Rashaunajohnson 2017

FROM SAINT-DOMINGUE TO
DUMAINE STREET:
ONE FAMILY’S JOURNEYS
FROM THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION
TO THE GREAT MIGRATION
Rashauna Johnson
There is more than one way to apprehend the many “unfinished migrations”
of the modern African Diaspora.1 Their geographic scope is vast, encompassing
the transoceanic and transcontinental passages that millions undertook as cargo in
slave trades and the peregrinations of merchants and believers, artists and activ-
ists.2 Their temporal scope is equally vast. In U.S. history, for example, attention
to the successive eras of black migration shows how the routes of slavery became
a palimpsest onto which African Americans mapped post-emancipation journeys
through the Great Migration.3 Taken together, these investigations show that the
history of black modernity is a series of circulations.
This essay uses family history to show the linkages between two key African
diasporic migrations and thereby expand the conventional time and space coor-
dinates of the U.S. Great Migration. For some, that 20th-century migration was
an extension of the Haitian Revolution’s emancipation diaspora from one century
earlier.4 From an Atlantic perspective, there was no single transition from slavery
to freedom, nor was there a single Great Migration. Rather there were a series of
emancipations and migrations, and each transition in turn affected the next one.
This family’s story allows us to chart that progression from the Age of Revolution
to the dawn of the American century, from the circum-Mexican Gulf to the U.S.
heartland. Specifically, this investigation follows the Frère-Sacriste family from
the French and Spanish Caribbean in the 1790s and early 1800s to New Orleans
in the 1810s and, one century later, to the U.S. Midwest and West, in order to illu-
minate the limitations on black privilege in societies rooted in slavery and reeling
from emancipation. Over the 19th century, generations of this family lived in sev-
eral capitals of Atlantic slavery—Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and Louisiana—but the
sacramental, vital, and notarial records, oral testimonies, and other sources con-
sulted here do not indicate that they were held as slaves in any of those places. In-
stead, they worked to secure their free status on landscapes contoured by the slave
Rashauna Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
427
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All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
428 The Journal of African American History
power. In the U.S. post-emancipation era and during the rise of Jim Crow, succes-
sive generations selectively cited, exploited, and even disavowed the race- and sta-
tus-based privileges of previous generations to better secure other advantages and,
barring that, their bare survival. For members of this family, the Great Migration
was as much an attempt to reclaim a portion of the privileges that their antebellum
ancestors enjoyed as it was a journey toward new opportunities.
As historian Tiya Miles observes, “[T]he process of family making and the state
regulation of family units can illuminate the values and dictates of the communities
and nations in which families live. The family can thus be read as a barometer for the
society, tracing and reflecting the atmospherics of social life and social change.”5 The
Frère-Sacriste family story offers one such “barometer” on what historian Martha
Hodes calls “the mercurial nature and abiding power of race.”6 Their story shows just
how intrinsic, not exceptional, complex and malleable racial categories were to the
perpetuation of racist discrimination in the Caribbean, Louisiana, and United States.7
The heterogeneous, highly stratified societies in which they lived afforded members
of this family certain privileges relative to those enslaved, even as they remained
subject to those classed as “white.” After emancipation, however, once their former-
ly free status became less salient than their racial categorization as “colored,” they
lost a key component of their privilege relative to the formerly enslaved. Ultimately,
this family’s story allows us to witness the ever-unfinished nature of black freedom,
even for those classed as free persons of so-called mixed race, during the eras of
colonialism, slavery, and emancipation in the French Caribbean; the rise of King
Cotton in the U.S. South; the reconfiguration of racist hierarchies and race-based sol-
idarities during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and the emergence of the twinned
hardships of Jim Crow and the Great Depression that fueled black migration.8
This investigation consists of two parts that each focus on a bloodstained
emancipation and the family journeys that each one inspired. The first section be-
gins with Marie-Louise Frère, a girl of color born in Saint-Domingue about three
years before the Haitian Revolution. Though the exact date is unclear, during the
course of that antislavery, anti-imperial revolution, she migrated to Cuba and then,
around 1810, to New Orleans where she secured free status. Shortly thereafter, at
14 years old, she entered into an asymmetrical domestic arrangement with Jean
Félix Sacriste, a 40-year-old Frenchman and fellow Saint-Dominguan immigrant.
Though neither church nor state recognized their interracial union, Frère and Sac-
riste established a household in New Orleans and had five children. Their moth-
er’s free status conferred that same privileged legal designation on the Sacriste
children, but their racial classification as people of color left them subject to an
increasingly repressive racial regime that undergirded King Cotton.9
The second half of this study shows how another epic antislavery struggle—
the U.S. Civil War—diminished this family’s antebellum privileges relative to the

One Family’s Journeys From Haitian Revolution to the Great Migration 429
formerly enslaved in the post-emancipation and Jim Crow eras, even as its repres-
sions inspired them to form new intimacies and communities. Two of Marie-Lou-
ise Frère and Jean Sacriste’s grandsons—Octave and Henry Rey—sought to secure
citizenship rights equal to those of white men through service in Confederate and
then Union forces during the war. Their experiences of racist discrimination while
fighting for the Union pushed them and others of their caste, however reluctantly,
into alliance (if not total identification) with the freedpeople. Yet, as Radical Re-
construction gave way to the backlash of Southern Redemption, the Rey brothers’
niece, Anita Fonvergne, and her children struggled. Jim Crow’s black-white binary
became a “metalanguage” that effaced a century of geographic, economic, and
so-called racial crossings.10 Their ancestors’ antebellum free status and proximate
whiteness did not guarantee protection from anti-black racism in the early 20th
century. So, as their ancestor Marie-Louise Frère had done over one hundred years
before, they too escaped a region ravaged by the traumas of emancipation and the
backlash against it. They, like one million others all told, participated in one of the
archetypal black experiences of the 20th century: the Great Migration from the
U.S. South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast.11
Recently, two historians have asked, “Why is history—especially long term
history—so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our
conflicted present?”12 This family’s story provides at least one answer. An account-
ing of their long 19th century disrupts linear narratives of racial progress. In the pe-
riod under examination, Louisiana transformed from a multilingual, colonial outli-
er to the site of some of the most devastating milestones in the establishment of the
black-white Jim Crow binary. Likewise, free people of color transformed, however
haltingly, from being a distinctive group that enjoyed a privileged status relative
to the enslaved to membership in a single, if highly stratified and color conscious,
African American community. Instead of seeing a linear progression from depriva-
tion to privilege, slavery to freedom, members of this family enjoyed antebellum
privileges before having them rescinded in an Age of Emancipation. Their story
shows that anti-black racism threatens all of those classed as persons of African
descent, no matter their status. Yet as the terrain shifted beneath that family’s feet,
they forged new intimacies, solidarities, and routes in search of something better.
FROM COLONIAL SAINT-DOMINGUE TO ANTEBELLUM

