Categories: Identity, Language, Slavery

Yesterday débuted International Creole Heritage Month.
At first glance, folks in their particular locales may think: “International, though?”
Well, yes; international.

While we all have population specifics, there are unifying elements for all Creoles/Latins, which generally include, but are not limited to:

– an historic Creole/Latin identity
– a colonial version of Roman Catholicism (practiced or influenced by cultural practices)
– Indigenous and African servitude
– Latin-based languages (Creoles, French, Spanish, Portuguese)
– Latin-European, African and Indigenous genealogies (most often in combination)
– sugarcane cultivation
– culinary practices

Each day, I shall post on 1 region of the global Creole world, as a kind of Creole spotlight. Today’s explores Creole identity in Louisiana and states carved from colonial Louisiana. But only briefly.

Louisiana

According to scholars, the first non-Indigenous persons born in the French colony of Louisiana, claimed for France in 1699 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne d’Iberville, were the light-skinned Jean-François Le Can (4 October 1704, Mobile) and brown-skinned Antoine Jacemin (October 1707, baptized 26 October 1707 Mobile). However, as the academician Virginia Meacham Gould points out in her doctoral dissertation, the first person to identify as “the first Creole of the colony” was Robert Talon, who had been born someplace between present-day southeast Texas and Mobile in 1684. The irony is that Robert Talon was intimately linked to my family in colonial Mobile. There, he married Jeanne Preau or Prau, and was a brother-in-law of one of my 8th great-grandfathers, a Corsican named Jean-Baptiste Colon dit Laviolette.[1]

From the 1730s onwards, Creole identity persisted. During the colonial, territorial, early national and antebellum periods, slave- and free-born Francophone and Creolophone Catholics in Louisiana (and the states carved out of colonial Louisiana), of all hues, rather consistently identified as Créole in Catholic sacramental and colonial civil records in Louisiana; or they were so identified by clerics and registrars. Creole identification continued well into contemporaneous times, too. For World War One, in the United States, at least 11 men declared their “race” to be Creole on their Draft Registration Cards. They were racialized in censuses and other documents as white, mulatto and black. In October 1998, Northwest State University in Natchitoches, opened Louisiana’s only Louisiana Creole Heritage Center, which hosts an annual Creole Heritage Celebration every October, and conferences. In more recent years, the internet has been home to many groupings of Louisiana Creoles, not least of which can be found abundantly on Facebook. Finally, in Summer 2014, when Majorie Sayas Dawson–a New Orleans native and resident–died, her Louisiana death certificate read “French Creole” for her race. Like many Louisiana Creoles, she descends from both free and enslaved Creoles at various times in Louisiana history.[2]

In an earlier post, I clarified all of the common elements to all Creole-identified (voluntarily or ascribed) Louisianians. You can read those points by clicking here. You will probably be interested in how Americanization eroded Creole communities and complicated Creole identity. You can explore that on this flowchart I created just for you. 🙂

Now that the historicity of Creole identity in Louisiana is out of the way, tomorrow, we can explore what Louisiana Creoles share with Creoles/Latins in the Americas, Atlantic Ocean west of Mauritania and Senegal, as well as the Indian Ocean.

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Endnotes

[1] Antoine Jacemin was a slave of Antoine Le Moyne de Châteaugué, a brother of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne d’Iberville. Antoine was the son of slaves François and Marie Jacemin, the latter probably born on the island of Saint-Christophe or Nevis, present-day St. Kitts & Nevis, then a French possession. Archives of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mobile, Book A, 26 October 1707; Jay Higginbotham, Old Mobile: Fort Louis de la Louisiane, 1702-1711 (University of Alabama Press, 1977), 302; Virginia Meacham Gould, “In Full Enjoyment of their Liberty: the Free Women of Color of the Gulf Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1769-1860,” Doctoral dissertation, Emory University, 1996, 36-37. Colon was first married to a Kaskaskian Indian named Catherine Exipakinoea, an 8th great-grandmother of mine. He later remarried Marguerite Prau, a sister of Jeanne Prau. Jean-Baptiste and Catherine’s daughter, Henriette Colon, married Charles Rocheron or Rochon, a native of Quebec City. Their son, Pierre Rochon, my 6th great-grandfather, married Catherine Prau, a niece of Jeanne and Marguerite. I descend from Pierre and his négresse consort, Marguerite Rochon.

[2] There were 2 slaves who, in 1764 and in 1765, were termed Creoles from Mobile. The slave in the 1764 document, named Sozie (nègre), was born in 1734. The second slave, Louis (also nègre), was born in 1740. See Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Afro-Louisiana History and Genealogy, 1718-1820, website. For specific entries on Sozie and Louis, see the following URLs: (1) http://goo.gl/92Uqci and (2) http://goo.gl/4kQbB6 . The 11 Creoles linked to colonial and national Louisiana, were: Lawrence Baquet (born 12 February 1890 in Louisiana), Jérôme Victor Bertrand (born 19 March 1894 in Baldwin County, Alabama), Marc C. Bobé (born 8 December 1893 in Mississippi), Cicero Carlyle Brooks (born 14 August 1891 in Mississippi), Wilmer Ernest Brué (born 22 January 1898 in Mobile, Alabama), Eddie Chastang (born 31 July 1872 in Mobile, Alabama), Bertrand H. Conway (born 23 September 1890 in Donaldsonville, Louisiana), Vernon Mabron Cook (born 23 July 1891 in Baldwin County, Alabama), Willie Mc Donald (born 28 April 1888 in Alabama), George Smith (born 16 November 1888 in Mobile, Alabama), John Sullivan (born 25 January 1892 in Washington County, Alabama). To view the actual record, consult United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls. Imaged from Family History Library microfilm. Marjorie Sayas Dawson was the daughter of George Émile Sayas and Elda Elizabeth Gaillard. Her obituary can be viewed here.