French-Canadians in America with Denis Ledoux

Gary: Today's special episode is an interview with Denis Ledoux. Ledoux is a memoir and fiction writer, ghostwriter, writing coach, editor and book producer based in Lisbon Falls, Maine. He won Maine Writing Fellowships in 1991 and 1996, and his collection of short stories, Mountain Dance, was chosen for the 1990 Maine Fiction Award. Denis has helped thousands of people to write their memoirs through his company, The Memoir Network. He has been active in Franco-American organizations, most recently as a member of the Programming Committee of the Franco-American Collection, an archive in Lewiston, Maine. Today's episode is about his book French Boy, A 1950s Franco-American Childhood (2024). French Boy tells the unique story of an expatriate community, one which was initially French, then became French-Canadian, then Franco-American, and today perhaps just American. We talk all about the dispersal of French people and culture abroad, and how it impacted the lives of the hundreds of thousands first sundered from their homeland in France, then from Canada.

Thank you very much for being on the show. Denis Ledoux. Your book, French Boy A 1950s Franco-American Childhood, is a fascinating look at the life of a French-Canadian family. It also details the dissemination of French people and culture in North America. Can you talk about the historical background behind French Canada? What happened to Quebec after the Seven Years War, and how did French Canadians fit into an English dominated country?

Denis: Sure. I'm going to start off by saying that in Quebec, it's not called the Seven Years War. It's called ‘The War of the Conquest.’ And that gives you perhaps a sense of how people regard that period.  After the conquest, Quebec, Canada, of course, it was not called Quebec then, it was just called Canada. Quebec was a name that occurred later. The population was thrown into trauma. It was a traumatic event and it characterized decades and decades of French Canada. For one thing, there was the period of military rule until 1774 with the Act of Quebec, which reintroduced civil government, and then soon afterwards, there was the French Revolution, which the English Crown was not very much in favor of people cutting off monarch’s heads. And then there was Napoleon. And it wasn't until about 1830 that a commerce or intercourse between a French Canada and France resumed. So that period of about 70 years was a period of, I don't know how to say it. It's almost like a, a sleeping period. And it was during this time that the French in Canada really bifurcated from the French in France because there was no commerce. There was no university.  There were no newspapers. The French had no universities. McGill got its university charter before the University of Montreal. The English were not permitting that. So there was just a slippage of the French population. Uh, and it wasn't until the 1830s and 1840s that there was kind of an awakening. And then you have the combination of the two Canadas. In 1839, I have to slip this in, there was a man called Lord Durham, and he wrote a report because there were revolts in 1837, 1838. And he wrote a report which is usually called the Durham Report. And in it he said “the French are a people without a history.” And this is in 1839, and a woman who was a cleaning lady wrote across this handwritten document. In those days, of course, people handwrote their documents, and she wrote across the document “Thou liest Durham,” and she signed it ‘Madeleine de Versailles.‘ Madeleine de Versailles was a folk heroine who had saved the community of Versailles from a massacre at the hands of the Iroquois. So she was a historical figure, a heroine. And Durham said, these people, bring me this Madeleine de Versailles. She shall be severely punished. And the people said, well, we can't bring you Madeleine de Versailles, she's been dead for over 100 years. And Durham understood at that moment that he did not understand the French Canadians. And to his credit, he changed his report. And I offer that story because it was probably in the middle of the 19th century that the French began to use the government. The first Prime Minister of the United Canadas, which was established in the 1840s was a French Canadian.  Louis LaFontaine.  And through the 19th century and 20th century, there's a rise of the French understanding that their salvation will come through handling politics.  And that's kind of an overview. The French in Canada were living in somebody else's country until about 1840 the French population was dominant. There were more French speakers in Canada than there were English speakers. But after about 1840, the English began to dominate. And henceforward they would be the dominant people.  And that was something that convinced the French Canadians to fold in on themselves around largely around Quebec, and by the end of the 19th century,  Honoré Mercier, who was a premier of Quebec realized that Quebec was to be the speaker for the francophone population and that they couldn't depend in any way on Ottawa.  So that's kind of a, an eagle view of perhaps French-Canadian history in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Gary: That is a fascinating history, and one which goes a long way towards explaining how this French area essentially became a French-Canadian area, one that was split apart from mainland France. But it's going to split again. So let's jump ahead to the late 1800s, early 1900s. Why did so many French Canadians cross over into the Northeastern United States, to the point where the primary city you talk about, Lewiston, Maine, was 60% francophone?

