This short story is the intellectual property of Stephanie M. Chambers. J’ai passé devant ta porte.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!
I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.
No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts! I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.
Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!
(Credit for Cajun Folk Tune, “Jai Passe’ Devant Ta Port,” given below;
Photo credit: Stephanie Chambers, "Ooh La La Oak" ULL Campus 2008)
A cadmium yellow biplane swooped low across the hazy azure sky over Oncle Sosthene’s (pronounced Uncle So-stan') soggy rice field. The pilot looped back over Sosthene’s property to dust the flatland fields of Sosthene’s neighbor for insects that invade these crops. Sosthene had his 12-gauge Remington steadied on his shoulder and took direct aim at the crop duster. He fired several shots before dropping the gun in his field and shaking his burly right fist at the pilot, “goddammit, git outta here; you scarin’ ma chikins’!” This occurs several more times. Later in the day, a dusty Ford pickup drove up to the gate of Sothene’s property and hesitates. Thinking it better not to enter, the driver honked and waited for Sosthene to appear at the gate. The pilot scrambled out of the truck and walked hurriedly to the gate, politely confronting this stooped over, leathery-tanned crazy Cajun farmer. “ Comment c'est va? Were you trying to shoot me down? What the hell is wrong with you, man?” the pilot screamed to Sosthene. “As long as you scare ma chickins wit dat airplane, dey don lay no eggs!” Sosthene bellowed back in his distinctive gravelly thick Cajun burr. “So, ever tom you fly ova ma fiel, I gonna shoot yo ass.” “But, sir, how am I going to go back and forth across the land nearby, if I can’t pass over your field? I need to use this space to dust your neighbor’s land for rice borers.”
This logic was totally wasted on the seemingly simple Cajun rice farmer. Sosthene began his lecture on property rights, familiar to all who have heard him speak in the Duson and Mire town hall meetings. He pointed down the gravel road going south with both arms outstretched, “you see dat road down dere? Dat’s ma property.” Then, he pointed again, both arms outstretched to the road going north, “and ya see dat fence down dere? Dat’s da end of ma property.” Sosthene pointed to the ground with hands clasped as though in prayer, “and below dis gravel road to middle of da earth, dat’s ma property.” And then to the pilot’s astonishment, Sosthene directed both arms high in the air and hollers, “and up dere to God, is ma property too! And as long as you fly in any direction on ma property, I shoot you down in front of da whole worl.” I was not told the pilot’s reaction to this declaration of ownership of the sky, the clouds, the sun, and the air above his land. I only know that Sosthene's chickens happily laid eggs for years to come. No crop dusters were ever heard or seen over his field again.
Oncle Sosthene was Tante Swit’s husband. Together, they had four self-sufficient, hard working children and many grandchildren. It was not an option to fail in their home. Tante Swit was Mamam’s sister. Mamam was the woman I grew up thinking of as my grandmother. Mamam and Tante Nola, the other sister, married very strong Cajun men, too; Tante Swit married a character. Sosthene was known by both the laborers and the governors, and most all of the folks in southwest Louisiana. His arrival to any occasion was unmistakable. He drove a pickup at a heady speed and stopped just as quickly in Mamam’s driveway when invited to dinners where I got to be with him and all of my cousins. Sosthene always wore denim overalls and short-sleeved faded plaid shirts. And, due to some back injury, which I never understood, walked with his body bent at a 45-degree angle. He led with his head, an almost chocolate-creviced countenance half-hidden under a woven straw hat gently stained with perspiration. You could hear the booming voice before you saw the figure. I often wondered if bits of gravel from the roads on his property had somehow ended up tumbling in his vocal cords and the characteristic yell helped to keep the sound flowing. As children, we delighted in his appearance. We knew he would regale us with colorful stories. Like the one about the 8-ft. snake that stood on its tail in a darkened rice field one humidity-heavy evening and prompted more rounds of shotgun fire from Sosthene. My parents, on the other hand, groaned and shifted at the first explosion of that voice. Sosthene had important politics to discuss and even more important persuasion to do with his audience. Every gathering he attended was an opportunity to amass a following, and even better, a vote for his side of the current issue he drove.
