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Cajun vs. Coon Ass Now against this backdrop—where I knew that it might be inappropriate to call a Cajun a coon ass—I asked Byron Zaunbrecher if he were Cajun. He said, “Hell no! I’m a coon ass and proud of it.” He did not seem to appreciate my question. Since I was his guest and he was much bigger than me, I let the matter drop. But I was still curious. As best I can tell from my research, the Zaunbrechers aren’t Cajun. They came to Louisiana in the 1880s with a group of immigrants from Germany. An ancestor, Nicholas Zaunbrecher, is credited with being the first person to sell rice commercially in Louisiana. This branch of the Zaunbrecher clan farms a couple thousand acres of rice and soybeans as their main business. Raising and selling crawfish is a sideline, similar to rice farmers in Arkansas flooding their fields in winter to attract ducks so they can profit from hunters. So why does a person of German descent proudly refer to himself as a coon ass? The term coon ass now has taken on a meaning like redneck or cracker. While a decade before, any of those terms would be considered derogatory, the words now denote a regional pride. This would be consistent with a secondary meaning of the term coon ass, which has at its root the Caribbean Indian word cunaso, which means someone who lives simply, on and with the land. The inhabitants of the Cajun Prairie live simply and close to the land. More importantly, they like to have a good time. You often will hear around here, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!”—“Let the good times roll!” 278 As I drove back to Opelousas, I saw a pickup truck with a bumper sticker that said, “Coon Ass and Proud.” Made me think I should delay my search for zydeco music so I could find some more boiled crawfish. 279 ...

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