Categories: Clichés, Descriptors, History, Identity

On 20 December 2010, I rather haphazardly chimed in on a segment of NPR (National Public Radio) News called How Multi-Ethnic People Identify Themselves (in the United States). Throughout the segment, most of the callers seemed to be living in a chemist’s vile, where they bound themselves to the principles of Race Science and the now “defunct” One Drop rules.

You may recall that One Drop was legislation passed in over a dozen Southern U.S. states during United States Apartheid, or Jim Crow, defining who was “black/Black” with the same tactics that Adolph Hitler used in defining who was a Jew in Germany: a drop of black/Jewish “blood” made you one. Terms pertaining to one drop, based on “blood quantum,” said to measure blood quantity, include Mulatto (1/2 Negro), Quadroon (1/4 Negro), Octoroon (1/8 Negro) and so on. In 1964, State of Virginia v. The Lovings illegalized anti-miscegenation marriage laws, but hypodescent, as it turns out, is still very much a legal reality in the U.S. today.

During the segment, there was a caller who spoke of the complexities of self-identification in the United States, specifically pertaining to avoiding racial categories and the almost calculable topic of Louisiana was thrown in. When discussing “multiethnicity,” or “multiraciality” (for me, the two are one in the same concept), New Orleans and Louisiana are almost always included in the conversation, where Louisiana Creoles are reported as having historically self-identified as “Quadroons” and “Octoroons” and even going so far as to having stately balls called “Quadroon balls” in New Orleans.

Were “Quadroon” and “Octoroon” bona fide identities for Louisiana Creoles?
Or were they physical descriptors, instead, used in very specific descriptive contexts?
Let’s have a look.

FRENCH PERIOD (1685-1764)

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Through the scholarship of many historians, we understand that while (present-day) Louisiana was a French colony, the composition of the population was more or less along these lines: Wolofs, Senegals, Bambara, Choctaw bands, Chitimacha, Caddo bands, Ishák (Atakapa), Washa, Acolapissa, Bayougoula, Quebecer fur traders (“pelletiers,” in French) and military officers, military officials from France, a handful of women (as wives for those Quebecers and French officers) from France and Québec, an entire colony of Alsatians, Lorrainers, Allemanophone Swiss and Rhinelandermen.

Digging extensively in the parochial and civil records for this periods, we also know that not all Wolof, Senegal, Bambara (Bamana), and others, were not slaves. For instance, on 19 March 1731, Simon Vanon and Marie Amo, both free dark-brown-skinned (nègres) natives of the Senegal nation, married in New Orleans and the groom, who was the city executioner, even signed the marriage act in firm handwriting.¹St. Louis Catholic Church (New Orleans, La.), Marriage Book 1, page 48. One free dark-brown-skinned native of Martinique, named Jean-Baptiste Raphaël, even married a French gypsy named Marie Gaspart, aka Marie Jacqueline Pierret, on 4 August 1725.²Ibid., 89-90. Certainly they were not in the majority. But, must we ignore that which is numerically inferior? Isn’t that the gripe about “minorities” in the U.S. being excluded and ignored from the “majority?”

In 1724, within a generation of the arrival of the first shipload of slaves from Senegambia, the French crown promulgated a body of laws concerning the governing of slaves and free people of color in the colony. It was known as Le Code Noir. Louisiana’s Code Noir mirrored a code previously issued in the Caribbean in 1685, but had its own particularities as well.

Between 1718 and 1762, as the colony grew, we begin to see terminology (absent in the Code of 1724) employed in Louisiana ecclesiastical and civil records pertaining to the physical description of people of color in the colony whether they were Louisiana Creoles (born in Louisiana), Caribbean Creoles, or nègres brutes (freshly arrived from Africa).

