The Legendary Coe DuPuis

I came across this on the Web recently and thought y'all might enjoy reading it. You might also want to check out this URL for info on N Carolina Moonshine http://www.ibiblio.org/moonshine/

from the PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Sunday, July 9, 2000
STORY BY CRAIG LaBAN
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MICHAEL BRYANT

THE LEGENDARY COE DUPUIS
THE OLD MOONSHINER IS A CRAFTSMAN WHO'S GOT
STORIES TO TELL AND LESSONS TO TEACH.

This is the summer of Coe's last batch. At least that is what I hear 
from his friends in Cajun country who dread the day there will be no 
more of his magical moonshine. Each spring in Southern Louisiana, 
ever since the old man began feeding this terrible rumor, they repeat 
it without ever expecting it to become true.

Will this be the last year his copper still feels the slow heat of 
the flames he tends so meticulously? Since Prohibition, its 
coffin-shaped kettle has sent the sweet vapors steaming up through 
the cooling coils and down into the charred oak barrels. An American 
whiskey for the ages, kissed with a teaspoon of wild cherry bounce. 
Could this really be his last?

Edwin "Coe" Dupuis, 96, sits in the massive cedar rocking chair in 
his kitchen parlor, frail body cocked in contemplation, King Edward 
"cee-gar" chomped between his jaws. The smoke curls up and disappears 
into the white waves of hair that frame his regal face. He moves to 
speak, sometimes in Cajun French, sometimes in English, often a foggy 
melange of the two.

"Probably so," he says with a sly smile, but the question does not 
engage him. Hospitality does. "Have a drink."

On the table sits a large jug filled with whiskey. I pour a splash. 
"More," Coe tells me, "more," until I fill it to the brim.

I had always heard that moonshine could make you blind or crazy. It 
was the secretly distilled rotgut of mountain men and gangsters out 
to make a fortune cheap and rough. Ruckus juice. Pop skull. 
Preacher's lye. Dead man's dram.

But what Coe makes is another creation altogether. The pure amber 
liquid tickles my nostrils with inviting, sophisticated warmth. As it 
slips across my tongue, waves of caramel, charred oak and fruit flare 
but do not burn. The soft tease of a hum lingers, glowing long after 
the drink is gone.

Dickie Breaux, the restaurateur and former Louisiana state 
representative who brought me here, likens Coe's whiskey to fine 
Armagnac. Jim Bozeman, the retired cardiovascular surgeon and bourbon 
connoisseur who installed Coe's pacemaker 20 years ago, says, "it's 
not as good as Jack Daniels, it's much better." And Debbie Fleming 
Caffery, a photographer who is one of Coe's many devoted friends, 
tells him as they sway together on the porch swing, "It makes my 
cheeks hot after I drink it. It's a total aphrodisiac. Coe?" She 
wants his attention. "Can you hear me? Aph-ro-dis-i-ac!"

"Don't use such big words," he whispers coyly. "It just tastes like more."

I've come all the way from Philadelphia to speak with Coe, who is no 
ordinary backwoods moonshiner. Coe Dupuis is a wizard of whiskey, a 
Stravinsky at the still, a maestro of the mash. He has done for 
outlaw liquor what Robert Johnson did for the Delta blues, 
instinctively elevating a folk tradition into golden, liquid art. He 
makes it for a hobby now rather than profit, but he still infuses it 
with the flavor and legend of a place that is rapidly disappearing.

I flew into New Orleans and drove two hours west to Cajun country, 
crossed the Mississippi and Atchafalaya, passed over stump-filled 
cypress swamps and moss-covered bayous, and arrived at his little 
cabin with a list of questions two pages long. How is the moonshine 
made? What about the old bootlegging days? What about Megan Barra, 
his student?

At first he indulges my interest. But an hour into my weekend visit, 
his gray eyes become misty with indifference. He leans away from me 
with suspicious distaste and waves as if brushing off a fly. "Quit 
talkin' about this whiskey business! You're not going to make none 
anyhow."

I have misjudged the moment. Today's interview is done.

But Coe doesn't simmer for long. And besides, there's a party to 
prepare for tonight.

