"This culture and the culture I
grew up in New Orleans are on the surface very different", Sido said. She and Tyrone, Nico and Anne-Merry, and Pete and Merry were gathered after dinner in the family lounge of the Lodge La Belle Montagne. "And yet", Sido continued, "both Merry and I grew up in households where a version of French -- that in Louisiana is called Cajun French and here in the Northeast is called Acadian French -- was spoken. We both remember the stigma in school when we inadvertently talked in this language."
A December night light snowfall was visible out the window. "For as long as I can remember, along the Mississippi -- in the Bayou and in New Orleans -- my Father played clarinet in a Creole-Cajun jazz band, and my Mother played Zydeco fiddle. Meanwhile, here, way up North, Merry's Father is a stone carver who taught in an art school on the tributaries of the Winooski in Barre, VT, where sculptors from Italy, Spain, and French Canada gather to carve granite, and Merry’s Mother left the family farm to join the working women weaving culture of the textile mills on the Winooski River."
"Perhaps I am a link to our shared heritage," Nico said. "I grew up in France, but there are many in French Canada who also bear the name St. Denis."
"According to my Father", Pete Lafitte responded, "in 1604, the first Lafitte came from the Champagne region of France to the New World in the retinue of Jean de Poutrincourt. But Grand-Pere Lafitte claims that we are descended from a pirate, who defended New Orleans in the War of 1812. Perhaps both of these stories are true. It was when I sang this French children's song that Merry recognized me when I returned home from the World War II European front:
'Maman les p'tits bateaux
Qui vont sur l'eau…Ils font le tour du monde.
.
Mais comme la Terre est ronde
Ils reviennent chez eux'"
Outside, in this long Winter night, it was still snowing. "I will tell you the story of how many years ago Jacques Marie St Pierre Frazier was on the Saint Lawrence River, miles from his home in Acadia." Sido began. "He was a young man, alone in a Mi'kmaq-made boat when natives brought news of the destruction of his home in Grand-Pre and the expulsion of his family. The story of how he travelled on the Mississippi to Louisiana -- where in La Fourche des Chetimaches, he married a free black woman -- is written in the now lost diary of Jacques Marie St Pierre Frazier."