Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color

Title Page, Copyright

Creole THE HISTORY AND LEGACYOF LOUISIANA'S FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR EDITED BY SYBIL KEIN LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS BATON ROUGE Published by Louisiana State University Press Copyright © 2000 by Louisiana State University Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica Ninth Printing, 2009 Designer: Rebecca Lloyd Lemna Typeface: Janson Text Typesetter: Coghill Composition Co. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Creole : the history and legacy of Louisiana's free people of color / edited by Sybil Kein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8071-2532-6(alk. paper)—iSBN-i3: 978-0-8071-2601-1 (pbk. : alk.paper) i. Creoles—Louisiana—History. 2. Creoles—Louisiana—Social condition. 3. Free Afro-Americans—Louisiana—History. 4. Free Afro-Americans—Louisiana—Social conditions. 5. Louisiana—History. 6. Louisiana—Race relations. 7. Creoles in literature. 8. Louisiana—In literature. I. Kein, Sybil. F38o.C87 C7 2000 976.3004*44—dc2i 00-008449 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. ® This book is dedicated to the memory of my cousin, Ulysses S. Ricardjr. (December i, i95o-October 7, 1993). The essay he was writing for this text would have been a great contribution to the canon of American culture. Ulysses was a pioneer in Creole studies. He was a linguist, historian, educator, scholar, printer, poet, and genealogist. He grew up in the jth Ward, the section of New Orleans that gave the world many famous Creoles, such as Jelly Roll Morton and Homer Plessy. Rick, as he was known to his friends, attended Corpus Christi Elementary School, St. Augustine High School, and Lake Forest University, the latter on a four-year scholarship. He graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in philology, and went on to study French at the Institute of Paris and Spanish at the Institute de Cultural Hispanica , Madrid. An ardent advocate of Creole culture, language, and history, Rick held a teaching position at a college in rural Louisiana, and designed and taught that school's first course in Louisiana Acadian and Creole French. He also authored one of the first textbooks for such a course—Lagniappe: A Louisiana French Reader (1978). Rick spent most of his professional life collecting data for a dictionary of Louisiana Creole that he was compiling. He delivered papers on Creole culture and history at various professional meetings around the country, and was prominently involved in international projects aimed at disseminating, information on Louisiana Creoles and building cultural exchanges between that group and Creoles in other countries. For many years Rick worked with the Smithsonian Folklife Program and the New OrleansJazz and Heritage Festivals as spokesperson and exhibitor of Louisiana Acadian and Creole Folklife. Li te un vrai Creole. This page intentionally left blank ...