By Ken Wells

      Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

     3 August 1999

     Copyright Dow Jones & Co.

     NAPOLEONVILLE, La. -- Casting an eye over a two-acre lot crowded with concrete lions, pelicans, gorillas, alligators, dwarfs and various gargoyles, Michael DuBois points out the profit center of his peculiar business niche: Madonna.

     No, not that Madonna. The biblical one.

     Mr. DuBois and his wife, Patricia, operate Louisiana's largest Virgin Mary factory, using cement poured into patented molds to turn out statues of Mary for the seemingly eternal lawn-shrine business. Mr. DuBois's closely held firm, D&D Ornamental Concrete, also makes and sells other religious icons-Jesus, various saints and generic angels-along with large numbers of secular items.

     "But the Blessed Mother is by far our most popular item," the 40-year-old Mr. DuBois says of the thousands of pieces he sells every year. "Mary is probably 70% of the business."

     Moreover, though the bulk of his Marys are three-foot statues that retail for about $50, his factory is one of the few anywhere to make life-size statues of the Virgin in concrete. They weigh nearly half a ton and sell for $375, painted, delivered and installed. "Once you get them in, they're kind of hard to move," Mr. DuBois explains. "Not many other people do the heavy stuff."

     To understand why this is a business at all, drive along any of the scenic byways of the 22 parishes (counties) that make up South Louisiana's Cajun belt. In many towns in this French-influenced, heavily Catholic region, every third or fourth house will have a lawn shrine-typically a small statue of Mary, painted blue and white, arms beckoning and set in a concrete grotto. While both Protestants and Catholics alike recognize Mary as the mother of Jesus, Catholics, and Cajun Catholics in particular, have a strong attachment to her.

     "We don't worship the Blessed Mother," says Zam Tregle, a Cajun entrepreneur who lives in the bayou hamlet of Kraemer about a dozen miles from here and runs a thriving swamp-tour operation. "But we do venerate her." Mrs. Tregle is a major customer of Mr. DuBois, having bought a life-size Mary for her local church, and having erected her own elaborate lawn shrine of more than a dozen statues, Mary being the most prominent. Her shrine was put up partly in honor of a friend who died of a heart attack a few years ago after helping her load captured alligators into her pickup truck.

     Monsignor Joseph Latino, pastor of St. Francis de Sales Cathedral in nearby Houma, says Cajun Catholics display their religiosity with lawn shrines about as naturally as Midwesterners display their patriotism by flying a flag from the front porch. "Catholics here do believe in the intercession of the saints, and these shrines are often put up in the belief that a favor has been granted," he explains.

     Indeed, Mr. DuBois's thoroughly modern business owes some of its success to history and lore. Folklorists say some of the first lawn shrines began appearing in South Louisiana after the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. With New Orleans under siege from a much larger British force, Andrew Jackson reportedly visited a convent of Ursuline nuns and asked them to pray to St. Mary to spare his outnumbered army and the city. The nuns said their prayers, Jackson's force quickly routed the British and shrines went up everywhere to "Our Lady of Prompt Succor" for her quick favor to the American side.

     Anne Galjour, a Cajun playwright who featured the Cajun attachment to lawn shrines in a work she performed off-Broadway last year, also thinks Mary is writ large in Cajun culture because most Cajuns trace their ancestry back to the ancient Celts, for whom the God figure was a woman. "To those old people God was feminine in nature. Women gave birth, brought in life."

     There was nothing miraculous about Mr. DuBois's entry into the market 14 years ago. He was working for an oil-field fabrication company and found himself laid off during the oil bust of the mid-1980s. His mother, Helen DuBois, ran a plant nursery in Houma that sold small concrete religious statues -- when she could get them. Frustrated with the lack of reliable suppliers, she suggested to her son that he start making the statues for her.

     "We started with 10 molds," says Patricia DuBois, 39, who helped her husband start the business. But as the DuBoises traveled around the country to trade shows where other ornamental-concrete makers showed their wares, they began to realize that the outdoor religious-statue market was wide open. In fact, with demand slack in other areas of the country, they were able to acquire, often quite cheap, a number of Virgin Mary molds from other makers who didn't move very many of them. Eventually they also contracted with a local sculptor to make their own molds, which they have patented.

     "These days," says Mrs. DuBois, "we have hundreds of molds." And their lifesize religious statues, in four different poses, have become a signature known throughout the ever-expanding lawn-shrine regions. Not long ago, D&D shipped Marys and other religious statues as far as Ohio and Iowa. The shrines are also gaining ground in the Hispanic-Catholic areas of the Southwest, "though they tend to be quite different from Louisiana shrines," says Nicholls State University folklorist Pat Perrin.

     D&D does have a few competitors. One of them, Norma Weekley, operates a studio in Crowley, La., where she makes small ceramic Virgins and other icons for the indoor shrine market. "But Mike fills a real need in the larger-size statues," says Ms. Weekley, who buys and resells many of Mr. DuBois's outdoor creations.

     On a sweltering day in an open aluminum building bordered by tall stands of sugar cane, workers in D&D's plant show how a Virgin is constructed. Using one of several aluminum or cast-iron molds with rubber linings, the workers slowly pour cement into the two-piece molds, which are then held fast with bolts. In hot weather, the statues harden overnight, though in the winter it can take two days or longer. The molds are then opened and the Virgins taken off to a finishing shop, where sanders smooth out any imperfections.

     Then, those that are to be painted go to Janus Naquin, an affable woman in D&D's paint shop. She straps on a portable airbrush contraption and often spends her entire workday painting Marys. "I see her, even in my sleep," says Ms. Naquin as she puts the finishing coat on a five-foot Virgin statue. Before that, she had just completed a full-size Jesus; while Mary usually is painted with pale white skin and wearing a blue robe, Jesus has pale white skin and gets a red robe. Now and then, African-American buyers will ask Ms. Naquin to make their Marys black; she is happy to oblige.

     Mr. DuBois, himself a Catholic, is careful not to make any mystical claim for his products, though he does wonder whether it was purely coincidental that, in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in 1992, the only statues left standing on his lot were those of Mary and Joseph. Likewise, Monsignor Latino says the church, though it will bless a lawn shrine, believes "there is nothing magical about these things."

     Don't tell that to Malcolm Zeringue.

     If you follow the winding road along Bayou Lafourche south from D&D, you can't miss Mr. Zeringue's shrine -- Mary and three other full-size statues on his front lawn. A few years ago, Mr. Zeringue walked in from his garden and realized he was having a stroke. He got his son to rush him to a nearby hospital "doing 125 mph in his Lincoln Continental," he recalls.

     "When we got to the hospital, I fell out of the car. Eleven doctors came out and all of them, except my own doctor, said I was dead . . . They took me in and that's when I left the hospital." His own doctor thought he could be revived.

     By leaving, Mr. Zeringue explains, he saw himself leave his body, rise through a cloud of brightly colored circles and angels, only to reach a door. "When my hand hit the doorknob, I saw Jesus on my right and Mary on my left. They told me, `Malcolm, you're going home to take care of your sick wife.' "

     Mr. Zeringue says he survived his stroke with few lasting effects and paid Mr. DuBois a visit. Mr. Zeringue doesn't care if people don't believe him. He thinks a favor was paid, and "I kiss those statues every day."

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