A Traveler Comes By, South Louisiana 1964

SOUTH LOUISIANA, 1964

The hollow whine of the convertible’s tires on the bridge’s iron grid sounded an alarm that Jack couldn’t hear: South Louisiana was dead ahead, a world as foreign to the rest of Dixie as Dixie was to home. Like a rippling mirage, Louisiana’s grand billboard loomed over the far levee, large enough for two nicknames: SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE and THE BAYOU STATE, with nine-foot pelicans perched atop the corners, a bas-relief redfish leaping in the center, and hissing alligators facing off from the stilts… JIMMIE DAVIS, GOVERNOR.  – page 59

A Traveler Comes By is set largely in mid-1960’s South Louisiana. Then as now, that geographic term is preferred by most natives to designate their incomparable homeland of marsh, swamp, bayous, and prairies stretching along the Gulf coast and inland from the margins of the Mississippi delta to the Sabine River on the Texas border. Acadiana and Acadia were and are common but less used monikers, allusions to the Cajuns’ lost homeland in the French Canada of the 1700’s. Rare reference is made to the antique Creole appellation, La Louisianne, a Louisiana French name first applied to the region by Acadian immigrants in the time of their diaspora. Though widespread in the South Louisiana of the 1960’s, Louisiana French is now an endangered tongue, on life support as a primary language in a handful of enclaves.

For Jack Shea, our naïve young protagonist, a small-town Northerner who ventures into the Deep South in pursuit of a lofty dream, the six Deep South states he’s passed through seem exotic and at times even foreign, but as he crosses the Mississippi’s mile-long Natchez bridge, Jack is oblivious to what’s next—not just another state, but another world—a state within a state and country within a country, harboring a crazy-quilt of peoples and the captivating culture he’ll come to love and call his own… 

Sixty years ago, when Jack’s jalopy sped across that two-lane bridge, mid-nineteenth century Acadia was a land apart, an island culture with an ephemeral ethos, unique dialects, and an antique language spoken nowhere else on earth. Though hallmarks of its essence survive, including its precious music, cuisine, and openhearted populace, twenty-first century Acadiana is but a faint echo from that time.

Traveler presents a kaleidoscopic snapshot of that precious bygone country and its public, freezing on the page Acadia’s spirit and circumstance in a tale of discovery, joy, romance, and tragic misfortune.