Keagan Lejeune’s Legendary Louisiana Outlaws: The Villains and Heroes of Folk Justice focuses on famous criminals who were active in the Deep South in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Along with the introduction, each of the book’s seven chapters is dedicated to a particular legend. Lejeune begins and ends with his most (in)famous examples—Frank and Jesse James in the introduction and Bonnie and Clyde in the final chapter. These high-profile characters help communicate the author’s thoughts on the outlaw. Outlaws are more than lawbreakers. Most criminals are still protected by the legalities of fair trials and safe transport, but outlaws’ illegal activities are so prolific and/or so reprehensible that they stand “outside the system of justice” and “outside the protection of the law” (5). Having captured the people’s attention, however, outlaws can find sympathy and help among the folk whose systems for judging right-vs-wrong are more flexible.
Over and over again, Lejeune identifies factors other than legality that sway public opinion in favor of (and occasionally against) the outlaw. For the smuggler and pirate Jean Laffite (chapter 1), it is the British threat to the city of New Orleans and Lafitte’s choice to assist General Andrew Jackson in defense of the Crescent City. For opportunistic thieves like Ozéme Carriére hiding out in the bayous of southwest Louisiana (chapter 3), it is the oncoming troubles of Civil War and the jayhawker’s unwillingness to choose sides. For the masked train robber, Eugene Bunch (chapter 4), it is the audacity of the powerful railroad companies to run roughshod over honest, hard-working families and the retribution due to those companies’ absentee owners.
When people’s views on the given external circumstances of an outlaw legend are divided, interpretations of the featured hero/villain follow suit. The legend of Charles “Leather Britches” Smith—well-known in Merryville, Louisiana—exemplifies this dynamic. Leather Britches, a notorious and violent criminal, displayed his skills as a gunslinger fighting on the side of the Brotherhood of Timber Workers Union against the Southern Lumber Operator’s Association in 1912. In his chapter on Leather Britches (which seems to lean more heavily on the author’s interviews with locals), Lejeune argues that thoughts on the legend align with each person’s socio-political positionality: “For mill owners and certain residents, Leather Britches was a trouble-maker. For the millworkers and union sympathizers, however, he was a noble defender of the little man” (125).
Such differences of opinion represent the book’s core conflict of interpretation. The written code of law is dense and full of ambiguities, but unwritten codes of folk laws can be even more difficult to parse and to interpret. “The folk system is oral, dynamic, and administered by the general population,” so it “remains tied to the dynamic and sometimes obscure nature of the people” (7). Consider one of Lejeune’s early—and relatively innocuous—examples: Men and women who fish know that even though officials “won’t draw lines in a river to mark off fishing spots,” local people will “cut trotlines or destroy crab traps to remind intruders that certain spots belong, and likely have for some time, to another fisherman” (8). While the bulk of Lejeune’s data comes from secondary and historical sources, the fishing-hole example—appropriate for a book about the wetlands and prairies of Louisiana—anticipates Lejeune’s observations throughout, in which right and wrong are judged by the folk in ways that are locally and temporally contextualized.
Folklorists working on Southern legendry will find many references to regional motifs, such as buried treasures, post-Civil War lawlessness, the pitfalls of cotton-based economies, and grassroots struggles to decentralize the powers of government and of outsider business interests. Those working on outlaws will find a resourceful study and an interesting gloss on contemporary intersections of legends, politics, and heritage.
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[Review length: 618 words • Review posted on January 18, 2018]