French Boy

By Denis Ledoux

French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Memoir is a glimpse into a young life both at the margins and at the center of the 1950s American experience. Born in 1947, Denis Ledoux had a childhood that almost seems to have been lived in another country and another century, but it is typical of what many Franco-Americans born of his generation experienced.
 

French Boy explores much: the developmental stages of childhood; family dynamics, bilingualism, acculturation and assimilation, alienation and shame.

 

In French Boy, you will read about:

 

•    the conflict behind bilingualism,
•    persistent nostalgia for a past,
•    looking for mentors beyond one's reach,
•    how the unassimilable ethnics assimilated, and
•    the discomfort of "otherness."

 

What others have said of Denis Ledoux's writing:

 

"The stories of Denis Ledoux come from a quietly strange culture—that of the French in America—which gives them their own quiet strangeness. Clear and deep, these stories try to understand something just beyond understanding."
— David Plante / novelist, essayist / National Book Award nominee

"[Ledoux's] stories are fragile islands of the human heart where the unspoken epiphanies of joy and sorrow are given voice and presence. And Ledoux's own voice shimmers with a distinct Québecois-American sensibility that makes these stories heart-breaking and haunting."
— A. Poulin, Jr./  poet, editor / founder of BOA EDITIONS

[In Ledoux's stories,] "French-English language and culture conflict exist as an undercurrent...The problem for a writer will nearly always be uncovering the social subtleties arising from insistent domination...and that
Ledoux [does]."
— Elizabeth Hardwick / Novelist, Guggenheim Fellow / a founder of The New York Review of Books

"French Boy put me in awe of Denis Ledoux's talent, work ethic, good sense, and common humanity. These qualities add up to a touch of genius, which in summary displays Ledoux's ability to bring drama and feeling, as well as meaning, to the reportage of ordinary life."
— Ernest Hébert / Novelist / Whirlybird Island

"In French Boy, Denis Ledoux paints an intimate and informative portrait of his Franco-American boyhood in 1950s Maine, where he felt "separate from the present which seemed foreign—and American." Ledoux's abiding affinity for story enriches this tale of a thoughtful boy seeking more than his parents could provide."
— Steven Riel / Poet / Edgemere

"French Boy shines a spotlight on our complex Franco history and rich culture, and I found many points of connection throughout. You will, too."
— Susan Poulin / dramatist / Pardon My French!; Author / Finding Your Inner Moose; Blogger / Just Ask Ida


With vivid and painstaking detail, Denis Ledoux recreates Maine's Franco-American community in French Boy as it was when he was growing up in the 1950s. His memoir is so close to life as then lived that it evokes both pride and pain, regret and remembrance, in equal measure.
— Douglas Rooks / Biographer / First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics and Love
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Denis Ledoux
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223213208

Book preview

Praise For

French Boy

A 1950s Franco-American Childhood

For complete blurb texts and credentials, see Appendix 1

"French Boy shines a spotlight on our complex Franco history and rich culture, and I found many points of connection throughout. You will, too."

— Susan Poulin

Playwright (Pardon My French!), Author (Finding Your Inner Moose), Blogger (Just Ask Ida)

"French Boy put me in awe of Denis Ledoux’s talent, work ethic, good sense, and common humanity. These qualities add up to a touch of genius, which in summary displays Ledoux's ability to bring drama and feeling, as well as meaning, to the reportage of ordinary life.

"French Boy deepens and expands our understanding of American history. For people like myself, a grandson of old Canada, it is a gift. Thank you, Denis Ledoux."

— Ernest Hébert

Novelist

Whirlybird Island

"French Boy is a story of grit and self-discovery, and it offers an understanding of one's Franconess. For those who know Franco-American history or those on a journey to find it, Denis Ledoux's storytelling will inspire."

— Ryan Fecteau

Former Speaker, Maine House of Representatives

"In French Boy, Denis Ledoux paints an intimate and informative portrait of his Franco-American boyhood in 1950s Maine, where he felt separate from the present which seemed foreign—and American. Ledoux’s abiding affinity for story enriches this tale of a thoughtful boy seeking more than his parents could provide."

