A Pied-Noir named Marin

A little old woman was walking towards me on the bus.  Her hands were full with bags from the market and two bouquets of flowers.  With so many things encumbering her, I thought she might have a difficult time climbing up into the seat next to me.  I reached my hands out, and she immediately filled them with her flowers.  She put her bags into the seat and then slowly meandered up to the front to purchase her ticket.  I watched her, remembering my sweet great-grandmother, and how independent she was into her final years.

The woman came back and took her seat next to me.  She immediately began talking, telling me all about why she was taking the bus: just so she could make sure to get a seat.  She'd come all the way down to the Vieux Port to go to the market to buy flowers, but with all the construction and tourists and what-not, there was only one flower stand.  Dommage.  (Pity.)

She looked at me after all this and sweetly said, "You're not from Marseille, are you?"

"No, I'm American."

"Oh, American!  I love America.  I went there several times.  I have good friends who live in Miami.  But do you know?  I've been to Wyoming, too, and Calgary.  Oh, I love America."  She talked for a few minutes more about America, all the while enthralling my heart with soft voice, the beautiful cadence of her French, her all-white outfit with a gorgeous colored scarf around her neck tucked into her coat.

"And you, madame?  You're not from Marseille either..." The Marseillais have a notorious accent, one that I can't always understand, and she...she did not have this accent.  I understood her perfectly.  She shook her head no, no, she was not from Marseille.

"I have lived here for more than 50 years...but no, I am not from Marseille."  When my eyes waited for her town of origin, my mind was thinking some small town tucked away in some quiet region of France that I had never heard of.  "Before Marseille, I lived in Africa."

"In Algeria?" I asked quietly.  She nodded.

A pied-noir.  I'd heard of them, but never met one.  A French citizen born in Algeria when Algeria was part of France.  After the war for independence, they had to flee (1962).  She told me that she was 39 years old when she had to leave.

"Was it hard to acclimate to France?"  Usually I am the one asked this question, not the one asking it.  But to grow up your whole life in one country, and be forced to leave there, and move to a different land that is still your country...not accepted by the locals here, thrown out by the locals back "home"... seems much more difficult than to willingly move to a foreign country.

She talked the rest of the bus ride about Algeria then and how different it was from what Algeria must be like now.  She's never returned.  And after 50 years here in Marseille, she has acclimated to France.  But you could hear it in her voice, see it in her eyes...Algeria was still in her heart.

As I stood to get off the bus, I told her what a pleasure it had been for me to sit with her today.  She asked my name, and then I asked hers.  "Marin.  It's like the mistral...just...softer."  And so she was.  She blew in for a moment, thrilled my heart, and then just swirled away again.