Paul Broyard married Rosa Cousin in New Orleans on December 9, 1878. The couple eventually had eleven children—seven of whom survived to adulthood—including my father’s father, Paul Anatole, born on January 21, 1889. While researching in the city’s archives, I’d found out that Rosa was born in 1852 in St. Tammany Parish, across Lake Pontchartrain, in the village of Lacombe, and that her mother was a mulatto woman named Marie and her father was a white man named Anatole Cousin—the source for my father’s first name. In June of 2000, I spent a few days across the lake trying to learn more about Rosa’s background.
The Cousin name was well known in these parts. The family’s progenitor, a white man from France named Pierre François Cousin, helped to settle St. Tammany back in the 1740s, when the only other inhabitants were Choctaw Indians. As a reward the Spanish crown granted four thousand acres to Pierre’s son, Jean François Cousin, making him the largest single landowner in the parish. By the time of the Louisiana Purchase, the family had a prosperous business making bricks and milling lumber, along with a fleet of six schooners to transport their wares across the lake to the booming city of New Orleans. All the work was performed by slaves, and by 1850 the Cousins owned nearly two hundred people. I had a hunch that Rosa’s mother, Marie, had been one of the Cousin family slaves.
Several clues pointed to this fact, starting with Marie’s name. I’d seen her listed in records as Marie, Mary, or Marianne, but she always used the surname Cousin, despite the fact that she and Anatole Cousin never married. At the same time, I couldn’t find any reference to Marie’s maiden name, suggesting that she didn’t have one of her own. Also, “Mary” Cousin was listed on the 1870 census as born in Virginia in 1825—a state where fewer than 10 percent of blacks were free at the time. I speculated that Marie had been sold to a slave trader who sent her downriver in the hold of a ship or as part of a slave coffle to the New Orleans market, where Anatole Cousin had picked her out for his “fancy girl.”
Anatole was twenty-one when the first of his six children with Marie was born. During the antebellum era, it wasn’t uncommon for a young white man, especially one from a wealthy family, to take a slave mistress before marrying a white woman and producing legitimate heirs. Any children born to the union were also slaves, which helps to explain why by 1860 almost half of the people owned by the Cousin family were of mixed race according to the slave schedules. From some birth certificates I’d found for her children—issued a few years after their birth but before emancipation—I knew that Marie and her children had been freed before the Civil War began. (Slave births weren’t recorded in civil records.) But I was hoping to discover the date of their manumission to know whether my great-grandmother Rosa had once been a slave too.
My father wouldn’t have remembered his grandmother Rosa: he was just shy of his first birthday when she died in July 1921. But as I drove out to St. Tammany Parish, across the twenty-four-mile causeway spanning Lake Pontchartrain (the longest bridge of its kind in the world), I imagined the types of contact the pair might have had: Rosa picking up my father from his crib, my dad squirming in her lap during Sunday dinner, she giving him a bath—all the things that my father had done with me. And I tried to feel this sense of proximity bridging the generations, from my great-grandmother to my dad to me.
It had been nearly a decade since my father had died, since I’d learned of his—and my—African ancestry, since I’d begun reading and learning and talking about race. And despite my glimmerings of double consciousness, I didn’t yet feel black. I was still waiting for an “Aha!” moment, an affirmation of this identity down deep in my bones. I hoped that proof that my great-grandmother had been a slave would call forth something buried inside my DNA and I’d have my visceral confirmation at last.
Looking back now, it’s surprising, and discomfiting, how much I equated slavery with black identity. But I was hardly the first person to arrive at this formulation. In his book One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race, Scott Malcomson traces the correlation between African ancestry and bondage back to fifteenth-century Portugal and the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade. Writing in 1453 Portuguese royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara called upon the “Curse of Ham” story in Genesis to justify his countrymen’s enslavement of Africans, the race cursed “to be subject to all the other races of the world.”
Slavery had been going on since the ancient civilizations, but Zurara’s explanation marked the first time that enslavement was seen as a matter of biological inheritance rather than a conditional state brought about by war or an economic transaction. The notion that servitude was passed down through blood became particularly expedient as the plantation societies in the New World required more and more labor. Not only could the workforce continually regenerate itself through reproduction, but a seemingly infinite supply of new slaves were available for purchase on the Dark Continent. While African states had long been selling war prisoners to their Muslim neighbors, the Europeans, armed with their quasi-religious, then quasi-scientific rationale, elevated the practice into an international institution.
In the American colonies, the concept of the African’s natural servitude helped European settlers reconcile their allegiance to personal liberty with their reliance on slave labor. It also provided an entity against which a disparate collection of immigrants—from different social classes, geographic regions, and cultures—could unify as one society. To be American was to be white and free. A century and a half after slavery ended in the United States, the association of bondage with blackness remained potent enough to have implanted into my brain the belief that to be black in America necessarily meant to have been enslaved.
