My father was not the only story teller. My mother didn't write but this interview that I did with her when she was in her early 80s illustrates what a wonderful story teller she was.
Interview With My Mother
Final Project
Franco-American Women
University of Maine
Professor Rhea Cote
Introduction: My mother, Marie Lucie Gravel, was born September 20, 1917, the second surviving child and first daughter of Catherine Isabelle Michaud (called Isabelle) of Wallagrass and Jean Baptiste Gravel (called Jean) of St. Agathe. Isabelle was the youngest daughter of Catherine Farrell and Magloire (Mac) Michaud.
Catherine was a bright, witty blue-eyed woman of Irish descent. She was a teacher, and whether she met Mac because she came to Wallagrass to teach or some other way is lost in time. Catherine married Mac in 1871 when she was 20 years old. Over the next 21 years, she had 14 children, of whom 12 survived. Isabelle, the last born in 1892, was three years younger than the next to the last.
Catherine, had, by the time of Isabelle’s birth, returned to teaching. With most of her children able to care for themselves and, as records in Fort Kent show (notes 1 and 2), being something of a businesswoman when it came to land investments, she was too busy to return to the rigors of daily child care. She doted on Isabelle, and spoiled her endlessly, but packed her up and sent her to the convent in Wallagrass for her weekday instruction. Only home on the weekends and doted on by her mother and her older siblings, Isabelle grew into a lovely, headstrong and spoiled young woman with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a pretty smile.
When she met Jean-Baptiste Gravel, a happy-go-lucky near-do-well with a penchant for storytelling and a great sense of humor, she lost her heart. Despite her family’s opposition, or perhaps because of, she wed her storyteller on October 16, 1911.
Children soon followed, the first son born in October 1912 and lived only a few days.. The first surviving child, a son Joseph Leo, was born in 1913. He was followed by two more sons who did not survive before Marie Lucie’s birth in 1917. In total, Isabelle had 16 children of whom 10 survived. Jean-Baptiste earned what he could at odd jobs, lumbering, mill work, and whatever came to hand. The family was often destitute, and Catherine Michaud repeatedly came to the family’s rescue as recorded in the public records in Fort Kent with deeds to land in exchange for promises of care for her and her husband (Note 3).
The family lived with the Michaud, sometimes in the Michaud home and sometimes in what was called the schoolhouseî (note 4) just down the street until Marie Lucie was four years old. The young Lucie, who was named for her Grandfather Michaud's mother, Lucie Dube, was evidently a cute, vivacious child, the darling of the aunts who were all older than her mother. She was the apple of Tante Olive’s eye (Angelique Olive Michaud, 17 years Isabelle’s senior) and played most often with Tante Elizabeth’s boys, Patrick (Babe) Deprey, and Emme (Boy) Deprey).
Tante Olive looked at her one day and said, “You are too pretty to be a Lucie; I am calling you Lucille.” And the name stuck. For the rest of her life, she disliked the name Lucie and used the name Lucille.
In 1921, the Gravel family, then comprising four children: two boys (Leo and Alphie) and two girls (Lucie and Helsie), moved to Stockholm, Maine, where Jean-Baptiste found steady work at the Standard Box Company. This work ended sometime after 1932, the factory having laid many off with the Depression.
Stockholm, Maine, in 1921, was a small, economically poor mill town with a predominantly Swedish population. The population in 1920 was 1,038, up from 715 in 1910. Lumber mills and lumbering provided the primary employment in town.
The town was definitely a Protestant town and prejudice against the French and Catholics was rampant. The town got its first resident priest, Eugene Cremillon, in 1926. On May 6, 1927, there is a bland entry in the published town history: “Klan cross burned in evening.” That event was very frightening to my mother, who witnessed the cross burning somewhere in a field in front of her house. Until I was in college, she firmly believed that the Klan was a Northern anti-Catholic organization, not realizing that it was feared in the American South as an anti-black organization.
Stockholm did not have a doctor until sometime in the 1920s, and infant mortality throughout that decade was high, every year recording anywhere from 11 to 24 (in 1923) deaths of children under the age of three. According to my mother, her aunt, Beatrice Gravelle was a midwife: she was the only doctor the family had in Stockholm.
The town grew very slowly during the the 1920s. By 1930, its population numbered 1,101. The school population in 1930/31 was: 193 pupils in grades one through six; 23 in grades 7 and 8; and 24 in high school. That same year, there were 112 children enrolled in the Stockholm Baptist Sunday School with an average attendance of 78.
