The Last Cakewalk

Growing up in the Deep South, I have memories of many things that cross my mind from time to time. During the fifties in Vivian, Louisiana, there was no air-conditioning and only primitive television. By today’s standards, Vivian itself was primitive.

On Friday nights, my parents would take Brother Jack and me for hamburgers at the Rock Café (as in sandstone, not music). From there we would go to Vivian’s main street, park the car and watch the foot traffic passing on the sidewalk.

All the country folk would come into town Friday afternoon, buy their salt and flour for the week and then stay around to rub elbows and socialize with their neighbors. One electrical store had an early television in the window. Friday nights they would leave it running and practically the entire town would crowd around and watch the Friday Night Fights. That old television was not the only thing black and white in Vivian.

In the fifties, I grew up in a racially segregated town. The whites lived in their part of town, the blacks theirs, and never the twain shall meet. Even living in a region where the black population nearly equaled the white’s, I never met a black person until I was eighteen. This revelation is almost unbelievable, even to me, but it is true.

Unlike many of the small municipalities in east Texas and southwest Arkansas, most rural north Louisiana towns had no square. We did have a small park, complete with pigeons and benches, and the locals would congregate there on Friday nights, and during special events. I remember seeing Earl K. Long on a campaign stump give a steamy speech on a hot Louisiana day. It was really more of a performance than a speech. Sometime later, I remember that his wife Blanche had him committed to the mental institution in Mandeville.

A charity cakewalk was one of the events sometimes held in the square. Church members would donate cakes for the event and fifteen or so participants, each having donated a dollar, would walk around in a numbered circle until the music ended. The person stopping on the correct number would win a cake. This charity event was the white southern version of a dance created by black southern slaves, the dancers strutting in their best clothes in a parody of their owners.

Like the cakewalk, African slaves greatly influenced white southern society. Southern mannerisms, mores, speech patterns and culture all benefited and changed because of interaction between the races. Even southern cooking is black southern cooking. This interaction between the races ended, for the most part, after the Civil War and this extended isolationist period lasted through much of the nineteen-seventies.

I was probably no more than ten when I saw my last cakewalk. Segregation no longer exists in the little town of Vivian and there are no longer any white-only events in the local park. Moreover, like the end of other woefully dark periods in American history, this is a good thing.

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