Even Louisiana’s former Governor Edwin Edwards was a recipient of one of Sosthene’s fiery verbal assaults. Not far from Sosthene’s property, his perceived gift from God, was a two-lane asphalt road with four stop signs. For years, Sosthene could hear the familiar screech of drivers hitting the brakes and skidding down the narrow highway. The state installed stop signs at the intersection of the two free-wheeling country roads near Sosthene. Farmers often flew down one of the roads, the one everyone had decided was the Cajun ‘main’ road. The only problem was that out-of-towners and strangers didn’t know which one was the main road; both appeared equally traveled and important, and both had stop signs. But, the local Cajun rice farmers knew which set of drivers needed to stop. And in Duson and Ridge, that’s all that mattered. Laws there are decided upon informally by the locals; everyone knows to only abide by the commonly accepted traditions. But, Sosthene, the supreme arbiter of law around his property, deemed it unreasonable to place signs where there must be light. His cause du jour became a lobby for a light of some kind at this intersection. Lives were in danger, the lives of those ignorant of the informal law. Sosthene had a duty to protect them.
On the day of his visit to Governor Edwards, Sosthene laid out his newest pair of overalls and best short-sleeved plaid shirt. When dressed, he polished his lace-up boots and then he placed his unstained Panama straw hat right on the line of his forehead, the line between the white of his bald head and the dark from his work in the fields. Ready for business, he jumped in the freshly washed white pickup and pointed it toward the hour-long highway to Baton Rouge. The capitol building in Baton Rouge has a history with a bit of controversy. It was built by Governor Huey P. Long, and by his order, is taller than any other capitol in the U.S., including the capitol building in Washington, D.C. Never feeling the need for an appointment with those he elected, Sosthene showed up to the 4th Floor of the Capitol Building, unannounced, in the anteroom of the Governor’s office. The secretary begged to differ that Sosthene had single-handedly elected Edwards to serve the state, but upon hearing the distinguishing heavy brogue, Edwards popped out of his smallish office and invited Sosthene to take a seat in the oversized leather chair near his desk. “What ya got on your mind, Sos?” Edwards queried. “Guv, the people are dying at da corner of ma property and you da only one dat can fix it.” Governor Edwards tried in vain to let Sostene down gently. “I can’t put a stoplight on a tiny lil’ ole road in Ridge like dat, Sos.” At this perceived dismissal, Sosthene stood up fiercely, began to pound the governor's desk with his right fist and roared “but, Guv, people dying and dey gonna keep dyin’ and is gonna be yo faul!” Within months, a very short period in the time frame of Louisiana road work, a flashing yellow and red light was installed on Ridge Road at the intersection of it and the smaller road on the corner of Sosthene’s property.
As children we went to church every Sunday and knew Sosthene when was walking up the aisle to receive communion, even though we might be seated many rows ahead of him. We never mistook the sound of his leather boots banging the wide pine planks of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church floors for anyone or anything else. Newcomers might have thought a horse had wandered into the sanctuary and was loping toward the altar; we knew Sosthene was bolting to the rail. His hairless white and café au lait-striped head led the way atop the signature bend of his back. His hands were held tightly together in prayer, but pointed downward to the floor. My guess is that if he couldn’t lower his head, at least he could express his reverence by bowing his hands.
The most colorful Sosthene story concerns his religious zeal. On many occasions, he would bring along a Times Picayune, the New Orleans newspaper, when he came to Mamam’s. With the availability of such a captive audience, he would read from the paper and espouse his outrages of the day. This was the Sixties and the hippies, one of the many scourges that the devil sent to the Crescent City, were taking over Jackson Square. They slept on the park grounds, scrounged for food from the public trashcans, and the worst of their behavior was not smoking pot, but fornicating on the benches. One day the Times ran a feature, below the fold on the front page of the newspaper, about a statue of the Virgin Mother Mary that was secreting condensation out of her eyes and had begun to draw the usual crowd of rapturous believers. Another item was a picture, above the fold, of a scruffy long-haired tie-dyed couple making love in Jackson Square. The crowd gathered at Mamam’s seemed more interested in the weeping Virgin and some expressed interest in taking the drive to view her. Sosthene, never one to suffer fools, felt compelled to scream at the idiots who failed to get the point of his sharing the newspaper with our group and demonstrating this unfortunate juxtaposition of photos, he exclaimed:, “no wonder da blesset Mary is crawing, dey’s hippies foking in Jak-son squir. What dju gonna do ‘bout dat?”
