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C. Sorapuru: Conrad Sorapuru, resident of this house since
I’ve been born. There was five sons and two daughters, and my mom and a daddy
and a sister and brother on the other side. The Sorapuru’s were the only owners of the house and
has been since 1820, since it was built. Now I was in the military for twenty years,
so there’s about twenty years of my story, I have to get while I was gone in combat but
was here ‘til I was twenty years old and came back in 1986 and been here ever since.
We’re in the town called Lucy, which is not a mailing address anymore, it’s called Edgard.
People who’ve been here knows it’s Lucy. And the house has been here since I’ve been here and my
understanding of it is that it was originally built on the Mississippi River. Some people ask
why it’s not facing the highway. Well one of the theories they had was the highway is facing north
and if you’ll face north, you’d have the front of the house, when you open the doors, the north wind
comes in. To keep the heat in, from loosing the heat and stuff, you put the house where the wind
don’t cut. You can go from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, I think that’s the only house you’ll
see that doesn’t face Highway 18. Since it’s been here, sugar cane
has been the primary crop that the families raised for income. The other thing they, we raised was
vegetables and stuff, which my daddy, we used to take to the French market down in New Orleans,
and he would sell those and that was between seasons of doing the sugar cane. When the sugar
cane season came that was your primary work was getting them in. And you have to do it before
the first freeze. Sugar cane don’t last once it freezes. It’ll turn sour within a matter
of a week or two and then it’s no good to you. Like I said we used to raise a lot of vegetables,
even vegetables right here for the family. Fruit trees, pear trees, we had more pear trees,
fig trees, and we had filé branch trees. Oh, we used to make a lot of filé. Like
we used to pick up a five-gallon bucket of fig in the morning before we go to school.
Now my daddy planted those two pecan trees over there, but he bought those because he wanted a
certain type of pecan. He built a corral around it, so the horse and cows don’t go lean against
it rubbing and things until it start growing. Those two trees gotta be at least 70 years old.
I was small then when they planted them. They got a lot on the ground but they’re not as good
as the ones over there. But we always raised more than we could eat so we always had something to
sell, and we’d sell it on the side of the road. My daddy used to put something there because filé,
we used to have filé trees along here and we used to make it ourselves. Really all there was
to make file all they had was a tree, looked like a tree trunk with an inset in it that’s round and
you had something that looks like a baseball bat. You’d hang out your filé, took you about a month.
You had to do it when the sun shined, let it sit until it gets real brittle. Then you’d put it,
you’d just go and hit it with the stick and break it up to real fine. Then what you do is
you wait till the day got a very little breeze and you’ll pour it in the bucket and what the
breeze did, it would take the big, the stems and stuff. You don’t want stems in your filé.
So, you take it, and you’d drop a little slow, and then if the wind blow, it’ll blow the stems
out and you end up with just the file itself. And the filé will last you, it’ll last longer
than a year, but we did it every year cause at that time everybody want fresh filé and we use it
more in the winter because you use pork in gumbo. Andouille is pork. You did hog killing
from when it got cool and cold and again from probably November to maybe February might be the
latest. So that’s when you would use the most of your file anyway. Come the summer, people didn’t
make gumbo because you didn’t have Andouille. Everything then at that time was done by season.
And we used to, we’d take our Andouille and hang it in the house, up in the attic. After we’d
smoke it, we’d smoke it right here on the ground. We’d dig a little trench, put a barrel on the end
and put some wood and corncobs, we used to use to make the smoke cause you want smoke, not fire. And
they go up to the sacks and you would smell it all over, you can tell what everybody was making
and the killing of the hog usually was like a community gathering. Because we were all family,
so each family would go and help one family the next week and week after and whatever and that’s
how you got all your killing and things done. But you didn’t take it to no shop or no butcher shop.
The butcher was the people in the community. And that’s how you get a lot of, people get a
lot of the meat too, when you go, you share. When somebody help you kill,
you give them some. My aunt that lives here, she had her chickens, and she got her eggs.
We got our chickens, we got our eggs and things, but we always had eggs, no matter who had them,
but we always had eggs. Like the old thing used to be, was Sunday dinner with chicken. We had some
green beans and some potato salad and stuff like that and there’d be a little pudding and things.