Here’s what those descriptors (in Louisiana French language) mean physically:

• griffe: someone of copper (often deep) hue. Person could have any number of phenotypical  features, though the hair texture quite often is fine and wavy. The term griffe is hard to track etymologically: it is a mythological figure that appeared on the coat of arms of many families and kingdoms during the Middle Ages. But it is also the name of the claws of animals (une griffe) and equally the name of a breed of dog, the Griffon hound or Brussels Griffon. In the latter case, those animals have a coppery hue. Phenotypically, griffes correspond to mulatos in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americans.
• griffe sauvage: of the same hue and features as the griffe above, except that this expression lets you  know that this particular griffe has at least one parent that is Native America. Because those in southern Louisiana appear to have had yellow skin, to get the copper tone, the other parent generally was dark-brown-skinned, i.e. nègre.³An example of griffe sauvage is the following. Honorato [Honoré PAUL], griffe sauvage, son of Pablo [Paul MASSE], griffe libre and Francisca [Françoise JUPITER], griffe libre, was baptized 21 June 1797 at age 18 months on the farm of Jupiter, the captain of the Indians. The baptized’s paternal grandparents are Andrés MAS [André MASSE], negro libre and Catalina [Catherine “Catiche”], sauvagesse; maternal grandparents are Jupiter [Captain of the Indians], griffe and Fanchon, sauvagesse (Ibid., Baptêmes de couleur volume 1, page 81-A). All of these people are intricately connected to André MASSE, a trader among the Indians, native of Grenoble, France.
• griffon (female: griffonne): someone light yellowish in complexion with broad features and coarse hair. This corresponds exactly to the way that Puerto Ricans use the term grifo (an adjective).⁴Here’s an example of griffon used in a Louisiana civil suit: On 31 August 1832, “Eugénie Carrière, a free woman of color, presents to the court that she wishes to emancipate her thirty-nine-year-old slave, a griffonne named Marie Jeanne. She vouches that Marie Jeanne has always behaved in a blameless manner. She asks the court to order the sheriff to post up the necessary notice during forty days for Marie Jeanne’s emancipation” (Orleans Parish, Records of the Parish Court, Emancipation Petitions 1813-1843, frame 36D, reel 98-2), in Race and Slavery Petitions Project.
• mulâtre (female: mulâtresse): the blend of coffee and milk, giving any number of hues, but most widely light brown, honey, or wheat-colored. Their features range from Western European to Mediterranean to Wolof, or someplace in between. It’s certain that the French got mulâtre from the Spanish mulato (even if used differently in their 2 colonial contexts). But there’s now more compelling evidence that the Spaniards likely got it from the Moors who colonized them and who used the term muwallad. In North Africa and Moorish Spain, Muslims used muwallad to denote the child of a Muslim/Arab and a non-Muslim/Arab but reared in Islamic/Arab culture. This makes more sense than the “mula” (mule) theory since many more Spanish descriptors, like mameluco, come directly from the Moors. You can read about muwallad here.
• nègre (female: négresse): is the person whose hue is the darkest brown (“almost black”) and with woolen hair. The term nègre quite literally derives from the Latin term, negro, for “black.” Négrillon (female: négrillonne) and négritte were diminutives used for nègre.
• sauvage (female: sauvagesse): is the person who predated the Europeans. It is difficult to pinpoint a specific hue for these often non-related small groups of dwellers. Some had (and still have) the yellowish hues of Eastern Asiatics, others had the copper hues of the griffe sauvage and still some were dark brown. One Caneci indian named Labombe and christened Marie-Thérèse was, in her 5 June 1756 baptism on Bayou Teche called a négresse.⁵St. Martin Catholic Church (St. Martinville, La.), Baptism folio A-1, page 3.
• métis (female: métisse): sometimes spelled métif and métive (due to the colonial S within and at the end of words which resembled a lower-case F, also similar to the German ß but with a longer stem) was the term Francophones in Lower Louisiana often used for the offspring of a Native American and someone “white.” I must warn you that although this was the denotative use of métis, it sometimes referred to anyone with ambiguous features and fair skin, and folks who “should” be referred to as métis, as was common in Natchitoches Parish, were not. Métis may very well have functioned as both a physical descriptor, cultural descriptor (for folks who lived among the Indians rather than among others), and genealogical disclaimer.⁶This term may have been less common in colonial Natchitoches, where métis were treated simply as whites. This sometimes occurred elsewhere in Louisiana, too: when Jean-Baptiste Boulris, a native of Mobile, Alabama, married Marie Neuville, quarteronne libre, on 11 September 1809 in St. Martin Parish, no descriptor was used for the groom, even though his mother, Marie Magdeleine Sabourdin, was described as a sauvagesse. Marie [Neuville de Clouet], quarteronne libre, minor daughter of [Balthasar Neuville de Clouet] and Céleste [Guillaume Fuselier], mulâtresse libre of La Pointe in St. Martin Parish married 11 Sept 1809 Jean-Baptiste Boulris of Mobile, major son of Nicolas Boulris and Marie Magdeleine Sabourdin, sauvagesse). Witnesses were Jean Antoine Garrigon, Henry Pintard, Hyacinthe Jacquet, Garrigues [de Flaujac]. Fr. Gabriel ISABEY (SM Ch v 5 #162).In south Louisiana, it sometimes was used for people with white skin and ambiguous features, as was the case for the 6-month-old little brother of Marianne Julie Lemelle above, named Hildebert “Ildeberto” Lemelle, who was baptized 31 August 1780 in Opelousas. Neither of his parents have Native American ancestry (Opel Ch v 1A p 37). Neither François Lemelle III nor Marie-Jeanne Lemelle are known to have Native American ancestry. Marie-Jeanne is consistently described as mulâtresse and quarteronne, the daughter of an unknown father and freed mulâtresse mother from New Orleans named Jacqueline Lemelle, concubine of François’s full brother, Jacques Lemelle. François and Jacques’s parents were from France. Métis was definitely in common use in south Louisiana, however.  A good example is when Guillaume Martin, a Frenchman living at the Natchitoches Post, married on 18 August 1801 Marie Gertrude del Castillo in Opelousas. She was described as mestissa by Fr. Louis Buhot and was in fact, the daughter of José Joaquín del Castillo and Marie-Françoise dite Vénus, sauvagesse (Opel Ch v 1-A p 96). Example of métis used for the offspring of “whites” and Indians: Laurentine, métis, daughter of Charlotte Louison, sauvagesse, was born in St. Landry Parish on 20 July 1856 and baptized at St. Landry Catholic Church in Opelousas (Opel Ch v 6 p 27).

