"Interlocking Love," by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, and available on NFT Showroom, here

La Familie Dubois Chooses Itself

Part 1: Mo' Money (Is Good, BUT), Mo' Problems

Some relationships are such that when one partner is ready to leave, the other finally starts acting right. René Dubois remembered this at the end of January 2020 when considering the Dubois family business in Houston.

Dubois a la Maison, the restaurant, had been put out of its home in Louisiana by Hurricane Katrina right along with the entire Dubois family. This had devastated René's parents, Jean-Luc and Ébène-Cerise Dubois, but not enough so that they were willing to give up their entire life's work … so with Rene's 21st century skills on the Internet, the family had then opened Le cabinet à épices Dubois – or, as Rene had finally convinced his father to write it in English, Dubois's Spice Cabinet.

Neighbors and friends scattered throughout the nation were glad to have the taste of the love and Cajun spirit that the lost restaurant had brought to them in their kitchens, and word of mouth about the new business spread rapidly. But, life was different outside the bayous … people in the rest of the world did not cook as much for themselves, and there was much competition from industrially produced products.

“Ils n'ont ni amour ni âme,” the Dubois parents complained about many of these products, and their youngest son sighed and explained that “You're right – they have no love and no soul, but they have really big marketing and advertising budgets, and that's where we struggle.”

So, Dubois's Spice Cabinet had to grind up the hard way, slowly gaining ground by word of mouth and by organic growth as the Internet also grew and food communities of all kinds blossomed. By the end of 2019, it provided half a living for the family … but to make ends meet, Jean-Luc Dubois was still doing the unthinkable at 73 years old. He was a sous chef in someone else's restaurant, working 48 hours a week so that his wife did not have to work beside keeping their spices and sauces recipes in order for the business.

But then, eldest brother Jean-Paul Philippe Dubois had come to Houston with news: he had found a place in the U.S. where Cajun food was being begged for, and had a robust community of the type that the Dubois family would flourish in: strong, forward-looking Black population with increasing community development and increasing resources to support a new restaurant or food service.

So, it was decided: the Dubois family would make one last move, from Houston to Lofton County, Virginia, and open up again – Dubois a Nouveau a la Maison, quite fitting because this would be the Dubois family in their new home, finally getting the restart that Jean-Luc and Ébène-Cerise Dubois really longed for. They were both past 70 … but both were strong, and they had children and grandchildren eager to carry on the legacy. It was not yet too late!

But, just as all that was being decided, a foodie community in Chicago was ranting and raving online, badly mispronouncing Laissez les bons temps rouler!” in an attempt to describe how they had “let the good times roll” by using Good Times Roll Spice Blend from Dubois's Spice Cabinet.

“Imagine how they would have mangled Le cabinet à épices Dubois, Papa,” Rene said to his father.

“I see your point, now,” Jean-Luc Dubois said to his son in English. “Mon Dieu – that is bad, but, as long as they pay us in dollars and not French francs, we will forgive it all!”

“Papa, nobody pays in francs – Europe is on the euro now.”

“You would think people would have gone on Google and figured out how to say Laissez les bons temps rouler before going on camera around the world, too, son, but you see how people are.”

René Dubois leaned on his father's shoulder, and they laughed together until they cried.

The next day, Jean-Luc Dubois had put in his two-week notice at his job – he was needed at the commercial kitchen his business was using, as the amount of spice to be mixed in his recipes was now having to be compounded into the hundreds and then thousands of pounds a week.

All the Dubois relatives and friends in the area came to the call – the Dubois parents would not hear of soulless mass production methods, so work in early February and until the last week of March would continue around the clock until Houston's first stay-at-home order owing to Covid-19 closed the kitchen down … but by then, five members of the extended family had converted their kitchens to acceptable spaces to keep working, and the Dubois parents and uncles and aunts had already begun cooking in their homes to feed the families of those younger people than themselves who were doing the bulk of the work – and thus “Dubois at Home,” feeding and supporting the community that was feeding and supporting the family, restarted in Houston after all, although under new conditions!

