One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  In the early morning hours of January 8, 1815, British general Sir Edward Pakenham led an army of 8,700 veteran soldiers in a two-pronged attack that straddled the Mississippi at a point nine miles below New Orleans. Pakenham was so sure of victory that he carried on him papers appointing him as the British governor of Louisiana. But Jackson anticipated the assault and had 4,000 troops—including Lafitte’s followers and two battalions of free men of color—waiting behind some hastily erected fortifications.

  The British troops advanced across the plains of Chalmette hidden in a swirl of morning fog. The wind shifted and the mist was gone, leaving the winter sun to light up the Brits’ red coats. Jackson’s forces let loose a torrent of cannon shot and rifle fire, and in less than thirty minutes the field was empty except for the masses of dead and wounded British soldiers. The day scored a decisive victory for the Americans: the British retreated and soon left Louisiana altogether. In fact a peace treaty between the two countries had already been signed in Belgium, but the news hadn’t yet made it to American shores.

  The Louisiana legislators recognized the bravery of Lafitte’s men and the free men of color, noting in particular Joseph Savary’s brother, who was credited with sacrificing his own life in order to kill the British general. But the sight of so many black men walking in the streets carrying guns roused the old fears of insurrection. Perhaps bending to local pressure, Jackson gave orders for the two colored battalions to repair some fortifications outside the city. Colonel Savary answered back that his men “would always be willing to sacrifice their lives in combat in defense of their country as had been demonstrated but preferred death to the performance of work of laborers.”

  Henry and Gilbert were already out at the fort, hired on as carpenters to assist with the repairs. Savary’s defiance of Jackson’s order made the Broyards’ lives difficult: they were shorthanded on laborers, and the rest of the colored soldiers began grumbling about the insult of doing this menial work. The troops began deserting the post en masse. Henry and Gilbert soon walked off the job too, in solidarity perhaps, or because they were the last ones left.

  The colored veterans were granted small pensions, but they didn’t receive the land they were promised, nor the recognition that Jackson had led them to believe was their due. Every year in the parade commemorating the battle, they marched with the whites—and were even in later years granted the honor of leading the procession—but their war efforts never brought them the equal political footing they’d hoped for. Anyway, with the war over and the threat of foreign invasion gone, the pace of migration to the port city was picking up, which gave rise to a different kind of ethnic tension.

  In 1817 Captain Henry M. Shreve’s new steamboat, Washington, made the round-trip journey from New Orleans to Louisville, Kentucky, in an astonishing forty-one days. A trip that once took many months of hard rowing could now be completed in relative comfort in just six weeks. More and more Americans started the journey south. Goods from across the United States followed close behind.

  Parades of pine rafts, each stacked with an acre’s worth of freshly cut boards from the forests of western Pennsylvania and upper New York State, began arriving regularly at the levee. From there the wood was carted away to the various building sites springing up all over town. From Pittsburgh came more barges, these piled high with coal to heat the blast furnaces in which ironworkers fashioned the ornate balcony railings and balustrades that began appearing in New Orleans architecture in the early nineteenth century. Other flatboats, from the Midwest, arrived jammed with cattle, hogs, and horses, or barrels of flour and whiskey and sacks of corn.

  Captains and merchants shouted back and forth from ship to shore, striking deals. Sailors, roustabouts, draymen, and laborers unloaded and reloaded cargo, barking orders and trading curses in half a dozen languages. Negro women wove through the crowds, selling cakes, apples, oranges, and figs from trays they balanced on their heads. Groups of slaves worked the levee too, many of whom had first come to New Orleans as yet another type of goods to be unloaded and sold.

  In 1808 the United States carried through on its promise to abolish the import of slaves from foreign countries; however, a domestic slave trade developed in its place that would thrive until the Civil War. By the 1840s slave markets populated many southern cities, with the largest one in New Orleans. The traders initially concentrated their slave pens in the far end of the French Quarter, with the Americans opening a second, larger slave market in New Orleans’s central business district after the 1840s.

