Creoles of Color

A significant and deeply researched examination of the free nineteenth-century Black developers who transformed the cultural and architectural legacy of New Orleans.

The Creole architecture of New Orleans is one of the city’s most-recognized features, but studies of it largely have focused on architectural typology. In Building Antebellum New Orleans, Tara A. Dudley examines the architectural activities and influence of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—in a city where the mixed-race descendants of whites and other free Blacks could own property.

Between 1820 and 1850 New Orleans became an urban metropolis and industrialized shipping center with a growing population. Amidst dramatic economic and cultural change in the mid-antebellum period, the gens de couleur libres thrived as property owners, developers, building artisans, and patrons. Dudley writes an intimate microhistory of two prominent families of Black developers, the Dollioles and Souliés, to explore how gens de couleur libres used ownership, engagement, and entrepreneurship to construct individual and group identity and stability. With deep archival research, Dudley re-creates in fine detail the material culture, business and social history, and politics of the built environment for free people of color and adds new, revelatory information to the canon on New Orleans architecture.

2022 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Planning
2022 Summerlee Book Prize in Nonfiction, Center for History and Culture of Southeast Texas and the Upper Gulf Coast
2022 Best Book Prize, Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians
2022 On the Brinck Book Award, University of New Mexico School of Architecture + Planning

During these years we have lived very much in the shadow of Coincoin's legend (for the story of the Maison de Marie-Thérèse, see MacDonald, Morgan, and Handley 2002/ 2003; MacDonald, Morgan, and Handley, in press; MacDonald et al., in press). Little by little our research has unraveled the links between traditional narratives and certainties about the history of these properties, forcing us, as academics, to refine our understanding of the plantation's develop-The George Wright Forum 44

Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing the "extensive documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the diaspora," but he lays out a program for future diasporic studies. Prominent in this program are the compilation of biographical data on captives and slaves (including oral source material), the analysis of the sites of the slave trade and movements of Africaderived peoples, the analysis of cultural activities, and an unprecedented form of international, inter institutional cooperation, most notably among African, American, and European institutions which promote education and research. "Il ne servirait a rien non plus de dissimuler nos propres résponsabilités dans les désastres qui se sont abattus ou continuent de s'abattre sur nous. Nos complicités dans la traite [en esclaves] sont bien établies, nos divisions absurdes, nos errements collectifs, l'esclavage comme institution endogene...." Nicéphore Dieudonné Soglo The UNESCO Slave Route Project With these words, the Président de la République du Bénin launched the UNESCO "Slave Route" Project on 1 September 1994 at the old slaving port of Ouidah. 2 To achieve world peace, Soglo continued, it is necessary to come to terms with the legacy of slavery, not only the brutalities of the transAtlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas but also the legacy of the blood-soaked ritual houses in the royal palaces at Abomey, the capital of the Kingdom of Dahomey. The "Slave Route" began within Africa, and its impact was often severe for both deported Africans and those who remained as slaves in West Africa as well. The pursuit of the "Slave Route" represents a departure in the study of the history of Africa and the African diaspora. Hitherto, Africa and the diaspora have generally been discrete subjects of enquiry. Despite the work of Pierre Verger, Roger Bastide, Melville Herskovits and others, scholars have rarely pursued common links between Africa and the Americas. 3 To address this disjuncture in scholarship is the target of the UNESCO Project, which aims to trace the slave trade from the original points of enslavement in the African interior, through the coastal (and Saharan) entrepots by which slaves were exported from the region, to the societies in the Americas and the Islamic world into which they were imported. 4 The selection of Ouidah as the venue for the announcement of the Slave Route Project was auspicious, since Ouidah had witnessed the deportation of hundreds of thousands of slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 5 The enduring memories of the trade were on display, as a tour of museums in Ouidah, Porto Novo and Abomey revealed. The Porto Novo palace was the venue for a display of contemporary Béninois art, which depicted the tragedies of the slave trade in several mediums. The current depiction of the African past through art stood in sharp contrast to the racism of French society during the late nineteenth century as depicted through posters and advertising from the age of the Scramble; the legacy of slavery and the slave trade were readily apparent. The horrors of slavery emerge in a most grotesque form in the Abomey palace of King Ghezo. The walls of the shrine where thousands of war captives were sacrificed contain the dried blood used to make the bricks. In this setting, the opening words of President Soglo became all the more poignant. As the President proclaimed, "we are all responsible for the slave trade." At the closing of the colloquium, the Minister of Education and Culture disclosed the fact that he is the son of a slave and that he wanted to know about the descendants of his brothers and sisters in the diaspora; the pain of the past era could not have been sharper. With the UNESCO initiative, an effort is being made to bridge that almost unbridgeable gap that separates the academic study of slavery and the slave trade from a full and general appreciation of the heritage of Africa in the diaspora and the modern world. The emphasis on the "slave route" draws attention to the consequences of the trade on Africa and the continuities that rooted the deported slave population in Africa. Some slave descendants and former slaves returned, particularly in the nineteenth century. And there seems always to have been a small movement of individual freemen, especially merchants and their sons, within the diaspora. The settlement of liberated slaves in Sierra Leone and their subsequent dispersal represented one of several patterns of population movement that was a consequence of the slave trade. Besides the slaves taken off slave ships and settled in Sierra Leone, 6 other former slaves returned from Brazil, especially after the suppression of the Male revolt of 1835. 7 A few came from the United States, the Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora, a migration that tended to increase after the emancipation of slaves in the different parts of the Americas. 8 As these demographic patterns suggest, the return of former slaves and their descendants to Africa was one mechanism by which the diaspora influenced West Africa. "African history" not only followed the slave route to the Americas and the Islamic world, but "diaspora history" came back to Africa with the repatriates, thereby complicating the African component in the evolution of the diaspora. The African diaspora came to embrace Africa itself. A revisionist interpretation of the dispersal of enslaved Africans in the era of the transAtlantic slave trade, and by extension to the Islamic world and the Indian Ocean basin, concentrates on the role of Africa in the genesis and ongoing history of the diaspora. This revisionist approach emphasizes the continuities in African history and the extension of that history into the diaspora. The identification of disjunctures in that history is essential, but in contrast to previous interpretations of the diaspora, these disjunctures are analysed in terms of the continuities that have been largely overlooked. There were often