Well before March, the family was also flush with cash for the first time in 15 years, and with all this, René Dubois would have been content. His parents, uncles, and aunts were content to work as much as their age permitted and then go home and cook – they were delighted to be able to show food love again, and tickled by the idea that Rene had to put them on camera in front of the world and show the world how Cajun cooking from the deep bayous was done – “Dubois at Home – Live!” – was bound to be a guaranteed Internet sensation.

But just like some relationships only get right when you are ready to leave them, some relationships that are tolerable get intolerable when big money is introduced.

Jean-Luc and Ébène-Cerise Dubois had eleven children. Five of them had just not been of the restaurant temperament, but Papa Dubois' attitude had always been that he was building a family business on top of his passion so his children would have a foundation to successfully be whoever le bon Dieu had called them to be. The five had traveled outside of Louisiana and apparently found success in life, and while the whole family considered itself successful, all appeared well.

When Hurricane Katrina had hit, the firstborn child, daughter Jeanne-Cerise Dubois Thibodeau, was the first to come home to help, all the way from Canada. She had married into a Black French community escaped all the way from Louisiana to Quebec on the Underground Railroad, and was a doctor in private practice there in Quebec, but she had put all of that down at once to come home to help her parents.

This had not been as hard as it might have seemed: Monsieur Thibodeau had died of cancer the year before, leaving the widow no family obligations save to her late teenage children – but they adored their Dubois grandparents and were afraid to lose them so soon after losing their own father, and so negotiated independent study with their school and came down to Louisiana with their mother to help!

Jean-Paul, the firstborn son, was the next to arrive – Major Dubois negotiated six months of leave with the U.S. Army, and then convinced the Army Corps of Engineers that they needed a representative of the Judge Advocate General service around to help them with the legal issues arising from failures in the levees built around New Orleans for another six months. That ended up causing a world of agony for the Louisiana native, but he was willing to endure that to be able to be close to his parents for a whole year and help them by putting those Army checks in their hand.

Jeanne-Cerise and Jean-Paul remained supportive and connected after that first year and every afterward, but this had been the point when the other three outside Louisiana had stopped showing up except with excuses. Papa Dubois was so heartbroken already that he did not have the energy to face the truth there – “Well, you know, the cost of living in New York, in San Francisco, in Miami is so high,” and there he left it. Maman Dubois did not contradict him.

René Dubois, as a practical matter, couldn't leave it there – the needs of a new business and aging parents wouldn't let him leave it there, although his elder neglectful brothers ignored their baby brother routinely. But eldest brother Major Dubois wasn't having the foolishness and was not so easily ignored – when René finally got to the point of complaining to him, the eldest brother had a way of getting a little bit of money out of his brothers and also found more to send on his own.

None of this took place in front of the Dubois parents, whose burdens were heavy enough. The matter between the five Dubois brothers just simmered like a good pot of gumbo until the heat was turned up that by all that money that came in early 2020, when the three Dubois brothers who had to be begged and shamed and arm-twisted to send any money home suddenly all found reasons to visit home to ask for money!

Part 2: The Family Gumbo Gets REALLY HOT

"Exploded Heart," graphic by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, and available on NFT Showroom, here

“Jean-Paul, please tell me you are back in the States,” came the strained voice of René Dubois over his brother's phone on February 13, 2020.

“Yes – I completed my move last week, I am settled in an apartment in Big Loft for now.”

“Guess who's coming to dinner tomorrow?”

“I couldn't – anything is possible in a world like this.”

“The three brothers between you and me.”

“Well, that was predictable. I knew they would smell that money.”

“This time, they went too far, Jean-Paul. I can't do this anymore.”

The eldest brother took a moment to take a deep breath, and pray.

