With Hawks and Angels

Episodes from a Southern Life

Joel Lafayette Fletcher III

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9781496844699
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496844705
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: the swampy, laissez-faire South where he was born, the red clay hills and piney woods of northern Louisiana where his relatives lived, and exotic New Orleans, where he was educated.

Author Joel Lafayette Fletcher III examines his childhood on the campus of what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where his father, Joel Lafayette Fletcher Jr., was president for twenty-five years, to his time as a student at Tulane. The book follows Fletcher through his service as a naval officer—when he began to admit to himself, accept, and explore who he really was—to his life in Europe and, eventually, Virginia where he now resides. With Hawks and Angels intimately explores the life of a young man growing up in the racially segregated Deep South while coming to terms with being gay at a time when being out was not socially acceptable.

Based on his personal journals and recollections and filled with the unique characters he met along the way, With Hawks and Angels is the culmination of writing that, for Fletcher, was a way of holding onto an important part of his true self that for many years he felt compelled to hide.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Easter Weekend, 1873
• 2. Home
• 3. Uncle Will
• 4. Fannie’s Gin Soup
• 5. The New Coach’s Wife
• 6. Black Lives That Mattered
• 7. Fricassee, Gumbo, and Other Beasts
• 8. My Decisive Moment?
• 9. The Camellia Pageant
• 10. My Father Is Kissed by a Frenchman While the Bishop Watches, and I Become a Francophile
• 11. Growing Up Nervous
• 12. Aunt Bill’s Biscuits
• 13. The Long and Short Life of Guinevere
• 14. Robert Rauschenberg and the Sweet Potato Queen
• 15. The Republican Party Comes to Louisiana
• 16. Louisiana Live Oak Society
• 17. Les Vaches de M. Mouton
• 18. The Pink Dress
• 19. My Beautiful Sister
• 20. Hullabaloo
• 21. Information from the Other Side
• 22. Learn the English of Today!
• 23. Riso
• 24. Da Nello
• 25. Loretta
• 26. Mr. Ambassador
• 27. Count Francesco
• 28. The Second Act of Parsifal?
• 29. Paris, Finally
• 30. Thérèse Bonney and the Repudiation of Chic
• 31. M. de Lafayette Chez Les Lafayettes
• 32. Eating Paris
• 33. The Other Ms. Guggenheim
• 34. Lunch at the Hôtel du Parc Royal
• 35. The Emira
• 36. Stealing Angels
• 37. 9 Lower Mall
• 38. Ein Wanderjahr
• 39. The Return of the Prodigal Son
• Epilogue
• About the Author