Ethnic Voices in Maine Literature

By Judy Hakola

University of Maine

Most people think of Maine as peopled by sturdy, independent-minded fishermen, loggers, farmers, or small store owners and their equally sturdy, pie-baking and pickle-making wives—all descendents of English settlers (by way of Massachusetts) and all speaking the King’s English, although perhaps a bit quaintly. These folks, although not highly educated and not much given to talk, get by very well through a combination of hard work and Yankee ingenuity. The long winters may make some of them a bit strange, even teched, but generally they are helpful to their neighbors, whose business they keep a close eye on. This image of “Mainahs” may have had some validity in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but it does not accurately reflect a state whose increasing ethnic diversity surprises even some of its residents. This overview of some of the state’s minority ethnic groups as depicted in Maine literature is by no means a complete survey, but rather an introduction to a more diverse and complex picture of Maine and Mainers.

The largest group of non-native English speakers to come to Maine are, of course, the Franco-Americans, who poured into the state from Quebec and New Brunswick to trade the harsh life and economic insecurity of farming for the reliability of jobs in mills and factories. According to one estimate, a million Quebecois emigrated to the Northeast between 1820 and 1920, most to work in textile and paper mills, shoe factories, and the like. Many more were woodcutters. Although such moves generally led to better lives, they were not made without pain. In his short story “Germaine,” Denis Ledoux captures the distress of the main character as she and her husband and children leave their hardscrabble farm in Quebec for factory jobs in Maine where “They would have more money in the States because they would work in a mill. Every week they would receive a paycheck—whether there was a cold snap or not, whether there was rainfall or not.” (Maine Speaks, p. 165) Nonetheless, Germaine wonders, “How were they going to survive in a place where what they knew wasn’t what you had to know?” (Maine Speaks, p. 163) And, as their farmhouse disappears from view, she bursts into tears.

Isolated from the “natives” by religion as well as language, these immigrants—as do most such groups—tended to cluster together in enclaves in Maine mill cities such as Rumford, Waterville, Lewiston, and Old Town. Within their enclaves, life was lived much as it had been in Canada, except that both men and women worked in the factories rather than on family farms. There continued to be a strong emphasis on family and church. Children went to parochial schools where they were taught in French by nuns. Because of both language barriers and a general lack of education beyond grammar school for the first-generation newcomers, their stories were not written and made public until their children and grandchildren had not only a grasp of English but especially a sense of pride, a belief that these stories mattered and should be made available to people both within and outside the Franco community

.Denis Ledoux, the author of the short story “Germaine,” mentioned above, is one of several Franco writers who had to leave Maine and their Franco origins to get a perspective on their value. A fourth-generation Franco, he studied at Catholic University in Washington, D. C., and traveled extensively before feeling the tug to return to Maine–drawn not, as he has said, by memories of “the hills and the rivers and the long cold winter” but because Maine was “the home of the Franco American community [he] had been born into.” (Maine Speaks, pp.451-452)

Another such writer, Gerard Robichaud, was actually born in Quebec in 1908 and, although he moved to Lewiston as a small boy, he was educated in French-language parochial schools and a seminary in Quebec and thus didn’t learn to speak and write in English until he was nearly twenty. Although the stories of his Franco family and community that he told friends and Army buddies were warmly received, it was many years before he captured them in the novel Papa Martel., a work about a close-knit Franco family living in a thinly-disguised Lewiston. In this closed world, Papa dispenses wisdom, Mama runs the household , the children attend parochial school, and the parish priest uses hockey metaphors to persuade Papa to take in an orphan. Writing Papa Martel was “when I came home,” Robichaud has said. “Lewiston gave me such treasures. I walked away from it completely, and then I came back.” (Maine Speaks, p. 456) [Note: Papa Martel was republished by the University of Maine Press in 2003.]

