Languages: A Brief Personal History

If I hadn’t been a mimic as a child, I probably would not have had the sequence of events in my life that enabled me to save Winston.

1959: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

In the Boy Scouts, back in Philadelphia, my Assistant Scout Master, Harry Huff, was a kind old codger whose sarcasm was legendary.  I wondered if he ever heard himself.  A young Tenderfoot would come to him with a metal cradle full of ashes from the fireplace on a camping trip and ask Mr. Huff what to do with them.  He would stare up to the left for a moment and tell the young man, “Well, cheez, why don’t you put ‘em up under yer bunkbed!”  Not knowing any better, the boy would do just that.

When it came to packing for the troop to go on a camping trip, or packing up to return from the Pocono Mountains, someone would always ask where Mr. Huff was.  His voice would call out from off to the side of the group saying, “That’s me, Harry I’ll-get-the-truck Huff, that’s me, all right.  Don’t you worry about me, I’ll get the truck.  I’ll be there all righty.”  He was a likeable guy, even if his attitude took some getting used to.

At the final campfire of the week, leaders told spooky stories and we all sang campfire songs.  Then one of the boy leaders said, “Hey Wayne, do Mr. Huff!”

There were snickers from a few of the boys who knew what he was talking about, but among the 25 who were present, most had no idea.

Very reluctantly, I walked out into the glow of the fire, and went into a Harry-Huff pose, a little tilted to one side and his frown on my face.  Right away, there was laughter, because they all knew who that was.  

I stepped across from my pose of Mr. Huff to portray an innocent Tenderfoot, eyebrows and chin raised, holding a pretend cradle full of ashes and asked in falsetto, “Mr. Huff, what should I do with these ashes?”  The crowd lightly chuckled.

Jumping back to the other place, “Well, cheez,” my erstwhile Mr. Huff said, gruffly, “why don’t you put ‘em up under yer bunkbed!”  Now wild laughter ensued.

Then I played the Scoutmaster, Charles Hill, who went by Chaz, standing in a slouch, with his left arm straight down, hand turned out so his elbow was against his side just to the left of his little pot belly, his right arm across his chest and behind his left elbow.  Of course, there was always a cigarette between his index and middle left-hand fingers, so I held mine in a V.  It just kind of bobbed there, with me pursing my lips in and out a few times, like Chaz did.  I held the distinctive arm-pose, and exaggerated the lip pursing a bit more, nodding my head, and asked in Chaz’s staccato, “Where’s Harry—and where’s his truck?”

A quick jump back in front of the campfire to face my scoutmaster, again, was Mr. Huff, body tilted sideways and also with his sideways expression.  As gruffly as my own voice could sound, I said, “That’s me, Harry I’ll-get-the-truck Huff, that’s me, all right.  Don’t you worry about me, I’ll get the truck, I’ll be there all righty.”

I was a fairly little 12-year-old kid at the time, but now, two dozen men and boys were completely broken up.  Even Mr. Huff, over on the edge of the crowd, was shaking his tilted head with his wry smile.

That was when I realized it is not just the words, but also the intonation in one’s voice, and sometimes their body language, to complete the whole picture—all-important in sounding like them.  To me, it came kind of naturally.

1965-1968: Penn State

I studied Spanish in junior high and high school and was not thrilled with my teachers, to say the least.  I had no intention of signing up for more Spanish in college and needed something different.  My roommate was enrolled in French, so we sat beside each other in class for a couple of years.  I listened to the accent of our female professor from Paris, who truly did look down her nose at us, and another older French woman, who had lived much farther from the capital and had a different attitude and accent.  I found myself mimicking, not just a French accent in each of their classes, but the French accent of each one of my professors.  To an outsider, it would have seemed like I was making fun of them in exaggerating how they spoke—think Inspector Clouseau and Pepé Le Pew—but to their ears, it was the melody of a student who understood.

1971-1974: FBI Training to Monterey, California

During training in the FBI, we were given the Army Language Aptitude Test, ALAT, loved by some, but feared by most.  I was in the former category.

