Trip of the Tongue (18 page)

Simply put, Cajun French has grown out of the language spoken by Acadians in exile—most experts agree that
Cajun
is a corruption of
Acadien
.
^ai
Originally French settlers in Nova Scotia, the Acadians were deported by the British in 1715 for a variety of reasons that range from the pragmatic to the deplorable, depending on whom you ask. Many of the Acadians who were exiled to the United States or shipped back to France eventually headed south to Louisiana, where they settled in and around Bayou Teche. Today practically the entire lower half of the state, centered around Lafayette, is considered part of Acadiana.

Cajun French is a regional variety of French, which is to say it is
not
a creole. It does differ from Standard French in terms of pronunciation, idiom, and vocabulary. There are legions of petty differences between the two. A Cajun French speaker might omit the
ne
of
ne
…
pas
, he's probably ditched the subjunctive and the formal
vous
, and he doesn't call a car
une voiture
, he calls it
un char.
And if he refers to a lady's
galette
—well, he's no gentleman. But though the flesh may be different, the bones of Cajun French are basically the same as those of Standard French. Its nouns are gendered, its verbal structure is mostly the same, and its pronouns are nearly identical.

And as Louisiana Creole has rubbed up against Cajun French over the years, it has in some cases acquired features of this more standard version of French. The linguist Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh has described this in some detail, noting that as Cajun and Louisiana Creole communities came into more frequent contact over the years—particularly after the Civil War—certain forms of Louisiana Creole began marking gender and even using two different Cajun verb forms to describe habitual or completed actions. In this case, then, the typical course of language contact has been reversed: the new forms of Louisiana Creole that have emerged feature
more
inflections, not fewer.

It's important, I think, not to lose sight of the origins of creole languages, of the fact that many of these languages are testaments to a time of gross and loathsome inequality. But the circumstances of their creation are hardly the only interesting part of the story—after all, if all we ever knew were the facts of Coincoin's birth, we would remain ignorant of the remarkable accomplishments of her life.

Louisiana Creole and Cajun French are now so intermingled that they are often discussed not as separate languages but as two points on a continuum. At one end is the most creole version of Louisiana Creole, at the other the most standard form of Cajun French. Linguists, ahead of the curve as usual, are ever cognizant of the fact that humankind is rarely amenable to either/or distinctions. With no small amount of chagrin, I realized I'd managed to forget this. By focusing on one end of the spectrum I'd managed to miss the middle ground—I'd been so busy looking for the African influence in Louisiana Creole I'd overlooked the parts that could only be called American. And in so doing I'd failed to notice that these two languages were drawn together not just by a common lexicon and geographical proximity but also by the slow, steady march of emancipation, integration, and assimilation.

The linguistic landscape of Louisiana underwent a series of rapid changes in the nineteenth century, as possession of the territory was passed from Spain to France before finally settling into the hands of the United States. In 1812 the state was formally admitted into the Union and the doors were thrown open to settlers from other parts of the country. Most of these settlers spoke English. By the 1840s the Anglo community was well established politically and economically, and by the time of the Civil War they accounted for 70 percent of the state's total population.

The slave population was not unaffected by this demographic shift. In 1808, the United States banned the importation of slaves, and so—smuggling aside—most slaves that were thereafter brought to Louisiana came from English-speaking areas. Even Creole plantations such as the one owned by the Duparc-Locouls bought English-speaking slaves. A notice published in
L'Abeille
in 1816 identified six of the plantation's runaway slaves as “American” and able to speak “not a word” of French. By the time Laura was born, the English- and French-speaking slaves had begun to take sides. She writes in her memoir that “the Creole negro servants hated the American negroes and made them very unhappy because they did not speak the negro French dialect.”

After 1812 English gained significant traction throughout Louisiana, even in heavily Francophone areas. Before the Civil War this could largely be attributed to population transfer. Though Louisiana had been forced to declare English its official language in order to gain statehood, French continued to be used in parish governments, and in 1845 the state legislature even passed a bill declaring French its official language.

