KENNETH E. HALL OCTOBER 16, 2018 HOUSTON
"Write 200 lines: 'I must not speak French on the school grounds any more,'" the teacher told the little boy, because he spoke his native language in class. This little boy, who grew up to be a well-known Cajun fiddle player and songwriter.
How would you like to grow up and be scolded for being who you are?
"Soyez à la mode - Parlez Français!" read a small sign in the lower left corner of a store showwindow in Lafayette, Louisiana. It means: "Be in style - Speak French!" I smiled when I saw it, and walked in - ready to lay a little of the Gallic tongue on the folks who worked there. When I began to speak my Parisian French, the people there gave me a strange, offended look, almost as if I had intruded on something, and I was told that they did not speak French - that I should "talk English."
This was my introduction to what some call "Francophone Louisiana."
I had gotten a new job - one which required me to travel extensively throughout the state of Louisiana - among other places. A sizeable portion of south Louisiana is inhabited by Acadians - people whose ancestors came from Acadie (Acadia) - now known as Nova Scotia (New Scotland) in present-day Canada.
Acadians, also called "Cajuns", had for long been designated as the "largest unassimilated ethnic group" in the USA. You could have fooled me, with the "English-only" dubious greeting I got at that small shop I wandered into. So over the course of nearly five years, I made a point of seeking out Acadians in their hometowns, asking them questions, and listening to their stories. What I learned made me sad.
The Acadian language and culture is rapidly heading for EXTINCTION.
With such a large and widely-scattered number of people who identify themselves as Acadiens, how is such a thing possible? Here is what I learned after travelling through towns and villages in Acadiana for over half a decade, as well as actually living in Lafayette for another year and a half.
ENGLISH-SPEAKING AMERICA GAINS A NEW LANGUAGE
As millions of non-English-speaking people flooded virtually unchecked into the United States of America during the 1800's, many dozens of languages could be heard and even read on the streets and in newspapers in the cities and towns of the United States. With the acquisition of the French territory of Louisiana in 1803, FRENCH became a major American language . There were relatively few Spanish speakers in what made up the United States at the beginning of the XVIIIth Century, s with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, French actually became the second most-widely used language in the relatively new country, and its speakers were not immigrants! Their ancestors arrived in the 1700's, so by the time Louisiana became a U.S. territory, there were already native-born Cajuns there. They did not cross the border - this time, at least, the border crossed THEM!
For the first half-century or so, Acadians kept mostly to themselves. Their area was large and geographically diverse, being divided roughly into three major areas: prairie, river, and swamp. After their arrival in the Spanish colony of Luisiana in the late 1700's, these people spread out, cultivating rice and sugarcane, and surviving in the backwater bayous and swamps of Louisiana's Everglades by fishing and trapping
They spoke the language of their forefathers - a country dialect of French that had changed little in the few generations their ancestors spent in the harsh, chilly grounds of what is now Canada.
Cajuns did interact with other peoples - they traded with Native Americans. They lived among and even intermarried with immigrant Spaniards who also came to settle this vast territory. Cajuns also began to acquire slaves, just as other European settlers had, but their contact with English-speaking "Americans" was kept to a minimum and was limited to the most necessary trade contacts.
The U.S. Government likewise left the Cajuns alone - at least for awhile. It must be pointed out that the country was new and nation-building, including the formation of a consensus of the people, was a task that lay before them. It is relatively easy to gain a consensus if all of the population of a given land shares the same history, ethnicity, religion, and language. Iceland, for example, is composed of people who are share the same race, religion, ancestry, and language. But where the United States of America was concerned, work had to be done if "e pluribus unum" was to actually succeed in this wild, mostly unsettled land.
In order to grow as a republic, the United States allowed people to come from many places. Many of these immigrants were not English-speaking. Unlike the immigrants of today, back in the Nineteenth Century, immigrants were expected to adapt themselves to the new land of their choice, and the overwhelming majority of immigrants during this period actually aspired to become Americans. They worked hard, learned the English language, and grew to love the place they now called home.
When the Acadians arrived in Louisiana, they continued to speak French, since there was no incentive for them to do otherwise. The Native Americans of Louisiana had long ago adopted the French language as a lingua franca and the largest city of the territory was populated mostly by French-speaking people. African slaves had no choice in the matter.
