One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  Governor Miró began introducing measures aimed at reminding the free blacks about their proper place—beneath whites. He banned them from gathering in groups, which had little effect on the men’s card games and cockfights. And he forbade the women to wear anything ornamental—no more feathers, jewels, or silks—while also requiring them to cover their hair with kerchiefs to signify their lower status. They obliged by wrapping their heads in colorful scarves, called tignons, in a style made popular among the fashionable women of Paris by Empress Josephine.

  When refugees from St. Domingue started trickling into port, bringing stories about former slaves slaughtering their masters and raping their white mistresses, Miró started to clamp down on the slaves. The Africans’ tradition of gathering on Sundays in Congo Square on the edge of town to trade their wares, play their drums, and perform the dances they had danced back home now came under attack. No matter how well everyone had gotten along in the past, the revolution in St. Domingue pointed out blacks’ and whites’ inherent status as enemies.

  Within months of his father’s death in 1791, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry became a father himself, to a little girl named Felicity. The mother was twenty-one-year-old white New Orleans native Adelaide Hardy. Although the couple went on to have four more children, they never married. At the time, lots of couples didn’t bother to get married—weddings were expensive and unnecessary to establish legitimate heirs.

  After their second child, my great-great-great-grandfather Gilbert, was born, on October 11, 1795, Henry paid a visit to the notary public in town. There he recorded an official declaration that read “for the great love and affection that he professes for his natural children,” Henry Broyard donated a house to Gilbert and his sister “to have and to hold from now and always.” This act ensured that the children could inherit their father’s property even though they were illegitimate.

  The ongoing political and racial tension in Louisiana gave Henry reason to put his affairs in order. In 1795 Governor Miró’s fears proved to be founded. An elaborate plot for a slave insurrection, hatched over months of secret meetings between free people of color, slaves, and white radicals, was discovered in Pointe Coupée, the outpost a hundred miles upriver where Henry’s older brother Etienne lived. Before the date set to begin the revolt arrived, some Indian women revealed the plan. Fifty-seven slaves and three local white people were found guilty of the crime of plotting revolution. The prisoners were sent to New Orleans for sentencing, bringing the threat of racial unrest closer to home for Henry.

  While the condemned men waited in prison, their family and friends among the local slaves set a series of fires throughout the city. Six months earlier a massive fire, started from a prayer candle tipping over in a breeze, had torn through the streets, burning up entire blocks. The slaves hoped to create a similar state of chaos, during which the prisoners could escape. But the militia—including free black members—managed to contain the fires, and the sentences were carried out without further disruption. Twenty-three of the slaves were hanged in the town square. Their severed heads were displayed on poles along the banks of the Mississippi, all the way from Pointe Coupée to New Orleans.

  In 1800 Spain, under pressure from Napoleon, with whom the country had formed an alliance, ceded Louisiana back to France in a secret treaty. Before the transfer of government took place, Napoleon turned around and sold the colony to the United States to help cover France’s debts from the war in St. Domingue. Throughout these changes in power, the intermingling between the races in the city went on as it always had, and during the American regime it even increased.

  The Broyard family suffered a personal tragedy as the century drew to a close. Henry’s wife, Adelaide, gave birth to their fifth child on Christmas Day in 1799, which also happened to be Adelaide’s thirtieth birthday. She developed complications from the labor and died the following day. The Broyard children disappear from the public records for the next fifteen years. Most likely they remained with their father, who soon got married to a woman who also happened to be named Adelaide. Gilbert was only four when his real mother passed away. She had belonged to a world that was quickly disappearing.

  -13-

  After a few months in New Orleans, I’d gone from having no past at all on my father’s side of the family tree to uncovering 250 years of history. Where before I only thought of myself as an “American” during a college semester in Europe—and then with some reluctance because of the negative associations it invoked: loud, crass, materialistic—now the term began to actually mean something to me. I came from a line of people who had helped to settle the country, who’d arrived here under difficult circumstances and made the best of it, who had sometimes even flourished. It amazed me to realize that my family’s story paralleled much of the country’s larger narrative; to discover that we, the Broyards, were at once ordinary and emblematic.

  Walking through the French Quarter, I thought of my ancestors traveling these same streets more than two centuries earlier—heading to a job with a wooden box of tools propped on one shoulder or going off to church with a gang of kids in tow. I imagined them walking along the banquettes, the plank walkways that served as sidewalks, and wading through the rivers of mud that filled the streets when it rained. I pictured my ancestors’ shoes: leather clogs or boots caked in mud or covered in dust; Etienne or Henry cleaning them the first thing when they got home, perhaps the father and son performing this chore together. And then I remembered something that I hadn’t thought of in years: my father’s own ritual of cleaning and polishing my brother’s and my shoes—his wicker basket full of brushes and tins of polish; the rags he made from lone socks and ripped T-shirts; his caution against gumming up the brush’s bristles with too much wax; the last step, when he’d have us put on our shoes and prop up each foot on a stool while he knelt on the floor. Put your hand on my shoulder, he’d say, and we’d balance ourselves as he shimmied a cloth hard and fast across the leather, teasing out a high and glossy shine.

