While sitting on
the front steps of a very modest home in the small Cajun community of Church
Point in Louisiana, Nolan Lavergne talked to his son about the happiness
and hardships of growing up on a tenant farm in rural St. Landry Parish.
His son was a rookie high school American History teacher who asked a seemingly
simple question: "Who was your grandfather?" The father did not
know. "Well, Daddy, I'm going to find out for you," said the son. Thus began a fourteen-year-long project culminating in
Lives of
Quiet Desperation, a look at the ancestry of Gary M. Lavergne,
a Louisianian of French descent. In addition to a substantial genealogy
with over 1,200 names, Lavergne includes a series of concise essays placing
generations in historical context. Special treatment is given to the forces
that helped to determine the migrations of various groups of French-speaking
people, and the pioneers who helped to build new worlds in Canada and French
Louisiana. Particular emphasis is placed upon defining and describing the
differences between Cajuns, Creoles, and other Louisiana French cultures. The vast majority of the ancestors were simple, poor, tenant farmers
with large cohesive families. the uncommon were pioneers of note. they
all faced considerable odds and led lives of quiet desperation.
This page is an excerpt of LIVES OF QUIET DESPERATION
and is made available to the public. However, Gary M. Lavergne retains copyright and
all rights are reserved. LOUISIANA'S FRENCH AMALGAM From Lives of Quiet Desperation by Gary M. Lavergne Louisiana's French heritage has been the subject of much
prose and poetry. Since Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem "Evangeline"
romanticized the Acadian Odyssey, numerous novels, works of historical
fiction, histories, documentaries and motion pictures of the recent past
tended to melt all French cultures into a generic "Cajun" culture.
Louisiana is very likely the most ethnically diverse of the fifty states.
Pockets of German, Irish, Czech, Anglo-Saxon, Indian, Spanish and Italian
communities can be easily located and identified. The general tendency
of writers is to add French to the above list of influences, and to equate
French with Cajun. As Glenn Conrad writes in Attakapas Gazette: "No
matter the interpretation placed on the content and status of the South
Louisiana lifestyle, there seems to be an iron-clad rule that the piece
must end by quoting a South Louisiana 'Cajun' saying, laissez les bons
temps rouller." Louisiana's historical French heritage is not that
simple; to homogenize it is to deny a diversity. The Center for Louisiana Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana
is engaged in ongoing research on identifying the cultural contributions
of the several groups of French-speakers who settled Louisiana in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Hopefully, their noble work will do much to analyze
the various cultures of the Louisiana French. In another article in the Attakapas Gazette entitled "How Acadian
is Acadiana?" (Winter, 1986), Conrad identified four distinct groups
of French-speakers to arrive and settle in Louisiana between 1700-1900.
The first group were soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and adventurers
who settled in Louisiana between the founding of the colony in 1699 and
the surrender of it to Spain in 1766. The Louis Lavergne from Quebec who
married Elizabeth Tomelin in New Orleans in 1725, and her father, Pierre
Tomelin, would be good examples of this category. Historically, Sieur de
Bienville, the founder of the city of New Orleans and the "Father
of Louisiana" would be a member of this class of Frenchmen. Many of
these Frenchmen were not interested in settling as much as engaging in
business, commerce or getting wealthy through investment and speculation.
Many, like Pierre Tomelin, came to Louisiana directly from France. Others,
like Louis Lavergne made their way to New Orleans from Canada via the Mississippi
River. In South Louisiana such family names as Delahoussaye, Fontenot,
Boutte, Soileau, Patin, Bonin, Lavergne and many others pre-date the arrival
of the Acadians and as such are not Cajuns themselves. These families and
their descendants who remained in Louisiana after cession to Spain were
generally referred to as Creoles. Today, the term Creole has additional
and varied meanings. Successive generations of Creoles were given over
to a lifestyle generated by a plantation or mercantile economy. The second group of French immigrants to Louisiana were exiled Acadians
from what was Acadie and is today called Nova Scotia. For approximately
five generations French peoples lived and worked in the frigid climate
of the Canadian maritime provinces. The Acadians were forcibly ejected
from their homes shortly after the Seven Years War (1756-1763) between
France and Great Britain. The forced migration has been called the "Grand
Derangement." The term "Cajun" originated circa the Civil
War and was used as a pejorative term until it was adopted by the Acadians
themselves. Genevieve Massignon's Le Parles francais d'Acadie is a helpful
source in identifying Acadian surnames, as is the 1714 census of Acadie.
Acadian names found in this genealogy include: Aucoin, Brasseaux, David, Guidry, Pitre, Benoit, Breaux, Doucet, Hebert, Poirier,
Bergeron, Broussard, Dugas, Lalande, Prejean, Bernard, Chaisson, Duhon, Landry,
Richard, Blanchard, Comeaux, Dupuis, Leblanc, Savoie, Boudreaux, Cormier, Foret,
Leger, Simon, Bourgeois, Daigre, Fournier, Lejeune, Sonnier, Bourque, Daigle, Girouard,
Martin, Thibodeaux, Trahan. Cajuns bitterly resisted attempts by other Frenchmen to make them a
peasant class. Social friction between Acadians and Creoles resulted in
an insularity for the Cajun culture for many generations. For a significant
period of time, Cajuns cooperated in the near suppression of their own
culture by not encouraging, even punishing their own children when they
spoke French in public or in school. They tended to be more rustic, engaging
in farming, fishing, and cattle raising. The third group of settlers to enter Louisiana were refugees from slave
insurrections on the West Indian island of Hispanola, especially that part
that is present-day Haiti. From 1793 and on into the 1830s, thousands of
refugees poured into New Orleans and spread across Louisiana. This group
of French speakers were so similar in culture to the original French settlers,
or Creoles, that they were quickly assimilated into that element of French-American
society. In South Louisiana some of the family names of this group would
include Domengeaux, Pecot, Sigur, and Sorel. The final wave of French immigrants to Louisiana came over in waves
during the nineteenth century after various upheavals in France. The Napoleonic
Wars of the early 1800s and the era of the Franco-Prussian War saw the
movement of thousands of French families from Europe to America, and Louisiana
in particular. Some family names from this group are Bloch, Faul, Petitin,
Monie, Coussan, and Croucet. These nineteenth century immigrants eventually
settled into a lifestyle of small business operations in tiny urban centers
of South Louisiana. As Conrad suggests, recent popular literature has done more than any
of many other factors to blur the distinctive cultural characteristics
of Louisiana's French-speaking groups and their descendants. The media
blitz that followed the "Cajun Craze" of the 1980s was compounded
by the French Louisianians themselves and several would-be historians.
Very often, articles, monographs, and books about "famous Cajuns"
contain references to persons who aren't Cajun at all. Many Lavergnes do
not know that they are not Cajun, but of Creole descent; it doesn't matter
because, like most Louisianians of this generation, they don't know the
difference anyway. Moreover, it doesn't matter because most twentieth century
Louisianians are much like the subject of this family tree, an amalgam
of all of Louisiana's French, plus much much more.
| Gary's Bio
|Before Brown| Worse
Than Death| Bad Boy From Rosebud |
Sniper in the Tower | Cajuns
|