Denis: Yes. Okay well, it's a continuation of the subordination of the French within Canada.  We have to look at the geography of eastern Canada and the geography of northeastern United States. New England, where Lewiston and where I am from, is, I suppose you would say gifted with waterfalls. The rivers drop very quickly from a mountain regions, hill regions down to the ocean. And this became an ideal place for hydropower to develop. So New England was the first spot, the first place where industrialization occurred in the United States because of the possibility of hydropower. The same hydropower possibilities were just nonexistent in Quebec and Canada. That's one reason. Another reason was in New England, American money developed the mills here in Lewiston, the town that I am from. There was the Bates Mill and the Hill Mill developed by two Bostonians, Benjamin Bates and Thomas Hill. They had money which they invested in the United States in a developing a French speaking community. The money was sent to English speakers. I mean, one example is that the railroads connected English communities to Montreal and to Quebec, rather than French speaking communities. Both Montreal and Quebec in the 19th century were English speaking towns. Well, the French population I mentioned that after 1840, English dominated the English population, and one reason the French, were able to survive so long as a dominant group is because of what they call the revenge of the cradle that is having a lot of babies. It worked for a while, but after a while it overpopulated the world. I read some 20 years ago, which was a while back that said, if the world had populated at the same rate as French Canadians, there would be 60 billion people in the world. I don't know if that's true. Wow. But there were a lot of children and there weren't enough jobs for these children. Eventually the land that was arable tillable, was all taken up. Something had to be done with the younger, the younger sons and daughters and, and the mills in New England, which had first started, which had started with the workers were Yankee girls, that is, the Protestant Anglos who lived in the surrounding communities. Whether you're talking about Manchester, New Hampshire, Lowell, Massachusetts, Worcester, Woonsocket, Rhode Island, Lewiston, any of these towns were surrounded by farming communities in which Yankee girls, uh, would come into the mills and they would work, usually to earn a dowry or to help the family, perhaps to buy a new breed of cattle or to fix the barn. And these girls did well for a good 20, 30 years.  I don't mean one girl did well for 20 or 30 years, but the mass of girls coming in did well to furnish the workers. But then the mills got too large. The Bates Mill in Lewiston, for instance, at one point hired 5000 people, and they just weren't enough of the Yankee girls. So something had to be done. The first to come in with the Irish and the Irish built the canals.  But they weren't numerous enough. And so the French Canadians began to be invited down. The railroads would just give free passes and French the Canadian railroads would give free passes to the Canadians, In one way cynically, you can say this was to rid Canada of the French elements. But people started coming down and at one point it was estimated that a third of the French Canadians descended into New England and also the American Midwest.  About half of those people returned to Canada. And was the highest rate of return. And that's of all the ethnic groups, the European ethnic groups. And, you know, French Canadians are European ethnics, and it was the highest rate of return. And that's very understandable by the fact that they were next door. And you could get onto a train and be home in five hours.  So, half of the people that went back. But that leaves about one sixth of the population of French Canada that ended up living in the United States. And at one point they were called this ‘Ouiseaux de Passage.’ So ‘birds of passage’ and they would come down in the winter, in the fall. The boys, usually they were boys and young men who had come down. It's a very typical migration pattern.  The boys would come down, the young men, they would work through the winter, save money, go back in the summer to help on the family farm and bring money to their families.  And then one year, perhaps they met a girl and she lived in Lewiston, let's say.  And he came from one area of Canada, of Quebec, and she came from another area, and there was no one area to go back. So they stayed. And then because they stay, their brothers and sisters perhaps came down and then the parents came down. So the pattern was very much that way. The younger people came first and then they were followed by other younger people. And then the parents came down and joined them, which is a pattern that I saw here in Lewiston, very much with blacks and Latinos.  In the 80s, in the late 70s began seeing a lot of young black men and a lot of young Latinos, and then they were Latino girls and black girls. And then you began seeing people in their 50s and 60s as their parents came down, very, very typical migration pattern. Eventually and you ask what happened when they were down here? Well, they established unlike, say, a family that might be a French-Canadian family that goes to Tennessee and is the only French-Canadian family there. Here in the towns, whether it's Manchester, Worcester, Lowell,  Lewiston, Biddeford, Woonsocket. They all were sites of a community. There were churches, there were schools, there were hospitals, there were newspapers, and they were credit unions. A credit union, by the way, is a Franco-American contribution to American life. The first Franco-American credit union was established at Saint Mary's Parish, Saint Mary in Manchester, New Hampshire, and the second credit union in the United States was established at the Saint Peter's here in Lewiston, which is the Saint-Pierre and Saint Paul. So the community formed every tier. They were high schools that were formed. There were five Franco-American colleges that were created in New England. And of those, three have survived.  So, people were at home here, and oftentimes the men wanted to go back. The men who had picked up, you know, who had earned money wanted to go back. And then the mothers would say, well, I'm not leaving my children in the United States. And so people stayed.  And a very typical pattern during this time. Again, this is an immigrant pattern that we oftentimes have seen with some of the Vietnamese and some of the Asians who lived together and then save their money and then buy an apartment building and then buy a second apartment building. And, they live in one floor and their brothers live in the second floor and the third floor they might rent out. And the same thing happened here, the same pattern, the Franco Americans with money, they got through the credit union, bought tenement buildings, and they lived together, save their money. and then they bought a second one and a third one, and then each of the brothers or sisters ended up with a tenement. That's the most successful pattern. A lot of people, of course, didn't go back because they didn't have the money, but those who made well didn't want to go back because they were doing well here. And so there was a thrust. There were two thrusts in the community. One was repatriation. So oftentimes there was a lot of movement getting people back to Canada, getting people back to Quebec. If you're a French, you belong in Canada. You don't belong in the United States. And then concurrently, there was the citizenship become a citizen so that you can be involved in the politics of your city and of your state. So these were the two conflicting, and ultimately the citizenship won out.

