INTRODUCTION 
From "Acadians in the Philadelphia Harbor" 
by Robert Dafford
at http://www.acadian-cajun.com/expa.htm

Though Pennsylvania was founded by Quakers seeking religious tolerance, they shunned the French Catholics that showed up on their shores.  Like Maryland, they were bordered on the west by French territory and were afraid of French invasion.  From November 18 to 20, 1755, 454 Acadians arrived in Pennsylvania aboard the Hannah [from Grand Pré], the Three Friends [from Piziquid], and the Swan [from Grand Pré]... 
 Due to the fear of the French, the government placed them under armed guard until the legislature could decide what to do about the Acadians.  Disease spread rapidly through the ships.  Hearing of the problem, the Governor ordered the Acadians be unloaded on Nov.  24 onto Province Island until the diseases ran their course.  After reimbursing a French Huguenot for supplying the Acadians during their stay, the legislature adjourned till spring. 
 By February, the expense of taking care of the Acadians caused the legislature to act.  They passed a law to spread the Acadians throughout Bucks, Chester, Lancaster, and Philadelphia.  On March 5, 1756, four Huguenots from Philadelphia were assigned to disperse the Acadians throughout the colony.  The Acadians resisted being separated, and the towns refused to accept them anyway.  So the government continued to provide welfare (a daily ration of 1 pound of bread and 1/2 pound of meat) for the Acadians. 
 But the welfare ran out in September 1756 and the Acadians asked for continued support or to be allowed to leave.  In this request, it is noted that the Acadians "shall never freely consent to settle in this province." But the appeal didn't work, the welfare stopped, and the Acadians were left to their poverty. 
 So they stayed in the Philadelphia area, living off of welfare.  They tried to earn money by making cloth and wooden shoes, but there was no market for their products.  It is said that some resorted to theft when no one would hire them.  Some got a home when Anthony Benezet and others gave them small houses to live in.  These homes were located on the north side of Pine St., between 5th & 6th Streets. 
 Sickness and disease took its toll.  In a letter to the British king in 1760, it was stated that 250 of them had died ...over half of the original population.  This may have been an exaggeration, since fewer than 500 people made it to Pennsylvania.  Still, disease killed many of them.   When the legislature saw what was happening, it approved further assistance. By 1757, laws had been passed so that children had to be apprenticed to craftsmen and welfare was provided for the sick, old, and handicapped.  Needless to say, the Acadians objected to their children being bound out and forced to learn English.  When the legislature refused to hear their complaint, the Acadians publicly denounced the British crown.  The Acadians tried their best to prevent losing their children, and the government was fairly lax about enforcing the law. 
 When the war ended in 1763, the Acadians petitioned to be sent to France; but nothing came of this.  The following year, some of them sailed to Saint Dominque where they found their numbers decimated by hard labor, disease, and an unwelcome tropical climate.  By now, word of the Acadian resettlement in Louisiana had made its way to Pennsylvania.  The Acadians in Maryland and Pennsylvania started making plans to sail to Louisiana.  When faced with further financial support of the poor Acadians or sending them away, the colonial governments finally came up with funds to assist them in their journey. 
 Between 1766 and 1767, from 150-200 Pennsylvania Acadians left for Louisiana out of Chesapeake Bay.  Instead of chartering a single vessel, they left in small groups as space became available. 
 
 