It was at Dickie and Cynthia Breaux's Cafe des Amis four years ago 
that Megan Barra, a graphic designer, and her boyfriend, 
world-renowned slide guitarist Sonny Landreth, had their first taste 
of Coe's moonshine.

"It was so smooth, everything else since tastes like gasoline," Megan 
says. "I went up to him and said, `I love your whiskey.' And he said, 
`Don't drink too much!' "

"Something about this extraordinary drink taps you inside and helps 
you use your own personal powers," Sonny says. "One guy I know got 
inspired to contact his biological mother after he drank it. And my 
road manager, well, he didn't have any back pain for months and 
months."

For Megan, it was also the beginning of something special. She 
painted an image of Coe as a younger man on a whiskey jug and gave it 
to him. They became friends, sharing stories and recollections. She 
took him more painted jugs: Coe beside his still. His late wife, 
Angeline, eternally pretty in her black hair and blue dress. And Sam, 
the pony that used to walk into his house and eat ashtrays full of 
cigar butts. Her visits soon evolved into something more intriguing: 
She became the moonshiner's apprentice.

"He said he was going to quit maybe two years ago, and we were like, 
`Gosh, we love this stuff, what are we going to do?' I wanted to 
watch him and learn how, just like I learned to make gumbo from my 
grandmother."

This isn't the first time Coe has attracted followers. But none, he 
says, bothered to listen for very long.

"They always start cuttin' corners, they start to try tellin' me how 
to make it," he says with disgust. "But Megan might. She might make 
it. She looks very interested, and she doesn't mind spending the time.

"I'm taking a chance, I s'ppose" - Coe catches my eye - "but I've 
always picked good-looking girls."

He gives Megan a mischievous smile, knowing her intense shyness. She blushes.

I am surprised to learn that Coe Dupuis is not a drinker, save for a 
porch-swing nip or a little whiff when he is blending.

"He can't handle that firewater," says his nephew, Adley Dupuis. "He 
gets mean if he drinks too much."

It seems a strange contradiction, considering moonshine has been a 
constant in his life since 1928. Then 24, he decided to supplement 
the modest income he made fishing the Atchafalaya River with a little 
home brew. He acquired his copper kettles and the finer points of 
distilling from some Kentuckians who were installing high-power lines 
in the region. To compete with other local bootleggers, who sold 
their whiskey fresh out of the still, he aged his spirits from six 
months to two years in burnt oak casks, and then sold it for nearly 
twice as much, $5 a gallon.

A good bootlegger needs a poker face, he says, raising a hand with a 
ring finger that was shortened by a fan belt: "Don't be afraid. 
Nuh-uh."

A great bootlegger knows quality sells: "Take your time, and don't 
sell cheap. . . . C'est dans les barils, c'est dans les ans." The 
secret is in the barrels. It's in the years.

The significance of Coe's whiskey goes far beyond the occasional sip. 
It is his claim to fame. It is his way of marking seasons. He sets 
his mash to ferment only when the bayou sun reaches the peak of its 
summer swelter. And it is what Debbie Caffery calls his "mystic 
magnet," the force that draws all walks of people to his front porch.

After director Francis Ford Coppola showed up a couple weeks before I 
arrived, Megan began planning a portrait of Coe and "Francis" on a 
jug.

Recent episodes of heart failure have given Coe's friends a scare, 
but he insists on living alone where he can watch The Price Is Right 
every day and listen to his tape of country singer Jimmie Rodgers. 
Coe still drives his truck to town, although not always in a straight 
line. He has a daughter, but she lives in Indiana; friends whisper 
that a son committed suicide some years ago. Nephews and friends keep 
him in their sights.

"When you're around him, you realize that it's all about how you look 
at life," Sonny says. "He sees us young people running around at a 
frantic pace, always trying to accomplish, trying to be successful. 
But he has a more simplistic view: `Don't worry `bout nothin.' Be 
you're own man. And don't take anything for granted.'

"The moonshine is incredible, but it's really Coe. If there was no 
more, not even a drop of moonshine, I'd still come over to visit 
because I've never met anyone like him."

