9.
I believe Louisiana gets a bad rap.
I don’t want this story to add to it, though I know it will, because people often discount what we say here. We are relegated to a different human standard in the South, it seems, lower than the majority of this great nation, as if all our current tragedies are somehow payback for our unfortunate past. You may hear, for instance, something like, “Yes, it is a shame those folks in New Orleans drowned. But why didn’t they just evacuate?” Or, “It is terrible about that boy being shot, but I’m sure you’ve heard about the race problems there.”
Another catastrophe? Another injustice? Forgive me if I don’t look surprised.
This bothers me. It bothers everyone in the South.
So, in case you don’t yet know, let’s get this out of the way.
It’s hot here, yes. It rains and it floods.
If you say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” it’s because you’re from some other sunny place where you thought it was hot. It’s both the heat and humidity. It’s okay. You’ll survive. There are ways to get along.
One thing you do is amplify the pleasure of meals. Three times a day you sit down with friends or family who, if you’re lucky, are often the same. You take a break from the heat. You set a napkin over your lap and you can’t believe the utter joy. This tomato might just save your life, the cool fruit of it, that cold beer or iced tea your salvation. This is not gluttony.
You eat this way for a reason.
When everything else is burning, sweating, beaten down by a torturous sun, only your tongue can be fooled. So you tease it with flavors like promises, small escapes from a blatantly burdensome land. You offer it up sharp spices, dark stews, iced cocktails. Anything you can think of to do.
There is a saying in South Louisiana that “when we eat one meal we talk about the next,” and this is true. Who wouldn’t? In this imagined menu lies a future, a forecasted life, a community, perhaps even a weekend full of cheer and good food. What should we cook on Saturday? you wonder. Yes, honey, yes, darling, believe me when I say that sounds good. And at the house across the street, a similar family is doing the same. Perhaps a Sunday spent over a pot of beans. A lunch of hot po’-boys wrapped in butcher paper. It is also an unwritten rule that we don’t talk politics at the table. This is not because we’re dumb or old-fashioned or just too polite, but rather because we see right through it.
Middling stuff, the world. Nothing worth mucking up a fine meal.
And so the soul of this place lives in the parties that grow here, not just Mardi Gras, no, but rather the kind that start with a simple phone call to a neighbor, a friend. And after the heat is discussed and your troubles shared you say man it’d be nice to see you, your kids, your smile. And from this grows a spread several tables long, covered in newspaper, with long rows of crawfish spilled steaming from aluminum pots, a bright splash of red in the blanketing green of your yard. It is food so big it must be stirred with a paddle. You gather around this. You worship it. There is nothing strange about that.
Only the unfortunate don’t see it this way.
When I was in my twenties, I had a short-lived friendship with a fellow from Michigan. He had moved here for college, and so I bragged to him the way that all of us down here do, about our food, our hospitality, those mantles we cling to. I invited him to a friend’s party in the Garden District of Baton Rouge, a neighborhood full of old majesty and wraparound porches. Our host, one of the cavalry of great unknown cooks in this state, slaved all day over a steaming pot of crawfish. He offered my friend local beer and iced watermelon, anything to ease the day’s scorch. Then, when the table was piled high with boiled corn and potatoes, spicy crawfish from a pond not too far away, my friend backed away from the crowd. Dig in, we all said. We’ll show you how to peel.
He was polite but did not budge, insisting that he just wasn’t hungry.
“Your loss,” we said, and we meant it.
Later, in the car, he told me that he couldn’t believe I had eaten that.
“They’re mudbugs,” he said. “You guys were just eating a pile of insects. It’s more disgusting than I thought it would be.”
I did not begrudge him his idiocy. Instead I explained to him that the crawfish is technically a crustacean, no different biologically than the lobster he’d likely ordered at the finest restaurant in Ann Arbor, the term “mudbug” a misnomer. What he’d witnessed, I told him, was great luxury on a miniature scale.
“All I saw were bugs,” he said. “All I saw were drunk and sweaty people, sucking on the heads of dead insects.”
This is no small point.
It is this type of wrong-ended telescoping that gets Louisiana in trouble.
When I was a boy, for example, I played football with Randy behind his house. We set up end zones between twin oak trees in the back lot and used rows of bright yellow ragweeds as our boundary lines. We drew up plays by tracing our fingers through the thick grass and imagined scores of rabid fans there watching. We hiked, spun, dodged, and threw tight spirals to each other through the hot and heavy air. We dove and we caught. We scored and we celebrated. On one particular day, Randy punted the ball and it careened off his foot. It hit a tree and bounced into the small swamp behind our properties, covered at the time by a thin layer of green algae. Together we stood at the banks of this swamp, a place our parents told us not to go, and we were wary of snakes. We watched the football float in the still water, a child-sized football, mind you, for we were children, and we knelt in the mud to catch our breath. We tried to think. Before we could devise a way to retrieve it, we saw a nutria, a large swamp rat that looks like an otter, swim up to our ball through the muck. It nosed the thing, watched it spin around in the dark water, and it ate it.
Now go into the world and tell this story.
No one will ask you the rodent’s history, how legend has it that they were brought here from Argentina by the McIlhenny family, the founders of Tabasco, to be bred for their fur on Avery Island. So you will not get a chance to tell the epic tale of the hurricane that is said to have followed this event, allowing two of these rats to escape their cages like some brave and famous lovers and start a family in an unfamiliar land. The listeners are not interested in that. They do not see these animals setting off into the wetlands like pilgrims, like our own ancestors, to whom we owe a great debt. Nor will they see the two happy boys like me and Randy in this story, with bright glowing eyes and big hearts, witnessing a spectacle as bizarre to them as it would be to you. Instead, your listeners will only reaffirm to themselves what they previously thought about Louisiana: that it is a backwoods place with huge rats in the algae, some wild nightmare they’re glad not to face.
As another example, it once rained so hard in my youth that the swamps behind Woodland Hills backed up. It looked like we lived on a lake. Piney Creek Road itself also flooded, and our proud houses stood like chalets on some muddy gulf. For two days we watched snakes cruise the water. We watched our family dogs splash about like children. We threw fishing lines from the tops of our driveways and we waded with our poles into the lawn when the hooks got stuck on the concrete. We ate canned foods and drank warm Cokes. When the rain stopped, Old Man Casemore launched his aluminum boat right from his carport and trolled up and down the street like our own private Coast Guard, delivering us food that he’d made. Then the water receded and normalcy returned.
I imagine that many children in South Louisiana have stories similar to this one, and when they grow up, they move out into the world and tell them. This is not the problem. It is the way these stories return that dog us, the way they are altered by the outsiders who hear them. A man from California once asked me, for instance, if I rode to school in a boat. A woman from Des Moines said, “What was it like? Growing up chasing gators off your porch? It sounds horrible.”
It isn’t like that. I promise.