The Duke of Baton Rouge

It's a lot of Huey that Baton Rouge is a boring non-diversion from the romp of New Orleans. In March, I took a Greyhound portage from New Orleans to Houston so I could re-savor BR and see what the Cajun capital of Lafayette amounted to.

My first visit was in 1982, when I was researching an article on major American Art Deco buildings. The state capitol is one such--Bayou Deco if you will--with pelicans (the state bird) and other local exotica garnishing the tall structure (it was Huey Long's ambition to out-topple the Nebraska state capitol in Lincoln).

In the formal gardens that front the tall edifice stands a statue of HL with one hand extended--whether symbolizing his pre-assassination scratching or his posthumous legacy of very bad political habits is hard to determine.

I shall never forget the low that followed my architectural high that Sunday. When I called my son in St. Paul, he informed me that my mother had died that morning in Detroit.

On my next visit, the Louisiana Folklife Commission was staging its annual fair, and I stuffed myself with Cajun food and schmoozed with the craftier ones. A folk carver from Homer, Louisiana, was displaying the most elegant cache of his canes, one of which I gave temporary custody of to my son Michael with the admonition to return it to me when I seemed to need it.

There is also a tasty display of the whole range of the state's folk art in the basement of the capitol--when I discovered when I was waiting to get to interview David Duke, who had just joined the legislature.

That was an experience. First I was frisked for weapons by a portly man who could have walked right of the pages of All the King's Men. Legislators don't have offices, and you have to forward a message asking for an audience. Duke had the last desk in the assembly at the extreme right rear, next to the entrance, sort of symbolizing his marginality among many members.

He is an extremely good-looking man, tall and courtly (a dead ringer for Atlanta's Ted Turner), and dressed in a plaid sports coat as distant in tone from a KKK costume as possible.

He is also very articulate: The majority of Louisiana voters, he began, are tired of carrying unproductive welfare types on their backs. In Louisiana's troubled economy, they also find affirmative action unfair to non-minorities.

He was having no trouble finding members of the legislature willing to form coalitions to deal with the Metairie voters who elected him.

My impression is that it's a waste to keep reminding Duke of his nutty Nazi past. Or to imply that it is un-American to form a group like the National Association for the Advancement of White People. The Klan knows from losing its headquarters in Tuscaloosa that violence will backlash on itself.

Duke is not dangerous. It is better to have him in the open, engaging in public dialogue about the griefs of his constituents.

I'm more concerned about Governor Buddy Roemer's changes to reform the state's finances. I had lunch with one of the auditors of his new oversight department, headed by a New Orleans newspaperman with a reputation for tracking down boodlers. It's a Sisyphean ordeal.

The city is making respectable attempts to change that outlook. Take the current exhibition at the Louisiana Arts and Science Center, a marvelously recycled railroad station along the Mississippi River at the foot of downtown.

"Who'd A Thought It: Improvisation in African-American Quiltmaking" is a loan show from the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum, presenting the Oakland, California, collection of Eli Leon. (World Ward II created a diaspora of blacks from the South seeking war work in the Bay Area.)

The tradition of Southern black quilt making has, to my eye, two salient characteristics--asymmetry and marvelously strange color combinations. I first delighted in this folk tradition when I discovered the work of Pecolia Warner of Yazoo City, Mississippi, at Judy Peiser's Center for Southern Folklore in Memphis. My favorite Pecolia is a bear claw in the most extraordinary colors of lime green and orange.

In the LASC exhibition, look at Georgian Charles Cater (yes, Virginia, black men make quilts--when they're lucky enough to have a gifted grandmother tutor) for a fine example of asymmetry, and Arkansan Emma Hall's Double Ring for the exuberant color schemes black quilters are very very good at.

If you can't get to Baton Rouge before the show ends (Sept. 3), at least send for the marvelous catalog (LASC, P.O. Box 3373, Baton Rouge, LA 70821, (504) 344-9463).

Baton Rouge is only a few hours drive from--and less touristy than--New Orleans. Louisiana State University is a brisk half-hour walk from downtown, and I've always found that greatest achievement of Huey Long worth a visit in itself.

from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, August 23, 1989