Louisiana Creoles, at least from the early 20th century until the present-day, love to champion their gallic heritage. French this, French that. Fleur de lys, a symbol of colonial/imperial France, everywhere. However, as French social scientist, François Weil, observed in a presentation on the occasion of the Louisiana Purchase/Sale/Abandonment bicentennial, this has not always been the case.[x]
When Louisiana was abandoned by both Spain and France, Americans rolled in, loaded to their gills with money, and with a voracious appetite for fertile lands along Louisiana waterways to turn a profit. Between 1812 and 1900, Creole legislators decreased from 60% to 20% in the state’s capital. As Creole political clout in New Orleans and Baton Rouge diminished, so did Creole rights to learn in their native languages. And language lost coincided with Creole identity changes.
By 1910, the Louisiana Creole elite all knew English and, according to Laizaire Bienvenu, publisher of the St. Martin Weekly Messenger, a native and resident of St. Martinville, the Creole elite only knew English. “Is it not a sad condition to see children who cannot speak French not able to address their grandparents who cannot speak English,” he questioned. According to Bienvenu, he and his staff “[B]elieve this is wrong” and, furthermore, “[T]hose who can speak French should be proud of it.” It is no irony that the New Orleans-based French language promotional organization, L’Athénée louisianais, embittered, burned out, and outright frustrated with French language decline in New Orleans, found its greatest support in the 1910s from St. Martin, Iberia, Vermilion and Lafayette Parishes. Their efforts were in vain.[1]
The Americanization of Creole spaces was already well on the way. In neighboring St. Landry Parish, Opelouas-based newspapers, like the Opelousas Courier, owned and edited for many years by a Creole, Raymond Breaux, promoted quintessentially American values in the 1910s. “We should abolish in this country, every school, private, public or Sabath, conducted in any language but English,” the paper lectured. Opelousas papers equally advocated for class-based segregation. “[T]hose colored citizens who conduct themselves properly, and keep their premises clean and neat” Léonce Sandoz, editor of the paper, invited to reside in the central business district of the town alongside upwardly mobile whites and white-identified Creoles. For residents whose values clashed with those of the middle class townspeople, Sandoz petitioned the local Board of Alderman to enact an ordinance establishing “coon towns” where poor whites and persons of color would be relocated from the town’s center. These “coon towns” undoubtedly explain the origin of the coon’s ass, or coonass. [2]
Sandoz’s support for nonwhites to continue residing in downtown Opelousas should not be mistaken for his celebrating white-identified and nonwhite-identified citizens on equal terms. In fact, the editor of the St. Landry Clarion feverishly “outted” Henri “Harry” Bloch, a Creole residing in–and living as white–in Houston, Texas. The Clarion produced 3 generations of genealogy on the Blochs, including physical descriptors of everyone in the family, noting that Harry’s grandmother, Sophie Décuir, was “too dark to be a griffe.” The paper supported Hart Wartell, an Opelousas native residing in Houston (who discovered Bloch’s passing in Houston) in an attempted law suit in Houston against Bloch. Ultimately, Bloch’s Houston reputation (as a respected white man) overpowered allegations of his tainted blood (per American standards). Bloch hired an attorney and threatened to sue the Houston paper and Wartell for libel. All charges and brouhaha vanished, and Bloch spent the rest of his days as a white man. There is no irony, given the Opelousas editors’ vocal stance on racialization, classization, and English language, that L’Athénée avoided elite Creoles from that section of the state. [3]
For elite Creoles, then, French language in Louisiana was a dead dog. Most poor Creoles continued to mostly (some only) speak French (alongside Creole and Spanish), but 20th century American mindset discouraged interactions across class and color lines. So, elite Creoles, like Bienvenu, and others, found other ways to express, in English, their un-americanness, without making themselves total victims of the visceral American wrath against anyone non-Anglophone, non-Protestant, and nonwhite. It was dangerous. In 1921, Edwin Stephenson, a Methodist minister in Birmingham, Alabama, murdered the rector of the Birmingham Roman Catholic Cathedral in broad daylight, for marrying his daughter to a Catholic Puerto Rican.[4]