How you got pudding, well we had some bread that got stale.
We didn’t go buy the bread to make the pudding, we just, it’s just bread we got and didn’t eat it all
and it started getting stale. Well, my mom would make pudding out of it, called it bread pudding.
But we killed the chicken on Saturday. The eggs and things, we’d sell some right here
on the road and things for people who’d want them. Red beans and rice on Monday,
maybe pork chops, sausage, something meat to go with it. Sometimes you didn’t get any because
in the summer, you didn’t have pork. Raised corn for the animals, mostly it was for the
animals than us but when were no longer good to eat in the house cause it was old and hard,
then we’d go get it and we’d put it in the barn and that’s what we’d feed the animals through
the winter cause in the winter you could see there’s not much grass. The grass don’t grow.
But we eat as much as we could and we saved some because you could put it in a jar and
have it all through the winter because we put it in the those mason jars, they called them.
We’d do that and we do it with all the vegetables we had. We raised peas and snap beans and okra and
any vegetable you could think, turnips, mustard, all those stuff but those stuff could be saved too
by jarring it. So, you could end up with it in the summer. That’s how we helped ourselves
to have food without having to buy food. We didn’t buy much food, we bought like rice maybe
because we couldn’t grow it around here but at one time, they did have a lot of rice fields here.
When sugar cane came, that became the primary crop that everybody grow on the…sugar cane at
that time had a higher return, yeah, I mean that’s where the money was. And it’s the same thing over
year after year. I mean nothing changes except the seasons and you change with the seasons,
what you can do and what you can’t. And right now, is what you’d call
a lull. That’s when you got the most time when you can do something else that you want to do.
You could go to New Orleans and stay two or three days. Once spring come, you can’t
go to New Orleans and spend two- or three-days cause there’s things you gotta do. Cause right
now if this was the old days was here, we’d be cutting sugar cane today. Every day you cut sugar,
Sunday, Saturday, it didn’t matter. It was a something else, you had to hit it with what they
called a cane knife to cut it. Then, when you cut it you lay it on a row and then they had to burn
it to get the trash out. Then when they finished burning it, you used to have to go with your arms
under it, pick up an armful, walk up a ladder, one or two steps put it in the cart with your
arm. Then they take it to another farm where they had a derrick. They would pick it up
and then they would get a truck to come get it and then they would go to the sugar house then.
But you had to do it all by hand. It was people in the community. I mean the people that’s doing it,
everybody would help one another cut the sugar cane. You had a lot of small farmers and the big
farmers, now they came up with machinery before the small ones and sometimes they would help
the little farmers. But when they got a little break, they got on schedule, or had a good year,
then they could help the small farmer. But the small farmers couldn’t wait
to see if the big farmers could come and help. You had to get yours out. So, we did as much as we
could with the people we could get to help us. And if you look in our living room, you’ll see
some plaques on the wall. Our family earned awards for the most production of sugar cane per
acre for a small farm. And a lot of when those awards were won, we didn’t have a tractor. We,
you know, we was cutting sugar cane by hand. Around here, you never really experience the
civil rights disparity like you see anywhere else. I mean this is a real mixed community
and way back in that time and you almost had like a black family and a white family, a black family,
a white family, but I mean it was so mixed, when I say everybody help one another, it was them too.
Some of the white neighbors, they had sugar, they had white people have a little sugar cane thing
that they grow, well, it needed help too. I never experienced like it like I see on TV
and think a lot about the sixties and all that people getting beat up and things and all. Well,
the police, my daddy know him, you know, grew up with him you know, so he wasn’t a stranger.
When I went into the service, then go to different places, I started seeing more of it. But we never
had any kind of issue around here because your neighbor was white and you other neighbor was
black; it didn’t make a difference. But this place here was probably, I’d say about 50/50
between being white and being black. But still, we went to church and
you couldn’t go in the same, you couldn’t sit next to them in church.
