Trip of the Tongue (29 page)

Six months later it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Not, apparently, being a superstitious bunch, they raised some more money and built another church on the same lot.

The history of the Norwegian Lutheran Church is complicated to say the least, full of controversies and schisms both large and small. But one thing the various branches of the church did agree on was the importance of the preservation of Norwegian language and culture and the threat to that language and culture posed by public schools. In an article in
Norwegian-American Studies
, education professor Frank C. Nelsen describes the attitude of the Norwegian Lutheran church at a meeting on the question of public schools. “The Synod spent considerable time,” he writes, “discussing the most appropriate adjective to describe the American school. The pastors debated whether it should be called ‘heathen' or ‘religionless.' ”

So in 1866 the Church put forth its plan to build a parochial school system. In some Lutheran communities, the church allowed for public school attendance but recommended a strategy of infiltration to ensure that Norwegian Lutherans were hired as public school teachers. Many laymen, however, believed that Norwegian and American cultures could—and, indeed, should—coexist. They felt strongly that public schools were key to the future success of the Norwegian American community. The controversy over public schools raged for more than ten years, but ultimately the church lost. Although there were a number of private Norwegian-language schools successfully established, Norwegian Americans overwhelmingly elected to send their children to public schools.

And the linguistic preferences of the community ultimately dictated those of their church. As late as 1925 the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America was offering an equal number of services in English and Norwegian—though Odd Lovoll notes that the Norwegian services almost certainly drew fewer parishioners. In the following years, however, the use of Norwegian in the church continued to decline: more services and classes were offered in English and fewer pastors were trained in Norwegian. By the mid-1940s, less than 7 percent of services were conducted in Norwegian. In 1946, the word
Norwegian
was dropped from the name of the church entirely. There are today in the United States only two churches still conducting services in Norwegian: the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church of Minneapolis and the Norwegian Lutheran Memorial Church in Logan Square, Chicago.

This is really just an aside, though, because I wasn't looking for Bethania Lutheran in an effort to research the ecclesiastic effects on the Norwegian language. The church itself wasn't even there anymore. Bethania Lutheran was disbanded in 1988, and in 1992 the entire structure was moved to the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa. You can see it there today, on a quiet street amid a hodgepodge of other relocated bits of Norwegian Americana. Its cemetery, however, had not been moved. And unless I was very much mistaken, it was there I would find my great-great-grandparents.

I haven't been able to re-create the search string since, but the gods of Google were clearly behind me at the time, because I somehow came up with a plausible location. The Internet didn't give me a street or number, but it did give me latitude and longitude. And my off-brand GPS was just barely not-shitty enough that it was able to tell me what those numbers meant.

So I entered the coordinates into the machine, sent a quick hey-how're-you-doing to St. Christopher, and headed out.

Until then I'd thought that the back roads of North Dakota were just so quaint and beautiful, but I radically reconsidered this notion as I drove down ever dustier roads, each bumpier and more confusing than the last. I eventually found myself driving through a dairy farm, cows to either side, convinced that I was somehow trespassing. (I probably was.) As I adjusted to the mouth-only breathing essential in the presence of livestock, I thought, in quick succession:
This was a terrible idea. I can't possibly be in the right place. Fuck this fucking GPS.

Fully lost now in a maze of cow paths, I came to a kind of crossroads and just took a guess, turning right toward a small cluster of trees. That's when I saw a church bell, which had been mounted on a low pillar set just off the side of the road. I pulled off onto the grass and got out to investigate. There was a small sign beneath the bell that read “Former site of Bethania Lutheran Church 1883–1989.” I read it twice just to be sure. I couldn't quite believe I'd come to the right place. But there behind the bell was a small clearing surrounded by a fence, and in that clearing was the cemetery.

When I walked up to the fence I discovered that the gate was locked, and for a moment I actually considered leaving. But I strongly doubted I'd ever be able to find this place again, so after taking a quick glance around on the extremely off chance that one of North Dakota's eight police officers happened to be in the area, I threw a leg over the fence and climbed over, giving a quick prayer of thanks for my Norwegian gangliness as I did so.

I don't think I had really expected to find anything at the cemetery. My relationship with my Norwegian relatives had always been secondhand, just a meager handful of stories passed along at family gatherings. If I hadn't been so keenly aware that my existence was predicated on theirs, my grandfather and his family might as well have been characters in a fairy tale.

So it was something of a shock, then, to find almost without trying the two small stones marked Edvard and Mina Knain.