Censuses taken during this period enumerated Blancs libres/Gens de couleur libres/Esclaves (Free Whites, Free People of Color, Slaves).

SPANISH PERIOD (1764-1803)

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When the French monarch secretly transferred Louisiana to his Bourbon Spanish first cousin, Carlos III, the nearly 40-year-period that followed would see Louisiana culturally and economically flourish.

On the one hand, the Spanish period initially witnessed a rocky beginning. Spaniards were not initially welcome in Louisiana by the Francophone (and perhaps Creolophone) population. The first Spanish Governor-General, Antonio de Ulloa, was reportedly run out of the colony in 1768. He was replaced for 1 year by the French Governor-General who had preceded him, Charles-Philippe Aubry. When Carlos III insisted on Spaniards in the colonial government, he sent the Irish-born Spanish military genius, Alexander “Alejandro” O’Reilly, apparently later known in Louisiana as “Bloody O’Reilly.” He acquired that nickname because he allegedly murdered several local Francophones in New Orleans who had conspired to overthrow Spanish officials in New Orleans. O’Reilly remained only one year before Luís de Unzaga replaced him in 1770 and remained in office until 1777.⁷For more on O’Reilly, see his biography on KnowLA Encyclopedia of Louisiana; Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); José Montero de Pedro, Marqués de Casa Mena, The Spanish in New Orleans and Louisiana, trans. Robert E. Chandler (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 2000); Robert E. Chandler, “O’Reilly and the Rebels: Report to Arriaga,” Louisiana History 23, no. 1 (Winter, 1982): 48-59.

Likely due to a nearly invisible Hispanophone population within the colony, compared to the much more numerous Francophone and Creolophone populations, and perhaps also due to colonial wars elsewhere, the Spaniards were a bit more lax than the French administrators.

During this period, the cultural composition of Louisianians became more complex. The Spanish crown sought non-Muslim slaves, which explains the large Congo presence within the local slave population during this period. The Congos were from what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Congo; 2 separate nations. Historian Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall noted in a radio interview that during this period, many of the slave households consisted of Senegambian wives and Congo husbands, which I have substantiated in extant civil and parochial records.⁸Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); The Fertile Crescent: Haiti, Cuba, and Louisiana.

