American Sabbatical 98: 4/21/97

4/21.. Cajun Country.

The party was over Monday morning, but we were in no hurry to leave. We had eaten red beans and rice, but hadn’t tried muffalettas, beignets, or crawfish remoulade, so we’d have to come back. We hadn’t seen much of the city outside the Quarter, either, but we tried to remedy that by spiraling out from Bourbon Street.

Basin Street, the old heart of Storyville, had been renewed out of existence, and paved over. Maybe just as well, to judge by the map of low dives and cribs operating there when Cotton was King. And then Sugar. It may be where jazz was born, but Dr. John and Marie Laveau were the conjuring physician and midwife, and their hospital has been bulldozed. But the mojo is still working on other back streets.

We cruised around the modern sculpture gardens downtown, then followed the last trolley line, Jackson Street, into the Garden District. A 19th century suburb where all the noblesse built elaborate residences, the District is another wonderland of Steamboat Gothic, wrought-iron effacement, shaded galleries and effusive plantings. Honeysuckle instead of horse manure scented its privy parts. Now engulfed by greater New Orleans, this enclave is just as visually exciting as the Quarter, and its outer fringe looks like a place where artists might even afford to live. And ride the streetcar to their desires.

Destrahan Bridge

We wanted to find our way up the river to Plantation Row, but got lost passing the Elk’s Lodge, or was it the airport? Anyway, we shuttled back and forth over elevated causeways looking down into hectares of cypress swamp.. the great drowned wilderness surrounding the Crescent City. When we eventually found our off ramp it led up to the most astonishing bridge yet, at Destrahan. Peggy’s first plantation house was just downriver on the north bank, and I dropped her there, then found a prospect to view this arching feat.

The Owl sat on the shoulder while I climbed the levee. Topped with a white gravel walkway, this necessary embankment looks onto the busy ship channel of Mama M., and admires the bridge. I couldn’t find its name. No signs. Not on the maps we had. Isn’t it strange how monumental utilitarian sculpture becomes invisible and un-remarked? This is another stay-suspended act of modernity. A huge one. The two soaring towers are dark burnt sienna, a ruddy black, and are shaped like narrow vertical rectangles standing on slightly spraddled legs, with the suspended deck arching through them. If the towers are square-cornered Os, the A-line stays supporting the roadway make this the OAOA Bridge. I mouthed these syllables while I drew the scene. Tangled swamp trees along the shore, big ships, barges, and towboats sweeping past at hull speed, wakes rolling along the banks. Wildflowers glimmering on the levee.

My Post Sybaritic Stress Syndrome was acting up. After ignoring the aromas for three days, I was having a full-blown noserun. I started eating anti-histamines and acting erratic. Peggy, in the other seat, was exhibiting the giddy symptoms of Historiosis.

The main problem for the plantation tourist in Louisiana is choice. There are eight or ten plantation houses near New Orleans open for day trippers and many more invite you as you drive the countryside. Old time maps show plantations as strips all the way to Baton Rouge. For a whole bunch of reasons I wound up seeing Destrehan Plantation on the east bank and Laura Plantation on the west bank. They were both windows into Louisiana plantation life and Creole culture, very different from the plantations we have seen in Virginia and the Carolinas.

Both houses are in the distinctive architectural style known as RAISED CREOLE COTTAGE. This apparently combines elements of French, Caribbean, and African buildings. Its outline is long with a low pitch to the roof (we realize that the modern Florida-Southern ranch house has much the same angles). The windows are all floor to ceiling with shutters that actually shut. The house is surrounded by a wide veranda (or gallery) and all rooms open directly onto it. There are no inner hallways, you move from room directly into another room (rooms are generally multi-purpose). It is a house raised a story off the ground on brick piers. The first (brick) floor can be simply a storage area (as it is at Laura) pretty much open to the air or an integral part of the house and wonderfully cool (Destrehan). The main floor is reached by small outer staircases to the veranda. The outer appearance of a Creole plantation is simple and airy.

Both families (at Laura and Destrehan) were among the Louisiana elite and contained lawyers and cotton merchants, politicians and civic leaders. No one family member in either house was a totally dominant historical figure (such as George Mason), so the tourist hears the FAMILY history through numerous generations and there are many good stories. There are some artifacts associated with the families, but in both cases the houses have had other owners . Destrehan was a club house for oil company executives at one time. During a vacant period the sheriff foiled robbers who were trying to make off with the house’s huge marble bath tub.

I was fascinated to hear at both plantations (and later at Kate Chopin’s house) how prejudiced Creoles were against “Americans” who were considered fairly uncouth. For example, no Creole (and no Quebecois) uses the front door, “seule les animaux et les americains”! (only animals and Americans do) . Laura’s most flamboyant mistress Nanette refused to allow “Americans” into her house.

