Summary
Although evidence demonstrates a longterm mutual relationship between Éloi-Réné BROUSSARD, nothing supports their ever having contracted marriage.
The relationship between Éloi-Réné and Joséphine extended beyond the couple. Five generations of Joséphine LACY’s family were slaves of Éloi-Réné’s family, and they kept those 5 generations as slaves of immediate BROUSSARD relatives. Joséphine, her mother Rosalie JEAN-LOUIS, her grandparents Jean-Louis fils and Rosette, and her Congo (and potentially Senegalese) great-grandparents Jean-Louis père and Vénus, were BROUSSARD slaves.
Jean-Louis père and Vénus demonstrate early slave ownership among Acadians and their Louisiana Creole children. Within a decade of arrival on Bayou Têche, the Acadian and Louisiana Creole children of brothers Joseph and Alexandre BROUSSARD dit Beausoleil, purchased slaves to help transform their nascent Attakapas Post farms into plantations.
Since the 1970s, powerbrokers in Louisiana have institutionalized a version of the Acadian story that does not entirely match Acadia, Nova Scotia, or Louisiana’s actual history. We have been fed the notion that Acadians and their descendants in Louisiana were a downtrodden and deliberately impoverished people at the hands of Americans, Brits, Anglo-Canadians and Louisiana Creoles.
Yet, evidence, which has always existed in public records, shows a very different story. – As shown in Beyoncé’s family, Acadians and their Louisiana Creole progeny accumulated considerable wealth and enjoyed bourgeois comforts on the shores of southwest Louisiana’s slow moving bayous and rivers. The BROUSSARDs discussed here were far from unique.
Thankfully, this fuller picture of the Acadian and Louisiana Creole of Acadian descent experience is now being embraced publicly in the academy, film, and on social media. Some in our community reject this history. They attempt to undermine the actual story we share from reaching critical masses, and do so in various ways. But the tide has turned, and it is irreversible.
Acadians and their descendants participated in the slave economy like others in Louisiana. They owned and emancipated slaves before the Civil War. They showed affection to some of those slaves, and inhumanity to others.
These degrees of slavery in Louisiana are unpopular. There is a fear that by acknowledging the variation in slavery that this in turn invites or enables people to sanction slavery.
But as Beyoncé’s Louisiana Creole family history reminds us, slavery was complicated and not fully uniform. The work of legal scholars, historians, genealogists and social scientists like Judith KELLEHER SCHAFER, Jennifer M. SPEAR, Anne PATTON MALONE (in Sweet Chariot), Gary B. MILLS and Elizabeth SHOWN MILLS (in The Forgotten People), Virginia R. DOMÍNGUEZ, and many others, demonstrates how humans worked with slavery to survive and thrive, with often confusing and conflicting results.
Éloi-Réné may not have freed Joséphine and their children from official slavery, but evidence shows that they enjoyed some privilege within slavery (their family staying within the same plantations, portrait painting commissions, peculia and emancipation). We also know that some of them enjoyed freedom before the war.
Their story compels us to view slaves not as people without names, lineages, culture, memory, and identity. Creole Louisiana offers a remarkable inventory of records identifying slaves by names (sometimes from Africa, other times Creole), ethnicity, age, and genealogical relationships. It also reminds us that identity and culture are evolutionary –new experiences birth new people, memories, consciousness, and directions forward. This story is much juicier, more compelling, and promising than the narratives that tabloids and some on the ground seem to prefer.
– Christophe Landry, christophe@mylhcv.com
Original publication, January 2019
Thank you for sharing your fine work.
Thank you for all of your work
Always good to trace accurate family history informstion!
Dr. Christophe Landry’s research is excellent. Thank you very much for this blog.
It’s so hard to put into words what I’m thinking after reading this work. There is no doubt the institution of slavery was and still is a black eye on our society. But Josephine’s story tugs at the heart strings in a “love conquers all” sort of way. It’s proof that B’s ancestors were making lemonade long before she became famous! Thanks for your time and commitment in making this post!
Great read. Learned about new connections to people I’ve known for years.