The Creole Son

The Creole Son
Author: Roy Leblanc
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2010-10
Genre:
ISBN: 1608447235

In 1987, Andre Dupree was elected as a member of the Louisiana State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. According to a Louisiana newspaper he was the youngest person ever elected to a major Louisiana political office. As a 23 year old college student he won the election by defeating a college president and the president of a powerful teacher's union. Luck was on Andre's side when a jealous husband attempted to assassinate the college president. Andre had been told to accept his station in life with dignity. Creole kids never had much luck anyway; poor New Orleans neighborhoods were quicksand, no way out. But Andre had determination and tenacity, traits learned on New Orleans streets. Andre's father worked as a maintenance electrician at Tulane University. When Andre graduated from Tulane he delivered the commencement address, his father was in the audience. Andre achieved more than he ever dreamed possible. He helped create programs guaranteeing college availability to qualified Louisiana students. He rewrote the state's Minimum Foundation funding plan for elementary and secondary education, met the Commandant of the Marine Corps in his Pentagon office and ran for congress. Andre also brings about the resignation of the US Speaker of the House. But when it was all said and done, he longed for the many things he thought he wanted to leave behind. Success became an airport layover, not at his destination and not home either, just lost. At the end of the day, Andre fell short in some ways, his political career failed, but it was a wild trip worth remembering. Having entered Louisiana politics while a Political Science student attending the University of New Orleans, winning an obscure New Orleans office, Roy went on to experience the unique flavor of Pelican State politics. As a 21 year old elected member of the Orleans Parish Executive Committee, he exercised parole power covering prostitution, loitering, traffic and many other municipal offences. By 24, Roy was elected, 'Member of Louisiana's State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education' overseeing the state's $2 billion dollar Minimum Foundation Budget for Elementary and Secondary Education and Louisiana's system of Vocational-Technical schools. At 28, Roy was considered a significant challenge to the State's powerful 1ST District Congressman. Married for 25 years, he now enjoys a quiet life in another state. Disguising 9th Ward blue collar family roots behind a thin veneer of polish, success brought breakfast in the Governor's Mansion, private jets, financial security, the honor of being one of the youngest ever elected to a major Louisiana political office and a run for Congress. Every victory was sweet since success was so unexpected. His single advantage was a tenacious back against the wall determination to work harder than any opponent; a valuable trait learned growing up on tough New Orleans streets. An Associate of Arts degree from Delgado College and a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Liberal Arts from Tulane reflect a belief in the power of education to change unfortunate circumstances. Roy has served as President of the Consulting Board for a New Orleans Hospital, President of a Community College Foundation and delivered a commencement address at Tulane University. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humanities degree recognizing leadership in public education administration.

Creole Son

Creole Son
Author: E. Kay Trimberger
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0807173258

Creole Son is the compelling memoir of a single white mother searching to understand why her adopted biracial son grew from a happy child into a troubled young adult who struggled with addiction for decades. The answers, E. Kay Trimberger finds, lie in both nature and nurture. When five-day-old Marco is flown from Louisiana to California and placed in Trimberger’s arms, she assumes her values and example will be the determining influences upon her new son’s life. Twenty-six years later, when she helps him make contact with his Cajun and Creole biological relatives, she discovers that many of his cognitive and psychological strengths and difficulties mirror theirs. Using her training as a sociologist, Trimberger explores behavioral genetics research on adoptive families. To her relief as well as distress, she learns that both biological heritage and the environment—and their interaction—shape adult outcomes. Trimberger shares deeply personal reflections about raising Marco in Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s, with its easy access to drugs and a culture that condoned their use. She examines her own ignorance about substance abuse, and also a failed experiment in an alternative family lifestyle. In an afterword, Marc Trimberger contributes his perspective, noting a better understanding of his life journey gained through his mother’s research. By telling her story, Trimberger provides knowledge and support to all parents—biological and adoptive—with troubled offspring. She ends by suggesting a new adoption model, one that creates an extended, integrated family of both biological and adoptive kin.

