Orchid of the Bayou: A Deaf Woman Faces Blindess, The Kitty Fischer Story

20. Catherine: Acadian and Cajun

20 Catherine: Acadian and Cajun Theforce that through the greenfuse drives theflower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots oftrees Is my destroyer. -DYLAN THOMAS, "THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER" As my vision dissolved into the darkness that closed in from all around, I went through a period of introspection. The irksome recessive genes that caused Usher syndrome made me look at my parents with new eyes. Who were these people? And who were the people who had borne them? And why was this disorder encapsulated in the genes that had become me? I couldn't help but feel that the key to my inheritance lay in the mysterious word CaJ·un. Now, as an adult, I undertook to learn about the heritage that was my birthright and slowly managed to overcome some ofthe ignorance that can occur when one is cut off from one's hearing family by being deaf. The first thing I gleaned was that my ethnicity was prized. Cajun may have meant "illiteracy, ignorance, poverty, superstition, and an indecipherable tongue" in the early part of the century. But 234 Catherine: Acadian and Cajun by the century's end, it meant fresh food intriguingly spiced and familiarity with French, a language that still seemed to carry some of its nineteenth-century cache. I had initially balked at the term Cajun, replacing it with the more palatable Acadian; now I embraced CaJ·un. I used it freely, even proudly. The deaf community was changing its focus as well; instead of asking for services, we were demanding our rights. By 1980, Stokoe's research had led to a new linguistic understanding of sign language, closed captions were on prime-time television, and deaf culture was seen as offering something ofvalue for hearing and deaf alike. The hearing people who came to work in our school were eager to learn signs; I taught those who arrived in the library, sometimes using stories of my Cajun homeland. Deafand Cajun. They were identities that made me proud. Although chromosomes, not culture, had betrayed me, human bodies (and their genes) are products of human cultures. To find answers to the question, "Why me?" I had to look at people, and I had to look at history. I had to explore the precise human beings from whom I had sprung and peer into the leavings of my own genealogy. As I look back through the people who begat the people who begat me, their numbers increase exponentially, by a factor of two every generation. Two parents, four grandparents, eight greatgrandparents , sixteen great-great-grandparents, thirty-two greatgreat -great-grandparents. In 1628, approximately 4,000 of my ancestors were running around on this earth. If they had gotten together, they would have made a small town. One of these ancestors was Toussaint Hunault dit Deschamps ("Hunault of the fields"). Hunault was born in France and baptized in St. Pierreaux -Champs in Normandy. When he turned twenty-six years old, he was advanced 120 livres, recruited to go to the New World, given money for his passage, and promised a salary of 75 livres per year. One hundred fifty-two other men signed up to make the journey . They were millers, carpenters, stone-carvers, and land-clearers; one was a brewer. Maison de Neuve and the other aristocrats who planned the colony were explicit in soliciting only the hardy-men, 235 Orchid oftheCBayou and sometimes their wives and children, who could face and eventually vanquish the unforgiving North American wilderness. Hunault was number eighty-nine. He would work as a land-clearer. I don't know why he signed up, or why any of them signed up. Why would they have boarded a ship and faced an unknown ocean to make their lives in a wild, lonely land they had never seen? The people had revolted in Normandy that year, so perhaps my ancestor Hunault was among them. Perhaps he was desperate. In any case, the French colony across the Atlantic was desperate to receive him and the other colonists. Public prayers had been offered to hasten their arrival. Montreal, founded only ten years before, was scarcely more than a hospital, a fort, and fifty people. In Qyebec City, life was equally harsh. When the boat carrying Hunault arrived, officials initially refused to provide transportation for the final lap oftheir journey up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. Ofthose...