— Steven Riel,

Poet, Edgemere

With vivid and painstaking detail, Denis Ledoux recreates Maine’s Franco-American community as it was when he was growing up in the 1950s. His memoir is so close to life as then lived that it evokes both pride and pain, regret and remembrance, in equal measure.

— Douglas Rooks

First Franco: Albert Beliveau in Law, Politics and Love

Praise For Denis Ledoux’s Fiction

The stories of Denis Ledoux come from a quietly strange culture—that of the French in America—which gives them their own quiet strangeness. Clear and deep, these stories try to understand something just beyond understanding.

— David Plante

novelist, essayist

National Book Award nominee

[Ledoux’s] stories are fragile islands of the human heart where the unspoken epiphanies of joy and sorrow are given voice and presence. And Ledoux’s own voice shimmers with a distinct Québecois-American sensibility that makes these stories heart-breaking and haunting.

— A. Poulin, Jr.

poet, editor

founder of BOA EDITIONS

[In Ledoux’s stories,] "French-English language and culture conflict exist as an undercurrent...The problem for a writer will nearly always be uncovering the social subtleties arising from insistent domination...and that

Ledoux [does]."

— Elizabeth Hardwick

Novelist, Guggenheim Fellow

a founder of The New York Review of Books

Praise For Denis Ledoux’s How-to Non-fiction

"[Turning Memories Into Memoir / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories is v]ery beneficial...helps writers get off to a great start."

— Booklist

American Library Association

Denis Ledoux has helped thousands of people get started on their memoirs.

— Time Magazine

"The Photo Scribe has inspired me to a new level of photo-journaling."

— Rhonda Anderson

Co-founder, Creative Memories

"[Turning Memories Into Memoir / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories is a]n excellent book..."

— (New Haven) Sunday Register

"[In Turning Memories Into Memoir / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories,] Ledoux makes big promises... and he achieves them."

— (Portsmouth [NH]) Herald

"Anyone intent on writing family history should read Turning Memories Into Memoirs."

— Baltimore Sun

French Boy

A 1950s Franco-American Childhood

Soleil Press

For the French men and women

who braved life on a new continent

and for their Franco descendants

who braved life in a new country.

Table of Contents

Author Notes

Forward

Introduction:

An Arrière-Plan

Chapter 1

My World Begins

Chapter 2

My Parents Become Business Owners And Grow Their Family

Chapter 3

Early Memories

Chapter 4

Our Last Year In The City

Chapter 5

Making a Life On Our Yankee Farm

Chapter 6

Our First Winter On The Farm

Chapter 7

]The Nuns Will Hit You If You Don’t Speak English

Chapter 8

An Important Decision, My Grandparents Move upstairs, Life On The Farm

Chapter 9

Escaping a Raging Bear, So Many Changes, And More Storytelling

Chapter 10

Politics, Identity, And Losing Ground

Chapter 11

Fate And Destiny: Surviving The Clash

Chapter 12

Summer Play And Autumn Focus

Chapter 13

So Much Was Different Then

Chapter 14

Always Working, Mother Driving And Growing Up

Chapter 15

Past Friend And Present Friends

Chapter 16

Approaching Adolescence

Chapter 17

The Impact Of Sacral Years

Chapter 18

My Life Was Heading To This Outcome

Chapter 19

My Childhood Ends

Appendix 1

Full Texts Of Blurbs

Author Notes

I.

French Boy is a book of generous proportions. Just as a Russian novel contains many characters, so too does French Boy introduce you to many people who are necessary to support this memoir as it reaches to be the story of a community.

My early life cannot make sense without understanding the tribe I was born into. French Boy is their story also. Some will find the dramatis personae to be extensive. They have every right to think so, but the number of characters who make their way in and out of this story, however, is necessary to portray a complex community that shaped my identity.

Novels are filled with characters who contribute to a plot; why should a memoir not lean on characters also?

II.

French Boy is a memoir and not an essay or a history.

Foreword

French Boy is my version of the story of my tribe at a time when so much that was dear to us was being lost.

