How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
From Marshall to the Bayou Michel is about ten miles, five miles along the St. Charles River, and then you turn off the highway onto a blacktop road for another five miles. The Bayou Michel is then on your right, and houses on the left are facing the bayou. The road and bayou twist and turn like a snake. There's never more than a couple hundred yards of straight road before you have to go round another curve.
This was Cajun country. You had a few other whites, a few Blacks, but mostly Cajuns, with names like Jarreau, Bonaventura, Mouton, Montmare, Boutan, Broussard, Geurin […] all Cajun names. There were people back here with names like Smith and Kelly, and they claimed to be Cajuns, too, having married Cajun women. The Blacks on the bayou also spoke the Cajun French as well as the English.
Here, Sully gives us a look at where Gil's people live. It seems a whole lot different from the world that Miss Bea and Major Jack live in, doesn't it?
Quote #8
"Y'all remember how it used to be?" Johnny Paul said. He wasn't answering Beulah, he wasn't even speaking to her, or to Mapes now. He was just thinking out loud, the way a man talk to himself plowing the fields by himself or hunting in the swamps with nothing but a gun, not even a dog. "Remember?" he said. "When they wasn't no weeds—remember? Remember how they used to sit out there on the garry—Mama, Papa, Aunt Clara […] Remember? Everybody had flowers in the yard. But nobody had four-o'clocks like Jack Touissant. Every day at four o'clock, they opened up just as pretty. Remember?"
In this little bit from Johnny Paul, the memory of the land and the way it used to be is kind of a metaphor for all of the memories that keep Marshall's Black community together, and for all of their shared experiences. That's a whole lot to connect back to some little flowers, huh?