Trip of the Tongue (14 page)

New Orleans French doesn't just reflect the local heritage, it reveals the local personality. It's delightful but just a little hard to follow, like an excessively elaborate secret handshake. New Orleans is the same way. I've never been to a city so simultaneously gregarious and reticent. You're welcome to attend the festivities, but forget about the after-party. I bet you could live half your life in New Orleans and still not feel like a local. On your first visit, you can't help but feel that you might benefit from some footnotes.

All things considered, I was beginning to wonder if French in Louisiana wasn't a little more complicated than I'd thought.

Ironically, the more I explored the French Quarter, the more I began to be aware of languages other than French. Given that from 1763 to 1801 New Orleans was part of Spain, one of these languages was, unsurprisingly, Spanish. You can still see Spanish throughout the French Quarter—just look closely at the decorative tiles that memorialize the old Spanish street names. You can also find Spanish in two of Louisiana's most well-known and idiosyncratic words:
picayune
and
lagniappe
.

Picayune
is probably best known in the United States as part of the name of the largest daily newspaper in New Orleans. It also, of course, shows up regularly on SAT lists as a word meaning “worthless” or “petty.” Both uses stem from the word's older, Spanish usage.
Picayune
was the name for a half real, the smallest unit of currency in Louisiana under Spanish rule. By the time the United States took control of New Orleans, a picayune was worth 6¼ cents (one-sixteenth of a dollar). This also happened to be the exact price of one of the city's papers, which was, accordingly, thereafter known as the
Picayune
. The paper merged with the
Times-Democrat
in 1914 and has been the
Times-Picayune
ever since.

Another particularly characteristic Louisiana word is
lagniappe
(pronounced “LAN-yap”).
Lagniappe
derives from the Spanish
la ñapa
and means, roughly, “a little something extra thrown in for free” or, perhaps more succinctly, “gift with purchase.”
^aa
In
Life on the Mississippi
, Mark Twain writes of his first encounter with lagniappe:

We picked up one excellent word—a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word—“Lagniappe.” They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish—so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the
Picayune
the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a “baker's dozen.” It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop—or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know—he finishes the operation by saying:

“Give me something for lagniappe.”

The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor—I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely.

Without Twain I likely never would have realized the true sense of
lagniappe
. In my experience the word was thrown around, willy-nilly, by souvenir shops looking to gild their less popular merchandise with a sort of vague regional flair.

But the most important Spanish I learned in New Orleans by far was a third word:
criollo
. Its etymology is fairly straightforward: a diminutive of the past participle of
criar
(“to breed,” “to raise [children]”) and possibly borrowed from the Portuguese
crioulo
,
criollo
can ultimately be traced back to the Latin
cre
ā
re
, “to create.” The history of its meaning, however, is far more complicated. From Spanish and Portuguese the word made its way into French and eventually to English. We know it today as
creole
. And very few of us seem to agree on what it means.

When I hear the term
creole
bandied about, Inigo Montoya's voice frequently pops up in my head. “You keep using that word,” I hear him say. “I do not think it means what you think it means.” It's not that
creole
is necessarily hard to define. It's that
creole
is hard to define uniquely. It can describe groups of languages and groups of people, or specific languages and people within those groups. To make sure things are as mixed up as possible, it's also thrown about as a generic descriptor of the cuisine and cultures of Louisiana and the Caribbean. Sometimes the word flirts with even broader definitions: any tomatoes grown in Louisiana, for instance, could be called creole; the same goes for seemingly any spice blend containing cayenne.

If you'd asked me before I visited New Orleans what
creole
meant, I would have given you a largely linguistic explanation followed by the glancing acknowledgment that “it probably applies to some folks in Louisiana, too.” But on my second afternoon in the city, I found myself rushing to keep up with a fast-talking tour guide in a top hat who had promised to show me “Creole” New Orleans. He dragged me and an equally harried family of four from one end of the quarter to the other, pointing out landmarks, rattling off dates, and somehow in the middle of all this leading me to the conclusion that I was going to need to draw a much more complete picture of what constituted “creole” if I hoped to understand the languages and peoples of Louisiana.

The first way you can use the word
creole
is to describe language.

Though there is some scholarly disagreement on the precise mechanism by which creoles are created, this is generally the way things are thought to happen: first, speakers of two or more languages come into regular contact with each other and need to find a way to communicate.
^ab
They begin to simplify their speech. Soon they are regularly adhering to a set of basic words and to a set of basic rules for using those words together. Sometimes these languages—known as pidgins—become so widespread that children learn them as their first language.
^ac
The children develop the pidgin language, enriching its vocabulary and structure. This relatively more sophisticated, stable, and standardized pidgin is what we call a creole.

The SIL Ethnologue currently lists eighty-two creoles throughout the world, languages such as Papiamento, a Spanish- and Portuguese-based creole and the official language of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, and Tok Pisin, an English-based creole spoken natively by well over a million people in Papua New Guinea. With nearly 8 million speakers, Haitian Creole is the most widely spoken creole in the world. But there are also more localized and short-lived examples, such as Unserdeutsch, a German-based creole that developed in a New Guinean orphanage.

