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Chapter 6
Summer Farm Work, and the Church

My first real summer jobs were during my last years of high school and my first year of college, working for two local farmers, Mr. Habitz, and Mr. Judice.

In a region that almost exclusively grew sugarcane, Mr. Habitz was a rice farmer. Before a farmer can plant rice in a field, all of the large rocks, sticks and stumps have to be removed. It took five strong workers; two of us on each side of a large dump truck to throw all this debris into the truck, a fifth to work in the back of the truck, arranging the pile so we could fit more in. To grow rice, they had to build small levees around each field, and flood the fields with water from the nearby Bayou Teche. After the rice seed was harvested, they would make bales of rice hay from the remaining stalks. We would again walk through the fields, this time throwing the bales of rice hay into the same tall dump truck. By the end of the day our arms would cramp every time we lifted one, I'd drop the bale, and in some strange parody of a bronze statue by Rodin, would stand there with my arms locked in spasm until they relaxed. When payday came around at the end of the week we were well paid for our hard work, probably because Mr. Habitz knew how hard that work was.

Sugarcane defines the landscape of Acadiana. The long growing season, where every vacant patch of land has cane growing on it, green stalks with streaks of brown stretching eight feet up into the sky, making the roads seem like narrow passages in a state sized labyrinth. This myopic view of the world only changes for the few short months after harvesting, until the newly planted cane once again grows tall enough to obscure the world. Like most of the farmers in Louisiana, Mr. Judice was a sugarcane farmer.

During the planting and harvesting season I worked for the Judice family. Mr. Judice was a tall good man, whose face was always wrinkled into a stern look, no doubt from wondering whether this would be the year that farming would fail to bring in enough money for his family to make ends meet. Though tanned from years of work in the fields, it was what we called a “farmer tan.” Never shirtless, but often in sweaty white T-Shirts tanned only from the neck up and on the exposed parts of the arms.

He and his sons drove the tractors, while the other laborers, myself among them, walked behind them planting cane. We would tug out a length of sugar cane from the wagon hitched to the tractor and drop it into the furrow, we'd drop the next one so it overlapped by a foot or so. This went on mindlessly up and down the rows until we had planted the field, and moved on to the next one. There were machines available to do planting, but they didn't do as good a job as a person could, so Mr. Judice planted the old way. During harvesting season they did have machines to do the hardest part of the work, but even these needed manual labor behind them, you'd lose too much cane if you just used the machines.

A cane cutting combine would chop off the cane at ground level and move it vertically over to the right side laying it down horizontally across the top of two adjacent rows. Behind that, a cane "picker", which was a large tractor mounted metal arm, manipulated by a human, would grab bunches of the cut cane and put them into a cart pulled by a tractor. Our job was to walk behind this picker and put all the cane that fell into the bottom of the row, over onto the next pile so it wouldn't be wasted. It was honest, unglamorous, hard work and few people wanted to do it.

Lunchtime in Cajun country is known as Dinner. The evening meal is known as Supper. Now that I've thoroughly confused you, at dinner time Mrs. Judice would drive the farm truck out to whichever field we were working in and bring each of us a meal. Each meal was in a plastic "pail", the kind that ice cream comes in, full of country home cooking. Dinner was usually rice and gravy, or mashed potatoes and gravy, a couple of pork chops, a dinner roll, and a vegetable. She'd spend the time there, while we ate, talking quietly with her husband, occasionally with us, until we'd all finished eating, neatly stacking our empty pails one inside the other in the back of the truck, and headed back into the fields. I believe farming is a hard life. You want children to hopefully inherit the farm in future generations. You also want children to be trusted help in the fields to help keep the farm hand payroll smaller. The farmer’s wife no less stressed than the farmer wakes up early in the morning to begin preparing food not only for her family, but for all the farm hands working that day. She cooks the meals, cleans up afterward and drives the hot food out to her extended family. And the chores still aren’t over. There’s groceries to buy for the next few days, and supper to cook for the returning family in the evening with tomorrow promising to be the same as this day and all the days before that. I found Mrs. Judice to be a very quiet woman, noble, but quiet.

