L'Histoire
Should secondary school students be made aware that the fleur-de-lys, emblematic of the football team so beloved by New Orleanians, and so feverishly paraded by fans, was once the mark with which slaves were branded when being punished under Louisiana's Code Noir of 1724, issued to govern the interaction of les blancs et les noirs (whites and blacks)? Certainly, what better way to give our impressionable youngsters the necessary insight to comprehend the concept of deep time and to appreciate all of the inequities and complexities that it entails for a city like New Orleans, both past and present?
The run-away alone who has been gone one month from the day his master, has reported him to the court will have his ears cut off and branded on one shoulder with the fleur-de-lys; if he is guilty of a second offense another month from the time of his denouncement, he shall be hamstrung and also branded with the fleur-de-lys on the other shoulder, and a third time, he will be put to death. 10
Slaves were imported to New Orleans by the thousands under French colonial rule. Aggravated by a scarcity of white women in New Orleans from the earliest colonial period, the practice of white, well-to-do men (sons of noblemen, plantation owners, and military men) acquiring a "concubine" of African descent was widespread. "Whenever a dominant and a subservient race have lived together, the women of the weaker have always become the concubines of the men of the stronger." 11 In 1718 when French Canadian, Jean Baptiste LeMoyne, Sieur de Bienville brought his group of approximately 300 men to build the city of New Orleans, named in honor of le Duc d'Orléans, there were very few married men among them, and the prospects for the remaining bachelors were limited. The early colonists, including the French-Canadian voyageurs, had taken to hiring an attractive sauvagesse from a nearby Indian tribe, "…who, for a piastre or two a month and a handful of glass beads, consented to minister to their needs and keep house for an agreed period of time,…" 1 2 Later, les filles du roi were sent from French orphanages and convents, along with their small wooden chests called cassettes, containing the dowry given to them by the king – hence they became known as the "casket girls" - to help build up the colonies by becoming the future brides of the colonial men. Still, this was not enough to meet the demand for women, notwithstanding the earlier wave of prostitutes and female prisoners sent from France, another gift from le Roi Louis XIV, in his efforts to help populate the colony. 13
With African women being purchased and readily "available," not to mention considered physically more robust than white women in what was then swampy, mosquito-infested New Orleans, where yellow fever outbreaks claimed many lives, masters readily chose the best looking among the imported Negresses for their mistresses. This custom put in motion an inadvertent practice of selective breeding for lascivious beauty. "This, occurring in generation after generation, inevitably resulted in the production of a type of most exotic yellow women." 14 Although Le Code Noir, the decree passed by King Louis XIV, was in place in New Orleans as early as 1724 to define the conditions of slavery, to restrict the activities of free blacks, and to prohibit interracial marriages, miscegenation was so wide-spread that by the time of the Spanish regime in Louisiana, the descendants of women of color who had been freed by their grateful masters had produced a large class of desirable octoroon women notorious for their beauty. The possession of such a creature was a two-fold ego booster for the white master; it was indicative of his elevated social status, while having power over such a prized woman by means of owning her, was a testament to his manliness.
As luxury items, fancy girls provided an expensive canvas onto which slaveholders projected their sexual desires and social ambitions. […] The fancy girl brought together whiteness and sexual availability in unsettling and titillating ways […] more sexual than the ideal white woman and more refined than the promiscuous black woman. 15
The significant mixed-race population of antebellum New Orleans thus had its roots in the colonial period and was made up in part, by freed slaves and their offspring – descendants of their mulatto, slave mothers, highly sought-after by white men who gladly paid the higher price for them on the auction blocks, took them in as concubines, and habitually manumitted them and the children they fathered with them. Many mixed-race mistresses, usually quarteroons or octaroons, inherited the riches of their white lovers, as did their biracial children; giving rise to this privileged in-between class of citizens, some of them owned plantations and slaves of their own.
