Life Everlasting
An antiquated story-and-a-half Creole cottage sitting right down on the banquette, as do the Choctaw squaws who sell bay and sassafras and life-everlasting. -George Washington Cable, Café des Exilés
As any good student of Louisiana literature I had read Toole, Grau, Gaines, Percy, Fontenot and Chopin at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. However, it was reading George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days under the tutelage of the late Dr. Maurice Duquesnay, rumored muse for certain attributes of Ignatius J. Riley HIMSELF, that brought me the first mention of the elusive herb, life everlasting.
No mind, the herb was one of those details that, as a college student, I glossed over. Bay laurel and sassafras were common enough in our food. Bay leaves went in soups and gumbos. I foraged bay laurel at the top of a bluff on Santa Rosa Island, Florida. The sassafras root I was given to chew as a child. The leaf was known in my town as the ubiquitous tonic “tisane” and was, according to Mayor Vidrine, good for everything, including puberty. With harvested sassafras leaves (sometimes green, sometimes red) I would dry and grind filé to sprinkle in my gumbo bowl at the last minute. But life everlasting? What was this old herb the Choctaw women sold while sitting on the banquette in New Orleans?
It took twenty years for me to close my knowledge gap in the indigenous women’s herbal trifecta. As I was identifying the same mysterious herb in my own field, my husband at the time was creating a performance at the Music Box Village in New Orleans called "Café des Exilés" where our friend and poet Moose read so beautifully the very excerpt about the Choctaw women and their life everlasting.
Life everlasting. They say this herb will heal anything: skin, lungs and spirit, and make you live a long time. For me, there was a deeper meaning. Not only was my life feeling utterly over and un-lasting at that time because of my failed marriage, I had reason to attach the folklore about this plant as a respiratory and funerary herb, a protector and smudge, and connector to the afterlife to other experiences I had had. There was a spiritual lesson in this name life everlasting and vineraire, as well as in the properties of this plant. I often say it's smart like a chaoui (racoon). If you leave food out and make a habitat for it, it will follow you around. The everlasting came into my life at a time when we were both at risk of survival. The name life everlasting and the quest to identify and grow it out gave me what felt like a secret wink from the universe and indeed encouraged me to live a long time.
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