Johnson - Poor mans Provence: finding myself in Cajun Louisiana

Poor Mans Provence

Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana

Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Forword by Bailey White

N EW S OUTH B OOKS

Montgomery | Louisville

Also by Rheta Grimsley Johnson

Americas Faces (1987)

Good Grief: The Story of Charles M. Schulz (1989)

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming:
A Memoir (2010)

NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright 2010 by Rheta Grimsley Johnson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-58838-218-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-059-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007041010

eBook conversion by Brian Seidman

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

For Don, who loves it, too.

Contents

Hollywood Might Need Cajun Louisiana,
but Cajun Louisiana Doesnt Need Hollywood

The poem Yellow by Robert Service is used by permission of his estate. I also want to thank Chelsey Reid, Tony Salmon, and Annie Bates, all of whom encouraged me at different times to finish this little book. Editors Suzanne La Rosa and Randall Williams were steadfastly patient and wise, and I am grateful to them as well. The names of the children in the chapter called Toolshed Reading Club have been changed to protect the innocent. R. G. J.

June Bailey White

Who has not dreamed at some low point in career or personal life of simply tossing it all aside and running away to a completely different world? Loose the fetters of bitter disappointment, creeping disillusionment, or just the wearing grind of the same old same old and a whole new self might spring forthmore insightful, talented, purposeful, and capable.

Writers have that dream.

Forget the hackneyed Write what you know! When deadlines loom, editors grow peevish, and the native air stagnates, a writer longs for untried territory. All the better if the new place is one she loves, with good music, great food, entertaining people, and a deep and mysterious swamp.

From the fine old travel books The Canterbury Tales, Humphry Clinker, Robinson Crusoe to the new books by Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle, there is a long and honored tradition of escape in literature. However, some of the worst writing in the world has gushed in purple ink from writers in that foolish flush of first love with a place. In the heat of passion it is easy to lose perspective and reason, and just rave on.

Like those overlayered paintings of cottages in sunlit glades, with a babbling brook alongside, and flowers from every climate zone in riotous full bloom, books about newly beloved places are often unrealistic, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. The skeptical reader will soon wonder, and rightly so: Dont spiders live in that thatched roof, and isnt the house sitting in the flood plain of that brook?

Writing too cool, however, is equally odious. These are the books where the worldly writer insinuates himself into a provincial culture and settles down to observe the natives with detachment and reserve. With clever irony and an omniscient voice he writes about their cunning ways, their endearing dialect, and their charming ignorance. Drawn in by a smooth prose style and a promise of escape, the poor reader soon finds himself squirming and ill at ease, feeling like an uninvited guest, ushered in by the writer to a place where neither is welcome.

In Poor Mans Provence , Rheta Grimsley Johnson manages something that is difficult to do in life and in writing: she balances true love with a level head.

She writes eloquently about real friendship, hot French bread, and a spider wedding. But she does not leave out junk cars, trash in the ditches, and pit bull dogs chained to pecan trees. Azalea bushes die in her yard, but neighborhood children flock to her tool shed to read books and sprinkle glitter. She admits early to being a tourist. She says, Living for a decade in a place doesnt give me the right to report as a native. She vows that she has learned more from her neighbors than about them.

Insightful without being nosy, clever without being smug, funny without poking fun, this is one of those welcoming books, like some of the Acadian households Johnson describes, where everyone feels at home. Both her readers and the people she writes about will be comfortable, well fed, highly entertained, and happy they came to poor mans Provence.

Who would have figured a wild boar hunt would be a bore? Not the Atlanta newspaper editor who noticed an advertisement for one in Soldier of Fortune magazine. He felt inspired and sent me packing. Thats how editors work it. They have the bright idea, and the reporter does the work. Never mind its almost always impossible for a writer to execute anothers inspiration. That creative obstacle never occurs to most editors, even the good ones.

You would expect, at the least, to feel something at a wild boar hunt. Invigorated. Disgusted. Something. I went through the motions, but it wasnt really my kind of story. The result ran buried in the sports section, and the writing was lackluster at best. Not my proudest journalistic moment. Perhaps I should have seen the writing on the wall and begged off, which didnt win brownie points with a boss, but could be done. But, no, thank goodness I accepted the assignment with a grin, packed my grip and headed to south Louisiana. I went. I went because thats what you do when youre on salary and still believeor try tothat no matter how stupid a story idea might seem, somehow a good enough writer can make it matter to the reader, can mine deep for real meaning in what, on the surface, may seem an insipid or insignificant idea.

Mostly I went because the hog hunt was in Louisiana.

Louisiana was always good for a story. In the past, Id had wonderful reporting luck there, which usually means bad luck for somebody else. Id covered a raucous, flag-waving David Duke rally, back when that blond, surgically-tailored Ku Klux Klansman was running for governor against former Governor Edwin Edwards. The all-time best political bumper sticker derived from that campaign, when Duke gave smarmy Edwards a run for his money: vote for the crook; its important.

Id also written about an alligators funeral in Ponchatoula, and had interviewed the geriatric stripper Chris Owens on Bourbon Street. Id had lunch and a long talk with the former singing governor, Jimmie Davis, just days before his hundredth birthday.

Louisiana, this nations funky Xanadu, almost always meant sexy copy.

My destination this time, for the wild boar hunt, was five hundred miles from Atlanta, across the bottom of Mississippi and over the steamy Atchafalaya Swamp of south Louisiana, smack dab in the heart of Cajun Country, near its unofficial capital, Lafayette. The Louisiana legislature, highbrows, and local television stations call the area Acadiana, which sounds a tad prissy.

I think back now to that fateful trip, one of thousands I have made in three decades as a newspaper reporter and columnist. Ive been to pretty, melon-colored places like Key West in Florida and Mystic Seaport in Connecticut. In the name of good journalism, Ive rafted the whitewater of the Middle Fork of the Salmon River in a pristine part of Idaho. From a graceful old front porch on Fishers Island in the Long Island Sound, Ive watched billowing sails of boats as they cruised the Atlantic seaboard. Ive slept late in a suite at Richmonds grand Jefferson Hotel.

Ive been privileged to see lush, grand, beguiling places, all in the name of duty. And of course Ive seen some fiercely ugly ones, too. More of those, reallynews most often happens in the god-forsaken parts of the world, the slums and ghettos and back alleys. To paraphrase one of my favorite writers, Raymond Chandler, working for a newspaper is a lot like taking a glass-bottomed boat ride in a sewer. I had toured my share of sewers.