Bedroom In the Flood

Flood of 2016

A New Crop of Random ECards

YOU need to put some kerosene in the cistern to kill the tadpoles!

If you T-Galop all the way from la Pointe-aux-Pins to T-Mamou, you will burn some calories.

OUAIS! And I can name them... Allons 'oir.. there's drought, flood, bolls weevil and worm, rayon, nylon and .... hmmmm....

Ohhhhh she is as fine as a syrup cake!

La Ville des Manteau....

Go West Young Man! Go West and Go To Mamou!

Just Stop.

This reminded me of when Mr. JD was at the Mamou Mardi Gras and all the young guys were dancing on top of their horses and he stood up and said  "Hey! I'm fifty years old!"

Watch em, now!

So THAT's how they knew to come to Ville Platte...

C'est vrai!

Here's some veggies and cheese for yall to snack on.

Intro

 

I grew up Catholic in South Louisiana where shrines dedicated to the Blessed Mother are so common in homes and in yards that they go nearly unremarked. Yard grottos seemed as part of the landscape as the rosebushes and bird baths, hand pumps, and Victorian gazing balls that Cajuns and Creoles decorate with. Like most Catholic women, I inherited and cultivated a venation for the Blessed Mother, I saw the statues, but it was such a normal and quiet thing that it was unquestioned by me until I grew up, learned about myself, and looked around the prairie highways of my homeland with new eyes.

When I was twenty one I went to Church Point, Nova Scotia to learn French at the Université Sainte Anne where I was immersed in the language of my French and Acadian ancestors on the the very land where they lived four hundred years ago. I realized that our modern Acadian cousins shared more than last names and French blood with us, but that they were aware of our history in a different way than I had been growing up in South Louisiana. They were proud of their language and especially of their flag, the French tri-color, with one addition: a brilliant yellow five-pointed star in the field of blue in the top left corner that I was told represented the Maris Stella, Mary, Star of the Sea, Protectoress of the Acadians who had shepherded them on their sea voyage across the Atlantic from France.  While on excursion to an old Acadian graveyard, I entered a small chapel that had an altar and large statue of Our Lady of the Assumption inside. She crushed the serpent underfoot. She reminded me of home and family in a new and profound way. Back in Louisiana, the more French I learned, the more sensitive I was to our uniqueness and also our interconnectedness with other French speaking, Catholic cultures around the world.  I seemed to hear French everywhere, and the grottos to the Virgin Mary became a physical representation for me of the beauty, humility and faith of our culture. As I documented more local history and French, I thought someone should also document the grottos, but I never thought that person would be me.

    I was married after the Storms of 2005 and moved to the country of Saint Landy Parish, to an unincorporated area called la Prairie des Femmes, or Prairie of the Women. I struggled to teach French at the local high school, run a country household, and be the wife a mother I really wanted to be.  My husband was supportive and encouraged me to stop teaching and stay at home with our children, and we made the necessary sacrifices. Needing an outlet and unable to travel outside the Prairie des Femmes, I decided to go deep into the place where I lived, to accept it as my humble place in the world and to do research the origins of the name Prairie des Femmes and also document the daily life and French language that exists there. I started a blog site, www.prairiedesfemmes.blogspot.com, to organize my thoughts.

 There were a few yard shrines down the Prairie des Femmes road. One of my neighbors even had two separate grottos in their front yard with a Pieta in the side yard. This really is the "Prairie des Femmes", I thought to myself. I took pictures with my Iphone of all of the statues in the Prairie des Femmes. Because of the everywhere nature of the statues, and also because I had no real camera, I always brought my Iphone with me and photographed the statues that I encountered naturally in my community. Then I branched out to the adjacent prairies and towns and everywhere I went, I saw her. The statues, like the veneration, were such a part of the landscape, that it took slowing down to really see the beauty and mystery of my own surroundings. Incorporating the Marian veneration I saw in the Prairie des Femmes and eventually across South Louisiana became a natural extension of my research through the Praire des Femmes blog.

Through interviews I was told that the Prairie des Femmes has been a place where women and children found safety from different events: wars and floods and the struggles of life. It was also said that it was where the first French-speaking settlers to this land found an Attakapas village of only native women. None of these claims are substantiated, but as least for me, the Prairie was a refuge and a tough-loving mother. It was clear that the Prairie des Femmes was a wild place in Saint Landry Parish, but it had also became a metaphor of South Louisiana French-Catholic culture where veneration of  Mary is abundant, visible and unquestioned, an enclave where she still finds protection.

Origin Stories

 I have heard many stories of the origins of the Prairie des Femmes. The most common is that there were "a bunch of women" out here, or, a more girls than boys ratio among the settlers. The oldest residents have confirmed that it's "an old name, yeah" and that possibly the "Indian women looked good". They also told me things like it was where the Revolutionary War,  1812 or Civil War widows came to stay, or else the women worked the land when the men left for war. It could have been where the women and children came in the flood of 1927 to escape the crevasse and flood. The Prairie des Femmes is a higher prairie, a small and abundant prairie. Those stories may all have elements of truth to them, but maps showing the Prairie aux/des Femmes exist that predate the Civil War by 50 years or more.