Gary: Can you explain how these people saw themselves. Were they French, Canadian or American?

Denis: That's an interesting question, Gary.  Franco-American is a term that, really, well, it has been in use since the 19th century. For instance, in the 1890s, there was a group called La Ligue des Sociétés Franco-American, the League of the Franco-American society. So the term was used in the 19th century, but it was not a popular term. In the 1960s, the term Franco-American, to distinguish from French-Canadian, began to be popular. And today it is probably the best, the most popular term. I'm on a board of a group that calls itself the Franco-American Collection. It's an archive. I mean, we don't call ourselves the French-Canadian American collection. We call ourselves the Franco-American Collection.  After the conquest, people in Canada had called themselves Canadians. The French Canadians was a term that applied only for French. My grandparents, when they referred to Canadian, they meant exclusively French. If they had been referring to an English Canadian like Margaret Atwood, they would have never said, she's a Canadian. They would say she was an anglaise in English and Englishmen.  The term Canadian was, co-opted by the Canadians, by the English Canadians. I mean, nobody ever says Margaret Atwood, for instance, is an English Canadian, right? I just said it, but you won't hear it. People will say she's a Canadian writer, but Marie-Claire Blair and Annie Bear and all the others are French-Canadian writers. So there's a certain denigration, of what it means to be French. But as a result of the conquest, the term French, the English called the Canadians French. And the people really call themselves French more and more. And they made the distinction between the French of Canada and the French of France. And in fact, the whole while that I was growing up, people would say, we are French and we never, never confused ourselves with the French of France. And you notice what I'm saying? The French and the French of France. I had a woman that I know who teaches French, and she's from California, and she teaches French at the University of Maine. And when she first came, she said she heard these Franco Americans, you know, saying, well, French people like us or do this or do that. And she kept saying, what the heck are they talking about? They aren't French. And then one day she heard a student say, oh, she's a French of France. And she understood the distinction. So that was that was one identity. I think the term Franco-American is probably currently the strongest identity. We do see ourselves as different from the French Canadians, the people of Canada.

