50 Stories for 50 Years | #14
There are class ranks, and then there are rooms that don’t care about them.
French class was one of those rooms.
At the Naval Academy, class year is everything. It shapes how you walk, where you eat, and how you are addressed. I was a plebe.That word meant something, something loud and specific and constant. It meant you were at the bottom, and the bottom was a place with rules, and the rules had enforcers, and the enforcers were everywhere.
Except in one classroom, for one hour at a time, a few days each week.
I had validated English, but it was the two years of validated French that had earned me a seat in an upperclassman language course. I was a plebe. The men around me were not. Under normal circumstances, that asymmetry would have organized every aspect of the room.
Commandant Bodin didn’t traffic in normal circumstances.
He was a French Naval officer on an instructor exchange, and he carried the full weight of the Gallic tradition like a second uniform. Five foot five, ramrod straight, hands clasped behind his back, chin lifted at an angle that suggested the world was something he was generously tolerating. That nose, that magnificent, unmistakably French nose, arrived in a room milliseconds before he did.
The rule was simple. The rule was not negotiated.
Français parlé uniquement. Only French spoken. From the moment you crossed the threshold. No exceptions, no appeals, no explanations tendered in any tongue that had ever been associated with the British Isles.
Class year, in this room, was irrelevant.
What mattered was whether you could form a sentence. Whether you reached for the vocabulary or reached for English when it got hard.
I noticed, early on, that upperclassmen didn’t know what to do with me outside this room and didn’t seem to think about it much inside it. In here, we were students. Equally subject to Commandant Bodin’s raised eyebrow. Equally scrambling for the right conjugation. There was a leveling in that: a small one, but real.
That’s what language can do when the grammar holds authority, and the grammar doesn’t know your rank.
We had our moments.
The Christmas party we organized, to which we made a point of inviting Madame Bodin, because we understood, instinctively, that her presence was the one guarantee that the party would not become a surprise oral examination. We were right. She was charmed. He was disarmed. For one afternoon in December, we were sitting around a table, eating a slice of Bûche de Noël, which felt like a small miracle.
And then there was the afternoon that a midshipman wandered in, stood at the front of the room, and asked, in plain unguarded English, whether this was English 301.
The room understood immediately what was coming. We said non, non with the urgency of people watching a man walk toward a cliff. He did not read the room. He asked again, ” Do you know where English 301 is?
Commandant Bodin had been very still. Then, in a tone of philosophical inquiry rather than anger, he addressed the class.
Qui est ce barbare qui parle anglais?
Who is this barbarian who speaks English?
The midshipman left.
But the memory I return to most is smaller than all of that.
It begins with a nametag.
I had been given a nickname by a couple of upperclasswomen who had taken me under their wing early on. My stature had earned me the title: Munchkin. It was affectionate, and I received it that way. I had a contraband nametag made, Munchkin 81, and wore it in place of the regulation one. It looked, from any reasonable distance, completely official. Up close, it was a quiet act of rebellion, which is the only kind available when you are a plebe.
One day in class, Commandant Bodin paused at my desk. He looked down. He considered the nametag, his expression suggesting a man encountering something that requires careful classification.
Qu’est-ce que c’est, une Munchkin?
What is a Munchkin?
I had adequate French. I did not have adequate French for this. I did my best. Short people, I explained, in an American film. The Wizard of Oz. Small individuals who lived in a small place and had a particular role in the story.
He seemed, if not fully satisfied, at least provisionally willing to table the matter.
Several weeks passed.
Then one day, he found me in class with the energy of a man who had completed a research project. From the torrent of French that followed, I assembled this much: he had seen The Wiz, the 1978 film, the one that set the Wizard of Oz story in a contemporary Black American context, with Diana Ross, Michael Jackson,Lena Horne and all the magnificent strangeness of that particular adaptation.
I tried to explain. The original. The retelling. The themes. The tradition of adaptation. My French was working hard.
He listened. He considered. He reached his conclusion with the gravity of a man who had weighed all available evidence.
Je ne comprends pas Le Wiz.
I don’t understand The Wiz.
Neither do I, Commandant Bodin. Neither do I.
There is something I’ve thought about since, something I didn’t have words for at the time.
That classroom gave me a provisional citizenship that the rest of the yard did not. Not because the rules were suspended, Commandant Bodin had more rules than anyone, but because the rules were different ones. Ones I had some preparation for. Ones where a plebe who had studied could hold her own with an upperclassman who hadn’t.
Language was the great leveler, and I happened to speak some of it.
Later in my time at USNA, the Academy sent me on an exchange to the University of Grenoble. I walked around a French city, bought cheese and fresh bread at a market, ordered a good café au lait at a counter, and, for a few weeks, was simply a person in France, unranked and uncategorized, wearing clothes that fit.
I thought about Commandant Bodin when I got there. The way he had held the room. The way he had refused, categorically, to let English be a refuge. He had demanded something from us. He had demanded that we enter a language and live in it, however imperfectly.
He demanded that of a plebe and an upperclassman with exactly the same presence.
I appreciated the refuge then. I find it worth recording now.
Fifty years since women arrived at the Naval Academy. Fifty stories. This is one.