mignon…the list of luminaries who visited or lived at Melrose at various times is formidable.

Dr. Wilson’s essay about contemporary writer, Rebecca Wells, entitled “The Divine Saga Deep in the Heart of Louisiana,” takes the reader deep into central Louisiana territory, delving into the life of the author of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a novel which Wilson relates created a “powerful sisterhood that replicated itself across the country…the author herself identifying the hunger for sisterhood and community as the driving force behind the book’s rise to prominence.” Interestingly, Wilson defines the theme of this book as forgiveness, quoting from the theologian Henri Nouwen: “Forgiveness is the nature of love practiced among people who love poorly. That hard truth is that all of us love poorly. We need to forgive and to be forgiven every day, every hour – unceasingly…”  I was intrigued by Wilson’s comment about Wells’ recognition of the idea of sisterhood or women’s communities as a “necessary antidote to our depersonalized, isolated postmodern condition.” She highlights Wells’ articulation of this idea of female bonding in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: “I didn’t write the book because I had a group of friends like the Ya-Yas. I think I wrote it because I wanted one.” In this essay about Wells Dr. Wilson conveys the idea that Wells has accomplished in her contemporary writing what many outstanding writers accomplish – “she has [begun] with the regional (central Louisiana) and made it speak to and for a larger humanity.”

Lucinda Williams, the colorful Lake Charles Louisiana musician; Lindy Boggs, congresswoman and majority leader of the House; Cora Allen, member of the Calanthe Temple Commission; Sarah Towles Reed, labor union lobbyist, and educational reformer…the stories in Louisiana Women reveal the perspectives of eighteen scholars who have documented the activities of women who exemplified the courage and faith to pursue seemingly impossible projects and contributed to the history and culture of Louisiana.

I wish that I could highlight all the essays but perhaps this is a small titillation to read the profound stories in this volume featured in a series about Southern Women: Their Lives and Times, which includes many of the southern states, published by the University of Georgia Press.

Brava, Mary Ann!  

    

A MELROSE PLANTATION "WRITER IN RESIDENCE"

This morning I received an email from my good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Mary Ann told me that she's presently teaching a class in Louisiana History in which students are studying Children of Strangers by the Louisiana author Lyle Saxon. I was prompted to rummage in a cardboard box that contains the books I've published, searching for the volume entitled Their Adventurous Will, Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women. This volume contains an essay featuring Miss Cammie Henry, former owner of Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana, that tells of her friendship with Lyle Saxon. After re-reading the essay, I was inspired to write a few lines about Saxon, based on excerpts from Their Adventurous Will.

Lyle Saxon was a "writer in residence" at Melrose Plantation for many years in the first half of the 20th century when Miss Cammie Henry invited writers and artists to live on the premises of her plantation, issuing one requirement for permanent residence: they must produce works of art. In appreciation for Miss Cammie's patronage, which lasted many years, Saxon donated his personal library, manuscripts, and papers to her. This treasure trove comprised one tenth of the library at Melrose!

Miss Cammie had confessed to Saxon during his first visit to Melrose that she "always had her nose in a book," handing him book after book for his inspection. "So few people are interested in these old things," she said. "Why man alive, they are the most interesting things in the world to me. I love them all!" In the ensuing years following that first visit from Saxon, the books that he wrote gained a place on the Melrose Plantation bookshelves among volumes by Roark Bradford, Rachel Field, Kate Chopin, Caroline Dormon, and many others. Actually, historians believe that books by Lyle Saxon and Kate Chopin were pilfered from Miss Cammie's extensive personal library.

Miss Cammie invited Saxon to live at Melrose Plantation in 1927, and he readily gave up his New Orleans apartment to establish residence at Yucca House on the grounds of Melrose. Yucca House was one of several structures built by Augustin Metoyer, descendant of Marie Therese Coin-Coin, an African slave woman who gained her freedom because of her connection with the Frenchman Thomas Pierre Metoyer. Metoyer and Marie Therese Coin-Coin had 14 children, and several of her sons received land grants after they and their mother were freed. In 1796, Marie Therese's son Louis obtained a large grant for the property that is now Melrose Plantation, and later Augustin built three houses of simple African design, constructed of bousillage (mud and deer hair) placed between massive timbers, on the property then called Yucca Plantation. After Miss Cammie's husband, John Henry, acquired Yucca Plantation he renamed it Melrose after Melrose Abbey in Scotland, home of Sr. Walter Scott, his favorite author.

When Miss Cammie restored the distinctive buildings and showed them to Lyle Saxon, he became fascinated with Yucca House. He had once told Miss Cammie at a New Orleans dinner party, "I think I could write a book in that house." In "that house," Saxon wrote Father Mississippi, Lafitte the Pirate, Fabulous New Orleans, Friends of Joe Gilmore, Old Louisiana, and Children of Strangers. Children of Strangers, his only full-length novel, was set at Melrose, and Saxon featured people who lived on and around the plantation as models for the characters. He actually used many of the books and scrapbooks containing Louisiana articles that Miss Cammie had collected to fuel his writings and acknowledged her in dedications for Old Louisiana and Fabulous New Orleans.