The Spaniards also successfully resettled Canary Islanders and Spaniards from Málaga and Granada in Louisiana. The latter were sent to Bayou Teche and the former on Bayous Lafourche and Manchac and at Bayou Terre-aux-Bœufs in St. Bernard Parish.⁹Gilbert C. Din, The Canary Islanders of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1999); Montero de Pedro, The Spanish in Louisiana; Glenn R. Conrad, ed., New Iberia: Essays on the Town and Its People (Lafayette: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1986).

It was also during this period that Catholics of Scottish and Irish descent from Pennsylvania and Maryland fled to overwhelmingly Catholic Louisiana. They were met by 2,900 other Catholic political refugees who had been expelled from their land in Nova Scotia. They were sent to live on Bayous Teche, Vermilion, Carencro, Lafourche, on the Mississippi River at Cabannocé (St. James Parish) and to San Luis de los Natchez (Natchez on the Mississippi River).¹⁰Carl A. Brasseaux, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma: Primer on Francophone Louisiana (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005); Ibid., The Founding of New Acadia: The Beginnings of Acadian Life in Louisiana, 1765-1803 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1997); William S. Coker, “Luke Collins Senior and Family: An Overview,” Louisiana History 14, no. 2 (Spring, 1973): 137-155.

And the American Indian populations were changing in profound ways also. The Tænsas, Houma and Tunica, who, during the French period, were located in extreme Northeast Louisiana and in the “Florida Parishes” (from the Mississippi River to the Mississippi border) had relocated to the Bayou Lafourche-Mississippi River junction. The Chitimacha, who were originally on Bayou Lafourche, relocated to Bayou Teche (most of them). The Biloxi, who were in and around New Orleans, fled north into the Marksville area, and south to Bayou Lafourche. And the Eastern bands of the Atakapa originally on Bayous Teche, Courtableau and Mermentau, those who did not culturally marry into the new Creole population, dropped everything and migrated east into Calcasieu and Vernon parishes. Finally, many of the bands of the Caddos from Northwest Louisiana were descending the Red, Cane and Mississippi rivers into the southern half of the colony.¹¹Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013);Nathalie Dajko, “Ethnic and Geographic Variation in the French of the Lafourche Bassin” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 2009); Katie Carmichael, “Language Death and Stylistic Variation: An Intergenerational Study of the Substitution of /h/ for /ʒ/ in the French of the Pointe-au-Chien Indians (MA thes., Tulane University, 2008); Carole Marsh, Louisiana Native Americans (Gallopade International, 2004); Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); E. P. Roy, “The Indians of Dulac: A descriptive study of a racial hybrid community in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1959); John Reed Swanton, “Indian Tribes of the Lower Mississippi Valley and Adjacent Coast of the Gulf of Mexico”, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, No. 43 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911).

In addition to all these resettlement patterns, the Spanish government, while by no means any less oppressive than other colonial governments, allowed for far greater freedom to the slaves. The Spanish legal code of coartación allowed slaves to not only work on weekends and to plant their own plot of crop or make special trinkets and useful items, but to also sell those items and crop, money which could be later used to purchase their own freedom. What’s more is that slaves could congregate on Sundays in New Orleans in a place aptly known today as Congo Square, on the edge of the vieux carré which was both a marketplace for purchasing, selling, and bartering goods, and also a religious ceremonial ground, where slaves reportedly praised their extra-catholic gods.¹²Kenneth R. Aslakson, Making Race in the Courtroom: The Legal Construction of Three Races in Early New Orleans (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

The following are Spanish versions of the same terms used during the French period:

• negro (female: negra): used in the same manner as the French nègre.
• mulato (female: mulata): used in the same manner as the French mulâtre.
• grifo (female: grifa): used in the same manner as the French griffe, griffon and griffe sauvage. Should not be conflated with grifo in Puerto Rico today. See griffon above in the list of terms during the French period.
• mestizo (female: mestiza): The Spanish equivalent to métis.
• indio (female: india): used in the same manner as the French sauvage.

