In search of Willoughby

Juliette, Georgia, in its heyday

One of my favorite movies (and books) is "Fried Green Tomatoes." I even dragged Mr. G. to the tiny Georgia town where they filmed the movie. This required a lot of back roads and countless time out of our trip schedule, but it was worth it.

Much like Whistle Stop, Juliette in Georgia is kind of a knockabout place. There's not much there, but I'm a sucker for small towns. I kind of like the idea of living in one around 1910, when you could walk to work and grocery shop on Main Street. It makes me sad to drive through small towns and see the abandoned buildings that once constituted Main Street. I'm at a loss for why small towns can't sustain a two-screen movie theater and a general store. Do we really require a 16-screen megaplex and a Wal-Mart?

Willoughby: Not the happiest of 'Twilight Zone' episodes.

In other words, I'm searching for Willoughby, probably because we moved a lot when I was a kid so I never really had a Willoughby of my own.

An aerial view of the Hebert property. That patch of white between the rusted roof and the bayou is where my mom's childhood home stood. Those trees on the other side of the road (away from the bayou) once were known as the Hebert Woods.

What I had to sustain me were my mother's memories of her own Willoughby, which really was just a parcel of land on the bayou near Amelia that had been in her family for a century at least when it went to another family last year. It was kind of a knockabout place, and I've listened to my mother debate with other family members about what exactly it was called. The latest answer is Boeuf, but I've also heard Bayou L'Ourse tossed out (this was listed in my uncle's obituary). My aunt recently told me "We NEVER lived in Bayou L'Ourse" so heck if I know. My grandmother just settled for "the Assumption Parish side of the bayou" - or maybe that was where she was born. I don't know. It's hard to determine point of origin when you're deep in the bayou without any streets much less street names. My mother will tell you firmly, though, that they lived on the bayou. They did not live in the swamp. Thank you very much.

The old church in Amelia where my mother was baptized - and where she later set up her cowboys and Indians on the church pew during church services. 

The Kennedys had Hyannisport, and the Heberts had Boeuf. To get there, you leave Gibson in Terrebonne Parish and take a right just before the bridge to Amelia and Morgan City. Amelia, by the way, is where my mother was baptized and had her First Communion. It's also where my family did their shopping and were buried. You can see the cemetery from the family land. All you had to do was get into a boat and row across the bayou to Amelia. No one needed a car.

I think, although I'm not certain, that we ended up there this way: Jean Baptiste Etienne Penisson settled there with his wife, Henriette Boudreaux (they're buried in Amelia). They had a daughter, Marie Rosalie, who married Jean Severin Hebert (or John S., as we always knew of him). John S. and Rosalie had a ton of children, including my great-grandfather, Jean Jules, in 1878. He lived nearly 100 years.

At some point, Jules and his wife, Eugenie, moved across the bayou to Amelia, where they lived next door to Oleus and Louise Montet. In the Montet household was an orphaned niece named Florence Gertrude Gauthreaux. Jules and Eugenie's son Horace married Florence. They became my grandparents.

Granny at what I think was the back door of the old house. With her are Aunt Ethel's children.

But back to Bayou Boeuf. My grandfather built a home on the family land there once he married.  It was a three-room shotgun shack: Living room/Bedroom, Bedroom and Kitchen. I know exactly what it looked like because A. I saw it once when I was a kid and B. Miss Teen (my granny's neighbor) had the same floorplan. My grandparents raised six kids there before moving down the highway to Gibson. Four of their kids were actually born in that house, probably in the front bedroom, but who knows. I never thought to ask Granny before she died.

The bayou house also is where an old uncle was laid out for his wake after he killed himself in the bayou. The story goes that he ran out of coffee ration slips during the war and just couldn't go on. We do love our caffeine although I doubt the truth of that story. Granny tended to spin stories when she thought you couldn't handle the truth. Once she got into her 90s she let some things slip, but she never told me the truth about that tale of woe. She did tell me other stories, though. Those were some fun afternoons full of jaw-dropping gossip.

Aunt Ethel's yellow house in its heyday. In Assumption Parish, the Mary statue in the front yard is standard.

We decided to go back to Boeuf recently even though our connection is gone. I should probably explain something about Cajun families. Everyone seems to marry young. My grandmother lived to meet great-grandchildren and even a few great-great grandchildren. My grandmother's sisters and my grandfather's siblings weren't just people I knew from stories. I met many of them.

Aunt Ethel and Uncle Bake. How cute are they?

My grandfather's father was Paw Paw Jules Hebert. I don't remember him; but I was 3 when he died so I probably did meet him. Paw Paw Jules had a daughter, Aunt Ora, and several sons. Aunt Ora married and moved to Morgan City. Uncle Aaron died in the war. My grandfather, Horace, stayed on the Hebert land until he moved to Gibson in the 1960s. I never knew Uncle Howard since, like Uncle Aaron, he died before I was born. I should remember Uncle J.T., but I don't. He must have lived in Morgan City, which was like the other side of the world to us. Uncle Wilfred - or Uncle Bake - lived until 1982, and I remember him vividly. He was a nice man who liked to tease in a good-natured way. I used to imagine that my grandfather must have looked and been very much like him (he died prematurely not long before I was born). Uncle Bake was married to Aunt Ethel.

