July 2006

I moved to the Prairie des Femmes on July 14, 2006. On the 30th I went to the first Table Francaise at Nunu's in Arnaudville when it was on the bayou.

Sainte Anne, or How I learned Louisiana French Part 5

In college I kept my interest in French by copying Cajun French songs and French poems into notebooks and trying to figure them out. Then I met a couple of new friends at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who spoke French: Marie from Vermillion Parish and Jean from Jeff Davis Parish. They were fresh back from a French immersion program at the Universite' Sainte Anne, where they had become fluent. This was interesting to me, so I kept this Sainte Anne place in the back of my mind.

Through my new friends, I was exposed to a local French world in Lafayette different than the one I grew up with. Marie was raised in a rural cane field in Vermillion Parish with her French-speaking extended family in the neighboring pasture, but in college, she roomed with an enigmatic French woman with dark eyeliner and severe bangs. Marie's best friend André, another product of Ste Anne, became a dear friend, also. He was from Kaplan and spoke a beautiful French, so logically, like the way West Africans speak it.
 
Our fun friend Jean hosted weekly "bon temps" poker games where he expounded on the delights and mysteries of the Sainte Anne place and the petit bois (little wood) that surrounded it. We drank and played cards and he spoke French and played Cajun music on the guitar. He said things like "Ta mama m'a dit non, mais ton papa m'a dit Ouais!" (your mama told me no but your daddy told me yes!) He knew a lot about Louisiana French music. His roommate also spoke French, so I practiced and absorbed with them. Jean showed me the music of Canray Fontenot like Les Barres de la Prision, La Table Ronde and a few others. Those were the first songs I began to understand, thanks to good ole Jean.

 

Les Barres de la Prision by Canray Fontenot

Good-bye, chère vieille Mom,
Good-bye, pauvre vieux Pop,
Good-bye, à mes frères, et mes chères petites soeurs,
Moi, j'ai été condamné
Pour la balance de ma vie,
Dans les barres de la prison.

Moi, j'ai roulé,
Je m'ai mis à malfaire,
J'avais la tête dure, j'ai rentré dans le tracas,
Asteur je suis condamné
Pour la balance de ma vie
Dans les barres de la prison.

Ma pauvre vieille maman
Elle s'a mis sur ses genoux
Ses deux mains sur la tète en pleurant pour moi
Elle dit, "Mm-mm,
Cher petit garçon Moi,
je vas jamais te revoir.
Toi, t'as été condamné
Pour la balance de ta vie
Dans les barres de la prison"

J'ai dit, "Chère vieille maman,
Pleure pas pour moi,
Faut tu pries pour ton enfant pour essayer de Sauver son âme,
De les flammes de l'enfer"

Then I took a dry French grammar class at UL where I always sat toward the back.   One day, the director of Sainte Anne, the charming and eloquent Jean-Douglas Comeau, came to speak to us. That day, I happened to sit in the front. His words resonated in my ears. Soon after, my parents and grandparents agreed to send me to the five week summer program to learn to speak French for real. I am thankful they took a chance on me, because this Sainte Anne place was about to change the trajectory of my life.

Before I left, I went to my grandparent's to look at some genealogy from our Acadian  ancestors. They were in Port Royal, Nova Scotia and many other places in Acadie and France. At twenty years old, I had never heard this, or even knew that I had any Acadian blood or was "Cajun". Plus Papa said that our family was one of the only ones in Ville Platte who had any Acadian blood at all, because PawPaw Willie was from Saint Martinville. Most people in Evageline Parish are "straight from France" like they say. Who knew?! I copied the names in my notebook. One was named Joseph dit l'Officier Guilbeau.

So I left the summer of 2002 from the town of Scott (where the west begins) where I met up with Jean's roommate and a few other students and counselors. We drove from Scott to Canada in a van, the five of us. They had all done the drive many times, I was the new one. When we hit Tennessee we stopped at a Cracker Barrel and I saw the Blue Hills for the first time and was all Keyaw! For a girl from Flat Town, it was a very beautiful sight!

I was thrilled to arrive in Canada where the border guards were waiting for me because my Louisiana mother had called to reinforce that her daughter was leaving the country with her blessing. We arrived in New Brunswick and took a ferry that smelled of fish and gasoline across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia. I noticed the French signs everywhere, and the new, rocky coastline. The thinner air was less humid. My hair was bouncy and bountiful. I was in a foreign country!

Off the ferry, we traveled down a long rural coast road with neat houses and little communities like Saulnierville, Comeauville, and Grosses Coques (Big Clams), dotted along the way. It was a bit like home. We arrived at dusk in Pointe de L'Eglise (Church Point!) Nouvelle Ecosse at the Universite' Sainte Anne on the banks of the Baie Ste Marie. The tides of the bay are some of the strongest in the world, and the ocean rose and fell twice daily. We walked out hundreds of feet into the "dry" ocean bed and explored the seaweed, snails, tide pools and rock formations out there. I thought of my ancestors who knew these grey shores. I thought of them feeling the pull of these tides as I was now, even using the great tide to live and thrive there in Acadie.

