Growing up in rural Louisiana was hard for many. Nolan Fontenot shares his story

Editor’s Note: On writer Melinda Rawls Howell’s trips to the East Feliciana Council on Aging she’s spoken with many who have shared stories of growing up in and around the Felicianas. While not a Feliciana native, Nolan Fontenot’s stories of his early childhood growing up in another parish are similar to those told by many who grew up in the Felicianas. Here is the first of a two-part series on Fontenot’s life.

Nolan Fontenot’s stories are full of readily recalled dates and memories of family, places, other people and events. They are also glimpses of local, Louisiana, American history and of personal challenges that many families may have experienced.

When listening to Fontenot tell who and where he came from, why he settled in Jackson and went to work at institutions in East and West Feliciana parishes, his reminiscing is tinged with humor and compassion — reflecting his personality and character.

He recalls days of struggle and hardships, kindness and opportunities, growth and change, finding God and ministering to others. He still speaks with a lingering Cajun French accent and sprinkles French expressions/words in his conversation with a slight smile.

A large family in rural America

Fontenot, 86, is one of 16 children born to Feranand Joseph Fontenot and Threase Charles Fontenot. He was born April 26, 1938, during the Great Depression, into a French-speaking, Catholic family on a cotton farm in Tate Cove off Wabash Road north of Ville Platte, in Evangeline Parish.

There were three sets of twins in his family, of which Fontenot is one, and his parents “lost one child at 8 months,” he adds. The first child, Abel, was born in 1918 followed by Lee in 1919, Melton in 1921, Clamie in 1923, by Ethel who was the infant who died, then Eula in 1926, twins Harris and John in 1928, Rosella in 1931, Aline and Louise in 1932, Eva in 1943, Irene in 1936, twins Enola and Nolan in 1938 followed by the last child, Edison, born in 1939.

Growing mostly cotton, the hardship payment and more

The farm was owned by Dr. Arthur Vidine, who Fontenot describes as “very good doctor.” As a sharecropper, his father had “to give one-third of his profits from his cotton and sweet potato crops to the landowner,” he explains. In addition to those crops, he says, they raised some corn, soybeans and rice.

“We were very poor … Evangeline Parish was a poor parish“ and “then came the Depression,” he says.

Except for farming, the only other regular source of income for the family was an $8-a-month “hardship” payment. This was because they lived near “the Cabot carbon-black plant” which “had no filters” and dropped airborne pollution onto everything, he says.

“The closer your farm was to the plant the more money you were paid” and “the carbon affected the color and price we got for the cotton,” he adds.

His father plowed the cotton fields behind one of two horses they owned — Honey or Bella. As a child, Fontenot says he “couldn’t wait until he was big enough” to help plow.

He says father “walked his life away.” His father, Fontenot says, “never owned an automobile … he had a wagon and a buggy.”

For meat they had some chickens and ate “coon” sometimes, he says. They ate crawfish but his mother “did not like to cook them,” he adds.

The cattle on the farm belonged to the landowner but the family could milk the cows in exchange for taking care of them, he adds. There were two barns on the site — one could hold “1,600 bales of hay for the cows in winter, “ he says. The other one was the stables and housed the buggy and wagon.

In the town of Ville Platte, they got store-bought necessities on credit at the store of Henri Vidrine, the brother of Dr. Vidrine. He remembers his sisters’ dresses were made from the cloth from flour sacks.

The mud house, chores, siblings, school

Fontenot’s family first lived in a one-bedroom house but they eventually moved into a three-bedroom house nearby on the same farm. He calls it the “mud house.” The wood-frame structure “had walls made of mud, twigs and Spanish moss that were whitewashed inside and covered with shiplap outside,” he says.

The house had a two-sided fireplace, he adds.

Drinking water came from a cistern and a small amount of “coal oil was added” to discourage mosquitoes. The water was also “strained through cloth to remove mosquito larvae.” There was “an outhouse for the girls to use and the barn for the boys,” he says.

Like most children growing up on a farm he helped with chores.  After moving to town as a youth, he briefly worked at a creamery and was hired out to dig sweet potatoes and pick cotton. As for picking cotton he “wasn’t very good at it,” he says, shrugging and tilting his head slightly and that he was “slow” and, of course, “didn’t like the heat.”

As children they “went barefoot unless it was extremely cold,” he says. One of his older sisters, Irene, who he remembers as having a ready laugh, was the one who would defend them, when needed, on the school bus. Another sister, Rosella, was in charge of washing the kids in the evening but conditions were very basic — a shared bowl of water and cloth.

He remembers one of his older brothers, Melton, married at 16 and moved away to farm a place south of Ville Platte. Another older brother, Lee, was in the United States Army for eight years serving in the military police during World War II from 1941-1945.

Lunch during the school year was often “milk pudding sandwiches made on homemade bread” and “it was good,” he says.

He remembers that his only younger brother, Edison, did not want to go to school when it was his time. He says his little brother cried and cried and, arriving at school with several big pecans in his pocket, tried to give them to the teacher so she would let him stay with his big brother. “She probably didn’t even understand him” and that his prized pecans were an attempted bribe, he says.

The radio and electricity

The family had a box-shaped radio, which was powered by a large free-standing battery and connected to a tall antenna. They listened sparingly and mostly to the French programs and music, he says.

His parents did eventually get electricity on the farm in the 1950s.

It wasn’t too long afterward that they all moved into town, he says. Fontenot’s father died at 70 in 1969 and his mother lived to be 76 and passed away in 1977.