The Bayou Cajuns
A guide to the wild, generous swamp
Driving alongside the Intracoastal Waterway in Houma, I scanned the banks for the B&B whose online listing claimed I could “fish from the backyard.” I thought I’d found my place in a little white cottage with a green front porch, matching green rocking chairs, and a statue of St. Francis standing guard. I gave my hostess a call. Sharp and loud, her accent flat as rice fields, she answered: “Jordan! Where y’at?”
She directed me to park at the tanned brick house right across the street; as I pulled in, all four and a half feet of Mrs. Maudrey Bergeron walked out in the yard. The seventy-nine-year-old proprietor of Chez Maudrey didn’t skip a beat. “Our otha house is full tanight, you’ll be stayin’ wit me,” she said before marching back into her home.
Inside, under low ceilings, nostalgia swept my questions away. The distinct “Cajun grandmother” aura of Mrs. Maudrey’s home evoked no one place or person for me, but a jumble: dark paneled walls and linoleum, old men sinking in armchairs, a kitchen kept warm and aromatic by ever-frying onions and their slippered overseers.
But Mrs. Maudrey, though almost identical to the parade of French-speaking matriarchs who have shaped my own cultural identity, lives on the water. One hundred and fifty miles from my Acadian prairies, she sat at the kitchen counter with a stack of brochures, menus, and photos, prepared to usher me into the world of the Bayou Cajuns.
After showing me photos of her sixteen siblings (her twin sister Audrey George also runs a B&B in Houma, Audrey’s Lil’ Cajun Mansion), four children, sixteen grandchildren, twenty-seven great grandchildren, and 425 nieces, nephews, great nieces, and great nephews, she launched into suggestions for my time in Houma: a swamp tour, a hike around Lake Cocodrie, a mini Mardi Gras parade. But I had the next day already planned: a full day in the outdoors with Mr. Robert “Frenchy” Crochet, of History Channel’s Swamp People.
Frenchy had promised over the phone that there’d be plenty to see in Gibson, the nearby unincorporated town where he lives. There are crabs and honeybees and catfish, and, of course, there are gators. It’s all in a day’s work for the 52-year-old outdoorsman, whose straight-from-the-land lifestyle garnered the attention of the History Channel back in 2015 for the seventh season of its original reality series documenting alligator hunters in the swamps of South Louisiana.
From the rural prairie community of Vidrine in Evangeline Parish, I’ve always identified strongly with Cajun culture: the food, the music, the deep-rooted family loyalty, and an almost spiritual devotion to our land. So, when I first saw the History Channel’s depiction of the Cajuns, I was disoriented at how these people lived so very differently from my friends and neighbors. No television cameras or producers would follow Frenchy and me tomorrow; I’d just be getting a tutorial on living off the land from a different breed of Cajun.
The distinct “Cajun grandmother” aura of Mrs. Maudrey’s home evoked no one place or person for me, but a jumble: dark paneled walls and linoleum, old men sinking in armchairs, a kitchen kept warm and aromatic by ever-frying onions and their slippered overseers.
I was heading out the door to take Mrs. Maudrey’s dinner recommendation—Bayou Delight, “the place to hear Cajun music around here”—when she stopped me. Reaching into the cushions of the likely thirty-year-old couch, she produced a handful of Mardi Gras beads. “Purple for justice, green for fait’, and gold for power,” she said. “Wear these so everybody’ll know you’re stayin’ at the Chez Maudrey.”
At Bayou Delight, a low-energy group of men droned out jazzy numbers on a sax, keyboard, and guitar—no fiddles or accordions in sight. But the room wasn’t without life. Thirteen couples—with a probable median age of seventy-five—swayed to the sound, locked tightly in each other’s arms. The place certainly possessed the surreal quality of old Cajun music joints, where youthful energy surges despite the absence of literal youth.
The next morning, filled to bursting from Mrs. Maudrey’s homemade breakfast of French toast (some of the best I’ve ever had), blackberry preserves, eggs, bacon, and grits, I headed back toward Bayou Black, slipping into Gibson. My boyfriend Julien met me in the driveway leading to Frenchy Crochet’s little house, the yard littered with a collage of boats, cages, trucks, and indecipherable machines. A truck that was undoubtedly older than I was sat, ready to roll, in the front yard with a boat hitched behind it.
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Across his neighbor’s yard, the Swamp People star yelled his greetings to us, adorned in jeans, white rubber boots, and a camouflage t-shirt and matching hat. “So!” he asked once he reached us, “Whatch’all wanna see today?” When he talked, Frenchy’s accent sounded like the second cousin to my father’s, the same lilt but thicker, like there’s more air his mouth has to move around to speak.
