A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years

A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years
Author: Viola Fontenot
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 102
Release: 2018-07-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496817087

Winner of the 2019 Humanities Book of the Year from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Today sharecropping is history, though during World War II and the Great Depression sharecropping was prevalent in Louisiana's southern parishes. Sharecroppers rented farmland and often a small house, agreeing to pay a one-third share of all profit from the sale of crops grown on the land. Sharecropping shaped Louisiana's rich cultural history, and while there have been books published about sharecropping, they share a predominately male perspective. In A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years, Viola Fontenot adds the female voice into the story of sharecropping. Spanning from 1937 to 1955, Fontenot describes her life as the daughter of a sharecropper in Church Point, Louisiana, including details of field work as well as the domestic arts and Cajun culture. The account begins with stories from early life, where the family lived off a gravel road near the woods without electricity, running water, or bathrooms, and a mule-drawn wagon was the only means of transportation. To gently introduce the reader to her native language, the author often includes French words along with a succinct definition. This becomes an important part of the story as Fontenot attends primary school, where she experienced prejudice for speaking French, a forbidden and punishable act. Descriptions of Fontenot's teenage years include stories of going to the boucherie; canning blackberries, figs, and pumpkins; using the wood stove to cook dinner; washing and ironing laundry; and making moss mattresses. Also included in the texts are explanations of rural Cajun holiday traditions, courting customs, leisure activities, children's games, and Saturday night house dances for family and neighbors, the fais do-do.

The Measure of a Woman

The Measure of a Woman
Author: Patricia Luquette Dean
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre:
ISBN:

Within these pages is a story of struggle, poverty, loss, and love as told by a young girl, born before her time to a sharecropper-father and a young, bitter mother to achieve her biggest dreams. Patricia delivers insight into a culture of people that most know little about. The Cajun Culture. It is a rare and dying culture. Hundreds of years ago these people were forced out of Nova Scotia only to plant roots along the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. For years, those roots grew to form a way of life that is still lived to some extent today. The language has changed over the years to adapt to English and perhaps they are not viewed as poor, underclass people anymore but they are known as a culture that relies on the water, the land, and family. Like all families of today and yesterday, nothing is easy. And for one little Cajun girl born in 1940, it was especially challenging. Like most Cajun folk, this young girl is tough. And she is loving. This is her rise from being spanked in the first grade for speaking French, the only language she knew to graduate college with an English degree where she taught high school English. This story is about her rise to overcome poverty through education and her struggle to find a mother she felt she never had. It's about understanding how parents hurt their children without realizing it. It's about the love of family, and the need to forgive a mother who did the best she could with the example taught her how to raise children. The book shares recipes and traditions of the Cajun Culture with the foods enjoyed on a daily basis and the use of natural resources afforded by the land, water and skies of South Louisiana.

Osceola

Osceola
Author: Osceola Mays
Publisher:
Total Pages: 68
Release: 2000
Genre: African American women
ISBN: 9780439263023

A sharecropper's daughter describes her childhood in Texas in the early years of the twentieth century.

Through the Eyes of a Cajun

Through the Eyes of a Cajun
Author: Linder May Landry
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015-06-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781681188171

Through the Eyes of a Cajun is a wholesome tale of a little Cajun girl named Linder May, and her coming-of-age story, while living on the Louisiana Bayou. The small town of Laffite, Louisiana, was founded and formed by the infamous pirate Jean Laffite. This majestic Bayou cove was once used by Laffite and his crew as a secret hideaway. Through the Eyes of a Cajun takes the reader on a mostly lighthearted journey with Linder May Landry and her grandfather. Linder was born and bred on the Bayou where she finds a spiritual awakening and acceptance. This story will bring the reader closer to nature and the simplicity of living on the Bayou, all the while focusing on the trials and tribulations of poverty, prejudice, and living off the land.

Cajun

Cajun
Author: Elizabeth Nell Dubus
Publisher:
Total Pages: 394
Release: 1994-05-01
Genre: Cajuns
ISBN: 9780963630728

The Sharecroppers Daughter

The Sharecroppers Daughter
Author: Annie Louise Howard
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2008-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781436325301

There is no available information at this time. Author will provide once available.

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope
Author: Sharon Moore
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020-12-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9780983891680

Kaleidoscope is a beautiful collection of personal remembrances capturing joy, love, pain, grief, adventure and growth. There are also prompts which encourage us to write our own stories. This is an inspirational journey that will inspire!

A Lesson Before Dying

A Lesson Before Dying
Author: Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2004-01-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1400077702

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Author: Carol Crown
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 519
Release: 2013-06-03
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 1469607999

Folk art is one of the American South's most significant areas of creative achievement, and this comprehensive yet accessible reference details that achievement from the sixteenth century through the present. This volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture explores the many forms of aesthetic expression that have characterized southern folk art, including the work of self-taught artists, as well as the South's complex relationship to national patterns of folk art collecting. Fifty-two thematic essays examine subjects ranging from colonial portraiture, Moravian material culture, and southern folk pottery to the South's rich quilt-making traditions, memory painting, and African American vernacular art, and 211 topical essays include profiles of major folk and self-taught artists in the region.

From Puritanism to Postmodernism

From Puritanism to Postmodernism
Author: Richard Ruland
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2016-04-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317234146

Widely acknowledged as a contemporary classic that has introduced thousands of readers to American literature, From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature brilliantly charts the fascinating story of American literature from the Puritan legacy to the advent of postmodernism. From realism and romanticism to modernism and postmodernism it examines and reflects on the work of a rich panoply of writers, including Poe, Melville, Fitzgerald, Pound, Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks and Thomas Pynchon. Characterised throughout by a vibrant and engaging style it is a superb introduction to American literature, placing it thoughtfully in its rich social, ideological and historical context. A tour de force of both literary and historical writing, this Routledge Classics edition includes a new preface by co-author Richard Ruland, a new foreword by Linda Wagner-Martin and a fascinating interview with Richard Ruland, in which he reflects on the nature of American fiction and his collaboration with Malclolm Bradbury. It is published here for the first time.