Louisiana: New Iberia: St. Peter's Cemetery

 

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

St. Peter's Cemetery is across the street, sort of, from the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Office.

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

Fictional Iberia Parish sheriff's deputy, Dave Robicheaux, could look out his fictional office window at the cemetery from the imaginary, but real, office. (Later, when the real-life detectives moved from this building to a new sheriff's building behind the library, fictional Dave moved with them.)

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

It was a viciously hot day when I visited the cemetery toward the end of July.

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

Here's what Dave said:

After lunch I drove to the Iberia Parish Sheriff's Department and went upstairs to my office .... From my second-story office window I could look out on a canopy of palm and live oak trees that cover a working-class neighborhood, and behind the cathedral I could see a cemetery of whitewashed brick crypts where Confederate dead remind us that Shiloh is not a historical abstraction. (Tin Roof Blowdown, 2007)

  

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

I saw this marker (below) and wondered, ah, a relative perhaps? My people include some Courtois. The Hebert name is ubuiquitous here; the Courtois name more rare.

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

The light was intense the day I visited.

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

Adjacent to the cemetery was some sort of machinery yard. Unlovely. As was the barbed wire fence separating the cemetery and the yard.

St. Peter's Cemetery, New Iberia, Louisiana

Louisiana Lit: Dave Robicheaux' Music

Songs marked important periods in Dave Robicheaux' life.

Who is Dave Robicheaux? 

He's the protagonist in 20 books written by James Lee Burke, a New Iberia, Louisiana, writer.

Dave is a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. Cajun. Recovering alcoholic. Vietnam war veteran. A man who marries. A father.

You can read more about Dave here. And what he thinks about north Louisianans here. And alcohol here. And some music here. On human exploitation here. On Angola here. On Louisiana's shadow self here. And on police violence and our complicity in same here. (My selections might give the impression that Dave Robicheaux (channeling James Lee  Burke) is a real downer about South Louisiana. Of course, Dave Robicheaux is a homicide detective, so that has an effect on the topics he talks about, but even so, Dave's love of Louisiana, the people, and culture do shine through.)

Dave's music

I've now read all 20 of the Dave Robicheaux books, and I'll roll out some more posts on same. But here's my round-up of Dave's music.

Dave talked about four songs in the last book I read (not the last Dave Robicheaux book),  Creole Belle.

The first is called Beat Me Daddy Eight to the Bar, by Will Bradley:

Then there's Just A Dream, by Jimmy Clanton:

And Faded Love, by Bob Wills:

Bob Wills' San Antonio Rose played a role in the book:

James Lee Burke, by way of Dave Robicheaux, has introduced me to music I wouldn't have otherwise known.




Other songs from prior posts:


From Louisiana Lit: Dave Robicheaux and Some Fine Music (March 2014):

Dave on some fine music of his youth

From Jolie Blon's Bounce (2002):

"The lyrics and the bell-like reverberation of Guitar Slim's rolling chords haunted me. Without ever using words to describe either the locale or the era in which he had lived, his song re-created the Louisiana I had been raised in: the endless fields of sugarcane thrashing in the wind under a darkening sky, yellow dirt roads and the Hadacol and Jax beer signs nailed on the sides of general stores, horse-drawn buggies that people tethered in stands of gum trees during Sunday Mass, clapboard juke joints where Gatemouth Brown and Smiley Lewis and Lloyd Price played, and the brothel districts that flourished from sunset to dawn and somehow became invisible in the morning light."

Clarence Gatemouth Brown. Source: wikipedia

Here's the song Gatemouth Boogie, which Mr. Brown says he made up on the spot one night during a performance, when he stood in for an ailing T-Bone Walker:

Here's a song by Lloyd Price - Stagger Lee:

From Louisiana: Angola and... (April 2014)

 

Angola prisoners. Credit: Angola Museum

Angola is the Louisiana State Prison.