Gary: Another important facet of the book is the presence of religion as a cultural marker. You note that the Catholic Church was a means of preserving identity in New England. Yet even there, there were issues, particularly as the Irish dominated the new the New England Catholic Church and primarily spoke English. Tell us about religion and the French-Canadian community in New England.

Denis: Okay, I'm going to start, as I have earlier, by giving you a little historical perspective. The Irish, yes, there was quite a conflict between the Irish and the French, and every single diocese of New England if I'm remembering right, there were 11 dioceses in New England, and every single one of them, the French sued the Irish bishop and every one of them, the French, lost because the American judiciary considered it to be a religious issue and did not want to step in. Okay. So let's give you, an Ireland is a fairly small, homogenous country, and the bishops in Ireland were able to connect with all the parishes. They were able to understand and know what was happening. In Saint Brendan's and in Saint Bridget's they knew that what was going on. In Quebec however, in Canada, the distances were incredible. And it could take days and days to paddle up the Saint Lawrence to get to the bishop. And so the parishes had great independence.  And the bishop allowed that. The bishop did not expect to go to Sainte-Thérèse’s parish and tell them that their vestments weren't right.  But in the Irish situation, there was a tight control. So you have here two very different governing mentalities about what is appropriate for the church. And the Irish, as you mentioned, came in, roughly a half to a full generation before the French Canadians, and therefore they inserted themselves into the Catholic hierarchy. And if you understand how bishops have traditionally been chosen, the Pope asks the sitting bishop to name three priests to replace him as bishop upon his death. And lo and behold, the three priests were always Irish. Surprise, surprise! And the French were always up against an Irish bishop. This kind of goes against the TV or the movie, The Bells of Saint Mary, O the Good Father. You know for the French, the Irish bishop was not the good father. He was a controlling person. And they wanted to reclaim the independence they had known in Canada. And the Irish bishop wanted to reclaim the close control he had known or the bishops had known in Ireland. So you have here it really isn't a religious controversy. It's a probably closer to like a civil controversy. It's more a governing controversy. And it was really, it was really an internal scene warfare. And in almost every diocese here in Maine it was called the corporation's soul controversy. And it was a matter of who owned the church. The bishop said, I own the church, the church building, the Catholic school, the rectory, and the French said, no, no, we own the church and the school and the rectory.  And so here in Maine, that was one of the reasons they went  to court and they sued the bishop. What happened was that the bishop died during the controversy while it was in court. And the new bishop came in called the French clergyman in and said, hey, let's be cool about this. You guys can do within reason. You can do what you want to do in your parishes. I'm going to say I'm the big boss, but you can do what you want to do. It was that kind of thing. You know, I've kind of made a cute little story out of it, but it really was one of these, let's save face. I don't want any more of this arguing. I want it to be over. And that's how almost in every diocese that's what happened. In Worcester, in Woonsocket, for Rhode Island, for instance, there was a controversy about building the Catholic school there, Mount Saint Charles. And it was a French school. It was run by, the money was from the French parishes. And the bishop said, no, this is not a French school, it's a diocese. And then the contributions completely stopped and Mount Saint Charles came to a stop. And it was only when again, they had this face saving, compromise that it worked its way through. The Catholic Church was very important in having bilingual schools, preaching in French, there were many hospitals that were French speaking hospitals with nuns and French doctors.  Up until 1923 to 1930, there were a number of several laws restricting the passage of people from between Canada and the United States. But until that point if you were a doctor, you might be at Saint Mary's Hospital, which was the French hospital in Lewiston, and then you might hire yourself out to a hospital in Sherbrooke, and then you might work at a hospital in Manchester and then go back to Montreal. Same thing with a journalist. You would go back and forth and the Catholic Church was really, in terms of its Institutions, was very strong in attracting people who went across the border. After about 1923, 1930, and I gave those two dates because there are different laws that were passed in those years. The the professional growth did not happen between North and South. For instance, if you were a journalist and a newspaper in Lewiston, you may decide that you would like to be in a larger newspaper in Quebec City, and you would go up and you would work there and they'd be no problem whatsoever. You got some experience and then you were ahead. You were made editor of a French newspaper in Fall River. So you went back and forth, and that's how you did your professional development. But after 1923, 1930, if you wanted to grow, you would go from, say, the newspaper in Lewiston and you would work for a newspaper in Pennsylvania, and then you would work for a newspaper in Illinois. And the the professional development began occurring within the United States, not between French Canada and in New England. And that was a big factor in assimilation. What happened after about 1930 is that the Franco-American population became a much more proletarian, much more working class community because of what I have just shared, that professionals now began, they began becoming Americans. They began writing more in English or doctoring more in English. Whatever they did, they understood that they could not go back north to south. They had to go from east to west. And so that middle class of Franco-American disappeared into the United States.  And the Franco-American community that I grew up in was much more proletarian than I might have found a generation and a half or two before I was a kid.

