Lookaway, Lookaway (56 page)

Most whites in North Carolina couldn’t be too sure who their ancestors were in the 1700s, let alone most blacks, but Dorrie was sure of her Louisiana roots. Let’s see, the 1700s are about ten generations ago, meaning she could trace back any of a thousand great-great-et-cetera-grand-ancestors, which meant that every abuse and cruelty and outrage of slavery, every brand, shackle, and lash of the whip haunted the majority of the Jourdain lineage, but much of that history was lost. Her romantic view of herself ran in the one detectable direction, the industrious French Creole ancestors made good. It’s why she took French in high school.

Free people of color made New Orleans possible. Most whites didn’t last longer than five years in the French colonies back in the late 1600s and early 1700s, in Mississippi and Louisiana—malaria, plague, yellow jack, scarlet fever, not to mention the profound lack of air-conditioning, to put it mildly. But the colored folk, with an African or Caribbean past, could take it, and they became the basis of society in New Orleans, becoming the government workers, soldiers, toll-takers, tariff administrators. White and free black mixed very well. Given what English colonial slavery was like, France’s Code Noir was pretty civilized: no selling off slave family members, slave marriages consecrated by the Catholic Church were honored and protected, and once free, you could not be re-enslaved. You even had the right to sue your master for cruelty.

Maybe it got a little tricky to tell who really was black, so slavers importing humans from Africa were encouraged in the contracts to bring the darkest Africans they could find. That darkness scale fell apart too, mainly because Frenchmen manumitted (freed, after a while) their slaves, as was encouraged by the colonial society and Code Noir. It was Spanish custom (and New Orleans, people tend to forget, was Spanish only five fewer years than it was French) to free all slaves upon one’s deathbed, leaving a little stipend or legacy for them to go make a life as a freedman. If you were a slave (of any hue) who fought the Indians—the Natchez proved strangely unwilling to become Frenchmen—then you won your freedom as well.

No one, apparently, was more into the caste system than the
gens de couleur libre,
the free people of color (born into freedom); they married among themselves and did not marry former slaves. The French were pretty adamant about white not marrying black, but the Spanish, already part Moor and semi-Africanized in skin tone and hair, turned a blind eye to interracial marriage, so North America had its own little Brazil of beautiful exotic golden-skinned people … and, as anyone knows who has seen the parade of Mardi Gras Indians and their spectacular feathered-and-beaded costumes, the escaped slaves who took up with the Choctaw made for some pretty red-brown people and fascinating traditions, too.

The politics of skin color, and whims of population (women of color were double in number to men), played a role in the Jourdain Family history. There was an Augustine Jourdane (people weren’t so particular about spelling then) listed as a
placée
girl in a document of the 1760s, and dating from the 1770s, on Esplanade Avenue, on the edge of the French Quarter where the free people of color lived, there is a Jourdane House. By the 1790s, there’s a Jourdain Importers in the French Market, where there are records of cane and cotton and other commodity trading.

But back to being a
placée
girl. That this happened in the US of A still impresses:
plaçage
was a system by which lovely mixed-race girls got “placed” in concubinage to young white men. Most white men would not marry until they came into their inheritance (their thirties or forties) at which time they would marry a much younger white girl, pure as virgin snow. In the meantime, to keep away from prostitutes (disease) or the slave girls out back (immoral), they went to madams who, with the girl’s mother, would negotiate a contract. The young Creole girl would be his lover and in return, he would provide her a house, and their children education (usually back in France), and these arrangements lasted a lifetime. Many white wives must have heartily hated those beautiful tan temptresses down in New Orleans whom their husbands would go visit on trips to the big city, away from the dullness of the plantation. Young planters’ sons and city-dwelling young men of promise would attend the Quadroon Balls in the French Quarter where the mixed-race beauties would be on display.

