Vendu Bayou Memories: A Book of Short Stories by Danos, Paul NEUF

The 24 stories in Bayou Memories are concerned with the Cajun people and culture that influenced my background. Most of the stories are set in South Louisiana. In a previous collection, I concentrated on the erosion of the old Cajun culture I knew as a boy. This volume has stories about individuals, many of whom are descendants of the Acadians who settled the bayou country. Some are set in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while others concern people in modern times. The book has three parts:

Part 1--Evangelines Children--has stories that tell of Acadian people who lived on the isolated bayous in communities West and South of New Orleans between the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River, often called Cajun Country. Some involve people living in the ancient way, some are about those who migrated to cities and for whom the old bayou culture is only a memory. How "things that used to be" reach into modern life is a strong theme in several of these tales. This section centers on people who were born into the Acadian world with its unique language, cuisine and music, and often touch on how a shared religion, relative isolation and a comprehensive joie de vivre molded them and how some of it lives on.

Part 2--Land of Dreams--stories are set in the environs of New Orleans of which the Cajuns with their unique bayou heritage are only one part. Concentrated in the greater metropolis with its unique cultural dynamics, they show the contrasts between the mainstream establishment, the newcomers (some are, in essence, immigrants from a different culture like the Cajuns and Sicilians) and the dreamers, free-spirits and artists from all over American who are drawn to that place. Some stories include a family that was physically and emotionally decimated by war but remained bonded by their shared love of the classic songs of the great American songbook; an aspiring writer who walks the exotic streets as a reluctant mailman and over the years finds in them mystery, love and his literary voice; a paraplegic who has a passionate but platonic affair with his long-time caretaker, a nun who must walk the fine line between her vows and human love.

Part 3--Other Locales and Other Modes--stories are set in a variety of non-Louisiana locations. Included in these pieces are: a newly-divorced Boston ghost writer and novelist who flees his old academic life for an isolated sheep ranch in the Colorado mountains where he develops an unlikely relationship with the rough-hewn woman who tends to his ranch business; an actress, on the verge of giving up, gets hope when she is paired for a series of performances with a legendary star; an aging professor on his last field project to the great Medieval Cathedrals where he is absorbed in the magic of the light filtering through the stained glass; an elderly woman who is jogged by a sermon to a long-forgotten memory about a celebrity lecturer who unexpectedly declared to his audience that his prime concern was getting to heaven; and a prolific artist, robbed of her creative ability by illness and age, who walks through familiar snowy scenes she often used in her pictures and then deep into the woods and onto the frozen river.