If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That

The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana

Thomas Klingler

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9780807155905
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That, by Thomas Klingler, is an in-depth study of the Creole language spoken in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, a community situated on the west bank of the Mississippi River above Baton Rouge that dates back to the early eighteenth century. The first comprehensive grammatical description of this particular variety of Louisiana Creole, Klingler's work is timely indeed, since most Creole speakers in the Pointe Coupee area are over sixty-five and the language is not being passed on to younger generations. It preserves and explains an important yet little understood part of America's cultural heritage that is rapidly disappearing.
The heart of the book is a detailed morphosyntactic description based on some 150 hours of interviews with Pointe Coupee Creole speakers. Each grammatical feature is amply illustrated with contextual examples, and Klingler's descriptive framework will facilitate comparative research. The author also provides historical and sociolinguistic background information on the region, examining economic, demographic, and social conditions that contributed to the formation and spread of Creole in Louisiana. Pointe Coupee Creole is unusual, and in some cases unique, because of such factors as the parish's early exposure to English, its rapid development of a plantation economy, and its relative insulation from Cajun French.
The volume concludes with transcriptions and English translations of Creole folk tales and of Klingler's conversations with Pointe Coupee's residents, a treasure trove of cultural and linguistic raw data. This kind of rarely printed material will be essential in preserving Creole in the future. Encylopedic in its approach and featuring a comprehensive bibliography, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That is a rich resource for those interested in the development of Louisiana Creole and in Francophony.

PART I
Sociohistorical Background

Chapter 1

Colonial Louisiana

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF where Louisiana Creole originated, how it developed, and how it came to be spoken in the several zones of concentration and smaller isolates where it is found today remains sketchy. Nevertheless, based on recent studies of demographics and social relations, as well as documentary evidence of early forms of Creole in Louisiana, it is possible to outline a likely scenario of the language’s development and spread. In this chapter I lay the groundwork for an investigation of the origin of Louisiana Creole by reviewing the exploration and settlement of Louisiana and the changing nature of social relations in the colony throughout the eighteenth century.

1.1 Exploration and Early Settlement of Louisiana

The first recorded European contact with the Lower Mississippi Valley was made in 1539, when the expedition led by the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto marched south along the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Red River, near the northern tip of what is today Pointe Coupee Parish. Here de Soto fell sick and died, finding his grave at the bottom of the river, where according to legend his men sank his coffin to protect it from the Indians who had harassed them in the course of their journey (Martin 1882, 35–36).

The French did not follow in de Soto’s footsteps until 1682, when René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s expedition sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming all of the land they had traversed for France and naming it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV. An attempt by La Salle to find the Mississippi again, this time by way of the Gulf, failed, ending in his murder at the hands of his own men. More successful was the expedition led in 1698 by two Canadian brothers, Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, and Jean-Baptiste, Sieur de Bienville, who were able to locate the mouth of the river and sail as far north as the Red River. With the brothers’ establishment of Fort Maurepas near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi, the long and difficult colonization of Louisiana had begun. The original fort was moved to a more favorable site in 1711 and renamed Fort Louis de Mobile. This was followed by the permanent settlements of Natchitoches in 1714, Natchez in 1716, and, most important, in 1718, New Orleans, which quickly became the center of the French colonial presence in Louisiana.

The royal government chose in 1712 to turn the responsibility of colonizing this subtropical wilderness over to private hands, granting ownership rights to Antoine Crozat, Marquis de Chatel. At the end of five years Crozat had succeeded in moderately increasing the population (from 400 to 700), but he had accomplished little else in the way of building up the colony and was prepared to relinquish his ownership of it (Taylor [1976] 1984, 7–8). Louisiana was thereupon transferred to John Law’s Company of the West, later called the Company of the Indies, which created a “bubble” of enthusiastic speculation that burst in 1720, forcing Law to flee France. Louisiana remained in possession of the Company of the Indies until 1731, however, when it reverted to the status of a royal colony.

During these early years the European population was composed primarily of military personnel, indentured laborers, wage earners, and forced immigrants who had been vagabonds, criminals, or prostitutes in France. Most of these settlers were of urban origin and had neither the inclination nor the competence to produce the agricultural goods needed to sustain the colony. Instead, the French relied crucially on the native population for basic food supplies. The importance of the Indians to French colonization efforts in Louisiana is reflected in the French settlement pattern in the Lower Mississippi Valley. Typically, the French established their military posts and agricultural concessions within a few miles of Indian villages. In many cases the Indian presence predated the French establishment, but very often the French persuaded Indian groups to relocate to the vicinity of their new posts. Several concessions were established near the existing Tunica settlement north of Pointe Coupee, for example, while the members of the Chitimacha tribe were persuaded to move from their homes on the bayous west of the Mississippi to a location along the river just ten miles south of the newly established Paris-Duvernay concession (Zitomersky 1992, 170–72). Here the Indians served a dual function as suppliers of basic alimentary needs and as buffers protecting the colonists from potentially hostile tribes and the British. The proximity of these Indian communities thus freed the French colonists to pursue their main interests, which were military fortification, commerce, and the cultivation of cash crops. It is important to emphasize that, though there were exceptions, the French generally did not settle in the same villages with the Indians. Instead, the two groups lived in proximity but remained separate from each other, maintaining a symbiotic relationship in which they entered regularly into contact as equals (and this despite the enslavement of Indians, which was practiced on a very limited scale) (Zitomersky 1992).

