Trip of the Tongue (17 page)

The history and culture of the slaves at Laura Plantation may not quite have been reduced to the status of uncomfortable footnote for the benefit of the plantation's tourists, but it was at the very least marginalized as an awkward tangent. The most overt testaments to African culture were the indiscriminately “ethnic” knickknacks for sale in the plantation gift shop. But there were a few more hints of African influence to be found in the stories of Alcée Fortier, a number of which feature the hapless Compair Bouki.
^ag
Bouki
didn't sound like any French animal I could think of, so I suspected it would turn out to be an African word. Indeed, after a little digging, I discovered that though in Louisiana Creole
bouki
is often translated as “he-goat,” in Wolof the same word means “hyena.”

Though I knew very little about Wolof, a Niger-Congo language of considerable difficulty for English-speakers, I knew enough to understand why it might be a language of some influence among Louisiana slaves. Under French rule, the African slave trade was highly concentrated in two respects. First, the vast majority of slaves arrived in the early years of the slave trade. As colonial records show, more than 90 percent of the slaves who were brought to Louisiana between 1719 and 1763 arrived before 1730. Afterward, economic and political realities ensured that Louisiana's slave population was largely augmented by natural means—among other factors, it made more sense for slave ships to stop in the Caribbean instead of going all the way to New Orleans—and so for several decades the black population in Louisiana was insulated from outside influence.

This first influx of slave labor also pulled the majority of its captives from a single part of Africa, which in combination with the punctuated importation schedule contributed to a relatively higher level of cultural and linguistic homogeneity in Louisiana's slave population than was seen in other parts of the Caribbean. As documented by the historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, two thirds of the first 5,000 or so slaves brought to Louisiana before 1730 were originally from Senegambia in western Africa, an area whose inhabitants were known for their skills as cultivators of rice.

Wolof, you will not be surprised to learn, is primarily spoken in and around Senegal and the Gambia.

I wanted to know more about the African influence on Louisiana Creole, but I figured that maybe Laura Plantation had helped me all it could. So I pushed on to a second plantation, one located deep in the heart of Louisiana, just outside the state's earliest permanent European settlements. This was a plantation owned by Creoles of Color—black Creoles who had managed to throw off the yoke of slavery. Perhaps there I could begin to sketch a more complete picture of this language that was proving so elusive. Perhaps by investigating where Louisiana Creole had come from, I could better understand where it had disappeared to.

This is how I found myself in the town of Natchitoches, about seventy-five miles southwest of Shreveport. I'd been in Shreveport once, many years earlier, and all I remembered about it was the heat, the humidity, and the fact that, in 1971, it released Jared Leto into the world. On my first day in Natchitoches (pronounced “NACK-uh-tush”) I was delighted to discover that those seventy-five miles make all the difference in the world. Natchitoches is a picture postcard of a town, a sleepy assembly of wrought-iron balconies and old-brick construction so charming and prepossessing you expect to see a film crew around every corner.

The most striking feature of Natchitoches is the Cane River, a gentle, shimmering arc of water that winds its way through town with a lazy sort of panache. If you spend an afternoon meandering through downtown Natchitoches as I did, you might find yourself wondering about the Cane River. It was like no river I'd ever seen, almost unnervingly placid and still, a Silent Bob where I expected a Jay. This is due to the fact that, as I later discovered, Cane River isn't actually a river at all. In 1839 a man named Henry Miller Shreve was hired to break up a 160-mile-long logjam in the Red River known as the “Great Raft.” As Shreve removed the jams over the course of the next thirty years, it was like popping the buttons off a poorly tailored waistcoat. The river, finally able to breathe, unfurled in unexpected and inconvenient ways. At Grand Ecore, just four miles north of Natchitoches, it jumped channels, cutting east as it rushed toward the Mississippi—and cutting off Natchitoches. Eventually the path through Natchitoches became unnavigable, and it was dammed off to form what is called an oxbow lake.

It was Cane River—or Cane River Lake, I suppose—that had drawn me to the area. Historically, Natchitoches is perhaps best known as the oldest permanent European settlement in the Louisiana Purchase. The first Europeans to visit the area were members of DeSoto's army in 1542, and just 150 years later, the French arrived to establish settlements and trading posts. But Cane River is also the center of one of Louisiana's most notable communities of black Creoles. They were notable in no small part because unlike so many of their brethren, they were not slaves. Rather, they were powerful, wealthy, and—above all—free members of Louisiana society.

Slavery wasn't fully abolished in Louisiana until 1865, when the Thirteenth Amendment released the slaves in the thirteen parishes that had been under Union control (and, thus, unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation). But even before the government put a legal end to slavery there were still a number of ways slaves could gain their freedom in Louisiana. They could, for instance, perform military or public service. Or they could buy their freedom with money earned by working on Sundays and holidays. During the years of Spanish rule, any slave who could prove Indian ancestry was set free by royal decree. Slaves could also be voluntarily freed by their owners; one of the most common forms of manumission was that granted by white farmers to their mistresses and their natural children.

It was this latter route in particular that contributed to the substantial increase of the free black population of Louisiana between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which grew from fewer than 200 in 1763 to more than 18,000 in 1860. But in the earliest days of colonial Louisiana it was still rare—if not scandalous—for a white slave owner to free his black companion. Nevertheless, this is how the founder of Cane River's Creole community gained her freedom. It is only one of the many extraordinary chapters in the story of the life of one Marie Thérèse,
dite
Coincoin.

Born in 1742 into the household of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the first commander of Fort St. Jean Baptiste and the founder of Natchitoches, Coincoin was the daughter of two slaves, one of whom was reputed to be African royalty.
^ah
Coincoin herself was renowned as a slave of great distinction. Not only was she clever and loyal, she also was a gifted herbalist who, as legend has it, nursed her owner through yellow fever and even cut her own baby brother from her dying mother's womb.

