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17 2 A Streetscape Emerges Rue Bourbon and Calle Borbon, 1722–1803 We stand at the intersection of Rue Bourbon and Rue Bienville in January 1732. Gazing southwestwardly, Rue Bourbon ends abruptly one block away, barricaded by an unimposing stockade lined with a loathsome moat “largely unfinished[,] only un pouce deep.”1 In the distant left is a smattering of “houses . . . built with wooded-front and mortar, whitewashed, wainscoted and latticed,” their roofs “covered with shingles[,] thin boards [with] the appearance and beauty of slate.”2 Greased paper or cloth plastille covers those windows that are not shuttered , as glass is a scarce luxury. Wisps of gray smoke rise from mud-clad central chimneys. Around the rustic hovels are sheds, chicken coops, dovecotes, rabbit hutches, fallow gardens, and scrubby fields with the occasional leafless fruit tree or mulberry bush, the latter planted in the hope of developing a local silkworm industry. Far away, a rickety windmill churns with the winter breezes sweeping off the river. A network of narrow drainage ditches, some lined with crude picket or seven-board fences, demarcate parcels regardless of the improvements therein—their proprietors apparently aware of the relationship between possession and the law. Farm animals wander more or less freely; some pigs wallow in fetid puddles. Rue Bourbon manages to be at once dusty and muddy, desolate yet persevering.3 In the distance to our right is a rather foreboding line of dense forest strewn with slash and debris. Villagers refer to this direction as the “woods” side of town—“back” toward the swamps, as opposed to the “river” side, or “front.” Along this wild edge toil enslaved black men, furnished by their masters “to cut down the trees at the two ends of the town as far as Bayou St. John . . . to clear this ground and to give air to the city and to the [wind]mill.”4 The landscape before us, little resembling Pauger’s original majestic vision, evokes any num- origins 18 ber of French colonial experiments throughout the circum-Caribbean world, and it appears equally unpromising. No wonder. Most denizens come from the geographic and economic fringes of the Francophone world: the lower strata of societies in France or French Canada, Saint-Domingue, and the West Indies, via the nascent coastal outposts of Pensacola, Mobile, and Biloxi. For every concessionaire , company employee, or soldier, there are more than a few engagés and forçats—indentured servants and forced immigrants deported from France for criminality, penury, indebtedness, or other undesirable traits. Nearly half the city’s population, including the field laborers we see around Rue Bourbon, arrived in chains in the past decade from the Senegambia region of West Africa or from other French slave colonies. As in the Caribbean, a small caste of free people of color (initially called affranchis and later gens de couleur libres) materialized between the free white and enslaved black castes. A few miles upriver, German and Swiss farmers settled about a decade ago, and now produce a disproportionate share of the city’s sustenance—something of which the local Francophones seem incapable. What we see from this corner of Rue Bourbon falls short of the great expectations of the founder generation and its royal patrons. Looking downriver, we see hints of city life. On the first corner of Rue Bourbon lives the widow Laforge on a property she rents from a man named Dauphin. Her neighbor, La Sonde, also a widow, lives with her child, her slave, and her slave’s child in a compound of three structures. The next two lots, granted “to one named Desloriers” and “to one named Jean Foutre,” are developed with little houses but currently unoccupied. What surprises our eye, to our right, is the ornamental garden with a symmetrical serpentine design, recalling the more enlightened aspirations once held for this forlorn outpost.5 It is the exception, however; mostly we see humble abodes. “The greatest part of the houses,” writes one resident, “is of brick; the rest are of timber and brick[;] many habitations [live] close together[,] each making a causey to secure his ground from inundations , which fail not to come every year with the spring.”6 Most houses on Rue Bourbon are of the standard one-story cross-timber type, in which locally made bricks cemented with a mortar of sand and lime—or, alternately, a mass of mud entangled with hay or other resilient grasses or stems—fill the X-frame of handhewn...

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