In a six-square-mile patch of land in St. James Parish — and nowhere else on earth — farmers grow Perique tobacco. The variety is pressed under weights in whiskey barrels for months, fermenting into something dark, peppery, and violently aromatic: a tobacco so concentrated it is never smoked straight, only blended in small amounts with milder leaves. The Choctaw and Chickasaw were growing it before Europeans arrived. Pierre Chenet, a Acadian farmer, learned the curing method from indigenous producers around 1824 and began the commercial tradition. The Louisiana soil here — a specific combination of alluvial clay and river silt — produces a chemical composition in the leaf that cannot be replicated anywhere else. Agronomists have tried in Virginia, in Africa, in the Caribbean. It grows but it does not taste the same. Perique is why the River Road's agricultural history is not just plantation cotton and sugar. It is also this: a single indigenous tobacco variety, tended by Acadian farmers, that never left the parish it started in and never will.