To give an idea of the economy as it would affect a mill worker’s family in 1932: Eggs were 20 cents a dozen; wood was $5 a cord; people were paid eight cents a barrel for picking potatoes but they had to pay anywhere from $2.80 to $9 a barrel to buy potatoes; first-class postage was two cents; mill wages were $2.55 a day and the work was seasonal, in other words, you did not necessarily have work every day.
The Gravel family moved into a small, unpainted two-story building that set between the river and the railroad tracks just west of town. On the other side of the tracks from them was a street called Red Row, a street of factory row houses all painted red. The Gravel address was Red Row, even though their house was quite separate from the factory houses. Here, the remaining nine children were born.
What schooling my mother had was provided by the town of Stockholm. Not a French community, French was not required, and Lucie, a good student, never had the French training that was required by schools in the solidly French communities of the St. John Valley.
When the family returned to Wallagrass (Soldier Pond), Marie Lucie resumed school, but quit because the school required her to take French and she was way behind the other students. She was accustomed to doing well in school, not being behind: in Stockholm, she had completed eighth grade, having been pushed so that she was a full two years ahead of herself. This in spite of the fact that she was often kept home from school to take care of the younger children.
My mother was never proud of being French: she told me many times of the lovely daughter of a theater owner in Fort Kent, about her beautiful blond hair, her lovely clothes, and her nice home. She told me that she had always wanted to be like that child. I think she equated her poverty and her lack of pretty things with being French and Catholic.
She left home during the Great Depression in 1932 at the age of 15 or 16. She ended up in Portland, Maine, where she turned her back on her cultural and religious heritage, and she didn't looked back. She never spoke French again although she understood it and was able to converse with people who spoke French while she spoke English. She left the Church and became a Protestant. She kept her contact with her family, her childhood pictures, and stories of her childhood to herself and never shared them with her children.
All my life, she told me that her family was, as she says of her father in this interview, "nobody." Imagine my surprise when I was able to trace every branch of this family back to France in the 1650s and 1660s. It is my father's family, the non-French family that she thought was so much more to be valued than hers, that couldn't be traced back to their native countries and couldn't be traced back in many cases before the mid-19th century.
Because she denied her heritage, hers is a sad story, and illustrates what Matthew Lord said: "To deny who you are is to hate what you are!" Going over this interview again with his article "From Shame to Pride, The Evolution of the Franco-American" in mind has helped me better understand the tragedy of my mother's life. By letting her tell you her story, I hope that we will all better understand the importance of encouraging children to accept their heritage and be proud of who they are. Writing this as the final project for an on-line course about Franco-American women helped me do what I set out to do when I started doing our family’s genealogy: to integrate my mother within the context of her life and her culture.
This interview took place in 1995 after I had read C. Stewart Doty, The First Franco-Americans: New England Life Histories from the Federal Writers’ Project. This book stimulated my interest in learning more about my Franco-American past. I talked to my mother about it and taped several of our conversations. The interview rambles, but I do not want to edit it or abridge it because I do not want to lose the flavor of her language and her natural storytelling abilities. Everything in italics are my notes from my own research.
The Interview:
JOYCE: I found a very interesting book when I visited the mills in Lawrence Massachusetts. It is called The First Franco-Americans, and the stories in it are wonderful accounts of life as remembered by people in the 1930s.
LUCILLE: There is a book about Aroostook county. My mother told me about it a long time ago. I lived in Soldier Pond, five miles outside of Fort Kent. My birth certificate says that I was born in Wallagrass in 1917.
Did you know that I died when I was a baby? No, I really did! There was a terrible flu epidemic that year, and it killed a lot of people. My aunts and my grandmother and my mother all thought I had died. I was in my cradle, and they pulled the blanket over me, and they were all sitting around crying. I guess I must have decided to join their crying, and that was how they knew I wasn’t dead.
I was born in my grandfather’s house, which is in Soldier Pond. The church was in Wallagrass so the certificate says Wallagrass. [Her birth certificate says Soldier Pond, Maine; she may have been thinking of her baptismal certificate.]
JOYCE: Was this the grandfather that you told me about, the one that came across the river illegally?
