Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  Chopin, a white Missourian who married a Creole cotton trader, meant this chilling story to be a morality tale, though one full of gray areas arrayed on the prism of skin and longing in a mixed-race land.20 But the frame—the song of Manna Loulou, and her sharing of the story—is what is most interesting. Why would Chopin imagine a scenario like this, in which a slave elicits her owner’s sympathy for another slave, cruelly treated?

  The author herself came from a Confederate family. Her stories romanticized plantation life, and tacitly, slavery, even as they exposed the realities endured by the black, brown, and white women often forgotten within those grand mansions. (A century later, her famous novel The Awakening would become a staple of early women’s studies classes.) Chopin sought to acknowledge the voices of those formed within and by these illicit unions; she attached romantic scenarios to the racial boundary crossings that the steps of the quadrille and other dances made palpable. She found her way into doing that, the opening scene of “La Belle Zoraïde” suggests, through the Creole songs that floated through the air in the hallways of her own Southern relations, and which she likely heard when she herself lived in Louisiana as a young wife.

  The Creole song tradition is mostly lost now, its revelations rerouted into Acadian folkways or submerged within the torch ballad lineage that later emerged in Harlem and Paris cabarets. Like the rhythm-shifted quadrille, these ballads originated as part of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, developing within the multicultural milieu of a new nation shaped by empire. Their melodies filled the spaces between official realms of work and leisure. They flourished in the home, forming a dialogue between slaves and the mistresses and children they served. Sometimes white men, expressing their own color line–violating attractions through the voices of others, appropriated the form. Creole songs also filled the streets, where vendors adapted them to advertise delicacies that, like the tunes they sang, located the sweet spot where African and European tastes merged.

  Popular before the age of recording and only occasionally adapted by either classical composers or folklorists, Creole songs, like the mixed language in which they were rendered, are not commonly known today. Only a few performers have dedicated themselves to their preservation. Camille Nickerson, known as the Louisiana Lady, performed them in her touring show beginning in the 1930s, when she served as president of the National Association of Negro Musicians. The Jewish immigrant singer Adelaide van Wey (née Silversteen) recorded some florid versions of them in the 1950s. Today, author and performer Sybil Kein maintains the tradition in connection with the Creole Heritage Center in the Northwest Louisiana enclave of Natchitoches. Some Creole songs also figure within the white, French-born Cajun dance repertoire still thriving in bayou Louisiana, though time and adaptation to different communities have shifted their meanings. Creole identity enjoyed a pop moment in 2016, when Beyoncé claimed it in songs and images from her “visual album” Lemonade. Still, it remains mostly obscured within today’s mainstream narratives, a complex and vital part of American history reduced to the flavor packet in a box of dirty rice.

  “Creole” itself is a highly contested term. Asked to explain how it might apply to people, someone with a little knowledge might focus on the French language or on a general Mediterranean bent that allows for some Spanish to slip in. The lingering presence of the Caribbean might also surface. “Creolization” has become a common synonym for hybridity in general, a soaking up of influence the way rice soaks up red. The conflicts and power struggles inherent in that process are often overlooked in favor of simply enjoying a distinct taste. Even the crucial role of Creoles of color as pioneers of jazz and country music, and inventors of the giddy hybrid known as zydeco, is often reduced to a happy nod toward the indulgences of Mardi Gras.

  Before jazz and country had those names, however, a different kind of Creole song made a mark on the American imagination. Its form was feminine, even when its practitioners were male, and the dialogue it represented was distinctly interracial. These songs of domestic life and romance fleshed out a private sphere in which erotic exchange was both a defining element and a threat. These little ditties contained much more than mere pleasantries: they were born of the closest mingling imaginable, bringing the facts and fantasies of miscegenation out of the public spaces where it became visible, and back into the bedrooms and kitchens where the American family was evolving.

