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WEDNESDAY’S CHILD
By Rhea Côté Robbins
Paperback
89 pp. Brewer:
Rheta Press. $12.50.
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Memory is the original unreliable narrator. We remember, over and over,
events that we would like to forget and often can’t remember details that
are important, such as a person’s name. Two people witnessing the same scene
will remember it in a different way, and at those times memory can seem like
a will-o’-the-wisp. Yet memories are what we have, and being human, we try
to make sense of them.
Wednesday’s Child, by Rhea Côté Robbins, is a collection of memories set in
motion by the author’s breast cancer and thoughts of mortality. It is an
account of growing up in Central Maine and of coming to terms with her
Franco-American Heritage. Ms. Côté Robbins, understanding both the
limitations and the importance of memory, writes, “All memories darken like
old photographs.”
Ms. Côté Robbins’s dark memories, aided by imagination, stretch back to the
past. “Whoever left France in our ancestry in the 1600s left with the idea
that they were going to get themselves a farm…On to Quebec and its stubborn,
rock ridden earthen crust. Still moving, coming south to New England,
French-speakers loose in a place of discontent, to work in the mills, to
keep from starving.”
This discontent, this loss of land, runs like a lament through the book. Ms.
Côté Robbins’s parents meticulously and lovingly tend their yard in
Waterville, the small city where they live, but her father yearns for a
farm, a place with a barn and wide, open fields. Ironically, when they do
move from Waterville and its Franco-American community to a farm in Detroit,
Maine, Ms. Côté Robbins realizes that she is different from the other
children in this new town. Her speech and her body language set her apart,
and she desperately tries to change who she is, adopting what she refers to
as a “Boston accent.”
However, “Losing oneself is hard to do…Remaking a girl into another girl is
tough work.” One might even say it is impossible work, a sort of betrayal,
as much a loss as “losing a piece of one’s body.”
Along with the loss of land and identity, class is another dark theme that
runs through the book. Like Ms. Côté Robbins's grandfather, many
Franco-Americans came to Waterville from Quebec to work in the mills, which
of course were by the river. The people who worked in the mills lived
nearby, and the river became the line from which the social order started.
The closer a person lived to the river, the lower the status. Ms. Côté
Robbins describes Waterville as a “small town five layer cake,” and at the
top is Mayflower Hill Drive and Colby College, an Ivy League school, the
shining star.
Ms. Côté Robbins writes that Franco-Americans work at Colby College as
“cooks, janitors, secretaries and maids.” However, while they may move away
from the river and live in neighborhoods by the college, they seldom go to
school there.
In a small place like Waterville, there is a limit to upward mobility.
Between Colby College and the Franco-Americans there is too much distance,
and there is too little distance. On Saturday nights, men from Colby come to
Water Street, a street by the river, looking for Franco-American women for
one-night stands. But the students would never consider marrying these
women, would never think of them as equals. And because of this, shame
becomes a divide that is seemingly impossible to breach.
Yet it can be done. Despite the obstacles, Ms. Côté Robbins slowly reclaims
her heritage. After the death of her parents, she sneaks into the family
house and takes quilts that her mother and her grandmother made. She travels
to Quebec, Louisiana, and France and finds “there are Côtés everywhere.”
But it is through writing that Ms. Côté Robbins finally comes to terms with
her heritage. “To write is to see. To record. To believe in the belonging to
the telling. To express. To explain.” And, to give voice to the voiceless,
which brings about a kind of redemption.
Wednesday’s Child moves freely through time, circling through past, present
and future, pieced together like Ms. Côté Robbins’s beloved quilts. It is a
sad story, moving and beautifully written. Ms. Côté Robbins does not
romanticize the poverty and the hard times of her childhood, yet there is an
abiding affection in even her bleakest memories.
Wednesday’s Child is the immigrant’s story, the story of Maine, the story of
our country. It is about alienation and reconciliation. It is an old story.
It is a new story. And because we forget, it needs to be told over and over.
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2008 Wolf Moon Desk Calendar
We are pleased to announce that we have put together another snappy desk calendar
featuring work by Maine photographer Clif Graves.
5 1/2" x 5"
2008 Wolf Moon Calendar just
$10.00 each
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Some of the fine
stores
where you can find
Wolf Moon JOURNAL
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Wolf Moon
Photo Note Cards
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