Birches

By Edward Beardsley

In 1750 This is the story of the Martin family of France: Grandfather Benjamin; Grandmother Christine; Father Andre; Mother Denise; Son Alain; Daughter Julie. They have emigrated to Canadian Acadia to escape heavy taxation and to find a new life in the New World. Under the yoke of the British Expulsions of all French speakers from what is present day Nova Scotia the Martins set out for Louisiana leaving grandparents in the little town of Grand Pr and Father Andre to the fight against the British with the Indians in what became the French and Indian War. Their journey down the Atlantic Coast through the British Colonies is both exciting and harrowing as they meet hostile Indians and Colonial Governors. There are two aims for the journeyto find Father Andre and to reach Louisiana to establish a new and permanent home for the entire family., George Washington is winning and losing battles in the struggle between the British and French for control of North America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491740552

Edward Beardsley

EDWARD BEARDSLEY is the product of the Rogers Park section of Chicago and of Sullivan High School there. He dropped out of school to join the U.S. Navy at the end of World War II. He didn’t see the world but did see most of the Pacific Ocean including Hawaii, Japan, American Samoa, New Zealand, Antarctica, California and some of the girls there.

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Copyright © 2014 Edward Beardsley.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4054-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4056-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-4055-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 8/1/2014

Contents

Prologue

Martin Family

One (Une): Choisy-le-Roi, France

Two (Deux): Grand Pré, Acadie

Three (Trois): Maine

Four (Quatre): Maryland

Five (Cinq): Virginia

Six (Six): North Carolina

Seven (Sept): South Carolina

Eight (Huit): Georgia

Nine (Neuf): Florida

Ten (Dix): Louisiana

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

For

The descendants of

My father

George Earl Beardsley

An American Francophile

Prologue

The year is 1750. In a struggle with the French for control of North America the British expel 913 French-speaking Acadians from present day Nova Scotia to Annapolis, Maryland. At that time the city has but one thousand residents, mostly British. The French-Acadians are seen as unwanted interlopers, as foreigners sent but not asked for. The normally open and welcoming Marylanders stiffen, throwing up a psychological unwanted sign.

The French call this the Great Expulsion, the Great Upheaval, or, more elegantly, Le Grand Dérangement. Over a period of time exceeding two hundred years an academic argument continues over whether these Great Expulsions are comparable to contemporary ethnic cleansing. One historian compares the Acadian Exodus to the retreating Russians who burnt their own lands before Napoleon’s invasion, and compares the British expulsions by the French in Newfoundland in 1697 to General Sherman’s destruction of everything in his path as his army marched unchallenged across Georgia during the American Civil War.

Historian John Mack Faragher compares the Acadian expulsions to contemporary ethnic cleansing. Two other historians, Naomi E.S. Griffiths and A.J.B. Johnston write that the event is comparable to other deportations in history, and do not consider it to be ethnic cleansing. He writes further that evidence indicates that since the British regarded the Acadians as a military threat the deportation of 1755 does not qualify as an act of ethnic cleansing. And, finally, Johnston says that it was a cleansing but not an ethnic cleansing because the British cared more about religious adherence than about ethnicity, the Acadians having refused to swear allegiance to Protestant England.

There were two major waves of expulsion of the Acadians. In the first wave they were deported to other British colonies. During the second wave they were deported to England and France, from where they migrated to Louisiana. Essential to mention as deportation destinations are Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Virginia, Carolinas and Georgia, and France and England.

In 1847, American writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his epic poem Evangeline, based loosely on events surrounding the 1755 deportation. The poem became an American classic both in Maritime Canada and in Louisiana. The Acadians who settled in Louisiana, known as Cajuns (an adulteration of Acadians) have had a dominant cultural influence in many parishes, particularly in the southwestern area of the state known as Acadiana.

Before the deportation, the Acadian population was estimated at 14,000. Most were deported but some Acadians escaped to Quebec or hid among the Mi’kmaq (Indians) or in the countryside to avoid deportation until the situation settled down.