Gary: So let's shift from broader historical themes to the personal. What brought your family to the United States?

Denis: Well, of course, I have a number of ancestors who came, so I'm going to just give you a brief overview.  On the Ledoux side, my grandmother Ledoux, her parents came down. They had 11 kids, and they came down to Fall River, and they came down to work in the mill. And the whole family worked in the mills, and they collected some money. And I'm not going to say a mass because I don't think it was an amount that was a mass. But they did, in fact, save something. And then they went back to Canada. So they were part of that half of the immigrants who went back. However, my poor great grandparents weren't able to survive on their farm. For one reason as I mentioned earlier, the railroad connected a town which, in spite of its French name, Saint Andrea; Saint Adrian.  The railroad connected Saint Adrian with Quebec City. My great grandparents had to go ten miles into the railroad to bring the produce to be sold in Quebec City. A lot of time for produce to wilt.  And so they just weren't able to survive. They came back and they worked in the mill. So that's my grandmother's parents. My grandfather parents, they came down to work, they were from a Montreal. They had lived in Montreal. My grandfather was born in Montreal. They came down to Fall River. And that's when my grandmother and grandfather met in Fall River. And then they came to Lewiston in 1916. On my mother's side, my grandfather lived in a town called Thetford Mines, which was an asbestos mining town, and he had lung issues, and his doctor told him that he would die very young if he lived there, if you continued to live there. And he had a cousin in Lewiston, his mother's brother, and his kids. So it was his uncle and his cousins in Lewiston. And so he went down and he worked with them. And then he just continued working. And then he had a girlfriend in Thetford, my grandmother. And they were married. And so they came down, they came down, for them coming to the United States, I don't think was a choice to come to the United States. It was a choice to come someplace where there was work for them.  They I don't think they had much, actually much interest in becoming Americans. My Ledoux grandparents, I think they understood when they came down that this is what was probably going to happen to them, that they would have to be Americans. You know, we have the American story of people wanting to come to these streets paved with gold. But I think most of our Franco-American ancestors came. They were ouiseaux de passage. They came to work for a while and then to return. And for some of them it worked, and for others it did not work. My grandmother, by the way, who was a young woman when her parents and the youngest ones in the family went back to the family farm because you couldn't sell them. Everybody was leaving, so you just close the door one day, sold all your animals, close the door and came down.  But my grandmother, who was at the time, in her early 20s, she and three of the other girls in the family stayed in Fall River. They refused to go back with their parents, and they stayed in the mill. And my grandmother said to me that she preferred working in the mills, where she was paid on a regular basis to working on the farm where, you know, hail could destroy your crop, or too much rain or not enough rain could destroy the crop. So I found that an interesting story about my grandmother as a young woman exercising that independence, which I think characterized her for much of her life.

