Bless Your Heart

Cajun streetfighter turned softy

This has all really jumped the shark, I text a friend, who then had to google what jumped the shark means before he could laugh.

I was laughing already because it’s a phrase to describe writers who have lost the plot and run out of material, that then start writing insane things into your favorite show. One of these writers once wrote a water skiing guy jumping over a shark, and there you have it. The critics had a field day.

I’m full of almost obscure-but-not-quite references like that. I’d like to think it makes me fun at parties, but mostly I’m fun because I host parties. Or at least I did, before I had a pandemic and three little kids, and that was half a decade ago.

I’m 43 now, my oldest child is almost 6, and amidst griping about assholes on the internet trying to guess the birthdays of my kids, my own birthday snuck up on me. My husband also didn’t tell me that he was doing too much and had planned a midweek surprise party. So by the time I knew what he was up to, I couldn’t talk him out of it and there he was with with pizza and beer and that damn boombox I’m still mad at him for buying, and a handful of other people in their 40’s with mixed families who have little kids (because clearly that’s our demographic), all of us tired and ready for bed by 7:30pm, except for the kids.

I had two beers at the party (that’s my mid 40’s limit) and caught my brother (who has quit drinking entirely) up on Quincy political drama over FaceTime later. My brother is a professional poker player who is used to making money from a room of people we might charitably call characters (aren’t we all?), but when I told him about local politics here and what was being said, he was like wow, that sounds unsavory, I don’t think I’d want any part of that.

I explained how I’d gone into it because I’m a stay at home mom boosting my policy chops for a return to the workforce in the fall (I even got a September daycare slot, woot woot!), and trying to better my adopted community at the same time.

But he was the kid that I’d called the cops to try and protect from our Dad’s violence when I was 14 and he was 9 (although they didn’t even hardly look his way, they were so busy telling me I had to submit to my father’s authority, including corporal punishment), so I think it might have hit a bit close to home.

Thankfully we are both grownups now, with our own little kids that we love (and while we talked our girls insisted on having their own parallel cousin FaceTime playdate where they put on princess dresses and crowns and showed each other stuffed animals in their bedrooms) and although we are each in separate states, north and south, we are caring for our children while sharing life updates, including the anti-Cajun rude shit I was seeing up here.

He of course didn’t like hearing that there are any angry cops (one a husband of a local consignment shopkeeper) on the internet, directing vitriol at me, including claiming that I’ve threatened their family, messed with their reputation on the force, their family’s livelihood, and, more sinisterly, that I am part of some cadre that’s “playing right into his hand.”

But my brother (who to my knowledge has never wrestled an alligator either, although he certainly looks like he could) took things in a more positive direction and told me he’d gotten one of those DNA tests, receiving his results a couple weeks ago. It said that among the Scots-Irish, English, and German, we are more Cajun French than anything else.

Watching our kids play virtually, I was left thinking that unlike my brother and his blue-eyed daughter, I have ended the Europe-only heritage. I think about how different my own kids’ DNA tests would be.

Every single one of my descendants will have Southeast Asian as an important part of their lineage. My kids at 50%. My grandkids (if I have them) at at least 25%. They will be more Asian than I am Cajun.

You’re a Cajun streetfighter, a local friend said. I like your sense of humor. I’d just made a catty comment about a man posing online with a local one and done political bumper sticker and shirt, saying his goatee should run in 2027 - it would lose.

This friend is an immigrant who had seen Cajun food advertised in restaurants here and mistakenly thought it was some kind of Mexican food.

Well, we are the only white people I know of to have our own spices rather than be borrowing somebody else’s, I say. But we are on the Gulf of Mexico, so you’re not too far off.

I’m her one and only Cajun friend. But I’m a lot of people’s only Cajun friend up here. They don’t know how funny we all are. Our ridiculous sense of humor, our self-deprecating potshot jokes that are almost as good as our food and our music. That would take having two of us, but preferably at least three.

It’s what I miss the second most, right behind the gulf shrimp and being in my Grandma’s kitchen.

My family has been poor and white in this country a long time. Long enough to forget whatever other homeland we once had. The parts that weren’t Cajun were white westward migrants from Appalachia (I’m rumored to be distantly related to the Hatfields of the Hatfields and McCoys infamy), and cotton farmers (the ones actually picking the cotton) in Tennessee. But we have always been White. Until now. With that comes some unquestioned beliefs about being temporarily embarrassed rich people, or future rich people. About the world having opportunity, in a competitive sense, if we try hard enough.

Having minority kids does in fact change the equation for me. It changes what sort of future is most important to me. It changes what opportunity looks like.

I am more invested in equity and multiculturalism and collaboration than I can even explain.

