The Boot, and Back Again
Southern reminisces.
By Lily Ouellet
It was one of my first days at Barnard, deep into the period in which time slugs and each morning serves another relentless effort at perfecting a pitch-deck of personhood. My new friend and I were sitting with our backs to Barnard Hall, picking at Hewitt scraps, having recently discovered that the building’s small-awnings were perfect for hiding from August’s piercing sun.
I was deep into an anecdote about La Bonne Vie, which is what my family called our house that lay on the edge of the bayou. It was inaccessible by car, raised over the swamp by a beautiful oak staircase. It had been built by my dad over the previous decades and was sort of a haphazard attempt at a home—it more resembled a child’s drawing of a dystopian compound than any sort of dwelling. All of the rooms were connected in one long line. To get to the bathroom, you had to first go through the kitchen, the living room, the first bedroom (consisting of only four hand-carved bunk-beds and a 10-inch portable TV), and the second bedroom. Then you could pee—but the toilet was in the shower and the sink was barely a bowl. And good luck closing the door.
My friend asked me to clarify where I was talking about. I said again that it laid on what we called the Boston Canal (pronounced Boss-taugh), which skirted the Gulf of Mexico. This was Cajun country, where the descendants of Acadian exiles from Canada had kept our traditions and French alive for more than two centuries.
Confusion passed over her face. It was a blank, empty expression, and her mouth opened like a fish. I zoomed out of Apple Maps until New York City was a dot and both the Atlantic and Pacific were visible. “Point to Louisiana,” I said. Her finger, hesitant but calm, headed toward Georgia. We laughed, fully and heartily. After a few tries she pointed at The Boot. “Sorry,” she said then, “I’ve just never learned anything about the South.”
Although I do concede that this friend’s lack of geographical knowledge was an anomaly, this phrase would come, in varying degrees, to summarize many conversations I would have throughout the years. No one at Barnard seemed to know much about the South, and at the time, I didn’t care. I was even filled with a twisted elation: The central goal of my teenagehood was to leave Louisiana and to scratch every bit of its forlorn influence off my skin. While Acadiana was relatively insular (my admission to Barnard was conveniently emailed to my parents in a newsletter from the Acadian Museum), New Yorkers were anything but—they voted for liberal politicians and shopped in-person and threw caution to a brightly-lit night.
When people asked where I was from, I typically said New Orleans (although I only lived there two years) because it sounded more hip and cool than the smaller, more ragtag region I grew up in. But if my friend didn’t even know where Louisiana was—well then, damn—my job was going to be easier than I thought. Maybe she would even forget I was from the South at all and loop me into her modern, wealthy, movie-esque Northern lifestyle. Those from the Jersey Shore are surely rolling their eyes. But New York and its adjacents hold an indescribable pull to the southern-belle. After all, how could the yellowing-subway seats and blinding Times Square Billboards not be the epitome of class and distinction?
***
I took many avenues to embrace the City—I signed up for Intermediate French I (to learn real, Parisian French) and started writing in an absurd leather notebook at the Met (to pretentiously appreciate art). But as March approached I could not divorce the tenacious lure of Mardi Gras, which yanked at me incessantly. My mom had mailed me some beads—a fat jangly package that probably sowed confusion in the mail room—but I couldn’t really do anything but force my roommates to wear them and dance around in some fun circles while playing Zydeco music. And anyway, the drab walls of Sulzberger seem to suck the joy out of everything, their only resemblance being a hospital room, or perhaps the Mathematics basement.
So when I found out that Ferris Dining Hall was having a Mardi Gras themed dinner, I gave some beads to each of my reluctant friends—purple, gold, and green—and set off. (It is important to remember here that I still had a sense of naivete that the dining-hall theme nights would be anything but the same mass-produced food dressed up in novel colors.) I prayed that the jambalaya on the menu would be Cajun-style (tomato-less) instead of Creole (gross). I imagined what music could be playing—the zingy brass of Acadia, or the beating jazz of New Orleans? Oh, the possibilities!