NEW ORLEANS: THE FRÈRE-SACRISTE-REY FAMILY
The Haitian Revolution ended colonialism and slavery in Saint-Domingue, but

the resultant disruption in the sugar supply motivated planters in Brazil, Cuba, and
the United States to expand slavery. It also hastened the Louisiana Purchase, which
in turn accelerated cotton production in the Lower Mississippi River Valley.13 As

Saint-Dominguan immigrants in Cuba and then Louisiana, Marie-Louise Frère and

Jean Sacriste experienced the Haitian Revolution’s antipodal legacies.
The circumstances of Marie-Louise Frère’s birth reflected the social hierarchies
of colonial Saint-Domingue, even as they formed the foundation on which her future
children’s freedom claims would rest. In or about 1788 in the Parish of Notre Dame
de la Rosaire, Rose and Hyppolite Frère had a daughter named Marie-Louise. Her
birthplace, landlocked Croix-Des-Bouquets, was home to some of Saint-Domingue’s
largest coffee and sugar plantations. It is unclear where Rose and Hyppolite fit into
the society’s hierarchies, which consisted of grands blancs, or wealthy white planters
and colonial officials; petits blancs, including merchants, traders, and clerks; gens de
couleur libres, or free people of color, who owned nearly one third of the colony’s
land and about one fourth of its unfree laborers; and a largely African-born enslaved
population.14 Marie-Louise’s status as a “natural” (i.e., not “legitimate”) child indi-
cates that her parents were unmarried. Rose, whose surname was not recorded, was
likely enslaved or a free(d) woman of color, and Frère was likely classed as “white”
or as a “free man of color.” Yet their daughter’s name preserved her parentage. Her
nickname, “Rositte,” was a diminutive form of her mother Rose’s name, while she
took her father’s surname, “Frère.”15 In 1791, as the French Revolution inspired free
people of color to fight colonial elites for citizenship rights, the enslaved community
revolted. They forced the abolition of slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1793, which the
French National Convention ratified and extended throughout the French Caribbean
the following year. In 1803, when Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces arrived to reinstitute
slavery, tens of thousands of free people of color fled. Some 18,000 went to Cuba
alone. Then, in 1809, tensions with Napoleon in Europe prompted Spanish officials
in Cuba to expel the Saint-Dominguan migrants. Between 1809 and 1810, some
10,000 of them moved to Louisiana.16
Though thousands of persons of African descent did not, Marie-Louise avoid-
ed enslavement at the U.S. border, but her classification as a woman of color sub-
jected her to racist and sexist discrimination in Louisiana.17 In 1806, the Municipal
Council passed a restrictive Code Noir, Black Code, with article 40 which stated:
“Free people of colour ought never to insult or strike white people, nor presume
to conceive themselves equal to white; but, on the contrary, they ought to yield to
them in every occasion.” Two years later, in 1808, the legislature outlawed marriag-
es between “free white persons” and “free people of color.”18 In 1812, 14-year-old
Frère and 40-year-old Jean Sacriste entered an intimate, though fraught, arrange-
ment. Sacriste, who was born in “Bergerac Departement de la Dordogne Kingdom
of France,” migrated first to Saint-Domingue and then to Louisiana.19 Since the
United States’ first naturalization law granted citizenship to “free white persons,”
Sacriste enjoyed rights that many others did not.20 Frère and Sacriste formed a
household on “Condé Street between St. Ann and Madison Streets” (presently the

800 block of Chartres Street adjacent to Jackson Square).21 In 1816 he bought

and quickly sold (at cost) an enslaved family—a 27-year-old “mulatresse” named
Adoche (Igbo for “Favor of God”) and her 7-year-old daughter Adele—but the
evidence consulted does not indicate that Sacriste, a confectioner, had the means
to become a major slaveholder.22
Though the Frère-Sacriste children were free before the law and possessed
phenotypic privilege, the state and the Roman Catholic Church denied them the
privileges of whiteness and legitimacy. According to sacramental records, in No-
vember 1812 Father Claude Thoma, himself a refugee from Saint-Domingue by
way of Cuba, baptized Louis Sacriste, the “natural” son of Jean and Marie-Lou-
ise, “femme de couleur libre.” The priest classed Louis as a “quarteron.”23 When
the priest baptized another of their sons, named Jean Sacriste after his father, the
priest did not attribute a racial classification, but he did record the child’s status
as “libre” or free.24 Even in death, the family remained segregated. In 1827, when
deceased patriarch Jean Sacriste’s body was interred in the St. Louis Cemetery, the
priest recorded his death in the ledgers reserved for whites, while records of his
children’s rituals appear in the books reserved for people of color, slave and free.25
At probate, the notary did not list Marie-Louise as a widow, but he did list her as
a “free woman of color mother of the said five natural children of the deceased
and natural guardian of the said minors.” Those children included “Silphide Sac-
riste, Auguste Sacriste, Clément Sacriste, Michel Sacriste, and Diogene Sacriste
all natural children and legatees of the deceased by particular title” (i.e., not legal
“heirs”). The notary, like the priest, inscribed the children’s socially constructed
illegitimacy into state records.26
When their daughter Rose Agnès (Sylphid) Sacriste married Barthélemy Lou-
is Rey in New Orleans in 1829, they united two prominent free black families
of the Saint-Dominguan diaspora.27 Rey worked as a tailor, but by the 1830s he
become a real estate agent. He helped to restore Faubourg Tremé, bought a pew
and stained glass window in St. Augustine Church, and became a leader of the
Institute Catholique. That school, which the African-born, free widow of color
Marie Couvent endowed, nurtured a generation of free activists of color.28 Many of
Louisiana’s “Colored Creoles maintained the commitment to the liberty, equality,
and human rights ideals of the French Revolution,” one historian observed, “But
still supporting slavery, they used human rights language to oppose their relegation
to a subordinate caste, even while they possessed slaves.”29 Rey was one of them,
and by 1850 he owned eight bondpeople.30
Rose Agnès Sacriste and Barthélemy Rey had at least five children, descen-
dants whose efforts to preserve at least two generations of free status led them to
fight for the Confederacy and then the Union. Rose and Barthélemy Rey had at
least two daughters, Josephine and Henrietta, and three sons—Henry, Octave, and