Tante Nola and Mamam worked hard that evening and every other, cleaning the kitchen until 9:00 p.m., after cooking and cleaning since 5:30 a.m. for the farm hands. Late at night, freshly laundered napkins were folded and laid out for the next day’s shift. Each day, regardless of whether it was a weekday or weekend, the women’s hands and feet never stopped their stirring, measuring, rolling, patting, and washing. Tante Swit labored just as hard, but not in silence. She was the bookend to Sosthene’s bluster, and while she often scared me, she loved as hard as she screeched. When Sosthene was ready to leave Mamam's house, he would bellow to Tante Swit, "Swit, we leavin' dis house, now." Swit, usually gave us a knowing look and turned to Sos and stated bluntly, "Sosthene, you sit down rat dere and don you move, chere. Swit not ready to go."
She was a stalwart woman with enormously bulging forearms and biceps, the upper right arm sporting a large tattoo that I can still see. In those days, I didn’t know any women with a tattoo, in particular not a nice one. Her very lengthy auburn hair was braided once a week in two long braids that wrapped twice around her robust scarlet face. Tante Swit didn’t perspire; she was often wet with sweat around her neck, between her monumental breasts, and in a band circling her ample waist. My clearest memory of her is of the many nights I spent with Nelly, my cousin and Tante Swit's youngest daughter. We often sat to eat freshly popped corn from large porcelain bowls in front of a 13” flashing black and white television set in the evenings during the early 1950s. There in the dark, on a large sofa, Tante Swit sat with a glass gallon pickle jar half-filled with fresh top cream collected from their cows’ milk. Her colossal muscular arms wrapped the jar in towels and for several hours she would shake and twirl the cream until it became a lump of pale yellow sweet butter piled at the bottom of jar that she whipped into submission. I knew we would have this to spread on her toasted homemade bread with blackberry jam for our morning breakfast. My attempts to milk their goats and cows so that I could make my own butter failed miserably. Nelly could milk the animals, but neither of us had the strength and grit to will cream into butter with the rocking bough of our arms. Her New Years Day lunches were legendary: cornbread lobster dressing and roasted turkey, oyster dressing, sausage–stuffed ducks, fruit ambrosia, and so many sweet dough pies I couldn’t decide whether to begin with the vanilla custard, lemon, blackberry or all three.
Tante Swit and N'onc Sosthene continued to live in the big farmhouse near the flashing light on Ridge Road for many years. All of his hard work had provided them with a very comfortable lifestyle. One summer, around midday, Sosthene was away from home. Tante Swit was working in the back of the house. Thinking the home deserted for a while, two men entered the side door of her carport looking for stashed cash that they presumed the couple had, so they could steal it to purchase drugs. The police say that Tante Swit was murdered with one shot to the back when they moved to the bedroom to go through their things and surprised her. When my mother called to tell me the circumstances of her death, I was at home in Dallas with my young son and another baby was on the way. I didn’t travel to the funeral. But, I cried when I hung up the phone. I wished that Sosthene could have been there with his Winchester to protect her like he did his chickens and the Ridge Road drivers. I knew that it probably broke his heart that he was not able to save her. He died a year, almost exactly to the day, of Tante Swit's death. The Virgin Mary wept that day, too.
J’ai passé devant ta porte.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!
I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.
No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts! I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.
Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!
One of the oldest songs of the Cajun repertory is "J’ai Passé Devant Ta Porte." It is a very popular old song about a lover who discovers that his sweetheart has died.
Credit: Harriet J. Bauman, "Cajun Music: the Voice of the Cajun Family," Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!
I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.
No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts! I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.
Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!
