Read First: Part 1: Rabbit Tobacco
In 2011 I found one veneraire plant growing in the back western corner of our field and made daily walks to check on its caramel scent that hung in the understory. I did a little work at identification and found online references of native tribes using it in different ways and chewing it for “fun”. This pleased me because there was indeed something fun about chewing on a plant that smelled like dessert. The plant was such a curiosity to me that I photographed her with Denny Culbert’s good camera and when I was asked to curate an Instagram account called Southern Glossary for a week, I used the platform to ask a wider audience to help with identification, to no real avail.
At the time I didn't know, but this plant roamed like the natives of the prairie did. When I went back the next year to check on her in the corner, she was gone, and as I was in the throes of young motherhood, lost her for years. In 2019 I was absentmindedly picking herbs in the pasture when I pulled one and realized it was the plant I looked for. That began another push in finding and identification of all of the plants in the Vermllionville Healer’s guide, a personal hobby I had started around 2007.
Mom will tell you I was always in the coves and canals around our house and in the Chicot woods. She’d tease me by calling me "white witch" and I’d roll my eyes. But when a person like me who has an interest in picking berries, gathering nuts and smelling leaves learns their ancestral language, there is a similar gathering that occurs.
I am a self-taught Louisiana French speaker and I gathered this language from every corner of every mouth that I could. For years I have used the language in writing and art to heal the wound left in myself and in our society from the cultural breakdown and loss of French. It's a vulnerable place to put one's self in, at the feet of our elders, making all the mistakes children make as adults relearning who we were. I have made all the mistakes there are to make, being over confident in my ability only to be humbled at the near unintelligible French of one of my Louisiana countrymen, but these experiences were necessary and helped me grow into not just someone who speaks French, but a citizen of Louisiana and steward of her sometimes cruel beauty.
There has been a bottleneck in the transmission of language in Louisiana, so the majority of Cajun and Creole speakers have not adequately passed on the language or the cultural information and it must be said that learning Louisiana French/ Cajun/ Creole is not just learning a language, but learning the history of Louisiana and her environment. Within the language there is native information that is not efficiently translated, or at all, into English. It does not exist in English. Much of the information held in Louisiana dialects are about the seasons, weather, animals and useful plants. French names mirror the Choctaw word and point to use. There is so much loss in the transmission of our language. As I learned and became more fluent I understood this profoundly, I took it on. I was persistent in asking and seeking out my elders who held the language, fueled by the passing of the generations and the loss of so many characters. They offered information and I meticulously recorded it, on paper and in the audio that I can keep in my mind and on file. Much information was passed to me because I positioned myself at the mouth of this bottleneck, with a big enough understanding to catch what flowed out. Yet as an orphan of this culture, I felt like a perpetual child in my acquisition of the language. For every two things I knew, there was a dozen things I didn't know. Thankfully I can be a fast learner when I'm enthralled with something.
I spent years teaching French and then transcribing my hometown French radio call-in show “La Tasse de Cafe Radio Program” on 92.5FM KVPI out of Ville Platte, Louisiana. Every morning I made my coffee, tended to the babies and sat with the radio. (Click here for a few archives) The same voices I heard as a child were now completely intelligible and the things they were saying were adding to my understanding of my home in a way I thought impossible s a child. Much of the information I transcribed from the years 2011-2021 from “La Tasse"' were plant, land, family, town lore and remedy information with a bit of old fashioned Americana mixed in. I kept illustrated journals of my findings on La Tasse and after so many years and through this documentation I was able to understand a larger expanse of the territory and my position in it. In the anses and points of this world there are wonderful things if you can access the place and navigate the land. For me, finding the venéraire was the culmination of years of gathering for a vulnerary balm that could heal so many wounds.
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