Treme: Race and Place in a New Orleans Neighborhood

CHAPTER 2. Afro-Creole Tremé

20 chapter two Afro-Creole Tremé In 1809, the New Orleans newspaper La Gazette ran a short one-column-wide article announcing the arrival of a shipload of destitute Cuban immigrants to the port of New Orleans.1 The article was little more than a nineteenthcentury press release. It provided no context for the immigrants’ arrival and in no way speculated on the impact on or future importance of the migrants to New Orleans. Today, the impetus for and ramifications of the migration are well known. In the 1790s, the free mulatto planter class in the colony of SaintDomingue revolted; the colony’s former slaves followed, creating an independent Haiti. The decadelong conflict led to substantial outmigration, spreading Haitians across the New World. Thousands moved to Cuba, whence they were summarily evicted after the French invasion of Spain in 1808. Roughly ten thousand Haitian Cubans eventually made their way to New Orleans.2 The Haitian influx, evenly distributed among formerly enslaved Africans, free mulattoes , and white Creoles, quickly doubled New Orleans’s population. Without this massive infusion of Haitian-Cuban peoples, New Orleans Creole culture might have wilted under the pressure of Americanization. There would have been little need, for example, for the development of New Orleans’s Creole faubourgs beyond the ramparts of the original city. In particular, Faubourg Tremé was formally created after the influx. The culture and institutions of those immigrants , in combination with New Orleans’s preexisting Francophone population , distinguished those early faubourgs. This chapter examines the development of New Orleans’s Afro-Creole cultural landscape outside the French Quarter during the nineteenth century. I summarize the academic research on Creole New Orleans, devoting particular attention to events in Faubourg Tremé. The work of other scholars, mainly historians, provides the background for this chapter, offering us a good understanding of the evolution of New Orleans’s Creole culture.3 With few exceptions , however, this work has little geographic specificity other than a secondary emphasis on the Downtown areas of New Orleans where most of the city’s free people of color lived. This unintended slight has resulted in knowl- Afro-Creole Tremé • 21 edge gaps. For example, while we know when important events happened and where, we have little understanding of why those events happened where they did. More important, these histories tell us little about why places have particular meanings and how they came to have those meanings other than as settings. This chapter explores how the Tremé neighborhood of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a place of unquestionable if conflicting importance, came to acquire meaning. The story of Tremé begins in the first decades of the nineteenth century, but understanding the Creole culture that came to define the neighborhood requires us to start at the city’s founding ninety years earlier. The French carved New Orleans out of the wilderness, one hundred miles north of the mouth of the Mississippi River, in 1718. The fortified city quickly became the French capital of the Americas. As with other colonial endeavors, New Orleans was an exercise in controlling foreign lands and people, an exercise that required abundant slave labor, a strong military, and strong will. The majority of colonial Louisiana’s slaves arrived directly from Africa in a short period of time. Most of the arrivals belonged to the Bambara ethnic group, a Mande people who originated in the interior of the Senegambia region. According to Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, these factors greatly affected and even structured New Orleans’s unique Creole culture.4 By the mid–eighteenth century, Africans enslaved in South Louisiana were coercively engaged in producing indigo, rice, and tobacco, outnumbering whites by a ratio of two to one.5 Contrary to popular interpretations of slavery as a plantation-bound experience, in Louisiana and in New Orleans in particular , slaves demonstrated considerable mobility and autonomy. Ingersoll writes, “The great majority of slaves, free white people, and free blacks lived in the adjacent plantation regions. To the town center, white and black resorted frequently to enjoy the social life there, or to conduct affairs in one of the official institutions. Travel between plantation and town center was frequent because it was easy.”6 Furthermore, as a sparsely populated frontier settlement, Louisiana required the construction and maintenance of significant infrastructure and protection from local Indians; many of those duties fell to blacks, again leading to their increased mobility. Louisiana slaves’ autonomy also resulted from their masters’ difficulty in providing for basic necessities. During...