“Cajun Country” has always seemed like a somewhat mysterious
place to me, one of swamps, hot weather, bald cypress trees draped with creepy
moss, and alligators . Culturally it’s one of the unique places in America, an
insular culture of people who share a common history, culture, and ancestry and
speak a funny version of French with a cuisine and lifestyle adapted to the
southern swamps, an exotic form of American hillbillyism.

I touched on the Cajun cultural region along the Mississippi
between Baton Rouge and New Orleans but headed deep into its heart from Houma
westward. Lafayette is actually considered somewhat more the heart of Cajun
Country than Houma, but Houma is thoroughly French. Southern Louisiana, of
course, produces lots of oil and natural gas, which is probably the main thing
that keeps Cajun Country from being a complete economic backwater.

Houma doesn’t have much in the way of sights, but I stopped
at two of its largest churches – the Cathedral of Saint Francis de Sales and
the Co-Cathedral of Saint Joseph. The huge Catholic churches of small towns in
southern Louisiana, built mostly out of solid-looking brick, look somewhat out
of place in the flat swampy countryside, like something transported intact from
Quebec or France rather than organic to the area. Saint Francis de Sales also
has an interesting cemetery behind it, with mostly above ground tombs typical
of southern Louisiana where the high water table of the swampy ground and
frequent floods make normal burial impractical and impermanent.