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PART ONE
Women and the Politics of Identity
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The Women across from Congo Square
(1772â1840)
EMILY CLARK
April 27, 1804, was a good day for Marianne Brion. Her attorney, Charles Caune, brought gratifying news from the New Orleans Court of Pleas where he had represented her in a suit against her tenant Michel Meffre Rouzan. A bench of four judges, two of them French speakers and two of them speaking the English of the new U.S. territorial government, had found in favor of Brionâs complaint against Meffre Rouzan for nonpayment of rent. The court ordered the deadbeat lodger evicted and satisfied Brionâs demand for $329 in back rent.1 The case is interesting not just for its satisfying revelation of a feisty female property owner who had her day in court and won against a man but also for the way it unsettles a well-entrenched myth about early New Orleans. Marianne Brion was a free woman of color who would have been generally known as a âquadroon,â and Michel Meffre Rouzan was a French-born white man. According to what has been commonly believed about relations between two such people, it was Meffre Rouzan who should have had the power to give or deny Brion the roof over her head. Women like Brion supposedly lived in houses provided for them by men like Meffre Rouzan, who kept them as mistresses. Such an arrangement has come to be known as plaçage, a practice that has been an object of disapproving fascination since travelers to New Orleans began describing it at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Brion and two other free women of color who were her neighbors were not letting out rooms to make ends meet: among them they owned most of a city block in early New Orleans. The recovery of their life stories opens a window onto an alternate reality that makes it hard for the plaçage paradigm to retain pride of place among historic descriptions of New Orleansâs free women of color.
During the final decade or so of Spanish colonial rule in Louisiana and the first years of American sovereignty, Marianne Brion, Marianne Coffy, and Marie Anstive owned, among them, nearly every square foot of the city block bounded by Rampart, Orleans, Burgundy, and St. Peter Streets on the northern boundary of the part of New Orleans now known as the French Quarter or Vieux CarrĂ©. Situated just opposite Congo Square and fronting Rampart Street, their property was located at the intersection of two mythic sites in the history of the cityâs people of African descent. The women who literally once owned this space are more qualified than anyone to play a part now in rewriting its history.
âThe Quadroon girls of New Orleans are brought up by their mothers to be what they have been; the mistresses of white gentlemen,â the British traveler and social commentator Harriet Martineau assured her readers in 1837. âEvery young man early selects one, and establishes her in one of those pretty and peculiar houses, whole rows of which may be seen in the Remparts.â2 Twenty years before Martineau marked the quadroon cottages of Rampart Street indelibly on the map of the American imagination, Benjamin Henry Latrobe made a different Rampart Street destination famous. âApproaching the Common,â on the edge of the city one Sunday morning in 1818, Latrobe reported that he âheard a most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse-millâthe horses tramping on a wooden floor.â When Latrobe got close enough to see what produced the racket, he found âthat it proceeded from a crowd of five or six hundred persons, assembled in an open space or public square.â The stomping and clapping that assailed Latrobeâs ears that day came from hundreds of African men and women absorbed in the ritual of the ring dance, circling around one another to the beat of two drums and a primitive banjo for hours on this Sunday afternoon.3 Latrobe had stumbled across Congo Square, the famous African dancing place of early New Orleans where the musical traditions that would eventually infuse jazz were sustained and celebrated. Between them, Latrobe and Martineau created two of the most popular itineraries for visitors to New Orleans in the two decades before the outbreak of the Civil War, travelers who often came in search of the exotic and the naughty, as some still do.
Nineteenth-century travelers who followed Latrobeâs helpful instructions to walk âup St. Peterâs Streetâ toward the commons that occupied the space where the cityâs ramparts had once stood would easily find the open space that came to be called Congo Square. If they hoped to get a glimpse of quadroon concubines slipping in and out of one of their âpretty and peculiar housesâ when they reached Rampart Street, however, they would be disappointed. The block that Latrobe passed on his way to the spectacle, a block that occupied valuable real estate just across from the thrumming dance ground, was owned almost entirely by three free women of color: Brion, Coffy, and Anstive. Not one of them was a kept woman discreetly occupying a little cottage given her by a white lover. In fact, the lives of these three Rampart Street entrepreneurs diverge in nearly every particular from the stereotype presented by Harriet Martineau and dozens of others who described the free women of color of New Orleans in the nineteenth century.4 The antebellum American reading public nursed an insatiable appetite for the sordid details of the quadroonâs tragic immorality. The real stories of free women of color like Brion, Coffy, and Anstive would not have satisfied their salacious expectations, whether they visited New Orleans via armchair or steamboat. Without the retrieval of these womenâs histories, what we have amounts to a fanciful travelogue of the cityâs past.
