Trip of the Tongue (15 page)

It's hardly easy, however, to impose a binary structure on a polyadic system. In a society where races have intermingled long enough that distinctions could be made between sacatra and griffe, where do you draw the line between white and black? Some relied on clumsy systems of physical differentiation such as the “paper bag test,” which grouped people depending on whether their skin was lighter or darker than the color of the bag, or the “comb test,” which tested whether or not a comb could be run through a person's hair. But Louisiana lawmakers—like many other lawmakers throughout the country—largely favored an “any black is all black” definition.
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Ultimately, the word
Creole
is confusing not just because it has so many meanings but also because the racial definitions that underpin those meanings are almost laughably insufficient, not to mention potentially misleading. I admit that until I went on my Creole walking tour, I simply hadn't realized Creoles could be white. To be fair, in Louisiana the term
Creole
is used most commonly as a term of self-identification by men and women of French-speaking African descent. But I assumed this was the only definition.

Before I went to New Orleans, race was not something that had factored much into my thinking of Louisiana French. Or, to be more accurate, I hadn't been aware of the ways in which race had factored into my thinking. But once I began to think more about the state's racial diversity I also began to think how that diversity played out in its languages. How, I wondered, was white Creole French different from black Creole French—if it was different at all? What did each language have to teach me about the histories of these groups?

I had come to New Orleans expecting to find the French of my high school textbooks and hometown street signs. I had found instead a language of tourism and commerce, words seemingly kept alive for their market value. If I wanted to understand what life in Louisiana was like for French-speakers past and present, I knew I'd have to move beyond
meunière
and
étouffée
, to look past the French-language equivalent of Mardi Gras beads and souvenir T-shirts.

In other words, it was time to go find some real Louisiana French.

It was, unexpectedly, a stripper who pointed me in the right direction.

After one particularly exhausting day spent tromping about the streets and alleys of New Orleans, I decided to call it quits and go find a place near my hotel to get a drink. I chose a bar by following one of my few hard-and-fast travel commandments: thou shalt not drink in an establishment playing trance music at deafening volume. On Bourbon Street this is surprisingly difficult, but eventually I spotted an unobtrusive little establishment just around the corner from the worst of the chaos. When I poked my head in the door, I heard nothing but the low murmur of human voices. Safe enough, I decided, and stepped inside.

The bar was busy but not crowded, and I was instantly comforted by the fact that everyone was drinking a real drink. There were no light-up cocktail umbrellas or neon blue concoctions in evidence, just shot glasses and bottles of beer. Grateful beyond words to spot signs of civilized life, I dumped my bag on a rickety table and ordered a Bud Light and a grilled cheese. I was midway through my sandwich when I realized the customers at the bar were eyeing me askance.

“What?” I asked, wondering if my shirt was on inside out or something disgusting was stuck to the side of my face.

A slip of a girl in a Saints jersey threw back a shot, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and smiled. “I'm Jerri! And we're wondering what you're doing here.”

“Drinking,” I muttered, a little nervously.

“Yes, but why
here
? What's wrong with the stuff around the corner?”

I just looked at her, trying desperately to figure out if I was going to make friends or lose them by revealing my deep-seated dislike of Bourbon Street. Would they take it as a sign of good taste? Or would they take it as a sign of bad taste? Or, worst of all, would they just think I was rude? Luckily, Jerri decided to interpret my silence—whatever it meant—as a friendly one. She turned around on her stool and planted her feet on the rungs. “So,” she said. “What brings you to town?”

Jerri, a dancer at a nearby club, was one of the nicest, most bubbly young women I'd met in a long time. Soon enough, she revealed that this bar was where many of the locals who worked on Bourbon Street came before and after their shifts. The fact that I had stumbled in was apparently enough to recommend me, and soon she was treating me like an old friend. She told me about her apartment and her family and the Cinderella tattoo she wanted to get—to match her Tinker Bell tattoo, she said—and how she had to wear knee socks at work because her shins were so bruised from crawling around on the floor. Even her glummest disclosures were delivered as cheery exclamations: “Bachelor parties are the worst! But I sure need the money! Because my little sister's having a baby!”