Adding to the number of biracial individuals who populated the territory of Louisiana were refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution after having gone to Cuba in the 1790s, and subsequently having to abscond from Cuba in 1809, when the war between France and Spain broke out. The arrival of these refugees from what was then Saint-Domingue (modern day Haïti), incited trepidation in the hearts of white Creoles, who feared they could initiate a similar, widespread slave rebellion in New Orleans. "Black rebellion spelled the ruin of the slaveholding regime [in Haiti]." 16 Most of these immigrants were personnes de couleur libres, free persons of color. Haitian Creoles were well-educated musicians, teachers, doctors, writers, artists, artisans and merchants. They were francophone Catholics of either French or Spanish, and African descent, and very proud of their heritage. They were set apart as socially above the slaves due to their cultured backgrounds. Colonial New Orleans also provided a Latin European religious culture and a tripartite racial order (whites, free blacks, and slaves) which allowed these free people of color, sometimes referred to as the cordon bleu, to flourish. 17 This helped to prolong the implementation of the Anglo-American two-tiered racial hierarchy, which relegated all persons of color to an inferior caste. However the racial binary that was upheld once Napoleon handed Louisiana over to the Americans, eventually caused them to lose their unique status and privileged existence, until finally they would be referred to as "the tragic mulattos." 1 8 Borne of the Americanization of Louisiana, a newfound need to categorize individuals as either black or white pushed the mulattoes who had heretofore been among the wealthy, powerful and influential New Orleanians, to the brink of society.
Dana Kress, professor of French at Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana, explains that however odious it was, under Spanish and French colonial rule, slavery was not as much a mark of racial inferiority as it was a condition that one could often get himself out of. For instance, many Frenchmen who developed intimate relationships with enslaved women would eventually free the woman and educate his liberated children, a process that helps explain the large number of well-educated free people of color who lived in antebellum New Orleans. Closer to the time of the Civil War however, as the English-speaking population became more dominant, the French and their customs were increasingly marginalized. Americanization and the new dual racial order had an adverse effect on the intermediate status of les personnes de couleur libres, a phenomenon which inevitably trickled down to make the conditions for slaves even worse than they had been. What Kress describes as an "uglier world view" took hold of New Orleans, causing slavery to become inextricably linked to issues of class and color. Kress points out that if before the Civil War the literacy rate was higher among the population of color than it was among white New Orleanians, there were obviously quite different things going on. In other words, a marked deterioration of the social condition of the Creoles of color and slaves from colonial New Orleans to pre-Civil War New Orleans is evident. 19
The word Créole originally designated anyone who was born in the colonies of the New World (descendants of the French and Spanish colonial settlers) as opposed to those who had settled in the New World after having emigrated from Europe. It was not until later that white Creoles would try to claim the title as their own, to distinguish themselves as being of "pure blood," which ironically, was often not the case. Black Creoles felt just as defined by the word "Creole" as their white counterparts. According to them however, the word Creole designated those who were native to Louisiana, in whose blood ran mixed strains of everything un-American, with the African strain being apparent. 20 The Créoles noirs consisted of the French-speaking, free people of color. Free people of color or Creoles of color, came to mean mixed-raced people of African and European descent.
Despite the origins of New Orleans as a racially and linguistically diverse city, it was not immune to the effects of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, when "whiteness" came to have the largest bearing on one's economic prosperity and social prestige in this Americanizing city. Many New Orleanian Creoles tried to "pass" as white, casting off the limitations imposed upon them by those who deemed them everything from impure half-breeds to adulterous bastards. 21 The importance placed on racial purity is made evident by the number of terms in existence to describe every gradation of mixed-raced individuals in such a meticulous way as to account for even the smallest drop of African blood:
Quarteroon, Quinteroon, Octoroon: Negro and white half-breeds, with fresh infusion of white blood each successive generation. Thus: Quarteroon has one-fourth, Quinteroon one-eighth, Octoroon one-sixteenth black blood only, the last being scarcely distinguishable from a white. 22
While some Creoles went to great lengths to cover up or deny any African lineage in the hopes of benefitting from the opportunities available only to those with white skin, others who might have been able to pass as white, refused to do so. The latter group disagreed with the notion of trying to pass into white society, not because they didn't recognize the benefits of doing so, but likely because they were rightfully proud of who they really were, and unwilling to forsake their true identities. Having pride in one's heritage would be cause enough to willingly relinquish the opportunities bestowed upon them if they chose to live their lives as whites. For an account of Henriette Delille, one such woman who chose not to "pass," even though her siblings did the opposite, visit: http://mademoiselle-mauti.wikispaces.com/The+Absurdity+of+Caste+Prejudice+in+Nineteenth+Century+New+Orleans.
