Part of the problem was that her job kept changing. She was a demographer. For years she had been building toward a job in the planning section of the ministry, estimating population characteristics and predicting necessary government services. In a perfect world, her day would have consisted of planning site locations for grade schools. She would have worked the French thirty-five hour work week, and we would have had long evenings together.
I could only hope that such a perfect world would one day return. In the current world she initially headed a team of number crunchers who were charged with estimating all kinds of things, many of which she could not tell me. What she could tell me was that the ministry was in absolute turmoil. Obviously there was lots of work as they tried to respond to the growing separation of Louisiana. What was less obvious was the number of Protestants who were quitting the government. People who had worked in the ministry for decades suddenly left. No one had even known they were Huguenots. Then one morning they would come in with a typed resignation letter, shake a few hands – often very few – and leave. Often these were very senior people.
The result was lots of job openings and lots of backing and filling with the folks that were left. Elise barely had a few days of orientation when she was made a project manager. A month later she became an assistant director with over two hundred people reporting to her. She had barely settled into that job when her manager told her to be prepared to head the planning division if he was moved to another division. Three days later he was an assistant minister, and Elise was Director of Planning for Canada. Elise is very bright, but that would be a challenge for anyone.
As for me, my job was pretty predictable. I was assigned two U.S. history classes for the fall semester, one undergraduate, one graduate. The undergraduate class would be a large lecture class, maybe two hundred students, and I would have a teaching assistant to lead discussion sections and help with grading. The assistant hadn’t been hired yet, but would be available in late August. The graduate seminar would be an elective course for students getting graduate degrees in history. In short, I got a very traditional teaching assignment, as promised.
I started going into the office daily in June. While I joked about the campus being underground, it was actually the passageways between buildings that were buried to keep them warm in the winter. The buildings were above ground, and my office was on the fifth floor of the Humanities Building with a very nice view of the Bay. I moved in some books and some pictures and felt at home.
My new colleagues were a genial group, and made a real effort to visit me. Each offered help with various aspects of campus life – which faculty committees had the real authority, which librarians were the most knowledgeable, which cafeterias had the best food. The two men who had taught U.S. history in the past stopped by with books and course syllabi. Both were glad to be out of the course. They had other interests. I was pleased that neither would be looking over my shoulder, waiting for their turn to take over.
As for the course materials, I should have been less surprised than I was. We all know that each country portrays historical events its own way, so I knew at one level the French texts would not describe Washington the way I would. But I have to admit I was not really prepared for their treatment of all our military men. Basically they were bumblers inspired by ambitious land-grabbers. U.S. history was a series of mistakes led either by an antagonistic British foreign policy or by American naiveté. Then there was slavery, racism, and sectionalism. You had to wonder why anyone would want to live there. By the time I was done reading the assigned textbook, I wanted to find the author and punch him out. No such luck. I checked around and discovered that he was long dead. No wonder -- the book was ten years old.
I checked with the department chair to see if I could use another book. Yes, but not this year. The books had already been ordered and were sitting on the bookstore shelves. I was free to augment with other books if I wished, and next fall I could order any book I wanted, but for the moment, I was stuck. Oh well, at least now I knew what kind of U.S. history my students had been exposed to in the past. I would take this on as a challenge.
For the next several weeks I ignored my own research and focused on finding materials for the class. Thank God for the Web. The Smithsonian has some great materials online, as does the University of Virginia. I decided I would match each chapter of the text with readings from those websites, and let the students see there were two ways of looking at America. If they still wanted to see us as racist boobs, well, at least I would have given them an optional viewpoint.
I was busy and proud of myself through June. I built several web sites, gathered materials for both my undergraduate class and my graduate seminar, and I even wrote my exams for the courses. I was going to be the most prepared professor at the National University.
But I had a problem. I was running out of things to do. I would wrap up my work at the university and head home around five – to an empty apartment. Yes, Elise was spending most nights at my place, but she would get home at eight or nine and be so tired she could barely speak. I had dinner ready for her, and a glass of wine, and some nights we would talk for a while, and some nights we would sit and watch a movie on the tube, but whatever we did, within forty-five minutes she had her head on my shoulder and was sound asleep. Most nights I carried her to bed.
There were plenty of reasons for her to be tired besides long hours and job responsibilities. Things weren’t going well in Canada. Claude Jolliet had given the country a week of church services, and had then started broadcasting carefully filtered news. Even the cheery version he was showing – neighbors reaching out to neighbors, cultural showcases where Huguenot cooking was enormously appreciated by housewives in Quebec, towns up and down the Mississippi participating in the “one river, one nation” celebration invented by the government – none of it could hide the brief references to fist fights and church burnings. Besides, we could all see the cars pulling trailers full of furniture. It didn’t matter if the cars were headed north or south, they represented one more family that couldn’t live where it had lived for generations. The country was coming apart.
