THE RHODE ISLAND CENTURY

4.25.99
Weaving French into Woonsocket culture

Standing before the smoldering ash heap that had been her home, Emerance Fontaine held two coins in her hand. A pair of daguerreotypes and the coins were all she had been able to salvage.

Mon Dieu, vous avez tout pris. Prenez-ca aussi! she wailed, hurling the coins into the embers. (God, you have taken everything. You might as well take this too!)

It was July 29, 1916, and Mme. Fontaine had just lost her farm and home in a massive fire that swept across her Canadian province, killing 300 and destroying farms and towns alike.

Two years earlier, her husband Louis had died, leaving her to raise their eight children alone. She and the children had tried so hard to make ends meet, but this final catastrophe was too big to overcome.

To survive, they would have to go south, to work in the textile mills. To Woonsocket, R.I., where her sisters Julienne Duguay and Sedalie Girard would take them in.

She cried as if her heart would break, and not for the last time.

THE FRENCH-CANADIANS weren't like other immigrants, for a number of reasons.

To begin with, they came earlier, starting in the early 1800s as a trickle that became a steady flow after the Civil War and surged again in the first decades of this century.

Instead of taking a dramatic voyage across the ocean, they boarded trains in Quebec. While others came to build new lives, French-Canadians came to make money when times were hard, planning to go home to Canada and rescue the family farm or business as soon as they had the cash.

They knew all about being a minority in a larger English-speaking country, and they clung fiercely to their language and culture.

They called that effort la survivance , which means survival but also connotes tenacity. To this day, Quebec license plates say Je me souviens (I remember); what they remember is the battle in 1763 when the British defeated the French to take control of Canada.

Like the Irish and Italians, the Catholic Church was the mainstay of their lives. But to the French-Canadians, it was also the guardian of their culture. Qui perd sa langue, perd sa foi , the priests would tell them (lose your language and you lose your faith).

They were determined to keep both.

They survived by banding together in tight communities from Lewiston, Maine, to Putnam, Conn. Mme. Fontaine knew that in Woonsocket, she would find support from more than her sisters.

WOONSOCKET was known in Quebec as la ville plus francaise aux Etats Unis (the most French city in the United States). It was said you could live there a lifetime without ever speaking English.

The heart of French Woonsocket was the Social District, a teeming neighborhood of mills and tenements along the twisting Blackstone River dominated by the gigantic Social Mills. In the 1920s, the community supported two French newspapers and five French churches; three out of four children went to bilingual Catholic schools.

While other ethnic enclaves scrambled to become ''American,'' Woonsocket fought to keep its distinctively French flavor. Its people -- particularly its young women -- went uncomplainingly into the hot, noisy mills, where despite long days they earned barely enough to survive on.

They didn't complain because they cared more about family and God than the new American religion of getting ahead. Not until the 1920s, when movies swept the nation and radios invaded even the Social District, did that begin to change.

THE FONTAINE FAMILY, penniless and dressed in fire-singed clothing, touched the heart of a train conductor they remember only as Mr. Picard.

''The way you look, you'll never get through customs,'' he told them. ''Tell them you have rich relatives in America, and show them some money.'' Told they had none, he dug into his own pockets, telling them to repay the loan after they'd cleared customs.

Then he went up and down the aisles, asking other passengers to contribute food to the hungry family. Thanks to such kindness, they made it safely to a relative's home in Derry, N.H., where they got work for a month in a shoe factory so they wouldn't be utterly destitute when they got to Woonsocket.

Serious French-Canadian migration began after the end of the Civil War brought the return of Southern cotton and boom times for New England's textile mills. By 1901, a half-million French-Canadians -- a quarter of Quebec's population -- were living in New England; by the 1920s, that number had doubled.

Quebec did not have enough good farmland to support the big French-Canadian families, which often had 10, 12, or more children. Textile recruiters patrolled the province, promising steady work that, to farm workers, seemed comparatively easy.

Priests in Quebec tried to discourage parishioners from leaving. ''Man doesn't live by bread alone,'' one had told Mme. Fontaine. ''Yes, but you need bread to live,'' she retorted.