LUCILLE: That was my father’s father. My grandfather Michaud grew up on a farm. He was a farmer. He married my grandmother who was Irish, and he taught her how to speak French. Half of his family didn’t speak English. [Actually, Catherine Farrell’s mother, Eulalie Bellfleur, and her grandmother, Julie Dube, were both French women from St. Basile, New Brunswick, who married into the Farrell family of Van Buren. With so many French relatives and living in Van Buren, it is very likely that Catherine grew up speaking French as well as English. For more on the Farrells, see Note 5]
JOYCE: The book says they were very protective of the French language, and even if they spoke English out in public for business reasons, they spoke French at home.
LUCILLE: That’s right. (She quickly changed the subject and talked here with pride) My grandfather was a gentleman farmer. He was tall, very good looking, and highly respected. He ran the post office. His house was in Michaud, Maine. [an old map does show this tiny spot as Michaud Maine] My mother’s maiden name was Michaud. Her mother’s name was Farrell. My grandfather was a very handsome man. My mother looked a lot like him, and you look a lot like her. My mother and father both had blue eyes.
JOYCE: What did your father do? You told me that his father came across the river: where did he come from?
LUCILLE: My father was no one. He came from nowhere. His father died when he was nine years old. And his mother could not speak English, or write her name or anything. And my father and his brother had to support her and all the other children in the family. He had 3 sisters that were older. Uncle Emmy and Uncle Joe were younger. They all came from St. Agathe. My father came from St. Agathe.
JOYCE: Who came across the river illegally? [Here, I am referring to a story that I heard from her when I was a teenager and first tried to do my genealogy. She told me then that we could not trace her family because my great grandfather came into the United States illegally by crossing the river in a row boat!]
LUCILLE: You’ve got me. Probably was his father. I can’t remember. I think it was his father. His father died when he was 27. He must have been older than that. [Actually, he was 52 years old when he died].
JOYCE: How many children did he have?
LUCILLE: There were eight children: Tante Clarisse, Tante Beatrice, Tante Elise, Oncle Aime, Oncle Joe, I cannot remember them all. My father and his father were lumberjacks, and my father worked in the mill for a long time.
[Changing the subject] My grandfather Michaud had a large farm. [Mac and Catherine owned lot number 118 per the John Brown survey containing appx 65.80] When the mill closed down, and there was no work to be had, my grandparents came to Stockholm on the train, and they told my mother to pack up and come home and live. My grandmother Michaud was blind, my grandfather had trouble with his legs and difficulty walking, so my grandparents needed my mother. So they packed us up, and we went to live with my grandparents. They had a big house. So there was plenty of room.
JOYCE: What do you remember about being very young?
LUCILLE: I was born in Soldier Pond, but we moved from Wallagrass to Stockholm when I was very little. Here’s a funny story: I had a nipple [she means she drank from a bottle] until I was five years old. No one could take it away from me. One of my uncles was at the house one day, and he gave me a bottle with mustard on the nipple. I threw up, and I never touched another nipple in my life! Alphie and Helsie were born in the schoolhouse in Wallagrass. All the other kids were born in Stockholm.
JOYCE: How long did you stay in school?
LUCILLE: Nancy [Nancy is her younger child, my sister] wanted to know when I dropped out of school. I left when I was 14, two years ahead of myself. You get in with a crowd older than you. They don’t want you to play with them. You’re treated like the “kid” and you can’t do anything right. I used to get the lead in the Christmas play, and the others didn’t want to be in it because I was the “Kid” and I was stealing the show. Children can be so cruel.
JOYCE: What kind of games did you play when you were a child?
LUCILLE: I used to play ball. We had a nice field to play ball in, so the others came to play with us. There was an old mill that they had taken apart next door to where we lived. I remember that there was a great big huge cement thing. On top of it, was a big round circle thing taller than I was. Leo and I used to climb up on that thing. It was probably part of a furnace or something. Inside was hollow. There were rough edges that we could grab. We could climb, and run, and dance, and everything. There were holes every so few feet that we could crawl through. We spent hours playing on that thing.
Someone tore down an old house, and my father got the wood and brought it home. He used it to build a chicken coop. He gave Leo the rest of the lumber, and Leo built playhouses for us. We had a lot of fun in the playhouses, and kids used to come over and play with us. We had a river in back of the house, a railroad across the field in front of the house. We didn’t want for anything. The Greens lived next door, and Mr. Green did a lot of whittling, and made us little toys.
JOYCE: Tell me more about your mother and father.
LUCILLE: My father was not good enough for my mother, and no one wanted her to marry him. But she was really a spoiled brat, and she always got what she wanted.
