Jean Marie Walls: Culture, Language And The Key To Understanding People

On Jan 11, 2023 at 10:50 am, I walked into French 111 for the very first time. I sat down at a desk towards the back of the room, hoping I couldn’t be seen because I was absolutely horrified by the idea of being called on to speak French. I wanted to take French in college since I took Spanish in high school, but as I sat in my chair and anxiously waited for everyone to arrive, I questioned if I had made the right choice. 

A few minutes later, Jean Marie Walls, Professor of Language and Department Chair, walked through the door. 

“Bonjour!” she said smiling. 

She continued speaking in French, and looking back at the moment, I probably looked like a deer in headlights.

“Don’t be afraid when I speak in French,” she told us. “It’s part of the process.”

After a few moments, I realized that I hadn’t released eye contact with Walls since she entered the room. I was captivated by the way she spoke. The more I listened, not only was her love for the French language evident in the way she taught her class, but so was her love for the culture. 

Walls went to Mississippi State for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. Then, she moved to Louisiana for two years to complete her PhD in French at Louisiana State University. After her time at LSU, she moved to Paris for a year. 

“I finished all the coursework for my PhD in French and had never been to France,” Walls said. “I taught English in a high school in Paris while we were there. It was wonderful. I felt more at home in Paris than I felt a lot of places.”

I asked Walls if she had any stories from her time in France. However, she apologized when she could not think of any mountain top moments to share with me. Yet, minutes later she told me a story. 

“When I went to France for the first time and I went in a French cafe, I ordered a ‘sandwich au fromage’, a cheese sandwich. In my mind, I grew up in a household where for my mother, a cheese sandwich meant sunbeam white bread, kraft mayonnaise, and either cheddar cheese or kraft american singles,” Walls described. “Then, as a graduate student, to go to France, and surely I would have known, but I didn’t because I went through a Lit program. I had no culture courses. I didn’t even know the word for shampoo. But I knew medieval to 20th century literature inside and out. They brought me this baguette with butter and brie cheese without the rines cut off either. That was one of the biggest culture shock moments I had when I first got to France. It was one of those ‘Dorothy you’re not in Kansas anymore’ kind of moments.”

When I asked Walls the question, “Why French?”, she explained that she originally went into college for pharmacy. However, she quickly realized (after a tough chemistry class) that maybe the Lord had a different plan for her life. 

“I was more interested in the humanities and in art. So, for a while I was in several majors. I was in French. I was in English. I was in art and I was in communications,” Walls explained. “But there came a point where I had to major in something.”

As we spoke more about her decision to finally choose French as her major, she told me about her personal ties to the French language and culture. 

“I was always fascinated by the French speaking part of the family from Quebec and really curious about that because we didn’t have that much information. Factual information. My grandfather sometimes just added information when there was some missing,” she laughed. 

In the journalism program at Union, they teach us how to be observant about the people we interview and the spaces they take up. However, when I first stepped foot into Walls’ office, I realized that it would not take an observant journalism student to immediately recognize the full bookshelves and several stacks of books and papers filling the once-empty spaces in her office. 

“I just read an article about people who have more books around them than they can read and it said that really it’s a sign, not that you have read everything on the shelves, but that there’s so much that you want to know,” Walls explained. “To me, there’s always one more thing to learn, one more perspective to look at.”

I proceeded to explain how I wished that I was more of a reader. Walls quickly offered all of her books to me and said that if I ever wanted to borrow anything, what’s her’s was mine. If I had asked for anything on her shelf at that moment, I believe that she would have promptly reached over and given it to me.

I think the fact that Walls is determined to inspire her students to pursue knowledge explains how someone who loves to learn as much as she does also loves to teach. I believe this is also why she has been teaching French since she was 22 at Mississippi State and how she is now in her 36th year at Union. 

“I signed my contract to come to Union before I visited campus. They sent me a contract, I signed it, and we moved up here,” Walls said.

Walls had never been to Jackson before signing to work at Union, and yet, that in and of itself seemed to be a blessing. 

“When we drove up, I thought ‘Oh, this building looks about like the high school where I went’ because there was only one building,” Walls said. 

Nevertheless, the unexpected size of Union’s campus ended up being a remarkable gift for Walls and her family. It was a job that brought her to Union. However, it was the culture and community that kept her here. 

“My kids grew up on Union’s campus. They came to all the events with me. It was a closer knit community because it was smaller faculty and not so spread out because we were all here in one building,” she laughed. 

Looking back, Walls seems to recognize that a family-like culture was something she always missed as she studied at larger schools during her own academic career. However, her time at Union has given her the opportunity to experience the culture of a place where people and Christ are the focus. 

“That was one of the things that I really appreciated about Union when I came, the very human scale of faculty-student interactions,” Walls said. “It wasn’t just that I had my students for one semester, but I had the opportunity to develop relationships with my students over a period of four years.”

Over the years, Walls has shared her experiences of living in foreign countries and her firsthand knowledge of the culture with her students. This adds a new level of depth to her classes that students would not encounter otherwise. 

“A lot of the time, she will just talk about her experience being in France or her son’s experience in Canada with Canadian French culture as opposed to France French culture,” Cate Milton, sophomore French major, said. “That’s one of the most fun parts of her classes, getting to have access to talk to her about any of the experiences she has had.”

For Walls, understanding culture is a step towards understanding people. She believes that language gives us this access, and access is the key to everything that we learn in the world around us. 

“She really is such a wealth of knowledge and a great resource for anybody who is interested in French linguistically or Francophone culture. I think it’s amazing that we have a resource like her on campus,” Milton said. 

Photo by Laila Al-Hagal