New terms included:

• moreno (female: morena): which literally means “brown” in Spanish (“marron” in French). The term used today in Louisiana English, “marronee” surely comes from “marron.” Marronnee is an adjective used in the same manner as the contemporary Hispanophone Caribbean adjective grifo.
• pardo (female: parda): which also means “brown” in Spanish, though used as a synonym for mulato, so lighter in hue than a moreno.
• cuarterón (female: cuaterona): brown but with far lighter overtone in the skin and with closer to Western European facial features.¹³You will be tempted to equate this with the English “quadroon.” I would only like to draw your attention to the usage of cuarterón in colonial Mexican castas: “de mulato y mestiza nace cuarterón.” My translation: a mulato and mestiza produce a cuarterón. Mestizo, in the castas, is the offspring of a Spaniard and an Indian. Mulato, according to the castas, was the child of a Spaniard and a negro. See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-century Mexico (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2005). Castas also hang in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid, Spain. Although, historian Mark Lentz’s research shows that the casta depictions are far too simplistic and that the terms were descriptors in colonial Mexico, too, where Spaniards, negros, mulatos, and indios all blended heavily and where Native Americans absorbed mulatos, negros, etc., to such a degree that they spoke only Yucatec. Mark W. Lentz, “Black Belizeans and Fugitive Mayas: Interracial Encounters on the Edge of Empire, 1750-1803,” The Americas 70, no. 4 (Apr., 2014): 645-75.

The Spaniards in the Cabildo tolerated usage of French in official colonial publications, but enforced Spanish in New Orleans. Still, some priests, registrars, and clerks in the hinterland learned Spanish, like Alexandre Joseph François de Clouet, military commandant of the Attakapas and the Natchez districts. Those who continued to write in French added additional terms, mostly clergymen, which mirrored the Spanish terms. The Attakapas and Opelousas Districts are great examples.

New additions in French during the Spanish period include:

1. nègre griffe (female: négresse griffe): I’ve only ever seen this a handful of times, it’s usage being the same as griffe. More evidence suggesting a person of darker hue, with finer hair than normal.¹⁴Good example of nègre griffe is the 7-year-old Claire, also called Clarisse or Clarice, and Clara, who died 22 Dec 1788 near St. Martinville, La. (SM Chv 1 p 74). She was a slave of Jean Labbé and Jeanne Ozenne, his wife, and had been purchased by François Décuir in 1787 along with her mother Jeanneton and her 3 sisters Manon, Jeanne, and Chalinette, for 2,200 piastres (SM Cth Estates Book Year 1787). Cf. http://www.ibiblio.org/laslave/individ.php?sid=17352
2. quarteron, carteron (female: quarteronne, carterone): Like cuarterón and métis, quarteron will confuse folks expecting an easy blood quantifier in fourths. Because it was a physical descriptor, any number of “combinations” could yield a quarteron, and it sometimes depended on the eye of the beholder, too. In general, quarterons were people falling into a color range from slightly toasted white bread to “white olive” (my modern correlation).¹⁵For example, in 1777, at St. Martinville, 13-year-old Marie Ester was described as quarteronne in the inventory of her deceased master, Paul-Augustin de la Houssaye. Her twin sister, Iris, was described as griffe and their mother was a sauvagesse (SM Cth Notary b1 #139; SM Cth Estates b1 #5). See this post to understand how these terms defy quantification.

   

   QUARTERONNE Marie Thérèse Carmélite Anty

   

   QUARTERONNE Françoise Elvina Pinta

   
   

   

   QUARTERON Aurélien Arthur Pellerin

   

   QUARTERON Ernest St. Julien

   
   

   Spanish censuses taken in Louisiana enumerated Libres/Esclavos (Free, Slaves) and within the Free tolls, Pardos, Negros, and the rest were not assigned adjectives, understood to be “blancos.”

EARLY NATIONAL & ANTEBELLUM PERIOD (1803-)

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With the treaty in 1803 between Napoléon Bonaparte and Thomas Jefferson, still more cultures came to Louisiana and more socio-cultural and political complexities.

It was during this period that roughly 10,000 refugees from Cuba and Hispañola (both sides) fled to Louisiana, doubling the entire population of New Orleans, but tripling the side of New Orleans’s Free People of Color population.

