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Inez Percle Guidry was a centenarian who could remember when the towns of the Bayou Region were connected by dirt roads and the primary form of travel was a mule-drawn buggy.
Inez died at 100 on April 17, 2015.
Born in 1915 on a farm in Choupic, Inez grew up with her hands in the dirt, working on her family’s farm from an early age. She never lost her love of horticulture, tending to a garden her whole life. That same garden is where she picked fresh vegetables for her delicious meals.
“The house always smelled of good food,” said granddaughter Barbara Becnel. “No matter when you went, they were cooking.”
Inez was a homemaker who cared for her three children and helped raise her 13 grandchildren. She was a quiet woman who represented the archetypal wife and mother of the 20th century. Like many children of her era, she left the school system, while still just in elementary school to work on her family’s farm.
At 21, she married Lawless Guidry, a Thibodaux native, according to Benny Percle, Inez’s nephew. Lawless saw the women of Choupic, where the two settled down, toiling in the fields beneath the sweltering Louisiana sun and said that his wife would not do that.
He worked two jobs, one as a cook aboard a ship and the other growing corn and shallots, along with the usual fare of chickens, cows and pigs, on their family farm He did so to keep his proclamation true – that his wife wouldn’t have to slog away in the fields.
“He said, ‘I don’t want my wife working that hard in the fields,’” Barbara said. But Inez still did work occasionally on the farm. Inez and Lawless would grow their crops and load them into their red truck to sell in the French Market in New Orleans along the banks of the Mississippi River. So she would occasionally pitch in to pull some potatoes or shuck some corn.
But she enjoyed the work. She loved her flowers, Barbara said.
Inez mothered two boys and one girl and all were birthed by a midwife who would make a 30-minute house call, deliver the baby, and leave to go to her next call.
Because her daughter, Mary Alice Guidry, would suffer occasional illnesses and need to be hospitalized, Inez would care for Mary’s five children.
A kind, quiet and attentive caretaker, she expected them to behave, but was not overly stern. Inez would always put her family first, even when serving meals. She would serve her husband and children, but adhered to traditional practice and did not seat herself, which was more common in the by-gone era.
“You would never see her sitting at the table,” Barbara said. “She would serve the children and her husband, but you wouldn’t see her sitting at the table.” Instead, she said, Inez would taste and sample while cooking and tend to the family during meals.
She loved her children and grandchildren and was prepared to lay down her life for theirs. In 1965, when Hurricane Betsy ravaged the Gulf Coast, the Cypress house where Inez and Lawless reared their family shook in the violent wind. Mary’s children were terrified and couldn’t sleep, so Inez huddled with them in the middle of the house, comforting them, but prepared to throw herself on top of them should the roof collapse.
The carport collapsed during the early morning hours. Ronald LeRay, who was five at the time, nearly ran into the storm to fetch his peddle-car trapped under the debris, but Inez ran after him without hesitation.
“They thought I was a little nuts to do that, but their warnings were verbal,” Ronald said. The two never used corporal punishment with the children, even though their parents used that practice on them.
Instead, the two, at worst scorned the children, and would rather cook good food for them.
“There was always a salad,” Ronald said. The kids were rarely given sweets, the closest being ice cream for dessert. “I think they were trying to teach us to eat healthy.”
Inez was an excellent cook. Ronald, who has travelled while in the Navy, said that he has yet to meet a better one.
“She made everything from scratch,” Ronald said. “She made everything with fresh vegetables from her garden. Her cucumbers would snap. I still haven’t seen anybody that cooks vegetables like her. Everything was crunchy.”
Barbara said she had a friend in college who would not eat fish, despite having no allergy to seafood. She told her grandparents this while visiting between classes one day when they were making Choupic Patties, which are similar to crab cakes, but shaped more like a ball made with the fish. They gave her one to take to her friend to sample, but with instructions to not tell her what was in it.
“She ate the whole thing. Did not even know it was fish,” Barbara said. “To this day, she still loves it.”
So it turns out that Cajun cooking made with love can make seafood lovers out of seafood haters. If anybody’s cooking could do that, it was Inez’s.