Slightly flummoxed, I sputtered out a loosely related collection of conversational gambits. I told her about the time the women's rugby team had tried to recruit me, that I just couldn't think of the Rams as a true St. Louis team, and that I was interested in Louisiana Creole.

At this she perked up. “Oh! Well we'll have to figure out where to send you to hear some, then!”

Her roommate, a student and part-time bartender, looked over. “There's no Creole spoken in New Orleans. Not anymore.”

“Who's from Louisiana?” Jerri challenged. “You or me?”

“Yeah?” retorted her roommate. “And who's a linguistics major? You or me?”

They bickered good-naturedly for a few minutes before Jerri turned back to me, shrugging apologetically. “I guess you'll have to venture outside the city.” She smiled brightly. “Sorry!”

Soon enough, Jerri and her friends headed off to work. I finished my beer and went back to my hotel, dodging the dipsomaniacal hordes I met along the way. They were heading out for a night on the town; I was turning in to look at some maps. I couldn't help but feel a slight twinge of envy.

But only very slight.

The next day I drove west out of the city, taking I-10 past Louis Armstrong Airport before cutting south to the surprisingly unassuming state highway known as Louisiana's Great River Road. As I sped along the sinusoidal path of the lower Mississippi, I wondered how it was that I had so far barely registered the river's existence. Part of it must be, I thought, that even four years after Hurricane Katrina there were still so many reminders in New Orleans of the destruction wrought by the storm. I'd seen homes and businesses that had yet to be rebuilt; throughout the French Quarter the souvenir shops were selling Katrina-related memorabilia, each promising with sly conviction to donate a portion of the price to rebuilding efforts; my hotel lobby was strewn with brochures for Katrina tours.

I spent some time agonizing over these tours. In theory, part of me could see the value in exposing as many people as possible to the full extent of the disaster. This was the same part that wondered if I myself wasn't doing New Orleans a gross disservice by not visiting its harder-hit sections. The rest of me, though, recalled with a flush of shame a time I had been walking through a hard-up village in British Columbia. I'd been taking too many pictures that day, and when I passed a house that was just shy of derelict, its front yard filled with broken furniture and toys and tools that caught the early evening light just so, my first thought had been to lift my camera to my face.
Pretty
, I remember thinking.

In the end I didn't go on a Katrina tour, and I'm glad I didn't. I didn't want to be a tourist to a tragedy such as Katrina. But I wouldn't say I have anything to be proud of, either. I still could have gone by myself, found someone to take me, or even volunteered some time. Instead I gave some money and bought a collection of
Times-Picayune
columns, telling myself there was nothing wrong with timidity but growing ever more certain that it must be my most contemptible trait.

This is what Katrina can still do, years later, even to someone so minimally acquainted with New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I suspect that many visitors have a similar experience. There's no middle ground here: you're either not thinking about Katrina at all or you're thinking about it and it alone. So even though the Mississippi is the raison d'être of the whole region, even though I'd surely known it was right there alongside the quarter, just beyond Café du Monde, if I was thinking about water, I wasn't thinking about river flow—I was thinking about storm surge.

But as I drove west though Hahnville and Taft, past Killona and Edgard, I couldn't ignore the river any longer, looming as it did just over my right shoulder. It feels strange to think that a river can loom, but that's what it does here. Anywhere on this part of the Mississippi the river is corseted between hundreds of miles of levees, so even on the Great River Road you can't actually see the Great River. Occasionally massive barges sailed past on their way to the Gulf. They looked as if they were floating though the grass.

I was on my way to visit two historic Creole plantations, one white-owned, one black-owned, both French-speaking. The first was Laura Plantation, an eighteenth-century Creole plantation home just outside the town of Vacherie in St. James Parish, about forty miles east of New Orleans. This stretch of the Mississippi was originally settled by immigrants from Germany and Switzerland, and it is still known to some as the German Coast or La Côte des Allemands. I have also seen it called the American Ruhr; this is a nod not to historical settlement patterns but to the petrochemical plants that line the river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.

