Pour Chere Josephine

For Josephine-

She'll get it one day...

"She looks up at me

With clear blue eyes

Expecting an answer

For all her whys

Her hand rest in mine

Safe, secure, without doubt

The other held in habit

Fingers folded, thumb in mouth

I collect her tears

And share her sorrow

Guide her today

While planning tomorrow

What of tomorrow?

What is left?

What do I tell her

Of it's theft?"

___________________________________________________________________________________

"She knows nothing of

Our days of glory

The flight of yesterday

Is but a bedtime story

As a forgotten fable

I tell her of a day

A day long gone

But not so far away"

"It is not a tale

Of fairies and elves

From worn out poets

On dusty shelves"

"It is the story of us

Our people, this land

When existed a balance

Between nature and man"

"A time before industry

Swallowed it all

Prior to our parents

Taking the fall"

"Before interstates

And inter web travel

When the mysteries of youth

Would slowly unravel"

"Before greasy handed tycoons

Stole all of our shores

And pop corn politicians

Became two dollar whores"

"Before convenience became king

Making comfort his queen

And a fellow man's struggle

Goes sight unseen

It is way before our phones

Would make us all dumb

And networks for socializing

Turns neighborhoods numb

Before television and oil spills

Polluted these lands

And making fun of my accent

Meant the back of my hand"

"The day before language

Was beaten and taken

Ripped from a culture

Already forsaken

I say to her

Let us talk about a day

A day long gone

But not so far away"

"A day when children

Ran barefoot in the field

And help their parents

Harvests its daily yield"

"When good clothes were reserved

For Sunday at best

And a cousins hand-me-downs

Meant more, not less"

"No digital games

Or online friends

Just a bike, a brother

And a day with no end"

"We were pirates and poets

Artist and thieves

Drunk in our imagination

With dreams to believe"

"We picked our own eggs

And milked our own cows

While Moma's and Daddy's 

Stayed true to their vows"

"There were fences to build

And pastures to bail

Ya Moma could slap you

And not go to jail"

"Fathers were feared

But took care of their own

And dogs were fed

What was left on the bone"

"Chickens were plucked

Hogs were scraped

And no one cared

If it was filmed or taped"

"A grandmother's table

Was always full of food

And she'd slap you also

If she was in the mood"

"Our sugar was our own

Milled in Breaux Bridge and Cade

Before Uncle Sam cut cane

And called it free trade"

"All rice came from Crowley

Not overseas

Served with basin crawfish

Not Chinese"

"We drank coffee

And called it a visit

Talked about life

Not what was posted"

"Long summer walks

Through thought and time

Without digital pollution

To clutter the mind

We never missed a meal

Our bellies were full

We slept like rocks

And worked like mules

Everything we wanted or needed

It came from this land

But now... today

It's all from a can"

"It was basic needs

For simple times

When a slower pace

Created complex minds

She ask me 'Daddy-

Where is this day?

And if we go,

Can we just stay?'"

"'Beb, yesterday is lost

And today is decided

Though tomorrow is a choice

And you have been invited'"

"In her eyes I see hope

So clear and true

Just because we're lost

Doesn't mean we're through

So I tell her that this time

Might be another day

A day that is long gone

But not so far away"

_____________________________________________

-Words so delicately composed by Toby Rodriguez,

 for his sweet Josephine, daughter, five years of age-

___________________________________________________________________________________

Grand Coteau, Louisiana 

by way of

Breaux Bridge, Louisiana

7.8.2014

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.