ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

stiff gloves, to pry the oysters from their reefs with your hands. Like most Cajun mommas, Bonnie cooked more than gumbo. She cooked sauce piquants (turtle or rabbit), court-bouillons (always redfish), and étouffées and stews made with either chicken or crawfish. You already know how the chicken got into the pot. For crawfish, there were no farms to speak of back then, and not that many ven- dors unless you wanted to drive all the way to Morgan City to buy Belle River crawfish — con- sidered the biggest, fattest and tastiest — from a local fisherman. No worries. Across the bayou from us, on Southdown land, sat a beautiful little stretch of swamp bounded by an old natural levee. We’d hike there, hauling our crawfish nets and the aforementioned chicken necks. I remember on one particular trip, we filled up two burlap feed sacks with crawfish in a single morning. Our gardens were ambitious. We planted one on the batture, the narrow strip of land between the road and the bayou, and carved another out of a rambling cow pasture behind the farmhouse. Believe it or not, in 1957, Southdown still kept a mule lot — in part, I believe, because tractors could not easily navigate the narrows of the bat- ture, and because the batture often contained the most fertile ground. So once or twice a year, Dad would pay Southdown’s mule handler to walk his mule the mile down our dusty shell road and form beautiful, straight rows on our batture. He’d then retire the mule and come back with a tractor to plow the big garden behind the house. We grew pretty much everything that would grow down here; for our gumbo pot, okra, onions, shal- lots and bell pepper — celery, no. It’s too hot. We’d also plant tomatoes, pole beans, radishes, cucumbers, squash, honeydew melon and can- taloupe, which did well, even though the water- melons we often planted did not. (Too hot, again, was our guess.) In the fall, we’d plant two long rows of potatoes. My mother would help plant the garden but one thing she wouldn’t do is pick okra, as much as she loved to cook with it — not just in her sea- food gumbo but in the tasty smothered okra stews she made. Anyone who’s picked okra knows why. The okra hairs and milky secretions from the okra stems when you cut them away from the stalk can cause serious itching if they touch bare skin. Thus, it was left to the Wells boys — dressed in their “okra-picking uniforms” — to harvest the okra. The “uniforms”? Long-sleeved shirts, gloves, ball caps and sunglasses to prevent okra juice from squirting into your eyes. Try that in the heart of the hot, sweltering South Louisiana summer when the okra ripens, and you will understand why the Wells boys would rather go to the dentist than pick okra. My parents quit the bayou in 1968 and moved to a small brick ranch house on the northern

16 MAY•JUNE 2019