Most of the records for St. Tammany Parish were housed in the basement of the courthouse in Covington, a small city of 8,400 people in rural Louisiana. A nondescript concrete building, the courthouse sat at the intersection of two main streets on the edge of a grassy square. In nice weather the benches lining the square were filled with (mostly white) workers on lunch or cigarette breaks. These people would nod hello as I walked back and forth to my rental car or across the street to the Conveyance Office, where the indexes of property sales and purchases—including slave transactions—were kept.
Most visitors to the courthouse basement came requesting marriage licenses or birth certificates, but a few metal stools were pulled up to the counter for people doing genealogical research among the probate and property records, wills and court documents, and marriage licenses for parish residents dating back to 1810. My first day there, I sat down on one of these stools, pulled out my laptop, and searched in vain for a place to plug it in. A computer felt out of place among these yellowing records and the old-fashioned uniforms of navy skirt, white shirt, and plaid necktie worn by the two female clerks. As the women chatted with each other or on the phone, I listened for evidence of their obsolete attitudes too.
But when I told the younger clerk that I was looking for a slave ancestor, she hardly batted an eye. After all, whites in these parts had been mixing with blacks and Choctaw Indians for centuries. There were lots of people like me, although they didn’t tend to go around looking for evidence of it. But, the clerk told me, the former archivist—an older woman by the name of Bertha Neff—had combed through all the public records in her spare time to put together a set of index cards on which she kept track of who was what. The young clerk pulled out a thick stack for the Cousin family and handed them over. “Apparently Miss Neff either liked you or she didn’t,” the clerk said.
I glanced through the index cards and guessed from Neff’s close scrutiny of the Cousins’ bloodlines that the family wasn’t among those she favored. One card for François Cousin—the son of Jean François (who’d received the land grant) and father to my dad’s great-grandfather Anatole Cousin—indicated that he’d cohabited with two different “squaws” from a local tribe of Choctaw Indians. The second, Eugenie Judissé, born of a “half breed woman and white man,” was Anatole Cousin’s mother. So I was part Native American too.
The clerk told me that when Neff started working at the courthouse in the 1960s, the archivist was already in her seventies. She stayed for twenty years and was well over ninety when she was finally forced out. During Neff’s lifetime Louisiana changed the legal definitions of whiteness and blackness and amended the miscegenation laws at least seven different times. It was up to clerks like Neff in parish courthouses across the state to interpret and implement the latest rulings, a job over which some of them exercised an obsessive despotic authority.
Neff’s counterpart in New Orleans had been a punctilious woman named Naomi Drake until she was fired in 1965 for, among other things, acquiring a backlog of nearly six thousand requests for certified copies of birth or death certificates on which she deemed the racial designation suspicious. Her office kept a list of 250 family names—mostly old French ones, with Broyard surely among them—that automatically triggered an investigation by her or one of her “race clerks” into an applicant’s racial background.
According to the clerk in the Covington courthouse, Miss Neff, by the end of her reign, had come to think of the records there as her personal property. On packing up her things, she even took some of the ledgers home with her for “safekeeping.” Most of them were eventually retrieved, but every so often a book would turn up missing, spirited away by Neff or someone else who wanted a fact about his or her family to disappear.
I tried to imagine the trepidation that my Creole cousins must have felt when facing Neff or Drake. For much of the state’s history, race determined almost every aspect of a person’s life: whom you could marry, where you could live, where you went to school, whether you could vote, the copy of the Bible you’d swear on in the courthouse. If someone in Miss Neff’s position didn’t like you, she could make your life very hard indeed. I had trouble envisioning this woman lording over her records just twenty years earlier, while I was blithely playing badminton at my prep school in Connecticut. Perhaps most telling about my degree of removal from such racial paranoia was my current eagerness to uncover slave ancestors in my own family’s past.
I’d spent the last three days looking through the probate records for every Cousin family member to see if a young mixed-race slave named Marie was included in anyone’s estate. I’d searched through hundreds of pages of property transactions for her purchase or emancipation. While there were plenty of documents for the Cousin family that involved slaves, none so far concerned anyone who seemed like Marie. Then, on my last day in Covington, the last day of this research trip in Louisiana, I found something.
At the Conveyance Office across the street from the courthouse, I came across a reference to a sale made by Anatole Cousin to Marie E. Cousin on December 28, 1859. The entry was handwritten and barely legible, causing me to miss it the first time I’d looked through these indexes. I’d seen Marie listed with the middle name Evaline, which would explain the middle initial. My heart began to beat faster as I copied down the page number for the corresponding ledger back in the courthouse basement. As I gathered my things to go, I wondered if it had been Marie’s own freedom that she purchased from Anatole or the freedom of their children.
