Prairie Laurent

La Serpente

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Prairie des Femmes Roman Frescos

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Si la Prairie Laurent m’appelle

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Prairies of Opelousas

Prairie des Femmes and other Locales

Via Mike Leblanc: 

10.0 Adjacent Angles, Prairies and Points

There is yet other places, known as Prairie Laurent, Prairie des Femme, and Point Clair. Each has its distinctive character based on the stories upon which its sense of place was created.

10.1 Prairie Laurant

Prairie Laurant is also known as Prairie des Mulates, that is literally, Prairie of Mulattoes. Mulatto is in French, is called a mulâtre for men and mulâtresse for women.[1] Perhaps one of the most well known residents of La Prairie Basse is Clifton Chenier, and his brother, Cleveland, both proud black men, who are among the founders of Zydeco music. Reflecting their racial heterogeneity, their music is a hybridization of Blues, Jazz, Cajun, Country and Western, and Rhythm and Blues, played with an accordion, that quintessential French instrument, and a washboard, a folk instrument used to create African rhythms.

10.2 Prairie des Femmes

To south of Prairie Laurent, a place is still called La Prairie des Femmes (or literally Prairie of Women). If you ask an inhabitant of that place (who are mostly Cajuns) what is the origin of that place name, you will be told that all of the men were killed while on a hunting expedition in time long forgotten or during a war, particularly World War I or World War II. However, the earliest maps of the area created by Spanish indicate that the place was called the same name so the meaning has been placed mouth to ear for some 300 years, its true meaning lost to the ghosts of another time.

To the east of La Prairie des Femmes is a place called Pointe Claire, a pasture used in the spring to herd cattle upon the grasslands. As late as the 1960’s, the cattle were driven by horseback from land laid fallow in the winter months to these nearby pastures for their spring grass. These lands were first discovered by that early band of Africans who hunted deer to extinction and were later to inter-marry with Acadians who herded cattle upon those lands.

10.3 McVeigh Plantation

To the south of La Prairie Basse lies the McVeigh plantation, a place of level lands upon a prairie cleared of its high grass and where slavery was practiced in the 19th Century and later where share cropping also enslaved Afro-American, Creoles and Cajuns in a labor system meant to drive their laborers and their families into penury and serfdom meant to tie them to land as well as to enrich their land owners. Today, McVeigh Road runs down the middle of this plantation and is bordered on both sides by cane fields.

McVeigh Road comes to an end at its intersection with Louisiana Highway 31, which parallels Bayou Teche. Alongside of highway is a narrow strip of land upon, which was too narrow to farm and which was the location of the sharecropper shacks used in the early 20th Century. While the descendants of Ton Ton were free persons of color and devote Catholics, the descendants of the slaves working on the McVeigh plantation were lively Protestants, practicing within the Baptist Convention.

Information via  Mike Leblanc

Saint Catherine of Prairie Laurent

Prairie Laurent Crowning

Prairie Laurent

Four Corners Yellow Flower

Mass at Prairie Laurent

Leonville vibez

Good Friday

Prairie Drama - Prairies and Coulees Episode 1

The prairies of Louisiana run one right next to the other along bayous like the Teche and the des Cannes, all lined up like neighbors and so of course, there is tons of drama dans le coin. There is overlap. They all know each other and everybody knows everything, every contour of their life. The bayous and coulees cut across the prairies and the prairies run along the bayous and you can imagine the tracas it causes.

So what I heard through the PrairieNet is that Prairie des Femmes used to date Prairie des Gros Chevreuil and it was perfect cause she was so bucksome and he was so strapping and loved to hunt and all, but they didn't work out once he converted his deer lease to pecan orchards and expected her to make pralines all the time. 

So then Prairie des Femmes started going out with Prairie Laurent who lived right next door and had always had an eye for her, but he had been leading La Prairie Basse on for a while. Him and Femme would sometimes meet up at the trail ride and text while he was still with Basse and now Basse, she's so jalouse. To show him she went off and hadeyaed with L'Anse Belaire for a while when him and L'Anse Bleue and Grand Prairie used to roder. Come to find out she was textin Frozard the whole time, too, but he lives right across the Hwy 93 and she lost interest, too quiet and small.  So Basse met up with Prairie des Gros Chevreuil, a real man in her opinion, and didn't care if he was calling himself Pecaniere or if all he wanted her to do was bake pecan pies. Prairie Basse likes pecan pies and pralines, too, and she can crank em out.

Then Laurent, of course, after a while with Prairie des Femmes, who wanted to get all mysterious and distant, started pinin' for his ex, Prairie Basse. Word is Laurent and her started rendez-vousing in the Opelousas Wal-Mart parking lot.  Then Laurent's side chick, Plaisance, who's with Faubourg and they have one lil boy, Andrepont, found out and went off with LeBeau to make Laurent jealous but you gotta watch out because Laurent is boys with Exit 11 Posse and the Bellevues, so. Then LeBeau's woman, Nuba went bonkers and they got in a big brawl with the Prairies and the Coulees too in the Opelousas Walmart parking lot.

