At one time the phrase “Creole twilight” would have been used to mean the period of the mid- and late- nineteenth century, when New Orleans Creole society was in its final stages of development, when it was in a period of decline and on its last legs. (It was during such a time period that the Louisiana Association of the American Folklore Society, led by arch-Creole Alcée Fortier, flourished, when Fortier looked into Creole French language.) But Joshua Clegg Caffery with his use of the title In the Creole Twilight for his collection of poetry seems to have quite a different meaning in mind (though what those poets who provided jacket comments, which seem mostly slightly puzzled, make of the collection or its title is another matter). Caffery takes off from Louisiana folklore, referencing such material as saints’ legends, folk beliefs, and folktale characters, building mostly on song genres (he is himself a musician, and has been a member of two bands, the bluegrass/Western swing group the Red Stick Ramblers and the largely Cajun band Feufollet, itself named after a folkloric phenomenon) to produce his own poems. The material he works from is mostly rural and comes from Cajun French tradition, so urban New Orleans does not come into play, and Caffery’s use of “Creole” (a term which as widely used today seems to mostly refer to Afro-French groups) is more a reference to the Louisiana French tradition and perhaps also to creole-ness, that is, to the cultural process of creolization and its end-results in Louisiana. Of course, the fact that Caffery’s poetry is itself in English points toward the abandonment of French as a language in much of Louisiana, a kind of “twilight” in itself, from which he draws his folk material.
Caffery is a scholar as well as a poet and musician, author of Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana, and recently a visiting professor in folklore at Indiana University, an authority on the work of Alan Lomax, particularly Lomax’s work in the Bayou State. And perhaps it was inevitable that he find his way into the study of folklore. I wrote about the work of his mother, the very talented Debbie Fleming Caffery, in my book Folklife in Louisiana Photography (and later reviewed her book), a photographer who has given much of her artistic attention to documenting folklife, especially that of the local sugar industry (she is also a distant cousin of the folklorist Henry Glassie). And his uncle, the Baton Rouge attorney Taylor Caffery, maintained a local folk music show for many years on public radio.
Caffery is one of a number of folklorists who have also looked to poetry as a means of further expression, a group that includes Ed Hirsch, Susan Stewart, Margaret Yocom, Solimar Otero, and Leslie Prosterman. The extent to which folklore has played a role in that poetry has varied. Caffery’s book is an indication that the role may be considerable, and in In the Creole Twilight he provides a section of notes in which he points out how individual poems relate to Louisiana folklore and the Louisiana locality, a section perhaps unneeded by someone who knows Louisiana culture well (and Louisiana culture is very much its own thing, an amalgam–a creole mishmash, if you will–of the Southern and the French), though some of Caffery’s references are very local and obscure.
He has a poem entitled “Captain Russel,” based on the well-known Cajun song usually called “Cadet Roussel,” based in turn, according the Caffery’s notes, on an actual person who in 1780 became something of a laughingstock. The song recounts some of the absurd things that Cadet Roussel has done. For instance, in a version recorded by Harry Oster, who traces the song back to France and the sixteenth century though he says that it descends from another song, Cadet Roussel has a dog which runs away when called. In Caffery’s poem Captain Russel has daughters who spend most of their time in bed and on the phone and horses with legs “thin as reeds,” even with “wooden pegs” (53).
Some of Caffery’s notes are rather scholarly and interesting from that perspective. For example, he sets his poem “Claude Martin’s Last Request” in the “historical frame” (71) of the Acadian removal from Nova Scotia by the British. Yet he comments in his notes to the poem that this tale of “cannibalism and self-sacrifice” (71) that he has partly from family lore about his ancestor Claude Martin, the first Acadian settler in the area around Breaux Bridge, is well known in Portuguese tradition and one song in which it figures “remains popular to this day in Brazil, where it is often accompanied by a dramatic dance” (71). He remembers that he first came across the “idea and image” (72) he works with in an African-American spiritual recorded from Albert Bradford and Becky Elzy “who sang it before the Civil War” on Avery Island.
But mostly Caffery’s work is interesting to the folklorist because of the ways in which it incorporates Louisiana French folklore (and certainly rewards re-reading). For example, in “The Loup-Garou” Caffery uses the widespread local belief in werewolves (though today the loup-garou may have become more of a generalized spirit) in a poem in which a man encounters one after ridding himself of his woman (who takes him back), suggesting that the werewolf appears in woman-less times of stress. Or in “Father January” Caffery sees an anti-Santa Claus in a folk figure “still preserved in the folklore of south Louisiana” (71), a figure far more sinister than the Santa of the American imagination (though in his notes he reminds us that Santa himself may have a more sinister history).
Caffery’s poetry, based on Louisiana folklore and brought to us by a poet who is both local boy and scholar and who draws on both of these identities in making his poems, makes for haunting reading and expresses the local and the folkloric well.
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[Review length: 994 words • Review posted on March 9, 2016]