Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives

Angola to Zydeco

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Angola to Zydeco Louisiana Lives R. Reese Fuller

University Press of Mississippiâ•… Jackson

www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2011 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First printing 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fuller, R. Reese. Angola to Zydeco : Louisiana lives / R. Reese Fuller. p. cm. Summary: Creative non-fiction pieces originally published in Times of Acadiana and Independent weekly of Lafayette, La. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61703-129-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61703-130-4 (ebook) 1. Lafayette Region (La.)—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. 2. Louisiana—Social life and customs—Anecdotes. 3. Lafayette Region (La.)—Biography. 4. Louisiana— Biography. 5. Interviews—Louisiana—Lafayette Region. 6. Interviews—Louisiana. I. Times of Acadiana. II. Independent weekly (Lafayette, La.) III. Title. F379.L16F85 2011 976.3’47—dc22

2011004066

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Heather, who heard all these stories first And for Henry and Bird, who are always up for a story

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Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Angola Bound 3 Thanks for the Memories 9 Marc of Distinction 14 Line of Vision 26 Down Home with Buckwheat 29 Inside Santy’s Studio 34 A Fighting Chance 41 The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll 57 The Man behind Dave Robicheaux 68 Signs and Wonders 84 The Last Perique Farmer 93 Driving Jimmy to His Grave 102 vii

Strung Out on a Dream 115 Going Home 126 Handfuls of Fire 140 Another Man’s Treasure 147 Shelter from the Storm 155 No Room at the Inn 159 The Record Man 162 Don’t You Worry about Boozoo 175 A Fistful of Hope 185 The Forgotten 197 Ride of His Life 208 One Day in Jena 215 Mourning Elemore 226 Indexâ•…229

Contents  •  viii

Preface I landed the job, but I already had other plans. I had arranged to tour Angola, Louisiana’s maximum security prison, with a group of criminal justice students. And this new gig was getting in the way. So on my first day as the assistant editor at the Times of Acadiana, I walked into my editor’s office, told her I was heading to Angola with some college students, and asked for Friday off. “Why don’t you write about it?” she asked. The idea hadn’t occurred to me. My job was to push copy, herd the writers into hitting their deadlines, and proof the paper. Writing wasn’t part of the deal. But it was then that I realized that I could have my cake and eat it, too: I could continue learning about what interested me in my own back yard while drawing a paycheck at the same time. For nearly a decade I got away with wondering about other people, asking them to tell me their stories, listening to their tales, and writing them down. I was usually driven by one question: “What’s that guy’s story?” I found that, if given enough time and space, everyone has a story to tell, and they’re usually willing to tell it if someone’s willing to listen. The writer’s job is then to figure out a way to tell the tale as honestly as he can in his own words and with his own voice. When I look back on all the words gathered within these pages, I’m reminded of the hours spent in front of a computer monitor, pecking away at a keyboard and making bloody messes of the printed copies with a red Sharpie ultra fine tip

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marker. I remember all the lost weekends and sleepless nights working to get it as right as I could. While looking back through these stories, I’ve fought the urge to pick up a red pen and mark up the copy again, rearrange the pieces, and try to improve them. To do so would be like rewriting history, trying to shine up what’s already passed. These are the words I wrote as best I could at the time. I wasn’t able to include everything I wanted in this collection, just as I’ve never been able to include everything I wanted in the stories. But I’ve tried to pick the pieces that best give a sense of the people I’ve met down here in south Louisiana. Aside from one, all of these characters have chosen to call Louisiana their home. Down here, we still battle for last place in every list under the sun. But there’s another story to what life’s like in Louisiana. It’s about people who value work as much as play, who know that they can’t take it with them when they leave. We’re painfully aware of living life close to the bone. And for all the heartache and stupidity and misery there is here, there’s even more heart and courage and soul. All of this plays out on the backdrop of an entrenched and broken political system where the only thing that ever seems to change is the names of the politicians. Maybe that’s why the stories are so poignant. Despite it all, people down here still manage to find a way to create their own stories, to own them, to tell them to one another, and to prove that they still matter. A lot has changed since I first took that job with the Times. After five years there I began writing for the Independent Weekly, which had just started up in Lafayette. And my wife later gave birth to our two children. As I write this, I’m out of the journalism racket altogether and teaching English, writing, and U.S. history at the Episcopal School of Acadiana in Cade, Louisiana.

Preface  •  x

The decade-long journalism chapter of my life may be wrapped up, but I wanted some of these stories in one place for my kids. I want them to know that although newsprint is flimsy and the words are usually forgotten as quickly as the ink hits the page, these people taught me something with their words. And more importantly, I want my children to know that their stories matter—just as much as anyone else’s. I hope you enjoy these words as much as I have. I was blessed to get away with it as long as I did.

xi  •  Preface

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Acknowledgments Thanks to all of the people who are featured in these pages. It takes a huge leap of faith to allow a complete stranger into your life to ask you a grocery list of questions. Thank you for entrusting me to tell your stories. From the moment he barged into my office unannounced for our first interview, Elemore Morgan Jr. proved to me, not just by what he said but by how he lived his life, that a practical life could be balanced with an artistic one, and that both are necessary for some folks, including myself, to live a semi-sane existence. I’m always going to be indebted to him for that. But I dedicate this book to my family. They have lived with these stories, more than anyone else, for the past decade. Heather, you have always been my first, most honest, and most valued reader on everything I’ve written. Thank you and Henry and Bird for all the hours y’all allowed me to sit in front of the computer to shape up my words as best I could. None of it would have ever happened without your love, support, and understanding. On my first newspaper assignment, I rode out to Angola with photographer Terri Fensel. I remember riding up Highway 66, looking past her out the window into a field and seeing a crumbling brick structure overgrown with weeds. For a second, I had profound déjà vu—the combination of driving out to Angola with Terri, seeing that old building, and the feeling that everything was all right and as it should be. Terri and I continued to work together throughout the years, even xiii

after we both left the Times and took jobs with the Independent Weekly. We fed off of each other’s energy trying to tell the same story in our own ways, and it was always a pleasure. Thanks also to Judy Johnson, not just for giving me the job as assistant editor at the Times of Acadiana but also for giving me the space and the time to figure it all out. I had admired Scott Jordan’s writing with Gambit Weekly in New Orleans long before we ever met, but I got to know him while working with him at the Independent. It was comforting to know that someone else was geeking out about writing too, and I’m fairly certain that I’m a better writer for having worked with him. Thanks to publishers Steve May, Cherry Fisher May, and Odie Terry and the rest of the Independent staff, past and present. Thanks also to Craig Gill and the staff at the University Press of Mississippi for seeing this collection all the way through. To Mom—Molly Conn Wiley—for telling me at a very young age never to put my name on anything that I didn’t believe in. It’s a lesson I’ve always remembered and one I’ve tried to adhere to with everything I’ve written. It hasn’t always been easy, especially when I was sometimes assigned to write about subjects I could not have cared less about, but I’ve always tried to write something that I wouldn’t be ashamed of later. I hope it’s worked. Steve Conn, it seems like I’ve always relied on your advice and counsel, for both my stories and my life. Thanks for letting me bend your ear all these years and for listening to my triumphs and tangents. And if I never did tell you, thanks for the Goo-Goo Cluster. Both of them. To Chris Lee—attorney, drummer, thespian, raconteur, and friend: Thanks for looking after my best interests and for helping the court see the grave injustice of that traffic ticket. Thanks to Will D. Campbell for calling me out of the blue Acknowledgments  •  xiv

one Sunday afternoon and telling me to get this book published. There are several people that I want to personally hand a copy of this book to. But since they’re no longer here, I’ll have to settle with simply acknowledging them. To my father, Clea Fuller, who did whatever the hell he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it: Thanks for teaching me that lesson and for never balking when I did the same. I love you and miss you terribly. To my grandmother, Bertie D. Conn, who always encouraged me to pick up the pen and who later did so herself: I learned most of what I know about telling stories from sitting around with you late in the afternoon after school, trading tales and sipping on black coffee. To my grandfather, Leabri Fuller: You could tell a story like nobody’s business, and your laughter shook the walls. To my stepfather, Mike Wiley: I hope this is the book that you said would one day make Mom proud. And to the rest of my family and friends, thanks for putting up with me all these years.

xv  •  Acknowledgments

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Angola to Zydeco

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Angola Bound A criminal justice class visits the nation’s largest maximum security penitentiary and learns the harsh realities of crime and punishment in Louisiana. june 28, 2000

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minous dark clouds lurk in the distance. The tour bus crawls though a field of soybeans, just one of the crops on the eighteen-thousand-acre plantation. The tourists recline in comfortable purple chairs, equipped with overhead air-conditioning controls for each seat. Occasionally they glance at the tour guide at the front of the bus. He speaks into a microphone connected to a loudspeaker and describes the lush forest and fertile fields they pass. “This is some of the most fertile land in all of Louisiana,” he says. “I wish I owned it. It wouldn’t be a prison.” Wilbert Rideau, Prisoner No. 75546, wears faded blue jeans and a white T-shirt with olive green letters: “Human Relations Club—Angola.” A drawing of two opposing hands break through brick walls and meet in the middle of the shirt to shake one another. He is the tour guide—not his usual assignment at the Louisiana State Penitentiary—for forty-eight criminal justice students from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Passing through Angola’s gatehouse and the infinite coils of silvery razor wire perched atop the fences some fourteen feet 3

above their heads, the students enter into another world. It’s a world that must be felt to be understood. No documentary viewed from the comfort of their living rooms can take the place of this experience. They are stripped of their “contraband,” including personal medications, beepers, and cell phones. They may be visitors, but they’re not exceptions. The status quo will be maintained. Since the beginning of Warden Burl Cain’s administration in 1994, these group tours have become common weekday occurrences. College students, wayward teens, even civic organizations, all have ventured through the heavily guarded front gates. It’s a rare glimpse into the nation’s largest and safest maximum security penitentiary. It’s also a view of tax dollars at work, $81 million a year of it to house 5,100 prisoners—86 percent of whom will never return to society. It’s the price for locking up criminals and throwing away the key. Professor Burk Foster has been taking his students on this biannual tour for the last twenty years. It’s one of eight trips they will take during their studies. Says Foster: “I don’t know how you change people’s wrongheaded views about the prison system without showing them.” Cathy Jett, director of classifications for the prison, notes that the warden has allowed the increase in the tours for a few reasons, but mainly because he has nothing to hide. For one, it allows outsiders a glimpse of the reality of life in Angola and, on a larger scale, Louisiana’s penal system. For the prisoners, these tours are an incentive. As long as tranquility is maintained, prisoners will have the privilege of catching glimpses of those who live outside the fences. “You want hope in a prison of this size,” Jett says. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the world, with one in ninety people behind bars. Every year, Louisiana’s penal system grows by another two thousand people. Jett says

Angola Bound  •  4

Angola isn’t experiencing an overpopulation problem, but it is experiencing an aging population. While visiting the prison’s law library, a counsel for fellow inmates informs the students, “Life means life.” It’s a phrase heard repeatedly inside these walls. For a prisoner serving a life sentence in Angola, there is no possibility of parole or probation. The prison houses four hundred inmates over the age of fifty-five, each serving this natural life sentence. That leaves an additional 78.2 percent of the population serving these life sentences who will become senior citizens while doing time in Angola. The prison already spends $12 million annually on medical expenses. Jett points out that as the number of aging prisoners increases, so will that medical budget. Some elderly prisoners’ medical bills already have surpassed $100,000. Still, Angola is considered a bargain by comparison. On average, each prisoner in Angola costs taxpayers $15,882 annually; the yearly national average for housing an inmate is $25,560. The fertile farmland cultivated by the prisoners allows the penitentiary to grow a good deal of the food they consume. The surplus is then sold to other prison systems and commercial food distributors, rendering the prison even more self-sufficient. “We’re doing something right here,” Jett says. “There’s a long tradition of [the administration and the inmates] having to work together.” While the administrator admits that the tours are advantageous for all involved, she also believes that too much attention is focused on Angola—the result of a life of crime. “Why aren’t we paying more attention to the front end of the problem, what gets people into prison?” she asks. “We need to teach kids the value of freedom.” The Annie E. Casey Foundation report, Kids Count 2000, a national composite ranking of the quality of life for children

5  •  Angola Bound

in America released just last week, drives that point home. The study takes into consideration a number of indicators—including economic characteristics, health, education, and child care. Louisiana was ranked the worst state for a child’s quality of life, while Minnesota was ranked the best. Conversely, Minnesota also has the lowest incarceration rate of any of the fifty states. Foster says, “The prison system is a reflection of the quality of life for young people.” Consider these numbers: Of Louisiana’s fourth-graders, 52 percent scored below the basic reading level and 56 percent scored below the basic mathematics level. In Minnesota, those respective numbers were 31 percent and 24 percent. Louisiana’s median income of families with children is $35,100, while Minnesota’s is $55,800. Invariably, during any discussion about whether society should fund education or incarceration, critics question whether there’s a direct correlation between the two. But those who live day in and day out in Angola’s community—from the administrators to the prisoners—consistently refer to the prison in scientific terms. Many dub the facility an “experiment”—a scientific method that has as its hypothesis that incarceration will reduce crime. One rarely, if ever, hears of the conclusion to the experiment—the masses of uneducated, unrehabilitated lives living to die at the taxpayers’ expense. Wilbert Rideau is not only a prisoner in Angola, he is an award-winning journalist and editor of the Angolite, the Louisiana State Penitentiary’s bimonthly newsmagazine. He has been incarcerated for thirty-nine years for a murder he committed during a bank robbery in Lake Charles in 1961. He spent eleven years on Death Row, where he taught himself how to be a writer. He has been referred to on a number of occasions as the most rehabilitated prisoner in America. In the radio documentary entitled “Tossing Away The Keys,” Rideau describes Angola Bound  •  6

life at Angola: “Behind these fences there’s a massive, unprecedented experiment taking place—the state is locking up large numbers of men and throwing away the keys so that they age and eventually die behind bars.” Even the administration isn’t hesitant to allude to Angola in a scientific manner. “This is the biggest laboratory of the human experience,” says Jett. If you ask Burk Foster to interpret the references to science, he will tell you that it’s an experiment because no one knows how it will turn out. These UL students intend on becoming a part of this experiment. They will inherit the legacy of Angola—an increasingly aging population. What isn’t known is how long these conditions will persist and how many employees it will take to maintain the status quo. Camp J is Angola’s outcamp with the tightest security, reserved for those who cannot live in the general population. Each prisoner lives in a sequestered cell. In the background, a prisoner is yelling as he paces up and down a tier of cells. His voice bounces between the cinder block walls, echoing until it’s only a whisper. He reminds the isolated prisoners of the beauty outside these walls, that this life is worth living and that suicide is a chump’s way out. The students are instructed not to get within ten feet of the cells. They are not allowed to talk to the prisoners. They are to walk down the hall, immediately turn around, and return through the gate. After passing through a solid steel door they are outside, though still within the confines of Camp J. The sun is descending. A few clouds are moving in, and the humidity is thick. The smell of rain is in the air. In the distance, subtle thunder commingles with the songs of birds flying over the camp’s walls. The tour is drawing to a close. After passing through a series of four more guarded gates lined with razor wire, they will be outside of Camp J. 7  •  Angola Bound

They pass a triangular exercise yard, enclosed by a fourteenfoot-high fence lined with the razor coils. Rideau points it out to four young women. “You see these?” he asks. “They call them dog pens. That’s where the guys exercise. They let them out here for one hour at a time.” “How many go in one?” asks one of the students. “One,” he says. “One per dog pen at a time. When they exercise, they’re shackled, handcuffed to their wrists. The only thing that’s free is their feet.” “Really?” someone else asks. “Yeah,” Rideau says. “I’d stay inside,” says one student while she continues to stroll out of Angola. “I wouldn’t want to come out.” “What kind of exercise can they do?” another asks. “You can walk around,” he says, “or you can jog. That’s it. That’s all.”

p o st s crip t

A year later, I published a three-part series about Wilbert Rideau and his unusual career. In 1961 he was convicted of the murder of Julia Ferguson. He would be tried and convicted two more times. In December 2000, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans overturned Rideau’s third murder conviction on the grounds that blacks had been excluded from the grand jury that had indicted him. His fourth trial begin on January 10, 2005. Five days later, he was convicted of manslaughter, sentenced to twenty-one years for murder (the maximum allowed by law for manslaughter in 1961), and released on time served after living in Angola for forty-four years.

Angola Bound  •  8

Thanks for the Memories After fifty-six years, Gene’s Food Store in Basile closes its doors for the last time. dece mbe r 27, 2000

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oe Burge looks menacing sitting on a barstool behind the counter. He wears a red T-shirt with large dice and cursive white letters that read, “Hi-Rollers—Beau Knows Zydeco.” Next to the cash register sits an open can of Dr. Pepper and a glass ashtray full of discarded butts. He flicks the ashes from his Marlboro Light into the trash can at his feet. A sawed-off lever from a posthole digger rests against the wall, a deterrent for arguments out in the parking lot. It’s a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon in Basile. The front and back doors are open. Occasionally a breeze sweeps through and slams the back screen door repeatedly. An old radio above the cash register softly bleeds out classic rock hits from KZMZ in Alexandria. A barefoot boy in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt runs through the front door over the worn painted concrete floor to a cooler. A leaf clings to his hair. After retrieving a can of Coke, he makes his way back across the room and places the can and two quarters from his clenched fist on the counter. “Mr. Joe, when’s it going to be the last day?” he asks. “Today’s the last day, boy,” Joe says. He takes his time getting up and looks down over the counter. “I’m going to close 9

this afternoon. You see that big ol’ candy cane over there? Get you one. I’ll give you one.” The boy doesn’t move for a moment, stands frozen as if he doesn’t understand what he’s heard. He turns around and grabs one of the two sticks of candy. “There you go,” Joe says. “That’s yours. Merry Christmas.” The boy cautiously walks out of the half-empty store. He doesn’t say a word and looks back at Joe over his shoulder. In 1944, Joe’s grandfather, Dallas Vizena, bought the little grocery store on the corner of W. Stagg and N. Green avenues. He changed the name to Vizena’s General Mercantile and sold everything from flour to underwear. Joe’s father, Gene Burge, bought the store in 1969 and changed the name to Gene’s Food Store, and ran it until he passed away in 1990. After working in the oil fields, Joe bought the store from his mother that year. For the last decade, the store has been open seven days a week, including holidays, from 6:30 in the morning to 8 at night. After years of trying to keep the business afloat, Joe decided to close the doors for good and to take a job at the Grand Casino Coushatta in Kinder where his wife, Gloria, has worked for the last six years. “Tomorrow will be the first day off I’ve had off in ten years,” Joe says. “I’m going to cook me a steak. Then I’m going to sit in front of the TV and cuss the Saints. I’m going to be like everybody else in Louisiana for a change.” Joe’s son, Brian, walks into the store and tells his father that he’s just stopping by on his way to Lafayette. Before he leaves, Brian pats his father on the shoulder, looks him in the eye, and says, “I’m proud of you, old man.” While Joe admits that it was a painful decision to close down the store, he also sees it as an opportunity. “The family business had a fifty-six-year run. I think that’s pretty groovy. I’m glad I had it. I’m glad my kids had it. But it’s like this: I’m

Thanks for the Memories   •  10

finished with it. It’s time for Joe Burge to live like a normal person—whatever that is.” A few minutes later Gloria arrives with Joe’s lunch, a hamburger with everything from the local Exxon station. When she talks about closing the store, she’s ambivalent. “I’m happy one minute,” she says, “and crying the next. When Joe and I met, this store was here. When we had our first grandchild, this store was here. There are a lot of memories here, a lot to let go of. It’s just time to start a new chapter.” Outside the store, there’s a wail of sirens in the distance. “There must be a bad wreck down the street,” Gloria says and walks outside to the gravel parking lot. Led by a police cruiser, a fire engine crawls down Stagg Avenue, lights flashing and sirens blaring. “It’s Santa!” Gloria exclaims as she looks down the street with a hand shielding her eyes from the sun and the other holding a lit cigarette. “Every year Santa comes to town on the fire truck and makes his way to the American Legion hall. All the kids go there to see him.” The fire engine passes the store and Santa Claus hangs off the back end of the truck, waving. The lucky boy with the free candy cane keeps up with the truck on his bicycle. “I started crying about Santa this morning,” Gloria says. “I’ll never get to see him again from this store.” Eugene “Bugg” Burge, Joe’s brother and an anesthetist at Savoy Medical Center in Mamou, enters the store with his son Jordan. He’s there to help clear off what little is left on the shelves and to help drink a case of Miller Lite when the store closes. They won’t crack a beer, though, until their other brother Brent, a pharmacist at Savoy Medical Center, shows up to help. Joe stands behind the counter and asks Bugg about the

11  •  Thanks for the Memories

ducks he bagged in the morning on his hunting excursion. While they talk, the fluorescent lights overhead dim for a split second and return to normal. “Hey, Bugg” Joe says. “Did you see that?” “What was that?” “It’s been doing that all day. That’s probably old Gene telling us to get out!” While Bugg doesn’t like to see the store close, he says, “I’m glad for Joe. He’s been struggling for the last three years. Everyone’s closing around here, and the economy is supposed to be doing great. We’ve learned a lot of lessons here. I’m not sad about it. It’s all good memories.” Joe adds his economic views: “It’s like when you build a house. You don’t start at the roof. You start at the foundation. For years the foundation of local economies were the momand-pops, but now that’s disappearing. The small town’s foundation is disappearing.” “Joe,” Bugg says, “you need to make a sign that says, ‘I’m gone.’” Joe tears off a piece of butcher paper and writes on it in red marker: Closed for good! I’m living the life of a normal person. Joe aka Dr Feelgood Joe holds the paper up and inspects his work. He places it back on the counter and adds, “Thanks for the memories.” He smiles. “Now it’s done,” he says. Brent pulls up in the parking lot and Bugg yells, “There’s Brent right there. Let’s drink!” While Joe hangs the sign up in the front window, Gloria instructs her daughter, Tracy, to sweep the floor and her sonin-law, Tony, to help divide up the food left on the shelves beThanks for the Memories  •  12

tween the brothers. While they clean, a couple of customers straggle in and Joe hands them each a trash bag, telling them to help themselves. They help themselves as vultures would to a carcass. The shelves are nearly bare. Only a few canned goods, jugs of vegetable oil, and boxes of salt remain. Gloria stands by a deep freezer of ice cream reserved for her grandson Nick and cries. “Gloria, stop that,” Brent says as he sips on a beer. “It’s supposed to be good.” Gloria retorts, “We’re giving this shit away, and they won’t take it all. How are we supposed to sell it?” Everyone laughs, and Joe still stands behind the counter. “Joe, get away from that counter,” Bugg yells. “You don’t have to do that anymore.” “It’s a force of habit,” Joe says. It’s 4:47 p.m., and the lights dim again. “It’s Gene,” Joe says. “It’s time to go.” Bugg instructs the family to get close together for a group hug. With their arms around one another they yell in unison, “1-2-3, Joe!” It’s 5 p.m., and Joe locks up the front doors. The family stands around outside while Joe and Tracy place a long metal bar across the door and padlock it. The wind picks up, and the sun begins to set. The balmy afternoon is turning into a bitterly cold evening. Gloria is still crying when she gets into her car. The family members get into their cars and pull out of the parking lot. Joe wears a baseball cap that reads “Stone Cold” with an embroidered skeleton shooting the bird with both hands. He shows no expression as he hops into his two-tone Chevy 1500 truck and pulls out of the parking lot for the last time. The two bare light bulbs over the front porch blink one more time. 13  •  Thanks for the Memories

Marc of Distinction Marc Savoy talks about growing up, building accordions, slopping pigs, preserving culture, and marketing quality. april 4, 2001 In a field east of Eunice on U.S. 190 sits a large green building surrounded by trees and meandering chickens. If you’re driving sixtyfive miles an hour down the four-lane highway toward town, you might not even notice it if it weren’t for the large white sign with black letters that reads “Savoy Music Center.” Marc Savoy is an imposingly tall man. His voice is a deep baritone and, whether speaking in French or English, his words are terse. His large hands could effortlessly wring the neck of a chicken. Instead, they spend hours connecting reeds, springs, buttons, stops, and bellows into his handmade Acadian accordions. He opened the music store and accordion factory in 1966, but he began laying the foundation in 1965 with the idea that he could operate a successful music store catering to the local Cajun and Creole musicians while still remaining true to his heritage. On average, he constructs nearly one hundred accordions a year. For the last thirtyfive years, he has shown his appreciation for his customers by hosting a Saturday morning jam session at the store. It attracts locals and tourists alike. It’s not uncommon to hear a dozen fiddles accompanying one accordion. The informal setting allows no room for stars and plenty of room for music lovers. 14

Born in 1940 outside of Eunice on his father’s rice farm, Savoy’s view of the world was shaped by observing the sheep, geese, goats, cows, pigs, turkeys, ducks, and chickens that surrounded him. He was also influenced by the older musicians he heard as a child. Hiram Courville, a tenant farmer and accordion player, suggested to his father that he purchase the boy an accordion. “To me,” Savoy has written, “owning an accordion was about as farfetched as owning the moon.” His father purchased his son’s first accordion when he was twelve, a Hohner 114 model from Sears, Roebuck and Co. for $27.50. His accordion arrived a few days before Christmas and on the opening day of dove season. After lunch, the boy declined to go hunting with his father and stayed behind to unpack his accordion. He withdrew into his room and when his father had returned, he had taught himself to play “J’ai Passe Devant Ta Porte.” Today, Savoy’s playing ability is world-renowned, and his handmade accordions are held as the standard for builders to build and players to play. These days, he seldom performs in public, preferring instead to spend his time building accordions and jamming with friends. He rarely grants interviews, believing that the media has “a skewed view, a preconceived notion of what this culture is.” Frustrated by outsiders’ assumptions and perceptions about local culture, he has written several unpublished pieces, including “Ponderings of a Reincarnated Neanderthal” and “An Interview with Myself.” The latter is generally what he provides journalists requesting an interview. It keeps him from having to provide “the answers for their formula,” while still making his thoughts known. “People always misinterpret the things I say,” Savoy says. In the process, he believes the culture ends up being glamorized instead of being understood. In an effort not to misconstrue his intentions, here are his own words from an interview conducted recently in his store.

15  •  Marc of Distinction

D

ennis McGee was a tenant farmer for my grandpa and he and I were much closer buddies than I was with his kids. I had nothing in common with his kids—who I’m friends with now—but in those days they hated Cajun music. All my friends were people like Dennis and Sady Courville or my grandpa. I wasn’t interested with the grandkids. I was interested in the grandparents. I just thought those old people were so amazing. To me they were so much more fun. They were lively. They wanted to play music. They wanted to have a party. They were so interesting. All these other kids wanted to either go to some teeny-bopper hop or go to some stupid ballgame or cheerleader practice or all this other mundane mediocrity. I just couldn’t relate to it. I sure wasn’t interested in sports. I couldn’t understand what the big attraction was. I still can’t understand it. It’s kind of like a parade. I don’t understand what the big attraction is. I went to school with a girl, and she was just such a beautiful creature. I was in her homeroom for five years. She was this real popular girl, beautiful, very active cheerleader. Everybody loved her. I had this big crush on her because she was nice also, and she didn’t even know that I existed, which was perfectly normal. I guess I was a fly on the wall. So about two or three years ago, this woman comes into the store, and she’s from Eunice. Now listen, I spent five years in the same homeroom sitting right close to this girl. She says, “My name is so-and-so.” I recognize her immediately. She says, “Can you help me pick out some Cajun music?” I said, “Sure.” I didn’t say anything. I just played it cool. I said, “You like Cajun music?” She said, “Well, I’m beginning to like it, yeah. But I have a daughter that lives in New York, and she asked that I pick her out some selections because she just really loves it.” Marc of Distinction  •  16

So I helped her and found some CDs for her. As she got ready to leave she says, “Do you play?” I said, “No, I don’t play.” She said, “Where are you from?” I said, “I’m from here.” It made me realize how flipped everything was in those days, how out of it I must have been and a misfit as far as what everybody else was doing. It was very weird growing up and going to school like that, with these kids. I wish there would have been something like nowadays, classes you can go to learn Cajun dance. You can take a course in Acadian history in high school, but in those days none of that existed. I receive letters from my graduating class saying, “We’re having a class reunion. Are you going to come?” I remember one time a guy called me. He said, “Don’t you remember me?” I said, “No, I don’t remember you.” He said, “Are you going to come?” I said, “ I don’t think so.” He said, “Why?” I said, “I didn’t have anything in common with the kids back in ’58. I’m sure I’ll have less now. I don’t mean to be mean, but it’s the truth. I didn’t have anything in common with y’all then, and I’m sure that it’s a lot less now.” I’m not saying that I was better than they were, or that they were right and I was wrong. I’m just saying that I was so different. And in those days, I didn’t have anyone in the ranks to support me. I was a weirdo because I liked that [Cajun music], and nowadays it’s cool to like it. I guess that’s why I have a lot of strong feelings about people who I see that embrace it all of a sudden for the wrong reasons. I don’t think it’s sincerity. I don’t think it’s for the right reasons. I think it’s because now it’s cool and popular. When 17  •  Marc of Distinction

you love something when everybody else hates it, that to me is the real love. It’s for the right reasons, you might say. It was so ridiculous to stigmatize something like that. It was so uncalled for. There was so much energy expended on trying to destroy something that couldn’t be destroyed and should have never been destroyed like they were trying to do. line #> I had no woodworking skills at all. My father was a very talented person. He didn’t have any power tools, though. Only thing he had was a circular saw. And I remember when he bought an electric drill, but all the other tools were just handsaws and a square—maybe a hammer, an ax, and a chisel. That’s pretty much what I built my first accordion with. I’d have to go to Futch and Son, contractors in Eunice. They would do woodworking. I remember they had a big table saw in there, and I went in there and said, “Can I use your table saw?” He said, “Who are you?” I said, “I want to build an accordion.” He looked at me as if, “I’d better call the cops on this guy.” He said, “Well, you can come on Saturdays and use it, but I want you to come with your daddy. I want to talk to him. If you cut your hands off on this thing, I’m not responsible.” He knew my father. So I told that to Daddy. I said, “He’ll let me use his table saw, but you have to come and tell him that you’re not going to sue him.” So I went and cut all the parts out on his table saw. I didn’t even know where the switch was. I don’t know how I still have all my members. It’s a miracle. When I finished, it was so awful looking, and I knew there was no use for me to go meet Sidney Brown in Lake Charles. Even if it would have been seven miles, much less seventy, he wouldn’t have showed me nothing. He was very secretive of that. If I would have had someone to show me just a few basic Marc of Distinction  •  18

things, man, I could have made leaps and bounds. But it was all trial and error, and the information just was not here. No one knew anything about that. No one knew anything about parts or wood. You’d ask the lumber yard for maple. They didn’t even know what that was. Maple syrup they’d heard of, but maple wood? So I made this thing, and it looked like an accordion. I wouldn’t say it was an accordion. It was something that resembled an accordion. It sounded horrible. But I was proud that I had put all this together. It was quite an accomplishment. In retrospect, it was really an accomplishment because I didn’t have any kind of knowledge about that or any woodworking skills. It was all pretty much put together with a baseball bat and a sledge hammer. Even though I was proud of it, I knew that it wasn’t much. I keep looking at this thing and I said, “I got to do this over.” I was just too proud, and I said, “I can do better than that.” To be sure that no one saw it, my father had a barbecue pit that would serve as a trash burner, so one day I said, “OK, in you go, baby.” line #> We always killed a bunch of hogs in the wintertime. Butchering, to me, was the most wonderful day. People would come by with a bottle of whiskey maybe. Those old guys would help my daddy. They’d wake up at the crack of dawn and make a big fire in the yard and get the water started, sip a little whiskey maybe. Boy, they thought they were being so bad. They thought they were really being rowdy drinking a little sip like that. As the dawn would approach and they could see—my father’s eyesight was bad by then—he’d say, “You go shoot the hog.” And man, I’d just said, “Great. Finally. I can pay back now.” I hated those damn things. I said, “Gladly. I’ll kill it. How many do you want me to kill?” 19  •  Marc of Distinction

Plus I liked boudin, cracklins, sausage, and everything else that they’d make. The reason I hated them so much was because of my job, the chores in the afternoon I had to do. We had a lot of chores to do. We’d always raise a lot of pigs, cattle, chickens and geese and turkeys and ducks. And we’d eat all this. It was a big farm. He was in the field with his help, and my job was doing the work. The job that I hated the most was feeding the damn pigs. That is the noisiest bunch of animals when it’s feeding time. They make the biggest commotion, and they’re very vicious. Mean animals, pigs. Very, very mean. In fact, you know, they can bite you. I’ve heard of them eating a baby once. And I just hated these damn pigs. They couldn’t wait to get at the slop. I said to myself, “You son of a bitches, what’s so great about this slop that you just want to fill up on it?” It was half water. There was hardly anything in there. I said, “I’m going to try something.” We fed the chickens corn. I’d go in the barn, and I’d shuck some corn and run it through the grinder and bring them corn. They were so used to eating slop, they wouldn’t even look at the corn. To me—fresh golden pretty clean corn—it looked so much better than slop. They didn’t even touch it, but I’d keep trying. I wanted to see how long it would take them. And finally they did make the switch from the slop to the corn. And they’d even make more racket to get it because they were smart. They are very smart animals. You can train them to do all kind of tricks. I’ve seen people train them for tricks. I said, “I just want to see how long it’s going to take them.” It didn’t take them long, maybe four or five times, and then they wouldn’t even touch the slop. I compare that to people. It’s pretty much the same way. Unless you offer an alternative, nothing ever gets better. Mu-

Marc of Distinction  •  20

sic has changed so much. It’s gotten so watered down, and it doesn’t have the same feeling. I hear all these bands, and I find it so bland and uninspired. Maybe it’s technically very good, but it still doesn’t hit you hard. It’s cold. It’s lacking something. I don’t know what that something is. I don’t know if I could find a definition in English. There might be a Latin word that would define that. If you can get people to all think alike and look alike, it’s easy to sell them the same product. It’s easy to reach them. It’s easy to control them. It’s easy to dictate to them what they should have. It’s easy to control their life for one fundamental reason—money. It’s all because of money. And I think that’s what the media is doing with us and the way we look, the way we dress, what we eat, what we want to smoke, what we want to drink, what we want to listen to. It’s affecting the whole world that everybody wants to be the same and I think it’s an indoctrination process. As I said, because of one little simple reason. It’s because of money. If they can’t make money, if they can’t make you think a certain way, they can’t sell you their product, or it’s easier to sell you their product if they can make you think a certain way. I think that’s what this is about. I think they just want to homogenize everybody for the sake of making it easier to reach us. And it’s definitely, surely not because they love you so much. It’s because they want your buck. Ann [his wife] says, “You could have offered an alternative.” And I really can’t. I can’t get out there and play. I’ve played music for so many years, and I got fed up with it. I got fed up with what the audience wanted. I got fed up with just the logistics of playing. I love to play music, but I don’t like to start worrying about a P.A. system, and I don’t want all this gadgetry. I see so many musicians nowadays that are so enam-

21  •  Marc of Distinction

ored with all this gadgetry, this electronic stuff, and all these amplifiers. Which is all right if you want to play in the big, big audiences. But personally, I just love to sit down with a bunch of friends and jump on your instrument and play it without all this hooking up and worrying about setting up a P.A. system. I don’t like to worry about the logistics of it, like in public places and on a professional level where you have to be there at a certain time. I like to play here on Saturday mornings because you play a few tunes, you go socialize, you drink some coffee, you come back and you maybe pick up a different instrument. It’s fun. It’s a fellowship involved in it. It’s a friendly situation like an old house dance. This is what I try to create here on Saturday morning, an old-time house dance. Ann sometimes tells me—and she is correct—“You could have taken a more active role in the public eye and offered an alternative.” Because we only play three piece. We play guitar, fiddle, and accordion. We don’t have any steel guitar. We don’t have any electric bass. We don’t have drums. We make, I think, great music. It doesn’t have all the kilowatts and the instrumentation that everybody else has, but you can hear it. You can pick out the pieces, and you can pick out the different instruments. You can hear it and pick out the different notes. It’s not all covered up with a bunch of big, tornado-like sounding music. But I just can’t. I keep telling her that, I just can’t. I don’t play festivals around here. I just don’t really care to go out there and do that anymore. I’ve done so much of that before and, like I said, I got pretty much fed up with it. I still love music. So the only thing that I can do, the only crusading I can do is via maybe writing about something that I think needs to be written about. It’s too bad that sometimes people find offense in some of the things that I say. Like I have friends of mine who are involved with the Mardi Marc of Distinction  •  22

Gras associations around here in different towns—personal friends of mine who are involved with certain, different Mardi Gras associations. I was talking to one of my friends with a Mardi Gras group, and I was telling him how I thought their Mardi Gras sucked. He said, “Well, why? We had a huge crowd.” I said, “Yeah. I know you did, but does anybody know what’s going on?” It’s all people from away from here that come down from God knows where. People from as far as Arkansas and west Texas. They come with these huge trailers for three or four days travel with their horses to come down. So all it means to them is a trail ride and they pay twenty dollars. And some of these organizations, these Mardi Gras associations, have made a ton of money selling tickets. But what are you selling? I think you’re selling admission to this thing, but you’re selling out your culture and your heritage because you’ve diluted it to the point where none of these people that are coming here have a clue as to what they’re here for. They know that they need a costume to run. They don’t know why. They’re going to drink until they can’t hardly sit in the saddle anymore, and they’re going to get drunk and they’re going to fall off their horse. It’s just a big bash. And I’m not against that because I sure love to drink and make merry also. If you sell tickets to an opera, you’re going to get people who like opera. If you sell tickets for mud wrestling, you’re going to get people who like mud wrestling. So what you’re selling depends upon what kind of clientele you’re going to get. I’m a firm believer—in fact it’s what I’ve based my success business-wise in the last thirty-five years—that there’s always going to be a market for quality. If you sell a cheap version of the culture, if you sell a watered-down snake-pit Hollywood/ Nashville style of your culture—that’s the people that you’re 23  •  Marc of Distinction

going to get to come over here and to take part of it, to look at and to participate in it. Whereas if you sell the real thing you’re going to get a totally different class of people. I think that’s what all of these associations have to look at. All of these people who are trying to impose so many of these parallels to Nashville and Hollywood with our culture. The Grammys this, the Grammys that. Well, this is not Hollywood, and these things should not be done because it gives a false sense about what this culture is all about. Look at the Grammys. I turn the television on every once in a while and look at the people, the degree of talent, who are getting Grammys on these things. My God! What is their claim to fame? Why are they getting these Grammys? They can’t sing. Well, she might have a pretty little behind. Her clothes are transparent, and you can see everything she’s got to offer. You know what she’s selling. They don’t stop and realize that we have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful culture that we can continue selling. And the thing about it is, it’s the sustainability of it, the longevity of it that counts. It’s the same parallel with technology. If the byproduct of our technology today is such that it destroys the planet, then what is the use of the frickin’ technology? What good has it done? And whatever you’re selling to these people, you’re selling your heritage and you’re going to water it down to the point where no self-respecting person wants to touch it with a ten-foot pole. What about the future? How are you going to get people to come run Mardi Gras? There won’t be a Mardi Gras anymore. I would personally prefer to see the culture preserved in some kind of traditional way and in a sustainable way that this can act for future generations, for the rest of time and make a bit of money. There’s nothing wrong if the tourist industry wants to make money on that. But the main thing is if they Marc of Distinction  •  24

want to keep it as a tourist attraction, you better not destroy it. Because if you allow it to be destroyed, then you lose the culture, and you lose the attraction as a tourist industry. I think those things need to be addressed. Just what are we selling? Are we really making money, or are we destroying what we set out to preserve? I think those are issues. It’s kind of like when I was in grade school. Nobody wants to think along those lines. The color green is a bright color, man. It’s hard. It’s hard when you’re making twenty, thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars on the Mardi Gras run. It’s hard for me to go over and say, “Hey, are you doing this right?” And they’re going to say, “Well, look at all the money. Look at the sack of money we made on it.” “Yeah, but how much did it really cost you to make that money?” I really believe that there will always be a market for quality. Your clientele depends exactly upon what you’re selling. If you sell crap, you’re going to get interested people who want to buy crap.

25  •  Marc of Distinction

Line of Vision Elemore Morgan Jr. has shared his unique way of seeing with the world for decades. april 18, 2001

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lemore Morgan Jr. sees the fine line between the rice fields and the sky above him. You can call it the horizon. He’ll tell you that it’s where our planet ends and where the limitless universe begins. For more than four decades, Morgan has been blurring that delicate line and exploring the soil and the sky that compose it. “They all deal with a similar theme,” he says, “which is the curvature of the earth. That’s really what this is about for me. One reason why I love the prairie is the meeting of the edge of the earth and the sky as we see it. We call that the horizon line, the sun going down. We really are seeing the edge of our planet, and then you’ve got all this atmosphere around it. The way those two things meet is very exciting to me. I never get tired of it.” Morgan is known for his images of the rice fields around Kaplan and Maurice. The vibrant, saturated acrylic paintings on pieces of Masonite reflect the intensity of the heat and humidity of the Acadia and Vermilion parish rice fields. They are images of vast open spaces, dynamic skies, imposing buildings, and reflective waters. They are more than documents of

26

the southwest Louisiana landscapes. They are reminders of what this land feels like and who we are in relation to it. Morgan was born in 1931 in Baton Rouge. He was the only child and raised on his grandfather’s farm. Today the farm no longer exists. The stretch down Essen Lane is covered with an Albertson’s, a hospital, restaurants, and office buildings. For Morgan, this piece of land sparked his creativity. “I call it the nature/man ratio,” he says. “If you have more nature and less man, it’s going to have a certain effect on you. If you live in the city and you hardly see the sky, you’re going to think different. From growing up on that family farm and getting a real strong dose of nature, I need it to function. I also find that I’m in much better shape mentally if I’m out in nature on a regular basis.” His father, Elemore Morgan Sr., was a major influence on his decision to become an artist. He worked at several professions, including farming, until he realized his true calling as a photographer in the middle of his life. “My father had a very good eye,” he says. For Morgan, seeing is more than the act of viewing. It’s the beginning of understanding. Visually, we may be intrigued by his use of colors in his paintings, the odd form of the Masonite, or his use of space. But on a visceral level, his work reminds us of the vastness of the universe and our small part within it. It acknowledges our minute role in the play, while realizing the significance of it, and celebrating our connection to the whole. It is a conflicting personal experience of humility and revelry. “So much of what we do,” he says, “comes from our own personal vision. It’s how you see things. Most people go through life and never really know how much they’re missing. Once you start seeing, you start to see all kinds of stuff around you that you’ve been missing.”

27  •  Line of Vision

Morgan graduated from LSU with a degree in fine arts. He then served for two years as a supply officer during the Korean War. With his savings from his service and the GI Bill, he attended the Ruskin School of Fine Arts at the University of Oxford in England. He toured and painted while in Europe and returned to Louisiana in 1957, moving to Lafayette to work with longtime friend and architect Neil Nehrbass. He refers to these years as the “monastic years.” It was during this time that money was scarce and making a living solely as an artist was difficult. But Morgan has no regrets. “If you think you want to be an artist,” he says, “you need to pay attention to that, wherever it may lead you. It may not lead you exactly where you think, but I’m absolutely convinced that you pay attention and trust your own vision wherever it leads you. It is kind of uncertain, but boy, I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t really want to live any other way. It’ll kill you to try to run away from it.” In 1965 he took the position of art instructor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, at the time known as Southwestern Louisiana Institute. He continued to hold that position until he retired in 1998. Today Morgan has more time to himself to spend in the rice fields and to expand his vision. His work continues to mature and to blur the line between earth and sky.

