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National Geographic : 1990 Oct
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is famous for its Saturday morning crowds (above). By 9:15 a.m., when Don Thibodeaux and his Playboys strike up the music and the live radio broadcast begins, the drinkers and dancers are shoulder to shoulder. on a dole from the French crown. For most, Louisiana was what destiny had in store. A plan was devised to reunite them with their kinsmen. Spain had gained control of Louisi anain 1762, and the king needed good Catholic settlers to bolster his dominion against English-speaking neighbors. He supported the plan, and from May to October of 1785, seven ships set sail from France, bringing their cargo of about 1,600 Acadians to Louisiana. It has been called the largest single transat lantic migration up to that time, the end of a 30-year exile. Today, in hundreds of Cajun homes whose families are descended from those long-buffeted souls, someone can unfold a dusty, fan-shaped family tree and tell you not only the names of their ancestors but also the name of the very ship they took so long ago. INSTINCTIVELY TRYING TO REBUILD their former life, the Acadians retreated into isolation along the bayous and in the open prairies west of the Atchafalaya Basin. In the passionless language of social sci entists, many of them "resisted acculturation" well into the 20th century. "Before the Civil War," historian Michael Foret told me, "Cajuns were not as poor as people think. But the war caused a depression in the South that lasted until the 1940s." And on the social lad der Cajuns were near the bottom rung. Many led a subsistence existence, and many still remember it: Paul Prudhomme, sitting in the test kitchen of his renowned New Orleans res taurant, described how his own family "had bartered butter and eggs for other things." When Louisiana began to require school atten dance in 1916, most Cajuns were illiterate. Their indifference to education lingered: "If you went to college," said Weldon Granger, a successful attorney who now lives in Houston, "people thought you were lazy." As late as the 1930s observers commented on Cajuns' "rude shacks" and their "chronic aversion to wearing shoes." By 1950 three major things had changed all that: the oil and gas demand, which brought jobs; new roads, which ended rural isolation; and World War II, which thrust thousands of Cajun youths into the outside world. When Weldon Granger invited me to attend his family's Christmas reunion in Erath, I was The Cajuns:Still Loving Life
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