So, elite Creoles refashioned themselves to avoid any association with nonwhites and un-american values. Creole, for Americans, meant a stroke of the tar brush in the genealogy. How does one wiggle around that, then? You claim to be French and/or Acadian and you exaggerate your gallic heritage. The “Louisiana Acadian” and “French Creole” were born to remedy that very impasse. Frenchmen are from Europe, and the common idea is that Europeans are white. Similarly, Acadians are reputed to be white, as they claim to be of French descent. You bypass association with coloreds. However, the gallicization of Creoles in the 1920s was nothing more than exaggeration, as Americans did claiming purity of British stock. By dent of bad parenting and capital investments-gone-wrong, Louisiana’s genealogical and cultural tapestry developed to be much more global than France and Acadia. And because of this, Louisiana Creoles have direct links to far-flung places like Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. [5]
Back in 1717, Louis XV, King of France, turned over Louisiana to the Scottish economist John Law, who that year established a joint-stock trading company known as the Company of the West, or La Compagnie de l’Occident, in French. Louis-the-Beloved (Louis-le-bien-aimé) turned the 20 year old French colony, struggling to make ends meet, over to Law for him to develop and, simultaneously, granted a trade monopoly of all French possessions in the Americas to Law. In 1719, the Company expanded to the Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) and was responsible, primarily, for the transport of slaves from Senegambia and Guinea, 2 French concessions in West Africa, to the Americas and to Île-de-France (Mauritius) in the Indian Ocean. Between 1721 and 1745, the Company transported roughly 4,000 Senegambians and Guineans to Louisiana and nearly the same amount to Île-de-France, the same crew working the slave ships to both destinations. Slaves headed to both final destinations were more-than-likely families separated by the trade. These Senegambians and Guineans left an indelible mark on the nascent Creole culture and people in both Louisiana and Mauritius. [6]
Indeed, Louisiana and Mauritius share more than just the slave trade of the same enslaved Africans; they also share the globe’s two closest related French-based Creole languages. They’re not identical; but they’re much closer than standard Haitian Creole is to Louisiana Creole. Given the timeline of colonial Louisiana and Mauritius’s earliest population growth, the 2 languages emerged at virtually the exact same time. Tulane University-based linguist Thomas Klingler observes that the first written evidence of Creole language development in Louisiana was in 1730 and again in January 1748. One year later, in 1749, Charles Grant, the Baron of Vaux, then residing in Mauritius, noted a Mauritian speaking in Creole. In those initial generations, the nascent Creole language in both places shared much with Creoles emerging elsewhere (which we will explore in subsequent posts). After the local population matured in both places, local Creole varieties crystalized. For whatever reason, by the 21st century Mauritian Creole and Louisiana Creole came to share an extraordinary amount of vocabulary and even grammar. It is highly probable that those pioneering Senegambians and Guineans who wound up as slaves in Louisiana and in Mauritius were genealogically-related, as were the Canadians and Frenchmen who settled in both locales, who shared hearth, beds, and taffia. One big Creole family. [7]
Examples between Louisiana Creole and Mauritian Creole.
Sources for MC: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Créole_mauricien
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Endnotes
[x] François Weil’s presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4mNoFnXrMs [1] St. Martin Weekly Messenger, Saturday, 5 March 1910, p 1; ibid., Saturday, 23 May 1914, p 1; ibid., Saturday, 4 July 1914, p 4; ibid., Saturday, 25 July 1914, p 2. [2] St. Landry Clarion, 1 February 1919, p 3; Opelousas Courier, 8 August 1903, p 1. [3] St. Landry Clarion, 26 August 1905, p 3. [4] Catholic World News, 23 May 2012. [5] The Evening News (Harrisburg, Pa.), Monday, 22 November 1926, p 4; St. Landry Clarion, 29 August 1891, p 2. [6] Stuart Bammer, Anglo-American Securities Regulation: Cultural and Political Roots, 1690-1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42; Alban Peres, “Esclaves à Lorient et à Port-Louis au XVIIIe siècle: Recensement des actes paroissiaux et d’état-civil concernant les ‘non-blancs’,” Société de l’archéologie, et d’histoire du pays de Lorient (Unknown publication date): 1-12; Robert Bousquet, La traite africaine (Saint-Denis, La Réunion: 1992), 1-146; J. M. Filliot, La traite des esclaves vers les Mascareignes au XVIIIe siècle – Tome I (Tananarive, Madagascar: Centre de la recherche scientifique et technique Outre-Mer, 1970), 31, 40, 156 etc; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1992); Christophe Landry, “Creole Culture, Identity, and Race in the Bayou Country,” Kreol Magazine vol 1(7), (Fall, 2013): 41-5. [7] Charles Grant, The History of Mauritius, or the Isle of France, and the neighbouring islands: from their first discovery to the present time (Nikole, 1801), 297; found in Peter Stein, Connaissance et emploi des langues à l’île Maurice (Hamburg, Germany: Helmut Buske Verlag, 1982), 74-5; Thomas A. Klingler, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: the Creole of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2003), 27-46.