Gary: Your parents seem to have quite a difficult life as you touch on, in part because they were poorly educated. How did they make it in the new country, and how did their struggles impact their children?

Denis: Well, they were born here, so my parents were both born in Lewiston in 1921 and 1922, and my grandfather, Ledoux, as I mentioned in French, Boy had done well for himself. He had become a foreman at the mill. It did not lose, well during the depression he only lost a few months of work, but he worked most of the time.  My grandmother always worked in the mills. And by the way, of all the European ethnics, the French Canadians had the highest rate of women workers, like half of the Franco-American women of working age, worked in the mills. And my grandmother was one of those. And so that really, I think that really helped the family economy.  And so I think my father, when he was growing up and he saw that his father had done well, he thought, oh, I'll do the same way. I'll be the same way. My father quit high school in his sophomore year. Um, but the times had changed, and the dynamics that had favored his father and his mother, they had a house. They always had a car. I mean, they weren't wealthy, but they just were not people who were scrimping. They were comfortable, within their expectations. So my parents, married, and neither of them had finished high school when they married. They promised, that they would ascertain that their children would graduate from high school. And my mother said we had no idea that you would all go to college and have graduate degrees. And of course, the times had changed in the 60s and in the 70s where that became possible.  My parents were working class.  They had a farm, they had chickens. And this is really the core of their difficulties. They had chickens, and they raised 7000 chickens and you keep chickens to a certain point, and then, they had layers. And then at a certain point, you, quote unquote harvest them because then the meat will become to tough. And so you send them to an abattoir to be to be slaughtered and then sold in the meat market. And then you started all over again with younger chicks. And the way you did this was generally by borrowing for grain, for the gas to heat the barns, for whatever it is that you needed. And then once you harvest it, once you sold the chickens, you paid everybody back. Well, my parents made an arrangement for the chickens to leave on September 29th, 1955, and which sounds like just a date picked out of the hat. And it was for my parents. Unfortunately, on the 26th of September, unbeknownst to the United States and even unbeknownst to him, Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and it was kept from the country. And then the night of the 28th, it was announced like 9 or 10:00, it was announced that the president had had a heart attack, but he was stable. Well, the men came on on Monday morning and picked up 7000 chickens, slaughtered them at the abattoir. And then by the time the markets open, the stock market, the money market, stock market had the worst crash since December 7th, 1941, the worst day. And as a result, my parents lost for them a fortune.  They didn't have any means of paying back the people who had sold them grain or sold them gas or anything, anything that they had gotten. And so my father went around and he told all his creditors, you can you can sue me, and I'll have to declare bankruptcy. I intend to pay you. I intend to repay you, but I can't do it. And of course, these were all small people like my father, you know, they depended, my father knew where they were at. And it took him five years, he and my mother to repay. And they worked really quite hard during that time. So it was a real story of the inherent integrity that my parents had. And I'm very proud of them for what they did. But it was a very hard time. And it was one of those things where their fate, their destinies and their fate clashed. And my parents, who should have had an easier time of life because the earlier part of their lives had not quite been so difficult. And then at that point for a number of years, yes, it was it was quite difficult. And my father said to me one day, if if the chickens had gone out on the 26th on that Friday before, he said, our lives would have been completely different, or if they had gone out the week later when the markets had reestablished, the markets collapsed. I think because people were talking about the McCarthy era here. We're talking about communism.  I think there was the real fear that the communists would try to attack the United States or some sort of crazy, I don't know, scenario where the American economy would collapse and so forth and so forth. But unfortunately for my parents, they were just little guys in this conflict, in this in this mess. And it really characterized them. And as a result of that, you know, when we were growing up, there was a, a real sense of not spending. And that was kind of I remember my sister saying to me, do you remember how in the schoolyard, there was in the school, there was a little store next door, and the kids would have a dime and a quarter of something to go out and get something for recess and snack and my sister would say, do you remember how we stood in a circle perhaps with the kids, and they were eating their Twinkies and their Little Debbie cupcakes, and we just never had anything. And we just said, oh, some kids have money for recess and some kids don't. And I think that characterized us as really being very supportive of our parents. I don't remember us really hassling them for what we knew they couldn't afford at that point.

