The Boudin and Cracklin' Trails

I took off on Sunday morning, zooming to try and catch a tour of an exhibit at the LSU Museum in Baton Rouge. Made great time, listening the Uncensored Blues podcast from the Delta Blues Museum. Great stuff. Had planned to hit Billy's Boudin & Cracklin's for lunch, but I got hungry way before Scott, Louisiana. A quick check of the Cracklin' Trail map directed me to Rabideaux's Sausage Kitchen in Iowa, LA.

I pulled my pants up over my underwear (I'm not lookin' like a fool with my pants on the ground!) and got one link of boudin and a few cracklins. The boudin was OK - there was a lot of rice, and it mostly just tasted like the Cajun seasoning blend - the same spicy powder covering the cracklins. It didn't really float my boat, and suddenly the distance to Billy's seemed much shorter.

Whole. Different. Story.

With Billy's, you taste the pork, the liver, the green onions, the black pepper, and the serious yum. Better cracklins too - this is like Norwegian ribbe meets carnitas - meaty, crispy, dangerously good.

On to Baton Rouge, where I made it just in time! The Visual Blues exhibit was neat, but they didn't let me take any pictures of the art.

Checked into my hotel, and headed out to Parrain's for dinner. I'm starting to wonder about this fetishizing of rural poverty through "shack" imagery. I mean, the parking lot was full of gleaming SUVs, and inside I got a martini. There is something uncomfortable about "slumming" in this way.

The service was abominable, the raw oysters were served on a bar tray, no ice, fork, lemon, or anything. Had to remind the bartender to put olives in my martini. The char-grilled oysters were just OK - nothing like the incredible ones at Drago's in Metairie. Won't slum here again.

Next up is Natchez, Ferriday, Vicksburg, and Jackson - I'm already tired again!

The South

I still wonder how I got here sometimes. I mean, I'm an urban girl, born and raised in San Francisco. I am used to a significantly higher proportion of museums, reliable public transportation, walkability, multiculturalism, great restaurants, and varied architecture than I have here in Austin, Texas. Don't get me wrong, Austin is an extremely cool place to live, and it has been nice watching it grow up and offer incrementally more of what I miss. Still, I don't identify with the South, even though I have lived here for almost as long as I lived in SF.

Rednecks and racism, right? The failure of Reconstruction and the Stand in the Schoolhouse Door. Bible Belt, NASCAR, and conservatism. Medgar Evers and Emmett Till. Paula Deen. Thankfully, my informal curiosity and formal education (thank you Karl Hagstrom Miller, Jacqueline Jones, and Coleman Hutchison) have loosened, widened, and complicated my understanding of a loose, wide, and complicated place to the point of awakening a new curiosity.

When I drove through the South in 1998, I was nonplussed. I thought kudzu was cool, and it was fun to trace the different BBQ traditions, but I didn't really connect. I remember the guy in an Alabama KOA trying to make conversation by doing his best Jeff Foxworthy-esque comedy, but he was making jokes about his decorating his grandmother's pig nut hickory tree for Christmas by hanging blacks. Strange fruit indeed.

But, I moved to a former Confederate state of my own volition in 1999, and have put down some roots. I'm thinking its time to find myself in this place - this South.


So, I am going to be presenting a paper at the University of Mississippi next week, and I'm driving out there - by myself. I'm going go through Ferriday, Louisiana, up the Delta, to Oxford, MS - then through Memphis, TN, and Little Rock, AR, and back through Shreveport, LA. I'm going to visit museums, markers, monuments, grave sites and battlefields, to sate the history geek in me. I'm going to research an essay on race memory in music heritage museums, and spend time in the Blues Archive at Ole Miss, to sate the scholar in me. I'm going to follow the Tamale Trail to sate the food fiend in me.


And I'm going to try and blog it daily. We shall see.....