  It was strange to stumble onto this memory of my father as I strolled down the streets of New Orleans, to suddenly feel this connection from his ancestors to him to me. I began to notice other traits that had traveled down the family tree, many landing on my brother despite his scant knowledge of our father’s past. I had always thought of myself as the child that most took after my father, but Todd turned out to be the classic Broyard of the family.

  We didn’t grow up attending church, nor were we even baptized, but Todd had become a Catholic when he was twenty-one. Although we’d been surrounded during childhood by artists, intellectuals, and professionals, my brother worked first as a carpenter after graduating from college and then started a business installing security systems, a career, as he proudly declared, that placed him squarely “in the trades.” In high school he began playing the harmonica; his favorite numbers were the blues. The more I learned about our history, the more it seemed as if heredity was a force as inescapable as the gravity that had pulled Newton’s apple to the ground.

  The Broyards officially became Americans on the twentieth of December in 1803, but they were still thinking of themselves as French in 1920, when my father was born. On the day of the ceremony transferring Louisiana to the United States, crowds of Frenchmen gathered in New Orleans’s town square to watch their beloved tri-color flag lowered for a final time. Men and women dressed in their finest clothes packed the balconies surrounding the square, with a select few invited to join the civic leaders in the inner chambers of City Hall.

  A roll of drums accompanied the American troops as they marched into New Orleans along the riverfront. They turned into the square and came to a stop in front of the French militia—including the two black units—assembled in battle formation. The Americans were shocked by the great number of brown and black soldiers staring back at them, all with muskets in hand. The territorial commissioners, William Claiborne and General James Wilkinson, later confided that they were barely able to
get through the ceremony without registering their alarm.

  My great-great-great-grandfather Gilbert Broyard was seven at the time. His uncle Louis was a member of the French militia, which might have drawn his family out to watch. Also, as members of the ancienne population—the settlers who’d arrived during the first French rule—the Broyards would be stirred by the brief reappearance of their flag. The scene would have made a lasting impression on a young boy, even if the new rule didn’t have much effect on Gilbert and his family. For all of his young life, the flag of Spain had flown over New Orleans, yet everyone around him still spoke French, drank café au lait, and scanned the French paper for the latest news about the upstart general Napoleon Bonaparte overseas. It would take more than a change of colors on a flagpole to make the French of New Orleans think of themselves as anything but French.

  And so while the tears may have fallen freely on some faces in the crowd that day, the champagne flowed just as copiously at the ball that night. Glasses were raised to Spain, France, and the United States, and partygoers of all three nations danced, drank, and played cards together well past dawn. They weren’t stupid, after all: since the river had reopened to trade with the United States, Louisiana had more than doubled its exports in just three years. Membership in the Union could only bring greater financial gain to the aspiring merchant class.

  New Orleans could stand some progress. The city hadn’t grown much in the fifty years since Etienne, the first Broyard settler, arrived. A little more than eight thousand residents were now living in New Orleans. Charleston, South Carolina, by comparison, had almost four times as many residents, according to the 1800 census. While the Spanish-style brick-and-stucco Creole town houses that replaced the old wooden one-story buildings destroyed in the fires were much more substantial, open sewers still ran down the center of many streets, and they were often clogged with garbage and the carcasses of animals. New Orleans was world famous mainly for its stench.

  Watchmen went around in the evenings, lighting rows of lanterns that hung from ropes strung across the street intersections, but the blocks themselves remained in darkness, offering cover for the robbers and vagabonds who roamed about freely. At nine o’clock, the guards shut the city gates, closing in the residents for the night behind a crumbling earthen rampart that had never been effective in the first place. Most would agree that the city could tolerate some internal improvements.

  The morning after the ceremony transferring Louisiana to the United States, General Wilkinson shot off a dispatch to the secretary of war calling for more troops and ammunition with the explanation that the “formidable aspect of the armed Blacks & Malattoes [sic], officered and organized, is painful and perplexing.” Claiborne sent off his own letter to James Madison at the State Department, asking for advice with his problem. He needed to commission the French militia into the American army, but if he included the colored troops, he feared objection from whites; yet if he didn’t muster them in, he feared creating “an armed enemy in the heart of the country.” Both commissioners resolved to do nothing until they heard back from Washington.

  The black and mixed-race soldiers, though, were impatient for recognition. A few weeks after the change of rule, fifty of them signed a petition stating that they expected full rights of citizenship. During the transfer ceremony, they’d listened closely as Louisiana’s cession treaty was read aloud, in English and in French, and they’d heard how every inhabitant of the colony had been granted “the enjoyment of all rights, advantages, and immunities of citizens of the United States,” with no qualification about race or color. Furthermore, the soldiers reasoned, they’d fought on the American side during the American Revolution. Didn’t that count for something?

  Claiborne stalled the men with the assurance that the United States wouldn’t try to take away their freedom or property. But he and the administration in Washington—who answered back with little practical advice—were both caught off guard: nowhere else in the United States had free blacks demonstrated such a sense of entitlement.