For most of my youth, and many generations before that, sugarcane was burned in the fields to remove the leaves from the stalks, as they didn't contain any of the sugars that the stalks did and only took up room in the carts. Every breath we took during the harvest season was thickly scented with the toasted molasses smell of sugarcane. In later years Louisiana banned farmers from burning cane in the fields, considering it to be an air pollutant. I miss that smell, when I go back there. It isn't the same.

I have fond memories of the few years I spent working as a farm laborer and only in retrospect did it occur to me that outside of Mr. Judice and his family, who owned the farmland, I was the only Caucasian laborer in the fields. My fellow field hands most of whom had worked for Mr. Judice for many years, were African American men and women. These farm hands accepted me without any prejudice, as long as I did my share of the work. Back then, and now, I never considered that the color of a person's skin made any difference. I truly wish I could say that was true of most southern people but history tells a very different story.

I've already mentioned that my family is Catholic. Almost everyone in south Louisiana is Catholic. Because of this connection, the church plays a large part in the community of Loreauville. Though I didn’t consider myself piously religious, I did enjoy the pageantry and formality of church ritual; choir’s singing with the ethereal scent of Frankincense and Myrrh filling your senses. Those special moments were few and far between. The run of the mill Saturday and Sunday Masses were enough to sedate even the most pious catholic. If it wasn’t a High Mass, then I’d rather have an empty church all to myself.

I have a deep love of Louisiana cemeteries. They are unique in the US because the water table is so high in the southern part of the state, you can't bury a person by just putting their coffin into the ground. After a short time the buoyancy of the sealed coffin would cause it to push its way back to the surface. So the burial customs in Louisiana have evolved to the practice of placing the coffin into a small concrete tomb set into the ground to keep it where you placed it. These tombs, of all shapes and sizes, many times stacked at least two high above ground, and one or two levels below, are the reason that cemeteries in Louisiana are called "Cities of the Dead."

I knew our cemetery grounds almost as well as the official caretaker. His name was "Crip". He had a mobility handicap and rode a bicycle everywhere he went not in the usual manner, but by propping his bad leg on the pedal, and using his good leg to push against the ground propelling forward like a skateboard. I always thought that the name Crip was a mean, disrespectful name, that others had given him, but Crip actually told people to call him that. I toyed with the spelling in my mind, and envisioned it spelled "Crypt" instead of "Crip". I helped him during the month of October before All Souls Day which is always November second (or the third if the second falls on a Sunday). This day is also called the “day of the dead”, and most families make the pilgrimage into the cemetery to visit the graves of their deceased family and ancestors. It was in preparation for this ritual observance that we worked all October in the cemetery. We mowed the grass, trimmed the edges, and killed and pulled the weeds that incessantly rose up again a few weeks later. It was a small comfort to know that only the grass and weeds forced their way back out of the ground on any regular basis.