Line of Vision  •  28

Down Home with Buckwheat Visiting with Stanley Dural Jr. at his home in Carencro. july 11, 2001

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ex greets you with an uncertain look in his eyes. He’s either going to go straight for your jugular, or he’s going to lick you to death. His eyes are pools of blue and gray like a cat’s eye marble with a tiny black dot in the middle. He has short gray hair and pointed ears. He looks like he’s half Catahoula cur and half coyote. He jumps up and throws his front paws on you and with a quick flick of his tongue, bathes your cheek in warm slobber. There are half a dozen puppies and their small mother on the welcome mat in front of the house’s side door. You lean over them and ring the doorbell. An iron alligator sits on the ground, guarding the door with its open jaws. The ground is wet from the rain the night before. There are a few clouds in the sky and the summer sun might dry out the grass by afternoon. The Spanish-style ranch house sits in the middle of seven acres of a fertile pasture. A white wooden fence surrounds the fields and divides them into sections. The base of the tree trunks are painted white. There’s a red stable

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behind the house with an orange ’78 Ford F100 custom pickup truck parked next to it. When the master of the house answers the door, he looks like Buckwheat Zydeco. He looks exactly like that cat, with his eyeglasses and his broad, warm smile—the man who played “Jambalaya” at the close of the 1996 Summer Olympics and was seen on television in roughly three billion homes around the world; who played for President Bill Clinton at both of his inaugurations; who performed with the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July in 1998 on the A&E network; who’s been nominated for a Grammy Award four times; who’s shared the stage with Willie Nelson, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Gregg Allman, Dwight Yoakam, Jimmy Buffett, John Hiatt, Bonnie Raitt, and countless others; who’s recorded sixteen albums within the last twenty years; and who’s been on David Letterman, NBC, MTV, CBS, and the BBC. Stanley Joseph Dural Jr. is that man, but today he’s taking a break from being Buckwheat Zydeco and being out on the road. There’s still work for him to do, and he’s taking care of his personal business at home in Carencro. Today you’re Stan’s guest, just popping in for a cup of coffee and a visit. line #> As he pours a cup of coffee for you, he’s rattling off all the things that need to be done within the next week before he hits the road for the entire summer. He talks with the same speed that his fingers exhibit when he’s playing his piano accordion. The accordion needs a checkup and a tuning. The van needs to be checked out and serviced by the dealership. If the grass ever dries out, he needs to get on his tractor and mow it. On the other side of the kitchen in the breakfast nook, Zydeco the talking parakeet is whistling, looking for atten-

Down Home with Buckwheat  •  30

tion. If you prompt him, the bird can say “Buckwheat Zydeco.” If you tell him to call the dogs, he’ll whistle for them. “He’s trying to learn the Andy Griffith song,” Stan says, “and he’s almost got it down.” When you walk by his cage, the bird catcalls you. In the corner of the living room, the television is set to the Weather Channel. “How about this weather?” he asks. Two of the walls are glass, with a view of the front and back of the property. The room is filled with Victorian-style furnishings, including antique chairs, a sofa and an upright piano. Stan isn’t wearing shoes, and he’s dressed in a white T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He sits in one of the chairs with his cup of coffee and a nicotine inhaler in his hand. He quit smoking two years and hasn’t touched one since. He makes a joke about Lee Zeno, his bass player and the backbone of his band. “You know what Lee told me the other day? He told me he was going to quit smoking . . . when they stopped making Kool cigarettes!” He laughs. Stan’s wife, Bernite, walks into in the room and hugs you, tells you it’s so good to see you. She makes her way to the television and turns the volume down. “Leave that on,” Stan says. She walks back to the couch. “He always has to have something going on in the background. He can’t stand it to be quiet.” line #> Stan opens the door to the tack room of his stable. He plugs the portable radio into an electrical outlet and turns up the volume. Gospel music fills the stable. Three of the stalls have been converted into a massive bird cage and about five dozen pigeons and some pheasants are flying around.

31  •  Down Home with Buckwheat

Stan steps into the pen with their feed. He yells, “It’s almost like that movie The Birds!” He’s right. The birds’ beating wings are disturbing and hypnotic. Their cooing is barely audible over their flapping clatter. He has some thirty dogs, including beagles, Pomeranians, and mutts. There are also rabbits, guineas, ducks, chickens, geese, and turkeys. Every morning he feeds the animals. If he’s out on the road, Bernite does the chores. It can take up to an hour and a half just to feed them and check on them. At one time, he had thirty sheep on the farm. “It was like having a mowing machine,” he says. There are at least a dozen cars and a tour bus in the yard. One of them and a van appear to be in running condition. The purple and silver bus sits neglected, grass growing up around the tires. He’s been taking the van out on the road lately. The bus is just too much to handle. He says with a smile that riding in the van just brings the band closer together. Stan looks over to his truck. “That’s my baby,” he says. “I love this old truck.” One of these days he’s going to build a shop in the back corner of his property and start restoring the cars. They’re shells of the cars they once were. But when Stan looks at them, he sees their potential, what they’re capable of being. There’s his 1965 Ford Fairlane, a ’62 Cadillac Fleetwood, a ’74 Cadillac El Dorado, a ’37 Chevy, a ’77 Ford LTD, a ’60 Lincoln Continental Mark V, a ’36 Olds, and a ’69 Dodge Charger. He’s a mechanic at heart. Once when he was in Columbus, Ohio, he ran into Albert Collins, who has having trouble with his tour bus. Stan looked at it and fixed it by replacing the missing alternator belt. line #> What you would call his office, Stan calls “my space.” A large desk occupies a third of the room, along with two small sofas Down Home with Buckwheat  •  32

and a television. Artwork given to him by fans hangs on the wall. There are photos of him and his family and the people he’s met in his travels. There’s Fats Domino, Dennis Quaid when he was filming Great Balls of Fire, Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Ed Bradley, Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, and a shot of himself on stage with his pet raccoon, Tina, resting on his shoulder. You ask him why he decided to record his latest album, Down Home Live!, his second release on his own recording label, Tomorrow Recordings, at El Sid O’s in Lafayette. “This is home, man,” he says. “This is where I come from. I can’t be something that I’m not. I’m not from New Orleans. I’m from right here. I grew up over there, and I can’t forget that.” While you’re relaxing in “the space,” sinking down into the overstuffed couch, you ask him to play some accordion for you. He almost jumps at the chance to play. He opens the case for his white Philharmonic accordion and says, “Man, I love playing with this thing.” You sit outside with him, and he sits on the tailgate of his beloved pickup. He plays the accordion, but he doesn’t sing. He doesn’t even play entire songs. He just moves effortlessly from one melody into another. The dogs are howling, and you can hear the geese squawking on the other side of the stable. He doesn’t hear anything except for what he’s playing. And you might as well be invisible because he doesn’t see you. He’s far too busy paying attention to his soul and what it tells his fingers to do. You’ve stayed too long, but he hasn’t made you feel that way. He’s made you feel at home, at his home. He shakes your hand, and you can feel the warmth and the strength in it. He’s made you feel like you’re a part of his family. He’s made you feel like you’re siblings in one large extended family.

33  •  Down Home with Buckwheat

Inside Santy’s Studio At ninety-four, Santy Runyon can still swing an ax. february 6, 2002

H

e can tell you the story behind every ax resting at his feet or he could go into detail about all the cats he’s played with, but Santy Runyon would much rather just blow. At ninety-four years old, he’s at the age where whenever “I go into a restaurant and order three-minute eggs, they make me pay up front.” But it doesn’t show. He wears a red baseball cap with a fishing hook attached to the bill. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses, his bright eyes follow the notes on the sheet music in front of him, and his fingers run up and down the keys of his alto saxophone. He blows into one of the mouthpieces manufactured by Runyon Products, a company he created more than sixty years ago with only an idea and a piece of chewing gum. Runyon’s small studio sits in the back yard of his modest home in a quiet neighborhood in Lafayette. A plaque on the studio door reads “Santy’s Studio.” The room is full of woodwind instruments, mouthpieces, music, and stories. The pegboard walls are covered with framed and signed photos from the likes of Jimmy Dorsey, Betty Grable, Harry Carney, Alvin Batiste, and Edgar Winter. In between playing his seven alto saxophones, two tenor saxophones, a baritone saxophone, four soprano saxophones, 34

a clarinet, three flutes, and an alto flute, Runyon recently reflected on his life—a life that’s always been filled with music. “You see,” he says, “I’ve got a story connected with everything.” line #> Before he was Santy, he was born Clinton Runyon in Chanute, Kansas, in 1907. He was raised in the small town of Barnsdall, Oklahoma,—Osage Indian country—where he learned to ride ponies bareback and about music. When he was six, he took up the violin. His sister, June, was only two years older, and she altered the direction of his musical studies when she shut a car door on his pinky finger. It was a Saturday night in Barnsdall and “the only doctor they could find was stoned, and he sewed it on crooked.” His father was an engineer in the oil fields, but he dreamed of owning his own movie theater. The elder Runyon even traveled to nearby schools with his gasoline-powered projection gear on a horse-drawn wagon. He would present the silent films on a white sheet for students in the school’s auditorium, until the day the generator caught fire and consumed itself. One time he tried to show the movies in a tent and a cyclone rolled through town and took his gear with it. On his seventh attempt, he established a movie house in Barnsdall. At the age of eight Runyon began his musical career. In the pit of his father’s darkened movie theater. His father instructed the fiddler of the small orchestra to teach his son to play the drums “or I’ll get myself a new damn fiddle player in here.” Runyon was a trap drummer, providing the beat for the other musicians and the sound effects for the silent pictures. During scenes of rain, he rattled a large piece of tin to mimic thunder. He also imitated birds whistling, trains chugging, cows bellowing, and guns firing whenever William S. Hart or Hoot Gibson fired their weapons on the screen. Runyon was a bright child and managed to skip two grades 35  •  Inside Santy’s Studio

in elementary school, much to his older sister’s dismay. At the age of ten, he picked up the saxophone and taught himself to play. When he was eleven, he read about the Bernoulli Effect and how it applied to aviation. Bernoulli, a sixteenth-century Swiss scientist, observed that when air flowed horizontally, an increase in the speed of the flow resulted in a decrease in the static pressure. In other words, when air moves faster it exerts less pressure than slower moving air. The Bernoulli Effect would later be used in designing the airfoil of airplanes. The shape of an airplane wing is designed so that air flowing over the wing travels faster than the air flowing under the wing, which means there is less pressure on the top than on the bottom of the wing. The increased pressure on the bottom of the plane creates lift, allowing it to leave the ground. Runyon wondered how the effect might affect his horn. He took a piece of chewing gum, shaped it into a small hump resembling a miniature version of the top portion of an airfoil and placed it within the mouthpiece of his sax. The slight hump increased the flow of air going through the mouthpiece and made the instrument louder. For years, he closely guarded the secret of his chewing gum–modified mouthpiece. It was while Runyon was attending the University of Missouri in Columbia that he made another important discovery. In 1928 he was performing at Samson’s Café in Columbia in exchange for two meals a day. One afternoon a young college professor came into the café and told him, “You’re not getting the right sound out of that saxophone.” In the professor’s lab, Runyon saw the first electric musical instrument, the theremin. The device looks more like a piece of furniture than it does a musical instrument. It’s a box with two antennae extending from it, one horizontally and the other vertically. The player of the instrument never touches it Inside Santy’s Studio  •  36

to get sound out of it. Instead he moves his hands toward and away from the rods. One rod controls the pitch and the other controls the volume of the instrument. To Runyon, it sounded a lot like a musical saw. The professor had built a device that allowed him to control the pitch of the instrument and produce precise pitches from the theremin. Runyon and the professor took the mouthpiece of a saxophone and cut it down to the shank. Where the reed of the instrument was normally placed, they devised a small speaker that was connected to the theremin. When the theremin produced the pitch of A at 880 hertz through the modified mouthpiece, all the notes on the saxophone could then be played, without a reed vibrating on the mouthpiece. These led Runyon to another conclusion. “Well, the damn thing’s not a vacuum,” he says. “You don’t have to blow it full of air. It’s already full of air. You just have to set the air in motion that’s already in the instrument.” Runyon devised a teaching technique that he continues to use today. If the player can play the pure note that his mouthpiece is intended to play, detached from the instrument, then he can play any note on his horn well. While working on his undergraduate degree at Oklahoma A&M, Runyon managed to support himself by putting together and performing in different bands. He made enough money to also dress well for the times, sometimes even better than his brothers in his Kappa Alpha fraternity. His friends constantly borrowed his new threads, prompting one of his fraternity brothers to comment, “Well, you’re just a regular Santy Claus, aren’t you?” The name stuck. Although Runyon may have been looking good while playing, he also understood the importance of a musical education. He says, “Most of the jazz players didn’t go to school. They thought that was a dirty word—to read music. You weren’t supposed to be able to play jazz if you could read music. That’s 37  •  Inside Santy’s Studio

what a lot of them thought. Man, if I wouldn’t have been able to read music, I wouldn’t have been able to keep my job.” From 1931 until 1942, Runyon played with the seventyfour-piece Chicago Theater Orchestra. He was making $150 a week. It was a time when public address systems weren’t yet commonplace and playing well was just as important as playing loud enough so the people in the balcony could hear you. He says, “You had better have some chops to play seven shows a day.” It was there that he met his future wife. She was a dancer who would come in to watch the other dancers in the show perform. Runyon spied her sitting on the front row. line #> Runyon’s résumé is as impressive as his playing abilities. He’s played with Betty Grable, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. He has also taught some of the jazz world’s best players, including Sonny Stitt, Paul Desmond, Lee Konitz, Bill Page, and Charlie Parker “before he got on that dope kick.” In the early fifties Cab Calloway and Lawrence Welk hired saxophone sections for their bands that were composed entirely of Runyon’s students. He designed the first woodwind mouthpieces for the J.J. Babbit Company, but he did not design them with his secret lump of chewing gum. He saved his secret until 1938, when he designed his own mouthpieces. He sold his first one for a baritone sax to Bruce Bronson, who was playing with Tommy Dorsey’s band at the Panther Room of the Sherman Hotel in Chicago. Runyon says it was the first time anyone could hear Bronson playing. He was soon flooded with hundreds of orders. In the early 1960s Runyon moved Runyon Products to Opelousas. Today the company employs thirteen people and sells mouthpieces to companies all over the world, including

Inside Santy’s Studio  •  38

Israel, Italy, Singapore, South America, “and every other place you can think of.” Runyon says, “I think I’ve made some good mouthpieces.” They are made of 40 percent synthetic rubber and 60 percent acrylic. “This costs me $4 a pound,” he says. “I’m not making cheap stuff.” Runyon Products was also the first company to manufacture mouthpieces in colors other than the standard black. “Why do they all have to be black?” he asks. “The red is for playing hot, you see. The blue is for playing the blues.” But does the color of the mouthpieces really affect anyone’s ability to play? “I don’t think so,” Runyon says with a laugh. Another one of his inventions is the spoiler, a small metal reed that can be wedged into the mouthpiece. It acts as another reed and increases the volume of the instrument. Runyon says it helps the saxophonist performing rock numbers to keep up with the amplified guitars. Runyon says, “We’re always coming up with something different and something new.” His newest design was introduced January 7. The Jaguar Jazz “V” Chamber mouthpiece is designed for the saxophonist looking for a deeper sound and a mellower tone. When looking directly into the mouthpiece, there is a V-shaped groove where the small hump usually is in Runyon’s mouthpieces. He says the mouthpiece gives the horn “a darker sound with that depth of tone and a big sound without sacrificing the volume altogether.” While Runyon has been busy throughout the years playing, teaching, and designing mouthpieces, he’s still managed to be a family man. He’s the father of four daughters, all of whom were “first chair players” in the band while growing up. He’s also a proud grandfather, but he laughs when asked how many grandchildren he has. “I don’t know,” he says. “I have several great-grandchildren, too. And that’s nice. Very nice.” He still teaches in his spare time. He met one of his stu-

39  •  Inside Santy’s Studio

dents, who lives in Singapore, through the Internet. For the last eight months Runyon has been giving him lessons over the phone. He continues to teach students how to get the perfect tone and he does so willingly and usually free of charge, giving credence to his moniker. He says before a student picks a woodwind instrument, “they better come to me and get started right.” With his mouthpieces, “now they don’t have to worry about the tone. The tone will be there.” He also continues to stress the importance of a musical education in a young person’s development. He thinks sports are fine for kids, but “it would be good for them if they would do both. What are you going to do after you get too old to play baseball? Look at me. I’m making a living. You can’t play football all the time. You’re bound to have some other interests.” Runyon is keeping busy playing, teaching, designing, and making plans for his ninety-fifth birthday party. It’s become an annual tradition at Antlers in Downtown Lafayette on April 18. So what’s his secret to a long life? “Two bourbon and Cokes every evening. Never three,” he says with a laugh. He says at his age, he deserves it, but he never really has been one to drink anyway. “You can’t do it and take care of a good job,” he says.

p o st s crip t

Santy Runyon died on April 4, 2003. He was ninety-five years old and just two weeks away from his ninety-sixth birthday.

Inside Santy’s Studio  •  40

A Fighting Chance The federal farm bill could turn Louisiana’s cockfighters into felons. march 20, 2002

I

t’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, perfect weather for La Grande Boucherie des Cajuns. The pink cheeks of children are painted with butterflies, rainbows, and clouds. The adults wear sunglasses and grip plastic cups and beer cans. Most of them are decked out in Mardi Gras beads, some the size of walnuts. Under one of the oaks, there’s a large circular trampoline frame wrapped with wire. Next to it are four caged roosters. They scratch at the leaves under their feet and peck at the ground. Behind the gathering crowd, a band sets up on a flatbed trailer. A heavy man in green shorts, a matching T-shirt, and a worn Adidas sun visor parts the crowd. He cradles a rooster with his right arm and strokes the bird’s feathers with his free hand. Behind him a smaller man holds another rooster, stroking it the same way. He’s dressed in denim, a leather hat, and cowboy boots. The roosters have small gloves, a red pair and a yellow pair, strapped to their spurs with rubber bands. Inside the ring, the man in denim scratches out two lines in the grass with the heel of his boot. Both men face one another. They extend the birds at arm’s length—close enough that the 41

birds could kiss—and then quickly bring them back to their chests. They do this several times, letting each bird get a good look at its opponent. They place the roosters on the ground behind the lines and let them loose. The roosters flare their hackles, spread their wings, and go at each other, striking with their beaks and their miniature boxing gloves. Donnie Landry has brought his wife and two young children out to the park to enjoy the festivities. He isn’t a cockfighter. He’s a thirty-seven-year-old diesel mechanic, a slender man with blond hair and a thin goatee, wearing a pair of shades and a baseball cap. He hoists his one-year-old son onto his shoulder to see the action. “You see ’em?” he asks. The child nods his head. Landry says to no one in particular, “That bird’s got a lot of heart.” What does that mean, for a chicken to have heart? “They stand their ground,” Landry says. “They won’t give up. If they go down, they come back up. As long as they’re alive, they’ll keep fighting.” Cockfighters call it gameness. It’s a gamecock’s ability to remain standing and fight, even until the bitter end. A cock that shows gameness and dies first in a fight can still be declared the winner. “It’s just like boxing,” Landry says. “To see which one is the strongest, like racing or kickboxing. You don’t want to be in it, but you love to see the action.” From the flatbed trailer, Lenny Kravitz sings over the P.A. system, “Are You Gonna Go My Way.” A bald man yells, “C’mon, Red! C’mon, big boy!” “Put him in the gumbo!” a young man yells. Another man yells, “C’mon, Red! Show him your heart!” After three fights with three rounds apiece, the crowd A Fighting Chance  •  42

moves on to the rest of the day’s events—the butchering of a pig, a greased pig chase, and the Squeal Like a Pig contest. The bass player on the flatbed trailer plays the bass line of Black Sabbath’s “N.I.B.” Landry isn’t aware of the farm bill recently passed by the U.S. Congress. If President George W. Bush signs the bill into law, it will increase subsidy programs and spending for conservation programs, while restricting how much money a farmer can receive. Part of the bill will make transporting fighting roosters across state lines a felony. “You know how long this has been going on?” Landry says. “This is one of the first forms of entertainment they ever had.” Page Smith and Charles Daniel write in The Chicken Book that cockfighting is “the oldest sport known to man.” The modern game fowl is believed to be descended from the Indian red jungle fowl. From ancient India the sport spread to Persia and China. It was introduced in Greece around the sixth century B.C. The ancient Greeks fought and used cocks for religious purposes. Young men were required to attend the fights to learn about courage and fortitude. In 186 A.D., St. Augustine wrote about a cockfight in De Ordine. He wondered why the birds fought with one another and why humans were so fascinated with the spectacle. He was struggling with the existence of evil in a world ruled by a loving God. He concluded that without evil, there would be no good in the world, that the ugly confirms the beauty in our lives. In England, under the reign of King Henry VIII, cockfighting flourished. It was primarily a rich man’s sport. The high entry fees usually kept the common man from entering his cocks, but it was the poor who cared for the birds. In 1834 Parliament declared cockfighting illegal. Smith and Daniel write, 43  •  A Fighting Chance

“In the long run it made little difference. The world did not seem to improve very much and cockfighting went on rather as before. In England, as elsewhere, it was to prove ineradicable.” Cockfighting is still common in France, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Belgium, Spain, Haiti, Italy, and Southeast Asia, where the sport holds religious and cultural overtones. Today, the Philippines is considered the cockfighting capital of the world. Sunset, north of Lafayette, is considered the cockfighting capital of the nation. In the United States, cockfighting was widespread throughout the South by the early 1700s. There was a new justification for the sport that the British hadn’t considered—its democracy. Smith and Daniel write, “The wealthy sportsman who wished to participate did so on the terms of the common man, the small hardscrabble farmer, the rancher of modest means, the cowboy or hired hand, the drifter, the mechanic.” It’s rumored that Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson raised game fowl and that President Abraham Lincoln’s nickname “Honest Abe” came from his fairness as a referee of cockfights. In the United States, cockfighting is legal only in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Despite the sport being an illegal activity virtually everywhere, Daniel and Page note that cockfighting is “almost everywhere forbidden and almost everywhere practiced.” On February 13 the U.S. Senate passed a farm bill that prohibits the transportation of fighting roosters across state lines. The House passed its version of the bill last year. Federal law already prohibits the shipping of animals for fighting purposes, but birds can still be shipped to Louisiana, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, where cockfighting is still legal; and cockfighters in the legal states can ship their birds out of their

A Fighting Chance  •  44

state to other parts of the world. If the farm bill is signed into law, it will make it a felony to transport fighting fowl across state lines, even to the states where it’s legal. Nolan Dugas is a cockfighter who isn’t worried about the pending federal legislation. “They’re not going to stop us,” he says. “They’ve been trying for years and years.” Cockfighting is in Dugas’s blood. His father fought roosters, and he’s been doing it for as long as he can remember. At age sixty-five he’s a grandfather, with three grown children and three grandchildren. He worked for Evangeline Maid Bread for eighteen years before retiring. Then he worked another twenty years for Community Coffee Company before retiring a second time. These days he only works for his chickens. Dugas is a man of few words, with a penetrating stare and a thick Cajun accent. Dressed in a black hat and flannel shirt, he yells to be heard over the twenty-five cocks crowing like it’s dawn in his back yard. The roosters are separated in individual cages. They strut around in circles, each one acting as if it’s the rightful ruler of the yard. Dugas spends about $300 a month keeping the birds healthy. He has to make sure that their cages are mended and that the birds are well fed. He feeds them vitamins, deworming medication, and “the best feed on the market”—a diet of corn, wheat, barley, and oats. He says, “A rooster will only give you in the pit what you give him at home.” The money he spends isn’t an investment, though. It’s just an expenditure of his hobby. He’s lucky if he breaks even in the long run and doesn’t mind losing the money. The enjoyment he gets out of raising, training, and fighting the roosters is compensation for the financial loss. He knows that there are those who object to his hobby, but

45  •  A Fighting Chance

“I don’t have nothing to hide, me. Maybe they just think it’s cruel.” He says cockfighting is like fishing or hunting and it’s “no crueler than killing a dove with a shotgun.” Like other cockfighters, Dugas enjoys “testing” his roosters with other game fowl breeders. He likes to go on Sunday afternoons. On a Friday or Saturday night there could be as many as three to four hundred people packed into one cockpit. Dugas tries to ignore the nights like that. “It’s too much,” he says. line #> On the first Sunday afternoon of Lent, it already feels like spring. Inside the M&M Cockpit, a gray metal building outside of Rayne, a couple dozen men—white, black, and Hispanic— stand around sipping beer and soft drinks at the bar just inside the front door. “We’re all color-blind out here,” Dugas says. “We come to fight our roosters.” There are four large cockpits in Louisiana—the Sunset Recreation Club in Sunset, the Hickory Recreation Club in Pearl River, the Bayou Club in Vinton, and Piney Woods in Vivian. It’s not uncommon for some seven hundred people to be present for a fight at the larger pits. There are about a dozen medium-sized pits and at least sixty community cockpits throughout Louisiana. The M&M is one of the smaller community pits. The front and back doors are open, and a breeze slips through and stirs the air under the fluorescent lights. Handlettered signs on the walls are reminders that any bird found drugged with stimulants or poison on its spurs will be disqualified without exception. Other signs state that no one under twenty-one years of age is allowed to purchase alcohol. A few boys hover around the men, being seen and not heard. They’re waiting to help ready the birds for the fight. The cockpit is in the larger room through a doorway in the A Fighting Chance  •  46

bar. It’s an octagon platform walled in with wire from its base to the ceiling. Inside the pit are two smaller cages with ropes attached to the top, extending to pulleys on the ceiling. Instead of pitting the cocks against one another with handlers, the birds are dropped inside the smaller cages. A rope from the side of the pit lifts the two cages into the air and the birds are left facing one another. A photography darkroom timer is strapped to the wire wall of the pit. There are two small sinks with faucets at both ends of the pit. Six levels of painted gray plywood bleachers circle the cockpit. Derbies are usually larger weekend events. In a four-cock derby, a cockfighter pays an entry fee to fight four of his cocks. He could pay anywhere from $100 to $600 in entry fees to enter them. It’s winner-take-all, and if there’s a tie the pot is split in half between the two winning cockfighters. Dugas has brought only one rooster with him this afternoon. The only fighting it has done is in Dugas’s back yard. It’s part of conditioning the cock for the pit. During these practice bouts, the bird’s spurs are covered with the tiny gloves that resemble boxing gloves. The birds spar without inflicting severe damage to one another. Asked if he thinks his bird will win, Dugas says, “If I didn’t think he would win, I wouldn’t have fed him like I did for the last year and a half.” Dugas removes his rooster from a wooden box and weighs it on a scale. A man with a baseball cap and a T-shirt tucked into his blue jeans looks to see how much the bird weighs. On his shirt is an image of Osama bin Laden with crosshairs on his forehead. It reads, “You can run but you can’t hide!” The man’s brought four roosters with him, and one of his birds weighs within a couple of ounces of Dugas’s. The men agree to pit the two birds against one another for twenty minutes and to outfit them with gaffs, one and a quarter inches long. The gaff is a small pick with a pointed end. 47  •  A Fighting Chance

After the natural spur has been filed down, gaffs are placed over the spurs of the roosters’ legs. Opponents of cockfighting say that strapping the weapons to the cocks’ legs is cruel. Cockfighters say it’s crueler not to use them. Natural spurs vary in length and hardness and could give a cock with better spurs the upper hand in a fight. They say the weapons are equalizers, assuring that each gamecock stands a fighting chance in the pit. There’s also the short and long knife, small knives that are slightly curved and sharp on one side. The short knife is any knife less than 11/16 inches, and the long knife is any knife longer than that. Only one knife is attached to a gamecock’s left leg. Knife fights are commonplace with Hispanic cockfighters. Within recent years, though, the knife has gained popularity in Louisiana. The weapons are more deadly than the gaffs, and the fights are quicker. Dugas fights his cocks with gaffs only. He says, “I can’t see feeding a rooster for two years to watch a fight that fast.” One anonymous cockfighter said that the “lucky lick of the knife” was corrupting the sport, placing less emphasis on gameness and more on betting. The roosters are dropped into the smaller cages through a hatch door. A judge enters the ring and sets the timer. When the cages are lifted into the air, the timer starts counting down the twenty minutes, and the birds are left in the pit to fight. Dugas has $200 riding on the fight. His opponent matched the money, collecting bets from some of the spectators to make a pool. There’s more betting in the stands. Bets are made verbally, and anyone can take you up on it. A handshake isn’t needed. Your word is as good as signing your name to a bank loan. Once the fight starts, Dugas watches his bird intently, never saying a word. His opponent is at the side of the pit coaching

A Fighting Chance  •  48

his bird. In the beginning it looks as if Dugas’ rooster has the upper hand. He manages to fly over his opponent and hook him several times with his gaffs. Occasionally the birds fight with their beaks, pecking at one another’s head. Then comes the decisive blow. A quick lick blinds Dugas’s rooster. A couple of minutes later the judge calls the fight off. The birds are bloody, and a light haze of feathers floats in the air. The whole fight lasts less than nine minutes. Two young boys take Dugas’s rooster and wash the blood from its head and feathers. A man offers to buy the cock from Dugas, but he simply gives it away. The cock might not be able to fight, but he’s still good for breeding. Dugas isn’t sore about losing the two hundred bucks. He says it’s all part of the game. You win some, and you lose some. What’s important is that you keep trying. line #> On the Web site LouisianaAgainstCockfighting.org, there’s a song titled “Chante Pas, Petit Rouge!” (“Don’t Crow, Little Red!”). The song is sung in both French and English. It’s the story of “a Louisiana boy’s efforts to save his pet rooster from being entered into a cockfight”:

Today is your day at the bloody cockfight. Parrain and Papa, they’d bet on you tonight. They gonna cuss; they gonna shout When the little red rooster doesn’t come out.

James Riopelle is one of the authors of the tune. He’s protested against cockfighting on three different occasions in Sunset. He says the song was written in hopes of fostering healthy relationships between children and animals. “(Cockfighting) is just a bad thing for people,” Riopelle says. “Children learn cruelty and see older people engaging in this.

49  •  A Fighting Chance

It’s a very dehumanizing influence. The cockfighters aren’t necessarily bad people, they’re just involved with cruelty to animals and that’s bad enough for us to want to stop it.” Pinckney A. Wood is president of the Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates. Since 1981, the group has been working with humane societies in Louisiana to pass legislation to end animal cruelty. In 1982, Louisiana’s animal cruelty law was modified to exempt fowl from the law, stating that chickens are not animals. In 1999, the group tried unsuccessfully to pass legislation to ban the use of gaffs and knives in cockfights. In an e-mail, Wood says that cockfighting “only serves to satisfy those instincts in man which are ignoble and sinister, and cruelly destroys innocent, sentient creatures in the process.” Asked why, aside from the apparent physical harm of the cocks, cockfighting needs to banned, Wood reiterates, “Base and cruel practices are deleterious and corrosive to the soul of those who revel in them. It doesn’t speak well of one’s character when one is intentionally cruel to any living creature. And it is injurious to the development of a child’s character and psychological adjustment to participate in and not be discouraged from committing acts of cruelty.” Cockfighters rarely deny that their sport is cruel, but they’re also quick to point out that nature is cruel and that a cockfight is merely an act of nature in a controlled form. Talk to a cockfighter long enough and he’s likely to mention Wayne Pacelle in a rather unfavorable light. One cockfighter stated that Pacelle was behind “the vegan agenda.” There is a perception among cockfighters that animal rights advocates won’t be satisfied until they have outlawed every possible use of animals—including rodeos and circuses, hunting and fishing, even, God forbid, boiling crawfish. Cockfighters say any step to legislate the use of animals is simply another step in outlawing the use of animals for all purposes. Pacelle is aware of how he’s perceived by cockfighters and A Fighting Chance  •  50

says that he’s being cast in a negative light in an attempt to kill the message he brings. “This isn’t about me,” he says. “This is about the policy issue being debated. It doesn’t matter if I have three heads. Cockfighting is still wrong.” Pacelle is the senior vice president for communications and government affairs for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), located in Washington, D.C. HSUS has been opposed to cockfighting since the organization’s inception in 1954, but increased its political pressure in 1998 to ban cockfighting nationwide. It began with a ballot initiative in Arizona and Missouri that led to the outlawing of the sport in both states. HSUS is currently pushing for the ban of cockfighting in Oklahoma, where the state supreme court recently ruled that a circulated petition met the requirements to bring the issue to a ballot initiative. HSUS is opposed to any form of instigated animal fights and, Pacelle says, supports “felony level penalties for people who perpetrate these acts of cruelty.” Pacelle adds that there is an entire culture of lawlessness and criminal activity that is associated with cockfighting. “Even if you remove all that criminal activity,” he says, “you are still left with an indefensible form of animal cruelty where people are pitting animals against one another to hack the other creature to death for the amusement of handlers and spectators. It’s a pretty good indication that it’s unacceptable activity when 94 percent of the states and the Congress deem it illegal activity.” But what about the argument that even if the sport is cruel, some still deem it as a part of their culture? “We have made a collective judgment in society that [cockfighting] violates our basic standards of decency towards animals and should be outlawed,” Pacelle says. “You can attach a cultural significance to almost any form of animal abuse— whether it’s cockfighting, dogfighting, or bullfighting. Our 51  •  A Fighting Chance

concern for the well-being of the animals trumps the argument that this is somehow culturally indispensable.” Pacelle concedes that if the farm bill is signed into law it won’t eradicate cockfighting, but says it will cause “major damage to the industry.” He says the HSUS is prepared to work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Postal Service, and other federal agencies to make sure that the law is observed and enforced. “Louisiana will be the final holdout,” he says, “until we can work with Louisianians to ban it in the United States in its entirety. We’re very confident that if this were ever put to a vote by Louisianians it would be outlawed in a heartbeat.” line #> Jim Demourelle’s insurance for his company, the Evangeline Psychiatric Care in Ville Platte, had lapsed when it burned to the ground. The fire, which started in three different places, was ruled an arson. He says nothing was salvageable, “not even a pencil.” His wife joked that no one could accuse him of burning down his business for the insurance money since there was none. He believes that animal rights activists set the fire, but he has no way of proving it. Demourelle served in the Navy for twenty-one years. He says some people are retired Navy, but he’s Navy retired. In 1960 he went to his first cockfight in the Philippines. “They told us cockfights were off limits,” he says, “so that’s where we all directly went.” He remembers “how valiant the bird was. Watching a cockfight is like watching a ballet. It’s beauty in motion.” Demourelle acknowledges that cockfighting is brutal “just like boxing and football are brutal,” but “we’re talking about a chicken. . . . A lot of the things we do are acceptable to [cockfighters], but they’re not acceptable to everybody.” He says the Humane Society of the United States is harassing people who

A Fighting Chance  •  52

are raising animals and, in many cases, are pet owners. “I don’t want to be engineered,” he says. It’s a common sentiment when talking to either side of the issue. Those against cockfighting focus on the cruelty of the sport first and foremost and add that it does not foster valuable traits in human beings. Cockfighters are quick to point out that there are several cruel sports man participates in— boxing, hockey, football, rugby—and what’s at issue is not allowing someone else tell you what you can’t do with your own property. Demourelle says that he can’t make his roosters fight. “It’s their nature,” he says. “It’s what they want to do. Do I capitalize on it and have a good time with it? Yes. That’s human nature. I don’t see that as so strange.” He denies that criminal activity is pervasive at cockfights. He says, “There’s more crime at an LSU football game in a day than at a cockpit all year long.” Emanuel Massa says that cockfighting has a $1.3 billion annual impact on Louisiana. It comes from a number of factors, like buying equipment for farms, hiring people to work the farms, feeding the chickens, putting gas in the cars to go to the cockfight, and the visiting cockfighters who stay in motels, eat at restaurants, and buy souvenirs. Massa is president of the Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association, an organization with nearly six thousand members. He says that if the farm bill is signed into law, it will negatively impact Louisiana’s economy. Fewer cockfighters from other states will cross the state line to go to cockfights and the breeders who ship fowl out of Louisiana would be felons. He says, “I think this bill walks all over our Constitution and our freedoms.” The federal legislation would regulate interstate commerce, but cockfighters say it’s a violation of states’ rights and that

53  •  A Fighting Chance

individuals are being regulated by the federal government under the guise of regulating interstate commerce. “The Humane Society and the animal rights people have big bucks, and we’re little fish,” Massa says. “They want to give us fifteen years [for violating the law], and it would be a felony. Some people don’t get that for killing other people, beating their wives, and abusing children. They’re going to make criminals out of people who are law-abiding citizens with families. We’ve got more to look at than people fighting and shipping chickens.” Massa says that cockfighters are being vilified, and he doesn’t “think what we’re doing is outrageous or anything worse than what’s going on throughout the whole country.” line #> Frederick Hawley says that cockfighters are “perceived to be ignorant, gap-toothed rednecks” and that criminal activities at cockfights are minimal. What concerns him more is that “when you have made cockfighting illegal, you kind of draw it into the arms of criminals and criminal activities. These moral crusaders who want to make it illegal need to think about this.” Hawley is a criminal justice professor at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. He has been studying cockfighting for the last twenty-five years and is writing a book on the subject. He says there’s a dual dichotomy between the upper class and lower working class and those who live in rural areas and urban areas. “You’re not going to find cockpits in upper-class neighborhoods,” Hawley says. He adds that cockfighters are “men of the 1860s, when people had to struggle more and die more in the process. They’re Social Darwinists without Darwin.” Clifton D. Bryant has also been studying cockfighting for the last twenty-five years. As a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, his primary area of study A Fighting Chance  •  54

is deviant behavior—any type of behavior that violates some type of norm, from robbing a bank to crumbling crackers in your soup, from blowing up a building to belching at the table. He says deviant behavior “covers a multitude of sins.” “What you have is a clash of cultural norms,” Bryant says. “The cockfighters’ norms are different from the norms you encounter in the city today.” Cockfighting is a symbol of a larger picture, what some refer to as a culture clash between the old way of doing things and the new. Bryant’s research indicates that cockfighters are “extremely normal people. They’ve very Norman Rockwell. These folks are ordinary Americans. They’re more likely to be married and to be religious people. They have jobs, and they work at it. They just so happen to raise cocks and like to go fight them.” Bryant says that society is suffering from “the Bambi syndrome.” He says, “For several generations now we’ve been indoctrinated that animals are simply people with fur. We’re giving human qualities to animals.” Bryant asserts that there is still redeeming social value in killing animals. The slaughtering of a hog builds social solidarity in a community. Hunting with a parent brings you closer to them. You may be killing animals, but there is something to be gained from it. He says, “It is my assertion that quality time is worth the sacrifice of the animal.” In 1972 Clifford Geertz, professor of social sciences at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, published “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” In it, he tells the story of how he and his wife, while conducting research in Bali, were virtually ignored by the locals until they fled with the rest of the townspeople from a raid on a cockfight. Geertz describes the conditioning, handling, fighting, and betting that characterizes Balinese cockfighting. “What it does is what, for other peoples with other temperaments and other 55  •  A Fighting Chance

conventions, Lear and Crime and Punishment do; it catches up these themes—death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance—and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature,” he writes. Geertz concludes that the cockfight is an interpretation by a group of people of their own experiences and a retelling of that story to themselves: “The slaughter in the cock ring is not a depiction of how things literally are among men, but, what is almost worse, of how, from a particular angle, they imaginatively are.” With two contrasting worldviews here, it’s yet to be seen which one will triumph. If the farm bill is signed into law, it may thin out the cockfighters’ ranks. But if the past has any lesson to teach us, it’s that cockfighting won’t be wiped from the face of the earth.

p o st s crip t

In 2007 the Louisiana State Legislature voted to ban cockfighting in Louisiana, which took effect a year later. Louisiana was the last state in the union to outlaw cockfighting.

