WHEN YOU ASK DIRECTIONS IN rural Louisiana, you’re often told that “Dis and dat road all be leading back home”, which may be true but not much help if you are trying to get somewhere else … in my case to some of the most-colourful film sites in the ‘Hollywood of the South’.
Luckily, I’ve learned from past experience of travelling in Louisiana that mechanical guidance is essential. So, I’m relying on my ‘Hertz NeverLost’ device (PR speak for a SatNav/GPS) to direct me from New Orleans across the mighty Mississippi River and into Plantation Country.
The route I’m travelling – Highway 18 running north along the river – is known as the River Road, which is a bit confusing as the parallel Highway 48 running on the other side of the Mississippi has been given the same name,
I’m not really seeing much of the river as the grass-covered levees are often more than 35 feet high. However, there are side roads that go down to the river and a few that run along parts of the ridge. What I am seeing are great plantation homes whose land prior to the construction of the levees extended to the river bank, where sugar cane, other products and passengers could be loaded on to the passing steamboats.
Among the particularly fine homes clustered around the small town of Vacherie is Oak Alley, its majestic, colonnaded facade framed by an avenue of huge 300-year-old oak trees. Given a choice for that night’s accommodation between century-old or newly-constructed cottages, all discreetly located away from the main house, I choose a well-appointed newer one, complete with kitchen although dinner is provided.
CONJURING UP TRUE DETECTIVE IN THE SUGAR CANE FIELDS
Then, as the sun slides below the horizon lighting up the wisps of paper-thin clouds in a rich but delicate palette of colours, I take a twilight walk out into the sugar cane fields. As this is where scenes from the popular True Detective TV series were filmed. I half expect to see Matthew McConaughey, soaked in sweat with gun drawn, emerge out of the cane, but my only companions are a squadron of thirsty mosquitoes and an eerie silence.
Majestic Oak Alley was home to Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire and John Travolta in Primary Colors
If Oak Alley seems familiar, it’s probably down to the movies. Both it and Houmas House, set in 38 acres of lush gardens across the river, were settings for parts of both Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the 1964 Gothic horror film pitting Bette Davis against Olivia de Havilland. In fact, Oak Alley was the home of reluctant vampire Brad Pitt as well as John Travolta in Primary Colors.
The tour of the grounds, including its slave cabins, brings the plantation’s troubled history of wealth, romance, tragedy and enslavement to life, as does the tour of Laura Plantation, just down the road. Its main house was built in 1805 in Caribbean Creole style and its slave cabins are still intact. This is where the slaves’ stories about a clever rabbit were assembled, later inspiring writer Joel Chandler Harris’s Br’er Rabbit and Uncle Remus books.
Evergreen Plantation’s slave cabins features in the film Django Unchained
Django Unchained (2012) was filmed in nearby Evergreen, which features a stunning double exterior staircase and is considered the most intact plantation complex in the South, Felicity provided the setting for 12 Years a Slave (2013), and Whitney Plantation, which concentrates on the life of slaves, is definitely worth a visit as its tour includes a small slave museum and the last surviving example of a true French Creole barn. (Incidentally, the general consensus is that to qualify as a Creole, you have to be born in Louisiana, speak French or Spanish, and be a Catholic.)
Set in 7,000 acres 30 miles to the north of Oak Alley, Nottoway Plantation is the South’s largest surviving antebellum home. The handsome front columns frame its twin staircases, one for men and one for women, and other attractions include a palatial ballroom. Reputedly, the mansion was saved from Yankee gunboat bombardment when its mistress reminded the young officer in charge that it would be discourteous to destroy her home as he had enjoyed its hospitality prior to the Civil War (still referred to by many Southerners as ‘The War of Northern Aggression’).
HEADED INTO STEAMY, SULTRY CAJUN COUNTRY
Southern Louisiana is full of atmospheric lakes, bayous, and swamplands, in this case Lake Charles.
As I head west into the hot, steamy Acadian bayou country, I have time to reflect on what makes Louisiana so special. Its somnolent, sultry and, indeed, addictively-intoxicating ambiance make me feel transported into a melodramatic Tennessee Williams play. Its food is hot, its women are spicy and its residents treat life slow, real slow. They don’t jabber or squawk, run or jog but sashay and sizzle. They can dispense with verbs and tenses, for there is only the present, and they need no excuse to drink, party or eat at any time of day or night … bedtime is usually any time before sunrise.
Outsiders may call the residents of this region Cajuns but here they call themselves ‘Cadians’. Descendents of French settlers forced out of eastern Canada by the British in the mid-18th century, they live in towns with design and names – Lafayette, Thibodaux, Loreauville, among them – that conjure up images of provincial France.
My car radio zones into a Ry Cooder number as I pass a surreal swamp with ghost like cypress trees menacingly rising up from the murky waters. Quite appropriate, I think, as Cooder wrote the haunting theme music for director Walter Hill’s much underrated 1981 film Southern Comfort, set in the Louisiana swamps.
