“Aren’t you happy?” my uncle asked Marie Rodrigue on the night of my engagement to her son. “You’re going to have a daughter-n-law!”
“I had one,” she replied, her face deadpan. “It didn’t work out.”
When she died in 2008 at age one hundred and three, George Rodrigue’s mother still wanted to “go home” to New Iberia. She wanted her car back, to remove her grandsons’ hats and cut their hair, to lengthen my skirts and overcook my Thanksgiving turkey, to visit long-dead friends and family, and, most important, to see her son get a real job, “with the telephone company,” she said, as she worried about his pension:
“When will you realize that nobody’s gonna buy those pictures?”
She was tough, ‘solid,’ as George used to say, with legs like tree stumps (her description, not mine, although…)…
…and the closest she ever came to happiness was in worrying about it. At age ninety-two she called us in
Carmel, as it stormed at our house in Lafayette, Louisiana, concerned about the rising water in the front yard. We heard the phone drop and an ‘Umph,’ amidst the thunder and rain, as she slipped on the front porch, her solid body rolling into the flower bed unharmed.
“Where are the sandbags?!” she hollered, recovering the phone as she lay trapped beneath an azalea bush.
(George Rodrigue painted his mother’s 1924 graduating class from Mount Carmel Academy in 1972; Marie sits bottom row, third from the right)
Like most of her generation, the Depression hovered over Marie Rodrigue’s decisions, threatening to return at any moment. However, she lived with another experience just as powerful.
It was a Sunday morning in 1927, and like all of New Iberia, twenty-two year old Marie Courrege knew that the water was coming. The U.S. Corp of Engineers, hoping to spare the big city, blew up the levy at the Mississippi River near Morganza, north of New Orleans, and in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, a few days before.
Marie parked her Model T Ford at the edge of the floodplain, just east of New Iberia, where the river ran thousands of years before, and where the land descends toward St. Martinville. She heard the water before she saw it, and for the rest of her life she recounted the story, her hands moving with the memory.
“The water was rollin’,” she said, her arms twirling and her eyes wide. “I jumped in the car and drove to the church, the river rising on the wheels of daddy’s car. ‘It’s coming!’ I screamed in the middle of the sermon, and the people ran from the church and left town.”
Marie Rodrigue, a devout Catholic, proud to be ‘French’ as opposed to ‘Cajun,’ was an odd and some would say charming mixture of funny and mean. “She has no filter,” George used to say in response to her biting comments. If it entered her head, it came out of her mouth, and like most families, maybe all families, it was those closest to her that felt the sting.
“George, you’re full of sh*t,” she said, on more than one occasion.
And eventually I was too. We learned to lie and tell her what she wanted to hear, that the new clothes were actually the dry cleaning, that I scraped the insides of the pumpkins to make the pies, that we sold paintings on our vacations, that her savings paid for her living expenses, that our dinner guests left twenty dollars at the door and, that if she would wear a new suit instead of her shroud to our wedding, I would,
“I swear, on the day you die, let the sleeves out again so that someone else can wear it.”
George, an only child, tried to please her, and perhaps that is the best that can be said of their relationship. He loved her deeply and lied daily to his mother, because he wanted her happiness. I know for a fact that she bragged about George to others, yet she existed on another plane from her son, unable to acknowledge his accomplishments where it mattered most, to his face. Fortunately, her wit softened the blow.
“She didn’t think she was funny,’ says George, “but she had a dry, cynical humor that cut to the chase real fast.”
Immune to criticism from a young age, George is confident in his artwork and in life’s decisions. In the years I’ve known him, he coveted only his mother’s approval. Yet, in one of life’s ironies, the harder he tried, the less likely her praise. The saving grace, both at that time and now, as we reminisce about Marie, is the leftfield humor in her retorts.
“Well, did he have anything good to say?” she asked, after we gave her a rosary and a signed proclamation from the Pope.