In the testing booklet, the left page had a few vocabulary words, maybe eight, and a couple rules of grammar.  The right page had eight multiple-choice questions.  Of course, these were made-up words and nonsense syllables, like abc was the verb “to eat,” and abci would be “I eat,” abcu would be “you eat,” abcw, we eat, and so on.  The questions asked us to translate short sentences from English into the ALAT language, then mark our answers, based on what we learned from the left page.  Then you turned the page for more vocabulary, more grammar, and more questions, which increased in difficulty the more you completed.

The benefit for me was the grammar followed Romance language rules, and I already had two of them in my head.  While others struggled, or just plain quit, I nearly finished the booklet.

A couple of years later I received a call from FBI Headquarters that I had the next-highest score in the ALAT and was asked to go to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, for nine months to learn Romanian.  I would have been a fool to turn down such an offer!  I had been assigned to an extremist squad in the New York Office, working cases in a seedy section of the South Bronx.  This would be my great escape!

I was speaking Romanian by the end of the course.  My classmates and I had never even met a Romanian outside of our six instructors, but this would begin my new life in the FBI working foreign counterintelligence—an unforeseen, dream career.

1975-1986: Washington, D.C.

In the Washington Field office, I was assigned to a squad that handled the Soviet Bloc, Warsaw Pact countries, and almost every one of the 39 agents spoke a language of Eastern Europe.  It was like a mini-United Nations on the fourth floor of the Old Post Office, but we got along much better than the true nationalists.  Many of us had gone to language school, but others had gained their knowledge at home with parents from “the old country,” like Joe Stipkala from Czechoslovakia, and Bill Malinowski from Poland.

We covered leads among the half-dozen agents assigned to our own countries, but also went out with agents handling other nations so we became familiar with all of them.  It was the largest squad in all of the FBI, dealing with Romanians, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and Yugoslavs.  It was nothing to call each other Rummies, Hunkies, and Jugs, but don’t do that in those neighborhoods because, “Thems are fightin’ words.”

A vocabulary of 400-to-700 words will communicate anything you want to say, but usually far fewer are needed if you are flexible in your approach to foreign languages.  You don’t have to know a version of the King’s English in each one, just enough words to make your point.  Basic greetings, follow-up responses, and questions like: “Where are you from?” “What is your name and telephone number?” and, “I have a friend who wants to talk to you.”

After twelve years of working foreign counterintelligence I became the Security Officer.  It was a big job, with 700 agents and 1400 support personnel.  One of my duties was to give security briefings on counterintelligence awareness.  Of the more than 120 language specialists in the office working on a sensitive squad, all of them were native speakers of their languages.  Many had lived through World War II, so what could I possibly tell them about security that they didn’t already know?  I had a few interesting anecdotes but, first, I needed to get their attention.

I had learned the basic greetings in many languages, and had to recheck how many others I would be dealing with to make sure I had my ducks in a row.  I made further preparations, and then the day arrived when all the linguists would meet in a cavernous room in the field office.  Understand that many of them did not enjoy the company of the others.  There is a backbiting, émigré factor, where Hungarians and Romanians will never get along.  The Czechs and the Slovaks, and the Poles and Russians, wouldn’t even sit near each other.

I stood in front of the group and everyone knew me, a friendly fellow who had gone to school to learn one of their languages.  At least, the native speakers thought, I had tried.  But for me, it was more than speaking the mere words.  I had the right intonation and actually sounded like a native speaker, no matter how small the vocabulary, which would get their attention and incline them to listen to me—I hoped.

I stood before the entire room, full of so many people, most much older than me, and was a bit intimidated.  I turned to the most familiar first—Romanians.

Bună dimeneaţa (BOO-neh dee-men-YAT-zah), I said, their “Good morning!” so different from all the other Eastern European Slavic languages, and smiled.

I turned to the Russians with “Dzień dobry,” and their large contingent all smiled and nodded.  Then to the Poles with the same Slavic “Dzień dobry,” and to the Czechs with “Dobrý den.”  I inquired as to how they were, “Jac se mate?” to more smiles.

            For the Hungarians, “Jó reggelt kivanok?” and to the Germans, “Guten Morgen,” then the Bulgarians, “Dobro utro,” and “Dobro jutro” for the Yugoslavs, in Serbo-Croatian, with a follow-up of “Kako ste?” (How are you?), and “Dobroho ranku,” for the Ukrainians, finishing up Eastern Europe.

