This is the second of a three-part installment recounting a trip I took to Louisiana 14 years ago. Since travel this year is either perilous or completely joyless, I have stayed home instead of making my annual migration to Lake Charles. The three posts were copied mainly as written from my farm journals. 

Cold Dixie longneck in hand? Or maybe a freshly made Sazerac? Then let’s go.

My trek across Northeast Louisiana culminated in spending an unremarkable night in Pineville. Pineville is just across the Red River from Alexandria — the city at the center, though not the heart, of the state. This morning, I woke up early and left the pinewoods and Pentecostals behind, crossed over the river, and turned left on LA 1.

I start the day by working my way through the river district of Alexandria, where the old warehouses, juke joints, and shotgun houses gradually give way to middle-class black neighborhoods on the south side of the city. LA 1 winds alongside the Red River on the way to Baton Rouge. Like all small highways ghosted by the interstate system, this one is infinitely preferable and more soul satisfying to drive, leaving me plenty of time to absorb the landscape and history.

After his defeat at Mansfield in April of 1864, General Nathaniel Banks and his army retreated south on the river, with the plan of regrouping at the Union-occupied stronghold of New Orleans. Unfortunate for Banks, however, the massive flotilla of boats presented a 200-mile slow-moving shooting gallery for pursuing Confederate troops. Four of the six great-great uncles on my mother’s Lewis side participated. (The fifth uncle had died in the bloody Mansfield engagement. The sixth son, my great-grandfather, was too young to enlist and instead carried mail for the Confederate government.) The Northern loss to the smaller and outgunned Southern army — most Louisiana regiments fought with hunting shotguns loaded with buckshot — left Banks in disgrace, and he hunkered down in New Orleans for the duration of the conflict, consoled with the old-world comforts of that city.

A few miles out of Alexandria, I turn onto a remnant of the old river road. The route is a carriage’s width and the area sporadically settled. Modest homes with large gardens, flocks of chickens, horses, and pecan orchards are all overhung with live oaks and Spanish moss, signaling the transition into Acadiana. The beauty and serenity of the river and levee have me thinking, I could live here.

It is April and the first hay has already been cut and is laying in the fields. At 7:30 in the morning, already hot, I have the window open to smell the rich curing of the forage.

The river road will continue on to the southeast, but my destination points elsewhere. I turn off on another small road and head across Rapides Parish, through the small towns of Latanier and Lecompte, where I stop for pie at Lea’s Lunchroom. At the risk of starting a fight, let me just be clear, the piemaker’s art is most evidently on display when making an old-fashioned meringue. A covered crust pie is all fine and dandy, but let us see the steep white waves of meringue with high brown peaks atop banana or coconut filling and we soon separate the men from the boys. That Lea’s is in the Louisiana Food Hall of Fame for its pies — which, shall we all now admit, is several orders higher than being in the Ohio Food Hall of Fame — makes it worth the stop.

As the waitress sets down my coffee with a “breakfast” slice of coconut pie and “honeys” me, I’m reminded of a bit of family lore. Aunt Jo (she of the recent 100^th birthday) tells the story of dining at Lea’s with her parents and sibling in the late 1920s, when her younger sister, Lucille, got up and danced the Charleston, to the amusement of one and all. [For those who knew Cille, they will know that dancing seems quite at odds with the more severe Baptist temperament she embraced in later years (starting from, say, age 8 until her death a few years ago).]

Back in my truck, I continue my journey. From here on, the land becomes flat again and the rice and crawfish fields begin to appear. My maternal grandfather was one of the early adopters of planting rice in flooded fields. He raised Early Prolific and Blue Rose varieties on 359 acres. Following the October 1929 Great Crash, he had $200 cash left over after paying the Federal Land Bank. He lost the farm soon after, then supported the family by working for the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Depression and later as a rice broker. His oldest daughter, my aunt, said he always regretted not being able to return to farming.

It is 11 a.m. as my truck rolls into Crowley, and I stop and ask for directions to the old Old Crowley Cemetery. I buy some flowers and head off to find my grandfather’s and grandmother’s graves, as well as those of his parents, my great-grandparents, all of the Roberts name. I tramp the cemetery for an hour in 90-degree heat. I come away as wilted as the flowers, yet unable to find the graves.

South from Crowley, I head for Lyons Point, a couple of dozen miles short of the gulf. It is here that on the night of September 27, 1819, 14 pirates of Jean Lafitte sailed up the Mermentau River and then up Bayou Queue de Tortue before attacking the plantation of my fourth great-grandfather, John Lyons. An article appeared on October 22 of that year in the New Orleans Courier, giving details of the raid and identifying marks on the slaves captured. There is a wealth of information on this particular raid, because it was a direct challenge to the authority of the new owners of Louisiana. The U.S. Navy dispatched the schooner Lynx to chase the villains. The Lynx caught up with them at Lafitte’s headquarters at Galveston Bay (then part of the Texas Republic). Lafitte hung the leader and turned over the rest of the men in a show of cooperation, disavowing any connection with the crime. He did, however, arrange for his lawyer to defend the men in New Orleans. The stolen slaves were returned to their owners and continued in slavery.

I leave Lyons Point (nothing to see now but a crossroads) and drive on toward Lake Charles. Passing through the community of Mermentau, I see a dozen pickups parked outside of C’est Bon, reminding me that it’s been a long time since Lea’s breakfast pie. I pull in and am soon eating both a plate of crawfish étouffée and a bowl of chicken sausage gumbo.

I finally arrive at my father’s home in Lake Charles in the early afternoon. My younger brother, Daniel, and I have coffee and talk until other siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews arrive. I spend the evening catching up on the family news before we all decamp for dinner at Pat’s of Henderson.

Driving the backroads of Louisiana is to wash in the rivers of time. The heroes and the villains are often related; indeed, they are often the same. Nothing is permanent in this landscape except the waters; nothing is stable, but all is of value; everything is kept, including the pasts.

No one leaves this state, even when they do.

………………………………………………………………

The next day I surveyed the damage from Rita (the previously posted Part 3 in this series).

……………………………………………………..

Reading this week: Lessons from History (Will and Ariel Durant) and The Culinary Plagiarist (Jason Peters). The latter is a cross between John Mortimer’s Rumpole series and Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour, and possibly the randy lovechild of P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is certainly mine.