The Misty Lady

The Stigma of Jeanne

            On February 11, 1858, three young girls approached the River Gave outside the small town of Lourdes located at the foothills of the Pyrénées Mountains in Southern France. They were sent on a mission by their parents to gather wood for the homes of two of the little girls. Marie-Bernard Soubirous, her younger sister, Toinette, and her friend, Jeanne Abadie were products of the families of impoverished Basque-French workers. Marie-Bernard was still in shock over her father losing his main asset, the town’s mill; a loss caused by a downturn in the local economy. Her malaise was further exacerbated when her father was accused of defrauding his customers at the mill by shorting their processed grain.

            When the three girls neared the river, Jeanne and Toinette crossed over to the opposite side and left Marie-Bernard to forage for wood on her own. Marie was physically weaker than the other two, and played on that fact to remain by herself; but she was wily, and always was able to manipulate Jeanne and her sister to do her bidding. The two less mentally endowed children began picking up wood, while Marie-Bernard sat watching the River Gave go by and contemplated her bleak future. Marie-Bernard knew she must do something to cut herself away from the herd and return to the placid life she had experienced prior to the economy decimating her father’s assets.

            When Jeanne and Toinette came back to Marie-Bernard’s side of the river, they found her sitting on a rock near the mouth of a cave, and noticed she had not picked up any wood.

            “You haven’t done anything, Marie. Why?” Jeanne asked.

            Marie, who was prone to daydreaming, began stammering about, looking for an appropriate excuse for her nonperformance. “I couldn’t gather any wood because when I came to this cave to look for some, I saw this beautiful lady,” she said sheepishly. “She just appeared out of the mist and told me the Lord had great plans for me.” Marie figured if she invoked the Lord’s name, it might divert the other two girls’ attention away from her laziness.

            “What are you talking about, Marie. There’s no misty lady in that cave,” said Jeanne, as she peered deeply into the shadows of the grotto. “You just fell asleep, didn’t you?”

            “I know what I saw and she told me to keep coming back to this cave and she would appear and talk to me every day,” said Marie, with more gusto this time.

            When the three girls got to Marie’s house, she told her mother the story of the misty lady as an explanation for why she didn’t have any wood as the other two did. Her mother was justifiably unmoved, and figured Marie had told the story because she wanted to get out of performing the chore. She forbad her from returning to the cave the next day and began to admonish her. But Jeanne Abadie was a smooth talking little devil and convinced Marie’s mother she might have seen the mystery lady too, and should allow Marie to return to the cave with her, just to check out the story. Marie’s mother, having been congenitally inbred, and therefore terribly naive, bought Jeanne’s package without objection and allowed the girls to return to the riverside grotto several days later.

            By this time Marie had convinced herself and several other girls in the town she actually had seen a holy lady. Her insistent behavior allowed the story to take on a life of its own, gaining momentum with each day of her telling it.

            Marie and Jeanne returned to the cave for the promised reappearance of the illusion. Marie carried a vile of holy water, recently blessed by the parish priest, to toss over the apparition’s head in case it was the devil disguised as the Virgin Mary. She was trailed by a skeptical Jeanne, who still believed Marie merely wanted to get out of work and hadn’t seen a damned thing in that cave.

            When the two girls neared the cave’s mouth, Marie sprinted forward and shouted, “There she is! There she is!” She spilled the entire vile of holy water onto the ground. Jeanne Abadie, in a fit of frustration, because she couldn’t see anything in the cave, picked up a stone and threw it as hard as she could in the general direction Marie had indicated the apparition had appeared to her for a second time.            The stone rattled harmlessly inside the grotto.

            Marie kept asking Jeanne, “You saw her didn’t you, Jeanne? You saw her?”

            “Marie, you just want to get out of working,” a perceptive Jeanne replied. “I told you, if you did see anything it was the devil, and that’s why I threw a stone at it.”

