Portland author Ron Currie grew up in a working-class Franco-American family in Waterville and has fond memories of his grandmother and her friends chatting away in rapid-fire patois amid plumes of cigarette smoke. It was a world from which the men were largely absent — they were either working at the mill, drinking at the bar, or in jail. Around that kitchen table, the blunt-speaking French women “handled” the neighborhood business while drinking coffee and ripping butts. They weren’t running a criminal enterprise, at least to Currie’s knowledge, but what if they were?
Thus came the inspiration for Babs Dionne — a brash, sharp-witted businesswoman, doting mémère, and ruthless drug kingpin of Waterville’s “Little Canada.” Currie’s crime thriller, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, published in March by Penguin Random House, is the story of how and why this crime boss controls the flow of drugs into Waterville’s Franco neighborhood, aided by a tight group of sexagenarian lieutenants — Babs’ girlfriends since they were teenagers.
The character embodies “that general archetypal idea of what an older Franco woman is right down the street, maybe a couple houses away from ‘gangster,’” Currie recently told The Bollard. “They weren’t actually criminals, as far as we know, but they wielded a kind of influence over their families, and by extension the neighborhood, that the men never did because the men were never there. And as such, the women ran the show. My experience growing up in that culture was that it was very matriarchal.”
Babs’ two barely functioning adult daughters help operate the family business. Lori is a beleaguered, opiate-addicted combat veteran struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. Her younger sister, Sis, is an absent mother with a crank habit and a drunken, abusive husband. Both women are haunted by the deaths of their older brother, killed during the Iraq War, and their father, Rheal, who’d died a few months earlier.
In the novel, set in 2016, the walls begin closing in when a mysterious enforcer from a Canadian drug gang appears in town to confront Babs, whose prescription-pill trade is cutting into his bosses’ heroin profits. When Sis turns up dead inside a burned-up car in a rural junkyard, it’s war.
I found The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne impossible to put down. It’s a thrilling ride full of unforgettable underworld characters with authentic Central Maine flair. A TV-version of the novel is already being developed by one of the big streaming companies.
But the book is more than just a crime thriller. Currie delves deep into Franco-American history to reveal the links between New England’s mill town working poor and the “King’s Daughters” — 800 or so young, French peasant women brought across the Atlantic between 1663 and 1673 to act as human incubators to populate New France. “Think of generations as a chain, one link leading to and binding the next, and all of them … forever connected and inseparable,” Currie writes. The ancestors “breathe through you. They bleed and cry and dance, pull your rotten teeth with pliers sanitized with bootleg rye.”
For Babs, that ancestor is a Parisian orphan named Evangeline LeNormand. Evangeline somehow managed to survive the voyage to Quebec in a squalid coffin ship containing the disease-infested corpses of King’s Daughters who didn’t live to continue their lineage. The Franco-American diaspora in New France subsequently spread to mill towns throughout New England as impoverished farmers swelled the ranks of urban factory workers during the Industrial Revolution.
These workers traded countless limbs lost in factory machinery for the promise of financial stability and a middle-class American lifestyle. But while the Anglo businessmen got fabulously wealthy, the working-class Catholic families downwind from the mill in Waterville’s Little Canada got the chemical-laden end of this devil’s bargain — blinding headaches, respiratory illnesses, pediatric cancers.
“O calm, dishonorable, vile submission” is the line by Shakespeare in Babs’ head as she drives past the since hollowed-out mills. Little Canada, writes Currie, is a place “where people anglicized their names and played by the rules of a rigged game and accepted broad-daylight theft as simply the cost of doing business.” They endured religious persecution and occasional violence inflicted by Know Nothing gangs and the Ku Klux Klan. They were often the butt of jokes: “frogs,” “dumb Frenchmen,” the “coolies of the Eastern states” and the “n———s of New England.”
Fiercely proud of her Franco heritage and bitterly resentful of rich Anglo Protestants and the crooked cops who reign over her neighborhood, Babs clings to an ethnic cultural identity that’s disappearing following decades of deindustrialization. Her dream is to establish a French-speaking school that will preserve Franco-American heritage for generations to come.
However, Currie doesn’t romanticize the lost ethnic neighborhood of his youth. Long before the factories closed, generations of young people fought to escape Little Canada’s legacy of corporate exploitation, industrial pollution and generational poverty. Appearing throughout the story, like the ghost of a long-dead family member, is the husk of the Hollingsworth & Whitney pulp-and-paper mill. As Lori passes “the only reason Little Canada existed in the first place,” Currie lyrically rhapsodizes about the factory.
“Siren for thousands of illiterate, starving Franco farmers,” he writes. “Papermaker to the world. Provider of livelihoods and carcinogens. Taker of digits. Destroyer of river life. Emblem of American ambition, prosperity, and vigor. Also, now and long since, defunct.”
For some reason, Franco-Americans have never celebrated their ethnic identity with the type of revelry typical of other working-class immigrant groups, like the Irish or Italians. Perhaps the reason, Currie speculated, is that there’s some truth to the stereotype of French Canadians — that “they just work hard and never complained,” which, he added, is a “recipe for disappearing.” The ethnic enclaves of New England mill towns like Waterville, where French was spoken more commonly than English, are mostly gone.
Currie said that during research for the novel, he also couldn’t find any evidence of Franco-American organized crime in this part of the country. “That fact makes sense when you think about the hard-working, never-complain character, ethnically,” he said. “But also, extrapolate it further down the line, temporally speaking, [and] you realize maybe we’d have a parade if we had a mob. Can you think of any other immigrant group in the history of this country that didn’t have a mob in some form or another?”
Currie said a major impetus for the novel was his sense that his childhood, steeped in the Franco-American diasporic culture, was a mirage, because its distinctive features have largely been absorbed into the white monoculture of the modern United States. “I just turned fifty,” he said, “and the further I get from that [childhood] experience, the less real it seems, but simultaneously it feels very much like a phantom limb. People who have phantom limbs experience pain and itching where the limb used to be, and for me, writing this book was like scratching the itch on the phantom limb. I had to do something, because it was driving me crazy.”
In some ways, Babs resembles Maine’s most infamous real-life Franco-American, former Republican Governor Paul LePage. Both come from hardscrabble backgrounds and both have a chip on their shoulder the size of Lewiston. But unlike the self-loathing, bullying LePage, who despised the people he grew up with and did everything he could to punish them for what he perceived as their indolence, Babs strives to protect and preserve her neighborhood, albeit in her own twisted way. At least with prescription pills, she reasons, her neighbors are able to feed their addictions without overdosing on imported street opiates.
“Babs is nothing if not a pragmatist,” said Currie, “even though she is trying to achieve an impossible ideal. She’s titling at windmills.” After all, her own daughter has fallen victim to the product they’re selling.
Currie is working on two more novels of what will become the Babs Dionne Trilogy. The next book will explore how Babs came to reject a conventional working-class living for a life of crime. It’s set during an epic labor struggle based on the real events of the International Paper Strike of 1987-88.
“It’s an origin story for Babs in how she became the person we meet in the first book,” said Currie. “When the strike goes sideways, she decides that playing by the rules doesn’t work anymore … if it ever did.”
The third book is set in the present, as Lori picks up where her mother left off in post-industrial, opiate-ravaged Little Canada, forging an alliance with first-generation Mainers from Francophone African countries.
“At the end of the day, a story isn’t worth a shit if it isn’t about a very specific people in a very specific circumstance,” Currie said.
For more about Ron Currie’s novels and other writing, as well as upcoming local events, visit roncurrieauthor.com.