(Credit for Cajun Folk Tune, “Jai Passe’ Devant Ta Port,” given below;
Photo credit: Stephanie Chambers, "Ooh La La Oak" ULL Campus 2008)
A cadmium yellow biplane swooped low across the hazy azure sky over Oncle Sosthene’s (pronounced Uncle So-stan') soggy rice field. The pilot looped back over Sosthene’s property to dust the flatland fields of Sosthene’s neighbor for insects that invade these crops. Sosthene had his 12-gauge Remington steadied on his shoulder and took direct aim at the crop duster. He fired several shots before dropping the gun in his field and shaking his burly right fist at the pilot, “goddammit, git outta here; you scarin’ ma chikins’!” This occurs several more times. Later in the day, a dusty Ford pickup drove up to the gate of Sothene’s property and hesitates. Thinking it better not to enter, the driver honked and waited for Sosthene to appear at the gate. The pilot scrambled out of the truck and walked hurriedly to the gate, politely confronting this stooped over, leathery-tanned crazy Cajun farmer. “ Comment c'est va? Were you trying to shoot me down? What the hell is wrong with you, man?” the pilot screamed to Sosthene. “As long as you scare ma chickins wit dat airplane, dey don lay no eggs!” Sosthene bellowed back in his distinctive gravelly thick Cajun burr. “So, ever tom you fly ova ma fiel, I gonna shoot yo ass.” “But, sir, how am I going to go back and forth across the land nearby, if I can’t pass over your field? I need to use this space to dust your neighbor’s land for rice borers.”
This logic was totally wasted on the seemingly simple Cajun rice farmer. Sosthene began his lecture on property rights, familiar to all who have heard him speak in the Duson and Mire town hall meetings. He pointed down the gravel road going south with both arms outstretched, “you see dat road down dere? Dat’s ma property.” Then, he pointed again, both arms outstretched to the road going north, “and ya see dat fence down dere? Dat’s da end of ma property.” Sosthene pointed to the ground with hands clasped as though in prayer, “and below dis gravel road to middle of da earth, dat’s ma property.” And then to the pilot’s astonishment, Sosthene directed both arms high in the air and hollers, “and up dere to God, is ma property too! And as long as you fly in any direction on ma property, I shoot you down in front of da whole worl.” I was not told the pilot’s reaction to this declaration of ownership of the sky, the clouds, the sun, and the air above his land. I only know that Sosthene's chickens happily laid eggs for years to come. No crop dusters were ever heard or seen over his field again.
Oncle Sosthene was Tante Swit’s husband. Together, they had four self-sufficient, hard working children and many grandchildren. It was not an option to fail in their home. Tante Swit was Mamam’s sister. Mamam was the woman I grew up thinking of as my grandmother. Mamam and Tante Nola, the other sister, married very strong Cajun men, too; Tante Swit married a character. Sosthene was known by both the laborers and the governors, and most all of the folks in southwest Louisiana. His arrival to any occasion was unmistakable. He drove a pickup at a heady speed and stopped just as quickly in Mamam’s driveway when invited to dinners where I got to be with him and all of my cousins. Sosthene always wore denim overalls and short-sleeved faded plaid shirts. And, due to some back injury, which I never understood, walked with his body bent at a 45-degree angle. He led with his head, an almost chocolate-creviced countenance half-hidden under a woven straw hat gently stained with perspiration. You could hear the booming voice before you saw the figure. I often wondered if bits of gravel from the roads on his property had somehow ended up tumbling in his vocal cords and the characteristic yell helped to keep the sound flowing. As children, we delighted in his appearance. We knew he would regale us with colorful stories. Like the one about the 8-ft. snake that stood on its tail in a darkened rice field one humidity-heavy evening and prompted more rounds of shotgun fire from Sosthene. My parents, on the other hand, groaned and shifted at the first explosion of that voice. Sosthene had important politics to discuss and even more important persuasion to do with his audience. Every gathering he attended was an opportunity to amass a following, and even better, a vote for his side of the current issue he drove.