Some readers will see French Boy as the story of one man, but they would be only partially correct. This story of my life serves as an arbor to support the many stories intertwined with mine that make up one version of the story of my tribe.

Other readers will see this memoir as an immigrant story of the process of acculturation and assimilation. Given this story’s timeline when so much was changing, they would be correct.

Still others will see this as a story of an ending to our culture, a dimming of the light that we did not appreciate was signaling an imminent dusk, of the approach of a night that would too soon descend on Franco-America. They, too, would be correct.

To all readers, I would say there would be a morning to follow, but on that morning, we would think ourselves Americans—only we wouldn’t really be. Not yet. Not for a few more generations.

Introduction: An Arrière-Plan

When my paternal great-grandparents, Thomas and Aurélie Gagné Bilodeau and Georges and Aurélie Dupuis Ledoux, and hundreds of thousands of their fellow Canadiens1 crossed the 45th parallel and left their homeland, they made a decision—although unwittingly—that inserted me and millions of their Franco descendants, my peers, into another people’s story.

My own story is one of exile, but not of the political sort. This is a story of emotional and cultural displacement. I am not a refugee, but I am a person living in another country than the one that ought to have been mine.

My great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents, and now I have lived in south-central Maine, a region I call home, for more than a century. My paternal grandparents came to Lewiston in 1916 to work at the Bates Mill, a textile factory that was part of both a chain of New England mills and of an industry that flourished region-wide and, for three-quarters of a century, needed an ever-larger workforce than the region’s population could provide. In the early nineteenth century, the workforce for the growing New England textile industry was supplied by Yankee girls—the term used—who left their family farms to work in the local mills. These were small mills that might have employed a hundred or two hundred operatives who lived and slept at the family farm and walked to work every morning. New England is spotted with these mills—many now empty and decaying, others converted into warehouses, apartment buildings, and office complexes. My town—Lisbon Falls—had three of these mills, two along the Sabattus River and one along the Androscoggin.

The Yankee girls worked with people of their culture—the foremen, the overseers, and the mill owner were Yankees like themselves. When those in charge and those in employ attended the same Baptist church on a Sunday morning, relations tended to be respectful as a common and homogeneous culture precluded the otherness that breeds discrimination and exploitation.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the capitalization of the textile mills in Maine followed a pattern already in place in southern New England. Ownership shifted from local entrepreneurs to wealthy investors who sought to maximize the potential of the expanding textile industry. These new owners constructed large mills that employed thousands of operatives. These new mills were erected first in Massachusetts cities such as Lowell, Springfield, and Fall River. By the 1850s and 1860s, the potential for growth in these cities had been largely exploited. Lewiston’s Great Mills—the Bates, the Hill, the Continental, the Androscoggin, and the Bleachery—were next to be constructed as investors looked for undeveloped sites. (In nineteenth-century Africa, these undeveloped sites were seized and made into colonies.)

Earlier in the nineteenth century, smaller mills in Lewiston—the Porter, the Lincoln, the Cowan, and the Lewiston—had been built along the Androscoggin River. As elsewhere, the river in Lewiston generated the potential for much hydro-energy as it sped to a lower elevation via a waterfall. The banks of New England rivers proved hard to manage for controlled waterpower and provided space for only a small number of mills. Constructing canals would permit future mills to control the flow (necessitating a millpond upstream to handle excess water) and to increase the number of factories that could be constructed. Under a canal system, mills could be built not only on the rivers but also along the canals where waterpower was now accessible. Additionally, canals and their millponds minimized the danger of flooding which had always threatened riverside mills.

While there were many advantages to building along canals versus natural rivers, constructing these waterways was expensive. Investment capital from Massachusetts was necessary to finance larger-scale development in Lewiston. At first, there were only two large mills constructed, and these were owned by men after whom they were named: Thomas Hill and Benjamin Bates. In time, three other mills—the Continental, the Androscoggin, and the Bleachery—were to be built. In this process of industrial expansion, small-mill owners were marginalized and often eliminated.