But back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the area was a center of agriculture, home to some of Louisiana's most lucrative sugar plantations. A few of the grand plantation houses still stand today, restored to their former glory by ardent preservationists who are from time to time funded by savvy corporate donors. Just past the town of Reserve is San Francisco Plantation House, a blue-and-peach monstrosity of architectural opulence that epitomizes the style known as “Steamboat Gothic.” Farther upriver is the classic colonnaded exterior of Oak Alley, arguably Louisiana's best-known and best-preserved plantation house. And up in Farrow is Houmas House, the Greek Revival residence that provided the setting for both
Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte
and
Mandingo
.

When I arrived at Laura Plantation, I stepped out of my car into the thick soup of Louisiana summer. Having grown up in St. Louis, I'd thought I was well used to humidity, but even I was taken aback by the weather. It felt like the inside of a cooler after a long day on the beach, stuffy and sticky and smelling of wet sandwiches. With a shiver of distaste, I slicked my hair back and held my shirt away from my body. I wasn't just sweating—I was fermenting. I began to wish I'd restricted my curiosity to those language communities established after the invention of air-conditioning.

I hurried toward the visitor center hoping for some relief, but before the perspiration on my brow even had time to cool, I was shuffled into a group of other tourists and placed in the care of a guide named Meze. Somehow managing to exude a kind of energetic serenity that I wish were more prevalent among tour guides, Meze quickly identified herself as Creole, explaining to the group that
Creole
simply meant someone born in Louisiana who was part of the Francophone culture. In my mind Inigo Montoya shook his head but otherwise stayed silent.

She then took us to the front of the house, which I had yet to get a good look at on account of being too busy melting. My first thought was that it didn't look like any plantation house I was expecting. It's squat, for one thing. The main structure is set atop eight-foot brick pillars—I was told the foundation is set at an angle to keep the house from sinking into the soft ground—but above that the house is just two stories high. Though there is a porch that runs the length of the building, the front façade is dominated by the Norman roof, an expansive slant of shingles punctuated by two dainty little dormers. Architecturally, it's almost plain. When a member of my group pointed this out, Meze shrugged and acknowledged that the house isn't nearly as fanciful as many of the “Anglo” plantations. “If you're Creole,” she said, “you don't show off your money where you make your money.”

This is slightly disingenuous, because the house is without a doubt something of a showpiece. Though the structure is relatively modest, the colors are downright flamboyant, with sunshine-yellow siding and robin's-egg-blue and vermillion trim. In contrast, the lavender railings seem almost understated. This, Meze told us, was another difference between Anglo and Creole plantation life. The Anglos may have built bigger, but the Creoles painted louder.

As we proceeded, the tour turned out to be largely variations on this theme: Anglos this, Creoles that; Creoles this, Anglos that. But I grew quietly frustrated that in all the talk of Creole versus Anglo that there was so little mention of language. Though Meze assured us that Creole was spoken at Laura Plantation until the 1920s, I wanted to know what exactly this so-called Creole was. Was it a dialect of French spoken by a particular class of wealthy plantation-owners? Was it the Louisiana Creole I had come in search of? Or was it something else entirely? And, for the love of Jonathan Lipnicki, why could no one else in my group help me out by asking a few of these questions for me? I was becoming a nuisance.

Mostly, I was worried there might not be straight answers to my questions. Creoles and pidgins present a number of challenges to linguists and other scholars, not the least of which is that in their early stages they are rarely ever written down. This is particularly true of the contact languages of the early Americas or any other languages that predated the development of systematic linguistic field methods. So if you're interested in the early history of languages such as, say, Mobilian Trade Jargon, Michif, or Palenquero, usually the very best documentation you can expect comes courtesy of the observations of missionaries, traders, or adventurers—in other words, men and women with even less formal linguistic training than I.