Les Femmes de Mamou

Les femmes de Mamou

Qu'elles boivent comme les trous secs

Elles sont aussi fortes que des ours

Et elles fart comme les mules

The women from Mamou

They drink like dry holes

They are as strong as bears

And they fart like the mules

We drove an hour and a half north on Interstate 45 to just outside Alexandria to visit Uncle Albern. My family calls him ‘Uncle’ but he’s really my cousin on mother’s side of the family. This happens a lot in Louisiana. Uncles are called “brother,” sisters are “tante so-and-so,” and my mother’s last name is spelled four different ways. My maternal grandparents lay side-by-side in a small cemetery near Richard. J’Mama’s gravestone reads “Olivia Sonnier Jeanis”; J’Papa’s reads Alus Jeanise. I grew up thinking of my mother as Clarisse Jeannis Moroux; her nephew is John Albern Jeanise. Other versions of the name in this same family are spelled “Jeanisse.” It just doesn’t matter. But, you better get their names right when you’re visiting them, whatever they are. You just can’t switch out your uncle for a cousin, even if he is.

I hadn’t seen Albern since my brother’s funeral fifteen years ago. And I was too disturbed by my brother’s death to focus on any one person that day. Before that, I was very young when we visited our cousins, so I missed getting to know that Albern is one of the most entertaining people in our family. When he found out last year that I was staying with my parents for a week, Albern invited us to his home for gumbo, pickled okra, and croissants. It was in the fall, so all of the things he had planted in the little garden behind his house were ripe for a celebration. But, even if it had been winter and nothing was on the vines, Albern would have canned and frozen fresh vegetables ready for his gumbo, maque choux, or anything else we might want.

He was loaded with family stories the moment we entered the door. “Oh, Chere, you still look the same,” he shouted to me. “You got you daddy’s eyes.” Albern works as a printer, but his original calling is as raconteur et chanteur de divertissement. “You know the Jeanise’s, if they couldn’t find anyone to fight with, they would fight with themselves,” as he brings life to the cantankerous Jeanise boys, sent home from elementary school for beating each other up on the playground. The story that follows tells us about Mozine Sonnier, my grandmother’s sister and illuminates the unique reasoning that defines Cajuns. Mozine is riding to church one Sunday with her friend, Jacque, in the black canvas-covered buggies so prevalent in early 20th century Louisiana. Mozine finds it difficult to make the journey to church without going to the bathroom. “Jacque.” Mozine demands, “pull over to the side and let me out. You tell me when I pull down my pants if a car comes. “OK,” replies Jacque. As soon as Mozine lifts her skirt and pulls down her panties, a car passes their parked buggy on the road. “Jacque,” Mozine shrieks, why you don’t tell me about the car?” “Well,” Jacque provides, “I didn’t think there was anybody in it.”

To illustrate the strength that Albern feels all Cajun women posses, he picks up the accordion lying next to his brown, over-stuffed Lazy Boy and beings to sing, “Les Femmes du Mamou,” a song J’Papa sang to him before bedtime every night he stayed with his grandfather. Albern’s lanky frame dances in the easy chair, providing a rhythm line for his solo. He smiles broadly when he reaches the phrase, “elles fart commes les mule.” The French speakers in our family audience erupt into spasms of laughter. Albern is encouraged to go on. He shares the genealogy of our family he spent five years assembling. I am so excited at the sight of this enormous document that he gifts me with the 24 x 30-inch poster of fifteen generations of Amiraults, DeGrandaires, LaFleurs, Jugnacs, Marchands, and Poiriers.

Albern proudly details our heritage originating from Alsace-Lorraine and ends by saying, “you know J’Mama was very well-educated. She could read and write in French and English. She came from a family of self-employed business owners and was in possession of valuable property when she married our grandfather.” These facts contradict the woman I knew to be a poor tenant farmer’s wife living in a wood frame house with no indoor plumbing, heat or electricity. “How did she evolve into the woman I saw slopping pigs and chasing after chickens in her drab cotton dresses and muddy shoes?” I asked incredulously. “J’Papa lost her inheritance in a failed deal to parlay her money into rice-producing land.” They became just another casualty of the drought around the time of The Great Depression.

I thought about this and other stories Albern sang and delivered so deliciously to us as we wound our way back to Lafayette that day. I was still analyzing the mettle of our gentle, incredibly humorous grandmother the next evening as I spoke with my brother, Greg, about our family. “No wonder our mother is so headstrong,” I remarked to Greg and shared with him how I didn’t understand our mother as I was growing up. “Don't you remember the story about Mama and the chicken under her arm?” Greg asked. “J’Papa told Mama to take a live chicken to the country store to pay for groceries for which they had no cash. Along the gravel road she used to walk barefooted to the store, a carload of young boys zoomed past her spraying dust and laughing as they hung out of the windows. Some threw rocks at this diminished girl. “Isn't that really all you need to know about Mama?” Greg pleaded to me for understanding. When Mama told Greg this story, he said she demonstrated how she shielded the chicken under her arm, protecting it from the dust as they blew past her. And how humiliated she felt by them as she bartered with the grocer for flour, oil, and other supplies. She was given "change" for whatever she wanted after the groceries were paid for, for her trouble. “Isn’t that an incredible story?” Greg repeated several times.