But after the war everything changed. In light of the events that led to secession, the federal government began to take a far less permissive stance toward potential sources of rebellion or nonconformity in the former Confederacy. One of its targets was the use of French in Louisiana. The state legislature soon adopted a constitution that required public schools to use English as the language of “general exercises.” They also made it illegal to pass legislation requiring the publication of laws, public records, and judicial proceedings in any language other than English. In conjunction with the rising stock of English as a prestige language as well as support for Americanization from the Catholic Church, these efforts precipitated a rapid shift to English.

The Cajun community was somewhat slower to assimilate, relatively isolated as they were by the swampy expanse of the Atchafalaya. But the 1901 discovery of oil in Jennings, about forty miles west of Lafayette, certainly helped things along, creating what Carl Brasseaux calls “unprecedented employment opportunities” for Cajuns in the oil industry. These employment opportunities were open only to those with some level of English proficiency, however, and with such incentives the Cajun community, too, found itself switching to English.

The ever-increasing preeminence of English has been driven in Louisiana—as it was driven in Montana, Arizona, and Washington state—by a variety of factors that include but are not limited to legislation, economics, education policy, and demographic changes. But I was somewhat surprised to discover that speakers of Louisiana Creole and Cajun French were subjected to the same tactics of linguistic humiliation that were used by those seeking to assimilate Native Americans.

The stories are remarkably similar to those I heard or read about while traveling through Native language communities. They involve public shamings, corporal punishment, and persistent campaigns of misinformation, all in an effort to convince the children that their language was “ignorant” or “bad.” In a 1999 article written for the American Association of Teachers of French, James J. Natsis compiles a few of these stories. In one, a student was forced to kneel on grains of corn when he was caught speaking French on the playground; in another a student was sent home to write 200 times “I must not speak French on the school grounds.” This latter student, ironically, grew up to become an expert on regional Louisiana French.

Just as they were with Native groups, these tactics were extremely successful in facilitating an abrupt cessation in the generational language transfer of regional and creole forms of French. Why would parents want their children to speak a language they themselves were punished for using? While passing through Lafayette I met a woman named Geraldine Robertson, who told me that her mother had prayed in French but refused to let her children speak it. This, for me, really encapsulated the difficulties these parents must have faced. I personally find it impossible to imagine not feeling free to use the same language with my children as with my god. Like so many privileges, it's one I hadn't even realized I had.

Speakers of Louisiana Creole have had to face additional layers of prejudice and disdain. Their language, often referred to derisively as
français nèg
or
gumbo
—is at the bottom of the prestige pole. While there is some comfort to be taken in the fact that Louisiana's social structure is flexible enough for Creole and Cajun to have a chance to influence each other, it is telling that the influence is one-directional. Speakers of Louisiana Creole can “move up” to use forms that are closer to Standard French. Speakers of Cajun, however, do not “move down.”

The stigma attached to Louisiana Creole is such that there aren't even any reliable data about how many people still speak it. According to the American Community Survey, in 2005 there were 129,910 French-speakers in Louisiana; 19,105 of these spoke “Cajun,” and 7,929 spoke “French Creole.” But because many speakers of Louisiana Creole won't actually admit they use it, Census data are in this instance highly unreliable. The best and most recent guess comes courtesy of the linguist Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh, who estimated in 1985 that there were between 60,000 and 80,000 speakers of Louisiana Creole. But you hardly need Census data or a field report to know that Louisiana Creole is disappearing, and fast. All you have to do is try to find someone—anyone—who speaks it.

Though I uncovered bits and pieces of French throughout Louisiana, despite driving past innumerable signs that read “Ici on est fier de parler français,” the only time I actually heard French was on a side trip to Vermillionville, a touristy see-how-the-Cajuns-lived-in-the-old-days sort of place. Apparently this is a not-uncommon experience: the one place where French seems to be gaining ground throughout Louisiana is in the tourist sector.

Louisiana's Francophone community hasn't taken this lying down. For the past sixty years or so they have by and large been extremely active in attempting to reverse the course of language decline. In 1969, for instance, the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana began bringing in French teachers from Canada and France. And in 1984 Louisiana became the first state to require foreign language instruction in elementary schools, a measure primarily aimed at broadening early exposure to French. My favorite effort to bolster Louisiana's French-speaking population was the brainchild of state senator Dudley Leblanc, a man who made a fortune by creating Hadacol, a “dietary supplement” that just happened to contain 12 percent alcohol. Leblanc's grand plan involved importing Acadian women from Canada and marrying them off to single Cajun men. It's exactly the sort of plan you'd expect a consummate politician to dream up. Even if it didn't accomplish its intended results, he surely made a few constituents very happy.