Prairie aux Femmes, in the V of the bayous under Opeloussas, Barthelemy Lafon - Map of Louisiana - 1806

As I dug deeper, the Indian stories started coming in. They say the PDF was a place of high native traffic, and I have heard a few variants of the same story: that there was a village of only native women and children here when the French settlers came upon the Prairie.

The first one is that the Attakapas who moved along the prairies of the Teche left a group of old women behind, as was custom, when it was time to strike camp. Then Miss Mavis told me that she heard that the braves had left for battle or to hunt and simply never came back. Then Mr. Paul told me more recently a more complete variant of the story that takes in the accounts of it being a place for widows. He said the tribe that lived in this area became too successful and began to overflow their lands. They would go to war with the other tribes (the Opelousas?) in the hills of Grand Coteau, where they would go to fight with honor (ball games?). When the braves would die, their widows would come to live together in the village at Prairie des Femmes, at the site near the junction of the Bayous Fuselier and Bourbeux, and that when the explorers came up the Bayou Fuselier, (Fuselier de la Claire? Darby?) they discovered only Indian women, children and old people there.

 

For now, I am really enjoying the stories and searching for the origins of La Prairie des Femmes...

Summer of Storms

The summer of 2012 was full of storms. It rained nearly every day for three months. There were storms of all kinds, from every direction, even out of nowhere.

Around here they say that if it rains on the feast day of Saint Medard, the 8th of June, that it will rain for forty days afterwards. This year, it rained a few days before the 8th, on it, and after it for two weeks. Then there was a little two week break, then July came. It rained every day in July except the 31st. There were long rains, afternoon rains that diminished the heat but made the night heavier than ever. In August there were daily downpours and a hurricane. There were other storms, too. All summer, there were navy blue clouds walking on jambes de pluie, fog, and flood across the Prairie. There were were black snakes in the tall grass that never got cut because of the rain and the broken tractor sitting in the rain. So we stayed inside, shut out from the heat and humidity, bugs and snakes. It was so mild last winter that the insects swarmed in the spring and everyone got fleas.

Between the storms and serpents and plagues many gifts fell on the Prairie, comme les bras de soleil. There were lots of birds. A few times on the dirt road I saw the fanned cream and white tail feathers of a marsh hawk swoop next to my car, close enough to touch. There were owls who stood on the road and flew up to a low branch to let me pass, eyes round. There was a big ole great white heron flying in the crepescule of the evening. Many cardinals zipping around the bamboo. One evening, while I was sitting on the porch, a rainbow painted bunting landed next to me and stayed for a minute.

Ceramic shards in the Field

We like to walk the perimeter of our eight acre property in the evenings. Sometimes, usually after a good rain, we'll go to the row of young live oaks or the parish ditch on the east of the property where there is a concentration of glass and pottery shards. We find what seem to be old ceramic or stoneware pots, crocks, and cups and plates made of milk glass. We usually find white, in all shapes. They come with beautiful angles, all a little different with no exact matches in quality or shape. Sometimes we find blue designs on them, old and new, or a piece of what seem to be the decorative curl of a fleur de lis. Sometimes there are chunks of thick pottery white on one side, black on the other and made of fine cement-like material. This area in general has been inhabited by French Creole settlers since well before 1800, and before that the Opelousa Indians rested here when hunting in the oxbow swamp. When we moved here, it had been a sweet potato field and let to go fallow for years. So how old are these shards? Were they left from trash dumps behind houses? Brought by flood? Used by farmers to aerate the field? Why are they all different, yet concentrated in one area? Were there houses all the way back here in our field, long ago? For now we'll keep filling mason jars with them as we try to piece together the jigsaw of PDF history they have revealed to us.

La Prairie des Femmes

La Prairie des Femmes (Women's Prairie) is a pre-colonial prairie name, located in Saint Landry Parish, Louisiana that borders an oxbow-shaped swamp to the north, Bayou Bourbeau to the west, and Pointe Claire to the east. Prairie Laurent is to the north/northwest and la Prairie Basse to the south. The nearest town is Leonville, and the towns of Arnaudville (La Jonction) and historic Grand Coteau are nearby. Coulée des Marks runs through la Prairie des Femmes and creates a cypress basin at the country intersection of Thomassee and Jules Lagrange roads at Pont des Marks, or Mark's Bridge.

Prairie des Femmes appears on detailed maps of the region as early as 1806, having been inhabited by French Creoles well before this time. The prairie was at the border of the Atakapas and Opelousa tribe's territories, so there was much Indian traffic through the area. Legend has that the area was a high land, a safe zone near the bayous where Native American women lived together while the men hunted or warred with neighboring tribes. Another story says that in Louisiana's historic flood of 1927 that woman and children were sent there from neighboring communities because of its safety. Another tale sites the area as a place where the widows of the soldiers of the Civil War settled to live the remainder of their lives in peace. The most likely story of the origin of the name Prairie des Femmes has two versions: One is that the natives inhabiting the prairie moved after a hunt, as was custom. A few of their old women were left at  the camp being too old to move. The other version is similar, but is more mysterious: that the braves went off one day on a hunt leaving the women and children and simply never came back.  The women left there were discovered by the French Creoles and Acadians who settled the area who called it La Prairie des Femmes.