The first day there we settled into our co-ed(!) dorms and explored the campus. My window in  Beaulieu (beautiful place) overlooked a green meadow, the petit bois (everything Jean had said was true) and the bay beyond. There was no air conditioning in the building. (I was in a foreign country!) The cool sea air came through my window all summer. I wanted to look in the Clare phone book, expecting to see the impossibly foreign names of exotic Canadians. I saw Comeaus, Saulniers (Sonnier) LeBlancs, Heberts, Muises, and Boudreaus. Same names as Louisiana. Where was I? A foreign country?

The second morning there we took a placement test and signed a contract that detailed the commitment it took to learn this language: no English at any time, whatsoever. If you were caught speaking English three times in five weeks you had to leave the program. This rule was enforced. I knew about it, but signing that contract was still surreal. I was relieved, though, when I lifted the pen and spoke French for the first time, I could actually get by with what I knew. People asked me how come I could speak French, and it was only then I realized that it was because I was from Ville Platte, Louisiana. I'd never had that perspective of my home before.

The University of Sainte Anne is an excellent immersion experience. I became fluent in French in a total of ten weeks, over two summers. Our days and nights there were full to the brim with experience; everything we did was new and wonderful to me, especially hearing French all day. I found myself bursting into laughter when I understood something for the first time, thinking it sounded so funny in French. It was like latent joy, learning the words that seemed to echo in my head. Once, a few weeks in to the program, I found myself humming the lyrics to "Johnny Can't Dance" a Cajun song that I had heard and danced to all my life. All of a sudden, I could hear the words, like I could "hear" English. They were more than just sounds. I understood them. Poor Little Johnny, he can't dance. Pauvre T-Johnny. peux pas. danser.  I ran down the hall of my dorm, looking for a fellow Ville Plattian to share the moment with. I found her down the hall and I showed her what we both knew:

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny voulait danser

Pauvre tit' Johnny peux pas danser

Il as essayé, Il as essayé

Mais pauvre ‘tit Johnny peux pas danser

Tout les samedi soir il allais à les soirées

Pour guetter tout les filles danser

Il as essayé, Il as essayé

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny peux pas danser

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny

Pauvre ‘tit Johnny peux pas danser

We took two language classes in the morning. I tried to use my Louisiana French in there, writing things like "pas rien" in my essay, which my teacher marked as wrong. I didn't like that, because I had heard "pas rien" my whole life and I knew it was right. I also was so proud when I showed her my translated lyrics to "La Toussaint" by Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, my favorite song. It's about getting together and putting flowers on graves on All Saints Day. As a Catholic school kid who grew up white-washing graves in the fall as part of religion class, I understood that song really well. I don't know if my teacher knew why I was so attracted to it.

 La Toussaint at the Liberty Theatre- Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys

Le premier de novembre, La Toussaint
On se met tous ensemble
Mettre les fleurs sur les tombes
Pour appeller et honorer nos ancêtres
Honorer leur travaille et leur sagesse

C'est assez d'être enterré dans ses tombes
Chers enfants, enterre-nous pas avec le train et de l'argent
Accordez, accordez avec nous-autres.
Accordez et jouez quelquechose pour nous danser.

After lunch there was a daily workshop you chose (I took arts one year and nature the next). In the afternoon there was an outing to go somewhere. In the evening there were events like the funny olympics, giant musical chairs, bands, shows, games, or films on the lawn. On the weekends there were theme parties like Toge(Toga), Tex-mex, Noel, Halloween, and Retro, at the Château (Castle) the on-campus bar, and since the drinking age in Canada is nineteen, we got the French flowing there nightly. There were activities to participate in no matter what your age or interest. There were always new things to do with interesting people in a new language, living together in a new place. It was sometimes frustrating but always a lot of fun. The two hundred students lived together on campus like les frères and les sœurs. We played softball in teams, swam in the cold bay, and dreamed every night in French. They said that as long as you did it in French, you could do pretty much anything you wanted at Ste Anne.
That was a joke but not too far from the truth.

Of all of the fun I had and lifelong friends I met and wonderful things that I learned while I was up there, what impressed me most was the Acadian people. They were like us Louisiana people, strong. They fished lobsters out of the Atlantic instead of crawfish out of the swamps. They even looked like us. They had the same names as we did, the same manners, it seemed to me. They were indeed our not-too-distant cousins, but I never knew that they even existed. They were the descendants of the Acadians that returned to Nova Scotia after the deportation. Who knew? Well, the country of Canada knew. The Acadians had services in French. I noticed that people there flew the Acadian flag as proudly as some fly the American flag here. They painted it on their barns and cars and even wore it in a variety of ways. The people up there still spoke the dialect of Acadian French, the girls danced Acadian dances, the people cooked Acadian food in the way we cooked gumbo. All of them, it seemed.

Once, I was at the only grocery store in the area, Foodland, that was the local one-stop shop, much like the small town grocery stores back home. As I was marveling in the aisles over a box of Canadian French Little Debbie Cakes, a mother pushing a little girl passed me. It was so normal of a moment that I could have been back home in Louisiana, but when I listened, the mother was speaking Acadian French to the little girl. Then I really wished I was in Louisiana.  In that moment, I knew that outside of all of the madness and mayhem of the college, beyond the songs I copied, beyond the language fading in Louisiana even as I was up in this foreign-motherland trying to learn it, I wanted to teach my own children this language because really, "ti-Debbie" sounded way too good in Cajun French not to.

I'm proud to be a Cajun from Church Point (Nova Scotia...)

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.