White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  As my mother and I watched the crown being placed on Judy’s head, she turned to me and said, “Yes, but she’s not much of a dancer.”

  By then I was a member of the Cleveland Civic Ballet Company, entrenched in dance, all notions of beauty pageants gone. I was perfecting myself in a different way.

  After my mother’s death, I joined a grief group facilitated by the local hospice center. One evening I finally found the courage to share with the other group members the devastation I felt at the loss of my mother, this woman who had been such a force in my life, who forged me as if I were raw metal and she was the smithy. Verging on tears, I pieced together what she meant to me, leaving out any mention of her secret. When I was done, after the other members had offered me their support, Liz the facilitator said, “Gail, you have such grace about you.”

  My mother would have loved that, I thought.

  25

  Marta

  “With much love and affection and services of the mother, no prices at all.”

  —Louisiana Slave Record 1783, reasons for Marta’s manumission.

  I’M MOVING BACK in time, each birth year, death date, marriage, census report are like ghost towns seen from the road offering little but a broken sign flapping in the wind, buildings and barns crumbling into the tall grasses, turning back into nothing. Everyone is gone. There’s no one to ask about the people who once lived here. This is what it is like to unearth the past through the visage of cold documents. I hold the dry paper, read the facts, and envision my people.

  When Judy’s email arrives with the news I’ve been expecting, I realize that she sounds like one of my mystery novel sleuths.

  “In studying other church records as well as some of the notarial records, I’ve developed a theory that Catherine Dauphin was the daughter of Pierre Dauphin and Marta, his former slave.”

  Then she backs up her theory by directing me to the 1783 manumission by Pedro Dauphin of Marta (twenty-four) and her four children Agustin (seven), Juan Bautista (five), Francisco (three), and Catiche (1.30). The preciseness of Catiche’s age, 1.30, irritates me as needlessly mathematical, reminding me of her value as property. The manumission names Pedro as the children’s white father. The reason Pedro Dauphin gives for freeing Marta and her four children is: “Much love and affection and services of the mother.”

  “I believe Catherine may be the same Catiche, as I found nothing further under Catiche,” Judy says. “Based on the relationships given in various baptismal records, I am fairly certain that this is Catherine’s family.”

  My enslaved ancestor has been found. She bears but one name—Marta. She is my portal to slavery’s ugly past. She and her mother are the progenitors of the Frederic African blood. The discovery opens yet another door into Louisiana and American history of the colonial period. It shows the muddled history of race relations, illustrating yet again the mixing of the races and the legacy of slavery writ large in so many people’s DNA, whether they know it or not. She is the Eve in our family story of mixed race.

  All afternoon I return to the manumission documents, each time experiencing a spark of anger tempered by insight when I read: “Much love and affection and services of the mother, no prices at all.” Pedro Dauphin’s statement goes to the core of slavery and patriarchy. What choice did Marta have but to submit, body and soul? What choice did she have but to render services to the man who owned her?

  Historian Lawrence Powell’s observation that “[s]lightly more than 40 percent of all slaves manumitted from 1771 to 1803 reached freedom through ‘gracious’ emancipation” does little to tamp down my disgust.1 Nor does the fact that French Louisiana, and especially in urban areas, “differed from other mainland slave societies in one notable respect: the number of white men willing to free slave mistresses and their mixed-race children, or at least acquiesce in other avenues by which they could reach freedom.”2

  Am I to feel gratitude for Pedro’s kindness in freeing my ancestor and their children? Though the circumstances are radically different, I’m confronted with the same question I asked about my mother’s passing for white: What was the cost to her? What was the cost to Marta for her freedom?