Once constructed, Lewiston’s Great Mills continued to attract Yankee girls—and necessarily ever more of them as mill capacity increased. Because the women now came from ever-greater distances to work in the factories, returning to the family farm at night was often no longer feasible. Dormitories, run in loco parentis, became a regular feature of the mills. The girls’ morals were closely watched, and they were marched to a Protestant church on Sunday mornings. (Nineteenth-century Maine, unlike Massachusetts, was Baptist and not Congregational.)

Many of the young women were earning the cash that would finance the improvements to the family farm or perhaps would ensure a dowry for themselves. They certainly were not people who were seeking a career. The bulk of these women stayed at the mills only for a while before returning to their country or small-town lives to marry and raise a family. Some, however, never married and had to continue to work in the mills to support themselves; still others married another operative and raised children in the shadow of one of the Great Mills.

As the textile industry expanded and, concurrently, as many Yankee families moved westward into Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, depleting the native population, the local pool of workers was exhausted and no longer sufficient to staff the expanding mills. By the 1840s and 1850s, the textile industry looked to other sources of labor to supplement the local population. First came the Irish, fleeing oppression at the hands of the British, and then the source of cheap labor shifted closer to home, a relatively short train ride away—the Canadiens. As were the Irish, the Canadiens were governed by the English, an imperial power all too often pleased to have their resistant Canadien colonials gone, no longer an impediment to policies of domination of the United Canadas.

The exodus of the Canadiens was facilitated as Francophone operatives, who had left la belle province earlier, wrote to family members to come join them. Mill recruiters also traveled to the Canadiens to call on them to join the ranks of the mill hands. These sometimes traveled on free passes given to them by railroads controlled by English Canadians.

In this way, aided by calamities at home, the Irish, the Germans, the Jews, the Italians, and the Canadiens joined the ranks of the working class in Lewiston. Soon the immigrants outnumbered the native-born workers and began to characterize the workforce. By 1900, Lewiston was 60% Franco.2

Lewiston is built on rolling hills through which flows the Androscoggin River. By the time the Androscoggin runs through the twin cities of Lewiston and Auburn, it has been meandering some 150 miles from its source in Lake Umbagog in New Hampshire. It has yet another 40 miles to go on its way through Lisbon Falls and Brunswick before it joins the Kennebec at Merrymeeting Bay and flows at last into the Atlantic.

Because the Androscoggin River drops thirty-seven feet when it reaches Lewiston, the city was a sought-after venue for installing what was then the best state-of-the-art hydro-technology that could be managed via canals. Lewiston’s new textile mills were constructed strategically along the new waterways. A single canal was constructed (largely by the Irish), beginning north of the falls, and once at the Canal Street level, it bifurcated where the land dropped a second time (beneath the mills where its power was harnessed) before the canal waters rejoined the Androscoggin.

After the 1850s, Lewiston’s mills were the city’s main source of jobs, but the municipality had also become a merchandising center for the region so there were many other motors of the economy. Lewiston’s sister city Auburn across the river prospered due to its many shoe shops. These functioned in smaller factories that did not depend on the river or canals as did four of Lewiston’s five Great Mills—the Bates, the Hill, the Androscoggin, and the Continental (but not the Bleachery where cloth was not manufactured but turned into products).

In time, mill ownership was jockeyed about: first in Boston, then in Philadelphia, Chicago, or perhaps New York. The owners no longer had names of people but were corporations who operated Lewiston as a colony (to be exploited as the British exploited India, Ireland, and Francophone Canada).3 In this regard, Lewiston differed little from Lowell, Holyoke, Springfield, or Fall River in Massachusetts, Woonsocket in Rhode Island, Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire, and Biddeford and Waterville in Maine. The prosperity generated in Lewiston and in these other industrial cities was shipped off to improve the quality of life in the mother country—Boston, New York City, and elsewhere. Lewiston's money financed athenaeums, universities, athletic facilities, and monuments and parks in cities where the financiers lived.4

In Lewiston, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, tens of thousands of Canadiens descended for work. A large number came as migrant workers—many returning home in the summer to farm their land—and not as immigrants who intended to make the US their home. (In this, they were not unlike many of the Yankee girls who committed to working in the mills only for a short time.) Even those who did not return in the summer were people who, as my aunt Rosa Bilodeau Aubut said of her parents, Thomas and Aurélie Bilodeau, "had come to make un tas d’argent (a pile of money)" so that they could return. If the statistics for New England are true of Lewiston—and I see no reason why they should not be, half of these migrants eventually took the train back permanently to their homeland in Québec. (The percentage for European immigrants returning to their homeland is nearer twenty-five percent for the Western European who, for reasons of geographical proximity, were more likely to undertake the return trip than the Eastern European.

