My Small Town America

About halfway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along the east bank of the Mississippi River in St. James Parish lies a string of towns that will forever resonate in my memory the ideal notion of small town America.  A mix of sugarcane fields, swampland and oil and chemical refineries that light up the rural landscape at night, this storied setting of my father's childhood surges in and out of my consciousness like the rippling wake that passing ships send lapping at the levee.  Generations of families with fun names like LeBlanc and Bourgeois, Duhe' and Zeringue, live among each other intertwined by history, marriage and Catholic roots.  Schexnayders, too, speckle the landscape in numbers that represent the large families that spread the name from sons to sons.  My grandfather dug his heels deep into his ancestral land throughout his long life, dying within ten miles of the tobacco shed where he was born in Grand Point.  Memory resides alive and accessible in this place namely because of the resistance of its people to leave and the sense of community they feel for each other. My father slipped through the region's influential grasp on its progeny without cutting loose the strings that tied him there allowing me to experience the bond, palpable as a roaring bonfire, between people and place, that even a young child could sense.  The adult child continues to bear witness with awe even if an excess of fantasy infuses her station as an outsider looking in.

My father grew up in the town of Gramercy, a scattering of narrow streets compressed between the river and Main Street, in the shadows of the Colonial Sugar Refinery.  The McKim, Meade and White powerhouse rose majestically near the river on the site of the old Golden Grove plantation with a garden of distinguished company housing spilling along the grounds along with a company pool that opened its cooling waters to the locals in summer.

The Gramercy of Dad's childhood remains vivid in his memory and during long visits in Asheville, mornings on the front porch of my home pass idly as we sip coffee and cover an array of topics from current events to the lastest in grandchildren entertainment.  Our slow, thoughtful conversation always turns toward Gramercy, a setting both familiar and foreign to me. Dad weaves stories in the same house where I crowded with cousins around the same clawfoot table where he sat with siblings and passed around the same mouth watering home grown vegetables but from a time and place I can't quite conjure. The narrow street didn't always have a name and began as a path where Dad took turns with his brothers bringing the family cow to the levee to graze for the day and then bringing her back home again for the night. Dad's descriptions of the house always include a cistern and sometimes an outhouse. He explains the process of making and maintaining the mattresses they crafted with Spanish moss for the bed that he shared with his brother in a crowded room. I can't help but envision my Dad and my uncles as their adult selves sleeping together in the small, middle bedroom, telling jokes.  (Dad and some of his brothers are pictured here.  A short visit  with them together and it will soon be evident that they believe the only people funnier than each other are themselves.)

 

The Gramercy of my childhood centered around my grandparents' house. The porch swing where I'd sit with my siblings resembled the porch swing that my grandfather made that sits on my deck. We'd wait for aunts, uncles and cousins to pour from cars for Sunday dinner.  Relatives arrived in droves, kissing and posing unanswerable questions before heading inside to greet the older folks.  The kitchen, warm from the busy stove and oven emitted an intoxicating scent of cypress and Memere's cooking that wafted to the porch each time the door opened.  Aunts and great aunts along with a few uncles kept my grandmother company as she prepared meals for dozens and their heavy Cajun French accents filled the room with a flowing conversation. The scene could have been any one of a thousand Sunday afternoons at that house where the numbers increased to twenty nine grandchildren and then to even more as they began to marry and start families.  I envied the close proximity my cousins had with each other, making the hour and a half long drive from our house a cross-country trek. My aunts ran into each other at the grocery and the beauty parlor.  My cousins attended school and played sports together and my uncles helped to build each other's houses. They all saw each other at church on Sundays. And they seemed to know everyone else that lived there.

As a child I walked up the street where all of the houses faced the river instead of the road holding my Dad's hand.  The promise of climbing to the top of the levee that loomed like a mountain beyond us compelled me to accompany him as he visited with all of the old relatives who happened to be home. Aunt Inez and Aunt Ida remain vague images that dance in my head upon mention.  Dad prefers to reminisce about earlier times and the people who lived on the street during his childhood like Uncle Ben, Ta Tante and the grandfather who lived in the house on the River Road and fussed loudly in French whenever he saw Dad.

I followed my grandfather, tall and broad, still carrying vestiges of the ruggedly handsome man of his youth, through the rich, black rows of river silt as his large, gnarled hands filled brown paper grocery bags with creole tomatoes and firm, robust eggplants while my grandmother stood watch over large pots of snap beans with new potatoes and fresh butterbeans with shrimp in the kitchen.  Reluctant in later years to relinquish the feel of his fingers in the dirt, my grandfather would lean his cane against the fence and tend to the rows that my uncles mostly worked on his hands and knees. He'd thrust a grocery bag at me and encourage me to fill it with whatever I wanted to take home with me when I'd take the long way home from LSU to visit him. The house sat hauntingly empty  after my grandmother's recent death and neither of us wanted to be inside.

Dad recalls the countless adventures of his paper route that included out of the way customers in places that no longer exist where women sat shirtless on small front porches to cool off on hot summer days. I trace the inception of his dislike for dogs in stories that took him past long stretches of fields where clusters of houses now stand. Dad marvels at the distance he covered each day with the responsibility and freedom the paper route gave him.  He moves on to his time at the picture show, odd jobs he did for Old Lady Caire at the drummer's hotel, work at the Winn Dixie and his one hundred straight nights of work one summer at the sugar refinery that helped put him through college.

My mind navigates the area from the south where I grew up, and  follows the Mississippi River from the mouth to its source.  The river relinquishes New Orleans slowly and then intersects parishes with spiritual namesakes like St. John the Baptist, St. James and Ascension on its way to Baton Rouge. The sugar refinery, now Dixie Crystals, and the new bridge spanning the river announce the town of Gramercy in St. James Parish that spills into the town of Lutcher that spills into Paulina and so forth all of the way to Baton Rouge along the River Road. The series of small towns that line both sides of the river mingle with the oil and chemical plants whose structures extend tentacles to the river to signify a shipping industry still at work. Shell, Marathon, Kaiser Aluminum are some of the places that provided livings to generations of my family and are also possibly responsible for the health problems of the people who live  in "Cancer Alley", the area between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. 

Behind St. Joseph Church in Paulina lies a quiet village of its own, a silent testament to the area's past. A walk through the maze of grassy paths among whitewashed tombs, old marble markers and new granite ones reveal the same French and German names that might be found in a local classroom.  Occasionally on my visits home, Mom and Dad take me and the children to visit my aunts and uncles.  We can't pass the church without stopping. My children search for angels and centuries-old dates while I call on relatives with my father.  We find my grandparents, my godmother, my cousin and great-grandparents.  Dad points to his old football coach and relatives I never met.  I try to imagine him in the school yard playing or in his white First Communion suit as a pallbearer for a baby girl.  The day grows hot and we seek the comfort of air-conditioning.  The children, flushed and damp wonder if they'll die of heat stroke.  We are, after all, mountain people.