Even Louisiana’s former Governor Edwin Edwards was a recipient of one of Sosthene’s fiery verbal assaults. Not far from Sosthene’s property, his perceived gift from God, was a two-lane asphalt road with four stop signs. For years, Sosthene could hear the familiar screech of drivers hitting the brakes and skidding down the narrow highway. The state installed stop signs at the intersection of the two free-wheeling country roads near Sosthene. Farmers often flew down one of the roads, the one everyone had decided was the Cajun ‘main’ road. The only problem was that out-of-towners and strangers didn’t know which one was the main road; both appeared equally traveled and important, and both had stop signs. But, the local Cajun rice farmers knew which set of drivers needed to stop. And in Duson and Ridge, that’s all that mattered. Laws there are decided upon informally by the locals; everyone knows to only abide by the commonly accepted traditions. But, Sosthene, the supreme arbiter of law around his property, deemed it unreasonable to place signs where there must be light. His cause du jour became a lobby for a light of some kind at this intersection. Lives were in danger, the lives of those ignorant of the informal law. Sosthene had a duty to protect them.
On the day of his visit to Governor Edwards, Sosthene laid out his newest pair of overalls and best short-sleeved plaid shirt. When dressed, he polished his lace-up boots and then he placed his unstained Panama straw hat right on the line of his forehead, the line between the white of his bald head and the dark from his work in the fields. Ready for business, he jumped in the freshly washed white pickup and pointed it toward the hour-long highway to Baton Rouge. The capitol building in Baton Rouge has a history with a bit of controversy. It was built by Governor Huey P. Long, and by his order, is taller than any other capitol in the U.S., including the capitol building in Washington, D.C. Never feeling the need for an appointment with those he elected, Sosthene showed up to the 4th Floor of the Capitol Building, unannounced, in the anteroom of the Governor’s office. The secretary begged to differ that Sosthene had single-handedly elected Edwards to serve the state, but upon hearing the distinguishing heavy brogue, Edwards popped out of his smallish office and invited Sosthene to take a seat in the oversized leather chair near his desk. “What ya got on your mind, Sos?” Edwards queried. “Guv, the people are dying at da corner of ma property and you da only one dat can fix it.” Governor Edwards tried in vain to let Sostene down gently. “I can’t put a stoplight on a tiny lil’ ole road in Ridge like dat, Sos.” At this perceived dismissal, Sosthene stood up fiercely, began to pound the governor's desk with his right fist and roared “but, Guv, people dying and dey gonna keep dyin’ and is gonna be yo faul!” Within months, a very short period in the time frame of Louisiana road work, a flashing yellow and red light was installed on Ridge Road at the intersection of it and the smaller road on the corner of Sosthene’s property.
As children we went to church every Sunday and knew Sosthene when was walking up the aisle to receive communion, even though we might be seated many rows ahead of him. We never mistook the sound of his leather boots banging the wide pine planks of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church floors for anyone or anything else. Newcomers might have thought a horse had wandered into the sanctuary and was loping toward the altar; we knew Sosthene was bolting to the rail. His hairless white and café au lait-striped head led the way atop the signature bend of his back. His hands were held tightly together in prayer, but pointed downward to the floor. My guess is that if he couldn’t lower his head, at least he could express his reverence by bowing his hands.
The most colorful Sosthene story concerns his religious zeal. On many occasions, he would bring along a Times Picayune, the New Orleans newspaper, when he came to Mamam’s. With the availability of such a captive audience, he would read from the paper and espouse his outrages of the day. This was the Sixties and the hippies, one of the many scourges that the devil sent to the Crescent City, were taking over Jackson Square. They slept on the park grounds, scrounged for food from the public trashcans, and the worst of their behavior was not smoking pot, but fornicating on the benches. One day the Times ran a feature, below the fold on the front page of the newspaper, about a statue of the Virgin Mother Mary that was secreting condensation out of her eyes and had begun to draw the usual crowd of rapturous believers. Another item was a picture, above the fold, of a scruffy long-haired tie-dyed couple making love in Jackson Square. The crowd gathered at Mamam’s seemed more interested in the weeping Virgin and some expressed interest in taking the drive to view her. Sosthene, never one to suffer fools, felt compelled to scream at the idiots who failed to get the point of his sharing the newspaper with our group and demonstrating this unfortunate juxtaposition of photos, he exclaimed:, “no wonder da blesset Mary is crawing, dey’s hippies foking in Jak-son squir. What dju gonna do ‘bout dat?”