But no matter how well funded or well intentioned the French-language activists of Louisiana may be, I have to think that the lessons of Louisiana Creole surely apply to Louisiana French. The dynamics of language contact are, ultimately, determined by the pull of prestige. Louisiana Creole cannot help but be drawn nearer to Cajun French; Louisiana French, I suspect, cannot help but be drawn nearer to English. One day it will go the way of the Cane River, drawing out-of-town guests to its tranquil shores while the rush of the main river passes it by.

Chapter Five

South Carolina: Gullah

One thing I neglected to mention is that when I stumbled across Alcée Fortier's folktales, it was actually the second time I had been introduced to a new language through the stories of Br'er Rabbit.

The first time it happened was nearly a decade ago. I was browsing through Schoenhof's in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the finest foreign-language bookstore I've ever been to and one of the primary reasons I was never able to attain any measure of financial stability while living in Boston. Occasionally I'd go into Schoenhof's with a mission—find a comparative Greek and Latin grammar, pick up a Classical Chinese dictionary, buy
Harry Potter
in French—but more often than not I would simply browse, drifting from beautifully curated shelf to beautifully curated shelf, eavesdropping on the booksellers as they advised their customers with magnificent expertise.

In this way I discovered any number of new languages. I bought primers on Tibetan and Basque and recordings of Irish and Romanian. I pored over kanji, Devangari, cuneiform. And I added to my ever-growing and ever-less-feasible list of languages to study before I die.

It was here, hidden away on a lower shelf in the back room, that I first met Gullah.

Gullah (also called Sea Island Creole, Sea Island Creole English, or Geechee) is an English-based, African-influenced creole spoken in some form by about a quarter of a million people, most of whom live on or near the Sea Islands, a chain of islands along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida.
^aj
Before that day I'd never heard of it. And I probably would have overlooked it then, too, had my boyfriend at the time not spotted the brightly colored cover of a book called
Gullah Folktales from the Georgia Coast
. We began to flip through story after story about the adventures of various animals including—you guessed it—Br'er Rabbit.

When I first saw the folktales I admit I assumed the stories had just been written in a particularly southern dialect of English. But when I looked at the text itself, I was surprised to discover just how much trouble I had with the language. Consider the passage below, which is the opening paragraph from a story about Br'er Rabbit and Br'er Wolf:

Buh Wolf and Buh Rabbit in a cote de same Gal. De Gal bin rich an berry pooty. Dem tuk tun fuh wisit um. Buh Rabbit, him gone der mornin, and Buh Wolf, him gone der ebenin. De Gal harde fuh mek up eh mine. Eh sorter courage bofe er um. One morning Buh Rabbit bin a mek fun er Buh Wolf ter de Gal, and eh tell um say Buh Wolf yent duh nuttne mo den eh farruh ridin horse.
^ak

As with the Louisiana Creole recorded by Alcée Fortier, the language here is nearly impossible for me to understand if I don't read the words aloud.
Pooty
, for instance, only registers as “pretty” if I say it; otherwise my brain doesn't make the leap. But even this strategy is of limited use. It doesn't, for instance, help me with the word
farruh
(which means “father”—or, in this case, “father's”). It took me ages to figure out that “Eh sorter courage bofe er um” meant “She sort of encouraged both of them.” And I'm still unclear on the precise meaning of the phrase “yent duh.” Even so, because Gullah is so closely related to English, I was able to rough out a translation without too much trouble. Unfortunately, as soon as I realized how easy it was to translate Gullah, I began to lose interest, being at that point still young enough to relish difficulty for difficulty's sake.

Shortly thereafter, I forgot all about Gullah, moving on to other languages (and other boyfriends). But once I began thinking about the African influence on American language, everything came rushing back. This was, I knew, something I needed to explore.

