Nellie Harrington of Breaux Bridge calls herself accident prone.
A believer in affirmations and tired of the bumps and bruises, she vowed to never experience another slip.
One rainy morning Nellie and her artist husband, Byron Knott, were running late and she took off out of the house, coffee cup in one hand and her work cradled in her arms. As she stepped down from the porch, she slipped on the rain-slicked steps.
“I was going down face first on the cement steps,” Harrington remembered. “And I heard Byron in the back saying, ‘Ah!’”
But Harrington never hit the ground. Suddenly, as she recalls it, her body was righted as if someone had grabbed her shoulders and stopped her fall. She found herself standing completely upright, feet flat on the ground.
When Harrington turned around, her husband was crying.
“He said he was sure I was going to break my neck,” she said.
Harrington credits that miraculous intervention with a rain stick created by Alvin “Pem” Broussard of Coteau Holmes, a Louisiana native with Native American and European ancestry. Broussard had been making the sticks for years, but sold one to Harrington about a year before her slip on the steps. Harrington loved the energy emanating from her rain stick and used it in her healing work as a traiteur or faith healer. She believes it was the stick that kept her from that disastrous fall.
Now, Harrington uses Broussard’s rain sticks in her work, especially in helping others become “sure-footed.” Harrington also believes that people who come to her to purchase one of Broussard’s rain sticks will find the perfect connection.
“That’s the most fascinating thing about this is when people come to get a stick, the rain sticks are already there for them, like they were made for them,” she explained.
Spiritual cousins
Broussard leaned back in his front yard swing, enjoying the fall breeze beneath a massive oak tree and behind a “meditation wall” he built of concrete. His long white beard and thoughtful eyes behind thick glasses make him appear as a wise sage.
He was raised in Coteau Holmes, born in a French-speaking Catholic home. He’s still a practicing Catholic, enjoying the rituals the church provides, but he’s studied many religions, including that of his Native American ancestry.
“My spirituality, it is what is,” he said with a twinkle in his eye. “It takes years to be on this level, you know?”
Broussard owns a demeanor that’s enviable, a charming fun-loving attitude reminiscent of Cajuns but also Zen-like, offering keen insights into life, meditation and good health. Not only does he create rain sticks as a form of art — in addition to his paintings and ceramic pieces — but he offers a type of stress management workshop with Native American and Asian meditative elements as well.
He was introduced to Buddhism at a Catholic monastery, he relates with a smile, and believes Catholicism and Buddhism are relatives on the same path. Broussard is also a member of the Ishak Metis of the Sunrise Group—Louisiana Native Americans with a long history of living and prospering along the banks of Bayou Teche and westward toward Texas. Historians call his tribe Attakapas, a southwestern Louisiana group some believe were cannibals, but Broussard prefers the sunrise name, although he adds with a grin that the sun doesn’t “rise,” the earth tilts in that direction. Broussard also refutes the negative connotation related to the Attakapas name and its tarnished history written by others.
But it was the rain sticks that brought together Broussard and Harrington, also of Native American ancestry. They first met at Nunu’s in Arnaudville, a gallery space where both Broussard and Byron Knott sold artwork before the gallery burned earlier this year.
“He (Broussard) said, ‘I know you,’” Harrington explained. “I said, ‘I know you, too.’ And I started to cry.”
Sacred tree
For years, Broussard created the rain sticks in honor of the sacred tree that once grew along the bank of Portage Bayou, which flows into Lake Dauterive and Lake Fausse Point near Coteau Holmes, Loreauville and St. Martinville. Broussard calls the waterway “T-Bayou,” and believes, as do many of the Native Americans of the area, that the ancient cypress tree delivered rain when needed, until it succumbed to old age and toppled into the bayou.
On a recent balmy day, Broussard and Harrington visited the site of the sacred tree, pausing along the side of T-Bayou where houseboats are now moored. Broussard dipped his hands into the tepid water, then sprinkled droplets above Harrington’s head and said a prayer. She bowed her head in reverie.
“The rain sticks,” Broussard explained. “They tie in with the sacred tree.”
Off to the left of the boat launch along the bayou exists a massive Native American burial mound located on private property, remnants of an ancient civilization.
Broussard uses minute amounts of sacred dirt in the decoration of his rain sticks, as well as water from the bayou. He also inscribes Native American language on the sticks, directional markings and animal drawings. Some rain sticks are painted vivid colors.
Broussard admits to originally creating the rain sticks as a way of making money, not thinking so much about the spiritual element, although that was certainly part of their creation. That was before he and Harrington connected, he said, and Harrington convinced him of their power.
“Before, I just made sticks,” he said. “Now I think of the energy I put into it.”
In addition to his rain sticks, Broussard creates small bamboo rattles that owners hold in both hands and shake, producing a more consistent sound. He also makes unique walking sticks.
Behind his house is Broussard’s workshop where various art pieces are in progress, including his own style of crackle glass and commercial tiles he paints and fires. In the past, he painted large-scale portraits of nudes and now he plans to purchase a new kiln and create original ceramic tiles.
“In the future, I will fire my own tiles,” he said.
Harrington appreciates all of Broussard’s art but her focus remains on the rain sticks. She recently offered a workshop teaching others how to use the rain sticks in utilizing healing energy.
In a sense, Broussard’s rain stick is still guiding her steps.
Cheré Coen is a freelance writer and author living in Lafayette. Her next book, Magic’s in the Bag: Creating Spellbinding Gris Gris and Sachets, will be out December 1. She recalls the first time she encountered the rain tree in her work:
In 1997, when I was on staff at The Advocate, I wrote a story on South Louisiana legends and lore and included the sacred rain tree of Bayou Portage.
According to Chitimacha legend, a fair-skinned man appeared to the tribe, spoke their language and offered to assist them in their work.
“Then came one day,” Chitimacha Chief Emile Stouff wrote in his book Chitimacha Notebook, “he told the Indians it was time for him to leave the Chitimacha and go do his father’s work. He picked out a cypress tree and climbed to the top.”
Before he disappeared, this man told the tribe that anytime they needed rain, to simply ask the tree for assistance, Stouff wrote.
Allen Babineaux, a former New Iberia fire chief whose family owned property along Bayou Portage which included a Native American burial mound, believed in the story. He claimed that six times he fished near the sacred cypress tree and each time he asked for rain. On each occasion, it rained.
“It really happened six times in a row,” Babineaux said.
Babineaux also related a story his mother-in-law told him, of a time when rain failed to come for thirty days and area farmers hired a man to say a prayer at the tree. Afterwards, the man refused to stay for coffee, claiming it was about to rain.
“It rained so hard it flooded,” Babineaux said.