  When I delve into the historical background of Marta’s life, I find that her lineage is as deeply rooted in Louisiana’s early colonial period as those of the German Coast farmers, who I believe are my ancestors and are credited with feeding New Orleans and saving the struggling Louisiana colony. The irony is that without their slaves working the rich alluvial land along the river, wet nursing and tending their children, and cooking their food with the spices and flavors of Africa the Louisiana colony wouldn’t have been saved. Not only did they provide physical labor for farming but also skilled labor from cabinetmakers to metalworkers to surgeons. Slavery was the business that the colony and the country invested in to be profitable, to be viable. And the African slaves were the people who paid the price.

  Marta, my fifth great-grandmother, was born into slavery in 1759 during the Louisiana colony’s last days under French rule. Pierre/Pedro Dauphin (fifth great-grandfather), the father of her children, was born in Louisiana in 1754. His parents, Joseph Dauphin and his wife Ana/Mariana, both natives of France, owned Marta and her mother, Maria.

  Making an educated guess at my sixth great-grandmother Maria’s birth year, based on the birth year of her daughter Marta in 1759, it’s likely Maria was born no earlier than 1744 or 1745, giving credence to her being born in the colony and that Maria’s mother, my seventh great-grandmother, was brought from Africa. If Maria’s mother was brought from Africa, then she came on one of the early slave ships.

  The first slave ships arrived on the Mississippi Gulf Coast between 1719 and 1721, approximately twenty or so years after Louisiana became a French colony. These nineteen hundred Africans were the first of six thousand slaves that John Law promised to ship to Louisiana as part of his charter with France to turn Louisiana into a tobacco colony.3

  If Maria’s mother was on one of these early slave ships, then she probably was from the Senegambia area of Africa, between the Senegal and Gambia rivers of West Africa. The first slaves brought to Louisiana were from that area and were identified as Wolof, Bambara, and Mandinga.4 Almost all the slave ships to Louisiana originated from the port of Lorient in Africa.5 By 1731 when the Company of the Indies left the colony, slave importation had waned.6 Despite the death rates that had reduced the charter generation of Africans by three-fifths, within a decade of their arrival, Louisiana, had become a black majority colony.7

  Whether Maria was born in the colony or not, what I am certain of is that Marta’s mother was Maria. They are listed in a 1769/1770 partition of the estate of Joseph and Mariana Dauphin, Pedro/Pierre’s parents. The heirs are Françoise Dauphin, Juan Dauphin, Josef Dauphin, and Juan Pedro Dauphin (an emancipated minor). The three sons take some land (German Coast) and a group of slaves. The other slaves associated with that estate are: (1) Barataria; (2) Jauno; (3) Juana, wife of Sans Chagrin with four children; (4) LaJoye; (5) Maria with one child; (6) Marta with her mother; (7) Sans Chagrin, husband of Juana; (8) Sans Souci, husband; and (9) unnamed adult. It appears that Maria’s one child is Marta and that Marta’s mother is Maria.

  Slave narratives attest to the dread experienced by slaves when a slave owner died and his or her estate was transferred to their heirs. Depending on the financial situation of the heirs, often slaves were sold and separated from their families.

  Delia Garlic, who was born into slavery, describes the separation of families. “Chillens was separated from sisters and brothers and never saw each other gain. ’Course dey cry. You think they not cry when dey was sold like cattle?”8

  Fannie Moore relates the manner in which women were sold. “It was a terrible sight to see de speculator come to the plantation . . . de ‘breed woman’ always bring more money den de rest, even de men. When they put her on de block dey put all her chillen around her to show folks how fast she can have chillen. When she sold her fami
ly never see her again. She never know how many chillen she had. Colored chillen and sometimes white. ’Taint’t no use to say anything, ’cause if she do she just get whipped.”9

  If the heirs of the Dauphin estate had sold the inherited slaves in a public auction, Marta and her mother would have most likely experienced the same fate. Though the inherited slaves weren’t publically auctioned, they were separated and dispersed among the heirs along with their parents’ other property. Pedro/Pierre inherited Marta and Maria.