Hyppolite (named for his great-grandfather Hyppolite Frère of Saint-Domingue).

Henry and Octave were both members of the Louisiana Native Guard.31 Louisiana
seceded from the United States on 26 January 1861, and months later the governor
called for five thousand free men of color to serve for one year in the Confederate
forces. According to local historian Rodolphe Desdunes, “Blacks were called on
to fight for the Confederacy, and they were warned to fight or face exile or execu-
tion.”32 Yet some free men of color did not require coercion, as they were invested
in slavery. Henry Louis Rey excoriated proslavery free men of color in a toast
before the Native Guards on 26 December 1861: “Break the chains of your slaves
who are burning to enroll themselves for the defense of the Union and for the rights
of man. . . . What a shame for you to permit that your slaves seek a place in our
ranks when you, yourselves, ought to be here.”33 Rey continued, free men of color
“Chavanne and Oge did not wait to be aroused . . . they became martyrs . . . John
Brown was hung on the gallows; but . . . his joyful soul . . . leaps with joy at the
clang of breaking chains.”34 When New Orleans fell a few months later, leaders of
the Native Guards, including Henry and Octave Rey, turned over their weapons
(stored at Couvent Institute) to Union General Benjamin F. Butler, declared their
allegiance, and became one of the first black regiments in the Union Army. They
served with distinction in the spring of 1863 during the siege of Port Hudson, but
subsequent anti-black discrimination within the Union Army led Octave Rey to
resign.35
As the “War Amendments” abolished slavery, enfranchised African American
men, and granted citizenship and equal protection, members of the Rey family took
advantage of the apertures of Reconstruction amid a violent backlash. National
outrage at the 1866 massacre of several white and some fifty black Union support-
ers in New Orleans resulted in the passage of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867.36
Louisiana voters elected a black Republican lieutenant governor, Oscar Dunn, who
served from 1868 to 1871, and a black governor named P. B. S. Pinchback, who
served in 1872 and 1873. In New Orleans, the federal military commander ordered
the mayor to adopt a hiring quota to ensure that Union veterans made up 50 percent
of the metropolitan police department. Octave Rey took advantage of this policy to
join the force, where he became one of four black captains.37 Yet by the late 1870s,
the national commitment to African American equality waned. On Easter Sun-
day 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, white Democrats executed thirty-seven unarmed
black Republicans in the town square. That same week, the Slaughterhouse Cases
brought by white butchers in New Orleans effectively eroded federal citizenship
protections for African Americans. After the bitterly contested 1876 presidential
election, the Hayes-Tilden compromise allowed former Confederates to trade the
presidency for home rule. By 1880, Octave Rey and his family lived on Dumaine
Street in the Tremé, and he worked as a post office clerk. He, his wife Louise, and

their eight children were all classified as “mulatto” on that year’s census. Members
of his community continued to challenge segregation, an effort that culminated in
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court decision that sanctioned Jim Crow
segregation. Octave Rey died in October 1908.38
ATLANTIC ASSEMBLAGES, JIM CROW BINARIES:

THE REY-FONVERGNE FAMILY
In the years before and after Plessy, former Confederates and their partisans
across the South undertook campaigns of sexualized, racial violence in hopes of
eroding black political and economic gains. The public spectacles of lynching and
the private torment of rape formed a regime of terror.39 But racist terror was not
the only story of this period. “The era following emancipation,” historian Michele
Mitchell writes, “was an era of cautious optimism for most African American
women, children, and men. No longer divided into categories of ‘free’ or ‘slave,’”
she writes, “people of African descent acted upon assumptions that the race was
unified, that institution building was possible, that progress was imminent.”40 In
New Orleans, however, the legacies of antebellum status, color, and caste distinc-
tions made racial unity a difficult endeavor. “The historical divisions among peo-
ple of African descent in New Orleans,” one historian writes, “are perhaps more
complicated than the experiences of those African Americans elsewhere.”41 As
post-emancipation white leaders debated the deleterious effects of interracial sex
and “miscegenation,” African American women’s bodies and sexualities became
tethered to questions about racial existence, unity, uplift, and progress. Frère-Sac-
riste descendants navigated these divisions by remembering their family’s history
of racial and geographic complexity, repeating a revisionist interpretation of their
ancestor Barthélemy Rey’s slaveholding past; selectively conforming to and defy-
ing the norms that governed bourgeois sexualities and domesticities; and ultimate-
ly leaving Tremé for opportunities elsewhere.
At the height of the Great Depression and through heavily mediated testimony,
79-year-old Anita Fonvergne, daughter of Henrietta and niece of Henry and Oc-
tave Rey, recounted her family’s 19th-century history and contemporary realities.
As historian John W. Blassingame argues, though the Works Progress Administra-
tion (WPA) interviews present methodological challenges, they nonetheless “con-
tain much genealogical data on black families not found anywhere else.” Despite
the interviewers’ inconsistent skill levels and cultural competencies, as well as in-
formants’ advanced age and economic and political vulnerability, these interviews
provide invaluable family histories and memories of chattel slavery that would be
otherwise unrecoverable.42 Though her interviewer’s name is not available in the
source consulted, that person gained Fonvergne’s trust, which in turn allowed the

