Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  According to Professor Andrew Jolivétte, there were many Creoles who abandoned their culture the farther they moved away from Louisiana. It doesn’t surprise me that Cleveland Jr. never really identified as Creole to my father and his siblings. How would they make sense of it? They were North Carolina–born. The number of people of Louisiana Creole descent in North Carolina was negligible. Their only link was Catholicism. Creoleness became an abstraction. Even my relatives who remained in Houston don’t live in the Fifth Ward. After World War II ended, Frenchtown began to lose its core identity, especially as segregation ended in the sixties. There was a time when there were certain avenues that darker-skinned black people could not cross over unless they wanted a swift rebuke. When speaking with relatives as they drove me around the Fifth Ward, they categorized where they’d lived as separate from Frenchtown and dubbed Mother of Mercy a black church. I’m not sure if they misspoke or if it was an example of how this community had fallen since it “became” black.

  The further I delved into genealogical studies, the more questions I found. Yes, the Regises were descended from Louisiana Creoles. But if they sought to distinguish their community from black Americans, they must have thought they were different or socially distinct from them. If they thought of themselves as separate, even in a black-and-white world, maybe they once had a higher social position. An uncomfortable thought crept into my mind. Was my family once composed of free people of color who wanted to maintain their social advantage over (other) blacks after migration? The idea seemed perverse. I was never taught, either through family oral history or educators, that free people of color existed. The known story was simple: we were captured from someplace in West Africa, enslaved, emancipated, and so on and so forth. To harbor the possibility that my family was once free on American soil before the Civil War would be to undo twenty-something years of indoctrination as to who I am as an African American. I didn’t want to be the descendants of free people of color. Wouldn’t that mean my family was what I detested, what I assumed Creoles to be—uppity? I wanted to be part of the burden of being black. My blackness is as much tied to my phenotype as my systemic disenfranchisement. If at one time some of my ancestors weren’t as disfranchised, then that would make me unravel. But then again, why was I binding blackness and oppression together? The more I pondered these complicated relationships, the more I found myself speaking and note-taking in circles that returned to the original point: me. Reconsideration is what history is all about; history doesn’t care what you feel. I had to be OK with being uncomfortable with whatever I would find out about my family.

  Ultimately, I decided that I needed some help. I didn’t know how to juggle the contradictory, interrelated identity markers of my family genealogy, that of the Colson family, and the history of Cane River. I reached out to black academics who had experience with ethnography and historical research. I connected with Antoine Hardy, a black Southern professor with a deep affinity for black ethnic studies and a gift for using Twitter as a resource. Every day, Antoine and I researched and exchanged and reviewed articles about the Metoyers, the social milieu of Creoles, and how racial binaries threatened their lives. From his experience I learned which questions to ask, how to keep my mind and heart open for my upcoming trip, and some note-taking skills for fieldwork. While preparing for this ethnographic research, I also searched the Regis surname and Saint Martin, Louisiana, in the Ancestry.com search engine and found a distant cousin, Janice Bradley, in a matter of minutes.

  Janice is a Turpeau and related to David DeWitt Turpeau who wrote an autobiographical history of the Regis and Turpeau lines. She had a long, extensive family tree, one she worked and reworked over decades. I took a deep breath and sent her an e-mail. She responded within a few hours, and we hopped on the phone that same night. Toward the middle of our conversation, she told me that my earliest ancestor that she could trace was Maturin Regis Sr., said to be from Virginia. He was manumitted, moved to Louisiana, and fell in love with and married a Creole woman named Carrie. She said, “They once all lived along the Cane River.”

  “Cane River?” I asked. That’s absurd, I thought. No way could I have a link to where I’d be traveling. No one would believe me. Hell, I didn’t want to believe it myself. Saint Martinville isn’t near Cane River, so unless Maturin or Carrie traveled or there were other family members I had yet to learn about. . . . As Turpeau mentioned in his characterization of Creole communities, how connected we were, it was beginning to feel too coincidental for comfort. I thought I was kidding myself when I saw how quickly the threads were weaving themselves together in front of my eyes. But I soon learned that I wasn’t.