           Then I spoke to the Middle Easterners, first the Farsi speakers from Iran, “Salom chitouri,” and the many Arab speakers, “Alhamd lilah,” with a short bow, touching my hand from my stomach, to my heart, and then my forehead.  Then it was over to the Far East, to the Chinese contingent, “Nǐ hǎo ma,” and here the intonation is important.  Honoring the proper dialect brought even more smiles.  After their responses I re-engaged with “Hǎo, bù hǎo,” to more smiles and laughter, and then “Xièxiè” (shěh-shěh), their “Thank you,” to light applause.

I came back to the easy ones, off to the left, French and Spanish, because some nations in francophone Africa, and, of course, Cuba, were areas of FBI investigations.

With those in the room thinking this finished it up, there was still a little old lady I did not want to leave out.  Just for that meeting, I had made an effort to learn her country’s greeting, the last one.  It sounds something like Borden’s non-dairy creamer, Cremora, but is pronounced with a deep-throated, guttural sound, “Goeie more,” the morning opener in Afrikaans.

With that, everyone in the room had received the proper greeting, covering about a dozen-and-a-half languages, and they rewarded my efforts with a round of applause.  Even the most basic greeting can start you on your way.

For the next hour, all of our highly qualified and experienced-in-life linguists sat and listened to my security anecdotes.  It was, I believe, the only time that group ever sat in one place for so long, patiently entertained, and without mini-wars breaking out.

Over time, I had learned a person could speak a language without accent if it is learned before the age of thirteen.  The voice box, like a bicep, is simply a muscle.  Use it one way, and it will take a certain shape.  Speak one language, and by age thirteen, that language controls the shape of the voice box that makes the sound of the language spoken.

But take the children in Switzerland, who typically speak at least two languages, and often three, French, Italian, and German, all without accent in those tongues.  However, if they learn English after thirteen, there will be an accent from whatever is their primary language—the one they use to count and speak with their mothers.

I once overheard a conversation with a Romanian and another man who spoke his language, but with an accent.  This was something wholly new to me.  In a second language, he had the accent of a third.  The man was from France.  I almost felt stupid, but it was something I had never experienced, although it surely applies the world over.  You are simply not aware of it unless you speak more than one language.

1992: Istanbul, Turkey

My travels took me to Turkey where I had the opportunity to meet with an old friend I hadn’t seen in years.  I had almost no forewarning of the trip, so I could not make preparations with the Turkish language.  But the cosmopolitan nature of Istanbul, its crossroads-of-the-world status, made me hopeful that my current language skills would arm me well enough to get by.

While taking in the major tourist attractions, we talked all along the way.  With many stops, we eventually found ourselves walking up a narrow street which wound down to a section of the city where tourists would never venture.  Far from the beaten path, there were no shops or landmarks as reference points.  We were utterly lost, now at dusk, and needed directions to get back to our hotel.

We came to an intersection, deserted of vehicles, with a kiosk.  There was an orderly queue of twenty-five Turks waiting for a bus.  Few would speak any but their own language.

From the center of the street I faced them all and firmly asked, “Does anyone speak English?”

No one answered.

“Vorbiţi Româneşte?” I tried, and waited.  Then…

“¿Habla español?”  Nothing.

“Po Russki?”

“Sprechen sie Deutsch?” Still nothing.

“Jac se mate?” I asked in Czech.

“Jo napod kivanok?” I tried Hungarian.

“Parlez vous, Français?” I went on.

Near the end of the line, a little man with a goatee in a beige suit, wearing a bowler hat, raised his cane.  Emphatically, he called, “Ouí, ouí, je parle!”  Yes, yes, he spoke French!

He walked toward us and we met him halfway.  Half out of breath, he removed his hat and bowed.  In Turkish-accented French he said, “I knew what you were doing, so I waited until you came to a language I knew.”

We happily accepted his directions in French, and I was inwardly thanking my old professors back at Penn State.

2004: Antigua, West Indies

Just when I thought learning new languages was a thing of my past, and I feared I would begin to forget some of the vocabulary words I did know, something quite unexpected occurred.

I was now retired from the FBI and was working as a private investigator on a massive construction fraud case in Antigua for a billionaire client.  On this Caribbean island, unknown individuals were stealing building material from a dozen jobsites on weekends, severely delaying the projects, to say nothing of the logistical nightmare of getting resupplies from the U.S.

