RETURN OF THE KAJUN KWEEN??

While packing up papers in anticipation of returning to Tennessee for a short visit to my home on The Mountain, I came across an old book entitled Of Other Worlds by C.S. Lewis. It includes an essay concerning his speculations about the famous Narnia stories for children, as well as those about his science fiction trilogy. The short essay that interested me, “It All Began With A Picture,” focused on how Lewis came to write The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which he explains that all of his seven Narnia books and three science fiction books began with seeing pictures in his head; e.g., the Lion began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.

I experienced a sudden “aha” in my own head when I read this line, remembering how Kajun Kween, a young adult book I wrote several years ago, originated with a picture in my head of a six-foot, two-inches tall, 13-year old girl with feet that required size 12 shoes. The entire story, in comic book form, unfolded in my head. It featured this giraffe-like girl who interviewed for an actual comic strip publisher and beat out more ordinary jolie catins in a contest for a character who would become the heroine of this comic strip. Her job was to provide true adventures about her native Cajun French Louisiana; e.g., an encounter with a mama ‘gator protecting her egg nest; a stand-off with a giant snapping turtle; and an experience with a loup-garou late at night in a cypress swamp. The pictures in my head were described for and beautiful executed by Paul Schexnayder, New Iberia artist, for Kajun Kween.

Sketch by Paul
Schexnayder for Kajun
Kween

The picture that came into my mind as I planned the trip back to Tennessee was one of Petite Marie Melancon fulfilling the last line of Kajun Kween – she would be exploring new kingdoms. Thus, she might consider The Mountain at Sewanee in Tennessee. Pictures of adventures flashed in my head: ghosts appearing to Petite at Rugby, Tennessee where a Brit once tried to establish a Utopian colony; Petite attempting to hike to Fiery Gizzard;  a “See Rock City” trip to Chattanooga where she plunges off a cliff; an experience in which she becomes Queen of the Moon Pie Festival at Bell Buckle, Tennessee…

Since I’ve just completed a book of poetry, Street Sketches, which should appear in a few weeks, the pictures that appeared in my head about Petite Marie seem like they want to tell a story in 2016. Like Lewis, “I don’t know where the pictures came from, and I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he/she makes thing up. Making up is a mysterious thing…” All I know is that the pictures will persist until the story is told. In Petite Marie’s case, four or five years passed before she was birthed. We’ll see how she responds when I return to the winter cold on The Mountain next week; that is, before we move on to Florida for a few days. Pictures of her exploring Florida may become cut lines for a comic strip based there -- elusive crocodiles in the Everglades, Disney World experiences, glass-bottomed boat rides, explorations of coral reefs… Petite has begun to travel a lot.

As Lewis notes, “the right sort [of stories] work from the common, universally human ground the stories share with the children, and indeed with countless adults.” Meanwhile, I’ll just enjoy the pictures forming in my head.

THE WHISTLE OF TRAINS

Sketch by Billie Perkins

An artist gave the above sketch to me to accompany a little feature I was writing for The Daily Iberian back in the 70’s. It’s a rendering of the platform and partial front of the train station here in New Iberia, Louisiana, now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The platform and tracks are owned by BNSF and have also been used by the Louisiana and Delta Railroad since 1987.

According to Leo Marx, author of The Machine in the Garden,  the railroad’s development didn’t have any particular meaning for the southern states during pre-Civil War times because the South was enamored of a pre-industrial pastoral ideal which Marx claimed southerners used as a weapon against industrialism. However, the Civil War provided unexpected liberation for southerners to get on the road to modernity, and Georgia led the way in the performance of southern railroads. Railroads were soon established in the post-antebellum South, and by 1890, historian Edward Ayers observed that nine out of every ten southerners lived in a railroad county, “surrounded by an aura of glamour throughout the New South era.”

In Louisiana, depots became the sites of frenetic activity where one northerner related his privileged treatment at a Louisiana depot: “Here we are at the depot and oh, what a collection of porters, cabmen and Car men, Irish, Americans, and Blacks.”* Actually, New Iberia’s first passenger train from New Orleans didn’t arrive until 1879, and a few years later a spur was laid to Avery Island and Abbeville. The railroad became vital to the lumber business and was used to transport cypress from the swamp to landowners who built many of the handsome homes along the Bayou Teche.

In the early 1900’s, my Great-Uncle Ed Greenlaw laid a private railroad track leading from his property in Ramsey, Louisiana to my Grandfather Paul’s lumber mill in Franklinton, Louisiana, transporting long leaf pine logs approximately 28 miles. When he sold the property after he had denuded the forests around Covington, Louisiana, he had the audacity to pick up the rails and take them with him, according to the present owner of the property that is now a bed and breakfast destination.

