Categories: Catholic Sacramental Records, Discrimination & Prejudice, Free People of Color (FPOC), Genealogy, History, Latinité, Law, Mythology, Religion, Slavery

On 2 May 1854, at St. Martinville, St. Martin Parish, Louisiana, Joseph Darcourt LANDRY and his wife, Marie Louise Euchariste LE NORMAND – gens de couleur libres of St. Martinville, and first cousins, appeared before Adolphe COUDROY, a notary public in St. Martinville for St. Martin Parish.

Darcourt and Euchariste’s LANDRY, LE NORMAND, HENRIOT, and CHAMPAGNE families often appeared before notaries public in St. Martin Parish between 1790 and 1865. They were Louisiana Creole free people of color who figured out a way to defy the very caste tradition that enslaved their grandmother, Jeanne Charlotte BROUTIN, and all of her maternal family.

That defiance did not begin in Darcourt and Euchariste’s generation; in fact, it began in the mid 18th century in New Orleans with their great-grandmother, Catherine DESTRÉHAN. At the death of the well known agriculturalist, politician, colonial and provincial Louisiana Treasurer-General, Jean-Baptiste-Honoré d’ESTRÉHAN de Beaupré de Tours’s death, Catherine, a slave belonging to the decedent, petitioned the Cabildo on 14 Dec 1771 to take full advantage of coartación. This Spanish Louisiana provincial law permitted slaves to pay for their own value as a slave, in order to emancipate themselves. Catherine stated that before his death, Jean-Baptiste-Honoré promised her emancipation. JBH’s son-in-law, Étienne DE BORÉ, equally well known in Louisiana history, refused Catherine’s petition. He insinuated that she was a whore, and explicitly argued that she had intentionally harmed herself to make her infirm, and thus worth less than the value the surveyors’ established. At the time, Étienne was one of the 5 most important, and powerful men in the province. It took years to settle, as did JBH’s estate, but Catherine came out victoriously in 1774. By then, all 3 of her daughters, Jeanne, Manon, and Félicité, had been emancipated, and the daughters went on to marry or live in concubinage with respectable men in the province.¹New Orleans Notorial Acts, Almonaster y Roxas, 1771, #242.

Jeanne, the eldest of the daughters, began dating Pierre Marin LE NORMAND, son of the colonial bailiff in New Orleans, while still in New Orleans, where 2 of their 5 children, Modeste-Arthémise and Alexandre-Norbert, were born. At some point after Modeste-Arthémise’s birth in 1783, Marin and Jeanne relocated to the Attakapas District, purchasing land neighboring St. Martin Church’s property, on the east side of Bayou Têche. In 1786, 1794 and 1798, three more of the couple’s children, were born and baptized at the Attakapas. Their baptisms clearly appear in the newly separate parochial register for people of color. This separateness would not last for much longer. After the baby daughter’s birth in 1798, all sacramental records for the family appear in the register for whites. No known civil or parochial document explains this transformation in their caste position, but it may be related to Marin’s donation of lands to St. Martin Church. If such an arrangement existed, a kind of kind unwritten limpieza de sangre or whitening, which was relatively common in the Spanish provincial Americas at the time, it would explain the whitening of the LE NORMAND children and their progeny. Extraordinarily, on 12 Sept 1812, at St. Martinville, the St. Martin curate married Jeanne and Marin, with their marriage appearing in the white nuptial register. The church’s priests remained true to the arrangement, but civil authorities continued to describe them in records as gens de couleur libres until the Civil War. Jeanne’s family had beat the system, a second time.²Modesta Artemisa – mulata libre, was baptized in New Orleans 9 June 1783. Église paroissiale de Saint-Louis, Registre des baptêmes de couleur vol 5, p 350. Alexandro Norverto – negro libre, was baptized 15 Sept 1788 in New Orleans. Église paroissiale de Saint-Louis, Registre des baptêmes de couleur vol 4, p 73. Joseph Marin was baptized at St. Martinville on 25 April 1785. Église Saint-Martin, Registre des baptêmes de couleur vol 3, #108. Marie-Aimée Modeste and Marie Élizabeth were baptized 31 Dec 1795 at St. Martinville. Église Saint-Martin, Registre des baptêmes de couleur vol 3, #227. The baby, Marie Azélie, was baptized in St. Martinville 25 May 1800. Église Saint-Martin, Registre des bapêmes vol 3, #464. Jeanne and Charlotte’s marriage: Église Saint-Martin, Registre des mariages vol 5, #270.