Whenever he was around, she only had eyes for him. No one else mattered. She could be working in the kitchen or playing with me, and he would walk in, and it was as though I wasn’t there.
My father was cruel. I remember one morning he called me to get up. I was sleeping in the bedroom upstairs and it was really cold. I wanted to stay in bed until the fire warmed up the kitchen. He came up those stairs, yanked me out of bed and threw me down the stairs.
My father was a story teller. He knew more stories, and he would sit in his chair, smoking his corncob pipe, and the stories just came. People used to come over on Saturday night. So many people came that they had to bring their own chairs, but they wouldn’t miss his stories for anything.
JOYCE: What kind of stories did he tell?
LUCILLE: Everything. Stories like Cinderella. He knew them all. He couldn’t read but he must have had a photographic memory. Once he heard a story it was his. He never forgot it. I loved to listen to those stories.
JOYCE: I know there was a lot of alcohol abuse in the French community. Was there any in your home?
LUCILLE: Oh, my mother would never have stood for it. My father came home just once drunk as could be. He fell on the porch. It was a very cold night. My mother went out, picked up the bottle, emptied it and threw it over the railing. Then she pulled him inside and left him there on the floor. Boy, he never came home drunk again!
I know it sounds awful, but I hated my father. He was cruel to me.
JOYCE: Why did you leave home?
LUCILLE: I used to fight with the other children. Once I had a terrible fight with Leo: he used to tease me something awful, and I had this nice doll with porcelain head, hands and feet. Leo took that doll and flung her hard against the wood pile and she broke. I was so mad. Another time he followed me through the house teasing me. The more I cried, the more he teased. I was in the kitchen and I picked up a knife and I turned around and threw it at him. It just missed him. That scared me so much that I never threw anything at anyone ever again.
Anyway, one day, I had a fight with one of the younger kids. My father and mother were in the kitchen, and I heard my father tell my mother to get rid of me, that I couldn’t live there anymore, that I had to leave.
My mother got me a job with her cousin’s wife, Emma. Emma needed a baby-sitter and asked my mother if I could do that. I stayed with Emma. For the first time, I had my own things, my own money. I went to the store, and I put this beautiful coat on layaway for the winter. One day, I went home to visit, and I had my purse with me with the money for my final payment in it. When I left, I picked up my purse. When I got to the store, my money was gone. Somebody took it out of my purse while I was at home. So I had no coat for the winter that year.
JOYCE: Where did you learn to sew?
LUCILLE: I taught myself to iron and to sew. My mother made terrible clothes and she never ironed anything neatly, so I taught myself how to do those things so that I could have nice clothes that were not wrinkled.
JOYCE: How did you come to go to Portland? Why did you leave the St. John Valley?
LUCILLE: My mother came over to Emma’s one day and told Emma that she couldn’t pay me, that she had to send my money home to my parents.
That evening, Emma told me that I was not going to work for her anymore. I said, “What am I going to do? I don’t want to go home.” Emma said, “Well, you’re not.” She said, “I’ll get you another job, and we won’t tell your mother where you are.” So she got me a job in the National Hotel in Madawaska working in the kitchen as the chef’s helper. I helped with dishes and other things. Usually I washed the pots and pans because the waitresses came out and washed the dishes.
I didn’t stay there very long. A friend of the woman who owned the hotel came from Biddeford to stay as a guest at the hotel. They knew each other pretty well: I guess they had gone to school together. Somebody in his family had died, and he had come to the funeral.
They (he and the hotel owner) sat in the back of the dining room, and they talked for hours. They were still talking when I went to bed. She saw me starting up the stairs, came out, and said, “This man wants to talk with you. Could you go sit with him before you go to bed and talk to him?” I couldn’t imagine what he wanted.
She introduced me to him. He told me that he had a wife and three children, and he needed someone to look after the children. Would I be interested in coming to Biddeford to do that? I told the woman what he had said. She said she knew that was what he wanted. She also said that she didn’t think the kitchen was a very good place for me and she said that I should go with him. So I went with him on the train to Biddeford and worked for his family.
We didn’t tell my mother where I was. She had decided I wasn’t old enough and she could collect my pay. So we decided it was best not to tell her where I was. We didn’t. I felt mean and cruel and everything else. I didn’t feel right about it. I was about 15 or 16 when I went to Biddeford. I can’t remember. It was such a long time ago. I went to Biddeford. I went to work. I stayed there.