About 95% of the islanders are black.  All of the construction people were too, except for the most senior ones.  It was Caucasians, most from Europe, who lived in the upscale houses on the sandy beaches.  Almost all of the tourists are in the same demographic, so there was very little intermingling between the locals, who I would be interviewing, and anyone who was white.

Certain individuals were chosen from a long list of employees.  Note that Antigua, pronounced, an-TEE-gah, is a former British territory, and there are no Spanish speakers there, so it is not pronounced an-TEE-gwa.  But the English, which the native people do speak, is not what you might think.

I had a small office with a round table in a bank building where my first interviewee sat across from me.  He had a fearful look on his face.  Unbeknownst to me, he had never been in that building, and had never even spoken with a white man, so this was new to him.

Unsolicited, the first words out of his mouth were, “Me no be teifing, Mon!”

What the heck was that?

I tilted my face toward him and raised my eyebrows, an international signal that meant, “Repeat that, please?” but I got nothing new as he repeated the very same words.

Trying to use the old flexibility-in-languages concept, and needing to communicate with him, I tried, “You no be teifing, Mon!”  I matched his sing-songy intonation as best I could.

He smiled broadly and nodded.  “Yeah, Mon, me no be teifing.”

It was apparent we did not speak the same language, but I had communicated with him.

What he was saying was, “Me no be thieving,” meaning “I am not stealing.”  In other words, “I am not the thief!”  “Mon” seemed to be added to everything for emphasis.

This was Milton, and he was a decent little fellow, originally from Guyana.  When he saw how hard I was trying to communicate with him, he became the teacher and, I, his student.  He was honest and would play a crucial role in making this a successful investigation.

The next man who came into the office had a similarly fearful look on his face, so I started with, “Hey, you be teifing, Mon?”

No, no, Mon,” he replied, “Me no be teifing, no be teifing, Mon!”

I was beginning to get the hang of it.  After all these years, I was learning another new language, at least something like it.

If you have heard the sing-songy intonation a Jamaican accent, it is not really an accent, for they do not speak a separate language.  It is their version of English, pidgin, (some prefer to call it patois), spoken as closely to “normal” English as they can speak, but it is also not poorly-spoken English.  Pidgin is their language, plain and simple.  Because most people easily understand the sounds of Jamaican, there is really no reason to change the way they speak in order to communicate better.  But the deeply-pidgin of several other Caribbean islands can be a real stopping-block for back-and-forth conversation. 

 After becoming somewhat skilled at the language, I found myself bringing a couple of large pizzas to some of the frightfully unstable board houses—the kind hurricanes blow away—of the young men helping me with the investigation.  Their families were equally surprised and happy that this very white man sat on their floor, bearing the gift of pizzas, and was not only speaking pidgin, but was learning it from them.

In seven months on the island I found 28 houses, and an eight-unit apartment building, all built with stolen material, which would have never happened if I hadn’t mastered the Antiguan version of pidgin English.

In all that time, my very straight and blond hair had grown.  One day, as I sat on Milton’s front steps, with his young daughters behind me, they took it upon themselves to braid my locks, not exactly into dreadlocks, but close enough.  The language had been the catalyst to the culture, and a better understanding of each other, all around.

In the last month of the investigation, another retired-FBI agent, Ken, was brought in to help with some of the onus of interviews and write-ups.  He was originally from Iowa.

On his first day out, we were in one of the scores of small villages looking for the house of a particular person.  There are no street signs in most of Antigua, and no address numbers on any of the houses, which makes big-city visitors go crazy.  It meant we had to depend on the help of locals to get anywhere.

In Antigua, as well as the majority of the English-speaking Caribbean, starting off with the morning greeting is absolutely essential to getting to your point.

A stout, middle-aged black lady was walking down the sidewalk, decked out in her orange Sunday-church dress.  I told Ken, first, to tell her, “Good morning,” wait for a response, and then ask for directions.

When I pulled over near her, he rolled down his window and, in a typical American way said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but I was wondering if you could help us find a house.”

She did not pay him any attention and kept walking.

I pulled a little farther up to where she was, repeating my original instructions to my Iowan partner.

Again, he started with, “Excuse me, maybe you didn’t hear me, but I’m trying to find a house…” as she walked past, unaffected by his efforts.

