2011: L'Ordre des Chevaliers de La Prairie Cadjine
And thanks to these knights of the Cajun Prairie, chivalry is far from dead
This story was selected by the Country Roads magazine editorial team as the representative piece for 2011 in the archival project "40 Stories From 40 Years"—celebrating the magazine's 40th anniversary on stands. Click here to read more stories from the project.
The chivalric tradition is alive and well in Ville Platte, Louisiana. There, in that rural agricultural town, you can still find a somewhat authentic medieval knight. It doesn't matter that he is dressed in sports sunglasses and a faux suit of chainmail, or that the point of his helmet is awry; each competitor is a true knight pledged to do great things.
Though Ville Platte is best known for zydeco, gumbo and fais do-do, few know that the town preserves a tradition of medieval jousting dating back to the Norman Conquest. Yep, that's more than a thousand years.
For it is in Ville Platte where young men, the pride of the Cajun prairie, do battle against a figurative foe (The Seven Enemies of Cotton) in an equestrian competition called Le Tournoi (the tournament). Le Tournoi (roughly pronounced toourn-wa) involves a horse, a rider, a lance and seven three-inch iron rings suspended from poles. The rider must gallop the horse at a high rate of speed on a semi-circular track and spear each of the suspended rings to score a perfect round.
The annual competition is held in conjunction with the Ville Platte Cotton Festival. When cotton was king in Evangeline Parish, field hands were always needed. Anyone big enough to carry a cotton sack could make a few dollars handpicking the fields.
Soybean and rice are the primary crops of the region now, and the only cotton plants you'll find in the city are ornamental. Still, we're talking about tradition and Le Tournoi is tied to the Cotton Festival, let's hope in perpetuity.
The boll weevil and the bollworm, as well as flood, drought, silk, rayon and nylon were the seven enemies of cotton. What better way to kill the enemies than to spear them with an ancient lance? It's positively primeval.
The twenty qualifying competitors are the main attraction of the Cotton Festival Parade. Riding two by two, they're clad in silver tunics meant to resemble a medieval armor. The fabric, however, suspiciously looks like it's made of synthetic fiber, even perhaps that mortal enemy of cotton—rayon. The irony of wearing a foe of cotton is apparently lost on the knights. It doesn't
matter anyway. The knights are anxious to reach the field of battle, otherwise known as the Ville Platte Industrial Park. There, seven posts, each dangling a ring that represents one of cotton's enemies, mark the circular track.
The object of the competition is simple. Who can spear the most hanging rings on their lance in the fastest time? Each rider gets three runs.
Le Tournoi competition is fast and furious. Twelve seconds and seven rings will usually get you in the running for the trophy and a kiss on the cheek from the Tournoi queen. A run
of 14.5 seconds? A rider in last year's competition put it best, "If you do 14.5 seconds, you got to get your horse moving. If you can't do better than that, it's best you just put your horse back in the trailer."
Event official Gerald Fontenot, 82, is one of the elder statesmen of Le Tournoi. Fontenot remembers when the sport was resurrected in the town in 1948.
"Le Tournoi is a French tradition," Fontenot said. "It was brought to Ville Platte by Marcellin Garand, an officer in Napoleon’s army."
Fontenot said the first Tournoi was in 1858. Other accounts say the race was held as early as 1828, but all sources say the tradition came to end in 1889 when baseball and other forms of horse racing arrived on the scene.
Le Tournoi was resurrected as a cultural event by a group of World War II veterans in 1948. The veterans enlisted the aid of a few elderly horsemen who competed back in the nineteenth century. And that tradition continues today so the youngest rider of the 2012 competition will know the man who competed in the 1940s who knew the men who competed in the 1880s who knew the man who started the tradition in 1840. Legendary.
Fontenot raced Le Tournoi until 1979 when his son began competing.
That's chivalry. Fathers ride until sons are old enough to carry on the family honor. Fontenots, Trahans, LaFleurs and Vidrines are perennial challengers for Le Tournoi honors.
But competitor Shane Trahan's father was not with him in 2010.
"My dad's been here every year with me but he passed away last January," Trahan said. "I've qualified twenty-two years in a row and I want to stay healthy enough four more years until my son is eighteen and old enough."
The Ville Platte tradition provides a time and place where hard work is noticed and rewarded. What is a knight, after all? He is an equestrian in diligent pursuit of a noble quest. If you think about it, we have modern knights in abundance. Diligent people who do their duty, and do it to the best of their ability: that is nobility. Novelist Charles Kingsley noted, "Toil is the true knight's pastime." If that's true, then a modern knight could be a truck driver, a police officer, a butcher... or a man with a horse trailer in Ville Platte.