  During the day the enslaved men might be dressed up in blue suits and top hats, and the women in long-sleeved blouses and ankle-length skirts, and made to walk back and forth on the street outside the firm’s office. Sometimes a fiddler was produced, and the slaves were commanded to dance to show off their vitality. The markets became a popular destination for tourists visiting from across the United States and from Europe.

  Buyers from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi purchased their field hands or house servants, blacksmiths or “fancy girls.” In the decades before the Civil War, a healthy good-sized seventeen-year-old boy cost around $1,200 (about $28,000 today), while a wealthy New Orleans man might pay as much as $5,000 ($116,000 today) for a light-skinned beauty whom he “fancied” for his own.

  The increasingly profitable cotton and sugar plantations fueled the need for slave labor and provided the fortunes to buy it. During February and March, when the cotton crop was brought into town, hundreds of thousands of bales piled up on the levee and barricaded the streets until they were sold and reloaded on ships, bound for France or England or New York. All this activity meant more duties and taxes for the city and more business for nearly everyone: commission merchants, exporters, importers, banks, insurance companies, lawyers, hotelkeepers, tavern owners, shoemakers, tailors, and carpenters too, all stood to gain.

  In the decade following the transfer of Louisiana to the United States, my great-great-great-great-grandfather Henry started to acquire slaves. There were two male African natives in their early twenties, who probably assisted on carpentry jobs, and a thirty-year-old black woman, who likely helped Henry’s wife with the cooking, cleaning, and care of Gilbert and his siblings. No details of these peoples’ lives exist beyond the records of their purchase and sale, so I don’t know whether Henry was kind or cruel to his human property.

  While New Orleans natives such as Henry welcomed the increased opportunity brought by American rule, the newcomers’ attempts to impose their own lifestyle and values set off a culture war that would eventually divide the city. Part of the problem was that the two populations shared so little common ground. New Orleans natives spoke French, worshipped in the Catholic Church, bet on cockfights and cards (even on Sundays), and favored a spicy cuisine full of Spanish and Indian influences and cooked with methods that the slaves brought over from Africa. The Americans, on the other hand, had Anglo-Saxon roots, spoke the Queen’s English, were Protestants, frowned on gambling—especially on the Sabbath—and liked their food boiled and bland. Also, New Orleanians were far more casual than the Americans with their slaves and the local free people of color—appearing in town with their colored mistresses and illegitimate colored children, which the Yankees pointed to as ultimate proof of the moral bankruptcy of the Latin race.

  For their part, New Orleans natives bristled at the hypocrisy of the Protestant ministers’ sermons railing against their pastimes when half the churchs’ parishioners had been enjoying those same pleasures twelve hours before. They referred to the northerners as “Yankee Buzzards” and griped that they were only drawn to the port city by their get-rich-quick schemes. More practically, the natives also recognized that in the contest for city rule, the Americans, with their experience in democratic government, held the upper hand.

  In trying to distinguish themselves from the arrivistes, the New Orleans natives began referring to themselves as Creoles. Previously the term had been mostly used as an adjective to di
fferentiate between native and nonnative born, but now it became a catch-all description for the ancienne population and St. Domingue refugees, both black and white. It wasn’t until American mores, including their racial attitudes, prevailed after Reconstruction that the white Creole population began insisting that it had always applied only to themselves, lest the Yankees doubt their racial purity. The ubiquity of plaçage relationships (a formalized mistress or common-law relationship) between white men and women of color gave the Americans reason to wonder about the Creoles’ blood.

  Shortly after the Louisiana Purchase, marriage between the races had been outlawed, making such unions null and void. In 1828 the legislators changed the state’s civil code so that illegitimate children could no longer inherit from their fathers—even in cases where paternity had been officially recognized before a notary. At the same time, the New Orleans city council began to ban the attendance of whites at the “quadroon balls,” where many plaçage relationships were initiated. But threats of fines and imprisonment couldn’t keep the white men—Yankee and Creole alike—from searching out these nightly affairs. For male visitors to New Orleans, a trip to a quadroon ball was as customary as a tour of the slave pens and a stroll along the pier.