A Fighting Chance  •  56

The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll Like an irritating rash that won’t go away, the raving lunatics of radio are now the tomfools of television. may 8, 2002

T

he room looks like an electronics morgue. Cables are piled on shelves. A large desk sits in front of a wall draped with wires. On top of the desk is a compact disc player and a plastic owl. There are two folded metal chairs and an amplifier. You can hear Muddy Waters whipping the crowd into a frenzy. He belts out a few guitar licks and sings, “Everything’s gonna be all right this morning. Oh yeah. Whew!” The drums and harmonica kick in, and the song’s in full gear. The door to the set swings opens, and Todd Ortego and Joe Burge (aka Dr. Feelgood) strut into the room, moving to the music. Ortego is a long, tall snap bean of a man in a T-shirt and overalls. Burge looks like a retired wrestler from the MidSouth circuit, thick all over and dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, a baseball cap, and glasses. They shuffle up to the camera, Burge pops his false teeth out, and they saunter back to the desk. Muddy Waters is singing, “But now I’m a man, way past

57

twenty-one. You got to believe me woman. I have lots of fun. I’m a man. I spell M-A-N.” They unfold the chairs. Ortego hooks the microphone clipped to Burge’s T-shirt into a cable and then slaps him on the back as if he’s sending him out onto the football field. He turns around, and Burge hooks up his microphone. Ortego’s legs and arms are stretched out, and he’s quivering like James Brown waiting for his cape and his cold sweat towel. Burge lays his right hand on his forehead and gives him a quick push. Ortego is smiling and convulsing from the feeling the good doctor has laid on him. When they sit down, Burge spreads his legs out and crosses them at the ankles. He folds his arms across his broad chest and leans back into his chair. Like Mister Rogers, Ortego kicks his shoes off, but he doesn’t put on a fresh pair of sneakers. He rubs the ball of his foot through a white athletic sock. “Doc, my feet get hot,” Ortego says. “Your feet get hot?” “Sometimes,” Burge says. “See, I’m from Ville Platte. That’s why I wear the white socks.” “The white socks keep you from getting the athlete’s feet, like whiskey keeps you from getting the worms.” “Does that really work?” Ortego asks. “It must,” Burge says. “I’ve never had the athlete’s feet or the worms.” For better or for worse, The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show is back on the air. Tom Voinche Jr. is the host of KATC’s Good Morning Acadiana. He started KJJB 105.5 FM in Eunice in 1981 and ran the station until he sold it in 1993. In 1987 Voinche approached Ortego with the idea for a three-hour, Wednesday night radio program. A native of Ville Platte, Ortego began working for his brothThe Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll  •  58

er-in-law, Floyd Soileau, at Floyd’s Record Shop at the age of fourteen. In 1978, fresh out of high school, he opened Music Machine, a record shop in Eunice. Today he sells cassettes, compact discs, beepers, and sno-cones (weather permitting). He’s also a disc jockey for weddings, class reunions, and other social functions in the area. Voinche wanted Ortego on his radio station. “Creativity in radio and television comes from personalitydriven shows,” Voinche says. Ortego came up with the idea of a live radio program that featured oldies mixed in with Louisiana music for good measure. He called the program The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show, for its mix of swamp pop and rock ’n’ roll classics. “There was a nostalgia for that music at the time,” Ortego says, “and the only place you could hear it was on KVPI in Ville Platte.” Burge and Ortego don’t agree on the details of how they met. Within a couple of weeks of the show first airing, Ortego claims that Burge called the radio station and said he liked the show. Ortego then invited him over to the station. Burge claims that he bought some commercials for his father’s grocery store, Gene’s Food Store in Basile. Either way, Burge went to KJJB one Wednesday night and returned every week after that. Voinche trained Burge to run the control board and eventually turned the show over to Burge and Ortego. Burge is a native of Basile in “the sovereign state of Evangeline Parish.” In 1987 he was tired of working in the oilfields and started managing his father’s store. In 1990, after his father passed away, he bought the store from his mother. Ten years later, he closed the store that had been in his family for fifty-six years and took a job on the night shift as a slot attendant at the Grand Casino Coushatta in Kinder. He also writes a weekly column, titled “Bustin’ Loose,” which appears in the Eunice News, the Ville Platte Gazette, and the Basile Weekly. 59  •  The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll

The July 29, 1987, issue of the Eunice News declared that the “Swamp and Roll Show has caught on in a big way in Eunice.” Swamp ’n’ Roll was on a roll, but Burge and Ortego wanted to play more zydeco music. They started a new show on Sunday afternoons on KBAZ, a country music station, called Front Porch Zydeco. When KBAZ was sold, they moved the program to Sunday afternoons on KJJB. Voinche gave Burge and Ortego free reign over both radio shows. “It wasn’t slick, but it was real,” he says. “I was real pleased with that. It was some of my prouder moments.” line #> It’s Wednesday night, 7 p.m. Dr. Feelgood starts the radio show with a disclaimer: “Warning: The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show contains adult language, nudity, and subversive political commentary. Test results show that The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show may cause dizziness, enlargement of the prostate gland, constipation, hair loss, and ringworm. Do not attempt to listen to The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show without first consulting your physician or your favorite TV evangelist.” The Bar-Kays break into “Soul Finger.” Swamp ’n’ Roll was the Wednesday night South Louisiana party. The show blended local music—including Cajun, swamp pop, New Orleans R&B, and zydeco—with soulful, nationally known numbers by artists like James Brown, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Otis Redding. Every commercial was announced live with a wry sense of humor, and there was always a host of characters cutting up in the background. Everyone in Swamp ’n’ Roll’s live studio audience had a nickname bestowed upon them by either Burge or Ortego. The Human Jack, Marvelous Malcolm, Miss Judy, The Sheriff, Big Corner, Jude, Tim de Lansmeg, and Bird were all integral parts of the show. Herman Fuselier, entertainment editor for the Daily AdThe Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll  •  60

vertiser, was a sports writer at the Daily World in Opelousas when he first heard the show. He is also host of Bayou Boogie, a weekly half-hour Louisiana music TV program on KDCG and an hourlong South Louisiana music program of the same name on KRVS. “There was always a party atmosphere surrounding it,” he says. It sounded like a party because it was. It was common for someone to walk into the studio and leave the door open, letting the sounds of the traffic on West Laurel Avenue bleed onto the microphones and over the airwaves. Sometimes the jokes Burge and Ortego cracked were taken seriously, like the time they offered a free Swamp ’n’ Roll Tshirt to the first guy who could produce a nude photo of his spouse. Within twenty minutes they had a winner. A listener had taken a Polaroid of his nude girlfriend at home and driven to KJJB. She waited in the idling car as Burge and Ortego dug up a T-shirt. About once a month, Big Corner would bring in his barbecue pit from Lawtell and cook up a feast of pork steaks served with white bread and Jack Miller’s barbecue sauce. “It’s something we can’t do at home,” Burge says. “Miss Gloria [his wife] and Miss Debbie [Ortego’s wife] stay on us about what we eat. But when we cook on the show, it’s our time to splurge. It’s kind of like when the Romans would get together and eat and drink.” The thirty-second live commercials were never scripted and Ortego says, “We’d have to work at it to do a commercial under thirty seconds. Our sixty-second commercials average out to two and a half minutes.” John R. Young Chevrolet in Eunice was a longtime sponsor of the show and Burge liked to encourage male listeners, especially “if you’re an ugly man, you need to go buy you a Camaro from John R. Young so you can get you a chick.” Of 61  •  The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll

North State Street Conoco in Eunice, Burge would wrap up the commercial by reminding listeners that if they filled up with ten gallons of gas or more, owner Gerald LeJeune would let them rub his bald head for good luck. Voinche says the commercials on Swamp ’n’ Roll hearken to the days when “radio was really in touch with its community. Time was treated completely different in those days. The idea then was to sell the product. You weren’t selling time, you were selling products and services.” Burge says the approach worked and that “the people go and tell [the sponsors] that they hear this stuff. It might be a little unorthodox, but they hear it and that’s the name of the game. It’s like when your washing machine develops a new noise. After a while you don’t notice it. If you play the same commercial thirty times a month it becomes part of the landscape and people don’t really hear it. When we do it—because we have no script—it’s different each time.” The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show didn’t go unnoticed. There were articles about the show in the Basile Weekly, the Eunice News, the Daily Advertiser, and the Daily World. By 2000 the show had been featured in Billboard and Rolling Stone, and Burge and Ortego had been interviewed by VH-1. They were gaining new fans on the Internet, and the show was making money. That’s when the bottom dropped out. The station was sold to new owners, but Ortego didn’t think they had anything to worry about. They had an established audience, good press to back them up and, more importantly, the show was making money. In April 2000 Swamp ’n’ Roll’s thirteenth anniversary show had already been planned. It was set for the first Wednesday in May. Big Corner would grill a hundred hot dogs and give them away to the first hundred listeners who drove up to the sta-

The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll  •  62

tion. On the last Tuesday in April 2000, the new management of the station called in Burge and Ortego, cancelled Front Porch Zydeco, and gave them the option of doing Swamp ’n’ Roll on KEUN 1050 AM, KJJB’s sister station. “Basically, he wanted to send us to purgatory, to the AM,” Burge says. “We wanted the FM, on prime time. Our record stood for itself. We were a solid money-maker for thirteen years. They wanted to move us from the major leagues to the minor leagues, and we wouldn’t compromise. A lot of people wanted to know why we didn’t go to the AM. We had set a standard for ourselves, and we wanted to maintain it. There are too many times that Louisiana shows are put on the AM to die. We’re from here, and we weren’t going to step down.” Karl De Rouen is president and general manager of KEUN and KJJB in Eunice. In 2000 Roger Cavaness, of Cajun Communications in Pineville, bought half of the stock in both stations. De Rouen says that he didn’t want to pull Swamp ’n’ Roll off the air, but that Burge and Ortego did not take him up on his offer to move the show to the AM dial. He says KJJB switched its format to a classic country music format and “the new management’s belief is that purity in your format is a necessity.” The new format left no room for the show, and De Rouen says the station has doubled its listeners since then. “Swamp ’n’ Roll had a great cult following,” he says. “I didn’t like to make that decision, but it’s just one of those things you have to do. You have to look at the numbers first. I hated doing it, especially with Joe and Todd. They were buddies of mine.” “It was OK with me,” Ortego says. “We weren’t going to compromise with someone else’s business decision, even though he had the right to make that decision. Now Joe, he was ready to fight. That’s Dr. Feelgood’s fishing. That’s what he does.” Instead of saying farewell the following night on KEUN, which Ortego says, “could barely cover Eunice,” they walked

63  •  The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll

down the street to KBON 101.1 FM. They sat in with Paul Marx, owner and general manager, on his Wednesday night program and thanked their listeners for thirteen years. Four months later, Burge and Ortego revived Front Porch Zydeco and brought it to KVPI 92.5 FM and 1050 AM in Ville Platte. It airs on Sunday afternoons from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. For two years, The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show went on hiatus. On Wednesday evening, March 6, 2002, the TV version of The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show premiered on KDCG, channel 22 in Opelousas, and on its translator frequency, KLFT, channel 21 in Lafayette. The show airs on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. and is rebroadcast on Saturdays and Sundays at 3 p.m. General Manager Thom Daly thinks it’s safer for the show to be on television. “They have a unique way of looking at things that’ll make you laugh. It’s hard to listen to them and drive at the same time,” he says. Roddy Dye also had problems listening to the radio show while driving. He says he caught himself “sometimes pulling over on the side of the road and laughing to tears at the commercials.” Dye is the sales manager for KDCG. For Dye the radio show was a weekly event, and he arranged his Wednesday evenings so that he wouldn’t miss it. He even started taping it and sending the copies to his brother in Alabama. “These guys are the essence of South Louisiana—great music and plenty of humor,” Dye says. “It all revolves around friends, family, and having a good time. They keep Acadiana abreast of what’s new and remind them of what’s old.” Liz Hernandez is Swamp ’n’ Roll’s producer, a luxury the show went without for thirteen years, and she remembers

The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll  •  64

“just listening to them on the radio and laughing at them boys.” Hernandez says that “at times they can make you a little nervous, but so far I’ve been able to maintain semi-control.” She says Burge and Ortego are catching on quickly to the nuances of a TV broadcast. She’s also getting a better feel for what they want to do. She wants some order to the show, but she doesn’t want to polish it. “It can’t be perfect,” she says. “Then it wouldn’t be The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show. They have to have spontaneity. The soul of the show is their antics.” Ortego says the show is “real loose. It makes it easy for people to relate to it. We don’t try to make people think that we’re something we’re not.” “Me and Todd are ourselves,” Burge says. “Stop and think about it. A lot of personalities, somebody tells them what to say and what to wear and how to act. They have no part in the creative process. They’re basically a puppet. With The Swamp ’n’ Roll Show, what you see is what you get. We’re honest.” “It’s just a radio show on the TV,” Ortego says. “If you’re on the radio you can do four songs in a row. On television you have to have something to look at. If there was solid music, I don’t think it would be that interesting, not that we’re that interesting to look at.” Burge and Ortego have faces made for radio. Instead of pearly, white teeth, Burge has a set of false teeth. Instead of flawless enunciation of a script and pointless banter, Burge speaks with a thick Cajun accent and Ortego has a loud, baritone voice. They don’t wait for each other to complete their sentences. They talk at the same time, trying to beat each other to the punch and to get in the next wisecrack. Instead of politely questioning their guests about an upcoming commu-

65  •  The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll

nity event, they’re more likely to trade lies with Geno Delafose about his cows getting out of the pasture or listen to Lil’ Bob tell the story of trading his horse for his first drum set. The TV show is an hour long. There’s less music, but there’s more time to visit with guests about the music they like. At times, the show borders on bawdy, not with outright vulgarity, but with innuendo subtle enough to slip past the kids. As an affiliate of the family-friendly PAX television network, KDCG promotes programming for the entire family. Dye says Swamp ’n’ Roll doesn’t go against KDCG’s mission. He says it’s a characteristic of South Louisiana’s paradoxical nature. “We know what they’re talking about, and every family in South Louisiana does that same thing around the crawfish boil or the barbecue,” he says. “Take a look at South Louisiana during Mardi Gras and then look at them during Lent. How do you explain that?” Fuselier agrees. “I don’t know if it would work anywhere else except for South Louisiana. People in Minnesota probably won’t get it, but people in Mamou love every minute of it,” he says. Dye says the show hasn’t stepped on anyone’s toes yet. “We’ve got more e-mails on that show than any other show that’s been broadcast,” he says. Voinche knows how difficult it is to make the transition from radio to television. He says radio is “a medium where everything is left to the imagination. It’s a lot of make-believe in the listener’s mind generated by the jock. On television, what you see is what you get. To pull it off on television requires an extra bit of effort.” But he says he doesn’t have any doubt that Ortego and Burge will continue to pull it off. Fuselier also had his suspicions about how well the radio show would translate to television, but after seeing it a few times and being a guest on the show, he says, “I’m glad it’s The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll  •  66

back. It got to be a Wednesday night tradition for me. Now that it’s back, even though it’s only an hour, I really look forward to it every Wednesday night.” Swamp ’n’ Roll is starting to reclaim its old audience while building a new one through television. There’s even talk about the show being made available on cable. Daly says that KDCG is negotiating with Cox Communications to rebroadcast the station’s programming on Cox’s cable television network. Steve Creeden, assistant manager of Cox Communications in Lafayette, confirms that Cox is in negotiations with KDCG. Ortego isn’t letting any of this go to his head. He’s keeping his priorities straight. “Regardless of how popular this show becomes, if it’s a Wednesday and the weather’s really good, I’m not going to miss a good fishing day for this,” he says. “If the speckled trout are biting in Vermilion Bay, Swamp ’n’ Roll will be a rerun that night. The Simpsons do it, so why can’t we?” Burge is optimistic about the show’s future and thankful for the chance he’s had. “It’s been a groove,” he says. “For fifteen years we’ve been doing what we want to do. We haven’t made a king’s fortune at it, but we’ve made people happy. If it all stopped today, we could look back on it and say, ‘Yeah, it was worth it.’”

p o st s crip t

Joe Burge died on January 30, 2010, two weeks shy of fiftyfive years old.

67  •  The Return of Swamp ’n’ Roll

The Man behind Dave Robicheaux James Lee Burke talks about violence, writing, littering, alcoholism, liberalism, and bestsellers. june 5, 2002

J

ames Lee Burke has seen and heard enough to fill a book. Actually, make that twenty-two books. Burke is best known for his novels featuring Dave Robicheaux, an Iberia Parish detective who sees the world in black and white, a man who is haunted at times by his own alcoholism and his desire to do right in a world ruled by insanity. At sixty-five years old, Burke is a demure man with small, penetrating eyes and a disarming smile. His laughter sounds as if it’s rattling itself free from his bones. There are times he laughs so hard it ends in a coughing fit. He writes about man’s depravity and his grace, his beauty and his vulgarity. His novels have engaged millions of readers all over the world, propelling him to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. But for the man who lives in New Iberia, with a second home in Missoula, Montana, life hasn’t always been a gravy train. The ride to the top has been riddled with detours and unexpected delays. 68

Burke was recently at his home along the banks of Bayou Teche, preparing for a national book tour in support of his latest Robicheaux novel, Jolie Blon’s Bounce. In his office, bathed in sunlight filtered through an oak tree outside of his bay window, he gave some insight into the man behind Dave Robicheaux. Before drawing any comparisons between Robicheaux and himself, Burke points out the differences between the two men. “The character defects are mine, none of the qualities,” he says. He laughs so hard he’s headed for a coughing fit. Burke was born in Houston in 1936. His mother was a secretary and his father was a natural gas engineer. At the age of eighteen, Burke’s father died in a car accident in Anahuac, Texas. Although he was raised in Houston, Burke spent a good deal of his childhood in New Iberia. “I’ve always considered this area my home,” he says. “My family has lived in New Iberia since 1836.” In 1955 Burke enrolled at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, where he studied Homer, William Faulkner, Samuel Coleridge, Francis Bacon, and John Stuart Mill. He also met one of the most influential people in his life, Lyle Williams, his freshman English professor. After receiving countless D minuses on his papers, he approached his professor, certain he would receive an apology for the mistake of the low grades on his paper. Instead, according to Burke, Williams told him, “Your penmanship, Mr. Burke, is like an assault upon the eyeballs. Your spelling makes me wish the Phoenicians had not invented the alphabet, but you write with such heart, I couldn’t give you an F.” For the rest of the semester, Burke revised his papers every Saturday under Williams’s supervision and managed to 69  •  The Man behind Dave Robicheaux

squeeze a B out of the class. “Had it not been for Lyle Williams, I probably would not be a writer today,” he says. While at SLI, Burke published his first short story, “Terminus,” in the school’s literary journal. In his junior year, Burke transferred to the University of Missouri in Columbia to study journalism. He hoped that a career in journalism would lead to a literary career. Instead of studying journalism, he studied creative writing and met his future wife, Pearl. In 1960, he graduated with honors. Before he mastered the bestseller, Burke was a jack of all trades—a land man for Sinclair Oil Company, a truck driver for the U.S. Forest Service, a teacher in the Job Corps, a reporter for the Daily Advertiser, a social worker in Los Angeles’s skid row, and a professor at four universities and a community college. The best job he ever had for his writing was as a land surveyor for pipelines in Texas and Colorado. “You don’t use your mind in the sense that you don’t use up creative energy,” he says. “It’s a real good life. You’re outdoors. You’re rolling all the time. You’re never in the same place two days in a row. The pay’s good, and there are great guys to work with. Pipeliners were the most unusual, interesting people I ever knew. They’ve been everywhere. They have no last names and they don’t have first names—W.J., R.C., L.T. And if the guy’s name isn’t W.J., it’s J.W.” Burke remembers working with W.J., a man that had been all over the world. During World War II, W.J. fought in the South Pacific. He went into the army as a private and when he was discharged seven years later, he was still a private. When Burke imitates W.J. he lays on a slow, heavy Texan drawl. He says, “I didn’t like it, man. Them people was mad. They was shooting at me. I ain’t never getting in the U.S. Army again.” W.J. was also an amateur meteorologist. When he talked about Saudi Arabia, he said, “Boy, that was a hot sumbitch.” The Man behind Dave Robicheaux  •  70

When remembering Iceland, he remarked, “Boy, that was a cold sumbitch.” Burke laughs and says, “This was what he extrapolated from the experience.” One day W.J. showed up for work five days late. He said he had been in Lake Charles and that he was never going back, that it was a town of liars. He said that they had concocted a story about him one evening in a beer joint during a bourrée game that had gone sour. They threw him out and locked the door on him. W.J. hooked the winch from his truck to the building, pulled it off of its blocks and drove through the front wall, blowing his horn for another drink. Burke is still imitating W.J.: “If I’d done something that awful, I would have surely remembered it.” Burke laughs so hard recounting the story that he’s brought to tears. “Those are remarkable people,” he says. “They’re the cutting edge of empire.” Although working on the pipeline provided fodder for writing, Burke says the drawback was being away from his wife and four children for long periods of time. Over the years, he says he continued to work at “anything that made money.” He wrote steadily and developed a system for dealing with the rejection of his short stories. After receiving a rejection notice, he gave himself thirty-six hours to get the story back in the mail and off to another magazine. He’s used the same system for forty-five years. “If you keep your story at home, you’re insured to lose,” he says. While he continued to work, write, and raise a family, Burke also struggled with alcoholism. He attended a twelve-step program for people with drinking problems and has remained sober for the last twenty-five years. He’s reluctant to talk about it, because he says “unless a person goes inside of it, it’s like listening to Sanskrit,” but he takes a crack at it anyway. 71  •  The Man behind Dave Robicheaux

••• What compelled you to quit drinking? For people who have gotten on the dirty boogie, there are choices to be made. A guy can stay on it and flame out, blow out his doors, crash and burn. That’s when he can make a choice for another kind of life. Until a person gets to that point where he decides that he wants a better life, in all probability, he’s going to live inside what is a kind of hermetically sealed environment where insanity seems rational. People who are knowledgeable about addiction today treat it as a disease. They don’t try to proselytize about it. But there’s no question that condemnation of the addicted person only empowers him to stay out there, to stay on the dirty boogie. Maybe a day finally comes when he realizes that shame and guilt should not be his province and at that moment he can elect to have a good life. Condemnation and criticism of the drunk or the addict is the same as giving him the liquor store. He will determine to prove that he can handle it, that he is not afflicted, that he is not morally weak, because the indictment of him is usually on the basis of moral weakness. He is being told, in effect, he’s a spiritual leper. An alcoholic is going to do everything in his power to prove he’s normal by getting drunk again. It’s insanity, but it’s the nature of compulsive, obsessive behavior. Then when he meets a group of people who have been there, who have been inside that hermetically sealed environment where you see the world through a glass darkly and they tell him that, yeah, he’s responsible for all the mistakes he made, nobody made him drink or use and that he needs to make amends and he has to own up to things and he has to get square with the world and he cannot blame anyone else for his plight except himself. But nonetheless, he has to be aware that there’s a difference in his chemistry that is not like other

The Man behind Dave Robicheaux  •  72

people. Booze doesn’t have the same effect on everyone. It’s just one out of ten. Then maybe he begins to see hope, and he also learns that he is not a pariah. That’s the onus which alcoholics struggled with throughout history, that they were weak. If you tell a man every day he’s weak, he’s not good, you condemn him to repeat his behavior. No one is ever better—you learn that in any twelve-step program—because of criticism. You never make anybody better by excoriating them. Burke published his first book Half of Paradise in 1965, followed by two more—To the Bright and Shining Sun (1970) and Lay Down My Sword and Shield (1971). The first two books sold well and established him as a writer, but the third book didn’t fare as well. He continued to write, despite having difficulties publishing his material. In 1984, his books were out of print, and he had not been able to strike a publishing deal for a hardcover book in thirteen years. He sent a collection of short stories to Louisiana State University Press to consider for publication. They published the stories the next year under the title The Convict. Burke says that, with that book, “LSU Press put me back in business.” He says, “It’s like being rich twice and being broke three times.” He says he owes a debt of gratitude to LSU Press he can never repay. He’s also leery to draw a connection between his sobriety and the fortunate change in his career. He says his career took a change for the better because he continued to write despite the rejection. In 1986 he published his fourth novel, The Lost Get Back Boogie. The book holds the distinction of being the most rejected book in New York’s publishing history. “That’s not exaggeration,” Burke says. “It’s known for the record, 111 times with my current agent. It was out with another agent previous to those

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111 rejections. It was under submission through my current agent, Philip Spitzer, over a nine-year period and received 111 rejections.” The Lost Get Back Boogie was later nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Burke may have had a difficult time publishing his work during those lean years, but he never quit writing. He says that just because no one was buying his work didn’t mean that his writing well had run dry. “I wrote all of those years,” he says. “I just couldn’t sell anything.” “I write all the time,” he says. “You can’t compute it in terms of hours. You can’t compartmentalize it. It’s something you live inside of all the time. It’s a continuum.” Burke’s daily routine consists of writing, taking care of the business of his writing, lifting weights at his local health club, and fishing when time permits. He says, “There are a lot of other things to be done and if you don’t do it, it will be done for you, but not to your benefit.” In 1984 he was fishing with writer Rick DeMarinis on the Bitterroot River in Montana. DeMarinis suggested that he try his hand at a crime novel. Burke later flew from Missoula to San Francisco and began outlining a new novel on a yellow legal pad. He wrote two chapters while sitting in an Italian coffee shop next to the City Lights Bookstore. It was the beginning of The Neon Rain, the first novel featuring Dave Robicheaux. Burke has since written a dozen books with Robicheaux as the protagonist. Although he has another series following the life of a Texan, Billy Bob Holland, the Robicheaux books have become his trademark. He is also a Guggenheim Fellow, a Breadloaf Fellow, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow. His short stories have been published in national magazines and collections of short stories like Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. He is the only writer with the distinction of receiving two Edgar awards (named in honor of Edgar Allen The Man behind Dave Robicheaux  •  74

Poe and given by the Mystery Writers of America) for Black Cherry Blues (1989) and also Cimarron Rose (1998). The success of Black Cherry Blues allowed Burke to quit his teaching job and write full time. Burke’s novels are painted with vivid descriptions of the land, pithy dialogue, and sudden acts of physical violence. The combination of action, description, and dialogue makes for a page-turning read. But the common criticism made against his work is that there is too much violence. How do you respond to the criticism that your writing is too violent? When people use that term violence, we hear it all the time, “Look at the violence in this.” What kind of nonsense is that? It’s just doo-dah. It’s like saying, “My God, look at this Hamlet leaving all these bodies in the fifth act. Jeez, this is terrible.” This usually comes from the same people to whom the violence in Central America leaves no scratch. The loss of a hundred thousand civilian lives in the Iraq war are just kind of passed over, a war conducted against a man who was the ally of the administration during the 1980s, a man whom we armed and suddenly who became the anti-Christ. I don’t have any doubt this guy is evil, but that was not the attitude of our government towards him previously. People do not consider this violence. This is the most violent nation on earth. We export more arms than any other nation on the planet. It’s our greatest product. That’s not metaphor. That’s a statistical fact. President Clinton exported more weaponry than Presidents Reagan or Bush. It’s our big gift to the world. We arm both sides. The M-16 meat cutter used to be found everywhere. Dave Robicheaux says that our gifts to people who harvest rice with their hands are the AK-47 and the M-16. In The Last Don, [Mario Puzo] talks about the gambling in75  •  The Man behind Dave Robicheaux

dustry, and he says what kind of government would inculcate a vice in its citizenry? And, of course, it’s all with the blessing of the state and the federal government that the poor, the uneducated, the obsessive, and the compulsive—who are the only people who gamble habitually, because it’s not gambling. You’re going to lose. There’s no way you’re going to win. This is an act of violence, in my mind, because it robs from the poor. Oh, they’re there by their own consent, but it’s not an informed consent. Everyone knows it. No one who had any awareness of the commitment which he’s made would be there. I used to spend a lot of time at race tracks. I love horseracing. If you watch the action at a track, you’ll notice the bar is empty during the first races. By the seventh race, it’s packed with two kinds of people—the winners and the losers, but more losers than winners because the compulsive gambler wins when he loses. His loss confirms his long-held and cherished suspicion that the universe has plotted against him, and he’s got the evidence to prove that he is not responsible for his own failure. The fates have done this to him, but he’s happy again, as happy as a pig rolling in slop. And then if he wins, he’s proven that he can intuit the future he’s painted with magic. Well, in other words, we’re talking about a psychological basket case. Of course, the attrition, the real violence sometimes is precipitated on down the road. I mean, after this guy spends the rent and the grocery, and they do. If you look at the guys at the $2 window, that’s where the money is made. These are the guys that drop it all. As a former reporter, do you think the media is liberal? It’s an old myth that the press is liberal. It’s absolutely nonsense. It’s a statistical fact 90 percent of media are owned by Republican interests, and that’s great. But to say the press is

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liberal is just silly and has nothing to do with reality. Secondly, most news people, almost universally, are decent people. It’s like people in the book business. You don’t have many negative experiences. They tend to run of a kind. They are people of goodwill. They enjoy language. They enjoy books, and I would say that 95 percent of them are simply interested in the truth. There’s maybe 5 percent that have an agenda, but they’re usually not journalists. They’re columnists, and the ego is very apparent in their prose. When you start seeing those five words—I, me, my, mine, and myself—you know who I’m talking about. Most journalists want to just file the story and go to lunch. They have an irreverent sense of humor, but you see journalists become imbued with cynicism because they see the discrepancy between the way a city is run and the way its operations are reported. Most mainstream media stay away from controversy. There’s an unwritten history of the 1980s. When I published the novel The Neon Rain, which deals with clandestine operations in Central America, the smuggling of arms, the Iranian-Contra story had not broken when that was written, but I knew about it. Here’s a guy living in Wichita, Kansas, who knows about it. Where in God’s name is everybody else? Here’s a guy teaching freshman English at a Midwestern college. If I could have access to that information, I mean the media people in Washington, D.C., did not? It was a story that people didn’t want to touch. It was well known in Gulf Coast ports, but the larger story also involved the trade-off of narcotics for arms. I’ve just heard that story from too many people. Those ties between the underworld, the narcotics industry, the arms industry, and CIA operations go back to the Golden Triangle in southeast Asia, back into the French and British colonial period.

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There are many stories, but I’ve heard them, even recently from individuals, that all coincide. The dope went north, and the guns went south. It’s probably the worst political scandal in America’s history, and when the Sacramento Bee broke the story, I think the Washington Post and the New York Times discredited it, but I believe the account in the Sacramento Bee. I’ve just heard it too many places. I heard the head of the DEA say it. This guy was a Reagan appointee. He said, this is an exact quote, “The Contras are introducing cocaine into the United States.” Now for anyone to simultaneously say we’re serious about what’s called the War on Drugs is deceiving himself, deluding himself.
Now, there are people, to my mind, who are libertine, who have taken on the guise of being liberals, and they are not liberals. They are involved in something else. I’m not knocking them, but this stuff about correctness in language, this hypersensitivity about ethnicity and the notion that people are not accountable for what they do, this is not liberalism. Liberalism is founded on the Jeffersonian notion that ultimately the individual deserves the protection of his government, that the government has to give power to and protect those who have no voice, who are disenfranchised. The government is there to make the society work in an equitable and just way. That’s the spirit of and the tradition of the liberal movement in this country. This other stuff has nothing to do with it. Empowering an adult bookstore to open up shop in a neighborhood filled with elderly people who lack political power, whose finances are immediately compromised and their property values plummet, that is not, in my mind, enforcement of the First Amendment. It has nothing to do with the First Amendment. This is a misinterpretation of the constitutional views of people like Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and all these other early guys. They weren’t there to protect pornographers who create victims out of defenseless people. The libertine view of life has much more to do with fashion than it does politics. There’s nothing liberal about Hollywood. That’s just nonsense. The Disney Company violated minimum wage laws in Haiti. I mean, you’ve got to really work to violate sweatshop laws. You have said before that opening a Wal-Mart in a small town is the equivalent of setting off a hydrogen bomb. Do you think cultures can survive in the face of corporate America or will the Wal-Marts of the world win out in the end? 79  •  The Man behind Dave Robicheaux

The latter is, I’m afraid, what probably is going to occur in my lifetime. Louisiana’s great tragedy is the lack of education that we provide for the poor, for those who have inherited the problems of the past. I think, you see, as long as there are politicians who are sycophants for right-wing and venal and industrial interests, we’re going to see more of the same. What all demagogues and all those who manipulate the electorate and exploit the earth seek is an uninformed electorate. Their enemy is knowledge and enlightenment. If you can give people cheap goods—you give them Powerball lotteries, drive-by daiquiri windows, implicit permission to drive with alcohol behind the wheel—in effect allow them the libertine ethos, which normally only the rich have had access to, and are sacrosanct, in effect, are finally not made accountable for, as long as we give these things as a kind of collective opiate to the poor, we’re going to have all these other problems. For example, no one, in my lifetime, I know, has ever been arrested for littering, even though Southern Louisiana is strewn with trash from one end to the other. As soon as that happens, it’s like pulling on a thread on a sweater, and people are going to start asking other questions. How about these oil industries that have caused Louisiana to be rated eight years in a row as having the worst water quality in the nation? Number fifty. Your accountability goes from the bottom up. So you’ve got this huge number of people who are uneducated, often addicted. They’re given casinos they can go to and lose their money. The cynicism involved, to my mind, is mind-numbing. To me, it’s hopeless, in my lifetime. I think what’ll happen is that the generation after mine will see a time when people from other places, as well as indigenous native Louisianians, will rediscover what we have and will create a replica of what used

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to be, and they’ll live in it. People will see what used to be there, but they won’t be the original denizens. It’s the irony of history. It’s in retrospect that we value what we lost. But the damage is done here by developers. You see live oaks lopped down in front of Wal-Mart in Abbeville, hundreds of years old. It makes your heart sick. In my lifetime the changes are just enormous. Lafayette used to be a sleepy Southern town covered with oak trees. From the Oil Center plumb out to Vermilion Bayou was a solid tunnel of oak trees. It was a two-lane road. It was beautiful. Just before you reached the river on the right-hand side was an antebellum plantation. I don’t believe it has to be either/or. There are ways to do things so that you don’t destroy what is just invaluable. It’s irreparable. It’s like watching people using a chainsaw while on acid. But you can’t turn it around. This used to be the Old Spanish Trail that went through here. It used to run all the way across South Louisiana to New Orleans. Boy, you drive on the four-lane out here to New Orleans, and it’s just incredible. For twenty miles from the airport into Southwestern Louisiana it looks like a sewer. I don’t know another place like it, and I’ve been everywhere in the United States. It’s mindnumbing. People come here from other places, and they just kind of wince and say, “Why in God’s name do you allow this to happen?” But I don’t know the answer for it. Education is part of it, but at some point we have to enforce the law. It becomes discouraging when you get involved with it, trying to do something. There are people here in New Iberia who really work hard to save the trees, to keep the town clean. It’s just a daunting task. They’re really dedicated. And it’s not simply the poor. You see people who obviously are of means throw their trash out the window, bags of garbage, man, just explode on the side of the road. The bayous are

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full of it. I see trash every morning floating down to the Gulf. It’s one of those things you’ve got to work the serenity prayer on, but it goes down sideways anyway. To me, what’s disturbing, is that it was not always like that. It was not like that years ago. I think maybe part of it has to do with that kind of Mardi Gras mentality. People become imbued with this notion of laissez les bons temps rouler, like there’s no tomorrow. Just fling your garbage. I think Dave Robicheaux calls it a self-congratulatory form of hedonism. Dave Robicheaux is a better writer than I. I know that sounds peculiar, but I try to quote Dave, and I can’t do it. It’s really humbling. [Laughs] What’s the secret to writing best-selling novels? [Laughs] What’s the secret? There is no secret. There is none. You build a readership, as a rule, over a very long time. It’s incremental. There’s people whose early work becomes bestseller fiction, but ofttimes it doesn’t sustain itself. Now there are others for whom there’s a kind of electronic element at work—sales to film and television. But that’s not enough either. Usually to get into what is called, in publishing, best-sellerdom, requires many years while the readership grows and grows. It’s a fickle business. You learn real quick. It’s like the oil business. It’s gushers or dusters. Why is the business so fickle? It’s popular taste. One thing an author can always rely upon is that if he has success, it will go away from him. It’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. So when you have some success, put it in the bank because you’ll need it. What’s key to a successful life? You do it a day at a time, I think. If I’ve learned anything it’s that maybe you don’t learn a lot. I feel as young as I was when The Man behind Dave Robicheaux  •  82

I was twenty-one. I’m probably a little more patient than I was then, probably less impetuous, but otherwise I think it’s one of the great myths that age brings you great wisdom. What we learn ultimately, I think, is probably that the things that are valuable really are not purchased with money. It’s like one of those admonitions that’s true: Money keeps a mess of grief off your porch, but the things that really count are the things that you never can buy—family and friends, the good life.

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Signs and Wonders There’s a man in Opelousas who says Jesus Christ has blessed him to heal pain and cure disease. july 3 1, 2002

Greg Kerr runs small ads in the local newspapers with his photo and his phone number. He’s dressed in a white suit with long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a long, flowing gray beard. The ad says he is “An Anointed Cherub” and that he’s “Blessed by Jesus Christ with the gift to heal any pain or disease!” He looks like he’s in ZZ Top, not like he’s in the healing business. Photographer Terri Fensel and I drove to his home in Opelousas. I wanted to find out what kind of man would make such claims and back them with advertising. Kerr lives in a small brick house with a spacious yard on the edge of a field. As we pull into the driveway, a crop duster flies overhead and a mule brays in the distance. A sporty black Mercedes sits in the driveway. I make some wisecrack to Terri about how well the healing business must be paying these days. Kerr’s wife, Louella, answers the door. She is soft-spoken and shakes our hands gingerly before inviting us into the house. In the living room, silk flowers are intertwined in two metal arbors. Pieces of a beige sectional leather couch form a half-circle, next to a recliner and an open Bible resting on 84

a stand. There are inspirational sayings written on plaques hanging on the walls. Soothing pan flutes from a small stereo system in the corner of the room mingle with the sweetly perfumed air. It’s almost too much to handle, and there are knots in the pit of my stomach. Kerr walks into the room and greets us. He’s dressed normally enough, in a long-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and loafers. I don’t know why, but I had expected a robe, maybe even sandals. He asks that we call him Greg and invites us to have a seat. “God is a healer,” Greg says. “His No. 1 method of operation is that He uses people. We have difficulty in getting people to understand that there can be someone in this day and age that has the ability to lay hands upon them and to literally get them bailed out by God.” Greg says he isn’t the one doing the healing. He’s just an instrument of God. He tells both of us to hold our hands up as if we are about to wave to someone. We’re both facing him, and he sits about ten feet away from us in a recliner. He lifts his hand in the same manner. There’s a tingling sensation in my hand, like when my foot falls asleep. But this is different. There is no numbness, just a subtle sensation of electricity dancing around my open hand. Before I can say anything, Greg says, “If you can feel an energy in your hand, tell me. Do you feel heat or a tingling?” I tell him that I feel a tingling sensation. Terri says her hand feels the same way. “That’s the anointing,” he says. “That’s the power of the spirit. The anointing is a physical force. It’s a wonderful feeling.” He says that the sensation usually takes the form of heat, 85  •  Signs and Wonders

coolness, or electricity, and sometimes a combination of all three. I ask him if he feels the same thing we’re feeling. He says he feels it all the time. “I probably have stepped into the greatest treasure that an individual on Earth can find,” he says. “If you find the anointing, you have found heaven’s treasure. What you are literally doing is bringing power from a different realm into this realm.” I ask him if he charges people to anoint them. He says he doesn’t ask for money, because he’s not doing anything. God is the one responsible. Greg is just the conduit. However, he does accept donations to his ministry. “I come from way out in left field,” he says. “But I’m on an incredible journey. I’ve waited my whole life to go on this journey, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. The anointing is the greatest gift and the greatest treasure that an individual can have here on Earth.” Greg was raised Catholic in Opelousas. He attended the Academy of the Immaculate Conception, now Opelousas Catholic. He never found the God he was taught about in school and in church. His journey began when he started studying the Bible. In 1987, he had two divinely inspired visions in the night. They were as vivid as movies, and to this day he can recall every detail of the visions. In the first instance, he stood in a meadow and saw the resurrected Christ. They stared at one another in silence. There was a fog that kept Greg from seeing Jesus’s face clearly. It grew thicker, and Greg strained to see Him. He was then struck in the face with a shaft of light that dropped him to his knees. “I have never before—nor since—seen anything so bright,” Signs and Wonders  •  86

he says. “As the scripture said, the power of the sun is tremendously dim compared to the lightness within this Christ. There is a great love within this man.” In the second vision, God revealed to Greg that the world is the church, and the church is the world. Greg then realized that he would not find God through organized religion but through the Bible and through Christ. He began telling others of his visions. He knew that his story could set others on the path to Christ. His new job was to “bring people to the truth.” Years went by without any more visions, but Greg continued his spiritual journey with fasting and prayer. In 1995 he attended a Benny Hinn revival in St. Louis. When Hinn entered the room, the atmosphere in the building changed and “the air around me turned like electricity.” When Greg returned home, a blue-gray mist followed him, what he calls “the glory cloud,” and it remained for four days. On the third night of the cloud’s presence, God told him that if he wanted the glory to remain in his family’s life, he was going to have to pay the price. Greg told his wife, and she said whatever the price was, he should do it. The next day, he accepted the price, and the cloud lifted from his life and disappeared. For the next year he prayed and fasted. He never went for more than two hours without praying. In August 1996 he was working at his vacuum cleaner shop in downtown Opelousas and managing Carpet Land for his uncle. One day an elderly woman walked in with her husband. The old man began apologizing profusely. He said his wife had insisted that they go to the shop. She wasn’t taking no for an answer. Greg sat them down in his office. He had never seen either one of them around town. The old lady said to him, “Young man, I have a message for you from God. Are you interested?” 87  •  Signs and Wonders

Greg said he was. “I saw you in a dream last night,” the woman said. “Jesus had his hands upon your head, and he told me to come and tell you that he has anointed you.” No one else, aside from his wife and his daughter, knew of Greg’s soul-searching. “I knew she was sent by God,” he says. Since then he has never seen the couple around town or met anyone who knows who the couple were. Greg was praying on a regular basis, when on September 9, 1997, he “made a breakthrough in the realm of the spirit.” He had been praying during the middle of the night for two hours in his living room when a beam of heat hit him in his face. He could smell smoke for a minute, and then it was gone. Eight days later, he woke early in the morning to pray. He felt as if a hot hand was feeling his face. He says, “From that point on, I have this energy, this anointing, that never leaves me day or night. And since September 9, 1997, it has been increasing.” He asks us if we saw the car in the driveway. I lie and say we didn’t see it, even though it’s sitting there in broad daylight right next to the door into the house. He tells us how an anointed cherub came to drive a Mercedes. Alex Chachere is Greg’s first cousin. He’s seventy years old and, despite living with Parkinson’s disease, he says, “I feel fantastic.” He attributes his good health to God and Greg’s healing hands. “I wouldn’t consider myself a real religious man,” he says, “but my views have changed about how I feel about my religion.” Chachere developed a staph infection in his knee after surgery. He was in the hospital for two months, taking antibiotics that never fully worked. He was later released from the hospiSigns and Wonders  •  88

tal. He was back at home, when one day he went into cardiac arrest. He was admitted back into the hospital, and his doctor informed him that it would require a six- to eight-week stay in the hospital to get rid of the infection. After a monthlong stay, his daughter suggested that they call Greg to come to the hospital one evening to pray. Chachere says he was willing to try anything. Greg prayed with him that evening in the hospital. The next morning, Chachere says, “I looked and felt so good they let me go home and put me on IVs.” The staph infection wasn’t gone, but his condition had improved enough overnight to allow him to return home. The staph infection eventually disappeared. When asked how much he attributes his improved condition to Greg’s ability to heal, Chachere says, “All of it. It’s the Holy Spirit. He’s just a conduit.” Chachere was so impressed with Greg’s abilities that he turned over the Mercedes he had recently bought. He says, “I realized in the hospital that I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t get rid of the damn thing, and I had just put $6,000 into the air conditioner.” Chachere says Greg “continues to see me every day and anoint me with the Holy Spirit.” “He’s a very gentle man,” Chachere says. “I really enjoy him. He’s at peace with himself. That’s something most people aren’t. I’m not at peace with myself, but he is.” Greg sits up in his chair and looks at Terri. He places his hands around her open hand, but he doesn’t touch her. “What did you need from God?” he asks. Terri smirks. “For my back pain to go away,” she says. About five years ago, while on assignment at a basketball game, a pain shot through her. She had to be helped up from 89  •  Signs and Wonders

the floor where she sat taking photos. She went through six weeks of therapy and even had an MRI and a full body scan, but her doctor couldn’t figure out what was causing the pain. Since then, she’s consulted three different doctors, gone through physical therapy, taken pain killers, and exercised to strengthen the muscles in her back, but the pain has never really gone away. Acupuncture has relieved some of the pain, but it’s never completely wiped it out. “Do you have it right now?” Greg asks. “Yes.” “Tell me when it’s gone,” he says. Terri looks apprehensive. She is forcing herself to smile for Greg’s benefit. When she’s behind the camera, she’s shielded, but now she’s vulnerable, open to her subject’s whims. From the look on her face, I can tell that she’s not too hip on this role reversal and being the center of attention. She plays along, though. Then there’s a flash of confusion that comes over her face, and she says, “It’s gone.” Then she looks disoriented. She is having a difficult time balancing herself. She shudders and then breaks into tears. It’s getting weirder. This guy’s already made my hand tingle without touching it, and now he’s making my co-worker cry like a baby. “I know,” he says. He pats her knee. “That’s the Holy Spirit,” he says. “He’s something, isn’t He? We have an incredible God. This is what you do. Listen to me. If you miss everything on Earth, but you enter into His kingdom, you are victorious. You are an eternal being that will live forever. If you gain everything this world has to offer, if you gain a great mansion and billions of dollars, but if you lose His kingdom, you have been defeated.” I try to comfort Terri, telling her it’s OK. I don’t even have

Signs and Wonders  •  90

a grasp on what’s going on, much less whether or not it’s OK. I do know that I am comfortable and at ease. I later asked her what she had felt at the time. She said she felt energy traveling from her hand through her arm and into her back. As if there was a dimmer switch on the energy traveling through her body, there was a quick and gradual reduction of pain until it was completely gone. Then she felt an incredible pressure inside of her. She didn’t know what it was, but the only way to relieve it was to cry. Greg says it’s a common reaction for people to cry after he anoints them. He says another common reaction is for people to vomit after they leave his house. I don’t tell him I’ve been nauseous since I walked through the door. Greg says we might not want to print this part. He doesn’t like to be the bearer of bad news. “I have all sorts of understanding about things to come,” he says. On September 10, 2001, he had a premonition. He remembers telling Chachere that all hell was about to break loose in this country. After September 11, Greg closed down his shop and began doing God’s work full time. God revealed to him that the United States would be struck three times. The first blow was on September 11. With the second blow, this nation will go down on one knee. And with the final blow, the nation will crumble and not be able to rise again. “The end of the age is easily all within our lifetimes,” he says. It’s been a long hour, and at times it’s felt like a lifetime. I wrap up the interview and thank Greg for his time. He says, “I’ve been waiting for you guys. Where you been?” He tells how he knew we were coming. He sometimes watches “those two crazy guys” on The Swamp ‘n’ Roll Show. The first time he saw the show he couldn’t figure out if it was a

91  •  Signs and Wonders

real show or just a bad joke. He tuned back in the next week to see if it was still on the air. Now he watches whenever he can. He likes how Joe Burge acts like he’s healing Todd Ortego at the beginning of the show. “Those guys don’t realize that that’s possible,” he says. One afternoon, Greg picked up a copy of a newspaper with Burge and Ortego on the cover. “When I picked it up, the Lord said, ‘They’re going to do an article on you.’ I knew you were coming. I’ve been waiting for you. That’s usually the way the Lord speaks to me.” As we’re heading out the door, he asks us if we know what the story will be like and when it will run in the paper. I tell him I’m not sure about either, but I’ll let him know once I figure it out. “Never mind,” he says. “I already know what the story’s going to be like.” All of this happened over a month ago. Since then, Terri and I have been working on other stories. One afternoon I watched her fall from a tractor and land in a field on her tailbone. When she made it to her feet, she was clutching her camera and laughing. Since Terri met Greg, she’s had no back pain. p o st s crip t

I’ve often wondered if during this interview there was some sort of subliminal messages in the music playing in the room that might have made me less skeptical. I’ll never know, and I still can’t deny or explain what happened that day. And of all the stories I’ve ever written, this is the one most people have contacted me about, usually looking to locate Greg Kerr. I saw him on a few occasions in 2007, but I have since lost contact with him. And Terri’s back pain did return but not until years after this story was first published.