I drove farther along the street, parked, got out, and walked around the car to the sidewalk.  I smiled and burst out with a fine, “Good morning!”

She looked over at me and gave me a big smile, and returned, “Good morning!”

I told her I was looking to speak with a man in the village, name of Boggle, who be in no trouble, and I be wonderin’ if she knew where he be leevin’.

With that, she pointed to the next street, and bid me to go right.  It was the green house.

When I got back in the car, Ken looked flummoxed.  Now he, too, was learning how to communicate in Antigua—the hard way.

2011: Florence, Italy

Even in retirement, there was still a need for my language skills—well, sometimes just an extreme matter of convenience.

My girlfriend and I were traveling in Italy and, while taking photos at the Medici gardens in Florence, we met a couple from Sarasota, Florida, a dentist and his wife.  Dinner together at a restaurant overlooking the Arno River would be wonderful.  Howie was a great guy, but English was the only language he would ever know.

As we stood waiting outside the restaurant, a young woman was hurrying down the street and approached us.  She had a photo on her iPhone that she held up to our faces.  She kept pointing at it, tap, tap, tapping on the screen, but said nothing.  

It was a picture of the Duomo, famous for its towering dome and green and white marble façade.  Apparently, she was late in meeting someone and was lost.

I asked her where she was from, but she didn’t understand.  She just kept tapping the photo on her phone.  

I asked what language she spoke, but she didn’t understand that, either.

I looked at Howie, frowned, and inhaled deeply.  Okay, I thought, I had done this before.

I said to her, slowly, and in succession:

Vorbiţi Româneşte?”

“¿Habla español?”

“Po Russki?”

“Sprechen sie Deutsch?”

“Jac se mate?”

“Jo napod kivanok?” 

“Parlez vous, Français?”

I would begin to run out of languages soon, but kept going with what I knew.

At this point, in great frustration, the girl said, “Türkiye!” (tur-KEY-ay).

Well, I thought, why didn’t you say so?

After my perilous moments in Istanbul with my Romanian friend, I had bought some tapes and taken a Berlitz course in San Diego for Turkish.  Because it had not been a Cold War language, I hadn’t known any of it, but would finally get to use it. 

I said to her, “Allahaısmarladık” (al-LAH-smar-lah-dik), the greeting in her language.

Her eyes went wide.

“Günaydın,” I continued.  It meant, “Good Morning,” but she got the idea.

She finally smiled, then tapped back at the photo of the Duomo.

I had learned enough in my course to be able to haggle in the Grand Bazaar, and it served me well.  Using the very basics of the Turkish language—left, right, distances—I was able to give her directions to her destination.  She thanked me and quickly ran off.

When I turned to Howie, pleased I had been able to help the girl, he was staring at me.

“How the hell did you do that?” he stammered.

2012: The Bahamas

A Miami attorney asked me to help with a case where everything the Antiguans had taught me would become crucial.  A wealthy couple was midway through a divorce, and the father had been given permission to take their four-year-old son to the Bahamas.  A judge required the father to “keep the boy safe,” in order for the wife to agree to the trip.

When the boy returned, happy and healthy, he told his mother that he had drowned and come back to life, which would be upsetting to any mother.  The father said there was nothing to it.  On some sort of water ride, the boy had gotten hit by a big splash, but was never in danger.

The wife’s attorney, wanting all the facts for his client, sent me on a mission to the Bahamas, and Paradise Island, to find out what had happened.  The boy had recalled the name, Denville, as his savior and hero, who seemed to have been a lifeguard.

I flew to the island and found that the management was none too happy with my mission, the senior HR person telling me, “You cannot speak with Denville.”  Well, why the heck not, I wondered, but she was adamant and curt about it.

I found the employee entrance and saw dozens of Bahamians coming and going and listened to some of their conversations.  While they would smile broadly at the tourists, and could speak a few words about the nice weather and point out directions in the enormous park, when amongst themselves, they would speak only pidgin, the Bahamian version.  

It had been ten years since my Antigua case, so I tried to open the drawer in my brain that contained pidgin, and slip back into its sing-songy cadence.  I chose a young man, who seemed outgoing and friendly among his peers, entering the property.

I approached him and began, “Good morning!”

He stopped where he was and returned my greeting.  Now I had to seize the moment.

