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29 two A Matriarchal Legacy I n 1778 free nonwhites were relatively rare at the Natchitoches post. The census of 1776, the last one taken before Coincoin’s manumission, tallied a total population of 1,021 residents; 430 were nonwhites; but only 8 of these were free. Three of those free people of color died or moved away shortly afterward; by 1785 the post still claimed only eight free nonwhites.1 Coincoin, Antoine Joseph, and the two additional sons born to her after her manumission constituted half of this free nonwhite population in 1785.2 Freedom, initially, had little effect on Coincoin’s lifestyle. For at least seven more years she remained with Metoyer under roughly the same status as before Quintanilla’s interference. In the meantime, Metoyer did not bother to make public the fact that the woman in his household was no longer his slave and that she remained there by mutual agreement. When their eighth child, Marie Françoise Rosalie, was born in 1780 and when her brother Pierre was born two years later, Quintanilla tersely recorded the baptisms of both, each time identifying their mother as “the slave of Metoyer.”3 During this period Metoyer executed a series of maneuvers by which he might legally reunite his family and forestall further clerical persecution. In the wake of Manuel de Soto’s release from prison in 1779, the two households acquired properties in the more tolerant lower post of Opelousas and prepared to move there. However, citizen removals between settlements in the colony required administrative permission; and those were rarely granted at Natchitoches. A sufficient force of able-bodied men was critical for borderland defense. Habitans who abandoned Natchitoches were usually ordered to return by the governor, under threat of arrest and imprisonment.4 The well-placed de Sotos managed to skirt the prohibition. Metoyer, by necessity the forgotten people 30 or by choice, affected a compromise that allowed him, Coincoin, and their children to remain at Natchitoches without further prosecution. In April 1780, before the de Sotos’ departure, Metoyer purchased his two remaining children whom the lady still owned: Dominique, aged six, and Eulalie, aged four.5 In September 1780 he sold the vacherie (cattle ranch) he had purchased at Opelousas, together with its house (thirty-six feet long), a small cabin for slaves, a stove, a corral, a fenced garden, twenty-one head of cattle with their calves, four bulls, four oxen, one plough, one cart, and fifteen horses.6 He then petitioned the Natchitoches commandant to grant him land suitable for a plantation, about eight miles below the Natchitoches post on the stretch of Red River then called la Grand Côte (and later, Côte Joyeuse). That petition was successful.7 The two children bought in 1780, as with their siblings Metoyer had purchased in 1776, were not freed; however, he soon indicated his intent to do so. He had, by this point, become a man of some means and regularly conducted business in the provincial capital. On one such trip to la ville, Metoyer visited a notary to draft a document he apparently did not want to file in the small and gossiping post where he made his home. In February 1783, before the royal notary Leonardo Mazange, Metoyer executed his earliest-known will. A later, public, and less incriminating testament would go into great detail about his family background and his relatives, both living and dead.8 In this 1783 document, quietly filed in a distant city, Metoyer identified no kin and, contrary to custom, omitted even his place of origin. The document began with the conventional acknowledgment of his faith and his unworthiness, the commendation of his soul to God, and the specifications of desired funeral arrangements. Then, the usually verbose Metoyer wrote one paragraph of uncharacteristic terseness. In its entirety, it stated: “I declare to be a bachelor and not to have any children.”9 Across the years, writers have extrapolated various motivations from this passage, proposing sentiments from shame to callousness; most have missed the legality that mandated Metoyer’s declaration. Under the inheritance laws that prevailed in the colony, and in France where he held other property, had he acknowledged paternity of illegitimate children, Metoyer would have been legally barred from leaving them any of the property for which he and their mother had labored. Denying illegitimate children an inheritance was, indeed, a time-honored means of encouraging “regularity” in marriage and the transmission of family fortunes...

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