![]() ![]() I need to check-in but am anxious about getting my bearings before sunset. My first trip to Acadiana would just that, I said to myself.Īround 4 p.m., I find the local motel. She had provided helpful information and suggestions in our numerous email exchanges, however, and I had been studying maps and local histories. Gaines Center, thought she might be able to meet me there for a brief orientation to the area, but that proved impossible. Marcia Gaudet, founding director of the University of Southwestern Louisiana’s Ernest J. The cemetery site, an island in the middle of a vast cane field, was visible from their back yard, and they had set about restoring it (Drash).Īt the time, I had begun planning the Welty house visit and carved out a couple of extra days to make the easy drive down to Oscar while I was already that far west. In retirement, Gaines and his wife had returned to Oscar and built a house on a six-acre parcel of the original plantation that they had discovered for sale and purchased. Over more than a hundred years, five generations of his family had lived and worked the land-first as enslaved people, then as sharecroppers-and were buried there. Gaines had grown up in the “quarters” on River Lake Plantation, where the cemetery is located. The idea for this particular trip formed a few months earlier, when I happened to see a CNN story on the writer Ernest Gaines and his preservation of a cemetery in a community called Oscar, near New Roads, Pointe Coupee’s parish seat. Making pictures this way, inspired by reading, I need space to get lost in imagination. It involves using my camera to ponder how the homes and places associated with writers I admire might have influenced their work. The project I’m working on, called Native Ground, on depends on freedom to roam. I’m going to find a cemetery.Īfter two days in Jackson, where I photographed Eudora Welty’s finely curated house and gardens under the close attention of a well-intentioned docent, it feels good to be alone in open country. For another thirty miles, under sunshine, I zig and zag west toward my destination, Pointe Coupee Parish, northwest of Baton Rouge. I worry I might be in for a washout, but an hour or so into the drive, the sky starts to clear. Storm clouds chase me south out of Mississippi toward the Louisiana state line. Gaines, “The Last Regionalist” (Brister 550) It is one of the main characters in my work. So the land is very important to me and to all the things I write about.
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