René Dubois was, on the surface, a classic “baby boy” – he had still been a teenager when Hurricane Katrina hit, and he still lived with his parents. But he had his father's iron will and business sense, at 13, he had started figuring out how to make money to support his family on the Internet, and Dubois's Spice Cabinet was his creation while he was still not an adult. He had talked all his sisters and brothers in-law who had come to Houston with the Dubois parents into it. Now, at 28, the baby boy's “baby” was at last supporting the whole family.

But the other thing about René: his childhood had been ended by the loss of everything the family held dear. That had scarred him as it had not scarred the older children, and because of that, he was not at all inclined to have anything else taken from him or his family.

Like his father and his eldest brother, René Dubois was calm and peaceful until he wasn't, but of the three of them, the one who was going to kill you was René, as some burglars that had done a home invasion on the new place in Houston had found out while Papa Dubois was at work and René was at home to defend his mother.

For Major Dubois, a military law enforcement officer who had moved over to Interpol as Chief Inspector Dubois, the realization that his baby brother was a killer – even in self-defense – was deeply disturbing, but not a surprise. Trauma and PTSD could warp a grown man, much less a teenage child.

The dangerous part of the matter for la familie Dubois was the resentment that had built up in René against his brothers since Hurricane Katrina. The saving grace was that René looked up to and respected his eldest brother, and called him before he boiled over about anything. His eldest brother always heard him all the way out.

“I don't know how it is that people who have not invested one thin dime in something each come with a whole plan to destroy it – not even thinking that there are two other leeches who might feel entitled to a third of the money, but each one thinking that they can take all the money!”

“Leeches don't think, René – they are nothing but hunger. Tell me the rest.”

“All of them – Émile, Jules, and Gilbert – called in a line to Maman. They wouldn't dare call me, talking about how they were coming to visit before Mardi Gras and how excited they were about the business finally taking off and how they have all these contacts in Miami, New York, and San Francisco that they can connect us to and can we let them have all the money to get things started. Maman wrote down the amounts they said it would take.

“Then they called again for Papa – and they blew his head up, congratulating him and giving him the same lines about they were coming home and this was so exciting and they'll be here tomorrow and we should all put our heads together and let them rob us! They don't know what I did to the last people in this house who tried that!”

“René, now I'm going to have to come down there today and arrest you – you can't let a police officer know you are premeditating!”

“You'll come today?”

“René, I'm there. I think we should all sit down and put our heads together, indeed, before three family members who haven't visited since before Hurricane Katrina arrive. We ought to have something special cooked up for them.”

“You're going to keep me out of jail, Jean-Paul!”

“Of course. Beside that, tell me this; did Papa or Maman happen to mention that I was back in the States?”

“No.”

“Did they make any kind of commitment to anything our brothers were saying?”

“No.”

“Consider this, René. Papa and Maman are old now, and they are not Internet-savvy, but they are not stupid. And although you are too young to remember, I can tell you this: Papa usually has a plan for people who think they can beat him out of things. He is not the kind of man it pays to disrespect. He hasn't overlooked the disrespect of his own sons for him, their mother, and the family. That pot has been simmering for 15 years. I think you can put a little more in it and I can put a little more in it to finish it up this evening, and I think tomorrow it will be ready to serve, nice and hot and very spicy!”

“I feel so much better after talking with you, Jean-Paul, and even better knowing you are coming – a united front!”

“Call our sister Jeanne-Cerise too. She is also in the States at a conference – I think in Colorado – that is ending today, so she might want to come on down and add to the pot as well.”

That evening, the Dubois parents and eight of their eleven children were under their roof in Houston, and before dinner, Jeanne-Cerise and René followed brother Jean-Paul's lead in doing some research on certain things in San Francisco, New York, and Miami. The three presented their findings to their parents before dinner, and Jean-Luc Dubois, their father, sighed deeply.

“C'est la vie,” he said, before translating and then transliterating himself into English: “That is life. It is what it is.”

