One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  My great-grandfather was an overlap between my life and the lives of my New Orleans cousins. He made me feel as if the distance between us would be less than I’d imagined. As I planned my trip to New Orleans, I began to wonder what else Sheila and I would find in common. There was a directness in her conversation and a playfulness that was familiar to me. I started to fantasize that despite Sheila’s upbringing in a black community in the South and my childhood as a white girl raised in Connecticut, we’d find that there was hardly any difference between us at all.

  My first afternoon in New Orleans, Sheila picked me up at the guesthouse where I was staying for a quick tour around town. I jumped into her car, we shared a brief hug across the gear shift, and then we sped off. We were shy with each other. As Sheila pointed out the locations of various archives and historical sites of interest, she kept stealing glances at me and saying, “This is so weird.” I wondered if what she meant was that my white appearance was weird. Like many of my Broyard cousins, Sheila had always known that she had kin “living on the other side,” but I was the first one that she’d actually met.

  With her caramel-colored skin, wavy brown hair, little button nose, and full round cheeks, Sheila looked to me as though she could be any number of things: South American, Indian or Pakistani, Puerto Rican, or light-skinned African American. People in New Orleans, however, were accustomed to her Creole looks and seemed to generally recognize her for what she was. It helped that she spoke with the Yat accent—a kind of Brooklyn drawl adopted by locals—and greeted people with the popular expression “Where y’at, girl?” and called them “bay” for “baby.”

  Sheila had always known about her Creole roots, but by the time she was born, in 1964, Creole identity in New Orleans had been folded into a larger black identity in the fight for civil rights. (Only in recent years have some Creoles of color started to reclaim their mixed-race ancestry.) After we had known each other for a while, Sheila confided that my interest in my black roots made her feel less self-conscious about searching out her white ones. Although many African Americans have European forebears, curiosity about this branch of the family tree is often viewed with suspicion by other blacks. But research into the black branch can often be a disappointing dead end.

  Some African Americans have a precious handful of photos or letters or a Bible inscribed with their lineage that has been passed down from one generation to the next; others have stories—about the trials endured by a great-grandmother born into slavery or the whispered name of some prominent white man who makes a cameo on the family tree. Most black people who are descended from slaves, however, have missed out on accumulating family artifacts, since their ancestors were legally forbidden to learn to read or write, nor did they have the income to hire a photographer or the urge to capture for posterity the meagerness of their existence.

  Census slave schedules list individuals only by age, skin color, and gender. Newspapers didn’t include details about blacks’ lives or were too prejudiced to be reliable as sources. African American publications were rare and more rarely preserved. Personal records such as receipts for slave sales, if they exist at all, often remain in the private hands of the descendants of slaveholders. Louisiana is an exception: unlike the British-derived common law used in the rest of the United States, the legal system bequeathed by its French colonial history was based on civil law, which required the execution of all financial transactions before a notary public. As a result the Notarial Archives in New Orleans contain records of slave sales and purchases, as well as wills, successions, and marriage contracts that often include details about slaves in the property inventory. Even with these abundant sources, however, it can be very difficult to locate an enslaved ancestor without the name of the owner. And documenting the trip across the Middle Passage can be impossible without the serendipitous mention somewhere of the ancestor’s African origins.

  In the absence of a specific personal history, many African Americans have only the general narrative of black American history, much of which is tragic, in which to insert themselves. The other choice has often been to either mythologize the past with stories of African kings and queens or to ignore it completely.

  On my second day in New Orleans, Sheila and I got down to work. We headed over to the Historic New Orleans Collection, where we spread our research across one of their large oak tables. After a couple of hours comparing notes, Sheila set down her best guess of the line of our male ancestors from Paul Broyard back through four generations to the first settler, the white Frenchman Etienne.

  Sheila’s records were organized into separate binders for each branch of the family. She knew all the names, dates, and places off the top of her head. I tried to follow along with her reasoning, but I kept confusing this person with that person as I shuffled through my own heap of papers, on the verge of throwing my hands up in despair. However, a part of me was also relieved to find myself in the role of her apprentice, self-conscious as I was about the advantage my father had already secured me. But Sheila had no better idea than I did which of our white male ancestors was responsible for the origins of the family’s mixed-race identity. We started searching through the archdiocesan volumes recording all the Catholic sacraments performed in the city, looking for more clues.

  As we worked, another researcher—a white woman—was scrolling through microfilm at a nearby reader. She called over to one of the archive’s assistants.

  “It says here that the mother of my great-great-grandmother was born in St. Domingue. Where’s that?” she asked.

  “Present-day Haiti,” the assistant explained. “It used to be a French colony.”

  “Haiti?” the woman repeated in a surprised voice.

  The assistant seemed accustomed to this response. She gave a little speech about how the island had once been populated by blacks and whites, many of whom emigrated to New Orleans in the wake of a slave revolt at the end of the eighteenth century.

  “So it doesn’t mean that she was black,” the woman said.

  Sheila and I, catching each other’s glance, had to fight back laughter.

