"A ... book describing what life was like growing up in south Louisiana in the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s. Some 20 authors help paint the picture: eating Sunday dinner at grandma's, hearing Cajun French spoken in the home, working on the farm before school, attending fais do dos and boucheries, chewing sugarcane, etc."--

A 176-page hardcover book describing what life was like growing up in south Louisiana in the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s. Some 20 authors help paint the picture: eating Sunday dinner at grandma's, hearing Cajun French spoken in the home, working on the farm before school, attending fais do dos and boucheries, chewing sugarcane, etc. Illustrated with photos, drawings, and maps.

It was the sixties. The decade of Vietnam protests, and riots, of the Beatles and the senseless deaths of a president. But to those of us who were children in our tiny south Louisiana village, those events were barely background noise. Our rural lives were predictable, and for the most part, uneventful. In my teens I resented all of it and vowed I would leave as early as I could, and I did. Now as an adult somewhere past middle age, I have acquired respect, insight, and a genuine longing for that uncomplicated life. These essays capture specific moments of my childhood during that era and hopefully they will stir a recollection of similar events in the mind of the reader. Events they might otherwise have forgotten.

Winner of the 2019 Humanities Book of the Year from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Today sharecropping is history, though during World War II and the Great Depression sharecropping was prevalent in Louisiana's southern parishes. Sharecroppers rented farmland and often a small house, agreeing to pay a one-third share of all profit from the sale of crops grown on the land. Sharecropping shaped Louisiana's rich cultural history, and while there have been books published about sharecropping, they share a predominately male perspective. In A Cajun Girl's Sharecropping Years, Viola Fontenot adds the female voice into the story of sharecropping. Spanning from 1937 to 1955, Fontenot describes her life as the daughter of a sharecropper in Church Point, Louisiana, including details of field work as well as the domestic arts and Cajun culture. The account begins with stories from early life, where the family lived off a gravel road near the woods without electricity, running water, or bathrooms, and a mule-drawn wagon was the only means of transportation. To gently introduce the reader to her native language, the author often includes French words along with a succinct definition. This becomes an important part of the story as Fontenot attends primary school, where she experienced prejudice for speaking French, a forbidden and punishable act. Descriptions of Fontenot's teenage years include stories of going to the boucherie; canning blackberries, figs, and pumpkins; using the wood stove to cook dinner; washing and ironing laundry; and making moss mattresses. Also included in the texts are explanations of rural Cajun holiday traditions, courting customs, leisure activities, children's games, and Saturday night house dances for family and neighbors, the fais do-do.

"GROWING UP SOUTHERN" ... The words evoke a tide of images, both bitter and sweet: overalls and organdy, hot green fields, cool brown creeks, Grandma's front porch, lengthy and complicated family connections, Mama's fried chicken and biscuits and Granddaddy's cane syrup, "colored" water fountains and "white" ones, church, chores, Dixie, and hot dark dangerous summer nights. Today's Southern children get their biscuits as often from Hardee's as from Mama. On Saturday afternoons they're as likely to cool off in the local shopping mall as in a shady spring-fed swimming hole. But Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Joe and Aunt Elaine loom large in the lives of today's Southern kids, just as they did in those of earlier generations. The hard work many children still do isn't likely to be acknowledged by their elders; "colored" and "white" labels are less blatant, but they still constrict the futures of this generation's Southern children. Crowing Up Southern explores the continuities and the chasms between the lives of Southern children today and in the past.