How confounding a time it must have been, to have people within the same family engage in conflicting responses of resistance, and resignation in the face of fading Creole dominance. The fact that New Orleans had been diverse from its inception makes it all the more tragic that its citizens would be faced with race ostracism. Having to choose between two very different lives caused a schism within the Creole community. To help my students imagine what it may have felt like to have one's identity constantly scrutinized, I will ask them to reflect upon the indignation they feel when someone merely mispronounces their names. When someone mishandles or even unwittingly misrepresents those artifacts that we most closely associate with our identity, it strikes a very sensitive chord within us, the response is visceral. This obviously pales in comparison to what some Afro-Creoles in nineteenth century New Orleans faced - the decision to "pass" as white or forever sign f.m.c. or f.w.c. (free man of color or free woman of color) on legal documents. 23
There were other malevolent forces at work which aided in the marginalization of free people of color in antebellum New Orleans:
By the mid-nineteenth century, the scientific community had largely abandoned an environmentalist understanding of race in favor of theories ascribing racial distinctions to inherent biological differences. In this schema, the particular physical "defects" of blacks, Native Americans, and other nonwhites rendered them inferior – in body and mind – to "Caucasians." 24
After having filed a slander suit for being called a "woman of color" in public, Anastasie Desarzant lost the 1859 case when the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled against her on appeal: "It can be no more doubted that the plaintiff's real status is that of a person of color and that she has been endeavoring to usurp that of a white person." Desarzant was married to a white man. The case determining her race would have meant that she lost the social standing she had enjoyed all of her life until then. It also meant that she would go from being a married woman to a placée, thereby losing her legal rights. The refrain of a popular song intended to taunt Desarzant for wanting to deny her African ancestry seems particularly cruel: "Ah, Toucoutou, we know you! You are a little Mooress. Who does not know you? No soap will make you white." 25
It is both because of and in spite of such contradictions, that people have come to view New Orleans as an exotic place, so much so that one could argue that this eroticized city is hardly evocative of an American location at all. It was a multilingual, multicultural city before any other North American city. Nonetheless, in the nineteenth century, it was also a place where it was not uncommon for racially mixed residents to file law suits against those who dared to refer to them in public as "people of color," fearing the loss of privileges they were entitled to if they could "pass" as white and safeguard their light-skinned, "European" identities. 26 Upon hearing testimony from various witnesses, it was then left in the hands of the Louisiana Supreme Court to rule that the defendant in question was either veritably white, or merely trying to assume the identity of a white person. What lends an extra layer of absurdity to this paradoxical time period is that under prior Spanish and French colonial rule, before the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, white people, African Americans, and those who were frankly mystified by the matter of their own multi-ethnic heritage, enjoyed rather malleable, interracial interactions.
It was in this social milieu that a group of resident poets who referred to themselves as Les Cenelles, or the holly berries - the red color of the berries evoking the color of their skin tone 27 – composed poems emulating the literary French Romantic Movement, adapting the European style to express their uniquely American content, their hidden messages of social critique neatly packaged in a box of aching love ballads. To fully appreciate the works of these French-speaking, American poets is to understand the circumstances under which their anthology was born.
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