Swamps and Plantations

CONTINUING STORY OF OUR LOUISIANA ADVENTURES BY OUR FRIEND, JEAN

One of the things I had said I wanted to do in Louisiana was one of those swamp tours where you sit in one of those boats with a big engine at the back and whizz over the water so Debs being such a great organiser had already made the reservations. The boats take 6 plus the guide so we were joined by another couple and provided with life jackets and ear plugs. While we were waiting for this other couple though, we had a laugh at a car sticker on one of the 4 wheel drives parked there belonging to a local—remember these folks are weird and live for “huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’”. This particular sticker said “IF IT FLIES, IT DIES”. Brilliant! We had brought plenty of mosquito repellent, this being the swamps, but the guy just laughed and said we wouldn’t need it…..”How fast do you think a skeeter can fly?”

Anyway, the tour was excellent and we saw lots of interesting birds and alligators and a massive lake filled with water lilies which were just dying off but you could imagine how stunning it would have been when they were all in full flower. There was also some stuff called Spanish Moss which draped the trees and looked like cobwebs—exactly how you imagine the swamps to look. The guide told us that they‘d had lots more rain than usual this year and where he would normally expect the swamp to be only 6” deep at this time of year, it was actually now over 3 feet. There are rules governing how many alligators can be caught in a season and how much duck shooting etc can go on so it was all very interesting.

When we left there, we decided to go to lunch at a place Debs had read about in her guide book. This sounded like another dive but ‘colourful’ - in other words, not your typical tourist haunt but where we would get fabulous authentic Southern food. We found the town where this place was but couldn’t find the restaurant (café?) so we stopped to ask a couple who were passing by. What a laugh….. We couldn’t have chosen any better! This couple had obviously just come out of church as they were in their Sunday best and we were quite scruffy having just got off the swamp, but we asked them if they knew where this place was and the woman first of all pretended she didn’t know and then said oh yes, she believed she had read about this place but really, it wasn’t wear decent folks went…...no, it was in the ‘low income neighbourhood’ - in other words, where the black people live (who do the best food!!). She obviously couldn’t understand at all that we would actually chose to go some place like that and directed us instead to Victor’s, a restaurant “where decent people have their roast pork after church”. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe that people like this woman still exist but we thought we’d check out Victor’s anyway as it was just across the street.

When we got in, we were in a sort of passage and there was a long queue in front of us which I thought was for the maitre d’ or some such to find you a table. Not exactly! The queue was because you had to take a tray and serve yourself like in a work’s canteen. The food was OK and that’s all but it was packed with folks in their Sunday clothes and even the priest was there having his lunch. Afterwards, we said it was a shame we’d listened to this woman but then I suppose Victor’s was a revelation in itself—sort of like time had stood still.

Our next stop was the Lara Plantation, an authentic plantation house which was now in the process of being restored.

Our guide was Elmore and he obviously knew his stuff. He told us that when the owner of the plantation died, rather than it passing to the eldest child automatically, it was given to the smartest…….. This gave us some discussion of how we would have fared if our own parents had adopted this thinking!! Apparently, the owner was a very kind man and treated his slaves well but his wife was a harridan and beat them at every opportunity. In the back garden were 69 slave huts which had each housed two families so these owners were obviously seriously wealthy. After the Civil War when the slaves were freed, some of them chose to stay on and work so the owners wife would calculate their wages at the end of the year (in Lara’s case, it was $12) and then charge them a matching sum for their bed and board, leaving the slaves with nothing. The average life span of the field slaves was only 6½ years which illustrates how hard their lives were. If they had a child, it automatically became the property of the owner who if he chose, would simply sell it to somebody else. Interesting stuff.

We eventually found ourselves back in New Orleans and back to La Belle Reve so at last, we could unpack our suitcases. We had a walk in wardrobe and an iron and ironing board so could make ourselves decent again and now that we were all spruced up, where did we go??? Another dive…...Ms Mae’s Bar where beers cost only $1 each!! There was some really weird customers in there but like all these places so far, a good atmosphere and we had a right laugh.

That night we ate in an Indian Restaurant quite near where we were staying and the food was lovely.