Zemon-Davis:
Reversals … are ultimately sources of order and stability in a hierarchical society. They can clarify the structure by the process of reversing it. They can provide an expression of and a safety valve for conflicts within the system. They can correct and relieve the system when it has become authoritarian. But, so it is argued, they do not question the basic order of the society itself. They can renew the system, but they cannot change it. (153)
On her eighty-ninth birthday, Anne Laudun Mayfield asked God not to have to see another birthday. For the past three years, she was, she told me, a little put out. When everyone gathered for her ninety-third birthday this past June, we asked her what she thought of being ninety-three. “It’s just ridiculous,” she said. “It’s just ridiculous.” Funny when she was mad, or pretending to be mad, Aunt Anne was an independent soul who, in an almost contradictory fashion, seemed put here on this earth to remind us of the importance of being together.
Her life began along the road that stretches from Home Place to Weeks Island where she grew up in a family that eventually numbered ten children that had two fathers and three mothers. Perhaps it was there that she learned that all that mattered was love and being together, for she would reveal that, technically, many of her brothers and sisters were half or step-siblings. In her heart and in her stories, however, they were no steps, no halves.
There on Weeks Island, in the literal and figurative big house of her telling, she was reading one day on the porch when the mill boss came striding his way across the yard to see her mother. Seeing her reading, he stopped and asked her what she was reading. “A book,” she said. “Don’t you like to read magazines or go see movies?” he asked. “No,” she replied. “They’re all so silly.” He continued on his way into the house, but the next day word came that he wanted to pay for Aunt Anne to continue her schooling, and with that she took her first step out of the country and began the journey that would lead her eventually to Atlanta, where she worked for what was then American Motors, and where she would meet the love of her life William Mayfield.
Her time with Bill was all too brief, but in her estimation it was all she could have hoped for, and when he died, she brought him home here to Jeanerette, to be with her, and so that she could join him today.
From that moment over forty years ago until now, she became the great aunt that most of us knew her as. Her and Cecile became, well, Anne and Cile. They were a pair, intertwined in our minds, always together. If Anne ever regretted not having children of her own, she never spoke it. Instead, she seemed to rejoice in the love and attention that all of you had so much of that you blurred the line between mother or grandmother and aunt and great aunt.
I would be remiss in speaking here today—and I know Anne would want me to say it—if I didn’t publicly thank all of you for everything you did for her. Eddie, you and your children have my thanks and the thanks of everyone here for everything you did. She was not always the easiest of charges, and I know you sometimes felt taken for granted. I got to sweep in and be the special guest of the day now and then, but what you cannot have known was that how she spent time with me was telling me stories about you. All of you were her lights. She couldn’t read, and towards the end, she couldn’t even see to watch television, but she could listen and she could tell stories.
One time when I was visiting her, and I had finished reading her something, and I asked her to tell me a story, she told me that she didn’t have any new true stories to tell me but that she had some stories she told herself but that she made up. One involved a man who got lost in the woods, and one involved a doctor falling in love with a young woman. Things weren’t, she said, looking too good right now, but I shouldn’t worry, she assured me, things were going to turn out all right: the hunter would find his way out of the woods and the couple would fall in love and marry.
Things were going to turn out all right. And things have turned out all right. Anne Laudun Mayfield took what she had, time and love and stories, and she made a family out of them. Out of us. She’s telling stories to others now, and I think I can with some sense of certainty that in those stories things are going to turn out all right. Thank you, Aunt Anne, thank you for keeping us together, for telling us stories, for loving us. May God bless you and hold you close.
In the wake of the “great awakening” of French culture in Louisiana, there have been numerous offerings by “natives” to represent themselves. In the early phase of the process, many of these documents were scholarly publications looking to balance an historical record which seemed unaware that Louisiana owed much of its history and culture to the Continental European and African origins of a number of groups that populated south Louisiana from the colonial era into the post-Civil War era. In the second phase of the awakening, a number of authors — most notably those writing cookbooks — began to draw upon these roots consciously, often universalizing their particular experience of south Louisiana culture and history. Also arising at this time were number of publications which consciously treated various stereotypes — I’m thinking here of joke books and memoirs. All of these texts continue to play a role in what might be called the post-renaissance, or at least the post-awakening, moment in which we now reside, where a certain kind of sophisticated cultural consumerism has come to dominate the logic of understanding. I want to argue that this is a dangerous period for us, in which we face two paths, one which encourages a kind of “free play of signs” which may very well leave us consuming ongoing misapprehensions of our history and culture or one which seeks to go beyond the logic of easy consumerism.
As a number of scholars have observed, there have been two notable fluorescences in the written literature of French Louisiana. The first occurred in the years leading unto and following the Civil War, with the publication of Les Cenelles and the writing of the New Orleans Tribune poets.
1845: Les Cenelles published. 1860s: Tribune poets. 1980: Cris sur le bayou. 1981: Kein’s Gombo People. Acadia Tropicale.
Sometimes
even early in the day, we take our
brothers in our arms as we sing and
dance, forgetting we wear masks.
We get caught up in the act. We are
fire and air. We will not remember
until tomorrow our separateness,
and that we are also earth.
For the Cajuns and Creoles of south Louisiana’s bayous and prairies, masks are not metaphors, not figures of speech, but an active part of reality. The irony of masking in this context, as Darrell Bourque makes clear in his poem, is an activity who’s seeming purpose is to alienate us fro ourselves as well as each other, makes us more who we are as individuals as well as communities. Removing the mask then, becomes something far more significant that simply symbolic, as Creole poet Debbie Clifton makes clear in her “Nôte pas mon masque,” which is both an homage as well as a revision of James Weldon Johnson. In that poet, she reminds us that “truth that can drive you mad” may lurk behind the mask. But Clifton is not content to embody the complex historical realities that are both the legacy of the South in general and Louisiana in particular. Like Bourque and other south Louisiana poets, this is a personal matter and as such, she is free to revise historical precepts as she sees fit, as she makes clear in the poem “Renaissance” which begins:
Yes, I was his negress.
I am her.
and I will be her always.
Anytimes he wants me like that,
I am his negress.
What Cajuns and Creoles share is history and geography and they make full use of the latter in their work. It is almost as if by re-figuring the land, they perceive an opportunity to re-figure themselves. In poem after poem, Clifton and others re-imagine swamps, bayous, and marshes that so often as kinds of waking deaths in exoteric texts into places so fecund as only to be understood in glimpses.
In conversation Grandma Laudun noted about the future:
“It’s always coming. It never gets further, only closer.”
Some old notes on a yellowed slip of paper that were in my copy of Being and Nothingness. I am backdating this entry to 1986.