A SITE ON "THE RETURN LIST"

From Martin's Quest by Billy Ledet
inside St. Martin de Tours

When I return to New Iberia, Louisiana every year following a sojourn on The Mountain in Sewanee, Tennessee, I usually have a mental list of places I want to re-visit while I'm in Cajun country. Yesterday, after I received the news about a friend's daughter being seriously injured in an automobile accident, I thought immediately about St. Martin de Tours Church in St. Martinville, Louisiana, a few miles down the road from me. Although I'm not Roman Catholic, I've made many short pilgrimages to the beautiful, historic church on the Square to light candles for family and loved ones. I'm always consoled while sitting in a pew of the old church, and when I return home I find that small miracles have occurred.

One of the oldest Roman Catholic churches in the U.S. and the third oldest in Louisiana, St. Martin de Tours was established in 1765 when Acadian exiles who had been driven out of their homes in Nova Scotia landed in Acadiana. A Capuchin missionary priest named Jean Francois helped establish the church and by 1814, it had become incorporated. The church that stands on the Square today was built by lottery funds in 1836 and dedicated in 1844. As I said, I'm not Roman Catholic, but I like to think that when I sit in one of the church pews, I'm sitting near one of my ancestors, an Acadian exile named Pierre Vincent who must have been a member of the predominantly Roman Catholic congregation at St. Martin de Tours.

Inside St. Martin de Tours are gated pews, remnants of a time when congregants were assigned pews according to their donations to the church. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and a blue ceiling with stars overhangs the altar. The space inside is large and has the ambience of a country church, and brilliant light fills the interior. For me, it is one of those "thin places," so designated because the space between God and the people is thin... and the connection with God is easily made. I've been in a few thin places and experienced this connectedness—near the red buttes of Sedona, Arizona; at St. Mary's Convent church on the bluff at Sewanee, Tennessee; in a small church named Church of the Holy Spirit in Graham, Texas; and in the Garden of Evangelism in Tehran, Iran. On my bucket list of thin places is the Isle of Iona as I've read and heard that it is the thinnest of thin places where spiritual experiences frequently occur.

St. Martin de Tours is mentioned several times in my young adult book, Martin's Quest, and a pencil drawing by Billy Ledet depicts Martin, the hero of the story who is a traiteur, lighting candles in the old church. Martin's grandmother explains to him that the Church "is only against traiteurs trying to cure someone if they leave God out. When the prayers are said, God isn't left out. The Church today believes in the gift of healing, just as in Jesus' day. But the priests don't like superstitious practices," she added.

In St. Martin de Tours

I have lit many candles in the small blue crystal holders on a stand near the side door by the gray-walled Grotto at the left of the altar. The Grotto is a copy of the famous Grotto at Lourdes in France where miracles still occur and was created of mud and green moss by a black man named Paul Martinez. On my return trip to St. Martin de Tours, I'll petition for the complete recovery of my daughter and for the healing of the young woman who was seriously injured in the auto accident. For those who wish to add your petitions, the names are Stephanie and Glenae.

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

A SONG IN THE NIGHT

Over a year ago, I accompanied Vickie Sullivan to meet with Kim Graham of St. Martinville, Louisiana to discuss editing a book Kim was writing about the loss of her youngest son, Pvt. Mark W. Graham, who died from critical injuries sustained in the Iraq conflict. Kim and her husband live in an old, Victorian home that has what I call an onion-topped roof on the Main Street of St. Martinville, a lovely home that Kim has been restoring and decorating for seven years. She took us to lunch at a small café alongside St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church, and we talked about her heartache following the loss of her son, which she had written about in a manuscript entitled A Song in the Night.

As my personal inclinations are pacifistic, my responses to the death of Kim’s son in the awful conflict in Iraq were feelings of rage that such a wonderful young man had been brutally injured when his vehicle was hit by a roadside bomb and everyone in the vehicle perished except Mark. He had been scooped up by a medical helicopter unit and flown to Baghdad, but lost both legs and a kidney and had third degree burns on more than sixty percent of his body. Five days later, he died.

Kim’s book covers her spiritual journey from the point of a dream presaging the death of her son a year before he was killed, through months of grief and a search for the grace she developed by following her Roman Catholic faith. In the dream she glimpsed a heaven that sustained her through the aftermath of Mark’s senseless death.

She writes, “I think God prepares us for our biggest moments with smaller ones leading. We had our share. Financial or marital problems are normal in any family; ours were extreme. Flood, debt, separation, and a family torn apart led us on a tremendous journey of ‘faith searching’ and blessedly, ‘faith finding.’ Flat on your back with arms reaching upward is the time God can come, when we are literally open to Him in every sense of the word. Yes, each moment led to the next and prepared our hearts and our faith, but we never knew how much we would need that strength or faith for the journey to come…”

In March, 2006, Kim had a dream in which she encountered God while she searched for her family, walking down different roads that she thought would lead to those family members. In her encounter with God, He embraced her, and she “felt as joyous as a mother would feel when her son returns home from a war…it was clear, this feeling, with all it implied,” the feeling that a mother has when a son who has battled and suffered and grown returns safely. “I knew all he (the son) had been through clearly, and I knew the love, safety, and warmth of his (God’s) hug, and I knew, as well, that that was what heaven felt like. I had just had a glimpse of heaven.”

In the dream, Kim also saw groups of four and five men who were of different nationalities – “men of Arabic nations, Chinese, and Africans in colorful dress.” She was instructed to tell them about God’s embrace, about His love and joy that waits for them in heaven. One year after Kim dreamed what she later defined as a parable, Mark was killed.

Part of Kim’s recorded journey concerns her experiences as teacher of a memoir writing class that helped her survive the loss of Mark, a class that included bankers, inventors, civil rights leaders, stay-at-home moms who blossomed in their time. The students, of varying ages, wrote about events that, for Kim, resembled parables, “snippets of time and not always in clear detail, but we remember the atmosphere of an event, the feeling of the room, how someone made us feel. We remember our most important times, when they are most vivid in our mind, not because they were everyday events, but because they were special and almost always they cost us something. Sometimes it was our innocence.”

After Mark’s death, Kim was also consoled by the appearance of dragonflies which she considers to be the spirit of Mark and a reminder that God is omnipresent. Since the appearance of the first dragonfly, dragonflies follow Kim and her husband Neil throughout their yard in St. Martinville, almost every time they go outdoors. Her first instinct is to greet her son as she really feels that he accompanies her in the form of that beautiful insect. “I was told that if you think the Holy Spirit is with you, and you feel its presence, then you are correct in that assumption. If it’s in your head, then God put it there, I guess I’m always justifying that the bird (a yellow and black bird that appeared to her shortly after Mark was injured) and the dragonfly are Mark.”

Pvt. Mark W. Graham

A Song in the Night is the poignant story of a mother’s loss of a beloved son, one that will give hope to the thousands of mothers who have lost sons in senseless conflicts. Kim is a brave woman who recorded a hard journey, but readers will feel inspired from having read her bittersweet account, an account that she feels she was instructed to disseminate after having the special dream a year preceding her son’s death.

We hope to visit with Kim again when we return to Cajun country. She’s an inspiration, and, by the way, she makes wonderful fudge brownies!

A Song in the Night was published by Dragonfly Press. Click on the title to order.