“He who laughs on Friday will cry on Sunday.” There is an English proverb, “Sing at your breakfast and you’ll cry at your dinner.”—[Louisiana.]
96. Ciramon[37] pas donne calabasse. (Le giraumon ne donne pas la calebasse.)
“The pumpkin doesn’t yield the calabash.”—[Hayti.]
[37] I give the spelling Ciramon as I find it in Mr. Bigelow’s contributions to Harper’s Magazine, 1875. (See [Bibliography].) Nevertheless I suspect the spelling is wrong. In Louisiana Creole we say Giromon. The French word is Giraumon.
97. * Cochon conné sir qui bois l’apé frotté. (Le cochon sait bien sur quel arbre [bois] il va se frotter.)
“The hog knows well what sort of tree to rub himself against.”[38]—[Louisiana.]
[38] In most of the Creole dialects several different versions of a popular proverb are current. A friend gives me this one of proverb 97: Cochon-marron conné enhaut qui bois li frotté. (“The wild hog knows what tree to rub himself upon.”) Marron is applied in all forms of the Creole patois to wild things; zhèbes marrons signifies “wild plants.” The term, couri-marron, or nègue-marron formerly designated a runaway slave in Louisiana as it did in the Antilles. There is an old New Orleans saying:
“Après yé tiré canon
Nègue sans passe c’est nègue-marron.”
This referred to the old custom in New Orleans of firing a cannon at eight P.M. in winter, and nine P.M. in summer, as a warning to all slaves to retire. It was a species of modern curfew-signal. Any slave found abroad after those hours, without a pass, was liable to arrest and a whipping of twenty-five lashes. Marron, from which the English word “Maroon” is derived, has a Spanish origin. “It is,” says Skeats, “a clipt form of the Spanish cimarron, wild, unruly: literally, “living in the mountain-tops.” Cimarron, from Span. Cima, a mountain-summit. The original term for “Maroon” was negro-cimarrón, as it still is in some parts of Cuba.