In the first wave of the expulsions most Acadians were assigned to rural communities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Carolinas. In general they refused to stay where they were put and large numbers of them migrated to the colonial port cities where they gathered in isolated, poor French-speaking Catholic neighborhoods, the sort of communities British officials tried to discourage. In addition, some Acadians threatened to migrate north to French-controlled regions, including the Saint John River, Ile Royale, the coasts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and Canada. Because the British believed that their policy of sending the Acadians to the Thirteen Colonies had failed, they deported the Acadians to France and England in the second wave of the Expulsion.

All of this is set against the backdrop of the French and Indian War. The Expulsions (1755-1763) occurred during this war, in which the French Canadians and the indigenous Indians of southeastern Canada—Nova Scotia and New Brunswick notably—fought the British in their struggle to control and colonize, if possible, all of North America. Approximately 11,500 Acadians were deported by the British.

Just north east of the Bay of Fundy lies Scots Bay and at the bottom of that sits the little town of Grand Pré. From this town came the Bellefontaine family of Longfellow’s Evangeline. Grand Pré means Large Meadow and it is from this pastoral scene that comes the Acadian family of Martin, the family of our story.

Martin Family

Benjamin Martin—Grandfather, Grand-père

Christine Martin—Grandmother, Grand-mère

Andre Martin—Father, Père

Denise Martin—Mother, Mère

Alain Martin—Son, Fils

Julie Martin—Daughter, Fille

Colloquial

Grand-papa

Grand-maman

Mon Grand-pere

Ma Grand-mere

Pépère

Mémère

One (Une)

Choisy-le-Roi, France

My name is Julie Martin. My twin brother’s name is Alain. Our family originated in the area around the town of Choisy-le-Roi, France, about seven miles southeast of the center of Paris in the Ile-de France region. What was to be called the French Revolution had not begun but, as my grandfather would say, you could smell it in the air. Financial mismanagement by our French government over a period of almost one hundred years and including, later, losses incurred in the French and Indian War and in loans to the American colonies during their Civil War contributed to excessive taxation of the people, especially the peasants, and set the stage for economic depression that led to a general but not pronounced exodus of French citizens to Acadie in Canada.

Change, of course, is almost always difficult and when it involves one’s residence, especially one’s country, the rent is both painful and, often, impossible to bear.

Choisy-le-Roi is a beautiful town on both banks of the Seine River. Our family of Martins traces its roots in this part of France to as far back as Henry IV and the Bourbon Dynasty. Interestingly enough, as my brother and I learned in school shortly before our recent graduation, it was this same Henry IV who began the sponsoring of French colonization projects in Canada.

And so I write this not from Choisy-le-Roi but from Grand Pré, Acadie, where the Martins began new lives in a new country and in the unfamiliar, to us, rural setting of the rich farmland of Grand Pré. Had we known what was to come would we have stayed in France on ground that nourished its growth with the blood of our ancestors? I don’t know. The history books are full of adventures from France and from nearly every country on earth who struck out in every direction to discover and to change the landscapes, the languages, and even the beliefs of those already there, discoveries called by some, invasions.

Choisy-le-Roi means, literally, the choice or pick or favorite of the king. It is easy to see why. Among all the visual and other sensory delights that constitute France—most notably her language—the light in our area illuminates somehow from within. Mon père calls it an émanation or soufflé, something that comes at one in a blast or unexpectedly. Many talk of it but no one seems able to explain it, something like the recently described aurora borealis. As small children playing by what we were told in school was the world’s most beautiful river, playing in the water as all children everywhere seem to like to do we played also with the magic of the light, casting pictures, shadows of the river’s swans and ducks with our hands against the smooth banks where grass did not grow. Truly, the Seine was our playground without slides and swings. We loved our river. We tried to swim in it despite being told not to by our parents, our damp clothes and hair giving us away until one of the boys, too far out and a weak swimmer, drowned and we no longer had to be told. If you were without a sister or brother the river was their substitute, always there, always welcoming even in danger, the friend you always could count on. And, before we boarded the ship, our whole family including grand-mère and grand-père wondered if, and hoped that, there would be a Seine somewhere near Grand Pré in our new land called Acadie.