Megan and Adley take me inside the stuffy shack Coe calls his office. 
Wasps hover overhead, attracted by the cane sugar in the plastic 
trash cans in the corner. These are where the mash ferments, a slurry 
of water, sugar, cracked corn and yeast that foams and gurgles from 
four to 12 days before it's ripe. Coe stirs it with a paddle, filling 
the room with the smell of yeast.

When it's ready to be distilled, the mash goes into the kettle. The 
joints are sealed with thick dough and the three gas burners below 
are set just enough to boil, but not enough to stir up any 
impurities. The pure vapors rise up through a copper cone and into a 
tube that spirals down through a 75-foot coil into a barrel of cool 
condensing water. When the alcohol comes out - 50 gallons take 24 
hours - it drips down a little thread, ready to be distilled a second 
time.

Coe can stay up for 48 hours on end, a perfectionist tweaking the 
flames, discarding the toxic first half-gallon, unperturbed by 
temperatures above 100 degrees.

"All he wants is alcohol," Adley says. "And it's just as clear as 
water, man, just as clear as can be. That's white lightning."

The fresh liquor goes into 10-gallon charred oak barrels he only uses 
once. Then, after two years of wooden slumber, the rich 
caramel-colored whiskey emerges. Coe keeps a hydrometer for proofing 
alcohol in the box it came in 72 years ago. It happens to be the only 
thing he can read, but he rarely needs it anymore. His whiskey, Jim 
Bozeman says, is almost always exactly 80 proof.

How will the novice become so proficient?

"I came every other day last fall just to watch that batch," Megan 
says. "I felt like I could do it. I'm still not sure that mine will 
taste like his. But I want it to. Because when he goes, there's no 
more. And I would hate for this recipe to die with him. Just to carry 
it on is important. Because it's a good thing. Simple as that. It's 
good."

When Coe gets ready for his public, he puts on pancake makeup, 
smearing the deep pores in his nose. He spritzes on perfume and 
rinses blue tint through his hair. (Sometimes it comes out green.) 
His dark pants are sharply creased, a white handkerchief billows from 
his back pocket. He gives his shoes a fresh buff. "I shine them every 
day; that way they're easy to find."

And then he prepares the whiskey. Over to the sink he shuffles, 
tapping along on a cane that is wrapped with a wooden serpent. He 
takes a bottle from a recent batch - "the man's drink" - and spoons 
in warm sugar syrup and a dose of bounce, the sweetened essence of 
tiny black cherries he harvests from backyard trees.

He sets his cane aside, grabs the bottle at each end and begins a 
gentle sloshing. Back and forth, swish swish swish. Soon Coe puts his 
whole bowlegged body into the mix, twisting, swerving, levitating in 
the gyroscopic gravity of the whiskey's tide.

The blend is done. The "woman's drink" is ready.

Coe's whiskey is not for sale these days. You have to be a friend. 
Rather than money, he receives presents of artwork or sugar-dusted 
beignets or sometimes Crown Royal, the most expensive whiskey Coe 
could find in the liquor store, and therefore, he feels, a fair 
exchange. He doesn't drink it, of course, but sometimes he gives it 
as a wedding present.

When moonshine was Coe's livelihood, most customers lived between 
Lafayette and Baton Rouge. During Prohibition, local parish bosses - 
sheriff, judge and clerk of court - were among his most ardent fans.

"If you can't get along with the law," he says, "that's tough."

Work on oil and dredge boats gave Coe useful contacts in the North. 
One of Coe's best customers, Jim Bozeman tells me, was a seafood 
purveyor in Cincinnati whose regular train shipments of buffalo fish 
from Atchafalaya station concealed barrels of whiskey.

"J'ai fait quelques sous," Coe admits. He made a few pennies.

Coe's small cabin belies the accumulation of many pennies with its 
rusting metal roof and gloomy wood-paneled rooms stagnant with late 
spring heat. "Joliment chaud!" says Coe, reveling in the "beautiful 
warmth."

"He is not the destitute-looking person you see in this old house. He 
could have a very nice house, but doesn't want it," Bozeman says. "He 
bought a truck a year ago that must have been the only one sold in 
the entire state the last 10 years without air-conditioning or radio."

