Cajun Adventure, Post-Hurricane Rita
(continued)
To escape The Grinder, we switched corners. Getting across the room was a challenge. We had to literally snake our bodies through the crush of hundreds of other bodies – drinking, laughing, cowboy-hat wearing dancers, young, old, black, white. We danced a little while in corner number two, where we got a better view of Geno and his band. (What a pretty man!) Finally Ann found a guy her age to dance with, a young Marine named Josh. Joe and I eventually forsook the corner. We eased into the crowd and danced. It was like dancing with eight people besides Joe, because I swear there were seven other bodies touching mine.
A phenomenon occurred that night that I’ve only experienced a few times in my dancing life: I crossed the line from dancing into dancing ecstasy. It only happens when I’m tired and ready to quit. All of a sudden the music gets into me. I’m not me anymore – I become a dancing machine, one with the sound, one with the sweat. Wonderful.
Just around the end of Geno’s session, I looked up and saw about seven young women dancing on top of the bar. I looked around for Anna. I found her and pointed toward the bar. Within seconds, she had joined the dancin’ queens. Most of the others danced a safe zydeco two-step, but Anna did a free-form dance, all smiles, arms flinging, dreadlocks flying.
Geno played long beyond his scheduled finish, but it was time for the workers to go home and get some sleep. I walked outside and took a long look at the swamp waters, stretching out from the landing, vast, quiet, dark. I felt happy. I like swamps.
Anna and Josh were talking and talking. Finally Joe and I pried her away for the ride home.
Lesson learned by Anna that night: Don’t wear open-toed shoes for zydeco. Her toes got stomped. She recounted how a girl in the rest room spotted her as an outsider. The girl said, “We all wear boots.”
Earlier, Joe had explained the genesis of zydeco music. The word zydeco, he said, comes from the French word for green beans. (I later looked up the term – it’s les haricots, pronounced in Cajun French as “layz-ah¢-dee-co.”) Joe said in the old days, black women washed their laundry outside in big pots of boiling water. Being efficient, they’d start second pots of water for beans, to get their cooking done at the same time.
“Where women are, men follow,” Joe said. “Men in the villages soon learned that women could be found around the pots of beans. To impress the women, the men brought harmonicas and fiddles and they sang songs. Their music became known as bean music.”
“Les haricots” music became zydeco music.
Joe told us stories I’ve never heard anywhere else. Joe is a professional storyteller. I never knew if his stories were true, but I liked them. I’ve scattered some of his tales throughout this remembrance.