My Cajun Prairie

Shifting understandings of the Opelousas Country

Vernon Fuselier’s property in Eunice, which has been thoughtfully restored to a true Cajun Prairie ecosystem.

All of this started with Little House on the Prairie.

Well, kind of.

Growing up at the very end of the millennium and into the 2010s, I was a voracious reader. We lived in between rice and cattle fields in an unincorporated community called Vidrine, where things like satellite television and broadband Internet arrived long after it did for the rest of the world. My parents discouraged video games and mostly listened to the news on the radio, instead of music. But they were both readers. Before the digital age descended upon us all, books were mine—and my brothers’—most accessible art, most ready escape.

It's not that Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books were my favorites, or that they had some remarkable impact on me as a person or an aspiring writer. Actually, I remember very little about the plot or the characters or the craft of the thing.

But the setting, the landscape—sky stretched tight, blade to bud, river to river. The prairie. I can see it so clearly, the pioneers’ wagon trundling along, the grass green and shuddering. Something about that panorama burrowed its way into my psyche. Only now do I realize so clearly that it was because I recognized it, that it reflected my world. We didn’t use the word “prairie” to describe the flat, endless fields dotted with livestock or lush with rice, with soybeans—reaching into infinity. We called the place we lived the platin—a Louisiana French word approximating “flat, low land”.

When I was somewhere between nine and eleven, my dad read about a writing contest in the newspaper for kids my age. I named the story that resulted “The Secrets of the Prairie,”—an epic and a love story, with a magical heroine to boot. The main character meets her love, and tells him about her secret powers, all beneath the moon in a field that I still to this day imagine as the horse pasture behind my parents’ house. Before I did a “reading” for my fourth or fifth-grade class at school, my parents had to sit me down and ask if I had written that my characters “made love” on purpose. “Are you sure you didn’t mean, ‘fell in love’? Do you know what ‘made love’ means?” 

And that, friends, is how I learned what “made love” means.

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The prairie of that story, though, was still a Midwestern prairie. It was Wilder’s prairie. I did not know, then, that the place I lived—here at the heart of the South Louisiana region—has been called a prairie for centuries.

That realization came later, as part of the general unfolding that happened after I left Evangeline Parish at age eighteen—a gradual and fitful awakening to the chaotic and fascinating world beyond my little community, and ultimately, my understanding of that community’s place in this grand tapestry of history and culture. The Zydeco-Cajun Prairie. The Attakapas region. This is the land I grew up on.

This coincided with my first forays as a professional writer, and as someone who writes about home, about Acadiana. I dug into the history of my ancestors who settled here, distinguished them from the “Bayou Cajuns” to the east. My people were the “Prairie Cajuns,” the Acadian refugees sent to “the Opelousas Country” (originally the land of the Attakapas Indians) by the Spanish governor in 1765 to farm longhorned cattle. Who learned to control the land, to mold and shape it, while their bayou cousins reached into the murky waters and pulled out their bounties.

I learned, too, that I was more French than Acadian, actually, and that most of us here are. I learned the difference, and that we say we’re Cajun because it’s a better story.

In this land, which became St. Landry Parish, which was ultimately divided to create the new parish Evangeline, agriculture was king. After eight generations on this prairie, my Papa Wayne, a doctor, was one of the first in his family line to have an occupation other than farming. And still, even today at age eighty-four, he keeps a herd of cattle.

My Great Uncle Glenn LaHaye (the grown man furthest to the left), pictured with his wife, my Aunt Janie, and their two boys, my uncles Jody and Richard at the wheel, and two farm laborers. This photo was likely taken sometime in the early 1960s.

When I came to understand that Evangeline Parish was prairie, I romanticized it to nth degree. Visiting home from wherever I was living, I’d study that seamless, limitless reach to the horizon. The beauty of food being grown before our eyes so neatly, so green. It is true that there are no colors quite like those that emerge driving down Miller’s Lake Road at sunset, nothing but you, this road, those fields, and the stray houses of the people who plant them. I’d recognized this beauty as soon as I was old enough to drive. I knew there was something that these wide expanses offered, something about the speed and the emptiness and the potential to run forever. I’d race around the curves and sing at the top of my lungs, windows open, daring the potholes to shake me. Blissful. Now, I had a name for it. The prairie.

There are many different ways to farm, of course. My great grandmother Emily grew up sharecropping and subsistence farming, the way many of the French-speaking people living in this rural, isolated region did. Almost everything they ate, they grew. But Aubrey, my great grandfather—he was raised by a man who knew how to make money farming. John LaHaye, my great, great grandfather is often credited as one of first major rice planters in Evangeline parish, where rice is now the number one crop.

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When I started writing this book, the prairie immediately emerged as a character—intricately woven into the history of my family, of Aubrey. Of me. These pastures and what emerges from them hold so very much, provoke so very much. They’ve fed us, held us, served as our backdrop for over two hundred years. They’ve inspired us. Failed us. We’ve claimed them and produced a fortune from them. We’ve lost them, and we’ve paid their price.

