February 21, 2016, fell on a Sunday. Although it looked like an ordinary day, it was actually a big deal in a specific part of the Caribbean. St. Lucia to be precise. In New York people wore colors of blue, yellow, black and white. What may have looked like fashion gone wrong, signified the St. Lucian flag. It was independence day and although most people couldn’t go to the island to participate in the festivities, some made sure to spend their day in church.

The worship leader turns his attention to me and says, “I want a youth to tell me something about St. Lucia.”

I look down on the ground and pretend not to hear him, but it doesn’t work. “Kerlin,” he says “Can you stand up and tell us something?”

I stand up, face the crowd of smiling faces and say, “Something interesting I learned in my English class last semester was that patois created by French slave masters to communicate with slaves.”

Before I could even continue my fun fact about St. Lucia, I was abruptly interrupted by a woman who didn’t want to believe that. Within twenty seconds there was a division on that subject.

I don’t believe my professor lied to me and the other twenty students in the classroom. What he stated makes sense because after all if you speak patois then you understand French to a certain degree. However, I definitely wouldn’t take a French class because that would be to confusing. What’s even crazier is that although creole, patois, and French are similar, they’re completely different. Fè ou katjilè (makes you wonder).

To be honest with you, I used to be hont (embarrassed) of speaking patois when I was jenn (younger). Growing up, black people who spoke another language were associated with all “bad” whereas when another group of people spoke their language it was considered classy/normal. This is one of the reasons why I pursued Italian perché ha cose belle ad essa collegati (because it has nice things related to it). It wasn’t until I had a little brother that I realized that patois was important for him to learn. Today in St. Lucia patois is dying because parents are forgetting to teach it to their children. They tend to think that it is a language that can just be picked up which has proven to be wrong.

Being able to speak another language in America is quickly becoming popular especially in schools and the military. However, the nation as a whole would rather stick to English. I guess it’s an “American thing”.

Last year a stranger came up to me while I was waiting for the light to say walk and asked me about my background. When I told him I was St. Lucian he was pleasantly surprised and asked me if I knew patois. Apparently, he was taking a Creole class in college. In just a four-minute conversation we were able to bond, which got me thinking if more Americans were more open to learning another language they would be able to bond with immigrants in this country.