The Novel

Chapter One

I know how I came to be here. I know who my people are and who my neighbor’s people are. I know that we are different. I know that we don’t speak my country’s language and I know that they think less of us for not knowing. We live in this place called America, the land of immigrants and thieves and wanderers. Papa calls us Americans but Mamee calls us Acadienne. They call us Cajuns and that is just fine by me. I know who I am.

Here, not far from the front steps of our small house in the middle of the sugar cane fields, the black, brackish water where my brothers fish seeps in from the ocean and into the marshes and swamps. On the drier parts around our town the great Mississippi pours into bayou canals that bring us small boats from the ports in New Orleans, Gretna and Westwego. Yelling from the bows, the commis voyageurs sell us bom-bon’s and treasures, calico, iron pots, toys and sometimes a guitar or a violin. Some peddlers have wagons that come directly by our house and they bring us flour and meat from the grocer and butcher in Thibodeaux. Green living things of every form shape and color sprout and shoot and stretch into every direction so that whatever their tentacles touch, it is as though I also touch. The hanging vines of every sort and webs of Spanish moss drape themselves across the grand Oak, Pumpkin Ash, Water Tupelo and the majestic Cypress as if they were ornaments and garland special made just for them. The algae, the Dwarf Palmetto and the Lilies that have found their heaven here have also found me, and this is also who I am but it is not who I wish to be.

 Papa’s great-great great granmere was from a place they called Acadia, way up north. Not in America. Before Grandmere passed I remember holding a very tiny painting of her that she kept in her treasure box along with her brown stained rosary and a cameo. The image was so old that you could barely make out her eyes but you could see that she was pretty. Most likely the mold got hold of it and ate her beautiful face because I have never seen it again. Sometimes I imagine her body, long and lean like mine, resting in the galerie of our house, sipping sweet tea and holding my hand with her hard calloused, wrinkled fingers.  She feels warm and soft and loves everything I say and do. And when she kisses me I smell the powder that she uses to keep her hair clean. I conjure a conversation in the old French and I ask her why on Earth they ever left such a wonderful place like Acadia and France. “Why would our ancestors willingly leave such a civilized and interesting world to come and live in a land with so many snakes and bugs and creatures, most of which would bite a girls arm right off if they had a moment’s chance?  I try to muster a response from her but she gives no reply and I am disappointed. I resign to just sitting and holding her loving hands.

I have dreamed of being a French girl who lives in Paris and not in America, least of all, not in Labadieville, Louisiana. How, in our Lord’s name did they think this place was better than where they were? If I could fly across the ocean, I swear I would stand on the sandy, white shores of Auderville, France and yell to my distant relatives and tell them, No! Please don’t go to Louisiana!

On hot, sweaty nights, when the sounds of critters and bugs and slithering things are so loud that it is nearly impossible to let my mind sit still and sleep, I listen to the okra vines slowly pushing their way through the cracks of the floor and inch through the walls of our simple, 3-room home. Through the small window above our bed I can see the moon glowing through the thick, heavy air, hanging and waiting, for what I don’t know. My two sisters lie beside me, Sweet Marie and rough hearted, little Agnes. I listen to their breathing, so deep and long that even if I pushed our tiny bed out through our parent’s room in front and outside to the stoop they would not even move, or care, that is, until the mosquitos came to feed on their foreheads. 

My office