Amazing Grace

La Grâce du Ciel est descendue

Me sauver de l'enfer.

J'étais perdue, je suis retrouvée,

Aveugle, et je vois clair.*

Grace from heaven came down

And saved me from hell

I was lost, I am found

Blind, and I see clearly

It was hard to ignore Mama’s grim face staring across her now cold cup of coffee. I was outside, near the ocher rose bushes, and could see her through the sliding glass door. From her perch on a stool at the breakfast bar, Mama sat staring through the glass with saggy eyes and a deeply drawn mouth looking toward the farm where the people that I grew up thinking of as grandparents lived. There was no barrier to this unvarying view of the dairy farm situated a half-acre away from our home in the southwest Louisiana countryside. Mamam and Papop Alleman owned and worked the dairy farm, along with acreage of cotton, soybeans, and produce that provided most of the food for their sizeable table of three boys and farm hands. Only when the hurricanes fired up in late summer did the landscape rise and fall. “Juanita is coming to be with Daddy again tonight,” Mama sighed. “I’ll be spending most of the evening in my bedroom.”

It was 1967. I was visiting my home during spring break from my junior year of college. Years of traveling with a military family made me discontent to live on an acre of flat marshland near my grandparents, their dairy cows, horses, dogs, chickens, and everything that edged its way up onto our hammock of land suspended above sodden ditches. Consequently, I found scholarship money at a Texas school and left Louisiana at the end of my sophomore year. Mama didn’t pull on me to stick around like so many Cajun families do. But, she still depended on my counsel in all things linked to relationships. And, in particular, she lacked an understanding about her marriage to my dad. I could see that there was a new impasse with him to sort through, so I invited Mama to talk.

She began to tell how my dad’s fervor to discover his natural family was rapidly collapsing the normal that Mama came to expect. Daddy was now in his mid-forties and restless about really belonging to no one. He was rummaging through the scraps of his memory about how he came to live at the dairy farm across the clover pasture. And then, he made a relentless commitment to follow the leads about his early life wherever they shifted in order to replace the fairy tale that he always carried around as the truth. Mama was uneasy about what he might find. She was wholly unprepared for what unraveled.

I already knew some of Daddy’s past, but hadn’t heard much more than that he was a foster child of Mamam and Papop Alleman who arrived at their farm around the third grade. He left them when he was 17 to join the Army. That was pretty much all we wanted to know. As children, we always felt as though we were the lucky ones who escaped southwest Louisiana to see the world. We didn’t envy our adopted cousins from the dairy farm. That Daddy longed to be one of them wasn’t ever said out loud. Mama never wanted to return to that acre of mud near Highway 95 and the farm. But, an unfortunate investment in a meatless wiener scheme, promoted by a close friend while Daddy was still in the military, left my parents with few options. After we left Germany and the military for good, Mama fashioned a commanding case that she made to the Alleman’s and wrested the acre near Highway 90, north of their dairy. Papop signed over the land to them. His three sons and their wives were resentful that this happened quickly, without their consent, and vowed to get even with Daddy and Mama’s because of their conquest.

Mama continued with her story of Daddy’s newly unearthed discoveries, “Your dad was given to the Alleman’s when he was eight years old because he had no other place to go.” The Alleman’s had older cousins who lived on a farm in Jennings, located down Highway 90, east of the Duson dairy farm. The elderly Alleman cousins removed Daddy from third grade because “he found school too difficult.” He worked in their fields. But, soon after his arrival, they became too frail to maintain their farm and gave away the eight-year old boy to the Alleman’s. Mamam and Papop’s three boys milked the cows before and after school, but there was still cotton to pick, and corn, soybeans, and potatoes to be harvested. Daddy fit the job description to work all day by Mamam’s side. No one on the farm worried about Daddy’s ability to read or add numbers. He stayed at home with Maman and they gradually shaped an alliance as he shielded her from Papop’s temper and increasing demands.

Days passed as Daddy and Mamam the hung bed sheets on outdoor lines, snuggled eggs into baskets they collected from restless hens, and poured cream that floated to the top of milk into bowls to make a crème fraiche called “clabber.” At other times, he wrung chickens’ necks, plucked fluffy feathers from fleshy bodies in hot water, and burned the deeper pin feathers on the hens over fire on the kitchen gas stove. They kneaded bread dough and laid it to rest under softly worn towels made from used bags of flour. As Daddy moved into the kitchen and showed his prowess as a chef, he earned the privilege of sitting in the kitchen each day after the older farm hands ate their midday meal. There he sipped Mamam’s inky thick coffee that dripped in the white enamel pot on the stove and lightened it with fresh cream sweetened by two teaspoons of sugar, accompanied by gooey blackberry sweet dough pies. Daddy became Mamam’s closest and only confidante. They shared stories with each other to carve through the tedium of caring for Papop and her three sons.

There were shreds of this story that Harold Moroux, my father, pieced together long ago. The rest, he fabricated for himself. Possibly, he had two beautiful young parents who were killed suddenly in a car accident and there were no relatives ready to step in and take him. Or perhaps a woman was suddenly widowed and couldn’t put her life back together with a young energetic son. Maybe his family was looking for him, becoming separated during a catastrophic incident. In the 1920’s and 30’s, children were sent to orphanages or foster homes for many reasons. It was not unusual to have one’s family nearby, but unable to care for some of them.

