Q&A with Ken Wells about growing up in South Louisiana, writing Meely LaBauve and his “other life” as a journalist.

Q. What was it like growing up on the bayou? Describe your family.

    Imagine two parallel roads winding for 12 miles with a broad, dark ribbon of water--the bayou--in between. Imagine scattered farmhouses with tin roofs and broad porches set on wide lawns of St. Augustine grass. Imagine a sea of sugar cane surrendering eventually to swamp and hardwood forest full of cypress and moss-draped live oak. That's Bayou Black, a place of maybe 350 people built not around a town square but strung out along opposing banks of an ancient bayou. We live "down" the bayou, about five miles from town, on a five-acre farm with a cow, six dogs, countless feral cats, a pet mink named Stinky and a mischievous pet monkey named Peanut. Peanut is a gift from one of our bayou neighbors, "Alligator" Annie; she runs a reptile menagerie from her bayou side farm.

    From our house, the bayou is just across a rutted road paved in clam shells. The bayou is our fishing hole and our swimming pool--just watch out for the snapping turtles and occasional water moccasin. The woods and swamps are our playground, where we take long rambles and where, in spring and summer, we hunt alligators, catch crawfish and frogs and collect live snakes for Alligator Annie. In the fall, we hunt squirrel, rabbit and raccoons. The latter we sell into a brisk market for both the meat and hide, adding a few dollars into our usually depleted piggy bank.  My dad is timekeeper for the local sugar mill but his real passion is the outdoors; my mom is a fun-loving Cajun who stays home to look after their sons (I am second of six). She dances the Cajun two-step; she is a Cajun gumbo chef extraordinaire.

     Almost everyone on Bayou Black (except my dad, an interloper from backwoods Arkansas) is Cajun. People of my mother's generation or older still speak Cajun French, which is a patois of perfectly fine 19th Century country French and a smattering of English. Almost everyone here works in sugarcane but work, in a strange way, seems far from the center of bayou life.  Everybody has a

boat--or at least a pirogue, the Cajun canoe--tied up to homemade docks and much free time is spent fishing and hunting and otherwise collecting the bayou's bounty of wild things for the pot. Cajuns are sociable folk; they love to eat, drink and dance, and the center of bayou social life is Elmo's Bar, a combination grocery store and honky-tonk, named for Elmo Giroir, its owner. A typical bayou scene: Elmo, out fishing, has caught a 120-pound loggerhead turtle, a creature whose head is the size of a cantaloupe and whose shell has massive raised ridges that make it look prehistoric. After a suitable period of display in a washtub atop the bar, Elmo dresses the turtle and cooks sauce piquant for the whole bayou. The food is free; people come on Saturday night and plunk coins in an aging jukebox full of Cajun

music and Fats Domino records (six songs for a quarter) and order copious amounts of beer from the bar. In typical Cajun fashion, this turns into what the Cajuns call a fais-dos-dos--a party for all.

Q. Was it hard to write in Meely's voice?

    Actually, it was one of the easiest things I've ever done. I wrote Meely in 20 days--while commuting back in forth to the city aboard a New Jersey Transit train. But, a bit of explanation.

    Meely was born out of rejection and constructive criticism of a previous (never published) book, a sprawling tale about a dozen or so characters who have close encounters with the loup garou (the Cajun werewolf) before all ending up at a party at the bayou honky-tonk.  An editor wrote to say that, though she admired much of it, the book was too long, had too many characters doing too many things. Find one character you really like and simplify, she advised. Indeed, the book contains a kid character who seemed to resonate with those who'd read it. But I didn't consider him "big enough" to carry an entire novel. But what about a different kid…one in difficult or strange circumstances? I mulled this over for a couple of weeks--then Meely began pouring out of my head.

     As to voice, well, doesn't everyone want to rewrite his or her adolescence into a more heroic, interesting story? Meely's life is complicated by circumstances--loss of his mother, a wayward if loving father, loneliness and the constant menace of a bully. And, yes, there are elements of autobiography in this. I lost a brother when I was 19 (he was 16 and died, three days after he fell sick, from mosquito-borne encephalitis). I had a wayward, charismatic grandfather (also an alligator hunter) who was fond of drink and disappeared for days at a time. As a scrawny kid, I endured my share of normal schoolyard bullying, which instilled in me a huge sympathy for the underdog.

    Yet Meely's story isn't my story. I also had two parents who loved me, five rambunctious brothers who filled up my days with camaraderie and mischief and a stable, if somewhat eccentric, home. But having crafted Meely from some borrowed bits, and a large dose of imagination, the challenge--and thrill--as a writer was to figger out, in Meely's parlance, what Meely would do in the various circumstances in which I placed him.

Q. You've been all over the world for the Wall Street Journal.  What's the strangest thing you've ever seen?

     I was dispatched to Kuwait shortly after its liberation from the Iraqi army to cover the effort to put out the oil-well fires that Saddam had unleashed.  He'd basically blown up every oil well in the nation--more than 700 in all--and most of them were on fire. One well alight and gushing a fiery maelstrom sounds like a Boeing 747 on take-off. Imagine a cluster of  40 of them all roaring at the same time and you get some idea of what it was like to stand in a field watching as the roughnecks from Red Adair's crew tried to put these fires out. One day, I'm in middle of this cauldron, the air choked with putrid black smoke and it starts to rain--not real rain, but warm sticky oil. Then it starts to pour: It's an oil storm!