Ébène-Cerise Dubois, their mother, began to cry, and all seven of her children and all of her grandchildren old enough to understand saw red at the thought of what was in those findings, and how it hurt her.

Jean-Luc Dubois took his wife into his arms and comforted her, and when she had stopped crying, he spoke again.

“I owe all of you – my wife, and my children – the deepest of apologies. I should have gotten Émile, Jules, and Gilbert straightened out after Hurricane Katrina, but I was not able to endure what the hurricane told me I had truly lost. It was one matter to lose all of our things, but another to confront the fact that I had lost my sons as well. It is one thing for them to have gotten caught up in new life new cities. It is another thing for them to have abandoned and betrayed our family when we needed them the most. I should have confronted them in 2005. I didn't. I haven't. This is the result. I take full responsibility for this failure, and the results. I promise you I will not continue to fail.

“Especially to you, René, I owe this apology, for you have truly borne the burden of your brothers' betrayal in a way no one else has. I failed to protect you in that way, but you have never complained to me about it, and you have remained as cordial as possible with your brothers to spare the feelings of myself and your mother all these years.

“I apologize, my youngest son, and I want you to know how much I respect you and honor you and am grateful to you for all you have done for this family. You have been better to us than three brothers rolled into one – and from here on out you will not be troubled with having to bear their burden. I will do what I should have done a long time ago, René, and you will see it. You held me up when I was not strong enough; you will at last see me strong again.

“Jean-Paul, to you also especially, I apologize. You, the great investigator now of world fame, lived without complaint in an attic in Paris for ten years, making up the gap of three of your brothers to supply our needs. When René shared that with me, I was ashamed. I say to you what I said to your brother: I apologize, my eldest son, and I want you to know how much I respect you and honor you and am grateful to you for all you have done for this family. You have been better to us than three brothers rolled into one – and from here on out you will not be troubled with having to bear their burden.”

“After all that you and Maman sacrificed to give us a life worth living,” Major Dubois answered, “that was nothing to do, living in what really was a beautiful, airy loft in Paris with just a lot of stairs so you could see today, prosperous again.”

“And, Papa, it was nothing to do, to be who I need to be, after you have been all this time the best father anyone could ask for,” René said.

“Perhaps it seems like little now,” Papa Dubois said, “but it has been everything to this family, and to me and your mother in our old age. All of you have done your part for us to see this day. We are la familie Dubois, right here – all we have is all we need!”

Those were words of affirmation and joy for those present … but anyone who knew Jean-Luc Dubois knew that anyone not counted right then no longer counted. All the rest was just details.

Part 3: Papa Dubois Serves EVERYBODY Just What They Need

"Heart Pileup," graphic by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, and available on NFT Showroom, here

The thing about walking into a trap: if you knew you were walking into a trap, you wouldn't keep walking into it. Nor would you be worried about other people walking into the trap ahead of you, except to warn them, if you loved them. Certainly you would not be disputing about the right to be first into the trap.

Thus consider the sad state of Émile, Jules, and Gilbert Dubois, as they arrived in their cars, stepped out of their to appreciate the odor of their parents' cooking, and then each noticed the others.

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, if I had known you were coming, Mr. Big-Time Spendthrift, I would have gotten here sooner to cut you out of the family's new money.”

“All right, Mr. Real-Estate-Investor-in-the-Leaning-Tower-of-San-Francisco.”

“Why, you little--.”

“Both of you can shut up and get your flights back to California and Florida – by the time they finish hearing me, your silly ideas about investing the family money won't matter.”

“Oh, OK, Mr. Many-to-Penny-to-Junk-Stock-Investor – Mr. Wall Street Head-On Collision Daily!”

Up in the attic of the Dubois house, their dark faces invisible in the window with no light on behind them, Jeanne-Cerise and Jean-Paul Dubois shook their heads.

“I don't know how Maman is going to endure this,” Jeanne-Cerise said.

