All families have their secrets, that thing no one talks about. Maybe it’s an illegitimate child, divorce, drugs or alcoholism. For Jordan LaHaye Fontenot, it was kidnapping and murder.
Growing up on Vidrine Road, just outside Mamou, Fontenot knew her great-grandfather had been murdered. His body had been found in a nearby bayou, and her great-grandmother, MawMaw Emily, had been tied to the bed in their home — an image that stuck with Fontenot. She never got a chance to meet PawPaw Aubrey. He was murdered more than a decade before she was born.
“It definitely felt like something that had happened so long ago,” she says, sitting at the dining room table in her plantation-style home off Rue de Belier in Lafayette on a chilly January morning. It wasn’t until she started writing about Acadiana and Evangeline Parish in college that the tragic family story came up in a conversation with her father. “That made me realize how recent it was, that someone who could have done this was still in prison and alive,” she remembers.
Her growing curiosity led her to a newspaper article about the trial that called into question whether the man convicted, John Brady Balfa, was actually guilty. Soon after, Fontenot, who serves as managing editor of Country Roads Magazine, embarked on a journey that ended with a major book deal at just 25 years old.
Her first book, Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie, releases April 1 and is the result of an eight-year process of trying to find out what really happened to her great-grandfather Aubrey LaHaye.
Home of the Happy opens with “Part 1: The Murder” and the day LaHaye’s body was found in Bayou Nezpique (pronounced “Nip-ee-kay”) on Jan. 16, 1983.
A family spotted what looked like a body wrapped in a tarp floating in the bayou while out shooting beer cans on a bridge. LaHaye had been missing for 10 days after being kidnapped from his home in the early morning hours of Jan. 6.
After visiting the site with her father, Dr. Marcel LaHaye, Fontenot posits that her great-grandfather may not have been the only body disposed of in the remote creek. “There is a legacy of silent tragedy in this bayou, of bodies sunk in her waters, nestled on her banks,” she writes.
Despite its violent centerpoint, the book is as much a love letter to Fontenot’s home of Evangeline Parish as it is an investigation.
“The relationship to the place, as well as the relationship to my family and my relationship with the world is a slow realization that I saw a really bright, sunny part of it all, and that it’s much more complicated and darker than that,” she says.
The title of the book, “Home of the Happy,” is a phrase lifted from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie.” Fontenot first read the poem in sixth grade at Sacred Heart Elementary in Ville Platte. Today, she finds parallels to her own family’s story.
“It’s like this lost paradise of things being wonderful and then something terrible happening and disrupting that,” she says. “This is paradise, but paradise is never what it seems.”
Fontenot had her dad in her corner, but she felt like she needed to ask her grandfather, Dr. Wayne LaHaye, for his permission to pursue a book about his own father.
“He said: ‘I always thought someone would do this eventually. I’m glad it’s someone in our family,’ but I could tell he was never comfortable with the whole thing,” Fontenot recalls. The rest of her family members were mostly supportive and ready to help, she says. Some seemed glad the big family secret was finally out in the open.
Just recently, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, Fontenot asked all of Aubrey LaHaye’s grandchildren to meet for a family book launch. She handed out early copies to the people she is most excited and nervous about reading what she’s written. “They all came,” she says, “and it was powerful for us all to send it out together into the world.”
But it wasn’t just her own family she had to worry about. In the process of her investigation, Fontenot formed a relationship with the convicted Balfa’s family and the attorney trying to prove his innocence. She even planned to testify in support of Balfa in court at one point, a tough spot to find herself in as a journalist and author.
“There was a certain point where I couldn’t be as objective as I wanted anymore, and I had to kind of come to terms with that and what it meant for how I was going to tell the story,” she says. “I’m trying to be balanced and fair, always, but I didn’t feel like I had enough evidence either way.”
While the book recounts the LaHaye family history and what has come to be known as “the dark decade” in family lore, it’s also a story of convict John Brady Balfa and his own family origins.
