Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

Darryl Barthé

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175538
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.'s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans' Creole community forward, documenting the process of "becoming American" through Creoles' encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans's voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. "Becoming American" entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of "Creolization" and "Americanization, " social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

1

IDENTIFYING A HISTORIC LOUISIANA CREOLE COMMUNITY

In 1832, iconic American author Washington Irving toured the prairies of the western frontier of the United States in what are today the states of Missouri and Oklahoma. The resulting account, Irving’s Tour of the Prairies, is a romanticized retelling of his exploits on the US frontier. Initially, Irving’s companions in this adventure were two Europeans: an Englishman, Mr. Latrobe, and a young aristocrat from Switzerland, the Count de Pourtales. Yet, in St. Louis, the three intrepid tourists found their wilderness guide in the person of Tonish:

a personage of inferior rank, but of all-pervading and prevalent importance: the squire, the groom, the cook, the tent man.—in a word, the factotum, and, I may add, the universal meddler and marplot of our party. This was a little, swarthy, meagre, French Creole, named Antoine, but familiarly dubbed Tonish: a kind of Gil Bias of the frontiers, who had passed a scrambling life, sometimes among white men, sometimes among Indians; sometimes in the employ of traders, missionaries, and Indian agents; sometimes mingling with the Osage hunters. We picked him up at St. Louis, near which he has a small farm, an Indian wife, and a brood of half-blood children. According to his own account, however, he had a wife in every tribe; in fact, if all this little vagabond said of himself were to be believed, he was without morals, without caste, without creed, without country, and even without language; for he spoke a jargon of mingled French, English, and Osage. He was, withal, a notorious braggart, and a liar of the first water.1

Irving’s characterization of the “French Creole” reveals much about the Anglo-American perception of the people who fell under US authority after the Louisiana Purchase. Tonish was effective, indeed indispensable, to the purposes of Irving and his companions. Yet, Irving’s portrayal of Tonish also casts him as fundamentally untrustworthy, morally depraved, a compulsive liar, a sexual deviant, and a philandering polygamist. Despite this depiction as a base and unserious person, however, there is a clear menace in Irving’s depiction that speaks to a larger sense of “otherness.”

Upon arriving at the trading town of Chouteau, Oklahoma, Irving hired two more Creoles, both of French-Osage heritage. One was a young man, also named Antoine, who Irving described as having “a vehement propensity to do nothing, being one of the worthless brood engendered and brought up among the missions . . . a little spoiled by being really a handsome young fellow, an Adonis of the frontier, and still worse by fancying himself highly connected, his sister being concubine to an opulent white trader!” The other Creole was a hunter named Pierre Beatte, and it is with his description of Beatte that Irving was most explicit in communicating that sense of malicious “otherness” that existed between the Creoles and Irving, the American:

I confess I did not like his looks when he was first presented to me. He was lounging about, in an old hunting-frock and metasses or leggings, of deer-skin, soiled and greased, and almost japanned by constant use. . . . His features were not bad, being shaped not unlike those of Napoleon, but sharpened up, with high Indian cheek-bones. Perhaps the dusky greenish hue of his complexion aided his resemblance to an old bronze bust I had seen of the Emperor. . . . He had altogether more of the red than the white man in his composition; and as I had been taught to look upon all half-breeds with distrust, as an uncertain and faithless race, I would gladly have dispensed with the services of Pierre Beatte.2

Irving takes care to speak to an image of a frontiersman that his audience would have been familiar with when describing the hunter: he racialized and exoticized Beatte, the Creole with the high “Indian” cheekbones and the chiseled features that reminded the New Yorker of a bronze bust of Napoleon Bonaparte. Not quite civilized, being more red man than white, Beatte was devoid of pretense and wholly unconcerned with social niceties. Unkempt and filthy, he was not a “Noble Savage,” as such; just savage. Indeed, it is almost as if Irving used Beatte as a literary representation of the Louisiana Territory itself: a twilight land inhabited by “a sprinkling of trappers, hunters, half-breeds, creoles, negroes of every hue; and all that other rabble rout of nondescript beings that keep about the frontiers, between civilized and savage life, as those equivocal birds, the bats, hover about the confines of light and darkness.”3 It was a wild, dangerous land, yet by the 1830s many Americans viewed the subjugation of that wild frontier—and its people—as a natural consequence of the arrival of Anglophone American settlers there, and it is in this context that the story of the Americanization of Louisiana’s Creole people takes place.

