Not Bad, Crawdad . . . Of What's Said and Shibboleths

It was the culminating rhymed bye of a g-chat that began with a pedestrian pleasantry, (“See you later, alligator!) followed with the expected reply (“After a while, crocodile!”) took a detour though the jungle (“See you soon, baboon!”) and landed right where it began: in the bayou.  Not bad, crawdad.

Not that anyone in Louisiana says “Crawdad” as far as I can tell.  And no one says “crayfish” either.   I’d read these assertions in an article called “Cajuns and Crawfish in South Louisiana” by C. Paige Gutierrez that I had photocopied for my class.

-C’est vrai?  I interrogated my French 1002 students. 

-Oui, they affirmed, some a little grudgingly. 

The ethnographic tone of the article at times felt odd to a portion of the class while others nodded in agreement as the author listed the unspoken rules of the crawfish boil, and reflected on how the crawfish, in its bayou-bred, up-from-the-mud tenacity, has become a symbol for Cajuns, themselves

-The way she writes about us . . . I just don’t think she’s from here, one student said.

-Maybe. Maybe not.  Maybe she’s a transplant who decided to stay, I offered. 

Sometimes choosing a place that wasn’t yours at first makes it even more yours in the end.   

“Crawdad” and “crayfish” sound like terms out-of-towners might toss around to try to blend, all the while giving themselves away.  Crawdad, especially, just sounds affectionately familiar.  I probably said it when summering in New Orleans in college, when I learned that I was a Northerner. 

“NORTH Carolina?” my New Orleans friends echoed back to me as if the name, itself, negated the need for argument.  “Did y’all even secede?” 

(Ulysses S.) Granted, we were the next to last to declare southern sovereignty, but still . . . I had never had my own regional identity questioned.  How southern was I?  How southern did I want to be?

“You’re a Yankee, aren’t you?” one student asked another French instructor in our department.

“Uh . . . I’m from Romania.”

“Is that north of I-10?”

Louisiana is bursting with words that puzzle outsiders: Atchafalaya, Natchitoches, muffaletta, boudin, beignet, half the street names in New Orleans.  The word “New Orleans” is a sort of shibboleth, too, often used in the show Treme to distinguish out-of-towners (who pronounce the last syllable in a way that rhymes with “means” or approximate the French pronunciation by separating it into three syllables) from locals (who use a short “i” sound and sometimes rhyme it with a drawly “Dahlins.”)

Crawfish are another in-group/out-group marker.  Within the first few minutes of a crawfish boil, peeling skills reveal who’s where on the continuum.    

I’ve been to two this year.  After the men cook the pot of crawfish, boiled live with spices, andouille sausage, corn, and potatoes, all of the contents of the pot are dumped onto a long table and everyone gathers around to pick at the pile.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

1) Heads come off with a clockwise twist. 

2) Peel back the first section of shell, then press on the end of the tail until it pops up. 

3) Slide the meat from the remaining shell and remove the intestinal vein, and voilà!  You have the first 

    fishy fraction of your dinner. 

WARNING: If the tail's poking straight out, don't eat it.  It was dead before boiling.

You should have crawfish!  I exclaimed to the middle-aged British tourists whom my roommate and I met on the levee, a few days ago when the river was predicted to crest.  They had taken an obligatory photo of the swollen Mississippi, but quickly steered our conversation from sandbags to sandlots. 

-Where can we see a baseball game?  You know, like a local team or a school group?

My roommate and I looked at each other and shrugged, a little amused by the urgency in their voices.  It reminded me of the time I was in Ireland and woke up at 6 A.M. to drive to this step-dancing competition for 9-13 year olds.  I was enthralled because it felt like the perfect thing to do when roadtripping through the Irish countryside.  In fact, I couldn’t believe my great fortune.  But as I looked around, I knew the other people in the audience, primarily parents, were beyond bored, eyes aglaze from watching girl after girl bounce and tap through the same routine.

The last time I’d seen a baseball game was in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the day after I’d flown back from France in 2008.  I was trying to be open-minded at the time because I loved someone who loved baseball, but between the circus antics of the announcer, the perpetual product placement on the billboards, rows of children eating corndogs and cotton candy, it encapsulated much of what I found uncomfortable about the United States. 

-Was it that bad?

-I squeezed his hand.  Can we please go the Farmers Market now?

-You looked young, so we thought you might know, the tourist said, a little disappointed at our un-Americanness.    

-You really should try the crawfish though.  It’s the season.

Child Dressed as Crawfish, Looking Vaguely Like a Religious Icon

-I don’t eat that, she said. 

