How, Even as an Americaine, I learned Louisiana French Part 1

I remember singing "Frère Jacques" with my aunt in the bathroom of my grandmother's house on Park Boulevard in Baton Rouge when I was four. There is a tape of my parents playing with me when I was almost two where mom calls dad a gros tub and I repeat it, and he howls with laughter. Mom was constantly doing things like making us pat-pat-zoo (pain perdu) and cleaning the gra-doo (gras-doux) off of my toddler face. Dad was always repeating these words and laughing. I guess I was aware of the French because of his perspective. He was a Baton Rouge Creole, a musician, with that "dark French" skin. His family, despite having ample French, Spanish and Acadian heritage, had been Americanized a couple generations back in Baton Rouge, though his grandmother spoke some French for sure. That is where the Frere Jacques came in. Dad was charmed with the cute "coonass" things my mother, the youngest daughter of a Ville Platte merchant said. One of the first stories he told me about their courtship (besides them meeting at the Evangeline Club when she was 15, he was playing in the band Clutch) was about the time she asked him, upon arriving somewhere, if he was going to "get down" out of the car. He thought she meant "getting down" in the 1970's sense of the word. She just meant get out of the car.  She did not realize that, like so many other things she said, getting down from the car, saving the dishes, getting "to da terre" was not standard, and on the other side of the Atchafayala Basin, they talked differently. Now I know that the way we use "get down" comes from French. When stepping down from a car or carriage, the verb "descendre- to get down, descend" is used. We learned English from people whose first language was French, and so we speak French in English.

Dad always used the words he heard the Ville Plattians use in his songs. One song, "Frenchy Town" went: 

"Got drunk at the bar, 

ti pas honte, 

ti pas honte, 

threw a big tracas, 

no mo drinks for me..." 

Another one about him leaving for tour went: 

"I had to phone ya from Livonia 

It's me, T-Neg.

I'm on my way to California

Heart all broke like a paques-paques egg."

When dad entered the contest for the 1984 New Orleans World's Fair theme song, he went up against giants like Toussaint and Neville, and won first and second places with the two songs he wrote and recorded entirely himself in the studio at our house. He incorporated Louisiana French lyrics at the end of the winning song, Mardi Gras City, saying "'Eh là bas, allons..."

When my parents divorced I was in first grade. I moved to Ville Platte where my grandparents and extended family lived. There my first real immersion began. I picked up on how people talked differently from Baton Rouge. The week we moved I told my mother, Mom, I love Ville Platte, It's a lot like Baton Rouge, except in Baton Rouge they say "Main Street" and in Ville Platte they say "Main Street". That is, I was picking up on the way Cajun French and Cajun English emphasize the last syllable of a word or phrase. 

In Ville Platte, French was commonplace, but because it was never spoken to children of my generation, at least not in my family, as a young child I heard it, and also tuned it out to a point. I remember hearing it the most in Pointe Blue, at my best friend's house. Her grandmother Soileau lived down the road from her, and was a real French creole woman. She and her son, my friend's father, would sit in their cowhide rockers in front of the fireplace in her country kitchen. They'd rock on the linoleom floor behind us and chicane back and forth in French while we ate squirrel rice and gravy, spitting the bbs out until they went ting ting ting on the plate. We couldn't drink our pop while we ate, no. Had to eat, then drink. We got a check cola on ice from under the sink. Before dinner, we washed our hands in the corner of the kitchen in an old time bassin with a pitcher to pour fresh water. The water in the bassin stayed cloudy with soap. When we were bored, we chased the sheep in the back yard of her house or went to explore the ancient sharecropper barn. Sometimes, my friend's dad would leave to run his traps, and come home having caught something mysterious, like a pure black coyote.

One day, I asked Mr. Soileau about what they were saying, what language was it? He said it was French and asked me if I wanted to learn. I did. He was eating a banana. He showed it to me. "Banane" he said. I repeated. That's easy, I thought. If that's French, I can do that. I kept that word "banane" in my head like a treasure, my first real French word. Old Mrs. Soileau gave us Moon Pies and pop rouge for a snack when I'd spend the weekend there. She'd always say, "Aw, Cher, you so fat!" to me. My friend's parents assured me that it was a compliment, and I struggled to understand, but after so many times of her telling me, I did start to understand. I loved her ways. I loved her cooking and her button collection and her kind eyes. Surely, though, to her, I was a 'tite Americaine. I had an Americain last name, I was the granddaughter of the owner of the only department store in the parish who spoke French for business only. And I was fat. Americaine.

In fifth grade, I moved schools and went to Vidrine Elementary. In the mornings I'd ride with Ms. Dolly Fontenot and her son, and she'd listen to KVPI, the town radio station. We'd listen to the news in French and to the radio program called the Tasse de Cafe, all very lively and almost all in Louisiana French. The whole drive through the misty cow fields of the Vidrine Road, I would listen, and pretend that I, too understood. I did understand when they were advertising a buisness and giving the telephone number because they'd say, "trois-six-trois" (363) which was the prefix that all the phone numbers in Ville Platte began with. So I must have known my numbers. Then, low and behold, the next year, on the Sacred Heart playground, a little Buller girl taught me how to say "fee bee tan" (fils de putain) or SOB, in French. Americaine or not, I was learning.