And that’s not to say that otherwise I wouldn’t care about Asian women city councilors being bullied so badly that an AI face that doesn’t even look like them is added into a poster protesting their use of a private lawyer (instead of being beholden to the aggressive hack opinions of a city solicitor who really needs to retire), alongside an angrily raised hand making a karate-chop motion that the poster-creator doesn’t even bother to notice has six fingers.

I bet I’d still cringe and be offended by that. But it would not hurt in the same way it does imagining the same thing being done to my own children when they are grown.

I do not know how the brown people of this country have survived so many of the things they do, while knowing full well the hate and nastiness that will be directed at the future adults that their cute little babies will grow up to be. Indeed it is its’ own special sort of horror.

I consider how if I didn’t didn’t tell anyone up here I was Cajun, if I wasn’t moved to share it in a recorded setting (after witnessing the hateful look given by the school committee chair to a Chinese-speaking grandmother of a local student, for needing extra time for translation services), they’d never have known. There never would have been any ethnicity-based ammo for them to use.

And indeed there’s still a lot they don’t know about it. Like the fact that there is an ethnic slur for Cajun people (It’s coonass, don’t ask me why, I don’t know. I only know that me and my Grandma can use it as a joke, but you can’t). Or that there was a civil rights case in the 80’s involving a Cajun man discriminated against at his workplace, where we were determined to be a protected class. Or, equally importantly, that most Cajuns would never live up here because of still holding a grudge against Boston soldiers who helped Canada kick us out of our homes and land in the 1700’s. Boston has of course completely forgot about that history. Cajuns have not. Dem yanks is still an insult where I’m from. People down there openly wonder how I can live up here, and it isn’t just because of the winter.

After us Acadians were driven from Canada as refugees, half died in the ensuing migration. Many who moved to south Louisiana, then still owned by France (and Spain), faced, after the Louisiana purchase, a concerted effort by the American schools to strip their children of the language. And it worked. The dialect became a pejorative. Cajun was a way to make fun of how we said Acadian. Today most Cajuns of my generation and beyond only know enough French to get ourselves in trouble. Drop boucoup into a sentence. Call someone a couyon.

And yet the wordless past we were stripped of has nonetheless hurt us. My Grandmother was an orphan, raised by a stepmother. Both her father and brother committed suicide.

One of my earliest extended family memories (and there aren’t many) is of attending Uncle Sonny’s funeral, at one of those cemeteries in New Orleans with raised graves.

I remember watching an old black man with a very wrinkled face and a trowel scraping cement, closing off a new burial, and my Grandpa unexpectedly getting angry and smacking me for thoughtlessly walking over a grave I didn’t realize was there, accidentally being disrespectful. I remember crying, but mostly I remember the silence of the adults. The quiet desperate grief of people deeply religious and believing that suicide is murder, so uncle Sonny won’t get to go to heaven, like his father before him.

The only funerals sadder than that kind are the ones where children die too soon.

I think about how my Grandma’s maiden name is O’Brien. The same last name as the cop who called me a Louisiana reject.

I want to say we are all rejects or refugees from somewhere, sir. Whether it’s the potato famine or le Grande Derangement or hurricane Katrina or the Vietnam War that brought us here in a roundabout way, we try to survive and all hopefully find a home somewhere eventually, if we are lucky.

It was not in my original plans, but I have decided to call Quincy my home. It isn’t just because New Orleans is sinking into the sea (which to be fair, isn’t a huge change, as it always was a bit of an Atlantis). It’s that I have married into this place, with someone who was born elsewhere but raised here, and have babies entering the school system. I have decided to care how this city treats its taxpayers and its Asian population and its future. I have chosen to make an investment in Quincy, using my time and skills and training and love.

I’m on the Board of the Quincy Tree Alliance. I just got elected to the Executive Board of the Citywide PTO. I’m an active member of the Quarry Hills Citizen Advocates, which so far has successfully held off a multi-generation golf course lease that would give away a choice piece of land to developer friends of the mayor for less than pennies on the dollar of what it’s worth. I went to the statehouse to testify against it. I also am a volunteer for Quincy Votes! I was part of the informal community advocacy gathering to get Lunar New Year made into a formal holiday for our schools. I’m now working on another bill, which others have already been advocating for, that would teach our population more about Asian and other ethnic history, which I know I learned very little of in school.

But it seems my concept of investing in this place conflicts with some who are connected to a bigoted old mayor who gets the city into debt while handing out gifts to his Irish city patrons and Mayflower-adjacent friends, while I would like the man out of office and the gifts stopped.

Perhaps if it wasn’t for the mayor and the grift-gifts and propensity of some people to think local born and raised white people are better than Asian people (and Cajun people too), this cop and his wife and father in law and I might get along, be cool. Maybe talk about how we are both O’Briens. Because my Grandma came from Crowley, LA, a Cajun-Irish fusion area. She’s got the brown skin and brown eyes and almost-Mediterranean features most-associated with being Cajun (as does my Mom), but her maiden name was Irish. I look mostly Irish.