I wondered if she was a vegetarian or allergic to shellfish or thought no explanation was necessary since crawfish live in the mud, resemble feisty, fiery insects, and much like artichokes, prompt curiosity about how to get past their prickliness to something edible.

-We heard there was a festival?

 

-Yes, in Breaux Bridge last weekend. 

The Crawfish Festival is held every year in Breaux Bridge, LA, Crawfish capital of the World. 

I’d gone with a friend and her husband.  We ate alligator on a stick, confronted death in a ride called the scrambler while listening to Joan Jett, took Cajun waltz and two-step lessons from a man in his eighties who later tried to sell us a self-produced instructional DVD, watched the defending champion take all in the crawfish races, and got sunburns as we sipped watered-down daiquiris out of coconuts and listened to zydeco . . . bons temps. 

Which, by the way, is another shibboleth.   Good times, bons temps.  (As in Laissez les bons temps rouler.)  My students write about having a bon temps in their French compositions all the time, and I half-heartedly circle it and note that it’s non-standard.  It’s a borrowing from English, transformed into French, and a said signifier that you’re in Louisiana

Southern Snow

“Here’s what I call snow.”

My grandmother, Tee Tee, is speaking.  We’re on our second glass of Chattanooga Blush, a variety of wine I love as much for its Kool-Aid shade of pink and muscadine magic as for the Biblical chiding on the front of the bottle, which references Ephesians 5:18: “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery.  Instead, be filled with the Spirit.” (NIV)

Well, we're filled with spirits at least . . .

She continues, “You can’t get to work and you can’t get to school, but you CAN get to the mall and the restaurant.  That’s what I call snow.” 

The meteorologists had speculated that our Christmas would be more white than warm, which means that we’ll celebrate any brrr-inducing blanketing of the ground by primarily protecting ourselves from foreign flakes.  A mad rush to the grocery store for hot chocolate.  Some kerosene for the heater.  A snowscape admired first though a pane then up-close for as long as we can endure.  (Before we realize that our boots aren’t designed for trudging through the drifts, that our cotton socks prove too thin for below freezing.)  

The one time I'd been caught off guard by the snow in Chapel Hill in 2003, my boyfriend and I had driven from hardware to grocery store for an hour after a cross-town power outage left us shivering in our little one-bedroom, sure that spooning was no match for temperatures in the teens.  Our search for firewood eventually led us to a man named Leon who took our 20 bucks in exchange for a bundle of wet timber.  We supplemented it with two armfuls of stolen newspapers and spent the next several hours building the most futile of fires, one that left the rug soot-stained and and made us wonder if we were on the verge of carbon monoxide poisoning.  Finally, he said, "Let's just drive to your parents' house, honey.  Neither one of us was made for this sort of battle with the elements."

Usually, southern snow is a ground dusting as light and unlasting as confectioner’s sugar on a waffle.  Northern snow, in my imaginings, might be more like the copious covering on the Louisiana brand of beignets: heaps of powdered piles at first delighted in, then eventually shoveled to the side once they’ve overstayed their usefulness.  Once you’ve had your fill and then some. 

I remember the first time I had beignets in Baton Rouge.  Two friends and I stopped into Coffee Call, a local diner-style beignet joint after an Abita pub crawl.  By the end of our witching-hour snack, I looked as if I’d weathered a bakery blizzard, with snowy sugar on my eyelashes, flecks around my mouth, white spots dotting my top.  Both of them, in black, managed to stay impeccable. 

“But how….?” I began.

“We grew up here.”

What must it feel like to grow up in a place where snow isn’t limited to special occasions, where it’s a chilly given of winter?  I’ve read that director Tim Burton thought of snow as magical because he never saw it in his native California.  One of my favorite movie scenes is his, when Edward Scissorhands carves an ice sculpture as Wynona Ryder’s character swirls beneath it, savoring a snow unknown to her.

This year we had a white Christmas, just like the ones I (didn’t) used to know.

Profound South: Invincible Summer

"Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

-Albert Camus

About a month into my summer stay in Paris, I bought a little purse-sized bottle of Tabasco and began carrying it with me like a fiery flask.  I loved the thought of it tucked into my bag, a potion from home.

Is this the culinary equivalent of packing heat? I wondered.  And if so, what was I armed against?  A spiceless life? 

I pepper my morning smoothies with cayenne, sprinkle Tony’s on my popcorn, shake sauce onto pizza.  Moving to Louisiana has only encouraged this practice.  Two Tabasco bottles sit, side-by-side like salt-and-pepper, on nearly every restaurant table in the state.  There’s classic crimson and a lighter green version for those who like it less hot.  