interviewee to offer a level of candor and insight absent from many WPA inter-
views. Fonvergne declared, “I’m talking to you because I can see that you’re good
and that you ain’t no spy. Darlin’, you know there’s so many bad people going
around now, you’ve got to be careful who you talk to.”43 Fonvergne’s assessment
of the contemporary political climate was an astute one. Fonvergne depended on
government assistance: she received $12 each month from the Federal Emergen-
cy Relief Administration (FERA), part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New
Deal. “I’m poor, but I’m proud, and I’m glad to talk about my family and myself
because I want people to know what I come from.”44
Fonvergne perhaps chose to be exceptionally careful because her family’s
history defied ascendant racial fictions. In the early 20th century, popular culture
remained transfixed by the “quadroon” and “octoroon” balls of Old New Orle-
ans, parties at which mixed-race women competed to secure the attention of white
men “who would support them financially in return for sex and companionship.”45
At the same time, members of the dominant society sought to protect whiteness
from “degeneration” through “race mixing.” “During the 1920s, many Americans
feared the advent of a ‘mongrelized’ America and in response engaged in strenu-
ous efforts to shore up the boundaries of race,” historian Elizabeth Pryor-Smith
commented. “Membership in the Ku Klux Klan rose, racial scientists searched for
a sure method of distinguishing races, white restrictionists sought to limit immi-
gration, and white homeowners sought to prevent the ‘invasion’ of other races into
‘their’ neighborhoods.”46 According to Fonvergne, both of her parents appeared
to have been white—“We don’t know how or where we got [N]egro blood”—and
U.S. census takers found it impossible to consistently assign a race to her: they
listed her as mulatto in 1880, white in 1900, then mulatto again in 1910. Indeed,
census officials found it impossible to define and deploy that category with any
consistency, so they eliminated the distinction between “black” and “mulatto” al-
together after the 1920 census.47 “We don’t class ourselves as [N]egroes and we
don’t class ourselves as white,” Fonvergne insisted, “but with our connections and
what we know, there is no house in New Orleans that could close their door on us
if we wanted to go in.”48
Fonvergne’s “connections” came from her Atlantic lineage that crossed bound-
aries of race, nation, and empire—the kinds of crossings that had once provided
privileges but that, by the 1930s and 1940s, also carried liabilities. “The reason
so many people don’t want to talk is because they ashamed of their people,” Fon-
vergne declared. Perhaps she meant the descendants of some formerly enslaved
people were ashamed of their ancestors’ bondage. Conversely, by the time of her
testimony, the Jamaican Marcus Garvey’s mass mobilizations, and the New Ne-
gro Movement and literary Renaissance advanced black pride and independence,
movements that found support in New Orleans. Perhaps Fonvergne referred to per-

sons of so-called mixed-race who were ashamed of their European ancestry.49 If so,
Fonvergne did not share that shame. She claimed Spanish maternal ancestry and,
on her father Armand Fonvergne’s side, Swiss and French lineage. “My grand-
mother was Sylphid Sacriste and she was from Santo Domingo. She came over to
Louisiana during the Revolution,” Anita Fonvergne explained. “When the Revo-
lution broke out, she was separated from her mother and never saw her again.”50 It
is likely that Sylphid’s grandmother, not mother, died in the passage to Louisiana.
Nonetheless, the account that Fonvergne transmits does preserve the fact that a
female ancestor claimed free status at her immigration a century before, a feat that
secured the family’s freedom.
Fonvergne’s testimony also captured the quandary that the descendants of
slaveholding persons of color confronted in the Jim Crow South. This fraught his-
tory of African diasporic participation in the slave trade and slavery became a point
of tension among African-descended populations in New Orleans and across the
Atlantic World. “No, darling, none of my family were ever slaves,” Fonvergne
emphasized, “we were free people.”51 Indeed, the fact that interviewers included
her testimony in an “ex-slave” narrative project is evidence of the very erasures
that Fonvergne attempted to refute in her testimony. She was not an ex-slave. On
the contrary, her grandfather had been a slaveholder and slave trader of color. Her
account emphasizes that her grandfather, Barthélemy Rey, migrated from Cuba to
Louisiana, where he worked as a tailor until a Mr. Prados introduced him to the
bustling New Orleans slave market.
Mr. Prados would buy slaves, and my grandfather used to go up to the slave market with him.
That’s how he became interested in slave dealing and later became a dealer himself. My grand-
father had plenty of money, but the war ruined him because then Abraham Lincoln freed the
slaves, that’s when he lost all of his money. . . . My mother used to tell me that my grandfather
would come home from the slave market up on Chartres and St. Louis [Streets] with his clothes
all torn from him. He was so good to the slaves that they would beg him to buy them, and that’s
where his clothes would get torn.52
This account is likely a recitation of Barthélemy Rey’s own interpretation of

his actions as told to his daughter and then his granddaughter (“My mother used
to tell me”). In the antebellum era, the slave dealer’s social rank was lower than
the slaveholder.53 Yet Anita Fonvergne’s family account offers an unlikely “lost
cause” narrative. This account celebrates antebellum prosperity for slaveholding
free people of color and exculpates her grandfather by positing his paternalistic
kindness to his enslaved workers.54 Fonvergne’s family tale characterizes the late
antebellum era as a time of plenitude. Emancipation, in this telling, caused the
family’s financial destitution: “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, that’s when he
lost all of his money.”55