The family didn't have much money. He was an insurance man, but they did have a nice home in Saco. They were Catholic, and I went to church every Sunday with them. I took the kids to church. The church wasn’t that far from the house. There was a school across the street where the kids went to school. And really all the man’s wife needed was someone tp help after school. Since I had more time, I got a job as a waitress in a restaurant in Biddeford. I liked that a lot. I worked there for a year or so.
Next, I went to work in a summer place owned by the Dwyers, and I had my sister, Helsie, come and live with me. [She does not say how she contacted her sister or how she made these arrangements. From what I remember her telling me as a child, her mother sent her sister to live with her so she obviously had made contact with her mother.]
The Dwyers gave Helsie and me a cabin to ourselves. They were an old couple that ran a summer place in Wells and spent winters in Florida. When the place closed for the winter, Helsie and I went to Portland.
Helsie and I had saved our money. We didn’t spend any money all summer long. We went to Portland, and we stayed in a boarding house. I got a job at The Splendid Restaurant as a cashier. That was working nights. I didn’t like that so I got a job at the Oyster Bar and later at The Mayflower. I liked both of those restaurants.
I met your father when I was working at The Splendid. He came in as a dishwasher. I picked up some dishes, and they were filthy. I went out to the kitchen, and I gave him hell. He started to laugh. I can still see him standing there with his hands on his hips laughing at me. [My mother was barely 5’2; my father was at least 6’3!]
Helsie didn’t go to work in the restaurants; she worked as a mother’s helper at a doctor’s house. I preferred working in the restaurants because I liked being with people. I liked to talk. I liked to laugh. And I did.
JOYCE: When was Dad a reporter with the Press Herald?
LUCILLE: Oh, before I met him.
JOYCE: Had he left the Press Herald?
LUCILLE: I can’t remember what that story was. He had been in Portland awhile but when I met him, he didn’t have a job. He didn’t stay at The Splendid for more than a few days. But he wasn’t just at The Splendid.
I was living in a room in a minister’s house. I had a hot plate, and I used the window for a refrigerator. Anyway, there was a minister renting the room next to me. He used his typewriter at all hours of the night. I used to get so mad. I came out of my room one night to tell him to stop, and there was your father. He was living across the hall from me. Then he disappeared. I didn’t hear from him again.
Tilly [a new friend that she met at The Mayflower and who remained her best friend until Tilly’s death in 2000] and I got an apartment, and her folks helped us furnish it. The landlady even gave us a few things to use. Tilly’s mother supplied blankets. We bought dime-store dishes. The landlady loaned us a table. Tilly worked at The Mayflower for years.
Dad reappeared a year later. I was at the Oyster Bar. In the meantime, I had Carlo on my back. [Carlo Fiore met her at one of the restaurants and took a strong liking to Lucille. She did not like him.] Boy, was he a nuisance? Oh, my God. I couldn’t stand him. I’d come out of work, and Carlo would be waiting for me. And then I met your father again. I hadn’t seen him for a long time. He was very good looking. And so I went after him, I guess. Or he went after me. I really don’t remember!
Anyway, by the time your father reappeared, I was living with Tilly. He must have gone into the Mayflower, and when he saw Tilly, he must have asked her where I was.
He went into the army later that year. That was when he served in the last mounted unit of the Cavalry in Panama.
And I had another boyfriend that I liked. Elwin Bradbury. We had a lot of fun. We were like two crazy kids. We were just friends. We used to go window shopping. We used to go out to eat dinner together every Sunday. We usually went to the Mayflower for dinner. You could get a whole meal for 45 to 55 cents. I had a lot of nice, clean fun with him.
Then your father decided that he liked me. Every time I turned around, he was under foot. I had to marry him to get away from him! He was in the army, stationed in Vermont. He wrote to me. He came to Portland whenever he could on leave. That’s why we went to Vermont to get married. Burlington, Vermont. He was in the army in Burlington, Vermont. He was in the army when we got married.
After our wedding, I came back to Portland and kept working until he got out of the army. I lived with Tilly. I still went out every Sunday with Elwin. I didn’t tell your father: he was so-o jealous. Elwin and I went window shopping—we’d look at cameras, clothes, compare prices, etc. Elwin was younger than I was. He worked for Swift, and he was the delivery boy that came to the restaurant. That was how I met him. I don’t remember that I ever kissed Elwin. He was just a chum. Like being out with another girl. Your father would never have understood that.
