Une Lettre d'une Amie

1.30.2014

Composed by Kelli Landry

Lafayette, Louisiana

by way of

Pierre Part, Louisiana

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Waking up to the sunlight. There’s something so human about waking with the birds. Free from man made devices; alarms that our bodies reject with our hands stamping down on it. But the morning sunlight. It’s gentle, subtle, loving, like my Ma when she used to softly shake me from my dreams when I was a child.

It’s early. Probably 8:30AM. I’m looking forward to this morning. We are fully equipped. Eggs, bacon, coffee, music. Waking up to a Freetown morning, there is a special anticipation.

My two friends, the lovely Zoë and Katie, live in what I call “the camp.” Wooden walls, wooden floors, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 3 cats, no wi-fi, no dishwasher, no TV, and a gas stove. We crawl out of our cocoons that we wrapped ourselves in from the night before. Zoë turns on the stove to heat the kettle. First things first for a Cajun girl. Coffee. Brewed in the French press. We wait. And wait. The kettle overflows.

“Shit.”
Zoë sees that it overflows. Grabs it off the stove, pours the coffee into the press. There’s something holy about fresh caffeine. Not even that it warms you or wakes you up. But sitting down with my friends, and soaking up every drop of peace.

We go to the kitchen, and both sinks are filled with dishes. I volunteer to wash, while Katie and Zo prepare for our morning meal.

“Old school or new school?” Zo asks both of us.

“Definitely old school.” Katie says. We all agree.
We wash dishes. The bacon fries. Egg shells are cracked. The cast iron heats up. Cleoma Breaux, D.L. Menard, Amede Ardoin, Iry Lejeune, The Balfa Brothers sing from Zo’s computer. Our old school.

There is silence amongst all of us. And this is where I can’t help but fall in love.

There was something about washing the dishes, hearing the tinkering in the kitchen, smelling the bacon fry, tasting the coffee, and hearing the cries of a Cajun people sing about love, heartbreak, the 2-step, front porches, ... listening to the fiddle, accordion, and guitar among others come together in friendship.

Every once in a while I’d look back, and take it all in. Seeing us not just as three women cooking breakfast together, but loving every step of the process, even in the little silence of the morning. There was no need for conversation at that moment. Just listening to the songs of our true home. What brings about a simpler time. With shotgun houses that were filled with what was necessary, with a meal made and shared among friends, with music that wasn’t made for money, but for the love of an existence that remains today still very much alive.
We sit down at the round table, with no reservations. Three friends sitting down as a family around a table with no edges. No one excluded, and I’m thinking about the Acadians. They hiked to the ends of the earth to be reunited with their relatives who were lost after the exile. What a passion to search for family of which we don’t choose, from who we are born crying into this world hoping to feel like we belong.

I’ve never felt more at home sitting down in this small spot in the world. Louisiana. Lafayette. Freetown. The camp. A round table. With people who I consider my family. Who, if ever separated, I would crawl through the soil to find again just so I can sit with them in silence during a gloomy morning listening to a Cajun song with our only concern of living unapologetically.

Agneau

 "You have to cher-cher da' meat"

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"You like dat', huh? It's a little love tap."
while basting the lamb

-Mr. Toby Rodriguez

Boucherie Master

Attaché au Sol Natal

"Très sédentaire parce que physiquement attaché au sol natal." 

They say we come from stubborn, agricultural stock. Hard-headed and gruff. I've come to learn that my hand is calloused and my pith is rigid. My hips are thick and my feet are set. But they have to be, they had to be. The past has sentenced my way of living to manifest into what it is now. The endeavor of the Acadians is akin to the air I've breathed. The great upheaval of my common people, the estrangement of my brio from a soil I am meant to till. It is taught to these folk the history of their people, the reason why this culture exists. It’s a form of common knowledge- something I never acquired, a history I never knew. My life was lived unconsciously for nearly two decades before my mind provoked a self-awakening.

