Orgeron’s success a hit in Louisiana
Fans of LSU football embrace Cajun coach: We ‘love him’
When Louisiana State completed a rare victory over Alabama in November, my sister, Irene Cloud, kissed her tiger-striped fingernails. Then she pressed her hand to LSU coach Ed Orgeron’s face on her television, which had been sprinkled with holy water for good luck.
“He’s so cute; I love him so much,” Melissa Landry, a family friend, said in a video of the victory celebration at Irene’s home in Lafayette, Louisiana.
“The Cajun Cookie Monster!” yelled Sarah Davenport, Irene’s daughter and my niece.
“He does not speak English at all,” Landry laughed.
Orgeron’s raspy voice is similar to bayou voices they have heard their entire lives but more gravelly, like the sound of tires on an oyster shell parking lot.
Scratch that. It is the sound of a fiddle being played with a chain saw.
“We finally have a coach without an accent,” Irene likes to say.
All kidding aside, as LSU faces Clemson in college football’s national championship game Monday in New Orleans, a sensitive subject lurks beneath the good-natured jibes about Orgeron’s voice.
The Cajuns of south Louisiana, descended from French-speaking Acadians who were expelled from Canada in the 1750s for refusing to pledge fealty to the British, have long endured media portrayals as a people whose distinct accent makes them seem backward and ignorant.
Exhibit No. 1: Adam Sandler’s witless character in the football comedy “The Waterboy.”
“You were laughing at that character; nobody’s laughing at Coach Orgeron now,” said Shane K. Bernard, a Louisiana historian and author of “The Cajuns: Americanization of a People.”
The success of Orgeron, 58, from tiny Larose, La., southwest of New Orleans, has provided an athletic and cultural rebuttal to ridiculing vocal stereotypes of Cajuns, who otherwise have been embraced for their food, music and hospitality.
“A lot of Cajuns can’t understand him, either,” Emily Davenport, my niece and Sarah’s sister, said with a laugh.
“But true LSU fans, now we get it. It’s like a secret language. And we love it.”
That was not always a prevailing opinion. In the World War I era, Louisiana tried to smother its French heritage by assimilating Cajuns into the broader American culture.
The state constitution of 1921 required that public schools teach in English only. When my father attended school in the 1930s and ’40s in Eunice, Louisiana, he and others caught speaking the Cajun French dialect were sometimes paddled or forced to kneel in uncooked rice that bruised the knees.