Life in the Martel home is nearly idyllic with none of the Martels—parents or children—questioning their ethic heritage, but life was not always that straightforward for children and grandchildren of Francos. Although not of Franco heritage himself, Fred Bonnie attended parochial school and graduated from Cheverus, the Catholic high school in Portland, which was also attended by many Franco boys. In his short story “The State Meet,” he deals sensitively with the identity issues of Daniel, a youngster who is running cross country only because the coach, Father Paloski, is also the math teacher and Daniel needs to stay in his good graces. Among his teammates are Murphy, who calls him the Canuck, and Michel Minard, whose father works in the mill with his. Daniel’s father encourages the two boys to be friends, telling his son, “You two could speak French together,” to which Daniel responds sarcastically, “Wow, I can’t wait.” (Maine Speaks, p. 46) Michel is quite willing to be friends with Daniel, but Daniel has no use for the younger boy, who is even less athletic than he is. In addition, Daniel has little interest in a friendship with a boy whose whole family speaks French at home. To Daniel, “French wasn’t a language to speak; it was the language your grandmother spoke. You answered in English. No one with any sense answered his grandmother in French.” (Maine Speaks, p. 48) During the course of the state cross country meet, Daniel comes to admire the top-finishing runners from the small schools division, boys with Franco names such as Dupont and Fournier who are cheered and jeered in French but who run strong races. At the end of his own race, where he comes in next to last and Michel comes in last, he has also recognized that Michel is more than just a skinny kid who speaks French to his grandmother; he’s as tenacious a runner as Daniel and any of the front runners. In spite of having lost his glasses on the trail and having been beaten by everyone else, Michel smiles at Daniel and offers to shake hands. Daniel acknowledges not only Michel’s “Frenchness” but also his own when he responds, “Great race, mon ami. Hell of a race.” (Maine Speaks, p. 54)

Although Daniel’s struggle with his Franco identity has a happy ending, for other Franco writers the matter is complicated by gender as well as ethnic factors. Rhea Coté Robbins’ memoir, Wednesday’s Child, which won the 1997 Chapbook Competition sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, explores what it means to be, not just a Franco, but specifically a Franco woman. She writes about the women in her family who during the day and under the watchful eyes of male bosses sew shirts which only wealthy men can afford in the Hathaway factory in Waterville, then at night piece quilts at home for their families. She sees her own life as a quilt, and she herself as the quilter trying to make the scraps of her life into a meaningful pattern, which is one of the reasons she wrote this book. She writes perceptively and critically of the world of difference between life at Colby College on Mayflower Hill, where the only Francos are maids, groundskeepers, and Zamboni drivers, and the reverse, when the young men of Colby descend from the hill seeking with lecherous intent the Franco girls of Water Street. Coté writes of spoken language and body language, and how, when her family moved from the Franco enclave along the banks of the Kennebec to an “Anglo” town where her father sought to fulfill his dream of being a farmer, she acquired a Boston accent so she wouldn’t be teased. She acknowledges that “Losing oneself”–one’s self—“is hard to do. Hard work. Remaking a girl into another girl is tough work. Being white, and Ameritchaine, not French, Franco-American, is snob work. I become a snob.” (Wednesday’s Child, p. 66) Yet, by the end of this brief book, Coté Robbins can say with painfully earned honesty, “I will be French in Maine, Franco-American female, and proud of it.” (Wednesday’s Child, p. 85) Her book is sprinkled liberally with French words and phrases, with no translations and no apologies. Hers is a powerful presence among the multi-ethnic voices of Maine.

Although Franco writers constitute the majority of the non-“Yankee” writers of Maine, there are other, smaller groups who have their representatives. For example, in Turnip Pie and Other Stories, Rebecca Cummings writes of her Finnish grandparents, especially her grandmothers, recreating their lives in western Maine. There are the remnants of three Finnish enclaves in Maine: one in Monson, where the men quarried slate; one in the Thomaston-Port Clyde area, where the men worked in the limestone quarries and later bought farms west of Route One; and one in the South Paris area in southwestern Maine, where the men were farmers. Cummings sets her stories about Kaisa and Matti Kilponen and their neighbors in the ten or so years preceding World War I. Like the Francos, these immigrants had come to the United States seeking economic opportunity, but they were also driven by a longing for political freedom. During the period covered by the stories, Finland was a possession of Russia and under the heavy-handed rule of the Tsar, and the Finns worry about the fate of their families back home and of their beloved Suomi.