But as the country grew, changes in linguistic and ethnic patterns likewise were apparent. Germans and Czechs settled in Texas, Mexicans were natives already in what became Texas, Swedes inhabited Minnesota, etc. That added diversity to a once white Anglo-Saxon nation, and at first nobody saw multiculturalism as a bad thing.
Then came President Theodore Roosevelt. He made a push for immigrants to do more to adapt and assimilate to their new land. His speech in 1907 states his philosophy very clearly:
“In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American … There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag … We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language … and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.”
This seems reasonable - be a part of our nation.
It is around this time that many Americans sought to implement the slogan "E Pluribus Unum" (from many, one) literally, and began to do so at the most basic level: the schools.
Immigrants in their thirties or older cannot be expected to change their core beliefs, their customs, their culture, or much of anything else - no matter how hard they tried. As foreigners they came, and as foreigners they died - in a foreign land. The big difference was that they had a love for their adopted country and were given the same rights as every other American citizen.
Their children, however, were another matter entirely. They could - and in all rights should be made to speak the national language, as well as be taught (some say indoctrinated) American ideals. In every schoolhouse, the "English Only" policy was put in place, and since there were places in which numerous languages were spoken, this action was expedient but in these cases NECESSARY.
In the case of Native Americans, becoming "American" meant losing their tribal identity - the most important thing to them. Assimilation - "Americanization" did the work that diseases, resettlement, and guns did not do - it did not kill the race, it killed the bonds that held the people together. It killed the very ESSENCE of these peoples.
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were to have a similar experience: they were prohibited from speaking Spanish on the school grounds, and in many cases, Hispanic families also began speaking English at home. The result was a generation of Hispanics who did not speak Spanish! They retained many of their cultural characteristics, but the majority of urban hispanics lost their language nearly completely.
I spoke to a young man who had Mexican features - his first and last name were Hispanic - but he himself spoke not a work of Spanish. He informed me that, as a child, he was told by everyone that he should not speak Spanish, and that his parents and grandparents spoke Spanish when they didn't want the children to understand them. Yet when he applied for a job, he was asked if he was "bilingual"! They told him it would be a plus if he were. He was shocked.
I myself recall my Grandparents speaking French when they did not want me to understand what they were saying, so I could relate. I would hear this later on among Acadians as a mantra - what I thought was a unique family experience turned out to be so common as to make it the norm.
Throughout Acadiana, children were made to go to school. Formerly, they worked on the family farm, hunted, and trapped. Schools were for the "Americans" *"les Goddam". This was to change as truancy laws were passed - children HAD to go to school.
One Cajun gentleman told me that when he started school, everything he heard was a "mumble" - a gibberish. The first English word he learned was: "beescyusd" (be excused). He didn't know what the word meant - only that if he raised his hand and said it, he was allowed to get up and temporarily extricate himself from his unhappy predicament of being in a place he did not want to be.
Some of these old Cajuns told me that they would be punished for speaking French in class - writing lines, standing in the corner, or sometimes even getting paddled. All this for speaking their native language in their hometown.
My maternal grandmother spoke French as her NATIVE language. She passed away at 94, having only grasped the rudiments of English. Her children were raised in the same oyster fishing village - likewise speaking French. Croatian, not English, was a second language there.
New Orleans was becoming a bilingual city even in 1800, and it would have lost its French language soon thereafter had it not been for the influx of tens of thousands of refugees from the slave revolt in Saint Domingue (Haiti). Some thirty thousand people - both black and white - free and slave - left the city of Santiago de Cuba for New Orleans, thus pushing back the virtual extinction of French in that city for another two or three generations.
After that, only small pockets of New Orleans still held on to the language. In the 1920's, people who spoke with a thick french accent were mostly Cajuns coming to "la grande ville" the Big City to live or to work. By this time, the Cajun ethnicity was ridiculed - the Cajun man was seen as a caricature - a comical hillbilly-like man, poorly dressed with laughable features, backward, stupid, gullible, and on and on. The pejorative used on the street was: "Bougalie":
"The transients, negroes and the Boogalees all flock here for this Crescent City is the haven for all idle and lazy drifters." - 1934 - American Dictionary of Regional English
A rhyme chant was even used by the children of the city: "Bougalee Kiskadee". (Kiskadee comes from "Qu'est-ce que tu dis?" - What did you say? This was mocking the Cajuns not understanding English. My mother told me about this rhyme when I was a child.