We followed Frenchy to the launch at Bayou Black, where we settled into his fishing boat, The Silver Bullet, which was rigged up for alligator hunting with a crane-like contraption at the front. No alligator hunting for us, though; the thirty-day season doesn’t start until late August. But still, there was plenty to do on the water. A kind of bayou-made jack-of-all-trades, Frenchy shared with us the various ongoing projects he undertakes to pay his bills. “If there’s somethin’ I can do to make a dollar, I’m on it,” he said. He told us the river is filled with his own personal “refrigerators,” hoop nets designed to catch hundreds of pounds of catfish at a time, not to mention crab and crawfish traps when in season. “Frenchy got groceries,” he said, laughing. We floated along a bit further before he pointed to an old, seemingly-abandoned shrimping boat along the bank and reminisced about days spent almost sinking her with the mountains of shrimp they had scooped out of the waters.
Frenchy knows every crook and every cranny of the Bayou Black. He knows what color the water turns when there are fish and the way the air smells when there aren’t. It’s an incredibly dependent, incredibly personal connection to the landscape, a dance that allows nature to take the lead.
“Ya see? That water looks like it’s nice and soft and it’d never hurt nobody,” he said. “But it’ll turn on you in 2.5 seconds.”
With our cultivated and arranged prairielands, flooded and drained with the coming seasons, my people’s relationship with earth is one of conquering, of control. Our crawfish traps lined up and orderly, our fishing at leisure. Our water contained, its fruits induced.
As we floated on, the swamp, in all her wildness and generosity, opened herself up to us. Blue herons posed on cypress knees, and more baby gators peeped at us past the marsh grass. A dragonfly chased The Silver Bullet for what seemed like miles, and when you looked up, you could point out abandoned eagles’ nests. When we passed an entire cypress tree, fallen into the water and sinking away, Frenchy pointed to it and said, “That right der’ll earn me thousands. I’ll be comin’ back for it later this week.”
Throughout the day, bent on giving us a show, Frenchy drove the boat in circles again and again; each time he’d tease dozens of Asian Carp into flying out of the water after us. Finally, a sudden and audible slap had Frenchy bent over laughing, the boat slowing down, Julien soaking wet and stunned, and a huge fish flopping desperately at the bottom of our boat. “Ah, he gotcha, didn’t he?” laughed Frenchy as Julien rubbed the blossoming bruise on his shoulder and wiped the slime from his face. “Ya see? That water looks like it’s nice and soft and it’d never hurt nobody,” he said. “But it’ll turn on you in 2.5 seconds.”
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Through the swamp’s various shades of green we could make out pink flags jutting proudly, marking the locations of known alligator nests. Frenchy drove us up close to one pile of straw, parking the boat against the bank. Inside this nest, he said, there could be anywhere from twenty to fifty eggs, most of which would soon be harvested and brought to the local farm. This harvesting will be his primary project for the next few weeks.
We started to make our way back to the launch, and I asked Frenchy if this kind of life ever feels risky to him, putting such trust in the land to provide to him. He looked at me and said, “Well, I’m glad that I’m fortunate enough to pick and choose the things I want to do. Now, there ain’t no guarantee when you wake up in the mornin’ what the day’s gon’ be. It could be good, bad, ugly. But every day, I just start wit’ bein’ thankful that I opened my eyes. And after that, everything else can only be a blessin’.”
Then Frenchy slowed The Silver Bullet, giving us both a mischievous look: “Gotta make a stop at the grocery store.” He fed a pipe below the water’s surface and slowly pulled up a hoop net. Little by little, he worked the catch into the boat, and by the time he got to the end, I was shocked to realize that there were dozens, maybe even hundreds of fish in his net. He dumped them all into the massive trough in the back of the boat. “That’s about a hundred pounds of cat right there,” he said.
We returned to Frenchy’s house, where he pulled out a huge ice chest and asked if it would fit in my car. Before I understood what was happening, Julien intervened, “No, no, Mr. Frenchy there’s no way we can take all of that.” Perplexed, Frenchy asked, “What? Why not?” We eventually convinced him that we could take some, in a much smaller ice chest, but that a hundred pounds of fish was much too generous a gift.
Before we left, Frenchy told us that when God and the earth provide, he believes you’ve got to give back. “I feel like you give, you get paid three times back, if you’re givin’ to the right people,” he said. And then he sent us off with around thirty pounds of catfish, two jars of his homegrown honey, and a baby alligator head.
Follow along with Frenchy:
Stay in Houma:
Chez Maudrey Cajun B&B
311 Pecan Street
Houma, La.
(985) 868-9519