Nevertheless, speculators aren't uncommon at Coe's door. A Louisiana 
senator came by not long ago, Bozeman says, his eyes asparkle with 
designs of making lots of money.

"Coe told me, `He was just a couillon, a big shot. Doesn't he 
understand you can't make any money on this because the taxes are so 
high?' "

The tense relationship between illegal distillers and the government 
dates back to George Washington's 54- cent-per-gallon whiskey tax of 
1791, which led to a farmer rebellion in southwestern Pennsylvania. 
At one time the tariff made up 60 percent of the domestic taxes the 
government collected.

The antagonism hit its apex during Prohibition, when small-time 
bootleggers like Coe Dupuis got their start, contributing both to the 
local trade and the flow north of Southern booze and smuggled 
European liquor. Louisiana's swampy maze of a coastline and easy 
access to the Mississippi have always attracted smugglers, from the 
pirate Jean Laffite to the drug runners of today. Even during 
Prohibition, New Orleans was a party town. Legendary government agent 
Izzy Einstein set a record there for finding a drink - within 35 
seconds of his arrival.

Even though amateurs may now brew beer and make wine, distilling 
spirits at home is still illegal, whether for sale or personal 
consumption.

Temperance is no longer the issue; but taxes are. The federal tax on 
a gallon of 100-proof alcohol is now up to $13.50, and the government 
doesn't want to lose that revenue to home distillers. Health concerns 
are another matter. Poorly made moonshine - sometimes condensed in 
lead-contaminated radiators - can cause brain damage, blindness or 
even death.

And yet the renegade art of moonshine persists. Every so often the 
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms comes across huge 
illegal distilleries, capable of distributing millions of dollars in 
untaxed hooch. During Operation Desert Storm GIs made moonshine in 
far smaller quantities to relieve the stress of war in the dry Middle 
East.

And then there are the legendary craftsmen like Coe.

Norbert LeBlanc, an alligator hunter, is showing me the swamp near 
Coe's house. His people do a little moonshining, too, using a recipe 
that's been in the family for generations, but they ferment their 
mash with dried peaches instead of cherries.

"Anybody can buy whiskey in town, but when you make it, it gives you 
something a little extra. It's a novelty now, really. But it's 
something the Cajuns are going to lose if they don't keep it up, like 
how younger generations don't speak French anymore."

He uncovers a recycled Crown Royal bottle filled with deep red 
liquid. I can smell peach peels when I don't breathe too deeply. But 
then I do, and fire fills my nostrils. The taste is even more vivid 
than the smell, with buttery richness fizzling into a rough and heady 
burn. At 106 proof, only a few sips leave me punchy.

"Coe's is pretty good," Norbert says. "Course, mine is better, naturally."

 From Coe's front porch, you can see the fields of sugarcane across 
the street rising into the horizon like a vast green fringe. His 
cabin is set like a surprise in the shaded bend of a two-lane road, 
corralled by a woven bamboo fence painted red, green and white. 
Twirling in the front yard is a funky menagerie of wagon-wheel 
mobiles, dangling ax picks, wrenches, a grinding stone, a ship's bell.

Dickie Breaux says the irrepressible Cajun urge to render something 
beautiful out of nothing is responsible for Coe's lawn fantasies. And 
his whiskey.

What better seat could there be than the porch swing where Coe 

receives his guests with all his creative wares on view? The mobiles 
clang in the breeze, and the whiskey bottles move between us in 
perpetual pouring motion.

"Chantez! Chantez!"

Women circle around Coe, urging him to sing.

"Have another drink," he replies.

"Oh, that tastes illicit," says Alice Landry, licking her lips, 
holding her 3-month-old daughter, Alix Basden, in her left hand.

Debbie tells of the time when Coe, sporting a diamond stick pin and 
his trademark polished shoes, kissed her two years ago on her 50th 
birthday.

"He kissed me so powerfully, I felt as if I'd kissed the moonshine 
sage," she says, taking a sip. "He has very soft lips."

Without warning Coe's quavering voice rises into a tune, a husky lilt 
that sounds like wind passing through dry tobacco.