Dad went to Mass Radio School after he got out of the army. We lived in Boston on Huntington Avenue. He was there 9 months, and the school got him the job with Pan American. That meant moving to Coral Gables, FL. That was fun for me.
And then you came along. There was never a child in the world that was wanted more than you were. I can still see you running down the middle of a very busy street. And me right behind you. And you’d stop, look at me, start laughing, and keep running. Then this nice man stopped his car, and picked you up, and put you in my arms, and said, “Hold onto her.” That’s why I got the harness for you; so you couldn’t get away from me. And we built a fence for the yard so you couldn’t get out.
After we moved back North, we lived in Greenfield, Massachusetts on Conway Street. Your father went back to Florida, but he didn’t stay. It wasn’t what it had been so he didn’t stay.
It was a happy time -- when we were in Florida. Your father didn’t believe that men should carry children around. His office was on the second floor, up a long flight of stairs. And it was very hot, and you were heavy. He walked up ahead of me, and met his boss. His boss looked down the stairs. He didn’t say a word. He took you out of my arms and put you in your father’s arms, and said: “You carry her. You don’t let your wife carry that child the way she is.” I think your father was embarrassed. I never had to ask him again to carry you. I was barely over a 100 pounds, and you were an armful!
LUCILLE: I bought you the most beautiful stroller -- a Tailor Tot. Not everybody had a Tailor Tot. And boy, oh boy, I saved every penny to buy that stroller.
JOYCE: There is a picture I’d like to have. The one in which Nancy and I are in pajamas and yo’íre in a dark skirt and white blouse, and we’re sitting on twin beds in a bedroom. The one in which you look so happy.
LUCILLE: I was. I was. I was very, very happy. I had two beautiful children that I loved very much, and I was a very happy Mommy. [silence] Yep. And Daddy took the picture. I’ll have to find it, won’t I? [She did and it is at the top of this article.
JOYCE: Tell me more about your brothers and sisters.
LUCILLE: Leo. Lorraine. Johnny. and Gerald. Gerald doesn’t read or write. Momma did not send anyone to school if they didn’t want to go. Gerald was very shy and he didn’t want to go. Alphie couldn’t read or write. Leo can. And Helsie learned to read and write after she left home. When she was living at that doctor’s house, there were two daughters who were in school and I think they taught her to read and write.
JOYCE: Were you the only one in the family that loved to go to school?
LUCILLE: I loved to go to school. My mother kept me home from school all the time. She kept me home to help her with the washing, or to help her with the kids, or if she had to go to the store and somebody had to take care of the kids. She kept me home even though I loved school.
JOYCE: That must have been like a punishment for you.
LUCILLE: It was. It was a big punishment for me. My father couldn’t read or write.
JOYCE: What about his father?
LUCILLE: His father. I have absolutely no idea. I know that he was cutting wood, and he cut himself on the knee, and got blood poison and it killed him.
JOYCE: What was his name?
LUCILLE: Pierre. Now his ...I thought he was 28, but I think he was 38 because he had all those kids. He couldn’t possibly have been 28.
JOYCE: And your Irish grandmother, what was her first name?
LUCILLE: Catherine.
JOYCE: So she really was Irish.
LUCILLE: She was Irish through and through.
JOYCE: Where did she come from?
LUCILLE: She was a school teacher. Her family came from Ireland. I think she was born in Van Buren. [Catherine was the granddaughter of Michael Farrell who immigrated from Ireland and built a successful logging business. His sons, Michael (Catherine’s father) and John, were both very successful in Van Buren. Michael had a prosperous general store and John was a major landowner. Both had extensive property holdings according to maps of the time.]
I have a picture of my grandmother and her mother and my grandfather and all of my grandmother’s brothers and sisters and in-laws.
JOYCE: What happened to it?
LUCILLE: I have it. It’s probably 15 X 24 inches.
JOYCE: Do you know everyone who is in the picture?
LUCILLE: Alice was my oldest cousin. She was Aunt Lizzie’s daughter. She would know who is in the picture. And I know there’s Uncle Eddy. I knew him. I knew Aunt Lally and Uncle George. I can’t remember who else but my grandmother’s whole family is in that picture. And my mother took the frame -- it was a beautiful frame -- my mother took that frame and she had Leo make her a different frame for it and it spoils the picture. And I think I’ve got the frame. I have to check upstairs. And if I have, I’m going to have it repaired and put it back in the frame. But while it’s in this wooden thing, it can be copied because it can come out of there with no problem.