Because they had a section for white and a section for black. But we knew one another, when we come
out, you still talk with them, tell them hello and things. But still you go to the theater,
they had a section for white, a section for black in the theater. They had the white and
black signs now, you didn’t have, I call it the animosity you see between black and white like,
even like you’re seeing it today. But my mama now, she used to be a seamstress. All
she had to do was see it and she could make it. But a lot of people would come to her and that’s
how she made extra money. My daddy drove a school bus for a while. He drove it for twenty years.
He was the first black school bus driver in Saint John Parish. That’s when they started having buses
for the black students and the white students. Well, he drove the first bus. That was in 1948.
They only had two on this side, one for the white and one for the black.
And he had to go from one end of the Parish to the other end and bring them to elementary
school and high school. He used the bus to bring people to church and he did that on Sunday and
from one end of the Parish to the other. He’d bring them right there to St. John Parish.
The only thing I can remember of them doing with the house like say in the fifties,
that’s when they started using shingles and stuff on houses, they took the metal roof
that they had up there and put shingles on them. Then they took the chimney down
because that’s the time they started having gas. When we had that, my mama usually would wake up
in the morning, she’d get the fireplace going and everything would warm up, then
about an hour later or so, we’d get up and we’d get ready and go to school and things.
And they did the same thing with the gas, see the old people, they didn’t trust that thing burning
all night and you ain’t watching it, so they turn it off. You weren’t going to run no gas heater
all night. You were going to shut it off but, in the morning, you could get up a little earlier,
turn it up and let it get hot. Then when the rest of you get up then that’s basically how they did
it. They didn’t have to go and get wood for the fireplace no more so that’s what made it better.
And the firewood, we used to go right there behind that levee, June, July,
and maybe into August, you’d cut that wood and you’d let it lay there and then later on, you’d
go get it, bring it home and you’d cut it up into pieces so when it got cold in probably November,
December before you really used that fireplace. When I went to elementary school,
we the students I’m talking about, had to start our own fire for heat for the school.
There wasn’t no janitor or whatever you want to call him, building maintenance people that come
there and they got the things going. We had to do, when they would serve lunch, we had one cook.
She’d cook it but when it got time to serve it, we the students had to go in and help her serve it
and clean up and throw it out, you know when they finished, the slop we had to give to the hogs.
Well, when you did that, you weren’t in school learning either though. We, the students have to
do it, I’m talking about when I went to school, used to call it Lucy Elementary right here.
Thanksgiving and things was good, I mean because usually did her little bonfire and things like
that and as children it was good because that was our time we could almost get a little more freedom
to get together and do some things that we maybe shouldn’t do.
The holidays was good, I mean then we’d make some praline and
some fudge and cake and we’d make what they call an anisette. It’s a wine.
Christmas was the same way. We’d go to church and you’d have your bon fire and you could stay up
late, and you shoot your firecrackers and all that. But you’re going to have a big dinner,
you know gumbo and some fried chicken and things. And then wherever you went
to visit, it was the same thing, somebody had gumbo, they had some anisette, somebody might
have made some blackberry wine or something and things. So, they give you a little taste
and even though you were small and young, they would still say you could have a little taste.
See the house like that, we used to play under that house. I mean a five-year-old
kid can walk under there. We used to play marbles and things. When it would rain hard,
we’d just go under there and play. Now, I’m going to tell you the truth, presents wise,
we didn’t get too many presents. It wasn’t about the presents though; it was more the getting
together and things. But one time, he bought my little dump truck, and he went and got some
dirt by the river and brought it and put it in the house so I could play with my little dump truck.
Like I say, sometimes for Christmas you still had things to do. You still had that hog to feed,
there was always something you could do. When we was out of school, Thanksgiving, you’d be
off for a week. We was in the field cutting sugar cane. When you had a break in school, you had a,
that means you’d come home, and you’d go do some work over there.
It all came out good. I mean it was kind of a hard living, but it was a good living.
*instrumental music builds* Looking back on it like I say, when you’re younger
you have a different perspective with what’s going on in your life that
it maybe don’t seem as right or as good because you know you’re young and you got different
expectations but when I go back and look at my life, I wouldn’t change it. I wouldn’t
ask for nothing no different even for the way I was raised and things because I think
it made me the man I am today. *instrumental music fades*