The One-Man Acadian Liberation Front : When the British expelled the Acadians from Nova Scotia, they didn’t count on Walter Perrin. Two hundred and forty years later, this Cajun lawyer wants justice.

Frowning mightily, Warren Perrin gazes around his garden. Clearly, something is amiss.

“Is it the azaleas?” asks a visitor. “Do they look a little wilted?”

No, it isn’t the azaleas. And it isn’t the rhododendrons. Or the fishpond. Or the sandlot.

Then what is it?

“This,” says Perrin, pointing at what should be a lawn. “I don’t know why, but I can’t grow grass.”

His lawn has been resodded three times now, and a lesser person would have called it quits. Not Perrin. He has every intention of trying again.

A successful lawyer in Lafayette, La., Perrin loves a contest. Though small and hampered by bad vision, he tried out for and eventually captained a weightlifting squad that placed first in the nation four years in a row when he attended the University of Southwestern Louisiana in the mid-1960s.

Then, in 1972, just months out of law school, he took on Texaco. His more experienced colleagues said he couldn’t win, but the rookie proved them wrong, forcing the oil giant to raise significantly the royalties it pays his parents to operate a natural gas recycling plant on a portion of their land.

More recently, Perrin has thrown down another gauntlet, challenging an institution more formidable than Texaco: the British government. His complaint this time has nothing to do with royalties, but with an event he calls “one of history’s great wrongs”--the peacetime expulsion of his Acadian ancestors from Nova Scotia in 1755. Some of these exiles--a precise number has not been determined--settled in Louisiana where, over time, the name “Acadian” evolved into “Cajun.”

Perrin is seeking neither monetary damages nor the restoration of ancestral lands. He doesn’t want an apology either because, he says, the government didn’t order the expulsion; it was an action taken by a rogue officer, a man he calls “one of the Ollie Norths of this world.” What he does want is: (1) that the British government admit that the Acadians were done an injustice; (2) that it order an inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the expulsion; and (3) that the expulsion order be officially revoked. Until it is, he says, he and people like him remain exiles and, technically at least, risk arrest when they visit Nova Scotia.

He lays such store by these demands that four years ago, he incorporated them into a petition and sent them to Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street. Oh, and there was something else: Perrin advised both Queen Elizabeth II and then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that unless he heard from them within 30 days, he would file a lawsuit.

The next four weeks were long ones. If the British ignored him, he’d look ridiculous. “I’d be seen as a kook or a joke and be printed up in the offbeat column of the newspaper.” And then, just a day before his deadline, the British Embassy in Washington called. Take no action, he was instructed. Someone will contact you within 24 hours. It was all very cloak-and-dagger--only missing was a password--but Perrin was ecstatic. He was contacted a day later by a lawyer retained by the British consulate general in Houston. And the two have been exchanging letters and phone calls ever since.

He holds up the file containing their correspondence. It’s hefty. But beyond this tantalizing glimpse, he declines to describe their exchanges in any detail.

“I’ve got to keep that quiet,” he says. “We agreed to negotiate in private and in good faith. Failing that, all bets are off.” But he did divulge this: The British have made “some interesting offers.”

Then he’s confident that his three demands will be met sometime soon? Perrin invokes his favorite word. “Absolutely,” he says.

But the British are not so sanguine. “I don’t think the government feels there’s any particular point in having an official investigation or anything like that,” says Helen Mann, Britain’s vice consul in Houston. “And I don’t see how you could possibly describe a contemporary Cajun as living in exile. To say that a Cajun who travels to Nova Scotia is breaking the law is a real stretch.”

BEFORE I MET PERRIN, I’D HEARD OF THE TEXACO CASE AND HIS WEIGHTLIFTNG prowess. In the mental picture I had formed of him, he resembled Falstaff--loud, impetuous, flamboyant. And big, of course, “a huge hill of flesh.” But he’s not like that at all. Slight and solemn and self-effacing, he’s defiantly undramatic. Dressed in gray and as thin as a broomstick, he looks penitential.

He offers to take me to Erath, a little town 15 miles from Lafayette, where he has a branch office and runs a small museum. Our route takes us through fields of sugar cane and soybean. Perrin looks around appreciatively. “The land here is completely flat,” he says. I am reminded suddenly of John Gay, the English poet who hated hills because they offended his sense of order.

Perrin’s life has changed dramatically in the last five years. And all because of a question posed by one of his sons. “Why were the Cajuns thrown out of Nova Scotia?” the boy wanted to know. “What did we do wrong?”