Fonvergne did not inherit much wealth, but she used her body, and its apparent
whiteness, to authenticate her and her family’s European ancestry. From the Khoi-
San woman Saartje Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus” forced to display
her body in European capitals in the early 19th century, to abolitionist and wom-
en’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, who famously bared her breast to authenticate
her sex, women of African descent have long been compelled to place their bodies
on display for the consumption of largely white, male audiences. In the early 20th
century, postcards of nude African women circulated across the globe, and Jose-
phine Baker performed the Danse Sauvage for the titillation of male audiences in
Paris. In New York’s famous Rhinelander trial of 1925, socialite Leonard “Kip”
Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Jones Rhinelander, for fraud. He claimed that she
had pretended to be white when she was “in fact” black, and that this deception
warranted an annulment. During the trial, Alice Jones Rhinelander’s lawyers had
her display her body in hopes that the jury could determine her “race.”56
Fonvergne displayed her skin tone and hair texture to authenticate her claim
to mixed-race ancestry at a time when whiteness was becoming an increasingly
exclusive form of property. “You see how dark I am—my face and arms—that’s
because I’m not well.” She blamed her darker hue on illness and years of outdoor
labor as a vegetable peddler. “But look at my legs and see how white they are.”
Fonvergne “lifted up her dress and showed legs many shades whiter. She has pretty
white hair combed straight back, and long. Anita is proud of her hair,” the inter-
viewer editorialized. “Let me show you how long it is,” Fonvergne said before
“[s]he undid her hair and it fell to her waist.”57 In the 1930s, when whiteness again
became a prerequisite for citizenship, economic opportunities, and basic personal
safety, Fonvergne displayed her body to substantiate her family history, subvert
the racial classification ascribed to her, and claim proximity to whiteness and its
wages. In the process, she undermined the fiction of “racial purity” even as racial
categories largely determined one’s life chances.58
Whatever privileges Fonvergne’s phenotype might have offered, her sexual
choices exacerbated the challenges of creating “respectable” bourgeois domesticity.
Around 1880, at about 19 years old, Fonvergne became a single mother. “I wasn’t
married to the man that I had my daughter from. . . . I guess I was old enough to
know better, but I didn’t; and he, he fooled me like he fooled three other girls in
New Orleans.”59 Some young women in this predicament became subject to de-
tention in the House of the Good Shepherd, a Catholic reform institution where,
historian Lakisha Michelle Simmons writes, “white nuns worked to rehabilitate the
‘world worn girls’ of New Orleans—both black and white.”60 Fonvergne apparently
escaped such confinement. Despite her embarrassment and shame, Anita Fonvergne
said she “didn’t do anything not to have my daughter because I had too much pride,
and it was my own fault.”61 She never married, nor did she have more children.62

Fonvergne’s and her daughter’s choices to take sexual partners of presumably

African descent subverted stereotypes about so-called mixed-race women in New
Orleans who exclusively pursued white men. Anita Fonvergne’s daughter, Henrietta
Mamie Moreau Egana (1880–1963), lived at 2120 Dumaine Street, one block from
her mother (see fig. 1). State birth records indicate that Henrietta had at least six
children with Joseph Egana (1880–1935) between 1903 and 1914. Henrietta’s prox-
imity to her mother’s lodgings allowed her to be a caregiver while she raised her own
children and likely assisted with the upbringing of her grandchildren. Henrietta’s
daughter, “Lumena Marine” [Alphonsine] Egana, who lived at 1404 St. Bernard Av-
enue, was a twice-married mother of six. According to the interviewer, Lumena and
her children all “looked more [N]egroid than either the mother or grandmother.”63
Her presumable choice of a phenotypically black partner effectively augmented the
African American population in New Orleans, even as it foreclosed opportunities for
her descendants to “pass” into white society. This foreclosure perhaps retroactively
extended to Anita Fonvergne; when she died in her home at 2004 Dumaine Street on
15 November 1942, her death certificate listed her race as “colored.”64
Figure 1: Map of Tremé section of New Orleans.
Anita Fonvergne lived and died in the historic Tremé, which, by the beginning
of the 20th century, had become one of the most culturally distinctive neighbor-
hoods in the Americas. At the time of her death, her home, located near the corner of

North Prieur and Dumaine Streets, was within walking distance of Dooky Chase’s
Restaurant, St. Peter Claver Catholic Church, the tree-lined Claiborne Avenue prom-
enade, and other institutions central to the city’s African American culture. As activ-
ists challenged Jim Crow segregation, they also built a culturally and economically
vibrant neighborhood.65 The Fonvergne family, the interviewer noted, “has most of
its friends among [N]egroes. They have married into blacker families.” And her sons
participated in the Great Migration. “Henrietta has a son in California, and one in St.
Louis, and one in Mississippi.”66 It is difficult to follow these descendants to their
destinations based on public records. Yet, Anita Fonvergne’s testimony about their
migrations from the Tremé is significant. A neighborhood that served as a refuge
for immigrants of color and their children in the 19th century had become a staging
ground for a second, 20th-century migration. This time, African Americans hoped to
trade the uncertainties of Jim Crow for a fresh set of possibilities at the end of a long
train ride.
This essay used nine generations of Frère-Sacriste family journeys from colonial
Saint-Domingue to Jim Crow New Orleans to show how the U.S. Great Migration
was part of a longer history of Atlantic circulations that included refugees from the
Haitian Revolution and their diasporas. Rather than hold these two epic moments in
the history of black freedom apart, or even focus on the formerly enslaved persons
liberated by each one of them, this family and its generations allow us to see how even
relatively privileged persons of African descent remained subject to the malleable cat-
egories that defined racism in New Orleans and the United States. Yet in the same way
that the categories of oppression were malleable, so were the strategies that people
of African descent used to challenge them. In the era of Jim Crow and the Great De-
pression, the descendants of the Saint-Dominguan diaspora in New Orleans took part
in another paradigmatic African diasporic exodus—the U.S. Great Migration. The
descendants who stayed in the Tremé and the ones who left all sought the same thing
that Marie-Louise Frère had come to New Orleans in search of over a century earlier:
opportunities to advance in a society rooted in racist and sexist hierarchies. Like their
ancestors before them, they used whatever tools they could to, as “race woman” Nan-
nie Helen Burroughs phrased it, “work out [their] own salvation.”67
NOTES
1
Tiffany Ruby Patterson and Robin D. G. Kelley “Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and
the Making of the Modern World,” African Studies Review, 43 (April 2000): 11–45.
2
Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge,
MA, 2007); Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in
the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Winston James, Holding
Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (London, 1998); Paul
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993).