  Nothing is more intimate than the primal scene where these songs were enjoyed, like the one where Chopin’s old nanny serenaded her charge. The most frequently cited account of Creole songs is an 1886 article by none other than that master of the fictional dance, George Washington Cable. “How many tens of thousands of black or tawny nurse ‘mammies,’ with heads wrapped in stiffly starched Madras kerchief turbans, and holding ’lil maitre or ’lil maitresse to their bosoms, have made the infants’ lullabies these gently sad strains of disappointed love or regretted youth, will never be known,” wrote the Grandissimes author. Cable was not a Creole himself—his father was a Virginia slaveholder and his mother a New England Puritan. Yet, born and raised in Louisiana, he developed a lifelong fascination with the perils and possibilities of race mixing. On an 1885 speaking tour with Mark Twain, Cable performed a selection of Creole songs, accompanying himself on guitar.21 Contemporary reports indicate that his “simple, quaint and dignified” performances were gentler than a minstrel’s mugging, though equally loved by paying white audiences.

  Cable’s starched-collar evocations carried forward something very complex. Within the fraught negotiations of still-forming America in the early 1800s, the imagined or distantly observed Creole became one of America’s first exotic, not-quite-white characters. A shifting racial category that encompassed people of mixed African blood as well as those with French and Spanish ancestry became linked to a tawny aristocracy demonized as decadent and cruel. The term “Creole” also often included the slaves of that elite who had spent time in the Caribbean, another region where cultures blended as much as they clashed. Antebellum Anglo-Americans presumed a certain unhealthy intimacy between Creoles and their slaves. Accounts of their lives together veered from rhapsodically sensual to sadistic. (One particularly sick variation on the standard cautions about Creole-slave mixing is the tale of the murderous psychopath Madame LaLaurie, retold in the twenty-first-century television show American Horror Story—a nightmare with a sexual undercurrent, since LaLaurie’s alleged medical experiments on male slaves included genital mutilation.) The melody and romance of Creole songs made palatable these suspect desires.

  Like the mixed-race women whose lives became subsumed within the myth of the quadroon, Creoles in the white imagination of antebellum Louisiana became avatars of romantic anxiety and allure, and their unclear (to outsiders) lineage pushed fantasies of miscegenation to the forefront. The Creole gentlewoman’s life cycle as it was commonly depicted was marked by the touch of her servants: the mammy who cuddled her; the girlish companion who brushed her hair; the coachman who took her hand and helped her to the street. Bound together within the daily dance of domestic life, Creole mistresses (masters are rarely mentioned in these accounts) and their slaves supposedly spent hours in musical dialogue.

  Creole songs were rarely singled out as a phenomenon in antebellum times, but they became a conduit for Southern nostalgia after the Civil War ended. A 1925 New Orleans Item-Tribune article featuring songs collected by Ruth Harrison, a socialite and “tireless worker” at preserving folk tradition, added musical annotation to this century-old image. It describes a typical afternoon in which a “dusky” ladies’ maid advises her mistress on a new love affair with “her wiles and manoeuvers, her love potions and subtle magic”—and with “gay little couplets and quatrains fraught with meaning.” The slave, a figure similar to Kate Chopin’s Manna Loulou, sings:

  Mam’zel Ce-Ce, look in the glass,

  Why are you blushing that way?

  I don’t know what you’ll answer him,

  But my heart knows you
won’t say nay!

  She encourages her mistress, already wanton in her tendencies, to acquiesce to the demands of an ardent suitor. The mistress responds with a “blush to the roots of her hair,” turning a darker color as if to physically reflect her affinity for the African American advising her.22

  Like the scene of the mammy with her beloved charges that Cable painted forty years earlier, this description of how Creole songs originated turns a relationship based on unpaid labor into a loving union. Yet the songs themselves were rarely just “gay little couplets”—even the snippet shared by Harrison hints at encounters that go much further than a kiss on the hand. Just as the music and dances in New Orleans ballrooms were musical hybrids that embodied unacceptable erotic unions, these songs constructed a Creole voice that sweetly advertised the temptations—and the dangers—of racial mixing. The songs made audible hushed conversations about illicit liaisons and rivalries; on a deeper level, they communicated the powerful displacement haunting bodies and souls—black, white, and brown—whose longing was for lost homelands and for outlaw loves.