  “Not necessarily,” the assistant said. But the woman had learned all she wanted for one day. She packed up her things and stood to go.

  -12-

  On January 13, 1753, Etienne Broyard arrived in New Orleans from La Rochelle, a port city on the Atlantic coast of France. He was about twenty-four years old, a soldier in the French Royal Army. More than likely he’d been assigned to the Louisiana colony against his will.

  In fortresses around France, soldiers attempted to mutiny when they heard they were being sent to the “wet grave” of the New World, so called because its location placed inhabitants in the path of floods and hurricanes and exposed them to a damp climate that brought on sickness and famine. The discontent of the soldiers made the trip across the ocean tense, with the officers barely able to control the men. On landing in New Orleans, the soldiers were sometimes assembled in the town square and made to watch as the most defiant among them were hanged, to discourage further disobedience.

  Etienne had indeed found himself in a new world. La Rochelle had a population of close to twenty thousand people and boasted a grand theater, numerous hotels and churches, taverns and shops. New Orleans was a small grid of dirt streets, nestled up against the riverbank, surrounded by swampland. Most of the buildings were simple one-story wooden houses. About three thousand people lived there—almost half of them were slaves. Etienne had probably never seen sub-Saharan Africans before. Despite La Rochelle’s position as a midway point in the triangular Atlantic trade route, slave ship holds were empty when stopping off to sell their goods on their way back to Africa.

  Few people in Louisiana had come there voluntarily. Beyond a handful of Canadian fur trappers and holders of land concessions, the white colonists were mostly rejects from French society: convicts who’d been condemned to the gallows, vagabonds, and prostitutes, all deported to help populate the inhospitable outpost. To mak
e matters worse, the Natchez and Chickasaw Indians, upset over French encroachment onto their lands, kept raiding the settlements, killing the men and taking the women and children as prisoners.

  Back in 1731 the Company of the Indies, hired by the crown to colonize Louisiana, had gone bankrupt and pulled out. With their departure the slave trade into the colony temporarily dried up. The Africans who were already there were overworked and underfed and often ran away, sometimes taking their masters’ guns with them and teaming up with the local Indian tribes. In 1754 the outbreak of the French and Indian War between France and England over control of North America brought British blockades of French ships carrying desperately needed supplies.

  As a soldier, Etienne fared no better than anyone else. Corrupt officials sold the food intended for the troops, leaving them with little to eat besides Indian corn, which the French considered animal feed. A French official complained to powers back home that the fighting force was often left hungry and naked. The soldiers who dared to desert risked capture by hostile Indians, who might burn them alive or scalp them. If the soldiers were caught and returned to the colony, the deserters would also almost certainly face execution.

  With such desperate conditions, nobody paid much attention to segregating the races. From the very beginning, white men, confronted with a shortage of white women, had taken up with Indian women or slaves. Initially French authorities followed a policy established in Canada of encouraging mixing with native women to increase the colony’s population. Louisiana’s first priest went so far as to publicly declare that “the blood of the savages does no harm to the blood of the French,” and went around trying to get these couples to come to the church so he could marry them.

  A few white men even managed to legally marry black women before the French Code Noir, or Black Code, introduced in 1724 to regulate the control of slaves and the few free blacks, put an end to the practice. It became a crime for white men to even have sexual relationships with slaves or women of color, although the many mixed-blood children whose baptismal records described them as having a “father unknown” suggest that this particular law wasn’t regularly enforced. Some of these unknown fathers eventually paid a visit to the notary public, where they acknowledged the children as their own and occasionally granted them their freedom too. Less frequently, the men emancipated the children’s mothers. Before long a new population of people began to emerge in New Orleans: blacks who had been born into freedom, who became known as les gens de couleur libre, or the free people of color.

  A slave could also gain his freedom on the battlefield or for faithful service to a master or mistress. One African native, named Louis Congo, was emancipated in exchange for agreeing to serve as the colony’s official executioner. Nobody else wanted the job: it was brutal work, and Louis was always in danger of being assassinated by the friends and family of those he’d punished. Now that he was free, though, Louis could buy and sell property, marry whomever he wanted, and testify against another free person in court, just like white people. Marriage to a white person, however, was still off-limits. And he was no longer subject to the punishments outlined in the Code Noir that he was occasionally obliged to carry out—branding for first-time runaways, severing the hamstrings of those who made a second break for freedom. If a slave struck his master “so as to produce a bruise or shedding of blood in the face,” Louis was charged with executing him.

  While many of Etienne’s fellow soldiers defied the Code Noir and slept with (or raped) black women, Etienne appears to have been an exception. He had barely arrived when he impregnated a young white New Orleans native named Louisa Buquoy. Louisa’s mother’s family was originally from La Rochelle, which may explain this speedy conquest.

  The couple married before the baby came, and went on to have ten more children over the next twenty-five years—each one promptly baptized, sometimes at all of a day old. In a city fraught with famine, flood, and frequent outbreaks of smallpox and yellow fever, Etienne and Louisa apparently were unwilling to take any chances of a dead child ending up in purgatory. Despite the difficulty of life in the territory, nine of the eleven children survived to reach adulthood and have families themselves.