The slave revolt at Destréhan, La Place and Norco in 1811 immensely changed the legal privileges that Free People of Color (FPOC) and slaves enjoyed by an already wary Protestant Anglo-American population whose customs and traditions, especially in relation to persons of color, differed from the Spaniards and the French.

The Royal Decree or Cédula de Gracias issued in 1817 by the Spanish Crown for its American colonies lured many Louisiana Creoles free (and slave) to Mexico, Puerto Rico and Cuba. But, it also instigated a level of back-and-forth migrations between Louisiana and those places that would last until the beginning of U.S. sanctioned Apartheid (1891).¹⁶Sidney J. Lemelle, “‘The Circum-Caribbean’ and the Continuity of Cultures: the Donato Colony in Mexico, 1830-1860,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 6, no. 1 (Jul., 2013): 57-75; Mary Gehman, “The Mexico-Louisiana Creole Connection,” Louisiana Cultural Vistas 11, no. 4 (Winter 2000-2001): 68-75. Charles Kinzer, “The Tio Family: Four Generations of New Orleans Musicians, 1814-1933” (PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 1993).

Despite social and legal actions leading to official segregation in 1891, social interactions continued to take place and even more complex relationships and products thereof grew.

Outside of New Orleans, in parochial and civil records, records continued to be written in French (and often with an English translation) until well into the 1930s. Those written in English where specific terminologies were employed, simply anglicized the French version.

Physical descriptors during this period (new ones in French), include:

• quarteronné, qarteronné (female: quarteronnée, quateronnée): a degree lighter in complexion and closer to Western European “white” features.¹⁷Example is Irène Caso y Luengo, quarteronnée libre, native of St. Martinville, daughter of Commandant Francisco Caso y Luengo, a Spaniard, and Victoire Lemelle, quarteronne libre, native of Opelousas. See next footnote.
• tierceron (female: tierceronne): a degree even lighter in complexion than the quarteronné. I have only seen this in one document, but the term is included in the index of baptisms for St. Louis Church during the Spanish period. ¹⁸Charles Joseph de Penne, tierceron libre, was born 7 Oct 1810, baptized 26 Dec 1811. Baptismal sponsors were Charles Olivier de Vézin – represented by his brother Pierre Olivier du Closels, and Dame A. DE CLOUET, veuve François Benoît de Sainte-Claire. The child’s parents were Joseph-Fortuné de Penne, native of Toulon, France, and Irène Caso y Luengo, quarteronnée libre of St. Martinville. The baptism also includes both sets of grandparents: Joseph-Fortuné de Penne of Toulon, France, and dame Anne St. Sauveur; Don Francisco Caso y Luengo of Biscaye, Navarre, Spain, Captain of the Louisiana Regiment and dame Victoire Lemel [Lemelle], quarteronne libre of Opelousas (SM Ch BC v 6 #1266). He died 24 Feb 1839 in New Orleans (Orleans Deaths 1839 v 6 p 265). St. Louis Catholic Church (New Orleans, La.), Baptismal Books 1777-1800.

Additional civil status terms and caste designations appeared more commonplace in Louisiana French, too:

• couleur libre/de couleur libre, sometimes abbreviated to “c.l.”: nearing the war, this overarching term became the common term used for all free persons of color, regardless of hue and other features. It literally means “Free colored” or “free [people] of color.”
• gens de couleur, sometimes abbreviated to “g.d.c.”: means “people of color.”
• gens de couleur libres, sometimes abbreviated to “g.d.c.l.”: used interchangeably with c.l. above. Literally means “free people of color” (abbreviated to fpoc, in English). The final-S in libre is required as libre (free) is an adjective describing the people, which in this case is les gens, a plural word. The term is always plural because gens is a plural noun. For singular, see the bullets below.
• personne de couleur (plural: personnes de couleur), often abbreviated to “p.d.c.”: basically means the same as gens de couleur above: “persons of color.”
• personne de couleur libre (plural: personnes de couleur libres), often abbreviated to “p.d.c.l.”: used interchangeably with g.d.c.l. above.
• homme de couleur (plural: hommes de couleur), often abbreviated to “h.d.c.”: man of color; men of color.
• homme de couleur libre (plural: hommes de couleur libres), often abbreviated to “h.d.c.l.”: means “Free Man of color”; “Free Men of Color,” (abbreviated to f.m.o.c., in English).
• femme de couleur (plural: femmes de couleur), often abbreviated to “f.d.c.”: means “woman of color”; “women of color.”
• fille de couleur (plural: filles de couleur), same abbreviation as previous term: means “girl of color”; “girls of color.”
• femme/fille de couleur libre (plural: femmes/filles de couleur libres), sometimes abbreviated to “f.d.c.l.”: means “free woman/girl of color”; “free women/girls of color,” (abbreviated to “f.w.o.c.” and “f.g.o.c.,” in English).

