Gone but not Forgotten

Lining a brick wall in the living room of Barbara Overstreet Hardy’s house in north Baton Rouge is a gallery of black and white photos taken in and around Oscar in Pointe Coupee Parish, where Hardy was born in 1945.

Besides family members, the photos depict Highway 1 along False River, a huge tree known as the “Miss Jane Oak,” and a row of slave cabins that made up Cherie Quarters, the workers’ community at River Lake Plantation. Many of the photos were taken by Cherie Quarters’ most famous former resident, Ernest Gaines, on trips home in the 1960s, when he was living “up north” in San Francisco. (The plantation, especially the quarter, is the subject of all of his fiction.)

The big house and one of its twin pigeonniers are still there, but only one slave cabin remains of what was once a double row of thirty houses. Descendants of the workers who built the cabins stayed on after Emancipation as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Many families lived in the quarter for six or seven generations.

Among them were the Kemp, Lovely, and Horton families from whom Hardy descends. Her strong sense of family, and memories of the home place, have inspired her to hold a series of reunions over the past fifteen years.

“When we were small, they used to have family reunions,” she recalls. “Everybody would bring something to eat, and it would last all day.”

Hardy says the death of her mother in 1986 started her thinking seriously about organizing a reunion. Then the 1988 death of her cousin Lee Williams Cador, who was “as close as a sister,” galvanized her into action.

“I started talking to Uncle Freddie, my mom’s brother, who was the last of seven children still living,” says Hardy. “I got [ancestors’] names from him. Sometimes they would be nicknames and I’d have to figure out what their real names were.”

In 1991, she launched her first gathering. She created a booklet that showed various branches of the family tree. The hot air balloon festival had recently come to Baton Rouge, so Hardy’s son Ronnie Overstreet designed a booklet cover depicting a hot-air balloon. The three-day reunion, titled “Journey through a Bayou Family Heritage,” drew “sixty or seventy” family members from near and far.

That first year, the group gathered on Friday night at a union hall, a rousing celebration despite the breakdown of both the air conditioning and the plumbing. On Saturday, they went fishing in New Roads. On Sunday, they attended church, then dined at Ralph and Kacoo’s in Baton Rouge, followed by a trip to the French Quarter in New Orleans. Everyone loved the experience—and a tradition was born. “After I did the first one I was on a roll,” says Hardy.

She masterminded subsequent reunions in 1993, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2004, and 2006. (Travel from as far away as Seattle, San Francisco, and Lansing, Michigan, can be costly, so Hardy schedules the reunions every other year or sometimes every third year.)

Each of the reunions has had a theme: “Gone But Not Forgotten” in 1996 commemorated the recently destroyed slave cabins. In 1999, the group was “On the Road to the Second Millennium.” This year’s theme was “A Sense of Memories.” (The 2006 attendees included several who survived harrowing experiences during Hurricane Katrina.)

Traditionally, the reunion opens with a Friday night gathering to eat, drink, and catch up on family news. Saturday is usually devoted to a fishing trip—in past years to False River but this year to a BREC park in Baton Rouge. “I always want ‘em to fish on Saturday,” says Hardy. “Conversation can run out, but with fishing you never get bored.”

Sundays open with a church service, often conducted by Hardy’s cousin, Reverend Levert Kemp, followed by dinner in a restaurant. Sometimes they drive to the Cherie Quarters graveyard to pay their respects to absent friends, although most of their ancestors are buried in nearby Lakeland. (In such a close-knit community, even those who weren’t blood kin considered each other family.) 

Often Hardy and her husband William, known as Buck, put up out-of-town visitors in their home. “Sometimes,” she jokes, “they won’t leave.” At night they sit up and reminiscence, often watching videotapes of reunions past. There is much joking and teasing, and Hardy, who is quick with a quip, gives as good as she gets.

But most of her time is spent making sure all goes smoothly. “Í have to think of everything,” she says. Such as what to do when a fishing trip is rained out: you roll out the barbecue pit and have a cookout for fifty people at your house.

