MAMOU, La. -- On the first morning of school on the Cajun prairie last week, Alice Renard marched her third-graders outdoors and under the sheltering arms of a live oak, speaking to them in a language that used to be beaten out of Louisiana schoolchildren.
Renard's Parisian French seemed at once at home and out of place in Cajun country, like the voice of Edith Piaf emanating from a zydeco club. She told her students they had gone outside "pour apprendre a travailler ensemble" -- to learn to work together -- by learning a few new playground games: L'oiseau silencieux, the silent bird. Douaniers et contrebandiers, customs agents and smugglers. Pingouins sur la banquise. Penguins on ice.
Renard, 27, was one of roughly 65 French-speaking teachers imported by Louisiana this year to help bolster its growing roster of dual-language French immersion schools, part of an international recruitment program that dates to 1972. Most of her students bore Cajun or Creole surnames -- Desormeaux, Guillory, Martel, Thibodeaux -- and the summer break had rendered their language skills rusty.
But the fact that they were soon running and chasing and tagging each other according to Renard's French-only instructions was a small but important victory for those who fear that French, so emblematic of south Louisiana culture, may be inexorably dying out.
Louisiana French is the legacy of early settlers and later arrivals, among them the Cajuns, 18th-century exiles from eastern Canada. But the language was nearly smothered in the 20th century by laws and customs that encouraged assimilation with the Anglophone world.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some states banned bilingual education. (More recently, Massachusetts and California lifted those bans.) In Louisiana, a stern knuckle-rapping was for many years the punishment for speaking French in school. Some parents discouraged their children from learning it, seeing English as the best route to economic and social success, decisions that were made in immigrant households across the country.
Regret and a change of heart followed.
In 1968, the state created the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana in an effort to promote and preserve the language. But the decline continued: Census figures show that the state had 250,000 French speakers in 1990 and about 100,000 in 2013.
Matt Mick, a spokesman for the council, said it would be wrong to think that the state's expanding immersion programs would return French to prominence. But he argued that it was still worth fighting for, enriching the music, the cuisine and the storytelling that continue to thrive in modest rural communities like Mamou.
"The language carries with it all of these other things that make this part of the world so special," he said.
But if Mamou, an agricultural town of 3,200 about a three-hour drive from New Orleans, is not guaranteed a French renaissance, it has been guaranteed a new kind of cultural exchange. It began in 2017, when the Evangeline Parish School District adopted the immersion school model and began receiving international teachers recruited by the Council for the Development of French.
This academic year, Mamou Elementary School has Renard, who arrived in town this summer with a box of French teaching materials and a pair of low-top Chuck Taylors. She spent the three weeks before school began settling in among Evangeline Parish's sweet potato fields and rice farms.
She admitted she was not prepared to teach the Cajun French dialect, with which she had only a passing familiarity. But she was ready in other ways.
She had spent the past five years in the classrooms of Paris' outer districts, mostly teaching the children of immigrants. Her English is almost flawless, honed by school, television and the Internet.
"I'm fascinated by this culture," she said of America generally. She called it a jewel. She found it exotic, and found Louisiana to be "the exotic inside the exotic." She praised the forward-leaning state of feminism in the country and marveled at Americans' religiosity.
She arrived on campus on the first day of school last week around 7 a.m. with a couple of bags slung over her shoulders, moving briskly past signs declaring the rules of the hallway ("Marchez en ligne droite," walk in a straight line), and the whiteboard lunch menu (coleslaw was "salade de chou"). She was more stressed than nervous. In the teachers' lounge she grumbled at the bulky photocopier.
Her classroom was adorned with an American flag and the lockdown rules for an intruder scare. Parisians have those rules, too, she said, since the terrorist attacks of 2015.
Her 16 students trickled in, most of them in pristine first-day sneakers. Nekol Henderson, 38, dropped off her son Ethan Harris, 8, one of three black students in the class. Henderson said her family's multigenerational tradition of French speaking had dwindled by the time she was born.
"I sit down with my elders and they talk," she said, "and I don't understand what they're saying."
Class began at 7:40 a.m. Renard asked her students what her surname meant. Yes, she affirmed: fox. She told them about where their notebooks would go, which ones to leave and which ones to take home. She gave them a photocopy of famous Parisian sights to color.
There is something universal in the way a seasoned elementary school teacher commands a classroom: loving but stern, largely dictatorial but open to democracy within reason and rules. A boy named Abram wiggled in his chair. Renard chided him without breaking her flow, and as if she had taught him for years. "Abram est-ce que tu peux t'asseoir correctement?"
Kim Manuel, the assistant principal, stepped in for a moment. Like Henderson, she never learned the language from her French-speaking family, though she learned to understand French while working at her family's combination service station and dress shop. "Bonjour," she said to the children, adding, almost apologetically, "Now, Ms. Manuel, that's as far as she goes."
Darwan Lazard, the superintendent of the Evangeline Parish school system, also made a cameo. He said his grandmother had spoken Creole French. He made a glancing reference to studies that suggest dual-language immersion students outperform their peers academically. "We can still be wonderful, loyal, patriotic Americans without erasing our various cultural backgrounds," he said.
Soon Renard and her class were under the oak tree, and then on the swing sets for a brief recess. Her students had been learning in French since the first grade but this year would face their first state standardized tests.
With the emphasis on testing, she worried that she would be asked to follow rigid guidelines and lose sight of what she loved about her job -- imparting the tools for thinking freely, tools that would allow her students, she said, "to be intellectuals."
Renard, like most teachers, ended her first day exhausted. She and a few other French teachers were staying a few miles away in the little town of Chataignier, named for a kind of chestnut tree mostly wiped out by blight.
The next morning, at 7:40 a.m., she was back in her classroom, leading her students in the Pledge of Allegiance: "J'engage ma fidelite au drapeau des Etats-Unis, et a la republique qu'il represente ..."
SundayMonday on 09/01/2019