Of course, there were tears enough to fill another Seine in saying goodbye—for it was, truly, goodbye—to relatives and friends, the fleshy building blocks of one’s being, one’s life. Shakespeare, we learned in school, said that parting is sweet sorrow. The sorrow I can vouch for. The sweet? Well, I’m not so sure. The sorrow part tells me that there is more than a touch of the acrid in sorrow that is sweet. The tears that swelled and spilled in our goodbyes to school friends and cousins especially tasted not only of salt but also of a bitterness approaching gall. There is nothing in the sphere of my young life that comes close to the pain of parting.

My brother, Alain, faced an even more painful goodbye than I. Her name was Claudine Belanger. She and Alain had been sweethearts since we were seventeen. They had promised eternal love and, although she wore no ring, had spoken of marriage as though it were a given. Her family could not leave. They were shopkeepers, a bakery—or, as we say, a boulangerie—and, as such, were both more heavily entrenched in the community and more crushingly taxed by a government which saw loss of business as more threatening than simple emigration. Our parents had been teachers and, in the impending revolution, teachers were seen as potential political problems. Our path was clear. Claudine had begged her parents to go with us but the distance was too daunting and, as the only child, she was needed in the business and, eventually, to carry on with it. It felt strange as Alain and I sat on a bank of the Seine after he and Claudine had said their farewells to have my twin brother in my arms, sobbing on my shoulder. He would never see Claudine again and I would never see him cry again. A bird, or as we say, un oiseau, a cardinal, my favorite, flew to sit at the water’s edge and a repeat of the revolving question about our new land rushed into my head—would I see my beloved cardinals in Acadie? And what of the oak and chestnut trees? I had done some homework but it seemed impossible to cover all the things I loved and might miss in Canada. As the French are fond of saying, A bird may shed its wings before a Frenchman will depart France.

And, almost lastly, there was Père Gaudet our parish priest. He was the only priest I’d ever known, having come when I was a small child and he a young man. Would we, I wondered even have a priest in this New World? We sat on a bench in the church yard and he heard my confession and reminded me to come to Mass the day before we left for the port of Le Havre. We, too, talked some of the birds and he laughed as he was sure that this new place to which we were going gave life also to the small swallows known as martins.

Two (Deux)

Grand Pré, Acadie

It is possible that we picked or, rather, grand-père picked the wrong place for our new homestead in Acadie, Canada, for Grand Pré became the site for the first expulsions of the Acadians in the Great Expulsion of 11,500 of them in what we French call Le Grand Dérangement.

To my surprise Grand Pré was easily as beautiful as Choisy-le-Roi. We had located our new home on maps in the Choisy library. In one of the books we found pictures of eastern Canada including Acadie but nothing as pertinent as little Grand Pré at the south end of Minas Bay. The area around Grand Pré was lush land and it wouldn’t be long we were told until our refusal to sell farm produce to the British would give us some bargaining power, if not control. The bargaining power would come in the form of British tolerance: When the time came for the first expulsion of French Acadians, Grand-Papa and Grand-Maman would be allowed, also because of their advanced ages, to remain in Grand Pré. Of course, aside from lingering fears of mistreatment, this gave our family much relief.

The change from life in suburban Paris to the rural village of Grand Pré was dramatic but, somewhat surprisingly, not too uncomfortable. Grand-père had arranged through our bank in Choisy-le-Roi the purchase of a home vacated by a family fleeing to Maine across the Bay of Fundy in advance of the widely rumored expulsions.

It was decided and agreed upon after several lengthy family meetings not only that pépère and mémère should remain in Grand Pré both to manage the house and for their health and safety, the latter assured by British military and governmental authorities to citizens of Acadie in general above the age of sixty-five.

