“Not So Denatured as to Kill Her Child”

Chapter Three moves to the Illinois Country (Upper Louisiana) in 1748 and explores the contentious relationship between two enslaved women: Marie-Jeanne, a pregnant woman of African descent accused of infanticide after going into labor, and Lisette, a young Indian girl. The chapter explores French views of motherhood, and of enslaved Africans as parents, but also enslaved women’s particular vulnerability to sexual abuse from French men both in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans (especially Mauritius). Marie-Jeanne and Lisette’s court appearance, in Kaskaskia and then in New Orleans where Marie-Jeanne was sent to be tried, afforded them the possibility of narrating their own stories of loss, and, in the fissures between the lines of questioning and their answers, the childless woman and the motherless child interspersed references to work roles, conflicts over authority, and their conceptions of motherhood.

“Asleep in Their Bed at the Door of Their Cabin”

Chapter Five shifts the action to 1767 and a swampy bayou beyond New Orleans as it traces the love story of Kenet and Jean-Baptiste and their search for a way to be permanently united. Where enslaved women are concerned, testimony about courtship, love, labor, and longing is especially rare. This man and woman belonged to different owners, and their testimony illuminates the multiple and sustained steps they took to secure, over the long term, their affective and physical union, steps which included negotiating with their owners, a perilous escape via waterways towards Mobile, and running away to set up house together. Their words also illuminate what they envisioned when granted autonomy over two gendered corollaries of spousal relationships: domestic organization and household labor, themes that find parallels in the concerns of by free people of color in Louisiana.

“It’s Only from God That We Ask Forgiveness”

This analysis focuses on Louison, an enslaved woman belonging to the Ursuline convent in New Orleans, who testified as victim of a violent aggression in 1752. She was stabbed during an incident that escalated when a soldier demanded that she and her companions launder his soiled handkerchief. The depositions in this case laid bare the role of the Company of the Indies and Catholic orders as slaveholders, but also reveals the importance to the enslaved of family and kin relations, as seen when her husband, the convent-hospital’s enslaved apothecary and surgeon’s aide, came to her succor. In her testimony we hear Louison insistently communicating her response to a violent act of aggression, making full use of the opportunities available to her to speak: first, in her religion-inflected words to the soldier during their encounter and, second, in her subsequent retelling of the event to court officials.

“Said, Without Being Asked”

Drawing on 18th century testimony by enslaved Africans in French colonial Louisiana, and the 1764 interrogatory of Marguerite in particular, the introduction lays out why such court records can be seen as a form of autobiographical narrative. Their words, meticulously recorded according to French court procedure, show that deponents constantly redirected the court’s focus away from the crimes being investigated, veering off subject and offering details that seem extraneous at first glance, but are in fact deeply revealing and very often riveting. Less concerned with whether testimony can tell us whether the events described actually took place, this analysis focuses instead on the medium of testimony as an opportunity for the enslaved to construct a narrative, one that reflected the spontaneity of oral speech, that was anchored in their own experiences, and that brimmed with character, personality, wit, emotions and ways of knowing, one that was autobiographical because it expressed how they looked at their world, how they evaluated it, and made sense of it at that moment in time.

Epilogue

The Epilogue foregrounds the enslaved African François-Xavier, whose dogged attempts in 1753 Mobile to get a soldier shamed for a profoundly disturbing act reads at times like a searing indictment of slavery. In this highly unusual court case, François-Xavier’s actions and words signal how he made sense of his world and his place within it and, especially, how well he understood the limits imposed on his person because of his status as a slave. François-Xavier had witnessed a shocking and disturbing act but he knew that he was powerless to stop it simply because he was a slave and the soldier was not. His testimony served as a damning intellectual critique of slavery, one that he could not explicitly verbalize in court but that hung in the silence. By stepping away from the specific allegation against the soldier and parsing François-Xavier’s words, it is possible to recognize once again how testimony served as a form of autobiographical expression. Spoken in the moment, often in mere slivers, such narratives remind us to consider how—and why—some enslaved individuals spoke, often so fearlessly, about themselves, and how tenaciously they strove to keep the focus on their own humanity.

“Only in Default of Whites”

This chapter offers a grand tour of French court procedures as applied to the enslaved in French Louisiana, in order to frame the analysis of slave testimony. Using particular court cases to flesh out the application of the law in the colony, it discusses the role of slave codes against the backdrop of French colonial laws and judicial procedure, which dictated in minute detail how crimes were investigated, prosecuted, sentenced, and, especially, how testimony was heard, transcribed, and recorded in the archive.

“Our Place”

This case study centers on the court case brought in 1766 against Francisque, an outsider of African descent who self-described himself in New Orleans as an “Englishman from Philadelphia” whose peripatetic life as a slave took him around the British, Spanish, and French Atlantic. Francisque was prosecuted for marronnage (being a runaway) and in the court of the trial, a picture of life on one plantation on the outskirts of New Orleans emerges. Francisque’s behavior, including ostentatious deployment of dress at slave assemblies and in courtship left him vulnerable to the enmity of rival slaves, laying bare the artificial cleavages between freedom and unfreedom when the “free” person was a runaway slave. The Igbo Démocrite, in particular, revealed through his words and actions how local enslaved communities—and their leaders, such as Hector—made use of French colonial justice to regulate social, economic, and sexual interactions. This is Démocrite’s and Hector’s story as much as it is Francisque’s.