About this time, a comic work called "The Mayor of Bayou PonPon" came out - mocking and ridiculing Cajuns in much the same way that "Lil' Abner" lampooned and stereotyped Hillbillies - poor residents of Appalachia.
SPEAKING FRENCH WAS ONCE CONSIDERED BACKWARD, IGNORANT, AND UNEDUCATED!
When my maternal grandmother arrived in New Orleans from Buras, La. in 1920, she spoke broken English - and that with a very thick accent. She was horribly mocked and ridiculed by the "sophisticated" New Orleanians so much so that she learned to speak English BETTER than the "yat" brogue that so many used in that city. In the process, she occulted her ability to speak French from all but immediate family. Happily, her brother, Léon, who spoke English with an accent not unlike Cajun entertainer Justin Wilson, parlayed his knowledge of the French language into a job as interpreter to American Generals, thus spending his tour of duty in World War I in Paris!
My maternal grandfather who was born in 1905, learned French from his mother, and many of his buddies growing up also spoke French. His generation was the last of the native speakers of French in New Orleans. Thus a once-French-only city founded in 1718 became English-only in a period of 200 years.
This trend also continued in Cajun Country, but at a much slower pace. French, which was once a vibrant part of this area began to dwindle in terms of native speakers. Eventually, French-language newspapers ceased publishing in that language, and because of the "English Only" policy in schools, the children were never taught how to read or write their own language.
[[[See my blog story: "Pointe d'Église Stopover"]]] https://kennyduke.blogspot.com/2014/10/pointe-deglise-stopover.html
In my travels and time in this part of Louisiana, I met many people who had French and Cajun last names. Very few of them spoke much French, They told me the same thing over and over - that they were prohibited from speaking French in school, and that their older family members spoke French when they did not want the children to understand. This was a generational break in language use, which continued until the present day.
One day in the late 1970's, I was sitting at a hamburger restaurant just off of I-10 when I heard two YOUNG fellows speaking fluent Cajun French! I had heard old men speaking it too often to say, but these men were in their low twenties!! Soon enough, curiosity got the better of me and I asked then where they were from, and how is it that such young men were speaking French! They answered that they were "from Cécilia là-bas..." from down there in Cecilia. This was the only time I ever heard youths speaking French.
One day in 1984 I was at a social function at a large fishing camp across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. There was a live Dixieland Jazz band there and I sat right by it. During intermissions, I discovered that one of the musicians was from France. We began speaking French, and a black lady who was in charge of the food and the tables stopped and listened to us. She smiled broadly, and jumped into our conversation as if it had been English.
Her young daughter was also working there, and she spoke to her mother only in French! This was again something I had never experienced - before or since. She and her family lived on the bayous, and she told me where she lived nearly everyone spoke French. That was in 1984. I wonder if that is still true today.
In addition to the schools, the increase of the non-Francophone population of French Louisiana has added more non-French speakers who do not even have French heritage.
English is the dominant language without a doubt.
Then there is MODERNIZATION! Perhaps things can stay in the 1700's if you are Amish, but other ethnic groups eventually progress. Music has had both positive and negative influences in Cajun culture. Acadiens had fiddle music which they brought with them from France to Acadie and then to Louisiana. The accordion was introduced much, much later, and finally electric instruments came into the picture. These instruments produced many types of Acadian, Cajun, and Zydeco music, as well as fusions of Cajun rock, Cajun rock and Roll, "Swamp Pop", and Country Music sung in Cajun French. These types of music have helped modernize and diversify Cajun culture, but the dominance of Rock has relegated Cajun music to tiny enclaves - brief periods of play on AM radio stations. As French speakers diminish in number, the amount of Cajun singers has likewise diminished - and by the same degree.
