There’s something about the swampy, steamy landscape exuding an earthy, organic perfume from the wetlands that grabs you in southern Louisiana’s Cajun Country. The state’s marshes have always conjured up images of alligators lurking, slimy creatures slinking and voodoo spirits emanating from the murky wilds.
Louisianans have long lived peaceably amid the swamps, capitalized on them and even invented a name, bayou, for the marshy, sluggish channels that connect the wetlands. Combine this watery wilderness with friendly small towns, crawfish boils, oyster bars and dance halls and you’ve got Cajun Country.
Acadiana, 22 parishes of swarmy Louisiana, is in the 150-mile Atchafalaya Basin, the nation’s largest river wetland, a complex of floodplain forests, cypress-tupelo swamps, backwater lakes and bayous. In Cajun country, nature inspires savory cuisine and rollicking music (Remember “Shrimp boats are acomin’. There’s dancing tonight”?), dishes, like slow-cooking gumbos and etoufee, a shrimp or crawfish stew. Chefs take pride in combining multiple ingredients that gurgle, simmer and emit enticing aromas.
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In Lafayette, the unofficial capital of Acadiana, Spanish moss dangles from the live oaks, azaleas bloom year round and alligators are part of the culture. The city earned a Conde Nast “dark horse” designation in 2015, as a “gem … waiting to be discovered,” a “cornucopia of cultural curiosities found nowhere else on the planet.”
“If you want to know Cajun culture, this is the place to come,” Dianne Monteleone, a former Lafayette history teacher, maintains. Cajun music seems to spill out of the dance halls, clubs and restaurants and bounce off front porches. Locals twirl around the floor to zydeco, fast-paced music featuring an accordion, fiddle and triangle, sometimes a guitar and washboard. Dance is the universal language of the region, some say. Here, the swamps, food and music intermingle.
Exploring Cajun Country
Cajun Country is a potpourri of French, Spanish, African and Caribbean traditions and Creoles, people rooted in a mix of French, Spanish, Africans and American Indian culture and history.
Lafayette’s Acadian Cultural Center recounts the Cajuns’ story through exhibits, rangers, a film and boat tours. The Cajuns were originally French colonists in a region of Nova Scotia called Acadia. When the British expelled them in the 18th century, one group was drawn to Louisiana because of its French history. After many decades of suppressing their heritage (speaking French in school was stigmatized, a sign of ignorance), Cajuns found a renewed pride, with food and music front and center.
Vermilionville is a 23-acre, living history, folklife park that preserves Acadian, American Indian and Creole cultures from 1765 to 1890. In traditional Cajun homes, artisans spin cotton, carve wooden decoys, make cornhusk dolls and weave palmetto leaves. The dance hall has a jam session every Saturday and a dance every Sunday.
Lafayette’s Dutch-Romanesque St. John the Evangelist Cathedral offers a handout, the “Prayer for Safety in Hurricane Season”: “… the Gulf, like a provoked and angry giant can awake from its seeming lethargy … yearning for a stormless eternity.” In earlier times, parishioners probably prayed for those Union soldiers to abandon their camps on the church’s grounds, under the now-500-year-old, 126-foot-high St. John oak. One limb weighs around 72 tons.
On Avery Island, 28 miles south of Lafayette, Paul McIlheny, great-grandson of founder Edmund McIlheny, manages the 70,000-square-foot Tabasco Pepper Sauce Factory, which every day spews out 700,000 bottles of the signature sauce. Still made as it was in 1868, it’s now sold in 160 countries. Visitors learn how it’s made as hundreds of bottles jiggle along a conveyor belt being filled and capped. There’s a tasting bar of samples not on most grocery shelves, like garlic, chipotle and habanero. The Tabasco name? It means “land of the hot and humid.”
In Jungle Gardens, part of the Tabasco complex, visitors watch alligators prowling the lagoon and learn how to estimate the reptile’s size. Every inch from the eyes to the snout’s end roughly equals the total length in feet. The park is also home to armadillos, possums, raccoons, bobcats and plants from all over the world.
St. Martinville’s main attraction is in the graveyard next to the Mother Church of the Acadians, St. Martin de Tours, a statue of Evangeline, the fictional, Acadian heroine of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, who was separated from her fiancé, Gabriel, when the Brits deported her from Canada. Two adjacent museums, the Acadian Memorial and Museum and the African American Museum, draw parallels between two diasporas, the Acadians from Canada and Africans from West Africa.
“The great egrets come from miles around when they hear me sing,” claims Black Guidry, who conducts swamp tours and serenades through the mocha-tinted waters of Houma, the “Venice of America.” The alligators come too, teased by the raw chickens the captain hangs off the stern. Guidry plays a guitar and Cajun accordion to tunes like “Colinda,” which begins, “Allon, let’s dance, your mother is not here to chaperone.”
Gastronomy extraordinaire
“We live to eat,” Louisianan Whitney Breaux brags, raving about specialties like gumbo, jambalaya, oyster pie, shrimp remoulade, catfish Orleans, crawfish etoufee and alligator.
Like the people and the swamps, the food is a rich melange: tomatoes from the Creoles; file from American Indians; okra from Africa; rice from the Chinese; the roux from France. “If America is a melting pot, here in Acadiana and south Louisiana we are at the center of the stir,” wrote the Acadiana Gazette columnist Karl Breaux.
Marcelle Bienvenu sums up the devotion to good food in her Cajun cookbook titled “Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux?,” explaining that cooking is a passion and preparing and serving it are “an intimate form of communication.” Southern Living magazine dubbed Lafayette, the “Tastiest Town in the South” in 2012.
Food and music are the heart of year-round festivals, celebrations of cracklins, catfish, crawfish, frogs, okra, zydeco, shrimp, boudin, Cajun and Creole heritages and of course, the big blowout, Mardi Gras.
Cajuns have a vocabulary all their own, words like “lagniappe,” which means, a little something extra. In Cajun Country, you’ll find a whole lot that’s extra and extra special. And you’ll get “swamped” in all that’s Cajun.
Glenda C. Booth is a freelance writer who grew up in the Roanoke area and now lives in Northern Virginia.