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c h a p t e r e i g h t THE SEASON OF REDEEMER DISCONTENT 1878–1886 BBB Chas E. Kennon died Oct.—1878 of Yellow Fever—Noble, generous, constant friend, farewell until we meet in the better land. T.C.W. Ellis —Home & alone, Nov. 20, 1878, 81⁄2 pm. C Charles St. Albin Sauvinet stared despondently at his son as the two listened to Dr. Charles Roudanez’s prognosis. Born in the midst of the secession crisis, Charles Sauvinet Jr. had grown up enjoying many of the privileges that were available to the mixed-race elite in New Orleans. In his early teens, however, the boy contracted tuberculosis, and in the spring of 1878 the disease had taken a turn for the worse. Even though he was one of the city’s most eminent physicians and held a medical degree from the University of Paris, Roudanez had little luck convincing Sauvinet that his son was not in the last stages of life. “Doctors all say that,” the distraught father replied. “He’s going to die and when that occurs, there will be nothing left for me but to throw myself into the river.” Father and son left the doctor’s office and began their somber journey back to the Faubourg Marigny . When they reached their Kelerec Street home, Sauvinet helped his son to bed and then slowly walked to his own bedroom at the front of the house and closed the door behind him. Once inside, he took off his coat and walked over to the mantle, where he kept a .32 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. Lying down quietly on his bed, Sauvinet pressed the pistol to his right temple and pulled the trigger. The man who had endured so much, who had fought so tenaciously, died forty-five minutes later from a wound inflicted by his own hand.1 When Sauvinet’s son succumbed to his illness two weeks later, the coroner recorded a “C” to denote his race on the death certificate. It was an ironic twist: T h e S e a s o n o f R e d e e m e r D i s c o n t e n t 187 One’s race could never matter less than in death. Yet it was also symbolic. The son who had been declared white as an infant did not die that way in the eyes of officialdom. Much had changed since 1861, the year of Charles Sauvinet Jr.’s birth. During that year both optimism and trepidation existed in New Orleans’s free black community. The war had conferred upon this caste a sense of civic standing that no amount of wealth in a slaveholder’s society could ever have supplied . Postbellum political advancements, though mitigated by the forces of factionalism , reactionary impulses, and occasional violence, seemed tangible and perhaps inviolate. At his most politically active, Sauvinet had challenged the white establishment in the courts and had successfully carried his point. In doing so, however, he forever abandoned the racial ambiguity that had been his life’s constant companion. Physical appearance notwithstanding, because of his actions , Sauvinet and, by extension, his children now stood unmistakably as people of color. One wonders whether, and if so at what point, Sauvinet realized that his aspirations may simply have been a small piece of a larger political gambit run by those whose objectives did not bear his own sense of justice. Was this understanding a factor in Sauvinet’s suicide? We will never know for certain. His love for his son and namesake is creditable, but Sauvinet also left behind a widow, two unmarried daughters, and another son. And he killed himself almost exactly ten years after his first wife’s death. Whatever the dark forces that drove Sauvinet’s despair, their depth was all too plain.2 The uncertainty that hovered over all aspects of life for New Orleans’s mixedrace elite must have weighed heavily upon Sauvinet’s surviving children. His older son, James Nelson, had already left home and was probably working as a traveling musician at the time of Sauvinet’s suicide. By the 1890s, he became a proprietor of a traveling circus based in Texas. Perhaps in such an environment of nonconformists , James Sauvinet found a home where his own racial makeup and past mattered little. His sisters, Clothilde and Angela, took a different path toward securing a new identity. In 1886 Clothilde married a Creole man by...

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