Jambalaya

By Annalyn Swan

THE CAJUNS: FROM ACADIA TO LOUISIANA by William Faulkner Rushton Farrar, Straus & Giroux 342 pages; $15.95

Fans call him the "Ragin' Cajun" and "Louisiana Lightnin'." By any other name he is Ron Guidry, the best pitcher in baseball--and the best known of that group of 900,000 French-speaking Louisianians, descendants of French farmer-fishermen, who live in the bayou country south and west of New Orleans. Except for Guidry's left arm, Cajuns are known mostly by hearsay. They are reputed to play strange-sounding accordion music, make a mean gumbo, and generally be as colorful as the crawfish in their bayous. The rumors are right, as Journalist William Rushton demonstrates in the first popular survey of Cajun culture.

Their roots are romantic enough. The Cajuns' Acadian (Nova Scotian) ancestors founded a colony on Canada's Bay of Fundy in 1604, and by 1755 had transformed the wilderness into a bucolic countryside. Then came a scheming English Governor who hated the French. In an act of genocide that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later made a cause celebre with his poem Evangeline, the British jammed thousands of Acadians onto prison ships and scattered them throughout the Old and New Worlds.

Of the half who survived, many found their way to Louisiana's "Acadian Coast," a new mecca on the Mississippi. From there, they filtered into the woods, turning into the dialectal "Cajuns" along the way. Those who went south into the swamps became the ancestors of today's fishermen and trappers. Those who retreated still farther, settling Louisiana's western prairies, rode into another part of American folklore: the West.

Long before cattle barons appropriated Texas, French-speaking cowboys were running Spanish longhorns on Louisiana ranches.

Much of the Cajuns' singular culture lingers on today, despite the invasion of their backwater over the past 30 years by public roads and private oil entrepreneurs. Gumbo and jambalaya still simmer on Cajun stoves and are dished up at local crawfish festivals (Rushton includes recipes for the adventurous). Men like James Daisy still rise at 3 a.m. to dredge for oysters: "Out there's where I live," he says of the endless marshes.

In this country, everyone is a cousin of sorts. There are 6,000 Moutons, descendants of a Salvador and Jean Diogene Mouton, whose family tree is more like a woods. And, of course, there is the lazily rounded French patois that holds them all together (and which Rushton might have discussed as a vital ingredient of the culture, instead of relegating it to an appendix).

At one point, skimming the Louisiana marshes in a helicopter, Rushton vividly describes the swamp below, floating "like a pad of lilies anchored in place by the most fragile and tenuous of roots."

Throughout, he is at his best in this middle distance, giving an overview of Cajun country, past and present. As Rushton indicates, Louisiana's French still manage to remain themselves, despite the bayou ranch houses that look "depressingly like Everywhere Else." A few delightful closeups, like those of bright-eyed Ambrose Thibodeaux, 74, playing his old French Acadian accordion music, show a cul ture as slyly pervasive as its cuisine. Hardly a rhythm and blues aficionado lives, for example, who has not spoken Cajun in translation: "Laissez les bons temps rouler"; let the good times roll. --Annalyn Swan

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