Bayou ballad - poem - Section 3: Sayings, Sermons, Tall Tales, and Lies - Contemporary Black Poetry

African American Review, Spring, 1993 by Sybil Kein

Oh, have you heard, and it was not long ago, how they killed the sweetest singer of cajun zydeco?

Amedee Ardoin was brought to play a fais-do-do near Mamou. The summer's heat bore through the roof and walls of that wooden-tin dance hall. The waltzers and two-steppers did not notice through their whiskey eyes that the singer who had not moved from his seat before the crowd was soaked to the skin in sweat, was blinded by the salty water beading on his face.

By and by, one dark joli blon did glance at this and of habit to others carelessly offered a white handkerchief to him as he smiled between songs. The fete went on with the gaiety of hees and haws, claps and howls as he chuned and soothed many a weary soul. But then, when it was over, when the moon shone high through the still, piney woods, rough white hands found his neck, fists of hate punched his head, his groin, his chest, pearlized boots kicked his breathless body on the ground. He played dead, but not dead enough. They drove the wheels of a late T-model over his throat, back and forth to that refrain of regular curses and "That'll teach you to never take no handkerchief from no white woman, nigger!"

And so it was in this Luzianna, this south. He lived long enough to tell of it in ghost words, in signs. His accordion, stabbed and mangled, died too. The killers never suffered, never gave it a second thought. Did not those back roads see many a bloody night? Did not God and country make the rules as plain as skin and hair? Was it not fair to defend our womanhood against this evil?

Is this a song that never ends?

Oh, have you, have you heard, and it was not long ago, how they killed the sweetest singer of cajun zydeco? Ahieeeeeeeeee!