Paul Kieu
Curled up on my couch early on a Tuesday morning, I tuned my computer into KVPIonline.com. Out came a stream of familiarly indecipherable chatter: that distinct Ville Platte lilt and laughter, old people speaking the mother-tongue as if it were some kind of inside joke. And I suppose it is. Someone calls in and Charlie Manuel answers:
Bonjour, qui c’est qui parle?
C’est Monsieur Gallow qui parle, comment ça va ‘vec vous-autres?
Charlie answers, laughing: Mais Monsieur Gallow, ça va à ‘tit galop!!!
It’s been years since I’ve heard La Tasse de Café, Ville Platte’s “Franglais” radio program. On Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings, listeners can call in to ask co-hosts Charlie Manuel and Mark Layne about specific words in Louisiana French or to simply tell jokes and stories. Dad would tune in on our drives to school, acting as if he understood every word. I now know that he knows only a small degree more French than I do (which is close to none) and a huge degree less than his father does.
When I visited fellow Ville Platte native Ashlee Wilson a few weeks before, she articulated the condition of our shared hometown’s generational language loss: “The people who are fluent now, they are fluent. But their parents know fifty percent more adjectives than they do,” she said. “And their parents knew fifty percent more than they did.”
Wilson now lives in an unincorporated rural area outside of Grand Coteau, known historically as La Prairie Des Femmes (Prairie of the Women). In this place, named for a legacy of women’s work, she’s set out on a mission to explore South Louisiana culture through the lens of a disappearing language.
“My daily goal is to learn or document something in French,” said Wilson. “Digest it and use it in my life.” Tuning in almost every morning to KVPI’s La Tasse de Café, Wilson sits at her kitchen table or on her back porch, recorder in hand. “People call every morning and they talk about amazing things,” she said. “I’ll take notes, [and I’ll] call back if I miss something. A day wasted is a day I don’t listen to KVPI and learn something.”
“Our French in Ville Platte, it has some particularities and things that are very mysterious to me, very archaic, but at the same time, very anachronistic.”
We were sitting at her table just as her eldest son, Julien, age 10, was polishing off a plate of rice and gravy. The Acadian-style cottage (featured in The New York Times in 2012) is all glass and old cypress, airy and faded, with light freckling and dancing in the corners of the room, as decorative as the antique furniture and hand-painted cabinets arranged around a baby blue piano. Knick-knacks and strange fairy treasures crowd every corner. Wilson shared with me her “most prized possessions,” a collection, stacked high, of handwritten and hand-decorated journals. Among her personal reflections, prayers, songs, and ideas nestle years’ worth of transcribed vernacular Louisiana French.
Paul Kieu
Michot's journals are filled with personal reflections, poetry, songs, art, and troves of recorded oral Louisiana French.
In conducting this research, she notes, she is following the pioneering work of another Ville Platte native, Amanda LaFleur Giambrone, co-author of the Dictionary of Louisiana French. “I feel a pressure to continue this work because I am able to understand it, and not a lot of other people do anymore,” she said. “And it’s there! It’s so ripe. There’s so much wonderful information in our French. Funny information, funny words. And that information on KVPI, it’s so rich, but it’s over the airwaves and it’s gone.”
When Wilson says “our French,” she is referring to the distinctly regional “Ville Platte French.” Ville Platte, so recognized for its French roots, is often lumped in with Lafayette and the other surrounding areas as Cajun, an area populated by the ancestors of the French Acadian immigrants. However, as Wilson explains, and as I know from my own family history, the makeup of Ville Platte’s particular demographic is much more complex. There are families, like the LaHayes, whose ancestry is traced not to Canada, but straight to France itself as well as families of Spanish, Native American, and Black Creole lineages.
[Read this: For sixty years the Tunica language slept, until it gained a champion in Donna Pierite.]
Wilson argues that the emphasis on Cajun culture has overshadowed the area’s nuanced history. She’s interested in the untold side of the story. “Our French in Ville Platte, it has some particularities and things that are very mysterious to me, very archaic, but at the same time, very anachronistic,” she said. “Saying a modern thing in an old way. Indian words and very, very old French words and Spanish words.”
Paul Kieu
Ashlee Michot and her husband planned their home in the Acadian tradition, featuring a bousillage wall that they built themselves. In it, she carved out a tiny Marian grotto—a place for treasure keeping.
Gathering together selections of this research—writings and transcriptions from KVPI, conversations, songs, and more—Wilson is currently in the process of publishing a collection called Platte Vernacular, which she describes as “a time capsule of what French is like in this town at this time.”