JOYCE: When did, let’s see, Catherine was married to whom?
LUCILLE: My grandfather. We called him “Mac.” His name was Magloire. I never heard that name before.
JOYCE: There’s one in this book I’m reading. Yes! Magloire.
LUCILLE: Yes, that’s it. I had a man in Fort Kent that wanted to trace family background. He didn’t get very far with my father. ...He gave up. He got stuck on my grandfather too. He’s the one who told me my grandfather’s name. Mac is a nickname. I had never heard his real name before. That was as far as he could go.
I can’t understand that. My grandfather had lived there a long time, all of his life, and his family was very important. I knew two of his brothers and it seems to me that I saw his mother once. I might be wrong, but I’m sure I met his mother. My grandfather’s mother. I wasn’t very big. (Lucie Emond was born in 1830 and married Mac’s father, Magloire Michaud, in 1848. They had 10 children, of which Mac was the oldest. I have not found her date of death but if she was born in 1830, she would have been 90 in 1920 when Lucille was three years old.)
JOYCE: Record-keeping wasn’t all that great.
LUCILLE: It wasn’t. I went to find my birth certificate at the town office in Soldier’s Pond. The woman showed me the book and my birthday was listed as July 14. I said that’s wrong. “Well, itís right there,” she said. And I said “well I can’t help it; somebody made a big boo-boo here because my birthday is September 20th.”.
LUCILLE: And she said that isn’t possible. So the next day, we decided to go back, and her husband was there. And we got over there, and she had several little kids and they had those books on the floor playing with them. He came in and said to her in French, what does she want? And she told him in French what I wanted. They didn’t know I understood everything they said, and I didn’t tell them. Then he said to me, “Come on; I’ll go through that book with you.”
The woman told him that I was wrong. I had my own birthday wrong. He decided to help me understand that I was wrong. He put that one book on the table, and he found the mistake. He talked to her, and he told me that they would have that corrected. I was right and he was wrong. They had made a mistake, left someone out, and the lines didn’t match. He found the mistake in the original book. She was using the copy with the mistake.
JOYCE: In the house you lived when your father was at the mill -- what modern conveniences?
LUCILLE: None! No running water. No electricity. No pump. We had a very wonderful spring. I guess you call it a well. We had a spring at my grandfather’s house. In Stockholm, we had a well. Water was running all the time. Everyone in Red Row used to get their drinking water over there.
JOYCE: Red Row?
LUCILLE: Red Row was a street where the Mill had built all these double houses -- duplex houses -- and they were all painted red. All the houses were painted red, and they called it Red Row. We didn’t live on Red Row. We lived on the riverside of Red Row. There was the river, and our house, and Mr. Green’s house, in all, there were three houses. And the railroad track that went to the mill ran in front of our houses. Then there was this playground. And there were a couple of stranded houses like they’d started to build a street and they didn’t finish. One of my mother’s cousins lived in one of those houses. We had some very nice neighbors that lived in one of those houses. There were a couple more down the street from us. And then, there was Red Row.
JOYCE: What color was your house?
LUCILLE: I don't think it had ever, ever seen a coat of paint. [she chuckles] But the walls inside were pretty. My mother liked green.
JOYCE: You always had green...
LUCILLE: I like green. And my mother had painted the kitchen all green. And the living room was wall-papered with a green print. During the winter, we had a wood stove.
The house, of course, was not insulated. During the winter months, my parents brought all the beds downstairs, and put them into the living room. There was a door from the living room that went out into the hallway, and there was a door from the living room that went into the kitchen. There was an opening in back of the stove to go through...and so, Leo and Alphie had the bed near the heat. Leo and Alphie were on one wall, and around the corner from it, there was a chimney, and then there was my bed and Helsie’s. And then there was another bed that Emile slept in. Louis was born there. Emile had a crib. And Louis had a cradle. And then there was my mother and father’s bed. It was kind of crowded, but it was clean. We were not cold, and we had plenty to eat.
JOYCE: Did you grow any of your own food?
LUCILLE: Oh yes.
JOYCE: So you had enough room for a garden?
LUCILLE: We had a good-sized garden, where we grew onions, carrots, beets, turnips, . . . we had a cold cellar underneath the house with sand to bury the vegetables in for storage. There was no heat down there but nothing froze in the sand. There was a trap door in the kitchen floor and you went down on a small ladder. We didn’t grow potatoes in Stockholm; we got the potatoes from the potato house.
