One Drop

by Bliss Broyard

  I’d spent the last three days looking through the probate records for every Cousin family member to see if a young mixed-race slave named Marie was included in anyone’s estate. I’d searched through hundreds of pages of property transactions for her purchase or emancipation. While there were plenty of documents for the Cousin family that involved slaves, none so far concerned anyone who seemed like Marie. Then, on my last day in Covington, the last day of this research trip in Louisiana, I found something.

  At the Conveyance Office across the street from the courthouse, I came across a reference to a sale made by Anatole Cousin to Marie E. Cousin on December 28, 1859. The entry was handwritten and barely legible, causing me to miss it the first time I’d looked through these indexes. I’d seen Marie listed with the middle name Evaline, which would explain the middle initial. My heart began to beat faster as I copied down the page number for the corresponding ledger back in the courthouse basement. As I gathered my things to go, I wondered if it had been Marie’s own freedom that she purchased from Anatole or the freedom of their children.

  I walked outside into the glaring noonday sun. The people on the benches nodded hello as usual and I stared back, feeling as if I’d never seen them before. My senses were strangely heightened: the heat of sunshine on my shoulders, the rustle of paper lunch bags, the smell of cigarettes on the warm air, all recorded precisely in my brain, as if I anticipated returning often to this moment. I entered the courthouse and headed down the metal stairs, wondering how different I’d feel when I ascended.

  As I filled out my request slip for the ledger, I told the young clerk about my discovery. She offered a neutral nod. But I could sense her watching me as I started to search through the ledger’s pages. She’d already told me about a girl who’d run crying from her twin sister when she realized what the yellowing record of a slave emancipation she was looking at meant. I located the referenced page and searched the handwritten entries for Anatole’s or Marie’s name. The transaction wasn’t there. I flipped back and forth to the surrounding pages.

  “You can’t find it?” the clerk asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Maybe the page number was transcribed wrong.” She stood up and walked over to the counter. “See if there’s an index in the back of the book.”

  There was another index. I scanned it for Marie’s name. “Nothing,” I said, and then, “Wait a minute. Here’s something for a Marianne Cousin in 1870.”

  I found the entry and started reading the details of a land sale of two hundred acres to Marianne Cousin...fronting the bayou...measuring one hundred chains on one side...ninety-five chains on the other side...adjacent to the lot owned by Marie Evaline Xavier, also known as Marie Cousin. My stomach dropped. It dawned on me for the first time that there was more than one woman with a name resembling “Marie Cousin” and I might have been chasing the wrong person.

  My Marie seemed to have a maiden name after all, and enough money to purchase a lot of land before 1870, which was sounding less and less like someone who’d been a slave. I checked my watch. If I hurried back to New Orleans, I’d have a couple of hours to look for information about the Xavier family in the library before heading to the airport to catch my flight.

  I raced back to the city, across the twenty-four mile bridge, riding all the way in silence, shaking my head every so often and swearing under my breath. The leaps of logic I’d made and the clues I’d missed in researching Marie’s genealogy were suddenly distressingly clear. The thought of how blinded I’d been in my obsession to find a slave ancestor made me feel sick with shame.

  Xavier wasn’t a very common surname. The first probate record I looked up belonged to François Xavier, who died in 1839, leaving behind a wife and five children, including a daughter named Marie Evaline, my great-great-grandmother, who was born free in New Orleans in 1824. I quickly read on, discovering that both of Marie’s parents had also been free people of color. They’d arrived in the city as children, among the wave of refugees fleeing the slave revolt in St. Domingue. Marie’s father was educated and was a successful shoemaker. At his death his holdings were valued at roughly $4,100, placing him well above the average net worth of $3,000 for free people of color at the time.

  Among the property that François passed along to his wife and children, including my great-great-grandmother Marie Evaline, were three different lots of land, two buildings, a collection of furniture, the inventory of a shoe store on Bourbon Street, and two slaves: a twenty-eight-year-old Negro named Marie, and a twenty-year-old “griffe” (three-quarters black, one-quarter white) named George. I swore out loud this time—drawing an annoyed glance from the woman at the adjacent microfilm reader—and copied the rest of the document before hurrying off to the airport.

  Once the plane was aloft, the events of the day began to sink in. In a few short hours, I’d gone from believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she’d grown up in a family of black slave owners. Sometimes free blacks purchased their own family members, particularly when the laws regarding emancipation tightened, but these relatives remained slaves only in name. That scenario didn’t seem to be the case in the Xavier family. In the years after François Xavier died, the slave Marie was put up for auction numerous times. According to the probate record, she was “addicted to intoxication,” which made it hard to fetch her appraised price. The family held on to George longer. My great-grandmother Rosa was six when her grandmother finally sold him, at a 50 percent return on the original investment. That my white Louisiana ancestors had owned slaves wasn’t surprising, but the fact that my black ancestors had also partaken in the “peculiar institution” astounded me. These weren’t the noble tragic figures I’d been expecting to encounter. My claim to an authentic black identity felt more distant than ever.

