In Avoyelles Parish, a Louisiana Folktale that transcends time and language
No historical images of the Pachafa exist, so this artist rendering provides an idea what the mythical creature looked like. Illustration by Burt Durand
By Natalie Roblin
This article was published in partnership with Country Roads Magazine. Read the article and more here.
Mention the word “Pachafa” in Avoyelles Parish and you’re likely to get at least half of a story. For generations, children have feared the tale of the grisly half-man creature coming to steal them away. As for the other half of the tale…well, it depends who you ask.
“When you were a little boy, there you were alone in the woods, in the cypress swamp,” begins anthropologist and Avoyelles Parish native, Dustin Fuqua. “It’s very quiet. You hear a whistle.” He emits a high-pitch whistle through his teeth, then pauses, “and you look up high, high in the tree. Behold! Pachafa!”
Fuqua recounts the tale in Avoyelles-accented Louisiana French, the way he heard it from family members growing up. “Pachafa starts to come down from the cypress tree,” he continues, looking up. “He sees the little boy. In one hand, he offers herbs; in the other hand, he offers a knife. If the little boy chooses the herbs, he becomes a medicine man. If he chooses the knife, he’ll become a warrior.”
While the story of Pachafa is familiar to residents across the parish, it has a prominent presence in the Spring Bayou, otherwise known as Bayou Blanc, community, which is located a few miles outside the parish seat of Marksville, near the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana reservation. For Fuqua, Spring Bayou is the frightening mise-en-scéne for Pachafa. “The earliest recollection I have of Pachafa was riding in the car in the Spring Bayou Wildlife Management Area,” says Fuqua, who was always told by his mother that Pachafa lived in an old Wildlife and Fisheries maintenance building, near the Boggy Bayou boat launch—only about twenty minutes from his family’s home. Fuqua and his family would make the drive often; fear and anticipation building as they crept down the gravel road, closer and closer to Pachafa’s house.
Spring Bayou Wildlife Management Area spans 12,000 acres across the Red River backwater system. A series of coulees, lakes, and rivers flow through the area and its communities, and with them flows the tale of Pachafa. On the edge of the system, running through the middle of the Tunica-Biloxi reservation, is a canal called the Coulée de Greus, which flows into Old River and then into Spring Bayou. In the story of Pachafa, the Coulée de Greus and Spring Bayou, as well as the Fort DeRussy cemetery in the Brouiliette community, are prominent sites in the Tunica and French Creole tellings. As Fuqua points out, Coulée de Greus is a sacred place where cemeteries were once located and, according to some Tunica tellings of the story, where Pachafa camps out. While Pachafa has no explicit homebase, he hovers near and around these historic waterways and the indigenous mounds surrounding them, never shifting too far geographically. ”His story is pretty localized,” says Fuqua, “and, in my opinion, it’s because of the presence of the mounds.”
Language and Transmission
Language bears on the malleable nature of Pachafa’s story and name. The many iterations of the tale exemplify the complex interaction of culture and language that historically make up Avoyelles Parish. While the most widely recognized name for the legend is “Pachafa,” there are various spellings and interpretations. To children who heard the tale from French or Creole speakers, he became “Johnny Pachafa.” Some, like Fuqua, believe this to be an anglicized version of the French folktale “Jean á patte de fer,” meaning “John with an iron paw,” and referring to a character who has a prosthetic foot. For members of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, he was “Tanapachafa,” or simply, “Tanap"—which is originally a Choctaw word associated with war.
Dr. Pete Gregory, who is the curator of the Williamson Museum at Northwestern State University, and Donna Pierite of the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resource Center, translated the Tunica legend to “Tanap apah achafa,” loosely describing a half-man, half-warrior with only one leg. According to Fuqua, Gregory, and Pierite’s research, the word “tanap” might also derive from the Tunica word “tana,” meaning “louse,”—a common slang term for a scoundrel or rascal. The Tunica word, “pachafa” is used to describe someone who walks with a limp—a notorious idiosyncrasy of Pachafa.