Thomas and Aurélie Bilodeau came down to southeastern Massachusetts—first to Taunton and then to Fall River—in the late 1890s.5 There, they worked for about ten years in the textile mills after which, as did so many, they returned to their homeland—to their farm in Saint-Narcisse in the Beauce—around 1906. Not able however to buck the economic situation in Canada that favored the Anglophone over the Francophone, my great-grandparents admitted defeat—perhaps believing their failure was personal rather than an institutional aspect of colonization—and came south again after a few years of struggle during which they had spent their savings ("ils avaient dépensé leurs économies,") according tomy great-auntRosa Bilodeau Aubut.

With farms empty or emptying all around them, the Bilodeaus could not sell their place. (Thomas had built the house before 1879, the year he and Aurélie Gagné married.) First in the late 1890s and then later toward the end of the first decade of the last century, they had simply left their farmhouse vacant one day, unable to pass it on to anyone. Subsequently, two of their sons were to return to the family home. Perhaps because they were then single men without responsibilities to anyone but themselves, they made a go of farming and did not return to the factories in which they had labored in the US—contrary to their sisters who willed themselves here permanently to work in mills that paid them regular wages. Working in the mills provided independence that must have been liberating for a woman—certainly, my grandmother expressed it as such. When asked if she had wished to return to the farm, she was quick to reply, "Non! Jamais! (No! Never!)

As with my grandmother’s decision to remain in Fall River, many factors contributed to keeping people in the United States. Marriages of children to people from another region of Québec complicated repatriation when the young spouses could not agree on where to return and so decided to stay where they had met. Mothers were especially prone to respond to this situation with I’m not leaving my children in the US! Home ownership, which was promoted by the curé (the pastor) as a way of stabilizing the population and promoting church affiliation, also ensured people remained in place—especially if the family had sold their property in Québec and had no place to return to. Of course, continuing poverty trapped many of the Canadiens into a permanent stay in the US. To these must be added those who had done well here—the relatives who had pooled their savings to build tenement buildings ("des blocs"), the entrepreneurs who had opened shops and small businesses that catered to the Franco community, or people who had simply been able to put money away.

When my Ledoux grandparents—William Ledoux and Marie Bilodeau Ledoux—came to Lewiston, Maine, in 1916 after a sojourn of almost two decades in Fall River, Massachusetts, they brought my grandmother Ledoux’s extensive family—including her parents, Thomas and Aurélie Gagné Bilodeau. The extended family worked in the mills, but not Aurélie who, now in her sixties, cared for her working daughters’ children.

Twelve years later, on the evening of Wednesday, February 29, 1928, Thomas Bilodeau, came home, after a day working at the Hill Mill, to one daughter's apartment where, in pre-Social Security days, he and his wife, in their older years, had accepted shelter. (Every few months, they would shift their residence to another daughter’s home.) After an evening that gave no indication of what was to happen, needing rest for the workday that would too soon come upon him, Thomas had gone to sleep from which he never awoke. He was 78.

A walk through Lewiston and a second walk through Portland (30 miles to the south) points out the difference that inevitably is produced in a city by a history where local money was sent away and in another city where local money had tended to stay.

The memoirist must ask: what happens to a people who experience colonization for generations—first in their own country and then in a new country?

History is all around us—here in Lewiston and wherever you live, dear reader—and knowing it can explain us to ourselves—and to others. Awareness of Franco history in particular is what this book is about.

French Boy is also about one of the products of that history—me—in this new land.

