America’s history of absorbing immigrants gave rise to the term “melting pot”–a mixing of ethnic types into a common American flavor. That notion seems sadly antique in our tribalized nation. “Multiculture” is the popular term to connote a kind of atomized diversity, varied cultures as pieces in a mosaic, like the floating vignettes of MTV.
Music is the memory of popular culture because it reaches the masses–hence the adage that each generation remains loyal to the music of its youth. Literature appeals to a deeper cultural sensibility, the hunger for narrative.
As shards of the multiculture float across our screens, an older soundtrack hums with expectations of harmony, a shared language of common purpose. Out of America’s ethnic differences, the quest for a national identity arches over our cultural life.
Since the early 1980s, a drama of regional identity has been unfolding in south Louisiana–the flatlands stretching from the vast Atchafalaya Swamp below Baton Rouge, across fertile prairies, girded by bayous and laden with oil, down to the Gulf of Mexico. The spicy cuisine popularized by chef Paul Prudhomme spurred a national trend in restaurants, while Cajun bands like BeauSoleil and black artists like Buckwheat Zydeco hit the radar screen of pop culture. The musicians and chefs serve up the celebrational image of a culture primed on dancing and feasts.
And yet the major novelists of the region–Ernest Gaines, James Lee Burke and Tim Gautreaux–write of racial and familial conflict, crime and psychological tensions that veer toward violence.
Can a land of good times down on the bayou be so easily split? Or is the chasm between literature and popular culture an extension of some deeper divide in the South?
For generations, French was the native language in south Louisiana, carried by Acadian immigrants driven from farmlands in Acadia, Nova Scotia, by British troops in the 1750s. In the Louisiana patois, “Acadians” became “Cajuns.” Some 300,000 people, roughly one-fifth of the region, still speak some form of French. Politicians and journalists call the region Acadiana, a name not warmly received by many of the black residents who call themselves Creoles.
Until the 1950s, when new highways reached into the area, the bayou parishes were geographically and culturally isolated. French was banished from schools in the 1930s as a sign of alien ignorance. Music kept the language vibrant and central to the culture. With the 1968 founding of The Council on the Development of French in Louisiana, the language was restored in classroom teaching; exchange programs began with Canada and France; folklorists plunged into oral-history projects.
Young poets discovered an out-of-culture experience. Barry Jean Ancelet, a professor of French at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in Lafayette, recalls his: “I got to France in 1972 and found I knew a lot about French art, French kings, and yet it was frustrating–something was missing. After eight months I was feeling so homesick. Then, one night in Nice, I found a guy singing folksongs from Crowley”–a rice-farming town back home. Ancelet had a vague memory of the songs; he asked the singer, who turned out to be from New Jersey, how he learned them. Don’t you know Dewey Balfa? the man asked. No, the student admitted. Back home several months later, Ancelet made a beeline to the home of Balfa, a legendary fiddler, in the town of Eunice. “I stood on the porch and basically said, `Will you teach me about my culture?’ ” says Ancelet. “And he invited me into his house.”
By the 1970s, Baby Boomers were dancing to French-language music in local clubs and at festivals. Many knew only a smattering of words and phrases. But it was terrific dance music. The revival of a culture was underway.
Balfa, a regional folk hero, is profiled in “Cajun and Creole Music Makers,” Ancelet’s essay and landmark collection of interviews, published in parallel columns of French and English. The book has lush color photographs of the musicians by the distinguished artist Elemore Morgan Jr. An expanded version of the 1984 publication has just been reissued by University Press of Mississippi. Balfa has since died. Several other artists have become major musicians–Michael Doucet, leader of BeauSoleil, the group that makes frequent appearances on “A Prairie Home Companion”; singer Zachary Richard, a star in Louisiana, Quebec and France; and the late zydeco king, Clifton Chenier, whose accordion-driven rhythm-and-blues style blazed a trail through pop culture.
Chenier was black, yet fiercely proud of a bicultural heritage. “All my people speak French, and I learned it from them,” he told Ben Sandmel, author of “Zydeco!” “A lot of people, they was kind of ‘shamed of French,” said Chenier. “I never was ashamed of French.”
French lyrics of the black idiom and Cajun bands are inaccessible to most Americans, but the rhythmic power and graceful melodies have popularized both forms to growing audiences via radio, festivals and concert tours. Nevertheless, writes Ancelet:
“If the language fades, the music we now know as Cajun and zydeco will not survive intact. We will still eat gumbo, call ourselves Cajuns and Creoles, and refer to our music as Cajun and zydeco, but, without the French language, will the music have real cultural meaning?”
That idea of a culture in free fall is where the region’s major novelists begin their stories: French has faded, change lumbers on.
Ernest Gaines’ acclaimed novels and short stories follow the struggles of poor blacks in the fictional community of Bayonne, along the False River. Gaines’ literary sensibility is closer to the vision of bluesmen, coping with epic struggles, than to the sizzling rhythms of zydeco. His last novel, “A Lesson Before Dying,” is about a community preparing for the execution of a condemned man. Injustice–as in the quick death penalty, as in life in Bayonne itself–is a given. The novel might be said to wrestle with Faulkner’s notion that “man will not merely endure . . . (but) prevail” by turning the idea into a question: What does it mean to endure?
In a similar measure, Tim Gautreaux’s novel, “The Next Step in the Dance,” and two books of short stories (most recently “Welding With Children”) follow rough-hewn whites across frontiers of the heart. The Cajuns of Gautreaux’s universe, mostly Catholic, get in trouble fast and blunder toward a reckoning with their behavior. The men in his stories are often overwhelmed by their failure with women. In an early short story, “The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc,” he writes:
“They danced once or twice and sat at a table by the bar while she told him her life story, her dead husband’s life story, and the problems her four sons had with the law. It occurred to Merlin that marrying someone his own age would probably make him father of several young men and women who would soon be after him for hand tools and car-insurance payments.”
James Lee Burke’s acclaimed crime novels feature detective Dave Robichaux, an ex-New Orleans cop and Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic flashbacks. Robichaux’s sleuthing begins when the hand of evil reaches his house on an Edenesque bayou and draws him back into a fallen world. Burke’s descriptions of Louisiana landscape are famously rhapsodic. His novels are moral fables; the settings sometimes change quickly to convey a dark underbelly of the South. In “A Stained White Radiance,” Robichaux drives across “a green levee that was covered with buttercups” to “a chain of willow islands, and sand-bars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an out-house, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. . . . The sky was black with birds.”
The novelists’ bleak view of French Louisiana is consistent with a dominant theme of late-century Southern literature: individual upheaval and the fraying of community life. Race remains a looming issue; but where the wider culture seemed a distant flicker in the works of Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, countless Southern novels of recent years have explored an identity rooted in land and kin, reeling under a homogenized culture. Television turns the family into a blind unit of consumerism; rootless searchings lead to trouble. Southern fiction before the civil rights movement was more insular and more isolated, as the region itself was.
Although the music of French Louisiana has an abundance of lyrics about despair and broken love, the sweet rhythms and warm sounds conjure an imagery of some distant, exotic dreamland. The French patois has proved to be a healing glue between Creoles and Cajuns. For generations, these blacks and whites at the bottom of America were exiled from a South of spoken English, including the rest of their own state. In isolation, the folkways of food and dance flourished, eventually became bicultural, and have found a minor slot in the spinning roulette wheel of multiculturalism.