Like me, Wilson grew up listening to KVPI’s French radio—and like me, she didn’t understand a word. “It was just excruciating for me,” she remembered. “I always wanted to know what they were saying. It sounded so joyful, you know?” She touched on a reality I had also experienced growing up in our French-speaking place: how our generation was somewhat unintentionally excluded from it. “I knew that there was this French thing, my mom said these funny words,” she explained. “My friend’s grandmother and her dad spoke French together. I knew about it. But it wasn’t something we talked about.”
[Read this: Searching for truths in French Louisiana with "C'est Vrai" columnist.]
Wilson said that while the language and culture have always intrigued her, it wasn’t until she left the country during college that she really felt the call to immerse herself in her French heritage. Two summers spent at the Université Sainte Anne immersion program in Nova Scotia sent her home fluent and hungry for more. “We have so many similarities with those (Acadian) people,” she said. “They just speak French. The government supported their maternal language, and they fought for it. I came back wanting to learn all I could about Louisiana French, to be a steward of my generation.”
And it turns out, a steward for the next as well. As she and I spoke, her three boys poked curiously in and out of our conversation. Her youngest, Marius, then nine months old, was teething. In search of something for him to chew on, she grabbed a piece of bread, asking him, “You wanna little piece of pain? Du pain?”
Paul Kieu
Ashlee and Louis Michot have committed to raising their children to speak both French and English.
Wilson and her husband Louis Michot, of the Lost Bayou Ramblers, have both striven to share their academic and artistic relationships to the French language with their children. “It was definitely harder than we really expected,” she said. “It’s difficult to teach a language that’s not your maternal language. We thought, we’re just going to speak French to them. But we live in an English society, and there are all these pressures around. But it’s a journey. I have a commitment to speak French with them every day, and to give them all their commands in French. But they’re definitely bilingual. They know it better than me!”
A huge part of that success, she said, has come from her ability to homeschool them in their early school years and to spend every day with them, for which she credits her husband. “We definitely sacrificed a lot, but it was an urge of mine to spend this time with my children, to be a mama.”
This maternal drive of Wilson's speaks to her larger veneration for womanhood, a prominent theme in her creative work and her exploration of what it is to exist in this Prairie des Femmes. In studying the place’s name, she’s discovered a canon of stories––stories about women doing good work. “Women were here, taking care of business basically.”
“The name of this place gave me a framework to make comparisons of Acadiana as a place that still venerates Mary and the physical Prairie des Femmes.”
When she and first settled in their little cottage in the sweet potato field, Wilson said she had to find a way to cope with the isolation of the place. “I really had to find a way to love it,” she said. “I started trying to document this place I found myself in. And something I found: Virgin Mary statues. So many abandoned ones and abandoned houses. And I just … thought they were so beautiful. I wanted to document them before they were gone.”
Paul Kieu
Living and working in the Prairie Des Femmes, Michot has found great inspiration in the theme of Louisiana womanhood, particularly in the Acadian veneration for the Madonna figure.
She saw the statues as a cultural testament to the area’s French Catholic devotion to Christ’s mother, and set out to photograph each that she came across, cultivating a massive photo collection of roadside Madonnas, contained in a series of self-published books. “The name of this place gave me a framework to make comparisons of Acadiana as a place that still venerates Mary and the physical Prairie des Femmes.”
Wilson's most recent project is yet another exploration of collective Louisiana womanhood. Upon noticing a stark absence of female voices in the Louisiana French canon, particularly when it comes to Cajun and Zydeco music, she used her blog (prairiedesfemmes.blogspot.com) to grant French-speaking female voices more visibility. Called “Oh Malheureuse!”, the ever-growing collection responds to the male-constructed woman archetype of an “unhappy woman” with a celebratory barrage of French songs, poems, and stories from the feminine perspective.
On her Instagram page (@prairiedesfemmes), Wilson addresses the tendency for women to make excuses for their writing: “We don’t have the luxury not to call ourselves writers at this juncture! We are women who speak this language at this time in Louisiana and we need to use it.”
And it is from such a place of preservation—of recognizing value in this place, this language, and this people, in all knowledge of their ephemerality—that Wilson draws her energy. As part of the Prairie des Femmes, she has not only taken her place in the legacy of female culture bearers but also cultivated something tangible to leave behind for the generations to come.
And still, il y a plus à faire.
Paul Kieu
Michot says that her collection of journals, spanning over a decade of meditations and work, are her most prized possessions.
Editor's Note: Since this article was written, La Tasse de Café has started an archive! You can now listen to up to past episodes online at classichits925.com/la-tasse.
In October of 2019, UL Press published Wilson's collection of women's writings in French in a book titled Ô Malheureuse: French Writings by Louisiana Women. Get your copy at ulpress.org.
