Tombs in the Life and Art of George Rodrigue

It’s the month of Halloween, which makes me think of skeletons and vampires and okay, pumpkins and candy, but those don’t apply here, which makes me think of cemeteries and caskets, which makes me think of George Rodrigue’s unusual to my mind and on-going interest in tombs.

As I mentioned briefly in my last blog, George’s father was in the tomb business while Baby George -actually, known by this time as Big Rod- was in high school. This impacted George more than you might think. Among other things, he drove his father’s large black truck to the all boys’ school, Catholic High (formerly known as St. Peter’s College), in New Iberia, Louisiana and often used it to pick up dates, testing their character and sense of humor by their reaction to the words written on the side: “Rodrigue’s Portable Concrete Burial Vaults.”

With twenty-two aunts and uncles, all older than his parents (who were in their forties when George was born), George grew up going to funerals. He was used to the ideas of death and burial, and he was well-instructed in the Catholic beliefs concerning the after-life. He remembers his mother white-washing the tombs of her parents on All Saints Day. And I remember his mother, in a (quite humorous) jealous fit, refusing to visit Big George’s grave for several years after she discovered fresh flowers at his tombstone: “Those hussies, they’re still after him!”

He also grew up in a community that produced strangely beautiful ‘cities of the dead,’ a description often applied to cemeteries in South Louisiana where, due to the high water table, the dead are buried above the ground in concrete tombs, lest they float up after a hard rain.

The Courregés (George’s mother’s side) have a family vault. George tells a great story about his last living aunt, ‘Bertha the Old Maid,’ and his mother Marie. In the late 1980s Bertha, already in her nineties, decided to clean out the family tomb before moving in herself. Every day she sat outside in the cemetery in a lawn chair under an umbrella, supervising the workers she hired for the job. Marie, curious as to the progress, stopped by the site one day. Poking around the trash pile, she noticed a cardboard box containing a skull and other human bones. Alarmed, she confronted Bertha, who said,

“Oh that’s nothing. That’s just some old bones we found in the tomb.”

To which Marie replied,

“But that’s Mama! You can’t just leave her here with the trash!”

And with a huff, George’s mother put the box of bones in the trunk of her car and drove away.

Several weeks later, George was visiting his mother in New Iberia and had cause to open her trunk.

“Who’s in the trunk, Mama?”

“Oh I didn’t want to you see that. Bertha was throwin’ Grandmere out with the trash, so I decided to keep her until the tomb’s ready.”

And that’s how George’s grandmother, after having been dead more than fifty years, spent three weeks riding around town in her youngest daughter’s Dodge Dart.

But not everyone is buried above ground, and the Rodrigue’s tomb business advertised air-tight, heavy chambers which many, depending on the cemetery, chose to bury below ground --- a trend that gained popularity during the 1950s.

And sure enough, the rain caused problems. It was not unusual for George’s father to send him out on a job when a family called to complain that Grandpa Hebert and his tomb were floating out of the ground. Fitted with shrimp boots and a sledge hammer, George waded into the flooded area and knocked a corner off of the concrete box, which then filled with water and settled back down. So much for air-tight.

As a teenager, George got a real kick out of the tomb business. He not only had fun with the truck and sinking the tombs (in that teenage guy traipsing through the mud, zombie movie kind of way), but also he found a good use for the discarded coffin boxes. Apparently the coffins arrived in heavy, giant pieces of cardboard. George saved the materials and used them each year to create elaborate Christmas decorations covering the house on St. Peters Street. Sometimes he’d build them up so large that they covered the entire front --- one year Santa and the reindeer and the elves, another year a complete nativity scene with Wise Men and camels, and still another year Frosty the Snowman and his friends. After winning the decorating contest (and the $25 prize) two years in a row, the town committee disqualified him, saying that someone else needed a chance. (I wonder what they would have thought had they known that Baby Jesus was cut out of a coffin container).

Once George started painting South Louisiana scenes beginning in the late 1960s, these tombs became common subject matter for him. The ‘cities of the dead’ help define area culture and because, like the oak tree and the Cajun people, the above-ground cemeteries were so different from other parts of the country, they appeared (and continue to appear) often in Rodrigue works.

Early Rodrigue scenes included paintings of the Cajun people spending time in the cemetery, no different than if they were hanging out in downtown New Iberia (I probably didn't pick the best painting for this description --- one that shows the Mardi Gras King choosing between two paths of life, a future by chance or a future of love, all directed by the knight). Again, burials and tombs were not only a significant part of George’s life, but also a large part of Cajun custom. In addition, he’s always claimed that his Cajuns are ghosts, all in white, glowing with their culture, beneath (and indeed trapped within) the black trees.

Once George started painting the Blue Dog, he continued to incorporate tombs into his designs. This played well with the idea of the loup-garou, the Cajun werewolf that lurks in cemeteries and sugarcane fields, and the inspiration for the Blue Dog series. It also adapted well to the idea of George’s deceased pet, Tiffany, a ghost searching for her master and landing anywhere he can imagine.

And later, the tombs became an integral part of the Bodies series. In fact for several weeks in 2003, George and I (fully clothed – HA!) visited every above-ground cemetery in the New Orleans area so that he could plan his designs for these new works. This time the tombs complemented allegorical figures of life and death, and perhaps of Jolie Blonde and the ghosts Rodrigue has painted all along. Beyond that, he refuses to say very much, because if he were to explain the depth of these pieces, they would lose some of their mystery and intimacy --- sort of like the silent mystery within the ‘city of the dead’ or even a grotto, something we also visited for his inspiration numerous times in recent years. (Although long since abandoning established religion, as a child it was a part of George’s daily life, and for years he prayed at the grotto in New Iberia on the grounds of St. Peter’s College).

This year, as he explored painting with water-based oils, he returned to the classic landscape and, unsurprisingly, to the tombs.

So as I decorate our house with mummies and skeletons and bats (oh my!), I remembered to see these tomb paintings, some of which are right in front of me. I easily could have written about one Halloween in the early 1990s, with the twenty life-size skeletons George spray-painted blue and suspended on a clothes-line across the front yard. His mom, dressed as a pirate, sat alone in the middle of those bones and handed out candy (one piece per child), while George hid behind her near the front door and gave each trick-or-treater a Blue Dog print. But maybe I’ll save that story and others for next year (giving me some time to hunt down the photographs).

Wendy