Taken by Edward Bloor Read Free Book Online

Deeply. Might he get up? Might he hit me, or worse? There was certainly no one around to stop him.
    I quickly stammered, “I’m sorry. I heard you speaking one language. I should not have assumed that you did not speak another one. You speak it very well, I might add.”
    His sneer returned. “Listen to you. You are still assuming.”
    “What?”
    “Now you assume that I am incapable of speaking any language other than English, the language of the slave master. Isn’t that right?”
    I started to deny it, but I stopped myself. I had to win this boy’s confidence somehow. I decided to tell him the truth. “Yes. You’re right. I did assume that. And I apologize again.”
    The truth had a definite positive effect on him. The sneer dropped. He asked me,
“Parlez-vous français?”
    “Uh, no, actually. I don’t speak French. I speak a little Spanish. I want to learn French. We can take it next year, in high school, and I do want to.”
    “C’est ma première langue.”
    “Uh, sorry, I didn’t get that.”
    “It is my first language.”
    “Oh. I see. And Creole is your second?”
    The sneer returned, but at half strength. “No. English is my second. Creole is something I picked up recently. And it’s not a language, in my opinion. It’s a creole.”
    My mind raced, trying to come up with a good reply. And failed. Instead, I heard myself repeating a line from Mrs. Veck: “You can’t define a word using the same word.”
    His brown eyes looked right into mine. They were very intelligent eyes. I hadn’t noticed that before. He said, “They are different words if you see them on paper. One has a capital
C,
and one has a small
c. Comprendez-vous?
”
    “No,” I admitted.
    “The word
Creole,
with the capital
C,
describes Haitian Creole as a civilized language worthy of capitalization, just like French or English. But in fact it is not a civilized language. It is a creole, with a small
c,
which is defined as a civilized language mixed with the language of a savage tribe. In the case of Haitian Creole, you have the language of the civilized masters, the French, mixed with the languages of the many African tribes that they enslaved. No disrespect to my
frès
and
sès,
but their language is a textbook example of a creole with a small
c.
” He paused to let that sink in with me.
    I said, “Well, thank you. I didn’t know that.”
    He turned away, very satisfied with himself.
    I had the impression he was about to resume ignoring me, so I decided to ask him something else. Anything else. “Uh, does that guy on the other end of the phone speak French, too?”
    I waited quite a while for a reply, but he finally did say, “No. None of them speak French. They speak Creole and Spanish, mostly. And some English. Bad English.”
    “Yeah? Yeah, I’ll bet. How about you, though? How come you speak English so well?”
    I thought it was a harmless question, but his lip curled up again into a full sneer. “I see. Well, there is a simple explanation for that. I was plucked from the ocean by an eccentric white billionaire, who bet another eccentric white billionaire that he could teach me to speak better English than King William.”
    I couldn’t tell if he was really angry or simply mocking me. I assumed he was angry. “I’m sorry again. I didn’t mean to offend you—”
    “I am not at all offended. It is a typical rich-white-girl reaction. You look at me and figure I cannot do anything requiring a brain.”
    “No. I don’t think that. I—”
    “For your information, I speak English because I am a citizen of the United States, a primarily English-speaking nation.”
    “Well, sure. Okay. So what about the French?”
    He shook his head slowly. “Forget it. You don’t need to know anything about that.”
    “But I want to.”
    “Why? So you can tell the FBI about it? So you can have me caught, tried, and executed by lethal injection? I don’t think so.” He didn’t say anything else for a few seconds. Then he