1The original Canadian population of European descent was, of course, French-speaking, and the term Canadian applied only to descendants of that population for at least a century after the Conquest of 1760. Then the Anglophone population gradually appropriated the designation, leaving the Francophone Canadians without a unique name. Today, Americans and Anglophone Canadians use the term Canadian to refer to Anglophones and French Canadian to refer to Francophones. In this book, I will refer to Francophones as Canadiens and Anglophones as English Canadians or Anglophone Canadians. I use the French term Canadiens to distinguish Francophones whose roots date from before the Conquest of Canada from Anglophone Canadians who came as a result of the Conquest. They share a citizenship but are not the same people. The term Canadien will appear henceforth without italics.

I have chosen to capitalize Francophone and Anglophone in all of its uses. I realize there are arguments in favor of no caps in some instances, but I want to emphasize an ethnic identity. The proper names by which ethnic groups are labeled are always capitalized.

2Within another decade and a half, the Canadiens would be able to elect the first Francophone to the mayor’s office.

3The exception was the W.S. Libbey Mill which stayed locally owned and was one of the last to go under, ceasing operations in 1991. (The Lincoln Mill mentioned earlier in this Introduction was purchased by W.S. Libbey and an associate and renamed the Libbey Mill.)

4It must be noted that Benjamin Bates did help finance Bates College in Lewiston, but that school was a Protestant institution that Catholic immigrants would not have felt welcome at. Bates College was founded by Freewill Baptists as the Maine State Seminary, and when endowed by Benjamin Bates, adopted its eponymous name. Benjamin Bates accumulated wealth in the antebellum years from the labor of enslaved people who grew the cotton that was spun and woven in his mills by immigrants working long days at minimal pay.

5Their last child, Rosilia, was born in Québec Province in October 1897. The Bilodeaus thus had to arrive in the US after that date.

Chapter 1

My World Begins.

My mother had been on time with her first baby, and she was sure she would birth me on her due date. She and my father were living with his parents—an arrangement not unusual in 1947 when adult children were not necessarily expected to move out of their parents’ homes to live on their own. Many young people of their generation started their marriages and families as my parents were doing.

Although the house at what was then 49 Farwell Street was not large, the three generations that inhabited it were not cramped.1 My grandparents’ other children were gone—Rhéa and Armand were married, Lucien was a priest in the Monfortin Congregation and living in a rectory, and Léonard was in the American Merchant Marines—and so the house had an empty second floor where three rooms had been placed at the disposal of my young parents. At each end of this upper floor was a bedroom. My parents occupied one of the upstairs bedrooms, and my brother Billy—only 19 months—was in the other. In the middle area, which was not so much a room as a large hallway with a dormer that overlooked my Verreault grandparents’ house across Warren Avenue, my mother had made a sort of sitting room, but mostly my parents shared the common space downstairs—the kitchen, the double living room, and the dining room. Because of this second-floor arrangement, my parents were luckier than many couples who found themselves lacking privacy, perhaps in a bedroom off the busy tenement kitchen where everyone naturally gathered and everyone could overhear every noise from the adjacent bedroom.

On the cold afternoon of the Saturday that was January 18, 1947, because snow had begun to fall heavily, my mother told my father he had better put the tire chains on the car.2 They would be driving to l’Hôpital Générale Ste-Marie soon as their second baby would be born that day, she was sure.

Thick snow was accumulating on the city streets as my father drove the red Buick a mile and a half towards city center to the Canadien hospital on Sabattus Street. Even in so short a trip, perhaps he looked at my mother with some apprehension. Surely she would be all right! He would have held her arm as she shuffled her way through the accumulating snow to the entrance of the hospital. The unaccustomed weight of her pregnancy would have altered her center of balance and would have made traversing slippery ground problematic. Soon, my mother having been admitted and brought to the pregnancy ward where she was to wait for her contractions to progress, there was nothing for my father to do but to follow the strong admonitions given to fathers at the time to return home and leave his wife to the attention of the nurses and the doctor. There was no need, the staff assured my young father, for him to stay. He would not be permitted, anyway, into the birthing room. Dr. François Méthot would be in soon—if he was not already in the hospital. A gruff man with a pencil mustache, Dr. Méthot had seen my mother during her pregnancy and now he would help deliver her baby.

The tire chains clanking their sonorous rhythm as they gripped the slippery streets,