Perhaps you and I are long-lost cousins, I could say. Perhaps, as long lost cousins, and hearing you had a heart transplant, I should say bless your heart and mean it, as in long-live your second heart.

Life is short. Life is hard. We all have struggles. There is no need to be hateful or us vs them.

We can’t we toast to each other’s health?

I actually had someone from old Quincy show up unannounced at my house after all that hateful talk. But not for the reasons I feared. She had read my last blog post and was bringing me some homemade lavender salve that she had made herself (which I have since used and found lovely), and said she was so embarrassed by the hateful attitudes, and what I had had said to and about me online, that she wanted to apologize on behalf of old Quincy.

We sat on my patio for a bit, getting interrupted by my children, who had sidewalk chalk smeared on their faces from drawing on the driveway, and shared a happy moment as friends. Because we arefriends. There is no divide here. Not if we don’t want there to be.

My neighbor a couple blocks over, one of my native plant gardening buddies, someone born and raised in Quincy, also said I’m so sorry, I know there are people like that here, but that isn’t the Quincy I know. On my street here we all get along so well. Like when I put in a new fence, I added a gate so my neighbors’ dogs and mine could play together.

I might have been the only Cajun in either conversation, but I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t unusual for having come to this city for a better life and found friends, a community, and a home.

That’s the Quincy I know, the place I live. The place I’m raising my kids. The place I feel hope for.

So when you see these manufactured fights about the city budget or the Eastern Nazarene College acquisition proposal, or the city councilors’ pay, or any of the AI slop that a clearly disturbed (and disturbing) woman from Weymouth uses when she’s going low and then lower, know that it’s a divide and conquer strategy that the rich people want.

But I was there when lunar new year got made into a holiday. I was there at the local park where all our children were playing together, black, white, Asian, Hispanic, Arab, and mixed. I was there when my old Quincy neighbor sat on my lawn furniture and talked about history and community. And I’m still here.

I can see that like New Orleans, a port city that crafts food and music that spread out to the world, Quincy crafts policy and statesmanship. It’s no accident that two presidents are from here. That it was the place where trial by a jury of one’s peers was first implemented on American soil. A place that so many historic policy and political norms in this nation and the world came form. And so it’s no accident that we are struggling with trumpism here too, on a small scale, reflective of the federal-level malady. It is my extravagant hope that if we can show how to solve it here, using local tools and local work and local love for our fellow humans, that the rest of America can see it and know that they too can solve it where they’re at.

So don’t be a couyon, cuz. While I get that it might suck to switch from patronage politics that your family is financially benefitting from to a more fair and equal system that benefits us all, please look around and see how much we have survived, what we have gone through to have the miracle of being alive today, take stock of what all our children need from our better selves, and that indeed our hearts are blessed.

—-——

Below, in the interest of community kindness and fun and intercultural sharing (and because some lady from Weymouth asked, even though she wasn’t particularly nice about it), I will teach you how to make a roux, and share my own personal recipe for gumbo.

First, some notes about the roux. The ratio is almost equal amounts of fat/oil to flour, maybe a little bit more fat/oil. Use a heavy-bottomed pot (cast iron is my go-to). Don’t burn it. If you do, start over. I generally find New Englanders go too light with their roux. So try to go a little darker. At least cook it until it smells like popcorn.

Chicken and Sausage Gumbo

1 med fryer chicken, cut into pieces

enough water to submerge chicken pieces

1/4 cup flour (I prefer whole wheat)

1/4 cup vegetable oil or butter

1 package andouille sausage, sliced in rounds and browned in a skillet

1 med onion, chopped

4 stalks of celery, chopped

1 bell pepper (any color is fine)

2-2.5 cups okra, sliced (can be raw or frozen)

1 head of garlic, minced

A couple shallots, chopped (optional)

1/2 a bunch of fresh parsley, chopped

2 bay leaves, dried or fresh

3 tbsp. Tony Chachare’s cajun seasoning

Extra cayenne pepper and black pepper to taste

Parboil chicken until just cooked. While parboiling chicken, cut onion and set aside. Make a medium roux with flour and oil/butter in heavy pot, stirring constantly. Add onions to roux when browned as desired and stir frequently. Cook until onions start to become clear and then add other vegetables. Cook for a few minutes and then slowly add the water (now stock) that the chicken was cooked in, stirring while adding. (If the chicken came with a giblet packet, parboil the giblets with the rest of the chicken, then mince the giblets and add to the roux at the same time as the vegetables.) Put in sausage, 1 to 2 bay leaves, and Tony Chachare’s cajun seasoning. Cook for about an hour, adding the chicken (removed from the bone and torn into bite size pieces) in the last 15-20 minutes. Serve like a soup or stew with a scoop of rice and some fresh parsley on top. Feeds approx 8-10 people.