It is important to, first, disambiguate, define, and analyze the interplay of creolization and Americanization, social processes that often worked in opposition to one another throughout the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans throughout the period of this study. Much of the scholarly discourse on “creolization” has taken place among linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Of those historians who have grappled with the inexactitude of créolité (that is, the quality of “creoleness”), there is a wide variety of opinions and perspectives on what créolité is, how it has manifested historically, and who and/or what can be authentically identified as “Creole/creole.” More than a decade ago, German linguist Eva Martha Eckkrammer observed that,

to investigate creolization and its underlying anthropological, social and linguistic processes on general grounds, the point of departure has to be at least pan-Caribbean if not—and I personally plead for a cognate perception—a geographically much wider belt including all territories where cultural and/or racial mixing have led or are leading to the evolution of mixed cultures and new identities some of them including an independent linguistic output. If we base our considerations on such a broad definition we cannot avoid asking what the term creole means precisely. . . . the etymological exigency lies in the changing semantic values transported by the word which differ across languages, chronologically as well as geographically.4

Eckkrammer’s observation is useful although perhaps its greatest utility is in its presentation of the sort of problematic complexity inherent to the dialogue on creolization and creole people and languages. If creolization consists of processes of cultural and/or racial mixing that have led to the evolution of new hybrid identities, then where on Earth did creolization not occur and who on Earth is not a Creole? No one perceives Egyptians as “Nile River basin Creoles,” nor have Egyptians ever identified themselves as Creoles, yet it is undeniable that Egypt was the setting for processes of “cultural and/or racial mixing.” Eckkrammer, even as she attempts to extend the interpretive device of “creolization” to wider contexts, acknowledges that extending the limits of the “Creole World” can easily result in the term losing its meaning. Thus, the first task of this study is to define terms and to positively identify the historic Creole community in Louisiana.

The ambiguity inherent to créolité, and the varied ways that créolité is manifested, make identifying historic Creole communities in Louisiana a difficult proposition at times. This is especially true, it seems, for those who have been conditioned to see “Whites,” “Blacks,” “African Americans,” “Indians,” “Germans,” “Frenchmen,” “Spaniards,” and “Cajuns” when viewing Creoles. Only adding to the confusion is the fact that Louisiana Creole identity is not mutually exclusive to any of those identifiers: there are white Creoles, black Creoles, and African Americans who assimilated into Creole communities in Louisiana. There are German Coast Creoles, Creole Isleños (Hispanophone), métis Creoles, Creole Houmas, Creole Ishaks, and Creole Coushattas. The very word “Cajun” is a Creole pronunciation of the word “Acadian,” and many of the cultural markers of contemporary cajunéité, particularly Cajun cuisine (for example, “Cajun gumbo,” “Cajun spices”), are simply not Acadian in origin, suggesting that the Cajun ethnic identity itself is inseparable from Louisiana créolité.

Créolité in Louisiana is manifested in the new modes of social interaction that emerged among the Africans, Amerindians, Europeans, Afro-Amerindians, Euro-Amerindians, Afro-Europeans, and Afro-Euro-Amerindians who settled there. Creoles in Louisiana, compelled to grow new foods and to prepare old foods in new ways, were forced to expand their palettes to accommodate one another’s tastes since they were all eating the same meals, even if not around the same dinner table. Enslaved Afro-Creoles who refused to relinquish their ancestral spiritual traditions continued to observe traditional African spirituality but couched their devotion in the imagery of Catholicism and found American alternatives, like tobacco and rum, to replace traditional devotional offerings that may not have been so readily available in the Americas.

Créolité in Louisiana is also manifested in language. Indeed, French-lexified Creole languages emerged everywhere in the Americas from as far north as French Canada, throughout Louisiana, and as far south as the Caribbean. Métis Creole, also referred to as Michif and French Cree, of the Métis people of Canada and the United States is influenced by French, Cree, and Ojibwé. Haitian Kréyol, one of the two official languages of Haiti, is significantly different from both Louisiana Creole French and Michif, and borrows idioms and pronunciations from both African languages and the language of Amerindian people as well. Louisiana Creole, also referred to as “Louisiana Creole French” and “Kouri-Vini,” is influenced by French but also incorporates vocabulary from West African languages and Amerindian languages as well as Spanish.