The first numerically significant group of European settlers equipped to produce food for local consumption was the tenant farmers from various parts of Germany and Switzerland who were brought in to work the large concessions that the Company of the Indies granted to individuals prepared to provide the labor and materials necessary for cultivation. “Naturally hard-working and more contented than the French” (Recensement 1724), they were considered the most worthy and capable of the colonists whom the Company of the Indies sent to Louisiana: “Valued for their seriousness, their sense of organization, their enthusiasm for work and their discipline, they were, among all the settlers, the ones who contributed the most effectively to the development of agriculture in the colonies” (Denuzière 1990, 253, my translation). They settled mainly along the Mississippi upstream from New Orleans, and a stretch of river bank in St. John the Baptist Parish is still known as la Côte des Allemands, or the German Coast.¹ In 1722 their population was estimated to consist of 330 males and females of all ages, and it would grow in coming years (Beer 1911, 19). They were vitally important to New Orleans as providers of fresh produce, game, pork, and fish, which they floated downriver in pirogues from their farms to sell in the city (Usner 1992, 200). As would be the case with most immigrant groups who arrived in Louisiana before it was sold to the United States in 1803 and for many years thereafter, these early German-speaking settlers were fully assimilated by the French population. They eventually adopted the French language, and even their names were often Gallicized. Thus today, alongside names like Folse, Himel, Kraemer, Toups, Tregle, and Triche, whose German origin is fairly transparent, we also find names like Oubre (from Huber, but pronounced [ub]) and Labranche (the French rendering of German “Zweig”) (Griolet 1986, 34; Taylor [1976] 1984, 11).

1.2 Slaves

Of crucial importance to the development of the Creole language was, of course, the slave population. Although it did not attain significant proportions until after 1719, the year in which slave ships from Africa began to arrive, the presence of blacks in the colony was first documented fourteen years earlier, in 1706. That year Iberville, with the aid of his brother Antoine Le Moyne de Châteaugué, had taken 3,178 slaves from the British in a raid on the island of Nevis (Parkvall 1995, 55). According to Higginbo-tham, 6 or more of these were taken to Fort Mobile where they were put into service by Bienville and Châteaugué. The following year saw the baptisms of at least 3 black slaves, all belonging to Bienville: Jean-Baptiste, aged seven; Joseph, aged three; and Antoine Jacemin, who had been born that same year and was the first recorded black born in the Louisiana colony (Higginbotham [1977] 1991, 302; Gould 1996, 29–30).² Two years later, in 1709, Bienville succeeded in obtaining some slaves from Havana. Their exact number is not known, but just three years later, in 1712, there were still only 10 blacks in the colony (Hall 1992a, 57–58).

The slave trade from Africa to French Louisiana was brief but intensive. Shipments did not begin until 1719, and they continued in earnest for just twelve years, until 1731. During this period a total of 5,310 Africans were landed in the colony: 1,297 from Juda (also Whydah or Ouidah) on the Gulf of Benin, 3,719 from the Company of the Indies’ Senegalese concession, which comprised a vast area along the west coast between Arguin Island and Sierre Leone, and 294 from Cabinda (Angola) (Hall 1992a, 60).³ After 1731 there was a twelve-year hiatus when no new shipments arrived; then in 1743 the last slave cargo of the French regime brought 190 Africans to Louisiana, also from the Senegalese concession. No additional slaves were imported from Africa until after the Spanish took effective control of the colony in 1769.

In all then, 5,500 Africans were brought to Louisiana between 1719 and 1743, of whom 3,909, more than two-thirds, were embarked at the Senegalese concession (Hall 1992a, 60; 1997). While the point of embarkation provides no certain clue as to the specific geographical provenance of the slaves, shipment from the Senegalese concession strongly suggests an origin somewhere in the Senegambian region.

In an effort to hasten the transition from subsistence farming to the cultivation of cash crops such as indigo and tobacco, many slaves were distributed among the large planters and small farmers holding lands along the Mississippi. In this early period, however, a significant number were put to work in and around New Orleans building levees, digging ditches and canals, cutting lumber, and performing more skilled work as carpenters, cartwrights, blacksmiths, and even doctors (Hall 1992a, 126). Many were also forced into military service as soldiers, guarding New Orleans and other settlements and fighting in wars against Indian tribes—especially the Natchez and the Chickasaw—who were hostile to the French, or as sailors, bringing supplies to military posts (Hall 1992a, 134).