Any language is going to serve as a repository for information about its speakers' culture and history, but contact languages such as pidgins and creoles are revealing in a more immediate and specific fashion. Creoles don't just tell you which languages interacted; they tell you
how
those languages interacted. For instance, if a pidgin or creole exists at all, you know that at some point there were two groups who needed to communicate. But you also know that for some reason neither group was willing or able to learn the other's language.

The words and structure of the language lend further insight, as the composition of a pidgin or creole vocabulary is an indication of the relative social, political, and economic power of each language group. The more power one group has, the more accommodating the other group will tend to be. From time to time a creole will develop that borrows words equally from both (or multiple) languages, but this is far more the exception than the rule, because the conditions for creole creation have throughout history most frequently occurred in the context of colonization. Indeed, most creoles are based on the languages of major colonial powers—Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese. And so the majority of the words in these creoles come from the colonial languages in question (i.e., the vocabulary of Papiamento is largely Dutch-inspired; the vocabulary of Tok Pisin is largely English-inspired).

A creole, then, is not just a remnant of historical necessity. It's also a linguistic encapsulation of the power dynamics of colonization and cultural exchange.

The cultural definitions of capital-
C Creole
are just as revealing. According to the most recent scholarship, the term has been in use in Spanish and Portuguese since the mid-sixteenth century, when it was used primarily to distinguish African-born slaves from slaves born in the New World. In his primer on Louisiana French, historian Carl Brasseaux wrote that as the use of
criollo
and
crioulo
expanded, so too did their definitions. Furthermore, these definitions varied from place to place. “In South America,” Brasseaux writes, “native-born whites eventually came to apply the term exclusively to themselves. In the sugar islands, on the other hand, the term
Creole
was applied to natives of all racial backgrounds.”

It is this latter definition—New World–born—that predominated in the early days of New Orleans. At first the use of Creole was inconsistent and relatively non-specific. Anthropologist Virginia R. Domínguez identifies what she called “the earliest published reference to Creoles in Louisiana proper” in Jean-Bernard Bossu's
Travels in the Interior of North America, 1751–1762.
In 1751, Bossu wrote, “There are four types of inhabitants [in New Orleans]: Europeans, Indians, Africans or Negroes, and half bloods, born of Europeans and savages native to the country. Those born of French fathers and French, or European, mothers are called Creoles. They are generally brave, tall, and well-built and have a natural inclination toward the arts and sciences.” As New Orleans grew in numbers, nationalities, and native tongues, so did the need for distinctions beyond “born over here” and “born over there.” The meaning of
Creole
eventually became a sort of terminological lever, a way for one group to distance itself from another group—often one it considered somehow less desirable.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the English-speaking population of New Orleans grew steadily, a trend that accelerated when the United States acquired New Orleans as part of the Louisiana Purchase. Soon, and perhaps naturally enough, tensions developed between the city's new and established populations. It was in this environment that Creole became a way to distinguish between the descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers and the more recent arrivals from Anglo America.

Given the modern-day usage of the word, it's easy to assume that Creole identification was dependent on race, but according to Domínguez, it wasn't until the late 1800s that the term
Creole
began to evince a strong racial component in New Orleans. By this time the country was busy persecuting and restricting the rights of black Americans, and there was an ever-growing perception outside Louisiana that
Creole
was synonymous with
mixed-race
. Many assumed even the whitest-looking Creoles had some African heritage in their background. White Creoles worried about the effects such assumptions would have on their status, rights, and privileges, and eventually they began to separate themselves from the rest of the Creole community, avowing an all-white definition of Creole. The black Creole community, meanwhile, continued to call themselves Creole, a distinction that sometimes put them at odds with the Anglophone blacks they were increasingly identified with.

Creole is, then, depending on whom you ask, a dividing line between French and Anglo, white and black, white and light-skinned black, light- and dark-skinned black, or some combination thereof. Today it can also be used to distinguish among whites with French heritage: while Creoles are descendants of the original French and Spanish settlers, Cajuns are descendants of Acadian refugees. And these are just the conventional definitions. I suspect that the tourist industry likely has its own, wildly different set of meanings.

The confusion engendered by the term is, I think, a testament not only to the historical complexity of Louisiana's racial and ethnic makeup but also to the shifting demands placed on race as a descriptive construct. Before the Civil War, the population of Louisiana wasn't a simple collection of black and white but was rather a grab bag of Anglo, French, Spanish, Caribbean, African, Isleño, Acadian, German, and Native American. Moreover, many of these groups intermingled, creating a wide variety of potential racial identities, an environment reflected in the state's race-related vocabulary. Historian Gary Mills looked at records in colonial and antebellum Louisiana and found extremely specialized terms for mixed-race individuals. Some, such as
octoroon
(one eighth black ancestry) and
quadroon
(one quarter black ancestry), are relatively familiar and were in fairly common use outside Louisiana. Others, such as
sacatra
(seven eighths black ancestry) and
griffe
(three quarters black ancestry) are more obscure. Taken together, these terms provide some indication of the relative frequency of—if not the typical attitudes toward—miscegenation.

After the Civil War, however, black and white Creoles who had previously shared a single culture and community found themselves retreating to opposite corners, as it were. Some were surely surprised by which corner they ended up in. Though Louisianans had once appreciated the gradations of a multi-ethnic society, the racial distinction that mattered the most in the second half of the nineteenth century was the one between black and white.