Lafayette, Louisiana Bound-With The Good Old Swamp Boys The Hackenberry Ramblers In Mind  

 

From The Pen Of Jack Callahan

Sam Eaton was nothing but a swamp Yankee, never claimed to be anything but that, would have at various younger points in his now long life make any aspersion that he was not or that there was something wrong with that identity a cause for back alley  barroom fists and general mayhem. He, at six feet three inches and two hundred and forty pounds of mainly sinewy muscle, then could enforce that belief. Yeah, Sam had been born the son of a swamp Yankee down Carver in Southeastern Massachusetts way where there are fewer but still plenty of the breed hanging around the small cabins and cottages that partial identify kindred. His forbears going back as far as Sam was able to trace the genealogy were of that same condition, lived life close and survived to tell the tale.

A swamp Yankee for those not in the know, for those whose sense of history about the genus Yankees only extends to what you read in the bloody high school history books and goes only to knowledge of the high tone rarified Boston Brahmins is one of that breed who didn’t get his or her fair shake in the fortune, brains, good luck department and so wound up as farm hands or small hard-working scrabble farmers, fisherman if by the sea or woodmen. Those Brahmins, far removed from these brethren even in the old struggles to survive not matter how they made their ill-gotten fortunes mostly connected someway with the slave trade, now being slowly driven to distinction if not power in their secluded protected enclaves, the progeny of the Beacon Hill city on a hill crowd that John Winthrop and his Puritan crew that guys like Perry Miller a professor out of Harvard who made a big study of the breed in its entirety not always kindly brought forth on the Northeast corner of this continent were the tip of the iceberg. 

The swamp Yankees, not being the godly sort or at least not pretending to some elect, were people who came over in the later Pilgrim, vagabond, derelict criminal indentured servant migrations and got stuck or just fell into the human sink. A writer once to fill out his story of one branch of the breed devoted the first forty or so pages of his novel to a very vivid description of the set ways, the closed-ness, and the wariness of these folk in their edge of New England small town enclaves. Told about their origins back in the British Isles old country where they were loose cannons, on the run or ready to go on the run, coming in or going out of the jails and as one historian of early America, the post-Puritan period, these were master-less men. The kind that either fell into the sink holes of their towns or they drifted, and drifted is the right work, working a little especially the land until it bled out and then moved on, moved on until they ran smack into the Pacific Ocean running to the Japan sea. There at land’s end they then fell back into the human sink and developed their loves for fast cars, motorcycles and midnight hell-raising, but at least it was not cold.

You know though that these damn swampers, Sam’s kin, not under some city on the hill dream but to escape the poor house, the debtors prison or the hangman and wound up doing some indentured servitude did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged there way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought them and theirs  every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought them down in places like Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where they tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as “boggers,” as men who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner.

Sam’s people stayed in place, kept to the edges of Carver. Sam the first of his breed to finish high school (and later some college), the first to not work the broken down bogs (more recently being sold to developers for condos), and most importantly the first to go away to that far Pacific running to the Japan seas ocean and breath in some fresh air. His people didn’t like it, some still surviving cousins still don’t, still give him an evil eye at family reunions but he broke out with his generation in the hell-bend 1960s. Learned a lot about other kinds of people but for our story he learned that the swamp Yankees formed out of the British migration to the new continent were not the only ones who developed the swamp way of thinking, entertaining themselves   and just being content with existing.

On Sam’s second trip out to San Francisco via the hitchhike highway that every other footloose young man (and some young women although they usually were travelling with a man) was using to get west, to find out what was “happening” and those quotation marks no mistake for that was the feeling of the times, he met a guy who was also from Massachusetts. From North Adamsville a town about thirty miles from Carver, a guy named Markin, Pete Markin, who had come out about a year before on the same kind of search and had wound up living in one of the then very common converted yellow brick road school buses that were running up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, searching, hell, just searching. He had met Markin in Golden Gate Park one day and Markin had invited him to come to a party that the denizens of Captain Crunch’s yellow brick bus were throwing. (Crunch the owner of the bus although he was usually not around and did not press the issue of his ownership very hard since as some of the denizens suspected on the basis of some urban legend rumor that he had exchanged a big bag of primo dope for the vehicle.)

At that party, after the obligatory passing of the joint and jug among the brethren, including Sam, Markin introduced him to Josh Breslin, who despite the surname had grown up in the Quebecois quarter of mill town Olde Saco, Maine. Josh and Sam had almost instantly gotten along since Josh’s people were what they would later jokingly call swamp Cajuns although strictly speaking the Cajuns were located in southwest Louisiana in places like Lake Charles and Lafayette heading toward Texas. Longfellow the Brahmin poet did a long poem about the travails, Evangeline. The Cajuns had been run out of Nova Scotia way back when and driven down south in a big migration after the British defeated the French in a bunch of long running worldwide wars (then worldwide which was basically wherever the British and French had outposts) but when they settled in they exhibited many of the same characteristic as the swamp Yankees around New England.

 

After Sam and Josh (and Markin of course) had been on the bus searching for whatever they were searching for several months Josh’s cousin Rene Dubois joined them. (Sam some forty plus years later had lost the drift of what he had been looking for back then when asked by his grandchildren and so he stole Markin’s line about the “search for the blue-pink Great American West night” and that seemed to satisfy them.)

Rene had grown up with Josh in Olde Saco until sixth grade when the mills that made the town run were moving south and Rene’s father who had come from Lafayette and thus had bene a real swamp Cajun had decided to move his family back to his hometown. They had nevertheless stayed in touch and Josh had convinced him to come west and see what was what. One night Josh, Sam and Rene were stoned out of their gourds (Sam’s expression) when they started talking about music, not about the acid-etched rock and roll of the Grateful Dead, The Jefferson Airplane and the Doors that they were crazy for those days but the music they grew up with.

Sam told the two others that his father would always be playing old time mountain music which he said had travelled from the old country to America and had stuck mostly with the swamp Yankees when they had their local dances or family reunions. You know plenty of fiddles, mandolins, mountain harps, hell, washboards even, whatever noise would take the miseries away for a minute. Rene had to laugh at what Sam said because his family had done the same thing except they would sing the songs in broken down French, patois they called it, he just called it Cajun and left it at that. Rene said one time his father had taken his mother, him, and his brothers over to Lake Charles to hear the Hackenberry Ramblers and just then Rene started singing a few songs in the patios. Sam smiled a knowing smile. Swamp brethren indeed. Jolie Blone.