But the jambalaya was just the fried rice bar and the beignets were just still-frozen donuts from Hewitt. I hid a distinct pang of nostalgia—why did I feel such a large loss, from this one small day? But as my life was spreading out beyond Louisiana, this experience unveiled the first pricks of an intense urge to hold on to my Cajunness and embed it into my life, so that it couldn’t run away: a possibility that had once felt freeing but now seemed to loom intimately dangerous.
***
Away from New York my inclination to hedge Louisiana began to crumble. I was sitting at a small, crowded bar in London with my friend Clare. We didn’t know each other particularly well yet—our acquaintance was less the result of any natural chemistry but instead would be better described as genetically predetermined: Our respective best friends are twins. Still, she agreed to come to this jazz bar with me, and I was itching with anxiety, which tends to crawl into my mouth as the desire to talk. A tall man with a nice face and a nice jaw and some hair sauntered lazily to where I was scraggily leaning up against a large stool.
He asked me the usual, where I’m from—you know—but in London his American accent was distinctive. For once, I did not have the instinct to lie. I did not say New York, or even the heavily practiced “I go to school in New York,” or that I go to Columbia, which all Barnard students say they don’t do, but they occasionally do (don’t lie now—I’ve seen it). Instead, I just said what was true: Oh, I’m from Louisiana, a little small part at the bottom. And for half a second I watched the map on my phone, La Bonne Vie shrinking to a dot I could cover with my thumb.
I don’t know why it didn’t happen that night, of all nights. Maybe it was the accent catching me off guard, some Pavlovian reflex toward honesty when I heard home in a stranger’s voice, three thousand miles from either of ours. Maybe I was tired of performing for a man I would fall for approximately forty minutes later—and embarrassingly get ghosted by after a tumultuous yet uneventful fling in which I was convinced he was perfect. Or maybe, I simply forgot to lie. But the workaround had become so automatic that its absence, for once, felt like tripping, like the truth tumbled out before the newest, coolest, hippest part of me—the New York part—could catch it. No matter my outward intentions, something still knocked the inside of my skull, desperate for the relief of being known truly: to spell out life on the bayou and celebrate (even a lackluster) Mardi Gras. You don’t get to keep loving a place while attempting to erase your relationship to it. It comes off in one piece, or—in my case—not at all.
***
It felt cathartic to tell the truth, like I had begun to chip away at something deeper. Of course, there will always be parts of Louisiana that I will let go with no hesitation: It’s intense parochialism, for one—My brother’s 16th birthday present was a shotgun (something that nobody thought was crazy at the time), despite mostly spending his time at the local soccer complex. I did not know what communism was growing up and was always vaguely confused about World War II. But moving did not highlight this as much as I thought it would. Day-to-day I think mostly of my town’s one seafood restaurant, festivals all together, and the porch-y white mansions that lay a mountain range across Prytania. Of four plastic chairs on the neutral ground.
Distance has afforded me a better vantage point for what moving has cost—not some larger-than-life reinvention where I suddenly became New York chic and conveniently shed all of my state-related frustrations. I still have a complicated relationship with Louisiana and the South at large. Once I would have shunned it without a second thought, but now I don’t know what to say. This is what I have come to understand about home: It is not the caricature I once wanted so badly to escape, nor the romantic inheritance I sometimes want to reclaim. Its contradictions are braided into it like the roots of an old oak.
Underneath it all, is a memory: I was young, and the fishing pole doubled my height. My dad cast the line for me, like he did most times, and still does today. I pulled, with all of my might, pushing against the wood of the dock, feeling splinters slip into the soles of my feet, and off the line was an eel—yellow, furious, and thick as my arm. I held the line for too long, and my dad quickly flung it back in the water, before I could look it in the eyes. I’ve never been prouder of anything.