One of the services Crip provided was the preparing of a gravesite to receive another coffin. He would break the concrete seal around the tomb opening and clean up the inside, then after the burial service would seal the tomb closed again. Many strange things could be found when opening a grave, and I am a stronger man for being present for a few of them. One incident in particular remains with me. Most graves have the opening on the end of the elevated tomb face, but some, this one in particular, have a large concrete removable capstone over the entire top of the crypt. An African American family was going to use this cemetery plot to inter the remains of the patriarch’s brother who had recently passed away. When Crip and I removed the capstone we were surprised to find that the tomb already contained the remains of another person. Though many years had passed it was still obvious that the person had been lovingly put to rest. The family had not been able to afford a metal coffin, and though a wooden coffin may have been used it had disintegrated into dust. The rosary still entwined in the mans fingers, the black suit only disintegrating where the capstone corner had touched him as we removed it, a round clock with the words “a time of sorrow” written on the face, it’s hands set to the hour of death. All of these things combined to humble me, as I’d never really seen a dead person after they’d been buried, but the strangest thing of all was the skin had not disintegrated from the bones. It had shrunk slightly and become leather, still loosely holding the body together but drawn back at the extremities only showing white bone there at the finger tips, teeth, and feet. We replaced the capstone and let Fr Groschen know what we had found. On the second meeting with the family of the newly deceased they looked at each other and said they didn’t know who the other body might be. Old Church records were not always kept well, and we didn’t have any record of a previous burial. The bereaved family couldn’t afford to purchase another plot, and in the end Fr Groschen, Crip, and I decided we had to relocate the previously buried remains. We didn’t want to move them very far from the existing plot, in case there were family members of this person still returning yearly to pay their respects. There was no etched gravestone to indicate who the person was or any family on record to inform. In the end Crip and I dug behind the tomb in the small space left between the tomb and a live oak tree. The hole was neither six foot long nor six foot deep; there wasn’t enough room for the length, and too many roots for the depth. Using the bodies natural pivoting points of knees, and waist, as respectfully as we could we collapsed the mummified old man into three overlapping pieces and lowered him into his new resting place. With the freshly moved earth as a marker I returned to the cemetery a week after the funeral to find fresh flowers at the tomb, and another set of flowers resting on the earthen mound in the back.

A holdover from a much more prejudiced south, the cemetery was divided into a white and black section. There was a white Catholic Church, and a black Catholic Church one street away. Though the days of legal segregation seemed long over, they were not so far removed that the signs of their presence were gone. Just down the street from the church was a Café that still had a back entrance that was once designated for blacks only. The painted letters that used to say BLACKS with an arrow pointing to the rear of the café were long gone, though the entrance was still used by some of the older African American townspeople.

I remembered back to the two years we spent in South Dakota and my first glimpse of prejudice. I knew it was wrong then when practiced against Native Americans, as well as now against African Americans. I prayed to a God I wasn't sure I even believed in, that this type of behavior would disappear, and while praying I remembered the acceptance I felt from the farm hands when working side by side with them in Mr. Judice's fields. I could not knowingly ever be a part of such segregation.

One of the most meaningful projects I was a part of during my tenure at St. Joseph's Catholic Church was an attempt to moderate some of this prejudice. There were separate white and black areas of the cemetery. This separation was magnified by an open, sewage ditch between the sections. I proposed a plan to Fr. Groschen to de-emphasize this obvious divide. Without asking for any approval and using only donated supplies, we put concrete pipes into the ditch and had topsoil trucked in to cover it. We sowed grass seed over it and soon there was an attractive spread of beautiful green Bermuda grass where once there had been an ugly putrid reminder of the prejudices that although illegal, were still very much around.

The cook and housekeeper at the church was an African American woman named Anastasia. I remember she spoke with an accent that sounded like she came from England rather than the normal Cajun accents I was used to. She always had a smile for me; regardless of whether I was actually working, or sneaking around setting up practical jokes for Fr. Groschen to find. She was the unintentional recipient of many of these practical jokes. I made a stuffed shirt and pants body to resemble a corpse that I placed in closets ready to fall out onto the unsuspecting opener or leaning over head under water into the small pond in the back courtyard of the rectory. After finding these, she'd regain her composure, and carefully leave them as she found them, for Fr. Groschen to find.

The rectory always smelled heavenly. The wonderful smell of food in the air; a roast slow cooking in the oven one day, lemon pound cake the next, or loaves of fresh baked French bread cooling on the counter, a new smell every time I passed by.

When I returned to Loreauville after a twenty year absence, I stopped by to visit the church and rectory. Many priests had come and gone over the years, but as I was reminiscing with the current pastor I saw Anastasia come around the corner. She still worked there. I was delighted to see her again, but doubted that she'd remember me.

" I don't know if you'll remember me Anastasia, it's been ---"
" Oh I remember you Craig" she interrupted, with tears glittering in her eyes. "You're the one who filled in the sewer ditch in the black section of the cemetery"

Now I was crying too, and am crying again, as I write this. I couldn't have asked for a better remembrance.

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