|
a ACADIAN REBIRTH article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, April 27, 1999
Charles Dudley Warner offered sympathetic view
by Jim Bradshaw
Although many Northern journalists found little good to say about the Acadians or the place where they lived, Charles Dudley Warner wrote a largely sympathetic article for Harper's Magazine in February 1887.
Warner was considered one of the foremost journalists of his day. He visited Acadiana in 1886 as part of a trek across the South to report on conditions in the former Confederate states.
According to an analysis by James H. Dorman in the Attakapas Gazette magazine, Warner believed that the regional wounds caused by the Civil War could be healed only by better understanding between the people of the North and South. His journey across the south resulted in a series of articles in Harper's Magazine, one of which was "The Acadian Land." The entire series was later republished as a book.
Here are excerpts from Warner's account of his visit to Acadiana.
If one crosses the river from New Orleans to Algiers, and takes Morgan's Louisiana & Texas Railway ... he will go west, with a dip at first southerly, and will pass through a region little attractive except to water-fowl, snakes, and alligators, by an occasional rice plantation, an abandoned indigo field, and interminable stretch of cypress swamps, thickets of Spanish-bayonets, black waters, rank and rampant vegetation, vines, and water plants. By-and-by firmer arable land, and cane plantations, many of them forsaken and (now) thickets of undergrowth, owing to frequent inundations and the low price of sugar.
At a distance of eighty miles from Morgan City is reached, and the broad Atchafalaya Bayou is crossed. ... The Atchafalaya ... has its origin near the mouth of the Red River, and diverting from the Mississippi ... it makes its tortuous way to the Gulf, frequently expanding into the proportions of a lake, and giving this region a great deal more water than it needs. The Bayou Teche, which is, in fact, a laze river, wanders down from the rolling country of Washington and Opelousas, with a great deal of uncertainty of purpose, but mainly southeasterly, and parallel with the Atchafalaya, and joins the latter at Morgan City. Steamers of good size navigate it as far as New Iberia, some forty to fifty miles, and the railway follows it to the latter place, within sight of its fringe of live-oaks and cotton-woods. The region south and west of the Bayou Teche, a vast plain cut by innumerable small bayous and streams, is the home of the Nova Scotia Acadians.
The Acadians in 1755 made a good exchange, little as they thought so at the time, of bleak Nova Scotia for these sunny, genial, and fertile lands. They came into a land and a climate suited to their idiosyncrasies, and which have enabled them to preserve their primitive traits. In a comparative isolation from the disturbing currents of modern life, they have preserved the habits and customs of the eighteenth century. The immigrants have spread themselves abroad among these bayous, made their homes wide apart, and the traveler will nowhere find --- at least I did not --- large and compact communities of them, unalloyed with the American and other elements.
The Teche from Morgan City to New Iberia is a deep, slow, and winding stream, flowing through a flat region of sugar plantations. It is very picturesque by reason of its tortuousness and the great spreading live-oak trees, moss-draped, that hang over it. A voyage on it is one of the most romantic entertainments offered to the traveler. The scenery is peaceful and exceedingly pretty. There are few conspicuous plantations with mansions and sugarstacks of any pretensions, but the panorama from the deck of the steamer is always pleasing. There is an air of leisure and "afternoon" about the expedition, which is heightened by the idle ease of the inhabitants lounging at the rude wharves and landing-places, and the patience of the colored fishers, boys in scant raiment and women in sun-bonnets, seated on the banks.
The panorama is always interesting. There are wide silvery expanses of water, into which fall shadows of great trees. A tug is dragging along a tow of old rafts composed of cypress logs all water-soaked, green with weeds and grass, so that it looks like a floating garden. What pictures! Clusters of oaks on the prairie; a picturesque old cotton-press; a house thatched with palmettos; rice fields irrigated by pumps, field hands, men and women hoeing in the cane fields, giving stalwart stokes that exhibit their robust figures; an old sugar-mill in ruin and vine-draped; an old begass (sic) chimney against the sky; an antique cotton-press with its moldering roof supported on timbers; a (Negro) on a mule motionless on the bank, clad in Attakapas cloth, his slouch hat falling about his head like a rood from which the rafters have been withdrawn; palmettos, oaks, and funereal moss; lines of Spanish-bayonets; rickety wharves; primitive boats; spider-legged bridges.
From New Iberia southward toward Vermilion Bay stretches a vast prairie; if it is not absolutely flat, if it resembles the ocean, it is the ocean when its long swells have settled nearly to a calm. This prairie would be monotonous were it not dotted with small round ponds, like hand-mirrors for the flitting birds and sailing clouds, were its expanse not spotted with herds of cattle scattered or clustering like fishing-boats on a green sea, were it not for the forests which break the horizon line, and sent out dark capes into the verdant plains. On a gray day, or when storms and fogs roll in from the Gulf, it might be a gloomy region, but under the sunlight and in the spring it is full of life and color; it has an air of refinement and repose that is very welcome. Besides the uplift of the spirit that a wide horizon is apt to give, one is conscious here of the neighborhood of the sea, and of the possibilities of romantic adventure in a cost intersected by bayous, and the presence of novel forms of animal and vegetable life, and of a people with habits foreign and strange. There is also a grateful sense of freedom and expansion.