  * * *

  I FLEW INTO Alexandria, Louisiana, at the end of April 2018, right at the peak of crawfish season. It was an auspicious arrival, one of many to come. As my plane pulled into its gate at the airport, I notified Tracey of my arrival, to which she responded with an enthusiastic “Welcome home!” I couldn’t help but feel a sliver of happiness alongside a more overwhelming sense of uneasiness. I’m a New Jerseyan through and through. But New Jersey is not my ancestral home. Tracey told me that it is not uncommon for people to scrutinize one’s face and guess the parish where that person’s family is from. Even though I was a few generations removed from Louisiana, I wondered if someone would recognize me. Then I silently admitted to myself, as I walked to baggage claim, that I actually did want someone to recognize my face and tell me something I didn’t know about myself. Maybe then I would feel less uneasy and more accepting of my lineage. After all, I was in the Deep South now. It would be much more difficult for me to remain in denial in the land of my people.

  Because Louisiana was not far from where Antoine was based and spring break was on, he agreed to meet me in Alexandria to help me with the ethnographic research. Just as I had done in the Lowcountry, I wanted to have notes, video, audio, and photography. I would primarily take the notes and Antoine would do some of the notes alongside the visual component.

  Tracey picked Antoine and me up the following morning at eight thirty. The closer we got to Natchitoches, the more the streets began to change. The street signs were in French and adorned with the fleur-de-lis. Magnolia trees were everywhere. Scenic roads were paved with cobblestones, and the buildings reflected Spanish and French architectural styles. The downtown district was full of restaurants, galleries, mom-and-pop shops, and fashion boutiques. When Tracey drove over the Cane River Bridge, the view of the town reminded me of when I first walked across the Pont des Arts in Paris, looking toward the first arrondissement.

  There is no mention of Marie Thérèse, Tracey’s great-grandmother, anywhere in the heart of Natchitoches. The average visitor does not know who she was. The parish is most famous for Steel Magnolias. The worldwide attention that the film brought to this otherwise quaint town caused a boom in the tourism industry, especially for the hotels and bed-and-breakfasts.2 Tracey spoke to us along the waterfront of the downtown district, where she expressed her main critiques about the town. “When people come here [to Cane River], when Creoles come here from California or from Chicago or wherever they’re coming from, this is their Mecca. This is where everybody wants . . . this is home, this is where they want to come to, because everybody has that connection to their particular family—and then they walk away feeling kind of left out.” The Creoles, those who have ties to Cane River, are all over the United States, and yet when they come home, there is very little reflection of themselves in the landscape.

  I got a severe sense of this erasure when Tracey took me on a tour of Melrose Plantation, right off Highway 119. When Marie Thérèse died, she left Louis, one of her sons with Claude Metoyer, 912 acres, upon which he began to build Melrose.3 Along with the typical features of a plantation, such as pecan trees, colonnades, and monochromatic tones, there is a structure called the African House, built by slaves, whose purpose remains unknown. A two-story hutlike structure, it has a roof of Cypress shingles, floors of brick and hand-hewn ti
mbers, and a twelve-foot overhang.4 Nowadays, the African House is home to the murals of Clementine Hunter, the community’s most famous artist of folklife from 1940 to 1980. Much reverence was paid to her on the tour but not much to Marie Thérèse. To understand this, one must understand the Metoyers’ loss of affluence.