Gary: So let's talk about your childhood. What was it like and how did you fit in with this Francophone community in an Anglophone country?

Denis: Well, I learned to speak French first, so I just didn't speak English until I was probably 6 or 7. So there was a long time in my early childhood where I didn't know people spoke English. I mean, I just had no idea.  And in Lewiston, where I grew up, I now live in Lisbon Falls, which is ten miles away, but in Lewiston, where I grew up the children that I played with all spoke French, and their parents all spoke French. And I remember being with my parents and my parents speaking English to people. Perhaps it was in a grocery store. I'm not sure. And I just remember the sense of the linguistic puzzle that my parents understood what these people in their garbled speech were saying, and to me, it was just gobbledygook. I mean, I didn't understand anything, and I remember that feeling of otherness, that I was different. We were different. And and I think that's a very common experience of a somebody in a minority, is that you're you are aware at that time, I didn't know that they were the majority. I just knew that we were different. And then as I was growing up, we moved to Lisbon Falls, and we were the only Franco family there. All our neighbors were Yankees, which is what we call Anglo Protestants.  Probably doesn't make much sense from somebody who grew up in Oregon, but, we were the Franco's in the Yankees. And, they would refer to us as the, well, first of all, they, I couldn't talk to anybody. There were several other kids, but they lived at a distance enough that you wouldn't have allowed a five year old to go to their houses. It was on a country road. It would have been dangerous.  So I really didn't have much access to them. Once I went to school and I started learning English. I did have access to them, and I just remembered people would refer to us as that French family. Those French kids, that French boy. Which is the name of my book, French boy.  And because that's how they referred to us.  And again, they didn't confuse us with the French of France, you know, they knew exactly who we were as French people.  So that sense of otherness  was a really a strong, a strong feeling.  That really took a while for me to feel more comfortable. And although I learned to speak English, I learned to speak English within a community that was made up of French speakers. So the nuns who taught us in the Catholic school were all Franco-American nuns. They taught us English and all the other boys and girls in the school, except for probably ten of them. You know, we're all again, Franco-American. So I really, I did not develop what is oftentimes referred to as a Maine accent. And sometimes I would be someplace and somebody would say, well, where are you from? And I would say, well, you know, I'm from Lisbon Falls or something. They would say, well, how come you don't have a Yankee accent? And again, that was a sense of, I was the third generation living here. In fact, my great grandparents had lived here in central Maine. And still there was a sense that we weren't really here. So there was a really a sense of, of otherness. The Francophone community, I remember my grandmother, probably in 1954, receiving her French newspaper Le Messager out there announcing that they're going to three times a week publication, three times a week. And she said, this is the beginning of the end. And it was, it was because within about seven years it had dropped to once a week. And then by 1968, it had ceased publication. And the same thing with the schools, my father had gone into the military and he spoke English when he went into the military and there he lived in English. There was just an expression to say to live in English or to live in French. And there he lived in English  for the three years that he was in the military. And when he came back, he and hundreds of thousands of Franco men came back, really being much more comfortable, being able to speak English, although they continued, miscegenation, marrying outside the Franco community did not really occur until the 1960s. And then it was just, you know, it was rampant. I mean, it just occurred. People just fell in love because they spoke the same language and married whoever they wanted to marry at that point.  But my mother and father's friends, when I was growing up, were all Franco Americans.  They knew anglophones, but they weren't friends. I mean, they were friendly, but they weren't friends. The people who came over and had supper at our house and who hung out with us in the yard were all Franco Americans.  But over the 60s, through the 50s that I was growing up, you there was a really an assimilation that was going on. TV came in the early 50s. My family had TV in about 54, so now TV was in the family.  When my brother was young, my brother was 19 months older than I. Just older enough so that his a slightly different consciousness. He listened to radio dramas in French, and I remember his being in front of the, of the woodstove listening to a radio drama. But I was too young. I couldn't follow the drama. It was too much focus. I was too baby to be able to do that. So I never, I never did that. But that program, there was a radio station that was a French language radio station, and by the end of the 50s, it had a lot of English programming. And interestingly enough, the radio station was WCOU. COU was after a man called Couture, Jean-Baptiste Couture and he was very involved in the Irish French parish clergy conflict. Jean-Baptiste. In fact, he was excommunicated by the Irish bishop.  Anyway, COU was for Couture and then years later the station was bought and it was changed into a country music station. And they would say, they had the nerve to say WCOU, COU stands for country and country music. Well, no, it stood for Couture.  So that was, there was an assimilation that was the inevitable process.  My own children, I had two children. And my goals for them as a, as a Franco-American children, their mother was Yankee, but very sympathetic to the French cause, she spoke French. And my goals for them was to have them speak as much French as possible, but also to have them identify as Franco-American, and both of them do identify as Franco-American. They speak of themselves as Franco-American and my daughter, so much so that she is a graduate of the University of Montreal, which is a francophone university in Montreal. And she met a Quebecois, a French Canadian man, and they have two children. She's now a Canadian citizen and lives in Rimouski. So I and my goal, I more than succeeded in my goal. I wish if I had known that she was going to go be quite so far away, I probably would have toned down my goal a bit. I had meant for her to be a Franco-American in Maine, not a Canadian in Rimouski.

