Trip of the Tongue (16 page)

Luckily for me, Laura Loucoul—the plantation's namesake—left a few hints to go by.

Laura was the great-granddaughter of the plantation's founder and, eventually, owner of half the family business. In 1885, still in her early twenties, Laura met a man from St. Louis named Charles Gore, and after a lengthy—and secret—betrothal, they married. At this point Laura sold her share of the farm and moved with Gore to what is now St. Louis's Central West End. Much later, at the behest of her three children, she began writing down her recollections of her life in Louisiana. Her memoir, published as
Memories of the Old Plantation
, was completed in 1936, but it remained private until 1993, when it was discovered in the possession of a Gore family friend.

Laura's memoir focuses primarily on the history of her family and on the details of everyday life in antebellum Louisiana. Nevertheless, she reveals enough that I was able to infer a rough sense of the type of French used by Laura and her family. It seems clear to me that they must have spoken a mostly standard French, a variety the linguist Michael Picone has termed “Plantation Society French.” Like many other wealthy and socially prominent families of the time, the Duparc-Locouls kept in close contact with European French, both socially and culturally. Of course, they weren't very far removed from their roots to begin with: Guillaume Duparc, the family patriarch, hailed from Normandy, and his wife, Nanette, was only the second generation of her family to be born in Louisiana. Nevertheless, each succeeding generation was careful to maintain connections with France through marriage and travel. Guillaume and Nanette's daughter Elisabeth married a man from Bordeaux; their granddaughter Aimée also married a Frenchman and lived in Lille and Paris before returning to Louisiana. Of Laura's three first cousins, one returned to France, one married a French consul, and the other became a French consul.

The family also relied on education to reinforce ties with France and, consequently, the standard French dialect spoken by the educated elite. Many wealthy Creole families of the era sent their sons to school in France and their daughters to Catholic schools, and the Duparc-Locoul family was no exception. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen Laura's father, Émile, studied at a military college in Bordeaux. Laura's mother, Desirée, meanwhile, was sent to a convent in Louisiana where she acquired, according to Laura, a “perfect command of both English and French.” And Laura's cousins, themselves born in Paris, received daily instruction from one Monsieur Medout, a French professor hired by Laura's aunt for the express purpose of supplementing her children's language skills. Even Laura, who admits to being no more than a mediocre student (and who initially got less than perfect marks in French at her New Orleans boarding school), uses only perfect textbook French in her memoir.

However, just because Laura and her family spoke Standard French, this was not necessarily the only form of French spoken on the plantation—or even the most popular one. Because, of course, the members of the Duparc-Locoul family were not alone on the plantation. Like any other sugar plantation of its era, Laura Plantation built its success on the backs of slaves.

The first slaves in Louisiana were Native American, but the administrators of the French colony soon began lobbying for a supply of African slaves. Nicolas de la Salle, the colony's first commissary, complained that Native slaves were insufficient, as they “only cause us trouble” and “are not appropriate for hard labor like the blacks.” Their efforts—which included a proposal to trade Native slaves for African slaves from French Caribbean islands at a ratio of 2:1—were at first largely unsuccessful, and the black population of Louisiana remained exceedingly low until the arrival of the first slave ships from Africa in 1719. Growth thereafter was rapid, and by 1800, just four years before Guillaume Duparc was granted his land along the Mississippi, there were more than 24,000 slaves in lower Louisiana, accounting for 55 percent of the total population.

For most of my time at Laura Plantation the history of slavery was set aside—perhaps not surprisingly—in favor of a more crowd-friendly narrative of female empowerment. In Creole families, Meze explained with a smile, you don't leave the business to the eldest son, you leave it to the smartest child. (Although I suspect that most eldest sons consider these to be one and the same.) As a result, women had a hand in the family business until 1892: after Guillaume Duparc's death in 1808, the plantation and its businesses were left in the hands of his widow, Nanette. And when it was time for Nanette to choose a successor, she skipped over her sons and settled instead on her daughter Elisabeth, who ruled the plantation with an iron fist for many years. As we moved through the house, dutifully admiring the woodwork and décor, Meze regaled us with stories about the women of the Duparc family and their extraordinary business acumen.

