December 16, 2004

December 16, 2004

St. Martinville & Lafayette, "Loozeeann"

DAY 182

 

Radio ad for service department of local Shevolay dealer ; "Even if you dinn buy it from dem, day woan treat you like no red head step chile"

I keep being addressed as "honey" and "darlin" by sales clerks. Joanne heard one elderly gentleman address another elderly gentleman in a grocery store as "Boo-Boo". We don't know if the old man's name was Boo-Boo, or if that's the Loozeeann equivalent of "dude".

This morning when I took Bo for his morning walk, the people in the motor home next to us were outside cooking on their picnic table. The woman was preparing "roux" on a little one burner stove, while her husband was chopping up the "golden trilogy" as its known here. Roux is the fried flour and oil base for gumbo, as well as some other Cajun dishes. The "golden trilogy" is a combination of three vegetables chopped finely ; onions, bell pepper, and celery. All gumbos start with roux as the base, with these three vegetables as a minimum. I started up a conversation with them, and after awhile, Joanne came out of the trailer to see where I was. Both of us chatted with them, and two other "neighbours" for quite awhile, in both English and French. While chatting, we had a sample of Cracklins, which are deep fried balls of pork rind and pork fat.

English and French are equally difficult for us to understand here. On the other hand, whites and blacks sound the same here, so we misunderstand them equally here. In Mississippi we understood the whites, and not a word spoken by blacks.

Milton, the 63 year old man next door, speaks openly ( and innocently ) of the three way segregation of schools when he was a young boy in this area. The French speaking Cajuns ( like him ) were put in one area of the class, and punished for speaking French. The "rednecks" ( the non-Cajun whites, I assume ) in another area, and the "niggers" < cringe > in another.

After visiting with neighbours, we left to drive about a half hour south of here to the town of St. Martinville, to the Longfellow-Evangeline Historical Site National Park. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline" about two young Cajuns in love, separated by the exiling of the Acadians / Cajuns from Nova Scotia in the mid 1700's, is a big deal in this area. This National Park is a "living history" museum dedicated to Acadian / Cajun history. We learned a lot.

After the park, we drove to "downtown" St. Martinville and walked around exploring this small town. On the banks of the Bayou Teche, where we went to visit the "Evangeline Oak", the reuniting place of Evangeline and her lover Gabriel, I found a found a very skinny, very hungry, affectionate, filthy little stray kitten. Sorry, baby ... with Bo the inn is full.

On the way back to Breaux Bridge we stopped at a Wal-Mart to look for a zydeco Christmas music CD. We found one ! We returned to the trailer to walk Bo, and feed Teddy and Bo. They both think we've been leaving them alone in the trailer too much in the last few days. Sorry, guys. Just one more evening.

We left to drive to Lafayette, where we had supper at Luther's Bar-B-Q. I had barbecued beef po-boy. Joanne had barbecued pork po-boy. Hooooo-eeeee ! ! ! After supper, we drove over to Cowboys Night Club to see a performance by Leroy Thomas & The Zydeco Roadrunners. When we were at Canada's National Ukrainian Festival in Dauphin, Manitoba, in August, I was very impressed with the dancing skills exhibited by most of the "locals". How naive. I hadn't yet seen dancing in a Louisiana cowboy zydeco bar ! ! !

If anybody has the internet skills to find KBON, 101.1 FM in Lafayette, Louisiana, do it. It's the most interesting radio station we've listened to so far.

DSK