Forgotten Corners of French Louisiana

Everybody knows about New Orleans, though the mythical city that lives in most people's minds is not always the same city found on the Mississippi River in southernmost Louisiana.  Sometimes it isn't even the same city that lives in my mind, and I lived there for over eight years, but a long time ago.  Lots of folk who lived there just five years ago find that the city that is there now isn't the same city they left, and many of those who came back after the Katrina cleansing still long for the city that they knew.

 But New Orleans is a topic for another day.  Today I want to share some of the pleasures of a part of the state that is often not considered part of the more Gallic, Catholic, hedonistic southern sections of the state.  North Louisiana is predominantly Protestant, Anglo-American and less-often-visited by non-Louisiana residents.  But the oldest French settlement in the state is in this northern section, close to the Texas border.  Natchitoches, settled as a French trading post by Juchereau de St. Denis, retains its colonial atmosphere and its French flavor, blended with a  rich African-American heritage and a treasure trove of early colonial and southern planter architecture.

                                               The Badin-Roque House Kitchen at Isle Brevelle

The kitchen of the Badin-Roque House as it is known today is a well-preserved example.  One of the oldest surviving structures in the Mississippi Valley, it served the bousillage (mud and timber), dirt-floored house built by and for the Ursuline Nuns when they first arrived in the still largely unexplored Louisiana territory in the 1790s.  By that time Natchitoches, only a short ten or so miles away, was a thriving settlement.  The house itself stands nearby in an amazing state of preservation.

                                               The House, once the home of the Ursulines

 The small Cane River Community of Isle Brevelle is home to several generations of Louisiana Creole families descended from a former African slave named Marie Therese but called by her more familiar name of Coin-Coin and a French military officer and planter named Metoyer from the Natchitoches Post.   Theirs is not an unusual story in some ways, and extraordinary in another.  After fathering twelve children with Coin-Coin, Officer Metoyer decided that he had to have a white, Catholic, French wife.  Giving her forty acres miles away on the Cane River, Metoyer freed her, but not her children.  Cultivating the land diligently, she succeeded in buying all of her children from slavery and with them built one of the most famous early-nineteenth century plantation homes in Louisiana, Melrose, just across the Cane River and about a mile from the Badin-Roque house.  The house came into the families of some of her descendents who intermarried into other free famililes of color, many of whom in Louisiana were affluent, highly skilled, and well-educated.   Some of  Coin-Coins own grand-children were educated in Paris, returning home to Louisiana with worldly ideas as well as silver-headed walking canes and rock-crystal tumblers decorated with sterling heads of Napoleon Bonaparte.

     A visit to Natchitoches offers  a fascinating opportunity to explore deeply into the inter-connected history of Old World France and New World Louisiana.  Anyone seeking European side roads would be well repaid in spending several days in the too-often forgotten corner of the American south.  And a day or two relaxing at nearby Toledo Bend Lake, especially in the Fall and Spring, will provide some of the best of Louisiana's pleasures.

French Louisiana

The Lafayette, Louisiana Museum, home of Alexandre Mouton, President of the Secession Conference, 1861

I (Bonnie) live in the southwest corner of Louisiana, the heart of what is known as "Cajun" country. When I was growing up here, French was commonly heard in and around my home town, most of the merchants and businessmen spoke French or had someone around who did as so many of their customers spoke only that language. After the spread of American affluence and television, the language died out except in remote areas and country pockets, but a determined effort in the 1950s and 60s by a local congressman by the name of James Domengeaux created an agency called CODOFIL--the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. CODOFIL is still strongly promoting Louisiana French language and culture, and the degree of its preservation that exists is the result, and the result of the determined efforts of young Louisianians of French heritage who have appreciated and promoted their culture. The popularity of Louisiana French music, now widely appreciated as a unique cultural expression along with Creole and African-American musical forms has ensured that Louisiana's distinctive French-influenced cultural gumbo has survived. "Cajun," though, is widely misunderstood outside its home territory--even in the state at large. "Cajun" on menus throughout the U.S. and lately way too often in London and even in provincial England simply means drowned in red pepper. Those of us who know the richness and subtleties of true Cajun cuisine run like mad when we see "Cajun chicken" or other such frights on British or New York menus--we know it will be a travesty of any of our proud culinary dishes.