Gary: So final question what is New England's Francophone community like today.

Denis:  I guess I would have to say it is a remnant community. It frequently has nostalgia.  My generation has a real sense of nostalgia, of our grandparents, of our parents generation of living in French. I think there's a sadness there. There's also a sense of guilt, I think is pretty strong of we are the generation that somehow lost it.  I think like any, any skill, I think speaking French has become a skill more than something, like my grandparents spoke French because that's the language they spoke. They didn't speak any other language.  My generation has the choice. And what I have found is that there are people, my generation and younger people who see a value in speaking French. You have studied French. You make a point of speaking to each other in French when they meet. But, there are for many, for instance, my mother, the generation before me, my mother was bilingual, but my mother was not consciously bilingual. That is, she spoke English or she spoke French, depending on who she was with.  She didn't nurture her language in a way that I would nurture my language, that I make a point of listening to French language programs and of reading in French. And my mother wouldn’t had done that. My mother would have just simply read what was convenient or listened to what was convenient. And I think that's what we have today in the Franco, in the, you know, the Franco-American Community here in Lewiston.  Were kind of very fortunate to have many francophone immigrants from Africa. They come from the Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Togo, Burundi, Rwanda.  So they come from a number of these French speaking countries. And, so it is very interesting to see they have moved into the neighborhoods that were once Little Canada. And, uh, we also have a large Somali population, but the Somalis don't speak French. They were Arab speakers. And when they came here, they learned English. The Congolese came speaking French and so I don’t they will keep French alive for another generation. I'm not sure what will happen to their children, but they themselves speak French.

Gary: The book is French boy, a 1950s Franco-American childhood. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Denis: Well, it's, uh, it's been a pleasure, uh, Gary. And, uh, I wish you luck. À la prochaine!

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.