The Finns in Cummings’ book, especially the women, are as isolated by language and custom from their Yankee neighbors as were the Francos, but even more of a mystery to their Yankee neighbors since they had come, not from Maine’s northern neighbor, but from a completely unfamiliar part of the world. George Pottle, one of the Kilponens’ neighbors, describes their way of life as “strange” and, frustrated by his attempt to tell Kaisa, who speaks no English, that her cow had got loose in his cornfield, he shouts at her and then complains to himself about “the bother of having to deal with these people.” (Turnip Pie, p. 11) The details of daily life among the Finns—from saunas to turnip pie—set these stories apart from other ethnic literature, but the characters deal with the same kinds of human issues: isolation, homesickness, fear of losing or forgetting the “old ways,” and gradual assimilation. But it took a college-educated granddaughter to tell their stories to an English-speaking audience.

The ethnic stories discussed so far have been written by “insiders”—writers who, although a generation or two or three removed from the subjects of their work, nonetheless share their heritage and background. There is one small group, however, whose spokesman is truly an outsider. While working as a State House reporter for the Associated Press, Willis Johnson, a journalist from Connecticut with deep Yankee roots on his father’s side (although his mother’s parents were Hungarian immigrants), “discovered” the Russian community in Richmond, a village seventeen miles south of Augusta on the Kennebec River. Beginning in 1952, when a former Russian baron purchased land there and began advertising the real estate in American Russian-language newspapers, Richmond attracted mainly older czarists living in urban areas who were lured by descriptions of a land like the one they had emigrated from many years before. By the time Johnson arrived in Maine and discovered Richmond, the Russians constituted about 500 people of the town’s 2000 inhabitants. He and his wife became honorary “Russians,” playing in a balakaika orchestra and helping to form a Slavophile society in the small town. Johnson’s attraction to the exotic food, language and social customs and mores is transferred in the short story “The Girl Who Would Be Russian” to Debbie Brown, an overweight, 31-year old who has returned home disillusioned from four years in college in California. While watching herself on the evening news tape of a demonstration she had taken part in, Debbie had realized that, although she sought to be part of a distinctive minority, on the TV coverage, she looked just like all the other demonstrators. Back home in Plankton (the fictional Richmond) under the thumb of her proper mother, she finds herself attracted to the Russian emigrés because they were so different from her mother and her mother’s friends. She decides to become a Russian. She tries to learn to play a balalaika (which her mother calls a “bellyliker”), she dresses in what she thinks of as Russian peasant garb (with folk designs copied from illustrations in an old National Geographic), and she speaks her own version of “Russian.” For example, when one of the old emigres who has heard her strum chords on the balalaika asks her if she is Russian, she replies, “Hahf….[laying her hand on her chest] Thees hahf…where iss my heart.” (“The Girl Who Would Be Russian,” p. 76) However, neither Debbie nor Willis Johnson can sustain the effort of being Russian. The balalaika band that Johnson and his wife had been members of eventually dissolved with acrimony on all sides and, in the story, Debbie, escaping a rape attempt by a young “American” man her mother had set her up with, blunders into a Russian graveside service with her balalaika broken, her pseudo-Russian costume in tatters, and her face red and tear-stained. The Russians, not recognizing her, tell her to leave, cut short the service, and as quickly as they can drive away, leaving Debbie with no world in which she truly belongs. She cannot be a Russian just because she wants to be, nor could Willis Johnson, as he has later acknowledged.

Other ethnic voices in Maine have not yet found their way into its literature, once again because of language. Beginning with attempts by Maine churches and social agencies to provide refuge to Southeast Asians displaced by the war in Vietnam, Maine, especially the Portland area, has become home to refugees from many parts of the world. In addition to Vietnamese, Cambodians, Hmong, and Laotians, southern Maine residents now include immigrants from Serbia, Croatia, and other eastern European countries, Somalis from Africa, and a dozen other ethnic groups. Unlike the immigrants I have discussed, however, many of these people are well educated and were members of the professional class in their homelands. Now they struggle to learn enough English to get jobs in bakeries and poultry packing houses. As well, many of them come from traditions where stories are not written but oral, as with the Somalis, or are performed through music and dance. The next round of ethnic voices in Maine literature may well be theirs, but how it will be presented remains to be seen.

References

Cummings, Rebecca. Turnip Pie and Other Stories. Puckerbrush Press, 1986

Johnson, Willis. The Girl Who Would Be Russian and Other Stories

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

Maine Speaks: An Anthology of Maine Literature. The Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, 1989.

Robbins, Rhea Côté. Wednesday’s Child. Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, 1997.

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This paper was first presented at the 2000 North East Popular Culture/American Culture Association (NEPCA) conference in Springfield, MA.

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