Feufollet – Au Fond du Lac

In the Cajun people of Louisiana writers find what writers always find in the remote peoples of the world: pride of race, a healthy love of pleasure, a gift for spinning sorrow into beauty, ruddy confidence, a balance and a rhythm of life that seems enviable to the alienated wanderer.  I have gone to their parishes myself on several auto trips.

In the wrong mood I find their men crude and ribald.  But their women are at every age attractive.  A girl of 13 or 14 from the Acadian parishes can be almost impossible to look at in her beauty and passion.  Look her in the eye and it can stop you cold.  You will think on her for days.  Many of the older women spend the rest of their lives in the consequences of their first sexual blossoming.

Of their men I will say this: in a tight situation they are heroic.  None can argue they bleed life.

But above all it is this, you can feel it in their humor, in their food, in their music, in their religion, in their stories: they don’t treat life as though it’s too damned important.  Sad, beautiful, sorrowful, happy: it’s something, good and bad, take it as it comes, do your damnest.

– Vivien Kent, How To Travel (1947)

[HT our Virginia Beach office via Garden & Gun magazine.  As of last reading, all the comments on this video were perfectly nice (“she was my substitute teacher in 4th grade!”)]