Signs and Wonders  •  92

The Last Perique Farmer For two hundred years, farmers in St. James Parish have raised perique tobacco. Only a few farmers remain, and they farm solely by hand. augu st 21, 2002

P

ercy Martin farms 235 acres in St. James Parish. With the help of his five sons, the eighty-four-year-old raises tomatoes, bell peppers, and sugar cane. He’s planted twelve acres of his farm with perique tobacco, and those twelve acres contain the bulk of the world’s supply. Perique grows only in St. James Parish, along the Grande Pointe ridge, just outside the town of Paulina, in the rich alluvial soil of the Mississippi River. Tobacco experts generally point to three qualities that make perique distinct: the St. James soil, the perique seed, and the fermentation process. Martin says some scientists believe St. James Parish sits on top of a mineral deposit that gives the tobacco its robust and pungent flavor, but he doesn’t know if that’s true. All he knows is that he needs the perique seeds, the St. James soil, and hickory whiskey barrels to make perique. Perique’s distinctive, powerful flavor makes it nearly impossible to smoke by itself. A small amount of perique is usually blended with other tobaccos to add another dimension of flavor to the dominant tobacco. And although the fermenta93

tion process makes for a stronger-tasting smoke, perique has been proven to produce less nicotine than other domestic tobaccos. While Martin grows perique, he won’t smoke it. “When I work in it, that’s enough,” he says. Martin speaks in a thick Cajun accent that makes him sound like he grew up somewhere south of Abbeville, even though he lives only fifty miles from downtown New Orleans. He was born and raised in Grande Pointe. His father and his grandfather raised perique. Martin remembers that during his childhood about fifteen families cultivated some five hundred acres of perique each year. Jimmy Garrett is the St. James Parish agent for Louisiana State University’s Agriculture Center. He estimates that only 15.25 acres of perique are raised in Louisiana, specifically in St. James Parish. “Right now, the largest producer is Mr. Percy Martin,” he says. “Then there are probably about four or five others who grow anywhere from a quarter of an acre to as many as a couple of acres.” Of that handful of people, Garrett says only two other men, aside from Martin, raise perique commercially: Timothy Bourgeois and Dudley LeBlanc, both of Paulina. In St. James Parish, the agrarian life is slowly being supplanted by the industrial life. The indigenous plants of the area are being replaced with chemical plants. The younger generation is finding work, lured by the stability of a steady paycheck and the hope that their children won’t suffer from the hardships of their farming forefathers. Martin’s grandchildren work in the chemical plants that loom along the horizon. He says they are “making more money than all of us put together.” He doesn’t have much hope that his family will farm perique into the fifth generation.

The Last Perique Farmer  •  94

“I don’t believe I’m going to last too darn long either,” he says with a laugh. The Martins begin planting perique in late March and usually finish by mid-April. Depending on the weather and how well the plants mature, they begin harvesting the crop at the end of June. It takes three weeks to get all twelve acres of perique harvested. On a Sunday afternoon in July, while his sons work in the field, Martin sits on his four-wheeler. He would give them a hand if he could, if he didn’t have a bad knee. His doctor told him to stay out of the sun, but he can’t do that. He has to oversee the work. At least his hat keeps the sun off his face. His sons have had health concerns too. You wouldn’t know it from the way they work, but three of his boys have already had five heart bypasses among them. The men move slowly down the rows, in the shadows of the sugarcane stalks. With one quick lick of a cane knife, they sever the tobacco plants at their base. A second blow, or even a third, increases the risk of damaging the plant. After the stalks are cut, they are carefully laid out over the severed bases and left out overnight. The moist night air makes the leaves easier to handle, less brittle to the touch. There are four hundred stalks to a row, and it takes the men an hour to walk down the five rows in the field and harvest two thousand stalks. While they work, the men don’t talk. There’s nothing to say. The work is in their blood. It’s as routine as the sun rising and setting over the fields of sugar cane and perique. At six the next morning the Martins, along with a few boys, load the tobacco harvested the day before. One of Martin’s sons, Teddy, drives the tractor, straddling

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the rows, while the boys fling the wet leaves onto the flatbed trailer. The dew flies from the leaves in an arch over their heads. When they stack leaves incorrectly, Teddy corrects them. The young men don’t seem to care, and Teddy has to correct them several times. Teddy brings the tobacco to the barn and dumps it on a sheet of plastic covering the dirt floor. The barn has only one wall. Some tobacco stalks are already hanging to dry in the barn, and the smell is earthy and pungent. The Martins drive a nail into the base of each stalk at a 45degree angle. They use a small wooden paddle to drive in the nails. Percy Jr. says they are called “cop-cops” because of the sound they make when they tap the nails into the stalks. The stalks hang from nails on one of several thin wires running the length of the 160-foot-long barn. In twenty-one days, with proper ventilation and hot weather, the tobacco will dry. “The crop is going to be a good one,” Percy says. “The quality is looking good.” He’s worried though about the weather in the Gulf of Mexico. He’s always keeping a close eye on it, hoping it stays put until they can get in the crop from the fields. “We just keep our fingers crossed,” he says. By noon, the men have finished hanging the leaves. They will eat lunch, and if the weather holds, they will be back in another field in the afternoon to harvest more perique. It just all depends on whether the sun’s shining. “Tobacco is like hay,” Percy says. “You make it with sunshine.” Three weeks later, on a warm Tuesday morning, a dozen people are at work in the barn. They sit on plastic chairs, overturned plastic buckets, and milk crates. An old radio covered in dust plays gospel music that tells the workers there’s a place for them, a place of glory, not of this world. It will take the workers two weeks to strip the leaves from the stalks of the entire crop. Two groups are at work. The first removes the stalks from the wires overhead, pulls out the The Last Perique Farmer  •  96

nails, and strips the leaves from the stalks. Boys then gather as many leaves as they can. They beat the dust out of the leaves on one of two whiskey barrels and then bring the leaves to Ray and Percy Jr. The two men are dressed in rubber boots and plastic aprons. They stand over a wooden table and spray a fine mist of water from a garden hose overhead onto the leaves. Then they flip the leaves over and do the same to the other side. Moistening the leaves makes it easier to remove the stems and prepares them for the final process of fermentation. After shaking and beating the excess water out of the leaves, the boys place them in a long, wooden rectangular box in the center of the second group. The second group rips out the central spine of each leaf and discards it. When there are enough leaves, they are wrapped together in two-pound bundles, called “torquettes,” and placed in the whiskey barrels where they will ferment. “If you don’t ferment it, you ain’t got no perique,” Percy says. One barrel will hold about four hundred pounds of perique. The barrels are then placed under pressure with huge jackscrews to ferment the perique. In September and again in February, the pressure will be removed, the leaves flipped over in the barrels and placed under pressure again. By March, the entire process will be completed, and the perique will be ready for shipping. It will also be time to start the entire process over again and to plant next year’s crop. In the 1950 book All This Is Louisiana, Frances Parkinson Keyes wrote about the production of perique tobacco, and photographer Elemore Morgan Sr. documented the process with his photos. Keyes wrote, “This is perique tobacco, which has been called the greatest mystery crop in the world—and no wonder. In spite of repeated efforts to raise it elsewhere, it flourishes 97  •  The Last Perique Farmer

only on a triangular piece of land, skirting the Mississippi for about ten miles between Convent and LaPlace and thrusting its third point back into the swamps about three miles distant.” By the time the Acadians made their way into St. James Parish in 1776, the Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians were already raising the tobacco. Pierre Chenet was the first to begin raising it commercially in 1824. He is also credited with refining the fermenting process which gives perique its pungent flavor. Chenet’s nickname was Perique, and the tobacco he raised became associated with his name. In 1950, Keyes says, there were two families that controlled the production of perique, the Roussels and Guglielmos. The Roussels were planters and dealers of the tobacco. Farrell Roussel also grew sugarcane to supplement his perique crop. J. F. Guglielmo, the principal of Lutcher High School, was also a broker of the tobacco. Alfred Guglielmo told Pipes magazine in 1996 that his family had abandoned the perique business in 1990 because of a vanishing perique supply. In its heyday, the Guglielmo Perique Tobacco Co. processed anywhere from 400,000 to 500,000 pounds of perique a year. Leon Poché takes exception to Keyes’s statement. Poché is president of L.A. Poché Perique Tobacco Inc. in Convent. His grandfather was a perique farmer, and his father became a broker of the crop. Poché says his company sells perique when they have it, but the company hasn’t been able to purchase any in years. “There’s not enough perique,” he says. Primarily, Poché sells a tobacco trademarked by his company and called Acadian Green River Perique. He says, “We buy Green River tobacco [from Kentucky]. We bring it down to Louisiana, and we process it in the methods that we process perique. You can’t tell the difference. It’s cured the same.” Martin was selling his perique to Poché until the two men had a disagreement. Martin claims he quit selling to Poché beThe Last Perique Farmer  •  98

cause he wasn’t offered a fair price for his crop. Poché claims he stopped buying from Martin because of the poor quality of one crop. Either way, the man growing most of the perique and the man selling it stopped doing business with one another in 1999. Christopher Brown and Matt Nichols had both read about perique tobacco and were curious to see how it was grown. One afternoon in the summer of 1998, they set out from New Orleans and drove up River Road to St. James Parish. “In our minds,” Nichols says, “what we had envisioned was that we would see [perique] plantations, that there would be many farms, and tobacco would be readily available.” They found no such plantations. When they pulled into a restaurant in Convent for a bite to eat, they asked some older residents if anyone was still growing perique. The old timers directed them to Percy Martin’s farm. Brown and Nichols met Martin, who told them of his woes of selling the crop to Poché and his inability to get a better price for his tobacco. He was considering quitting all together. He told them it was already too much work, and the lousy price he was getting for his perique only compounded the problem. If he could get a better price, he could continue raising perique. Nichols says, “The reality is that they’re relying on tobacco. Without the tobacco money, I think the farm would fold.” Brown and Nichols realized the world’s supply of perique and an agricultural tradition were both on the edge of extinction. Neither one of them knew how to run a business, but they agreed to help Martin find a buyer for the perique. Nichols says, “This was less about the tobacco and more about the farmer whose blood seemed to be contained within the crop.” Brown and Nichols became brokers of perique overnight. They sent packages of perique to fifty different tobacco com99  •  The Last Perique Farmer

panies, but they got little response. Only the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co. showed any interest in purchasing the crop. At the end of 1999, Santa Fe agreed to purchase all the perique Martin could produce. Since then, Santa Fe has purchased an annual average of 12,000 pounds of perique from Martin. Santa Fe’s senior vice president Mike Little says, “Mr. Martin’s limited supply limits us in how we market the product.” With that supply, Santa Fe generates 100,000 cartons a year of a perique-blended cigarette. “It’s just another style we can offer to our consumers,” he says. “It’s like a cognac or a cigar, to relax with later in the day.” Santa Fe’s perique cigarettes make up only 3 percent to 4 percent of the company’s total tobacco sales. The blended cigarette uses between 10 percent and 20 percent of perique, and the rest of the tobacco is domestically grown. The company uses no artificial flavors in the perique cigarette or in any of its products. Little says Martin’s perique seeds have adapted to the soil of St. James Parish. One could take the seeds and grow them anywhere in the world, “but you couldn’t come up with the same product.” And it’s also “the way that it’s handled when it’s harvested. He’s causing forced fermentation of the tobacco by packing it in those whiskey barrels. It sweetens the tobacco by soaking it in its own sap. It’s the only tobacco I know of in the U.S. that’s force fermented.” Although Martin has found a new market for his crop, the future of perique remains uncertain. Martin’s son Ray says he and his brothers will continue to farm the crop, “if we can get a good price, and the government’s not on our ass.” Not only does the perique farmer worry about the care and production of his tobacco—which is completely dependent on Mother Nature—but he also has the current moral climate to The Last Perique Farmer  •  100

contend with, at a time when tobacco is the No. 1 enemy of public health. Nichols says Martin’s last crop was his best since Nichols and Brown became his broker. “I wish there were ten more farmers growing it,” he says. But ultimately, Nichols knows there’s not much incentive for a farmer to plant perique, much less to be a farmer in a land where chemical plants offer steady paychecks. “The culture of perique is dead,” Nichols says. “That I will state with some assurance. With an anthropological background, I will absolutely state that, and I hate to state that. In fact, my business partner, Christopher Brown, does not like to hear that. But the truth is, if we define culture as an aggregate of families with a shared cultural way, then perique does not meet that definition. There’s no longer fifty families that would meet annually, plant together, and share work.” Nichols continues to work hard for the dead culture. Recently, in cooperation with the Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., Nichols and Brown oversaw the construction of a new barn on Martin’s property. Nichols also envisions a perique cooperative where area farmers work together to keep perique alive. “The culture of perique may be dead,” he says, “but the tradition lives on.”

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Driving Jimmy to His Grave At seventy-five years old, Jimmy Martin is still the King of Bluegrass. He knows he’ll never be a member of the country club, and he doesn’t mind telling you why. o c t obe r 2, 2002

J

immy Martin is being driven to his grave. He rides in the passenger’s seat, heading north on Old Hickory Boulevard through Madison, Tennessee. Driving over the Cumberland River, he’s singing “Knoxville Girl,” the tragic tune of a man who takes a Sunday evening stroll with his girlfriend, beats her to death, and throws her body into the river. Martin wears a red jumpsuit and a pair of white canvas Converse sneakers. His long white sideburns peek out from beneath his cockeyed baseball cap. He’s seventy-five years old and the King of Bluegrass. He’s also known as Mr. Good ’n’ Country, for his first solo album, Good ’n’ Country, recorded on Decca Records in 1960. “You can use them both,” he says. “I like them both. I’m damn sure good and country. I don’t care what they call me, just as long as they let me out there and pick.” In the Spring Hill Cemetery, Martin’s tombstone is taller than he is, adorned with his picture and his epitaph. 102

“I had nobody to look out for me,” he says, “so I just went ahead and had me one made. Of course it cost me a little bit more money to get what I wanted. I wanted to put it as close to Roy Acuff as I could get it.” Martin shelled out $15,000 to move his grave directly across from Acuff’s, the final resting place of the King of Country Music. “That’s as close as I’m ever going to get to Roy Acuff,” he says. Martin’s tombstone reads in part, “A colorful and consummate entertainer and musician, Jimmy Martin produced profound and enduring influences on the idiom during its critical formative years and throughout the remainder of bluegrass music’s first half century.” There’s no mention of Martin’s lifelong rejection by the Grand Ole Opry, the Promised Land for every young country boy of his generation. Driving back to his home, Martin is still singing and having a fine time mimicking Acuff’s “Wreck on the Highway.”

Who did you say it was, brother? Who was it fell by the way? When whiskey and blood run together Did you hear anyone pray?

Martin lives in a comfortable brick home in Hermitage, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville. In front of his house sits his 1985 Lincoln Town Car limousine with the personalized license plate king jm and a license plate in front that reads widow maker. There’s a stop sign in his driveway with a message in gold letters: beware of dog. bad dog will bite tail. “I’ve got some good dogs,” he says. “I love my dogs.” His guard dogs—Joe Louis and Little Dixie Hall—roam the 103  •  Driving Jimmy to His Grave

property. In his back yard, his dogs for hunting coons, rabbits, and squirrels are penned up. They’re named Tom T. Hall, Patty Loveless, Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Little Tater Jimmy Dickens, Mel Tillis, Charley Pride, Hank Williams Sr., and Eddie Stubbs. He also has guineas, chickens, a mule, a billy goat, and a pet raccoon. Martin lives 250 miles from were he was born and raised in the Cumberland Mountains of East Tennessee, in the little town of Sneedville. At the age of four, his father died and his mother remarried. He was one of ten children who worked the family farm. He went to school until the third grade but quit to help out on the farm. He grew up listening to The Midday Merry Go Round radio program on WNOX in Knoxville. It’s where he heard the music of Carl Story, Charlie Monroe, and the Bailey Brothers. He also tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry on WSM in Nashville, where he heard Uncle Dave Macon, Roy Acuff, and his hero, Bill Monroe. He says of Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, “I think they played better music. I think they was really together and had their outfit and all their singing together.” Martin’s stepfather had a quartet, and that was where Martin learned to sing bass, baritone, lead, and tenor. His first singing job was with Tex Climer and his Blue Band Coffee Boys on WCRK in Morristown, Tennessee. During the day, Martin worked in a factory, and in the evenings he sang. “We lived about thirty miles across the hill,” Martin says, “and my family and all my kinfolk could hear me singing on the radio. I thought there was nothing like that, just to dedicate my folks songs, hope they were listening to me.” In 1949, at the age of twenty-two, Martin took a bus to Nashville to see the Grand Ole Opry. From the balcony, Martin watched Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys perform. Martin

Driving Jimmy to His Grave  •  104

says Monroe “was my idol in bluegrass. That’s who I wanted to work with when I was back home on the farm. I always wanted to be a guitar player and sing with Bill Monroe. And when I first sung the first note with him, he gave me a job right the same day.” After the show, Martin waited for Monroe outside of the Opry. When Monroe walked through the back door, Martin introduced himself and said he knew all of Monroe’s songs. Monroe invited him inside to play a few numbers. With Monroe on mandolin, Martin on Mac Wiseman’s guitar, Rudy Lyle on banjo, and Chubby Wise on fiddle, they sang “Old Crossroads.” Roy Acuff stood in the doorway listening. When they were through playing, he said, “Boy, he sure suits your singing good. He sounds good with you, don’t he, Bill?” Martin also played “Poor Ellen Smith” and says he “got it as lonesome as I could.” After playing “Orange Blossom Special,” Monroe made him a member of the Blue Grass Boys. When Martin thinks back on those days, tears come to his eyes. “When Bill gave me a job on the Grand Ole Opry,” he says, “I didn’t get much of an education in school, but it gave me the greatest education that I ever wanted in my life. When I could stand on the side of the stage and watch Roy Acuff and how he approached the crowd, that’s the best education I could have ever got in my life. It’s been good for me. It taught me to know kindly how to talk to a microphone and how to talk to a crowd of people. I watched all that and I got all the experience I could get. Of course, I used my own way of doing it, my own heart and my own soul. If you do something that you like and do it the best you can, that’s the only thing you can do.” Some say that Martin was the best singer Monroe ever had in his band. It’s undeniable that Martin’s playing and sing-

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ing complemented Monroe’s. His high, nasally voice and gutwrenching vocal expressions have come to define the high lonesome sound of bluegrass music. For five years, Martin played with Monroe, helping him write standards like “Uncle Pen.” In 1953, Martin left the Blue Grass Boys and teamed up with Bob and Sonny Osborne. Three years later, he parted ways with the Osborne Brothers (in a dispute that has kept them from speaking to each other to this day), signed with Decca Records, and formed his own band, the Sunny Mountain Boys. Throughout his solo career, Martin recorded tunes like “20/20 Vision,” “Sunny Side of the Mountain,” and “Hit Parade of Love.” He performed frequently on the Louisiana Hayride and the Grand Ole Opry. Even though his performances brought the house down, Martin says, for years Monroe threatened to quit the show if he was ever made a member of the Opry. He says, “There’s no hard feelings that I wouldn’t hug Bill Monroe’s neck. Boy, what good times we had together when we was together. The best friend I had was Bill Monroe, and the best friend he had was Jimmy Martin. I loved him. I loved him as good as anybody, but he don’t want me down there singing on that Opry. It’s not like he wanted to shoot me.” Martin also appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 1972 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken. The landmark album bridged the gap between the younger musicians and their musical elders, and also featured Roy Acuff, Mother Maybelle Carter, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, and Vassar Clements. Martin also appears on volumes two and three of the albums of the same name. In 1997, in the first Southern music issue of the Oxford American, Tom Piazza published an article about his encounter with Martin. Later published as a book titled True Adventures with

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the King of Bluegrass, Piazza contacted Martin by phone to ask for an interview. Martin asked Piazza, “Is there gonna be a few dollars in it for Jimmy Martin to buy himself a fifth of whiskey?” Piazza explained that he couldn’t pay him for an interview, but he would bring him a fifth of whiskey, if that’s what it was going to take to get an interview. Martin agreed. Piazza interviewed Martin at his home on a Thursday morning. He brought a fifth of Knob Creek and a fifth of Gentleman Jack. Martin looked at the bottles, said he drank Seagram’s 7, and put them away. After the interview, the two made plans to visit the Grand Ole Opry the following Saturday night. When Piazza arrived at Martin’s home that Saturday night, he found him intoxicated. Piazza drove them both to the Opry in Martin’s limousine, after nearly being electrocuted while jumping off the battery. Backstage at the Opry, Piazza wrote that when Martin saw Ricky Skaggs, he yelled, “Is that the BIGGEST ASSHOLE in Nashville?” Skaggs later strolled up to Martin and was polite. Martin harangued him for not singing a tenor part on a song with him. Skaggs eventually excused himself from the conversation. Martin later threatened country singer and songwriter “Whispering” Bill Anderson. Martin told Piazza, “He talked to me in a way I don’t like to be talked to, and I’m going to knock his ass off.” Since then, Martin has been banned from the Grand Ole Opry. Martin says, “A lot of the writers tells it like they think it, like stories about George Jones and me. They don’t tell the real, exact story.” According to Martin, the real, exact story is that “Tom Piazza come to Nashville to get just what he could get out of Jimmy Martin to sell a book. He set me up. I don’t prefer putting in a book what I said to Ricky Skaggs. That should be a

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little bit personal, but since he said it, I don’t give a damn. I did say it, and I’m not sorry of it. “Tom Piazza come during hunting season when I didn’t even want him to come to be interviewed. I told him I didn’t want him to come, but he come here anyway to my house and brought a fifth for me and him to drink and took me down to the Grand Ole Opry. He said he didn’t know I was a big drinker until he come and visited me. That’s a pretty good deal, ain’t it? He didn’t know that Jimmy Martin was a heavy drinker until he come to my house to visit with me, and he come in the nighttime and had a fifth with him. “When I do take a drink with somebody, it’s not that strong. See, like Jack Daniels and that kind of stuff, I don’t drink it. I might take a drink of Seagram’s 7, where it’s kindly light. If I take a drink, I don’t drink to raise hell with anybody or anything like that. “He got me down there at the Grand Ole Opry and what I said to Ricky Skaggs in his book is nothing I regret, because Ricky Skaggs is five times worser than what I could ever say about him. He didn’t tell why I said that to Ricky. I said that to Ricky in a recording studio when he come over to record with me. He was to sing tenor on ‘If Teardrops Were Pennies.’ “I know Ricky sings it, and he knows it. I’ve even asked people in Ricky Skaggs’s group, ‘Do you think Ricky could have sung tenor with me on that?’ “They said, ‘Why hell yes he could. We’ve told him that, but he just didn’t want to do it.’ “At that time, Bill [Monroe] was still living and [Skaggs] was afraid he would hurt Bill Monroe’s feelings if he sung a duet with me on a record. Ricky Skaggs can flat sing tenor with Jimmy Martin. I have sung with him at bluegrass festivals around the fire, and me and him could sing any song together. “And besides, that same day over there at the studio, he said, ‘Jimmy, your voice is too powerful.’ That’s how come I Driving Jimmy to His Grave  •  108

called Ricky this. I told him just exactly what he was, and I mean that. I’d say it the same way again today. There’s no apologizing to it. He’s what I’d call a big hypocrite. “I like Ricky Skaggs, but he’s done me just like the stars of the Grand Ole Opry. I’ve not done nothing to none of them.” Piazza laughs off Martin’s accusations that he forced him into an interview and got him drunk. Piazza was fully aware that Martin enjoyed whiskey, even before he made the initial contact with him. “That would be like going to the beach and not knowing they had water there,” he says. “Everybody knows Jimmy drinks. There are stories about Jimmy and his drinking. All you have to do is get within about a hundred miles of Nashville, and you’ll get a good Jimmy Martin story.” What’s unfortunate, Piazza points out, is that the wild tales of Jimmy Martin have a tendency to overshadow the man’s God-given talent. “You have to love Jimmy Martin because of his incredible talent,” he says. “He’s a good man, I think, and a really difficult man and his own worst enemy. We’re all incredibly lucky to be around to see it. I’m grateful for the time I had to see him, as crazy as it was.” And while the tales are sometimes what people remember the most, Piazza is quick to point out why we should even care. “It’s natural to focus on a lot of the wild behavior,” he says, “but it’s more important to remember that the reason that we’re interested in that in the first place is because Jimmy is such a great musician and singer.” In the foreword of True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass, country musician Marty Stuart writes of Martin, “He’s part preacher, part prophet and a card-carrying madman who is completely filled with the musical Holy Ghost. Time spent with the King of Bluegrass is not for the lily-livered or the faint of heart.” 109  •  Driving Jimmy to His Grave

The first time Stuart saw Martin perform was at the Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival in Bean Blossom, Indiana. It was 1971 and Stuart was twelve years old, a young Mississippi boy who was in love with bluegrass. Stuart says Martin and his band “stomped their feet on stage. The feet stomping to the music on those wood planks followed me all the way back to Mississippi. I loved the pizzazz and the showmanship, but I had enough sense, at twelve years old, to know I was hearing great music. I knew back then that Jimmy Martin had a whole other thing going on.” At the age of fourteen, Stuart joined Lester Flatt’s band as a guitarist and later as the mandolin player. Since then, he has gone on to work with The Sullivans, Doc and Merle Watson, and Johnny Cash. In 1982, he released his first solo album, Busy Bee Café, with a heavy-hitting lineup of some of country music’s finest talent. His 1989 album Hillbilly Rock brought him national recognition and his first Top 10 hit. It’s only within the last five years that Stuart and Martin have become close friends. Stuart says, “One day I woke up and saw a musical genius.” Last June, Stuart accompanied Martin to Bean Blossom as his guest. Martin wanted to make a grand appearance, so he and Stuart were delivered to the stage in a police car, with lights flashing and sirens blaring. After the fourth encore, Martin turned to Stuart on stage and asked him what he wanted to hear. Stuart said something he didn’t normally play. Martin broke into a rendition of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Brakeman’s Blues.” “He put it on its side and spun it around,” Stuart says. The crowd went wild. As the police car carried them back through the crowd, Martin turned to Stuart. “You know what’s a pitiful thing?” Martin asked. “What?” Stuart replied. “I do this to them everywhere I go.” Driving Jimmy to His Grave  •  110

Stuart is planning an all-star country music tour across the nation, called the Electric Barnyard, and he says Jimmy Martin, along with Merle Haggard, will play an important role in the show’s success. What Stuart finds appealing about Martin is what others find so unsettling, that he’s quick to speak his mind and that he does it rather frankly. “Jimmy is pushy,” he says, “but what he’s pushing is the truth, and he does it in a way that makes the establishment uncomfortable. It’s refreshing to have someone that blatant putting it out there. There’s a lot of old stigma that goes with Jimmy, and most of that has to do with the business end of a whiskey bottle. There’s only a couple of times I’ve seen him a little to the left, and the rest of the time he was right on the money and stole the show.” Martin’s ability to pull out all the stops during his live performances may be part of the reason he’s never been made a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Or maybe it’s his refusal to conform to Nashville’s standards. Either way, Stuart says, “He knows damn well that when he plays the Opry he wrecks the place. At this point, Jimmy is very adamant he doesn’t need to be a member of the Opry, and if he became a member he wouldn’t have anything to complain about.” Despite his showmanship and his talent, Martin says the professional jealousies of the folks backstage at the Grand Ole Opry have kept him from becoming a card-carrying member. “I’ve never begged them to be on the Grand Ole Opry,” he says. “I’ve followed Ricky Skaggs, Alison Krauss, and Bill Monroe, and the encore went over so big I must have something different than they got. I’m not bragging or boasting, but I’ve not done nothing to none of them down there.” When it comes to Jimmy Martin, the folks at the Grand Ole Opry declined to comment. Martin’s sitting in his kitchen, and he’s on a roll. He’s talk111  •  Driving Jimmy to His Grave

ing about how the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack had nothing to do with bluegrass and everything to do with “the biggest advertising campaign this country’s ever seen.” Martin says he doesn’t care for the music coming off of Music Row these days. “It all sounds alike,” he says. “I don’t know one star from another. If they ever make any of them that can out-sing George Jones, the late Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Faron Young, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Carter Stanley, I want them to please get the record and bring it to me so I can hear it.” When Martin’s building up steam, you don’t want to be the one to tell him to simmer down. While he talks, he points emphatically at the tape recorder sitting on his kitchen table, as if it has the ability to record the emphasis he’s adding with his eyes and his finger. The best thing to do is to sit back and let him at it. “There’s only two kinds of tears that you shed in this whole world,” he says, “that’s tears of happiness and tears of sadness. You’re looking at a person that’s had them, and you’ve seen them in his eyes this morning when he was talking about the music he loves so good. Jimmy Martin has shed all of them. When I sing a happy song, I jump around and look happy on the stage, and the crowd looks the same way. When I get ready to sing a tear-jerker, they can get their handkerchiefs out right then because I’m liable to cry with them. “One time I heard my folks say up in Sneedville, how can you sing ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’ and go into a beer joint and sing a good gospel song? You know what Jimmy Martin said to them? That’s a very sad place to sing it. You’ll have more people crying there because there ain’t nothing there but broken-hearted people. It’s either a woman, her husband has left her with little kids. Or, it’s a man with a woman who’s Driving Jimmy to His Grave  •  112

left him and done him wrong, and he don’t know the way out of it. He’ll sit back and sing that song and cry with you. I’ve seen it done many times. “What makes good music is a man that’s experienced. If he’s had a hard life, he’ll play hard music. If he’s lived it, he can play it. If he’s not lived it, he can’t play it. He’s just guessing at it. A lot of the people nowadays think you can get a bus, hire you a driver so they can sleep all the way there and back. They don’t even pick. We used to sing all the way sometimes. We’d sing those quartets for two hundred miles. All you hear now on your bus is a bunch of snoring. Nobody wants to do nothing but get their money, and most of the guys want to run after girls or get them some beer and party and that just won’t get it. “They’ve told on me about drinking. I never did care about drinking like I did about picking music and singing. I’ve always loved the style of music that I play. Bill Monroe said I talked about bluegrass more than anybody ever had in his band. It’s our living. It’s something I love. Every time I go on stage I do my best to do the best I can for them people out there. I put everything I can into that mic when I’m out in front of them people because I love them. If it wasn’t for them, I would be nothing. I want to go and put on shows as long as I can and satisfy the people and be good to them people that have made it where I can retire. “If you put your heart into it and try and give it your best, you will always do good. But if you think you can just lay around and sleep and somebody’ll give you something, they ain’t going to do it. It’s out there if you work hard for it. I would say that in anything you go at. If you want to make a living and you work hard for it, you’ll get it done.” Martin stares out of his window into his back yard. “Put this in your write-up,” he says. “I love all the people that supported me.” 113  •  Driving Jimmy to His Grave

His voice is cracking, and he’s holding back his tears. “I never intend to let them down as long as I live. I want to shake hands with all of them. Tell them how much I appreciate them and how much I love them.”

p o st s crip t

This was one of those stories I could see clearly before even sitting down to write it, and when we left Martin’s house I knew what the first sentence was. Hurricane Lili hit Lafayette the day after this story was printed, and folk’s minds were already on the storm long before it made landfall. It’s doubtful anyone ever read this story, and it’s always been one of my favorites. Martin was scheduled to headline the inaugural South Louisiana Bluegrass Festival, which was cancelled in the wake of the storm. When the festival was held the following year, I caught up with Martin in his tour bus at Acadian Village in Lafayette. “Yeah, I remember you,” he said. “You’re the one who wrote all of them lies in that newspaper. You said knowing I didn’t drink would be like knowing there weren’t water in the ocean.” After giving me the cold shoulder for about five minutes, he started directing bawdy jokes my way. Two years later, after being diagnosed with bladder cancer, Martin died at the age of seventy-seven. He was laid to rest in his grave at the Spring Hill Cemetery in Madison, Tennessee.

Driving Jimmy to His Grave  •  114

Strung Out on a Dream For the last two years, Santeria has been laboring under a curse. They’re banking on their new album to break the spell. nove mbe r 6, 2002

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t doesn’t matter that it’s been raining all week or that the water is rising in the streets. It’s a joy ride for Santeria. Things haven’t gone their way for so long that it’s just part of the journey. If the clouds parted, the sun shone, and the water subsided, it would be just plain weird. They’re cruising down Bayou Milhomme, just outside Morgan City, on an aluminum party barge. They have a gig later that night at the Hi Ho Lounge in New Orleans. Dege Legg is the band’s singer, songwriter, and guitarist. He sits at the helm of the boat with his acoustic guitar. Bassist Jay Guins and guitarist Troy “Primo” Primeaux are also at the front of the boat. Drummer Krishna Kasturi and percussionist Rob Rushing lounge in the back of the boat. It’s taken Santeria two years to record their third album, House of the Dying Sun. They’re convinced they’re living under a curse, and they don’t know their way out of it. What they do know is how to rock. They believe if they play hard enough and long enough, then maybe they’ll break the curse. Maybe the dark clouds won’t always stalk them. Maybe. 115

••• The band takes its name from the Santería religion. John Laudun, folklorist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, says Santería is a synthesis of Western African religions and Catholicism. When West Africans were enslaved and indoctrinated with Catholicism, they were able to maintain their beliefs by grafting them onto the beliefs of Catholicism. In Santería, Laudun says, “There’s a belief that there is a creative force behind the world, but you don’t have access to it. You have access to the pantheon of gods, which is not much different than having saints to pray on your behalf. “As you get increasingly involved and move up the ladder in the practice,” Laudun says, “you get to the point where you don’t just interact with the god, the god possesses you. The god becomes you and speaks through you. In some ways, you make the god available for other people to interact with.” Santería is often perceived by outsiders as an animal-sacrificing cult. It does utilize animals, particularly chickens, in its rituals. It’s not a religion that’s open to everyone, and the closed and secretive nature of its practitioners contributes to the suspicions of those on the outside. Legg chose the name for the band not for religious reasons, but for metaphorical ones. He says the band is a synthesis of people and styles, much like the religion is a synthesis of what may at first appear to be opposing beliefs. “It’s a cool-sounding name,” he says. “It sounds kind of heavy metal, but it’s kind of cool.” Apparently, there are some believers of Santería who don’t find it too cool. On a number of occasions, band members have received answering machine messages and e-mails from strangers demanding that they stop using the name. But the most startling message was when they found a cow’s heart in their mailbox.

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Other strange occurrences have strengthened their belief in the curse. In the course of a month, each band member’s car either died or was totaled in a wreck. During another month’s time, they were all evicted from their different homes. Kasturi says he would have a hard time believing in it if he hadn’t had firsthand experience with it, but he doesn’t think the curse will follow the band forever. “It could be just random events,” he says. “You never know with these kinds of things, but it’s probably more colorful to believe that this stuff is going on.” But if there is a curse on the band, could it be broken simply by changing the band’s name? “I don’t know,” Legg says. “It’s such a cool name, and we’ve been banging it out for so long. In reality, I think it’s just a string of bad luck we’ve attributed to this thing. But at the same time, the subconscious mind takes over and you start making inferences, thinking that maybe we are cursed and doomed.” Legg spent most of his childhood as a military brat, born in Rayne and raised in Georgia, California, Mowata, and Baton Rouge. The only music he listened to was whatever his parents had playing on the radio. At the age of thirteen, though, his musical interest was piqued when he heard the hardcore, postpunk music of Hüsker Dü, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys and the blues of Son House, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Blind Willie Johnson. “It’s all the spirit of rock ’n’ roll,” he says. “It just keeps reincarnating itself, and people give it a different name.” While living in Baton Rouge, Legg was enrolled at Louisiana State University but admits he spent more time studying drugs and crime. “It was an education in the underworld,” he says. “It was nasty. It’s nothing I’m proud of. I don’t walk

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around bragging about it, wearing it like a badge of honor. It’s an experience I went through. I don’t regret it. I learned a lot from it, but I had to get out of that town. There was a lot of negative shit.” Legg moved to San Francisco. He lived in a motel room for $100 a week and wrote music. “That place was just as bad,” he says. “As much as you want to go to the big city and vibe with the higher octane of culture, you see that everybody in the big city is from somewhere else and really doesn’t have any roots. It was a rootless kind of existence.” He decided to devote his life to music and to move to Lafayette. “I’ve been to hell and back, man,” he says. “What the fuck do I have to lose? I may as well do something I’m interested in.” In the summer of 1994, at the age of twenty-two, Legg moved to Lafayette. Moving back was a strange experience for him. He says he felt like “a wild beast of sorts, like a weird animal that wandered in out of the woods.” Legg soon met Kasturi, the drummer for the now defunct group Bubba Daddy. Kasturi says of meeting Legg, “I didn’t know if I could trust him or not. He’s shaky, man. He’s shady. Dege is a strange character.” With bassist Ricky Williams, the three began jamming in Kasturi’s garage. A month later they had their first gig at Metropolis. Santeria was born. Kasturi was born in Hyderabad, India. As a child, his parents immigrated to Lafayette so his mother could work on her doctorate at UL. He started playing drums at the age of fifteen in the high school band. He says he wasn’t really drawn to any particular style of music, but rather music as a whole. Whether it was the music of the marching band or the music of D.R.I., Kasturi liked it all. In high school he played with a hardcore band, Zen Bastards. Strung Out on a Dream  •  118

Kasturi says the early version of Santeria tended to meander quite a bit, without a focused direction in the music. “Dege would come up with riffs. I would come up with rhythm, and he would sing over it. We really had no preconceived idea of what a song should be or how it should be done. Things would kind off just go off in their own direction, and we played a lot faster.” Legg says in the early stages, Santeria was “this big, noisy, demented, art-core thing. It was a big, heavy noise fest. We had the reputation of hooligans. Most of it was deserved. We were really loud and insane. We totally gave ourselves to the music.” In 1996 Williams left the band and was replaced by Ryan Pankratz on bass. Matt Gautreaux also joined the band as percussionist and djembe player. Legg says it was around this time that the band began making a transition from “the art-damaged noise stuff.” Santeria drove to Colorado, where friends of theirs were assistant engineers at a recording studio. They recorded their first, self-titled album in three days. They released it on their own label, Golar Wash Labs. Primeaux heard Santeria live at Metropolis for the first time that same year. After the show, he introduced himself to Legg. “I remember checking out these guys and thinking they were totally brash and very noisy, but there was something unique about them,” Primeaux says. Primeaux admits that he was leery of Legg to begin with, but still accepted Legg’s invitation to jam one afternoon. “He comes to the house,” Primeaux says, “and I’m watching him ’cause he looks crazy. He’s cuckoo-eyed, and I’m hoping he doesn’t steal anything out of my house.” “I would have,” Legg says, “but it was all too shiny and new.” Primeaux was reared on the south side of Crowley. He grew up listening to the monster rock sounds of Grand Funk Rail119  •  Strung Out on a Dream

road and Van Halen on his parents’ stereo console. The first time he strummed his Sears guitar, he didn’t understand why he didn’t sound just like Eddie Van Halen. “Then I learned how to tune the damn thing,” he says. As a teenager, though, the group that influenced him the most was Guns ’n’ Roses. He saw them at the Cajundome when they opened for Mötley Crüe. “There was something punk about it,” he says. “I didn’t even know what punk was. It had that classic rock with something new. I remember loving it and hating it, but going out and buying the album.” Primeaux would later meet guitarist Slash and have him sign his Gibson Les Paul guitar. It’s the guitar he plays today. When Primeaux met Legg, he wasn’t ready to be a member of the band. Legg coaxed him into Santeria, but he has no regrets. He says, “Everybody wants attention, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t in this for the attention. I’d rather have the attention than the money. People get in plays and drama to do it. They join sororities or fraternities to do it. Everybody wants to be a part of something, and I think we’re part of a very cool group of guys that love music and love people. Of course, on the surface, I’m sure we look like a bunch of scraggly idiots.” Legg says Primeaux didn’t know it at the time, but while they were jamming, he and Kasturi were auditioning for a new guitar player and a bass player. Pankratz had left Santeria to start his own group, Ice Pick Revival. He was replaced by Guins. Primeaux also joined Santeria as the lead guitarist. Gautreaux would later leave the band and was replaced by Rushing on percussion and djembe. Legg says, “It’s more important to me to be able to get along with somebody in the band rather than to be impressed with the amount of musicianship they demonstrate. You’re going to be friends with the person. You’re going to be around him a lot. It’s like having four girlfriends at the same time. If you don’t get along with that person, no matter how good they are, Strung Out on a Dream  •  120

you’re not going to stay together. If you don’t get along with them on a personal, friendship level, it’s not going to last.” Two years later, Santeria released its second album, Apocalypse Louisiana, a compilation of demos, live tracks, readings from Legg’s self-published novel The Battle Hymn of the Good Ole Hillbilly Zatan Boys, and a radio interview. Legg says, “It’s like a scrapbook.” After the release of their second album, Santeria began working on their third. Their first recording engineer left town with their work. It took them months to track him down and get the recordings back. Then, after finding a second engineer to work on the project, he soon left town as well. Luckily for the band, the second engineer had been working on the project as an assistant to Tony Daigle at Electric Comoland in Lafayette. Daigle took over the engineering and ended up producing the album. “This is a good representation of us at this time,” Kasturi says. “This was a great learning experience, working with Tony Daigle. It’s a whole different art involved with recording as opposed to just playing. It’s an art unto itself, and I think I have a little more insight into that now than I did before.” From the first lick of the album, a sustained and defiant chord on a crunched guitar, you know you’re about to see the underbelly of a beast reared in Lafayette. But the creature has more than one head, and it exposes itself throughout the album, sometimes blatantly and sometimes subtly. There are no power ballads on this album. They are songs of contradiction, frustration and, ultimately, an acceptance of the whole big, hairy situation. Legg has written all the songs for Santeria. He says about his music, “At first, you’re at odds with your place in life, feeling like you’re trapped in Louisiana. Then you open your eyes, and all of a sudden you realize that, man, this is a beautiful 121  •  Strung Out on a Dream

place. It’s really interesting. I like it here. I’ve been to other places, and I end up coming back. As soon as you give up trying to escape you realize you’re home.” Legg says House of the Dying Sun is more in line with what Santeria had intended to do with Apocalypse Louisiana. At the same time, he believes the record is an honest depiction of the band’s development over the years. “I don’t know,” he says. “We might sell fucking fifteen copies. It might sell two thousand. Who knows? I mean, fuck. It’s just like a book in itself about a group of guys growing up in Louisiana, being on the outside of everything, coming home to roost and writing about it and making it our home. You know what I mean? Like staking your claim on this place, like this is what it is, and staking your claim on your own artistic vision. Sometimes it’s a hard thing to do. This isn’t high art, though. It’s rock ’n’ roll. “Sometimes people are in it for the chicks and the drugs or maybe pipe dream delusions of cashing in a bunch of money. You have people that are maybe into some of that, but are more concerned with the artistic nature of it, doing something interesting, and staying productive. It really sucks not doing nothing, letting your life pass you by and not being a productive part of society. It’s not like we’re running for mayor or anything. That’ll never happen. We’ve got a reputation as hooligans, but this record is based on a lot of traditional elements of rock ’n’ roll. We’ve come to stake our claim on it.” Dave Hubbell has been a fan of the band since its inception. Hubbell owns Toys Music Center and hosts the radio programs Out on the Fringe on KRVS and Now Hear This on Planet Radio. “I love them,” he says. “They’re straight up rock ’n’ roll. No tricks. I love the way that Dege writes and the way they incorporate the guitars in their sound. It’s new guitar rock steeped in the classic rock tradition. They have new music attitudes, but the music is straight-up rock. Strung Out on a Dream  •  122

“These guys have been plugging away at this for so many years. If anyone on this scene deserves a modicum of success, they do. They take what they do very seriously, but they don’t take themselves very seriously. That’s a beautiful thing.” “I believe we can be a success,” Primeaux says. “I don’t believe I’m living a delusional life, but some people in town tell me that. ‘What are you doing, man? Why don’t you go to school and be a doctor?’ Who’s to say those people are any happier? Making music is an extreme joy for me and the other guys. It’s a brotherhood. It’s like a club. I really want to get a record contract and to get the music out there. That’s a joy if I can comfortably make a living spreading music and having fun. Maybe that’s an irresponsible lifestyle to some, but the world needs people like us.” Kasturi believes Santeria has the potential to bring Lafayette’s local rock to a larger audience. He also knows that rock ’n’ roll is a business, big business, even in a sour economy. “I’ve realized that you almost have to make your band a viable business before you’ll ever get a record deal or succeed,” he says. “The state of the music business is so screwed up right now. You almost have to be self-sufficient before anybody else will even try to give you a deal or a break of some kind. If they’re going to spend a dollar, they’re going to want to make ten. There’s no more losing propositions in that business. “But that’s the beautiful thing about doing art as opposed to anything else, you never lose. You never go back and regret, like why did I play last week in New Orleans? If something good happens and you can sustain yourself, that’s great, but the key thing is to keep it together. The second you give it up you have zero chance. That’s one thing we’ve been able to do, just keep it together, regardless of all the ups and downs. And it’s been crazy.” Legg is also skeptical of the music business beast but just as confident. “I know that this music industry is a crap shoot, and there’s a lot of elements that come into play,” he says. 123  •  Strung Out on a Dream

“Sometimes it’s luck. Sometimes it’s having a fucking big money management company to sell you to the kids. Look at all the crap that makes it now. But to be honest with you, I know if we had a good-sized record label that could give this record a push, there’s no doubt in my mind that we could rock it. I know we could. We rock live. If we just had a couple of opportunities and things would align in the proper order, not necessarily perfectly, I know we could do it. I’m not saying we could be Led Zeppelin or anything like that, but I think we’d have a pretty good chance of succeeding. I think we could do something interesting.” Kasturi knows that the business end of rock ’n’ roll is brutal. But Santeria doesn’t mind. “We like being the underdog,” he says. “We’re like Mr. T in Rocky III, Clubber Lang doing situps in the basement while the rest of the world is watching Rocky Balboa flashing off his sports cars.” Back on the boat in the bayou, Santeria is gliding across the stagnant water, making their way back to the dock. The dark clouds are starting to move back in. They want to make it back to dry ground soon, to start making their way to New Orleans for their gig. Then the boat quits running. There’s no bump, no hiccup of any kind. It just dies. They check the fuel, but there’s plenty of gas. They pull up the engine and check the prop, but nothing’s tangled around it. The fuel line is even clear. They try restarting the engine and for a few tries it catches but sputters out and dies. After a while, the engine turns over but won’t catch. Rushing is sitting in the front of the boat. While his friends try to figure out what’s going on, he looks out over the water. He doesn’t look the least bit concerned. “It’s the Santeria curse,” he says. “There’s no explanation needed.” Legg breaks out the guitar, and Kasturi starts beating on Strung Out on a Dream  •  124

the djembe. The whole band is singing a song from their new CD, “Strung Out on a Dream”: Perfection’s an addiction That I ain’t got time to play. I’m broke and out here stranded Trying to kick a dream. Guess I got to find a way To make some money soon. I’ve been staking claims In dirty motel rooms. Strung out on a dream In the ghetto of heaven.