3
Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggle in the Rural South, from Slavery to the Great
Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and
Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997).
4
Leslie A. Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill,
NC, 2009).
5
Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 3.
6
Martha Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story,” The Ameri-
can Historical Review 108 (February 2003): 84–118.
7
On slavery and freedom in multiracial regimes, see Natasha Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the
Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham, NC, 2015); Aisha K. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La
Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841–1844 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015); Alex Borucki, From Shipmates to Soldiers:
Emerging Black Identities in the Río De La Plata (Albuquerque, NM, 2015); Doris Garraway, The Libertine
Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC, 2005); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New
World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004); Nancy Appelbaum, Anne Macpherson, and
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).
8
On family history as lens for viewing race and migration in slavery and freedom, see Kendra T. Field, “‘No Such
Thing as Stand Still’: Migration and Geopolitics in African American History,” Journal of American History 102
(December 2015): 693–718; Sydney Nathans, To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Cambridge, MA,
2012); Lawrence P. Jackson, My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (Chicago, IL, 2012);
Martha Hodes, The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century (New
Haven, CT, 2006); Miles, Ties That Bind; Adele Logan Alexander, Homelands and Waterways: The American
Journey of the Bond Family, 1846–1926 (New York, 1999).
Family histories of the Haitian Revolution and its diasporas include Mary Frances Berry, “We Are Who We Say We
Are”: A Black Family’s Search for Home Across the Atlantic World (New York, 2015); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean
M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Martha S.
Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation
New York,” Law and History Review 29 (November 2011): 1031–1060. Other histories of that migration include
Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions (New York,
2016), chapter 1; Rebecca Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-Enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolu-
tion,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (2011): 1061–1087; Nathalie Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orle-
ans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville, FL, 2007); Paul F. Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue
Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration, and Impact,” Louisiana History 29 (Spring 1988): 109–141.
9
On New Orleans as capital of King Cotton, see Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery
and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History
(New York, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2013); Scott P. Marler, The Merchants’ Capital: New Orleans and the Political Economy of the
Nineteenth-Century South (New York, 2013).
10
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17,
no. 2 (1992): 251–74.
11
Works on women and gender in the era of the Great Migration include Marcia Chatelaine, South Side Girls:
Growing Up in the Great Migration (Durham, NC, 2015); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The
Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: Af-
rican American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001); Kimberley L. Phillips, AlabamaNorth:
African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45 (Urbana, IL, 1999);
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the
Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs 14 (Summer 1989): 912–920.
12
Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (New York, 2014), front cover. Works in African diasporic
history that use an extended temporal frame include Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive
History of Racist Ideas in America (New York, 2016); James T. Campbell, Middle Passages: African American
Journeys to Africa, 1787–2005 (New York, 2006); Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet; Gomez, Exchanging Our
Country Marks; Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York,
1981); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1947 (Hamden, CT, 1978).
13
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, 2014); Laurent Dubois,
“The Haitian Revolution and the Sale of Louisiana,” The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South
44 (March 2007): 18–41.

14
Dubois, Avengers, 39; Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below
(Knoxville, TN, 1990).
15
Marie-Louise Frère, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record, 17 March 1840, vol. 6, page 364, Louisiana State
Archives, Baton Rouge, LA (hereafter LSA).
16
Scott, “Paper Thin,” 1063; Berry, We Are Who We Say We Are. Frère’s 1840 death certificate lists her as “about
fifty two years of age and domiciliated in this Parish since nearly thirty years.” Death Record, Marie-Louise Frère.
On French emancipation, see Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the
French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004).
17
Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cam-
bridge, MA, 2009); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, MD, 2009);
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City
(New Haven, CT, 2008); Sybil Kein, Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton
Rouge, LA, 2000); Virginia Meacham Gould, Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female
in the Old South (Athens, GA, 1998); Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest
Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1997); Kimberly S. Hanger, Bounded Lives, Bounded
Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, NC, 1997); Ira Berlin, Slaves Without
Masters; The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974).
18
An Act Prescribing the Rules and Conduct to be Observed with Respect to Negroes and other Slaves of this
Territory, 7 June 1806, 40, Louis Moreau Lislet, A General Digest of the Acts of the Legislature of Louisiana (New
Orleans, LA, 1828); Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order, 201–06. On the consolidation of power among local
elites in the early American period, see Eberhard L. Faber, Building the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the
Transformation of Early America (Princeton, NJ, 2016) and Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion
and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA, 2005).
19
Jean Sacriste, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record, 25 June 1827, vol. 1, p. 269, LSA.
20
Hodes, “The Mercurial Nature,” 91.
21
Pierre Sacriste, Parish/Statewide Death Record, 2 April 1834, vol. 4, p. 116, LSA. Though Frère was free, her
vulnerability compares to the asymmetrical intimacies between male slaveholders and bondwomen, such as that
of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. They, too, were separated by chasms of race, gender, age, and status.
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York, 2008).
22
On the history of confections in the early republic, see Wendy A. Woloson, Refined Tastes: Sugar, Confectionery,
and Consumers in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore, MD, 2002). On sugar and slavery, see Richard Fol-
lett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2005);
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1986). On 14 May 1816,
Jean Boyrie, Marcellin Boyrie, and Aimée Felicité Boyrie Lepelleur sold Adoche and Adele, whom they inherited
from their deceased parents, to Jean Sacriste for 1,000 piastres. Ten days later, Jean Sacriste sold the mother and
daughter to Jean Baptiste Lepelleur, likely Aimée’s husband, for the same price. This set of transactions allowed
Aimée and her husband to buy out the siblings’ interests in the two bondpeople through sale to Sacriste, a third
party buyer. Sacriste did not earn money on this straw purchase, though he likely received some unrecorded
benefit or compensation. Act of Sale, Jean Boyrie, Marcellin Boyrie, and Aimée Felicité Boyrie to Jean Sacriste,
New Orleans, 14 May 1816, Narcisse Broutin, Notary, New Orleans Notarial Archives (hereafter NONA); Act
of Sale, Jean Sacriste to Jean Baptiste Lepelleur, New Orleans, 14 May 1816, Narcisse Broutin, Notary, NONA.
23
“Louis Sacriste,” SLC, B26, 51, Office of Archives and Records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, New Or-
leans, LA (hereafter AANO).
24
“Jean Sacriste et Frère Libre,” SLC B32, 99, AANO.
25
“Jean Sacriste, Français,” SLC, F14, 194, AANO. On reading across the ledgers, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies
of Four Continents (Durham, NC, 2015), 4–8.
26
Jean Sacriste’s Inventory, Gallien Préval, Notary, 27 June 1827 [filed 5 July 1827], Louisiana, Wills and Pro-
bate Records, 1756–1984 [database on-line], available at www.ancestry.com [accessed 25 April 2016]. Other
versions of the children’s names are as follows: Félix Michel, Jean Félix, Rose Agnès (Silphid), Jean Diogène,
Louis Clément. I examine Silphid at length. One other child attributed to that relationship died in infancy. In his
dubious testimony, 21-year-old gunsmith Louis Sacriste, “declare[d] that Pierre Sacriste aged one year and eight
months son of Jean Felix Sacriste now deceased, and Marie Imbert both F.C.P. [sic] died . . . on the twenty seventh
of February.” First, though in life Jean’s whiteness prevented him from marrying his mulatto partner, in death,
when his body could not be presented as evidence, the notary listed him as a free person of color. Second, Jean
died in June 1827, so he could not have fathered a child born five years later. In a society in which mixed-race

