About the Book
Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie
At 5 am on January 6, 1983, my MawMaw Emily answered a stranger’s plea for help. Standing at her doorstep, he asked if he could use her phone to call a tow truck. He’d had an accident. My PawPaw Aubrey let him in the house. “Come in, come in,” he said. Within twenty minutes, the man—armed with a knife—had left Emily tied to her bedframe. And he’d taken Aubrey with him.
For the next ten days, hundreds of Cajun men set out on horseback, four-wheeler, boat, and helicopter—scraping clean the backwoods, rice fields, and bayous of Evangeline Parish in search of Aubrey and his abductor. The FBI agents moved into my MawMaw Emily’s house, where they ate some of the most remarkable food they’d ever tasted, provided by a rotating crew of the local women, all of them constantly muttering Hail Marys—fingering rosaries in their pockets.
Then finally, on January 16, a ten-year-old boy stood upon a bridge crossing the Bayou Nezpique, staring down at what his mother was screaming was a body. His father was naming it, “That’s Mr. Aubrey, that’s Mr. Aubrey LaHaye. Oh God, it’s him.”
In 2016, when I was twenty years old, my dad told me this story, the story of how his grandfather was kidnapped, was murdered. I’d heard versions of it before, but this body has floated so very silently these past thirty-something years. These are not things that our family talks about. In this telling, my dad told me something else: “A lot of people still have questions about it all. I still have questions.”
HOME OF THE HAPPY (to be published April 1, 2025 with Mariner Books) follows my journey as I attempt to raise these questions, as I dare to try and answer them. Revisiting my family’s darkest hours, the ground beneath me shifts—shaking my grasp of who I am, where I come from. Against the backdrop of my paradisiacal childhood growing up in a parish named for an Acadian woman who lost everything, I allow myself to see, for the first time, the traumas of this prairie, the blood beneath the rice fields that for a time, gave us everything.
Over the past six years, this story has consumed my life. It’s transformed truth into something liquid, something elusive; me into a skeptic, an obsessive. It’s shaken my belief in justice and shattered my trust in memory. And it’s brought me home, to that vast and mysterious Mamou prairie, in more ways than one.
About the Newsletter
In the year leading up to my book’s publication, I’ll certainly be using this space to post updates, milestones, and announcements on all things HOME OF THE HAPPY.
But I hope to also use these emails as a chance to deepen the reader experience, to explore with you the process of writing this book, to share behind-the-scenes stories from my reporting, introductions to key characters, and celebrations of the French Louisiana history and culture that breathes throughout the story.
Consider this an “Insider’s Guide” to HOME OF THE HAPPY, a collection of more intimate ramblings from a Cajun writer obsessed with folklore and family history, and with a penchant for true crime.
About Jordan
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot is a writer and editor based in the Acadiana region of South Louisiana. A graduate of Louisiana State University and the recipient of the 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction, her work has appeared in regional and international publications including inRegister, Atlas Obscura, and the Oxford American. She was a Writer-in-Residence at NUNU Arts and Culture Collective in Arnaudville in 2022 and 2023, and a panelist at the annual Society of Professional Journalists Conference in 2021. Her work has been published most extensively in the Louisiana culture magazine Country Roads, where she currently serves as Managing Editor.