Terms used in documents drafted in English, translated from Latin terms were:¹⁹See New Orleans Mayor’s Office, Register of free colored persons entitled to remain in the state, v 2, 1856-1859.; ibid., v 3, 1859-1861; Orleans Parish, Police Jury, Petitions for the Emancipation of Slaves, 1827-1846; Orleans Parish, Parish Court, Emancipation Petitions, 1813-1843.

• Negro (female: negress)
• Mulatto (female: mulatress)
• Grif(f)
• Quadroon

Quadroon
A Civil War claim for damaged property was filed in 1872 by Charles Condley, a native of St. Martinville, son of an Englishman and a quarteronne libre named Palmyre Rivière. He described himself and his parents as follows: “I look like a white man. The Confederates kept trying to make me join their ranks, because they thought that I was a white man. I was born free before the war. My mother was a quadroon, my father a white man.” He never called himself an octoroon.²⁰You can read the entire claim for damaged property here.

As time went by, the census enumerations and categories of U.S. Louisiana became more complex as well.

U.S. Census Categories (Federal)

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The categories pertaining to physical features in U.S. Census from 1810-1930 include:

• 1810: Number of Free Persons and Number of Slaves in Household
• 1820: Number of Free white persons under 16, Free white persons over 25, Number of Slaves, Number of Free colored persons, Total of all persons in household (Free, Slave, FPOC)
• 1830: Number of Free white persons under 20, free white persons 20-49, Total number of Free whites, Total number of persons in household (Free Whites, Blacks or Slaves)
• 1840: Number of Free white persons under 20, free white persons 20-49, Total number of free white persons, Total number of Free colored persons, Number of total slaves, Total number of persons in households (Whites, Colored persons, slaves)
• 1850: Under “description” it states Color: White, Black, Mulatto, however, enumerators wrote in Copper (New Mexico), Yellow (throughout the country, used for Indians), and Indian, in addition to White, Black and Mulatto which the census called for exclusively.
• 1850: Slave Schedules: Black and Mulatto.
• 1860: Under “description” it states Color: White, Black, or Mulatto.
• 1860: Slave Schedules: Black and Mulatto.
• 1870: Under “description” it states Color – White (W), Black (B), Mulatto (M), Chinese (C), Indian (I).
• 1880: The actual document reads under “Physical Description”: Color (White, W., Black, B., Mulatto, Mu., Chinese, C., Indian, I.). In addition to those 5, enumerators wrote in Mexican.
• 1890: Fragments remaining indicate “Whether White, Black, Mulatto, Quadroon, Octoroon, Chinese, Japanese or Indian.”
• 1900: Under description, simply states “Color or Race.” Write-ins include: Black, Caucasian, Chinese, Colored, Eskimo, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Mulatto, Negro, Polynesian, Polynesian Hawaiian, Portuguese, Red, Spanish, White, Yellow.
• 1910: Under physical description, it states “Color, or Race.” Write-ins include: Black, Chinese, Colored, Cuban, Filipino, Greek, Hawaiian, Hindu, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Mulatto, Negro, Polynesian, Puerto Rican, Spanish, White.
• 1920: Under physical description, it states “Color, or Race.” Write-ins include: Black (B), Chamorro (C) (Guam only), Chinese (Ch) – ancestry.com codes as Asian, though original write-ins are clearly “Ch”, Filipino (F), Hawaiian (H), Japanese (J), Mexican (Mex) – ancestry.com codes for Latino, even though Latino does not exist in the write-ins, Mulatto (M), Octoroon (Ot) born in Italy, Belgium, Russia, Hawaii, etc, Polynesian (Pol) and White (W).
• 1930: Under physical description, it states “Color or Race.” Writeins include: Chinese (Ch) – ancestry.com codes this as Asian, but write-ins are “Ch” for Chinese, Filipino (Fil), Hawaiian (Ha), Mulatto (Mu), Negro (Neg), Japanese (JP), White (W).