Food is always a highlight of the reunions, much of it cooked by Hardy herself. Good cooking is a family tradition, she says; both her mother and maternal grandmother were outstanding cooks.

Hardy waxes nostalgic over the food of Cherie Quarters—Miss Rosie Ruffin’s pecan candy was a particular favorite. (Pecan candy, which Hardy continues to make, is less creamy than pralines, she explains.) There was gumbo, cush-cush (cornmeal fried in a skillet then crumbled and served with mustard greens), pork slabs sliced thin, boiled, then fried like bacon and served with grits, eggs, and biscuits.

Hardy’s mother Albertha Bibbens, known as Bert, cooked for twenty-five years at the Triple Arch restaurant near False River. One of her specialties was flapjacks. “They had a lighter texture than pancakes,” says Hardy. “She would beat the batter until it had air bubbles in it. She’d make a stack of flapjacks with syrup and we’d all sit around the table for breakfast.”

Hardy remembers her grandmother sitting out on the front porch, or gallery, grinding coffee beans. “I don’t know where she got the beans,” says Hardy. “Probably from the [plantation] store.”  Coffee was made in a drip pot with water heated in a teakettle. Even the children drank it. “They’d add extra water to ours, and milk,” says Hardy. “We had that coffee every morning.”

Even in a large family—Hardy is one of seven children—everyone sat down together to eat. “Everybody had to come to that table for breakfast. Dinner, the same thing—in the front room at the white table. We were brought up the right way.”

Hardy recalls housecleaning on Saturday so the house would be clean on Sunday. A clean, ironed cloth was put on the table, starched scarves or runners on the side tables and mantel, and clean spreads on the beds. “Saturday evening, everything was so nice and crisp and clean, ready for Sunday,” she recalls.

After Sunday school and church services, which were held in a wooden building that doubled as a school, the family came home, changed clothes, and sat down to dinner cooked by Emma Kemp, Hardy’s grandmother.

“She'd buy fresh meat every Saturday from the butcher Mr. Jack, because he’d kill on Saturday,” says Hardy. On special occasions, Emma Kemp made rice dressing, a time-consuming process. “We very seldom had rice dressing because it was a lot of work,” says Hardy. “They chopped everything so fine—the green onions, bell peppers, and celery. The pork was ground up with a grinder.”

Another of Emma Kemp’s special treats was eggnog once a year. “On Christmas Eve, the kitchen smelled so good,” says Hardy. “Mama [Emma] was in there grating nutmeg. At a certain time on Christmas Eve, she’d make eggnog, the best eggnog in the world. She whipped that egg white up, put a little sugar in it, added it to the [cooked] yolk and poured it in your cup. The nutmeg was ground fresh. They [adults] had a teaspoon of whiskey [in each glass], or maybe a half a teaspoon because she [Emma] wasn’t a drinker. Every Christmas Eve, you had eggnog. You looked forward to it because you only had it once a year.” 

Many of the cooking utensils have disappeared, but Hardy treasures an iron pot she inherited from her mother and grandmother—and possibly from another generation back. After washing the pot, her grandmother would coat it with lard to season it.

Hardy also has Emma Kemp’s World War II ration card and an iron—the kind heated on coals—inherited from a cousin who died at ninety. Other family heirlooms include a pitcher and washbasin, an old sewing machine, and handmade quilts. Her grandmother’s iron tester bed, in pieces, is stored and—she hopes—awaiting reassembly.

Hardy’s eclectic collection includes pieces given to her by friends and neighbors who appreciate her love of old things. As usual, Hardy sums it up with a quip: “I don’t turn down nothing but my collar.” 

But she turns serious as she explains what has motivated her to hold reunions that keep the ties strong. “Age,” says Hardy. “The older people. You begin to lose your ancestors, your grandmother, your mom. You want to do something, to let the young ones see something of this. This is history.”

Ruth Laney, the writer and coproducer of a television documentary on Ernest Gaines, published the book Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People That Inspired Ernest J. Gaines at LSU Press in October 2022. Find an excerpt of the book, published in our October 2022 issue, here: Of Love and Dust: Daily Life in Cherie Quarters.  She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.