“Well, if their imagination is equal to their delusions, at least it will be entertaining at table – until it is not,” Jean-Paul said.

“If they don't get a clue that it is all over when you, master investigator that you are, sit down at the table, I imagine it is going to be entertaining indeed.”

“They are just as likely to think I'm here for the same reason that they are. They are mad that René has access to the money now, and they will be mad to think that you and I, who are the oldest and to their view always got more of everything any way, are here to get our share as well.”

“Oh, that's what this is about?”

“You're the oldest, Jeanne-Cerise. You have no idea what it is like to be a middle child or a middle-middle child among 11 children. But just watch – now that you know to look, you'll see that some of us grew through it better than others.”

Sure enough … as she simply observed her ten siblings and how they interacted, she noticed cooperation that their parents had always encouraged between them among seven of them, but also noticed the subtle but immense resentment the middle brothers had for their eldest brother, who had always enjoyed privileges they had not, and their youngest brother, who had remained the baby, the “new thing” people fawned over, while they had been “bumped” from that position in childhood by every child younger than them. Compound it by the fact that the “baby” had restored the family fortunes, was being praised and admired even more, and had control of all the new family money.

The three middle brothers also detested the closeness between their eldest brother and baby brother, without actually observing the conversation that took place several times:

“I can't do this, Jean-Paul – they've really gone too far now – I'm about to go stomp them!”

“Hold on, René, and work the plan. This is not our fight alone now, so watch and pray!”

What was making René so angry was the way the three middle brothers were treating Maman Dubois, who, while welcoming her sons home, took each to the side and lovingly, gently addressed the fact that she had mixed feelings because they had been away so long and had communicated so little. To a man, each of the middle brothers condescended to their mother and told her not to worry about the past and to focus on the now and the future as they were going to take the “little” money their baby brother had made and turn it into big-city type of money.

“Isn't that called gaslighting?” one of the Dubois grandchildren said to her cousin. “Making the person confronting you on your mess feel like they are stupid and backward for even bringing it up?”

“Yep,” said the cousin. “I can think of a lot of stupid things to do, but disrespecting Grandma with Grandpa close by has got to be in the top ten.”

“Even when Grandpa is not close by,” the other grandchild said. “You know Grandpa and Grandma grew up in the deep bayous when Black French Louisiana was like super-real. I think Grandma could be anywhere in the universe, and Grandpa would know and come get anyone who bothered her.”

“Kinda good that we are still young enough to go upstairs and sit at the kids table tonight,” the other said. “I don't think it's going to be pretty tonight at dinner with the adults.”

“Yes … I don't want to see it either, because you know if Grandpa has to get anyone, they are about to get got.”

Sure enough: after dinner was served, Papa Dubois said how good it was to have his entire family at table just once again – just once again – and then asked each of his middle sons what brought them home and what ideas did they have to invest the family's new money. His wife, other children, and adult grandchildren ate in perfect, ominous silence as the three middle brothers competed with each other expressing how glad they were to be at the new home, how much they had been thinking of the family the whole time they had not visited and barely called, and how good their new opportunity would be to use up the family money.

It was entertainment, if of a ghastly sort, if you knew Jean-Luc Dubois and what he was doing in letting his sons go on and on and on until the table was cleared and dinner was over except for dessert. Chief Inspector Jean-Paul Philippe Dubois had inherited his talent for interrogation from his father. Jean-Luc Dubois had never gotten his son's training, but had never needed it, either. He turned that corner just as smoothly as the best interrogators in the world … .

“So, Émile, tell me this: how did your investment go when it was discovered that the company you were backing was responsible for the 90-foot pylons being delivered for San Francisco's Millennium Towers and put down instead of the 210-foot pylons that were actually requisitioned?”

Émile nearly jumped out of his seat, and Jules and Gilbert were frozen in terror as their father recited Émile's entire high-flying and hard-landing portfolio in real estate investing in the San Francisco Bay Area to him, right down to the amount he was personally in debt.