1.3 Economic Activity and Social Relations

The hardships endured by newcomers to the subtropical wilderness of Lower Louisiana were many. Lack of supplies of all kinds, crop failures, famine, and disease reduced Europeans (the tiny ruling elite excepted) and Africans alike to the barest form of existence and made each group dependent on the other, as well as on the Indians, for survival. Their interdependence during these early years necessitated regular and intensive contact among the various segments of the population, which reduced social distances typically linked to race and status and encouraged cultural exchange.⁴ Pellegrin’s description (1949, 21) of a rigid social hierarchy in early Pointe Coupee must be understood as the “official” version of the social order, which masked a more complex reality: “At the top of the social pyramid were the large landowners. These, of course, had to be in a favored social and economic position in order to receive land grants from the Company of the West. Their representatives, the overseers and supervisors, no doubt were next highest on the social scale, followed by officers of the fort at Pointe Coupee, owners of small holdings, the coureurs de bois, and the soldiers garrisoned at the fort. At the very bottom of the social pyramid, as always, were the Negro slaves.”

The meaningfulness of the social divisions Pellegrin describes was in fact quite limited during much of the French period, when the colony was still struggling to establish itself. Hall (1992a, 238), also writing about Pointe Coupee, paints a picture of a much more fluid society of Indians, Europeans, and Africans all leading a precarious existence and, in no small measure, bound together by the common need to survive: “Red, white, and black met under crisis conditions. The insecurity of this frontier world created a society in which the three races were deeply dependent upon each other and physical survival was often more important than accumulation of wealth. Racial lines were blurred, and intimate relations among peoples of all three races flourished. The population of this face-to-face community, living in danger and isolation much of the time, adapted by creating a flexible, permeable world where human talents and abilities were at a premium. Hybrid race, culture, and language were created.”

The nature of the cultural and linguistic exchange that took place among Indians, colonists, and slaves in Lower Louisiana was shaped by the ways in which they entered into contact. During the early years of the colony in particular, an important setting for regular contact was petty trade, characterized by “small, face-to-face transactions” conducive to cultural exchange (Usner 1992, 198).⁵ As we have seen, the French typically did not live among the Indians but instead located their settlements near Indian villages in order to have ready access to food supplies and as a buffer against hostile tribes and the British. The colonists gave the Indians imported goods in exchange for food for their own consumption and furs that were shipped off to be sold in Europe. An essential means of survival in the earliest years, the colonists’ widespread practice of trade with the Indians eventually began to interfere with the Company of the Indies’ goal of turning the colony into a profitable agricultural enterprise. General Commissioner Marc-Antoine Hubert complained in 1716 that Louisiana’s settlers “will never be satisfied with this infallible resource [i.e., tilling the soil], accustomed as they are to the trade with the Indians the easy profit from which supports them, giving them what they need day by day like the Indians who find their happiness in an idle and lazy life” (Rowland and Sanders 1929–1932, 232, quoted in Usner 1992, 41–42). The problem of agricultural labor became somewhat less acute once African slaves began arriving in large numbers in 1719. It was not long, however, before the slaves themselves began engaging in the trade and sale of goods, eventually becoming, along with free people of color, “the most ubiquitous peddlers of food in Lower Mississippi Valley towns” (Usner 1992, 43, 201). Although slaves sometimes sold produce on behalf of their owners, they also marketed goods raised in their own gardens or game and fish they caught, keeping the profits for themselves. Such small-scale farming and marketing of garden produce was encouraged by owners because it “helped [them] to maintain slaves at a level of subsistence minimizing hardship, death, and rebellion [and] provided consumers with a larger quantity and wider array of foods than would otherwise have been available.” There was inherent tension, however, between the advantages these marketing activities held out to owners and the dangerous degree of autonomy they afforded slaves, leading colonial officials to take measures to regulate them more closely (McGowan 1976, 145–46; Usner 1992, 197). Yet such measures could not put an end to petty trade by slaves, which continued to be an important avenue for interaction between blacks, whites, and Indians.

While trade activities continued apace, the foundations of a more stable agricultural economy began to be laid in the form of numerous small farms, known throughout the French colonial world as habitations. It was on these modest agricultural units—the essential prelude to large plantations, veritable agro-industrial operations that would not truly take hold in Louisiana until the beginning of the nineteenth century—that the most sustained and intensive contact between Europeans, Africans, and, to a lesser extent, Indians took place in the early years. On the typical habitation, a farmer might live with his wife and children, one or two indentured...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Table
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Symbols
• Maps
• Introduction
• PART I Sociohistorical Background
• PART II Grammatical Description
• PART III Interview Excerpts
• Works Cited
• Glossary
• Index