Poor ole Prarie des Femmes, she was mortified that Laurent had acted like that, so she's drowning her sorrows. Last I heard she was seen at the Silver Slipper with Bayou Portage and his boi Knotleyville.

The Dashing Prairie Laurent

 

Faubourg

Grand Prairie

La Belle Prairie des Femmes

LeBeau

Pecan Orchard, AKA Prairie Gros Chevreuil, Prairie of the Big DEER, Boiiiii

NUBA

Prairie Basse

Green Pears in Leonville

As my old student Mlle LeMelle used to say. "Nothin's happenin in Leonville. You go to church, you go home." Technically, Leonville is the closest town to the PDF, but I don't often go there lately, mostly because the bridge leading there was out for six months, and because sometimes the big stores up on the Interstate have more selection and fresh fruit. But sometimes you don't want selection or the freshest fruit. Selection is overwhelming and say you want just good old fruit, trucked back on the Teche and displayed at the Marche. On those days, I retreat back into Teche Country, not to the busy Exit 11. Yesterday, I had a sick child and a fussy baby and we were out of milk. It was almost 5 and I wanted to be back home for my afternoon coffee and world news with Diane Sawyer, which is like religion to me. So, at the end of the driveway, I decided today would be a quick trip to Leonville, to the right, through the open fields of Pointe Claire. 

On the way, there is my favorite little homestead: it is a little white house with a blue roof and red truck in the driveway. It is surrounded by the green fields along Jules LaGrange. In the ditch are a big clump of red flowering ginger and in the side yard are hand painted statues of Jesus and Mary. Their house reminds me of the cardinals that swoop across the road along the bayou:

The town of Leonville itself is a little like a 1940's ghost town.  A few hundred people live in quiet, neat houses and trailers, and otherwise, abandoned white structures line the streets. Even the brown Teche flows quietly through with none of the fanfare you would find over it in a place like Arnaudville. At the heart of Leonville is Champagne's grocery, flanked by Leonville Elementary on one side and the rounded bell tower of St. Leo's Church on the other.  Inside I recognized a few of my old students and their growing siblings. I am always greeted with a "Bonjour Madame", even though I only taught French at the high school for five years and haven't taught in three.


D'après moi, Champagnes' Marche' is the perfect local grocery store. They had home-grown cantaloupes, perfectly portioned packs of green beans, soft loaves of sausage-jalapeno-cheese bread and giant boxes of Little Debbie Snacks. I got a six-pack of glass bottle cokes. I especially enjoyed picking out four green pears, whose green color and form seemed to belong in some mystical way to the very fiber of grey Leonville. 

In the parking lot, I saw a plainclothes Father Ken Domingue walk in, red shirt, smiling. He had taught me as a teenager at Sacred Heart in Ville Platte. Other people were pumping gas. There were dark, thin men with their sons, blonde mothers with children, more of my students, and an old couple talking in French. The church bells gonged the half hour. People were going home. 


Near the silos at Mark's Bridge, Mister Simon, expert snake killer and father to les belles filles Stelly was crossing the road near his lovely oak-shaded home on the Coulee. I pulled over briefly to tell him Hey, I almost called you earlier! I had a six foot chicken snake in my cabanne! He laughed. I told him that it got away, and I wanted to use my pistol, but there was cement in the cabanne, and would it ricochet? As I saw a black truck coming up behind me from the fields, Mister Simon said, Oh no, you don't wanna do dat, it'll ricochet bad! and as I drove away, he waved and laughed, Don't do dat!!

Mista Simon, masta snake killa and awesome neighbor! Pic by M. Stelly

 Further up the road, where the new houses (!) are being built, there was my old student the PDF Gazette and another neighbor, Tante Claire, visiting in the yard. I took the chance to pull over, visit for a minute, en Francais meme! and take a couple pictures of the double (triple) Mary Statues in their yard. It was nice to get to talk to the neighbors. I even saw something at their place that I never saw before:

A cement baby Jesus- SHA!!!!!

Prairie Pietà

 Appropriate Double-Grotto Home In the Prairie of the Women

Our Lady, Reine des Guêpes (and there are many on the Prairie!)

You never know the mystical things you will see when you go to Leonville...

Our Ladies of Ozenne Road

Mary Statues of Ozenne Road, Leonville, St. Landry Parish, Louisiana 
  

Mr. Reed and his Lady

 "To honor the Blessed Mother."

Marie, Jesus, St. Francis? and Resurrected Jesus

Marie Aucoin

Our Lady of the Natural Light

Our Lady of the Natural Light

Our Lady of the Reeds

Real Rosary for extra awesomeness

Nice, Nice

Our Lady of the Louisiana Humidity