  It’s important that these songs originated in the home, and were allegedly shared by free and slave women. Even when composed by men, they were a feminine art form intended to uncover the private concerns of the heart. To uncover the Creole song tradition is to find a communal diary of desire; of that yearning’s displacement, which broke many hearts and bodies; and of the dangerous negotiations through which women, especially, survived a system that deemed some less than human and subjugated all to the whims of their various patriarchs.

  THE FUGITIVE COCOTTE AND THE CANDIO

  The Creole song came to America through the Caribbean. The first one likely written down, called “Lisette Quitté la Plaine,” is also the earliest known text in Creole. The writing credit for this song goes to the Haitian landowner and magistrate Duvivier de la Mahautière—a white man. But the lyrics paint a picture of a paramour whose heartbreak is keeping him from an obviously African dance:

  My steps, far from Lisette

  Stay away from the Calinda;

  And my sash fitted with bells

  Languishes on my bamboula.

  The Calinda is the dance that later fed the central nervous systems of the Afro-American diaspora during Sunday afternoon slave gatherings in New Orleans’s Congo Square. The bamboula is the drum used in that dance. “Lisette Quitté la Plaine” wrings pathos from the plight of two slaves whose happiness has been stanched by a forced separation.23

  That a white overlord-turned-songwriter projected his own emotions into this character reveals how colonial whites, like today’s upper-middle-class kids mimicking inner-city rappers, problematically deployed the black Creole culture that surrounded them. As often happens in Creole songs, in “Lisette Quitté la Plaine” romantic love’s metaphorical bondage gains extra intensity when linked to literal bondage. The dubious value in this is that it allowed whites to imagine themselves in their own kind of bondage, their desires confined the way they themselves confined the very bodies of others.24 Chains of iron cut in ways that chains around the emblematic heart do not. Could real, live black Creoles journeying from the Caribbean to the Gulf Coast within the African diaspora have enjoyed any mobility at all? Yes, some: the caricature of the African-born entertainer in the new world was of someone who used music as a freeing tool.

  They’re in La Mahautière’s song: the wandering lover Lisette is a typical female cocotte, or flirtatious ingénue, while the narrator is a candio, a dancing dandy. In colonial Sainte-Domingue, cocottes were women of mixed race who provided the women of a plantation house with the diversions of song and dance, while candios were men who participated in voudou ceremonies and enjoyed a modicum of liberty in both Northern and Southern American cities at the turn of the eighteenth century. Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave had some characteristics of the candio. In her book on the slave trade in Haiti, Deborah Jenson calls the candio “the slave who was a little master,” a trickster whose hybrid nature allowed him to resist categorical confinement “as much as the female troubadour, black or mulatto, slave or freedwoman, singing to the mistress with whom she might have been in sexual competition.”25

  At least once, a song arose that tried to make light of slaves’ provisional empowerment. “Z’amours Marianne” barely made it to the twenty-first century. It was rarely recorded: once by the late-twentieth-century balladeer John DuBois, a few times as an art song with a classical arrangement, and once, in 1929, at an Okeh Records session in Atlanta, Georgia, that was one of the first to lay down the voices of Cajun musicians in a studio. Sybil Kein seems to be the only person performing it today, as part of her lifelong project to preserve Creole culture. It seems likely that the open tone of sexual insurrection in “Z’amours Marianne” made it less than a favorite in the plantation-dominated South. But it’s a fascinating document.

  Two voices speak through it: a master’s and his conquest’s. She has the upper hand. “If your love is strong, sir,” she sings three times, “You must have money in your pocket!” He replies with a ribald lament implying impotence. “All my canes are burnt, Marianne! My harvest has gone to flames!” And with that, she rejects him.