Pay in the mills was so low that, to earn enough to save, the whole family had to work. Fathers and brothers would try to get better-paid jobs in lumbering or construction, while young women headed for the mills (about four out of five textile workers were unmarried French-Canadian women).

Many were just girls.

''These children, these young girls, worked under extremely difficult conditions,'' writes Yves Roby in A Portrait of the Female Franco-American Worker . ''Twelve hours a day, almost without interruption, they had to live as recluses, in an enclosed area which was dirty and nauseating.''

The steam used to keep the threads from breaking encouraged colds and pneumonia. Temperatures in the summer could go as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit; girls sometimes fainted from dehydration.

The light was bad, the noise deafening, the air filled with dust. ''When the looms were running, we couldn't hear anyone speak,'' millworker Evelyne Desruisseaux told a historian. ''We communicated by hand or eye signals.

''To be heard, we had to speak directly into an ear. That's probably why I am hard of hearing.''

Mill owners liked to hire French-Canadian girls because they were docile, hard-working, and (raised to obey their fathers and priests) famously resistant to unionization. Green workers were often brought in from Quebec, in fact, to break strikes across New England as American textile workers grew more militant.

But docile didn't mean doormats. Family was the most important thing to French-Canadian workers, and family members looked out for each other in mills across New England.

New arrivals quickly got the lowdown on who was a fair boss, who was a stinker, who would try to demand sexual favors from a pretty girl and who could be trusted. If a girl ran into trouble in the mill, she usually had friends and relations to back her up.

Emerance Fontaine's daughter, Leopoldine, was 18 years old when she went into the mills. She stayed for seven years.

She never talked much about her life as a millworker, though the women she worked with became lifelong friends. It couldn't have been too bad, says her son, Rene Tellier: when her younger sister, Marie-Ange, finished convent school, Leopoldine got her a mill job.

''And it did provide them with a modicum of comfort and affluence they had never enjoyed before,'' says Tellier. Finally, he says, ''they had some purchasing power.''

LEOPOLDINE LEFT the mills in 1923 to marry Alfonse Tellier and raise a family. It was considered shameful for a femme de maison to work, no matter how bad the family's finances were (although one in five married women did work).

It was just as well, because the textile industry was in turmoil. Cotton mills were the first to shut down, lured south by lower labor and energy costs and the logic of putting factories closer to the cotton fields.

Rhode Island manufacturers tried to fight back by cutting wages, 22 percent in 1921 and another 20 percent the following year (they also added an hour to the workday).

Workers, not surprisingly, revolted. Strikes roiled the Blackstone and Pawtuxet Valleys; in February, Governor San Souci called out the National Guard to quell the violence. One millworker was killed and 14 wounded; labor gained back some ground.

But only for a while.

World War I had stirred up society in a number of unexpected ways, exposing even insular cities like Woonsocket to the wider world and pressuring immigrants to prove their patriotism by becoming ''real Americans.''

Traditionalists tried to fight back. When Rhode Island passed the 1922 Peck Law, requiring English to be taught in parochial as well as public schools, the French community saw it as a declaration of war, a bid by the Irish-dominated church to eradicate French culture.

The community voted so heavily against legislators who had voted for the Peck Law that it was substantially weakened in 1925.

Then the Irish-dominated church weighed in. Woonsocket priests had asked the diocese for help in building a high school for French-Canadian boys; when the diocese decreed it must be open to all Catholic boys, a group of traditionalists revolted.

The French newspaper La Sentinelle launched a campaign to exclude the diocese from local parish affairs; the battle didn't end until the ringleaders were excommunicated by the Pope in 1929.

Meanwhile, several stealth weapons were making inroads.

The newfangled radio was beaming English right into the Social District, and young and old alike flocked weekly to Woonsocket's six movie theaters, where they laughed at Charlie Chaplin just like the Swedes in Minneapolis or the Chinese in California.

Streetcars and then automobiles carried young French-Canadians far from the Social District. Leopoldine Fontaine married a Frenchman, but she met him on an excursion to Oakland Beach.

Long before the floods of 1955 destroyed the Social District, the cultural war was over.