Lafayette

Driving into Lafayette on I-10 from the east, you cross the Atchafalaya River and the landscape shifts. The billboard French appears first — a welcome sign for the Cajun Heartland, the bilingual notation that somewhere in here the language survived, that French made it through two centuries of pressure and prohibition and came out the other side. My grandmother spoke a patois from the Loire valley that shared words with what I heard on the radio station playing zydeco out of Eunice, and I sat with that strange acoustic kinship for a long time before I figured out what I was feeling.

Lafayette is not a beautiful city in the postcard sense. It sprawls the way most American cities of its size sprawl, with the strip-mall outskirts that tell you nothing about the place. But the center holds things of real interest — the Cathedral of Saint John the Evangelist, the restored streetcar-era neighborhoods on the south side — and the surrounding parishes hold everything. I drove out to Breaux Bridge on a Saturday morning, the self-proclaimed crawfish capital of the world, and found a table at a place that had been serving the same breakfast of cracklins and café au lait for decades.

The crawfish boil happened on a Sunday at someone’s house on the edge of town, introduced through a chain of connections that began with a conversation at a gas station. They used an enormous propane burner and a pot that could have accommodated a small person, filling it with water and Zatarain’s crab boil and bay leaves and whole heads of garlic. When the crawfish were done they dumped the entire pot — mudbugs, corn, new potatoes, andouille — onto a table covered in newspaper. No plates. No utensils. The technique of twisting the tail and sucking the head, which sounds undignified described in print, comes naturally within about two minutes and after that becomes automatic. I ate until my fingers were orange and my lips were burning from the spice and I was full in a way that has nothing to do with the amount consumed and everything to do with the quality of the occasion.

The music at night has its own geography. The dance halls out in the parishes — places like Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, which has been broadcasting live Cajun music on Saturday mornings for decades — are where you hear the old accordion-and-fiddle sound played by people who learned it from their parents, not from YouTube. Zydeco, the Black Creole tradition, has its own venues in Lafayette proper, and on a Tuesday night I found myself at a place where an eight-piece band played for a crowd that ranged in age from maybe fifteen to eighty and everyone danced.

When to go: The crawfish season runs roughly February through May, and March is the sweet spot — the weather is mild, the season is in full swing, and the Festival International de Louisiane in late April is a genuinely magnificent world music and culture festival. Avoid the height of summer, which is brutally hot and humid, though the food and music remain year-round.