moé pi toé

• Contents :: 
• Essay :: 
• Wild Strawberries :: 

When I think about my childhood, I remember running around with neighborhood children, going to church in our school’s gymnasium, and singing in my mother’s choir “La Chorale Des Francs Amis.” I remember family reunions and treasure hunts with my cousins at ma tante Margot’s cabin in St-Jovite. I spent a lot of time fishing with my grand-moman in Ste-Agathe and picking wild strawberries in the summer. J’aimais tellement les petites fraises sauvages. I also remember that we had no English Canadian friends and that there was tension between French and English Canadians that I did not quite understand. Eighty percent of the Province of Québec spoke French, however English speaking folks had this aura of superiority over French Canadians. As a little kid, I did not realize how much discrimation my parents and grandparents had endured. However, it did not take long before I experienced it first hand.
I was born in Verdun, Québec to French-Canadian parents. My father was an aeronautical illustrator at Canadair, and my mother was an elementary school music teacher at l’École Vaillancourt. I had two sisters and one brother. Twenty years after their first four kids were born, my parents had two more boys. When I was two years old, my parents moved to a newly built bedroom community outside of Montréal, in the small town of Fabreville. They purchased a house for $13,000 on rue Émile which was directly behind l’École Sacré-Cœur.
Our backyard and the school yard were separated by a chain link fence. In the winter, when snow banks were ten feet high, I could just hop over the fence and I was home. This had its advantages and disadvantages. We did not have much privacy, and sometimes it felt like I was living at school. On the other hand, I was never late for school, and walking home for lunch was a breeze. The school was a typical école québécoise. It was a rectangular red brick building, surrounded by pavement (une vraie prison). There was not an inch of grass or a tree in sight. That would have been too distracting.
This was a French public school where Catholic religion was part of the curriculum. I will never forget having to go to confession in 2nd grade. Y nous faisaient aller à confesse à l’âge de sept ans. The concept of sins did not make much sense to me. I particularly remember one instance when I could not think of any sins I had committed. So I made up that I had stolen a dime out of my mother’s purse. The priest let out a huge gasp and orderded me to say ten Hail Marys. Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grâce, le Seigneur est avec vous. I felt terrible when I went back to my classroom because I had lied to a Catholic priest. Surely this was a huge sin that would send me straight to hell. I went home feeling pretty shaky. Ah misère!
My father was very active in the newly formed Parti Québécois whose sole purpose was the independence of Québec from Canada. At ten years old, I often had to walk door to door in the streets of my neighborhood with my dad to distribute flyers that explained the “cause”. My father could never get my other siblings to come along. I liked meeting people, so I didn’t mind going with him. Sometimes he would get in long conversations with people, and at other times people would yell at him to get off their property when they realized what he was distributing. Most of the time people were pretty decent. Vive le Québec libre! We knew what streets were French and what streets were English, so we would stay within our “territory.” This was something my parents did not speak about, but all us kids knew to stay away from the “streets that must not be named.” There were clear boundaries that one crossed at his or her own peril.
These were the days when parents let their kids run loose in neighborhoods, and there were no fences between houses. It was safe to play in the streets until it was dark outside. I used to ride my bike with friends and play hide and seek all over the neighborhood. On jouait à cachette et on espionnait nos voisins. Our favorite game was to spy on our families when it got dark outside. We would peek in windows to see what people were doing inside, pretending we were secret agents. We knew all our neighbors, except the ones who lived in the yellow and white house at the end of the street and spoke English. I used to feel bad for them, wondering if they realized they lived on a French street. Thirty-five years later, when my husband and I owned a motel in Maine, I was talking with some of our customers who were visiting from Canada. I was stunned when they told me they used to live on Émile street in Fabreville. They were the people who lived in the yellow and white house. Oh mon Dieu!
French kids never interacted with English Canadian kids. On jouait pas avec les Anglais. We had no idea where they went to school, or what they were like. As far as we knew, they were our “enemies.” I remember one time, when I was about eleven years old, I was standing on a street corner talking to a couple of friends, when a boy I had never met came rushing toward us on his bicycle. He slowed down just enough to spit on me and yell “French Pea Soup!” Then he took off at high speed. I felt numbed. It took me a while to realize what had just happened. I hadn’t done anything to this boy. I stood there wondering, “ What that was all about?”. And what was it he yelled? It sounded like peesoo.1
This episode bothered me all day. Ça m’a achalé toute la journée. I started feeling angrier by the minute. Later on in the afternoon, I decided to hang out near the “English” street to see if I could find the boy. Sure enough, there he was. He came toward me again, and was about to say something. Only this time, I was ready for him. As he came toward me, I pushed him hard enough that he fell off his bicycle and started crying. He ran off to his mother who came out of their house wondering what had happened. Before the boy could say anything to his mother, I yelled “E call mee French Peesoo!” My English was pretty limited, but the woman understood what I said. She slapped her boy on the head, yelled words I could not understand, and dragged him inside the house. I went back home to brag about my victory. This was my first experience standing up against injustice. Ça t’apprendra à cracher sur une Québécoise!
This need to “set people straight” became a way of life for me over the years. When I moved to the United States in my early twenties, I was often confronted by Americans who ridiculed the Québec movement to separate from Canada. Time and time again, I tried to explain the reasoning behind this initiative, and why it made sense for those of us French speakers who grew up in Québec and remember the discrimination we experienced on a daily basis. Québécois author Pierre Vallière portrayed French Canadians as the “white slaves” of North America in his 1969 book Nègres Blancs d’Amérique, stating that what French Canadians experienced was a form of racism.
It seems I am often involved with defending one cause or another. I have a reputation with many of my friends to be the Norma Rae of my days. However, as I get older, I feel the need to step back. I want to embrace and protect my French heritage, rather than defend it. I moved to Maine in my forties, and was quickly captivated by the state’s rich French heritage. No matter where I live, I think I will be involved with helping French survive in North America. Although this time, my focus will be on teaching French language to children, and helping them connect with their heritage through folk songs, stories, and French poetry. And while promoting the “survivance” of Maine’s French heritage, I am hoping to help create communities where people live together in harmony despite their differences, and where we can all learn from each other’s culture and traditions. Pour vivre ensemble il faut savoir aimer… This will be my legacy. C’est ce que je laisserai en héritage aux futurs Franco-Américains.

1I only recently came to the realization that an expression we used to say to describe someone who is weak, was “peesoo”(sometimes spelled “pissou”). I am convinced that this expression must come from “French Pea Soup.” This was an English Canadian expression used to make fun of the French who were considered inferior. I think the majority of French Canadians who used that expression had no idea where it had actually originated from.