BECOMING FRENCH

Linda Griffith writes 

 In October of 1986, I was thirty-five, living a comfortable life in a suburb of Philadelphia and on the fast track of a professional career as the Director of Social Work in a 360-bed nursing home owned by the wealthy County of Bucks in Pennsylvania.  Six months later, I was jobless and wandering along the wooded banks of local streams, talking to Indian artifacts and crying a lot.  Essentially, I achieved the transition by reporting to state authorities the county's failure to protect its nursing home patients from 106 cases of physical abuse and neglect.  Over the next four years, a federal lawsuit I filed against the county ultimately rectified the legal injustices of my firing and black-listing, but I was on my own to find a way out of the emotional damage whistle blowers experience.  Among the retaliatory tricks was stalking, threatening by middle-of-the-night phone calls, wiretapping and repeated break-ins.  In short, I was metaphorically raped by my government as a pay-back for exposing the literal raping and beating of elderly women in that government's care. 
 It was during this "exile" from ever having the professional future I envisioned that I began a genealogical inquiry on the hunch that there might be some clue in the distant past that would explain why I seem to live my life in such adamant opposition to almost everything deemed generally acceptable by dominant (read: male white heterosexual Bible-wielding) culture and have never really succeeded at succeeding.  (This was not my first firing.  In fact, it was the fourth job from which I had been axed because of an "inability to take direction." Each time, my job performance failed to meet the same ludicrous standard: that I park my soul with my car in the lot and kiss any anatomical part of the boss that needs kissing at the expense of any disenfranchised population subject to screwing.) 
 As a child, I once heard my Aunt Rae railing at the kitchen table through her vapors of beer about some great-grandfather "freeing the damned niggers." Some years later, a cousin I never met sent out letters to relatives about his discovery of a genuine saint in the family tree.  My father vaguely hinted at a heritage of misfits when, in World War II, he declared himself a Quaker pacifist and, instead of killing, was assigned to cook for those who killed and was sent home a basket case, indelibly traumatized by the horror he witnessed, would not discuss, and relived years hence whenever it thundered and drove him to safety under the bed.  Surely, I thought, there is something going on here in the genetic code that inspires from century to century activism, pacifism, martyrdom, and, the other big clue: sufficient suffering to have caused my grandmother's brother to quietly hang himself. 
 On my first visit to the hallowed halls of the Pennsylvania Historical Society Library in Philadelphia, I found the answer in a red leather volume under archival lock and key: the Benezet bloodline.  Beginning with the earliest known little troublemaker (a nine year old Catholic French shepherd named Anthony Benezet, later sainted for miraculous healings, to whom God spoke during a solar eclipse in 1177 about going to the pope and getting him to build a bridge over the river Rhone at Avignon) through the 1700's and Philadelphia's Quaker saint Anthony Benezet (who, indeed, was a vital force in operating the Underground Railroad and key author of the ethical arguments that led to abolition; founded the first school for blacks; founded the first public school for women; refused to eat animals; fed rats from his corn crib so they wouldn't have to steal; and passionately condemned the genocide of Native Americans-- see: http://www.brycchancarey.com/abolition/benezet.htm), the family genes seem to incline my family toward disruption of the status quo. 
 How amazing, I thought, I'm French and without knowledge of this heritage at the time, in 1972 religiously traced every footstep of Gertrude Stein through Paris; in high school chose the utterly impractical French language to learn while those with a little foresight took Spanish; and in college ditched the initial goal of becoming a respectable psychologist in favor of obtaining a degree in the floozy theatre (as an affirmation of romantic and artistic temperament by French birthright, no doubt), producing as my thesis Gertrude Stein's drama about the French wartime Resistance entitled, "Yes if for a Very Young Man". 
 How obvious was the historical aura of the agitator in which I unconsciously lived, I wonder, that my request for a visa to study theatre in Poland under the Fulbright I had been awarded in 1970 mysteriously "got lost" and, years later, was explained as a matter of Poland not wanting "troublemakers," for I had hardly made much trouble at all in those days.  It later, when I entered the workplace and, later still, started wielding the ethical mandate of a master's degree in social work that the shit and the fans started finding each other from light years apart and in the dark.  It wasn't until the late 1970's that I suspected that the FBI had a file on me for creating a feminist cultural center in Omaha. 
 And there, in the red book was the knot tying me to an ancestry of sociopolitical kamikazes whom, by the blessing of my great grandmother, Caroline Benezet, watch over me: a Franco-American babe now stumbling into Maine as if somehow coming home to a place in which no known family member has ever lived, but where a self-possessed power observed among women taking visceral charge up here in an untamable environment calls me back into a Northern woods that is barely a stone's throw from the homeland of the tortured Acadians my great-great-great-great-great uncle, Anthony Benezet, tried to shelter on Pine Street in Philadelphia, the city of my family, over 225 years ago. 
 When I bought 75 acres in Blaine, the wilderness I hoped to rejoin was as much one within my heart as within the continent.  Now aware of (but not consciously motivated by) my French heritage, I was touched by Rhea Cote Robbins' generous appreciation of a photography exhibit on my website and, in the wonderfully mysterious ways of Spirit, was then drawn to read Wednesday's Child and now beam with the sudden realization that it is not because I am lazy that I have been leaning on everything. 