DESTREHAN - Destrehan is the nearest plantation to New Orleans. The major highway snakes through desolate delta swamp (small trees, Spanish moss, mud) from the suburbs to a Mississippi Bridge. Destrehan is hard by the modern levee, twelve miles from New Orleans (a three hour boat ride in its heyday). There are huge grand live oaks trees in the yard. The house was once a mile from the river bank, now a few hundred yards and a levee separate them. The plantation which ran TWO miles along the Mississippi and had 600 acres, was the second largest producer of sugar in the area and one of the owners worked hard to perfect the granulation process. The slave population varied from 57 to 210 slaves.

Destrehan really used its ground level where the dining room and butler’s pantry are. On the April day I visited the reason was obvious: the temperature dropped at least ten degrees when I entered the brick floored rooms “under” the house. The table was set for dessert. The grand double staircase took us to the main floor where there is an elegant double parlor. Bedrooms open off the parlors on either side. There is much less furniture than in a Virginia plantation. The whole house seems rather spare and airy.

LAURA - Laura claims to be the place where in 1870 the Brer Rabbit stories were recorded (in French) as the Compair Lapin tales. Joel Chandler Harris recorded the same stories in Georgia in English. Compair Lapin and Brer Rabbit are both an outgrowth of hare the trickster stories brought over by slaves from Africa.

Laura is only a few hundred yards from the river. Oddly the 69 slave cabins were three and a half miles away from the main house. Four that remain have been moved near to the big house.

Laura is named after a spirited daughter of the house who lived 101 years (from the term of Abraham Lincoln to that of John F. Kennedy)! She remembered a former slave, a chronic runaway, showing her the scar on his forehead where her grandmother Nanette had branded him. Laura remembered her grandmother getting ready to sell a slave mother off and keep the son on the plantations. Laura’s kindhearted father bought the two slaves who stayed on after the Civil War in gratitude (at $12 a year). Laura wrote her memories of plantation life after Gone With the Wind presented a romantic view of the old South.

4/21.. cont.

The Owlers swivelnecked as we rose over the OAOA. Across the Mississippi, and headed West at last. Which meant along the River Road at this point. Every mile or so we’d pass another grand plantation house set back from the river, with long drives lined in live oaks. To our right, over the levee, we’d see ship superstructures twirling their electronics as they sped past. St. Charles Parish. The drowned woodlands all had the feathery foliage of willows, tossing in the persistent winds. St. John the Baptist. Wild white lilies and purple profusions lined the road. St. James. We were into the Cajun Country, and uncertain which bayou to boogaloo to.

Plantation Row ran west along the Mississippi banks, but if we were going to plunge deep into the delta waterways, that would mean a long swing south, adding another day, at least, to our next leg. We’d promised Seth we’d be in Boulder by Sunday. Here we were, sidetracked already. I was for “Cajun Country”. I had 50’s zydeco stomping on the music machine, and the scent of boudin making my nose drip already. Our patient navigator said, “This IS Cajun Country.” Somehow I thought I had to get beaten up in New Iberia like James Lee Burke’s Robichaux to get the full impact.

By mid-afternoon Madame was toured out, and we left the river at Plaquemine. My eyes were still smarting. Maybe from the big refineries we’d been downwind of. The atmosphere along the lower Mississippi is not salubrious. We couldn’t tell if all the supine armadillos along the road, with their little claws in the air, had been run down, or just passed out.

We quartered away from the big river by compass, cutting across the Atchafalaya Basin. This was the South we’d imagined. Gigantic old live oaks squatting beside the narrow roads, draped in moss. Tin-clad shotgun shacks, or shallow hip-roofed houses with the eaves almost to the ground. The buildings were all up on brick piers, and I realize that this has been a defining detail throughout the South, especially in low country. Keep your feet dry, I figured. Along the bayous modest houses on barges were tied up under the jungle growth, with skiffs knocking at the door.

Down these lanes I found one of my hypotheses shot full of holes. Virtually no lawn ornaments! I’d expected the French regions to be a paradise of signboard delight, like Quebec and Maine. There were occasional concentrations of cement kitsch, certainly, but you wouldn’t accuse the Cajuns of excess du dooryard, at least not in Iberville or St. Landry Parishes.

Chastened, the Owlers blundered out of the undergrowth south of Alexandria, and ran across yellow-flowered cattle country, and through mile after mile of young cane. Sugar cane. Back in Mississippi that park ranger had explained that the cane in “cane breaks”, the impenetrable thickets that lined early American waterways, was the wild bamboo we have seen everywhere in the South. These grids of grassy sprouts, now knee-high, are the cutting kind of cane, destined for candy bars, or the like. And cotton. Acres of cotton. Those clusters of galvanized buildings called Lafourche Gin, or Audnaud Gin, weren’t bottling plants, sonny. The tall wire-mesh carts outside, with fluffy rags tangled in the sides, were a dead give-away. This is still cotton country, too.

Punchy with anti-allergins, and stuffed full of plantation lore, we found a working phone jack, returned to cyberspace, and slid off into slumber.