A gadfly gets her due

OUR VIEW: Legislature plays budget shall game
June 16, 2015
In loving tribute to Bay
June 16, 2015
OUR VIEW: Legislature plays budget shall game
June 16, 2015
In loving tribute to Bay
June 16, 2015

In every community are those who see it is as their personal duty to hold elected officials accountable, to voice their opinions when they think something is wrong and to spread the alarm when that is the case.

The efforts of these gadflies – although capable of fomenting change that is often for the better – are rarely if ever thanked for their efforts. Some become pariahs in the very communities they care about. Most of them don’t really care. If they wanted to make friends more than anything else they never would have become gadflies.

A political candidate I referred to in writing a while back as a gadfly took great offense at the characterization. I personally thought I was paying a compliment.


A lot of times the things the gadflies care about are not high on the list of public priorities. But that is precisely why the gadflies are needed, because you just never know.

Lucretia McBride is one of Houma’s better-known gadflies. A self-identified and self-employed forensic consultant, she has drawn the wrath of some public officials and at times ridicule from others. She knows a lot about laws concerning the burial of people and related topics. Sometimes she gets tangential, and the closer she is to being on target with something the more tangential she can be.

Lucretia has run for a Terrebonne Parish Council seat in the past, without success.


She was a public employee for a while, appointed by former Parish President Bobby Bergeron as the parish’s cemetery administrator. The job didn’t last, in part because Lucretia demanded that certain rules and regulations be followed. Some of these were obscure, not always practical and generally a royal pain for those who deal with the dead on a regular basis. Rules in some cases were not followed, or were bent, and Lucretia wasn’t having any of it. So she didn’t last long.

For the past few months Lucretia has been heavily involved with attempts by the Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha to maintain a cemetery where a lot of their people are buried. The story behind the cemetery has a lot of twists and turns. And Lucretia’s insistence that some rules be followed, or that things be done in certain ways in a graveyard like maintaining and cleaning it but in an appropriate manner have raised a few hackles. But not among the Dulac Band.

Quietly, behind the scenes, over many years, Lucretia has helped these folks out; she sided with native people when a dispute arose over a burial mound a few years back.


The cemetery project is a pretty big deal, but one that also has the potential to harm sensibilities and egos. As an agent for the tribe, she has dealt with these issues. And the members of the tribe know it.

So last week she went to a tribal meeting in Grand Caillou and gave a presentation about the cemetery, which the people found quite helpful. And then, Sherill Parfait-Dardar, who is the group’s chief, made an announcement.

Lucretia McBride, by a vote of the tribe’s council, had been made an honorary member. They gave her a certificate, a special card, and they gave her applause.


They also gave her something else.

This woman who has never been concerned with whether her words or actions made her popular – indeed usually running into just the opposite reaction – was finally, at this point in time, recognized and thanked for something she did.

The recognition, unsought and presented as a total surprise, warmed her heart far more than if it was from some hall of government, which would make her rather suspicious.


“It was honest and it was pure,” she said.

“In honor of your works, your compassion, years of dedication and your love for our tribal community, you are hereby forever officially acknowledged and accepted as an honorary tribal member of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe,” is what the certificate says.

That statement is more than any gadfly – or non-gadfly – could ever ask to achieve.


Certainly there are people who will have something to say about it.

But that’s something both Lucretia McBride and those who honored her are more than used to experiencing.