  The most elegant of the balls were held at the St. Phillips Theater, off Bourbon Street, or the Globe, just outside the French Quarter. On most evenings white balls were held too, and men would leave one, meet up in the street to swap tickets, and then go to the other. When they recounted the dances later in their diaries or in letters to friends, they often commented on the superiority of the colored events: their finer furnishings and better orchestras, the exceptional poise and propriety of the young women in attendance.

  At the St. Phillips Theater, three immense cut-glass chandeliers flooded the ballroom with light. The finest liquors lined the bar at one end of the room, and on the other end, one of the best orchestras in town accompanied the lines of quadrilles and rounds of waltzes. The women wore long gowns, and masks to cover their faces. Some of them had fair hair and pale skin, while others were almost as dark as Africans. The men disguised themselves too, dressed as young Turks or Peruvian Indians. In between dances and polite conversation, the men and women sized each other up as potential companions, and outside on the balcony or in the courtyard, under the cover of shadows, the couples appraised each other more frankly.

  Among the wealthiest white men and most desirable young women, courtship involved a negotiation with the girl’s mother. She’d question the suitor about his net worth and business affairs to ensure that he could support her daughter adequately. They’d set an annuity amount, $2,000 perhaps, that he’d have to pay if he should ever leave her. Usually the man then bought or rented his mistress a little cottage on the edge of town. While her new home was being readied, the girl’s friends would fuss around her with all the same excitement as if she were having a church wedding. Sometimes the couple even lived together as man and wife; other times the man divided his time between his colored mistress and a white wife.

  As the two branches of the family went on to have children themselves, all bearing the same last name, it became increasingly difficult to remember who among the dark-eyed, dark-haired children carried the taint of Africa and who did not. Indeed the siblings often knew each other—if the colored children became orphaned, it was not unheard of for the white wife to take them in. In my great-great-great-grandfather Gilbert’s case, the opposite seems to have been true: his colored “wife” and their children took in his white son, my great-great-grandfather.

  Gilbert was the first white Broyard I discovered who was romantically involved with a woman of color. In the 1820 census, at the age of twenty-five, he was living with a young free woman of color, and ten years later, his house was full of children: two girls and two boys, all free blacks. The nature of Gilbert’s relationship to these people—who are not described in the records beyond their racial status and approximate age—isn’t clear. He may have been a tenant in the house; many free women of color took in boarders. Yet if that were true, his landlady’s name should have appeared as the head of the household rather than Gilbert’s. More likely he had taken a colored mistress.

  Just as Gilbert entered his teenage years, the city’s streets had filled with the daughters of the St. Domingue refugees. Many of these girls owed their freedom to the beauty of their mothers or grandmothers, which had caught the eye of their slave masters, and the young women carried this cursed legacy in their own faces. Men visiting New Orleans likened the mixed-race women to sirens. One Englishman waxed on about their “lovely countenance, full dark liquid eyes, lips of coral and teeth of pearl, long raven locks of soft and glossy hair...” At the same time, white women were in short supply: in 1820 there were twenty-three white men over the age of sixteen for every ten white women of the same age. A white man without much wealth or property would have a hard time finding a desirable mate. But while visiting a quadroon ball or strolling along the levee, even a young white carpenter like Gilbert might catch the eye of a free woman of color.

  For men in Gilbert’s class, the plaçage arrangements were neither as taboo nor as formalized. Gilbert couldn’t afford to pay a hefty annuity nor buy a mistress her own home. Nevertheless, a young woman of color might opt to throw in her lot with a white man with a skilled trade. No matter his degree of success, his station would be higher than that of a man of color. And at the very least, he could lighten the stigma in her children’s skin. Also, free women of color were legally prevented from marrying whites or slaves, and they greatly outnumbered the men of their caste, leaving them few alternatives.

