My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was an awkward suit in West Tennessee.
His own father was a man called Germain Bouguereau that spoke French and owned a big sugarcane farm ten miles out from New Orleans, and his mother was a woman from Madagascar but her name has long fallen away. I remember my mother talking about her though, when we were little, not that she could have known a thing about her. It was all just pretty legend.
If Germain asked a by-your-leave of my grandmother then I’m a Frenchman too. He had a sort of is-he-isn’t-he look to him, my father. But he was charming as all get-out, and lots of folk loved him.
My mother said old man Bouguereau had let him go. Maybe that was just part of his story, when he sneaked up to Tennessee. Germain Bouguereau never sent a hunter or set a notice so maybe it was so.
He had a long shining face, my mother said. And he was fortunate in his trade as a blacksmith, fixing ploughs and wheels and shoeing horses, that he had learned as a trusted Creole man. He had found himself able to earn decent money in Louisiana – and, having made his dangerous move, in Tennessee.
The reason he felt bound to make that journey he never made clear. Stupid folk that didn’t know said he was too handsome for Louisiana and too clever. He wasn’t long suiting himself out to be a king on Sundays, and he had an open laughing manner which was why people took to him and the patrollers let him be for the most part.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