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Going Home After twenty-two years as the writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, author Ernest J. Gaines looks forward to writing a new chapter in his life. march 5, 2003

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hen Ernest J. Gaines was a kid growing up on the banks of False River in Oscar, he never dreamed that he would one day build his home alongside the big house of the plantation on which he was raised. In the town of Oscar, south of New Roads in Pointe Coupee Parish, the bare trees extend into the gray sky overhead. The open fields, once planted with cotton, corn, and potatoes, now grow sugarcane and soybeans. It’s the land of Gaines’s fictional Bayonne, the setting of his stories depicting early-twentieth-century Louisiana, when black and white sharecroppers worked the land of River Lake Plantation. Gaines looks out over the land. He’s a tall man, wearing his signature beret and an amulet around his neck. At seventy years old, he uses a cane whenever he can. In the last decade, his arthritis has become worse, and it’s harder for him to get around. He’s soft-spoken, but his voice is deep. “This is my world,” he says. “This is my country. This is what I write about. This is my dream. This is my home.” As a child, Gaines never dreamed he would move to Califor126

nia to continue his education or that he would be allowed into a public library. He never thought that he would write about this land or that he would spend his life telling the stories of the people who lived here. He had no idea that he would write eight books, that he would be twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, that he would be honored with the MacArthur Foundation’s genius grant, or that the president of the United States would one day place the National Humanities Medal around his neck. He had no way of knowing that he would become writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, an institution he would not have been allowed to attend as a student in his younger years. And he did not foresee the day he would return to False River to spend his golden years fishing with worms and minnows from his own pier, catching catfish, bream, and sac-au-lait. Gaines has begun another chapter of a life filled with one story after another. This year, he will retire from his writer-inresidence position and, if the weather cooperates, by the end of the year he and his wife, Dianne, will move into their new home on False River. The oldest of twelve children, Ernest James Gaines was born January 15, 1933, on River Lake Plantation. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne Jefferson Gaines, worked in the fields on the plantation. His paternal grandfather was the yardman and his maternal grandmother the cook for the big house. When his mother moved to New Orleans to find work, his maternal aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, cared for Gaines and his siblings. She was unable to walk but got around the house and the yard by dragging herself. Even though she was unable to walk, she taught Gaines the importance of standing and “to strive, to keep striving. That was the only way I was going to make it in the world. That was her advice to me.” Gaines was working in the fields by the age of nine, digging 127  •  Going Home

onions and potatoes, pulling corn and picking cotton for fifty cents a day. He also attended school at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, with thirty other black children. He would later describe his early education in his 1993 book, A Lesson Before Dying. By the age of thirteen Gaines was writing and directing his own plays, which he staged in the church. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother later remarried Ralph Norbert Colar. Gaines says Colar “was Catholic, very disciplined, a hard worker,” and credits him for seeing to it that Gaines continued his education. In 1948 Gaines’s mother and stepfather moved to California, where they found work. After settling in, they soon sent for the young Gaines to join them. The day he left the quarters, the local name for the old slave quarters of the plantation, he remembers that the old people brought him teacakes and fried chicken for his two-day train journey. All of his possessions fit into an old leather suitcase his uncle gave him. His aunt sat on the floor in the doorway of the house when he told her goodbye. Gaines walked away with his friends out to the highway to wave down the Trailways bus. He did not know that he had seen his aunt for the last time, that he would not get another chance to tell her goodbye. Gaines boarded the segregated train in New Orleans. It wasn’t until he reached Los Angeles that blacks and whites rode together in the same cars. When he arrived in Vallejo, California, where his stepfather was stationed as a merchant marine, Gaines remembers meeting children of different races and nationalities, something he had never seen back home. He got along with them all and, while he wasn’t a great athlete, he was usually chosen to play in their games. One afternoon, at the age of sixteen, Gaines was hanging out on the corner with his buddies when his stepfather came home from work. He was told that he was going to get himself in trouble just hanging out and that he needed to get off Going Home  •  128

the street. He had three options—the movies, the YMCA, or the library. He had no money for the movies, so he chose the YMCA. There were several activities at the center, but Gaines wasn’t interested in swimming, dancing, or basketball. He says, “Some guy asked me, ‘Would you like to box?’ So I got in the ring with this guy, and he just beat the hell out of me. After that, I went to the library. I couldn’t hang around [the YMCA] anymore because they would have laughed at me.” Gaines began reading plays, novels, and short stories. He looked for stories by black authors and about black people but found none. The closest things he found were nineteenth-century Russian and French writers. He read Chekhov, de Maupassant, Cather, Turgenev, and Steinbeck. The stories were the most similar to the people he knew back in Louisiana. “If they wrote about peasant life, people who worked in the fields, I liked reading those stories,” he says. “I wasn’t reading too much of American writers at the time because I didn’t care for them, especially Southern writers and the depiction of blacks in their books. I didn’t care for that.” At the age of sixteen, Gaines wrote his first novel, titled The Little Stream. After writing the story in longhand, he tore pieces of paper in half, typed the story single-spaced on the front and back of each page, and bound the book together just as a published book should look. “I didn’t know too much about punctuation,” he says. “I didn’t know anything about indenting paragraphs. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wrote a single line on both sides, and I don’t know what kind of margin I had on either side.” After the book was rejected by a publisher, he burned the manuscript in the incinerator in his back yard. Ten years later, he would revisit the same idea of The Little Stream when he published it as the novel Catherine Carmier. Gaines graduated from Vallejo High School and Vallejo Ju129  •  Going Home

nior College, then served two years in the army, stationed in Guam. It was there that he won his first two awards for writing fiction, including a twenty-five-dollar prize in a short story contest. Under the GI Bill he later enrolled at San Francisco State University to study English and creative writing. In 1956 he published his first short story, “The Turtles,” in the first issue of the college’s literary magazine, Transfer. His second story, “Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit,” was published a year later in the same magazine. After graduating with a bachelor of arts in language arts, he was awarded the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. Gaines realized that he needed to publish a novel if he was going to make his living as a writer. He worked as a shoe shiner, a cab driver, a dishwasher, and a post office clerk. He wrote whenever possible. He also delivered the mail in an insurance office, where he would sneak into the bathroom to jot down a story, “A Long Day in November,” composed on 250 pieces of paper towels. In 1962, Gaines intended to move to Mexico, but that fall James Meredith became the first black to enter the University of Mississippi. “That was felt all over the world,” he says, “especially for a young black who wants to write and who’s writing about the South and staying away from the South.” Inspired by Meredith’s courage, Gaines returned to Louisiana in January 1963 and lived with an aunt and uncle for six months in Baton Rouge. He says, “It was James Meredith going into Ole Miss that I’m sure saved my life, as well as my writing. I didn’t know whether I would succeed as a writer, had I not come to Louisiana in January of ’63. . . . If I had not come back to Louisiana at that time, I don’t know that I ever would have completed Catherine Carmier. If I had not completed Catherine Carmier, I don’t know what I would have done with my life.” Going Home  •  130

Gaines published Catherine Carmier in 1964, after revising it twelve times. “No writer worth his salt believes his first draft is worth publishing,” he says. In 1967 he published Of Love and Dust, followed a year later by Bloodline, a collection of five short stories. Gaines also received the National Endowment for the Arts Study Award and began giving public readings of his work in 1967. But Gaines did not garner widespread attention until 1971, when he published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the story of a 110-year-old woman told from her own point of view. The book became a best seller. Gaines says that readers were so convinced by the voice of Miss Jane Pittman that they did not realize she was his creation and not an actual person. The book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Three years later the CBS network made it into a television movie, which received nine Emmy Awards. Gaines also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Louisiana Library Association Award, the California Gold Medal and the Letters Award from the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. But he didn’t rest on his laurels. Gaines began working on a novel titled The House and The Field. The book was the story of a mulatto, the son of a slave woman and the white owner of a plantation, who could pass for white. The character runs away from the plantation with other slaves and ends up selling the others into bondage in order to pay his own gambling debts. Gaines abandoned the work after publishing the first chapter in The Iowa Review. He had grown tired of writing about slavery so soon after publishing The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and he was already working on a new story. It took him seven years to write, but Gaines published In My Father’s House in 1978. Despite the amount of time and work it took him to complete, he says, “I don’t feel like it came off as I wished it had.” That same year, he spoke for the first 131  •  Going Home

time at the Deep South Writers Conference at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Three years later, he became a visiting professor of English at the university. A Gathering of Old Men was published in 1983 and was later made into a CBS television movie. Gaines was also named the university’s writer-in-residence. Local attorney Ray Mouton donated his home in the Arbolada subdivision to the university with the stipulation that it would remain Gaines’s home for as long as he was a member of the English department faculty. In 1993 Gaines published A Lesson Before Dying. The novel won the Best Fiction Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Southern Writers Conference, and the Louisiana Library Association. He was nominated again for the Pulitzer Prize and was awarded a genius grant of $355,000 by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. But the most significant event in his life that year was his marriage to Dianne Saulney, a Miami attorney. Gaines had met Saulney, a New Orleans native, at the Miami International Book Fair in 1988, and they had courted and corresponded for five years before marrying. Oprah’s Book Club chose A Lesson Before Dying as one of its selections in 1997. The daytime talk show host’s endorsement of the book sent it to the top of the best seller list, four years after its initial publication. Two years later, the book was made into an HBO movie, which won two Emmy Awards. In 2000 Gaines received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton, and the city of Seattle began a program that would be duplicated in a dozen cities across the country, including Lafayette: Schools, colleges, public libraries, and city halls chose A Lesson Before Dying to read and discuss on a citywide level. With the endorsement of entire cities, the book has continued to sell well over the course of the last decade. Going Home  •  132

Throughout his career, Gaines has had fifty awards and honors and a dozen honorary doctorates bestowed upon him. He has also received the Louisiana Center for the Book’s Writer of the Year Award, the National Governors’ Association Award for Distinguished Service in the Arts, the Louisiana Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Louisiana Writers Award. For the last twenty-two years, Gaines has incorporated his tenets of discipline, work, and clarity in his advanced creative writing course. Every fall semester at the university, about two dozen students and nonstudents apply for acceptance into the class. One must supply either a twenty-page short story or a chapter from a novel for Gaines’s consideration. Only twelve students make the cut. Each student submits two pieces of fiction, either short stories or chapters from a novel, during the semester. The class reads and critiques each piece. Each student reads a portion of his work to the class, followed by an hourlong discussion. Gaines adds his insight, going paragraph by paragraph if necessary, pointing out errors, omissions, or ambiguities. “Dr. Gaines is a stickler for clarity of writing, and he makes you think about what you are writing and whether it makes sense,” says Danny Smith, a doctoral candidate, teaching assistant, and native of Marion. “This is a class that will improve your writing, not stoke your ego.” Gaines also comments on the structure, conflict, characters, dialogue, and action of each piece of work. The student who hears Gaines ask, “What does that mean?” knows that he has failed to convey his intentions to the reader. For Gaines, simplicity is the best policy. Suzanne Synborski, originally from upstate New York, lives in Mamou as a freelance writer working on her master’s degree in literature and rhetoric at the university. She says the 133  •  Going Home

hallmark of Gaines’s work is his simplicity and clarity. “He tells important stories without hype or gimmicks,” she says. “As an instructor, Dr. Gaines is like his writing. He doesn’t spout complicated theory that usually has little or no use in the real world. He helps his students keep their feet on the ground.” Oddly enough, Gaines says, “I don’t feel like I’m a teacher really. I’m a writer who’s written a few more books than my students have, and I can give them some advice. I always leave it up to my students to make that final decision. I just try to help them.” His advice to writers is always, “Read, read, read. Write, write, write.” Gaines says the writer’s obligation is to tell a story and to entertain. He adds, “I think the writer should write about whatever he wishes to write about, and I think he should know what he’s writing about.” At the same time, Gaines doesn’t believe that the purpose of fiction is to serve as a podium for expressing political and social ideas. Instead, “through those characters, those things must come through. They must happen if the story is worth reading. Something has to come through.” Dr. Darrell Bourque, the head of the university’s English department, says, “I don’t think his students ever forget that [Gaines] would not call himself a master, but he is a master. When he participates in the workshop, to a large extent, he participates as a fellow reader with the other students. And he has a tremendous amount of respect for the text that a student produces. He becomes a teacher with a really powerful impact on the students who study under him.” For some students, the chance to study under Gaines is at first intimidating. Claire Lowry, a graphic artist at Lowry’s Kwik-Kopy Printing and an undergraduate majoring in general studies, says, “At first I was a little starstruck just to be sitting in the same room with one of the greats. I would have

Going Home  •  134

never thought I would have the nerve to make Dr. Gaines read any of my work. After the first couple of meetings, I relaxed.” Some students become so comfortable with Gaines and his workshop that they re-apply to take the class. Edward G. Gauthier, an English and environmental science teacher at Carencro High School, has taken the class twice already and says he will apply for the class again this fall. He says Gaines is “a writer of force” who “writes and teaches with incredible clarity.” Mark Gremillion, a civil and environmental engineer, has also taken the class twice. He says the obvious reason for taking the class is the opportunity to study under Gaines. “His fiction is truer than most things you’ll read about Louisiana,” he says, “and you won’t find many people with a broader understanding of human nature or a simpler, more direct approach to telling a story. I don’t know of a better living writer.” Bourque says that Gaines is in many ways “a star,” but that he wants nothing to do with any fanfare that may get in the way of his writing. He says, “He’s one of the most fully realized human beings that I know. Gaines tests himself over and over again. Part of him testing himself is in the writing, but part of him testing himself is in living as a human being. He’s immensely successful in both ways.” It’s one thing to be an accomplished writer, but what does it mean to be a “a fully realized human being?” Gaines says, “To me, a man, a woman, whatever, is someone who loves mankind. He cares for mankind, and he respects nature. I care for people, and I must care for nature. I care for trees and the waters and the plants and the earth and the birds and the insects and everything around me. You know, you have to, at times, destroy things in order to survive, like a rattlesnake. You’ve got to get rid of the rattlesnake. And I suppose in areas you have to destroy things, but I believe in respecting nature.

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“I wish we could all get along, care for each other, help each other, support each other. That’s my idea of what living should be about, having the courage to do it. Most of us are such cowards that we’re afraid to stand up and believe in things. We’re afraid to go against our peers, our race, or our family and to speak out. “But you know, life is made up of balance. You’re always going to have evil in the world. You’re going to have good people, and you’re going to have evil people, no matter what the hell you do. And if you concentrate only on the evil, you are going to be destroyed by it. If you try to destroy evil in the world, you will be destroyed. I think that a good example is in MobyDick, you know, Ahab going after Moby Dick. ‘I’m going to destroy this thing.’ Who’s destroyed? Ahab is destroyed. “So you try to control it, and you try to help develop goodness in people. The world is always going to be made of good and bad, and who’s to say what is good and what is bad? I don’t know. That’s why I said I hate saying anything that can be quoted. Goethe once said that everything has been done. The problem is doing it all over again. Goethe would say things like that, and I believe in it. But, I would never say things like that. “Yeah, I just try to write. I try to write in a way that anyone can read it. The writing is simply put, but I hope that the story has some meaning to it, that you can get something out of it, to improve one’s self, and yet, that’s not the purpose of it, the main objective to writing. “A writer is nothing but a storyteller. A guy went to another little village or he’s traveling, walking across the world, the earth, with a little walking stick and enough food in his pack, and he tells a story so that somebody will give him another biscuit or a piece of cheese or something to eat. He entertained them while he was sitting there, starting out in these

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caves, millions of years ago. So they would start out and go from one village to another, one cave to another, tell a little story and move on. “That’s all we are, just storytellers.” It’s been ten years since Gaines published A Lesson Before Dying. He’s been working on a new book titled The Man Who Whipped Children, but he doesn’t expect to have it completed anytime soon. “I have five or six chapters,” he says, “but the energy is not there. The creative energy is not there. The thing that should go into the book is not there.” Gaines admits that “if you’re a writer, you want to get back to your writing,” but writing is not the same thing as teaching. He seems satisfied with the prospects of the retired life, to be moving with his wife back out to the land of his work and the source of his inspiration. Two years ago, the couple purchased six acres along False River Road. A trailer sits on the banks of the lake, and they plan to build their home on the other side of the highway that dissects the property. They hope to have the 4,000-squarefoot, Acadian-style home completed by the end of the year. Gaines is also moving the dilapidated Mount Zion Baptist Church, the schoolhouse of his childhood, into his back yard. He plans on remodeling it, turning half of it into his office, and the other half into a meditation space for his wife. The church now sits alongside the main paved road into the quarters, a road that Gaines remembers when “it was all just dust” in a time when the small church “was the biggest place around.” Gaines was born and raised in one of the houses, about “a dozen pecan trees down” from the church. It’s no longer standing. All that remains of the lives lived here are the church and two houses. One is hidden in a thicket of brush, and the other is on its way to the ground.

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Behind his land, further down the road and past the quarters, lies the Mount Zion Baptist Church Cemetery. It’s an acre of land in the middle of the fields, nestled in a grove of tall and sturdy oak trees. Sixteen people, all descendants of the people who once worked the land, share ownership of the cemetery. Gaines, his wife, and about thirty other people maintain the cemetery. Every year, they meet on All Saints’ Day to tend the graves and the grounds. Gaines isn’t sure how many people are buried here. He guesses that hundreds have been laid to rest since the nineteenth century, even though only forty to fifty of the graves are marked with tombstones. The wooden grave markers have decayed and disappeared over time. The newer tombstones are marked with the names of the families that once worked the land: Spooner, McVeigh, Hebert, Williams, Overstreet, and Phillips. Gaines points to an area of ground with his cane, stirring in a circular motion. “My aunt’s buried somewhere around here,” he says. There is no marker, only a spot of land firmly planted in his mind. When Augusteen Jefferson died, Gaines was living in California. “We were too poor to put a marker there when she died,” he says. “I was too poor. I couldn’t even come back to the funeral because we didn’t have any money.” Gaines points to the spot where he and his wife plan to be buried, between two lone oak trees in the corner of the cemetery. He looks up into the trees, at the parting clouds overhead and the sun trying to fight its way into the day. Sometimes, he likes to visit the cemetery with his dog, Didi. He sits on one of the concrete benches and thinks of the people who have come before him, who have lent their voices to his own, in recalling a land that still is, but a place and a time that are no more. “Without them,” he says, “I wouldn’t be anything.”

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As he walks past the graves and the tombstones, steadying himself with his cane, he says of the cemetery, “I love it, as long as I’m standing up like this. I’m sure I’ll be at peace lying down here, but I’m not going to rush it.”

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Handfuls of Fire Technology has improved some aspects of Avery Island’s Tabasco pepper farming recently. But the 135-year-old tradition of reaping the crop by hand continues this fall. sep te mbe r 15, 2004

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n a warm September morning, the sun slowly ascends over Avery Island’s harvest. A layer of fog blankets the thirty-five acres of Tabasco pepper plants. About thirty pickers—mostly black and about half a dozen Laotians—wear hats to protect them from the approaching rays. They bend over to pick peppers in one of the green fields dotted with yellow and crimson peppers. They’re only after the ripe ones—Tabasco red, with a tinge of sunset orange. Lillian Gregoire knows exactly which ones to pick and which ones to leave alone for now. “I’ve been here long enough,” she says. “I’ve been here for over sixty-something years.” She lives in New Iberia and travels to the island to work. The seventy-three-year-old, called Miss Lil by the other pickers, snaps the tiny peppers off the plants, leaving the stems behind and dropping her tiny treasures in a white plastic bucket tied around her waist. She picks with her bare hands. Some others pick with gloves, but she can’t get a good grip with them on. Her hands still burn after picking all day, particularly if she’s cooking and the steam hits them. 140

The Tabasco peppers are picked by hand, as they have been since Edmund McIlhenny, the founder of the McIlhenny Co., planted the first commercial crop of Tabasco peppers in 1868. A new irrigation system in the pepper fields and a new machine hitched to a tractor to plant the seedlings are the latest technological advances in the cultivation and harvest of the tiny peppers. Although there have been attempts to manufacture a machine that would also pick the peppers, no one has been able to devise one that doesn’t destroy them in the process. So this autumn, as in years past, pickers take to the fields to reap the spicy harvest by hand. The 2,200-acre Avery Island, outside of New Iberia, sits on top of a salt dome that is believed to be as deep as Mount Everest is high. The peppers planted and harvested on the island every year are not produced primarily for use in the Tabasco pepper sauce. The local crop instead provides Tabasco seeds for the rest of McIlhenny’s fields around the globe. Harold Osborn, vice president of agricultural operations, says the company has some 5,000 acres around the world planted with Tabasco peppers—in Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. The privately held McIlhenny Co., whose annual revenues are estimated at nearly $200 million, has managed not only to sell its sauce in more than 160 countries, but to market the Tabasco name in twenty-one different languages on everything from playing cards to underwear. The harvest on Avery Island begins every year near the end of August and continues until the first frost kills off the crop. On a good day, Miss Lil can pick eighty pounds of peppers. At fifty-five cents a pound for her effort, that’s $44 in cash. For loads of eighty pounds or more, Miss Lil says that the company kicks in an extra $10 bonus. “My children tried to stop me from coming in the peppers,” she says. “I wouldn’t give this up for the world. I come out here 141  •  Handfuls of Fire

every day, the Lord willing. I love it. It makes my little change, my little pocket money. That’s what keeps me going. I live for every year to do this.” Miss Lil’s husband of fifty-five years, seventy-five-yearold Nolan, works on the other side of the field. They met at a basketball game when she was only fifteen years old. “He was shy,” she recalls. “He tried to get a friend of his to talk to me, but his friend was talking for himself, so he came and talked to me.” The mother of eleven children, grandmother of twenty, and great-grandmother of sixteen says that when her kids were younger, they came to the fields to pick for extra cash. Even after they left home, some of them still make it into the fields every year for a little lagniappe. “It’s like working for yourself,” Miss Lil says. “Whatever you pick is what you get. There’s no boss man on you. You sit down when you want to.” Before Miss Lil makes her way down her row to pick more peppers, she jokingly chides. “If I keep standing around talking to y’all,” she laughs, “y’all going to have to pay me!” There’s pocket change to be made and a whole day’s worth of peppers to be picked. The 200-foot-long and 50-foot-wide greenhouse on Avery Island is the incubator for some 130,000 Tabasco plants. Seeds from previous years’ crops are planted in January in 2,100 plastic trays with sixty-two cavities per tray. The temperature never drops below eighty degrees. In March, about a month before the new shoots are planted in the fields, Fred Romero stands in the greenhouse, his hands in his pockets. The supervisor of agriculture for thirteen years, Romero oversees thirteen employees, five of them assigned to the greenhouse. He looks like a roughhewn cowboy from the

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west Texas plains, with long hair, a thin scruffy goatee, boots, and a grubby cowboy hat with a feather in it. But when he speaks, there’s no doubt that he’s Cajun. “We want them for their seeds,” Romero says. While the thirty-five acres planted on the island may yield some peppers to add to the sauce, that’s not their primary purpose. Romero says these plants will produce some 1,100 pounds of Tabasco seeds to be shipped to McIlhenny’s fields abroad. Tabasco peppers are planted throughout the world to ensure that there will always be a supply, in the event that natural catastrophes might hit the regions, like floods, droughts, or hurricanes. With the high demand for the sauce around the world, placing the entire world’s supply in one location could prove to be costly and dangerous. Attempts to raise the plants for their seeds outside of Avery Island have been unsuccessful, and even the experts can’t say why with certainty. “For some reason,” Romero says, “the seeds from here are disease-free.” Romero says it’s difficult to estimate how many peppers can be picked from each plant. However, peppers can be harvested from one plant about half a dozen times throughout the season. It takes about a week to plant the seedlings in the fields. Two years ago the company purchased a planter that attaches to a tractor; before then, the planting process was done entirely by hand. Romero says the planter displaced about fifty field workers. The machine doesn’t save any time in planting; it just reduces the number of people involved with the process. Since no one has been able to manufacture a pepper-picking machine that can harvest the Tabasco peppers without destroying them, the picking is still done by hand. This year’s planting begins early on a Wednesday morning in April. Romero sits at a table playing a few hands of fifty-

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cent-ante poker with field workers before the group piles into an old school bus that delivers them to the fields. By 7 a.m. they are at work. The new machine has three seats. The men load trays of Tabasco seedlings onto a large board running at waist level in front of the seats. As the tractor moves down the row, the three sitting people place the plants into a metal chute that drops the plants into holes in the ground, about three feet apart. Another dozen men follow the machine, adjusting the shoots in the rows by hand. Romero says that there has been just enough rain for planting. “If we could get some rain after planting, it would be even better.” But rain, for the first time at Avery Island, isn’t crucial this year. McIlhenny just completed installing an irrigation system, freeing the company from relying on Louisiana’s weather. In September, after the plants have matured for months and their fruit has ripened for the harvest, the peppers are pulverized into a mash on the same day they’re picked. Although most of the island crop is used for seed, today’s haul will instead be added to the mash for the sauce. As the peppers are crushed, a small amount of salt from Avery Island is added to the mix, and the peppers are sealed in fifty-gallon oak whiskey barrels. For the uninitiated, the crushing process is brutal, as acidic fumes fill the air. The eyes water. The nose runs. The throat itches. There’s coughing and sneezing, and breathing is difficult. Each barrel is placed in a warehouse the size of a football field. Currently, there are some 54,500 barrels holding about 2.7 million gallons of Tabasco peppers. The barrels, stacked five high, will ferment for three years before their contents are extracted and processed for the sauce. Even the peppers grown and harvested overseas are treated in the same manHandfuls of Fire  •  144

ner. After being harvested and pulverized abroad, the mash is sent to Avery Island in 5,500-gallon containers before being transferred into the wooden barrels for storage. After three years, the mash is strained, separating the juice from the seeds and pulp. The liquid is then processed with vinegar and a tiny bit of salt. Some sixty-four white oak vats, each of which can hold two thousand gallons, are stirred slowly by machine for twenty-eight days. The smell in the processing facility is pungent but not nearly as much as during the crushing process. After it’s mixed, the sauce is piped into the bottling facility, where four lines run ten-hour shifts during the day. At night, two of the lines run two more ten-hour shifts. The company fills two-, five-, and twelve-ounce bottles—about 750,000 a day, year round. On a separate production line, McIlhenny bottles eighthof-an-ounce containers of Tabasco that are sold as novelties in tourist shops and roadside attractions all over the state. McIlhenny packages 70,000 of the tiny bottles every day. The sound of the bottling is deafening. The beat of pistons firing in time and the endless clink of glass on glass provides a steady soundtrack for the process. Out in the fields, far from the monotonous music of the bottling line, the Tabasco pickers start packing it in around 2 p.m., making their way slowly back down their rows. Others have set up portable tables to sort through the peppers, throwing out the ones that aren’t the proper red and removing other debris. The peppers are then placed in boxes, which can hold from thirty to thirty-five pounds, and are weighed. The workers can pick from 1,500 to 2,500 pounds of Tabasco peppers a day. Each picker is given a ticket to bring to the company office where they’ll be paid for their work. “I only picked about sixty pounds,” Miss Lil says. That’s $33. “But I got out the house and got to get out here. If y’all would 145  •  Handfuls of Fire

have stopped talking to me, I would have made my eighty pounds.” She laughs as she walks out of the field and off to collect her pocket money.

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Another Man’s Treasure Frank Rogers Jr. says he’s creating art. His neighbors say he’s collecting trash. And the courts say he needs to clean up his act. sep te mbe r 2 2, 2004

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he community of Hidden Hills near Grand Coteau is aptly named. Behind the wooden-gated entrance, with its no trespassing sign, narrow winding roads surround the thirty-five-acre Hidden Hills Lake. The neighborhood—a mix of small, unpretentious houses and larger, more elaborate ones set far from the street on oversized lots—is home to some sixty families. Nothing appears to be unusual today in the idyllic neighborhood, until Frank Rogers Jr.’s home comes into view. His multicolored, two-bedroom home resting on a quarter of an acre along the lake is hard to see from the road. It’s obscured by dense vegetation and a plethora of broken and discarded objects turning black from the Louisiana humidity. Water sprinklers, perched on ten-foot-tall PVC pipes, spray the entire yard, adding to the August moisture. There’s a gumball machine, an electric fan, a football helmet, a speaker horn, computer monitors, and a glove attached to a pole stuck in the ground. The concrete driveway is painted in a random pattern of geometrical shapes and colors. Hundreds of strands of yellow caution tape hang from the trees over147

head. There’s a posted sign, another instructing drivers not to block the driveway or risk being towed at their own expense, political campaign signs from elections long past, white plastic bleach bottles, large animal skulls painted in bright colors, a phone handset, a life raft, and one lone shoe. Flags made of fabric remnants fastened to wooden poles with duct tape flap in the breeze. In the side yard, as the wind blows through the trees, a dozen giant pieces of Styrofoam hang from tree limbs some thirty feet in the air. A tricycle dangles nearby. The scenery in Rogers’s back yard doesn’t thin out; it just changes. The large oak trees are painted with bands of different colors. A mop and a broom stick out of the ground, their handles buried in the dirt. There are ramshackle displays of old cash registers, televisions, coffee makers, an exercise bike with a helmet resting on its handlebars, and a dilapidated basketball goal reaching into the limbs overhead. Rogers’s bizarre choice of yard ornaments has been a major source of controversy in Hidden Hills for over three years. He says he’s creating art, but his neighbors say he’s collecting junk. In district court, Rogers initially won the right to do as he pleases, when Judge Donald Hebert ruled that the neighborhood’s rule for keeping yards “reasonably neat and clean” was vague and open to interpretation. But the Third Circuit Court of Appeal later overturned that decision, ordering Rogers to clean up his act. Rogers says he has since hauled off six pickup truckloads of his art, but his neighbors say they haven’t yet seen enough of a change. And the courts agree, reaffirming on Monday their previous position that Rogers’s art must go. The forty-three-year-old Rogers walks down the driveway with a black T-shirt tied around his head. His gray corduroy pants are spattered with paint and tucked into his black rubber boots. His long-sleeve shirt is patched around his lower rib cage with a piece of denim. He has the beginnings of a goatee, Another Man’s Treasure  •  148

and around his neck a small gold pendant of a dagger hangs from a gold chain. “I just like being different,” Rogers says. “I like sticking out.” He’s doing a fine job of it. His yard looks like a garage sale on a bad acid trip. “I’m almost embarrassed to show y’all,” Rogers says, apologizing for the dent the cleanup effort has made in what he calls his art. “But it was basically take it down or go to jail. I’ve basically lost my constitutional rights.” Rogers rarely makes eye contact. Instead, his eyes dart back and forth between the objects he points out in his yard. He says he has been busy cutting the fishing line strung between his trees, holding some of the objects in the air. Now most of them lay on the ground. “This is freedom of expression,” he says, “and I don’t have it no more.” It’s unclear exactly when Rogers began his peculiar art project. He says now it was 1985, a year after he bought his house. But court papers suggest he didn’t paint the house in its unusual patchwork of every conceivable color until 1997, shortly before he started hanging plastic bleach bottles between trees that he claims were birdhouses. (Court documents note that the bleach bottles had no holes cut out of them for birds to enter.) Next-door neighbor Deanna Cobb, who moved to Hidden Hills in 1997, testified that in November 2000 Rogers began painting his shrubs and trees. He later added dishwashers, weed-eaters, lawnmowers, squirrel traps, vacuum cleaners, and a few telephones strung from the trees. Rogers claims that within just a few months of moving in, Cobb delivered him a note calling his property an eyesore and demanding that he clean it up. She passed on her complaint to the homeowners’ board. 149  •  Another Man’s Treasure

Bobby Broussard, former president of the Hidden Hills homeowners’ board, says Rogers was given notice in March 2001 that he was in violation of the neighborhood’s rule that lots be kept “reasonably neat and clean.” He was instructed to clean up his yard within thirty days. But the budding controversy only spurred the retired oilfield-worker-turned-yard-artist to greater heights of expression. According to Cobb’s testimony, Rogers’s yard underwent a “plastic explosion,” noting that the art project grew to include a thousand jugs and items like “long pieces of triangular banners, plastic bottles hung from trees, flagging tape banners, political signs, food signs, real estate signs, home loan signs, PVC pipe, rope, television sets, computer monitors, and a plastic grandfather clock.” She also noted a screen door suspended in the air, and a glove six or seven feet high atop a pipe, its middle finger pointing toward her home. The Hidden Hills board sued Rogers in the 27th Judicial District Court in September 2001 for violating the community’s covenants. He fought back, arguing his art was his right as a citizen. “I’m patriotic,” Rogers says. “I’m proud to be an American, but this isn’t American if people can’t put what they want in their own yards. This may be a private community, but this is still America.” Judge Hebert concurred, ruling that Rogers had not broken the neighborhood’s rules. Since the initial lawsuit was filed, according to Rogers’s own court testimony, he has added even more items to his yard— including “a peanut machine, a cash register machine, TVs, pieces of ladders, non-working satellite dishes, snow cone advertisements, [and] a sign that says ‘rice and gravy.’” Hidden Hills took its case to the Court of Appeal. Folks outside Hidden Hills speak highly of Rogers. Eric Breaux of Visual Edge Productions in Lafayette, who filmed portions of Max Cusimano’s independent film Royal Sports on Rogers’s Another Man’s Treasure  •  150

property, says he’s a standup guy. Breaux says that the movie script called for “a lot of abstract, out there, colorful things. I thought his yard would be a perfect place.” Rogers says that the crew estimated that it would have cost them $20,000 to create a set as elaborate as his home and grounds. So Rogers reasons that his yard is at least a $20,000 investment. “I could have made a fortune out of this,” he says. Breaux says that throughout the three weeks they filmed at Rogers’s property, he found Rogers to be affable. “I think he’s one of the most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met,” Breaux says. “He’s a little quirky, but he’s an artist. Other people might not believe it, but I believe he is. You kind of have to look past all of that junk. He was absolutely a gem to work with. I don’t see why anybody would try to bother the man. He’s so unconditionally lovable.” Timmy Credeur says he rented the house next door to Rogers—the home where Cobb now lives—for about a year beginning in 1996. “He’s a nice guy,” Credeur says. “I can pick up the phone right now, and there’s nothing Frank wouldn’t do for me. He was one of the best neighbors I had in my life. He watched my house and mowed my grass if I wanted him to.” But, then again, Credeur knew Rogers before the art project took off. “His house didn’t look nothing like that,” Credeur says. “He didn’t have all that shit in his yard. He cleaned it every day. His yard was phenomenal. He mowed his yard every two or three days. It looked like a golf course.” Today the self-described artist stands out on his pier overlooking the lake, next to a row of brightly colored plastic chairs and homemade flags. Rogers says, “I’m just afraid that whatever I do they’re going to find fault.” He points to one of his sculptures, which he calls “Mr. Rapper”—a white-rubber-boots-wearing dummy in a chair, relaxing next to a display of a computer monitor, a radio, a 151  •  Another Man’s Treasure

VCR, and a toaster. “It’s against the law for me to be silly,” he says. “What’s the world coming to if a man can’t make his own scarecrow and put it up in his own yard?” The difference here is that the plastic duck decoys he has floating in the lake aren’t attracting ducks, and his homemade scarecrow is scaring his neighbors, not pesky crows. While some describe Rogers as a man who would give you the shirt off his back, others say he would just as soon shoot you the bird or spit at you. In June, Molly Davenport claims Rogers did spit at her. He was arrested after she contacted the St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office. Davenport declined to comment for this story. Rogers contends that he was protecting himself from Davenport’s dog, “a pretty vicious dog,” he says. “The thing has tried to attack me several times.” Neighbors say the allegedly vicious dog is a golden retriever. Hayden Cochran, a Hidden Hills resident on the other side of the neighborhood, says the incident with Davenport isn’t an isolated one. “He’s spit at several neighbors,” he says, “and he finally spit on one.” Cochran finds it hard to believe anyone would spit at an animal in self-defense. “I wonder if that would stop a snake.” Rogers says he only spits to protect himself—“a couple of times when some of them tried to run me over.” But Rogers also admits his disdain for his neighbors. “There’s a bunch of people out here who don’t have a life,” he says, “a bunch of busybodies.” “This is recycling,” Rogers says. “I’m saving landfills.” He walks from his back yard to the front, past a shopping cart filled with a Styrofoam pumpkin bleached white by the sun, a computer monitor, and a hubcap. “Where am I supposed to put all this?” The appeals court doesn’t really care where it goes, so long Another Man’s Treasure  •  152

as it just goes. The Third Circuit overturned the lower district court’s ruling: “After reviewing the evidence, particularly the photographs, we find that the trial court’s finding that Rogers’ property was ‘reasonably neat and clean’ was not reasonable. We acknowledge that ‘one person’s trash is another person’s treasure,’ however, a reasonable person cannot claim that the Rogers’ property is neat and clean. He argues that the term ‘neat and clean’ actually describes his property and argued . . . that the jugs and other objects are strung in a geometrical manner, which should be pleasing to the eye. In a word, that is absurd.” Rogers was back in Judge Hebert’s courtroom on Monday and was given another thirty days to clear out his yard. If he fails to clean it up, he can be held in contempt and fined. “There’s no way I can remove all this within thirty days without a crew,” Rogers says. After the hearing, Roger’s attorney, Frank Olivier, withdrew from the case. “I guess I’ll represent myself,” Rogers says. Olivier did not comment on his reasons for withdrawal. “I don’t know what to do or say anymore,” Rogers adds. “If I took everything down I think they would still find some fault with it. So I guess I’m going to go to jail, but I can’t go to jail forever. I think there will be a public outcry if I’m arrested.” His legal strategy may be absurd, but Rogers insists he’s not crazy, contrary to some of his critics. “I’m just a little off the wall,” Rogers says. “A lot of people think I’m crazy. I just tell them I’m confused, misunderstood, and a tad bit mentally challenged. “Why be normal?” he asks. “I’ve still got responsibilities, and I know what’s going on. I know what’s right from wrong. I just try to go about my business and live my life. I don’t like being like everybody else.” If there’s one point Rogers and his neighbors agree on, it’s that he doesn’t do things like everybody else. 153  •  Another Man’s Treasure

Although Rogers claims to be merely standing up for his rights, his neighbors say he’s just looking for attention. Current Hidden Hills board president Nathan Meche (who also claims Rogers spat on him) says that even Rogers’s neighbors’ attempts to set the record straight simply fan his desire to be in the public eye. “I feel as if this is playing right into his hands because he wants the attention,” Meche says. Since March 2001, just after Rogers was served with the notice of violating Hidden Hills’ restrictions, he has been the subject of local newspaper and television news spots at least twenty-nine times. He says he’s become so famous he’s had to put up a gate to his driveway to keep passersby from bugging him. Rogers has maintained vigilant communication with local media outlets, calling journalists at least once a month, sometimes more, to update them on his situation and his legal proceedings. He speaks in short sentences, perfect sound bites for reporters, and much like his yard, what he has to say is always colorful. As the long strange tour draws to a close, Rogers does something he has avoided for the better part of the afternoon—he makes eye contact. With a slight smile on his lips, he asks, “Do you think this’ll make the front page?”

Another Man’s Treasure  •  154

Shelter from the Storm The Cajundome is now home to those displaced by Hurricane Katrina. sep te mbe r 7, 2005

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utside the Cajundome, a line of cars snakes down Cajundome Boulevard into the parking lots. On the corner of Souvenir Gate, the Lafayette Police Department Mobile Command Unit stands at the parking lot entrance. The cars are filled with young and old, the healthy and the sick, and they all need one thing: shelter from the wrath of Katrina. Councilman Marc Mouton is directing a group of AmeriCorps volunteers from UL Lafayette on how to collect and deposit the donations being made by local residents from the curb. “This is not a council function,” Mouton says. “This is a Red Cross function. These people are left with nothing. The idea is that we try to make them as comfortable as possible and attend to their needs. That’s the part of the mission of Red Cross. You just do the best you can with what you have.” The Cajundome opened its doors at noon on Tuesday, August 30, as an American Red Cross shelter. By 4 p.m. there were already 2,400 people. Seventy-seven-year-old Gladys Richardson is walking slowly up the sidewalk with a cane. Her daughter, Joann Spurlock, follows behind her with a small dog in her arms. “Are y’all coming into the shelter?” Mouton asks. 155

“We’re trying to get into the shelter,” Spurlock says. “Well, Rover can’t go in,” Mouton says. “I know,” says Spurlock. “And it’s not Rover. It’s Shorty. But I’m bringing my mama right here, and I got my people coming behind me. There’s more than us. My little niece is in that wheelchair right there.” “Tell them to put your mama in the Mardi Gras ballroom,” Mouton says. The ballroom had been designated as a room for people with special medical needs. While her family unloads its minivan, Richardson sits down while Mouton looks for a wheelchair for her. She’s a soft-spoken woman. After she introduces herself, she asks, “How you doing, baby?” Her family evacuated on Sunday morning after New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the mandatory evacuation for the city. They had been staying with her nephew in an apartment, but it was too cramped for everyone. When they learned that the shelter was open, the family decided to relocate to the Cajundome. Spurlock says the family is from the east side of New Orleans, and Richardson starts to cry. “I know,” Spurlock says to her mother. “We’re going to be all right.” “I left a lot of grandchildren back there,” Richardson says. “I’m so scared.” Richardson regains her composure. She’s a lifelong resident of New Orleans and experienced Hurricane Betsy in 1965. “Betsy wasn’t as bad as this,” she says. “Downtown was bad, but where we were staying wasn’t bad. This is the worst. I can’t start over again.” She starts crying again. “I can’t start over again. I’m sick as a dog. I got this here diabetes and heart trouble.” Spurlock says the plan is simply to stay at the shelter until they can go home. One of her nieces talks to her from New OrShelter from the Storm  •  156

leans sometimes on a cell phone. “She says we can’t go home. We can’t do nothing. All of the lights are out in New Orleans. There’s no phone. They’re hungry, and the roof done blowed off of their house. We were going to Bourbon and Orleans where my sister worked, but they said that’s the most dangerous place you could go. So we just got in the car, and we rode.” “Thank God for y’all,” Richardson says. “Yes, Lord,” Spurlock adds. Inside the Cajundome’s administrative offices, Director Greg Davis says no events are on the books for the facility until September 26. Even then, he says events can be shuffled around to assist the operations of the local Red Cross. “We have lots of time to juggle those questions,” he says. “Plus we have some other space. The Mardi Gras ballroom is about 7,000 square feet. We have the exhibit hall with 32,000 square feet, and the Festival ballroom, that’s another 12,000 square feet. We have the ability to take on more than what you are seeing now, and it’s our intent to be as accommodating as possible. We’ll do whatever it takes, for as long as we have to.” Behind the Cajundome, numerous volunteers tend a dozen massive barbecue pits billowing with smoke, with hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on the grill for the evening’s first meal. Inside the Cajundome, hundreds of people have already laid claim to their space, marked only by a blanket or a sleeping bag and the few personal belongings they have. Others are making their way into the first tier of stands to set up camp. Some are talking, some are napping, and others are watching the largescreen TV overhead broadcasting the latest news from New Orleans on the aftermath of the hurricane. Tony Credeur oversees seven parishes in Acadiana as executive director of the Acadiana chapter of the American Red Cross, and he’s been working since 4:30 a.m., overseeing some 157  •  Shelter from the Storm

125 volunteers. He says there’s no end in sight. There’s also no idea how long the Cajundome will be used as a shelter. “There’s no way to know,” he says. “It could be a few days. It could be a few weeks. It could be a few months. Nobody knows.” The shelter was scheduled to open at 1 p.m., but by noon, there were already people lining up to get inside. “It was just too hot to leave people standing outside,” Credeur says. “As we get utilities brought back on, like in Baton Rouge and east of Baton Rouge, as these facilities become available we’re going to be opening those as shelters and actually moving people into those areas. Our philosophy is that, as fast as we can, we want to get them closer to their homes to see what they have to do to recover. It’s hard for them to do that from way out here.” The waiting is the hardest part. “We get a couple of days of sunshine,” Mouton says, “and they think that they can go back. It just isn’t possible.”

