FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE IS IN SPAIN!

Yesterday afternoon, I discussed with a friend the importance of smell in evoking the urge to write and lamented that I missed the scent of the musky, fungi-laden air in New Iberia, Louisiana, my home for part of the year. It is a place I have lived for over 45 years. Smell often helps me connect with past pleasant memories that are grist for poems, novels, articles, even blogs (shades of Marcel Proust!). As soon as I talked about the scent of the Bayou Teche, memories of New Iberia began to fill my thoughts, and I suppose this blog was inspired by both a person and the memory of the town’s distinctly humid, loamy air.

When I see that word “connection” appear on my computer, telling me that I am about to enter the territory of e-mail, I usually feel a lot of anticipation, hoping that I’ll hear from some of my friends in New Iberia when I open the mailbox. Last night before I went to bed, I opened my e-mail in a rather desultory way, not really anticipating mail at that hour. Voila! There was a long message from a woman named Nancy Armentor Lees, a New Iberia native now living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, telling me she had found and purchased my book, FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE, during a visit to New Iberia. She told me that she realized I had read Jose Manuel Molina’s book on the founding of New Iberia when I was researching the history of New Iberia and had woven some of his information about the Spanish settlement of this city into the story about the Romeros, the principal characters in FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE.

Nancy writes: “For several years my cousin Norman Carnahan and I corresponded with Jose Manuel Molina about the Spanish origins of Nueva Iberia and the link to Alhaurin de la Torre, Spain. He consequently wrote a book about the history of Alhaurin de la Torre, including a chapter in English about the founding of New Iberia. I think of Jose Manuel as the Glenn Conrad (a New Iberia historian who was the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies, ULL, for many years) of Alhaurin de la Torre. Norman helped Jose Manuel with the translation, and I was mainly the 'third pair of eyes' reading the draft.”

Nancy says that she dreamed of making a cultural connection between New Iberia and Alhaurin de la Torre for years and in April of this year, Jose Manuel and three city officials from Alhaurin de la Torre visited New Iberia for the initial part of a twinning ceremony between the two towns. She added that in the Spring of 2010, a group of New Iberians will visit Alhaurin de la Torre.

Nancy bought Jose Manuel a copy of FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE this past April at Books Along the Teche, New Iberia’s major book supplier. Manuel Lopez, a member of the Dept. of Culture in Alhaurin de la Torre, bought a copy also, along with Maurine Bergerie’s THEY TASTED BAYOU WATER, a history of New Iberia that encompasses all nationalities who settled in this colorful town on the banks of the Bayou Teche. Nancy attached copies of photographs showing the delegation from Alhaurin de la Torre discussing the trip to New Iberia with their city officials, and FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE is one of two books lying on their conference table!

And the piece de resistance at the conclusion of the e-mail: “I thought you might be happy to learn that the library in Alhaurin de la Torre, Spain has a copy of FLOOD ON THE RIO TECHE!”

Note: The photograph shows the delegation from Alhaurin de la Torre discussing their trip to New Iberia with their city officials.

LOUISIANA WOMEN: THEIR LIVES AND TIMES

Twenty-five years ago I wrote a book about Louisiana women, and it was published under the imprint of Acadian Press in Lafayette, Louisiana. Now out of print, it was entitled THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL: Profiles of Memorable Louisiana Women and was an anecdotal, journalistic collection of bios about 16 Louisiana women, living and deceased. Except for interviews with six of the sixteen women, material came from secondary sources and through library collections of letters, articles, etc. My intent was to create an account of Louisiana women who “took great leaps of faith and in all cases made something so that had been envisioned as impossible, moving their ideas from conception to being with extraordinary fervor.” (From the introduction of THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL). I’m not a historian or a scholar and didn’t lay claim to having created scholarly, definitive biographies of the women included. At the time I just felt compelled to create personal bios – some of them regarded as “quirky” by a few readers-- that showed how Louisiana women had contributed to the culture of my home state.

A few days ago, I was thrilled to receive a copy of a brand-new book about Louisiana women edited by Janet Allured and Judith F. Gentry and written by eminent scholars at universities throughout the United States. The essays are definitive profiles of southern women who were influenced by their education …“the culture of the surrounding community, intellectual and organizational networks, the natural environment, and other women”… (introduction to LOUISIANA WOMEN: THEIR LIVES AND TIMES written by Janet Allured). Four of the essays in LOUISIANA WOMEN focus on women I mentioned in THEIR ADVENTUROUS WILL, and they receive more comprehensive treatment by eminent scholars, one of those scholars being a personal friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, who wrote the essay on Grace King, “New Orleans Literary Historian.”

