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276 Epilogue T he twentieth century wrought its own cycles of change along Cane River. As family lands were sliced and slivered among each new generation, few families could subsist on the acreage left to them. Their youth began to disperse, seeking better opportunities in industrial areas. Some settled in North Louisiana’s larger towns, Alexandria and Shreveport. Others were drawn to south Texas by the oil booms at Beaumont and Houston. Many sought factory jobs in the North and along the West Coast, particularly in Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. In those distant places, some assimilated into the white population; but most settled in family clusters, creating satellite communities where Creole culture would be preserved. Regardless of where the offshoot families lived or worked, Cane River remained their home. Ties to the Isle and its families remained strong, and many of those who died in distant places expressed a last wish to be buried in the cemetery of St. Augustine Parish. The twentieth century also, eventually, brought progress for those who stayed behind. The first catalyst was a cultural renaissance, of sorts, sparked by a white matriarch of unusual grit. The plantation that had been built by Louis Metoyer—the one his young grandson Théophile Louis had lost for debts in 1847—had passed through a succession of white owners. In 1898, it was inherited by a young planter, John Hampton Henry, who brought his family into the long-neglected manor house. While Henry devoted his time to the redevelopment of the plantation, his wife—the former Carmelite Leudivine Garrett—set out to restore the “estate” to its once stately self. Henry gave the plantation a name, Melrose, in honor of the isle of his immigrant father’s birth. But “Miss Cammie,” an overseer’s daughter from South Louisiana , was drawn to Cane River’s French heritage. That was the world she chose to foster, as she developed Melrose into a literary and cultural center. 277 epilogue Fascinated by the families around her, Cammie Henry used their lives as the theme for her endeavors. She also used their needs and talents to create the grand country estate she envisioned. Skilled craftsmen from the Isle restored the buildings for a peasant’s pay. They did so, according to their offspring, not for the edification of the landlords but because Oncle Louis’s home was still, in their hearts, their family home. In their times of want, when Miss Cammie showed up with a sack of groceries and offered it for a painting, an armoire, a bookcase, or a four-poster bed, they took consolation in the knowledge that their heirlooms would be preserved in their house. At Melrose, with their labor, cabins were restored and turned into writer’s cottages and studios, where early Cane River crafts were revived. In the “big house,” the library was stocked with works of literature, medicine, and law—family books they had preserved and used to teach their children after schooling became an unaffordable luxury. With time, Miss Cammie expanded those works into a collection that explored many aspects of Louisiana life and Cane River’s past. Records from the parish courthouse found their way to Melrose. The family’s oil portraits from the 1830s, including the one of Grandpère Augustin that had been slashed by an enraged Union officer, were “borrowed” for restoration and then hung on the replastered walls of Melrose. Old-timers in the community were regularly visited, not just for their memorabilia but also their memories . Both ended up in a growing collection of scrapbooks that celebrated the river and its people. Throughout the Great Depression, Melrose was a mecca for writers, painters, and others interested in the arts. Miss Cammie’s hospitality was boundless at a time when funding was scarce for those of artistic bent. William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Roark Bradford, and other literati of the era visited Melrose, stayed a spell in one or another cottage, and found inspiration in the culture of the Isle. There Saxon penned his Children of Strangers, in which he explored his fantasies of a dusky beauty who took lovers from all races. There Harnett Kane was inspired to write his Plantation Parade, whose cast of characters included Miss Cammie herself, immortalized as Melrose’s “Chatelaine in Shirtwaist.” One of those Cane River visitors, an embodiment of the fictional “man who came to dinner,” would spend three decades as Melrose’s writer-in-residence —spinning stories as creative as the...

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