|
a ACADIAN REBIRTH article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, April 27, 1999
Caricature mirrored in other parts of South
by Jim Bradshaw
In the early 1970's, Timothy F. Reilly studied accounts of Acadians as as seen through the eyes of Anglo-Americans visitors and reported his findings in a series of articles in the Attakapas Gazette magazine.
Reilly found that "the sharpest criticism of nineteenth-century Acadian culture was often penned by authors least acquainted with their topic." These were mostly journalists touring the south for Northern newspapers who, in Reilly's view, wrote from a prejudice springing from "the South's intimate association with the accursed institution of slavery, a prolonged and bloody civil war, (and a perception of ) agrarian poverty, and educational backwardness."
He says that all Southerners, not just the Acadians, were "sometimes perceived as debased and tainted by their uncomfortably humid climate, their loathsome swamps, whose 'miasma' spread deadly disease, and the social burden of a large black population, whether enslaved of freed."
Reilly also points out that many of these Northern journalists spoke no French --- good French, bad French, or indifferent French --- and so interviewed Acadians with considerable difficulty, if at all. That inability to communicated in Northern English was often ascribed to Acadian ignorance. He notes, too, "Besides the language barrier, nineteenth-century travelers' views of Acadian were tinged by the Cajuns' rejection of the basic American values, such as the acquisition of great wealth as a positive good, tiresome temperance, and unwavering faith in technology, and Protestant concepts of religious orthodoxy."
At least one of these journalists, Charles Nordhoff, who visited in 1875, recognized that the Acadians chose not to have much to do with English-speaking Northern journalists, because the chose not to have much to do with any English-speaking people. Nordoff wrote, "The (Acadians) speak French, and retain many of their old French customs. They live a good deal among themselves, and do not even care to trade with the Americans, whom, though they have occupied the country ever since the acquisition of Louisiana, the Acadian still regards as interlopers."
Nordhoff characterized Acadians as "industrious and prosperous." Not everyone shared that view.
According to Reilly, A.R. Waud, a writer for Harper's Weekly who traveled to Louisiana shortly after the Civil War, was "author of the most harmful portrayal of the Acadian country folk (because) Harper's Weekly ... was carefully ready by thousands of middle-class Americans (and) Waud reinforced a number of injurious stereotypes and honed them with a thoroughness which has perhaps been unequaled."
One of Waud's reports was entitled "Acadians of Louisiana," and appeared in the Oct 20, 1866, edition of Harper's Weekly. Here are experts from it.
These primitive people are the descendants of Canadian French settlers in Louisiana; and by dint of intermarriage they have succeeded in getting pretty well down in the social scale. ... The majority of all the white inhabitants of these perished are tolerably ignorant, but these are grossly so. ... To live without effort is their apparent aim in life, and they are satisfied with very little, and, are, as a class, quite poor. Their language is a mixture of French and English, quite puzzling to the uninitiated.
With a little mixture of fresh blood and some learning they might become much improved, and have higher aims than the possession of land enough to grow their corn. ... They have suffered a great deal by the overflowing waters, even to making their escape from their houses in boats, or knocking the upper works off and floating to safely on the floor for a raft.
Washing day is a sketch from life. These simple folks have no acquaintance apparently with the wash-board, nor do they employ their knuckles. Placing their clothes upon a plank, either on the edge of a pool or the bayou, they draw their scanty drapery about them with the most reckless disregard to the exposure consequent, and squatting, or kneeling, beat them with a wooden bat. The approach of a stranger does not disconcert them much, if at all.