free women of color were thought to be hypersexual “Jezebels,” perhaps Marie-Louise ascribed paternity to her
deceased partner to preserve her honor. Pierre Sacriste, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record. On the fantasies
of the quadroon, see Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the
Revolutionary Atlantic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2013). It is unclear why the notary recorded Marie-Louise’s last name
as “Imbert” rather than “Frère.” Since there were people with the surname Imbert in New Orleans and the French
pronunciations of both names rhyme, he likely misheard her last name and transcribed and archived the error.
27
Before Rose married Barthélemy Rey, she had a “natural” son with Julien Adolph Herviant whom they named
Jean Herviant Sacriste. That son was born in August 1821 and baptized about three months later on the same day
as Rose’s younger brother Jean, who was born in August 1820. According to federal census records from 1820, a
Herviant household lived on Dumaine Street. It consisted of one white male aged between 16 and 18, one white
male aged between 18 and 26, and one female listed under “free colored people” aged 26–45. The absence of
a racial marker in sacramental records suggests that Herviant was white, while Rose was classed as a person of
color. Rose’s parents, Marie-Louise Frère and Jean Sacriste, became their grandson Jean’s godparents. 1820 U.S.
Census, Ancestry.com ; “Herviant Sacriste, libre,” SLC B32 99, my translation, AANO.
28
Donald E. De Vore and Joseph Logsdon, Crescent City Schools: Public Education in New Orleans, 1841–1991
(Lafayette, LA, 1991), 41; Melissa Daggett, “Henry Louis Rey, Spiritualism, and Creoles of Color in Nine-
teenth-Century New Orleans,” University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. Paper 994, 2009, available
at http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td [accessed 11 May 2016], chapter 1.
29
Berry, We Are Who We Say We Are, 27.
30
Daggett, “Henry Louis Rey,” 14.
31
Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, Our People and Our History; a Tribute to the Creole People of Color in Memory of
the Great Men They Have Given Us and of the Good Works They Have Accomplished. Translated and Edited by
Sister Dorothea Olga McCants (1911; reprinted Baton Rouge, LA, 1973); Mary Frances Berry, “Negro Troops in
Blue and Gray: The Louisiana Native Guards, 1861–1863,” Louisiana History 8 (1967): 165–90; John W. Blass-
ingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago, IL, 1973); James G. Hollandsworth, The Louisiana Native
Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA, 1995); Dennis C. Rousey, “Black
Policemen in New Orleans during Reconstruction” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in Black Men’s History
and Masculinity, Vol. II, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Bloomington, IN, 2001), 85–104; Bell,
Revolution.
32
Desdunes, Our People, 120 n. 12.
33
L’Union, 15 October 1862, quoted and translated in New York Times, 5 November 1862.
34
Ibid. Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, a veteran of the American Revolution, and Vincent Ogé were free men of color
and co-conspirators who agitated for free black rights in colonial Saint-Domingue during the French Revolution.
They were both sentenced to death in 1790. Ogé became a martyr in France and among free men of color in Saint-
Domingue. John Brown, a white man, led a mixed-race assault on slavery at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. He
too was sentenced to death. Dubois, Avengers of the New World, chapter 3; Bell, Revolution.
35
Desdunes, Our People, 114–123; Hollandsworth, Louisiana Native Guards, 74; Berry, We Are Who We Say We
Are, chapter 4; Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre
in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006).
36
James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., An Absolute Massacre: The New Orleans Race Riot of July 30, 1866 (Baton Rouge,
LA, 2001).
37
Rousey, “Black Policemen in New Orleans.” See also Dennis Rousey, Policing the Southern City—New Orle-
ans, 1805–1889 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1997). On the post-emancipation period in Louisiana, see Moon-Ho Jung,
Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD, 2006); Rebecca J. Scott,
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA, 2005); and John C. Rodrigue, Re-
construction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton
Rouge, LA, 2001).
38
Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 252–254; 1880 U.S. Census, ancestry.com; Desdunes, Our People, Our
History, 117. Octave’s brother Hyppolite worked as a printer, while his other brother Henry became a founder of
the Spiritualist movement in New Orleans. New Orleans City Directory, 1869, U.S. City Directories, 1822–1995,
ancestry.com, online database [accessed 26 May 2016]; Daggett, “Henry Louis Rey.”
39
The literature on lynching and rape during this period is vast. Recent contributions include Karlos Hill, Beyond
the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory (New York, 2016); and LaKisha Michelle
Simmons, Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (Chapel Hill, NC,
2015).

