The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Enemies & Empires, Cajuns & Yankees, Blood & Blossoms

    By quinn esq on Tue, 07/08/2008 - 9:28pm |
    Down Home, they tell stories. Endless, spiraling, swooping stories. Sit and listen, you're gonna hear some of the best story-tellers in the English-speaking world. Maybe it's the Scots-Irish thing, memory and clan... and entertainment. Stories - salt on the potatoes. It may be called Nova Scotia, New Scotland - but Old World ways came with. And layered on, turn & turn again, stories from their new lives. Stories of the world, from all the ships they sailed on. Stories from "goin' down the road," seeking work in Boston, Toronto, story-mad L.A. & frozen Northern oil-fields. Cash-in-hand baby, enough for a house, a truck, a boat. But... make sure to bring home some stories. Well-educated stories, oddly enough. 12 universities for a million people. Tuition cost nothing, Winters were long, so... take another degree. Tourists get fooled,we all look scruffy. Grunge. Appearances deceive Down Home. They like it that way.

    The stories aren't just the official, formal, book-bound "histories" we get taught in Anglo-world, but stuff with the blood still in it. Blood, all over it, is the preference. The more the loss, bigger the disaster - the better the story. Make it a personal loss - and you're real. Make it funny - move closer to the fire. Laughter and disaster, laugh 'til you cry, and mean it. The music plays. Feet tap. Bodies rock. And when your story coils in around a bigger one, a big old one, well. Then you're invited to everyone's fire. Good stories take hours. This one, a tale of Empire. Oil. Enemies. Drownings. True Love. You know it already, but it's strong enough to bear re-telling.

    400 years ago, the French settled there, in N.S. Called it Arcadia. And later, just... Acadia. Called themselves Acadien. The Acadians. This was their paradise. They cleared some forest. Dyked in a few acres from the sea. Stayed out of trouble. Lived and worked and shared and married the natives, the Mikmaq. They worked hard. Cooked, sang, fiddled, danced. Set up the Order of Good Cheer. Had that joie de vivre thing happening. And apparently, they wooed. In the apple orchards. Which is what did me in, learning that. 'Cause I grew up surrounded by those apple orchards. Right up to the side of the house. Now, we hated the French. But to learn that they wooed, fell in love, kissed, under the apple blossoms... that stung me. Stuck with me.

    The history books say the Acadians were a threat to the English. By 1755, France had given up the Acadians under some peace deal, and so the English set a deadline for them to swear an oath. The Acadians had maintained neutrality for a century. But the English demanded they not only choose sides, but commit to picking up weapons against the other French, and the Mikmaq. The Acadians played for time, and... didn't make it to the oath-swearing on time. That's the official version. The English one. My half-people. Whatever.

    Truth was, we English aimed to kill 'em all. Well, we call 'em English, but they were from Massachusetts. We talked up the threat the Acadians posed. Refused to let them stay neutral. Demanded they take up arms against their own kin. They thought we bluffed. Didn't know how far we'd go. Didn't know how we'd behaved at Salem, 1692. Or at Glencoe, 1691. And so, Massachusetts Governor Lawrence resolved, "To send away the French Inhabitants & clear the whole Country of such bad subjects." The official orders read: "You will use all the means proper & necessary for collecting the people together so as to get them on board. If you find that fair means will not do, you must proceed by the most vigorous measures possible, not only in compelling them to embark, but in depriving those who shall escape of all means of shelter or support by burning their houses & destroying everything that may afford them subsistence."

    Last week, Down Home, I stood at the old farm. Behind me, back in our fields, I knew there was the foundation of an old house. I'd played in it as a kid. Real old. Acadian old. While looking out ahead of me, from the front porch, two miles away, is where they loaded the Acadians onto the ships. At Grand Pre. We captured 6,000 in the first sweep, maybe 15,000 over time. We separated men from women & children. Dumped them at any port that would take them. Thousands drowned on the way. Thousands more hid in the woods, starved and froze. Maybe 5,000 Acadians died. Maybe 10,000.

    Here's the oil. We, my English ancestors down in Massachusetts, already had people, our people, signed up to come take over the Acadian farms. The fix was in - before the order given. 8,000 "New England Planters" came, settled the stolen land. And on our Anglo side, well, we hide stories like this. Mayflower, Puritan - those words we could pronounce. But Salem, Glencoe, Acadian? We stutter. Choke. We named the event "the Expulsion." Clinical, that. The French called it Le Grand Derangement. Derangement, a better word. Even in English. Longfellow wrote a poem about it, 1847. A young Acadian girl, Evangeline, and her lover, Gabriel. Separated, put on ships, dumped thousands of miles apart. She spends her entire life traveling, looking for him.  But no solid information, no GPS, in a culture deranged. End - she's an old nurse, reunites with Gabriel, on his deathbed. 

    Longfellow says: "Still stands the forest primeval; but under the shade of its branches, Dwells another race, with other customs and language." That's my forest. My blood. That other race. Still, the Scot in me made me listen, study, remember the story. I've clambered over its limbs a thousand times. When I saw New Orleans go under, and Cajuns floating in the flood - because oh yes, Cajuns are the descendants of those same, already once-displaced Acadians - all I could see were the bodies floating in 1755. When I heard "You're either with us, or against us" - I recognized that son of a bitch, Governor Lawrence, 250 years on. When I hear oil, I see the most beautiful, dyked-in, tide-facing, glorious farmland. Arcadia.

    Oh. True Love. No tale complete without. 6 boys in our family. One fell in love with a beautiful Scottish girl. They wooed under apple trees. Prepared to wed. And then, feuding families, broken communications, time lags, folly, blew it apart. They became separated by thousands of miles. 25 years passed.

    Last Spring, they met again. Loved still. How could he describe that joy, that loss? 25 years. That's a long, lost love. And yet - time remains. He knows it's not the loss that Evangeline & Gabriel had to bear. He writes his story now. A new blossom, at the end of a much older branch.