Not once did he consider what really happened to be his story. A Syrian high school girl, the daughter of a prosperous Opelousas baker with the last name of Moory, fell in love with an older German man, named Fuchs. Disapproving of a cultural intermarriage, and even more so of their out-of-wedlock child, the girl’s mother sent her to a New Orleans’ convent to give birth to her son among the community of nuns. Celeste Moory left her baby in New Orleans and went home to finish high school, recapture her reputation, and regain the approval of her unsympathetic mother. Harold received the last name Moroux, a frenchified contraction of Moory and Fuchs, leading him to believe that he was an authentic Cajun.

The orphanage in New Orleans where Daddy lived burned to the ground before he was five years old. His mother, now out of school and by this time working in the family bakery, kept track of Daddy and drove to New Orleans to get him. On her return to Opelousas, she managed to place him away from town with a black family who bought weekly from her on her bread route. Nothing thrilled Celeste more. She could see Harold frequently while she made deliveries for her family bakery. Daddy never realized it was his mother who came to see him the two or more years that he lived there, tucked safely nearby. But, eventually, the parish sheriff had other ideas. White children did not live, share meals, and take baths with black families and their children in southwest Louisiana. Daddy was removed by the police and taken to a priest in Jennings who placed him with the Alleman cousins who had no children. He was a bastard from an orphanage. Children like him couldn’t expect a better life. They were often passed from home to home, still too serviceable to abandon entirely. Celeste eventually had to give up on him.

Once Daddy pieced his story together and started contacting people, it didn’t take long for an odd caravan of characters to appear at our home. Celeste married a legitimate Syrian suitor and bore Aunt Juanita and Uncle Sid. Uncle Sid became a French chef of some renown in Lafayette. Sid drank much of the wine that went into deglazing his sauces. He skin was the color of a skillfully reduced Bordelaise Sauce.

Around 5:00 p.m., Aunt Juanita hauled up and turned into the gravel drive of our home. She appeared to be an olive in the process of turning from green to a deep purple. She was a short, slightly barrel-shaped woman with creamy gray green skin and mid-length coal colored curly black hair. Her stuttering husband, Tom, while tall and stocky, was battered to find a chair and stay for a while. Juanita and Daddy sat together on the white sofa and stared into each other’s eyes like lovers reunited after years of disengagement. Tom and Mama stared at each other too, in disbelief.

I wondered how long my mother could engage Tom as he falteringly spoke about his failed career as a drummer? And how long before Mama was released from Aunt Juanita’s orders to fix her afternoon coffee, two spoons of sugar, a quarter-cup of cream and to make dinner for her? Mama retreated, after a while, to her room. Two years of tears, arguments, and sleepless nights, passed before Mama’s purgatory came to an end. She forced Daddy to take his visits to Juanita’s house and leave her alone. It took another years for the crack in my parents’ marriage to mend. When Aunt Juanita took to showing up at Mamam’s house, unannounced, for her own coffee and blackberry sweet dough pies, it was the line in the sand for Mama. She told Daddy he had to choose between her and Juanita. Daddy couldn’t face being abandoned by Mama; the visits to Juanita became more infrequent.

The way I see it, Daddy didn’t make out so badly. He found a way to leave the Allemans’ home and become one of the youngest sergeants in WWII. He received his GED in the military. He still reads slowly and frustrates us all at his inability to follow a movie plot, but there is nothing wrong with what he values. Daddy continued to walk over every afternoon to the house on the dairy farm to sip coffee with Mamam. She made him cornbread and yeast rolls; he gave her someone with whom to share her thoughts again. When Papop died, Mamam was taken by her three sons to live at the Sunshine Cottage in Lafayette. The estate was carved up among the three boys. My brother, Anthony, a lawyer at the time, was asked to draw up the papers, with specific instructions to exclude Daddy. It was the only time I ever saw my grown brother cry. Anthony decided to complete this transaction and charge them a towering legal fee, which he gave to our father. Daddy was reluctant to take the money; my brother was insistent that Daddy had earned it.

Daddy never found Celeste or her German lover before they died. Aunt Juanita, Tom, and Uncle Sid danced in and out of our lives with little dramas until mother shook them off like the lint that clung to her carpets. In time, Daddy found himself and an amazing grace. This constant love is what he passed on to five children and their children and their children, a family to whom he really belongs.

Quand j’aurai chanté dix mille ans

Dans Sa chorale des Anges,

Je n’aurai fait que commencer

À chanter Ses louanges.

When I will have sung ten thousand years

In His choir of angels

I will only have begun

To sing his praises

De tous les dangers de la vie,

La grâce est mon abri.

C’est cette même grâce qui m’amènera

Aux portes du paradis.

From all the dangers of life

Grace is my shelter

It is this same grace which will lead me

To the gates of paradise.

Translation for Cajun "Amazing Grace:"

La Grâce du Ciel

Les Amies Louisianaises

(Amazing Grace) (Traditional, French words by D. Marcantel)

Musique Acadienne Pub. Co. BMI and Pocahontas Music BMI