The Problem of All These Cajun Names
Pépère, PawPaw, Papa. Mawmaw and Mommee. Parrain and Nenan.
One of the first notes I ever received on the early drafts of my book was, “What is a Parrain?”
Writing the claustrophobic, eccentric place of Mamou, Louisiana for an audience who doesn’t know how to make a gumbo has been one of the most exciting challenges of this process. It reminds me of something my dad told me about when he went off to college in Baton Rouge, how it was the first time he realized the rest of the world wasn’t also “Cajun, Catholic, and conservative” (we’ll unpack all that another time).
As anyone who grew up in small town Acadiana knows, it’s a world unto itself—where if you look far back enough into the family tree, everyone’s your cousin. It’s a place where every kitchen you walk into smells a little like frying onions and holds special places in the cabinets for the magnalite, the cast iron, and the Hitachi rice cooker.
(Last year, I went down the Hitachi rice cooker rabbit hole—read the history here.)
It’s a place where when old men gather, they’re often speaking French, and where when old women gather they’re likely gossiping over coffee milk or praying the rosary—no in between. Where teenage boys arrive to the school parking lot early in the winter still dressed in camouflage, and gather in the evenings to replicate the ritual of their fathers: get drunk and burn a sauce. Where some of the most successful small businesses for miles around are the meat markets, ranked for the smokiness of their sausage, or the spice of their boudin.
Everyone who has ever moved away remembers the disappointment of discovering Squirrel Day is not a recognized holiday beyond Evangeline Parish, of being asked what? when you tell a puppy, or a baby, Awe sha.
One of the main issues during the copy-editing process of my book was that of names. There is a whole series of footnotes required to explain that just because this guy and that guy both are named “Soileau” does not mean they are related. The weed dealer with the last name Dupré is not (significantly, anyway) related to my grandmother’s Dupré side of the family. The sheriff’s deputy Eddie Soileau is a different Eddie Soileau than the businessman Eddie Soileau. And no, amazingly, it was not suspicious at all to the people in Mamou that the man who kidnapped my great grandfather said his last name was “Vidrine,” which also happened to be the last name of the Sheriff.
That there wasn’t a Fontenot until one of the last pages of the book is a true miracle—I graduated in Ville Platte with 59 people and approximately 15 of them were Fontenots (when I, little miss moving-to-New-York-and-never-coming-back, met and fell in love with a Fontenot in Lafayette years later, God laughed).
This isn’t even to speak of the pronunciation issues. An earlier version of this book was titled Secrets of the Nezpique—a name tossed because I was worried folks seeing it on shelves would pronounce it Nez-Peek instead of Nip-ee-kay. Footnotes help the reader along, navigating Vidrine (Vee-dreen) and Soileau (Swall-oh) and Pucheu (Pee-shoo). Ardoin (Ar-dwen), DeVillier (De-veel-ee-yay), and Rozas (Ro-zah).
But one of the biggest dilemmas in the editing process came with the question of how to title my family members. My relationship to the characters in this story name them Pépère, PawPaw, Papa. Mawmaw and Mommee. Parrain. But with an already sprawling family tree scattered throughout these pages, I had to ensure that readers wouldn’t confuse my grandfather with my great grandfather, that they knew exactly who MawMaw was. At the same time, though . . . how am I gonna go and write a sentence about Papa and call him “Wayne”?
Then there are the dozen or so aunts and uncles who are paramount to this story. It was easy enough with my dad’s immediate family, his siblings: clear aunts and uncles. But growing up, I had aunts and uncles far beyond that branch of the family tree—extending often to my best friend’s parents (who were probably 6th or 7th cousins), and to old men I only ever saw at Christmas—my cousin’s grandfather’s brother-in-law. Uncle. Family, in a place where people never leave, becomes a feeling, a memory. A shared relationship to the earth beneath you, and the people that cared for you. More even than blood.
So when it came to my dad’s first cousins—Aubrey LaHaye’s other grandchildren—my copy-editor sent an email: “Aren’t these technically your cousins once removed?” Um, I guess . . . But you can’t title someone “Cousin-once-removed Dusty”. Even writing “Cousin Dusty” makes me want to laugh. In Home of the Happy, it has to be Aunt Dusty (explained to the rest of the world in a neat little “Author’s Note”).
In the end, my editors and I came to a balance of honorifics in some places, and not in others. Because while my relationships to these people drives the momentum of the book, in the end I had nothing to do with what they experienced. In places where I am part of it, where I write about our world today, and our conversations now—they are Papa, Mommee, Aunt, Uncle, Parrain, Dad. Whenever I lay my thoughts bare on the page, my worries, my questions, that’s who they are.
But when I look back in time, to the 1980s when so much tragedy befell my family, I take a step back. I was not there. They experienced those moments not as grandfathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and parents; but as sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, and some of them as children. They were Wayne and Susan, and Glenn and Janie, and Sonny and Tot. Danny, Suzette, Marcel, Jay, and Nick. Jody, Richard, Smokey, Sandy, Billy, Dusty. Kaye and Anne.
Part of the great revelation of this book is encountering my elders—the people who raised me in a world of such comfort, love, and stability—as individuals who experienced something horrific. Through this process, I’ve come to understand this unspoken part of their stories, and how it’s shaped them into the people I know today. The sweet Cajun childhoods my cousins and brothers and I inherited are gifts I thank God for often. But that world was not built without suffering.