Over 500 years old, Lafayette's Cathedral Oak has presided over a unique blend of cultural influences.

A visit to southwest Louisiana and to "Cajun Country" is a visit to a complex cultural pocket containing a blend of Caribbean, African-American, French, Spanish and Anglo influences, spiced lightly with Irish, German, Vietnamese and other strains. From town to town, even close neighbors less than twenty miles away, cultural dominance can change. Franklin, for example, with its many Greek-revival plantation-style nineteenth-century homes and moss-draped oaks, was formerly dominated by southern Anglo-American elites. Now populated by the descendents of early planter families and of their African slaves, it remains a pocket of American plantation culture only a few miles away from both the French areas to the west and the bayou regions to the east. Driving through the southern regions of Louisiana is a drive through time-warps of multiple cultural colors.
        And all of this is not to say anything about New Orleans, America's unique port city, the city that almost everyone first thinks of when one hears "Louisiana." New Orleans is truly sui generis and worthy of its own entry. But if anyone is looking for a European sideroad, he or she should certainly look here, to Louisiana, starting with the Queen City perhaps--no one should die without experiencing it--but going on beyond, into the regions where the cultural European past still lingers, still resonates, still fascinates.
         A trip to Louisiana is in many ways a trip to a foreign country, and equally compelling.  It is quintessentially American, yet not like the rest of America.  It is southern, yet unlike the rest of the American south.  Its languages are English, often spoken with a strong accent, various varieties of French like yet unlike the mother tongue.  Its cuisines are rich and proud; food is a religion here.  The oil rig spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a far greater disaster than the national news media generally recognizes. Its threats not only to the environment and to the economy is dire, but its threat to one of America's richest unique cultures is heartbreaking.

After a hiatus of more than two years, I am hoping someone out there will still be interested in reading our blog. I have just returned from my first trip back to Europe since 2008--the longest time between trips for me since the early 1980s. A year in Washington, D.C. and a prolonged re-entry following kept me not only from traveling, but from having much to add to a blog that involved exploring fascinating roads and by-ways. But I have learned that the U.S. has just as many interesting sideroads, with many, many connections to Europe. So I am going to continue to expand the interpretations of the term "sideroads of Europe" to include those in the U.S. that invite European discoveries in other ways. That was one of the many things my year in D.C. taught me. I have been a shameless Europhile for so long--I guess that comes from being educated from the age of 12 by an order of French nuns and from living in a region of the country that proudly proclaims that it preserves the French language. Southwest Louisiana is one of those European side roads, so often both American and yet different.
France in late May, early June 2010, after a two-year absence--was similar: familiar, yet different. I found the streets of Paris dirtier than I had ever seen them, but the spirit of the Parisians as energetic as I remembered. I was there, sadly, to empty the apartment my family has enjoyed for over eleven years, a sad task that involved sifting through memories of so many pleasant experiences, even those that would probably have been trying but for the excitement of place. Sifting through STUFF and trying to figure out what to do with it wasn't easy either: what does one do, for example, with a ten-year old, burnt-out ten-inch television set? But we sold the apartment to friends, which made it much easier to part with it in so many ways. And I found that all of my wonderful, varied friends acquired over the years in Paris jumped to the task of helping, rallied round strongly, and solved all the problems, the television set among them. One wonderful friend simply came to pick it up and take it to the "dechitrie", wherever in the nooks and corners of Paris that might be found.
It wasn't all hard work, so later posts will detail some of the interesting moments. But on June 5 I closed the door for the last time, left the doors and the street that I have greeted with such joy for so many years, and said good-bye to the 12th Arrondissement street that I think is one of the most beautiful in the city.