  To put into perspective just how wealthy Cane River Creoles were compared to other free people of color in the South, in 1860 the average free black person’s wealth was $34, whereas a Cane River Creole’s was $1,875. The region took two hits in the 1830s and 1840s. In the 1830s, property costs were rising as people speculated, and too much credit led to a decade-long depression. When the Depression ended in the 1840s, a flood brought an influx of caterpillars that ruined half of Cane River’s crops, causing the price of cotton to drop from nine to four cents a pound in two years. Unlike the white people of Cane River, the Metoyers did not have any Creole peers in their income bracket, so even though they produced more than the whites, their per capita wealth continued to decrease, because they married and had children with those who made less than their family.5

  As Louisiana became more Americanized and it became a black-and-white binary, Creoles were not as distinct a class as they once were. As new white American settlers came into the parish and not only depleted the available land and finite food supplies, there was a level of tension played out differently among the Cane River whites and Creoles. While the Cane River whites often amicably associated with the incoming whites—and eventually subsumed their identities under these newcomers—to maintain social and actual capital, the Creoles of color soon learned that their friendship was of interest to whites only if there was a profit involved, which usually led to legends of property loss. While white people were able to rebuild after the Depression and the Civil War and emancipation, the Creoles of color were not. In a sense, they had been blackened.6

  Melrose Plantation passed into white hands when brothers Henry and Hyppolite Hertzog purchased it for $8,340 in 1847. After Reconstruction, the Hertzogs sold to the Henrys. The Henrys owned Melrose from 1884 to 1970. From 1971 till the present, the Association for Preservation of Historic Natchitoches (APHN) owned the plantation.7

  Despite Tracey having a stake in Melrose Plantation, this was her first time going on a tour there. From the moment it started, I thought this whole event was a masochistic experience for her. Our tour guide was a white woman who could not have been any older than twenty-three. Though friendly, she had a bubbliness that seemed ill-suited to a plantation tour. Unsurprisingly to me, almost like a repeat of Sapelo Island, there were no other people of color on the tour. The guide began with the story of Marie Thérèse, who she said got her name Coin Coin, the onomatopoeic French equivalent of Quack Quack, because she allegedly talked too much. I shot a glance at Tracey, who smirked and swayed from side to side, her bottom lip eventually tucking into her mouth. “Don’t say anything,” I whispered.

  The guide did mention Marie Thérèse Coin Coin’s relationship with Claude Thomas Metoyer and the singsong tunes she sang to describe their bond did convey the illicitness of that union. Yet beyond mentioning her eventual freedom and the birth of her son, who was responsible for building the plantation, nothing else was said. There was no mention of her wealth, land and slave ownership, or descendants. Her life story was packed into a one-minute introduction. I learned more about the Hertzog family and about Cammie Henry, who turned the plantation into an artists’ retreat, than about the Metoyer family, despite the fact that paintings of Marie Thérèse Coin Coin’s children and grandchildren still hang in one of the dining rooms.

  You are a descendant of Marie Thérèse Coin Coin if you live in and around Natchitoches and your last name is one of the following: Metoyer, Antee, Hamilton, Sarpy, Roque, Severin, Conant, Colson, Rachal, Dupre, Balthazar, LeComte, LeCour/LaCour, or Llorens. I don’t think their absence from Melrose was out of ignorance. The vast majority of the extended family members did not want to be a part of the APHN and their cultural tours. On one hand, I can see why they wouldn’t feel welcome if their grand-mère is characterized as a talkative whore. They shouldn’t want to be a part of APHN. They should have control over these tours themselves. And since these descendants knew their own history, there might have been no purpose to be included. Would they be participating for themselves or for an outside audience? If Creoles were being exoticized, there was too much at stake; their whole lives and histories would be stamped into gimmicks and cheap thrills.