“And I wasn’t able to tell him,” says Perrin. “Like most Cajuns at the time, I knew very little about our history.” And so he began to read. And the more he read, the more livid he became. In 1755, Acadians numbering in the thousands were deported--some to Europe, some to the West Indies, and some to the British colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland and the Carolinas. The expulsions weren’t just immoral, he says, they were illegal. Only a governor could order a deportation and, in 1755, Nova Scotia’s governor was ill in London. By presuming to act on his behalf, Charles Lawrence, then a mere lieutenant governor, was exceeding his authority.

Why expel the Acadians at all? Two reasons, says Carl Brasseaux, a professor of Cajun history at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. At a time when Britain and France both sought control of North America, the French-speaking Roman Catholics were thought to pose a security threat. And then there was the matter of their lands. “Beginning in 1754,” says Brasseaux, “Gentlemen’s Quarterly in London ran a number of articles saying that probably the best farmland on the northeast Atlantic coast was in Nova Scotia, and since it was occupied by Papists, the time had come to turn it over to Protestants.”

The diaspora decimated Nova Scotia’s 15,000 Acadians. “It was genocide; a holocaust,” says Brasseaux. By shipping the Acadians to places like Virginia and Massachusetts, “the overt intention was to force their absorption by the Anglo population,” he says. But thousands died of exposure, malnutrition and disease. “Initially, the deaths were an offshoot of this (assimilation) policy. But over time, the policy changed. The goal now was not just to destroy the culture, but the people as well.”

Brasseaux commends Perrin’s efforts, but wonders if he isn’t being too conciliatory. “I wouldn’t be surprised if more militant voices emerge,” he says--a reference to a small but increasingly vocal group of lawyers in Louisiana and New Brunswick. “It may be that the British government is blowing a golden opportunity to extricate itself from this situation with minimal damage.”

But Perrin has no intention of changing course. “I get letters probably once a month from somebody saying, you’re not being aggressive enough; you need to file a lawsuit; you need to sue for $1 billion. Well, I accept no money from anybody, so it’s still my petition. I prefer being conciliatory. Back a cat into a corner, and it’s going to scratch your eyes out. But pet him, and you’ve made a friend.”

TWO OF PERRIN’S CLIENTS ARE WAITING when we reach his office: a man struck by a car and another, a long-distance trucker, injured in a collision. I ask the trucker if he missed being able to work. “God, yes,” he says. “Every time I see a rig, my heart aches.”

Perrin specializes in personal-injury cases “to help the people I grew up with. My relatives and the people I know are working people--people who get hurt offshore, hurt in accidents. I opened this office to represent them.”

People drop by all afternoon, many of them just to chat. Since filing his petition, Perrin has become something of a celebrity. And not just in Louisiana. In New Brunswick, home to most of Canada’s Acadians, he’s seen as a hero. “The papers up there interview me all the time,” he says. His fame has even spread to France where, in April, 1993, he was invited to address a human-rights conference in Normandy.

His law office shares a one-story former bank building with the museum he founded five years ago. He did so, he says, “to try to excite the kids in the community about their heritage.” A modest collection, most of the exhibits were contributed by townspeople: cooking pots, branding irons, letters, maps, quilts and numerous editions of “Evangeline,” the Longfellow poem inspired by the Acadian exile.

There are photographs, too. By far the most startling is one of Perrin standing cheek by jowl with the achy-breaky-heart man, Billy Ray Cyrus. “It was taken at the Grammys a few years back,” he says. “I went out there with D.L. Menard.” Menard is known as the Hank Williams of Cajun music, and I mention admiring him a lot. “Heck, he lives just down the road,” he says. “Come on. I’ll take you to meet him.”

Menard, all sprawling nose and jutting ears, is standing on the porch when we reach his run-down bungalow. “Come on in,” he calls. “I’ve just made a fresh pot of coffee.” Though it’s mid-afternoon, the kitchen is in semi-darkness, everything painted a chestnut brown. “Have you seen this?” asks the 61-year-old performer. “It’s a Hank Williams flask. Wind it up and it plays ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart.’ ”

“Hank would have loved that,” says Menard’s wife, Louella. Then she returns to lecturing one of her grandchildren: “When I was your age, we got one pair of shoes a year. We had to learn to make them last.”

She was 13 when she and her husband married. “How old were you?” she asks him. “Pushing 20,” he says, sounding as if she had been his last chance.

The talk turns to lineage--a Cajun obsession--and Perrin tells them that his mother is expecting her first great-grandchild later that day. “It’s good for her,” he says. “My dad died in December. She needs this in her life.”

