Acadiana: Louisiana’s Historic Cajun Country – Book review
The pages of Acadiana: Louisiana’s Historic Cajun Country might as well be smudged with cracklin grease or the buttery debris painted on fingers by a thick wedge of crawfish cornbread from Café Des Amis. It is that authentic of a read, a romantic journey through South Louisiana to meet the people and feast on the architecture, the food and the music that makes the area one of the most exotically rural and historically rich regions in the nation.
Carl Brasseaux, who recently retired from his many posts at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, including director of the Center for Louisiana Studies and editor of Louisiana History, lovingly researched and wrote the book. Longtime architecture photographer Philip Gould contributed his photographs. Acadiana covers a lot of ground—22 parishes, actually, from Avoyelles and Pointe Coupee on down to Vermilion, Terrebonne and LaFourche.
Brasseaux set out to brush past the ubiquitous post card imagery of moss-draped oaks and investigate the true roux that makes the area so unique. Sure Acadian pioneers from Canada made their mark on the region, but so did Native Americans, African slaves, German Catholics, Lebanese Christians, Sicilians and the wildcats and roughnecks of the Texas and Oklahoma oil fields. It is this great cross-pollination that fascinates the author most, even as he and Gould take time to celebrate the artistry of the ornate St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church and Crowley’s Grand Opera House of the South in the same manner they recognize the quieter grandeur of a jockey straddling a dark steed on the bush track at Acadiana Downs or the gray cypress curve of a weather-beaten pirogue.
Acadiana’s 200 color images showcase the extant beauty of a lost-and-found world that sits just one tempting hour away from Baton Rouge, one that has live oak branches and winding bayous for veins and sublime indigenous sounds for a voice.
“It’s all French music,” Danny Poullard inked boldly on the toile bellows of his ruby red accordion in one of Gould’s more lively images. Poullard had been asked one too many times to explain the differences between Creole and Cajun music. Don’t fret about the details; just experience it, he seems to be telling audiences. Just listen.
This is a gorgeous coffee table book, if you can keep it there. It is bound to end up a travel guide, tossed in the back seat of a car gassed up and ready for Cajun Country, echoing Poullard’s sentiments: Don’t worry about the details; just go.
