Creole Language | Folks (1985)

funding for the production of folks is provided in part by the friends of lpb coming up today a look at a pilgrimage from buxton canada to louisiana genevieve stewart will be taking a look at the creole language and then we'll visit the big bunny program in baton rouge i'm rob hinton and we'll have those stories today on folks [Music] is just to survive everybody [Music] everybody [Music] hello everyone and welcome to folks first up today we have a story about a canadian pilgrimage it involves a group of black canadians from buxton canada who came to louisiana to discover their roots they came to louisiana from north buxton canada by bus all ancestors of 15 slaves taken to canada by the reverend william king after inheriting them he didn't want them to well he couldn't really free them in the state of louisiana because they may be seized and sold back into slavery detesting slavery the way he did he felt his only hope and that only survivor really uh hinged upon him taking them out of here and going on to canada purchasing land where he did buy 4 500 acres of ground of course at large area was more i guess than would you consider 15 people needing but he was wise enough to realize that being so close to the border of this country that it was going to become a haven for fugitive slaves and that it did mrs smith who organized the canadians trip first became interested in the connection between louisiana and buxton canada while reading this book this book uh really has only about a paragraph talking about a plantation owner from louisiana who inherited 15 slaves but of course not liking slavery he decided to take them to canada and this is where that story begins and with me it was this book the first stop on the pilgrimage was a tour of the courthouse and clinton the same courthouse where reverend king transacted a lot of his business i wanted them to retrace reverend king's route i wanted them to see buildings that he had seen or to to visit places that their ancestors were familiar with and that's why i took them to the courthouse first because reverend king did transact his business in that very building and of course that's where um we found the will that i had already you know pulled together knew where it was and of course the clerk of court uh was expecting us so she had it ready and they were eager to get copies of that meal because it did list those slaves by name that are every um i mean i'm sorry that um mr farris uh willed to his daughter and of course they were able to get those wells after the stop in clinton the canadians ventured on to a church in jackson louisiana it was there that we got a chance to talk to some of them the the building has been very fulfilling in that for most of us it's a first and and we really didn't know what to expect but regardless of what we expected this has far exceeded our expectations i'll assure you and uh the as i say it being a first we were kind of feeling our way but as it advances everybody because of the the general nature of the people with whom we've been in contact it's just like whole home week you know yeah and everyone is has really been put at ease and there's no strained relationships and and we're really looking forward to the balance of the pilgrimage when we started out you you don't know just who you're going to meet or all you know you feel that you're going to wind up meeting a whole lot of fine people and certainly we have and they're gone all out here to make us happy talking to one gentleman in there he mentioned about being in victoria and i'm sure he didn't realize how many miles he was from where we're from we're from uh more the central part we're in ontario he was talking about being in british columbia area which is about three thousand miles i think it is from uh the area that we live in but we've enjoyed we are enjoying ourselves and certainly we know as we get down into new orleans that it's even going to be greater my grandfather newbie came from this area but he did none of his sisters others didn't come along with him so therefore we've never had any contact with anyone the night before the pilgrimage officials at southern university staged a concert to honor the canadians a concert featuring spirituals jazz and black creole songs [Music] yo [Music] we are now going to turn our attention to the creole language a language primarily spoken by black southern louisianians now when directly translated into english creo colloquialisms have had an effect on all louisiana citizens as genevieve stewart discovered mostly all of us here in louisiana have had contact with creole either speaking or trying to understand it expressions such as parking on the banquette making groceries or saving clothes have their origins in the creole dialect well i ventured to bro bridge to listen and learn more about this louisiana phenomena de quillo you see creole is a is a mixture of french and i imagine spanish and english and when i was overseas in france i did exceptionally well making people understand uh what i wanted and uh this did well it's not really french there are a lot of things that i cannot say in french i can say it in creole and if you speak only french you you will understand it's a sort of a broken french and a mixture with you know english and and spanish i would define creole as a slang language get over language where people black people especially in this area spoke different from the cajun french and that was a lot of times it was just to get over and get the words would get the points out to themselves and not let nobody know what's going on there's little documentation on how the creole dialect evolved because it is not written it is an idiomatic language and an oral tradition joseph jones states a commonly repeated theory of its origins you will not find this in any book i think it's just something that was handed down to us from generation to generation my understanding is that uh as far as the black french the french that uh creole that we speak uh came about as a result of uh the slaves developing a sort of a a lingo that the masters could not understand so the kind of french that that we speak is not the same as the so-called cajun french it's all together different and the slaves who were in this particular area were enslaved by people who came from canada who spoke french pure french and they developed their own french as a sort of an escape thing where you just couldn't understand this kuri-vini thing that we are sometimes uh accused of speaking and uh this carried on through throughout the years and even today uh the the french that we speak