Categories: Discrimination & Prejudice, Free People of Color (FPOC), Genealogy, History, Identity, Language, Latinité, Religion, Slavery

I

n early February this year, Beyoncé Knowles dropped the video for her song “Formation” out of nowhere. It left the nation in an uproar. Why? Because she dared address America’s greatest taboos publicly.

There are innumerable articles discussing “Formation,” so I will not reinvent the wheel here. But briefly, there were two streams of grievances she raised. To white-identified Americans, she addressed police brutality and white neglect of New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. To black-identified Americans, she had the gall to lecture them on homophobia, phenotype and identity politics, obsessive rumormongering, and family.

I was more intrigued by Beyoncé celebrating her Creole history and culture and fascinated by the bruising condemnation she faced by African Americans because of it. Colorlines author Yaba Blay “cheered” to “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils,” but “cringed” as Bey uttered “You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma.” Blay goes on to explain that as a dark brown-skinned New Orleanian, she and others in her skin have felt marginalized and slighted by New Orleans Creoles. Her distress over New Orleans créolité resonates with many and has legitimate historical and social significance. Historian Darryl Barthé discusses historic degrees of separation between Americans and Creoles in 19^th and early 20^th century New Orleans. Pertinent to Yaba’s angst, Barthé also analyzes the anxieties New Orleans Creoles of color and African Americans in particular shared for one another. ¹Yaba Blay, “On ‘Jackson Five Nostrils,’ Creole vs. ‘Negro’ and Beefing Over Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’,” Colorlines, 8 February 2016, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/jackson-five-nostrils-creole-vs-negro-and-beefing-over-beyonc%C3%A9s-formation. You can learn more about Yaba Blay here. Darryl G. Barthé Jr., “Becoming American in Creole New Orleans: Family, Community, Labor and Schooling, 1896-1949, Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 2016.

Blay’s reaction to créolité (the quality of being Creole) and Barthé’s work probably will come as a surprise to many, so best we unpack it just a bit. For starters, it is useful to understand that New Orleans was founded by Francophones (French-speakers) in 1718 when Louisiana was a French colony. Over the course of the 18^th century, it slowly grew to become a stopping point, or home, to Choctaws, Biloxys, Alabamans, Wolofs, Senegalese, Bambaras, Congos, Kisi, Canadians (Quebecers), Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Cubans, Dominicans, and many others. The muddy mosquito-infested town eventually served as the colony’s third capital, and in 1762, Louisiana was ceded to Carlos III, king of Spain. Under the Spaniards, New Orleans and Louisiana’s economy and population grew, as did the face of New Orleans. It was the Spaniards who rebuilt New Orleans after the devastating fire of 1788, giving the Vieux Carré’s buildings the same aesthetic/architecture we see in Cartagena de Indias, Veracruz (México), old San Juan (Puerto Rico). A Louisiana Creole identity, used by and towards people of all genealogies who spoke French or Creole and were born in the colony, had crystallized by 1762. That locally-rooted cultural identity intensified during the Spanish period, including the emergence of Kouri-Vini, a language indigenous to colonial Louisiana.²New Orleans, founded on 7th May 1718, will be celebrating its bicentennial in 2 years. On the demographics of early colonial New Orleans, see Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). For the 1788 fire, see Sally Reeves, “French Quarter Fire and Flood,” New Orleans French Quarter.com, http://www.frenchquarter.com/elements/. For early Louisiana Creole identity, see Virginia Meacham Gould, “In Full Enjoyment of their Liberty: The Free Women of Color in the Gulf Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1769-1860,” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1996, pp. 36-7; Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana; Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, https://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/fields.php, search terms: epoch – French, origin – Louisiana Creole; Thomas Klingler, If I Could Turn My Tongue Like That: The Creole Language of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003.

Louisiana Creole identity became especially pronounced when Anglophone Americans began migrating to New Orleans and Louisiana en masse after 1803. Americans arrived in Louisiana and New Orleans with the goal of making money, colonizing the locals, and converting the Latin territory into an American one through American legal traditions and culture. Yet Creoles resisted change, and insisted on rights guaranteeing Creole cultural continuity and shared legal power in the state and city of New Orleans. The result, at least in constitutional terms, was a state constitution that merged Europe’s Latin codes (Roman, Siete Partidas, French codes) and British common law. Louisiana Creoles had taken up arms against the British in support of Americans during the American revolution in 1776. They fought against the British again in the War of 1812 and Battle of New Orleans, also in support of the United States. But that did not mean that Louisiana Creoles wanted to be Americans or adopt American ways. Colonial Louisiana and the American colonies had emerged simultaneously, each developing unique cultures, economies, identities, and aspirations. Creoles had been prepared to support America’s independence, but now America was colonizing Louisiana. When Americans arrived to assume governance of Louisiana, tensions mounted as Creoles felt their power diminish.

