Julien Fontenot
Country Roads magazine's Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye Fontenot, holding Advanced Reader Copies of her forthcoming book, "Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie".
What makes someone a “writer?” It’s not putting down one word after another. It’s not writing emails, texts, or promotional copy. It’s not filling diaries, or whether we write for ourselves or for others. I think it’s not necessarily writing a publisher’s column, either, since I’ve been doing that for nearly thirty years without managing to string together anything longer than the contents of this page. However, if upon becoming aware of a story not fully told, there arises in you a need to assemble words to deliver the truth you’re sure lies just out of sight, and if that need becomes strong enough that you are compelled to devote years to willing that story into being, perhaps you are a writer. I’ve had the privilege of knowing such a writer for six years now, although Country Roads’ Managing Editor Jordan LaHaye has been one for longer than that. The story she tells in her first book, Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie, has taken all of her life, and longer, to come into being.
In January, 1983, thirteen years before Jordan was born, her great-grandfather, Aubrey LaHaye, was abducted at knifepoint from his home near Mamou and never seen alive again. Ten days later, after a massive manhunt, Aubrey’s body floated to the surface of the Bayou Nezpique, making him the victim of Evangeline’s first-ever kidnapping and most sensational murder. In life, Aubrey had been president of Guaranty Bank in Mamou and the head of the large and influential LaHaye family, whose French roots reach back to Evangeline parish’s earliest days. In Evangeline, as well as beyond, to be a LaHaye was to enjoy a position of privilege. In Home of the Happy, Jordan writes, “The name LaHaye can get you out of a speeding ticket all over the state or trap you in an hour-long round of stories with an old man who used to be padnahs with your uncle.” The abduction and murder ruptured this large, close-knit family’s deep-seated sense of security and belonging in ways that have resonated across generations, and continue to impact its identity to this day. For the extended LaHaye family, the murder became “Something we do not speak of,” metastasizing into a dark shadow that became a fact of life—like a birthmark—on this local dynasty, until one evening in 2017, when Aubrey’s grandson, Marcel, began to tell his undergraduate English-major daughter “… a story about this place. A story that needs to be told.” Jordan has been working on Home of the Happy, which takes its title from a passage in Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, ever since. Published by Mariner Books/HarperCollins, her book comes out April 1, 2025.
Yes, Home of the Happy is a book about a murder. But it’s also a memoir—the story of a family and of a place, and of the culture that defines both. From the first page, Jordan’s book brims with detail about life in Evangeline parish—its land- and waterscapes, its ebb and flow of work and play, and the ways in which its people look and talk and act. Taken collectively, her descriptions—of the Bayou Nezpique (“narrow, claustrophobic, more river than lake and more ditch than river), of a local sheriff (“… bearing the familiar potbelly of the area’s rice-and-gravy-fed patriarchs”), or the smell of her great-grandmother’s kitchen in the days after the kidnapping, when the house filled with FBI investigators (“the spicy richness of burning roux and frying meats allowed the chaotic space the grace of a haven, for the strangers and the family alike”)—are simultaneously lurid and lyrical, gothic and graceful, surreal and serene. In Home of the Happy, Jordan delivers one of the most vivid accounts of Cajun-ness I’ve ever read.
[Read Jordan LaHaye Fontenot's story on the mysterious Holiday Lounge in Evangeline Parish, here.]
If that’s not enough to compel you to pre-order Home of the Happy, there’s also the lingering possibility that the man convicted of the murder, John Brady Balfa, might not actually have killed Aubrey LaHaye at all. Throughout the thirty-nine years Balfa has served at Angola, he has maintained his innocence, and to this day, as Jordan recounts, patients still come to her father’s medical practice in Ville Platte and say, “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.” As Home of the Happy unfolds, Jordan interrogates the evidence, attempting to separate fact from fallacy, memory from myth, setting out what is known and not known, against Balfa’s ongoing post-conviction appeal.
Memoir, reportage, and investigative journalism, wrapped in a propulsive narrative that tells the tale of a family and a place across time. Is it the writer in Jordan that compelled her to tell this complex, challenging story? Or is it her upbringing against the omnipresent backdrop of a scarcely resolved injustice that made her a writer? I don’t know, but having had the privilege of spending a few days with Home of the Happy, and six years working with Jordan, I can assure you that she is a writer worth getting to know. Now, our job, and our privilege, is to read.
Pre-order a copy from your local independent bookstore, or online at harpercollins.com.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
