In With The Old (Haunts), Out With The New
Volume III, Issue I - Spring 2012
  • We left the land where we became Acadians. We layered our clothes and threw what we could into baskets and bags and we left the houses we built ourselves. We were grabbed at the elbow by British soldiers and when we turned our head, we immediately regretted it, for we saw flames: torches alighting the roofs that had sheltered our lives, our babies. We walked. We stood on the red dirt bank, waiting to board the boats. We were separated from our husband, our wife, our children, our mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousin. We were pushed onto the boats and we could see the smoke and fire rising up from what had been our village and the blur of fields we made green with our own hands, with our aboiteaus and water from above. We wanted to remember this place and we needed to forget. The journey on the ocean was tumultuous. We breathed in the salt air and it carved holes in our stomachs. We gave our children what little food was given us. We thought about the decision to remain neutral and what it had cost us. To not swear allegiance to a church we had no faith in. To not send our sons and fathers into wars we had no claim to. That answer, No, whether said with grace and humility or not, had cost us our home. We were not peasants but we would become them. Stepping off the boat into Maryland, among Episcopalians who scorned Catholics. They  ......................

  • would graciously, not graciously, offer our children positions in their homes, where they were forbidden to speak French, where they would learn fluency in English and how to forget where they came from. We would step off the boat in France, among countrymen who were no longer our countrymen, who didn’t know who we were or where to place us. We were foreign now. We would hear through cousins that some of us had settled in la Louisiane, a French colony. We journeyed down there only to find the land now settled by the Spanish. But the Spanish gave us the swamps. They gave us ground they could not understand and we would learn the land and make it submit. We would trade our houses insulated for the strong winds of Acadia for shotgun houses built for cross breezes and screen doors with wire netting to keep out mosquitoes. We stuffed our pillows with Spanish moss from the oaks outside our houses. We would still grow starches to feed bellies, but now we would raise rice instead of potatoes, adapting to a new kind of earth. When German, Irish, Spanish, French, and Italian immigrants moved into our territory, our children and grandchildren would marry them. We invited them in, having remembered what it felt like to be strangers. They became part of us. Thoughts of home entered in and we tried to dismiss them. We dared not dream of returning or of the  ..................

  • future. We merely put cast iron on the stove, we birthed our babies, we held them to our breast. We sewed, we chopped wood, we fished, we hunted, we built our houses right next to each other and entered our neighbors’ homes without knocking. We learned what crops would grow here and we grew. We whispered lullabies to our babies in French and seared the words into one another at times when we could not hold our temper. Our traitteurs would place their hands and whisper prayers when we were suffering with twisted ankles, with polio, with sunstroke, with snakebites, with a uterus that was empty. They instructed us to put a potato on our wart, to press a knife flat atop the blemish on our face. We would come to be called Cajuns, those of us in Louisiana. Our name was Arcenaux, Aucoin, Babineaux, Benoit, Blanchard, Boudreaux, Breaux. Our name was Comeaux, Cormier, Doucet, Dugas, Granger, Guidry, Hebert. Our name: Labrie, Melancon, Naquin, Orillon, Pitre, Robichaud, Savoie, Trahan, Vincent, Woods. We were to learn English. We learned it, many of us. Some of us only spoke it when necessary. We lost our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren to those strong guttural sounds, the nuance of the l’s and the s’s sunk down into the water beside the cypress knees. We would love, oh, love, oh, love, and we would have babies: ten, twelve, fifteen; eight would live to be  ............

  • adults and have their own. We taught our daughters how to make a home: making dress patterns out of newsprint and dresses out of feedsacks, stirring oil and flour to make a roux without burning it, putting pillowcases in the icebox to cool them for hot nights. The boys we taught to be men: how to plant the rice fields and then flood them before harvest, how to call ducks from behind a blind using a certain flip of their tongue and a fist covering their mouth, how to sit still and wait for deer to emerge from the woods, how to aim straight and true. We taught all our children to say Merci, to say it more than once. Sometimes our babies would go to school past first, fifth, eighth grade. But sometimes there was too much work at home. To be poor was not to be pitiful. We stacked our furniture against the walls, swept the floor, and had kitchen parties. Company came over for gumbo and pie. We brewed strong coffee with ground beans and chicory root, to make the beans last longer. We drank it black or with milk from the cows we kept. We danced into the hay of barns. We put blankets atop bales and let our babies make sleep while we caroused into the night. We felt the strong hand on the curve of our low back and we placed it there. And when the dark night began to turn a lighter shade of blue, we carried our children home and tucked them into bed, we discussed what was to come  ............

  • tomorrow, we shut our eyes for a few hours, praying for good sleep and good dreams, for the nights were always too short and the day was never short of work to do.

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