Kids today do not talk Cajun
anymore. Times have changed—had to. Otherwise, the Cajuns would be living in a
vacuum while the rest of the world revolved around it. It was bound to change. First,
radio came in and brought American Rock n Roll and country western music. We
had to learn American to understand it. Then television brought in the rest of
the world. The news was in American, and we had to learn the language just to
find out what was going on around us. Even the local television news was in
American. There were a few Cajun holdouts, mostly delegated to early morning
talk shows and news programs. The daytime and nighttime shows were in American,
and during the daytime, stay-at-home women especially, watched the soap operas.
We saw in those stories a life so
much more exciting than what we were living. There was nothing like this in our
lives. Oh, there was church gossip, talk about who was seeing whom and possibly
sleeping with whom, but none of those characters could compare with the ones on
the television screen. The Cajun women were nowhere as glamorous, innocent, or
evil as the American women on the screen were. I read Gustave Flaubert's Madame
Bovary once, about a woman from the farm who marries a man from the town
because she thought life in town would be exciting. She reads romantic novels,
Flaubert's version of the soap opera, and begins to think that they are what
life should be like. They made her life, her perfectly normal, exciting, and interesting
life, seem boring. The more her eyes took in, the more she wanted what she saw.
That wasn't the main problem with Madame Bovary, though. The main problem
was that she did not understand that what she was reading was only a reflection
of the real world as the mirror reflects it, only inverted. This was what
happened to the Cajuns. Television brought in all sorts of new images: The
Vietnam War, the racial problems, and the soap operas. We understood that the
Vietnam War was happening, but the news about it was sandwiched between "The
Edge of Night" and "The Lawman," so it didn't seem real. After
all, the people there did not look like us, so we watched the good guys chase
the bad guys and paid little attention otherwise. It wasn't until Jeremy Rozas
got killed there, the only boy from Serpentville to die in Vietnam, that it
became real. It was the same with the civil rights marches. They were happening
in big cities like Birmingham or Los Angeles. Then Joe shot that black man for
walking into the front of his saloon, and before you knew it, everybody parked
themselves in front of their television screens. Racial problems had become
real.
The soaps were different, though. People
fought and loved on the television screen, and it never seemed to reach us. This
is what life should be like, we thought. This is love and hate and living with
passion. The women did not have rotten teeth or sagging breasts. The men did
not have leather skin from fighting the sun and mosquitoes. Our lives were like
the waters of Bayou Serpent, muddy, slow, and constant. The soap opera lives
were like the waters of the Atchafalaya River—fast, furious, mysterious, and dangerous.
We were waltzing, and the rest of the world was two-stepping, jitterbugging, or
whatever the dance craze was then. We wanted the soaps to touch us in some
way—to become real for us.
Then Pete LaSache found Alain
Babineaux shot to death next to Joe's Saloon and life in Serpentville and
Ellison Parish suddenly turned fast, furious, and mysterious. We found
ourselves living a real-life soap opera. That's when the story starts. Alain
Babineaux's death caused the outside world to rush into Serpentville like
floodwaters, and it changed just about every life it touched.
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