There were accounts of men being so besotted that they married their
placée,
consequences be damned; some men left more to their Creole family than to their white family in their wills. Well, it took the concupiscent French and colonial slavery to make such a world; the dreary Southern Protestant mentality would begin to put an end to all of this when Louisiana became American property under Thomas Jefferson (who had some
plaçage
action of his own, come to think of it). Dorrie amused herself to imagine being a lesbian
placée
who found herself in the arms of the exquisite and powerful Doña Isabela de Pontalba Leblanc … but a better fantasy was to be disguised as a young, wealthy freedman shopping for a girl at the Quadroon Ball, no one knowing Dorrie was a woman, not even the
placée,
until she brought dear Euprosine or Philomène or Clémence (
loved
those Creole names!) home to her own elegant town house in the Faubourg Marigny. Hey, this
plaçage
system sure as hell beat what was happening elsewhere in the South: granddaddy dragging the newest slave girl out by the woodshed to rape and impregnate.

If you said Creole in the 1700s, it meant mixed race or black, with French-Spanish-Indian ancestry in the mix. By the 1800s, whites wanted Creole to mean the original European settlers, so that’s what it started meaning. Sixty years of redefining mixed-race people began, so there would be just Black and there would be just White. Whites were outnumbered by slaves one hundred to one on these mega-plantations, cotton and cane mostly, and after several uprisings in the 1820s and 1830s, the whites figured it didn’t pay to take any chances—any drop of Negro blood made you black. Free colored folk had to carry papers that proved they were free, at all times. There were deportations of free blacks—don’t care where you go, folks, but you can’t stay here. Colored could not testify against white in court. A law forbidding “favorable stories” about people of color was passed. My my, Dorrie thought, learning about all this, white people seem to have such a tenuous hold on their whiteness; how they could own and run and possess absolutely everything and
still
lie awake terrorized by downtrodden, oppressed and marginalized—criminalized—blackness is a long-running mystery.

There was a free Celestin Jourdain in Natchez, trading cotton through the 1850s when the whole King Cotton boom played out. And one of his sons, maybe moving north up the river while the getting was good, opened a mercantile in the black section of Cairo, Illinois, which was known as a prosperous black city in the 1800s. There is a grainy black-and-white photo still in the family possession of a brick general store, Jourdain & Lavalle Dry Goods, a trio of black men in suits looking proprietary, three women in long white skirts by their side, everyone a little out of focus.

From what Dorrie could see, the family had darkened back up, hence her own dark coloring. After one drop was good as being half- or quarter-black, given one’s rights in society, why not marry who you want? Dorrie understood the mulattoes in New Orleans, descendants of the true Creole, still marry within their ranks, never marrying white, never marrying black. Dorrie visited New Orleans to see some early Edgar Degas paintings (he joined his brother there in the 1870s, and his painting of the New Orleans cotton market was his only piece to get into a museum in his lifetime). There was an older Creole woman who, depending on the light in the room, looked black, looked white, looked Indian when she held her head back, looked French when she pursed her lips and scolded. Dorrie was ready to quit school and move to New Orleans on the spot.
Maman de sucre
 … what do you suppose the French term was for sugar mama?

There’s a black historian who says all the miscegenation in the South is not, as you might expect, solely due to masters raping slaves; only eight percent of whites in the South owned slaves. Most of the mixing—no surprise to Dorrie—was just people not able to keep their hands off other attractive and legally forbidden people. In the remote rural areas of the South, no one seemed to care what the poor folk got up to. And now, in 2012, that the social barriers are almost wholly gone for race mixing, from the president on down, white people, Dorrie predicted, are gonna get more and more tan, just you watch.

So. From Cairo to Kannapolis, North Carolina. Her grandfather had worked in the mills there, making towels, and her mother had been an employee until textiles collapsed as an industry due to ubiquitous Chinese imports. Tobacco, textiles, furniture—just when the blacks were getting somewhere in these traditional North Carolina businesses, splat, the bottom falls out of these professions. Thank you, globalism.