Coincoin was eventually leased to Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a local planter. Whether it was strictly a business arrangement, genuine affection, or some combination of the two no one can say, but Coincoin and Metoyer were nevertheless together for twenty years, during which time Coincoin bore ten children and Metoyer granted Coincoin her freedom. Eventually Metoyer, in need of a legitimate heir, married a white Creole woman (coincidentally also named Marie-Thérèse) and parted from Coincoin. But before he did so, Metoyer granted Coincoin an annuity and sixty-eight acres of land along the Red River. Coincoin, able at last to reap the full benefits of her considerable talents and work ethic, took her plot of land and turned it into something of an empire. Eventually she and her children—all of whom she freed—owned more than 18,000 acres of Natchitoches Parish.

Coincoin was the reason I'd come to Natchitoches. Her son Louis, in keeping with the family tradition of being utterly unwilling to allow fate to be dictated by injustice, somehow managed to become a landowner while he was still technically a slave. His plantation, today called Melrose, is still home to a number of well-preserved historical buildings. One of these buildings is, as they say, not like the others, and it was this structure that drew my attention as soon as I set foot on the plantation grounds on what would later prove to be one of the hottest days of the summer. It looked, I thought—wishing not for the first time that I had a more sophisticated aesthetic vocabulary—like a mushroom house from Super Mario 3.

This building turned out to be the “African House,” a structure thought to have been built around 1800, making it one of the oldest extant American structures built by and for blacks. It is also like no other building I had ever seen. The lower structure, two stories of wood and whitewashed brick, is mostly obscured by a massive sloping roof that sits atop the building like an oversized hat. Had I not been told that the architecture was reminiscent of structures found in the Congo, I would have not been able to pinpoint its architectural provenance any more specifically than “Africa.” And even that conclusion was driven not by a familiarity with any of the building's features but rather by a lack of familiarity with them. If it wasn't European, I figured, it probably had to be African.

The sweltering heat faded into the background for a blessed few minutes as I considered the ramifications of this. During my time in Louisiana I'd collected African words like crumbs of bread leading to a destination I'd already mapped out in my head. Anything that didn't fit in with my schoolgirl's idea of French—
bouki
,
gris-gris
,
gombo
—was considered proof positive of the language's essential non-Frenchness. When I read that the name
Coincoin
was thought to be derived from the Ewe name
Ko Kw
ē
, which is traditionally given to a second-born daughter—and then that Coincoin was, in fact, the second of her parents' daughters, I thought it a grand piece of evidence, the sort of thing Perry Mason might coax from a witness in the last five minutes of an episode.
So you see, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Louisiana Creole
is
African!

Common sense dictated that the language couldn't possibly be wholly devoid of African influence. But until I found myself in front of the African House I hadn't stopped to question how much of that African influence still existed, whether it had been preserved by a series of lucky sociohistorical accidents or whether it had given way to other words, to other structures. Was it possible that I had been exaggerating the impact of African languages simply because I was interpreting anything not European as African?

Crap.

I turned on my heel, got in my car, and found a library. What I discovered was less than conclusive. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, such a helpful resource when researching the details of the early Louisiana slave trade, is reassuring, writing, “The vocabulary of Louisiana Creole is overwhelmingly French in origin, but its grammatical structure is largely African.” But the linguists are less enthusiastic. Albert Valdman and Thomas A. Klingler point out that “so far no scholar has demonstrated, with support from carefully documented studies comparing the various French Creoles and various African languages, a clear link between the grammar of a specific African language or group of African languages and a particular French-based Creole language or the entire group.”

Now, I don't like to disagree with linguists, because (a) they tend to be extremely clever even as academics go, (b) they're perfectly willing to take to the Internet to pick apart substandard arguments and assertions, and (c) they have an annoying tendency to be entertaining while they do so. But something about this didn't make sense to me. How could a language that was created in large part by the commingling of French and African languages display so few African characteristics?

As far as I could figure, there were only two potential explanations. The first being that linguistic diversity among the African population could have minimized the structural influence of any one African language. But I knew that two thirds of the initial slave stock had come from Senegambia, and though there are a substantial number of languages spoken in that area, most of the languages are from the same family and many of the dialects are mutually intelligible. Though some leveling surely would have occurred, would it really have been so extreme that scholars in the twentieth century would find no evidence of a grammatical link between Louisiana Creole and any African languages? It seemed unlikely.

Which meant I was underestimating the role of French. Because whatever Louisiana Creole once was, over time it wasn't becoming more African or even more English. So it must have been becoming more French—which means it must have been becoming less creole.

I puzzled over this for a few days as I skulked about Natchitoches, taking in the sights and wondering just how many bed and breakfasts could have been used as filming locations for
Steel Magnolias
. Given what I had learned at Laura and Melrose, I could understand how French had continued to exert a pull on Louisiana Creole. Wealthy white Creole families worked hard to maintain ties with France; free black Creoles like Coincoin and her family, meanwhile, were active in local business and society, both of which would have allowed and required the development in the black community of a more standard form of French. But that sort of change would have been limited to the more rarified echelons of society. It seemed to me that there had to be another force at work—so what was I missing?

It came to me over a meat pie. Of course. I was forgetting about the other kind of French in Louisiana. I was forgetting about Cajun French.

I don't mean I
actually
forgot about it, of course. You can't be in Louisiana and forget about Cajun French, no matter whether you're in actual Cajun country or just in some part of the state that would like to sell you overpriced sauces with “Cajun” on the label. But I had admittedly hoped to be able to ignore the language while I was in Louisiana. My brain had enough on its plate as it was. However, I was beginning to realize that any efforts to rein in the scope of my explorations were utterly futile.