  According to Ancestry.com, Pedro Dauphin owned property in the German Coast Township, situated along the Mississippi River and above New Orleans, bounded on one side by his brother Joseph Dauphin’s land with whom he was in partnership with in a sawmill.

  To understand the milieu Maria and her daughter Marta inhabited as enslaved women in eighteenth-century Louisiana, I access the archival civil records for two German Coast parishes: St. Charles Parish, 1770–1803, and St. John the Baptist Parish, 1804–1812. Besides Pedro Dauphin, the Frederic family also owned property along the German Coast. Though I’ve yet to prove one way or another if Ursin Frederic descended from the German Coast Frederic family.

  The archives provide snapshots into the river parishes during the Spanish period and as an American territory, giving a legal accounting of everyday life in the parishes in terms of slave sales, manumissions, and treatment of crimes and misdemeanors of slaves. These records provide a perspective to help me understand the legal positions of enslaved people, as well as slave owners in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Louisiana.

  In relationship to slaves and their masters, the civil records indicate how the local authorities enforced the Code Noir, or Black Code. As early as 1724, the first slave code, Code Noir, was initiated, outlining the treatment of slaves, including under what conditions they could be freed and, once freed, their rights and obligations. The code granted slaves the right to a religious education (Catholic), the ability to be hired out by their masters or work for hire to earn wages, and to bring their masters to court for mistreatment.10

  In the German Coast Parishes’ civil archives, I could find no such redress made by a slave regarding mistreatment. The Code Noir’s intention was to limit opportunities for emancipation.11 The Code also prohibited marriage between whites and blacks whether slave or free, as well as prohibiting owners keeping slave concubines.12 But what appears on paper as a law doesn’t necessarily translate to what actually happened.

  The German Coast civil archives indicate that the Frederics were active in buying slaves, which comes as no surprise. But when I read the details of one transaction involving two siblings, the callousness of the legal transaction becomes too real. Silvain (eleven) and sister, Marguerite (ten), are separated and moved like pawn pieces or worse, livestock.

  Besides slave and land sales, marriage and succession contracts, the St. Charles Parish Original Acts contain accounts of slave runaways and the famous 1811 slave insurrection. Runaways were treated harshly. Not only would they be whipped, sometimes as many as two hundred times, but their lacerated skin was rubbed with sponges soaked in pepper and vinegar, followed by a branding of a fleur-de-lis.13

  Harriet Jacobs in her slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl recounts a particularly horrifying punishment that elaborates on the use of brine. The strong brine was used to prevent the flesh from mortifying and to promote healing.

  Her account of the punishment of a slave named James is particularly horrendous. After receiving a hundred lashes, James is put in the cotton gin and given only a piece of bread and a bowl of water daily. The slave who delivered the water and bread was not to speak to James under threat of a similar punishment. After four days and five nights the water was not used and a horrible stench came from the gin house. When the press was unscrewed, James’s body was discovered partly eaten by rats and vermin. Jacobs concludes that perhaps the rats that had eaten the bread had gnawed him before he died, thus explaining the water not being used.14

  The St. Charles Original Acts 1808 Depositions Regarding a Runaway Slave contains an extended account of a runaway slave named Charles involving the exchange of gunfire between the runaway and the plantation’s overseer (a white man), which resulted in Charles being wounded and dogs tracking him into the sugarcane fields where he is captured.15

  The central issue is not whether he fired in self-defense, but whether he could see whom he was firing on. In other words, was the moonlight sufficient to determine a black man from a white man? All the witnesses testify that the moonlight was sufficient to determine the man’s race. Though Charles denies knowing he fired on a white man, he is sentenced to death. On the same day that Charles was condemned to death by hanging, an appraisal of his worth was conducted. He was appraised at $300.

