She was barely school age in her bright white dress, ether going to, or more likely as I was, coming back from church on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar. On that warm Easter in a Winn Dixie parking lot I waited for my wife to exit the big grocery store in Houma with our Sunday favorite, fresh from the oven French bread done no better anywhere else. Eager for the weekly treat, one so tantalizing in expectation I played Pavlov’s Dog after the bell rang, I didn’t know I would soon get something far better than bread, spiritual soul food that still makes me smile decades later.
By this time, I’d restored and moderately hot-rodded a 63 Karmann Ghia and installed a nice cassette deck and high-fidelity speakers. I’d just popped in a Little Richard tape not expecting to connect so deeply to Richard’s southern roots, and was tapping my fingers on the steering wheel to “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” when I looked out at a dance exhibition I sparked about 10 yards away.
I don’t know where she learned to dance, but the little black girl was exceptionally gifted, stepping and twirling with a ballerina’s grace, a child’s enthusiasm and obvious athleticism. Apparently, we both dug Little Richard’s music and I was now being given an enchanting performance with another deep southern groove. I could have watched her perform all day, but when the song stopped, so did my little dancer, who then cast a radiant smile in my direction. I smiled back and waved, the girl returned it, and then turned to walk across the parking lot and out of my life forever, except for the Easter present two strangers gave each other on a humid early afternoon, another heaping helping of South Louisiana life.
Louisiana was a place of many sharp contrasts when I lived there, trash and treasure intertwined like the white lilies blooming every spring around and inside of junk truck tires tossed into the swamp behind our trailer. Poverty often rubbed elbows with people of far greater means, the social settings closer together than in the North where distance between the classes always seemed greater, exclusive neighborhoods keeping out the riffraff that down here sat on the front porch and shared a cool drink irrespective of background. While clear distinctions and much racism still existed in plenty, I found far closer proximity and greater familiarity with different people and social classes in South Louisiana than I’d ever seen. I think it had much to do with the Cajun motto “Laissez les bons temps rouler” which translates “Let the good times roll” and is celebrated many ways.
My new environment was beyond anything I knew existed, its society and culture complex and diverse. Lots of folks think that someone can visit or vacation in a given region for a few weeks or months and come away knowing it well. I don’t believe this possible, even for a most perceptive person. It took several years before I even began to partially understand parts of my new world, one that made me a better person.
Eventually, I found South Louisiana had many different social groupings under a wide Cajun umbrella that didn’t encompass everyone either. I just highlighted one, African Americans brought here in chains and subjugated for centuries. Not much was worse than being “sold down the river” and that river, the Mighty Mississippi, ends here. How and why an abomination like slavery made and still makes such an enormous contribution is a reflection for another time, but had it not been for these people our entire country would be far poorer for it and Louisiana even more so.
Another significant group I wasn’t even aware of until years after I left Louisiana because this stratum prefers public invisibility, its importance very much sub rosa and not defined by office or title. I refer here to the real power brokers, ranging from oilfield and farming millionaires to newly minted lawyers serving old money Cajun aristocrats who trace their lineage back to before the Civil War and still wish they’d won it. Since I was just a worker in the vast sugar cane, oil and seafood combine, I never knew anyone socially from the elite classes and only recognized their emissaries who ranged from school board members to the parish sheriff. These folks appeared as the public policy makers, but the real power structure behind them truly ruled, a reality far from limited to South Louisiana. None of these folks, however, lived “down the bayou” and preferred higher, safer ground, protected far better from the region’s great nemesis, the hurricane. You don’t really know South Louisiana until you live through one of these and been terrified beyond description.
Many if not most of my Louisiana friends came from a few rungs down, a most diverse group made up of all races and generally defined by various levels we commonly define and categorize as middle class, but quite a few like me were more plebian in actuality. Professionals, business people, skilled tradesmen, and successful commercial fishermen comprised much of this group and nearly all of my friends, quite a few by way of my most common association, teachers and administrators. I became an adopted member, a good Louisiana friend calling me a “Yankee Cajun,” a title I accepted proudly. Quite a few representatives of this group did live in the Grand Caillou area and had for generations.
Mary and I were blessed to become a part of the Frisella family, and I do mean part of the family because that’s the way we were treated. I taught the two youngest members, Ben and Susan and grew to know and love the entire family. Technically, we rented property from the Frisellas, but the $50 a month we paid often didn’t even cover the food they gave us, the “potato bus” an excellent example.
Mr. Tony and Miss Doris, as we called them, a traditionally southern form of address to anyone viewed as a respected elder, were school bus drivers as was their oldest daughter Brenda. We became acquainted through the bus driver connection, but the bus job only a part of the Frisella family enterprises that included construction, heavy equipment operation, farming and cattle raising along a large tract of land up against the Intercostal Waterway, a major conduit for water-borne commerce of all kinds.
The “potato bus” was an old school bus Mr. Tony acquired at public auction that became a moving storage building. In this case it was filled with potatoes the Frisella family grew, harvested, and told us to take all we wanted anytime, potato bonanza. Being money tight as we were, we sure did eat a lot of potatoes that year and supplemented it with all sorts of other gifts, not all of them from the Frisella family, and frequently seafood. Gifts of food and drink were as common in Grand Caillou as mosquitoes, the latter not at all appreciated but very much a part of the environment.
Periodic hurricanes were also a big part of the environment and even smaller ones had devastating impact. I’ll always remember the Frisella family for many kindnesses, but one in the face of danger and loss still strikes me the most. With the water rapidly rising during Hurricane Juan in 1985, Mr. Tony’s son-in law Peter instructed me to move Mary’s VW Squareback, another junkyard restoration of mine, up to the highest ground where Mr. Tony’s son Sam lived 50 yards from us. Mr. Tony was waiting there with his back hoe. After I parked the car, Mr. Tony wrapped a chain around the rear where the engine is on VWs of this period, and hoisted the car so that only the front wheels touched the ground. When the worst of the storm surge hit and put chest level water in our yard and a foot inside our trailer, Mary’s vehicle was safe and mostly undamaged, unlike my Ghia and so much more that went underwater, as did everything the Frisellas owned too. They protected our car because they knew we needed at least one to survive, and saved ours when they could have saved one of their own.
It also wasn’t at all unusual to answer a knock on our trailer door to see one of my students either past or present who asked if I’d like some “shrimps” or fish. The fish were what’s called “bycatch” meaning the shrimpers didn’t really seek the catch and often gave to people like us. Small flounders were most common and especially loved by me as Mary stuffed them with a mixture of seasonings, bread crumbs and shrimp. If you marry a good Cajun woman one thing’s for sure, you’ll eat like a king as long as you don’t make the queen mad, and then brother, it’s time to run.