  “If your canes are burnt, sir, your love has gone to flames!” It’s impossible to not see the big house burning as she stakes her ground. Kein’s research suggests that slaves in New Orleans danced to “Z’amours Marianne” at the end of their free evenings in Congo Square.26 That’s remarkable if true—did slaves really make fun of their owners so openly? But if this is yet another white-authored song, then it’s even weirder: a case of sexual humiliation assigned to the master by himself.

  “Z’amours Marianne” is included in the 1921 songbook Bayou Ballads, compiled by the composer Kurt Schindler and the folklorist Mina Monroe, who grew up on a plantation in St. Charles Parish.27 Monroe, like Cable in his author-tour performances, painted a picturesque image of contented black workers whose bodies overflowed with musical feeling. She offered her songs as proof of the harmony of antebellum interracial life. Yet “Z’amours Marianne” is only the most extreme of her twelve selections, most of which paint scenes fraught with tension, struggles over freedom and self-possession that shaped the emerging American character. Violence simmers within these songs. One weapon often wielded is skin color. The female narrator of one “taunt” song expresses rage that the man she loves has fooled her into thinking he was white, while in another, “Michie Preval,” a white magistrate throws a dance open to African Americans, and it ends in chaos after the slaves steal their masters’ clothes.28

  Only one character stands outside of this foment: the independent “Suzanne, Suzanne, jolie femme,” who chooses to reject the tasty morsels that mingling with white men would guarantee her in favor of the gumbo of her own people. Yet the very idea of such stability within one’s own community can’t be maintained for long, for every other song in the collection reminds us that the “bed of quality” Suzanne rejects may be one where she is soon physically forced to lie.

  Real human beings lived these roles, but they also became characters in song and story, embodying the way African cultural practices permeated America through dancing and music. The cocotte and the candio enjoyed only provisional freedom—or performed freedom as a living fiction, to appease the anger of the whites who dominated them but also lived as their closest intimates. Yet their determination to move, even in bondage, did more than just keep these characters alive. It made them foundational within the psyche of an African American community striving to possess themselves as erotic beings and free people.

  CREOLE AFTERLIVES

  One song still sung in the twenty-first century is “Michieu Banjo,” which celebrates a kind of Creole Yankee Doodle. This is a song for dancing. Pete Seeger brought the song into the American folk revival, but earlier, Camille Nickerson, a Howard University professor and composer–song collector who toured the United States in Creole costume as the Louisiana Lady, brought i
t to concert halls.29 With its sprightly tune and fond description of a finely dressed entertainer, “Michieu Banjo” opened up the space where men of color could express pride and sexual prowess even while enduring the Middle Passage and Deep South. Its jauntiness recalls the boast made by Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave: that when he strolled the Louisiana backroads with his fiddle, “I was considered the Ole Bull of Bayou Boeuf.”30

  This is the figure, again, of the candio, as sexually charismatic as he is flamboyant. One observer described the candio in a religious rite in nineteenth-century French Guiana: “impassive and majestic, draped in a long robe of crimson calico [ . . . ] A young girl stands by the Candio, shading him from the ardent sunshine with an umbrella. Another young girl leads him by the left hand, holding a handkerchief in her other hand. Women follow, singing [ . . . ] An elderly woman steps out of the crowd and goes to congratulate the Candio. He removes his head covering, places it on her head, and invites her to dance. The crowd goes wild . . .”31 Fancy clothes, female camp followers, the ability to entice the crowd: the candio set a template for male rock and soul stardom. In antebellum times, the candio strutted through song and story, feared and admired by whites and blacks alike for his glamour and his way with women. He had a wild side, often misinterpreted by observers. But he was also an elegant figure whose arch self-possession translated into the early-twentieth-century jazz style of Sidney Bechet, which then became the flash of urban bluesmen like Guitar Slim and the outrageousness of rock and funk stars like Little Richard, James Brown, and Jimi Hendrix. Today, rappers such as Andre 3000 and Kanye West are candio types. The musicians who inhabit this character have always specialized in sounds that cross generic borders and disregard traditionalism. In their moves, we can see the playful subversiveness of Michieu Banjo, who moved through antebellum city streets under the power of his own charm and musical dexterity.