The Early Posthumous Work

Louisiana, Home of the Blues

87 Louisiana, Home of the Blues During the thirty years I lived in neighboring states, I heard only a little about Louisiana, mostly folklore stuff like that was where you hired a first-rate professional killer, or where the roads destroyed your suspension, or where Mardi Gras destroyed your brain cells, or where Cajun food destroyed your stomach lining (but what a way to go, etc.). I never took time to notice that all of these observations, except maybe about the roads, really only related to that part of Louisiana which dominates, for good and ill, their public relations , the southeastern Creole region (the hit man supposedly was Cajun). When my thoughts wandered over to Louisiana at all, I assumed more or less what Ben Johnson in The Wild Bunch says about Mexico, as he gazes across the Rio Grande: “Just looks like more a Texas far’s I’m concerned.” So, living in the East a few years ago, when I got a teaching job in Louisiana, I was ecstatic. I was going home! Only I wasn’t. Having lived over the years in nine or ten cities in eight states, I have noticed that most places feel just about the same, once you fine tune. In Baltimore, order “chili” and you get sloppy-Joe mix. In Houston, forget about getting a decent cheesesteak. In Mississippi , men are supposed to stare at women (lightly, lightly); in Maryland, they’re not. Saying “Howdy!”—or even “Hello!” with 88 The Early Posthumous Work an exclamation point—is ill-advised anywhere north of Chattanooga . Boston, Denver, even California—all the same, after you learn the local tics. We’re all in it together. But Louisiana? No. The Pelican State is strange. While most Louisianans use the same currency, calendar, and language as natives of the other forty-nine states, in many ways they’re about as familiar as Aztecs . The land, the cities, and the attitudes are enough to make a Texan, or any other outsider, feel he’s in Tenochtitlan. The place is beautiful. Driving from Lafayette to Baton Rouge, you ride twenty miles of highway with nothing on either side of the pavement but twenty miles of cypress trees with their roots and considerable trunk under water. Atchafalaya. It’s a swamp, but it’s a beautiful swamp—which well describes Louisiana as a whole. In cypress swamps and along the rivers and bayous that cover the state, lush plants and trees seem to assert a power which nature shows only in special parts of other places—Okefenokee, Big Bend, the Everglades. In Louisiana, your backyard, without care or cultivation, turns into a jungle in a month or two. It’s the only place I have ever known where St. Augustine grass could grow to threatening proportions. Don’t try to grow things in pots; house plants have mediocre lives here. But should you inadvertently drop something outside on the ground—presto: Brazil. Physically it’s beautiful; but the real differences between this state and the other forty-nine are psychological. Louisiana got the blues. The blues come in a couple of subspecies. Louisiana is really two states, maybe three, depending on how you count New Orleans. I know little about New Orleans, and much has been written about it by others, and anyway, New Orleans is only technically in Louisiana, about the way Hong Kong is in China or Oz is in Kansas. It’s a place to itself. The rest divides in two. Louisiana One, the southern/southeastern part, familiar to many people by virtue of the aforementioned public relations, is a pleasantly decadent, if dangerous, region, largely Catholic, Steven Barthelme 89 heavily Cajun-French. The whole state is a land of despair, but in the south it’s an extremely good-natured despair. People from the south and southeast know how to feel hopeless in a carefree sort of way that only Catholics seem to master. They party hardy and eat boudin and crawfish (it’s work), the bars stay open all night, the jokes are endless and sometimes enhanced by Cajun dialect which takes a while to catch on to. They know how to sin, but they’ve forgotten how to worry about it. Nobody worries too much about anything, I suppose because everyone has known from an early age that he is damned. Southern Louisianans identify with Houston—the Astros, the Rockets, the...