Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

Introduction

In 1700, Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, sailed up the Mississippi River, gathering information about the territory he had just claimed as the French colony of Louisiana. When the expedition approached a Bayougoulas settlement, the villagers , according to André Pénicaut, “fled into the depths of the woods with their women and children.” They were enticed back when a Biloxi Indian, a member of Iberville’s troupe, convinced them that the Frenchmen “were good people.” Returning with a calumet, the Bayougoulas welcomed the visitors, offering them the pipe and inviting them to eat. After ascertaining that their guests had had sufficient sustenance, the hosts asked Iberville “whether we would require as many women as there were men in our party,” a gesture of hospitality among many southeastern Indians that was often misread by Europeans. Iberville politely refused this offer of female companionship, making “them understand that their skin—red and tanned [rouge et bazanée]—should not come close to that of the French, which was white [blanche].”1 Despite his rejection of Bayougoulas women, however, Iberville realized the bene fits, with respect to the practical matter of establishing a colony, of encouraging “the French who will settle in this country to marry Indian girls.” Before setting out for Louisiana, he had requested and received permission from Louis XIV to implement just such a policy.2 Iberville’s use of skin color to oppose nonmarital sex between French men and Indian women at the same time that he advocated intercultural marriage as state policy encapsulates the major themes of this book: the tensions between ideology and practice that bedeviled Europeans as they set out to colonize North America, the centrality of sex in the establishment of those colonies , and the justificatory role that racial ideologies played in everything. By the time the first colonizers arrived in Louisiana at the turn of the eighteenth century, Europeans had been thinking and writing about Indians and Africans for over two hundred years. In a rich and well-developed literature, scholars Introduction 2 Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans have analyzed how, as Europeans found themselves increasingly involved in transAtlantic ventures that depended on the exploitation of Africans and Indians, European ideas about differences between themselves and those who would become colonized others developed. As Europeans hungered for Indian lands and African labor, they transformed their ethnocentric notions of cultural difference into ideas of immutable, inheritable, racial difference.3 These ideas—what Europeans thought they knew about Africans and Indians—formed what one historian has called an “image archive,” textual and visual representations that circulated throughout Europe from the fifteenth century on, crossing national and linguistic boundaries with ease.4 Yet, as Iberville’s contradictory positions exemplify, European ideas about Africans and Indians did not necessarily determine colonial policies involving actual Africans and Indians. Rather, as Europeans conceptualized how these groups would fit, or not, into new colonial societies, they drew selectively on the image archive in order to identify and signify differences that were then used to organize and justify social hierarchies and determine access to economic, political, and social rights.5 It was this process—the politics of race, or its codification into law and social order, rather than images and descriptions that floated through the pages of Christopher Columbus’s letters, Richard Hakluyt’s collections of travel narratives, or Diderot’s Encyclopédie—that gave form to the world within which colonial North Americans, indigenous and immigrant, lived.6 But even though focusing on the politics of race grounds disembodied, floating discourses in historical and geographic specificity and reveals how tangible circumstances and needs shaped racial formation, this approach still overemphasizes the power of elite discourses and, more importantly, distorts our understanding of the power of race in fashioning everyday life. Just as colonial elites drew selectively on widespread ideas and adapted them to local concerns, colonial inhabitants too carefully drew on elite ideas about race as codified in law, choosing when to utilize those ideas, when to reject them, and when to ignore them all together. It is precisely these daily decisions made within structural constraints that produced the concrete historical circumstances that made race real, and it is only by bringing the politics and practices of race into the same analytic frame that we can fully understand this process. Consequently, this book operates simultaneously on two levels. First, using laws, official proclamations, and...