If the Acadians can anywhere be seen in the prosperity of their primitive simplicity, I fancy it is in the parish of Vermilion, in the vicinity of Abbeville and on the Bayou Tigre. Here, among the intricate bayous that are their highways and supply them with the poorer sort of fish, and the fair meadows on which their cattle pasture, and where they grow nearly everything their simple habits require, they have for over a century enjoyed a quiet existence, practically undisturbed by the agitations of modern life, ignorant of its progress. History makes their departure from the comparatively bleak meadows of Grand Pré a cruel hardship, if a political necessity. But they made a very fortunate exchange. Nowhere else on the continent could they so well have preserved their primitive habits, or found climate and soil so suited to their humor. Others have exhaustively set forth the history and idiosyncrasies of the peculiar people; it is in my way only to tell what I saw on a spring day.
To reach the heart of this abode of contented and perhaps wise ignorance we took boats early one morning at Petite Anse Island, while the dew was still heavy and the birds were at matins, and rowed down the Petite Anse Bayou. A stranger would surely be lost in these winding, branching, interlacing streams. Evangeline and her lover might have passed each other unknown within hail across these marshes. The party of a dozen people occupied two row-boats. Among them were gentlemen who knew the route, but the reserve of wisdom as to what bayous and cut-offs were navigable was an ancient ex-slave ... who responded to the name of "Honorable" --- a weather-beaten and weather-wise (man), a redoubtable fisherman, whose memory extended away beyond the war. ... From the Petite Anse we entered the Carlin Bayou. ... In the fresh morning, with the salt air, it was a voyage of delight. Mullet were jumping in the glassy stream, perhaps disturbed by the gar-fish, and alligators lazily slid from the reedy banks into the water at our approach. All the marsh was gay with flowers, vast patches of the blue fleur de lis intermingled with the exquisite white spider-lily, nodding in clusters on long stalks. ... Sometimes the bayou narrowed so that it was impossible to row with the oars, and poling was resorted to, and the current was swift and strong. At such passes we saw only the banks with nodding flowers, and the reeds, with the blackbirds singing, against the sky. Again we emerged into placid reaches overhung by gigantic live-oaks and fringed with cypress. It was enchanting. But the way was not quite solitary. Numerous fishing parties were encountered, boats on their way to the bay, and now and then a party of stalwart men drawing a net in the bayous, their clothes being deposited on the banks. Occasionally a large schooner was seen, tied to the bank or slowly working its way, and on one a whole family was domesticated. There is a good deal of queer life hidden in these bayous.
After passing through a narrow artificial canal we came into Bayou Tigre, and landed for breakfast on a greensward, with meadow-land and signs of habitations in the distance, under spreading live-oaks. Under one of the most attractive of these trees, close to the stream, we did not spread our table-cloth and shawls, because a large moccason (sic) snake was seen to glide under the roots, and we did not know but that his modesty was assumed, and he might join the breakfast party. It is said that these snakes never attack any one who has kept all the ten commandments from youth up. Cardinal-birds made the wood gay for us while we breakfasted, and we might have added plenty of partridges to our menu if we had been armed.
Resuming our voyage, we presently entered the inhabited part of the bayou, among cultivated fields, and made our first call on the Thibodeaux. They had been expecting us, and Andonia came down to the landing to welcome us, and with a formal, pretty courtesy (sic) led the was to the house.
The house, like all in this region, stands upon blocks of wood, is in appearance a frame house, but the walls between timber are of concrete mixed with moss, and the same inside as out. It had no glass in the windows, which were closed with solid shutters. Upon the rough walls were hung sacred pictures and other crudely colored prints. The furniture was rude and apparently home-made, and the whole interior was as painfully neat as a Dutch parlor. Even the beams overhead and ceiling had been scrubbed.
Andonia showed us with a blush of pride her neat little sleeping room, with its souvenirs of affection, and perhaps some of the dried flowers of a possible romance, and the ladies admired the finely woven white counterpane on the bed. Andonia's married sister was a large, handsome woman, smiling and prosperous. There were children and I think a baby about, besides Mr. Thibodeaux. Nothing could exceed the kindly manner of these people. Andonia showed us how they card, weave, and spin the cotton out of which their blankets and the jean for their clothing are made. They used the old-fashioned hand-cards, spin on a little wheel with a foot treadle, have the most primitive warping bars, and weave most laboriously on a rude loom. But the cloth they make will wear forever, and the colors they use are all fast. It is a great pleasure, we might almost say shock, to encounter such honest work in these times. The Acadians grow a yellow nankeen sort of cotton, which without requiring any dye is woven into a handsome yellow stuff. When we departed Andonia slipped into the dooryard, and returned with a rose for each of us. I fancied she was loath to have us go, and that the visit was an event in the monotony of her single life.
Embarking again on the placid stream, we moved along through a land of peace. The houses of the Acadians