Miss Caroline Dormon, famous Louisiana naturalist and botanist, was a frequent visitor to Melrose Plantation and appears in another essay of Their Adventurous Will. She believed that Lyle Saxon had a gift greater than William Faulkner and described the Nobel Prize winner as "pompous with bags and bags of tricks." She told Saxon that he (Saxon) was restrained and should turn loose in his writing, which would release "tremendous, mysterious power." In a letter to Saxon she exclaimed "one of these days, I will read a novel by Lyle Saxon which will fairly quiver with power and which will curl up the thin sheets of bright metal (probably tin) that glitter on Faulkner, Anderson, Lewis, and these other poseurs..."

Lyle Saxon paid the ultimate tribute to Miss Cammie in a letter extolling the plantation life of Louisiana—particularly Melrose: "When I die and go to Heaven (pause here for the jeering to die down)... and I go to that place where one is allowed to spend eternity in doing the things he enjoyed most on this earth, I shall pass by the halos, the harps, the wings and all the rest of the celestial grandeur—and I shall ask for just one thing. Just let me spend the rest of my time in visiting the places on earth that pleased me when I was alive...and if I get this wish of mine, one of the first places to which my ghost will return will be Melrose, the home of the Henry family, some twenty miles out of Natchitoches..."

The above excerpts from this essay in Their Adventurous Will were based on research I did in the Cammie Henry Room of the Eugene P. Watson Memorial Library, Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches, Louisiana. Archivists there graciously opened to me library collections of letters, photographs, periodical articles and memorabilia concerning Cammie Henry, Lyle Saxon, and many artists and writers who resided at Melrose Plantation during the 20th century.

Brava, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, for recognizing one of Louisiana's "undersung" authors who once enchanted the naturalist Caroline Dormon and whose book, Children of Strangers, "quiver[ed] with mysterious power."

A BIT OF GOURDING

Yesterday when I went into Paul Schexnayder's A&E art gallery to pick up several paintings that will be included in a book entitled Porch Posts that I and Janet Faulk-Gonzales have written, I discovered a new brochure about the Louisiana Gourd Society lying on the checkout counter. Now, I'm a fan of gourds, as my father always raised a crop of them that he dried and placed on the back screen porch because my mother loved to see them hanging there. Mother was an artist, but I don't think she ever considered painting or decorating them like many contemporary artists do. On my travels last year to Rugby, Tennessee and Berea, Kentucky, I saw many painted gourds and admired the colorful artwork, but I left them hanging as I found that they were a bit pricey for my pocketbook.

The Louisiana Gourd Society, whose mission is to educate, promote, and encourage the growing, culture, use, history, and/or craftsmanship of gourds, made its debut at the Acadiana Gourd Festival in Jennings, Louisiana three years ago. The festival featured two gourds decorated with beautiful paintings—one of a Blue Heron and the other of a traveling gourd dedicated to Louisiana's Threatened and Endangered Wildlife.

The first annual Louisiana Gourd Show, "Gourding on the Bayou," was held last April in Haynesville, Louisiana, and this year it will be held in "The Berry," aka New Iberia, Louisiana. An auction and a raffle for the Louisiana Gourd Festival Traveling Gourd entitled "Louisiana Native Wildflowers" will be featured.

My discovery of the gourd brochure brought to mind the gourds I saw at Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana when I was researching Their Adventurous Will: Profiles of MemorableLouisiana Women, a book I wrote back in the 80's. A long line of gourds extended across the front of African House, a building representing Congo architecture on the grounds of Melrose. Later, I found much ado about gourds written by Francois Mignon who lived and wrote at Melrose Plantation for over thirty years. Mignon compiled the columns entitled "Cane River Memo" (later changed to "Plantation Memo") that he wrote for the Natchitoches Times, The Alexandria Town Talk, Opelousas Daily World, and Shreveport Times and published them in his book, Plantation Memo.

Mignon published a lengthy column tracing the history of gourds to Aztec, Mayan, and Inca empires of Central and South America, reporting that these people used them for dippers, jars, even as aids to folk music performances. He said that it was fun raising gourds in the Spring, but it was a job curing them in the Fall, adding that "any dolt can toss a gourd seed into the ground with fair prospects of it bringing forth a vine and a bumper crop," but at harvest time it was a job to divest them of excess moisture. To avoid decomposition of the gourds, he advised the grower to allow the gourds to remain on the vine until they ripened and fell, then suspend them from a line until the water (3/4's of a gourd!) within them evaporated. Mignon reported that in a few weeks the gourds would become discolored, but he usually removed the outside layer of them with a knife, then washed the gourds in soapy water, dried them with a cloth, and hung them back on the line to dehydrate.

A few weeks later, Mignon would take the gourds down and paint them with a thin coat of oil. His gourds would eventually develop colors ranging from deep russet to shades of purple, and he recommended using them to decorate porches, to provide houses for wrens, to create dolls, even to provide containers in which to store eggs. He concluded his remarks about gourds with the comment: "I am the happier when my calendar reminds me it's time for gourd harvest."

And, in case you think I've gone off my gourd about this subject, I refer you to Mignon's Plantation Memo, published by Claitor's in 1981. Francois Mignon was another Louisiana writer who may be unsung in the annals of Louisiana literature, but I admire his writing and regard it as a breath of fresh air. He wove a rich tapestry about life in Cane River country during the three decades he lived on Melrose Plantation.