My wife’s mom’s family is from Louisiana, and that means absolutely everything you would think it would mean. It means her Granny always has some gumbo or etouffee going in the kitchen. It means that while the family sits around the table eating the gumbo or the etouffee, the conversation runs from the cousin who’s at LSU to the upcoming birthday of the priest of the local church to “Big Mike, you remember Big Mike? Oh yeah, cher, you know, his brother used to live next door to the woman who used to sew the covers for the pews of the church. She was the one that had the son who went into the army and married that real pretty Vietnamese woman, and they live over to Lafourche Parish now. She runs a pet grooming business now and Lord but she talks so fas’ I can’t unnerstand a ting she say.” It’s that kind of Cajun family (or Acadien family; there was some disagreement as to which is the more accurate term). Several years ago, someone in the family gave my wife copies of old pictures of family members. These are black and white, stiff cardboard pictures of Cajuns with straw boaters and parasols, having a picnic in a swamp somewhere, the Spanish moss cascading from the huge oak trees in the background. We don’t actually know who these people are, just that they’re family, and that they were picnicking well before Henry Ford delivered his vision to the country.
Lately, my wife has become interested in researching her family’s history, and finding more old pictures of Cajuns. So we arranged to go visit her Granny in Louisiana, scan a bunch of old family photos, get the stories behind the pictures, and go find where a bunch of her distant relatives are buried. Of course, it’s Louisiana, so any of those relatives that weren’t washed away in some flood or other were not so much buried as entombed. Apparently caskets that are buried in Louisiana have a bad habit of floating down the street during a flood, so people there put their loved ones instead in an above-ground burial vault. So over the Fourth of July weekend, instead of grilling hamburgers and drinking cold lemonade, we were prowling through old cemeteries in southern Louisiana and drinking lukewarm Gatorade. But the names, oh man the names…
We had a list of names we were looking for, names of people we knew were in her family and that we were pretty sure were in the cemeteries we visited. Some of the ones we searched for and found were Pierre-Jean Bourg, Jean Baptiste Charpentier, Michel Morvent, Eugene Robicheaux and Francois Sevin. And that’s not seven, as in one more than six. That’s say-vaugh as in “I’m so French I can completely ignore the last letter of my name.” And then there were the names we saw and weren’t looking for, but were just too great to ignore. Being a compulsive list-maker, I now have this awesome list of Cajun-French names.
My niece, Delilah, just turned one a few days ago. Before she made the scene, my brother and his wife were searching for a name for her and decided they wanted an old-fashioned, more traditional, perhaps even retro name for her. They went with Delilah- a fine and lovely name- even though I suggested Lula or Pearl. Well, if little Delilah ever gets a littler brother or sister, I have a list of names for him or her that are real doozies.
My folks named me Matt after a character on ‘Gunsmoke’. Okay, that’s fine, but do you have any idea how many Matts were born in the early 70’s? Lots and lots and lots. But how many times are you in a public place and you hear “hey Ulinor” or “well if it isn’t Junius, you old sonofagun”? Or say there’s a woman who, well- she has a great personality. But her name is Etienne or Justillia or Clothile. Or Eufrozine. I mean c’mon, she’d have to have an eye in the wrong place or have too many ears not to be cool with a name like Eufrozine. That’s just instant cool points.
So we huffed and sweated our way through cemeteries that featured brilliant, freshly painted tombs and headstones at the front, and older, more ornate, crumbling tombs toward the back of the cemetery. The new, clean white tombs were in perfectly straight rows, like a warehouse for, you know, dead Cajuns.
Searching those tombs for names from the list of family names we had became some sort of an incredibly hot, tortuous march: step, step, look to the right, sweat, step, step, look to the left, sweat. Between and behind the clean white tombs were the older graves and tombs that stood at odd angles, where weeds were allowed to grow around the grave markers…
…or even on them.
These are the really interesting parts of the cemetery. These older tombs and headstones (and here’s your plant tie-in) had a mosaic of moss and lichen growing on them.
Spanish Moss dripped off of every tree surrounding the cemetery, and ferns grew out of cracks and in corners.
Some of the really cool plants I saw growing were a Dwarf Palmetto and a white Verbena that had escaped whatever borders it once grew in.
In Thibodaux, there was this gorgeous, very dark blue Agapanthus… maybe it’s ‘Elaine’?
Pretty much anything you put in a cemetery will eventually be covered in lichen and mold.
Of course, you know the most popular kind of flower in a cemetery? Plastic.
Hey, you know why they have to put fences around cemeteries?
‘Cause people are dying to get in.
