Swathed in the romance of pirates, voodoo and Mardi
Gras, LOUISIANA is undeniably special. Its history
is barely on nodding terms with the view that America was the
creation of the Pilgrim Fathers; its way of life is proudly set
apart. This is the land of the rural, French-speaking Cajuns
(descended from the Acadians, eighteenth-century French-Canadian
refugees), who live in the prairies and swamps in the southwest
of the state, and the Creoles of jazzy, sassy New Orleans
. (The term Creole was originally used to define
anyone born in the state to French or Spanish colonists - famed
in the nineteenth century for their masked balls, family feuds
and duels - as well as native-born, French-speaking slaves, but
has since come to define anyone or anything native to Louisiana,
and in particular its black population.) Louisiana's spicy home-cooked
food , regular festivals and lilting
French-based dialect - and above all its music
( jazz, R&B, Cajun and its bluesy black counterpart,
zydeco) - draw from all these cultures. Oddly enough, north
Louisiana - Protestant Bible Belt country, where old
plantation homes stand decaying in vast cottonfields - feels more
"Southern" than the marshy bayous, shaded by ancient
cypress trees and laced with wispy trails of Spanish moss, of
the Catholic south of the state.
The French first settled Louisiana in 1682, braving
swamps and plagues to harvest the abundant cypress, but the state
was sparsely inhabited before its first permanent settlement,
the trading post of Natchitoches , was established
in 1714. In 1760, Louis XV secretly handed New Orleans, along
with all French territory west of the Mississippi, to his Spanish
cousin, Charles III, as a safeguard against the British.
Louisiana remained Spanish until it was ceded to Napoleon in 1801,
under the proviso that it should never change hands again. Just
two years later, however, Napoleon, strapped for cash to fund
his battles with the British in Europe, struck a bargain with
president Thomas Jefferson known as the Louisiana Purchase
. This sneaky agreement handed over to the US all French lands
between Canada and Mexico, from the Mississippi to the Rockies,
for a total cost of $15 million. The subsequent "Americanization"
of Louisiana was one of the most momentous periods in the state's
history, with the port of New Orleans, in its key position near
the mouth of the Mississippi River , growing
to become one of the nation's wealthiest cities. Though the state
seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy in 1861, there
were important differences between Louisiana and the rest of the
slave-driven South. The Black Code , drawn up
by the French in 1685 to govern Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti)
and established in Louisiana in 1724, had given slaves rights
unparalleled elsewhere, including permission to marry, meet socially
and take Sundays off. The black population of New Orleans in particular
was renowned as exceptionally literate and cosmopolitan.
Though Louisiana was not physically scarred by the
Civil War, with few important battles fought on its soil, its
economy was ravaged, and its social structures all but destroyed.
The Reconstruction era, too, hit particularly
hard here, with the once great city of New Orleans suffering a
period of unprecedented lawlessness and racial violence. In time
the economy, at least, recovered, benefiting from the key importance
of the mighty Mississippi River and the discovery of offshore
oil, but over the last century Louisiana has come to rely more
and more heavily upon tourism , centered around
New Orleans and Cajun country. And it's not hard to see why: whether
canoeing along a moss-tangled bayou, dining in a crumbling Creole
cottage on spicy, buttery crawfish, or dancing on a steamy starlit
night to the best live music in the world, few visitors fail to
fall in love with Louisiana.