“Hey, Mon, me be talking to you.  Me be looking fer Denville.  No problems wit him, Mon, just to talk, you see?  He be workin’ today, Mon?”

Seeming unfazed by this oh-so-Gringo personage making such an overture, he told me, “No, Mon, he be off to-day, be home wit hees best girl, you know?”

After a few more exchanged lines, he agreed to call Denville on his own phone and barter an introduction.  We met in a park, and I interviewed him sitting on a bench, a decent fellow.

Showing him a photo of the young boy, he gave a smile and said, “Me remember dis lee-til boy.  Heem fall in de wah-ter, grandma let heem go, Mon.  Both go under de wah-ter, bad, Mon, but Denville fix-um.  Dey be fine now, Mon!”

So, the boy had been placed in the care of his grandmother in the water rapids on a large park innertube, and both got dunked.  Denville had rushed in to pull him out, and the grandma, too.  Whether that meant the father had not taken the proper care of the child on vacation would be up to the mother and judge to decide.  Well it wasn’t nothing, and the boy might have drowned, if it hadn’t been for Denville, the heroic lifeguard.  

At least, now they had the full story, compliments of a little bit of rusty Antiguan pidgin.  The client was happy.  As for the HR lady, I now realized she had not meant that I wasn’t allowed to speak with Denville, rather that I could not communicate with her native-island employee.  I couldn’t blame her, looking as I did, but if she only knew…. 

2014-2016: Plantation, Florida

I had moved from Miami to Plantation, Florida, just thirty miles north of the hubbub of the metropolis.  On several days, I saw a man walking across and down the street from where I lived.  He was medium height and quite slender, of moderate-dark skin tone, and around sixty-five-years old.  He had a gray beard, which matched his gray, basketball-size, knitted hat that surely contained a prodigious amount of dreadlocks—a Rastafarian.  My guess was Jamaican, and I decided to make an overture.

The next time I saw him, I walked diagonally across the street to intercept him and began with a full-bodied, “Good morning!  He returned one to me and also a smile.

I figured he had to speak American English to have survived on the economy here, especially in this neighborhood, but a little pidgin wouldn’t hurt what I was doing, either.

“Heeey, Mon, me see you here on de street.  You be livin’ here, Mon?”

“Oh, no, me be workin’ fer de old woman in dis house.  Just to help her out, you see, Mon?  Me know her many years now.  She be nice lady, Mon.”

I introduced myself, “Me be Wayne, and dis be my house, long time, no?”  

I asked his name.

“Me be Ween-ston, Mon!” he said with a big smile, and we shook hands.  That was actually the Jamaican pronunciation of Winston, a typical Caribbean island name.  For his part, he would call me Mr. Wayne, which he pronounced, Meester Wayne.

From time to time, we would meet on the street and talk of families, our grown children, and problems of gardening.  His English was pretty good, but his fallback of Jamaican pidgin was clearly more comfortable for him.

One day I went to my driveway to find that my car was completely useless with a dead battery.  The Triple-A man who answered my call was Jamaican and spoke English just fine, a necessity in dealing with all of his American customers.

We were under the hood assessing my car problem when I saw Winston coming up the other side of the street.  I called out a sing-songy, “Heeey, Weenston!  How you be, Mon?” and trotted over to him to shake his hand.  We exchanged just a few words, and I trotted back to my driveway. 

The tow-truck guy was befuddled and bemused, an expression I was familiar with—last seen on Howie’s face back in Italy.

“What was that?” he asked, incredulously.

“Oh, that’s my friend Winston, why?”

I downplayed it, and how I knew what I did, but I am sure it left him with a story to tell his wife over dinner.

Winston and I kept up our casual chats over the years, but I seemed to be the only person in the neighborhood who actually knew “that Jamaican man.”

One evening I saw red-and-blue flashing lights out on the street and two police cruisers pulled up to the front of the house where Winston was the caretaker.  It was late at night, and I initially thought it could have been a medical emergency with the older lady who employed him.

I let it go and watched from a distance, but an ambulance did not appear in the next few minutes.  Something didn’t feel right.  My reflexes kicked in and I walked over to see what was going on.  Any retired-FBI agent would have done the same.  As former badge-carriers, we all speak “cop.”

In the horseshoe driveway, one uniformed officer was standing beside Winston, who looked quite down and a little disheveled.  It looked like he was about to be arrested.