"When I was single, ah had no worries. Now that I'm married, I'm in 
trouble all the time. Lord, I wish I was single again. . . ."

Sonny Landreth takes his steel guitar and slides a bottleneck up its 
frets. Another cup of whiskey. The strings hum and buzz, leaping from 
the instrument with mesmerizing syncopation. And whiskey flows 
through our little cups as effortlessly as the music moves, swaying 
sweetly into an impromptu lullaby called "The Bayou Teche Waltz."

They say you can calm a baby by rubbing moonshine on its feet. But 
the touch of a real moonshiner is even better. As the amber sun sets 
beyond the cane fields, and the steel guitar fills the cooling air, 
Coe reaches out to caress Alix's tiny heel. Before the waltz is over, 
the baby is sound asleep.

"Goodnight, Coe. See you tomorrow."

He looks at me suspiciously: "What time?"

I say, "Three," and he gives a wheezy groan.

"You got lipstick?" he asks Megan.

She applies a fresh coat and kisses him on the cheek.

"Aaah, that tastes better," he says. "You come back tomorrow and I'll 
show you the real McCoy."

"Watch out for quicksand!"Norbert calls to me over his shoulder, but 
I've already slipped off a cypress log and sunk knee-deep into the 
sandy clay banks of the Atchafalaya River. We are just below Bayou 
des Ourses, near where the Dupuis clan lived in the 1920s.

We've motored for hours in Norbert's boat through the twisting 
bayous, entered the powerful river and circled around an island. We 
have pulled over to do some exploring.

Coe Dupuis' original stills were not too far away. We pass the ruins 
of railroad pilings where Atchafalaya station used to be. As I sink 
into the soft suction, surrounded by deer tracks and dragonflies, it 
is easy to imagine nimble-footed swampers like Coe - 100-pound sacks 
of sugar on their backs - disappearing into the thick veil of willows 
and cottonwoods as their government pursuers struggle in the mud.

In his most productive years, Coe says he made up to 800 gallons of 
moonshine a trip. Even in 1929 he made a nice profit. Somehow people 
found the money for his whiskey: "Oh, yeah, 800 gallons wouldn't last 
too long."

Coe was caught once, in 1928 when a customer's irate wife tipped off 
revenuers, who burned his kettles. When Coe went to court in 
Opelousas with 27 other bootleggers, his attorney - the lieutenant 
governor of Louisiana - got him acquitted.

"The poor fellas," he says of the revenuers, "were people just like 
us. They had their job, I had mine."

Even so, Coe tells the epilogue with sweet satisfaction. A man 
approached him one day and asked for a match. The man's 
whiskey-loving brother was angry, he told Coe, because he'd been one 
of the revenuers who had burned Coe's camp.

"Yeah? Well, tell your brother to come back," Coe said. " 'Cause 
y'all didn't burn it all. Tell your brother to come back 'cause I got 
plenty left."

The government men had missed the 50-gallon barrels buried under their feet.

Today is my last day with Coe, and for the first time we will be 
alone together. No more protective nephews to translate his foggy 
dialect. No more parties or beautiful women to distract us. Just a 
pesky couillon, as he calls me (in jest, I think), and the reluctant 
subject.

Debbie encouraged me last night as she prepared to leave for New 
Mexico, a bottle of moonshine tucked into her suitcase, ready to test 
her latest boyfriend.

Coe can be a demanding friend, she said, especially as his health 
declines. He wants his friends around when he wants them around.

"But it's still always fun to go over. A lot of old people are 
crotchety and nobody wants to be around them. But Coe is lovable. He 
is like some kind of mystical being that wears the same perfume my 
grandmother did. And it's the smell of good memories.

"Here, bring him this," she said, handing me an empty Crown Royal 
bottle. "This'll score you points."

"Bonjour, Coe! Ca va?""Ca ne va pas," he groans as I creak through 
his screen door. "I'm not so great. Have a drink."

Coe looks at me funny, noting the fierce pink sunburn I'd acquired 
that morning.

"I went out to the Atchafalaya River today with Norbert."

"Sho nuff?"