Dorrie got some idea of why her people might have left Cairo when she took a Twentieth-Century Black History class at Carolina. In 1909, Willie James was lynched there and the whites who made it into a big public event couldn’t control the forces they’d unleashed. The hanging was played out in a fairground atmosphere, electric lights for the scaffold, refreshments sold, souvenirs for sale, ten thousand whites cheering and jeering. After the hanging, the white ladies lined up for a turn of dragging the corpse through the streets, heading to a pyre where they would burn the body. But just the one death was an anticlimax, so this mob went looking for more blacks to lynch. And when that pool ran dry, some good-for-nothing whites. The class read a defense written by a Cairene for
The
New York Times:… This negro population, coddled as it is, is a constant menace to the town. No white woman dare venture outside of the house at night alone for fear of assault. Many outrages of which the world has never heard have been attempted. This is why, as Mayor Parsons says, the effect of the recent lynching will be “salutary.” Altogether it is not surprising that a lynching took place in Cairo. The only wonder is that one did not take place long ago.

There was always, and is always, some white woman alleging a black man done raped her or done flirted with her or done looked at her or done brushed against her sleeve. Like Greenwood, Oklahoma, in 1921, where hundreds were killed and ten thousand blacks were burned out of their homes, thirty-five city blocks incinerated. After thousands of the black homeless were put in camps by authorities, some fool got out his airplane and dropped homemade bombs on them for good measure. The great Chicago race riot in 1919 stemmed from a young black man paddling his paddle-boat over to the white side of the pond; that was worth a week of death and destruction. Two racist Democrats competed for the Atlanta mayoral election in 1906, law and order, keeping the blacks in line, and they both tried to outdo each other in inventing black-on-white outrages, fueled by the newspapers of the day. When it appeared that nude photographs (commercially available) of white ladies were found in a black tavern, then it was time to lynch and burn some stuff down.

In 1919 in Omaha the whites worked themselves up into such a frenzy they burned down the courthouse demanding the release of a black convict so there could be a lynching, trapping the white police and city workers inside. The hostages kept moving up, floor by floor, to avoid the flames. The mayor, who was a reformist and constantly libeled by the newspaper, which was in the control of local oligarchs—newspapers have a
lot
to answer to Black America for, you better believe it—said nobly, “If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.” They took him up on it, clubbing the white mayor and stringing him up. And weren’t there some Greeks and Eastern European immigrants who needed to be taught who was really white, too?

This was just the twentieth century, with laws against vigilantism and laws asserting black men’s rights held up by the courts—you don’t even want to know what shit went on in the nineteenth century. When Lincoln drafted men to fight the Southern rebellion, in New York City the Irish and others too poor to pay a fee to get themselves out of the war marched straight on the black neighborhoods and two thousand dead black bodies later, the army had to be sent in to calm things down. A bunch of Irish guys went to the black orphanage and set it on fire. A building full of children. Every once in a while you can’t even imagine how any human being would … but then you can.

East St. Louis, Rosewood, Hamburg, the thing is that these were the model places, this is where the Good Negroes were living, working hard, making a prosperous community, keeping out of the whites’ way, agreeing, almost to a citizen, not to vote. From 1898 to 1904 in North Carolina, it was simply illegal for blacks to vote—the whites made it that way, and Washington, D.C., didn’t move a finger to stop disenfranchisement. So blacks said fine, we won’t vote because it will antagonize the whites … and it didn’t matter because, let’s face it, whitey
likes
being antagonized. No behavior was so good that the nightriders and the lynch mobs couldn’t march into a black neighborhood near you.

Don’t get her started. Just look around at these fanatical right-wingers today—same old shit, mad as hell, stoked up on made-up racist fantasies, ACORN and voter fraud, reverse racism, sharia law, a resurgent Black Panthers—all two of them—and President Obama, white-deranger in chief—who is barely barely barely left of center—some kind of totalitarian socialist communist treasonous closet-gay Black Power Islamist working with the terrorists. It’s time to “take our country back.” You there, ugly white lady—hold that misspelled sign up high with the letter
N
turned backward, show radiant Michelle Obama as an ape-woman or another Barack Obama photo in a bull’s-eye or with a Hitler moustache. Blacks are fortunate, Dorrie supposed, that this inextinguishable American howling white mob, for the moment, has turned its attention to gays, Moslems, and Mexican immigrants, but they’ll be back in force. They’ll circle back around, they always do.