I don’t know why it took Mama so long to tell me her story. I had only just heard this one a couple of years ago, as I begged her for background about our family. After she shared it with me, I wrestled with how I could make her know I was so proud to be her daughter. She could have trusted me with the fear and shame long before I dragged the details out of her. I already knew that she could drink like a dry hole. I now believe her to be as strong as a bear, no matter how her name is spelled. And the other, well,

Papo and The Hippies

If you knew Papo in the 60’s, you would think that the greatest scourge the earth ever had to endure was Hippies. My dad commanded a tank in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII, liberated the concentration camp, Munchausen, got blown from his jeep by a land mine, survived a winter in Asia in the Korean War, and bivouacked for weeks in the Bayreuth snow while waiting for Germans to raise the Berlin Wall. But, I never saw him plan for an all-out onslaught, until he talked about Hippies.

They have long hair, bathe infrequently, sleep around in the open air, and smoke pot—which makes them bathe less, forget to cut their hair, do more sleeping, and smoke more pot. Then, in a final tragic chapter of their worthless lives, they gather in groups to protest anything and piss away the college educations their parents slave to provide them on any platter they can scrape up. Papo’s theory is that most Hippies don’t hatch out of poor folks, unless the Hippies need recruits to locate more munchies or drugs. They are the product of guilt-ridden, affluent, middle-class parents who feel the need to subsidize soul-searching behavior. And soul-searching just isn’t worth the paper its take to write books about it. Hippies, and Yippies, must know where their next meal is coming from because they wear the luxury of wallowing in their own filth and liberal ideology like medals. So, Papo’s rage came as no surprise to any of us when my brother Anthony decided to grow his hair below his ears in 1966.

As it was, Anthony and Greg emulated dirty rotten scoundrels. When they were six and eight years old, respectively, they loved to ‘pretend-play’ poker and spit chewin’ tobacco like Wild West saloon cowpokes. On one occasion, when my mother entrusted their care to me at a barbershop, they blew each other away in a floor-scraping shootout. Their final death scenes took them over tables where magazines were neatly stacked and across hair strewn on the floor to lay in bleeding agony at the front door where patrons stood aghast as they tried to enter.

Being in each other’s constant company allowed them both to sink to the lowest common denominator. The combination of their superior intelligence couldn’t mitigate the urge to collect their own methane gas in glass pickle jars in futile efforts to accelerate fires. Even into their 30s, after the acquisition of law degrees with honor, finding women who would adore them and bore their children, our family gatherings would suffer many memorable holiday dinners at the mercy of our two brothers. On one Thanksgiving, my mother realized that the one dining room table at which we had all sat for dinners in our childhood, could not seat the blistering growth of our family. It was then that she made the unfortunate decision to bring a smaller, somewhat lower table and place it two feet away from the larger, more prominent table in the dining room. As the Thanksgiving dinner was being laid out on a buffet, she said, “Greg and Anthony,” take all of the grandchildren and go THAT table,” pointing to the now, baby table. It wasn’t long before my brothers engaged the grandchildren in “We’re Indians, They’re Pilgrims.” I don’t remember who started it, but immediately after chocolate and pumpkin pie slices were placed in front of the ‘Indians,’ the food fight erupted. No one can recall if the walls got by with being washed down or had to be repainted, but it reminded me that the boys never left these men throughout their lives.

Long hair was the true harbinger of the decline of our family’s ability to laugh off such antics, however. The most searing memory was the night my brother, Anthony, returned home during his college years after sleeping off a hangover for days on the sofa of the Kappa Sig fraternity house. His all-expenses paid four-year college education, already endangered by a below-2.5 grade point, appeared to vanish. Earlier in the semester, he had been arrested for sticking his bare buttocks and spreading the cheeks out the window of a speeding automobile as his fraternity brother blasted the car of the Lafayette cops. And though my parents’ home was never the same after he rode one of our grandfather’s horses into the front door of our sun porch, my Dad drew the line in the sand when Anthony’s hair met his eyebrows. As my brother slunk through the glass sliding door of our kitchen, post-hangover, my Dad barked, “Get a haircut or you’ll never sleep in this house again!” By this time, my brother’s fraternity and girlfriend had anointed him with the name, “Tony.” Tony shot back, “I don’t have to do what you say anymore.” This was not the response my Dad was holding his breath for. Tony never saw the shove he got from my Dad coming, hurling him against the sliding glass door. Years of anger and disappointment washed over both of their faces. Both recognized it was time for my brother to leave home, his way. Dad wanted a haircut and respect for his values. Neat hair was proof of reverence and spoke to him of this. A trim top means a soldier is ready for battle. His boots are shined, his rifle is prepared to shoot, and his soul is clean enough to meet God. The Army can trust him to go onto foreign soil, remember who his enemy is, work hard to stay alive, and keep harm away from those back home. Long hair drags all virtue down with it. To my brother, long hair meant freedom from the cookie-cutter expectations of a father's unrealized dreams for himself.

My brother subsequently did lose his scholarship, flunked out of school, and allowed the military to draft him into the Vietnam War. He became a code breaker in an Intelligence Unit in Korea. He smoked pot, but found an opportunity to break the latch on Dad’s tight, shut heart. Tony was decorated for being a model soldier. He was honorably discharged and put himself through LSU law school and into a successful litigation career in Lafayette, Louisiana.

The severe photograph of Tony with lowered ears, his pink scalp peeking beneath his Army cap still hangs on the ‘honor wall’ of my family’s home. I suspect it’s one of Papo’s most prized possessions. It may even rank above the hand-built barbeque pit, his Cajun microwave, the seasoned gumbo pot, tall peach trees, carefully-tended blackberry bushes, and maybe even the riding lawnmower (a seat for his own soul-searching, though I doubt he calls it this). It takes a powerful life to erase the memory of Hippie hair. But, the little rascal did it.