Some Stuff About Da Cajun Grrl

I was born on December 20th, 1963, in a place called Houma, La, which is about an hour drive south west of New Orleans. My dad's name is Richard, my mom's name is Shirley , and I have two brothers, both younger than me. Only one of my grandparents are still alive, my MawMaw LeBoeuf.

In case you were wondering, "LeBoeuf" is pronounced "La-Buff", and it's a Cajun French surname. Actually the original LeBoeufs came directly from France, where they were breeders of bulls for the bullfights in Spain, or so I've been told. But with all the other Cajun descendants I have, I am a Cajun.

And yet, I didn't even care about the history of my own people for most of my life. Actually, that's an understatement -- I didn't want to know, or be associated with my Cajun heritage. I avoided taking French in high school. I would quote the family line, "Well, my LeBoeufs came straight from France, not Canada, so I'm not a Cajun," conveniently forgetting about all the other Louisiana-born descendants in my line. And also quoting, "I'm German on my mother's side," also conveniently forgetting about that my German great-great-grandfather Dinger settled in Morgan City and married a Cajun woman, and his decendants married Cajuns, too.

But why should I have valued it? Until the 1980's or so, no one else much valued Cajunness either. The only relatives I knew in my childhood who spoke Cajun French were my MawMaw LeBoeuf and her mother "Grandma" Bourg, since they lived next door to each other. My MawMaw Dinger (nee Florence Boudreaux -- how much more Cajun can you get?) told stories of how she grew up in New Orleans, and only spoke French when she went to school, but soon all her memory of French was beaten out of her by her teachers. It's no wonder that I gave no value to my own heritage and tried to find tenuous ties to the Anglo culture.

This all started to change in 1990. I was attending the Summer Medical and Research Training program at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. For the first time in my life, I found people who thought the fact that I was a Cajun was cool! The years passed, and slowly I began to get more in touch with my culture, and to regret the fact that I had abandoned it.

Up until 1996, I had never lived more than a couple of months anywhere but Houma. That changed when I met my "wife" Suzie, through a correspondence club. (Yes, I am a lesbian.) She lived here in Shreveport, and when I came to visit I found I really liked the place. I've been living here, off and on, ever since. But as much as I like Shreveport, I have been experiencing culutre shock for the first time in my lkife. I've been to London 3 times, spent 2 months in Copenhagen, and have been (in the US) as far north as Ohio, as far east as South Carolina, and as far west as Texas, but all these times I was basically a visitor. "Shreveport IS in Louisiana," I said to myself. "How can it be that different?" But it is. Shreveport is part of the South, but it is also part of the Anglo-Saxon culture, and thus is very different than Acadiana.

So while I was hanging out last summer, waiting to start my first semester here at Centenary, I made a trip to the Shreve Memorial Library and got all the books I could about the Cajuns. The best of the lot was "Cajun Country" by Glen Pitre (of Belizaire the Cajun fame) (and some other people whose names I can't remember). It is a scholarly book, cites many primary and secondary references, and taught me many things. It made me realize why I (and many other Cajuns) have tried to dissociate myself from my own heritage, but why we really never can, or should.

  

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