            When the two girls returned to the town of Lourdes, Marie insisted she saw an angelic figure; that Jeanne Abadie hurled a stone at this beautiful lady, chasing her away; and this lady implored her to return to the grotto so she could tell her something important.

            Marie-Bernard Soubirous returned again and again to the cave, each time without Jeanne, sixteen times in all, and on each occasion claimed she had spoken with the mystery lady. The story quickly morphed into a local legend where Marie could heal people because she had met with God’s representative, who bestowed curative powers on her. If one went on a pilgrimage to the grotto, bathed in the River Gave, or drank from some local spring, miraculous things would happen to one with a deformed body.

            The Catholic Church, in their infinite wisdom, methodically changed her name and canonized Marie-Bernard Soubirous as Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, and thousands of inflicted humans flock to the cave and river each year to seek her cure.

            When the town elders of Lourdes realized what a wonderful and profitable thing it was to have pilgrims genuflecting at Bernadette’s cave and river, they felt it did their economy no good to have Jeanne Abadie hanging about debunking this miracle as a figment of Marie’s imagination. So they immediately railroaded Jeanne and her family out of the area, forever stigmatizing the Abadie clan as miserable hucksters, naysayers, and frauds.

My grandfather, Bernard Abadie, le boucher du village, probably had endured enough criticism because of the ‘Stigma of Jeanne,’ and shortly before the turn of the century, migrated to the United States from the Lourdes area in France, depositing nine children on his newfound soil. My father, one of Bernard’s nine, spoke French until he was approximately thirteen years old. He was raised in the Irish Channel area of old New Orleans. I have no earthly idea why the area was called the Irish Channel since it was populated primarily by people speaking French, German, and Italian, and was renowned for being one of the roughest areas in the city. All three cultures were first generation settlers and all three had their separate Catholic Church located within a two block radius.

I once asked my father why he lost his French language, because when I knew him, he couldn’t say “hello” in French. He told me if he was speaking French on the street with a friend, and one of the rival Italian or German gangs overheard him, they pummeled him until he spoke English. Presumably, he did the same to them when armed with his bande de francais. He literally got the French beaten out of him by other children, who spoke primarily German and Italian, in an area called The Irish Channel, located within an English speaking country. Go figure!

Ultimately, my father married a young local gal and moved across the Mississippi River from New Orleans with his new bride.

            One blustery October day in 1937, Ilda Boylan Abadie, my father’s bride, deposited this mass of human protoplasm onto a table in Hotel Dieu Hospital in New Orleans. The doctor performed the ritual ass-slap and I uttered my first sound. I haven’t cried much since then, although I probably should have, given the mistakes I’ve made along the way. I often felt the ‘Stigma of Jeanne’ followed my grandfather across the ocean and landed squarely on my shoulders. It has plagued my every move since birth.

            But in the prophetic words of little Édith Piaf, Je ne regrette rien. Even if I did regret something, it’s too damn late to change anything. I’m quite sure when my parents bent over the bassinette, trying to coax a smile from their newest arrival, they never anticipated their son would turn out the way he did.

            The way their son turned out is the subject of this book. I have taken various vignettes from my life and pasted them together in what I hope is a representative amalgam of one human’s time on this planet. I have not changed the names of people in this opus to fictional ones, to protect either the innocent or the guilty. I have portrayed each person as I remember them.

            New Orleans is a city replete with characters. I knew my share of them and have tried to represent their flavor to the best of my abilities. I also am a character, but I leave that to the reader to judge where I fit into the scheme of things.

            Some may look upon this work as a primer on how not to live one’s life; but I would have to disagree. I don’t know anyone else who has had as many experiences, good and bad, as I have, and survived to tell the tale. I still drink good wine; have wonderful and loyal friends, a loving family, and a wife I adore.            

            Who can top that? 

            “Autobiography is a preemptive strike against biographers,” said one wit.  So, here’s my preemptive strike, as told by an old man with plenty of life yet to live.