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Freeing the silenced tongue
Mainers with French-Canadian roots try to revive their banished patois
By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 2/12/2001
ATERVILLE, Maine - Rhea Cote was a ponytailed 5-year-old when she
marched into the living room and informed her parents they would no
longer hear French coming out of her mouth.
Rhea was too young to explain her decision to her baffled parents, who
continued speaking to her only in French until their deaths, but her
reasons would be clear to all the Roys who became Kings, Boileaus who
went by Drinkwater, Bonenfants who renamed themselves Goodchild. In
Maine in 1959, French identified you as a descendant of French-Canadian
immigrants - a person, Rhea had picked up from the other children, who
would grow up to be considered the second-class citizens of Yankee New
England.
Forty-two years later, it was a tremulous Rhea Robbins who showed up in
Waterville on a recent weekend, hoping to speak French again before she
dies.
Some who have examined language in Maine speculate that New England may
have as many as half a million Franco-Americans like Robbins, people who
share the experience of repudiating their birth language practically
overnight. Born at a time when assimilation seemed the only route to
social success, they bore the brunt of a systematic attempt to eradicate
the French patois that had been spoken in Maine for generations.
Now, as they reach middle age, they are trying to reclaim the ghost of a
language. Phrases they cannot translate pop into their heads. Words get
muddled between their brains and their mouths. And for many, the sound
of spoken French prompts a great upwelling of loss.
''Everyone who calls has the same message. They want to revive the
language that's buried in their brain,'' said Linda Gerard der Simonian,
who hosted the first meeting of the ''language reacquisition'' group
that Robbins attended in Waterville last month. ''It's almost like a
tape recorder.''
The women in appliqued sweatshirts and leggings in der Simonian's living
room are predominantly in their 40s and 50s. One Acadian activist calls
them ''the Punished Generation'' - the fourth- and fifth-generation
Americans of French-Canadian descent who were chastised, or teased, or
shamed into purging from their consciousness the tongue they had learned
from their grandparents.
Many of them spoke only French until they reached school age, and then
were stunned to confront an official world that considered the language
a bad habit. In the parochial schools to the north, near the Canadian
border, which had received state orders to prioritize the switch to
English, nuns employed strict and sometimes creative sanctions against
the use of French, even at recess.
Martha St. Pierre was a 9-year-old who had been in Maine for five months
when she broke her arm in a Van Buren schoolyard. When she ran to her
teacher to ask for help, she was sent to her seat until she could ask in
English, said St. Pierre, who is now 47. In the elementary school Don
Levesque attended, children got a free pass on homework for reporting on
classmates who lapsed into French.
''It was total immersion,'' said Levesque, 53, who is editor and
publisher of the St. John Valley Times, and grew up in Madawaska. ''What
was it that Vladimir Lenin said? Give me one generation and I'll give
you the rest? Well, it almost worked.''
Shadow of a memory
Ben Levine, who documented the French-Canadians' loss of language in his
1980 film ''Si Je Comprends Bien,'' said he believes there are 300,000
to 500,000 Franco-Americans who abandoned the language abruptly under
social pressure. He and his collaborator, a language teacher named Julia
Schulz, began seeking out members of ''the middle generation'' at two
Franco-American film festivals that they organized in Waterville in 1999
and 2000.
As films flickered to an end, people began to come forward, telling
organizers that something about the Quebec landscape had tripped a wire
in their brain - but that they could not quite get hold of the memory.
''They experienced tremendous tension, and they didn't learn to speak
it,'' Levine said. ''That's the group we're trying to
contact.''
And so last month, at the first language reacquisition meeting in
Waterville, Schulz used plastic fruit to teach the words for ''apple''
and ''grape'' to a group of women who weren't sure how much they
knew.
''What they want is to reconnect with some kind of a very deep place
within themselves,'' said Schulz, president of the Penobscot School of
languages in Rockland. ''They sense that there's something very, very
strong in there, and they want to reconnect with it. We're not going to
practice ordering a meal in a restaurant.''
That morning, ordinary complaints about case and gender were accompanied
by wistful stories. Robbins said she found herself trailing
French-speaking people in the supermarket, hoping to catch a few
snatches of conversation.
Estelle Guerette Quimby, who attended the Waterville meeting, said she
once approached an old man in a store and asked if she could go to his
house just to hear him speak. The meeting was awkward and unsuccessful,
she recalled; she couldn't understand him and finally went home.
When she tried to explain how she lost the language as a 5-year-old,
Quimby sounded bereft.
''It just left,'' she said sadly.
Some are beginning to take the attitude that their French was not simply
lost, but taken. In parts of New England, attitudes toward French
changed so radically that within many families, older siblings speak
fluent French while younger siblings never learned it.
The first waves of Canadian immigrants flowed into mill towns like
Waterville starting in the second half of the 19th century, with about a
million settled in New England before the Depression hit. As the
French-Canadian neighborhoods boomed and overflowed, the immigrants
found themselves an urban underclass, and some were even targeted by New
England's Ku Klux Klan.
Although many of the first wave of immigrants never did learn English,
some children and grandchildren coming of age in the postwar era decided
the best way to help their own children would be to raise them speaking
English - a divisive decision in a community that resisted the idea of
the melting pot.
Recent reversal
In Maine, schools began turning away from French in 1919, when a state
law was passed establishing English as the only legal language of
instruction. But the real dropoff came in the 1950s and '60s, when
French masses were dwindling and the war had nudged Franco-Americans
into the American mainstream, say historians. In the northern St. John
Valley, where the parochial schools were attended by all children, nuns
began serious enforcement of a ban on French, while to the south,
Franco-American children like Rhea Cote felt the full force of peer
pressure.
''You had to prove your patriotism,'' said Roger Roy, a business
professor at the University of Maine-Fort Kent who recently wrote a
paper about the loss of French-Canadian culture and language.
By 1963, Roy said, it was over; French was threatened not just as a
first but as a second language. Among people of Franco-American descent,
the number of households using French would drop to just over 1 in 10 by
1990, Roy wrote.
In recent years, a bilingual program has begun accepting children in the
Madawaska area, the very border towns where nuns had cracked down
hardest in the 1950s. But the last generation to be schooled in French
is dying, said Schulz, conveying urgency to their middle-age children.
In adulthood, many of them say they now understand the impulse behind
the school rules. Levesque remembers the shock of showing up at the
Sacred Heart School to discover that his native tongue was forbidden.
Every week, children were issued red movie tickets, which they would
have to hand over to any classmate who caught them speaking French. At
the end of the week, the child with the most tickets would be exempt
from homework.
Recently, Levesque learned of the death of the nun who had passed out
those tickets. Reading over her obituary for publication in his
newspaper, he realized something staggering.
''You wouldn't have known it, but this nun may have been very French and
very local,'' Levesque said. She probably spoke French with her own
family, he added, wonderingly.
''My feeling,'' he said, ''is that they thought they were putting
out
good American citizens.''
This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 2/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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