“I dare you to lie to my face, and say that none of that is true, Émile.”

Émile did not dare. Jules and Gilbert were next, as they went through the humiliation of having their buy-high-and-sell-low adventures on Wall Street and their adventures in dissipation and debt in Miami made family knowledge. Neither Jules or Gilbert dared lie to their father's face when put to it.

At the end, you could hear a pin drop until Papa Dubois, his voice rumbling like approaching thunder, spoke again.

“Maman and I could have forgiven you all of that you have done, and all of the previous 15 years of your neglect, had you not come here to the purpose of dismissing the anguish you have caused us in order to lie to us, to deceive us, to rob us – as if we are nothing but old, ignorant Black swamp rats inferior to whoever you pretend to be, and you have come to punish us for being the cause of your failures – as if you are not precisely from us, and of us, and as if it is not your very pride and pretense that has caused you to fall so low in the world!

“But you know what? You are free men of mature age in a free country. You may pretend to be anything you wish. Yet what you may not and you will not do is to be ashamed of la familie Dubois and come as an enemy to us while still claiming to be a part of us!”

Jean-Luc Dubois stood up to his full six feet and four inches, straightening out the very slight stoop of his 73 years as he laid his hand upon his chair, his voice booming in his full paternal authority.

“As you have dishonored and disrespected and degraded our name in the world and at last betrayed us here, so we disown you – you are Dubois no more, no more welcome at this table, and no more to be counted among my sons!”

He turned his chair and his back to Émile, Jules, and Gilbert, and each of his children, sons-in-law, and adult grandchildren rose in turn, one after another, to turn their chairs and their backs to those disowned, and to sit down, arms crossed, back straight, stone-faced. It was like falling dominoes, swift and sudden and startling, all the way around to Maman Dubois, who hesitated, but then, in response to her husband laying his hand upon her chair, then stood up, trembling. He turned her chair around, and she turned her back upon her sons, took her husband's hand, and sat down.

Maman Dubois could not hold her composure, however, and her heartbroken sobs filled the room. Yet she did not turn around. She leaned into the embrace of her husband, who spoke with a choked but imperative voice.

“You have broken the heart of one the who bore you for the last time tonight. Get out.”

Émile, Jules, and Gilbert, all three deeply humiliated and shaken, left, and Jean-Paul got up and locked the door behind them. It was done, and the family solemnly listened as the three cars sputtered to life and drove off, each alone, into the darkness of the night.

“René, go upstairs, and have everyone come down here,” Papa Dubois ordered.

This was done.

“Put all the little ones here on the laps of Maman and I, and the rest who don't fit their by our feet and upon my shoulders. The rest of you, gather round, and come close.”

This was done, and Papa Dubois spoke.

“We face uncertain days. Maman and I are old now, and there is a new disease stalking the world. We may never see each other again as one family under one roof.

“But this day, we have learned: there is the family that le bon Dieu chooses for you by birth, and there is the family that le bon Dieu chooses for you by causing the family to choose to actually be family to one another. We that are here are now that kind of family, and I will have no other around me in my final years. I will have no other around my wife.

“In the last 15 years you have shown yourselves as the family we want and love and need and will give everything we have for and to. We choose you too, and affirm you as our family. We – we right here, from the eldest to the youngest – are la familie Dubois. We are all we have, all that le bon Dieu allowed us to have after He took from us everything that was not important. He is a good God indeed, for He said He would provide for our every need – so we, with Him, are all we have, and all we need!”

It was done. Now, the family was ready to face the challenges and seize the opportunities of 2020, as one united front. Indeed, the days of big family gatherings would soon come to an end, but this last great one for the year had accomplished what was necessary for the Dubois family's healthy future growth.

"Hearts Growing On," graphic by the author, Deeann D. Mathews, and available on NFT Showroom, here