Esther Chilton

Please give a warm welcome to David Faucheux, my Guest Writer this week. He has kindly shared an extract from his book with us. Here’s some information about his writing background before you read it:

David Faucheux is a lifelong resident of Louisiana and currently lives in Lafayette. He attended Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he obtained a B.A. in English and later a Master of Library and Information Science. He has worked as a braille instructor and medical transcriptionist. With the encouragement of a friend, he began an audioblog, which he maintained for several years. He continues as a reviewer of audiobooks for Library Journal. His hobbies include dining out, listening to music, and learning new trivia. He has abridged his recent book Across Two Novembers: A Year in the Life of a Blind Bibliophile and hopes to have an audio version released by fall under the title Selections from Across Two Novembers: A Bibliographic Year.

He can be emailed at scopist65@gmail.com

Learn more about the book at www.dldbooks.com/davidfaucheux/

Roux and Remembrance

By

David Faucheux

“Brush your hair; they are messy.”[1] My maternal grandmother did not want any grandson of hers appearing in public looking unkempt. She had standards. Hair was always brushed before running errands in town or going to mail. That’s what she called going to the local post office for the daily mail—“going to mail.” When I asked her if there was anything in the mail, she knew what I meant. I wanted to know if I had any pale green plastic boxes from the library in Baton Rouge; I used a library that mailed out uniquely formatted 4–track, slow–speed cassette books to blind patrons. It made the summers pass for a bored teenager in the country.

Like the beads of a rosary falling through her fingers, thoughts of my grandmother cascade through my mind: the Charlie perfume that she wore to church; her many refrigerator magnets that secured her grandchildren’s drawings; Monday night Bingo at the American Legion Hall with her and her friends. They had the best grilled hamburgers there; I never missed going if I could help it. And then there were Mrs. Regina’s hot dogs at the Charenton Church Hall Bingos; they had the best. I tried not to miss going there, either. 

My grandmother could have made her living by her skill in ironing, producing the crispest Madras shirts and the best knife–edged blue jeans I ever wore. One person thought I had my clothes professionally pressed. She had grown up using heavy irons that had to be heated on the stove. She said that the men of that era wore white suits. Washing them on a washboard was arduous enough, but then they had to be ironed. It was easy to get soot on a suit being ironed. If it happened, the suit would be washed and ironed again!

Food was a big part of my memories. I loved her creamy white beans. She was very particular about freshness. She knew the new crop of beans came out in September. “Old beans from last year cook up yellow,” she often said, and waited for the new crop. She boiled them twice and tossed out the water; vitamin–rich cooking water be damned. Then she used a pressure cooker to produce this creamy effect. Late summer was corn soup time. She’d buy a bushel of corn from a local farmer. I can still recall her sitting and energetically brushing off the corn silk, then using a knife to cut the kernels off the corn cobs. That always intrigued me, but she never let me try. Likewise for the okra. She held each okra spear and sliced it into thin coins. I used to like looking at the openwork pattern inside each slice. The okra was then smothered for us to enjoy. Additional okra was cooked and frozen to be used in shrimp okra gumbo (think a thick, roux–based[2] soup) during Lent, as she never ate meat on any Wednesday or Friday during this season. Even now, I would never eat meat on Good Friday, lest her ghost come back to haunt me!

I remember her weekly Pokeno games.[3] When we appeared briefly at the start of ceremonies to say hello, the ladies loved to switch to Cajun French. We knew they were talking about us or gossiping about matters that little ears were not supposed to understand. I regret never learning the patois or dialect native to my culture, but all my grandparents told of being punished for speaking it at schools during the 1920s and 1930s. It was not a time of multiculturalism or inclusion. In some ways, it sounds as though my grandparents were recent immigrants to the United States, although many of our ancestors arrived here in the mid–18^th century.

I stayed with my grandmother during the day when in fifth grade I missed half a year of school recovering from eye surgeries. I’d do my schoolwork at the white Formica counter in her utility room while she prepared lunch for my grandfather and me, talked to her sister on the phone, or  kept an eye on her soap operas. I must have been more disciplined then.

My grandmother lived until 2006 and was the last of my grandparents. As long as she lived, I felt safe, protected from my mortality by a buttress of two generations. I knew she’d make 90; she did not. Whenever I smell lemon spray starch or the rich brown aroma of roux, I think of her.

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[1] In French, the word hair, or les cheveux, is plural. Sometimes traces of French lingered in my grandmother’s English or that of other elderly family members.

[2] In Cajun cooking, roux is a dark brown concoction made of flour and oil that provides a rich flavor base for stews and gumbos. It’s made blond for crawfish étouffée.

[3] For a description of Pokeno, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokeno_game.

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