Paul Kieu
It’s another Saturday morning in the unincorporated community of Reddell, Louisiana, north of Mamou. Pickup trucks line the road for what seems like miles—some new and shiny with enormous mud tires; others old, rickety, and on their very last legs; all leading up to the old Reddell Superette. Coffee and fresh boudin are on everyone’s breath as the weekly auction gets underway.
“Here-we’ve-got-a-jar-o-honey-folks. Fresh-homegrown-local-honey. Two-dollars-let’s-start-the-bidding-at-two-dollars. Three? We’ve-got-three-dollars folks, four-dollars! Five? Sold-to-buyer-number-nine!”
The first October cold front nips as I walk among rows of tables laid out with just about anything you can imagine: Pottery, plates, silverware. Random, indecipherable bits of metal. An iron knuckle hiding under a marionette. Old duck calls arranged carefully next to waders and a set of decoys. Ziploc bags of kumquats, homegrown satsumas, and stalks of sugarcane laid out right by the auctioneer’s stand. A complete, yellow-paged collection of Disney’s Wonderful World of Knowledge books. I flip through a beautifully illustrated French bible and turn around to see a toilet that looks as if it’s been plucked straight from the ditch. Each abandoned token tells some story of life in South Louisiana.
Alongside these riches one can also find the strangest, most eclectic oddities. Auctioneer and present owner Wayne Cauthron remembers things coming through like Little Debbie cakes, peacocks, and even a jar of baby teeth.
I sit down on a bench to watch events unfold, and an older gentleman sits beside me. I ask him if he’s bought anything today. He smiles and shows me a dusty old handgun. “It doesn’t work,” he says. But he got it for $2.
Another woman tells me, “You never know what you’ll find or what kind of deals there will be.” One-time owner of the Reddell auction (then called Crazy Cajun Auction, a name still advertised on the roadside sign) and Associate Professor at the University of Louisiana Lafayette Gwen Fontenot attests to this. She tells me that with an auction like this, the things that pass through and the way they sell depend entirely on factors like season and the changing crowd.
“The things that sell the best are these really rare antique hand tools that come through pretty often, old plows that mules would pull back in the day,” she says. “People who go to these things know the difference between a glass and a Depression-era glass. Real wood or not wood. Real jewels have even come through from time to time.”
Alongside these riches one can also find the strangest, most eclectic oddities. Auctioneer and present owner Wayne Cauthron remembers things coming through like Little Debbie cakes, peacocks, and even a jar of baby teeth.
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I’ve come to the Reddell Saturday auction, a five-minute drive from my home in Vidrine, on a slow day. It’s the beginning of deer season here in Evangeline Parish. Even so, there are easily thirty or forty people in attendance, milling around the tables, treasure hunting. For the first thirty minutes, it seems as though I don't hear anything go for more than six or seven dollars.
Then Cauthron’s voice announces over the loudspeaker the sets of Magnalite pots, the ultimate Cajun luxury. They all sell for $25–$40. Wrapped up in fluffy coats and hats, the people here know that gumbo weather is fast approaching.
Paul Kieu
Good tidings, then, for all those who have come to sell their poultry today. Stepping inside the old superette, the familiar stench of barnyard reaches my nostrils. Lined from wall to wall are cages housing various feathered and furry creatures: ducks, chickens, turkeys, guineas, pigeons, and rabbits. Boxes on a table are filled with newborn chirping yellow chicks, which go on to sell for as low as $1.50 a head.
“I’ve sold chickens for a dollar a head and I’ve sold them for $60,” says Fontenot. “You really can make a lot of money selling your animals if you do it at the right time.”
Paul Kieu
Fontenot’s family entered the small-scale auction business in DeQuincy around forty years ago. After a move to L’Anse Grise, and then to Vidrine, the business found its home in Reddell when her dad passed away in 2006. Fontenot took over it herself, dubbing it the Crazy Cajun Auction. “When he died, people were afraid I wouldn’t keep it,” she says. “They said I had to. It’s social, kind of like this big family thing. It’s a community service.”
Fontenot remembers driving in every weekend to run the auction while she was also serving as a professor at ULL. “One day I was interviewed on TV about something going on at ULL,” she says. “Everyone at the auction came up to me and asked me why I had been on TV. To them, all I did was the auction. It didn’t matter what else I did during the week. I was the auction lady to them.”
In 2013, Fontenot decided to rent out the family business and ended up selling it to Cauthron; in 2016, the Reddell auction came under the umbrella of The C&C Auction Company, which also holds an auction in Crowley every Thursday.
“If Wayne didn’t have the personality he has, the values he has, he would never succeed,” says Fontenot, of the auction’s new owner and auctioneer. “It’s a special type of person that can do it.”
Watching Cauthron at work, I see exactly what she means. Even as someone who is not from here, Cauthron evokes a local vibe. (It helps that his hometown of Kinder is less than an hour away.) He knows his customers, calls them out by name, makes jokes, and keeps up an air of excitement throughout the day. This auction lasts from 8:30 in the morning until everything is sold, which can be as late as 4 or 5 pm, but Cauthron never seems to grow weary or to lose focus.
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He’s made a few changes since taking over, all with an eye on increased community engagement. “We stepped up advertising a lot,” he says. “We kind of streamlined things so that we get through it all a lot faster. We do discounts for sellers and social media and all of that too now.”
Paul Kieu
Wayne Cauthron takes a bid.
How does this auction work in the fast-paced world of Amazon Prime, eBay, or even just Goodwill? Why do people make the effort to come here—some from as far as Virginia or California—every Saturday to sell their old things and animals for maybe just a few dollars?
“The camaraderie,” says Fontenot. “We became just a big family of all the people who came to the auction. When my dad had it, half of his employees didn’t even get paid. They just wanted to be there every Saturday. If somebody was sick, you knew about it. All the people were just one big social family.”
What a world my flat, field-laced, Acadian home is: where every Saturday people gather up their things, once-beloved and now set aside; where they find treasures and trash on the sides of the road or in old barns and bring it all together; where they come from miles and miles to peruse its refuse and secrets and stories; where people find profit in simply sharing each other’s company.
I ask a woman whose husband has just bought her a bag of marbles if she has been here before. “Oh, we come every Saturday,” she says.
“How long have you guys been doing that?”
“For years,” she says. “For as long as it’s been here.”
The Reddell auction begins at 8:30 am every Saturday at 3029 Old Highway 13, Mamou, LA. General merchandise is auctioned off until around noon when the animal sales begin. For more information and updates on what is coming up for sale, you can visit C&C Auction Company’s Facebook page.