here in broad bridge in saint martinville is different from uh the french or the creole that you hear in other areas in traveling around the state of louisiana can you understand people that speak creole from other cities yes i can understand uh practically every area that they speak creole but it's it's different from the creole i speak a lot of places are different it's in modern parish speaks uh we're different from a whole lot of other parishes in in southwest louisiana alexander could not speak a word of english when he started school he felt that this initially hampered his educational development i had i had a very bad problem when i was going to school to to speak english learn how to speak the language and then when i learned how to speak english i was speaking bad english and so uh i believe that's why they getting away from it i wouldn't call it a handicap i think uh not being able to speak english when you attend school as they you're not handicapped you just have to go and start learning again it's it's it's a handicap in the sense that your progress is perhaps slowed down a little bit because you have to pick up another language but i think the intelligence is there uh the fact that you learn creole to me is indicative of the fact that you have some intelligence and of course innate ability plays a part in this and the kids who who spoke uh creole when they attended uh some of my doctors today lawyers and they've done exceptionally well like i said it's it's it's it slows you down a little bit because everything in america is english the books are in english not french uh the curriculum is is an english curriculum and you had to just learn another language but i don't believe that in as far as preventing children from learning that creole was a barrier in some instances i think it's an asset as a child beginning school could you speak english when i came up back here in broadbridge we uh at home we learned english and french and of course the reason for the french is the fact that my grandmother two grandmothers could not speak english at all and she lived in the household so therefore we had to communicate with her so it was incumbent upon us to to learn french or creole as you will and also english my mother saw a need for us to learn english so that when we would attend school which sought to be a would have a head start over uh the other kids and we did but creole was spoken by 90 or perhaps more than 90 of the children in that particular area so going to school meant uh learning english and with us we were fortunate enough to uh learn english and french at home so when we attended grade school for some reason we skipped some grades because of the fact that we could speak english the nuns at saint francis of assisi uh promoted us to a higher grade because when we attended we we had command of the english language of course when i say command we could speak english because the english we spoke was really a direct translation from french from the creole and creole is really not a language in a sense there are no verbs subject agreement and that sort of thing but at least we could communicate with people who spoke english and also we could communicate with kids in the community who spoke on the creole speaking creole in the classroom was frowned upon and often resulted in punishment when i went to school there were nuns that came practically from all parts of the country and we had very few nuns from this area they taught us majority of them spoke english and uh they had a tough time to break us from it they used to make us write lines like i will not speak creole and sometimes up to 500 to try to break us the habit of speaking it and uh that's uh that was a a very hard difficult thing for them to stop us from doing because when we went back home we had to speak our parents practically couldn't speak english either his mother mrs agnes alexander learned to speak english as an adult she is still more comfortable with speaking creole did your parents speak creole or yes ma'am did they speak any english at all not at all not at all when you talk to your friends do you speak creole or english well mostly creole when you have to call offices to check on a bill or something of that sort do you have any difficulty in people understanding you what you're saying not too much no if you do have difficulty are there usually people in the offices that can speak creole or understand it well some of it understand it and some you know some of them not just speak english instead of rio you see but i started real during jones youth speaking creole was a preeminent qualification for the hiring of teachers consequently few teachers in creole speaking parishes had college degrees you had teachers who taught school from the broadbridge community but they were not degree teachers they were high school graduates and again in those days if you could not if you were not bilingual you could not speak creole you couldn't you couldn't teach uh uh the law of graves you had to uh be a a creole speaking individual so it was sort of a must to select people from the area irregardless of whether or not they were college graduates or not and what would happen you'd go back and finish or you'd go back and pick up a few subjects get your certificate and so forth and so on and then continue to teach when jones returned to bro bridge as a college degree teacher the creole language was an advantageous instructional tool even myself in teaching mathematics i had to sometimes revert to creole to get kids to understand or get the point over and a lot of times i mean kids are i taught school they're growing now but they'll tell you now oh yeah i remember how mr jones would discuss geometry and creole but i did that on a number of occasions although cajun french and creole french share their origins in louisiana they are two distinctly different dialects the cajun french is more attuned to the french language there are a lot of french phrases pure french phrases in cajun french that is not in the french that blacks in this community speaks uh and again that's going back to uh the time of slavery when the blacks were trying to develop a language that whites did not understand and they could communicate among themselves and and they did fairly well with that tell me something short sweet and clean in creole and then translate i love crawfish i'm going to translate this in cajuns french and also black french more lamb licorice would be the creole the cajun version blacks would say more lamely can it be i love crawfish louisianans are very proud of speaking de cuyol whatever the language one