The white Jeep Wrangler sprinting down the gravel road, stirring up dust in the early morning light, bore no markings of the U.S. Postal Service. No lights, no logos.
But everyone in this corner of Acadiana knew who was inside: Aleke Kanonu Jr., the only mail carrier in town.
Kanonu covers 100 miles a day, a third of them dirt or gravel, delivering to more than 655 mailboxes, doorsteps and, pretty often, people’s hands. On a recent morning, as he turned into Marla Taylor’s long, curved driveway, Taylor approached him with a wide smile, her arms extended.
The 50-year-old grew up seven miles away, in Rayne, where his mother is from and where he and his wife are raising their teenage daughter. He shares a name with his father, a Nigerian musician, and for years he refereed local basketball, baseball and football games, before a doctor amputated the lower part of his leg.
So his nicknames include “Junior” and “the referee.” But after 22 years with the U.S. Postal Service, he said, grinning, “everyone just calls me the mailman.”
He’s also vice president of the Louisiana Rural Letter Carriers’ Association, the state chapter of a national union organizing protests across the country, including one last Sunday in Baton Rouge, warning that restructuring the postal service would most hurt the people who live along roads like these, some of them surrounded by crawfish ponds.