But as I listened to the history of Laura Plantation, I couldn't help but begin to wonder at the sort of ruthlessness that such acumen required at the time. Elisabeth, for instance, was singled out as the driving force behind the plantation's early expansion and prosperity. And though Meze never suggested that Elisabeth was a particularly pleasant person—indeed, it seems as if she was roundly disliked even by members of her own family—even those of us inured to the casual horrors of modern industry would be taken aback by some of her methods.

Consider her management of the plantation's slave population. When the plantation commenced production in 1805, there were only seven slaves in residence, six Africans and one Native American. By 1808—the same year Nanette inherited the plantation—this number had risen to seventeen slaves, which included five children and one adolescent. The family eventually decided to invest in the plantation's labor force, but slaves were expensive, and they would need a great many if they wanted to expand the business. Elisabeth came up with a cheaper solution: in 1830, the plantation acquired thirty teenage female slaves for the express purpose of breeding a workforce.

Her plan worked, and by the time of the Civil War she had 186 slaves living in sixty-five cabins behind the main house. But this “success” relied on Elisabeth's ability to treat the men and woman in her employ in the same way she might treat livestock—if not worse. And though this is the most troubling example of Elisabeth's harsh treatment of her slaves, it is far from the only example. Her disdain for her workers was evident in all her behavior: she branded problematic slaves on their faces to make it more difficult for them to run away; she hurled epithets at her least favorite slaves; she had no compunction about separating children from their parents and spouses from each other.

Four of Elisabeth's slave cabins still exist today, standing in dark, cramped, and run-down contrast to the fanciful and celebratory aesthetic of the main house. Had the tour kept to the front and interior of the main house, I might never have known they were there, but out back they are impossible to miss. As Meze led us toward them, relating in low, somber tones the grimmer facts and figures of the plantation's history of slavery, I felt—surprisingly, unnervingly—something close to relief. Finally, I thought, I was getting closer to a fuller picture of life on the plantation.

Moments later I heard my first words of Louisiana Creole:
Compair Lapin
.

The stories of Compair Lapin—or, as most American children know him, Br'er Rabbit—were ultimately popularized by Joel Chandler Harris, who collected the tales while living on Turnwold Plantation in central Georgia. He was probably also the first American folklorist to record the stories. But it was a man named Alcée Fortier who first transcribed the Louisiana Creole versions of the stories. That he did so while visiting the area around Laura is a fact the plantation, its guides, and their publicity materials make much of.

Fortier, later a professor at Tulane University and a president of the Modern Language Association, was born in 1856 to a prominent land-owning family that lived not far from the Duparc-Locouls in Vacherie.
^ae
In the 1870s Fortier began compiling local folklore as told to him by area slaves.
Louisiana Folk-Tales
, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1894, includes Fortier's transcriptions and translations of more than forty stories, bringing to life the French spoken in the slave quarters at Laura Plantation.

Here, for instance, is the first part of Fortier's transcription of “Chien Avec Tigue” (The Dog and the Tiger):

In jou in chien acheté cent poules et in coq, et in tigue acheté cent coqs et in poule. Tous les soi chien la trouvé in panier plein dézef dans so poulailler, et tigue la té trouvé jisse in dézef. Tigue dit chien volé li, et li taché li, li metté li dans in brouette et li parti pou vende li. On chimin li contré in chévreil; li conté li so zaffaire et li mandé li si li pas raison vende chien la. Chévreil la dit non, alors tigue la tchué li. In pé plis tard li rencontré in lion et li raconté li so lhistoire. Lion la dit tigue té gagnin tort, et tigue la dit, “Vous parlé comme ça pasque vous connin vous plis fort qué moin.”
^af

