Living Creole and Speaking it Fluently

As a native of Louisiana growing up Creole, I feel compelled to write about my life and culture. Raised without a Mother or a Father most of the time, I was fortunate enough to have family, including a loving Grandmother, to care for me until I got married.  Of course it wasn’t always perfect, but they taught me enough to lead a respectable and fulfilling life. 

I did not know that I was Creole until I became a teenager. My Grandmother always spoke Creole to me and I would answer in English; she did not approve. As I got older I learned to appreciate the fact that I knew a second language. In her honor I am including a Creole Dictionary and I hope she knows that I did. Also, I have done this because Creole is said to be a dying language. I hope others can learn with this easy to learn Dictionary and accompanying CD.

 My primary objective for writing this book is for the preservation of Creole culture and language, which has long been ignored and rarely acknowledged in spite of its uniqueness. “There is no state in the union, hardly any spot of like size on the globe where the man of color has lived so intensely, made so much progress, been of such  historical importance (as in Louisiana) and yet about so little is known.” (Alice Dunbar Nelson).

In spite of much literature written on the subject, many are unaware of the contributions that the Creoles made to New Orleans and the State of Louisiana. Because of ethnic bias, the history and culture of Creoles have been ignored by mainstream America.  The word “Creole” was first used by French and Spanish settlers who arrived in Louisiana; they referred to their children as Creoles because they were born in a new land of mixed culture. The faces of Creoles have features and skin tones that show centuries of inter-racial mixing of African, Indian, Latin and European.

After the Haitian revolt, some of the Haitian Creoles were brought to New Orleans along with slaves to work in the cane and cotton fields. The history of the slaves is well known. But in the shadow of this history are the free people of color, as the French named them. After the Civil War, they were called Creoles of Color, and later this was shortened to Creoles. Many free men of color joined the Battle of New Orleans, others joined the side of the Confederacy in the Civil War. Free women of color were nurses, hairdressers and dressmakers to upper-class French women. The husbands, sons, and brothers of these upper-class French women sometimes had a hidden family among the free women of color and set them up in small houses and had children with them, giving their natural offspring their own French last names and passing on to them their property and wealth.

 New Orleans had the largest community of Creoles in the United States. There they developed their own leaders who helped shaped the state of Louisiana. In every change of government the Creoles used their influence and are credited with helping to shape policies in Washington D.C. on civil rights and suffrage for blacks. In 1719 the first ship of slaves were brought to New Orleans and their hard work saved the struggling French Community. Recently a woman from New York wrote that she does not believe that Creoles really exist. 

Cajuns were exiled from Nova Scotia by the British Government, and many of them settled in South Louisiana and have shared the French, Catholic heritage with Creoles. They speak different French dialects. Ironically, both Cajun and Creole languages are on the endangered list, since the older Generations are passing away.  The younger generation seems to have ignored that part of their culture in order to fit in with the mainstream.