Elise was pretty good about not bringing work home and not telling me about government doings. After all, while I was her fiancée, I was also a foreigner. But she didn’t have to say anything for me to know what was going on. Two or three nights a week she would start some story, and then just break down and cry. By late June I knew something big was in the wind. Elise was going to go to some retreat for big shots in the government. She would be gone a week or two while they tried to focus on the latest, and I guess most serious, challenge. Something big was going to happen.
One morning a limo was waiting for her outside the apartment. I carried her bag down, gave her a kiss, and then watched her ride off. I had no idea when I would see her again.
By that evening I was already pacing around my apartment and drinking far too much Bordeaux. This wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t just wait at home, or fiddle around in my office for days or weeks. The country was coming apart and I was writing web pages and cooking meals. I tried to think through what I knew about the Huguenots. What was so different about them? Sure they were Protestant, but they were French, right? They had shot Americans in New Orleans just as well as the Catholics had shot Americans in Quebec. Why did they suddenly object to sharing their country? Why now?
Ask an historian a question, and you will always get an historical answer. I started thinking back to what I knew of Protestants. Sister Angelica had taught me much. In tenth grade all of us took European History from Sister Angelica. She had an interesting way of teaching the history of the continent. To her, every historical event – wars, pestilence, hunger – had a single source – heretics. Heretics had taken the unified church of Christ and broken it, taken the unified continent of Europe and broken it. Everything was due to heretics. If the older kids
saw you with a European history book, they just said, “I see you’ve got heretics this year.”
For silly fifteen year olds, it was a pretty interesting way to learn history. Heretics often did interesting things. Take Jan Hus and “defenestration.” There is a word kids have to love. Anyone could shoot or hang or burn someone at the stake, but who would think to “defenestrate” someone? Sister Angelica loved to tell the story. The Godless Hus had challenged the Pope and dared to throw his bishop out a castle window – defenestration. But God had saved the bishop and he had landed safely in the mud below the castle wall. We kids read books more carefully than we ever had before and discovered the bishop had survived because the castle moat had become filled with garbage. The bishop was alive, but boy he must have been messy. As for the Pope, he wasn’t interesting at all. He just burned Hus at the stake same as everyone else.
That was her approach to history. Bohemian history was Hus and the retribution he so surely deserved, German history was Luther and the agonies of Hell he will suffer for eternity. As for English history, we loved to get her started on Henry the Eighth, just to see her build to a boil about that adulterer and assassin. Who did she like? Louis XIV. Sure he kept Europe at war for a generation, but he kept his country Catholic. What happened to the French Protestants? They left France and good riddance.
It was well over a decade since I had taken Heretics from Sister Angelica, but I could still recall her storming around the classroom, nearly apoplectic about what the heretics had done. You had the impression she believed she was living three centuries too late to lead the righteous of God. Just put her in the same room with Martin Luther or John Calvin and God’s will would be done fast.
So how did the Huguenots get to Louisiana? Did Louis exile them? I was suddenly embarrassed to realize that I had been living in Canada for two years, and I didn’t know. Sister Angelica didn’t say, and I didn’t know. Worse, I hadn’t asked.
Who should I ask now? When I had been researching the Marquette/Jolliet expedition, I had had the ideal situation. I had access to good libraries and archives, and I had been able to interview Claude Jolliet to get an oral history of the events. But I couldn’t take this to Jolliet. For one thing, now that he was back in the government, he wouldn’t have the time for me. Besides, he was part of the mystery. The Jolliet name was magic all over the country, except in Louisiana. Something wasn’t right there. I needed a new source.
At this point the Bordeaux must have really been kicking in, because I decided I would drive to Louisiana to study Huguenot history there. There was a certain logic to it. Elise was going to be gone for weeks, so why hang around Green Bay? The Louisiana libraries would have better source materials. I could visit the local historical societies and talk with old timers. It made a kind of sense, except for one obvious problem – the country was on the verge of going to war and I would be driving right into the midst of it. The reasonable thing to do would be to sit down, wait until the wine wore off, and watch an old movie.
Instead, I picked up the phone, and called my father’s business rep in New Orleans to see if it would be possible to rent a place down there for a couple weeks. He just laughed.
“Shawn, you may not have heard, but the tourism business is a little off this summer. It is never big in July, but I think this July you could have any suite in any hotel for ten francs a night – breakfast included. If you’d like, I’ll make you a reservation tonight. But you do understand things can get a bit spooky, right?”
“Out and out dangerous, or just odd?”
“So far, just odd, but this city has the feel you get just before a major thunderstorm. It is too quiet, too still, and the air feels funny.”
“Thanks for the warning, but I want to do some research down there again. Please make the reservation. I will be down in two days.”
And with that conversation I was committed. Suddenly I felt better than I had in weeks. All the restlessness that had been building was now going to be released. I wrote Elise a long note in case she got back before I did, packed my bags, and went to bed early. I would be up at dawn and on the road.
Chapter Four
I Make Some Friends in Missouri