  I sat back in my seat and looked out the plane’s window. A thick bank of clouds obscured the landscape below. Normally I enjoyed the feeling of disorientation when flying, the idea that I could be anywhere, but right then I wanted something concrete to hold on to. Each time I thought I’d finally tracked the path of the color line through my family’s past, it twisted out of sight. First I hadn’t been able to place my great-great-grandfather Henry Broyard on one side or the other. Now my great-great-grandmother was confounding my grasp of what African American identity was supposed to be. I was nearing the end of my research in New Orleans and I was worried. If I couldn’t pinpoint the place from which my father had fled, was he going to elude me too? As I kept discovering, nothing in New Orleans was as simple as black and white.

  -22-

  Anatole Cousin’s father owned a town house in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, around the corner from the headquarters of the family’s brick-making operation. Wealthy families living in the countryside often made lengthy stays in the city, especially during Carnival season. When Anatole was growing up, it was likely that he visited the family’s pied-à-terre a few times a year, either accompanying his father on business or to celebrate the holidays. In 1843, when Anatole was fourteen, a widow moved across the street with her five children. There was a boy, François, who was Anatole’s age, but Anatole was more drawn to the eldest sibling, Marie Evaline, who was five years his senior. Although she was colored and Anatole was white, their families weren’t that different from each other: the Cousins and Xaviers were both French-speaking Creoles, and they both belonged to the propertied class—owning land, buildings, and slaves. So when Marie Evaline’s pregnancy started showing in 1851, a few months after Mardi Gras, perhaps it wasn’t much of a surprise for anyone to learn that Anatole was the father.

  Before the baby arrived, Marie Evaline moved across Lake Pontchartrain to Bayou Lacombe, where she and Anatole began to live as man and wife. My great-grandmother Rosa was their second child, born almost exactly a year after the first one. Perhaps the difficulties of these back-to-back pregnancies made Marie Evaline begin to shy away from Anatole’s advances; or perhaps their five-year age
difference became more apparent after the physical toll of childbirth on Marie Evaline’s body. In any case, by the time Marie Evaline reached her midthirties, Anatole had begun to stray with twenty-year-old Margaret Ducré, the daughter of an emancipated slave, who would eventually bear thirteen of his children. Bayou Lacombe was a small community; Marie Evaline must have known about the infidelity. Yet a colored woman with little means didn’t have much recourse, and she continued to allow Anatole into her bed.

  By the time the Civil War broke out, Marie Evaline was pregnant with her and Anatole Cousin’s fifth child, and he had another two children with Margaret Ducré. Legislators for St. Tammany Parish had initially voted against Louisiana’s seceding from the Union, but once the war started, all the local men were expected to volunteer for the Confederate cause. In the summer of 1862, Anatole and his brother Octave set off for Camp Moore, up near the Mississippi border, to join the Ninth Louisiana Partisan Rangers. Marie Evaline had no family in Lacombe other than Anatole’s kin, who may have been disinclined to look after her, especially when he had a second colored family living down the road.

  After New Orleans fell to Union forces, getting food and supplies to St. Tammany Parish across the federal blockade on Lake Pontchartrain became nearly impossible. Deserters from both sides raided a nearby Indian village for food, killing or displacing hundreds of Choctaw, many of whom later died from illness or starvation. Lincoln’s proclamation freeing the slaves in the rebel territories made life more difficult still.

  Anatole Cousin owned about fifteen slaves, one or two of whom may have been assigned to help Marie Evaline. Cousin family lore describes a group of happy workers who stuck by the family throughout the war, even helping them to evade capture by Union soldiers. The story went that when some Yankees came to the door of the Cousin family’s homestead in a neighboring town, a slave convinced the marauders that everyone inside was sick with yellow fever and sent them on their way. Nevertheless, in the weeks following Lincoln’s proclamation, when thousands of slaves from the parishes surrounding New Orleans were making a dash for Union territories, some of the St. Tammany slaves must have seized the opportunity to flee as well.

  Sometime after the birth of her fifth child, Marie Evaline sneaked across the lake herself to wait out the duration of the war in New Orleans. After the conflict ended, Marie Evaline saw Anatole at least one more time, for she became pregnant with their sixth (and last) child in February of 1867. But the war laid bare the fact that more differences existed between them than a few shades of skin color. During the Battle of Port Hudson, Anatole’s Confederate unit had faced off against Marie Evaline’s brother François, who belonged to the Louisiana Native Guard. The Partisan Rangers had supplied the sharpshooters who struck down so many of the colored soldiers that day.

  After impregnating Marie Evaline for a final time, Anatole returned to Lacombe, where he would live out the rest of his years with Margaret Ducré. But he didn’t completely disappear from Marie Evaline’s life. A few years later, a family friend of Anatole’s arranged for the sale of a few tracts of the Cousin family land in Lacombe to Marie Evaline and two other colored women who’d been mistresses of his brothers, the records of which I’d come across in the basement of the Covington courthouse. Leasing the acreage to farmers or lumbermen provided the women with some regular income. And so even if Marie Evaline’s children didn’t see their father very much (or appear as beneficiaries in his will), they continued to have ties to Lacombe, even becoming friendly with some of Anatole’s other children. In fact after Rosa and Paul married, they built a summer home in Lacombe, which my father used to visit as a child until his family left Louisiana.