She wore step-ins instead of panties, passed a good time with her visiting relatives, went ridin’ in the afternoons, had the en vie for chicken stew, and (unable to grasp the concept of reruns) marveled at how good Ed Sullivan looks for his age.
Unable to sleep, she roamed the house at night, checking doors and the refrigerator, one time locking me out in my nightgown at 5:30 a.m. as I picked blackberries in the backyard for a pie. (Thank you again, George Parker, our neighbor, for your discretion and the use of your bathrobe and phone-)
For no reason at all, she stood barefoot on a railroad tie in our driveway and sang the French National Anthem at the top of her lungs as George and I planted bamboo around our greenhouse. Another time she and her niece Berta Lou yelled like Janes throughout the evening during a Tarzan marathon, feasting on Doritos and red wine, as George,
the boys and I stared from the next room.
In the two years she lived with us, she expected ‘dinner’ on the table each day at noon, shortcuts not allowed. I apologize here publicly to
my stepsons for thinking that they finished off the cakes in the night, leaving me panicked nearly seven days a week for a new homemade dessert. It was the incessant roach problem that alerted me to the truth, when I found cakes and cokes stored beneath Marie’s bed, hidden, she explained, “from all those kids…..and from Dickie (Hebert)!”
On the road, George called her everyday to reassure her that he was working. He often recounts the time some friends from California heard her on speakerphone after he explained to her that someone bought a painting for $50,000.
“She got real quiet and then said, ‘How much?’
“So I repeated it slowly.
“‘She paused again before she got mad: “For one of your pictures? George, you give those poor people’s money back right now!’
“She was more worried about those ‘poor people’ than she was about me.”
Without question, Marie softened with age. She forgot about Andre’s long hair and Jacques’s girlfriends. She forgot that she hated Christmas. And she forgot me altogether. Unfortunately for George, she remembered that he took her car and that she wanted to go home. In her own way, a Mother’s way, she loved her son, and she reminisced until the end about his childhood studio in the attic and the way the other mothers cooed at him in the carriage.
While in her early nineties, Marie and George visited
his father’s grave in New Iberia, where a cousin left fresh flowers for what would have been his one-hundredth birthday.
“Those hussies,” she snapped, “they’re still after him!”
And she never visited him again.
For better or worse, Marie lived her later years (her last forty, according to George) in the past. Admittedly, the repeated conversations often brought tears to my eyes,
“George, let’s visit Lona,” she said, dressed and ready for the ride.
“Lona’s dead,” he replied.
“Oh yes? Where’s Caspa?”
“Dead.”
“Well then, let’s call Romain….”
But they were all dead. Finally we lied about that too and spoke of ghosts as though they lived. We explained that they would visit her next week, as we grabbed a chance, a fleeting chance, to make her happy.
Wendy
Thanks for sharing – that was Amazing x
Beautifully written Wendy. Happy Mother's Day to you.
Thank-you Miss Wendy—brought smiles, visions, truth and nostalgic moments. Hey George, you're a good son.
A Happy Day to the Mother in all of us!!
Barbie
what a beautiful story wendy, thank you for sharing, it brought tears to my eyes
Thank you all for reading and writing in- and Happy Mother's Day!
That was really nice Wendy. I remember those days of our reunions w/ the guys at George's house in Lafayette and we all kept talking and reminising w/ her. She was a good person and a great mom to George. George was lucky to have her so long. I lost my mom at 16 to cancer and now I'm fighting it. Have a great day.
Thanks for a great Mother's Day story, Wendy. I was talking to my Mom (her Mother's Day call) and among other things, I told her about your post and George's mother, that she bristled at being called "Cajun."
I never knew this about my grandmother, but my mom told me after hearing that, her mother, from Houma (and was a real Cajun), considered the word "Cajun" as derogatory as the n-word. "We are ACADIANS!" she would say. My grandfather, though, was descended, as I guess Marie Courrege was, from French colonists (as was my father's side of the family from New Orleans) and not Acadian refugees. Who knew it could be so complicated?