Like a few other American prisons - such as Alcatraz, Folsom, Attica, Rikers - its infamy also elicits a perverse ... awe? reverence? pride? I don't know, but whatever it is, it says something uncomfortable about humans. 

Dave Robicheaux on Angola

(See references to fictional homicide detective, Dave Robicheaux here, here, here, here, and here.)

From Jolie's Bounce (2002): 

It is difficult to describe in a convincing way the kind of place Angola was in the Louisiana of my youth, primarily because no society wishes to believe itself capable of the kinds of abuse that occur when we allow our worst members, usually psychopaths themselves, to have sway over the powerless.

For the inmates on the Red Hat gang, which was assigned to the levee along the river, it was double time and hit-it-and-git-it from sunrise to sunset, or what the guards called "cain't-see to cain't-see." The guards on the Red Hat gang arbitrarily shot and killed and buried troublesome convicts without missing a beat in the work schedule. The bones of those inmates still rest, unmarked, under the buttercups and the long green roll of the Mississippi levee.

The sweatboxes were iron cauldrons of human pain set in concrete on Camp A, where Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams, Hogman Matthew Maxey, and Guitar Welch did their time. Convicts who passed out on work details were stretched on anthills. Trusty guards, mounted on horseback and armed with chopped-down double-barreled shotguns, had to serve the time of any inmate they let escape. There was a high attrition rate among convicts who tried to run.

(links added)

'course, when I thnk of Angola, I think of the old state prison in New Mexico, site of the massacre at the 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary Revolt.

And of the growing unsettledness about solitary confinement of our prisoners.

Which brings me to this March 2014 article in The Guardian:  Why Do We Let 80,00 Americans Suffer a 'Slow-Motion Torture of Burying Alive'? The article compares the experience of Sarah Shroud, who spent 13 months in solitary confinement in Iran, with that of American prisoners who face similar conditions for the indefinite future.

You can read more about solitary confinement here. 

Louisiana Lit: Dave Robicheaux and The Beautiful Whore Called Louisiana

Dave Robicheaux sees Louisiana as a woman who is ravishing and who is also a whore. Dave and I don't always see eye to eye on the subject of women, but that's a conversation for a different day.

Who is Dave Robicheaux? 

He's the protagonist in 20 books written by James Lee Burke, a New Iberia, Louisiana, writer.

Dave is a homicide detective in New Iberia, Louisiana. Cajun. Recovering alcoholic. Vietnam war veteran. A man who marries. A father.

You can read more about Dave here. And what he thinks about north Louisianans here. And alcohol here. And some music here. On human exploitation here. On Angola here. On Louisiana's shadow self here. And on police violence and our complicity in same here. (My selections might give the impression that Dave Robicheaux (channeling James Lee  Burke) is a real downer about South Louisiana. Of course, Dave Robicheaux is a homicide detective, so that has an effect on the topics he talks about, but even so, Dave's love of Louisiana, the people, and culture do shine through.)


My definition of a whore

A whore is anyone - man or woman - who debases himself, another human being, or his habitat for money or power that goes beyond his needs.

How Dave views Louisiana as a whore

 ... the irony of falling in love with my home state, the Great Whore of Babylon. You did not rise easily from the caress of her thighs, and when you did, you had to accept the fact that others had used her, too, and poisoned her womb and left a fibrous black tuber grown inside her. (Creole Belle, 2012)

How about oil? Its extraction and production in Louisiana had set us free from economic bondage to the agricultural oligarchy that had ruled the state from antebellum days well into the mid-twentieth century. But we discovered that our new corporate liege lord had a few warts on his face, too. Like the Great Whore of Babylon, Louisiana was always desirable for her beauty and not her virtue, and when her new corporate suitor plunged into things, he left his mark. (The Glass Rainbow, 2010) 

 

In the  state of Louisiana, systemic venality is a given. The state's culture, mind-set, religious attitudes, and economics are no different from those of a Caribbean nation. The person who believes he can rise to a position of wealth and power in the state of Louisiana and not do business with the devil probably knows nothing about the devil and even less about Louisiana. (Crusader's Cross, 2005) 

In Louisiana, which has the highest rate of illiteracy in the union and the highest percentage of children born to single mothers, few people worry about the downside of casinos, drive-through daiquiri windows, tobacco depots, and environmental degradation washing away the southern rim of the state.

