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2 / “Fascinating Allurements of Gold”: New Orleans’s “Copper-Colored Nymphs” and the Tragic Mulatta There walks one, the representative of a class whose look and every movement , whose whole existence is love. Related by blood to two of the races into which the human family is divided, she is excluded from each, and stands alone. . . . She has known from childhood her true position, and might teach the Roman poet his own art. h. didimus, new orleans as i found it (1845) Many commit suicide: more die broken-hearted. harriet martineau, society in america (1837) If the ship carrying Zelica and her betrothed, Lastour, had docked in New Orleans in April 1804, the couple from Leonara Sansay’s novel might not have been allowed to disembark immediately. Like many other refugees from Saint-Domingue who immigrated to New Orleans in the early 1800s to escape the aftermath of the revolution, Zelica and Lastour might have been forced to stay on board as officials inspected the ship “in order to prevent ‘the illicit entrance of negroes and colored people, coming from the Antilles, and particularly from San Domingo.’”1 Jennifer M. Spear explains that members of the New Orleans city council “expressed apprehension over the abuses and dangers to ‘Public safety’ that could occur if ‘colored people of all kinds and from all countries’ were admitted into Louisiana. They sought a ban on all ‘black or colored persons’ from entering ‘into this province under pretext of being servants or any other reason,’ allowing exceptions only for those ‘negroes decidedly recognized as uncivilized’ who arrived directly from Africa and were uncontaminated by revolutionary ideologies emanating from the Caribbean.”2 The circulation of revolutionary ideas was not the only threat to “Public safety.” The city council’s willingness to admit Africans because they were “decidedly recognized as uncivilized,” their unmixed blood making it easier to determine their legal status, reflects a larger 38 / “fascinating allurements of gold” fear that mixed-race refugees could potentially carry the racial secrets of Saint-Domingue into New Orleans. The fear that mixed-race free people of color, or gens de couleur libre, from the West Indies could pass into the white population undetected reflects the city council’s anxiety that New Orleans citizens would be unable to read the bodies of mixed-race refugees to determine who was free or enslaved and, perhaps more crucially, who was white or mixed-race.3 Despite Governor William Claiborne’s “attempt to prevent ‘free people of Colour of every description’ from relocating to Louisiana” because , as he declared, “We have already a much greater proportion of that population, than comports with our interest,” the population of gens de couleur libre in New Orleans continued to grow in the early 1800s, increasing from “almost five thousand in 1810” to “fifteen thousand in 1840, mostly through natural increase, although manumission and migration continued to play minor roles.”4 The ambiguous racial and social identities of the gens de couleur libre captivated visitors to New Orleans. British and European writers who visited New Orleans in the 1830s, such as Frances Trollope, Harriet Martineau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and his traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were fascinated by accounts of plaçage, an institution that allowed free women of color to arrange unions with affluent white men. As in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, the free women of color were the most powerful members of the free population.5 Indeed, the financial power and social status free women of color gained from the system of plaçage was reflected in the names given to streets in the French Quarter. Shirley Thompson explains that “although they’ve since been changed to correspond with Burgundy and Rampart Streets . . . Rue d’Amour and Rue des Bon Enfants (Love and Good Children streets) designated thoroughfares associated in public knowledge with the practice of plaçage and the partial inheritance of a white father’s estate by his natural children of color.”6 However, as travel narratives merged with the abolitionist movement, accounts of plaçage mingled with descriptions of “fancy girl” slave markets where eager bidders paid more for a fair-skinned slave or “fancy article” than a good field hand. Visitors to New Orleans depicted the placées as women without sexual agency, thereby setting the stage for the development of the Tragic Mulatta in popular fiction of the 1840s. This chapter examines how free women of color were transformed in the cultural imaginary from placées participating in...

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