  For the Louisiana planters, the unfolding drama, with free blacks agitating for equal rights, resembled events in St. Domingue too closely for comfort. The sugar crops in Louisiana were finally bringing in some profit, and the planters weren’t about to risk losing their precious slave labor, especially with all these Americans pouring into the territory, eager to grab up power and patronage for themselves. As it was, the new government was interfering with the planters’ efforts to expand their plantations. Claiborne had continued the Spanish ban on importing Africans from the French Caribbean, and the U.S. Constitution, to whose laws they were now bound, seemed to suggest that the import of foreign slaves might be outlawed altogether as early as 1808.

  While Commissioner Claiborne (soon to become territorial governor) fretted over a response to the free blacks’ demands, boatloads of refugees from St. Domingue were arriving daily on Louisiana shores, keeping the specter of a slave revolt on everyone’s minds. A few weeks before the transfer ceremony, the insurgents had succeeded in overthrowing the French local government. Then on January 1, 1804, the victorious blacks in St. Domingue declared their independence. Their new nation—the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere—was called Haiti after the name given to it by its original inhabitants, the Indian natives, before the colonizers wiped them out.

  A few weeks later, twelve black Haitians were spied on a boat heading up Bayou Lafourche, just west of New Orleans. In a letter to Claiborne, a white informant described the blacks’ taunting of whites on shore with stories about “eating human flesh” and “what they had been and done in the horrors of St. Domingo.” Word spread throughout the territory that the principles of liberty and equality would soon be delivered to Louisiana in an equally bloody fashion. Up in Pointe Coupée, where the blacks greatly outnumbered the whites, Henry’s brother Etienne, along with ninety-seven other men, added his name to a petition asking for more troops, saying that the slaves were showing a “spirit of Revolt and mutyny [sic].”

  Troops, however, were in short supply. Claiborne resolved to ask the territorial legislature to enlist the black and colored militia’s help in controlling the slaves. After all, as in St. Domingue, many of the free men of color were slave owners themselves, and they hadn’t been asking for the emancipation of their bonded brothers, only that their own political rights be recognized. Claiborne reasoned that by treating the colored men as if they had the same concerns as whites, the state could win their loyalty. But the legislators wouldn’t stomach any action that further emboldened the free people of color. As it was, some colored planters were beginning to outstrip their white counterparts in amassing money and land. And so over the next few years, the lawmakers repeatedly ruled against the inclusion of the black and mixed-race corps in the militia and tightened the codes governing the rights of slaves and free people of color too.

  Now blacks were expressly forbidden to even conceive themselves equal to whites. If they struck or insulted a white person, they faced fines or imprisonment. Free black men were restricted from emigrating to Louisiana, whether from Haiti or anywhere else. Many managed to enter the state anyway, particularly during the second migration of St. Domingue refugees at the end of 1809 and the beginning of 1810. They came from Cuba, where they’d settled after fleeing the slave revolt, but with France and Spain back at war in 1808, they’d been kicked out. These ten thousand new residents, about evenly split between whites, free people of color, and slaves, made even more difficult the execution of another new law designed to prevent free blacks from trying to pass into white society. All public records had to include an indication of racial status—with FMC for free man of color and FWC for free woman.

  In 1811 the planters’ fears came to pass, with the biggest slave revolt in the history of the United States. Fifty miles upriver from New Orleans, three hundred slaves rose up, led by a free man of color from St. Domingue. The city’s free blacks saw their chance to demonstrate their solidarit
y with whites and rushed to volunteer their assistance to Governor Claiborne. The slaves were poorly armed and quickly put down. After the danger passed, Claiborne wrote testimonials lauding the free blacks’ patriotic conduct and again pressed for their enlistment into the militia, but the planter-legislators refused to be persuaded.

  Soon, however, the United States was at war with England, and the lawmakers had no choice but to accept the colored militia’s offer of aid. At Claiborne’s urging, General Andrew Jackson, who was charged with defending New Orleans, wrote an appeal that was posted throughout town, in which he formally requested the service of free men of color in this “Glorious Struggle for National Rights.” He referred to them as “sons of freedom” and the country’s “adopted children.” He also promised the colored soldiers that they would receive the same pay, $124 in cash and 160 acres of land, as the white troops.

  The speech infuriated many white Louisianans, who resented its suggestions of equality between the races. They predicted—accurately—that such treatment would encourage the free men of color to keep pressing their case for recognition. But the headstrong general had no patience for racial disputes. Over the summer, British troops had marched into Washington and torched the White House and the capitol building. Jackson couldn’t let America’s newly acquired southern port fall too.

  After arriving in New Orleans in December of 1814, General Jackson immediately mustered the existing battalion of 350 men of color into the U.S. Army, and directed Colonel Joseph Savary, a free man of color who’d served in the French Republic Army in St. Domingue, to raise another unit among his countrymen. Jackson also enlisted a ragtag crew of white and black St. Domingue revolutionary insurgents led by pirate Jean Lafitte, who agreed to lend desperately needed flints and muskets to the cause. Whites also rallied to the general after witnessing his forceful speech in the town square, where Jackson had sworn to “drive their enemies into the sea, or perish in the effort.” Henry Broyard and his son Gilbert were among those who signed up.