Neither Virginia nor Maryland produced a community of people, of mixed heritage or otherwise, that identified itself and was recognized by others as Creoles the way that Louisiana did. However, historian Ira Berlin offers a compelling argument that the English colonies in North America, from Chesapeake Bay to the Carolina low country, were settled by “Atlantic Creoles” from West Africa. Atlantic Creoles were the products of a colonial culture of trade and exchange that began in the middle of the fifteenth century between various West African peoples and the Portuguese along the west coast of Africa. Often having ancestral connections to both Africa and Europe, Atlantic Creoles were adept at trade languages and at exploiting their in-betweenness to profit from the triangle trade. Berlin argues, however, that Atlantic Creoles were forced into new, exclusively black, identities in North America as the plantation system in the English colonies matured. That system, which would become more severe over the course of the eighteenth century, required not only that non-Whites be socially subordinate to Whites, but also that people of African descent be considered a “special species of beings,” a species specifically designed for slavery. A Creole community did not endure in Virginia and Maryland because the operational ideology that promoted hybridization and promoted amalgamation (that is, creolization) was abandoned and replaced with an ideology of “radical separation of master and slave and the creation of the worlds of the Big House and the Quarters.”5

In 1992, anthropologist Ulf Hannerz observed that “Creole cultures—like creole languages—are intrinsically of mixed origin, the confluence of two or more widely separated historical currents . . . [that] come out of multi-dimensional cultural encounters.” These “multi-dimensional cultural encounters” in places like Michigan, Ontario, Mauritius, Saint-Domingue, and Louisiana all have underlying similarities that are directly related to a larger context of European colonialism, but the fact that Michif, Mauritian Creole, Haitian Creole, and Louisiana Creole are not all mutually intelligible languages speaks directly to the diverse ways that créolité is manifested, even if in every case there is cultural exchange and hybridization.6

Creolization is a generative process, a fact contained in the origin of the word itself: “creole” is derived from the Latin verb “creare,” that is, “to create.” Referencing only the original Latin, the word, when used as an adjective, is “creatus” which can be translated, roughly, as “created” in the sense of “begotten.” The same word can be used as a noun in fact (or rather, as a gerund), as a synonym for “offspring.” Indeed, the etymology for the word given in the Grande Dicionário da Lingua Portuguesa includes “infant” as an archaic use of the term.7 With this in mind, it is not difficult to contrast the ideology and process of creolization with that of Americanization.

Anthropologist Charles Stewart describes Americanization—a process he sees as a restructuring, rearranging, and reordering of new geographical and cultural contexts on the frontier—as a form of creolization. Yet, the story of the American frontier is a story of conquest, not of amalgamation; separation, not integration; domination, not exchange. As historian Rob Kroes so concisely articulates the point: Americanization is the “story of an American cultural language traveling and of other people acquiring that language.” Americanization is not the story of a new language, and new identity, emerging organically and erotically.8

Absent from the English colonies in North America was the sexual permissiveness that allows for the hybridity that characterizes creole contexts. Indeed, if legislation passed in seventeenth-century Virginia is any indication of public attitudes toward sex and sexuality, then it is clear that sexual mores were extremely conservative. Fornication, for example, had been a criminal offense from the earliest days of English settlement at Jamestown. Yet, in 1662, legislators in Virginia were compelled to stipulate additional penalties for fornicators who sinned across color lines. In 1691, Virginia legislators took this hostility to interracial sexual congress a step further and passed a statute criminalizing formal marriage across the color line and stipulating that violators of the prohibition be subject to banishment from the colony.9

According to historian George M. Fredrickson, the majority of Virginia’s anti-miscegenation laws seemed to fixate on the problem of white women and black men marrying. This is not to say that such laws did not include prohibitions on sexual relations between white men and African and Indian women, however. On the contrary, the more generalized (and directly stated) purpose of these statutes was to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue, which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by negroes, mulattoes and Indians intermarrying with English or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another.” Far from promoting admixture and hybridity, the Anglo-American context was actively opposed to it: not only were English colonials in North America not creole, but also they were actively anti-creole.10

Louisiana was an immense expanse that bridged the profoundly different worlds of French Canada and the Gulf Coast. Louisiana is often viewed in pan-Caribbean contexts, in part due to the social, cultural, and political connections between Louisiana and Cuba and Haiti in the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. However, the origins of Louisiana and of the Creole people of Louisiana, are in Québec. Historian Jennifer Spear even goes so far as to describe Louisiana as a colony of a colony to indicate the relationship between Louisiana and New France, observing that “many of lower Louisiana’s earliest colonizers were Canadian-born,” rather than French.11 It should be no surprise then that créolité in Louisiana was informed by the culture of métissage that had existed in French Canada for a century prior to New Orleans’s founding.

Samuel de Champlain established Québec City in 1608, establishing the Habitation de Québec as a trading post from which the French forged alliances with the Algonquin and Huron nations. It is there, in Québec, that the origins of Louisiana créolité are to be foun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Identifying a Historic Louisiana Creole Community
• 2. Strangers in Their Own Land
• 3. Cliquish, Clannish, Organization Minded
• 4. The American Labor Movement in Creole New Orleans
• 5. Learning American at School (and Church)
• Conclusion: Creole Americans
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index