speaks being able to communicate is really the bottom line the creole language has helped me a lot when i went to service for instance i was stationed with a lot of guys from mexico and uh these guys spoke spanish and uh it was very easy for me to pick up on what they were talking about because there's a lot of spanish mixed up in there a lot of the words mean the same thing irregardless to how you get the point out as long as you get it over whether it be in creole or english if you get it over he has learned something and learning is relating anyway so if you can relate whether it's english or french or creole you understand it then you can communicate even though we can't understand it some of us just love the sound of the creole we won't get censored for that will we no after watching this segment everyone should know that parking on the banquette making groceries and saving clothes is a direct translation which means parking on the curb grocery shopping and putting away clean laundry but i'm sure most of you already knew that didn't you sure we did we are now going to tell you about a program for underprivileged youngsters in the baton rouge area called the big buddy program the big buddy program is a non-profit organization that promotes youth opportunities among children in east baton rouge parish to me the big buddy program was just simply words to denote people working together our whole philosophy and the whole way we're set up is just simply we believe that that all of us everybody has talents and skills that they can share with somebody else and there are in this city a lot of kids who who do not have people willing and able to share those kinds of talents and abilities so our whole purpose is to just give kids opportunities to reach their potential how does it differ from the big brother program that we often hear about in some ways it doesn't differ at all the main the main difference is that we focus on the community the kids that we serve basically come from given communities we don't just provide the one-on-one but we try to work with the with the kid apart from the one-on-one we try to work with the kid in his group setting in his community in his school and in his neighborhood so how do the kids benefit from the program you know you change through role models you change through seeing other people and knowing other people and knowing somebody who's special in your life and all of us growing up had people who are special you know outside of our family and that's what a big buddy is it's somebody outside the family who's very special to that kid and that kid looks up to that person tries to emulate that person in addition to the one-on-one we try to work very close in the community where the kids live most of the kids come from single parent families low-income families a lot of them come from public housing projects and areas in town where there's a lot of negative influences you know the parents may be outstanding parents but when they when there's a lot of crime when there's a lot of drugs and a lot of drinking in the streets where the kids live they're going to grow up with too much of that inside of them and see too much that they shouldn't see so we try to work in those communities to to provide some positive activity some athletic teams some scouting some you know other types of cultural activities that the kids can can get involved in rather than get involved in the other things one of the primary resources is also the schools the schools have been outstanding letting us come in and work with the kids you know in the school setting and providing activities at the school and after school one of the volunteers in the program is michelle chamberlain she is a big buddy to 12 year old tamika mcgee my little buddy's name is tamika and i feel a part of her life because i feel she relies on me she calls me if she has a problem she calls me to help her with her homework she lets me know what things she wants to do that week you know i leave it pretty much up to her and i just feel sort of like a sister to her in a way to the park feed the ducks cook to her house mcdonald's do you like going out with your big buddy tell us why because i love her very rewarding and it makes i mean it's not something selfish because you're not really doing it for yourself you're doing it for someone else and when you when you see that child and you see how excited she is when you come to pick her up and when you take her somewhere that she really enjoys and you know just being with her and you know you're needed and it's just a part of your life and as it develops you just get more and more out of it each time eight-year-old portrayal williams is another of the little buddies what kinds of things do you do on your camping trips do you like the big buddy program yes why do you like it it's fun ten-year-old tashaba rogers and eleven-year-old gerard teletson are two players on one of the basketball teams sponsored by the big buddy program so how's your season gone so far all right has the coach been working you pretty hard yes sir how so make us run last a lot of laps how much practice do you guys put into sean a lot what's a lot every day yeah do you like this big buddy program tell me why well if you weren't yeah if you weren't playing basketball what would you be doing outside playing basketball how can the community get involved in the big buddy program there's a lot of ways the community can get involved primarily through volunteers uh you know there's there's a lot more kids and there are volunteers and the more volunteers we can get you know the more kids we can serve also just the the other youth agencies the the the schools you know their involvement we we in and of ourselves as i mentioned are not an organization looking to be an organization we're an organization looking to serve kids and any way that other organizations can come in contact with us or we can come in contact with them to serve better or to serve more you know that's that's that's what community involvement is and that's what you know we strive for well that's our show for this week thanks for watching we'll be back next week with another edition of folks and we hope to see you then [Music] bye-bye [Music] funding for the production of folks is provided in part by the friends of lpb

Channel: Louisiana Public Broadcasting

Views: 16,015

Rating: 4.9041095 out of 5

Keywords: Slavery, Freedmen, Canada, French language, Creole dialects, CREOLES, Big Buddy Program (Baton Rouge La.), Mentoring

Id: Kv2288MluDg

Length: 26min 31sec (1591 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021