Jim Bradshaw: The things that make south Louisiana special
About once a month I get a note from someone who lives someplace else, often far away and for a long time, who reads my column in a community newspaper they still get to stay in touch with the town they will always call home. It appears that the roots that bind us to this place spread wide as well as go deep, and I think I’ve found a few clues why that is during the half-century-plus that I have been writing about south Louisiana. It has to do with our sense of place.
Over those years, I’ve driven down practically every south Louisiana road on the map (and some that aren’t), visited (or at least passed through) every named community, and met and been befriended by some of the most extraordinary “ordinary” people on the globe.
Sometimes I visited a place for a reason; there was a specific person or story to be found there. Just as often it was my natural instinct to meander that made me turn onto a road I’d never driven before, just to see where it went and what it passed along the way.
I’ve spent considerable time looking for places that aren’t here anymore, trying to find traces of communities that are now only names on old maps and that have been passed by or swallowed up as the world changed.
I found a good many of them by stopping at homes that looked like they’d been lived in a while to ask, “Have you ever heard of Such-and-Such?” As often as not I’d get a wonderful reminiscence about growing up in a community that is now only memory, many times accompanied by a search through an armoire or old desk for a picture of “daddy’s old store,” or something similar. There has always been a good cup of coffee to go with the conversation.
Over the decades I’ve worn out a seemingly indestructible Olivetti manual typewriter, two fancy IBM electrics, and several computer keyboards to save the memories those strangers shared with me. I figured once that over my working life at least a million of my words have been put into print in one form or another – some of it decent writing, some of it only a step above typing exercises, but almost all of it in a quest to tell a remarkable story.
South Louisiana is full of colorful people and ways and traditions found no place else. My Louisiana map put out by the state highway department marks off Acadiana by coloring it beige while the rest of the state is in a darker color.
That’s a sure sign that the map was made by somebody from Shreveport. Anyone who’s been here for a night of eating and dancing and story-telling over cold beer or coffee noir comme le diable, forte comme la mort, doux comme l’amour, et chaud comme l’enfer — black as the devil, strong as death, sweet as love, and hot as hades — knows that the color for Acadiana is definitely not bland beige. The good times are too many for that.
Whether we are Cajun or Creole or Anglo or German or Whatever, we share a set of connections here — to shared celebrations (sometimes for no reason except that we like to have fun), to family, to each other, to the seasons, to the land and sea, to church and community, to a set of disappearing, simpler values that perhaps require simpler times to survive. I hope we can hold onto those things, or at least adapt them to this fast-changing world.
One of the ways we may be able to do that is to remind ourselves that they are important because they set us apart from people from other places and bind us together at home — that it is important that we keep alive experiences and places and circumstances that we can easily overlook because we think them commonplace, or because we are too busy or distracted to pay attention to them. Many of these things are in fact our glue.
Each New Year we look forward to what is to come. But this can also be a time to look back at who we are and where we have come from – and to resolve to make sure that we do not forget the things and places and customs and attitudes that make us want to stay in touch, even when we are far away.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 705089.