Culture Shock

[Excerpts from Chapters 28 and 29, "Culture Shock" and "Tabasco in Buckhead."]

In many ways, the Gatins family’s permanent return to Atlanta proved to be a culture shock for both the family and for their new American friends and neighbors. To begin with, none of the children spoke English in 1952. The oldest three had forgotten it, the youngest three had never spoken it. For Sylvia in particular, who had only visited Atlanta previously, this was a strange new world. In Paris, there was the underground Métro for transportation; in Atlanta, electric streetcars going up and down Peachtree Street. In America, the children had the funny papers, Dick Tracy and Snuffy Smith, and later, the very irreverent Mad magazine. In Paris, there was Tintin’s Hebdomadaire, which Grandmother Eglé religiously shipped to her grandchildren.

The Gatins kids looked and dressed differently from American children. In elementary school, the boys all wore shorts with long knee socks (flannel shorts in winter, khaki cotton in summer) and high-top leather shoes from France. American kids wore T-shirts and jeans and rubberized, high-top Keds. The food was strikingly different, too. In France, we ate macaroni with butter and Parmesan. In America, spaghetti was lathered with Ketchup. Sylvia made sauce Béarnaise to put on steaks; in America, there was Heinz 57 Sauce. Instead of hot roasted chestnuts bought from Paris street vendors in newspaper cornets, we stopped at the drive-by watermelon-and-fruit stand at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Peachtree Battle Avenue. And there was hot popcorn at the movies in Atlanta!

Still, assimilation did occur, somewhat faster for me and Charles and Sophie, who’d been born in the U.S., than for the youngest three. By dint of daily repetition, I recall learning to say the Pledge of Allegiance and the Hail Mary every day at Christ the King School by rote memory and sound—not having the faintest idea what all the words meant. Charles and I stopped dreaming in French, and with the help of little crystal radios attached to a metal night-light, learned idiomatic English while tuned in to Atlanta Crackers baseball games, Georgia Tech football games and the Grand Ole Opry, whose AM broadcasts from Nashville were powerful enough to reach Atlanta. Cousin Minnie Pearl, with her trademark greeting, “How-deeeeeee,” was our favorite. Rather than Citroën sedans and 2CV economy cars, we learned to recognize the sweeping lines of Plymouths and Buicks, Chevrolets, Fords, the ill-fated Edsels and every version of the modified hot rods that teenagers used to cruise up and down Peachtree Street.

It cannot be overestimated how memory of the Lost Cause suffused Georgia and Atlanta in the 1950s. Gov. Herman Talmadge has just been succeeded by an equally adamant segregationist, Marvin Griffin. Confederate flags flew everywhere after the state flag was changed in 1956 to include the stars and bars, as a protest to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling, Brown v. Board of Education. The little Studebaker sedans still driving around Atlanta traded in their “I Like Ike” bumper stickers for vanity license plates depicting a scruffy, mustachioed soldier in grey. The tagline: “Fergit, Hell!” Sometimes, sinister-looking redneck ruffians rode around town with Ku Klux Klan posters affixed to the sides of their big sedans, sidearms on their dashboards, after another cross burning on the top of Stone Mountain.

Excerpt: Grandmother lands in Atlanta

[My grandmother Eglé de Villelume-Sombreuil Gatins arrived in Atlanta in 1914, an event that marked her for life. That part of the story is now to be found on Like The Dew: A Journal of Southern Culture & Politics. Click below to view the entire, 1,500-word excerpt.]


http://likethedew.com/2009/08/12/we-were-dancing-on-a-volcano-an-excerpt/

Excerpt: Grandmother's private war of resistance

Eglé de Villelume-Sombreuil Gatins fought a private war right under the noses of the German forces occupying Paris [during World War II]. She sneaked escaped prisoners to the then-still free south of France, hid papers for Free French forces and aided the budding Resistance as best as she could. Unlike many of her countrymen and the cowardly Vichy government—and not a few collaborators of her own class of society—she had little use for the Nazis and the French puppets who were running what was left of the French government, or for the Vichy policy of working hand-in-glove with the Nazis’ anti-Semitic extermination programs. She particularly resented the military parade the Germans staged down the Champs d’Elysées every day of the occupation in Paris, so jarring to one who had seen the magnificent victory parades down the same long boulevard after the Allied victory over the Krauts in World War I.

In the early years of the occupation, in 1940-41, goodly numbers of escaped French prisoners of war were still fleeing through Paris, trying to get to the south of France, which was then still classified as a “free zone.” “So, we looked for passage and with money we could pass people through there,” Eglé recalled. “Thank God, we got some money, and the most important thing was a man in Montmartre who could make phony papers. He could make the best phony papers—you could not tell the difference from the real ones. That’s how I could get so many people out.”

The escaped prisoners, Eglé explained, were directed to a safe passage near Macon, a small town in Burgundy, about 35 miles north of Lyon, where a Red Cross committee provided them money “after they’d crossed the line,” (that is, the boundary between occupied France and the “free zone” in the south of the country). Eglé also recalled being able to assist several British escapees using the same escape route. “When the free zone was taken over by the Germans, it became much more difficult, but we managed to do so anyway. We had to watch out, though, because not everyone thought the same way as us, that is to say, they weren’t opposed to the Germans,” she said.

Grandmother Eglé’s work with the Red Cross in Paris, as well as her helping prisoners escape, was recognized after the war as a signal achievement that garnered her the highest award possible for French civilians, the Legion d’Honneur.