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Bayou Boys by Ken Wells

I grew up in and around Houma — and though I’m dating myself, I’m old enough to remember when the town didn’t have a proper supermarket. Until I was nine years old, my family lived in a tidy, slate-side house on Palm Avenue near the banks of the Intracoastal Waterway. My parents — and my grandparents who lived near us — shopped at a little neigh borhood market called Songe’s. I t was a friendly place run by a middle-aged couple of that name. The store mostly carried the basics, and the prices weren’t particu larly cheap. But my grandparents liked it because they could buy groceries on credit, then pay their bill at the end of the month when their Social Security checks arrived. In September of 1957, we moved to the Bayou Black area west of Houma when my father went to work as the payroll clerk for Southdown Sugars. The job came with a tidy rent-free farmhouse on about five acres near the wayside of Mandalay, these days best known for the area containing the Mandalay National Wildlife Refuge. It was a good place, my parents felt, to raise their six rambunc tious sons. About five miles of sugarcane fields stood between us and town. Even better, to the north and south lay plentiful woods and marshes that were owned by Southdown and that we were free to roam and explore. Though my parents would eventually move us back to town, ask any of the Wells brothers and they will tell you this is where we grew up — living the bayou life, fishing, hunting, swamp stomping to catch our own crawfish; raising chickens and rabbits and even a pig or two; helping my parents with the ambitious vegetable

“YEAH, CUZ!” MIKE DUPRE WAS A ROUSES TEAM MEMBER FOR MORE THAN TWO DECADES. A TRAINED BUTCHER, HE SERVED AS BOTH A MEAT MARKET MANAGER AND MEAT BUYER.

supermarket chains in America. The Rouse family has leveraged their deep knowledge and love of our regional foodways into stores whose offerings, through variety and innovation, have transformed food prep while still keeping a firm grasp on tradition. For me, this is epitomized by that state-of-the-art Rouses Market I frequent on St. Charles Street during my visits to Houma. Had that particular Rouses existed back in our early Bayou Black years, my mom’s labors at the gumbo pot would’ve been so much simpler and easier. I should explain that I have not always been a supermarket groupie. I moved from Houma in 1975 to attend graduate school at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and have never returned as a full-time resident. My calling as a writer and editor compelled me to live in cities that supported large-market newspapers and magazines. I’ve had an adventurous career that landed me in beautiful and interesting places: Miami, San Francisco, London, Manhattan and, these days, Chicago. Yet, truth be told, you can take the boy out of the bayou but not the bayou out of the boy. As I began to venture out from journalism to write novels and narrative nonfiction books, what poured forth were works that, no matter where I was living at the time, were 100% steeped in my South

gardens we grew each year in what had previously been a cow pasture. My mother, Bonnie Toups, a Thibodaux native who spoke Cajun French, was a terrific cook. She would routinely turn the fruits of our agrarian labors into tasty dishes at her kitchen stove: chicken and sausage gumbo; okra stew; smothered potatoes and green beans; corn soup; hot peppers and tomatoes for her rabbit and turtle sauce picante; spicy yellow squash casserole; stuffed bell peppers. You get the picture. In our first two years there, 1957 through 1959, there was no supermarket nearby and, honestly, there were days we wished there were. More than once, Bonnie’s chicken gumbo began with a hen chased down in the farmyard. Yes, okay, that may sound appealing to certain back-to-the-land types, but anyone who’s plucked and dressed a chicken or slaughtered a pig or killed and skinned a rabbit knows this is unpleasant business for everyone involved (especially for the chicken, pig and rabbit). By 1960, Ciro’s, the collaboration of Anthony Rouse, Sr. and his cousin Ciro, had opened in Houma, and that was certainly an improvement in our food shopping fortunes. The first Rouses Market then opened in Thibodaux in 1975; since then, Rouses has grown into one of the largest and most successful independent

30 ROUSES SUMMER 2025 • WWW.ROUSES.COM