To illustrate this, journalist-historian Richard Campanella notes that on “March 8, 1836, the state legislature amended New Orleans’s original 1805 charter.” For what purpose? Well, “by dividing the city ‘into three separate sections, each with distinct municipal powers’.” The 1^st municipality included the Vieux Carré and the Faubourg Trémé. The 2^nd ran along Canal Street to the northern-most city limit at Felicity Street. Meanwhile, the 3^rd municipality included everything along and south of Esplanade Avenue down to the present St. Bernard Parish border and was an extension of the Creole 1^st Municipality. Each municipality was then subdivided into wards, and each municipality elected a Board of Aldermen, the three of which met at the Cabildo (New Orleans’s administrative seat) on May 1^st with the city’s mayor. Together they passed legislation and divided debts. It sounds ideal on paper, but Campanella warns that “the system was egregiously divisive in both its effects and its root cause: an ethnic rivalry [between Creoles and Americans] going on since the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.”³Richard Campanella, “Culture Wars Led to New Orleans’ Most Peculiar Experiment in City Management,” The Times-Picayune, 7 March 2016, http://www.nola.com/homegarden/index.ssf/2016/03/relics_remain_of_new_orleans_m.html.Douglas Slawson, “Segregated Catholicism: The Origins of St. Katharine’s Parish, New Orleans,” Vincentian Heritage Journal 17, no. 3 (Oct., 1996): 6.

In fact, after 1803, the cultural divisiveness naturally expressed itself in settlement patterns. The older Latin population, who spoke French, Creole and Spanish, and professed faith in Roman Catholicism, lived in the original neighborhoods from the early French colonial period, called le vieux carré, the old square. The 1^st municipality encompassed those neighborhoods and parts of it later assumed the identity of “downtown New Orleans.” These residents referred to themselves as Creoles, sometimes as French, Spanish, and Latin. Since the Vieux Carré was already overflowing with residents, Anglophone Americans, mostly Protestants, settled “uptown.” They referred to themselves as Americans, and Creoles referred to them as Americans as well. As Campanella points out, the Americans pursued and enjoyed commercial dominance in the city, and shored up their growth by liaising with German and Irish immigrants who arrived during the Antebellum period. The ethno-cultural division and the tensions between Creoles and Americans were strong enough for Englishwoman Harriet Martineau to notice when she visited the city in the 1830s. “There is, as everyone knows, a mutual jealousy between the French and American,”she wrote. Martineau went on to explain that “The French complain that the Americans will not speak French (and) will not meet their neighbors even half way, (while) the Americans ridicule the toilet practices of the French ladies; their liberal use of rouge and pearl powder.” ⁴Ibid. For more, see Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Virginia R. Domínguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole New Orleans (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

We also find these same residential patterns outside of New Orleans. In southwest Louisiana, for instance, Americans dominated the prairies or Savannahs of present-day Acadia and Jefferson Davis parishes, as well as the towns of Opélousas, New Iberia, and Grand Côteau. Avery and Weeks Islands (Iberia Parish), Bayou Chicot (St. Landry Parish), Calcasieu and St. Mary Parishes, and large swathes of present-day Evangeline Parish, were also dominated by Americans. In these settlements, Americans brought their own culture and hopes, carving American island communities in an overwhelmingly Creole region. In these communities, its members established their own (racially segregated) institutions around which they cohered. Calvary Baptist Church, First United Methodist Church, and the Church of the Epiphany (Episcopalian), were established in Bayou Chicot and New Iberia in 1812, 1828 and 1852, respectively. Outside of commerce, Americans and Creoles therefore had no real reason to socialize with one another as they lived separate social lives.⁵Christophe Landry, “A Creole Melting Pot: The Politics of Language, Race and Identity in southwest Louisiana, 1918-45, Ph.D. diss., University of Sussex, 2016, pp. 45-47; John T. Christian, A History of Baptists, vols. 1-2 (Solid Christian Books, 2014), 506; Leona W. Smith, St. Landry–Up From Slavery: Then Came Fire (Bloomington, Ind.: Author House, 2011); Paul Harvey, Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), 72-3, 77, 79; Glenn R. Conrad, New Iberia: Essays on the Town and Its People (Lafayette: University of Southwest Louisiana, 1986), 79-87; Maurine Bergerie, They Tasted Bayou Water: A Brief History of Iberia Parish (Ann Arbor: Edward Brothers, 1962), 87-88. Calvary Baptist Church was founded by Rev. Joseph Willis, a free mulatto, probably of partial Cherokee heritage, born in 1762 in Chesapeake, Virginia. He arrived in Louisiana around 1798 and through collaboration with visiting ministers from Mississippi, established Calvary Baptist Church at Bayou Chicot. See “Joseph Willis”, A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, Vol. 2 (1988), p. 853; William Cathcart, editor, The Baptist Encyclopedia, 1881, p. 1256.

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