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No Room at the Inn The Pape family of Avondale claims they were evicted from Lafayette’s Ramada Inn. sep te mbe r 7, 2005

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n the parking lot of the Cajundome, Al Pape Sr. and his son, Al Pape Jr., are watching the local news on a small television resting on the tailgate of one of their company’s trucks. The two Avondale men packed up their families— five adults, three children, three cats, and two dogs—and left their homes on Sunday. They spent $250 in gas moving their vehicles, and it took them eight hours to pack up, but Al Sr. says, “We still left a lot of stuff.” The two men transport waste tires to recycling centers for a living, and their two trucks are their livelihood. Senior doubts his business will survive. “It’s a lifetime of work, and we just lost it all. Our house was paid for. I’ve got about $10,000 worth of antique swords and daggers. My wife’s got a lot of porcelain dolls.” As they traveled west, they called hotels all the way trying to find rooms. “We tried all the way to El Paso, Texas,” Al Jr. says. They found a room at the Ramada Inn in Lafayette. “They had a room with no air conditioning,” the elder Pape says. “We said, ‘We’ll take it.’ We needed the bathroom and the water. Then they turned around and told us they got an airconditioned room, and we said OK. We kept asking for [further] reservations, and they kept saying they weren’t taking 159

reservations. So this afternoon the guy tells us, ‘You gotta go. We got reservations.’” He doesn’t know what the problem was since the hotel had his credit card on file and could charge him for every day his family was there. “Next thing you know there was a cop knocking at the door,” he adds, “and he was real nice. The Lafayette police were super.” Eric Norris, the Ramada Inn’s general manager, declined comment on the Pape family situation and when asked if guests were being allowed to stay in the hotel for an indefinite amount of time. “If I had five hundred other rooms,” he says, “I could probably rent them.” Norris says that just about all of the guests of the Ramada Inn have fled from the New Orleans area. On Tuesday, August 30, the Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission sent out a fax to local hotels. The fax requested, at the urging of Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, to allow guests to extend their stays for as long as needed and asked that hotel staff members contact individuals with prior reservations to ask them to make other plans. (On Friday, Gov. Kathleen Blanco ordered all Louisiana hotels to continue to house evacuees.) “Please keep in mind that the people you are refusing to extend reservations for have nowhere to go,” the fax states. “They have lost their homes and are looking for us to help.” The fax also reported that Lafayette Police Chief Randy Hundley “has advised his officers not enforce” a Louisiana law concerning the eviction of hotel guests. Cpl. Mark Francis of the Lafayette Police Department says that’s not the case. “We’re going to evaluate every case on a case-by-case basis,” he says. “Of course, we will follow the law in every case. We’re not turning a blind eye to the law. We’ll evaluate the situations, and by no means are we going to do anything that would violate the law.” No Room at the Inn  •  160

Louisiana Revised Statute 21:75 states that a hotel guest cannot stay in a room past the time agreed upon when checking in but has to be given an hour’s notice to vacate. Revised Statute 21:76 makes it possible for an “appropriate lawful authority” to evict a guest if the conditions of the previous statute have been met, but does allow for an exception of “serious medical emergency requiring the continued use of the room or campsite.” There are an estimated 4,750 hotel rooms in Lafayette, and none are vacant. In the meantime, the Papes have found refuge at the Cajundome. “We’ve been trying to rent a house,” the elder Pape says, “because we figured we were going to be here for a while. A couple of places we talked to wanted $450 a week. That’s almost $2,000 a month to rent a house. That’s crazy.” But he also says it’s difficult to even think of any long-term plans now. “You just go day by day,” he says. “It’s taking time for it to sink in. It’s so hard to even think about anything.”

161  •  No Room at the Inn

The Record Man Goldband Records founder Eddie Shuler was viewed as a saint and a snake—and made immeasurable contributions to Louisiana music before his death. january 4, 2006

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ountry music superstar Dolly Parton has nothing but fond memories of her first producer. “Eddie Shuler was a gifted, special friend,” she says. “With him goes the passing of an era. I know he is in a special place in heaven.” Parton met Shuler when she was only thirteen years old. In 1960, she rode a bus with her grandmother from Sevierville, Tennessee, to Lake Charles. Parton’s uncle, Henry Owens, was living in Lake Charles near Shuler’s Goldband Records recording studio, and the two men were friends. Owens sent for his niece to come to Lake Charles, where she recorded two songs for Goldband—“Puppy Love” and “Girl Left Alone.” Dolly Parton is the biggest name that ever recorded for Goldband, but from 1944 until 2000 Eddie Shuler recorded a slew of musicians—including Iry LeJeune, Boozoo Chavis, Freddie Fender, Cookie & the Cupcakes, Jimmy C. Newman, Phil Phillips, Jo-El Sonnier, Rockin’ Sidney, Clarence Garlow, and Guitar Jr. When Shuler passed away this past summer, he left behind a musical legacy that includes a catalog of more than twelve thousand songs, nearly eight hundred of which Shuler wrote or co-wrote. 162

Behind his folksy, down-to-earth demeanor, Shuler was a shrewd businessman and the driving force behind Goldband Records. Without him, Louisiana’s musical heritage wouldn’t be what it is today. In a previously unpublished interview from 1999, and subsequent interviews with Shuler associates and the artists he recorded, a complex man emerges—one who clearly understood that simple songs had the power to pull at the heartstrings as well as the purse strings. Eddie’s Music House sits alongside Interstate 10 on Church Street in Lake Charles. The white frame building was once home to an Assembly of God church before Shuler purchased it in 1955. The front door opens to a main room filled with bins of Goldband compact discs, LPs, and 45 singles. A door to the right leads to the recording studio. A small room with a large pane of glass looks onto a large room with an upright piano against the wall. Now the area is being leased to a small graphic design company. Computers and printers occupy the space that amplifiers and microphone stands held for nearly fifty years. It’s April Fools Day 1999, and Shuler sits behind the desk in his office. Just five days earlier, he celebrated another birthday. “I’m now eighty-six years young,” he says. “I’m not old. I’m young.” Even though he’s called Lake Charles home for fiftyseven years, you wouldn’t know it by his thick Texan drawl. Shuler was born in Wrightsboro, Texas, in 1913, the oldest of three children. His parents separated when he was still a child, and the young Shuler worked odd jobs, picking cotton, corn, and pecans, and loading cottonseeds into boxcars. “I was one of those that had to grow up on my own,” he says. “I started working when I was nine years old. All I was trying to do was make a living. I didn’t have that much of an education.” Music wasn’t important to his parents, but Shuler says as a kid he was always creating little ditties in his head. “I’m not 163  •  The Record Man

bragging on me or nothing,” he says, “but I was very creative and had all kinds of imagination, which is good in the songwriting field. Now today, I got a catalog of over eleven thousand songs, and a big percentage of them I’m the co-writer or the writer on the song.” According to Broadcast Music Incorporated’s Web site, Shuler’s music publishing company, Tek Publishing, has published 787 songs with Shuler as the writer or co-writer. In 1942, Shuler moved to Lake Charles to take a job as a dragline operator. He took a part-time job in a music store and was carpooling to work in Sulphur with a group of guys who were playing music at night—the Hackberry Ramblers. The band had already recorded for Bluebird Records, and Shuler enlisted with the group a year later. “Naturally, I’m working in a record shop, I know all the songs so I could sing all the songs, but I was nowhere remotely interested in being a musician. That was the furthest thing from my mind.” Shuler soon found out that there were fringe benefits to being a musician. “I might have been an Elvis Presley or something in that day,” he says. He recalls one particular gig in Creole. “Boy, there were some pretty little gals. I’m telling you, them were good looking little gals, and I hadn’t never even seen a Cajun until I come over here. All them little Cajun gals was ganged around me like flies around flypaper. So the second time we went out there to play, they carried my guitar for me and all my songs and everything. I said, ‘To hell with that damn drag line! I’m going to be a musician.’” Shuler wanted to record his own songs and focus more on hillbilly music, like his main influence, Bob Wills. “Any country band was hillbilly,” he says. “It didn’t make no difference who you were, you were hillbillies. There wasn’t no country music then. They hadn’t even invented the word.” He left the Ramblers and started his own outfit—Eddie Shuler and the All Star Reveliers. The Record Man  •  164

In 1944, Shuler cut the first record for the Reveliers, featuring Shuler’s compositions “Broken Love” and “Room in Your Heart For Me Darling.” He called his new record label Goldband Records. “It had something to do with my mentality,” he says. “I said, ‘This is going to be a goldmine, so I’ll just call it Goldband.’” While the Reveliers were cutting records, they were also performing for three hours weekly on a radio show that Shuler hosted on KPLC. It was there that he met the man that changed his way of thinking and the direction of Goldband. “So this little Cajun boy came along and wanted to record with us,” Shuler recalls. “Seeing him coming down the street with an old floppy hat on and a flour sack under his arm, he looked like something that had been drug out of you know what. He was a real aggressive little feller. He walked up and told me his name was Iry LeJeune and he would like to perform on my radio show. He pulled this accordion out of the flour sack, and I had never even seen one of those things. The Hackberry Ramblers was a fiddle band. So here he is with this thing in the flour sack, and he called it a French accordion.” Shuler allowed LeJeune to perform that day in 1946. “Iry had really fast fingers. He had the fastest fingers I ever saw, and little short fingers at that, but he really could move them things around.” The station owner burst into the control room after the show was over. “He was a little short guy,” Shuler says, “weighed about 250 pounds and was 5 feet and 3 inches tall. He was just like a butterball, but he had a voice like a bull. He came bouncing out of that little room and he said, ‘Eddie Shuler, you son of a bitch! What in the hell was that you had on my radio station?’ “I turned around and said, ‘Mr. Wilson, the man told me it was Cajun music. I don’t know. I’ve never heard any Cajun music like that, but that’s what he said it was.’ 165  •  The Record Man

“He said, ‘If you ever do that again, I’m going to kick your ass right out the front door.’ “I said, ‘Yes, sir’ because I was making good money as a result of my air time and my bookings.” LeJeune knew Shuler was making his own records on Goldband and asked that he record him. Shuler was reluctant. It cost $200 to press copies of 78 RPM records, at about nine cents per copy. But Shuler struck a deal with LeJeune. They would record one record, and if it made any money, they’d continue working together. If not, they would part ways. Without a physical recording studio or even a tape recorder, Shuler found an inventive way to make records. “I would go into the radio station and give the engineer $10—and a pint of whiskey or a quart of whiskey, depending on what he had to have and how much I thought the record was worth—to cut me a disc. Then I would take the disc and mail it off to the record company, and they would cut the master from that.” LeJeune’s first two songs with Goldband were “Calcasieu Waltz” and “Lacassine Special.” The record made a profit of $72. “I was in high cotton,” Shuler says. “I could visualize all these big things I was going to do now because I figured out how to make money with the music business. And he never made one record that wasn’t a hit. He was a star. By that time, I was hung up in this record business, and I didn’t want to play anymore. I just wanted to make records. That’s how I got into the record business.” In 1955, just twenty days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, LeJeune was struck by a car on Highway 190 outside of Eunice and died from the injuries. “Iry LeJeune made Cajun music what it is today,” Shuler says. “All of the stuff that they’re doing today is a result of what he and I did. The guy was just a genius in the music business. We did a lot of remarkable things. Today, Cajun music hasn’t changed all that much, except with people like Wayne The Record Man  •  166

Toups. But the Cajun people want the authentic stuff. They don’t want none of that there malarkey stuff, with that rock ’n’ roll beat. That’s one thing I learnt while I was out there— you don’t change their music. Keep it just like it is. K-I-S-S, as we say. Keep it simple, stupid. Keep on truckin’, and you’re going to make the money.” Throughout the years, Shuler had some national success. In 1961, Goldband released Cleveland Crochet’s “Sugar Bee,” which topped out at No. 80 on Billboard’s Top 100. The raucous tune featured the Cajun accordion but included a driving rock beat with vocalist Jay Stutes belting out the English lyrics. “It was just a monster,” Shuler says. “It sold fifty thousand copies.” But Shuler’s biggest monster wasn’t on the Goldband label. Another local record man, George Khoury, brought in Phil Phillips to record at Goldband studios. Shuler recorded and produced the song, working on it for three months. The memorable lyrics are short and sweet: Come with me, my love To the sea, the sea of love I want to tell you How much I love you After being leased to Mercury Records, “Sea of Love” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard chart in 1959. “I knew it was a good song,” Shuler says, “but I had no idea that it was what it turned out to be. It had the story line. The lyric content was there. The melody was following along like a little puppy dog. So the rest of it had potential.” “Back in those days, they didn’t have air conditioners,” Shuler adds. “They didn’t have all the conveniences of what they have today. So when a guy said, ‘I’m hurting,’ he knew 167  •  The Record Man

exactly what he was talking about, and it was coming from the heart. He had been there. He had paid the price, and he felt it. Today the guy says I’m hurting, and he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. He’s just using a phrase because it’s been handed down to him from time immortal, so to speak.” Shuler was also the first to record Boozoo Chavis in 1954 on another record label he had formed, Folk-Star. Shuler met Chavis through local accordionist Sidney Brown, who had heard Chavis play. Chavis and Brown came into Goldband, and Chavis played “Paper in My Shoe” for Shuler. “That was a natural-born hit,” Shuler says. “That’s what I was looking for. So we recorded it and sure enough, it’s a classic today.” But there’s more to the story. Shuler had a hard time getting Classie Ballou’s backing R&B band on the same page with Chavis. They spent days trying to record the song, going nowhere. Even the final recorded product is an oddity; it sounds as if two separate songs are wrestling for the spotlight, while Chavis sings over the ruckus. Shuler claims that in order to loosen up Chavis, he gave him a pint of Seagram’s 7 whiskey to drink. “It was coming along real good,” he says, “and I thought, man, if we can get through this one, we’ve got it. And about that time I heard the damnedest noise I ever heard in my life, but the music never stopped. So I wondered what in the hell went on in that damn studio. When I opened the door, there was Boozoo, laying on the floor, but he was still playing his accordion. He says this didn’t happen, but it did. “That thing took off like a ruptured duck,” Shuler says. He leased the song to Imperial Records, then the home of New Orleans R&B sensation Fats Domino. Shuler contends that “Paper in My Shoe” sold 136,000 copies, but that Chavis didn’t record another song quick enough to follow up on its success. Shuler says Chavis’s brother had managed to convince him that Shuler was ripping him off and that he wasn’t going to The Record Man  •  168

get paid. “You can’t do that and still stay in business,” Shuler says. “You can do it, but you ain’t going to be there very long cause they’re going to catch up with you. Then you’re a dead chicken. You’re gone.” Shuler says Chavis’s first royalty payment was for $750, and when he called Chavis to pick up the check, Chavis responded, “That’s all?” When Chavis did pick up his money, Shuler recorded him again, but made him pay $285 up front. “What I was saying was if you got enough money, we’ll go in there and cut another one,” Shuler recalls. “If you don’t got no money, we ain’t going to cut nothing, ’cause I ain’t going to go down this damn same road with myself spending my money, screwing around like we done here.” Until his death in 2001, Boozoo Chavis contended that he never fell off a stool and that Shuler had ripped him off. He told writer Michael Tisserand quite bluntly in The Kingdom of Zydeco: “That dude stole my money.” In Ben Sandmel’s book Zydeco! (co-authored with photographer Rick Olivier), Chavis told Sandmel that he didn’t think he had been paid enough for the amount of copies that Shuler claimed that the song had originally sold. Chavis said: “And when I be telling you this, I’m mad now. If they came from Goldband today and asked me to make another record, I believe I’d have to shoot ’em.” In an interview in 1999, two years before his death, Chavis commented on recording for Shuler: “That was the worst thing I could have ever done.” Hackberry Ramblers drummer Ben Sandmel has also had his run-ins with Eddie Shuler. Sandmel says he had differences of opinion with Shuler over the ownership of some songs recorded by the Ramblers. The issues have yet to be resolved, and Sandmel won’t elaborate on specifics of the dispute. “For a guy who didn’t speak French,” Sandmel says sarcastically, “he wrote a lot of songs in French. He was pretty astute 169  •  The Record Man

at sewing things up in his interests. He was very shrewd. He tried to intimidate me, and I saw him try to intimidate other people. At the same time, he was pouring on the good old boy charm. He was funny as hell. He was like Mr. Haney on Green Acres. Even in the ugliest situations, he cracked me up. If you’re going to have an adversary, you might as well have one that’s entertaining, even unintentionally.” But even with his negative encounters with Shuler, Sandmel doesn’t dismiss his contributions. “A lot of people would have told Iry LeJeune to get lost,” he says. “So thank God he did some of the things that he did.” Shuler himself alludes to the problems he had with musicians. “The funny thing that I’ve discovered about the music business,” he says, “is that these people, these artists, they think that they’re doing you a favor when you spend your money on them, making their records. To these musicians down here, it was not a business. What they were doing, how they lived and how they performed was simple. They went out to enjoy themselves, playing music and doing their drinking and their carousing and having all these perks in life. They didn’t care nothing about taking it to the next level and being national successes. It was a here and now thing. There was no way you’re going to get them to move to that next level. It ain’t going to happen. They just won’t do it. They wouldn’t do it.” “But now, there’s an exception to that rule,” Shuler adds. “Dolly Parton is not like that. She puts heart up there, but she’s smart enough not to let it interfere with the business.” Shuler says he was invited to and attended several Dolly Parton functions and was treated like royalty. “That meant a whole lot to me,” he says. “Now those other people—like Jo-El Sonnier, Freddie Fender, Mickey Gilley, you name it—they ain’t never called me one time. They look at it like this: I’m just a crook. I didn’t pay them their money, and I didn’t do nothing for them. But not Dolly Parton. She remembers exactly who did what, The Record Man  •  170

and she always reciprocates in kind in compassion and human kindness. Those other guys never even looked at it like that. They never even thought of it in that context. Her, she did.” John Broven says he’s heard musicians claim that Shuler didn’t give them the money they were due. The author of South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous, Broven is working on a new book that focuses on the independent American record producers of the post–World War II era. “Each case is different,” Broven says, “and you just have to look at the original situation and the original paperwork. I would say in Eddie’s case, certainly in his defense, he had a contract for everything. The contract may have been onesided in his favor, and almost inevitably it was, but the fact that, to my knowledge, he’s rarely been sued and I don’t think anyone has ever got any settlement out of him, indicates that the original deal couldn’t be contested.” In the case of Chavis, for example, Broven says the problem is that Chavis never knew how many copies of “Paper in My Shoe” were sold originally, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to determine what money was owed to him. And long before the music industry became the juggernaut it is now, in post–World War II America musicians weren’t recording songs for publishing royalties but to use as a calling card to get gigs. And while Shuler may have longed for big national hits, Broven believes he was also quite content to keep his business operating on a smaller scale locally. “It was something he could manage,” he says. “His wife, Elsie, was a great rock. She looked after all the paperwork, the books, the royalties that were coming in and being paid out. She kept the paperwork end tied up tight, and Eddie was content to make the records.” In addition to Goldband, Shuler also owned and operated the Quick Service TV business for thirty-seven years, which during the 1950s was grossing annual sales of $200,000. Broven 171  •  The Record Man

says the lucrative TV business allowed Shuler to speculate and record any musician who walked through his door. Beneath Shuler’s good old boy exterior, Broven sees more at work. “Eddie would hate me for saying this, but beneath that folksy façade was a character of steel. It was that steeliness and that determination which enabled him to do what he did. He was a very shrewd man. What he realized more than anything was the value of song publishing. I’ve been there once or twice at the store when his artists have come in, and he basically told them, literally, to get the hell out of there. He was a tough man. On the exterior, he was almost too folksy to be true. He was very sharp-witted, very sharp-minded, and was certainly very protective of his rights.” Broven says what distinguishes Shuler from the other south Louisiana record men of his day—like J. D. Miller of Crowley and Floyd Soileau of Ville Platte—is that Shuler was a prolific songwriter and was in a position to record any and all kinds of music in his Lake Charles studio. “He was very lucky to live in the era that he did,” Broven says, “when there was so much natural talent around. Just think, you would have Iry LeJeune and Aldus Roger one day, then Jukeboy Bonner and Clarence Garlow the next. Then Cookie and the Cupcakes would suddenly descend upon you. He was certainly in the right place at the right time. One thing about the Goldband recordings is that they were very basic and certainly one wouldn’t describe them as being hi-fi by any means. Despite all of the many great records he made, if he would have just had the right equipment or had an assistant as an engineer, he could have got so many more good sounds out of that studio than he did. But just think, if it hadn’t been for Eddie Shuler, we wouldn’t have had Iry LeJeune. If Eddie hadn’t recorded him, that man would have been lost. That, to me, is as good as a justification as any. The other big credit is ‘Sea of Love.’ That’s just an international classic, and that came out of his little, tiny studio in Lake Charles.” The Record Man  •  172

••• In 1999 Shuler was recording very little in his little studio in Lake Charles, but he wasn’t concerned with the future of Goldband. At the time, one of his sons was living in Nashville and the other was living outside of Atlanta. “If we don’t have somebody to go forward with Goldband,” Shuler said, “the way I’ll have to work it is this: I’ll just do whatever I can until I die, and then I’ll let them worry about it because I won’t be around to know anything about what they did anyway. They can sell it. They can give it away. They can do whatever the hell they want to because I can’t do any more.” For the last eight years Pam Wilkinson, Shuler’s niece, has been running the day-to-day operations of Goldband. Although the Shuler family still owns Goldband, Wilkinson says she will continue to run the business. “They’re pretty much leaving it in my hands because that’s what Eddie wanted,” she says. “He just always told me to hold onto the ropes and keep on going.” The recording studio hasn’t been in operation since 2000, and Wilkinson wants to turn Goldband into a museum. She says she’s in negotiations with Lake Charles Downtown Development to bring the plan to fruition and notes that Tek Publishing and Goldband’s mail-order business will continue as usual. For Wilkinson, keeping Goldband running is more of a personal decision than a business one. “Eddie was a lot more to me than an uncle,” she says. “I spent a lot of time with him when I as a young girl. I grew up without a father, so he kind of filled in that spot. Then I had the pleasure of working with him for seven years before he moved on. He was a very knowledgeable man, very smart. He taught me a lot of things. I’m really going to miss him.” Due to failing health, Shuler and his wife moved to Atlanta in April 2004 to be closer to their son, Johnny. On July 23, 173  •  The Record Man

2005, Eddie Shuler passed away at the age of ninety-two. He was laid to rest in Lake Charles. In 1999, at the age of eighty-six, Shuler was asked his secret to a long life. He didn’t hesitate to answer. “Work like hell,” he said. “Give it all you got, and love what you’re doing. The best part about it is you must love what you’re doing. And in this case, as you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m in the music business because I love the music business. “I did what I wanted to, and the way that I function is this way: If you can’t do what you want to do and be happy with what you’re doing, then why do it? That’s what I’ve done all my life. I got my pleasure out of making these records, preserving history through music in a sense.”

The Record Man  •  174

Don’t You Worry about Boozoo In a previously unpublished 1999 interview, Boozoo Chavis explains why there was only one Boozoo. july 5, 2006

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nthony Wilson “Boozoo” Chavis lived out his life in Lake Charles, on a few acres he immortalized in the song “Dog Hill.” Born in 1930, he spent his life farming and raising horses. In 1954 he recorded the seminal regional hit “Paper in My Shoe” for Eddie Shuler’s Goldband Records in Lake Charles. Chavis always contended that Shuler ripped him off, and Shuler always denied it. The experience left a bad taste in Chavis’s mouth, and for thirty years he didn’t record or perform. But in the 1980s, Chavis re-emerged from obscurity to international acclaim and is credited with revitalizing zydeco music. On April 29, 2001, just days after performing at the Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week, Chavis suffered a heart attack and stroke while in Austin, Texas. He passed away six days later. Chavis was a walking powder keg of dynamite, both in conversation and on stage with his band the Majic Sounds. In the following exchange taken from a two-hour interview

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with Chavis in Lake Charles on February 26, 1999, Chavis talked about what made him the one and only Boozoo. How did you learn to play the accordion? You know you can’t hardly learn nobody how to play the accordion by telling them, “Do this and do that.” You ain’t going to learn like that. You got to look at your fingers and how they go. Then you can tell ’em, “Push and pull. Make it rhyme with you words.” It’s got to ding-dong there in your head. You got to make that accordion say what you want to say, the way that the song goes. You know, like “Susie-anna, Susie-anna, don’t you cry for me.” You heard that way back. [sings] “I’m going to Alabama with a banjo on my knee. Susie-anna, Susie-anna, don’t you cry for me.” Now make that accordion say that, and you can’t talk it. You got to rhyme it. I can’t read music, but that’s the only way I can explain you. You see, I got a son there. He tries to sing some of my songs, and I tell him, “You can’t sing that. Let me sing my own. You sing something that I can’t sing.” His voice is not there at all. You couldn’t sing my songs. You know what I’m saying? Because you might talk it. You’ve gotta let your music go up and down, let it rhyme. On my other record there, “You Gonna Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old,” [sings] “I can tell about your hair, you been fighting with that bear. You gonna look like a monkey when you get old.” See? You can’t say, “Hey, you gonna look like a monkey when you get old!” You talking it. You got to sing this thing. You’ve got to have a tone of voice. I explain that to the people, and it’s right. Yeah. You got to make the accordion say what you say, and you got to say it and sing it right, like the song goes. Did you learn to play the accordion just by watching others? Yeah, you watch. A lot of them come to the dance where I’m at and watch my songs and my fingers, and they pick up on my Don’t You Worry about Boozoo  •  176

songs and they cut it. They change the words around. All that music they got there, you watch all of my music in there. I told them don’t be famous on my music. Be famous on your own. They can’t wait for one of my albums to come out so they can copy off of it. They want to make a rock beat with it. I keep up the tradition, the zydeco. I’m the only one playing zydeco. I’m the oldest one now living, except Bois Sec [Ardoin]. The only one sticking with zydeco. Shit, that old messed up music. They ain’t doing nothing but messing that music up. That’s why when sometimes somebody asks me something, and I don’t be thinking about that, I tell ’em sometimes what I ain’t supposed to say. They want to change the tradition of that zydeco. They don’t want to say they’re French, they’re Creole. They want to try to play something like that come from New York or Chicago somewhere. That thing was born right here in the cotton fields, but they don’t want that to be said. But I’m proud where I come from, and I’m proud what I am. I’m Creole, and I’m down to earth. I’m not trying to be something I ain’t. That’s right. I’m me. People ask me those things sometimes, and I get angry. I come out with it. I tell it just like it is. I don’t bite my tongue, because I know. I’m sixty-eight years old. I’ve been married forty-seven years. When I was out there, them boys here wasn’t born. Then they want to act like they’ll pass over me. No, no. Right here. I speak like it is, and I’m telling the truth because they weren’t even here. Ask today. I know. That’s like what I be telling y’all. I don’t brag, no. I speak right out from the truth. The truth is the light. What I tell you today, I’ll tell that other guy that last year, and I’ll tell him that next year. Whatever I tell you, I’ll tell it again. If you met somebody who had never heard zydeco before, how would you describe it to them? 177  •  Don’t You Worry about Boozoo

The zydeco music is like the Cajun music, yeah, but it’s got a little rock beat to it. It’s more lively. Well, the Cajun music is lively, but then there’s a little rock ’n’ roll in there. Now a lot of people say that zydeco is snap beans and salt. That’s a bunch of bull. You understand? Everyone use that word. Like you ask me that, I could have told you that. That’s what it meant in French, Creole, but that’s a bunch of baloney, man. [mimicking] “Oh, zydeco is snap beans and salt.” Well what you explaining? You ain’t explaining nothing! Ain’t that right? You asked me, what’s the difference between zydeco and all this kind of stuff. The zydeco is more like a rock beat to that. See? It’s Creole music, but it’s got a rock beat. But that’s where the word came from. Yeah, that’s bull corn. Makes me mad. Snap beans and salt and all that junk. That’s not the word for that, but it’s the word— snap beans and salt. Zydeco sont pas salé. Well that’s snap beans ain’t salted, but don’t use that word. I think that’s ignorant, the way I can explain it. That’s ignorant. Don’t be using that. What was it like the first time you went up north to play for people up there? It was beautiful. It was wonderful. Did they react differently to the music? Yeah. It’s not too much different. They dance just like them out here, but to me they be dancing a little better. Over here, they want to clown now. Them people out there going to out-dance them two to one. And them people love that music over there. They’re all friendly. You know, I come from the old school, see. And if I would have been out there and known what I know now twenty-five or thirty years ago, I would have been out there that way. I wouldn’t be here at all. Because the people out here, they’re prejudiced. Don’t You Worry about Boozoo  •  178

Over there, them people, we already got a motel, they want to take you to their house, and eat dinner and spend the night over there—some doctors, lawyers. And over there, we call people by their name. They don’t want you to call them mister. And over here, I’m older than a bunch of them punks. I forget myself, and I say mister. I’m old enough to be that punky’s daddy, and I call that thing mister. But it’s a habit I grew up with over here, like Uncle Tom’s cabin. Shit. That burns me up, man. If I would have known what I know now, I would have been gone from here forty years ago. See what I mean? I get mad when I go to answering those questions. Over yonder everybody’s just alike, equal. Everybody’s equal over there. Shit. “Hey Boozoo! Hey, how y’all doing? Glad you could make it. We seen you on the Internet where you was coming, and we drove eight hundred miles to come see you.” Don’t that make you feel good? These bastards over here don’t even want to come here. I give a festival right there [pointing to his yard] every year for Labor Day. All them neighbors there won’t come here. First thing, you see them in the store, “Hey Boozoo, where you playing?” Sometimes I be wanting to say, “Go to hell.” No-good bunch of coonasses over here, I’m telling you. And the blacks are just like it. They won’t come. I got that pasture full of people from Washington, D.C., Chicago, Arizona, New Orleans. All that right here. All these from Lake Charles, nobody comes. My neighbors right there, they won’t come. All of them punks out here, man. I was born and raised here. We been married forty-seven years. I’m sixty-eight years old. But it’s too late for me to move from here now. But I wish I could move from here and go stay out there—Washington, D.C., or Chicago somewhere. I don’t want to stay in New York, but Ohio. We went to Cleveland. We went to Minnesota. We 179  •  Don’t You Worry about Boozoo

went to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Virginia. All that. Connecticut, I could go stay up there. Shit, to get away from this. Yeah. Dog eat dog. The people going to help you over there. Over here, nobody helps you. If you ain’t got a bite of food to eat, they ain’t giving you nothing. Sometimes they told me it was like that in California, but I don’t like California. Got a bunch of people there. I don’t like it. But over here, if you ain’t got no gas to put in that car, well you better leave it parked ’cause nobody ain’t going to give you nothing. You eat what you can, egg and rice, maybe get you some meat. But you ain’t got nothing. Nothing from nothing leaves nothing. They giving you nothing. They’re jealous of you. I’m the only black here got a hurricane fence around here. When I say something on that I be telling you true. If a promoter asked you to go to Europe, would you go? They’ve been asking me that. I ask them what they pay. I ain’t going to Europe just to say I’m going. It’s gonna cost them. Them other guys went over there for little or nothing. But not me. It’s gonna cost some money to go there, for me, and I told my agent that. People been asking me for years why I ain’t went yet. Because the money ain’t right. My son-in-law went over there. They went to Holland, $400 a piece when they come back here. Shit, besides the band they’re going to have to pay me twenty-five, thirty [thousand dollars] for me by myself. And that’s not the band. Then you’re gonna pay my motel. One guy told me from London, I met him at Slim’s and all that, I said, “What would y’all pay to go there?” “Well, Boozoo, you play one night over here for a thousand. You play one night over there for seven hundred. You play a night over yonder for—” I said, “What you saying? You got be hustling them nights like that?” Don’t You Worry about Boozoo  •  180

“Yeah, you know. You play for a thousand one night over here, and you go play the next for five hundred over there. Then you play another night over yonder for eight hundred.” I said, “Oh man, I’m not gonna play no thing like that.” . . . I ain’t lost nothing across there. Them people ask me that every year. I don’t want to go. Uh-huh. Piss with Europe. I ain’t going over there. I ain’t going to try to go there because you went. If I see you out with a red car, then I’m going to go buy a red one? Bull corn with that. That’s why come I’m gonna stay where I’m at because I’m not that kind of fool. I’ve been a fool all my life, but I begin to wake up now. And when I tell people that I guess I make ’em mad. I be mad when I tell ’em that! [Laughs] See I don’t try to do like them. They try to do like me. That’s where the problem at. Do you think zydeco is going to continue in the direction of the rock beat? I think so. All the old ones are going. I’m the only one left here. So all them young punks want to turn that music like that. You see, Wayne Toups was trying to turn that Cajun music to ZydeCajun. Now ain’t that something? They think the world of him. Me and him play together on the same stage, but Wayne Toups is just messing that music up. He can play that Cajun music, yeah, but he’s going to play you a couple songs Cajun, and then he’s going to start singing in English. You know what I’m trying to say. It’s Cajun music, but he’s singing “I left you crying this morning, blah blah blah.” They’re changing it. They’re turning it around. They use the English word in that and they change it totally different, but you can tell it’s that Cajun music, yeah. You can tell. Like them other boys, you can tell that’s my music. [sings] “I ain’t gonna cry no more; listen what they say, I ain’t gonna cry no more!” But that’s my music. But he changed the words. See? You can 181  •  Don’t You Worry about Boozoo

listen to my music in there. But that’s what they’re doing with this Cajun music. I would rather them stay like them other guys—Belton Richard, Jesse Leger—stay with that Cajun music like that. But Wayne Toups, he’s changing that Cajun music. I once read where you said that you don’t mind people playing your music, but you mind them playing it wrong. Are there any younger guys trying to play your music the right way? They’re all twisting it around. My grandson wants to try to play my music, but then he’s got that Beau Jocque style in there. Sometimes he acts like he wants to play, and sometimes he acts like he wants to go the other way. I gave him an accordion. So I ain’t going to mess with him. If you want to play, play. If you don’t want to play, well, fuck you. That’s the way I see it. In “Boozoo’s Payback” you sing “You play my music when I’m not home, but they can’t sing my song.” That’s a good song, yeah. You know I don’t get to play that song often. [sings] “You play music and you doing me wrong. But they can’t sing my song. Leona get mad and she stay home. Boozoo gonna keep on going.” On your album Who Stole My Monkey there’s an explicit lyrics label because of the version of “Uncle Bud.” Does that bother you? No. I play it good all the time. Then when they ask me to play it rated X, I play it. “Oh, no! Don’t play that in here.” Man, I come out with it more faster you make me mad. If they bother me to play it, if the owner or somebody gets disre-

Don’t You Worry about Boozoo  •  182

spect, well I’m sorry. I tell them ladies, I say, “I’m sorry about this ladies.” I let ’em have it. “Oh don’t say that!” Well, what’s the matter with you? You got some kids, eh? How you think you brought them kids here? And if you say it, “Oh, that’s bad for you to say that.” No. Bull, man. Come on. They don’t want you to use that bad word, but you know what it is. When you leave out the building you doing it every night. I tell it like it is, me. I’m serious when I tell you that because it’s coming from the truth. Then like [my wife] Leona hollers at me sometimes, you know. She says, “Oh Boozoo, oh no babe, don’t say that.” I say, “What? It’s the truth!” Don’t tell me don’t say that, but it is the truth. Then I come with it more. I get mad. Just like I tell you, if you play that “Uncle Bud,” you say, “Uncle Bud got this, Uncle Bud got that. Uncle Bud got a pecker like a baseball bat.” That offend you that much? Well you ain’t got no business being in this hall. If it offend you, don’t come here. See where I’m coming from? I don’t go out there and sing it all the time. The people ask for it. The audience. Charles tells ’em, “Y’all want it rated X-rated, or y’all want it clean?” “No, we want it rated X!” I say, “Y’all want it rated X, I’m going to give it to you.” Well, if you don’t want it you must as well walk out. You shouldn’t have been in here. This is not a church house. You’ll hear anything in a club. On songs like “Johnny Billy Goat” it’s just you and the accordion. Would you prefer playing just by yourself or with the band? It don’t make me no difference. Playing by myself, it sounds good yeah. That’s on that big accordion. That joker sounds

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good. So it don’t make me no difference. It’s a yes and no. You don’t want to lie. It will strain you a little bit more to play by yourself. And you’re so used to playing with the band. But I come up playing by myself! I didn’t have no loudspeakers, no guitar, no bass, and all that. We used to hit on the wall with some sticks or some spoons for the drums and hit on the Coke box. So I keep time with my foot, see. I ain’t keeping time with them boys now. They got to follow me. You keep time with me. I’m going, me. You catch me. I guess you prefer playing with the band, but I’m used to by myself. I can play by myself. But the people are gonna want to hear a band. The boss, the owner of the place is going to want the full band to pay you. He ain’t going to pay you no good money by yourself. So you got to have a band and look professional. You know like on TV they got about twenty horns in there. That jazz music; I don’t like jazz. I like the best music. I got the best. The Creole. The zydeco. I got the best music. I’m not bragging on that though. I’m just saying, I like the Cajun music and I like zydeco, but I don’t like all them jazz outfits with about twenty horns in there. That’s just kinda noisy there. If there’s one thing that you would want people to remember about Boozoo, what would you want that to be? I want them to remember me for my music, as the best in zydeco and remember that they had to copy my music. They know they got that music from me. I kept the tradition up, and then they want to turn it around. Don’t forget that. But they ain’t going to forget, no. But they gonna want to forget, but they ain’t going be able to forget. Some people ain’t going to let them forget. Yeah.

