Profile of a Visionary—Mary Lou Decossaux

She told the bus driver to pull over.  She asked him where the nearest highway was, walked to it, and hitchhiked to France. 

She didn't speak French.  And she only had $100. 

"In those days there would be a bear chained to a tree in almost everyone's front yard.  They didn't have dogs in the front yard--they had bears--and the little bears when they were being trained lived inside with the people."

In 1977, in Arrous, a small village in the French Pyrenees, Mary Lou Decossaux discovered that her grandfather had been a dancing bear master.  He had left France and traveled to the United States for seven years with his bear.

There were 400 people from the neighboring hamlets who did the same thing.  It was a local industry.

Decossaux was in her third year of college when the basketball team announced a trip to Europe.  Though disenchanted with basketball--she found the coach too militaristic--she signed on for the trip. 

"As soon as the plane was in the air I burst into tears.  I just had the overwhelming bodily experience that something had opened up for me.  I don't know what--but it came from my heart."

In Switzerland, when the team was heading home, she told the bus driver to pull over.  She asked him where the nearest highway was, walked to it and hitchhiked to France.  She didn't speak French.  And she only had $100. 

"I just appeared one day in Toulouse, where my Aunt Julia lived.  She took me to Arrous, where my grandfather's house was.  There were 12 stone houses with slate roofs, tiny mud streets and five inhabitants where once there had been 250."

A man in the village told her about her grandfather's profession.  Further digging revealed that the bear masters started as shepherds looking for employment during the long winter months.  "They traveled throughout France with their bears.  They'd stop at a little town and do a number--they had a tambourine or some kind of instrument or they'd sing to the bear--and it would dance."

In the late 1800s, bear masters started to come to the United States.  "They followed the railroad tracks because the bears upset the horses on the main roads."  Decossaux has collected stories of bear masters freezing to death in New England blizzards and weathering sandstorms in the Utah deserts.  And there were other kinds of trouble:  "Once two dancing bear masters got in a fight with some cowboys in Texas.  The bear masters won because they were using their feet--you know how the French kickbox?  The cowboys led with their fists and got kicked in the side of the head."

The masters also wrestled the bears.  "They'd pretend the bear was going to win.  But the masters would eventually win.  And sometimes the dancing bears would go in the saloons and would stand there and drink beer at the bar."

After six months in France, Decossaux returned to the United States and resumed her studies.  Her journey had opened many doors.  "After that first trip, I had enough French to speak to my Mom in French for the first time.  When I spoke to her in French, she started unraveling all of her past to me."

After graduation, Decossaux worked for awhile to earn traveling money, then headed back to France.  She wound up studying history at an innovative university, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.  Her M.A. thesis was on immigration from the French Pyrenees.  It was the story of her own family, among many others, and before she wrote it, it was largely untold.  It started with the dancing bear masters.

"They created a wave of immigration from the Pyrenees to New York City.  A few of them decided to sell their bears and get jobs in French restaurants, or the grand hotels.  Several fine French restaurants are owned by descendents of dancing bear masters.

"The next generation left for New York to work in restaurants.  This was my mother's generation.  They had cousins and uncles and aunts who were already working over here and knew how to get them jobs.  They established a network that worked really well.  It essentially caused a mass exodus from the Pyrenees."

This time Decossaux stayed six years in France.  One day, on a trip to Arrous, she found some mice-nibbled manuscripts in an attic.  They were by an almost completely forgotten visionary, Joseph Founau--"Sapou."  This was the start of her next big project.

Sapou spent 13 years in New York as a maitre d'.  Through his work, he met people like the arctic explorer Amundsen, who was the subject of a Sapou novel which is now lost.  Most of Sapou's writings were destroyed after his death.  The three manuscripts Decossaux found--and another that surfaced later from the walls of a pig sty--are all that survive.

After his years in New York, and a stint in World War I, Sapou returned to Arrous as a man with ideas.  He founded a sporting club, held boxing matches, started a union and designed a town seal.  He even composed an official Arrous song--a sort of local national anthem. 

"His desire was to make Arrous a model city.  But the people at that time were not into changing.  Everyone enjoyed the amusement he bought--they had wonderful dances--but they really didn't take him seriously."

Decossaaux wrote a book in French on Sapou:  "Sapou: Portrait D'Un 'Original' D'Arrous." She recently received a fellowship from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy to translate it into English.

Her other current project is renovating a house on Fulton Hill with her friend, Brenda Kroupa.  It's been as much of an adventure as any trip to France. 

The house was supposed to be finished last August.  It wasn't--but Decossaux and Kroupa had given notice at their apartment.  They had to move into a shed behind their house-in-progress. 

"The only water we had was the cold water hose.  We sat a sink on a barrel and hooked the hose to that.  We bathed outdoors in that sink at night and cooked our food on a Coleman stove on the front porch."

They finally moved into their house Thanksgiving Day.

The house, which the pair mostly designed themselves, is striking for its light, airy feeling and use of recycled materials.  An imaginative blending of old and new, it partakes of the same creative spirit that characterizes Decossaux's work.

"Dancing Bears and Visionaries" first appeared in the July 9, 1991 issue of Style Weekly.