A WHITE HORSE ON A RED CAR

Mary Elizabeth Aubé

“A majestic gleaming high-polished red car,” my uncle says, “with a white horse on it and a steering wheel protruding through the neck of the horse.”

Uncle Roland is recalling his first childhood memory as he tells me about growing up in Lewiston, Maine, in the 1920s. I can’t quite picture this white horse and steering wheel, can’t get the details to fit together in my mind.

“This was a car?” I ask. Could it have been a dream? I wonder.

“That’s right, a car with a full-size horse in the place where the driver sits. And the driver sat on top of the horse, all dressed up in a bright red uniform, almost like what soldiers wear, with shiny gold braid, and all his pomps, sitting on this big white horse, driving his car.” He smiles at the memory and gives a mellow chuckle. Of the nine siblings, four boys and five girls, Uncle Roland resembles my grandfather the most. The long face and flat cheeks, the smoker’s voice.

“Where did you see this?” I’m still processing.

“Right in front of our house.” 

“On a billboard?”

“No. No. We lived above the grocery store Poulin et Lessard on Ash Street, and this car would come in for advertising purposes I suppose, and it would stop right there, in front. I'd say I saw it on several occasions. I can't say how many times, exactly. But it wasn't only once.”

It turns out that my young uncle was looking at a Moxie horse mobile. This fantastical vehicle advertised Moxie, an early soft drink which started out as a medicinal tonic to which carbonated water was added. Horse mobiles were made with Buicks, Fords and even a Rolls Royce; some were red, like the one my uncle remembers, and there were black ones too. The cars were forgotten, but we still use the word for a person with grit—they’ve got “moxie.”

Uncle Roland’s memory brings together those most American of things, entrepreneurship and advertising, cars, and a soft drink and spunk. And yet this very American memory was formed in the mind of a French-speaking boy who grew up in a city in Maine with so many French speakers that one of its neighborhoods was called Little Canada—and still is. Four- and five-story wooden apartment blocks line a handful of narrow twisting streets between the Androscoggin River and the canal that powered the textile mills, which drove the city’s economy and drew many immigrants, among them my family.

My grandparents arrived in Lewiston from the towns of St. Justine and St. Cyprien, which lie southeast of Quebec City not far from the border with Maine—lumbering country with a smattering of farms. They came to Lewiston on their honeymoon in 1921 to visit my grandmother’s sister Angélina, who was already established there with her French-Canadian husband. “In Canada, we lived between the bread and the meat,” my grandmother used to say, which told me how difficult it was to make a living in the Quebec countryside. Lewiston offered my grandparents a vibrant French-speaking community and, crucially, contacts who could help them get work. So it was easy to feel at home, and they stayed.

“How old do you think you were when you saw this horse on the car?” I ask my uncle.

“Probably three or four. I don't think I could remember that if I was any younger. And I couldn't have been more than five when we left that apartment. It's just a matter of deduction.” Roland was born in 1923, so this memory dates to 1926 or 1927.

“There was another grocery store just a couple doors down, Caron et Langelier, where we used to trade. Langelier, he had a nice big Buick car. It wasn’t black, I think it was a dark green, almost black, with a wooden box on the back as a trunk. And on the back bumper were two big cylinders. Now, why I would remember the cars, I don’t know. But anyway, those two cars always struck me.”

All the more so a car with a horse on it.

My father, Lucien, was a year older than Roland. They and their siblings were born and raised in Lewiston in French. Fascinated by their bilingualism, I interviewed them, trying to understand what it was like to be a French speaker in the United States.

I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and my mother didn’t speak French, so my home life was in English. When we visited Lewiston every two summers or so my father’s family would gather and laugh in French, tell stories in French, tease each other in French. I was sure I was missing something when they translated for my mother, my sister and two brothers, and me because the version in English always seemed shorter than in French, and at the end the laughter was never as eruptive. I ached to learn French.

As I watched my relatives go back and forth fluidly between the two languages, no one’s body language changed, nor did their voices or laughter. But for me, the switch to French turned the words from transparent to opaque, as if thick snow were falling in front of my eyes. I imagined that being bilingual must be a sort of physical experience, like walking around on a clear, sunny day in both languages.