Happy Mother's Day to everyone!
Hi Gary – It's always good to hear from George's long-time, hometown friends. He sends his regards, as do I, along with our prayers and concern as you battle health issues. Our best to Carmen as well-
And Pontchartrain Pete! Great to have your comments. It's true that George's mom was aghast when George announced he would be a "Cajun artist." The Aioli Dinner, in fact, probably his most famous Cajun painting (and on view currently at NOMA, at the top of the stairs to the right), was her least favorite from the start. I was surprised in doing the research on the dinner club, because indeed they called themselves "French" and their food "Creole." No mention of Cajun anywhere. It was George that embraced his Cajun culture in his life and work, but his parents and their siblings did not support that decision.
George credits Chef Paul Prudhomme with getting the word out and 'lifting up the Cajuns'!
I loved your Mother's Day post! It brought up so many memories of my own mom who died at age 94, five months after Katrina. She couldn't understand why I was in the School of Journalism at U. Texas instead of becoming a teacher. And she always thought I worked too hard. In the last year of her life, I fulfilled her dream. Whenever she would introduce me, she told people I was a teacher. I just smiled, knowing that in her mind, I had finally made the "right" career choice.
It must be universal — no one can hurt us quite like our mothers. My husband and I were partners in a successful advertising agency and the best my mother could come up with was "I hope you're not crooked." She lived to be 94 and was miserable every moment of every day. Miss it? Not a second.
Marie sounds like quite a character, Wendy! Your post conveyed so much of the flavor of her personality. You did a great job!
Getting that parental approval is sometimes a task, as it was for George. Recently one of my brothers, who has always earned his living as a musician, took up painting. His wife is quite skilled so she gave him some pointers and solved his painting problems. He embarked on a series of portraits of famous jazz musicians, each painted in a different monochromatic palette from a photograph, and he's been selling them pretty successfully. I told my mother (age 94) about it and she said, "Oh, great. We have an artist in the family." I said, "But Ma, I've been an artist for years." She replied, "Oh, yes. I guess you could call what you do art."
Oh Nancy, That's priceless!
Great stories, Wendy. A lot of people have a negative opinion of artists, even if they're their own kids. My Father thought his three artist sons were irresponsible losers, although we all made good livings as artists.
Thank you for writing in, Al. George especially will be excited to hear from his Art School friend! And as to parents and artists….. My mother was an artist, so, even though my father wanted me to be an engineer, I had a mother who understood my Liberal Arts passions. In other words, I was, from the beginning, a lucky gal.
All of these posts brought tears to my eyes! It's amazing that we became who we are. They must have given us confidence. Everyone expresses their love differently. We know that, and it didn't stop us. We chose a different parenting style, for sure! Children need to know
they're loved and admired by those close to them!
Wow! Very similar to my story! I taught one year in public school (in TX) before Katrina hit. Before that, I taught in preschools at 1/3 the salary. My mom was glad I got a "real" job. My mom died in TX, a week after Katrina, 2 weeks after we moved her to TX, from N.O. She would have been proud to hear I just won the T.O.Y. award, at my school. She, too, was a teacher, but always discouraged that profession, saying it was too hard and unappreciated. It is hard, but it is my passion! And, my mother's, too…
Wow, she was a hoot!
Thank you so much, Wendy! What a wonderful story, and you're role in this mirrors my experience with my non-French in-laws! Of course, I was already trained in the ways of the French Louisiana Parental Force!
Wendy… Your memories of Aunt Marie has me giggling … what a character she was… and I see how much of her ways have still past down the line of our relatives…especially the wandering around at night!!! I wander all night long!!! And… " proud to be ‘French’ as opposed to ‘Cajun,’…" My Dad was the same… “She has no filter,”…." Yep…my sisters and I have no Filter…what goes in the head comes out the mouth, no matter how inappropriate… my Grandmother, Leontine Courrege Boutte was Marie's sister…
good Job writing!