NEW ORLEANS ITINERARY

1. French Quarter - observe beautiful architecture.

2. Bourbon St. - drink and listen to live music.

3. Bayou tour - feed alligators and enjoy the swamp air.

4. Pat O’Brien’s - order the famous (or infamous) hurricane drink. Be careful. It’s not actually juice.

5. What to eat:

   1. Café du Monde - beignets

   2. Galatoire’s - ($$$) fancy night out

   3. Willie Mae’s Scotch House - amazing fried chicken

   4. Domilise’s - po’boy

   5. William’s St. Sno Balls

   6. Casamento’s - oyster stew

   7. Pascal’s Manale - bbq shrimp

   8. Dooky Chase - Freedom Riders, including MLK, ate here. This was a place whites and blacks ate together during a time when that was illegal.

   9. Middendorf - ($$$) fried catfish, turtle soup, gator bites

   10. Cochon Butcher - boudin noir and grits

   11. Bevi Seafood - crawfish boil

6. Live jazz music venues:

   1. The Spotted Cat

   2. The Maison

7. Take advantage of the open container law or swing by a drive-through daiquiri spot

8. Haunted Nola Tour - spoopy (yes, spoopy) tour covering ghost lore, voodoo, and murder.

9. Whitney Plantation - only plantation tour that exclusively focuses on the lives of enslaved peoples (and not glorifying the enslavers).

NEW IBERIA ITINERARY

1. Avery Island Tabasco - visit the factory and find unique Tabasco creations including Tabasco soda!

2. Vermillionville - if you’re into history, this is a “living museum” complete with a real blacksmith.

 LOUISIANA ‘19

My trip to Louisiana was important to me for two reasons.

Firstly, my grandma grew up there. She often told me stories of her childhood shenanigans, from robbing graveyards to making clubhouses underneath neighbors’ houses. I heard about her nights out on Bourbon Street listening to jazz legends like Louis Armstrong and Sweet Emma when she was a young woman. Because my grandma raised me, I grew up eating red beans and rice, gumbo, jambalaya, fried catfish, shrimp creole, and I honestly didn’t know I ate any differently than most Oregonians until late in high school.

When I spent a few months unemployed writing in 2018, I took stock of my life and how I spent my time, and I made the decision to go stay with my grandma for a week. Oftentimes, life passes people by, and it’s easy to think that family will be around forever. During my stay, I finally read the autobiography she very much wrote with me in mind, and it was a beautiful week. As I read through stories I knew, and new ones I didn’t, I wrote down all of the places I wanted to visit in her honor. Not only did a trip to Louisiana sound like great fun, I figured it would be really meaningful to my Grandma for someone to take such an interest in her life.

I had on my agenda to visit my grandma’s cousin, Noel, to eat my weight in crawfish, to go out on Bourbon St. and listen to as much live music as possible, to lindy hop, to feed alligators on the bayou, and retrace my grandma’s childhood. I brought her autobiography with me and I had an itinerary of places that were important to her including her elementary school, her family home, and her favorite sno-ball shack. 

When we landed, I was immediately greeted by balmy, jasmine-scented air. Our rental car place right outside of the airport had palm trees growing inside, a sign of the humid environment we’d be staying in the next week and a half. When we arrived at my Noel’s, he immediately began laying out paper on the table and then brought out an enormous plastic bag filled with hot, fresh crawfish and potatoes. He taught us how to open them up and the proper technique for sucking out all of the seasoned juices in the shell. It was a pretty perfect way to begin our time in grandma’s city.

The second reason this trip was important to me because I wanted to educated and reflect on the parts about my ancestry we didn’t much speak of at home. Yes, I come from a family that enslaved other humans. The stories I learned about my family growing up, whenever the topic turned there, were very much sugarcoated for our own comfort, but even as a kid I knew in my stomach something was off about the account. For part of my trip, I knew I wanted to visit places like Whitney Plantation and spend time learning the history removed from text books for white comfort.

But while in Louisiana, I had the extraordinary, and surreal, privilege of visiting a descendent of one of the families my own family had enslaved. When I was in middle school, my grandma did extensive family lineage research online and in the middle of it all, encountered a woman named Phebe, looking for assistance rebuilding her own lineage destroyed by slavery. My grandma unabashedly let her know who she was and pointed her in the right direction to trace her roots, ours were tangled, so she had information that would help her on her way. They somehow formed a connection such that Phebe ended up flying out to visit and stay with us in Oregon. I learned during my trip to visit Phebe in New Iberia, that her family was extremely nervous about her flying off to stay with some strange old white lady in the woods  - which yeah, I can imagine! When they first met at the airport all those years back, they immediately hugged each other. Southern culture overrode their peculiar reunion. And over the years, they would call each other back and forth, never losing contact. 

For this trip, my grandma shared with Phebe that I would be coming out her way, and Phebe insisted that Jason and I stay with her and her family for a bit in New Iberia. I was also excited to hear about Phebe’s research in local histories. Her passion post-retirement is shedding light on forgotten African American heroes who contributed to society in various ways. She works with an African American historical society and is responsible for the placement of a number of public markers that share these stories with the community. On top of all that, she also has a background in speech pathology, and as a linguistics major, I really admired her for that, too.

I can not emphasize enough how impactful our visit to Whitney Plantation was. The stories I learned were sobering, tragic, devastating, but this place is a must if visiting Louisiana. When visiting places with such a past, I’ve made it my mission to take the time to immerse myself, even if for a little bit, while there and give it the acknowledgement it deserves.

Phebe also knew Jason had a love for spicy food, so she took us to Avery Island Tabasco factory where we tried all sorts of Tabasco concoctions. We had a very Tabasco-y shrimp creole there - it was delicious.

Phebe opened up her home to Jason and me. She fed us. She took us all around. She graciously educated us and was patient with my stream of questions. I was extremely humbled learning about the incredible work she does for her community as well as the graciousness she extended to me during my stay. 

During our stay with her, she recommended we visit Vermillionville, a “living museum”, and I was astounded by the presence she had there among the professors and researchers - I felt like I was getting an exclusive tour with a celebrity historian. Phebe is well admired in this circle. One of the houses at this living museum actually belonged to one of my ancestors, and well many Louisianans to be fair. I’ve known for some time that I’m a descendent of a man named Joseph Broussard, a local legend, but the name carried no meaning in the PNW. In Louisiana, everyone knows his name. He’s even an ancestor of Beyoncé, I discovered. Do with that what you will. This Broussard man makes half of Louisiana connected by blood in some way or another it seemed.