Though in almost every iteration of the folklore Pachafa is half-man, besides the other half being a warrior—he might instead be half alligator, or half horse. Occasionally, he is simply described as half of a man—limping along railroad tracks or lurking in nearby woods and fields.
Fuqua and Pierite believe that Pachafa’s story may have been adopted from the Choctaw tale of the “Little People”. Similarly, in this legend, a little boy wanders into the woods and is presented with the choice of a knife or herbs. The Tunica-Biloxi Tribe includes many people of Choctaw descent who, over generations, might have reinterpreted this tale and since preserved the story of “Tanapachafa.” Some Tunica versions reference the herbs and the knife, while other versions pit Tanap against the young boy in a wrestling match.
A Rite of Passage
Members of the Tunica-Biloxi tribe consider hearing the tale of the Tanapachafa as a rite of passage. Pierite, who serves as the Tunica-Biloxi Legends and Songs Keeper, has complex feelings toward Tanap. “There was fear, but there was also respect,” explained Pierite. She recalls the ceremonial way in which her grandmother shared folktales—locking the front door, and then her bedroom door, sitting the children on the side of the bed and, in a low voice, passing the knowledge of Tanap to the next generation.
For Pierite, hearing these folktales was a private and personal event. Growing up, she was told not to tell anyone the stories she heard because people would laugh. Keeping them close to your heart was a way to protect yourself from potential judgment or mocking. Pierite describes the difficulty of initially sharing the folktales with the public at Tunica-Biloxi Pow Wows. Over the years, however, her pride vanquished any fears. “This is our inheritance. This is the treasure,” she said.
The intimate nature of native folktales, coupled with the departure of large numbers of Tunica from the Avoyelles area over the past fifty years, may contribute to the strong association of Pachafa with the lore of the French Creole community in Avoyelles. However, like most of the best Louisiana traditions, the story is an amalgam of the many cultures that make up the area. Each of its diverse retellings is pivotal to its preservation.
An Oral Folktale
In the near decade he’s spent researching the legend of Pachafa, Fuqua has not come across any historical references or written accounts of the legendary spirit, other than a brief description he helped to create for the Pachafa Pale Ale brewed at Broken Wheel Brewery in Marksville. The story is ever-changing, ever-evolving, preserved only within the archive of individual memory. This is perhaps what makes such oral traditions so sentimental; we cling to our subtle variations of the stories as a way to remain close to our identities and our ancestors. It is also what makes the folklore a unifying agent, allowing us to bond over commonalities and shared experiences. As Nathan Rabalais explains in his book Folklore Figures of French and Creole Louisiana, “The paradox of specificity and universality is what gives readers and listeners around the world the peculiar impression of both familiarity and novelty.”
Pachafa is regional and specific; always lurking in proximal locations such as cornfields, bayous, or under nearby bridges. According to Rabalais, this process of substituting decorative or surface-level elements of a story—such as what the other half of the half-man might actually be—is called “localization.” “Localization,” explains Rabalais, “is responsible for the relatability of the tale and an affective proximity to its listener.” The stories change and take on contemporary aspects in order to become most relevant to each community, each family, each person.
Conclusion
To unravel the various versions of Pachafa story is virtually impossible, as each tale is so intertwined with the others—all of them, over time, lending themselves to each other. Today, the area’s French Creoles recall hearing the tale of Johnny Pachafa as a 'tit garçon—or little boy—on weekend rides to the camp with brothers and uncles or fathers and grandfathers, not necessarily realizing this story was itself an adaptation of the Tunica-Biloxi’s folktales of the Tanap.
As to how Pachafa, in every iteration, came to be a half man is unclear. This piece of the story seems to consistently change with each telling, but it is always gruesomely creative—a chainsaw, a train, a woodchipper, the devil. The tales of Pachafa do not exist in straight lines running parallel to each other, but rather, as twists and curves, weaving in and out like bodies of water, sometimes flowing in harmony. And sometimes cutting each other off.