I purchased my heat at a place called Thanksgiving on rue Saint Paul.  My friend Annie was the first person to tell me about the store.  “It’s one of the places you can buy peanut butter,” she’d said, imparting a piece of information valued among newly-transplanted Americans. 

So, one day I’m walking home and see it: the big glass window painted with a cornucopia, scrolly cursive words announcing underneath: cuisine de la Louisiane.

Inside, I find a section stocked with Zatarain’s Red Beans and Rice, Louisiana Hot Sauce, Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, just-add-water gumbo in little plastic packages. 

But this cornucopia isn’t all oysters and crawfish.  There are baked beans and marmite for the English, paper packages of maple-leaf cookies for the Canadians.  Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff for the Americans.  Then, tubs of fudgy icing and box mixes for yellow cake for anyone with a cupcake craving.  Prices aside, it’s every Anglophone expatriate’s dream.  So, in a move of (ex)patriotism, I splurged on grits, cornmeal, and hot sauce. 

While I was browsing, “Me and Bobby McGee” came on, and Janis Joplin told me a southern comforting story about kindness.  Even if you had a flat tire, you shouldn’t worry because a trucker would pick you and your boyfriend up and drive you to a city an hour and fifteen minutes away as it rained and the three of you sang, safe and sheltered in the cab.  The first line from the song was the only real association I had with Baton Rouge before moving here.  It was the place where Janis busted flat. 

During my move south, I had busted flat, too, in a U-Haul, in Mississippi, also with a boyfriend, but nobody offered to drive us to New Orleans.  And by then we really could have used a daiquiri.  So, instead of riding all the way to New Orleans as someone strummed her harpoon, we sat in the diner section of the gas station and tried to re-tranquilize my cat.

It about the time that I bought the Tabasco that I began saying I was from Louisiana.  I’m from Tennessee by birth, from North Carolina by virtue of having lived there for most of my life, and from Montpellier simply because I love it more than any place.  But now, in some ways, I am also from Louisiana.     

Hot sauce: wet heat.  A climatic clue you’re in the South. 

In Paris, people kept fanning themselves, bemoaning la chaleur, and I kept thinking, a little indignantly, you call THIS heat?  A sunny little seventy-five and no humidity?  On one of the first nights, I remember sitting in my apartment in jeans and a scarf, sipping tea and feeling desolate that it was late June and in the low 50s.  Fast forward to now: we’re in the home stretch of September and my roommate said yesterday, “It’s starting to cool off.  It might get down to 86 tomorrow.”

Louisiana’s all swamp and sweat, and so am I.

A few nights ago, I watched Steel Magnolias, which was filmed in Nachitoches, LA.  Viewing a movie set in the South has always been uncomfortable for me.  Things that seem natural in real life become affected, put on: the exaggerated accents, the waitresses calling you darlin,’ the languid pace.  It’s all drawl and dawdle that feels false played out on a screen.    

But beyond all the little signals of southerness, the mention of sweet tea, the words like “tacky,” and “grandbaby,” the hell-raising husband at the wedding who shoots firecrackers into the trees to scare off the birds, the Bible-brandishing beautician . . . beyond all the triteness, the tropes, there’s one part that gets me.  One part that feel real.  Southern. 

It’s the mother’s monologue in the cemetery, about her daughter Shelby’s death. (If you remember, she went into a coma after complications from a kidney transplant.)  It begins calmly then builds to rage.  There’s grace and resilience in it, even if M’Lynne believes she’s been done wrong.  I think of Louisiana.  Of Katrina.  Of Deepwater Horizon.  Of the steady strength of rebuilding. 

The cemetery monologue reminds me of another scene from an epic southern film, Gone with the Wind.  Scarlett’s “I’ll never be hungry again,” speech.  Famished, her hair all frizzy, Scarlett claws at the ground for a stray radish, then collapses, chest heaving against the earth.  If you’re from the South, you know the ground matches the sun-smeared sky.  “Red as birth land’s dirt,” to cite a line from a friend’s poem.

As God is my witness.  They’re not going to lick me.  I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again.  No, nor any of my folk.  If I have to lie, steal, cheat, or kill, as God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.

Scarlett’s standing.  The score swells.  

Camus wrote, "Au milieu de l'hiver, j'ai découvert en moi un été invincible."

"In the middle of winter, I discovered in myself an invincible summer.”

He grew up in a sunny place, too.  Algeria.  His story, like Scarlett’s, assumes a certain nostalgia for a way of life that became indefensible.  French Algeria fell like the Confederacy.

In French, the Deep South is called le sud profond.  The Profound South.  The more I live here, the more I realize I am profoundly southern.  The land and I lay claim to one other.  Like Scarlett, called back to her birth land’s dirt, I am also called back to my terre, and carry it with me when I go.