Life & Times of Christopher Le Monte

Louisiana in the summer time is a very hot and sticky place to be, especially if you are trying to work out in the sunshine. An old man by the name of (Bood-row) Boudreo Le Monte was moving slowly along the rows of cotton as he hoed the weeds that grew there. His ragged white shirt was stained yellow from his perspiration, as were his overalls. His foot ware consisted of a pair of worn out old sandals and he wore no socks. The stickers he occasionally encountered were painful when they penetrated his tough hide. His straw hat was jagged; a few holes were letting the sun to shine onto his gray curly hair. He wanted to quit and go sit in the shade of a nearby big oak tree, but if he didn’t work a full day he wouldn’t have enough money to feed his wife and young daughter that night. The four dollars the farmer had promised to pay him for weeding the cotton patch, these last four days, would feed him and the two women for three, maybe four days. All too soon, he would have to find additional employment.

Lucinda, his young daughter of sixteen was not married. However she was pregnant; due to being raped by a very wealthy land owner, Colonel Gregory Weston, who lived down the road two and a half miles from the house where he and his family lived. Because Colonel Weston was well connected politically, plus very wealthy and they were just dirt poor Cajuns, the law would not do a thing to help them. When Boudreo protested to the parish sheriff, he was thrown out of the court house and told to never return.

Doctor Mitchell was a kind hearted soul, if your skin was the right color, who said he wouldn’t charge more than five dollars to deliver the baby when it was time. The doctor was in his late fifties and his health was beginning to fade. “It might as well be a million,” Boudreo told the doctor “cause where’s a poor man like me gonna find that much money?”

“That’s the best I can do,” said Doctor Mitchell “If I don’t get paid then how can I feed me and mine?”

Lucinda’s mother, Sara Jane, said “well . . . I guess we will just have to let a midwife bring that child into da world.”

“How much dat’ gonna cost?” asked Boudreo.

“Marquette says we can work out her two dollars,” was the answer.

“But the real problem is how we gonna feed the youngin’ any how?”

“Lord only knows.”

A few weeks later the baby was born. It was a boy. He was on the small side of tiny. Marquette said “That young-un’ not gonna live very long cause he be too little, he just be a runt.”

Lucinda was a good mother to the child and the boy managed to live through the rough days. Then one day she took the infant to the house of Colonel Weston. She was met in front of the house some distance from the steps leading up to the wide veranda, where the Westons were seated in the shade being waited on ‘hand and foot,’ so to speak. The lord of the manor saw her coming up the road and went to meet with her before she would be able to reach the house.

“What do you want here?” he growled at her.

“I thought by now you would want to see your son,” she said in a nasty tone.

“That’s not my son . . . my sons are on the porch . . . so you get your bastard out of here . . . or I’ll send for the law.”