Zoé “Zoway” Broussard Demet

Zoé Broussard Demet was born June 22, 1912, in Youngsville, Louisiana, to Alceé and Aurelia Trahan Broussard. She was the second of nine children in this French speaking family. Zoé attended a one-room schoolhouse named the Verot School in Lafayette Parish, Louisiana when the Bayou State enforced its rule forbidding the French language to be spoken at school. At the hands of teachers and students alike, Zoé was ridiculed if she spoke her native tongue and was even required to spell her name phonetically thus changing her name to “Zoway” on all future documents. Zoway completed the sixth grade, but left school to help her family work in the cotton fields. At the age of 18, she traveled to Biloxi to stay with her grandmother and work in the seafood factories, but only stayed three months before returning home to help with sugar cane production. In spite of their efforts the crop failed to produce enough to support the family, so they sold their eleven acres and moved to Biloxi for all to work in the seafood industry. Shortly after, Noah Demet, Zoway’s sweetheart from Louisiana followed the family and the couple was married.

To her children, Zoway would describe her factory work as: “It was not like today, not just eight hours. When the boats came in, the whistle blew and we went to work and stayed until we were done… sometimes 2 o’clock in the morning. Some of the children worked in the morning before they went to school. The little children stayed in playpens while their mothers worked.”

Regarding home life, she would state: “We lived in the [seafood] camps with no electricity or indoor plumbing. I washed clothes on a rub board and we had the kind of refrigerator that you put a block of ice in and there was a man who would deliver the ice. When I had my two kids, John Rogers and Velma Ann, I worked in the factory the whole time. Both babies were born in the camps.”

Zoway Demet lived entirely on Point Cadet in Biloxi, first in the seafood camp and later in a house on Cedar Street, and finally, on Cadet Street across from Gulf Central Seafood factory. Her front porch view was of the huge mound of oyster shells that was common in that era. Eventually, this mound would be replaced by a parking lot, but Zoway would spend her final days on her treasured Point Cadet until her passing in 2006 at the age of 93.