Gullah may not be the best-known language or culture in the United States, but it has certainly, in a few discrete instances, slipped into mainstream American culture. For instance, a number of Gullah words such as
buckra
(white man),
gumbo
(originally, “okra”), and
chigger
(small flea) have made their way into English. (Or, more accurately, a number of West African words have made their way into English via Gullah.) There are also, of course, the stories of Br'er Rabbit and his friends, many of which match almost word for word stories still told today in West Africa. I would also be willing to bet that without even realizing it most Americans know a song that was originally sung in Gullah. “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” was first attested on the heavily Gullah island of St. Helena during the Civil War, and if you look at some of the later verses, it is easy to see the song's relationship to Gullah:

He raise de fruit for you to eat.

He dat eat shall neber die.

When de riber overflow.

O poor sinner, how you land?

Riber run and darkness comin'.

Sinner row to save your soul.

Without a doubt, however, Gullah's most far-reaching cultural influence is found in the story of Porgy and Bess.

In 1925, a Charleston insurance salesman named DuBose Heyward published
Porgy
, the story of a crippled beggar and the other inhabitants of a section of Charleston, South Carolina, known as Catfish Row. Two years later Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, successfully adapted the novel for the Broadway stage, but it wasn't until George Gershwin expressed interest in writing an opera based on the material that
Porgy
began its first steps toward long-standing cultural prominence.

Many of the elements of
Porgy
were inspired by real-life Charleston. Porgy was based on a man named Sammy Smalls, a somewhat less sympathetic character than his operatic counterpart might suggest. As most
Porgy and Bess
aficionados in Charleston were eager to tell me, Porgy was better known for beating up his female companions than attempting to rescue them from their disreputable circumstances. In fact, I discovered that in 1924 he was arrested for shooting at a woman named Maggie Barnes. The
Charleston News and Courier
noted that Barnes escaped injury due largely to Sammy's bad aim.

Catfish Row, meanwhile, was the fictional re-creation of a three-story double tenement located on Church Street in south Charleston just a few doors down from DuBose Heyward's onetime residence. Sammy Smalls and the other residents of Catfish Row were Gullah-speakers, and it was their speech Heyward attempted to replicate in his novel. These loose Gullah speech patterns can, in turn, be heard in some of the opera's most famous songs, particularly those (“Summertime,” “My Man's Gone Now,” “A Woman Is a Sometime Thing”) whose lyrics were written by Heyward.

Porgy and Bess
debuted in 1935 and went on to garner its share of both acclaim and controversy. Gershwin's choice to use an all-black cast was not met with complete equanimity. Although Gerswhin had been offered a grant from the Metropolitan Opera, he chose to stage
Porgy and Bess
at the Alvin Theater instead. This was in part a practical decision, but it was also a necessary one, as at the time the Met had yet to feature a single black performer.
^al

The production also ran into difficulties when it went on tour. The show's final stop was to be at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C., but problems arose when it was discovered that the theater did not intend to allow integrated audiences to any of its performances. Led by Todd Duncan—the original Porgy and the first African American to perform with the New York City Opera—the cast refused to perform unless the theater changed its policy. Management eventually acquiesced, and so, in 1936, the National Theatre for the first time seated both black and white patrons together.

But perhaps most controversial was the opera's representation of African American life. The plot's more scurrilous elements—gambling, drugs, prostitution, murder—and the depictions of many of the opera's characters also drew (and continue to draw) sharp criticism, particularly in light of the fact that it was a work about African Americans that was written by white Americans. Virgil Thomson, a white composer and critic, put it most succinctly: “Folklore subjects recounted by an outsider are only valid as long as the folk in question is unable to speak for itself, which is certainly not true of the American Negro in 1935.”

Many of the same criticisms have also been applied to the language of the show. In the 1930s, for instance, there were plans to stage a production of
Porgy and Bess
with the Negro Repertory Company, an African American theater troupe in Seattle that was financed by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project. The production was canceled before it ever got to opening night, however. The actors took issue not just with the show's content but also with having to use the show's “dialect.”

This is an eminently understandable reaction. Heyward wrote
Porgy
in part as an exploration of the “noble savage,” and he wasn't shy about explaining his reasons for doing so. As he wrote, “I saw the primitive Negro as the inheritor of a source of delight that I would give much to possess.” In light of this it's impossible not to be uneasy about Heyward's appropriation of Gullah-inspired speech. Heyward used these words because, for him, they served as inherent intimations of primitivism. The disdain with which this “dialect” was treated—by whites and blacks—got me thinking.