Of particular interest is the fact that, despite Louisiana’s multicultural presence and abundance in physical features, White, Mulatto, Negro or Black were the terms used from 1850-1930 in 90% of the census enumerations.

In 1920, there were only 38 “Octoroons” enumerated in Louisiana, half of whom were born in Italy, another fourth hailed from the U.S. East Coast, another fourth from Louisiana but all with Anglo surnames and ties to the Midwest and the U.S. East Coast. Not a single household in 1920 in Louisiana categorized as an “Octoroon” carried common Latin Louisiana surnames.

And I have not even spoken of the numerous families who, in Louisiana, fluctuate from Mulatto to Negro to White and back to Negro in census records, all by different census enumerators, of course.

CONCLUSION

My conclusion, at this point, is that Louisiana has acquired the reputation of a self-identified Quadroon and Octoroon community from Anglo-Americans. Louisiana Creoles have been familiar with the term quarteron, and obviously with a similar English term, “Quadroon.” But “Quadroon,” at least as far as civil status goes, did not constitute a separate community. Even enclaves like Frilot Cove in St. Landry Parish, Grand Marais in Iberia Parish, Grand Bois in St. Martin Parish, known for having light-skinned community members, have a range of people from milky white to copper; they’re not just quarteron communities. So far, I see no signs of “octoroon” communities, either. The term has been utterly foreign to Louisiana Creoles, especially in their own languages.

Update 

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I wrote this post in 2011. More recently, in February of this year (2015), my conclusion above has been confirmed in Emily Clark’s insightful study, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. Clark skillfully demonstrates that a Saint-Domingue refugee couple, who had a longer colonial maturation period, imported “Quadroon balls” to New Orleans. But it was not “just because”: there was a demographic imbalance occasioned by the Cuban and Haitian refugees swelling New Orleans’s tiny village walls and established customs, too. Free male refugees of color, Clark shows, married Louisiana Creole women, who were numerous enough to satisfy marriages for both Louisiana Creole men and refugee men. Refugee women of color, on the hand, were left disadvantaged: there were few free men of color for them to marry in New Orleans, so the Quadroon Balls filled the void by presenting them to white men (mostly (American) tourists) who had been lured to the city precisely because Philadelphians and other Americans exoticized the city for exotic and hyper-sexual “Quadroons.” White “foreign” men thus visited the city often for that reason alone. And where the balls lacked, brothels in Storyville, where Creole women marketed “French kisses,” served American appetites well into the 20th century. So, neither Quadroon Balls nor “the Quadroon” (idea of a separate caste of sexualized tawny-toned women) were homegrown; they were foreign imports. 

Relative to the term “octoroon,” I now know that the first time we see it used in Louisiana law is in 1910, a result of the State of Louisiana v. Octave and Joséphine Treadaway. In the case, the American plaintiffs provided an elaborate genealogy of Joséphine’s family tree, determining that, in fact, she was “an octoroon” and thus the couple married in violation of the recent anti-miscegenation law (1908). Judge Frank Chrétien, a Creole himself, dismissed the case, based on (1) the fact that the anti-miscegenation law was unclear as to what a negro was (was it the American term, i.e. a caste; or, was it the Creole term, which was merely a physical descriptor for dark-brown skinned persons?) and (2) the historical and cultural use of negro in Creole Louisiana, which differed from the American context. Judicial officials acquitted the couple, and upheld the Gay-Shattuck Law (1907), which stipulated that griffes, mulattoes, and quadroons were people of color, as were negroes, but the former were not negroes just like Chinese were people of color but not negroes. The American-dominant legislature followed a year later with the first of the hypodescent laws in Louisiana: it stipulated that all people of color would be classed as negroes (Indians in Louisiana only escaped this in 1921 with the Indian Act). There is no translation of “octoroon” used in French, Creole, or Spanish languages in Louisiana and you will not find it in historic Louisiana documents (legal, popular, nor parochial). It, too, is an import.

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