Jeanne’s LE NORMAND children, and their LE NORMAND, LANDRY, and HENRIOT grandchildren, went on to become St. Martin Parish’s largest free people of color slave holders. By 1860, they owned in excess of 100 slaves combined. They had beat the system a third time, being married and liberated from servitude, to later become themselves slave holders. For Louisianians today, through folk beliefs cultivated recently, there was a fourth milestone: Modeste-Arthémise LE NORMAND married a Frenchman, Joseph LANDRY, who had been born at Nantes, France, but was born there following the deportation of his parents’ and other family, from Nova Scotia. They were Acadians and their son and progeny accepted and participated in the servitude of peoples of color with broad open arms in provincial and national Louisiana.

Back to Darcourt and Euchariste. On the above mentioned day in 1854, they donated to their daughter, Félicie LANDRY, wife of Auguste NEPVEUX, a 28-year-old négresse slave named Sophie. The conveyance stipulated that Sophie was an esclave pour la vie, a slave for her entire life. At the closure of the reading, Darcourt, Euchariste, Félicie, and Auguste penned their names in quintessentially mid-19th century script. Louisiana Creole descendants of Acadians owning slaves, being upper bourgeois, and literate.³St. Martin Parish Clerk of Court, Conveyance Records vol 12, pp 407-08.

I share this entry for 3 reasons. First, to show how relations in provincial and national Louisiana before the Civil War were porous and malleable. It permitted, under certain conditions, people who had themselves been relegated to 2nd and 3rd class status, to ascend to first class and impose the same exclusionary and inhumane conditions onto others they saw as less than they. Second, to demonstrate additional examples of Acadians and their Louisiana Creole descendants being wealthy and literate. Third, because I actually know descendants of Sophie. Through genealogical research, we know that she was a daughter of another slave belonging to Darcourt and Euchariste, named Daniel JOHNSON. Sophie bore children for Darcourt, and for his brother, Alexandre-Victorin LANDRY. Their LEE, LANDRY, and MALLERY descendants still reside in St. Martinville today, and many of us know them well. Names in boxes on trees change and become more meaningful when we can paint a picture of the lives and experiences the people lived. The way we craft history in folklife often differs from the way our antecedents lived. My hope is that these historical and genealogical blurbs will help you, our readers, to dig deep into the wells of our history, and acknowledge it for the good, bad, and ugly. Acknowledgement is half the battle won. I descend from Joseph Marin LE NORMAND and from his sister, Modeste-Arthémise LE NORMAND, wife of Charles LANDRY. If I can do it, so can you.⁴Darcourt and Sophie produced 1 daughter, Irène LANDRY, aka Irène DARCOURT, born about 1848. Irène went on to marry Alfred LEE after the war, on 23 Feb 1870, at St. Martinville. Église Saint-Martin, Registre des mariages vol 10, p 146. Alexandre-Victorin and Sophie had 1 son, Hippolyte LANDRY, born about 1850. Hippolyte married Anna LEE in St. Martinville on 7 Sept 1871. Église Saint-Martin, Registre des mariages vol 10, p 213.

Beating the system is great, but becoming the system is shameful. It is easy for me to sit and say this from New Haven, Connecticut, on the steps of Yale University. Frankly, we all become part of the system in some way: I know few people in the United States who boycott products crafted in Asian sweatshops, or meat provided by meatpackers in the Midwest who work in a slave-like labor environment. Today, people of Italian and Irish descent are proud to identify as white, but were not considered white by Anglo-Americans before 1967. Native Americans in Oklahoma were sent to live there in the 19th and early 20th centuries, on a trail of many tears, to only come to accept the terms of the federal lands gifted to them, which included racism towards – and marginalization of – Negroes. Hopefully, these explorations will help us all learn, act, and undermine systems of oppression, which we (blindly) participate in, and hypocritically criticize others, for doing.

See images below of the act of donation of Sophie.

– Christophe Landry