This is why I decided to go to South Carolina. I wanted to learn the words and structures of Gullah, and I wanted to know what the language had to teach me about African American history and culture. And I wanted to visit the Lowcountry communities whose residents could trace their ancestry back to the African slaves who had been imported to work the region's rice fields. I may also have wanted an excuse to eat a little she-crab soup.

Even more, though, I wanted to explore the tensions between Gullah and English. The similarities between the two are both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, even though the languages are not precisely mutually intelligible, speakers of the two are certainly able to communicate with one another. But on the other hand, Gullah is subject to the same prejudices faced by so many other creole languages. The fact that Gullah so closely resembles English has led many to assume over the years that Gullah is just a simplified or corrupted form of English—that it's not its own language, just bad “dialect.” And that's an opinion held not only by whites but sometimes by blacks as well.

Just as Louisiana Creole is more than a whittled-down form of French, so too is Gullah more than some slow-witted kind of southern English. But because I'm a native English-speaker and not a native French-speaker, Gullah is the language that I—along with most Americans—am more likely to mistake and misjudge. Ultimately, I wanted to know how that prejudice had affected the Gullah language and community over the years.

And so I made my way to Charleston, the birthplace of Sammy Smalls, the home of Catfish Row, and the first American city seen by many of the ancestors of South Carolina's Gullah population. Here I began to tease out the context that would help me better understand this new language, learning along the way a little history, a little architecture, and—most unexpectedly—a little metalworking.

Originally established as Charles Towne in 1670, Charleston is the oldest city in South Carolina, located on a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic Ocean near the mouths of the Wando, Cooper, Ashley, and Stono rivers. Today the city is known primarily as a tourist destination, the home of Rainbow Row and a convenient hub from which to visit nearby islands and beaches. But it is also the home to a number of large corporations and is in addition the second-largest container port on the East Coast. It is in this capacity as a port of entry that Charleston first made a name for itself.

During the colonial period, the city made its initial fortune as the center of the deerskin trade, but the Lowcountry climate was particularly well suited to the cultivation of rice and indigo, and soon enough agricultural production accounted for the bulk of the region's economy. As it turns out, however, these two crops are particularly labor intensive, and in order to sustain its growth South Carolina planters needed access to a large and cheap labor pool. They found it in the African slave trade.

When I first arrived in Charleston, though, I was thinking less about slavery than I was about sandwiches.

The last time I had been anywhere near Charleston was for a wedding, so the most recent memories I had of the area were limned by bourbon-tinged recollections of soft lighting and rigid hairstyles. When I drove into town on a Sunday summer night, the aesthetic realities of the I-95 corridor were somewhat less than I might have hoped. I had envisioned a gradual transition from the wooded hills of Virginia to the dense, subtropical landscape of South Carolina. But I saw few giant oaks and little Spanish moss. I did, however, see plenty of gas stations. All in all, it was remarkably unremarkable, and an inauspicious start. I didn't manage to take in even a smidgen of city character that first night. By the time I arrived at my hotel I was cranky and hungry. That's when I made my first disappointing discovery about Charleston: the Panera Bread on Sam Rittenberg Blvd. closes at 9:00 p.m. on Sundays.

Fortunately, I'd engaged the services of a professional for my trip to the city center, so I had somewhat higher expectations for the day to come. On the drive into town I entertained myself with thoughts of brightly painted town houses and quaint cobblestone roads. I knew there was an open-air market to be explored and delicious southern food to be eaten. Charleston is a lovely and engaging city, and I was very much looking forward to my visit.

My introduction to Gullah Charleston came courtesy of Alphonso Brown, the owner of Gullah Tours and the author of
A Gullah Guide to Charleston
. I had signed up to join one of his midmorning tours, and though I arrived in plenty of time, I still managed to be one of the last people to get there. When I saw that the bus was nearly full, I ran up to Mr. Brown, apology tumbling across my lips. Then I caught my foot on a piece of sidewalk, tripped, and fell flat on my ass.