For the first time all day, Perrin looks relaxed, animated, telling us how his dad had served in the Pacific in World War II. “Who was your granddaddy?” Louella wants to know.

For some reason, the question delights him. He is among his own kind: the people he grew up with,the people he most admires. No trace of solemnity now. Warren Perrin is happy.

THREE WEEKS LATER, PERRIN drives me to St. Martinville, 15 miles from Lafayette, to see the Evangeline oak. Under this tree, the sundered lovers on whom Longfellow based his poem were supposedly reunited. “I would stress supposedly, “ says Perrin, anxious, I think, that he not seem credulous. “It’s all supposition.”

In the poem, Evangeline, exhausted by her years of searching, becomes a nun. One day, treating victims of a pestilence, she recognizes a dying man as her former lover. When he expires, she dies of grief, and the two are buried together, finally united.

The oak is a massive thing covered in moss and extending in all directions. Under its branches sit four old men, their faces as gnarled as the tree that gives them shade. A few feet away flows Bayou Teche, its red-brown waters the color of an aging gumbo. The Evangeline oak is dying--a situation viewed in St. Martinville with some dismay. Even if its claim to fame is spurious, this tree is a tourist attraction.

“Had Longfellow not written Evangeline in 1847, the expulsion would have become a footnote in history,” says Perrin. “By touching the world’s heart, he kept our story alive.”

He looks tired; he is just back from a holiday in Mexico in the course of which a car bomb exploded in front of his hotel. But for all his fatigue, he remains optimistic that Britain in time will yield. “I believe that absolutely. If I didn’t, I’d be fishing.”

He describes himself as “obnoxiously positive” and says it serves him well. But at times, he reminds one of the young women in 19th-Century novels who delude themselves that a glance from a man could only mean he intends marriage. When, for example, English historian Robert Lewis came to Lafayette last April to attend a conference about the expulsion, Perrin decided that he had been sent there by the Foreign Office “to feel us out, to see what kind of people we are.”

“That’s an astounding development,” he says. “His name was never publicly mentioned as being there officially. It was totally low key. (But) I know the British paid his expenses.”

But contacted at the University of Birmingham, Lewis says he represented no one at the conference. “I was in no official capacity whatsoever.” And he denies receiving any public money. “The university gave me 180 pounds, and I had a small grant to do research in Washington. I received no money from the government.”

Lewis subsequently wrote to Perrin asking that he not tell people he was some kind of government official. Perrin promised that any future reference he might make to the historian would describe him only as an “interested observer.”

Driving back to Lafayette, Perrin reaches into his box of cassettes. “What do you want to hear?” he says. “Cajun or Wagner?” To the rhythms of Beau Soleil, he explains the way exploring his history has changed him. “Discovering how the Acadians suffered has helped me to understand the sufferings of others,” he says. “African Americans, for example. I recently hired a young black lawyer. Five years ago, I wouldn’t have done that.”

He calls his wife on the car phone to tell her he is bringing home a guest for dinner. “Is there anything I should pick up?”

“Get a box of yellow-cake mix,” she says. “I’ll make an apple crumble.”

“I owe a lot to my wife,” he says later. “When I get too involved, she kind of shakes me and says, ‘Hey, there’s more to life than this petition.’ If it weren’t for her, this would be a full-time obsession.”

Does he ever fear he’ll fail? “Absolutely not,” he says. “I really don’t. Failure is relative. You can always salvage something.”

And if the British government sticks to its guns? What can be salvaged from that? There is a long pause. “I’ll pursue this for life if I have to. But if I don’t get an acknowledgment? Then at least I will have tried. A life placed at the service of a cause is a good life. It’s a good way to be remembered.”

He falls silent. And then, just for a moment, this “obnoxiously positive” man loses some of his confidence. “I always thought it would take five years. I think now it’s going to take longer. I hate to set timetables, but if there’s no breakthrough in, say, three months, six months, a year--then I’ll go ahead and file a lawsuit.”

If that happens, a court would have to weigh the merits of Perrin’s claim that the exile was carried out in violation of English and international law of the time. But which court? Perrin’s complaint involves three sovereign nations--the United States, Great Britain and Canada. “Jurisdiction is a problem,” he concedes. “No matter where I file, the British are going to say I’m in the wrong court. The case could end up in the European Court of Human Rights.”

By the time Perrin reaches home, his native optimism has again taken charge. He changes into jeans and a T-shirt. Opening a bottle of Medoc, he glances out at his garden. “That grass,” he says, shaking his head. “First thing tomorrow, I’ll order sod.”