  Cultural dissonance defines Natchitoches. There is no one meaning. There are multiple voices that clash over Marie Thérèse Coin Coin and her legacy. The academics who visit Melrose deny that Marie had any architectural say over the plantation, particularly the African House. The APHN is a not-for-profit group whose members are mainly affluent white women, who center the narrative of Melrose Plantation on three women: Marie Thérèse Coin Coin, Cammie Henry, and Clementine Hunter, the self-taught black artist. The problem with focusing on a black woman like Marie without any of her children’s children involved in these preservation groups is that doing so drives a wedge between us, the descendants, and them, the tourists and conservators. In an earlier Melrose brochure, Marie Thérèse Coin Coin is written about as a legend, not an actual person. The fact that there are no pictures of her only adds to her mythical aura. The Cane River Creoles are not exactly pleased with others telling a story that they themselves know. One of them asked me, “Why should the largely Anglo members of the APHN tell their version of our story for the benefit of their organization?”

  One voice dominates and inadvertently silences the others or pushes them to the periphery. The Cane River Creoles argue that the APHN directors are cherry-picking certain parts of Marie Thérèse Coin Coin’s story to suit their purposes; thus her life becomes inauthentic. Marie Coin Coin wasn’t just a strong woman—a crutch that I believe white folks use when they’re at a loss how else to compliment us—but the founder of a community. The omission of oral history leads to erasure altogether. A Cane River Creole once attended a Melrose Plantation tour on which an APHN member mentioned twice that Cane River Creoles had been “wiped out by Jim Crow.”8 On our tour, the guide never said anything that was blatantly untrue, but neither was there any mention of Cane River Creoles and their influence. Toward the end of it, I felt bad for Tracey. I could imagine what thoughts must have been coursing through her mind as the half-truths were spoken with no acknowledgment of her large family tree in the area.

  When we were back in downtown Natchitoches, Tracey told me a beautiful metaphor for her identity: “There’s this huge tree, and it’s got these big huge roots, and if you’re only watering one side of the tree and only one side of the tree is getting the sunshine, then the rest of it’s gonna die. So I choose to water and give sun to my entire tree, not just to the parts that make everybody else feel comfortable or the side that they like the most.” How much water and sun can a Creole woman give if the tree’s not on solid ground? What good are water and sun if people believe that that species of tree is extinct?

  Nevertheless, there is still a large part of Natchitoches Parish that has yet to be flooded with tourists: Isle Brevelle, an 18,000-acre stretch of land between Cane River and Bayou Brevelle; 16,000 of those acres are still owned by Creole families. It was at Isle Brevelle where I got to see a possible precursor to cloistered communities like Frenchtown in Houston, where Creole families like the Regises migrated. The original owner of all 18,000 acres was Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, one of Claude and Marie Coin Coin’s sons. A blacksmith and businessman, he petitioned the Spanish Crown for land in 1795 and received 395 acres. He and his brothers came to Isle Brevelle and cleared the canebrakes and prepared the land for tobacco and cotton cultivation. With each new harvest, they would buy out their neighbors, who also had received grants from the Spanish Crown but did not maintain the land. By the mid-1800s, Metoyer’s family held those 18,000 acres and five hundred slaves. When his wife, Agnes, died, Augustin divided his estate
among his children; it amounted to over $140,000, an incredible figure in the midst of a worldwide depression. Whenever his children married, they would receive land, cash, slaves, or all three. Like his mother, he eventually freed the slaves he bought, rendering a complicated portrait of those people of African descent who participated in the plantation economy.9 To this day, Metoyer descendants and their extended-family members still live in the area.

  While there, I was able to see just how wide and pristinely blue Cane River is. We toured the Badin-Roque House, the former residence of Marie Coin Coin’s grandson Augustin Metoyer, later turned into a convent for a few years before passing through several hands to the Saint Augustine Historical Society. We toured the house with Tracey’s eighty-year-old father, Oswald Colson, who is one of the few remaining people who still know how to maintain a house with bousillage, a mixture of clay with grass and/or retted Spanish moss used to fill the spaces between the timbers of the building’s walls. Then we traveled farther down Highway 484 to Saint Augustine Church. Like Our Mother of Mercy in Frenchtown, Saint Augustine was the Creole social hub. The connection reaffirmed to me that Catholicism was one of the strongest ties that my father’s family had to their heritage.