 It could be with French sexiness that I'm donning my boots, hiking into bog and standing in the bear's footsteps under a gray and winter-bitter autumn, breathing deeply knowing wrong from right; stealing from sharing; controlled from free; dying from dancing.  This (relative) hibernation far from the urban meat grinder is passionately empowering, not the retreat my misunderstanding of Benezet fervor initially suggested.  (The French have always cut close to the bone in staring boldly at final resorts.) 
 Just as the Quaker fear of being overtaken by French to the West and French in the harbor gave rise to the hypocritical Quaker desire keep those dying in the harbor dying in the harbor, I see my obsession with effecting social change as being the isolating culprit having moored me, in the end, to an island.  Débarquez!  Uniformed in Spirit, be it veil of the Goddess, Fatima, Holy Ghost or Tao, we better start walking to shore.  One helluva Final Circle Dance is next on the programme. 
 As my Uncle Anthony began his tedious process of finding each stranded family a home, we should be searching the trees on the beach for holes and, with the night vision of owls, nest ourselves in preparation for the storm.  There will be no rowboats leaving for the Bayou, ladies, for the bed was made and, willingly or not, we slept in it and bore the fruits of it and excel now in the making of useless cloth and shoes.  From within this house we now face our predicament, being strangers to the street, the neighborhood, the city, the government, but not strangers to the planet.  In fact, women fuckin' own it. 
 At some point in his forties, married but without children, Quaker Anthony took to his bed for a prolonged period of time from exhaustion derived from a nonspecific ailment that, I dare postulate, was depression.  Like the Catholic saint before him who died as a child while the Pont d'Avignon was being constructed in his honor, Quaker Saint Anthony never saw the slave chains cut as a result of his abolitionist labor, nor did he see much success within the broader scheme of things as educational opportunities for women and blacks failed to capture the imagination of Puritans.  His plea for vegetarianism, to this day, remains a joke to those in hideous complicity with the subjugation and torture of animals by "domestication."  It was, however, as a direct result of his modest but successful effort to house the Acadians that one of his time-distant relatives dares speak of the imminent days of holy terror to her leaning sisters, the women from whom the existentialists were born; the women from whom a green statue with a torch was cast and plunked down in the harbor of a greedy and murderous country-- mon Dieu, it is time to pray. 
 While on my wild goose chase of a walking tour in Paris 1972, longing to be Gertrude Stein again, sitting by the fire with my beloved Alice, exiled from America from whence my wealth and understanding still, ironically, flowed...I was assaulted on the Rue de Fleurus by a man the size of tool shed steeped in the stench of his Gauloises.  The horror of the moment was mitigated only by the fact that in my marginal grasp of the language, I yelled the first exclamation that came to mind: "Garcon! Garcon!"  So totally did this befuddle the monster that he relinquished his hold and scurried way, looking back only once to make sure that I wasn't following him. 
 In the manner that we dance and gesture, seeming to be mindlessly sewing, giggling and laying fingertips on cheeks, we speak first exclamations as spaces, passages, vast openings into a universe that has NOT forsaken the planet in our care.  However, we need to be prepared for the ridicule and appearance of fecklessness as we bring about the desired results.  Like those of my dear uncle, our significant spiritual deeds cannot be judged by the immediate consequences.  Like the body of that nutty shepherd boy who embarrassed the pope into building the bridge by the child, himself, picking up and placing into position the first stone slab weighing more than a ton--our accomplishments cannot be limited by the half-truths of science. 
 Buried on the Pont d'Avignon, little Anthony Benezet was washed down river in a casket when, in the 1600's, the flooding Rhone took out sections of the bridge.  It was only then, more than 400 years after the faithful knew the miracle when they saw it, that the skeptics were handed proof of one: a perfectly intact child's body without hint of decomposition lying in a rotting box. 
  I like being related to a remarkable Catholic and an extraordinary Quaker but am, however, a woman of the Benezets, so my territory is marked by deft spit and utterance disenfranchised from all of the organized religions, organized governments and organized organizations SAVE...the aesthetic order of seasons turning and the evaporation of rain.  I think back to my days in Paris at both the height of my love for all things womanly Gertrude Stein expressed, as well as that moment of confrontation on the street with a man all things male, stinking of himself, and I smile, having learned that year to put it all together in the epithet of epithets: "sacre futur du bordel de Dieu." I mutter it still, shaking hands with the oppressor d'jour, living in a house in a foreign city, braced for The Revolution and longing to go home. 
 

Linda Griffith was born in Philadelphia complaining about everything; is a 1972 graduate of Lake Erie College, Painesville, Ohio, where she earned her B.F.A.  degree in the direction of theatre; a 1979 graduate of University of Nebraska at Omaha School of Social Work where she earned her Master's degree in Clinical Social Work and got into a horrible argument with a sexist pig professor from India; founder of the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia; Orielle Women's Center in Omaha which collapsed under weight of FBI infiltration; an award-winning feminist photographer exhibited internationally whose website can be found at http://www.lindagriffith.com; and, with her partner Kay Johnson, proprietor of the newly opened Magic Pond Guest House in Blaine, Maine where women, in particular, are invited to commune with their souls, each other and the wilderness http://www.magicpondmaine.com .