When I was a kid, my family was filled with French-Canadian immigrants who spoke only French or a mix of French and English. All those people have died. French, which I don’t read well, got pushed to the back of my brain. In the ‘90s, there was a brief vogue for Cajun music and I often translated lyrics for my friends, as kind of a trick. Other than swearing, prayer and talking to one or two people over 70, I don’t use my French much anymore.
Or I didn’t.
In the last 10 years or so, we’ve seen a boomlet of immigration from Haiti, where they speak not only French but a dialect of French called Haitian Creole.
And one day in the market, I found myself clumsily translating for a Haitian woman who could not make herself clear to the checkout person. The paper where I work had a Haitian janitor for a while and we spoke French to each other.
One day, another employee remarked, casually, that the janitor was a black man and I said, “I don’t think of him as black.”
“What do you think of him as?” my bemused colleague asked.
“French,” I said.
I found out that some Haitians speak only Creole while some speak Creole and standard French. Bear in mind that my growled, ungrammatical French-Canadian dialect is not at all “standard French.” A high school French teacher in Missouri once informed me that I did not, in fact, speak “French.” My father told me the teacher spoke French “like she learned it from a book,” which he meant as an insult.
The other day I realized that I hadn’t spoken French to a white person in several months.
Which is, I suppose, America.
We grind against each other, babbling in a hundred tongues, cast in dozens of shades, competing for jobs and for the culture of the nation.
But, here and there, on the frontier, there is the Pakistani store owner who learns to count change in Spanish or the cop who learns a dozen stiff but necessary phrases in Khmer.
My grandmother, who lived in America for 60 years, spoke only French, having lived in French tribal neighborhoods all her American life. She used to tell me that she preferred shopping in the small stores owned by Jews because, “The Jews learn how to say some things in French. They know colors, the sizes, prices. You don’t have to go there and point at what you want like a baby.”
I thought of my grandmother when I stepped forward in the grocery store and asked that Haitian woman, in French, if she needed some help. She was one who taught me that “Eske ou pale kreyol,” is Haitian Creole for “Do you speak Creole?”
I don’t intend to forget that phrase in Creole, and I’m going to learn more. My white grandmother would have wanted me to.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist.