If you ever plan a trip to Southwest Louisiana, you gotta read Poor Man's Provence before you go--one of Rheta Grimsley Johnson's books about the area. Having recently been there, I love revisiting it through the eyes of Rheta, a Georgia-Alabama native who loved it so much she and her husband Don bought a houseboat and a house in Henderson.
As a tourist, I can only drop names of places and a few colorful characters I've met there; Rheta can tell you about the people who live there, the people buried there, and even some of the hardest of criminals at Angola Prison. It's a distinctively interesting area, and I wish I had read this book before my last slow roll through there, but I'll be going back as soon as I can.
Every year in April, Angola Prison hosts a rodeo along with an arts and crafts fair.
"The drive from Henderson to Angola takes about two hours, including a short ferry ride across the Mississippi River between the picturesque Louisiana towns of New Roads and St. Francisville."
Nearly half the prisoners are there for homicide. "More than three thousand are here for life, most of the rest are serving twenty years or more. So you come in with eyes wide open, knowing these are tough customers, violent and flinty hard."
She describes some of the crafts of the inmates, which--if guests don't buy them on the day of the rodeo--will often show up in New Orleans galleries with impressive price tags.
This is the most poignant paragraph about the day at Angola:
"It is sad to think that all this talent is being sponsored and honed just a little too late. If only Joe Blow from Bogalusa had learned to build a beautiful pirogue before he took up stealing cars. If only John Smith of Opelousas had taken up a paint brush before he took up a gun. If only Sam Boudreaux had taken up wood-carving before he took up wife-carving. If only, on and on."
She tells about the practice "in Cajun country" of burying the dead in vaults above ground, just as in New Orleans, due to the low land and frequent flooding. Catahoula is home to her favorite cemetery:
"Names are in granite of course, along with nicknames. Then, often with engraved illustrations, the family tells you something about the dead person--a hand of cards...the trucks or cars they died racing....What might be considered macabre or tasteless elsewhere is here loving tribute to lost loved ones."
She contrasts the whiskey bottles and poker cards and fast cars on their graves with the religious and hopeful words inscribed on graves elsewhere in the South. "The level of guilelessness is such that I'm not sure if it ever occurs to the Cajuns that they should hide anything. When you're given cultural license to pass a good time and let the good times roll, what's to hide?"
She writes about the wariness of the people to accept strangers, but once they do, you're Sugar Pie and Baby and Boo to them and they treat you to feasts in their homes and will literally "give you the shirt off their backs." Once they get started talking, you're in for hours--with stories told over and over so colorfully they are funny even on the umpteenth hearing.
She tells about opening a reading club in her storage house for straggler children in the neighborhood, children whose parents were working or elsewhere, When her friends heard about how the kids loved reading there, they sent her boxes of children's books to create a library in a town that had none.
She describes the geography and out-of-the-way places so thoroughly that this book is not only a great door into Cajun country and people; it's the best travel guide you'll find. Rheta tells you where you can find the best crawfish, the cemeteries with grave-stories inscribed in pictures and words, and the most authentic Cajun music and dancing.
Even if you don't go there, you'll "pass a good time" in these pages.
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