"I wanted to see everything - where you grew up, the old train 
station, Bayou des Ourses. It was beautiful. I got stuck in the mud."

He laughs at my dirt-caked shoes.

"That sand is somethin'. Need to know where you are going. I'm glad 
that you saw that. I haven't seen that for 50 years."

He is pleased when I give him Debbie's Crown Royal empty. Then I 
bring up the subject of Father Allen Breaux, whom I'd also seen that 
morning, and he becomes unusually sheepish.

Coe's relatives sent for Father Allen, who is Dickie's brother, when 
he was ill. They asked the priest to give Coe the anointing of the 
sick. He went, but he knew not to push too hard. Coe has been to 
church only four times in his life, and though he believes in God 
("My buddy!"), he has little use for ritual.

"He's a nice guy," Coe says of Allen, whose own grandfather was a 
moonshiner. "But a priest is a priest, and when he came, I didn't 
know what to do."

What Allen found was a man at peace.

"In fact, I find myself attracted to what he's about," Father Allen 
says. "He's a real craftsman, and there's no greed in his operation. 
He has lived a really full life."

I tell Coe this and he smiles.

"I ain't got much, but you see what I got. Maybe I can do better than 
that, but that's enough for me. If I could only work a bit to keep my 
yard the way I like, I'd be glad.

"You ever see a crawfish pond?" He grabs the serpent cane and rises 
out of his chair. "C'mon, let's go."

I drive Coe down a dusty street, an arid strip of dirt and gravel 
that he himself carved alongside a narrow bayou. The water is low 
today, its banks dry and parched. But as we turn a corner, the 
landscape that unfolds takes my breath away with its lushness.

A vast grass-fringed pond opens under the blue sky for a half-mile in 
either direction. Its glassy surface is entirely covered with purple 
water lilies and the air is full of graceful long-necked birds. It 
could be a sanctuary for great blue and white herons, snowy egrets 
and ibis, loping down to perch over the flooded crawfish traps.

"This is mine," Coe says, waving his cane toward the acres he bought 
in 1937. For each acre he paid $6, just about the cost of a gallon of 
moonshine. The price was right.

This is the place where Bozeman met Coe 30 years ago, sloshing 
methodically through the muddy pond in his rain slicker while younger 
men checked their traps in boats. Today two people wave from the 
pond, thick-necked and sweaty beneath their straw hats as they haul 
40-pound sacks of crawfish onto a truck. They salute Monsieur Coe in 
French.

His whiskey, they tell me, is the best: "C'est du bon l'ouvrage. Ca 
se boit bien." It's fine work. Drinks nice.

We drive back toward his house, but turn first onto a shaded drive 
nearby. It leads to a compound of two attractive houses, 
rustic-looking contemporaries with big glass windows. Modern 
sculptures of figures crinkle-wrapped in metal sheets dot the 
manicured lawn.

"This was my boy's house," he says. It is the only time he has 
mentioned his son. "I sold it."

My tour of Coe's empire is over, and we are back where we began, 
sitting in the beautiful heat of his dark kitchen, savoring a last 
cup of moonshine. It is just barely on the sweet side of a man's 
drink. Dark with wild cherry, charred with a bourbony oak that makes 
my gums tingle.

I will miss this taste.

"You can't be in too much of a hurry to make something like that," he tells me.

"What about Megan? Think she's going to do it?"

"Peut-etre," he says with a thin grin, baring his blunted teeth. "Maybe."

"Did you ever show her the real McCoy?"

"Oooh no. Not yet."

"Well, what are you waiting for, Coe? Isn't this your last batch?"

"Nuh-uh," he says with a smoky sigh. "I'm going to make some this 
summer, and next summer and the next summer. I got gallons of it 
left."

I toast the news and drink another. Then I rise to thank him. From 
his cedar rocking chair, he grasps my hand and holds it. His misty 
gray eyes suddenly bore into me with rings of white sharpness.

"When you comin' back?"

"Soon, I hope. Soon. Goodbye, Coe."

He stops me, holding up his stubby-fingered hand.

"Goodbye is for dead people. The right word is au revoir. Au revoir, 
au revoir. I'll see you again."

 

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