Another major family decision, a heart-rending one to be sure but nonetheless a unanimous one, was to support my father, Andre Martin, in his fervent and newly expressed desire to join the French Acadians and local Mi’kmaq Indians in battle against the British. The Mi’kmaq, we’d learned from local officials at the Grand Pré courthouse, had been in Acadie for thousands of years before the first Frenchmen arrived. They were fierce fighters and resentful of the British presence and their goal to take control of not only Acadia but also all of Canada if not of North America. As a Frenchman Father felt it his duty to join forces with the Acadians and the Indians to stop the British invaders.

The war would be called the French and Indian War, Father said, and my first thought and question to him was, Why would the French fight the Indians who are fighting the British? Remember, I was only twenty and my study of history had been dominantly French and very little beyond our country and even less beyond the ocean whose waters washed both coasts, those of France and Acadie.

Obviously, Father replied, it’s the British who’ve called the name, even before they’ve lost the war.

It turned out that Father was optimistic and full of enthusiasm but after eight years of fighting, the British won and, although they didn’t get control of North America they did win Canada, Acadia, the Mississippi Valley, and Florida. I was twenty-one and roaming the east coast of America with my mother and brother, searching for my father and a more peaceful life. I had no first-hand experience of war. Our textbooks in our French school, or école, of course spoke of many wars in history as far back as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. During those studies I often wondered if anyone ever connected the word war with the word blood. It seemed to me that the people responsible for either starting war or going to war must have had romantic pictures of stallions and swords and soldiers riding and marching all over the place in some grand effort to achieve land or revenge or both. Did their minds, I wondered, ever picture blood outside the human body? Certainly, blood does not belong outside the body except perhaps in childbirth or surgery or accident. Can one go to, let alone initiate, war and at the same time picture as part of the price a child’s blood on the ground beside a dead or dying body? Surely these minds were not capable of envisioning war as limited to the combatants alone even in the days before muskets and tomahawks. Not just someone’s brother’s or father’s or cousin’s blood but inevitably someone’s blood of mother-with-child. There is no noble romance here, no glorious battle scars to carry home to the officers’ dance at the governor’s mansion. Blood and life. They are synonyms.

And then we learned of something foreign to us and perhaps to most Europeans: Our people, the French, made regular payments to the Indian Chief Jean-Baptiste Cope for British scalps. Is God, I thought, the only dispenser of mercy?

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Even in the early days of our journey to the west and south we occasionally received word that our father, Andre Martin, had been seen either in areas we had just left or were headed for. Plans had been made but we had no clear idea of how or where we would rejoin Father either after or during the war and, of course, we knew we must deal with both the possibilities of his death and severe injury and even the fact that our own journey—that of Mother’s and Alain’s and mine—could prove perilous to the point of never reaching Louisiana, the agreed-upon rendezvous.

Also, we needed a lifeline of some sort. We needed a line to Grand Pré, a line to Grand-maman and Grand-papa to maintain a mental and emotional tie that would tell our hearts and minds that while the wilderness between us grew every day a connection, some connection would always be there, call it a love-line, that line that says there will always be a link, a heart-to-heart invisible thread that speaks of the human hope of renewal, of love that distance only strengthens. Someone, I remember, said that hope is everything, that hope is that state of life that dies only in death.

It was Grand-maman and Alain who came up with a solution. It was the birch tree. There were plenty of birches in Acadia and Grand-papa said that he didn’t know about the area south of the Colonies but along the eastern seaboard he was sure we could find them. The white

Reviews for Birches

[jfe16 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A picture book version of poet Robert Frost’s beloved and often-quoted poem. The verse blends the seen with the imagined; the illustrations, a series of paintings, complement and extend the verse.A lovely introduction to poetry for young readers, but those who appreciate the beauty of this verse will find much to appreciate in the blending of words and pictures that work together to create a memorable reading experience.Highly recommended.

[satyridae · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Picked this up at a sale today- I can't resist this book. The illustrations mesh so beautifully with the words, and it's one of my favorite Frost poems. I like to have multiple copies of this one on hand to give away to any kid who happens within my grasp.

[kapeoples · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book breaks down one of Robert Frosts most famous poems "Birches." The poem is broken into lines of two with an abstract illustration of a nature, a birch tree or a sunset. Great when talking about poetry.