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“I have those flying dreams--cruising low over the ground. In Louisiana in Words I can finally hear the voices that rise from the land. Joshua Clark has tapped into the soul songs of Louisiana.” --Judy Conner, humorist and author of Southern Fried Divorce |
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Read the Real Louisiana |
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--Ken Wells, Wall Street Journal Front Page Editor “Louisiana in Words is a Book of Hours for a place that’s more like a religion than a state. Witness within the worshipful attention to sunrise and sunset, the madness of LSU football on Saturday, and the calm of Ash Wednesday on St. Charles Avenue. From Caddo Parish way down to Plaquemines, Louisiana is like no other state in the union, and Louisiana in Words offers up minute-by-minute proof of that fact.” --Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack
Although there have been plenty
of “day in the life” picture books, never before has a book sought to capture a
single day in a state with words like this. Created from submissions received
from the world over, this anthology offers an authentic diary of Louisiana. One
hundred twenty nonfiction selections from known and unknown writers run
chronologically from dawn to dawn, each one minute in time. From Tallulah to
Thibodaux, Shreveport to St. Martinville, New Iberia to New Orleans, together
these minutes provide a mosaic of the landscape, heritage, speech, and
traditions of Louisiana unlike anything before them. |
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Some excerpts from Louisiana In Words: |
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“Sweetheart,” says a man’s voice. I reel around. “You know we’re in the middle of a budget crisis?” The Mayor’s head gleams. My face goes pink…. Her eyes scan the pod. There are no bars at Caddo Correctional Center, only metal doors, rectangular windows, eyes. It’s impossibly loud, and she is wondering how such loud voices can come from such small eyes. She counts the number of footlockers outside the door. Four inmates are on suicide watch. Inside, she knows, those inmates are dressed in blue. There is an awkward moment when she realizes that she too is wearing blue and stops mid-step. The voices coming from behind her stop. Perhaps they think she will turn around. She quickly resumes her pace, and the calls continue. “Teacher! Everything you need to know! Me!” Moon filters through reeds, mulberries, and moss--silver as sun-stained water. The egret alights, child angel, among wild blue irises. The alligator, cunning, skims the viscous swamp, opens its jaws, snaps shut. One white wing, blood tinged and torn, rocks, rests, in a small cove…. I’ve got five pints of Jim Beam strapped to my back and thighs. I’ve been up since Thursday. Today is Saturday. Today is game day. This is Death Valley. 96 degrees in the oaken shade. This ain’t Mardi Gras, no, but it feels like it. Baton Rouge is ours. This is the place of our birth. It is cracked tar and jungle hot all the time. It is un-mowed medians and copious billboards, spent chewing gum boiling up on our sidewalks. This is the unshaven neck of the Mississippi River, the bulbous brain of Cancer Alley, and we have bullet holes, like sores, on our capital building…. Crawfish on newsprint, boiled red with pop-eyes burning black from cayenne, and cold Jax beer in brown bottles, with Satchmo rupturing an old brown radio in the back room. Hear the bottle-tops’ metallic burp seconds before fizz collides with Tabasco on an old man’s tongue. No neighborhood gossip, only the game in black and white from a beery corner, the bat’s crack outdone by shells splitting, piled high as Grandma’s worries…. His words hush out of his mouth in a susurrus. “Shhhhh. None the baby gators can swim in John’s mouth in the heart house, none the baby gators can swim in hearts, everybody knows.” He digs his hand into the front pocket of his overall shorts. His bare chest exposes a clean count of four blue fingertips along the clavicle peeking out from the fold in the blue jean where the right strap hangs loose…. Somebody told him there is gold in Louisiana, and he believes it. Every weekend Marty loads up the old car with his gold panning equipment, his rubber waders, a seventeen dollar pan, a wooden fold-up camp stool he built himself, and his wife Lanie. For months on end he drives into areas she has never heard of and she refers to as God forsaken, mosquito infested swamps. But