'Dark Tales' portrays bayou life that once was

By Bill Decker
bdecker@daily-review.com
PATTERSON — After a working lifetime spent educating other people’s children, Lyman Wilson wanted to teach his own grandchildren about life along the Teche in the first half of the 20th century.
The result is “Dark Tales from Cajun Bayous,” a self-published volume of stories drawn from his childhood in the area near what is now Wilson Lane.
“I hate to call them stories, because they don’t fit into the category of a short story, so I call them tales,” Wilson said in an interview last week. “They are based on a lot of stories, not stories, but incidences I heard as a youth.
“I took those incidences and wrote tales around them. They’re all fiction. And the stories are based a lot on superstition and a sort of blend of superstition and Catholic beliefs.”
Wilson came by the stories honestly. He grew up in a way of life that, as his foreword notes sadly, is mostly gone. The fishing and hunting that are now done for sport were once ways to make a living. He didn’t grow up speaking French, but his parents would speak French when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were saying.
“When we were raised in this area, we were isolated in many respects,” Wilson said. “We had no television. We had a battery radio that we were allowed to listen to on certain occasions, like the news or ‘The Hit Parade’ on Saturday night.
“Other than that, we had to entertain ourselves, usually by hunting or fishing or playing with children in our neighborhood.”
His chores included cutting kindling and fetching ice from town. He walked a quarter of a mile to catch the bus that would take him to school.
“School was the biggest joy of the day,” Wilson said. “We enjoyed going to school because there was the activity there.”
Wilson went on to earn a degree in English and went to work as a teacher, mostly in Morgan City. Later, he went to work for the state technical college system.
When he retired, he and his wife, Ora Mae, traveled around the country.
“Dark Tales” is a project in which he hopes to preserve the memory of what it was like to grow up where Wilson grew up 60 years ago.
“It was a happy childhood,” Wilson said. “Everybody entertained themselves, mostly outdoors doing outdoor things.”
And they told stories, some of which inspired the stories in “Dark Tales.”
The book contains stories called “Mad Marie,” “The Spirit Wind,” “The Mule Grave,” “Water Lilies” and “Nothing to Fear,” about the hoboes that descended on the South during the Great Depression.
In one story, set long before the surgeon general’s warning, a hunter named Etienne gets a stern warning about tobacco from an albino squirrel.
Wilson recalls another story about an unpleasant woman who fell into the water and drowned, only to return to her husband as he worked in his garden. Suddenly, she disappeared.
“The ground where she disappeared was like burned,” Wilson said. “The old folks said that was an indication she was going to hell. She burned the ground on the way out. …
“Most Cajuns were Catholic, but they also had their superstitions mixed in with the Catholic faith. They believed in some things that I’m sure weren’t sanctioned by the Catholic church. They also show the Cajun humor. In the darkest of the stories, there is humor that comes through.
“There’s a mixture of superstition, belief, and also there’s a moral. There’s good in some people that comes through in some of the tales.”
“Dark Tales” is available through Amazon.
Bill Decker is the managing editor of The Daily Review.