The significance of Brion, Coffy, and Anstive lies in the ways they contradict and complicate the portrait of free women of color that has been reified in both the literary and the historical imagination. This is itself a densely woven fabric of fact and fiction that stretches back into the eighteenth century and across the Caribbean to colonial Saint-Domingue, which became the Republic of Haiti in 1804. Prior to the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, marriage and other forms of sexual partnerships between white men and women of African descent were commonplace in the face of a skewed sex ratio among Europeans that created a shortage of potential wives of unmixed European descent. Some 7 percent of the marriages in the southern part of Saint-Domingue were between Afro-descended women and white men, for example.5 The kinds of unions that European men formed with women of African ancestry ranged from transient liaisons to legitimate marriage. Other white men cohabited without benefit of marriage with women of color, or femmes de couleur, as they were known in Saint-Domingue. Often these relationships were life partnerships in which the men recognized their natural children and made them and their mothers legal heirs in their notarized wills. Many of these unions began when a free woman of color contracted to serve as the mĂ©nagĂšre or manager of a European bachelorâs plantation or urban household, an occupation for which she was remunerated at roughly the same rate as plantation overseers.6
Despite the wide range of types and quotidian circumstances reflected in Saint-Domingueâs interracial partnerships, descriptions of Dominguan mixed-race women and their relations with white men developed into elaborate and sensationalized caricatures in the late eighteenth century. As European nations struggled to come to terms with the place of their colonies in their polities, differences in colonial practices were often exaggerated and held up as reasons to restrict colonial autonomy. The marriages and liaisons of French men with women of mixed African and European descent, known in the colony generally as femmes de couleur, became a particular focal point in the decade before and after the outbreak of slave rebellion in 1791. The figure of the femme de couleur was often referred to as la mĂ»latresse, a label used in Saint-Domingue not to indicate the precise phenotype of a woman born to an African mother and a white father, but to evoke a composite type that could actually be of any number of ancestral combinations. La mĂ»latresse comprised a constellation of stock elements. Her sexuality was naturalized and exaggerated. These women were said to be ânaturally more lascivious than Europeansâ and to âhave reduced voluptuousness to a kind of mechanical art, which they have carried to the highest point of perfection.â Another writer declared that âthe whole being of a MĂ»latresse is a book given to pleasure.â7
The mĂ»latresses of these late-eighteenth-century descriptions had an insatiable appetite for luxury, one that most often took shape in the form of sartorial extravagance. They indulged themselves in âthe most beautiful things that India produces,â according to the French Caribbean writer Moreau Saint-MĂ©ry, and decorated these opulent fabrics with lace and masses of costume jewelry. There were, Moreau advised, âa fairly large number of mulattos in Saint-Domingue that could change their entire ensemble every day for a year.â8
The trait of the mĂ»latresse that made her dangerous, rather than simply offensive to European notions of propriety, was her cold-hearted exploitation of white male lust to satisfy her taste for luxury. âEvery night at bedtime,â Moreau confided, âyou can see the girls of color leaving their homes, often lit by a lantern carried by a slave, to go and spend the night at the home of the one they love most, or the one who pays best.â Dominguan mĂ»latresses were said to eschew men of their own racial background to flirt with white men at balls to which they were admitted and men of color barred. There the women performed a seductive dance called the Chica, âa kind of lute where all the tricks of love and all its means of triumphing are put into motion.â With the aid of her gorgeous clothes, the charms of the Chica, and her command of the arts of lovemaking, the mĂ»latresse was an irresistible temptress. She seduced men away from the wives and legitimate children who were the proper objects of their affection, and she diverted their allegiance from mother country to the colony and its unique diversions.9
At the very end of the eighteenth century and early in the nineteenth, the figure of the Dominguan mĂ»latresse was transported from her native territory to New Orleans. The relocation was physicalâhundreds of Dominguan women of color sought refuge in New Orleans in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolutionâbut it was its figurative migration that was most powerful in fixing the extravagant, parasitic mĂ»latresse in New Orleans.10 When travel writers described free women of color in New Orleans during the first decades of the nineteenth century, their accounts echoed those produced by earlier writers on the Dominguan mĂ»latresse. This is hardly surprising. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors freely borrowed from one another in a practice that would be recognized today as clear plagiarism. Hearsay was considered an acceptable source. Harriet Martineau simply employed the conventions of her era when she confidently declared that, âthe Quadroon connexions in New Orleans are all but universal, as I was assured on the spot by ladies who cannot be mistaken.â11 It would never have occurred to Martineau to consider her source and investigate the uni...
