Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives – Book review

After 10 years as a writer and editor at The Times of Acadiana and the Independent Weekly, Lafayette-based journalist and English teacher Reese Fuller is seeing 25 of his vintage stories newly published in a handsome volume by the University of Mississippi Press. Angola to Zydeco: Louisiana Lives is a brisk anthology of Fuller’s more poignant and impassioned profiles.

By simply changing the context of presentation, Fuller’s work from the past decade is reborn, allowed a sense of permanence and the chance to shed new light on his fascinating subjects—some dearly departed, others still thriving. Interviews include literary sketches of South Louisiana politicos and culture warriors and more thoughtful features on world-renowned icons like authors James Lee Burke and Ernest Gaines and painter Elemore Morgan Jr.

“I want (my kids) to know that although newsprint is flimsy and the words are usually forgotten as quickly as the ink hits the page, these people taught me something with their words,” Fuller writes in his introduction. “And more importantly, I want my children to know that their stories matter—just as much as anyone else’s.”

Fuller’s work here is not solely focused on individuals but shares a fair amount of his own experience as a fledgling writer facing wild, often intimidating incidents and institutions. His first assignment in 2000 is to visit the high-security bowels of Angola. From there he laments the closing of a longtime family grocery in Basile, bears witness to the post-Katrina Cajundrome crowds of displaced poor in Lafayette, and experienced anarchy and outrage in a protest-fueled Jena.

In all, Fuller’s filter for only the essential details is finely tuned, and he allows his subjects to share their ideas unencumbered.

“Most of us are such cowards that we’re afraid to stand up and believe in things,” Gaines told Fuller for his 2003 article Going Home. “We’re afraid to go against our peers, our race, or our family.”

As newspaper articles in a former life, these entries are not extensive portraits, but first impressions—creatively framed snapshots that, when read in sequence, feel like a flip book animating the Zydeco zeal of passion and devotion displayed by a clutch of creative thinkers and caretakers of Louisiana’s greatest natural resource: joie de vivre.