The "Nous" of Southern Catholic Quadroons: Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Identity in Les Cenelles

In 1845 a group of seventeen free Creoles of color in New Orleans published Les Cenelles (The Holly Berries), a volume of lyric poems in French. These poets, who two years before had helped to establish L’album littéraire: Journal des jeunes gens, amateurs de littérature, the first “little magazine” in Louisiana, had already achieved a local reputation as genteel literati. Many poems in Les Cenelles imitate the French romantic poets, taking up their characteristic meters and familiar themes: unrequited love, death and suicide, dreams and visions, the vagaries of longing and melancholy. Others are witty exercises: acrostics, displays of elegant repartee, assertions of poetic one-upmanship. The editor, Armand Lanusse, proclaims in an introduction that Les Cenelles was compiled to promote the cultivation of art and the cause of general education. Affirming that “a good education is a shield against the spiteful and calumnious arrows shot at us,” Lanusse deplores the fact that poets often suffer not just from active malice but also from the indifference of those who fail to see how poetry “peut avancer le progrès des lumières chez nous” (“may advance the progress of the gifted among us”). ¹ This invocation of a “nous” raises the question: What identity, audience, and politics does Les Cenelles construct and defend?

For a number of recent critics, this “nous” should be understood as the African American community. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for instance, calls the collection “[t]he first attempt to define a black canon” and considers Lanusse’s introduction “a defense of poetry as an enterprise for black people, in their larger efforts to defend the race” and to validate “the collective black intellect.” ² According to this reading, the absence of overt racial, political, or social themes in the poems, as well as their frequent and reverent allusions to Hugo, Lamartine, and Dumas, constitute a deliberate strategy. Racism is untenable, the logic goes, because black poetry can aspire to the same aesthetic standards of the masters. Just as Phillis Wheatley voices the aspirations of African Americans through a politically subversive use of eighteenth-century English poetic forms, Les Cenelles illustrates, in Gates’s words, “[a]n apolitical art being put to uses most political.” ³

Gates’s contention, however, relies on an implicit definition of nineteenth-century African American literature that regards the experience of slavery as central. ⁴ Such a definition emphasizes certain genres (the slave narrative, the spiritual, the folktale, the abolitionist lyric poem) and certain recurring figures (the heroic slave, the tragic mulatta, the orator, the trickster), while identifying the tradition’s authors and reading public with slaves, former slaves, and people with unambiguous abolitionist sentiments. Les Cenelles, however, corresponds to none of these categories. The poets’ use of French romantic models conflicts with the emphasis on the African American vernacular that is the corollary of this definition (so that the poets’ preference for standard French over Creole French or African American English presents a potential problem), while their subject matter often seems indifferent or hostile to political activism. Perhaps not surprisingly, Les Cenelles has often been excluded from major anthologies of African American literature: neither The Norton Anthology of African American Literature nor Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition, probably the most well known of such anthologies today, contains selections from Les Cenelles. ⁵

More significantly, Gates’s positioning of Les Cenelles ignores the cultural conditions that separated the gens de couleur libres from the vast majority of the African diaspora. Although their “blackness” would become increasingly enforced by an interlocking network of legal and cultural discourses as the nineteenth century progressed, there is little evidence to suggest that the Les Cenelles poets identified themselves as simply “black” in 1845. As Régine Latortue and Gleason R. W. Adams observe, free Creoles of color in New Orleans carefully distinguished themselves from...