Don’t You Worry about Boozoo  •  184

A Fistful of Hope New Orleans residents navigate the peaks and valleys of their post-Katrina world. augu st 2 3, 2006

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mound of trash, twelve feet long and four feet high, is piled up on the sidewalk—black trash bags, battered blue tarps, an old toilet, rotten boards, a door frame, and broken ceramic tiles. I’m standing in Bru’s living room, looking out the window of his front door at the debris across the street. “Has that trash been there long?” “Awhile,” Bru says. “At first they were pretty good about picking it up. It takes ’em a while now. They’ll get to it.” I met Bru (pronounced “brew”) in the seventh grade. He was a stout warrior on a skateboard, a bantam rooster of a kid who would fight you if provoked and win. He loved Jimi Hendrix and later Albert King. He had a wicked sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurdities of small town life in Pineville. In high school, he wrote and produced his own short film titled Hip to the Scene, where he poked fun at everyone—including himself. Since then, he’s grown a little taller and became a musician. His birth name is Henry Bernard Bruser IV, but everyone, including his parents, has always called him Bru. It’s been nearly a year since New Orleans’s levees broke. Bru’s hundred-year-old double shotgun house only took on an 185

inch of water, but it still left behind a layer of muck and mold that destroyed the wood floors. He moved here in 1998, drawn to the city and its music and bought this house on Hagan Avenue in Mid-City, which he remodeled while waiting tables, delivering sushi, and playing music. It’s also been nearly a year since my son, Henry, was born. He was born four days after Hurricane Rita ripped through Cameron Parish. Henry was my solace during that month when it seemed like hurricanes were devouring Louisiana. For the last year, I’ve been telling myself that with my responsibilities as a new father and my work at the paper, I didn’t have the time to go to New Orleans. But that’s only half true. I didn’t want to see it with my own eyes. But I knew if I was ever going to understand what happened there—and what is or isn’t happening now—I needed to see it for myself. There are three distinct realities in New Orleans. In one world, it appears as if nothing ever happened. In the French Quarter, you can order beignets at Café Du Monde, and tourists can still buy overpriced giant Mardi Gras beads in the T-shirt shops. Kirk Joseph’s Backyard Groove takes the bandstand at clubs like Le Bon Temps Roule on Magazine Street, his sousaphone leading the charge of a young brass band playing to a sweating, dancing crowd of black and white, young and old, locals and tourists. On a Saturday night, down on Rampart Street at Donna’s Bar and Grill, just across the street from the gates of Armstrong Park, you can hear Jamelle Williams and the New Orleans Slick Six jazz band. The second New Orleans offers peculiar sights that make you realize this isn’t the same city it was before Katrina. Driving down Carrollton Avenue in Mid-City, some traffic signals flash red and green lights at the same time. Stop signs are propped up on the ground at the intersections. There are more out-of-state license plates than Louisiana plates. There’s A Fistful of Hope  •  186

a sign at a Burger King that only would be on display in New Orleans—“Yeah. Now Open.” You don’t have to go far in any direction to see the third world. Drive down N. Claiborne deep into the St. Claude neighborhood, and it feels like a ghost town. You can stand at an intersection and look in four different directions, and you won’t see a soul. You might see a couple of campers parked outside the mangled homes. In the yards of gutted houses, the mud and mold have been baking under the sun, and the smell turns your stomach. There’s one home that’s not much different than the others. It’s gutted down to the beams, and the windows and doors are wide open. But there’s a T-shirt tacked to the outside wall with two images—one of a smiling black woman and the other of an infant. In cursive letters, the shirt reads: “Happy Mothers Day Geraldine. We Miss You. 9th Ward.” Spray-painted Xs with cryptic codes are still branded on every house, a haunting reminder of lives that have been crossed out. But the floodwaters didn’t seek out only the poor sections of the city. In middle-class and affluent neighborhoods, like Gentilly and Lakeview, the same scene plays out again and again, house after house, block after block, mile after mile. The homes are larger and newer, and some are even being repaired. Most of the houses still have that faint water line circling the structure, indicating where the water sat stagnant for days. The residents of one Lakeview home painted this message across their house: “Gone to Tennessee . . . Be back later, Cody & Brittney, Sonny, Gina. Long Live LV.” A yellow sign for a demolition company in their yard reads: “We beat any price.” Back in Bru’s living room—surrounded by his amplifiers, guitars, and piano—we’re drinking beer and talking about how Katrina changed his life. When the mandatory evacuation or187  •  A Fistful of Hope

der was given Sunday, August 28, Bru was in Baton Rouge for a gig and a wedding. He drove north to his parents’ house in Alexandria to ride out the storm. In Alexandria, he stayed glued to the television. He kept thinking about all of his musical gear he left behind, and he got madder the more he thought about it. “When the shit really starts hitting the fan on Tuesday night, my dad asked me if there was any way we could get to my house by boat,” he says. They devised a plan to launch on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain and boat down Bayou St. John to his house, only a block away from the bayou. “They had FEMA [officials] everywhere, and National Guard cops blocking every road,” Bru says. “If you tried to get close to New Orleans, you would come to roadblocks.” They finally found a rural boat launch outside of Mandeville and were about to launch the boat when his sister called and persuaded his father not to do it. She had seen on the news that people were being shot, and boats and cars were being commandeered. “It screwed up my plan,” Bru says. “I was so about it. We had guns. I didn’t give a fuck. This is everything that I have and I worked for. Everything I give a fuck about at all was right here at my house.” He returned to Alexandria and fumed for two weeks. “I was furious with FEMA and the National Guard. They didn’t let us go in and handle our own shit and help our people. They couldn’t do it. If they would have just let us handle our business, we would have handled it.” While he waited at his parents’ house, Bru was interviewed by the Associated Press and asked whether he would return to the city. At the time he didn’t have the answer. He had already spent so much time remodeling his house, putting his musical aspirations on hold. He wondered about the extent of the damage and whether he would have to began remodeling again. A Fistful of Hope  •  188

About two weeks later, he managed to sneak back into the city through Jefferson Parish. With so many trees down on Jeff Davis, he drove his mother’s Toyota Rav 4 down the neutral ground. Boats were wrecked everywhere. “Hardly anybody had been back in the city at this point,” he says. “There were helicopters everywhere. It was scary. It was just weird. It was like a war zone. Trees were down everywhere. I got back to my house, and I acted fast, because if the cops were to come I was going to be in trouble.” The only person he saw in his neighborhood was a police officer who checked his driver’s license to make sure he wasn’t looting his own house. That’s when he discovered that his house had flooded and that his backyard studio was destroyed, along with some musical instruments in the converted shed and a year’s worth of music he had been writing. “Everything stunk,” he says. “It smelled like Katrina. There’s no smell like it. They were still kicking down doors, and I wanted to get the things that meant the most to me.” He salvaged some instruments, his photo negatives and prints, and his CD collection. It took him two hours to pack up his belongings. He left the city and didn’t return until November 1, when he heard that his neighborhood had electricity. But there was still no gas until mid-December, which made for some cold showers. Before Katrina, Bru was writing music like a madman. He heard melodies that he had to write down, sometimes waking in the middle of the night to get it out of his head. When he hears those notes now, he ignores them. “I’ve been keeping my chops up and playing every day,” he says, “but I haven’t written one song since Katrina. I don’t want to write any negative shit. When you lose that many songs you just need to put some time between you and that.” He’s the only member of his band, N’Stankt, still living in the city, but he’s putting together another band. He’s calling it Government Majik. 189  •  A Fistful of Hope

Bru hasn’t cooked one meal in his kitchen since Katrina. He’s eaten out every day. He estimates that there are maybe five nights he hasn’t been out drinking. “Everybody’s got a drinking problem,” he says. “They’re all working hard and drinking hard.” In mid-November Bru returned to waiting tables at the popular Uptown eatery Dick and Jenny’s, where business is booming. But conducting any business in New Orleans can be grueling. Widespread staffing shortages make simple things like going to the bank, the hardware store, or grocery store take far longer in the post-Katrina Crescent City. “It sucks,” Bru says. “I don’t blame people for not coming back right now because it’s a bitch to get around, and it’s dangerous.” During the weekend I’m in New Orleans, a man is gunned down in Central City on Saturday night in plain view of about sixty people and only four blocks away from a police station, but no one steps forward with any information on the crime. The Times-Picayune reports that the death of Jeffery Lewis was the sixth murder in New Orleans during the weekend, including four murders in Treme the previous night. Even with the presence of the National Guard, called in a month earlier by Gov. Blanco, the crime rate has returned to pre-Katrina levels. Despite the return of violence, the inconveniences of everyday life, and a crippled infrastructure, Bru finds hope in the residents returning to the city and trying to piece together their former lives. “I think individuals are doing a lot,” he says. “I think government is doing shit. It’s all talk and no action. But in the end, you can’t expect anything from the government. You’ve got to do it yourself.” Bru senses our conversation has bogged down in the realities of post-Katrina New Orleans. He smiles and changes the subject. “Something good has to come of it,” he says. “The Saints got Reggie Bush. It’s all good in the neighborhood, man.” A Fistful of Hope  •  190

••• My sister-in-law’s brother, Sean Jeffries, sits in his apartment off St. Charles Avenue, just blocks from where he works as a banker. He rode out Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and is recounting how he managed to make it out of the city. He stayed behind with his friend, Tim Lawrence, the assistant manager of a French Quarter hotel, to help with thirtyfive tourists who were stranded, unable to get flights out of the city. During the storm, they watched Katrina toss bikes and bricks down the streets. The electricity in the hotel went out at 6 a.m. on Monday morning. By 3 p.m., Sean and some other hotel guests ventured out into the French Quarter and Jackson Square. “It was an absolute disaster,” he says. “There was nobody in the streets. The winds were still blowing around forty miles an hour. All of the trees in Jackson Square were crashed, the fence was broken, and there were dead pigeons everywhere. We were walking down St. Ann Street toward the river, and around the corner, here comes two drag queens, the first people I saw after the hurricane. One was black and one was white, and they were walking in their heels with beers in their hand. I looked over at everybody and I said, ‘New Orleans has made it. It has survived this storm.’ That really struck me. Those were the first human beings I saw, and I don’t know what the hell they were doing out there.” Trees were down on Decatur Street. Trash, debris, and even a fallen balcony blocked passage on Royal Street. On Canal Street, tourists who had been holed up in their hotels were out in the street, assessing the damage. “That evening walking through the French Quarter, you couldn’t see a thing,” he says. “It was dark. Five blocks away you might see a flashlight.” Sean went to bed that night in the hotel, without any electricity. At 8 a.m. the next morning, the hotel manager informed his guests that the floodwaters were rising and that the hotel 191  •  A Fistful of Hope

did not have the provisions for them to stay longer. Their options were the Superdome or the Convention Center. Sean and Tim left the hotel with a group of tourists. They were also carting around their two dogs and a friend’s cat they had rescued. On one street corner, the group was interviewed by FOX, CBS, ABC, and a local television station. “There was media all over the quarter,” Sean says. “We were on the national news. Every channel all over the nation was covering it at this point.” That’s when they heard from passersby that the Winn-Dixie on Orleans Avenue was giving away food. “When we got to Winn-Dixie it was not what they told us,” Sean says. “It was being looted, but it was very organized. The doors were open. There were all kinds of people, all races, from people with money to poor. The alarm was going off, and the emergency lights were on. The whole store was lit. Everybody had shopping carts, walking up and down the aisles and picking things they needed.” Sean and Tim took Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, canned goods, and juice. “Of course when you got to the checkout there was no one there, so we would sit in line and then grab bags like it was an organized grocery store. You just didn’t pay for it. It was people getting what they needed.” By the time they left the store, the water was knee deep. Helicopters were buzzing overhead. They walked in front of a police station where officers were outside the building. “They knew what was going on,” Sean says, “but it was at this point that I first realized that the city was falling into chaos. I felt it. The mood of the city was changing.” They ended up at the Hilton, where guests slept that night in the dark and hot lobby of the hotel. One of the tourists in Sean’s group was running low on insulin, and a National Guardsman gave him a ride to a nearby hospital. The next day Sean met a hotel employee he knew who gave Sean and Tim two hotel keys that would serve as tickets for a

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bus ride out of the city, arranged for by the hotel. A man who wandered into the hotel owned a secure French Quarter apartment and offered use of it to the group. The group decided that Sean and Tim should use the passes and take their pets with them out of New Orleans. “The first buses that came to pick us up were confiscated by FEMA when they got to the city,” Sean says. “They were taking buses to rescue people. So we ended up staying an extra twelve hours in the grand ballroom of the hotel with our dogs and the cat. It was about 115 degrees, and I was getting sick.” The buses arrived at 4 a.m. on Thursday morning, and they were transported to Baton Rouge. That evening, Sean and Tim saw the group they had left behind interviewed by Brian Williams on NBC’s evening news. The next day, NBC transported the tourists to Baton Rouge. After getting out of New Orleans, Sean learned that his parents had lost their home in Chalmette but had made it safely to his sister’s house in Hammond. Two months later, Sean and Tim reunited in Chicago with the tourists. Their reunion was covered by NBC’s Dateline. That’s also when they both got a small tattoo of a hurricane. “That’s the only tattoo on my body,” Sean says. “I never had one before in my life. I’m not a tattoo person, but I said I’ll put that on my body.” Sean’s is on his right arm. Tim’s is on the back of his neck. He wanted the hurricane behind him. Sean returned to New Orleans two days before Mayor Ray Nagin reopened the city. “It stunk,” Sean says. “It was strange. It was a Twilight Zone experience. It’s hard to talk about that. It was just an absolute disaster area.” He returned to work at the bank. For two weeks he dined with the rest of his neighborhood at Fat Harry’s at the corner of Napoleon and St. Charles avenues. The menu was the same every night—grilled chicken or hamburgers. “We were staring at each other like zombies,”

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he says. “I was disoriented. I never felt that way in my life. I didn’t know where I was. It was just horrible, but slowly and surely the city has started to come back.” “I think it’s going to be scarred,” he continues. “I know the landscape of it’s going to change.” He hopes a number of proposed new developments and the Louisiana Recovery Authority’s Road Home grants will help rebuild the city. “That’s a bailout,” he says. “The federal government failed us. This was a man-made event because the levees failed. If the levees wouldn’t have failed we would have been fine. I think the federal government and the Corps of Engineers know that, and we’re taxpayers down here. Look at my parents. They’re fiftyeight years old. They lost everything.” On August 29, Sean and Tim will reunite with a Scottish couple they befriended during the storm. They plan on having dinner in New Orleans. I spent a lot of my high school summer days in New Orleans. I met and became friends with Alcena Rogan at church camp; she lived Uptown, a universe away from Pineville. I also became friends with her brothers—Sims and Davis—and their father, Patrick. I still run into Davis every now and then. He hasn’t changed much since those days when we would sit out on their sleeping porch with the windows open, looking out over the back yard and listening to records of George Clinton, De La Soul, and Shakey Jake. Davis headed up the band All That, spent thirteen years as a DJ on WWOZ 90.7 FM, and taught for ten years in elementary schools. He’s living in France now, on an artist residency at Fontevraud Abbey in the village of Fontevraud-l’Abbaye. When I reach him by phone, he wants to be optimistic about New Orleans, but he’s having a hard time doing it. He plans on return-

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ing to his home on Gov. Nicholls in Treme, but he’s not ruling out other possibilities either. “I hate to sound cynical, but there’s a whole lot of business as usual,” he says. “Man, there had been a bomb of poverty and neglect that’s been going off in that city for years before the bomb of the hurricane. You could have toured the Ninth Ward before the storm, and it was still pretty devastated.” Davis sees Nagin’s re-election as a sign of more of the same for the city, a sentiment echoed by everyone I talked to that weekend. “There’s some times when a charismatic business man is a good person to run a city,” he says. “This is war time. Call in a politician. We need the brother of the senator to make shit work. No one has a plan. This is the depressing, frustrating thing. I wish I could say ‘This is the cause, write them a check,’ or ‘This is the guy, follow what he says.’ I don’t see a leader. I don’t see a cause.” Davis evacuated New Orleans with his father and stepmother and headed to Houston—on a fourteen-hour drive—where Patrick works and has an apartment. His wife, Lydia Hopkins, is a deacon with St. George’s Episcopal Church. They’re now back in their hundred-year-old, two-story house on Lowerline Street. A fluorescent orange X is spray-painted next to their front door. The house sustained little damage from the storm, even though their neighbors’ homes a block away flooded. Patrick and Lydia returned in October, and Lydia has been running the free meal program at her church. “It’s been a very positive thing,” she says. “But within the last month we’re seeing more and more people who are desperately in need, and all we have is free meals twice a week. We don’t having housing or transportation.” The New Orleans residents I talk with express the same sentiment—the government is not working, but the individuals are working in spite of it. Patrick says that in order for New

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Orleans to be rebuilt, there has to be a larger focus on bringing business, industry, and jobs into the city. Otherwise, it’s the same story—high crime, poor education, and poverty. In her work as a deacon, Lydia has been asked a number of times if Katrina was the result of human sin. “You had better believe it was because of our sinfulness,” she says. “Our sinfulness in not building good levees. Our sinfulness in not providing transportation for the poor. Our sinfulness in having people live in this kind of poverty. That’s the sin. The grace of Katrina—in a horrible way—is that it’s exposed the suffering that already exists in this city, along with the great beauty. I just don’t want to believe that the only way you can have a quirky, vibrant, and culturally astounding city is to have the majority of its population living below the poverty line with horrible education, rampant crime, drugs, and no jobs. These are the ongoing effects of racism, poverty, and poor education. This is the story of every big city in this country. If it can’t be solved here, if we can’t do something to save this city, then what’s going to happen if there’s a disaster in another city, and the veneer is all torn away? Right here, right now is where we can do something about it.” When I meet up with Bru later, he has Band-Aids taped around four of his fingers just below the knuckle. It’s his first and only tattoo. He says he’s not supposed to take the bandages off, but he does anyway. Across his fist, in capital letters, outlined in black and filled in with blue ink, is the word “hope.”

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The Forgotten Hurricane Rita decimated Cameron Parish, but residents say they’re still living in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina. augu st 2 3, 2006

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he clouds, like giant dirty cotton balls, tumble in from the Gulf of Mexico, and the rain pours down. On a two-acre patch of land near Sweet Lake in north Cameron Parish, four campers sit in a row. In one of them, seventy-threeyear-old J.C. Boudreaux and his seventy-one-year-old wife, Regina, are keeping an eye on their five-year-old grandson, Michael, who’s keeping his eyes on the children’s program Wonder Pets! on the small television. Occasionally, Michael turns around on the couch and looks out the window to see if it’s still raining. When he gets bored and moves around the camper, the adults move in their seats to let him pass. The FEMA camper’s main room has a small sofa, a computer desk, a television, a dining table, a kitchenette, and a refrigerator. Strands of plastic ivy trim the three small windows. A plastic divider curtain separates the main room from the bathroom and bedroom. “J.C. sometimes gets down in the dumps,” Regina says. “I say, ‘Hey, everybody’s in the same boat we’re in. You might as well suck it up and smile.’” “I want to go home,” J.C. says, “but we don’t have a home 197

to go to. It’s not there. You wake up in the morning, and you say ‘I’m tired of the camper. I want to go back.’ But you can’t go back. That’s the problem. It will never be the same, no matter what. If we go back, our neighbors aren’t there. We can’t get gas. We can’t get groceries. No doctors. So we’ll just wait around, and I don’t know how much longer we can wait. We’re getting a little age on us. We can’t wait no fifteen or twenty years.” J.C. and Regina weren’t the only ones in their family who lost their home to Hurricane Rita. Of their seven children, six of them and their families lost their homes. Except for their oldest son who lives in Alabama, all of their children were living in Cameron Parish. Some of them live in the other three campers next to J.C. and Regina’s on land owned by one of their sons. J.C. was born outside of Gueydan but has lived most of his life in Cameron Parish. In 1948 he starred in Robert Flaherty’s film Louisiana Story, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He later met Regina, a young woman from Creole, at a dance, and they married in 1952. Five years later, the couple was living in Cameron with three children. “Hurricane Audrey came and uprooted us,” J.C. says. “We lost everything we had then.” Regina also lost five members of her family. When Audrey came ashore on June 27, 1957, J.C. was working on a crew boat for an oil company. He learned about the approaching storm from his employer. “Back then,” J.C. says, “We didn’t have the weather communications like we’ve got now.” J.C. and Regina evacuated to Lake Charles with their children. When they returned, their home had vanished. They weren’t able to buy a new home for another five years, when J.C. took a job with Cameron Telephone, where he worked for thirty years.

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It’s easy for the older Cameron Parish residents to draw comparisons between Audrey and Rita. Both storms wrecked their lives, and both made landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border. But data from the National Weather Service points out some differences. While Audrey hit land with sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, Rita’s sustained winds were 120 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 150 miles per hour. During Audrey, Cameron experienced a twelve-foot storm surge, but Rita hit the city with a surge of fifteen to twenty feet. The major difference was the evacuation for the storms. Most residents heeded the mandatory evacuation during Rita, resulting in fewer than ten deaths; few evacuated for Audrey, and more than five hundred people, mostly in Cameron, drowned in the storm surge. J.C. thinks there was more property damage with Rita than Audrey. Homes that withstood the wrath of Audrey weren’t able to withstand the brute force of Rita. Regina has a hard time even comparing the two storms. “Everybody says Rita was worse,” she says, “but to me, everybody lost everything for Audrey. We lost our home, and everybody else lost their home.” Nearly fifty years later, the couple finds themselves homeless—again. And for the second time, their house was nowhere to be found. “Out there where we were,” Regina says, “everything was just gone.” “The worst weather was coming from the southeast,” J.C. says. “All that stuff went to the northwest. It’s out in the marsh and along the Intracoastal Canal. That’s where the debris is.” If you live in Cameron, you also live with the threat of hurricanes. You can take every precaution and follow every code for building your home, but that’s still no guarantee. Houses next to the Boudreauxs, built fourteen feet in the air on pylons,

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suffered the same fate as their home. “You can’t go against Mother Nature,” Regina says. “If she’s going to take it, she’s going to take it, regardless of how it’s built.” Unlike the aftermath of Audrey, the Boudreauxs are contending with FEMA this time around, and the results have been mixed. “It was difficult trying to get things in the right perspective,” Regina says. “One of them called me and said, ‘We have a place for you in a trailer park with your daughter and two kids.’ “I said, ‘No, you don’t.’ “He said, ‘Well, why not? Do you refuse to live with your daughter?’ “I said, ‘No sir, I don’t, but that’s not my daughter.’ “They call you, and they don’t know much of anything. And right now, nothing’s under the name Hurricane Rita. We all go under Hurricane Katrina. If you’re going to find out anything, you have to say Katrina. If you tell them Rita, they’ll say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. We don’t have any records on Rita.’” J.C. laughs and throws his arms out, gesturing to the small room. “This is all a dream,” he says. “We didn’t have a Rita.” Regina laughs. The Boudreauxs are growing weary of the name Katrina, particularly the media’s coverage of New Orleans. Regina says, “You hear all these celebrities with Katrina this and Katrina that. They have a Katrina fund and all this stuff. I think our governor almost forgot us.” “She’s beginning to wake up to the facts over there,” J.C. says. “We do exist. But we didn’t holler enough. We just sucked it up and went back on back to work. People in New Orleans there squawked and howled.” The Boudreauxs have no solid plans for the future, although J.C.’s considered pulling his camper back to his old home site, a mile away from the Gulf. “We’re in our seventies,” he says. The Forgotten  •  200

“We’re not going to go back there and build no home. Now we have to go so high, and my wife is handicapped. I’ve cleared my lot, and I can bring the camper there.” Regina isn’t completely sold on the idea. “At least for a while,” she says. “As long as we have the good Lord’s help, we’ll all make it just fine.” J.C. drives his 1991 Toyota Tercel down Louisiana Highway 27, giving a tour of Rita’s wrath. Driving through the Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, he points out the fields that are black from saltwater intrusion. A few egrets fly across the sky. After crossing the Intracoastal Waterway, beside the road there’s a mangled refrigerator and the shell of a trailer with the front door ripped off, its windows gone. Miles off in the distance, a lopsided house rests in the marsh. J.C.’s heard there are about twenty-five houses out in the marsh, and he wonders if one of them is his own. “We didn’t find any parts of either one of our homes in both Audrey and Rita,” he says. All the electric poles alongside the highway are brand new, a bright brown, not the blackened creosote stained poles found along most Louisiana highways. Cameron was without electricity for four months after Rita. Blackened trees look like twigs sticking up out of the ground. Pulling into Creole, J.C. points to a barren corner of an intersection. “The bank was right here,” he says. “A store was over here.” Traveling down the highway, there are fragments of houses and roofs alongside the road. A gutted gas station with an Exxon sign says boudin bros. A smaller sign says for sale. J.C. says this intersection had Cameron Parish’s only red light. It’s now a four-way stop. Sacred Heart Catholic Church is still standing but battered. Cameron Memorial Hospital is only a concrete foundation. Campers and trailers are parked in lots with piles of rubble. In Oak Grove, most of South Cameron High School is gone. 201  •  The Forgotten

Only two walls of the cafeteria and the gym remain, and water pours through their destroyed roofs. A closet left open to the elements displays broken trophies from past victories. Of Cameron Parish’s six schools, three of them, including South Cameron High, were completely destroyed. Entering Cameron, there’s a dump site adjacent to a park of campers. One house, barely standing, has the name freddy barrios spray-painted on its side. Pointing to the house, J.C. says, “It’s like my wife says, we’re not the only ones, so why sit around and worry about it.” Another house with a blue tarp strapped to its roof is perched twelve feet in the air, its siding ripped off, exposing the wood beneath. Just across the road a new trailer is precariously perched some twenty feet in the air on wooden posts. Concrete statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus are propped up next to foundations, campers, and trailers. Shredded fabric ripped from pieces of clothing clings to the trees overhead. There’s no street sign to indicate where he is, but J.C. pulls off onto Vejay Road. There used to be seventeen homes along the road. Now there’s only concrete foundations and one lone camper on the road, next door to where J.C.’s home once stood, where his neighbor John Willis is living. J.C. pulls up to his property, but he looks around for a second, taking note of the few trees to get his bearings and make sure he’s at the right place. “This is my place here,” he says. “This is home.” He gets out of the car and looks over the horseshoe driveway to nowhere. His eyes water. He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes, but he doesn’t cry. “We had it made,” J.C. says. He and Regina spent forty years rebuilding their nest, and J.C. points to the thin air, proudly recounting how he built a ten-by-twelve-foot glassed-in porch and even added a fireplace to their frame house. J.C. doesn’t come here often. He says he can’t. The Forgotten  •  202

••• In the town of Cameron, the only vestige of the United Methodist Church is its steel A-frame. The sign for the Family Dollar store is still there, but the building’s gutted. The Masonic lodge, Cameron Elementary, Cameron State Bank, a donut shop, and the First Baptist Church are nowhere to be seen, but J.C. points to where they each once stood. There’s a skeleton of a gas station, but there’s no gas to be had in Cameron. Inside of a camper, the Hurricane Café is open for business, and the sign out front says it’s serving up fried shrimp. J.C. pulls into the parking lot of the courthouse. The threestory building was one of the few left standing after Rita, despite taking nine feet of water on its first floor. In the parking lot there are two long portable buildings. J.C. enters the first one to find his hunting buddy, Clerk of Court Carl Broussard. He walks past four employees in a narrow pathway surrounded with computers, printers, desks, stacks of manila folders, boxes, and fax machines to reach Broussard’s desk, which is at the far end of the trailer. For the past five years Broussard had been diligently digitizing the court records, and luckily, he and his staff were able to save most of the paper records by moving them up to the clerk’s office on the second floor of the courthouse. Since February 1 they have been working out of this trailer. Broussard was living in Grand Chenier before Rita, twenty miles east of Cameron. He lost his home and everything in it. So did his daughter who lived nearby. “I bought me a camper trailer a couple of weeks after the storm,” he says. “I’m living south of Lake Charles.” There’s been progress with the cleanup, and residents are returning to Cameron Parish, with campers and trailers in tow. But even if he was looking to rebuild his home now, Broussard says contractors have waiting lists of up to three years. Broussard estimates more than four thousand homes and 203  •  The Forgotten

dwellings in Cameron Parish were destroyed by Rita, and two thousand were damaged. It’s difficult to gauge how much of the parish is returning, but one indicator is student enrollment, with 85 percent of South Cameron High School’s students reenrolling. And the oil industry is back up and running. “If you look at the [Calcasieu] river as you drive in, it looks like nothing ever happened,” Broussard says. “There’s a little bit more progress being made, but I just feel that it was a little slow to start. We had way too much bureaucracy. You had the federal government saying one thing, the state of Louisiana saying another thing, and the parish was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. The parish didn’t have enough money to clean up all this debris.” Hurricane Katrina put Cameron Parish in a bad position after Rita. “The whole parish doesn’t have but around 9,600 people,” he says. “That’s a city block in New Orleans. We would be real easy to forget about. Most people here take it upon themselves to clean up a lot of this over here. They’re not used to government handouts. They’re used to going out and getting it on their own.” Even with that determination, Broussard says Cameron Parish is being slighted. He points to the discrepancy in federal funds for cleanup after the two hurricanes, with southeast Louisiana receiving a complete reimbursement and Cameron Parish initially getting stuck with 10 percent of the cleanup costs. It’s just added insult to injury. From both personal and professional standpoints, Broussard believes the looming crisis in Louisiana is insurance. “There’s an insurance crisis in every coastal parish in this state,” he says. “Even though the state adopted these wind codes and FEMA had these elevation codes, even though you’re building up to these codes, you usually get a break on your insurance, but that’s not the way it’s happening.” Broussard recently checked on insurance rates for a $200,000 home built to code

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with coverage of $100,000 on the home’s contents. Estimates he found ranged from $8,500 to $12,000 annually. “The major insurance companies want to pick what they want to insure,” Broussard says. “I think the state of Louisiana needs to step in and say, ‘Hey if you’re going to insure one, you’re got to take it all.’ They want to pick and choose, and I don’t agree with that. If you’re in Louisiana, you insure everybody. Insurance is a risk. That’s why you buy insurance. It’s a risk on the consumer, and it’s risk on the company. But the way it is now the consumer is getting all the risk, and I don’t believe it’s a level playing field.” Broussard’s house was two feet above code, and his insurance company has still not paid him for his loss. Broussard’s secretary, Lynn Griffith, is sitting at her desk ten feet from her boss. The bottom of her house was fifteen feet above sea level—on a hill and on pylons—but the surge still swept it away. “A lot of people would have settled for a lot less not to go through this,” Broussard says. “It’s a real problem in Louisiana. We’re a small parish. Most people down here, I think they went through enough. We live in Cameron Parish, and I’m fifty-one years old. We knew that every hurricane season, this could be the year. We’ve lived with that, but people in California live with earthquakes. How many people live in San Francisco? They don’t make those people leave when they have an earthquake. You live with the risk anywhere you’re living. We knew it was coming. That’s why we had insurance. That’s been the No. 1 problem why there’s not more people here. The insurance companies haven’t paid them, and to reinsure yourself, it’s a problem because the prices have escalated so much.” On a small television in the corner of the trailer, the radar on the Weather Channel shows a blood-red patch of rain moving in from the Gulf and inundating Cameron. Griffith says it’s been raining steadily for three days. She wishes it would stop,

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at least for a few hours. She needs to do laundry, and she can’t do it while it’s raining. Her washer and dryer are set up outside of her camper. Across Highway 27, where the Cameron Public Library once stood, sits the Cameron bookmobile. It’s Cameron’s branch of the parish library for now. A white tent is set up outside for summer activities. Librarians Beckie Primeaux and Bethany Debarge are the only ones in the vehicle. Business has been slow, but they’ve been loaning more DVDs than usual. It’s the only source of entertainment in town. Primeaux lives in Creole. She didn’t lose her home, but even with it standing ten feet off the ground on pylons there was damage that took a while to repair. “We were able to fix it up, but we just recently moved in,” she says. “Things are just going slowly. To me, there’s more done and money given to the Katrina victims. The checks I’ve gotten from insurance all say Katrina, and even the date of it. We’re not Katrina victims. We didn’t have Katrina damage. It’s frustrating the way that President Bush is giving money just to Katrina. It’s like we don’t exist. That’s very frustrating.” Before Rita, Debarge was living in a mobile home in Cameron with her husband and two children. “I just don’t know what to do anymore,” she says. “It’s like they put us second.” She tried to get a camper from FEMA and after four months of the runaround, she and her husband went out and bought one. “I’ve got two kids,” she says. “I had to hurry up and do something. It’s just so aggravating. I don’t know who they have working for them, but they don’t know what they’re saying. They said I had five feet of water in my home. I lived in a mobile home. There was nothing left. I couldn’t even find it. How was I supposed to have five feet of water in my home? Every time we get on this subject it just aggravates me because FEMA did nothing.” The Forgotten  •  206

“We’re just trying to make a living and want to be back in our homes,” Primeaux says. “We want them to help us out so we can get back to our lives.” Pulling out of Cameron and heading back to Sweet Lake, the rain’s still coming down. The windshield wipers of J.C.’s little car are pumping as fast they can, giving a clear view of the road only for a split second at a time. J.C. doesn’t appear to be worried about the visibility. He’s been down this road before. He knows it well, and there’s only one route he can take. “You just suck it up,” he says, “and go about your business.”

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Ride of His Life Calvin Borel’s run for the Triple Crown with Street Sense was derailed at the Preakness Stakes, but the Catahoula native will forever be a Kentucky Derby winner. may 2 3, 2007

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he newspapers and sports announcers refer to him by name—Calvin Borel. The jockeys call him “Bo-Rail,” for his preference of riding the rail when he races horses. But his family has a hard time calling him anything but what they’ve called him all of his life—Boo-Boo. His older brother Cecil says, “Sometimes I got to think twice when they tell me Calvin. He’s always been Boo-Boo. They just call him that Calvin stuff up here in Kentucky because they don’t know no better. His name really and truly is Boo-Boo.” The rest of the world didn’t know too much about Boo-Boo, until he won the Kentucky Derby on a horse with a slingshot reflex called Street Sense. Then came the media barrage, followed by the state dinner at the White House with President George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, and Peyton Manning. Throughout it all, Calvin stuck to his routine of the last twenty-five years, working his horses, only answering reporters’ questions on his days off. (He begins every answer with “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.”) In a phone interview from his home in Louisville, Kentucky, 208

four days before the Preakness Stakes, the forty-year-old, 110pound, 5-foot-4 jockey from Catahoula remembers the first time he rode Street Sense. “I worked him the first quarter of a mile,” he says. “‘Man,’ I said. ‘Lord, have mercy. What kind of horse is this?’ You get on a bunch of them, and something always happens, but he just kept going and going—half of a mile, five-eighths, three-quarters, and boy, he was just getting better and better. So we run him. We schooled him good, like Carl [Nafzger] likes to do with his horses, show him the right way, because we knew he was a good horse. He run second that day, and we were very pleased. Then the next start, he won. So he wasn’t fooling us. He was the real deal.” And if anyone would know, it would be Calvin; over his career, he has won some 4,300 races. Before the Kentucky Derby, he rode Street Sense in seven races, winning three of them, including the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs in November. Street Sense was the first winner of that race ever to win the Kentucky Derby. This past Saturday, all eyes were on Calvin and Street Sense. They were the favorite at the Preakness Stakes, trailed only by Hard Spun and Curlin, the respective second and third horses of the Derby. Calvin and Street Sense started as they had in the Kentucky Derby, holding back for much of the race and waiting for an opening. But this time, despite a strong stretch run, the pair couldn’t find the spot along the rail to catapult them to victory. Lafayette native Robby Albarado and Curlin inched out Street Sense by only a head at the finish line. So this year, there’s no Triple Crown. But Calvin’s tenacity and his dedication to his life’s work earned him a Kentucky Derby victory for the ages. Long before the Triple Crown was even a possibility, Calvin and trainer Carl Nafzger were just looking for a horse strong enough for the Derby. Calvin says, “One day he had this two209  •  Ride of His Life

year-old walking around, and he told me, he said, ‘This might be our Derby horse.’ And sure as shit, there he was. Yes, sir.” The Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville is the first leg of the Triple Crown in thoroughbred horse racing. The second and third races are the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore and the Belmont Stakes in Elmont, N.Y. Only eleven horses have ever garnered the honor, and there hasn’t been a Triple Crown winner since 1978 when Affirmed won the Belmont Stakes. The twenty-nine-year drought is the longest in 125 years of American horse racing. At the Kentucky Derby this year, Queen Elizabeth II wore white gloves and watched from the stands. Curlin was the favorite to win and was unbeaten. Calvin and Street Sense ran next to last in the twenty-horse race through the halfway mark. For fans watching on television, Street Sense didn’t even find his way into the frame until a half a mile from the finish. In the final sixteenth of a mile, Calvin and Street Sense made a dramatic move off the inside rail to blow past the leader Hard Spun. Calvin only looked back once, just before crossing the finish line and throwing a quick celebratory jab into the air, winning by 2¼ lengths. “In between the three-eighths pole and the quarter pole, when I hadn’t moved on him yet, I was pretty comfortable there,” Calvin says. “The horses were starting to stop in front of me. I had a feeling there that I had a lot of horse under me. It would have took a good horse to keep going and a good horse to run him down if he was going to fire like I knew he could. So when I turned for home at the quarter pole, I knew for sure I was home free.” In another phone interview before the Preakness, Calvin’s older brother Cecil explained the chemistry between his younger brother and Street Sense. “He always thought that horse could run,” Cecil says. “Sometimes you get a special one, and he’s just a special horse. [Calvin] gets along good with Ride of His Life  •  210

him. He gets him to relax and to race real good. That has a lot to do with it. The horse is real good, but you also have to have somebody on him that takes their time and is patient, especially when you’re going this far. You’ve got to be awfully patient.” “He does whatever I want him to do,” Calvin adds. “If the pace is fast, he lays a little back; if it’s slow, he’s a little forward. But he’s his own self. When I want him, he’s always there. He puts me through holes that’s unbelievable. If something comes up in front of me and I need to be there, I just tighten up my reins a little bit and he puts me there right quick. People worried about him coming from so far back with a lot of horses, but that never crossed my mind. He’s the type of horse, you can use him more than one time. You can use him six, seven times if you want, and he’ll still finish.” NBC announcer Tom Durkin proclaimed as they crossed the finish line at the Kentucky Derby: “Here is Street Sense, a stretch-running sensation!” By the time NBC’s reporter caught up with him, Calvin had tears in his eyes. The interview by horseback was interrupted frequently by jockeys riding past Calvin congratulating him, and Calvin responded to each and every one. “I just want to thank my brother who got me here,” he said. “I wish my mama and daddy was here. This is the most greatest moment of my life.” Calvin and his fiancée, Lisa Funk, were later invited by President Bush to a White House dinner with Queen Elizabeth II. The president hugged him. The queen shook his hand. And as he told one television reporter, he even sat “against” fellow Louisianian and Super Bowl quarterback Peyton Manning at the dinner table. “It was a shuffle, I tell you what,” Calvin says. “Peyton Manning was all right. I liked him. He talked to me a lot. It was an honor to meet the queen, something that people don’t ever get to do. That was a big milestone for me and my fiancée to 211  •  Ride of His Life

do. And the president, he made us feel at home. It was unbelievable. It was amazing.” With the newfound media attention after the derby, Jerry Hissam, Calvin’s agent for the last seventeen years, scheduled interviews for him on his days off so his established work routine wouldn’t be interrupted. “He wants to focus on his job and his horses,” Hissam says. “He wants his eyes right between those two ears of that horse, of all horses. That’s what he’s focusing on.” “We grew up in Catahoula,” says Cecil. “Everybody says St. Martinville, but we lived in Catahoula all our life.” Cecil now lives in Shreveport, but he spends most of his time away from home training horses. “A lot of people don’t understand that when you’re with the horses, you move all the time,” he says. “You ain’t got no choice. If you don’t, you don’t go nowhere.” Calvin is the youngest of five boys born to Clovis and Ella Borel—Clifton, Clovis, Cal, Cecil, and Calvin. There’s a thirteen-year age difference between Calvin and Cecil. Their parents farmed sugarcane, and Calvin describes them as “the most greatest parents in the world. We had food on the table and clothes to wear. They were hard-working people. It was kind of hard Derby day—my dad died about three years ago—not for him to see me to win the race, but I knew he was watching me from upstairs. My mom’s disabled, but she was lucky to see me.” His father passed away at the age of eightyeight, and his eighty-four-year-old mother lives in a St. Martinville nursing home. Calvin made sure that one of his nephews was with her during the Kentucky Derby to see him race on television. “He was born on a horse,” Cecil recalls of his younger brother. “At three and four years old he was already riding in the pasture. At eight years old he was riding match races. He was born to be a rider. He could just walk, and he wanted to ride.” Ride of His Life  •  212

“He wanted to ride so bad and fool with the horses,” Cecil adds. “He was hardheaded, but he wouldn’t get in no trouble. He was a very, very active kid. Him and my baby girl used to get in trouble all the time. They’d go pick on mama’s chickens and break the eggs and stuff like that.” At the age of eight Calvin started racing horses, and during the summer he lived with Cecil, who raced horses at Delta Downs in Vinton and Evangeline Downs in Carencro. By the time he was twelve, Calvin was living with Cecil full-time. He dropped out of school after the eighth grade, but he didn’t stop working. “I just taught him how to work,” Cecil says. “He learned how to work until it paid off. The boy worked hard. He was small, but by the time he reached ten he could almost do a man’s job, as far as horse-wise. At ten years old, he knew what some people at twenty or thirty years old didn’t know about a horse.” Calvin credits his older brother with his education on and off the track. “He’s taught me everything I know—pace and training, how to feel a horse. I can train a horse. I know everything about a horse. He played a big influence in my life with that. He taught me about saving ground and give a hundred ten percent when you go out there, no matter if you’re on a $2,500 horse or a million-dollar race. If you’re going to ride him, go out there and ride to win. That’s the main thing.” Calvin cut his teeth riding the bush tracks across Acadiana—in Carencro, Henderson, Breaux Bridge, and Abbeville. By the time he was sixteen, he ran his first professional race and had eight years of experience already under his belt. “In Louisiana people are raised by it so much,” Calvin says. “When you come up from Louisiana to be a jockey, you start from the bottom. You start from walking them, grooming them, way at the bottom. You just don’t wake up one morning and start riding horses and then do good when you have the bug and then they forget about you. When you come from 213  •  Ride of His Life

Louisiana, you got to work your way up. It makes you a strong person, I think, if you do it that way.” Hissam describes Calvin’s work ethic as “impeccable” and says he’s never met anyone who works as hard. Calvin’s up before the sun and working with the horses before daybreak. “He’s got one at 5, 6, 7 in the morning; rides until 7, 8, 9 in the afternoons, and never once cries in his beer. Never once. We’ve been together seventeen years, and we haven’t had two cross words, and you know I messed up somewhere.” After the Kentucky Derby win, Calvin maintained his daily schedule, despite the overwhelming media attention. “It’s still the same routine,” he says. “You’re always trying to look for another one.” In a short NBC segment before the race on Saturday, Nafzger said, “If Calvin ever changes, I’ll lose all faith in humanity.” After his win at the Kentucky Derby, when the talk of the Triple Crown was reaching a fevered pitch and Street Sense looked poised to be the horse to finally break the dry spell, Calvin didn’t buy into any of the chatter. After twenty-five years of professional racing and a lifetime with horses, he was only betting on one thing: There was still work to be done. “We’ve got to take it day by day,” he says. “Like Mr. Carl told me, ‘We’re just going to go in there and do our thing.’ If he gets there, he does; if he doesn’t, he doesn’t.” NBC showed Nafzger and Calvin commiserating shortly after they lost the Preakness on Saturday. They’d just been outran, they said. A commentator interrupted them and asked Calvin, whose face was caked with mud, what had gone wrong. Calvin spoke directly and plainly. “I had a good trip,” he said. “No excuses. None whatsoever.”