  In the Spanish’s mania for record keeping, manumission acts were also recorded. One particularly stands out and illuminates the complicated layers of slavery (February 21, 1798). “Catherine Silvie, a free Negro, formerly belonging to Pierre Vieux, declared . . . that she granted freedom to the slave named Baptiste (fifty-two) whom she acquired from Jean-Louis Jardin (Girardin), a free mulatto, in recognition of the faithful service rendered to her by Baptiste during a period of illness.”16 Did a romantic relationship develop between Catherine and Jean-Louis that prompted her freeing him? Or was the reason given the true reason. Regardless, it was not uncommon for emancipated slaves to own slaves and then free them. During the colonial period, the institution of slavery was so pervasive and accepted that the Ursuline nuns and the Jesuits owned slaves. Two-thirds of free households contained slaves.17

  That my ancestors stood on opposite sides of the slavery fence as the oppressors and the oppressed adds to the complicity of my family’s racial history, both clarifying and mudding the question of what it means to be a mixed-race person descended from slaves and slave owners.

  After Dauphin emancipated Marta, she continued to live with him and bore him seven more children. As a free woman of color who’d been a slave, what options were open to her? Regardless of whether their initial sexual encounter was forced or not forced, it was a rape. After all Marta was his property. Pedro had all the power. If she gave her consent to his desires, unquestionably her consent was weighted on his side. Some historians suggest that certain enslaved women used their sexual powers to manipulate their white masters. I find that viewpoint difficult to understand. Having been born into slavery as property of the Dauphin family, Marta learned early that she was subject in all things to their will.

  Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative gives insight into what a slave woman endured sexually. As Jacobs explains, “The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers.”18 As property, women are of no value to their owners unless they continually increase their owners’ stock.

  Jacobs’s white master’s sexual pursuit of her is unrelenting, though he never rapes her. His particular brand of control is still a violation. Rather than submit to him, Harriet asserts her own brand of freedom and has a sexual relationship with another white man in the town, closer to her own age, who shows interest in her plight.

  “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.”19

  But when she gives birth to a girl fathered by her white consort, she despairs. “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”20

  Marta most likely didn’t have the option of finding a white protector. Was her decision to have seven more children with Dauphin after she was freed her way of working within an oppressive society? Was she, like Jacobs, eking out some measure of control? Did she tell herself that at least her owner was near to her own age and she might win his favor, securing freedom for herself and her children? If she did, her and her children’s emancipation proved her right, as
did Dauphin’s will.

  In Pedro Dauphin’s will dated April 3, 1800, he declares that he is “sick in body, in my full senses, memory and natural understanding.” He also states he is unmarried and has eleven mulatto natural children of the Negress Marta. Astonishingly, he divides his property in half, giving one portion to Marta and the other portion to be divided equally among his eleven children. In the event of Marta’s death, her half is to be divided equally among their eleven children. In bearing his children, in succumbing in all things to his desires, Marta secured the economic future of her children. Regardless of how I view my ancestors’ sexual relationship, there is no question that it was a committed one.

  It comes as a surprise to find their relationship cited in historian Kimberly Hanger’s book Bounded Lives, Bounded Places as an example of how mixed racial relationships contributed to the burgeoning and prosperous free black caste. Hanger discusses the long-term common law relationship between Juan Pedro Dauphin and his slave Marta, stressing the importance of kinship among family members as a means for free people of color to enhance their economic and social status. The free black Dauphin family combined their resources to purchase property. In 1802 Francisco and his older brother Augusto, both born into slavery and later freed by Dauphin, gave to three of their younger brothers a large plot of land in Barataria (the haunting ground of privateer Jean Lafitte).21

  Sexual relationships with free black consorts were also a pattern with Pedro Dauphin’s brothers, Joseph and Santiago, who both lived with free women of color.

  However Marta viewed her sexual capitulation to Pedro Dauphin, she remade herself from an enslaved woman to a free woman of color with property and prosperity that was handed down to her children. For a woman who was never even given a surname, she raised her status considerably in a slave owning culture. I’d like to think her canny survival instincts were passed down through the generations.