  Over the years, Marie Evaline was forced in various legal transactions to admit to her unmarried status, but she maintained the fiction to her friends and family that she and Anatole had been married. She went by the last name Cousin, and around the time of Rosa’s wedding, she began referring to herself as Widow Cousin, even though Anatole was alive and well, residing in Lacombe with Margaret Ducré. It must have been particularly painful for her to learn that Anatole eventually married Margaret—making their children legitimate—during the brief window in Louisiana when intermarriage was legal. But still Marie Evaline’s last word, on her memorial card, described her as Mrs. Anatole Cousin.

  Paul and Rosa had probably known each other since childhood. His father and her uncle served in the same company of the Louisiana Native Guard. Their extended families belonged to the same circle—people who worshipped at St. Augustine’s Church, attended Republican political meetings, and belonged to the more exclusive of the Creole benevolent associations. Compared to Paul, Rosa enjoyed a childhood of relative comfort despite her mother’s precarious connection to Anatole. During the antebellum years, when they lived in Lacombe or at her grandmother’s place in New Orleans, there’d been slaves to help with the cooking and cleaning. Even with the upset of the war, Rosa had been able to attend school, where she learned to read and write. And there was money enough for frivolities such as photographic portraits and elegant clothes to wear in them. Rosa’s Choctaw ancestry gave her straight dark hair, broad high cheekbones, and deeply set eyes. Neither she nor her siblings looked much like Negroes, which allowed them more freedom as the city became more segregated.

  At the time of the 1878 national election, Rosa was nearly eight months pregnant with her and Paul’s first child. The months leading up to the election had been marked by unprecedented violence, particularly in the cotton parishes along the Mississippi, as colored men attempted to register to vote. In New Orleans election officials first stalled on supplying the special deputies needed to assist in the registration and election processes, and then appointed only Democrats, wrecking any shot at fairness. On election day itself, the Republican U.S. marshal reportedly got drunk, allowing the Democratic deputies in the city to swing votes their way with impunity. No matter that blacks outnumbered whites in the majority of Louisiana’s parishes, all six of the state’s U.S. congressional seats went Democratic.

  Up in Washington, President Hayes received a day-by-day, parish-by-parish catalog of the colored Republicans who had been murdered:

  On Oct. 16th, William Henry was shot in Tensas Parish and Richard Miller was hanged at Lake St. Peter. On Oct. 17th, Louis Postewaithe and James Starier were shot at Wren’s store in Tensas Parish....On October 18th, Bob Williams, Peter Young, and Monday Hill were hanged and Hiram Wilson was shot, all in Tensas Parish. On October 19th, Charles Bethel was shot and had his throat cut on a plantation just above the town of Waterproof in Tensas Parish....In Concordia, on October 17, Charles Carroll and Wast Ellis were killed, and Commodore Smallwood, a preacher, was whipped, weighted down with an iron cogwheel and thrown in the lake and drowned. Dickey Smith was hanged on Oct. 18th....

  The list went on and on. Hayes sent federal prosecutors down south to investigate, but they couldn’t secure convictions in any of the cases. Those few witnesses who didn’t sympathize with the perpetrators were either killed before they could testify or were too afraid to come forward.

  The disastrous results of the November election forced the different factions of Louisiana Republicans to mend their rifts. The Democrats were convening another constitutional convention, where they would surely try to repeal some of the rights secured for Negroes at the last one. Republicans needed to work together to ensure that some of their delegates were elected if they wanted to have a voice in the process. To that end fifty white and black party leaders gathered at Antoine’s Restaurant in the French Quarter. In a great show of cooperation, ex-governor Warmoth and Tribune founder Louis Roudanez shook hands, agreeing to end the dispute that had been begun ten years earlier with the paper’s refusal to back Warmoth’s gubernatorial nomination.

  The Republicans’ united front paid off. Out of 134 delegates at the convention, 32 were Republicans, including 17 blacks. Sure enough, the Negroes’ franchise was debated, but white planters feared that taking away the bla
ck vote would drive too many of their laborers from the state. So Governor Nicholls moved on to the next goal: segregating public institutions and businesses. In order to pass the amendment, he needed the support of the Negro delegates. In exchange for their votes, he offered to establish a separate state-funded black institution for higher learning, which eventually became Southern University. P.B.S. Pinchback, a colored Republican who had always stuck by Warmoth, convinced the other black delegates to accept the deal.

  Pinchback later explained himself: “I have learned to look at things as they are and not as I would have them....This country, at least so far as the South is concerned, is a white man’s country....What I wish to impress upon my people, is that no change is likely to take place in our day and in general that will reverse this order of things.” But many in the Creole of color community never forgave Pinchback for his acquiescence to segregation. The national black leader Booker T. Washington would advocate a similar accommodationist position in his 1895 speech dubbed the Atlanta Compromise. In effect, these colored politicians agreed to forgo integration in exchange for the funding of their own institutions. It marked the beginning of a style of race relations that would persist in Louisiana, and throughout the South, until the 1960s.