LUCILLE: We also had a cow and chickens, and we always had a dog...and cats. I grew up with dogs and cats. Always. Dogs are good company.
LUCILLE: I took a lot of courses. I did a lot of studying. I liked school and I wanted to be a schoolteacher. But my mother and father had other plans for me. Maybe God did too. I think I would have loved teaching school.
LUCILLE: There isn’t much more to tell, is there?
JOYCE: I’m sure there is...there’s a whole lifetime.
LUCILLE: Yes, that is a few years isn’t it?
JOYCE: I’d like to hear about your feelings about some of these things: it must have been scary to leave home, to go off to Biddeford.
LUCILLE: No, because I had a lot of nice people that helped me a lot. First the nice man from Biddeford. And his family turned out to be the nicest people. They had a little boy and two little girls. They were such nice children. He also had one of his nieces living at the house with them. She was from Canada, from across the river at Madawaska. And she was older than I was. She was working at a dentist’s office and she was very nice.
This was the end of the interview.
I had planned to do more of these interviews, but they were stopped abruptly. I made the mistake of sending the raw transcript of this interview to her so she could make corrections where she wanted. Instead, she threw it out and would not talk to me about her family anymore.
She was offended by the language and accused me of trying to make her look stupid. She did not understand that we talk differently than we write and a transcript is the raw language of the storyteller.
Throughout her life, she was very insecure because of her lack of schooling and what she saw as a very poor family. She was so insecure that she was quick to see people as making fun of her.
As you can tell from the language of the interview, she was a storyteller. She told very rich and entertaining stories. This is a gift that came from the father she said she hated. And this gift came down to both my sister and me: we both love to tell stories.
Notes from the sources:
1. Catherine took title to the homestead in a deed of Sept 1, 1897, being a strip of land 24 rods wide off from the south side of lot number 47 as per state deed. Catherine Michaud, on September 1, 1897, purchased land from the state of Maine: "Charles E. Oak, on behalf of State of Maine, according to legislation entitles 'resolved that the land agent be empowered and directed to convey settlers' land in Wallagrass Plantation' approved on 3/23/1897 to Catherine Michaud 24 rods wide from south side of Lot 47 in Township 17 according to the survey of 1847 by John S. Webber." This deed was registered 9/16/1899.
2. Magloire and Catherine Michaud mortgaged their homestead farm in Wallagrass, which they had lived on since 1878, and which was part of Lot #47 which was conveyed to Catherine Michaud on May 27, 1878 by Frederick Valencourt, several times, including on 10/24/1888, 4/1/1893,
3. On October 24, 1911, Jean Baptiste and Isabelle agreed to support and maintain Catherine Farrell and Mack Michaud at the home conveyed to them for the rest of their natural lives and provide them with food, drink clothing, nursing and medicine and provide them with a suitable team or modes of conveyance to and from Church and other places where they may reasonably want to go and visit, and provide them with the privileges and benefits of the Roman Catholic Church during health, illness, death and burial, and make them comfortable.
4. Jean Baptiste Gravel purchased for $125 from Willie J. Michaud of Wallagrass: a former schoolhouse lot to be measured as follows: commencing at an iron pin in the center of the highway on the north half of lot No. 46, 20 rods and 2 3/4 feet from the east and west line of land of Catherine Michaud, running westerly at right angles with said highway four rods to a cedar post thence southerly in a line parallel with said highway 4 1/2 rods to a cedar post thence at right angles in an easterly course 4 rods to center of said highway, thence northerly along the center of said highway 4 1/2 rods to place of beginning. Originally conveyed to Willie by assessors of Wallagrass on 9/22/1913. Baptiste and Catherine Isabelle purchased this on June 15, 1918. As far as I can tell, this is the only piece of land that Jean Baptiste and Isabelle owned until their children were grown and had left home.
5. The first Farrell, Michael Farrell, married a woman of Acadian descent. Julie Dube descended from one of the 16 Acadian families squeezed out of their homes by grants to Loyalist families after the American Revolution. In 1785, a 16,000 acre tract of forestland was set aside for the deposed families between what is now Edmundston and Green River, N.B. In all 22 families were involved: 16 of them Acadian (including the family of Augustin Dube, either Julie's grandfather or great-grandfather) and 6 Canadian. The land was meted out as follows: "200 acres to each head of the family with the usual front of 60 rods." The only requisite was that they clear and cultivate the lands.