I’m trying to follow the Bayou Teche (a 125-mile long waterway) to Jeanerette, setting for scenes of the second (2006) film version of Robert Penn Warren’s powerful 1946 novel All The King’s Men starring Sean Penn and James Gandolfini. Unfortunately, I’m thwarted by road closures and forced back on to Highway 90. My destination for the night is New Iberia, home of both mystery writer James Lee Burke and his fictional Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux.
JAMES LEE BURKE’S BEAUTIFUL MAIN STREET
The multi-lane road I am travelling is a disappointing hotchpotch of budget chain hotels, fast-food emporiums, strip malls, car dealerships and bail-bond stores, but it all changes when I reach New Iberia’s Main Street, which Burke described as “the most beautiful Main Street in the country”. I’m not sure I agree but it is lined with more than 50 handsome buildings that date between 1890 and 1930, many of them restored.
I park and take a stroll along the peaceful Bayou Teche, enjoying a whisper of a breeze off the water. When I later head for St Martinsville, about 15 minutes’ drive along the bayou, I recall a previous trip when I was travelling in the area without a SatNav.
Reaching a junction with an arrow pointing in both directions but with no hint of a place name, I chose right and, after a few miles, spotted a farmer working in a field. “St Martinville?” I asked, and in an accent as thick as jambalaya stew, he replied: “You be turn bag daer son and left where the old Baptist church burn down.” I explained that I wasn’t from these parts and he replied: “Close by where Delecou kin lives” and I drove on, totally confused.
St Martinville is best known for the Evangeline Oak, which, in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous poem, is the mythical meeting place of Acadian sweethearts Evangeline and Gabriel, separated when they were forced out of Canada. The bayou-side setting is magical, St Martin de Tours Catholic Church is the epicentre of Acadian worship, and nearby on the bayou stands the Acadian Memorial, a moving testament to the plight of these displaced people.
Acadiana is awash with sleepy small towns, some with well-preserved historic districts such as the charming Abbeville and others, such as fascinating Franklin, whose decaying downtown could be straight out of a Coen Brothers film.
Cajun music was said to have begun in Mamou where Fred’s Lounge keeps it alive and well even at breakfast time.
If Franklin is Coen country then Mamou, an insular little town, where, it is said, Cajun music began, is pure David Lynch. At 9am on a Saturday, I swing open the door to Fred’s Lounge, where I’m met by the heady beat of Cajun music and an apparently-well-lubricated audience who could have come out of Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
The amply-endowed barmaids, in T-shirts sized for children, flash smiles full of promise as they sashay around serving food and drink, and the announcer is a pint-sized Cajun, who speaks in a rasping French Cajun accent that I swear was straight out of Blue Velvet.
TARZAN SWUNG THROUGH THE TREES HERE
Headed for my final destination, Houma, 80 miles south-east of New Iberia, I pass Morgan City, the location for the 1918 silent film Tarzan of the Apes – reputedly, the Atchafalaya River Basin was as close as the filmmakers could get to the African jungle.
Although the highway into Houma is uninspiring, things improve dramatically as I near the town, particularly when I stop off for lunch at Boudreau & Thibodeau Cajun Cookin’, where more amply-endowed waitresses in shrunken T-shirts, serve up spicy, mouth-watering Cajun dishes and delicious burgers.
In Houma – a ripe, juicy, exotic peach of a town – I check into the evocatively-named Le Grand Bayou Noir B&B, a Georgian-style house set on four acres of land shaded by magnificent oaks. It is the home of retired judge Tim Ellender and his engagingly-social wife, Debbie, who immediately invited me for cocktails, delicious, broiled jumbo prawns and juicy burgers, which Tim whistled up on the barbecue.
Tim tells me to visit the courthouse in the morning. “The second floor was mine,” he tells me, and in a feeble attempt at southern speak, I joke, “So you be the hangin’ judge then.” “You bet, son,” he drawls without a hint of irony.
Next morning I take a stroll downtown; with its handsome period buildings sited along both sides of the bayou, it, in my opinion, rivals James Lee Burke’s New Iberia. Then I head along back roads to the southern point of the bayou, stopping for a cold drink at a dilapidated grocery store, where old timers with fiery beards and oil-stained baseball caps do very little with great aplomb.
Gradually, the landscape becomes more sparsely populated, with homes built on stilts to cope with rising sea levels. It was on these bayous that the hauntingly-beautiful but disturbing Oscar-nominated 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild was set. It focused on a small, impoverished community faced with forced relocation because of the rising waters threatening their homes and lives. Recently, the real town of Isle de Jean Charles, which, since 1955 has lost 98 per cent of its land to coastal erosion and rising sea levels, had to be resettled, and my New Orleans novelist and playwright friend John Biguenet explained the situation in Plaquemines Parish, south-east of New Orleans where his acclaimed novel Oyster is set.
“Today, you couldn’t pinpoint a single place as it is all under water,” he said. “We are losing the equivalent of a large football field an hour to coastal erosion and rising sea levels.”
My GPS can’t compete with dirt roads; rickety, old iron bridges and the odd prehistoric drawbridge, but through some good fortune and my iPhone compass, I finally make it to Cocodrie. A road sign helpfully informs ‘DEAD END’, for here ends America and begins the Gulf of Mexico. Time to head back to New Orleans.