  If the woman living with Gilbert was in fact his mistress, she got a bad deal. Gilbert never acknowledged the offspring as his own: there are no records of their baptism under his name, nor do any Broyards of their age and hue appear in the public records over the next few decades. Some of them grew up and had children themselves, no doubt. Today their descendants, who would be my fourth cousins, can only guess about the story behind this empty branch of their family tree.

  Gilbert, however, was not directly responsible for the mixing of my own blood. Sometime in the 1820s, he married a white woman named Marie Panquinet. He and Marie had one son together, another Henry, my great-great-grandfather Henry Antoine Broyard, born on July 18, 1829. On his baptismal record, the boy’s status as legitimate was mentioned, establishing him as Gilbert’s sole heir, and his name too—a combination of his grandfather’s and his uncle’s—indicated his rightful place in the family line.

  The people assembled at Henry’s baptism on the first of October, 1829, at St. Louis Cathedral—the various Broyards and Panquinets, along with Marie’s aunt Adelle and Gilbert’s brother Anthony, who served as godparents—surely were familiar to each other, if not old friends. The Panquinets were also members of the ancienne population. Marie’s grandfather had been the sexton at St. Louis Cathedral: he rang the church’s bells at funerals and weddings and oversaw the digging of graves at the cemetery. Marie had grown up on Bourbon Street, a few blocks away from the Broyards, on the lower end of the Quarter, where the poorer Creoles and free blacks lived. And her uncle had been in the French militia too.

  Soon after Henry’s birth, Marie vanished from her son’s and husband’s lives, according to public records. It’s possible that she left over objections about her husband’s colored mistress. The writer Charles Gayarré, who lived in the city during the antebellum period, described the scene in the home of a white husband who kept a mulatto mistress: “The household peace was destroyed; there were secret tears, placid resignation, or open strife and deserved reproaches.” But in the small Catholic community, divorcing one’s husband brought about just as much social stigma as an interracial affair. A more likely explanation for Marie’s disappearance is that she simply died. Shortly after Henry was born, a cholera epidemic decimated the city’s population, leaving no record of the deaths of thousands of victims.

  By the time Henr
y was two, Gilbert had moved on to a new mate, a free woman of color named Eulalie Urquhart, with whom he had another five children. This time the kids received their father’s last name and proper baptisms (although they still weren’t entitled to inherit his property). Even Gilbert’s white siblings seem to have accepted his colored brood, with a few of them stepping in as godparents.

  The census only began enumerating the names of individuals beyond the heads of households in 1850, and so the details of Henry’s young life are few. No pictures of him remain, but his military record describes him as having a yellow complexion, yellow eyes, and dark brown hair. And he’s taller than most other Creoles of that era, reaching five feet nine inches in his adulthood. I don’t know for a fact that Henry was raised in the house with his father and his common-law wife, but it appears that Gilbert and his colored family remained an important part of my great-great-grandfather’s life. Henry also became a carpenter, and he grew up close to his father’s colored children, so much so that he asked one of his half sisters to serve as godmother when his first child was born.

  Yet as intimate as Henry may have been with his father’s other family, the world was increasingly drawing distinctions between them. The slaying of more than fifty whites during an 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia led by slave Nat Turner, on top of a growing abolitionist movement up north, led to clampdowns on people of color and slaves alike. If Gilbert took his family to the opera or theater, he’d be able to sit with Henry in the first tier while Eulalie and her kids were relegated to the balcony above them. If Henry and his siblings took the new omnibus that connected the different parts of the growing city, they would have to ride in separate train cars. Eulalie’s family members couldn’t legally meet with other free black friends or relatives (to prevent them from plotting a slave revolt or the overthrow of the government). And Eulalie and her children had to carry papers at all times to prove that they were free—the implication being that the natural state of blacks was enslavement. Also, as Gilbert’s only legitimate child, Henry was the only one who could inherit his property, which further reinforced the irreconcilable differences between them.