An Interview with Jimmie Martinez: Author of Cajun Chameleon

Jimmie Martinez is the author of a total of four books. He has a BA degree from Louisiana State University in New Orleans, now the University of New Orleans. His interests include traveling, reading and watching classic film noir movies. He is also a passionate Saints and LSU football fan.

The former New Orleans Policeman and Chief Administrative Officer of the City of Kenner, Louisiana and co-founder and CEO of a civil engineering firm is now retired. Born and raised in New Orleans, he resides in Kenner and his beach condo in Orange Beach, Alabama with his wife Gale.

Tell us about your book.

Cajun Chameleon is a story about living in the South during the 1960s and 1970s at a time when segregation was the law. Jax Badeaux, the young white protagonist, struggled to cope with the complexities of life like the: racial revolution, his extreme poverty, and insecurities. The specter of the prejudices he witnessed awakened his social consciousness, and he eventually found his moral compass.

Spiced with the flavor of simpler times, when TVs were black and white and most Southerners believed society should be segregated that way, Cajun Chameleon is one part memoir, another part social commentary on the historical South’s seamier side, and tells a story about one person’s struggle to be free of both poverty and prejudices.

Why did you want to write a book?

One of my grandchildren was studying the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s at school asked, “Gramps did you drink out of the white only fountain when you were young?” I paused and was struck by his question and then answered. “Yes. It was the law.” He looked at me with some disappointment and then changed the subject.

I pondered his question and attempted to understand why, as a kid, I drank out of the white only water fountain. I certainly no longer believed in segregation. But, how did that life changing metamorphose occur? So attempting to answer my grandson’s question, I decided to write a historical fiction about one person’s journey to be free of racial prejudices.

This story is not unique and over time happened in the South to millions. I plan to give each of my grandkids a copy of the book with an inscription. “Even if something is the law, that doesn’t make it right.”

Tell us about the genre you wrote in, and why you chose to write this sort of book.

To Kill a Mocking Bird is historical fiction and my favorite book that deals with racial issues and moral transformation of the book’s female protagonist. I attempted to tell a similar story, set in more recent times, that shows a moral conversion of a young white man’s views about segregation; a Bildungsroman.