Opinion: Rheta Grimsley Johnson - Christmas Tradition Cajun Style
Fishtrap Hallow, MS
Johnell has trouble breathing now, is tethered to oxygen much of the time and has endured pneumonia repeatedly in 2015. His eyesight is gone. Yet he seems to see important things clearly.
When I speak to him on the telephone, it’s as if he just returned from winning a million dollars at the Indian casino, or, better, reeled in a record catfish from Louisiana’s Henderson Swamp. Johnell is happy, exuding the kind of satisfaction you cannot fake.
You’re coming Christmas, right?” he asks, but it is more of a directive than question. “Jeanette’s making a seafood gumbo.” His enthusiasm would lead a stranger to believe it’s for the first time.
Jeanette makes chicken-and-sausage gumbo a lot during “gumbo weather,” though not in hot months, when only restaurants and the uninitiated do. She never puts chicken in with seafood, or chicken and sausage with the shrimp, unwritten rules that divide the Cajun version from the rest of the gumbo world.
But when Jeanette makes a seafood gumbo, it’s an occasion. It’s like alerting the media that Picasso is about to unveil a painting, or Louis Armstrong play a song. I imagine the bells from Henderson’s little church pealing through the sugarcane fields. If I have a Christmas tradition, it’s putting my feet under the Latiolais’ table near the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp. They have moved into a smaller house recently, but the amazing smells and welcome are exactly the same. Good times roll.
Jeanette will rise before light and make her roux, tending it the way a good mother tends a sick newborn. The roux should be the color of the swamp, she says, and the tedious process of getting it there without scorching is not for the impatient cook.She is a beautiful woman, and even in bluejeans and a T-shirt she evokes another era, her fine skin unblemished and milky, her silver hair a halo. I guess when people brag on your saintly ways you feel compelled to live up to that, because Jeanette spends her life doing things for others and then denying she’s done anything at all.
“Mais, no, Rheta,” she’ll say if I dare compliment her, as an almost pained expression crosses her beatific face.
The first Christmas I spent in Henderson on a houseboat, I resisted having the main holiday meal with our good but new friends. I figured that honor should be reserved for family.
But I agreed to come late in the day for leftovers, and I offered a rather anemic contribution, a pecan pie or some such. I am no Cajun cook. We ate ham and pot roast and Cajun dressing, which is rice full of well-seasoned pork. We ate Jeanette’s inimitable potato salad. There were white beans and fluffy white rice, too. Green vegetables were limited, culinary lagniappe.
The next year I was there at what’s called in the South “the first table.” And I knew better than to offer to cook anything. Coals to Newcastle, costume jewelry to Liz Taylor.
For eight subsequent years, I waited impatiently for the phone to ring and Johnell’s voice to say, “Gumbo’s ready!” This year, once again, I’ll be tucking a bib and waiting to hear that happy man say those words. It’s a clarion call to Jeanette’s Christmas miracle.
RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON’S most recent book is “Hank Hung the Moon ... And Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts.” Comments are welcomed at rhetagrimsley@aol.com.