Tante Nola and Mamam worked hard that evening and every other, cleaning the kitchen until 9:00 p.m., after cooking and cleaning since 5:30 a.m. for the farm hands. Late at night, freshly laundered napkins were folded and laid out for the next day’s shift. Each day, regardless of whether it was a weekday or weekend, the women’s hands and feet never stopped their stirring, measuring, rolling, patting, and washing. Tante Swit labored just as hard, but not in silence. She was the bookend to Sosthene’s bluster, and while she often scared me, she loved as hard as she screeched. When Sosthene was ready to leave Mamam's house, he would bellow to Tante Swit, "Swit, we leavin' dis house, now." Swit, usually gave us a knowing look and turned to Sos and stated bluntly, "Sosthene, you sit down rat dere and don you move, chere. Swit not ready to go."
She was a stalwart woman with enormously bulging forearms and biceps, the upper right arm sporting a large tattoo that I can still see. In those days, I didn’t know any women with a tattoo, in particular not a nice one. Her very lengthy auburn hair was braided once a week in two long braids that wrapped twice around her robust scarlet face. Tante Swit didn’t perspire; she was often wet with sweat around her neck, between her monumental breasts, and in a band circling her ample waist. My clearest memory of her is of the many nights I spent with Nelly, my cousin and Tante Swit's youngest daughter. We often sat to eat freshly popped corn from large porcelain bowls in front of a 13” flashing black and white television set in the evenings during the early 1950s. There in the dark, on a large sofa, Tante Swit sat with a glass gallon pickle jar half-filled with fresh top cream collected from their cows’ milk. Her colossal muscular arms wrapped the jar in towels and for several hours she would shake and twirl the cream until it became a lump of pale yellow sweet butter piled at the bottom of jar that she whipped into submission. I knew we would have this to spread on her toasted homemade bread with blackberry jam for our morning breakfast. My attempts to milk their goats and cows so that I could make my own butter failed miserably. Nelly could milk the animals, but neither of us had the strength and grit to will cream into butter with the rocking bough of our arms. Her New Years Day lunches were legendary: cornbread lobster dressing and roasted turkey, oyster dressing, sausage–stuffed ducks, fruit ambrosia, and so many sweet dough pies I couldn’t decide whether to begin with the vanilla custard, lemon, blackberry or all three.
Tante Swit and N'onc Sosthene continued to live in the big farmhouse near the flashing light on Ridge Road for many years. All of his hard work had provided them with a very comfortable lifestyle. One summer, around midday, Sosthene was away from home. Tante Swit was working in the back of the house. Thinking the home deserted for a while, two men entered the side door of her carport looking for stashed cash that they presumed the couple had, so they could steal it to purchase drugs. The police say that Tante Swit was murdered with one shot to the back when they moved to the bedroom to go through their things and surprised her. When my mother called to tell me the circumstances of her death, I was at home in Dallas with my young son and another baby was on the way. I didn’t travel to the funeral. But, I cried when I hung up the phone. I wished that Sosthene could have been there with his Winchester to protect her like he did his chickens and the Ridge Road drivers. I knew that it probably broke his heart that he was not able to save her. He died a year, almost exactly to the day, of Tante Swit's death. The Virgin Mary wept that day, too.
J’ai passé devant ta porte.
Jai crié ‘bye-bye’ la belle.
‘Y a personne qui m’a repondu! Oh yé yaille!
Mon coeur fait mal!
Moi, j’m’ai mis à bien observer.
Moi, j’ai vu des chandelles allumé.
Y que’qu’ chose qui disait j’aurait pleuré.
Oh yé yaille! Mon coeur fait mal!
I passed in front of your door.
I cried good-bye to my sweetheart.
No one answered me! Oh it hurts!
My heart hurts! I looked closely.
I saw vigil candles were lit.
Something told me I would cry.
Oh it hurts! My heart hurts!
One of the oldest songs of the Cajun repertory is "J’ai Passé Devant Ta Porte." It is a very popular old song about a lover who discovers that his sweetheart has died.
Credit: Harriet J. Bauman, "Cajun Music: the Voice of the Cajun Family," Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute.
