This might be an ideal time to acknowledge my ethnicity (however borderline): Cajun. Same as the head coach of the newly crowned national collegiate football champion. Same as all those citizens of rural Louisiana who don’t mind interpreting LSU’s gridiron triumph as helping to mitigate longstanding portrayals of their tribe—my tribe?—as backward and ignorant.
We’re going to need a bigger bandwagon now, a rolling sort of Mardi Gras float overflowing with celebrants of Cajun revenge.
It’s just football. Since all the fuss is based on the transitory, illusory aspect of athletic success, it may not be wise to tie self-esteem too closely to the jock exploits of this—or any—team. After all, LSU’s star quarterback (a transfer from Ohio State) and so many of its players are decidedly not Cajun.
But somehow LSU’s perfect season argues for Cajun aptitude beyond a distinct cuisine, music and hospitality. The title victory is a psychological boost to the largely self-contained rural communities in the Louisiana bayous with a passionate generational allegiance to LSU football. And the coach, bayou-raised Ed Orgeron, is quintessentially Cajun, the face (and voice) of the whole operation.
So I’m going to take the occasion to mull some marginal roots.
My ancestors, ‘way back, came from Acadia, the colony of New France in the 17th and 18th Centuries that included parts of eastern Quebec, the Maritime provinces and about half of modern-day Maine. Run out of town by the British during what was called the Great Expulsion in the Seven Years War of the mid-1700s, most of those French Catholic settlers of Acadia—“Acadiens,” then “Cadiens,” then “Cajuns”—wound up in Louisiana, where my parents were raised and I was born. In Crowley, La., the heart of Cajun territory.
Full disclosure: I lived only the first two weeks of my life in Crowley, my mother’s hometown, and can’t say I knew what a Cajun was. Because my father was a mid-level oil field executive, regularly transferred every two or three years, I grew up in West Texas, southern California and New Mexico—geographically and culturally distant from a Cajun identity or lifestyle.
Only every other year did we spend vacation time in Louisiana—boy, I hated the humidity—visiting relatives and being exposed to the French-inflected, mysterious accents of cousins, aunts and uncles. Cajun accents. Like nothing to be heard anywhere else.
I remember being with my father when he bumped into old acquaintances in tiny Hessmer, La., decades after he had left his hometown and was seriously out of practice with the dialect of his youth, having great difficulty keeping up with their archaic form of French/English patois.
It wasn’t until around my 11th birthday, as a studious follower of college football and therefore cognizant of top-ranked LSU’s run toward its first national title in 1958, that I became aware that my father was an LSU grad. Reason enough for me to adopt the Bayou Bengals.
My connection to “LOOZ-ee-an” (Cajun pronunciation of the state) beyond that? A line from Mary Chapin Carpenter’s lively Cajun tune, “Down at the Twist and Shout,” applied well into my teen-aged years:
Never have wandered down to New Orleans
Never have drifted down a bayou stream….
Until one summer, later on, my cousins Bill and Paul took me in a canoe—a “pirogue,” as referenced in the old Hank Williams song “Jambalaya”—down one of those streams, spooking me by noting that cottonmouth snakes could be dangling from the canopy of live oak trees. (It was only Spanish moss. And that also was my last bayou experience.)
So I’ve never had alligator stew or participated in a “crawfish boil.” Don’t play the fiddle or accordion. Didn’t make a living farming or fishing. But I do have this decidedly Cajun surname, common in the southern regions of Louisiana but foreign everywhere else.
And I have my dad’s 1936 LSU yearbook, “The Gumbo.” On its cover is a line from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, “Evangeline,” set during the Great Expulsion and the Cajuns’ flight to the Gulf of Mexico: “They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana.”
I’m thinking now of an uncle who introduced me to the work of Justin Wilson, an old Cajun chef, humorist, author and all-around ambassador for Louisiana who died at 87 in 2001. Wilson was said to be half-Cajun, on his mother’s side, to which he responded, “If I’d been full-blood, I couldn’t have stood it.”
Whatever my purebred status, I can stand it. And to all my Cajun relatives, dressed in style, going hog wild, me oh my oh; I hope the LSU thing means you’re having good fun on the bayou.