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One Day in Jena sep te mbe r 2 6, 2007

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riving northeast on Highway 28 just outside of Pineville, it’s still dark, but the sun’s starting to rise and the horizon is a hue of deep purple. The headlights of eighteenwheelers and chartered tour buses cut through the last remains of the night. Just past Catahoula Lake, a still blanket of fog clings to the ground and sometimes creeps over onto the raised roadway. There’s an occasional police cruiser sitting on the shoulder of the road, just as there has been all the way from Lafayette. A line of cars is headed for the dead end at Highway 84, where many will turn west and head to the small town of Jena. The license plates are from Texas, Florida, Georgia, New York, and Tennessee, and some of the cars have slogans like traveling to jena, journey to jena, and meet me in jena painted on their back windshields. Twelve miles west on Highway 84, the sun’s already on the rise, and the sign to the entrance of the town reads: welcome to jena. a nice place to call home. On this Thursday morning, aside from the occasional group of men standing around outside the gas stations that dot the highway, Jena is closed for business. Not even McDonald’s is open. The small town is clean and well-kept, but it looks as if no one lives here. The cars lined up to find parking spaces and the police officers from Jena, Alexandria, and Monroe, along with deputies from LaSalle and Rapides parishes, are the only signs of life. 215

As the vehicles park, the riders emerge from the cars, mostly black men, women, and children, dressed in black shorts and pants and T-shirts with slogans like enough is enough and free the jena six. They start walking west along the highway, also called East Oak Street, toward the LaSalle Parish Courthouse. On September 20, predominantly black men and women gathered in Jena, Louisiana, a small town of 3,500 residents, 85 percent of whom are white. On the day of the rally, CNN estimated anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 people were in attendance. The next day, the Town Talk, the daily newspaper in Alexandria, forty miles south of Jena, stated that Louisiana State Police initially estimated 60,000 people came to Jena. Lt. Lawrence Mcleary now says that after studying aerial photos of the rally, Louisiana State Police estimate the number of people between 15,000 to 20,000. With either scenario, it’s likely the most people the small town of Jena has ever seen in one day. They traveled from as far away as New York and Los Angeles, and as close as Alexandria and Lafayette, to rally in protest of what they say is the unjust prosecution of six black teenagers, students from Jena High School. They came by the carloads and in chartered buses. Ten buses traveled from Lafayette alone, with at least 550 residents. The initial story of the Jena Six went largely unnoticed by the national media but ran rampant on the Internet, fueled primarily by bloggers. It was later brought to the forefront of the nation’s attention by visits to the town by Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and later the radio shows of Michael Baisden and Tom Joyner. In response, Jena’s white residents have appeared in the news in defense of their community, stating that the portrayal of Jena as a Deep South town of racists is inaccurate and unfair. And although America and the world knew little to nothing about Jena before September 20, One Day in Jena  •  216

2007, the small town won’t soon be forgotten. On the day of the rally, even President Bush told reporters during a White House Press conference in Washington, “The events in Louisiana have saddened me. The FBI and Justice Department have been monitoring the situation. All of us want fairness when it comes to justice.” Two helicopters circle the town overhead. At the intersection of Oak and First streets, in front of the Bank of Jena, a black S.W.A.T. Hummer waits in traffic with the lines of buses. A large man walks to the intersection as the crowd makes its way to the courthouse. Looking around, he says, “Oh, Jesus. Black people everywhere. Everywhere!” Another man in a suit passes by him and responds, “Yes, sir. Ain’t it beautiful, brother?” Another man stands at the corner with a dozen people crowded around him. He carries a pile of black T-shirts that say free the jena six. Rodrick Crockett, Kenneth Brisco, and Carl Young each buy a T-shirt from the man. All of the men are in their mid-thirties and arrived in Jena the previous day. Crockett and Brisco are from Baton Rouge, but Young flew from Baltimore. “Any time you see injustice,” Crockett says, “I think as people we’ve got to stand up and believe in each other and be able to stand for each other. Because if we don’t, who will?” “We all bleed the same color,” Brisco adds. “We’re here for the movement, for justice. We’ve got kids growing up, and we’re just trying to make it better. It just wasn’t right. Black, white, it doesn’t matter. [The Jena Six] could have been white, I would have still came. It’s about the right thing. It’s a beautiful day. Everybody’s coming together instead of violence, and it’s nice to see people do something, to come together for a good cause.” What Brisco says isn’t right is a string of events leading up to the protest. There are still ongoing debates about the 217  •  One Day in Jena

precise nature of what took place—and even the tone and the timbre of those events. At a school assembly on August 30, 2006, a black student asked if he could sit under the “white tree” on the campus of Jena High. The principal responded that he was free to sit wherever he liked. The next day three nooses were found hanging from that tree. Despite the principal’s recommendation of expulsion for the white students who hung the nooses, the school board and superintendent overruled the decision and suspended the students found responsible. Then in November, a still unknown arsonist set fire to the school’s main building. At a private party in December, attended mostly by whites, a black youth was beaten up by a white male. At a local convenience store, a white student pulled a gun on three black students. On December 6, six black Jena High School students beat up seventeen-year-old white student Justin Barker, knocking him unconscious. He was treated at a local hospital and released that day, attending a school function later that night. All six of the students involved in the beating were expelled from school, and five of them were charged as adults with attempted second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. The five charged as adults were Mychal Bell, 16; Robert Bailey Jr., 17; Theo Shaw, 17; Carwin Jones, 18; and Bryant Purvis, 17. Jesse Beard, 14, was charged as a juvenile. Collectively, the group of students has become known as the Jena Six. On June 26, before going to trial, Bell’s charges were reduced from attempted murder to aggravated battery and conspiracy. During the trial, Bell’s court-appointed defense attorney, Blane Williams, presented no evidence and called no witnesses to the stand. Bell was convicted by an all-white jury and faced up to twenty-two years in prison. In July, the LaSalle Parish School Board superintendent authorized cutting down the tree where the nooses had hung. One Day in Jena  •  218

School Board member Billy Fowler told the Town Talk: “There’s nothing positive about that old tree. It’s all negative. . . . We don’t want the blacks coming back up there looking at the tree knowing what happened, or the whites. We just want to start fresh.” On September 4 a Louisiana District Court judge dismissed the charge of conspiracy against Bell. On September 14 the Third Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Bell’s battery conviction on the grounds that he should not have been tried as an adult, and LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters said he intended to appeal that decision. The day before the rally was to take place, Walters held a press conference in front of the courthouse with Barker and his parents. He stated: “The injury that was done to [Barker] and the serious threat to his survival has become less than a footnote. But when you’re talking about justice and a criminal proceeding, you cannot forget the victim, and I will not.” Over the loud drone of the buses’ idling diesel engines, a kid dressed in a striped polo shirt and khaki pants stands on the corner of N. 1st and Elm streets and hawks newspapers, holding an issue up at arm’s length. “Final Call!” he yells. “One dollar! Final Call!” The headline reads: we want full justice! A smaller headline above it reads: thousands to rally for the jena 6. Across the street, a group of people takes pictures of a piece of white paper taped to an office window. In capital letters the notice reads in part: regions insurance will be closed 09/20/2007 due to possible downtown overcrowding & congestion 219  •  One Day in Jena

A passing protester stops behind the crowd and tries to read the small sign. “What does it say?” she asks. A man says, “It says their office is closed today because of possible downtown overcrowding.” “Huh,” the woman says. “I guess they thought we were kidding.” She snaps a picture over the crowd and continues on her way. At the edge of the courthouse lawn, an RV is parked on the side of the road with its canopy rolled out for shade. Beneath it, a man with a microphone and a PA system speaks to the passersby. He points to a man walking by. “You shut your business down today too, huh? A doctor all the way from Monroe, Louisiana, shut his whole business down today to come up here to be with us. There’s some sacrifices made today, ladies and gentlemen. I’m sure you’ve all made some. That’s what it takes this time. At least we can do this. You see, our parents made that possible.” A woman walking by says: “Amen!” The man with the microphone points to another group. “Y’all came all the way from St. Louis? Y’all didn’t walk it? OK.” Pointing to another group he shouts, “South Carolina, y’all. We got people from all over the world.” Louisiana State Troopers stand at ease behind the barricades that line the front of the courthouse. On the lawn, thousands are already gathered, dressed in black from head to toe. People camp out on the lawn in lawn chairs with small ice chests and handmade signs in support of the Jena Six. A middle-aged man focuses his camcorder on a woman who sits in a chair and asks her if she has any children. “One boy, twentytwo,” she says. “And the two girls are here, sixteen and twelve. I wanted them to have this experience.” She wears a T-shirt that says enough is enough. In front of the courthouse, a sea of people dressed in black One Day in Jena  •  220

stands in the street; some wave signs while others wave flags. They listen to the speakers that will take the podium throughout the day, including Sharpton and Jackson. The crowd chants at different times, “Free The Jena Six!” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho! DA Reed has got to go!” In the crowd, smaller rallies pass in and out. One man walks through the crowd, yelling the chorus of James Brown’s 1968 civil rights anthem. “Say it loud!” he shouts. Those nearby him respond enthusiastically: “I’m black and I’m proud!” Another group with signs leads a chant of “No justice! No peace!” Richard Jones stands at the edge of it all. He traveled to Jena in one of two buses that came from Decatur, Georgia, taking three days off from his job to make the trip. He first heard about the Jena Six on the radio about a month ago and decided two weeks ago to attend the rally. “There’s injustice right here,” he says. “Racism is still alive, and I don’t really like it. I think we have a right to exist like everybody else, and it looks like we don’t have that right, the way I see it. So this is my way of showing my disapproval. We as a people need to come together. We’ve got some serious problems that we need to come together to straighten out, and the only way we’re going to straighten them out is through unity.” Although he’s traveled to Jena, Jones believes the problem extends far beyond the edges of this small town. “I believe America as a whole has a problem,” he says. “To me, America’s very violent, and we need to come together to stop the violence.” On Oak Street, Rev. Stanford Hunt stands with more than two hundred people who rode through the night on five buses from Memphis. His black T-shirt, like those standing around him, reads in white letters: memphis supports the jena six. The pastor of Beulah Baptist Church in Orange Mound, Ten221  •  One Day in Jena

nessee, Hunt says he first heard about the Jena Six on Michael Baisden’s radio show. “I just felt compelled to come down and try to make a statement,” he says. “It really seems to be a shame, that in 2007, that we would have this kind of thing still going on. It seems like a little spat that got out of hand. It doesn’t seem like it calls for the kind of action that’s taken place. Guys just get in fights, you know. It seems like it would have been chalked up as a misdemeanor and the young man would have gotten a couple of days suspension like the other guys got, maybe a week or whatever, and it should have been over with. “It’s really my hope that this will be resolved,” he continues. “If you do something unlawful, then yes, you should be punished. But to this extreme that it’s gone, to tarnish these young men’s lives for the rest of their lives, it will go on their record and they won’t be able to get decent employment and go on to college and be productive citizens. We don’t want that. It’s just a shame.” At the end of the block, on the corner of Oak and Second streets, protesters stop in front of the Jena Town Hall to have their pictures taken by other protesters. On the other corner of 2nd Street, Mel Stevenson, a white Jena resident, stands alone and watches the protesters streaming into town. He wears a pair of gold-rimmed shades and is dressed in slacks and a freshly pressed red shirt, with two Cross pens in the breast pocket. “I don’t know where we’re going to put all these people,” he says. He seems interested but not the least bit concerned with the protesters. The eighty-year-old retiree worked for Boeing before retiring to Jena fourteen years ago, but he was born and raised down the road in Alexandria. “I was wondering,” he adds, “ever since I was about seven or eight years old, why in the hell people can’t get along. It’s hard for me to believe that people can’t get along. I have no grudge with nobody, with no nationality. God put us all here, but this One Day in Jena  •  222

little old thing has blown up in this little old town here, and I never thought there was any discrimination at all here, to tell you the truth about it. And I still don’t think so.” One block down on Third and Oak, Hargie Faye JacobsSavoy sits in the passenger seat of an SUV. The Monroe police officer on the corner won’t let her and her daughter, Jacquelyn Savoy, back onto Oak until the stream of protesters walking to the courthouse and the bus congestion eases. So there’s nothing else to do but wait and have a few snacks. Jacobs-Savoy won’t tell her age. She smiles and says, “No, I never do that.” A Port Arthur, Texas, resident, she worked as the president of the Martin Luther King Jr. Support Group of Southeast Texas with Coretta Scott King for twenty-two years until her death. “I’m a believer in Dr. King’s movement and in the love that I received and the guidance and understanding and discipline that my mother and father gave to me, that all people are equal. I’m also a Christian. I believe in Christ Jesus, the trinity, the father, the son, and the holy ghost. But I see that there are people who don’t seem to understand that we’re all just one person, because what affects you automatically affects me. “And there’s so much violence in the world today,” she adds, “just so much violence. You see so many people being corrupted by so many different things. But when I heard about this tree thing, that’s what hurt me a plenty. When I read that the tree was there for the white kids’ enjoyment, I thought, ‘What about all the other kids? Why can’t they enjoy it? Why did it have to come to this point?’ So I saw so much injustice in that. But then the thing that bothers me the most is when people say our children are our future. I beg to differ with that. We are the future of the children. We give them nothing; they have nothing. So when I saw all of that, and I saw that some children may be being deprived of just some of the small pleasures of the shade of a tree, it vexed me so much.” 223  •  One Day in Jena

The rally outside the courthouse went on all day, as did the marches through the streets of Jena from the Ward 10 Recreation Park to Jena High School. By day’s end, they were all gone. State Police Lt. Mcleary says there were no arrests and no incidents, “nothing of significance.” The biggest problem, he says, were about twenty-five people in front of the courthouse who passed out from the heat. The same day as the rally, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that a bond hearing for Bell be set. Nearly a week after his battery conviction was overturned, he was still in jail. The day after the rally, on Friday, September 21, in a closed court bond hearing, Bell was denied bail for a second time. Three of the Jena Six—Bailey, Jones, and Shaw—have had their charges reduced to battery and conspiracy and are awaiting trial. Purvis still awaits arraignment, and Beard is being charged as a juvenile. For Andre Briggs, the protest in Jena is still fresh in his mind. The twenty-three-year-old UL Lafayette business management senior is a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, as well as secretary of UL’s chapter of the National Pan-Hellenic Council, a national organization of black fraternities and sororities. He rode to the rally with a busload of UL students. “It was hot and crowded,” Briggs says of the protest, “but it was enlightening to see that many people who showed up for one cause. You had people like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, but there were mainly other people from across the nation. It was really empowering to see. This is something my children and grandchildren will be able to read about, the action we took in 2007. This wasn’t just for the African American community. This was for injustice for everybody. This isn’t a black or white thing.” Bishop Taara Williams, of the African-American Catholic Congregation Imani Temple No. 49, the Cathedral of the Lafayette province, is also the national general secretary of One Day in Jena  •  224

the African-American Catholic Congregation. “I think yesterday was an example and an expression of where we need to be in America, not where we are,” she says. “It was a pilgrimage to demonstrate that we must be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Any place that there is injustice shows that there’s no justice. Justice must work and be accessible, equally. ‘One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ I think the crime [of the Jena Six] doesn’t line up with the punishment, and I think the African American community demonstrated that they can come together and be a unified voice. That’s what I got from yesterday. We had young people who were articulate—the best and the brightest—demonstrating in a peaceful manner, and what I saw was a sea of love between African American, Latino, and European brothers and sisters. When we begin to understand that we’re one nation under God, when we come together and work for a common cause, that’s when we do our best, that’s when we work for the red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes in our flag. That’s what I saw, a true demonstration of America.”

225  •  One Day in Jena

Mourning Elemore With the death of Elemore Morgan Jr., the South has lost one of its greatest artists and champions. may 21, 2008

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ne morning in 2002, while Elemore Morgan Jr. walked through the paintings he had stored in his studio, he told me how he priced his art. It was based upon the emotional attachment he had for each work. “It’s what it’s going to cost for somebody to take it from me,” he noted. It had nothing to do with the amount of acrylic paints he used, the size of the Masonite on which he painted, the wear and tear on his van to drive to the rice fields he rendered every day, the transportation cost and time to sell a finished piece in New Orleans, or the amount of time it took him to complete it. It seemed like an arbitrary system. I told him there had to be a better way to come up with a price tag for his work. He stopped what he was doing, stared at me, and asked, “Do you know of a better way?” When it was put that bluntly, I didn’t, and even if I did, it wouldn’t have mattered. That was Elemore. He loved his art— what he called his obsession—and he made up his own rules as he went along so that he could pursue his art. On Sunday, May 18, Elemore’s lifelong waltz with art in all its forms came to an end. He died at the University of Mary226

land Medical Center in Baltimore around 5:30 p.m. from complications from heart surgery he underwent in early April. He was seventy-six years old. Elemore was born in Baton Rouge in 1931. He was the only child of renowned photographer Elemore Morgan Sr. The younger Elemore grew up on his grandfather’s farm, where he used to say he “got a good dose of nature.” He obtained a fine arts degree from LSU in 1952 and then served in the U.S. Air Force as a supply clerk during the Korean War. Under the GI Bill, he attended the Ruskin School of Fine Arts at the University of Oxford in England. He returned to Louisiana, and for thirty-five years taught art as a UL professor until his retirement in 1998. He believed in hard work, in showing up every day. If the sun was shining, you could bet that Elemore was in a field somewhere painting, regardless of how hot it might be. He not only believed in hard work, he believed in doing what worked and never cutting corners, doing what the moment required of you. For more than twenty years Elemore was represented by Arthur Roger of the Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. “It’s a very big blow,” Roger says. “It’s a big loss. There’s not really any other way that I can look at it right now.” He says that the demand for Elemore’s work far outstretched what Elemore was able to produce, and all of the works in his current exhibit, which opened May 3, were sold before they were even hung. “But Elemore would be making his work whether anyone bought it or not,” Roger says. Elemore’s current exhibit has been extended to May 31. “Without a doubt, we’ve lost one of the most important painters in Louisiana, probably one of the most important painters in Louisiana’s history,” says Rick Gruber, director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. “I think equally important, from our perspective here at the Ogden 227  •  Mourning Elemore

Museum, working with New Orleans and Louisiana but also with the larger South, he’s one of the most important painters in the South.” “One of the themes in our programming is a sense of place— artists and a sense of place,” Gruber adds. “And Elemore embodies that about as clearly as anyone in Louisiana and in the South.” Gruber notes that in returning to Louisiana in 1957, Elemore became “an ambassador, artist, teacher, educator, a mentor to many.” Gruber remembers that after the hurricanes of 2005, Elemore was seemingly at every meeting about hurricane recovery. “Anywhere with anybody who was looking at how to rebuild Louisiana, Elemore seemed to have been there. It was amazing.” Elemore always stayed true to his uncompromising belief that art and life were inextricably intertwined. In a story I wrote about him in 2002, he said: “If you think you want to be an artist, you need to pay attention to that, wherever it may lead you. It may not lead you exactly where you think, but I’m absolutely convinced that you pay attention and trust your own vision wherever it leads you. It is kind of uncertain. But boy, I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t really want to live any other way.”

Mourning Elemore  •  228

Index Abbeville, 81, 94, 213 Acadia Parish, 26 Acadian accordions, 14, 18–19 Acadian Green River Perique, 98 Acadian Village, 114 Acadiana, 213 Acadians, 98 Accordion, 14, 18–19, 30, 33, 165, 168, 176 Acuff, Roy, 103, 105–6, 112 Affirmed, 210 African-American Catholic Congregation, 224–25 Ahab, 136 Albarado, Robby, 209 Alexandria, 9, 188, 215, 222 All Saints’ Day, 138 All That, 194 All This Is Louisiana (book), 97 Allman, Gregg, 30 Alpha Phi Alpha, 224 AM, as purgatory, 63 American Red Cross, 155, 157 Anderson, “Whispering” Bill, 107 Angola. See Louisiana State Penitentiary Angolite, The, 6 Animal cruelty law, 50 Annie E. Casey Foundation, 5–6 Antlers, 40 Apocalypse Louisiana (album), 121–22 Ardoin, Alphonse “Bois Sec,” 177 “Are You Gonna Go My Way” (song), 42 Armstrong Park, 186 Arthur Roger Gallery, 227 Associated Press, 188

Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The (book), 131 Avery Island, 140–45 Avondale, 159 Bacon, Francis, 69 Bailey, Robert, Jr., 218, 224 Baisden, Michael, 216, 222 Balboa, Rocky, 124 Ballou, Classie, 168 “Bambi syndrome,” 55 Bank of Jena, 217 Bar-Kays, The, 60 Barker, Justin, 218–19 Barnsdall, Oklahoma, 35 Basile, 9, 59 Basile Weekly, 59, 62 Batiste, Alvin, 34 Baton Rouge, 27, 117, 130, 158, 188, 193, 217, 227 Battle Hymn of the Good Ole Hillbilly Zatan Boys, The (book), 121 Bayonne, 126 Bayou Boogie, 61 Bayou Club, 46 Bayou Milhomme, 115 Bayou St. John, 188 Bayou Teche, 69 BBC, 30 Bean Blossom Bluegrass Festival, 110 Beard, Jesse, 218, 224 Beau Jocque, 182 Bell Mychal, 218–19, 224 Belmont Stakes, 210 Bernoulli, Daniel, 36

229

Bernoulli Effect, 36 Best American Short Stories (book), 74 Big Corner, 60–62 Billboard (magazine), 62 Bird, 60 Birds, The (film), 30 Bitterroot River, 74 Black Cherry Blues (book), 75 Black Flag, 117 Black Sabbath, 43 Blanco, Kathleen, 160, 190 Bloodline (book), 131 Blue Grass Boys. See Monroe, Bill Bluebird Records, 164 Bluegrass music, 102–14 “Boozoo’s Payback” (song), 182 Borel, Calvin, 208–14 Borel, Cecil, 208, 210–13 Borel, Clovis, 212 Borel, Ella, 212 Boston Pops, 30 Boucherie, 19–20, 41–43 Boudin, 20 Boudreaux, J.C., 197–203, 207 Boudreaux, Michael, 197 Boudreaux, Regina, 197–202 Bourée, 71 Bourgeois, Timothy, 94 Bourque, Darrell, 134–35 “Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit” (short story), 130 Bradley, Ed, 33 “Brakeman’s Blues” (song), 110 Breaux, Eric, 150–51 Breaux Bridge, 213 Briggs, Andre, 224 Brisco, Kenneth, 217 “Broken Love” (song), 165 Bronson, Bruce, 38 Broussard, Carl, 203–5 Broven, John, 171–72 Brown, Christopher, 99, 101 Brown, James, 58, 60, 221 Brown, Sidney, 18, 168

Bruser, Henry Bernard “Bru,” IV, 185– 86, 187–90, 196 Bryant, Clifton D., 54 Bubba Daddy, 118 Buckwheat Zydeco, 30–33 Buffett, Jimmy, 30 Bullfighting, 51 Burge, Brent, 11–13 Burge, Brian, 10 Burge, Eugene “Bugg,” 11–13 Burge, Gene, 10, 12 Burge, Gloria, 10–13, 61 Burge, Joe, 9–13, 57–67, 92 Burge, Jordan, 11 Burke, James Lee, 68–83; on alcoholism, 71–73 Burke, Pearl, 70 Bush, George, 75 Bush, George W., 43, 206, 208, 211–12, 217 Bush, Reggie, 190 “Bustin’ Loose” (column), 59 Busy Bee Café (album), 110 Café du Monde, 186 Cain, Burl, 4 Cajun, 14, 16, 17, 41, 45, 60, 63, 65, 94, 120, 143, 164–67, 171, 175, 178, 181, 182, 184 Cajun Communications, 63 Cajun culture, 23–25 Cajun music, 14–18, 60, 165–67, 178, 181–82, 184 Cajundome, 120, 155–58, 159, 161 Calcasieu River, 204 “Calcasieu Waltz” (song), 166 California, 117 Calloway, Cab, 38 Cameron, 198–203, 205 Cameron Parish, 186, 197–207 Cameron Prairie National Wildlife Refuge, 201 Cameron Public Library, 206 Cameron Telephone, 198

Index  •  230

Camp J, 7–8 Carencro, 29–30, 213 Carencro High School, 135 Carney, Harry, 34 Carpet Land, 87 Carter, Mother Maybelle, 106 Cash, Johnny, 110 Catahoula, 208–9, 212 Catahoula Lake, 215 Catherine Carmier (book), 129–31 Cavaness, Roger, 63 CBS, 30 Chachere, Alex, 88–89, 91 Chalmette, 193 “Chante Pas, Petit Rouge” (song), 49 Chanute, Kansas, 35 Charles, Ray, 60 Charley Pride (dog), 104 Chavis, Anthony Wilson “Boozoo,” 162, 168–69, 171, 175–84 Chavis, Leona, 183 Chenet, Pierre, 98 Chicago Theater Orchestra, 38 Chickasaw, 98 Chicken Book, The (book), 43 Choctaw, 98 Churchill Downs, 209 Cimarron Rose (book), 75 City Lights Bookstore, 74 Civil rights acts, 78 Clapton, Eric, 30, 33 Clements, Vassar, 106 Clinton, Bill, 30, 75, 132 Coalition of Louisiana Animal Advocates, 50 Cobb, Deanna, 149–50 Cochran, Hayden, 152 Cockfighting, 41–56 Cockpits, 46 Colar, Ralph Norbert, 128 Coleridge, Samuel, 69 Collins, Albert, 32–33 Colorado, 70, 119 Columbia, Missouri, 36, 70

Community Coffee Co., 45 Convent, 98–99 Convict, The (book), 73 Cookie & The Cupcakes, 162, 172 Cop-cops, 96 Courville, Hiram, 15 Courville, Sady, 16 Cox Communications, 67 Cracklins, 20 Crawfish, 50 Crawfish boil, 66 Credeur, Timmy, 151 Credeur, Tony, 157 Creeden, Steve, 67 Creole, 177, 184 Creole (town), 164, 198, 206 Crime and Punishment (book), 56 Crockett, Rodrick, 217 Crowley, 119, 172 Cullowhee, North Carolina, 54 Cumberland Mountains, 104 Cumberland River, 102 Curlin, 209–10 Cusimano, Max, 150 Daigle, Tony, 120 Daily Advertiser, The (newspaper), 60–62, 70 Daily World, The (newspaper), 61–62 Daly, Thomas, 64 Daniel, Charles, 43–44 Dateline (TV program), 193 Davenport, Molly, 152 Davis, Greg, 157 De Ordine, 43 De Rouen, Karl, 63 Dead Kennedys, 117 Debarge, Bethany, 206 Decca Records, 102, 106 “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight” (essay), 55 Deep South Writers Conference, 132 Delafose, Geno, 64 Delta Downs, 213

231  •  Index

DeMarinis, Rick, 74 Demourelle, Jim, 52–53 Desmond, Paul, 33 Deviant behavior, 55 Dewey Balfa Cajun and Creole Heritage Week, 175 Dick and Jenny’s, 190 Dirty boogie, 72 Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. See D.R.I. Disney Company, 79 “Dog Hill” (song), 175 Dogfighting, 51 Dolly Parton (dog), 104 Domino, Fats, 33, 168 Donna’s Bar and Grill, 186 “Don’t Crow, Little Red!” See “Chante Pas, Petit Rouge” Dorsey, Jimmy, 34, 38 Down Home Live! (album), 33 Dr. Feelgood. See Burge, Joe D.R.I., 118 Dugas, Nolan, 45–49 Dural, Bernite, 31–32 Dural, Stanley “Buckwheat,” Jr., 29–33 Durkin, Tom, 211 Dye, Roddy, 64, 66 Eddie Stubbs (dog), 104 Eddie Shuler and the All Star Reveliers, 164–65 Eddie’s Music House, 163 El Sid O’s, 33 Electric Barnyard, 111 Electric Comoland, 120 Ellington, Duke, 38 Eunice, 14–16, 18, 58–62, 166 Eunice News (newspaper), 59–60, 62 Evangeline Downs, 213 Evangeline Maid Bread, 45 Evangeline Parish, 59 Evangeline Psychiatric Care, 52 False River, 126–27, 137 Fat Harry’s, 193

Faulkner, William, 69 FEMA, 188, 193, 197, 200, 204, 206 Fender, Freddie, 162, 170 Fensel, Terri, 84–85, 89–92 Ferguson, Julia, 8 Fermentation of tobacco, 97–98, 100 First Amendment, 79 Flaherty, Robert, 198 Flatt, Lester, 110, 112 Floyd’s Record Shop, 59 FM, as prime time, 63 Folk-Star, 168 Foster, Burk, 4, 6–7 Fowler, Billy, 219 Francis, Mark, 160 Franklin, Aretha, 60 French Quarter, 186, 191 Front Porch Zydeco (radio program), 60, 63–64 Funk, Lisa, 211 Fuselier, Herman, 60, 64 Futch and Son, 18 Gaff, 47–48, 50 Gaines, Adrienne Jefferson, 127 Gaines, Dianne Saulney, 127, 132, 138 Gaines, Ernest J., 126–39 Gaines, Manuel, 127 Gambling industry, 75–76 Gameness, 42 Garlow, Clarence, 162, 172 Garrett, Jimmy, 94 Gathering of Old Men, A (book), 131 Gauthier, Edward G., 135 Gautreaux, Matt, 119–20 Geertz, Clifford, 55–56 Gene’s Food Store, 9–13, 59 Gentilly, 187 Gentlemen Jack, 106 Gibson, Hoot, 35 Gibson Les Paul guitar, 120 Gilley, Mickey, 170 “Girl Left Alone” (song), 162 Glory cloud, 87

Index  •  232

God, 85–92 Golar Wash Labs, 119 Goldband Records, 162–74, 175 Golden Triangle, 77 Good Morning Acadiana (TV program), 85 Good ’n’ Country (album), 102 Goodman, Benny, 38 Government Majik, 189 Grable, Betty, 34, 38 Grammy Awards, 24, 30 Grand Casino Coushatta, 10, 59 Grand Chenier, 203 Grand Coteau, 147 Grand Funk Railroad, 119–20 Grand Ole Opry, 103–9, 111 Grande Boucherie des Cajuns, 41 Grande Pointe, 93–94 Great Balls of Fire (film), 33 Great Depression, 78 Green River Tobacco, 98 Gregoire, Lillian, 140–42, 145–46 Gregoire, Nolan, 142 Gremillion, Mark, 135 Griffith, Lynn, 205 Gruber, Rick, 227–28 Gueydan, 198 Guglielmo, Alfred, 98 Guglielmo, J. F., 98 Guglielmo Perique Tobacco Co., 98 Guins, Jay, 115, 120 Guitar Junior, 162 Gulf of Mexico, 197, 205 Guns ’n’ Roses, 120 Hackberry Ramblers, The, 164–65, 169 Haggard, Merle, 111 Haiti, 79 Half of Paradise (book), 73 Hamlet, 75 Hammond, 193 Hank Williams Sr. (dog), 104 Hard Spun, 209–10 Hart, William S., 35 Hawley, Frederick, 54

Hebert, Donald, 148, 153 Henderson, 213 Henry VIII, 43 Hermitage, Tennessee, 103 Hernandez, Liz, 64–65 Hi Ho Lounge, 115 Hiatt, John, 30 Hickory Recreation Club, 46 Hidden Hills, 147–54 Hillbilly music, 164 Hillbilly Rock (album), 110 Hinn, Benny, 87 Hip to the Scene (film), 185 Hissam, Jerry, 212, 214 “Hit Parade of Love” (song), 106 hog butchering, 19–20, 55 Holland, Billy Bob, 74 Hollywood, 79 Holy Spirit, 89–90 Homer, 69 “Honest Abe,” 44 Hopkins, Lightnin’, 117 Hopkins, Lydia, 195–96 Horse racing, 76, 208–14 House, Son, 117 House and the Field, The (book), 131 House dance, 22 House of the Dying Sun (album), 115, 121–22 Houston, Texas, 69 Hubbell, Dave, 122–23 Human Jack, The, 60 Humane Society of the United States, 51–52 Hundley, Randy, 160 Hunt, Stanford, 221 Hurricane Audrey, 198–200 Hurricane Betsy, 156 Hurricane Café, 203 Hurricane Katrina, 155–58, 185–96, 197, 200, 204, 206 Hurricane Lili, 114 Hurricane Rita, 186, 197–207 Hüsker Dü, 117

233  •  Index

Iberia Parish, 68 Ice Pick Revival, 120 Iceland, 71 “If Teardrops Were Pennies” (song), 108 Imperial Records, 168 In My Father’s House (novel), 131 Incarceration, 3–8 Institute for Advanced Studies, 55 “Interview with Myself, An” (essay), 15 Intracoastal Canal, 199, 201 Intracoastal Waterway, 199 Iran-Contra affair, 77–78 Iraq War, 75 Jack Daniels, 108 Jack Miller’s barbecue sauce, 61 Jackson, Andrew, 44 Jackson, Jesse, 216, 221, 224 Jackson Square, 191 Jacobs-Savoy, Hargie Fay, 223 Jaguar Jazz “V” Chamber mouthpiece, 39 “J’ai Passe Devant Ta Porte” (song), 15 “Jambalaya” (song), 30 Jamelle Williams and the New Orleans Slick Six, 186 Jefferson, Augusteen, 127–28, 138 Jefferson, Thomas, 44 Jefferson Parish, 189 Jeffries, Sean, 191–94 Jena, 215–25 Jena High School, 216, 218–19, 223–24 Jena Six, 215–25 Jena Six rally, 215–25 Jesus Christ, 84, 86–88 Jett, Cathy, 4–5, 7 J.J. Babbit Co., 38 Joe Louis (dog), 103 John R. Young Chevrolet, 61 “Johnny Billy Goat” (song), 183 Johnson, Blind Willie, 117 Jolie Blon’s Bounce (book), 69

Jones, Carwin, 218, 224 Jones, George, 107, 112 Jones, Richard, 221 Journalists, 77 Joyner, Tom, 216 Jude, 60 Jukeboy Bonner, 172 Kaplan, 26 Kappa Alpha, 37 Kasturi, Krishna, 115, 117–21, 123–25 KATC, 58 KBAZ, 60 KBON, 64 KDCG, 61, 64, 67 Kentucky Derby, 208–12, 214 Kerr, Greg, 84–92 Kerr, Louella, 84 KEUN, 63 Keyes, Frances Parkinson, 97–98 Khoury, George, 167 Kids Count 2000. See Annie E. Casey Foundation Kinder, 10, 59 King, B.B., 33 King Lear (play), 56 King of Bluegrass. See Martin, Jimmy King of Country Music. See Acuff, Roy Kingdom of Zydeco, The (book), 169 Kirk Joseph’s Backyard Groove, 186 KJJB, 58–61, 63 KLFT, 64 Knives, short and long, 48, 50 Knob Creek, 106 Knoxville, Tennessee, 104 “Knoxville Girl” (song), 102 Konitz, Lee, 38 KPLC, 165 Krauss, Alison, 111 Kravitz, Lenny, 42 KRVS, 61, 122 KVPI, 59, 64 KZMZ, 9

Index  •  234

L.A. Poché Perique Tobacco Inc., 98 LaBauve, Nick, 13 LaBauve, Tony, 12 LaBauve, Tracy, 12–13 “Lacassine Special” (song), 166 Lafayette, 10, 28, 33, 34, 40, 44, 64, 67, 69, 81, 114, 118, 120, 123, 132, 150, 155, 159–61, 209, 215–16 Lafayette Convention and Visitors Commission, 160 Lafayette Police Department, 155, 160 Laissesz les bons temps rouler, 82 Lake Charles, 18, 71, 162–64, 172–76, 179, 203 Lake Charles Downtown Development, 173 Lake Pontchartrain, 188 Lakeview, 187 Landrieu, Mitch, 160 Landry, Donnie, 42 Lang, Clubber, 124 LaPlace, 98 LaSalle Parish, 215 LaSalle Parish Courthouse, 216 LaSalle Parish School Board, 218 Last Don, The (book), 75 Laudun, John, 116 Lawrence, Tim, 191 Lawtell, 61 Lay Down My Sword and Shield (book), 73 Le Bon Temps Roule, 186 LeBlanc, Dudley, 94 Led Zeppelin, 124 Leger, Jesse, 182 Legg, Dege, 115–25 LeJeune, Gerald, 62 LeJeune, Iry, 162, 165–66, 170, 172 Lent, 46, 64 Lesson Before Dying, A (book), 128, 132, 137 Letterman, David, 30 Liberalism, 78–79

Lil’ Bob, 64 Lincoln, Abraham, 44 Littering, 80–82 Little, Mike, 100 Little Dixie Hall (dog), 103 Little Stream, The (novel), 129 Little Tater Jimmy Dickens (dog), 104 “Long Day in November, A” (short story), 130 Loretta Lynn (dog), 104 Los Angeles, California, 70 Lost Get Back Boogie, The (novel), 73–74 Louis, Joe, 103 Louisiana Gamefowl Breeders Association, 53 Louisiana Hayride (radio program), 106 Louisiana National Guard, 188, 190, 192 Louisiana Recovery Authority, 194 Louisiana State Penitentiary, 3–8 Louisiana State Police, 216, 220, 224 Louisiana State University, 117, 227 Louisiana State University Agricultural Center, 94 Louisiana State University Press, 73 Louisiana Story (film), 198 LouisianaAgainstCockfighting.org, 49 Lowry, Claire, 134 Lowry’s Kwik-Kopy Printing, 134 Lutcher High School, 98 Lyle, Rudy, 105 M&M Cockpit, 46–49 Macon, “Uncle Dave,” 104 Madison, Tennessee, 102, 114 Majic Sounds, 175 Mamou, 11, 64, 133 Man Who Whipped Children, The (book), 137 Mandeville, 188 Manning, Peyton, 208, 211 Mardi Gras, 23–25, 41, 64, 82 Mardi Gras associations, 22–23 Marion, 133

235  •  Index

Martin, Jimmy, 102–14 Martin, Percy, 93–101 Martin, Percy, Jr., 96–97 Martin, Ray, 97, 100 Martin, Teddy, 95–96 Marvelous Malcolm, 60 Marx, Paul, 64 Masa, Emanuel, 53–54 Maurice, 26 McGee, Dennis, 16 McIlhenny, Edmund, 141 McIlhenny Co., 140–45 Mcleary, Lawrence, 216, 224 Meche, Nathan, 154 Mel Tillis (dog), 104 Mercury Records, 167 Meredith, James, 130 Metropolis, 118–19 Midday Merry Go Round, The (radio program), 104 Mill, John Stuart, 69 Miller, J. D., 172 Miss Judy, 60 Mississippi, 110 Mississippi River, 93, 98 Missoula, Montana, 68 Mister Rogers, 58 Moby-Dick (book), 136 Monroe, 215, 220, 223 Monroe, Bill, 104–6, 108, 111–13 Monroe, Charlie, 104 Morgan, Elemore, Jr., 26–28, 226–28 Morgan, Elemore, Sr., 27, 97, 227 Morgan City, 115 Morristown, Tennessee, 104 Mötley Crüe, 120 Mount Zion Baptist Church, 128, 137–38 Mouton, Marc, 155–56, 158 Mouton, Ray, 132 Mowata, 117 Mr. Good ’n’ Country. See Martin, Jimmy Mr. T, 124

MTV, 30 Music Machine, 59 Music Row, 112 Mystery Writers of America, 75 Nafzger, Carl, 209, 214 Nagin, Ray, 156, 193, 195 Nashville, Tennessee, 103–4, 107, 109, 111–12 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, 74 NBC, 30 Nehrbass, Neil, 28 Nelson, Willie, 30 Neon Rain, The (book), 77 New Iberia, 68–69, 140–41 New Mexico, 44 New Orleans, 33, 81, 94, 99, 115, 127–28, 132, 156–57, 160, 168, 179, 185–96, 200, 226–27 New Orleans Convention Center, 192 New Orleans R&B, 60 New Orleans Saints, 10, 190 New Roads, 126 New Stories from the South (book), 74 New York Times, The (newspaper), 77 Newman, Jimmy C., 162 “N.I.B” (song), 43 Nichols, Matt, 99 Ninth Ward, 195 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 106 Norris, Eric, 160 North State Street Conoco, 62 Now Hear This (radio program), 122 N’Stankt, 189 O Brother, Where Art Thou? (film), 112 Oak Grove, 201 Of Love and Dust (book), 130 Ogden Museum of Southern Art, 227 Oil Center, 81 Oil industry, 80 Oil Spanish Trail, 81 Oklahoma, 44, 51

Index  •  236

Oklahoma A&M, 37 “Old Crossroads” (song), 105 Old Hickory Boulevard, 102 Olivier, Frank, 153 Olivier, Rick, 169 Opelousas, 38, 61, 64, 84, 86–87 Opelousas Catholic, 86 Oprah’s Book Club, 132 “Orange Blossom Special” (song), 105 Ortego, Debbie, 61 Ortego, Todd, 57–67, 92 Osama bin Laden, 47 Osborn, Harold, 141 Osborne, Bob, 106 Osborne, Sonny, 106 Osborne Brothers, 106 Oscar, 126 Out on the Fringe (radio program), 122 Owens, Buck, 112 Owens, Henry, 162 Oxford American, The (magazine), 106

Planet Radio, 122 Poché, Leon, 98–99 Pointee Coupee Parish, 126 “Ponderings of a Reincarnated Neanderthal” (essay), 15 “Poor Ellen Smith” (song), 105 Poverty, 80 Preakness Stakes, 208–10, 214 Primeaux, Beckie, 206–7 Primeaux, Troy “Primo,” 115, 119–20, 123 Princeton, New Jersey, 55 Public healthcare, 78 Pulitzer Prize, 74, 127, 131–32 “Puppy Love” (song), 162 Purvis, Bryant, 218, 224 Puzo, Mario, 75

Pacelle, Wayne, 50–52 Page, Bill, 38 Pankratz, Ryan, 119–20 Panther Room, 38 Pape, Al, Jr., 159 Pape, Al, Sr., 159–61 “Paper in My Shoe” (song), 168, 171, 175 Parker, Charlie, 38 Parton, Dolly, 162, 170–71 Patty Loveless (dog), 104 Paulina, 93–94 PAX, 66 Pearl River, 46 Perique, 93–101 Philippines, 44, 52 Phillips, Phil, 162, 167 Piazza, Tom, 106–9 Pigs, 20 Pineville, 63, 185, 194, 215 Piney Woods, 46 Pipes (magazine), 98

Raitt, Bonnie, 30 Ramada Inn, 159–60 Rapides Parish, 215 Rayne, 46, 117 Reagan, Ronald, 75 Redding, Otis, 60 Richard, Belton, 182 Richardson, Gladys, 155–57 Rideau, Wilbert, 3, 6–8 Riopelle, James, 49 River Lake Plantation, 126–27 River Road, 99 Road Home, 194 Robicheaux, Dave, 68–69, 74, 82 Rocky III (film), 124 Rodgers, Jimmie, 110 Rogan, Alcena, 194–95 Rogan, Davis, 194 Rogan, Patrick, 194, 195 Rogan, Sims, 194 Roger, Aldus, 172 Roger, Arthur, 227

Quaid, Dennis, 33 Queen Elizabeth II, 208, 210–11 Quick Service TV, 171

237  •  Index

Roger, Frank, Jr., 147–54 Rolling Stone (magazine), 62 Romero, Fred, 142–44 “Room in Your Heart for Me Darling” (song), 165 Roussel, Farrell, 98 Royal Sports (film), 150–51 Runyon, Clinton “Santy,” 34–40 Runyon, June, 35 Runyon mouthpieces, 34, 36–39 Runyon Products, 34, 38–39 Rushing, Rob, 115, 120, 124 Ruskin School of Fine Arts, 28, 227 Sacramento Bee (newspaper), 77 San Francisco, California, 74, 118 Sandmel, Ben, 169–70 Santa Claus, 11 Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Co., 100 Santeria, 115–25 Santería, 116 Sausage, 20 Savoy, Ann, 21–22 Savoy, Jacquelyn, 223 Savoy, Marc, 14–15 Savoy Medical Center, 11 Savoy Music Center, 14 Scruggs, Earl, 106 “Sea of Love” (song), 167–68, 172 Seagram’s 7, 107–8, 168 Sharpton, Al, 216, 221, 224 Shaw, Theo, 218, 224 Sheriff, The, 60 Sherman Hotel, 38 Shreveport, 212 Shuler, Eddie, 162–74, 175 Shuler, Elsie, 171, 173 Shuler, Johnny, 173 Simien, Sidney “Rockin’ Sidney,” 162 Simpsons (TV show), 67 Sinclair Oil Company, 70 Skaggs, Ricky, 107–9, 111 Slash, 120 Slim’s Y-Ki-Ki, 180

Smith, Danny, 133 Smith, Page, 43–44 Sneedville, Tennessee, 104, 112 Soileau, Floyd, 59, 172 Sonnier, Jo-El, 162, 170 “Soul Finger” (song), 60 South Cameron High School, 201–2, 204 South Louisiana Bluegrass Festival, 114 South Pacific, 70 South to Louisiana: The Music of the Cajun Bayous (book), 171 Southwestern Louisiana Institute, 28, 69–70. See also University of Louisiana at Lafayette Spitzer, Philip, 74 Spring Hill Cemetery, 102, 114 Spurlock, Joann, 155–57 St. Augustine, 43 St. Claude, 187 St. George’s Episcopal Church, 195 St. James Parish, 93–94, 98–100 St. Landry Parish Sheriff’s Office, 150 St. Martinville, 212 Stanley, Carter, 112 Stegner, Wallace, 130 Stevenson, Mel, 222–23 Stitt, Sonny, 38 Story, Carl, 104 Street Sense, 208–11, 214 “Strung Out on a Dream” (song), 125 Stuart, Marty, 109–11 Stutes, Jay, 167 “Sugar Bee” (song), 167 Sullivans, The, 110 Sunny Mountain Boys, 106 “Sunny Side of the Mountain” (song), 106 Sunset, 44, 46, 49 Sunset Recreation Club, 46 Superdome, 192 Swamp ’n’ Roll Show, The (radio/TV program), 57–67, 91 swamp pop, 59–60

Index  •  238

Sweet Lake, 197, 207 Synborki, Suzanne, 133–34 Tabasco, 140–46 Tek Publishing, 164, 173 “Terminus” (short story), 70 Tex, 29 Tex Climer and His Blue Band Coffee Boys, 104 Theremin, 36 Tim de Lansmeg, 60 Times-Picayune, The (newspaper), 190 Tina, 33 Tisserand, Michael, 169 To the Bright and Shining Sun (book), 73 Tobacco. See Perique Tom T. Hall (dog), 104 Tomorrow Recordings, 33 Torquettes, 97 “Tossing Away the Keys” (radio program), 6–7 Toups, Wayne, 166–67, 181–82 Town Talk, The (newspaper), 216 Toys Music Center, 122 Trail ride, 23 Transfer (magazine), 130 Travis, Merle, 106 Tremé, 195 Triple Crown, 208–10, 214 True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass (book), 106, 109 Tubb, Ernest, 112 “Turtles, The” (short story), 130 “20/20 Vision” (song), 106 “Uncle Bud” (song), 182–83 “Uncle Pen” (song), 106 University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 3, 7, 116, 118, 126–27, 155, 224, 227 University of Missouri, 36, 70 University of Southwestern Louisiana, 132. See also University of Louisiana at Lafayette U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 194

U.S. Congress, 43, 51 U.S. Department of Agriculture, 52 U.S. Forest Service, 70 U.S. House of Representatives, 44 U.S. Postal Service, 52 U.S. Senate, 44 Van Halen, 120 Van Halen, Eddie, 120 “Vegan agenda,” 50 Vermilion Bay, 67 Vermilion Bayou, 81 Vermilion Parish, 26 VH-1, 62 Ville Platte, 52, 58–59, 64, 172 Ville Platte Gazette (newspaper), 59 Vinton, 46, 213 Virginia Tech, 54 Visual Edge Productions, 150 Vivian, 46 Vizena, Dallas, 10 Vizena’s General Mercantile, 10 Voinche, Tom, Jr., 58–60, 62, 64 Wal-Mart, 79–80 Walters, Reed, 219 War on Drugs, 78 Washington, George, 44 Washington Post, The (newspaper), 77 Waters, Muddy, 57–58 Watson, Doc, 106, 110 Watson, Merle, 110 WCRK, 104 Welk, Lawrence, 38 West Laurel Avenue, 61 Western Carolina University, 54 Who Stole My Monkey (album), 182 Wilkinson, Pam, 173 Will The Circle Be Unbroken? (album), 106, 112 Williams, Blane, 218 Williams, Brian, 193 Williams, Hank, 112 Williams, Lyle, 69–70

239  •  Index

Williams, Ricky, 118–19 Williams, Taara, 224–25 Wills, Bob, 164 Winn-Dixie, 192 Winter, Edgar, 34 Wise, Chubby, 105 Wiseman, Mac, 105 WNOX, 104 Wonder, Stevie, 33 Wood, Pickney A., 50 World War II, 70 “Wreck on the Highway” (song), 103 WWOZ, 194 Yoakam, Dwight, 30 “You Gonna Look Like a Monkey When You Get Old” (song), 176 Young, Carl, 217 Young, Faron, 112 Young, Neil, 30 Zen Bastards, 118 ZydeCajun, 181 Zydeco, 9, 30, 60, 63–64, 169, 175–84 Zydeco! (book), 169 Zydeco sont pas salé, 178 ZZ Top, 84

Index  •  240