  In 1763 New Orleans was handed over to Spain, as part of a peace treaty brokered at the end of the French and Indian War. The French settlers, resentful of Spain’s attempts to curtail their commerce, organized a revolt and kicked out the first Spanish governor in a coup that left the colony unstable for a few years. Though Etienne was educated and had a useful trade—master carpentry, which every Broyard male in my line practiced until my father—the few notarial records I could find suggest his fortunes rose and fell through the rocky transition. At one point he had enough money to lend 10,000 livres—about $500 at the time, or $12,000 today—to an associate; at another, a surgeon to whom he owed money got a court order allowing him to intercept Etienne’s wages and collect his debt.

  But Spanish rule eventually brought an influx of cash and people to Louisiana—the Acadians came down from Canada (and became Cajuns), and emigrants arrived from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, which were also under the Spanish crown. And Spain began importing again the slaves that settlers viewed as crucial to their economic success. By the time Etienne died, in 1791, he’d become the owner of several houses on the corner of Bourbon and Orleans streets in the French Quarter and a Negro woman named Mariana.

  That the Broyards owned a slave didn’t necessarily place them among the elite of New Orleans. Mariana likely worked together with Louisa—cooking, cleaning, and caring for the children. Nevertheless, Etienne could afford to educate his children, probably at one of the local private libraries that served as schools, and they went on to marry well and become property and slave owners themselves.

  The couple’s ninth child was my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry, a name that would reappear in almost every generation of Broyards to come. He was born around 1770, which made him twenty-one when he lost his father. His mother had died a year earlier. In the eyes of the law, he and his younger sister, Emilie, were still minors, and their share of the inheritance was entrusted to custodians, who probably auctioned off the houses and Mariana. Slaves weren’t fetching very high prices at the time. The agricultural market was soft, and there were stirrings of rebellion on the neighboring French colony of St. Domingue, which was making people wary of buying unknown hands lest they carry the “infection” of revolutionary ideas.

  A few years before Etienne died, a crisis in the royal finances of France sparked a general rebellion in the country against the aristocracy. In August of 1789, the revolution led to the convening of a new government body, the National Constituent Assembly, made up solely of “the People” (rather than the clergy and nobility who had been ruling). Inspired in part by the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the assembly outlined a set of principles for writing a constitution, entitled the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The document established as its guiding principles liberté, égalité, and fraternité and, more to the point, declared that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” As soon as the free black population in St. Domingue heard the news, they rushed representatives to Paris to demand equal citizenship. Many of them owned sugar and coffee plantations on the island, on which they paid taxes, earning them the right to vote too.

  At the time about twenty-eight thousand people of color on St. Domingue had managed to gain their freedom through means similar to those used in Louisiana: by serving in the military, being freed by their master, or, most frequently, having the good or bad luck to be the mistress or child of a white man. The revolution-era French government didn’t immediately capitulate to the free blacks’ demands, but in 1792, after two slave uprisings, the government granted the freemen their request, in hopes they’d help to keep the slaves in line. Since many of the free blacks were also planters, they counted on slave labor to work the fields too. But the slave revolt was too far along to stop, and finally, on Febru
ary 4, 1794, the French government voted on the question of abolishing slavery altogether.

  By this time the French legislature had become even more radicalized. When a deputy announced to a packed hall that “a black man, a yellow man, are about to join this Convention in the name of the free citizens of San Domingo,” the new members entered amid cheers and applause. The black man, an ex-slave named Bellay, took to the podium to call upon the French legislators to free his brothers. When Bellay finished, a white member stood up and made this motion: “When drawing up the constitution of the French people we paid no attention to the unhappy Negroes....Let us repair the wrong—let us proclaim the liberty of the Negroes.” Every last member rose to make known his acclamation.

  Back in Louisiana the Spanish governor, Esteban Rodríguez Miró, heard news of these developments and grew increasingly worried. Under Spain’s watch the colony’s population of free people of color—believed to be the principal instigators in St. Domingue—had swelled to more than eight hundred people by the early 1790s. That made them 15 percent of New Orleans’s residents, which, combined with the slaves’ 36 percent, put whites in the minority. Indeed it was Spain’s very policies that caused the great increase in the free blacks’ numbers. Bondsmen and women could purchase their own liberty through wages they’d earned by doing extra work for their masters or from hiring themselves out during the little spare time they had.

  The colonial society not only tolerated the newly freed Africans but had come to depend on them so much that Louisiana would be hard-pressed to function without them. The free blacks provided much of the skilled labor—the men became carpenters and shoemakers, and the women worked as seamstresses or laundresses. Spain also relied on the free blacks for help in defending the territory and controlling the slave population. Organized into light-skinned and dark-skinned militias, these soldiers served as a wedge between the free and enslaved black populations. For the most part, though, everybody—whites, free people of color, and slaves—had been coexisting peacefully for years.