Balfa is the nephew of legendary Cajun musician Dewey Balfa, and his dad, Harry, played accordion in the Balfa Brothers band. John Brady had no interest in music and had been pursuing a political science degree at Louisiana State University before dropping out of school and taking a job at Sunland Construction in Eunice, where he was working at the time of his arrest. After his conviction for the murder of Fontenot’s great-grandfather, his dream of eventually following in the footsteps of his hero Edwin Edwards was shattered. He has been imprisoned at Angola for going on 40 years.
Fontenot sees similarities between the two families that she describes in a chapter titled “Things I Know About John Brady Balfa.”
“People in Mamou went to see Dr. Wayne LaHaye when they were sick, and they visited John Brady’s mother, Mildred, whenever they needed their hair done,” she writes. “They negotiated their mortgages with Aubrey LaHaye at Guaranty Bank, and then called Harry Balfa to install their kitchen cabinets.”
Harry Balfa also drove the local school bus, so when it came time for jury selection in the trial, most people knew one family or the other. John Brady’s attorney argued for a change of venue, but the trial remained local and became known› as “one of the biggest spectacles in the collective Evangeline Parish memory.”
Fontenot had a rough book proposal that doubled as her honors thesis coming out of Louisiana State University in 2018, but wasn’t ready to share it with the world yet.
Her book stalled as she moved houses, got married during the pandemic and mourned her grandfather’s death. Her dad finally encouraged her to write a query letter. When she saw that the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival was offering a critique panel with young agents, she signed up and got five minutes with Mina Hamedi with Janklow & Nesbit, who liked her idea and invited her to send a formal query.
It only took about two months for Hamedi to sell what would become Home of the Happy to Mariner Books — an imprint of HarperCollins that has notably published George Orwell’s 1984 and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.
For Fontenot, what followed was a “whirlwind.” She was given a year and an advance to finish the book. She turned it in just as the 2022-2023 HarperCollins strike got going and lost her editor, bringing progress on the publication of her work to a slow crawl.
In the end, the wait was worth it. Her new editor, Ivy Givens, was from the South and understood Fontenot’s vision for the book. She helped her to cut and restructure to better move back and forth between historical information and her own present-day research, the author says.
The final structure is divided into five parts. Chapters act as vignettes with titles like “The Alibi,” “At Harry Balfa’s House,’ “The Alcatraz of the South” and “The Greatest Man That Ever Was,” a reference to Fontenot’s great-grandfather.
“In most of the memories my family members hold, PawPaw Aubrey remains firmly immortalized in his most recent self, his grandfatherhood,” she writes. “A fat old man in a suit and cowboy hat, driving to the bank every day and sitting in his recliner in the evenings, smoking a cigar.”
“The adoration was so overwhelming, and I was like, this can’t possibly be the most accurate portrayal of this man,” she says. “He had to be more complicated than that.” All she could find was a news article about LaHaye attending a rally in support of segregation. The main subject of her book remained elusive.
“I went in really naively, thinking I was going to find out the truth, and I didn’t know what it would be,” she shares. She sent a letter to the man still serving time for the crime, hoping to strike up a correspondence and get his side of the story.
“It was a search for truth,” she says. “The further I went in, the more evident it became that the truth was going to be really hard to find, maybe impossible.”
In the end, it was a family member who was pushed into the frame as a suspect. Their possible involvement, along with a bombshell from the Angola archives revealed toward the end of the book, almost gives Fontenot the answers she’s been searching for.
Proceedings to prove Balfa’s innocence are still ongoing, and a hearing is expected to take place this year. An audiobook recorded by actress Christine Lakin from the ‘90s sitcom “Step by Step” comes out the same day as the book, April 1. Fontenot also has an agent with United Talent shopping the story around for TV and film. She envisions “True Detective” vibes.
Fontenot will be at Cavalier House Books in conversation with her dad, moderated by Country Roads Editor James Fox-Smith, from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. on April 1. More book events follow through June 12.