The Story Behind the Story of Song of Belonging
I grew up in the Southern part of Louisiana surrounded by a large French, Catholic family, including thirty first cousins, lots of aunts and uncles and grandparents, and one very special great-grandmother who lived long enough for me to know her.
Haydee Richarme Shubert as a young woman in the late 1800s.
I remember three things about Grandma Shubert that have kept her firmly in my mind and heart all these years. First, she was a very small woman, and by the time I came along, she spent most of her time in a chair in a lovely room at the back of the home where she lived with my Great-Aunt Ursula, my grandmother’s sister.
My Grandma Alice lived just across the street from them in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. When we visited, we spent time with all of them.
Grandma Shubert’s African violets lining the window of her back room were the second part of my memory of her that stays with me. They were beautiful, delicate things, and she tended them carefully. I have kept some of my own over the years and when they bloom, I always think it is because she is helping me.
The most important thing I remember about her, though, was her love of learning and her deep curiosity. She did not attend school long enough to learn to read past elementary school level, and when we visited, she always had a stack of newspapers and magazines that she had saved for my mom to read and explain to her.
They contained things she was curious about, things happening in the larger world, and she wanted to learn about them, though by that time she rarely went far from her small garden room.
The jewelry box given to me by my great grandmother in 1972
The story I wrote is completely fiction, beyond the moment of Alice, the main character, receiving the jewelry box. It is inspired by listening to my older family members talk and tell stories, and by my own experiences of
living in such a wonderful community – the French Acadian world of South Louisiana. My mother’s family also
includes heritage from other areas of Western Europe, and those will appear in books still forming in my mind.
The culture I grew up in is very much alive, a community rich in culture, traditions, great food, music, and
connection that I wanted to capture in this story, with a focus on the matrilineal line of a fictional French
family.
The story also weaves in my deep love of the natural world, particularly the oceans and rivers. Waterways
shape towns and communities in Louisiana, and as a young adult I was fortunate enough to live in Hawai’i
where the ocean is a gift beyond measure. I fell in love there with the monk seals and sea turtles, and now
that I live in Southern Oregon, I have also fallen in love with otters – sea otters and river otters – and the story
includes these amazing beings as characters and teachers in Song of Belonging.
My mother, Ursula Lester St. Romain, as a young woman in the late 1940s
I loved the way Grandma Shubert asked questions of my mother, and was transfixed by her eagerness to learn. She couldn’t hear well and had a horn that she would hold up to her ear and ask us to talk into it so she could understand us. When she looked at me, I felt like she could see right through me, and I felt a sense of place, community, and belonging in this family lineage. And I believe I felt slightly haunted by the way she looked at me, as though there were stories she could never tell me, but that lived deep in her memory.
My Grandma Alice and my Great-Aunt Ursula as young girls in the early 1900s
The day my great-grandmother died, I was just about to turn seven. When my mother told me, I felt tears
wash through me, about to overtake me, and I went to my bedroom, sat down by my bed, and sobbed. I didn’t
understand why the loss felt so overwhelming to me since we only saw her a few times a year. I felt, though,
that the loss of her in my world was devastating in ways I could not understand.
A few days later we were in Metairie for her funeral. Aunt Ursula called my mother and asked her to send me
over from my grandmother’s house. I walked over from across the street, uncertain why I was being called
there. Aunt Ursula handed me a green jewelry box and said “Little Gram wanted you to have this. I don’t know
why and she didn’t say any more, but she asked me to be sure to give it to you when she passed away.”
I wasn’t sure why I had been given this gift, but it helped with the unexplainable loss I felt. The jewelry box
was empty, but when I opened it, I felt as though it was the container of a many invisible and untold stories. I
wondered about what it had held over the years, and what stories it could tell me if it could speak.
From that moment, I believe the story of Song of Belonging began.
A monk seal and a sea turtle resting on the beach on Kauai’i in November 2018
This book is my love letter to the Earth and our ancestors. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it leaves you with some of the questions that have moved through my mind since I was a young child: what are we to do with
the stories of those who came before us and how are we to live in this changing world? For me, the answer has always been to turn to nature and to the wisdom of our individual cultures to find the answers. We all come from people who knew how to live in harmony with the Earth and other people. Even if we have to go far back into our histories to find it – the wisdom is there for us to find.
Grandma Shubert as I remember her, late in her life, in New Orleans in the early 1970s
Protect what you love.
Create what you desire.