The only reason I know anything about Bethania, Northwood, and Edvard and Mina is that I stole my mother's moldy old copy of our family tree. It's more than a family tree, really—it's a collection of stories and genealogical information prepared by distant cousins in Cedar Rapids and Winter Park, painstakingly typed out, and then distributed to the family on forty-four mimeographed pages. But on the cover someone drew a picture of a tree and inscribed the words “Our Family Tree,” so that's what I call it.

When the family tree is informative, it is very informative. But when it is not, it is maddening. It offers only a few terse sentences about Ole Ronneby, the seventeenth-century family patriarch. For my great-grandfather it reads simply, “Emil was a plumber, sheet-metal worker, and furnace man for many years.” And my grandfather's entry, arguably the one that interests me most, is the very least informative: “Wendell Knain. Born Dec. 11, 1916. Married Regina Lupka of Schenectady, NY, August 24, 1941. Graduated from University of ND in 1937.”

The day after I went to Northwood I called my mother to see if she remembered anything else. “Oh, only bits and pieces,” she responded. She told me that Emil was also an embalmer—“Which makes sense, you know, because it's probably a lot like plumbing”—and that his wife, Annie, had gone to teacher's college. On one trip they had gone out to visit the farm, and my mother remembered milking cows and jumping out of the second-story barn door into bales of hay. They had gone to see my great-uncle Henry, who lived alone on his potato farm.

“Did Grandpa speak Norwegian?” I asked.

She paused for a moment. “I think that when Daddy was growing up, they spoke some Norwegian, but I think that didn't last for too long—he went away to college when he was only sixteen. And he certainly forgot what he knew. But I know
my
grandfather grew up speaking it.”

“So Grandpa didn't speak any Norwegian? Not even a word or two here and there?”

“There was one phrase. And he used it all the time. He liked to tell your grandma
jeg elsker deg
.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well,” she said, “it means ‘I love you.' ”

I smiled. It seemed my family had—in an utterly uncharacteristic fit of sentimentality—left me some Norwegian after all.

Chapter Eight

Florida: Haitian Creole

The patterns of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American immigration shifted abruptly and radically with the passage of the Emergency Quota Act in 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. With the adoption of quota systems such as the national origins formula, the rate of immigration to the United States was drastically reduced, with numbers of new arrivals from countries in eastern and southern Europe falling most precipitously. The quota system remained in place until 1965, when it was replaced with a new system based on professional qualifications and family ties. With the passage of this new legislation, rates of immigration began to increase once again. This time, however, immigrants weren't just coming from Europe. They were also coming, in ever-increasing numbers, from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

But most of all they were coming from the Americas. And though many of these new immigrants spoke languages such as Portuguese, Caribbean creoles, or even English, the vast majority were speakers of Spanish. This is a trend that continues today, with the nation's Hispanic/Latino population acting as the driving force behind the country's overall population growth. Though Hispanic/Latino heritage does not necessarily imply Spanish-language proficiency, Spanish is nevertheless now the second-most-spoken language in the United States. Current population estimates suggest that speakers of Spanish and Spanish creoles number nearly 35 million. Taken in total, without even accounting for undocumented speakers, the Spanish-speaking population in the United States is, after Mexico's, the second-largest in the world. By 2050 it could be the largest.

The growing influence of the Spanish language is hard to miss, whether you live in New York or New Trier. It can be seen on TV and billboards, in grocery stores and newspapers. It seems, on balance, as if it would be harder to find a city where you can't hear Spanish than to find one where you can. At the national level English is still the majority language by a wide margin—as of 2005 the ratio of English-speakers to Spanish-speakers was just slightly less than 7 to 1. In a few exceptional areas, however, Spanish is now the dominant language.

Though Spanish-language communities were nothing new to me after five years in New York, I had no intention of overlooking them on my travels. And so I planned one last long-distance drive, from the historic Spanish-speaking settlements in New Mexico to the most heavily Spanish-speaking city in Texas. But before I did that I needed first to make a stop in Florida to see a city I'd been avoiding for years. It was time for me to go to Miami.

There really is no other city in the country whose public image is less compatible with my private reality. Miami always seemed to me to be the Regina George of America: a little too pretty, a little too flashy, and a lot too bitchy. Everyone had to look gorgeous; everyone had to wear heels. It was a city of rappers and reality stars, rappers who were reality stars, and—most terrifying—reality stars who were rappers. Even its crime scene investigators were too cool for school. I was a little worried that I'd be stopped on my way into town as part of an effort to ensure that no one in the city had ever not been asked to prom.