Creole Son

Creole Son
Author: E. Kay Trimberger
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 080717310X

Creole Son is the compelling memoir of a single white mother searching to understand why her adopted biracial son grew from a happy child into a troubled young adult who struggled with addiction for decades. The answers, E. Kay Trimberger finds, lie in both nature and nurture. When five-day-old Marco is flown from Louisiana to California and placed in Trimberger’s arms, she assumes her values and example will be the determining influences upon her new son’s life. Twenty-six years later, when she helps him make contact with his Cajun and Creole biological relatives, she discovers that many of his cognitive and psychological strengths and difficulties mirror theirs. Using her training as a sociologist, Trimberger explores behavioral genetics research on adoptive families. To her relief as well as distress, she learns that both biological heritage and the environment—and their interaction—shape adult outcomes. Trimberger shares deeply personal reflections about raising Marco in Berkeley in the 1980s and 1990s, with its easy access to drugs and a culture that condoned their use. She examines her own ignorance about substance abuse, and also a failed experiment in an alternative family lifestyle. In an afterword, Marc Trimberger contributes his perspective, noting a better understanding of his life journey gained through his mother’s research. By telling her story, Trimberger provides knowledge and support to all parents—biological and adoptive—with troubled offspring. She ends by suggesting a new adoption model, one that creates an extended, integrated family of both biological and adoptive kin.

Creole City

Creole City
Author: Nathalie Dessens
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0813055237

In Creole City, Nathalie Dessens opens a window onto antebellum New Orleans during a time of rapid expansion and dizzying change. The story—rooted in the Sainte-Gême Family Papers harbored at The Historic New Orleans Collection—follows the twenty-year correspondence of Jean Boze to Henri de Ste-Gême, both refugees from Saint-Domingue. Exploring parts of the city’s early nineteenth-century history that have previously been neglected, Dessens examines how New Orleans came to symbolize progress, adventure, and culture to so many. Through Boze’s letters, readers witness the convergence of new Americans and old colonial populations that sparked transformations in the economic, social, and political structures, as well as the Creolization of the city. Additionally, the letters depict transatlantic experiences at a time when New Orleans was a key hub of the Atlantic trade and so very distinct from other nineteenth-century American metropolises, such as New York and Philadelphia. Dessens’s portrayal of this seminal period is innovative and crucial to understanding of the city’s rich record and its larger role in American history.

Dark, Light, Almost White

Dark, Light, Almost White
Author: Warren Barrios Wilson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780970684929

This book is a fascinating look into Warren Wilson's life and how, in the face of racism, he overcame many challenges to become a successful civil rights attorney.

Dangerous Creole Liaisons

Dangerous Creole Liaisons
Author: Jacqueline Couti
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1781383014

Dangerous Creole Liaisons examines the neglected corpus of white Creole writers from the French Caribbean and how their discourse has been reappropriated to expose the significant role these men played in the construction of blackness, French nationalism and culture.

Pidgin and Creole Languages

Pidgin and Creole Languages
Author: Glenn Gilbert
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2019-03-31
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0824882156

This book is for the memory of John E. Reinecke, a man whose humanistic activism and sharp-hewn scholarship helped to shape the scientific study of pidgin and creole languages throughout much of the twentieth century. Reinecke was both a social reformer and a leading sociolinguistic researcher working with creole languages and societies that derive from diverse groups of people thrown into close social contact. Most notably, Reinecke's keen sense of social justice has had a telling effect on the social history of Hawaii. Along with his persistent efforts to obtain a fair and equal share for wage earners in sharply stratified societies, his attention early became focused on their language. By encouraging others to study what he called "marginal languages," he was able to bring to them (and to the extraordinary issues—theoretical and practical—which they raise) a measure of prestige, both in the eyes of their speakers and in the increased attention accorded them by students of language and society. The book presents a description of Reinecke's life and work, the text of his own last paper on creolistics, and seventeen papers which reflect the range and vitality of the field that he did so much to open. Some of the papers reflect the issue which has come to dominate creole studies—the debate over the role of universals and of specific substrata as competing explanations of the amazing similarities that creoles, and perhaps pidgins also, exhibit across the world. Many describe the intense language contact within which language contraction and expansion occur (they do this either directly, or by supplying new data which will eventually feed such descriptions), and and some are our belated response to calls which Reinecke made in the 1930s. Fifty years ago, he saw the need for the kind of comparative studies which are only now under way—in, for example, Hazel Carter's paper, which represents a pioneering attempt to compare the suprasegmentals of English-based Creoles on both sides of the Atlantic. In his last years, Reinecke strongly supported research on contact languages with non-European lexical bases. He thought this was the area from which future creole studies would derive the greatest theoretical and practical gain, and in this volume six papers answer his call by analyzing such pidgins and creoles.