I ask Uncle Roland about learning English. It started in the fourth grade at St. Mary’s parish school, he says, where classes were taught a half-day in French and a half-day in English.

What had he known about English before then?

“I knew that people spoke English, but I had never been in contact to any great extent with people who spoke it. All the people that we were in contact with spoke French. In Lewiston, you were a Frenchman or you were an Irishman. The French people didn’t like the Irish. That’s more or less the way things were.”

Outside of work, where often the bosses spoke only English, French speakers had little need to be in contact with Lewiston’s English speakers, Irish or otherwise. By the 1920s, when my grandparents arrived, there were many small businesses owned by French Canadians, four parishes, which had elementary schools, devotional clubs, and sometimes marching bands and drum and bugle corps, cultural clubs such as the Cercle Canadien and the Institut Jacques Cartier, snowshoeing clubs, and the daily newspaper Le Messager, all operating in French.

“The problem was that we didn't want to speak English. We moved to Little Canada when I started school. The parents didn't speak English so the kids all spoke French at home. The nuns had a terrible time trying to get us to speak English in the English classes. That was the only time we were required to speak English, and we really resented it. We did it reluctantly. Any opportunity you had to get away from speaking it, you did. So even by the time we went to high school, we still couldn't speak English.”

My grandmother had a teaching certificate for the elementary level and had taught in Quebec country schools, but preferred life in the city where she could change jobs if she found one more to her liking, go out to the movies, or hop on a tram to go visiting. None of these were possibilities in the Quebec countryside. My grandfather had learned blacksmithing from his father, but he hoped to go in another direction in Lewiston and opened the Aubé Café, serving hot lunches to the mill workers. Imagine his disappointment when the Great Depression put an end to his plan of being his own boss, and he had to answer to a higher-up in the mill.

For my Uncle Roland, work was in French at first, beginning when he was ten, and he started peddling newspapers and then vegetables and fruits door to door, going up and down the staircases in the apartment blocks in and around Little Canada. After a winter in a lumber camp along with my grandfather during the Depression, another job that was in French, he landed at Lewiston’s DeWitt Hotel which had been built for the textile mills’ owners and investors when they visited from Massachusetts. One of the finest hotels in New England, its flat-roofed Italianate style matched the textile mills along the tree-lined canal. But the serene exterior of the factories belied their cacophonous interiors with the looms clattering as the shuttles shot back and forth. Discovering the manufactured calm of the hotel, my uncle announced to my grandfather that he would never work in the mills.

“At the hotel, of course, most of the people spoke English. I came to realize that the language didn't make much difference: People were people. And no matter what, there were good and bad people, both among the French-speaking as well as the English-speaking. I started accepting people more or less for what they were, and not for their nationality. That was a big turning point in my life.”

“My best buddy at the hotel, the person who helped me the most, was a black man. In Lewiston, there were practically no black people. As far as I knew, he and his wife were the only two. He was the cook, and he’s the man who helped me the most in showing me how to make my job easier.”

That day when young Uncle Roland looked out the window at the gleaming Moxie horse mobile, he was growing up in French and at the same time growing up American. “We were Franco-American. Oh, yes, we weren't Americans, we were Franco-Americans. You had to bring that French part into it, you know? When asked if you were American, you wouldn't say, ‘Yes,’ or ‘No.’ You were Franco-American.”

Some people say they feel different when they speak another language, but my relatives seemed the same to me in French and English. The two languages were parts of the whole of who they were. For me, they were Americans who spoke French. When our family trips to Lewiston coincided with July 4th, we celebrated like so many other Mainers with a picnic at the ocean, though if you walked by our table, you were bound to hear French.

Confusion and disbelief—that’s what I felt when I first heard about the horse on the car. But now I smile thinking of little Uncle Roland beholding this quintessentially American vehicle parked right outside his window. He imagines himself dressed in the gold-braided coat, sitting at the wheel of the white horse on the red car, and driving off. Wanting to share this magnificent vision, he calls out with all the air his little-boy lungs will push, “Viens voir, maman! Viens voir le cheval blanc sur le char rouge.” My joy is in knowing he would have said this in French.