French Patois, or Creole, was the preferred language on the island; the lingua franca where English was the official language. I felt I should try to learn it, but I just had not gotten around to it when I started construction of the hotel.
The workers chatted away in their Patois, laughing and occasionally making what I assumed were humorous references to me, but I really didn’t care. I began learning some words and commands that were better at conveying a quick instruction such as CLUE-ey when I wanted someone to drive a nail, or LEVE-ey when I wanted to say “raise that up.” If a worker wanted me to understand something they would say it in English so the job went along well.
I was gathering my own aggregate for concrete because there were no ready-mix companies on the island. Each day I would get the crew working and then take one or two men with me in the pick up truck and drive down to the Caribbean coast for material. Concrete is made up of several sizes of aggregate mixed with cement. If all you mix with the cement is sand you have mortar that is relatively weak but if you make up the same bag of cement with sand, small stone, and larger stones in about equal amounts you have concrete of some strength. Local women, working along the shore laboriously scooped up a mix of small to medium sized stones that were rounded by years of the sea’s pounding. They mound it into a pile of roughly a cubic yard and offer it for sale to builders. This mix is called ‘chippen’ and when mixed with sand at about two to one made a good easily worked concrete. I would make my deal with the woman and the men would shovel it into the truck.
For sand I went to a government borrow pit. The sand was in fact pure pumice and had to be dug out of the side of a small hill. I would leave the men there at the site to dig piles of sand so that when I returned from the construction site after dropping off the chippen I could expect a pile or two of sand.
This did not work terribly well. The men were, in the local term, skylarking in my absence and upon my return I would have to wait for them to dig what should already have been dug.
I asked my friend Allandale Winston what he would suggest. Could he teach me to curse in patois? I was gently told that I was having trouble enough with my pronunciation of patois and that curse words would likely come out more as a joke than a slur.
“I will teach you one phrase that will help,” he said. He always had that marvelous half smile and I knew that he was thinking mischievously. Try, “Le CHAT Pa La, WATT Cab-bay-Bahl.”
“What does it mean?” I asked suspiciously.
“When the cat’s away the rats will play,” he explained. “Literally it means the cat is not there – rat has a ball.”
I practiced it until I was tired of trying but I did not totally please Allandale with my pronunciation.
“Mutter it under your breath a little, they will be less likely to notice your missed pronunciations,” he advised.
The next day I arrived back down to the borrow pit where I had left two workers to dig pumice and only one pile was partially done.
“Le CHAT Pa La, WATT Cab-bay-Bahl,” I mumbled and grumbled half under my breath.
The two men looked up in surprise and immediately turned to the hill and began digging pumice at full speed. Neither one of them said anything in patois, and when we reached back to the job they immediately seemed to be spreading the news to the other workers.
I simply tried to look wise and went on about the supervision of the construction, but I noticed that the good humored bandying in patois had almost stopped and the work proceeded at a faster pace.