Fortunately for me, Miami's nothing like this.

Oh, don't get me wrong. Miami Beach is
definitely
like this. I spent a half a day in South Beach and it was like I'd looked into the gaping maw of a mythical beast composed of eight hundred disapproving beauty editors. But Miami Beach is not, as it turns out, the same thing as Miami. Miami Beach is actually a barrier island just across the Bay of Biscayne from the rest of the city, a fact that gave me no small measure of comfort. I was good at ignoring islands. I'd done it with Staten Island for years.

The Miami I was in town to see was on the other side of the bridge. This is the Miami that has the highest proportion of foreign-born residents of any major city in the United States. Here in Miami and its surrounding metropolitan areas you will find the nation's largest Cuban community, its largest Nicaraguan community, and its largest Venezuelan community. And these aren't just isolated or marginal ethnic neighborhoods. These communities are large, influential, and very much a part of mainstream Miami. According to the 2010 Census, Miami-Dade County was fully 65 percent Hispanic/Latino, a 5 percent increase from 2000, when the country was already home to nearly two times as many Spanish-speakers as English-speakers.

But though I ultimately came to Miami because of its large Spanish-speaking population, I was primarily interested in investigating a language other than Spanish, which is why I didn't head straight out to Hialeah or Sweetwater. Instead I drove up to the area between 54th and 86th streets, between I-95 and the Florida East Coast Railroad. Once called Lemon City, this part of town is now known as Little Haiti. And I was going here to find Haitian Creole.
^bb

Two things drew me to Haitian Creole. First of all, I was just plain curious about the language. I had looked at creoles in Louisiana and South Carolina, but this creole was different. According to the linguist and creole specialist John Holm, the first seeds for the development of Haitian Creole were sown in the seventeenth century, when the area was frequented by buccaneers from France, England, and Africa. Some of these men married French women and established plantations, and soon enough they were importing slaves from nearby colonies and from Africa. On one very small island, then, you had speakers of French, Spanish, English, Caribbean creoles, and a diverse set of African languages in a colonial context that required the rapid development of a shared means of communication. By the end of the eighteenth century both slaves and slave owners were speaking a form of Haitian Creole.

None of this is substantially different from the story of Louisiana Creole or Gullah. (In fact, linguistically there are so many similarities between Louisiana Creole and Haitian Creole that experts continue to debate whether they developed independently.) What is different about Haitian Creole, however, is that it is today an official language. And for a creole that's a relatively unusual thing, because given the circumstances of creole formation, creole-speaking populations typically have little political, social, or economic power.

I wondered, then, how Haitian Creole had become an official language and what, if anything, that meant to the Haitian diaspora and their attitudes toward language retention.

More important, though, I wanted to visit a non-Spanish-language community in a Spanish-language town. In every other language community I'd visited I'd gotten the impression that the pull of English was so strong as to be inescapable. I wanted to know if that was still true in a city where the majority of the population spoke Spanish. If it wasn't, if speakers of Haitian Creole were choosing to learn Spanish or choosing not to learn a new language at all, then that would seem to play into the idea that Spanish-language enclaves were a growing threat to the primacy of English. If it was, though, then that would be an indication that language prestige in the United States was determined by something other than population and proximity.

Because Miami was from the start an unexpected sort of place, it gave me the chance to think about all this and more.

The first Europeans to land in Miami were part of an expedition led by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the same explorer who happened to found St. Augustine, the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States. He apparently didn't take to Miami the same way, because the Spanish only bothered to establish a single mission, and they abandoned it after a year.

For the next three centuries the area was only sparsely and sporadically populated by Europeans. In the winter of 1894–95, however, the region suddenly began to attract speculative attention when most of Florida's citrus crop was lost to a spate of unusually cold weather in the northern part of the state. Only one citrus crop survived: that of Mrs. Julia Tuttle, from the town of Miami. She sent a railroad executive word of Miami's frost-free winter, and before long there were plans for a railroad extension and a resort hotel. The first railroad tracks reached Miami in 1896; the city of Miami was incorporated soon thereafter. Its rapid growth into the major metropolis it is today earned it the nickname “Magic City.” This is probably the one and only thing Miami has in common with Minot.