finally on this weekend, at this very minute, Lanie decides that maybe he is right, maybe there is gold here…. The gravediggers depart with a wave to Mr. Warren. His beer break over, he begins hoeing around a fellow veteran’s grave. He was drafted for Vietnam, he says, right out of high school. There, he learned that sleeping on top of the mounded graves would keep him dry, even if the water level rose during the night. Soon night will fall and, as usual, he’ll be alone in the graveyard. Mr. Warren doesn’t mind. “Dead people can’t do you no harm, baby,” he says. “You got to watch the ones that’s alive.” In the tropical wetness of a New Orleans summer, where the Natchez blows its horn over the crescent river, and the neighborhood edging the Quarter has buried the old timers in St. Louis Cemetery, we drive away, high noon, eyed by hostile natives sitting on stoops, high on crack. I call out to them as they diminish in the mirror…. At three a.m. he begins two 30-minute periods of zazen, sitting meditation. He pulls out the zafu cushion from his footlocker and sits in the half-lotus position on the floor of his cell, turning his back to the bars and facing his toilet. He puts his clock on the toilet seat, to make sure he does not lose track of time. This is his favorite time of day--the only good time of day--his religious experience. He is a Buddhist because it suits his view of the universe, and because it confounds all the fundamentalists trying to save his soul on Death Row…. So you anchor a hundred yards down a side bayou, the marsh grass and little trees all around you, butterflies waving madly and white egrets working the mud banks. Then, all of a sudden, a really strange thing happens. Your boat drops like an elevator and lands on the bottom…. For the length of several heartbeats, Time seems to warp and displace the Now, the Present, in his mind. For just a moment, he wonders: Is this a South Vietnamese rice paddy . . . or a South Louisiana crawfish pond? You look out at the spidery network of water and swamp before you. You can go no further. Before you shallow waters intermingle freely with swamp grass and trees. A few feet behind you a sign notes that this is the southernmost point of Louisiana in Plaquemine’s Parish. You stand even past that sign. You are standing at the end of the world…. Shortly after dawn. St. Charles and Louisiana. Ash Wednesday. A thumbprint of ash on the foreheads of faithful and unfaithful. No ash at all on the streets, what with the detritus from the last parades having been swept the night before. MacDonald’s flinging open its doors for the early morning regulars. Bundles of Times-Picayunes being dumped at the front of K&B. A Bultman’s van just arriving with a newly departed. And on the neutral ground a small elderly black gentleman in brown suit with white shirt and wrinkled tie. He’s dancing slowly, carefully, finely, to a band that only he can hear. On top of his brown felt hat there’s a glass of water… |
The contributors: |
Leslie AlexanderPatricia AllenSunday AngletonPlamen ArnaudovEmilie BahrIain S. BairdPatricia BakerJeanie BlakeLee BarclayFredrick BartonLina Hutches BeaversRemy BenoitJohn BiguenetCristina BlackDonna Maria BonnerLinda L. BoudoinElizabeth H. BoquetJerre BorlandPatrick BurkeMarda BurtonC.W. CannonJulia CareyChristian ChampagneTara Jill CiccaroneGraham ClarkeAndrei CodrescuL. Scott ConnorMichele CushmanMark DavidMarci “Merci” DavisWes DannreutherTara Scherner de la FuenteEileen DecoteauDiane DeesLenny EmmanuelGina FerraraSusan M. FolkesO.J. FredericBurk FosterEdward G. GauthierMary GehmanMichael GemmeBarry GiffordGiOGabriel GomezWilliam GriffinLee Meitzen GrueVeni HarlanAutumn Snyder HarrellChance HarveyJada HendrixBruce HenricksenJoshua Leran HolmesDale HrebikSarah K. InmanSam JasperLeonard Earl JohnsonClaire Domangue JollerJames L. Jones IIIKarissa KaryKathlyn KastnerMinter KrotzerKatheryn Krotzer LabordePhil LaMancusaChris LenoisCindy Lou LeveeDebbie LindseyJoe LongoRichard LouthAnita MachekDavid MaddenMarianne MansfieldRebekah MarkelBev MarshallBeverly MatherneDawn High McFarlandWayne McGawLou McKinneyGeorge NewtownMike & Stacy O’RourkeStacia Roberts PangburnDavid Parker Jr.Tim ParrishBobby D. PiercePatricia Ellyn PowellDonna PuccianiLinda RigamerKaty ReckdahlSarah Elisabeth RousselNancy RoweJack SauxR.C. SealyCathy SetzerEvelyn SmithErlene StewartTheresa ThevenoteGary ThomasAndrew TraversMargaret TrulyJanis TurkWilliam VailMick VoversM.O. WalshAndrea WatsonCody WhetstoneMissy WilkinsonKelly WilsonCarolyn WysingerKaren Yochim |