Aunt Ethel (really my mom's aunt) survived Uncle Bake by decades, staying on in the little yellow house on the Hebert land after everyone else left. That little yellow house hardly seems big enough now for two adults and six children (girls in one room, boys in the other; apparently all the Heberts had six kids), but it seemed grand in comparison to my mom's childhood shotgun shack. It even had a bathroom. Aunt Ethel surprised us all by dying a few years ago at age 85. I guess we thought she'd always be there, working on her crossword puzzles and tending to her flowers.

This Memorial Day weekend, we decided to go back to the Hebert land and see what was still there. Our party for the trip included Nanny (my Aunt Olive), my cousin Kim, her husband, my godbaby, Aunt Marilyn, me and Mr. G. The biggest problem would be finding the place even though we had two people who grew up on the land in the car with us.

We turned too soon and ended up in the town of Bayou L'Ourse (which is lovely even if it decidedly is not where my mom and her siblings grew up). We wound our way around to the bayou that separates Assumption Parish from St. Mary Parish, craning our necks for anything that looked familiar. When we reached the bridge, we knew we'd gone too far and turned around. Finally, Nanny told us to turn around again and guided us to what is now a paved road sandwiched between massive shipyards. The road even has a name now: Bayou Lane. It seems fitting. We parked at the end of the road, got out and went exploring.

Skirting a row of cars parked on the side of a shell road, I followed Nanny as she walked without hesitation to a stranger's door behind Aunt Ethel's house. My husband later joked that the menfolk hung back while the women and children breezed past the new "No Trespassing" sign.

Mom and Aunt Marilyn on the front porch of the old house, which was torn down in the 1980s.

Nanny had no fear because this was where she'd been born, on this spit of land down what used to be a shell road.  There, among an avenue of trees, is where the original Hebert house (the Big House) likely once stood before it burned to the ground long before my mother was born. There, back by the bayou, is where my mother's childhood home once stood. There, near a magnificent tree is where Paw-Paw Jules' house once stood, a three-room house that he later shortened to two rooms (kitchen and bedroom) after his wife died (although, as my aunt said, who the heck shortens a house? You usually add on, not take off a room). Somewhere there, probably by the bayou, is where the shack stood that housed Paw-Paw Jules' brothers until one of them tied his hands and feet together and flung himself into the bayou. Still there, right by the road, is Aunt Ethel's yellow house, where my mom and her sister watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon.

It was all foreign to us. We hadn't been there in 20 years, and it showed. Down the street was Cousin Bea's house, but Cousin Bea's long gone. At the end of the road was Miss Viola's house, but she's long gone as well and someone's fixed up her house and added to it, making it look picturesque, like something out of a movie.

The avenue of trees on the Hebert land. This avenue leads to the bayou.

Then we spotted the nice trailer behind Aunt Ethel's old house. It seemed like old times, back when one of her children lived behind her house in a different trailer. And, I think my aunt thought that it was Hebert land so no doubt we were related to whoever lived in that shiny new trailer. We weren't.

The Hebert land sold after Aunt Ethel died. It sold to an old man who peered at my younger aunt, said her name and reminisced about her birth. He grew up down the bayou - someplace called Bayou Cheramie - and used to come by in a boat to visit my mother's brothers. He took us through Aunt Ethel's house, inviting us to take anything we wanted, and invited us to visit again.

Sisters: Aunt Marilyn and Nanny by the old bayou.

I have a feeling that was our last trip to the Hebert land, which makes me more than a little bit sad. Soon enough, Aunt Ethel's house will fall down on itself, and there will be no trace that we were ever there.

Places really do hold memories, and all of the places where my Granny lived (save the nursing home) are gone. Even her house in Gibson - with the screened in porch, the lineup of graduation photos on the back of the couch and the framed picture of the pope - is gone. I can't walk up those steps, open that screened door and picture her sitting in her rocking chair in front of her stories.

A few good things did come of our visit to the Hebert land (as it will always be remembered in my mind even if it now is Charlie Davis' land). One, the women proved they're braver than the men. Ha! Two, we met some adorable French bulldogs who now live on the Hebert land. That seems fitting given our ridiculous love of dogs. Three, the visit made Nanny nostalgic.

Granny as a young mother with Nanny.

I learned, for example, that Granny could row herself across the bayou lickety split. Since she was 42 when my mother was born, Granny always seemed ancient to me. It was fun to hear about what a pistol she was in her younger years (not that she wasn't a pistol in her later years). I only knew her for the last 35 years of a very long life.

Nanny and Uncle Herbert. And a chair. Why is there a chair?

I also learned what kids did for fun on Saturday mornings in bayou country back in the 1940s. Obviously, there wasn't a movie theater, but the general store somehow showed movies on the weekends for the kids. Nanny remembers following the adventures of Rin Tin Tin each week in a room adjacent to the store. Each Saturday viewing ended on a cliffhanger with Rin Tin Tin's life in danger.

Beautiful Nanny

I love hearing about yesteryear. I especially love to hear Nanny reminisce. She's a favorite in our family - a woman with an enormous heart, a quick mind and a great sense of humor. Everyone loves her.

And I understand why my grandfather on the other side of the family holds onto the farm that's been in our family for so long. I understand why he holds onto it even though it's much too far away in West Texas and no one from the family really lives in the area any longer. Places hold memories, but places don't endure. And losing those places is like once again losing the people that made those places so dear.