Upheaval, lifting or rising, forcing or throwing up, the root of major fray.

When my crown broke out, I was crying, wailing at the brim of my lungs because it hurt. It hurt to see the light, it hurt to feel the cold, it hurt to breathe the air. It hurt. To be taken from a place of such comfort and thrown into a state of uncertainty is eerie. There is no guide, no direction. No sure way to find the end. Wandering swallows any being that dare fall in, altering an ego into a wanderer. 1755 to 1762 was the course of the exodus. The Exile of the Acadians from Nova Scotia. The deportation of an entire culture because they refused to submit, they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the British government. The refusal to take that oath over many decades ended with Le Grand Dérangement. The cardinal of the expulsions began in 1755; it’s when Acadian homesteads were set ablaze, it’s when Acadian people were chained, it’s when the Acadian life was deprived of their livelihood. Ritual scalpings were done to captives, a blade running down the contour, tearing and ripping and spilling that vermilion blood. Bloodcurdling screams intertwined in the haze of the grey fog and the haze of the reddened earth. I can hear the children bellowing air from their lungs. I can see flames breach the heat weakened roofs. I can feel the torment that entices the rage. The history that I have come to know has given me an intimate relationship with the understanding of who I am, because of my predecessors. The pain of being raped of your identity, of your land, of your home, of your friends and family- I know all too well. The roots I set into the soil of Louisiana the day my mother separated my soul from her womb had been severed and ripped. Transplanted to a land so foreign to the south, into States that freeze, my roots froze. They tried to grow; they tried to heal, but that they did not do. The ones deported forcefully to an unfamiliar loam will never be satisfied, they never were. The thirteen colonies proved infertile for the alienated Acadians. Few were tolerated but most were detained, detained and malnourished. Imprisoned and impoverished, disease and starvation stricken- the Acadians are survivors. They were severed, they were ripped and cut. Taken from family, taken from land that they had come to know, come to love.

On July 11, 1764, the British government agreed to legally allow Acadians to return to their homeland. Many did, many went back. But they went back to nothing. An empty memory, just a façade of what once was. Their land was given away, their houses burned, their livestock slaughtered. Nothing was spared. Feet firm on the ground with only the hands of family and culture held- they wandered. I wandered with them.

Wandering- roaming or rambling, having no permanent residence, meandering or winding.

The Period of Wandering, a course of seventeen years in the history of the Acadians, derived the unforeseen settlement of Louisiana. It’s fathomable, completely. The Halifax band assumed a voyage from Nova Scotia to St. Domingue, it deviated into a route for Quebec through the Port of Orleans because of the words of maltreatment of French immigrants by authority. But they never made it to their desired destination. The bankrupt Spanish colony couldn’t offer any monetary support to the refugees once they made it to New Orleans, but instead offered permanent settlement. Into the wetlands and into the prairies they went. The Acadian sprawl along Bayou Teche was christened New Acadia, the place they've been looking for. A place so fertile with life, this is where they could continue their legacy. Be it with the waterways, the grand prairies, pine forests, or the marshes and swamps, they made this place their home. They brought with them their morals, language, music, culture and heritage and created the Cadien- Cajun. Je suis cadien. The tiny shards of my roots that managed to stay grounded stretched every time we made the voyage to this land. They grew with every visit, with every conversation, with every story told. My Louisiana rhizomes continued to grow and flourish underground while the roots I tried to plant elsewhere did not, they never bloomed. It wasn't until that self-awakening that I decided to unearth my longed for bedrock. I came back, I made it back. I found it. Under all that dirt, all that dirt and grime I found the rootstock that is mine, the rootstock that I am supposed to grow.  Natural soil, sol natal. To be attached to such again is breath taking, my vermilion blood is slowly making its way down to the core, down the course the roots paved hollow. The further down it flows, the higher the bud grows. Roots in bloom they are, roots in bloom they will be. Racines en fleurs.