Oil and natural gas, for good or bad, comprise our lifeblood. When I was a boy, my home state, in terms of its environment, was an Edenic paraidise. It's not one any longer, no matter what you are told. When a group of lawyers at Tulane University tried to file a class action suit on behalf of the black residents whose rural slums were used as dumping grounds for petrochemical waste, the governor, on television, threatened to have the lawyers' tax status investigated. The same governor was an advocate for the construction of a giant industrial waste incinerator in Morgan City. His approval ratings remained at record highs for the entirety of his administration.  ..... Last spring, when the wind was out of the south, I could stand in our front yard and smell oil. It was pouring in black columns, like curds of smoke, from a blown casing five thousand feet below the Gulf's surface.  (Creole Belle, 2012)

To add to the above excerpt (related to the 1980s), a quote from Oliver A. Houck in his article, Save Ourselves: The Environmental Case that Changed Louisiana, published in the Louisiana Law Review, Winter 2012:

"Louisiana corporations, led by the oil, gas, and chemical industry, continue to perceive environmental policy as a nuisance, and Louisiana agencies continue to see these agencies as their clients. Neighborhood and environmental groups are still “others” in the equation. We are still Louisiana."

In 2010, from the article Kneecapping Academic Freedom, published by the American Association of University Professors in its November-December 2010 journal:

... the Louisiana Chemical Association (LCA) pushed for legislation, ... that would forfeit all state funds going to any university, public or private, whose clinics brought or defended a lawsuit against a government agency, represented anyone seeking monetary damages, or raised state constitutional claims. The bill also would have made clinic courses at the state’s four law schools subject to oversight by legislative commerce committees. The LCA sought the legislation after a Tulane University clinic filed a lawsuit that would have required LCA members to pay millions of dollars in fines for violating air pollution laws. The bill was part of a leaked LCA strategy to force Tulane to drop its environmental law clinic. The strategy included ... getting the governor and congressional delegation to pressure Tulane to close its clinic. ... Legislators debated the bill while oil was gushing in the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s oil rig, and the bill was defeated in committee, although its supporters were unrepentant in defeat and threatened to return with a revised bill that would more narrowly focus on Tulane. [Emphasis added.]

In case you didn't check out the link about that governor and the Tulane lawyers and the Morgan City incinerator? That was four-time Louisiana governor, Edwin Edwards. Who served time in federal prison for corruption. And who is now running for Congress.

Current governor, Bobby Jindal, was in office for the 2010 assault against the Tulane Law Clinic.

Rootless: It's Getting to be That Time Again

It's mid-October and my year in South Louisiana is almost up.

It means consolidating spices. I know, I know, this may make some foodies cringe, the idea of pouring leftover spices into one container. Also, I'm not gifted in knowing which spices complement each other, so it's a gamble if it will work out OK. As long as salt is involved, however, it's good enough for me.

Here's my current list of things I'll need to consume, release or decide to keep before I quit my 2014 spell in South Louisiana (notice how carefully I am wording that): 

• Spices (consolidating as already noted)
• Four side chairs
• Folding table (large)
• Full-length mirror
• Mardi Gras beads! 
• Salvaged cabinet
• My wonderful red "bed" 
• Tent + tarp
• Camp stove
• Sleeping bag
• Tea
• Canned soup
• Coozies
• Coffee mug
• Various pots and pans
• Vacuum cleaner (which worked when I left New Mexico and then, inexplicably, didn't when I arrived in Louisiana - probably an easy fix)

For now, I'll keep these as part of my rootless trousseau:

• Bed linens
• Bath towels/cloths
• Dish towels
• Plastic, child-size plates/cups
• Stainless flatware
• Folding table (small)
• Tension curtain rod
• Fabric shower curtain
• Plastic storage drawers on wheels
• Technical devices
• Shelf stereo
• Two coffee mugs (one from New Mexico and one from South Louisiana)
• Two folding canvas chairs

At the end of November, I'll return to Missouri for a one- or two-month visit before going to my 2015 base (which is kinda open for grabs again). My car will be significantly lighter this year than last.

