The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color

6. The Faith of Their Fathers

169 six The Faith of Their Fathers C atholicism was—and has remained—the cultural root of the society Coincoin’s family created along Cane River. Catholic respect for the sanctity of the family spawned the Code Noir provision that allowed Coincoin to grow to maturity in a two-parent household. The concern of a Catholic priest for the souls of the enslaved was the catalyst for Coincoin’s manumission. Ultimately her offspring’s steady piety and religious leadership would earn for their community much respect that “sheltered it from the ever-increasing restrictions Anglo-Americans introduced into antebellum Louisiana.”1 Theirs was also a devotion purposefully seeded and carefully nurtured by their patriarch, Augustin Metoyer. The church community the Metoyers created on Isle Brevelle was a rare outcropping in a long season of drought for Catholicism along the Natchitoches frontier. For all the colonial era, the registers of the parish and the civil records of the post reflect incessant tension between clerics, government officials, and the settler class. The last four decades of the century saw most families abandon the post for outlying plantations, seeking not only more economic opportunity but also less control by the parish priest.2 As Louisiana’s colonial venture limped to a close, the Natchitoches congregation was assigned a new priest, one whose family ties might have led Louisiana’s new bishop to hope for reconciliation between the church and its wayward frontier flock. Father Pierre Pavie, born in La Rochelle, was the brother of the late Cane River planter Étienne Pavie.3 Étienne’s widow Marie Thérèse Buard—who would remain Father Pavie’s sister-in-law for life by the religious bonds of affinity—had become Pierre Metoyer’s wife. Together, the Metoyers, the Buards, and the latter’s extended kin were now the hub of Cane River’s plantation economy. the forgotten people 170 Both Father Pavie and his bishop, Luis Peñalver y Cárdenas, were overly optimistic. Pavie’s first accounts from the parish, in the wake of Easter 1795, soberly reported the reality he faced: “Very few of the inhabitants have satisfied their Easter Duty. . . . With regard to the catechism that it is necessary to have for children, the major part of the parishioners live a great distance from the post and are not able to come to the instructions that are held for them.”4 Pavie’s annual accounts of 1796 and 1797 reflect more dejection than hope; but by 1799 he had a plan. As with his three prior reports, he first noted the failure of the parishioners to satisfy their Easter duties; then he proffered his solution: “I have proposed to the residents of Isle Brevelle to build a small chapel where I can come and say mass several times each year, and where it can be celebrated with more appropriateness than on their plantations, and those settlers from Rivière aux Cannes would be able to come. If this pleases your Reverence, I will make all efforts to succeed in this.”5 Pavie’s expectations were reasonable, but he was thwarted by either his parishioners or his bishop. The chapel never materialized. His next annual account, in February 1801, tersely reported: “The residents have not given me the satisfaction I hoped for. . . . I see with sadness that my teachings and my exhortations are for the most part useless with them.”6 Nearly three decades would pass before Isle Brevelle would have its chapel. When it materialized, it was not the elite white planters along the river who would build that house of worship. It would, instead, be Cane River’s Creoles de couleur, under the leadership of their patriarch, Augustin Metoyer. The strong presence of religion in Augustin’s life can be traced to his childhood . The church register of 1777 shows the nine-year-old Augustin acting as godfather to his cousin and namesake, Nicolas Augustin, a slave of Commandant de Mézières. In 1781 he served as godfather to an Indian slave child of the Sieur Le Court from the lower Rivière aux Cannes. Again in 1783 he sponsored an infant Negro slave of the white widow Mme. Gabriel Buard.7 By the time Augustin turned twenty-five, he had accumulated a dozen godchildren . From this point on, the registers show him acting regularly in this role. Augustin was, the registers show, godfather to more children than any other contemporary male in the parish. According to legend, while...