| Submitted by: Evelyn C. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 15 February 2005 |
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We started with the Wetlands Acadian Cultural Center. This had the history of the Cajuns in Louisiana back through the period when they were Acadiens in Canada. (The Acadiens were the first to call themselves something other than 'European colonials.')
The major periods affecting their history in Louisiana were 1755-1765 (Le Grand Derangement or The Great Upheaval, when they were expelled from British Canada), 1791 (when their numbers were increased by refugees from the Haitian Slave Revolt), 1916-1968 (L'Heure de la Honte or The Time of Shame, when they were forbidden to use French in schools and other places), and 1927 (the great Mississippi River Flood). The first period is what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about in his 1847 poem 'Evangeline,' which is much beloved in this area.
The displays use a lot of Cajun words, which is part of the culture, but it does make it more difficult to understand.
I learned that it's the prairie Cajun music that uses accordions, while in the bayous it is more country and western, and that there is French fiddle music, ballads, jazz, Cajun country, swamp pop, and renaissance Cajun music variations.
We also saw a video about hand-fishing in the bayous-not what we would have chosen, but interesting nevertheless. One thing it pointed out was that the bayous used to be clean and clear, but dredging in the 1930s for improved drainage ruined them. As someone said, 'We've ruined large parts of it trying to improve our life.' We also saw 'Cajuns-In Search of Our Roots,' in which Cajuns visited Acadiens who had returned to Nova Scotia.
The center talked about 'survival of a culture amid the plasticization,' but we can find only fast-food chains to eat at. I think plasticization has arrived.
We stopped in Houma for lunch at Tubby's Seafood (reasonable but not great gumbo once they reheated it from the lukewarm it was first served at) and for Mark to get a haircut. Tubby's also served tamales, not a Cajun food, but ubiquitous in the South.
We then drove past bayous (and an emu farm) on US-90 to New Orleans, and right through it to Jean Lafitte National Historic Park. This is the site of the 'Battle of New Orleans' (as in the song). Although it was a few days after the signing of the peace treaty for the War of 1812, it was not as meaningless as we had been led to believe. The treaty had been signed, but not ratified, and had the British won, they would have pressed for better terms.
The battlefield here is fairly small, this being a much smaller engagement than the Civil War battles we're following. The British flag here was flying at half-mast, but I assume that was for Princess Diana rather than the battle.
Returning through New Orleans, we passed an accident where an overhead traffic sign had given way and crashed onto the hood of a car. A few inches back and it probably would have been fatal, but the people seemed to have been able to get out of the car.
This would seem to indicate some decay in the infrastructure, and indeed when one gets out of the scenic French Quarter and the fancy downtown hotel area, New Orleans is a fairly run-down city, with neighborhoods that look as though they hadn't been painted or repaired in years. New Orleans has a very high reputation as a vacation destination, but that is only a small part of New Orleans.
We took I-10 W to Baton Rouge, where we found a Greek and Lebanese restaurant, Kabob's, for dinner. This probably wasn't difficult, since a newspaper article posted near the door said there were eighteen Greek and Lebanese restaurants in the Baton Rouge area. Perhaps it's Louisiana State University that does it.
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We started with a quick look at the Louisiana State Capitol, a thirty-four story building built during Huey Long's administration as governor. So perhaps it's only appropriate that it is also where Long was assassinated, as he was coming out of the Governor's Office on September 8, 1935. This is described in Unauthorized America, but there is in fact a small display and marker at the spot in the building. Long was quite a popular politician, building roads, dredging bayous (well, it seemed like a good idea at the time), providing textbooks for schools, and so on. He also made a good living at it, requiring all state employees to contribute a tenth of their salary to his campaign fund.
Baton Rouge also has its share of rundown areas. In fact, running north from the city is a road named Scenic Highway, which is full of slums and oil refineries. This becomes US-61, which does become more scenic on the way to Natchez, Mississippi. It also becomes more 'buggy'-we seem to have arrived during some sort of amazing bug season. The bugs are so busy mating that they aren't paying attention, and hit our windshield so frequently it sounded like rain (and required major windshield cleaning when we got gasoline). (You could tell the bugs were mating-either that, or Mississippi has some really interesting two-headed bugs.)
Mississippi is also hard at work on their 1987 road program. No, that's not a typo-the signs all say '1987.'
We continued on to Vicksburg, passing through Port Gibson, which Grant captured in 1863 and declared 'too beautiful to burn.'