One day a dog bought a hundred hens and one rooster, and a tiger bought a hundred roosters and one hen. Every evening the dog found a basketful of eggs in his chicken coop, and the tiger found just one egg. The tiger said the dog had robbed him, and so he tied him up, put him in a wheelbarrow, and went off to sell him. On the way he ran into a roe deer; he told the deer his story and asked him if he was not right to sell the dog. The deer said no, and so the tiger killed him. A little later the tiger met a lion and told him his story. The lion said the tiger was wrong, and the tiger said, “You spoke like that because you know that you are stronger than I.”

The first thing you probably notice about this passage is that the language is quite obviously closely related to French. In fact, if you've studied even a year of Standard French you can probably fumble your way through the Louisiana Creole version of the story. This is particularly true if you read it out loud, as many of the differences are exacerbated by transliteration. When spoken it is much more obvious that
in
is
un
(one) or
on chimin
is
en chemin
(on the way). Sometimes, though, you also need to pick apart the words a bit to recognize the Standard French.
Dézef
, for instance, is more familiar if you keep in mind the French partitive construction
des oeufs
(some eggs).

The passage also displays a few examples of the morphological simplification commonly seen in creole languages. There's no gender distinction, for instance. The words for “lion” and “tiger” take the definite article
la
even though their Standard French counterparts are masculine; meanwhile, “hen” and “wheelbarrow,” both feminine in Standard French, are recorded as
un poule
and
un brouette
. The pronouns are certainly also simpler:
li
is used for
il
(the third-person masculine subject pronoun),
le
(the third-person masculine direct-object pronoun), and
lui
(the third-person masculine indirect-object pronoun).

But it's important, as always, to keep in mind that a loss of inflection does not imply a concomitant loss of expressiveness. After all, if it did, we'd have to turn to Old English in order to communicate with any grace. For example, while the verbs in the above passage may look crude to a student used to the frequently irregular conjugations of standard French, this doesn't mean that Louisiana Creole French is without verbal finesse. Consider the phrase “Lion la dit tigue té gagnin tort.” I translated this above as “The lion said the tiger was wrong,” but to really communicate the meaning of the word
té
, a marker of anteriority, it would be more accurate to say “The lion said the tiger was wrong [before].” Louisiana Creole has a number of these verbal markers, including
ape
(progressive),
ale
(definite future), and
bin
(present perfect), each uninflected proof that in language there is a difference between simple and simplistic.

Generally speaking, however, due to their relative morphological simplicity creole languages tend to be labeled by non-linguists as “corrupt” or “uneducated” versions of the prestige language. Fortier himself acknowledges this tendency in
Louisiana Folk-tales
, emphasizing that Louisiana Creole “is not merely a corruption of French, that is to say, French badly spoken, it is a real idiom with a morphology and grammar of its own.”

It would be naïve, however, to imply that derisive attitudes toward creole languages are just reflections of morphological dissimilarity. It is also without doubt a consequence of the typically subordinate social standing of creole-language-speakers, as it is not typically our habit to judge a man and his speech independently. Even Fortier, an avowed champion of Louisiana Creole, is guilty of this. He writes, “It is curious to see how the ignorant African slave transformed his master's language into a speech concise and simple, and at the same time soft and musical.” It is hard to imagine a single sentence that could convey any more efficiently so many of the stereotypes about Africans and African Americans—innate ignorance, noble simplicity, exotic musicality—that persist to this day.

Though Laura Plantation aims to elucidate to its guests the differences between Anglo and Creole culture, ultimately the lesson I took away was that relatively more nuanced attitudes toward race do not preclude racial privilege. Though there are white Creoles and black Creoles and every sort of Creole in between, if a society and economy once depended on the enslavement of Africans, that fundamental bifurcation between free and slave will, it seems to me, linger longer in language—and the way we talk about language—than any of us should like.