When people talk about Aubrey’s murder today, they talk about his farm. They talk about the bank where he worked, a farmer’s lender—gripping hands with the old men in overalls, promising they’d make it through this dreadful flooding season. He’d make sure of it. Holding the little community together with seed and grain and coin. Until he was killed. They talk about the land, and how after he died, we lost so much of it.

People talk about the Prairie Cajuns and the Bayou Cajuns. Aubrey was a Prairie Cajun through and through, but after ten days of search parties scraping the prairies, they found his body in a bayou.

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My relationship with the prairie is still changing. Since I turned in my manuscript and proposed that the words “Cajun prairie” be printed on the cover, I’ve learned that the prairie I’ve come to know, those gorgeous groomed fields—it’s actually not true prairie at all.

Drawn to the word as I am, I’ve frequently heard mention of the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society in passing—have seen their posts on Facebook, assumed they were simply a group of native plant devotees. For the March “Outdoors & Gardening” issue of Country Roads magazine, where I work as Managing Editor, I assigned Acadiana writer Jonathan Olivier a profile on the organization. (Read that story here!) In it, he quotes French adventurer C.C. Robin’s impression of the Cajun Prairie in 1803:

“Crossing the wide prairie, strewn with flowers, whose stems raise them to the height of the horse on which the traveler is riding, surprise follows surprise in this varied vegetation.”

I learned that the Cajun prairie my ancestors settled on is no more, that widespread agriculture and the oil industry and urban development have literally destroyed one of the world’s most diverse ecosystems, which for centuries before we arrived existed right here in the region I grew up in. That the agriculture that has sustained our community and our culture has destroyed something else that was precious. An absence impossible to notice in a world that’s always been so neatly groomed.

And suddenly, everything looks different.

Dr. Paul Guillory’s prairie, which was planted three years ago with rare native Louisiana seeds meticulously gathered from the few remaining coastal prairie ecosystems. Slowly, the soil depleted from generations of monoculture farming begins to heal itself.

So, for the past several weeks, I’ve found myself immersed—more than ever—in the prairie, and in the spirited movement to resurrect it. There’s a lot to read, a lot to learn. Things to grow. But last week, I was in Mamou—a handful of miles from John and Aubrey LaHaye’s old rice farms—with three scientists, a landscaper, a filmmaker, a farmer, and the son of the man who ate gumbo with Aubrey the night before he died.

Dr. Paul Guillory, the son of Aubrey’s friend Bruce Guillory, is the grandson of A.V. “Black” Guillory—who, along with figures like my great great grandfather John LaHaye, played a large part in converting the Mamou Prairie into pastures and rice fields. One hundred years later, Paul is currently undergoing the largest restoration project on the Mamou Prairie to date, converting over five hundred acres of his family’s land back to its native prairie ecosystem. Walking through the knee-high, and sometimes neck high, grasses and wildflowers, which are now in their third year of development, the scientists ooh-ed and ahh-ed, snapping pictures and sniffing leaves.

Finally, I’ve made my way to the true Cajun Prairie. And the thing is, it’s filled with hope.

Upcoming Appearances:

April 22: As part of Baton Rouge’s annual Delta Mouth Literary Festival—hosted by LSU’s English Department, The Southern Review, New Delta Review, and the English Graduate School Association—I’ll be taking part in a reading and Earth Day panel discussion on the topics of Louisiana bodies of water, joined by Louisiana poet Alison Pelegrin and moderated by Dr. Chris Barrett from LSU’s English Department. The panel takes place at noon at the LSU Coastal Ecosystem Design School, and is just one of the festival’s many exciting events this weekend, featuring a slate of remarkable writers I’m honored to share space with.

Book Announcements:

We’ve got cover news! My design team at Mariner Books has officially commissioned Grand Coteau-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker Olivia Perillo—whose work has been part of the metaphorical mood board for this book for ages. I’ve had the privilege of working with Olivia on a number of occasions through my work at Country Roads, including for these Evangeline Parish stories:

The Holiday Lounge: On the Mamou Prairie, a portal to parties past

Stories from the Hidden Cemetery: In Point Blue’s pauper’s graveyard, little legends live on

See more of Olivia’s work, which includes two incredible documentaries on Louisiana life and culture, at oliviaperillo.com and honestartproductions.com, and give her a follow on Instagram at @olivialight. I can’t wait to share what she creates for our biggest collaboration yet!

In Other News:

This week, Country Roads magazine’s new podcast, DETOURS, officially launched its first episode! With my cohosts James Fox-Smith and Alexandra Kennon, I have been working my tail off learning how to tell stories well through this new medium (and reluctantly getting used to the sound of my own voice on a mic). If you’re interested in learning more about my day job, and my journey as a writer and editor—this episode tells all, including the story of how our magazine got its beginnings via deer stand gossip. Find (and subscribe to!) the podcast on Spotify and Amazon Music, or directly (and with shownotes!) on the Country Roads website. Or right here: