One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  In his inaugural address, Lieutenant Governor Dunn echoed the sentiments of many former slaves when he remarked: “As to myself and my people, we are not seeking social equality....We simply ask to be allowed an equal chance in the race of life; an equal opportunity of supporting our families, of educating our children, and of becoming worthy citizens of this government.” P.B.S. Pinchback, a black politician originally from Mississippi and a supporter of Governor Warmoth’s, put it more bluntly: “It is wholesale falsehood to say that we wish to force ourselves upon white people.” In his view blacks “could get no rights the whites did not see fit to give them.” But the colored Creoles couldn’t reconcile this attitude with their urgent desire “to be respected and treated as men.”

  As the oldest son, my great-grandfather was forced to become the man of the Broyard family when his father died in 1873. At age sixteen Paul was suddenly responsible for supporting his mother and five younger brothers (their sister Pauline had died), who ranged in age from fourteen-year-old Pierre to the baby Octave, just six months old. Paul’s trade, carpentry, paid well, but his few years of experience would have made it hard to secure jobs on his own. Over the next few years, the family moved from one rented cottage in Tremé to another, in search of lower rents and closer proximity to relatives who could lend a hand.

  The political situation in the state had grown more uncertain too. Shortly into his term as governor, Warmoth had traveled up to Washington to meet with President Grant, whom he assured that he would not let Louisiana become an “African State.” To that end he vetoed a bill that would have imposed fines on any Louisiana business or public resorts and conveyances that continued to practice segregation. Warmoth later explained that efforts to “Africanize Louisiana were bound to lead to civil war and to the ultimate destruction of the rights of all our colored citizens.”

  The blacks who helped put Warmoth into office were outraged by his veto of the enforcement bill. His own lieutenant governor, Oscar Dunn, called him the country’s first Ku Klux Klan governor, only to die soon afterward under mysterious circumstances. Warmoth silenced protests from Trévigne and his fellow editors by cutting off the Tribune’s main source of funding. The paper had been serving as the state Republican Party’s “official printer,” but Warmoth convinced party delegates to switch their patronage to the New Orleans Republican, a more conservative paper that—conveniently—supported him. After leading the struggle for universal suffrage for seven years, the Tribune had to close its doors just a few months after blacks were finally able to exercise their franchise.

  While fighting between Warmoth and his detractors tore apart Republican ranks, Louisiana’s white Democrats furthered their efforts to reclaim the state offices—a process called “redemption.” If the disarray among Republican leadership wasn’t enough to discourage Negro voters from heading to the polls, the Knights of the White Camelia gave them reason to stay away.

  Prior to one election in the city of Shreveport, sixty merchants and bankers vowed to withhold advancing supplies or money to any planter whose laborers or tenants voted a Republican ticket. If colored Republicans did risk their lives and livelihood to cast a ballot, their votes were often stolen or disregarded. Many northern parishes routinely reported 100 percent Democratic election returns, despite their large black populations. It’s not surprising that many blacks took the cash rewards for their votes offered by Democratic Party operatives.

  To combat the Democrats’ tactics of corruption and violence, Republicans began resorting to fraud themselves. Election results in the state were regularly contested. In the 1872 gubernatorial race, both Democrats and Republicans claimed victory, leading to the bloodiest episode in Reconstruction history, where 3 white and 150 black Republicans were killed when trying to defend their claim to the parish seat in the northern town of Colfax. In New Orleans a white paramilitary group stormed the city and seized control of the statehouse, until President Grant called in federal troops to restore order. A few months later, gangs of white boys traveled from school to school for three days, ejecting colored children from the classrooms. Students like Paul, whose black ancestry wasn’t obvious, were able to escape detection by sitting quietly and not calling attention to themselves.

  In 1876 Louisiana produced conflicting election returns yet again—this time throwing the outcome of the presidential race into question. Neither the Democratic presidential candidate, Samuel Tilden, nor the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, had a majority of electoral votes without the results from Louisiana or the two other contested Southern states, South Carolina and Florida. In Congress, Democrats kept blocking attempts to resolve the dispute, and when President Grant reached his last week in office, still no successor had been named. There was talk of another civil war if Tilden wasn’t declared the victor.

  With just a few days to spare, Hayes met with a group of Southern representatives with whom he hammered out the famous Compromise of 1877. The Republicans agreed to remove the remaining federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana (the only Southern states that had not yet been “redeemed” by whites), so long as the Democrats would let them have the presidency. In effect, the Southerners chose to regain local sovereignty in exchange for giving up their candidate as president, and the Republicans opted to sacrifice the cause of the Negro in exchange for the peaceful possession of the White House. Two days later the Democrats ended their filibuster, the vote counting continued, and Hayes was declared the country’s nineteenth president. On April 24, 1877, the last of the federal troops pulled out of Louisiana, and the fifty-year reign of the “Solid South” began.

  As part of the deal, Democratic candidate Francis T. Nicholls was declared the winner of Louisiana’s gubernatorial race. Nicholls, who’d lost an arm and a leg for the Confederate cause, had run on a platform that promised to respect black rights secured by the Reconstruction amendments. But when New Orleans’s children, including three of Paul Broyard’s younger brothers, headed back to school in September 1877, the superintendent began segregating them into separate black and white facilities. Paul Trévigne, who’d been on the school board during Reconstruction, immediately filed a lawsuit, alleging a violation of the equal protection clause of the U.S.’s Fourteenth Amendment, along with the article in Louisiana’s state constitution that forbade establishing separate schools for the races. The judge dodged the case, saying it was too late to hear it once school was in session. Also, Trévigne’s children weren’t directly affected by the law.

  Arnold Bertonneau, whose two sons had been turned away from the white public school down the street, quickly followed with a suit of his own. After a year-and-a-half delay, his case was also dismissed, with a ruling that no discrimination had been practiced. The opinion read: “Both races are treated precisely alike. White children and colored children are compelled to attend different schools. That is all.” Eventually this “separate but equal” ruse would drive Bertonneau from his hometown to California, where he and his family, including the mother of my friend Julia Hilla, would begin living as white. That a man like Bertonneau—who’d met with Lincoln to argue for the Negro’s vote—would resort to passing is a measure of the desperation felt by New Orleans’s colored community in coming years.

  Over the summer, my great-grandfather had turned twenty-one, which meant that he no longer had to watch this fight from the sidelines. In the election the following November, Paul would be able to finally exercise the franchise that his father and godfather had fought to obtain. Given the departure of the federal troops, it remained to be seen whether Paul’s vote would carry any meaning. By election time Paul was responsible for a family of his own, with his first child on the way and a wedding around the corner, which made his own stake in the outcome even higher.

  -21-

  Paul Broyard married Rosa Cousin in New Orleans on December 9, 1878. The couple eventually had eleven children—seven of whom survived to adulthood—including my father’s father, Paul Anatole, born on January 21, 18
89. While researching in the city’s archives, I’d found out that Rosa was born in 1852 in St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain, in the village of Lacombe, and that her mother was a mulatto woman named Marie and her father was a white man named Anatole Cousin—the source for my father’s first name. In June of 2000, I spent a few days across the lake trying to learn more about Rosa’s background.

  The Cousin name was well known in these parts. The family’s progenitor, a white man from France named Pierre François Cousin, helped to settle St. Tammany back in the 1740s, when the only other inhabitants were Choctaw Indians. As a reward the Spanish crown granted four thousand acres to Pierre’s son, Jean François Cousin, making him the largest single landowner in the parish. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the family had a prosperous business making bricks and milling lumber, along with a fleet of six schooners to transport their wares across the lake to the booming city of New Orleans. All the work was performed by slaves, and by 1850 the Cousins owned nearly two hundred people. I had a hunch that Rosa’s mother, Marie, had been one of the Cousin family slaves.

  Several clues pointed to this fact, starting with Marie’s name. I’d seen her listed in records as Marie, Mary, or Marianne, but she always used the surname Cousin, despite the fact that she and Anatole Cousin never married. At the same time, I couldn’t find any reference to Marie’s maiden name, suggesting that she didn’t have one of her own. Also, “Mary” Cousin was listed on the 1870 census as born in Virginia in 1825—a state where fewer than 10 percent of blacks were free at the time. I speculated that Marie had been sold to a slave trader who sent her downriver in the hold of a ship or as part of a slave coffle to the New Orleans market, where Anatole Cousin had picked her out for his “fancy girl.”

  Anatole was twenty-one when the first of his six children with Marie was born. During the antebellum era, it wasn’t uncommon for a young white man, especially one from a wealthy family, to take a slave mistress before marrying a white woman and producing legitimate heirs. Any children born to the union were also slaves, which helps to explain why by 1860 almost half of the people owned by the Cousin family were of mixed race according to the slave schedules. From some birth certificates I’d found for her children—issued a few years after their birth but before emancipation—I knew that Marie and her children had been freed before the Civil War began. (Slave births weren’t recorded in civil records.) But I was hoping to discover the date of their manumission to know whether my great-grandmother Rosa had once been a slave too.

  My father wouldn’t have remembered his grandmother Rosa: he was just shy of his first birthday when she died in July 1921. But as I drove out to St. Tammany Parish, across the twenty-four-mile causeway spanning Lake Pontchartrain (the longest bridge of its kind in the world), I imagined the types of contact the pair might have had: Rosa picking up my father from his crib, my dad squirming in her lap during Sunday dinner, she giving him a bath—all the things that my father had done with me. And I tried to feel this sense of proximity bridging the generations, from my great-grandmother to my dad to me.

  It had been nearly a decade since my father had died, since I’d learned of his—and my—African ancestry, since I’d begun reading and learning and talking about race. And despite my glimmerings of double consciousness, I didn’t yet feel black. I was still waiting for an “Aha!” moment, an affirmation of this identity down deep in my bones. I hoped that proof that my great-grandmother had been a slave would call forth something buried inside my DNA and I’d have my visceral confirmation at last.

  Looking back now, it’s surprising, and discomfiting, how much I equated slavery with black identity. But I was hardly the first person to arrive at this formulation. In his book One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, Scott Malcomson traces the correlation between African ancestry and bondage back to fifteenth-century Portugal and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Writing in 1453 Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara called upon the “Curse of Ham” story in Genesis to justify his countrymen’s enslavement of Africans, the race cursed “to be subject to all the other races of the world.”

  Slavery had been going on since the ancient civilizations, but Zurara’s explanation marked the first time that enslavement was seen as a matter of biological inheritance rather than a conditional state brought about by war or an economic transaction. The notion that servitude was passed down through blood became particularly expedient as the plantation societies in the New World required more and more labor. Not only could the workforce continually regenerate itself through reproduction, but a seemingly infinite supply of new slaves were available for purchase on the Dark Continent. While African states had long been selling war prisoners to their Muslim neighbors, the Europeans, armed with their quasi-religious, then quasi-scientific rationale, elevated the practice into an international institution.

  In the American colonies, the concept of the African’s natural servitude helped European settlers reconcile their allegiance to personal liberty with their reliance on slave labor. It also provided an entity against which a disparate collection of immigrants—from different social classes, geographic regions, and cultures—could unify as one society. To be American was to be white and free. A century and a half after slavery ended in the United States, the association of bondage with blackness remained potent enough to have implanted into my brain the belief that to be black in America necessarily meant to have been enslaved.

  Most of the records for St. Tammany Parish were housed in the basement of the courthouse in Covington, a small city of 8,400 people in rural Louisiana. A nondescript concrete building, the courthouse sat at the intersection of two main streets on the edge of a grassy square. In nice weather the benches lining the square were filled with (mostly white) workers on lunch or cigarette breaks. These people would nod hello as I walked back and forth to my rental car or across the street to the Conveyance Office, where the indexes of property sales and purchases—including slave transactions—were kept.

  Most visitors to the courthouse basement came requesting marriage licenses or birth certificates, but a few metal stools were pulled up to the counter for people doing genealogical research among the probate and property records, wills and court documents, and marriage licenses for parish residents dating back to 1810. My first day there, I sat down on one of these stools, pulled out my laptop, and searched in vain for a place to plug it in. A computer felt out of place among these yellowing records and the old-fashioned uniforms of navy skirt, white shirt, and plaid necktie worn by the two female clerks. As the women chatted with each other or on the phone, I listened for evidence of their obsolete attitudes too.

  But when I told the younger clerk that I was looking for a slave ancestor, she hardly batted an eye. After all, whites in these parts had been mixing with blacks and Choctaw Indians for centuries. There were lots of people like me, although they didn’t tend to go around looking for evidence of it. But, the clerk told me, the former archivist—an older woman by the name of Bertha Neff—had combed through all the public records in her spare time to put together a set of index cards on which she kept track of who was what. The young clerk pulled out a thick stack for the Cousin family and handed them over. “Apparently Miss Neff either liked you or she didn’t,” the clerk said.

  I glanced through the index cards and guessed from Neff’s close scrutiny of the Cousins’ bloodlines that the family wasn’t among those she favored. One card for François Cousin—the son of Jean François (who’d received the land grant) and father to my dad’s great-grandfather Anatole Cousin—indicated that he’d cohabited with two different “squaws” from a local tribe of Choctaw Indians. The second, Eugenie Judissé, born of a “half breed woman and white man,” was Anatole Cousin’s mother. So I was part Native American too.

  The clerk told me that when Neff started working at the courthouse in the 1960s, the archivist was already in her seventies. She stayed for twenty years and was well over ninety when
she was finally forced out. During Neff’s lifetime Louisiana changed the legal definitions of whiteness and blackness and amended the miscegenation laws at least seven different times. It was up to clerks like Neff in parish courthouses across the state to interpret and implement the latest rulings, a job over which some of them exercised an obsessive despotic authority.

  Neff’s counterpart in New Orleans had been a punctilious woman named Naomi Drake until she was fired in 1965 for, among other things, acquiring a backlog of nearly six thousand requests for certified copies of birth or death certificates on which she deemed the racial designation suspicious. Her office kept a list of 250 family names—mostly old French ones, with Broyard surely among them—that automatically triggered an investigation by her or one of her “race clerks” into an applicant’s racial background.

  According to the clerk in the Covington courthouse, Miss Neff, by the end of her reign, had come to think of the records there as her personal property. On packing up her things, she even took some of the ledgers home with her for “safekeeping.” Most of them were eventually retrieved, but every so often a book would turn up missing, spirited away by Neff or someone else who wanted a fact about his or her family to disappear.

  I tried to imagine the trepidation that my Creole cousins must have felt when facing Neff or Drake. For much of the state’s history, race determined almost every aspect of a person’s life: whom you could marry, where you could live, where you went to school, whether you could vote, the copy of the Bible you’d swear on in the courthouse. If someone in Miss Neff’s position didn’t like you, she could make your life very hard indeed. I had trouble envisioning this woman lording over her records just twenty years earlier, while I was blithely playing badminton at my prep school in Connecticut. Perhaps most telling about my degree of removal from such racial paranoia was my current eagerness to uncover slave ancestors in my own family’s past.