Coincoin, probably of Kongo parentage, was born a slave, became the concubine of a French planter, Pierre Metoyer, bore him ten children, and in 1787 was settled by him on a plantation of her own. Locating and excavating her house, the authors discovered it to be a type of clay-wall building known from West Africa. The house, together with an adjacent clay boundary wall, was probably built by slaves of Bight of Biafra origin loaned from the neighbouring plantation of her ex-partner. These structures are witness to emerging initiatives and interactions among people of African descent—but different African origins—in eighteenth-century Louisiana.

Although the term African Diaspora seems relatively new, a number of twentieth century scholars utilized a diasporic framework to explain the commonalities among people of African descent around the world. By the twenty-first century, there are suggested rules of usage when engaging the explanatory paradigm. The field of inquiry and the tools of explanation continue to grow and African Diaspora adherents are slowly populating all of the ‘traditional’ disciplines of academe. Today there is a veritable cottage industry of African Diaspora theorists in the academy continually employing concepts and frameworks that add richness to our understanding of black life in different locales. There are even interdisciplinary African Diaspora Studies programs located in several universities. Most of what has been theorized and analyzed utilizes an Afro-Atlantic model as the norm with slavery as the point of trauma and dispersal, although this norm has been expanded to include modern-day African migrations and diasporas including black life via the Indian Ocean. The first task of any narrative analysis is to provide clarity to the concepts employed, and in diaspora scholarship, we must also define the community and individuals under investigation.

Lovejoy argues that sufficient information exists about individuals taken as captives in the slave trade to allow historians to dispense with a generalized notion of a "traditional" African background for New World blacks and, accordingly, to articulate the African-ness of the black diaspora with ethnic and historical specificity. Lovejoy concedes there are difficulties involved with absorbing the "extensive documentation on the African-ness of the slave communities of the diaspora," but he lays out a program for future diasporic studies. Prominent in this program are the compilation of biographical data on captives and slaves (including oral source material), the analysis of the sites of the slave trade and movements of Africa-derived peoples, the analysis of cultural activities, and an unprecedented form of international, inter institutional cooperation, most notably among African, American, and European institutions which promote education and research.

Turning now to Africa, we find the legend of the creation of mankind out of clay among the Shilluks of the White Nile, who ingeniously explain the different complexions of the various races by the different coloured clay out of which they were fashioned. They say that the creator Juok moulded all men of earth, and that while he was engaged in the work of creation he wandered about the world. In the land of the whites he found a pure white earth or sand, and out of it he shaped white men. Then he came to the land of Egypt and out of the mud of the Nile he made red or brown men. Lastly, he came to the land of the Shilluks, and finding their black earth he created black men out of it. The way in which he modeled men was this. He took a lump of earth and said to himself, 'I will make man, but he must be able to walk and run and go out into the fields, so I will give him two long legs, like the flamingo.' Having done so, he thought again, 'The man must be able to cultivate his millet, so I will give him two arms, one to hold the hoe, and the other to tear up the weeds.' So he gave him two arms. Then he thought again, 'The man must be able to see his millet, so I will give him two eyes.' He did so accordingly. Next he thought to himself, 'The man must be able to eat his millet, so I will give him a mouth.' And a mouth he gave him accordingly. After that he thought within himself, 'The man must be able to dance and speak and sing and shout, and for these purposes he must have a tongue.' And a tongue he gave him accordingly. Lastly-the deity said to himself, 'The man must be able to hear the noise of the dance and the speech of the great men, and for that he needs two ears.' So two ears he gave him, and sent him out into the world a perfect man.' 1 Studies of the origin and development of African descent communities, culture, and spirituality in Louisiana have been limited. This is a preliminary examination of the evidence for pre-colonial arrivals, the African slave trade to these regions, and the emergence of distinguishing African-Creole culture.