In September 2013, here were lessons learned in my New Mexico year about furnishing a temporary home. Below are two views of what I packed into my car when leaving Alamogordo:

What I took with me when I left New Mexico

What I took with me when I left New Mexico

If I decide to do another domestic turn for 2015, I think I'll do some of my second-hand shopping in Missouri and carry it with me to my new place. The difference between second-hand Lafayette and second-hand Alamogordo was a shocker, both in price and selection. Second-hand Lafayette is more expensive than Alamogordo and Lafayette's selection of household items is abysmal.


  

Louisiana: Dancing Shoes

At a recent zydeco breakfast event, I admired Miss Kay's red dancing shoes. She let me photograph them.

Miss Kay's red dancing shoes. Lafayette, Louisiana.

A few months back, I needed to buy some new shoes. Never did I imagine that some day I would want to take into account if my new shoes were danceable. But there I was at the shoe stores, checking the smoothness of the soles to see how they'd slide easily over a dance floor.

Miss Kay? Well, she grew up in Alabama, but one day she pulled up stakes and came to Lafayette. She dances.

Lafayette: Scenes from Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles, #3

Jamming at the Festivals Acadiens et Creoles 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Jams are an important part of sustaining the regional culture and, frankly, part of the tourist market. People come from all over the world to jam with local musicians. I say local musicians, but these same musicians have carried the musical message of South Louisiana to all points of the globe, creating new fans, who then make pilgrimages here.

Lafayette: Scenes from Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles, #2

Red accordion and Brazos Huval, Steve Riley and Mamou Playboys, Festivals Acadiens et Creoles 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

To show what a cliched small world it is, Brazos Huval featured prominently in this story about Ned the Dog back here, some three years ago, along with its follow-up here.  

Based on my observations this year in Louisiana, I think Brazos plays an important role in bringing up young musicians to the traditional music of the region. He is a member in a number of bands, teaches music, and makes sure his students participate in jam venues.   

Lafayette: Scenes from Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles, #1

Rubboards, Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Rubboards, Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Rubboards, Festivals de Acadiens et Creoles 2014, Lafayette, Louisiana.

Louisiana: Carencro: Mercredi

In the spring and fall, the town of Carencro produces Mercredi in Pelican Park, a free music concert. Generally, the genres alternate among cajun, zydeco, swamp pop, and um, I guess kind of a golden-oldies cover-party type.

The scene below is from the October 8, 2014, performance, graced by a pretty sunset and the astral glow of baseball field lights. Later, the full moon shined its blessing upon the mortal doings. 

Mercredi, Pelican Park, Carencro, Louisiana.

Opelousas: Market and Music: A Pretty Girl

There are a number of reasons why the regularity of my blog posts has faltered, and one of them is that even though I may have gone to a kick-ass musical event, there's only so much one can say about music events. Ditto for photos of musicians. Even the sublime becomes mundane with too much talk about it.

So it is that instead of a photo or description of the eminently entertaining Lil Kenny and the Heartbreakers at the October 3rd Market and Music event in Opelousas, I present to you a picture of a pretty girl at that event, Lorena.

Lorena, Opelousas, Louisiana.

I saw Lorena and did a double-take - something about her reminded me of a beautiful Vermeer painting. Lorena makes me smile just to look at her.

So thanks to Lorena and her mother - a fellow life adventuress, as I subsequently learned - for permission to share this photo.