I have no idea how many trains passed on those first laid rails to New Iberia, but today I look up numerous times during the day when I hear them whooing on the tracks. I also hear them rumbling through at any time I wake during the night. Their long whistles used to sound like lonesome wails to me, but when I wake in the darkness now and hear them, I think of mobility – of going places and having new adventures, of still being able to travel.

In A Lonely Grandmother, one of the books of poetry I published last year, the lead poem is about a train:

The Aging Express

The sound of so many journeys

passes in the whistle of a train

and little wonder

this master of navigation wails,

pushing through sleeplessness

and darkness without news.

Shut-in passengers urge it on

thinking it a boundary-less machine

traveling on an open frontier

carrying them past houses

with open windows

crying ‘welcome aboard'

and rumbling through the night

making connections

in desolate places…

but not stopping for long.

*Most of the information about the history of railroads in this blog was derived from Railroads in the Old South by Aaron W. Marrs, a book I used while doing research for my book, Redeemed by Blood.

IONA, BLESSINGS, AND MIRACLES

There are numerous monasteries, convents, retreat houses, and churches that combine prayer and daily Bible reading with action for justice and peace, and one of the names that is on the bucket list of Anglicans searching for a place to join with others in carrying out this work is the Isle of Iona. Iona lies off the west coast of the Isle of Mull where St. Columba, an Irish monk, settled and influenced the establishment of Christianity in England, Scotland, and the European mainland. Iona, the site of a restored Benedictine abbey, attracts followers devoted to rebuilding “community,” and is populated by people from all walks of life -- followers who flock there to work in the kitchen and laundry and to light candles, lead morning services, or conduct sessions of Aramaic prayer for as many as ten weeks of volunteer service.

Sister Lucy, former head sister of St. Mary’s Sewanee, Tennessee, led many pilgrims to Iona and is reputed to have called forth miracles in this “thin place” off the coast of Scotland.  I’ve often told the story of a miracle about The Rev. Elmer Boykin, a good friend of mine (now deceased) who made one of Sr. Lucy’s pilgrimages to Iona years ago. It was a small miracle but nonetheless, one that reflects a kind of luminous clarity that occurred in a priest who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. During most of his life as a priest, Fr. Boykin had a booming voice that lifted the rafters when he preached and celebrated at the altar, but when he became ill, he not only lost his ability to celebrate, he could no longer read the Gospel at a service. When Sister Lucy was asked to conduct a service in the Abbey chapel at Iona, she walked up to The Rev. Boykin and in her characteristic no-nonsense way told him: “You read the Gospel.” Anne, the priest’s wife, hid her face in her hands in embarrassment, knowing that he hadn’t been able to proclaim the Gospel for several years. However, when the time came for the proclamation of the Gospel, The Rev. Boykin stood at the lectern and read it, every line reverberating in the old abbey chapel, and at that point in time, he reclaimed his voice. His wife Anne says that there was never a repeat performance, but in a restored abbey on an island off the coast of Scotland, he found his voice long enough to proclaim his faith.

The church in Iona was an early Celtic church, and the Celts, a strong part of the Anglican tradition, are impressive for their focus on blessing everything, from thresholds of homes and cooking pots to states of the heart. A blessing is an act that changes the atmosphere of a place or the heart of a person in a cogent way. In this new year, Fr. Matt Woollett, priest at the Episcopal Church of Epiphany in New Iberia, Louisiana (where I reside part of the year) has issued a call to parishioners to have their homes blessed, as is customary during the season of Epiphany. I had my home here blessed many years ago when the priest used the “long form,” blessing every corner and room, even the patio outside. The year that it was blessed, Hurricane Andrew roared through, flattening trees, destroying roofs, and flooding low areas in south Louisiana. However, although the wind squeezed my house back and forth like an accordion, it survived without harm, perhaps because “the defender of the household” had been invoked months before the storm.

For those who wish to read more about blessings that have Celtic roots, John O’Donohue has written a wonderful book of lyrical blessings entitled To Bless the Space Between Us that emphasizes seven rhythms of the human journey: beginnings, desires, thresholds, homecomings, states of the heart, callings, and beyond endings. He writes that “in the evocations of our blessings, the word ‘may’ is the spring through which the Holy Spirit is invoked to surge into presence and effect. The Holy Spirit is the subtle presence and secret energy behind every blessing…”

May you enjoy a blessed New Year.