01 A Free Man of Color

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In any work of fiction dealing with the American South, a writer runs into the problem of language and attitudes -specifically not only words and phrases but outlook, upbringing, and unspoken assumptions, which, though widely held and considered normal at the time, are appalling today.

The early 1830s were a time of great change in America. President Andrew Jackson's view of democracy was very different from the eighteenth-century vision of the country's founders. Civil War and Reconstruction lay a generation in the future, and the perception of blacks- by the whites and by the blacks themselves-was changing, too.

In New Orleans for most of the nineteenth century, it would have been as offensive to call a colored-that is, mixed-race-man or woman "black," as it would be today to call a black person "colored." Both words had connotations then that they do not have now; both words are freighted now with history, implications, and inferences unimaginable then.

I have tried to portray attitudes held by the free people of color toward the blacks-those of full or almost-full African descent, either slave or free-and toward the Creoles-at that time the word meant fully white descendants of French and Spanish colonists-as I have encountered them in my research. Even a generation ago in New Orleans, the mothers of mixed-race teenagers would caution their children not to "date anybody darker than a paper bag." Light skin was valued and dark skin discredited, and a

tremendous amount of energy went into making distinctions that seem absurdly petty today. An intricate hierarchy of terminology existed to categorize those of mixed race: mulatto for one white, one black parent; griffe or sambo for the child of a mulatto and full black; quadroon for the child of a mulatto and a full white; octoroon for a quadroon's child by a full white; musterfino or mameloque for an octoroon's child by a full white. (I've seen alternate meanings for griffe, sambo, and musterfino, so there's evidently some question about either what the records were talking about, or whether the people at that time used the same words for the same things.)

White Creoles, by the way, had an intricate hierarchy of words to categorize each other as to social standing and how long their families had been prominent in New Orleans society, so they evidently just liked to label things. Americans, of course, simply did not count.

I have not attempted to draw parallels to any modern situation or events. I have tried to construct a story from a historical setting, using the attitudes and outlooks -and, of necessity, terminology-of that time and place. I have attempted, to the best of my ability, neither to glamorize nor to conceal. The territory is touchy for those who have suffered, or whose families have suffered, from the prejudices and discrimination that once was- and still is to some extent-commonplace. To them I apologize if I have inadvertently offended. My goal is, as always, simply to entertain.