40
Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Recon-
struction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 7.
41
Berry, “We Are Who We Say We Are”, xv.
42
John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” The Journal of Southern
History 41 (Nov. 1975): 473–492. As part of the Works Progress Administration, individual states received federal
funding to record and archive the testimonies of formerly enslaved African Americans. In Louisiana, John B.
Cade, a history professor at Southern University who was also African American, led a project in 1929–30 that
resulted in interviews with 82 people. A second effort, the Louisiana Writers’ Project (LWP) led by Lyle Saxon,
conducted interviews in New Orleans in the late 1930s and, most intensely, 1940-1941. Saxon’s team of thirteen
interviewers, eleven of them white and two African American, visited their subjects roughly twice. Interviewers
posed a prepared list of questions and recorded responses by hand. The transcripts were subsequently edited,
typed, and archived. Anita Fonvergne interview in Clayton Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the Louisiana
Writers’ Project (New York, 1990), 1–12.
43
Fonvergne interview, Clayton, Mother Wit, 73–74.
44
Ibid., 74.
45
Earl Lewis and Heidi Ardizzone, Love on Trial: An American Scandal in Black and White (New York, 2001),
166. For a critique of the quadroon mythology, see Clark, The Strange History.
46
Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness
(Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 5.
47
“1880 United States Federal Census,” “1900 United States Federal Census,” and “1910 United States Federal
Census,” Database, ancestry.com [accessed 27 October 2008], entry for Anita Fonvergne [b.] 1861, New Orleans,
Louisiana. On the elimination of “mulatto” as a category from the census, see Smith-Pryor, Property Rites, 106–107.
48
Fonvergne interview in Clayton, Mother Wit, 73–82, 75.
49
On the Garvey movement in New Orleans, see Claudrena Harold, The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement
in the Urban South (New York, 2007). Garveyism generally did not attract the Afro-Creoles in New Orleans;
50
The date of the interview is unrecorded, but likely occurred in 1940 or 1941. As previously discussed, pro-
bate records suggest that Sylphid Sacriste’s mother Marie-Louise did not die during the migration from Saint-
Domingue to Louisiana. More likely, Marie-Louise’s mother Rose died en route to Louisiana, which left the
12-year-old orphaned in New Orleans and vulnerable to Sacriste’s offer of an asymmetrical domesticity. Fon-
vergne shares her father’s name in the interview, and it is also recorded on her death certificate. Anita Fonvergne,
Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record, 16 November 1942, vol. 218, p. 6138, LSA. Clayton, the editor of the
published volume, assumes Fonvergne spoke of the American Revolution, but the context makes clear that she
means the Haitian Revolution.
51
52
Ibid. Fonvergne mentions that her birth certificate indicates that her parents were Henrietta Rey and Arnold Fon-
vergne. In the same interview, she reportedly said that her mother was a Johanna Haugman, whom she claimed
“was white . . . a Swiss woman.” Yet it is clear from context that Fonvergne meant that Haugman was her paternal
grandmother.
53
Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 24–25; Edward
E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade
in the United States,” American Historical Review 106 (December 2001): 1619–1650.
54
The question of “black on black” slave trading and slaveholding remains a fraught topic in African diasporic
history. As scholars have noted, African ethnic solidarities meant participants did not understand themselves to
have been selling “fellow Africans” into slavery. Rather, in a context of European coercion to supply slaves in ex-
change for weapons and goods, Africans responded to those economic and political pressures to ensure their own
survival. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery; Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic
Slave Route (New York, 2007); Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks. On the Lost Cause and the reunification
of the U.S. nation in the early 20th century, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American
Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
55
Fonvergne interview, Clayton, Mother Wit, 74. The literature on the relationship between paternalism and capi-
talism in the context of slavery is vast. Recent works that take up these themes in relation to New Orleans include
Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told; Follett, Sugar Masters; and Johnson, Soul by Soul.
56
Lewis and Ardizzone, Love on Trial, 167; Smith-Pryor, Property Rites. See also Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste
for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC, 2014); Christraud M. Geary, “The Black Female

Body, the Postcard, and the Archives,” in Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body,
ed. Barbara Thompson (Hanover, NH, 2008), 143–161; and Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol
(New York, 1996).
57
Fonvergne interview, Clayton, Mother Wit, 79.
58
On the incentives that prompted some similarly situated people to enter whiteness, either intermittently or per-
manently, see Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Cambridge, MA,
2014); Bliss Broyard, One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—A Story of Race and Family Secrets (New York,
2007); Pryor-Smith, Property Rites; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8
(1993): 1707–91; and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Work-
ing Class (London, 1991).
59
Fonvergne interview, Clayton, Mother Wit, 74. The interviewer gives her daughter Henrietta Egano’s age as 57
at the time of the interview, which meant she was born in the late 1880s.
60
Simmons, Crescent City Girls, 141.
61
62
During slavery and after, women of African descent drew on their traditions to prevent and abort pregnancies,
and by the 1940s Margaret Sanger’s campaign for birth control drew national attention. See Sharla M. Fett, Work-
ing Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); and Dorothy E.
Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York, 1997), chapter 2.
63
Clayton, Mother Wit, 80–81; Henrietta Mamie Moreau Egana, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record, 1963,
vol. 67, 3299, LSA; Joseph Egana, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record, 1935, vol. 207, 1929, LSA.
64
Anita Fonvergne, Orleans Parish/Statewide Death Record.
65
Faubourg Tremé: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans, directed by Dawn Logsdon and Lolis Eric Elie (2007;
[San Francisco, CA], California Newsreel, [2008]), DVD; “Michael E. Crutcher, Jr., Tremé: Race and Place in a
New Orleans Neighborhood (Athens, GA, 2010).
66
67
Nannie Helen Burroughs, quoted in Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 245.


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FROM SAINT-DOMINGUE TO

Rashauna Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

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FROM COLONIAL SAINT-DOMINGUE TO ANTEBELLUM

The Haitian Revolution ended colonialism and slavery in Saint-Domingue, but

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Saint-Dominguan immigrants in Cuba and then Louisiana, Marie-Louise Frère and

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800 block of Chartres Street adjacent to Jackson Square).21 In 1816 he bought

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Hyppolite (named for his great-grandfather Hyppolite Frère of Saint-Domingue).

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ATLANTIC ASSEMBLAGES, JIM CROW BINARIES:

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This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This account is likely a recitation of Barthélemy Rey’s own interpretation of

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

Fonvergne’s and her daughter’s choices to take sexual partners of presumably

Figure 1: Map of Tremé section of New Orleans.

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

This content downloaded from 130.070.008.131 on April 10, 2019 12:47:54 PM

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