Cajun and Creole Music Makers

Cajun and Creole Music Makers
Author: Barry Jean Ancelet
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 180
Release: 1999
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781578061709

The virtual renaissance of all things Cajun and Creole has captivated enthusiasts throughout America and invigorated the culture back home. Who, just fifteen years ago, could have predicted that this regional music would become so astonishingly popular throughout the nation and the world? This new edition of a book first published in 1984 celebrates the music makers in the generation most responsible for the survival of Cajun music and zydeco and showcases many of the young performers who have emerged since them to give the music new spark. More than 100 color photographs, show them in their homes, on their front porches, and in their fields, as well as in performance at local clubs and dance halls and on festival stages. In interviews they speak directly about their lives, their music, and the vital tradition from which their rollicking music springs. Many of the legendary performers featured here--Dewey Balfa, Clifton Chenier, Nathan Abshire, Dennis McGee, Canray Fontenot, Varise Connor, Octa Clark, Lula Landry, and Inez Catalon--are no longer alive. Others from the early days continue to perform--Bois-sec Ardoin, Michael Doucet, D. L. Menard, and Zachary Richard. Their grandeur, humor, and humility are precisely the qualities this book captures. Featured too are young musicians who are taking their place in the dance halls, on festival stages, and on the folk music circuit. Cajun and Creole music makers, both young and old, still play in the old ways, but as young musicians--such as Geno Delafose and the French Rockin' Boogie, and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys-- experiment and enrich the tradition with new sounds of rock, country, rap, and funk, the music evolves and enlivens a whole new audience. Barry Jean Ancelet, a native French-speaking Cajun, is chair of the Department of Modern Languages and director of the Center for Acadian and Creole Folklore at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Among his many books are Cajun Country and Cajun and Creole Folk Tales (both from the University Press of Mississippi). Elemore Morgan, Jr., is an artist and retired professor of visual art at University of Southwestern Louisiana.

Unsilencing Slavery

Unsilencing Slavery
Author: Celia E. Naylor
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2022-07-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820362131

Popular references to the Rose Hall Great House in Jamaica often focus on the legend of the “White Witch of Rose Hall.” Over one hundred thousand people visit this plantation every year, many hoping to catch a glimpse of Annie Palmer’s ghost. After experiencing this tour with her daughter in 2013 and leaving Jamaica haunted by the silences of the tour, Celia E. Naylor resolved to write a history of Rose Hall about those people who actually had a right to haunt this place of terror and trauma—the enslaved. Naylor deftly guides us through a strikingly different Rose Hall. She introduces readers to the silences of the archives and unearths the names and experiences of the enslaved at Rose Hall in the decades immediately before the abolition of slavery in Jamaica. She then offers a careful reading of Herbert G. de Lisser’s 1929 novel, The White Witch of Rosehall—which gave rise to the myth of the “White Witch”—and a critical analysis of the current tours at Rose Hall Great House. Naylor’s interdisciplinary examination engages different modes of history making, history telling, and truth telling to excavate the lives of enslaved people, highlighting enslaved women as they navigated the violences of the Jamaican slavocracy and plantationscape. Moving beyond the legend, she examines iterations of the afterlives of slavery in the ongoing construction of slavery museums, memorializations, and movements for Black lives and the enduring case for Black humanity. Alongside her book, she has created a website as another way for readers to explore the truths of Rose Hall: rosehallproject.columbia.edu.