After getting a motel room and having lunch at a fast food place called Grandaddy's (not part of a chain, so there are still a few independents around), we drove to Vicksburg National Military Park. We watched the video about the battle ('In Memory of Men') and picked up a copy of the audiotaped driving tour in the gift shop. It turned out to be well worth the $4.50, giving not only descriptions of what we were driving past on the sixteen-mile loop, but also background, readings from letters, and songs. (I think they were trying to be an audio Ken Burns.)
Vicksburg has something like 13,000 markers and monuments, not including (one assumes) the markers for the 17,000 buried in the cemetery there. There are informational markers put up by the National Park Service to show troop placement and movements, and there are monuments erected by the various states for their forces, smaller ones around the field for each battalion or regiment or whatever, and a big one as a memorial for those who died.
Vicksburg was a forty-six day siege, punctuated by a couple of major battles, which ended on July 4, 1863. So Vicksburg was simultaneous with Gettysburg and as critical as that battle, because the taking of Vicksburg gave the Union army control of the Mississippi River there and eliminated its use by the Confederacy to transport materials or men.
Since I'm sure Mark will describe the siege and battle in great detail (or you can look it up), I will not attempt to do so here. Nor will I describe every monument, though a couple are worth mentioning. Missouri's monument was designed to honor Missourians who fought on either side. Illinois's is the largest, being a round domed marble building atop a small hill, with the names of the dead inscribed inside. Ohio had several small monuments, with very striking scenes on them, throughout the battlefield.
There was also a 'Hebrew Cemetery,' physically surrounded by the National Military Park, but not part of it. It is also not connected with it, since all the burials in it seem to be after the Civil War. I guess it was established as a private cemetery after the Civil War but before the National Military Park was established, so it got to stay. It was unusual for a Jewish cemetery in that there were some angel-like figures on some of the grave markers, and there were flowers on some of the graves (and no pebbles).
We also saw the U. S. S. Cairo (pronounced like the syrup, not the Egyptian city). This was the first armored warship sunk by an electrically detonated mine (December 12, 1862). The 'U. S. S. Cairo Engine and Boilers' have been declared a 'National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark' by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1990. It is described as the 'sole surviving gunboat' of the Civil War, but so little of it is left, and in such poor condition, that the term 'surviving' seems an exaggeration.
We finished seeing the battlefield at 6 PM and then drove around Historic Vicksburg for a while before returning to the motel. What with driving and sightseeing during the day, and then planning and researching in the evenings, these are pretty full days.
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We started with a lot of driving, from Vicksburg through Jackson and Hattiesburg to Biloxi. During the drive from Vicksburg to Jackson, our car passed 150,000 miles.
We would have stopped in Jackson, but this was Sunday morning and everything of interest was closed.
We got more of the 'rain of insects' on our windshield. It seems to be through a belt across the South. We also saw more dead armadillos-they're not just Texas road kill. (In fact, we saw them in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.)
Just before arriving on the Gulf Coast, we saw a billboard for a 'Bible Outlet' located in a factory outlet area. I assume they carry Bibles from many publishers rather than being a single-manufacturer outlet. But since we had other plans, we didn't go there to check, or for that matter to answer an even more intriguing question: would the Bible Outlet be open on Sunday? Everything else was, including all the casinos. Casino gambling seems to be big along the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast and the Mississippi River.
People in the South are definitely different. Biloxi and the other Gulf Coast cities have long stretches of beautiful sandy beaches on the Gulf of Mexico, and free parking along the beaches, it was a beautiful hot Sunday afternoon, and the beaches were practically empty. Why? Well, one woman I asked said that people just don't go to the beach after Labor Day. This is very different from New Jersey.
Our stop here was Beauvoir, the last home of Jefferson Davis (http://www.beauvoir.org/index.html). He moved here in 1876 and lived here until his death on December 6, 1889. (Actually, he died in New Orleans while on a trip.)
There was a short film about Beauvoir and Jefferson Davis. After the Civil War, all the residents of the Confederacy got their United States citizenship back-except for Jefferson Davis. From then until his death, he was 'a man without a country.' (Since citizens of the Confederacy had renounced their United States citizenship, they had to be given it back.) Interestingly enough, Davis's Vice-President, George Stephens, did get his citizenship back.
While living at Beauvoir, Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy. Although he spoke for reconciliation, when his daughter became engaged to a Yankee there was such an outcry that she broke the engagement and never married, saying she wished to spare her father more difficulty. |
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