A Summer of Birds by Danny Heitman

Author:Danny Heitman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

AN AUDUBON REPAST

Family ledgers that survive from the period indicate that the Pirries were wealthy enough to savor delicacies not available to most householders of the era—quite a change of cuisine for Audubon, who had subsisted only a few days before in New Orleans on cheese, a bit of ham, and salted mackerels. As in many plantation mansions that are now open to the public, Oakley’s dining room has the table set with exquisite china and dinnerware, as if perpetually waiting for the next meal to begin. Notably, no one at Oakley claims that Audubon hand-painted the family china while he was there, though other plantations and households throughout the South have made such a claim about some of their own heirloom china. We do know that Audubon, who loved to discuss his artistic pursuits in scrupulous detail in his journals and letters, never mentioned painting china. “As someone in St. Francisville once commented to us,” Audubon investigators Mary Durant and Michael Harwood once wrote, “if Audubon had painted all the dinner plates he is reported to have painted, he wouldn’t have had time to do anything else.”

The artful arrangement of the place settings in Oakley’s dining room reminds us that in the nineteenth century, dinner was a form of theater, with conversation as the principal means of entertainment. It was a forum that uniquely suited Audubon, a man whom House once aptly described as “the nineteenth-century version of television.” With his gift for anecdote, his unusual occupation, and his keen sense of the dramatic, Audubon would have been an eventful visitor to Oakley’s table, and his news and narratives would have been all the more welcome, perhaps, given Oakley’s distance from the city. Today, not far from Oakley’s dining room, it’s possible to hear the whisper of wheels from nearby Highway 965, a busy tributary of traffic from the interstates that quickly connect the world in a web of immediacy. That makes it hard to imagine the relative isolation of circa 1821 Oakley, which would have stood within the wooded wilderness like a feudal castle.

Like the stone fortresses of medieval Europe, Oakley also hosted its share of important emissaries. Among the visitors to Oakley during Audubon’s stay were Louisiana’s governor, Thomas Robertson, whom Audubon commended as “a really true philosopher of the age,” and John Clay, the brother of nationally known lawmaker Henry Clay.

The guest list at Oakley that summer suggests that there was provocative banter across the dinner table, and there would have been much to talk about. The world of 1821 that summer hummed with possibility. America was a young country during Audubon’s season at Oakley. House likes to remind visitors that in 1821, the memory of George Washington and other founding fathers was still fresh. Beethoven was still alive. On May 5, 1821, only weeks before Audubon’s arrival, Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Audubon admired, had died in St. Helena. Lord Byron was the literary toast of England, and fellow poet John Keats had just passed away, much too young, that February.

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