In the profile of Grace King, Mary Ann describes King as a woman who emerges “as a representative voice of white New Orleans and Louisiana. She was a Protestant American championing an aristocratic Creole world in decline by uncritically heroicizing its patriarchal past in her histories…she captured its complex racial and political dynamic in her fiction…” Mary Ann’s essay is meticulously researched, and she explores all of the literature appropriate to a definitive narrative about this southern author. She reflects on King’s appreciation for a world “that protofeminists like Julia Ward Howe opened up to her but lamented the sacrifice of feminine modesty and propriety often accompanying such vision...” As Mary Ann explains, King “…was caught up in a transitional period that would spawn the New Woman and usher in an era of unprecedented and rapid change in the new century…” She points to King as a woman who asked questions about the roles of black and white women’s roles “that echoed larger questions of national unity and identity plaguing a country still reeling from a divisive civil war but on the cusp of a larger global destiny…”

Oddly, I inherited from my godparents a share in Grace King’s Le Petit Salon, a women’s group that met to hear lectures given by various literary and artistic figures of the early 20th century. The certified share, loosely enclosed in a blue envelope, sat on a shelf in my bedroom for years until I heard that Mary Ann was writing the definitive article about Grace King, and I passed it on to her, a worthy recipient.

An interesting section at the conclusion of LOUISIANA WOMEN focuses on “Louisiana Women and Hurricane Katrina: Some Reflections on Women’s Responses to the Catastrophe” by Pamela Tyler. I love the comment she made in the preface to her essay: “Mopping up is, and always has been, women’s work.” Tyler explains the background of Hurricane Katrina and cites an example of massive clean-up efforts, post Katrina, carried out by New Orleans women and highlighted in the passages about New Orleanian Becky Zaheri. Zaheri organized fifteen women to pick up litter in the city streets and initiated a project that burgeoned into two clean-ups a week with 200 people participating. The women then enlisted the help of the entire U.S., clearing block after block of New Orleans streets. Zaheri is only one of several women activists profiled as leaders in nonprofit initiatives in the concluding section of LOUISIANA WOMEN.

Acknowledgements are called for and recognition accorded to this outstanding contribution to an area of Mary Ann’s own expertise – women’s studies -- and I deeply appreciate and applaud the essays written about the commitment and endurance of Louisiana women.

My friend Mary Ann is a professor of English and women’s studies at ULL in Lafayette, Louisiana and does research about 19th and 20th century American women writers and southern literature. She is author of numerous articles on women writers: Kaye Gibbons, Rebecca Wells, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Walker, and Grace King and has written a book about Jean Stafford entitled JEAN STAFFORD, A STUDY OF THE SHORT FICTION. Mary Ann was also awarded the ULL Foundation Distinguished Professor Award in 200l and was recently named a Friend of the Humanities/BORSF Endowed Professor of the Humanities.

Brava Mary Ann, brava the distinguished editors and authors who celebrated the accomplishments of Louisiana women in this new volume! LOUISIANA WOMEN: THEIR LIVES AND TIMES is published by the University of Georgia Press.

BIRD BATH?

A few days ago, I looked out the kitchen window and spied a new visitor to the bird bath under the hemlock tree. No, it wasn’t another deer, and far be it from the birds to claim their private watering station! It was a squirrel taking a bath. Yes, a squirrel, bushy tail raised to me. A cardinal on the fence watched it splash about in the basin, and this sight prompted me to write the following bit of prose that I call:

CARDINAL SIN

Two close friends brought me the dirt-colored stone bird bath as a housewarming gift. It sits under the shelter of a tall hemlock surrounded by daylilies and peonies. Birds stop by, but they’re second visitors, deferring to deer and their fawns. Cardinals perch on the wooden fence and wait, sometimes until midmorning, before they dive down and sip at the murky water.

When my mother died, I know she reincarnated into her favorite bird –the cardinal. She’s one of the drinkers at the well in my yard. How else could she visit except as a transformed male cardinal, wearing the scarlet plumage she loved while she was in human form? There was nothing to cheer about in her life, but hues of red excited her, stimulated her garrulousness. When she opened her mouth, the flow was red – the blood of wounds and sickness, murder, war, and death. It was frightening. Death was just around the block. Cars crashed in the street. Tramps, as she called them, appeared with large croker sacks slung over their shoulders – bags that held kidnapped children who would later be carved up. Knives on the kitchen counter gleamed with the insinuation of stabbing. Knocks at the door announced assassins. Soldiers dressed in WWII uniforms fell on bloody bayonets. Barking dogs, teeth bared, stood ready to rip human flesh. Red flags announced family battles, the blood of kin beginning to spill, her Scots blood stirring, her blood pressure always rising. Flashing red lights of police cars cruised the streets outside our home. Sin lurked in the red sky of the early morning, the blood of saints and martyrs spilling into the day.

Red omen that my mother was, I now envision her as a cardinal, the one sitting on our fence watching me and the visitors to the bath, waiting for IT to happen. Meanwhile, she drinks from my fountain, envying me this life. Yesterday, I went out on the porch and told her to leave. The color red blazes in the pattern of every rug in my house – that’s enough of her hue.