     Then I stumble onto an even stranger sight. On the edge of this field, two or three of the blown wells hadn't caught fire, thus their oil had been running unchecked for days into a depression in the nearby desert. The result is a literal lake of oil--about a mile wide and four miles long, and seven feet deep in some places. I look up and see migratory ducks winging low over the lake; they think it's a real lake and come skittering in for a landing--only to find themselves smothered in hot oil. Being the desert, it's barbecue-grill hot, at least when the huge black smoke cloud being created by the fires isn't blocking out the sun. So there I am on the edge of this lake, during one prolonged clear period, when I hear a muffled explosion across the way. I peer over in time to see a ball of fire--about twice the size of a basketball--streaking across the lake. It hits the opposite bank and dies in an appalling moan. When this happens again, I realize what's going on: The oil is spontaneously combusting into fiery, rolling dervishes.  I edge (way) back and watch, mesmerized.

     I christen the place Lake Eerie. 

Q. What's the big deal about gumbo? Do you make it?

    Italians have pasta. Cajuns have gumbo. It's inseparable from the culture. The virtue of gumbo for the early Cajuns, who were mainly poor farmers and fishermen, was obvious: It could be made with what was at hand. A chicken from the yard, a few vegetables (onions, garlic, bell pepper) from the garden, some shrimp caught in a trawl, some sausage from the pig you slaughtered in the spring. Some inexpensive spices--salt, pepper, file', or sassafras root, a few leaves from the backyard bay tree. All you had to do was make a roux--flour browned in oil (or lard), add some stock and cook it patiently and, well, you couldn't go wrong. And, served in bowls, like soup, over rice, a gumbo went a long way. This mattered: Cajuns, being stalwart Catholics, had big families to feed. My mom made two wonderful gumbos--a simple chicken gumbo and a seafood gumbo, a blend of shrimp and oysters. I had aunts who made shrimp-only gumbo; who made shrimp and okra gumbo; who made chicken and andouille (sausage) gumbo.  I ate, and liked them all. But, in my opinion, nothing quite compared to my mom's gumbos. I grew up not caring much about cooking. It wasn't some chauvinist resistance; there was no reason to cook, since my mom cooked so well and my dad now and then barbecued chicken and made a redfish courtbouillon.  In 1975, at the age of 27, I decided I wanted a shot at big-time journalism, so I sold my motorbike and packed my Chevy pickup and moved to Columbia, Mo., to enroll as a grad student at the University of Missouri's journalism. I would end up doing well there, but my first snowy winter I was cold, lonely, and, as much as anything, starved for Cajun cooking.  I missed my mom's gumbo. And had no clue as to how she cooked it.  So I called her up one weekend and asked for a recipe. There was this long silence on the other end of the phone. I said: "Mom, you there?"

    "Aw, yeah, cher, I'm here," she replied. "It's just that I never thought about exactly how I cook it. It's a li'l' bit different each time. But first, you have to make a roux." She then described what a roux was.

     I hung up, but not before getting the basic ingredients and making my mother promise she'd write down and send me the recipe. Then, in a fit of vanity, I went off to cook my first gumbo, figuring: Hey, how hard can this be? I even invited some friends over to eat it. My first effort at a roux ended in a cauldron of parched, fiery disaster; another roux ended up a beige glop, but I proceeded with the gumbo anyway. It was so bad that we ordered pizza; the cat wouldn't even eat it. I went home that Christmas and decided the only way to do this was to watch my mom make gumbo.  Making a roux, though, I learned, was tricky--the process is, in a way, Zen-like. No wonder my mom couldn't exactly explain it. No two rouxs are ever exactly the same; yet the roux is the soul of the gumbo. If you mess up the roux, your gumbo has no hope. It was probably a year before I made my first really good roux and thus my first really good gumbo. And it was close to--but never exactly like--my mom's. And thus I've spent the last couple of decades in a happy search for the perfect roux and a gumbo that lives up to my mom's.

     My mom passed away seven years ago; I miss her and I miss her gumbo. I have two daughters, Sara, 18,  and Becca, 13. They love my gumbo but haven't shown much interest in learning how to cook it yet. Sara keeps threatening, too. But, why should they cook? I cook Cajun and their mother cooks out of Gourmet Magazine. But I suspect, one day, they might get interested and I'll say what my mom told me: "Cher, first you make a roux!         Copyright@Ken Wells 2001-2005. No part of this site may be used, downloaded or reproduced without the expressed written permission of Ken Wells and Random House Inc.  

Bonnie Toups Wells, the author’s mother,  at the gumbo pot in the ‘80s.

Our Bayou Black farmhouse years after we moved away.

 

Growing up on the banks of Bayou Black, La.

 

 

William “Rex” Wells, the author’s father, with a gator taken from the Terrebonne Parish swamps circa 1949.

Above: The kind of place Meely would’ve fished for sac-a’-lait. Below: a cypress swamp scene.