Explore "A Gathering of Old Men" by Ernest J. Gaines on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
From Marshall to the Bayou Michel is about ten miles, five miles along the St. Charles River, and then you turn off the highway onto a blacktop road for another five miles. The Bayou Michel is then on your right, and houses on the left are facing the bayou. The road and bayou twist and turn like a snake. There’s never more than a couple hundred yards of straight road before you have to go around another curve.
This was Cajun country. You had a few other whites, a few blacks, but mostly Cajuns, with names like Jarreau, Bonaventura, Mouton, Montemare, Boutan, Broussard, Guerin, Hebert, Boudreaux, Landreaux—all Cajun names. There were people back here with names like Smith and Kelly, and they claimed to be Cajuns, too, their fathers’ having married Cajun women. The blacks on the bayou also spoke the Cajun French as well as English.