The first major wave of Haitian immigration to the United States, meanwhile, began with the rise to power of François Duvalier, the repressive leader known as Papa Doc. Most of these early transplants went to New York City, and to this day the city has a substantial Haitian population. By the 1970s, however, south Florida was on its way to becoming the preferred port of entry, attracting increasing numbers of Haiti's rural poor and urban working class. Soon Haitians from other parts of the United States and Canada, having realized as all sensible people inevitably do that winters in the Northeast are the pits, began relocating to Miami, bolstering the community's economic base.

New arrivals to Miami are concentrated in Little Haiti, where the cost of living is low and access to support networks is high. Those immigrants who are able to attain some measure of economic stability then move to relatively more affluent neighborhoods, a pattern of relocation familiar to anyone who has ever watched the ebb and flow of an immigrant neighborhood. For the Haitian population, these satellite neighborhoods are located to the north of the city, in places such as El Portal, Opa-Locka, and North Miami. Community groups such as Sant La, a non-profit based out of Little Haiti, estimate that more than 400,000 Haitians and Haitian Americans live in the vicinity of Miami. It is the country's largest Haitian population.

If I had been just a regular, everyday tourist in Miami, I probably never would have set foot in Little Haiti. I've read more than my fair share of travel guides, and I can't think of a single place I've ever seen depicted as ominously as Little Haiti. Travelers are admonished not to go at night, not to carry cash (not to carry anything of value, actually), and not to talk to anyone. Maybe, for that matter, you should just not go at all. The warnings felt not dissimilar to some I'd written myself for a travel guide—about the importance of steering clear of the North Korean border.

To be fair, those few guidebooks not in the business of scaring visitors away from Little Haiti aren't much better, waxing rhapsodically about the exotic rhythms of Kreyòl and the pounding beats of kompa music and generally patting themselves on the back for being so forward-thinking as to set foot into the area.

Nevertheless, when I got my first look at Little Haiti, I was prepared for the worst. Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. With 26.3 percent of its population living below the poverty line, according to Census Bureau estimates, Miami is the poorest large city in the United States. And Little Haiti is even poorer, an economically distressed neighborhood in an economically distressed city. You can see evidence of this wherever you look. The yards are patchy and strewn with assorted possessions and debris. Many of the chain-link fences have holes in them. Windows are barred, and barbed wire is everywhere.

The commercial thoroughfares are more welcoming, though, successions of painted storefronts and open doors and small clusters of residents chatting in the shade. And though there are botanicas promising spiritual guidance and restaurants serving
griot
and
diri ak pwa
, most of the stores just sell the same sorts of goods and services you could find in any part of town—or any part of the country. At the corner of NE 54th Street and NE 2nd Avenue, the neighborhood's main commercial stretch is anchored now by a Walgreens. For better or for worse, it is a neighborhood in transition.

Across the street from that Walgreen's is a place called Churchill's, one of Miami's more distinctive bars and music venues. Despite being in the heart of Little Haiti, Churchill's is a full-on English pub, with a Union Jack painted on the side of the building, rusting double-decker buses in the parking lot, and, over the entrance, a giant portrait of Winnie himself. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to go inside, if only to prove to myself that it was real.

It was around noon on a Friday when I pulled open the door and peered inside. There weren't any customers at that time of day, and the employees were all hustling to prepare for the evening's performances. So I had a good five minutes to stand there and just sort of take everything in. Now, everything about the place screamed “dive bar.” It's the kind of place that would refuse to clean its bathrooms just to make a point. But when I walked in that day, the first thing I saw was Martha Stewart on the TV. This was, I have to admit, not how I imagined the bar best known for breaking bands such as Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids.

Eventually someone took notice of the weird girl watching the segment on how to fold fitted sheets, and I soon found myself talking to longtime employee Barbara Eisenhower. She loves the place, and despite obviously having a great deal of work to do, she sat down to talk to me about the clientele, the music, and the neighborhood. I asked her if the Haitians who live in the area come in a lot. “They don't really drink,” she said. “They're not a bar culture, really.” I learned later that many of the bars that had been in the area when it was still known as Lemon City were converted to churches after the Haitians moved in.

I asked Barbara if she felt safe here, and she said yes—mostly. Granted, she wouldn't necessarily want to walk alone three blocks that way or three blocks this way, but she felt fine on the major thoroughfares. “There's good and bad, like everywhere,” she told me. Then, almost offhandedly, she mentioned that most of the crime had moved to the north of Miami, something I would hear over and over again while I was in Little Haiti, with various degrees of verisimilitude.