In 1962 a prophetic song was released entitled Fais Do-Do. It is a comical diatribe about how a Cajun girl - 10th generation Thibodaux - wants nothing to do with Acadian culture:
She don't like to ride in my pirogue,
She don't like to cook gumbo;
She upsets her Cajun papa
When she does the Twist at the Fais-do-do!"
This song, recorded both in English and in French, says so much about how the Acadian culture is beginning to disappear, and how Acadians are rapidly assimilating into North American culture.
ACADIANA FIGHTS BACK
The Counsel for the Development of French in Louisiana has made great strides to build awareness of the disappearance of the Acadian culture. They have pushed for French language studies in the very schools that caused its elimination. The only problem is the availability of fluent native speakers of the language. Teachers have been brought in from Québec, France and Belgium, but even the country dialect spoken in the Québec countryside is not the same as Acadian (Cajun) French.
A mother tongue is just that: it is the language a person is RAISED SPEAKING!!! Anything else is a learned language - a foreign language. The children might just as well learn Swahili or Armenian.... the connection to their linguistic chain has been severed.
Cajun cuisine has also been popular in the last few decades, showcasing this aspect of Louisiana French culture. Cajun Chef K. Paul Prudhomme was at one time one of the US' most famous chefs, and Tony Chachère's Cajun Spice can be found on virtually every store shelf in the country - as well as around the world.
There has also been a resurgence in Cajun and Zydeco music in the last few decades. More and more people have begun to play variants of this music more so than at any time - and it is no longer being rejected as much by those in Acadiana.
It is just possible that all these things are too little too late.
A PARTING SHOT
One day, during probably my last foray into Cajun country, I stopped at a small record shop. I asked the girl working there if they sold Cajun records. She LAUGHED at me!!
Angry, I told her that this was not MY culture - it was HERS, and that she should be happy someone is taking an interest in it. I told her that HER culture was DYING - and as long as people had that kind of apathetic attitude, it will be dead within two generations. I do not know what effect - if any - my rant had, but I felt I had to say something - as a parting shot - if only to express my frustration and outrage that a culture that has existed for hundreds of years will be asphalted over and replaced by fast-food chains, rock music, and the triumph of the dominant language becoming the ONLY language.
LANGUAGES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ARE IN SIMILAR DANGER OF EXTINCTION
Various languages such as Irish, Scottish, Breton, Hawaiian, Romansh, Hokkaido Ainu, and a host of contemporary languages and dialects are in danger of becoming extinct, many for the very same reason as Acadian French. They are under external pressure by one or more dominant languages / cultures. The saddest part is that much damage is self-inflicted: native speakers die out without imparting the language to their children, and the worst happens when native speakers or their children opt to use the encroaching language and abandon their own.
Cajun singer Zachary Richard sand a powerful and dramatic account of the Grand Derangement, in which families of Acadie were dole to "Réveille!" * wake up! The Goddams have arrived. This was their pejorative for the English. "Wake up- to save your crops, your homes, your very lives. It ends by shouting Réveille! Wake up! Save your Héritage!!!"
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COMMENTS:
I met Hadley J. Castille once in south Louisiana. He told me about his time growing up - and how it was difficult adapting to a foreign language that came from outside of the area in which he lived. "200 Lines: I Must Not Speak French" based on his experience of punishment for speaking French while he was attending public school in Léonville. La.
This is a link to Hadley Castille's Cajun song: "200 Lines: I Must Not Speak French"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ky2wwhnOaA
Here Hadley Castille plays Cajun fiddle with his granddaughter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91vBzCaNTQ0
This is a POWERFUL account of the pogrom which occurred in Acadie long ago. It is sung in Cajun French and is very emotional - more so if you understand the words:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qODyaCOyvOM
Link to the Swamp Pop hit - "Fais Do-Do":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StZDIeLt2Hk
Link to caricature art buy Guy Fanguy:
http://www.guyfanguy.com/webpages/cartoons_1.asp
Marc and Ann Savoy - Cultural Treasures!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPtPvGn2kU
AND...... ON MY BLOG:
This is a story about a sales call I made in the heart of Acadiana - and of a very interesting man I met there.
https://kennyduke.blogspot.com/2014/10/pointe-deglise-stopover.html
My WELCOME PAGE can be accessed here: http://kennyduke.blogspot.com/p/welcome.html
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