Over in the doorway stood three, 20-something white men in T-shirts and shorts.  One was speaking intensely with a second police officer.  It became clear that these white guys were making a complaint against Winston, who was about to be hauled away.

I approached the officer near Winston, and he raised a hand for me to stay back.  I brought out my retired-FBI credentials and told him I lived across the street.

Former-law enforcement officers will usually be given credibility when the facts of a situation are still being clarified.  

I asked the officer what had happened.

The neighbors behind the house had called the police about loud music playing late on a Saturday night.  When they arrived, the 20-somethings said they were just partying and having a good time, and turned down the music.  The police smelled marijuana on the boys and started asking questions.  The leader quickly explained that he lived in the house, which was his grandmother’s.  He pointed his finger at Winston, accusing him of selling them pot.  He used Winston’s Jamaican heritage as a scapegoat, and he was suddenly seen as a drug dealer.  That was all the local police needed to make a bust, and they were about to do just that.

I knew this was wrong and had every intention of clearing it up. 

I explained to the officer that it was Winston who lived there, and the three other men were the interlopers.  He took care of the old woman, and it was the grandson and his friends who were the ones partying loudly.  Winston was not a drug dealer, rather, the other three had brought their own marijuana and were now pinning a criminal offense on Winston.

The police officer starred at me, completely dumbstruck.  Here was a retired-FBI agent, a very white guy, vouching for a Jamaican over the three young white men.  But the officer’s own cop-sense saw the merit of my words, the sincerity with which I had said them to him, and then he excused himself.

Winston stood beside me, looking terrified, as the officer went to pull his colleague away from the others by the door to confer with him.  As they spoke, he glanced over at me and pointed in my direction, and then over to my house, down and across the street.  The other officer, who seemed to be his sergeant, put his hands on his hips and shook his head.

Both officers came over to me, the sergeant wanting to verify what I had said to his colleague, which I did, including how long I had known Winston, how long he had been a live-in caretaker for the old woman, and about his family.

The sergeant appeared something close to apologetic, as he had been about to make a terrible mistake.  Angst was on his face and he was, again, shaking his head.

It would have been an easy collar to take a Jamaican drug dealer away to the lockup for the rest of the weekend.  It would then have been sorted out on Monday morning, if Winston could afford an attorney, or the public defender could get one there for him.  Meanwhile, the old lady’s grandson and his two friends—the true culprits—would be long gone.

The sergeant extended his hand to shake, which I gladly did, then so did the other officer.  The senior man was embarrassed that the three young men had hoodwinked him with their story.  His problem was that the grandson actually did have a right to be in the house, even if he did not live there, and they had caused the noise that brought the original complaint.  With the music down, the police would depart, that much resolved for the neighbors, but what of Winston?

The sergeant didn’t have an answer for that, but if all was kept quiet, they could just settle back into the house.  He would give a well-aimed warning to the three visitors about their actions, making sure they knew he was not happy with them.  There is a law-enforcement tone-of-voice that comes with such a warning.  It makes the one on the receiving end realize the guy with the badge means business.

Winston was very much a pawn in the fictitious fact pattern that had swirled around him.  To say he was relieved would be a severe understatement.  He would not spend a night in jail or have an unwarranted and undeserved criminal record, on top of losing his job.  In a their-word-against-his before a judge, where the young men might have asserted what they saw as their “white privilege,” Winston could never have succeeded.  But now he didn’t have to.

* * *

Language has always been a tool from which to accomplish other things, and not an end in itself.  Little did I know there would be a chain of events, from mimicking Mr. Huff, to learning Spanish and French, and then Romanian, and bits of several Cold War languages, plus a smattering of Turkish, to pidgin in Antigua and the Bahamas, and finally, now, to saving my Jamaican friend.

A person who speaks three or more languages is a polyglot.  Those who speak two languages are bilingual.  But if you speak only one language—that is called an A-mer-i-can!

Fortunately, that doesn’t describe all of us.  To learn another’s language is the best way to understand someone different than yourself.  Make that gesture and, not only can it prevent wrongdoing, it can enable the truth to be told.

Now when I see my friend and call out, “Heeey, Weenston, Mon!” his smile beaming back at me is worth all that came before.

Plantation, FL

9/23/17