I walked outside into the glaring noonday sun. The people on the benches nodded hello as usual and I stared back, feeling as if I’d never seen them before. My senses were strangely heightened: the heat of sunshine on my shoulders, the rustle of paper lunch bags, the smell of cigarettes on the warm air, all recorded precisely in my brain, as if I anticipated returning often to this moment. I entered the courthouse and headed down the metal stairs, wondering how different I’d feel when I ascended.
As I filled out my request slip for the ledger, I told the young clerk about my discovery. She offered a neutral nod. But I could sense her watching me as I started to search through the ledger’s pages. She’d already told me about a girl who’d run crying from her twin sister when she realized what the yellowing record of a slave emancipation she was looking at meant. I located the referenced page and searched the handwritten entries for Anatole’s or Marie’s name. The transaction wasn’t there. I flipped back and forth to the surrounding pages.
“You can’t find it?” the clerk asked.
I shook my head.
“Maybe the page number was transcribed wrong.” She stood up and walked over to the counter. “See if there’s an index in the back of the book.”
There was another index. I scanned it for Marie’s name. “Nothing,” I said, and then, “Wait a minute. Here’s something for a Marianne Cousin in 1870.”
I found the entry and started reading the details of a land sale of two hundred acres to Marianne Cousin...fronting the bayou...measuring one hundred chains on one side...ninety-five chains on the other side...adjacent to the lot owned by Marie Evaline Xavier, also known as Marie Cousin. My stomach dropped. It dawned on me for the first time that there was more than one woman with a name resembling “Marie Cousin” and I might have been chasing the wrong person.
My Marie seemed to have a maiden name after all, and enough money to purchase a lot of land before 1870, which was sounding less and less like someone who’d been a slave. I checked my watch. If I hurried back to New Orleans, I’d have a couple of hours to look for information about the Xavier family in the library before heading to the airport to catch my flight.
I raced back to the city, across the twenty-four mile bridge, riding all the way in silence, shaking my head every so often and swearing under my breath. The leaps of logic I’d made and the clues I’d missed in researching Marie’s genealogy were suddenly distressingly clear. The thought of how blinded I’d been in my obsession to find a slave ancestor made me feel sick with shame.
Xavier wasn’t a very common surname. The first probate record I looked up belonged to François Xavier, who died in 1839, leaving behind a wife and five children, including a daughter named Marie Evaline, my great-great-grandmother, who was born free in New Orleans in 1824. I quickly read on, discovering that both of Marie’s parents had also been free people of color. They’d arrived in the city as children, among the wave of refugees fleeing the slave revolt in St. Domingue. Marie’s father was educated and was a successful shoemaker. At his death his holdings were valued at roughly $4,100, placing him well above the average net worth of $3,000 for free people of color at the time.
Among the property that François passed along to his wife and children, including my great-great-grandmother Marie Evaline, were three different lots of land, two buildings, a collection of furniture, the inventory of a shoe store on Bourbon Street, and two slaves: a twenty-eight-year-old Negro named Marie, and a twenty-year-old “griffe” (three-quarters black, one-quarter white) named George. I swore out loud this time—drawing an annoyed glance from the woman at the adjacent microfilm reader—and copied the rest of the document before hurrying off to the airport.
Once the plane was aloft, the events of the day began to sink in. In a few short hours, I’d gone from believing that my great-grandmother was born a slave to discovering that she’d grown up in a family of black slave owners. Sometimes free blacks purchased their own family members, particularly when the laws regarding emancipation tightened, but these relatives remained slaves only in name. That scenario didn’t seem to be the case in the Xavier family. In the years after François Xavier died, the slave Marie was put up for auction numerous times. According to the probate record, she was “addicted to intoxication,” which made it hard to fetch her appraised price. The family held on to George longer. My great-grandmother Rosa was six when her grandmother finally sold him, at a 50 percent return on the original investment. That my white Louisiana ancestors had owned slaves wasn’t surprising, but the fact that my black ancestors had also partaken in the “peculiar institution” astounded me. These weren’t the noble tragic figures I’d been expecting to encounter. My claim to an authentic black identity felt more distant than ever.
I sat back in my seat and looked out the plane’s window. A thick bank of clouds obscured the landscape below. Normally I enjoyed the feeling of disorientation when flying, the idea that I could be anywhere, but right then I wanted something concrete to hold on to. Each time I thought I’d finally tracked the path of the color line through my family’s past, it twisted out of sight. First I hadn’t been able to place my great-great-grandfather Henry Broyard on one side or the other. Now my great-great-grandmother was confounding my grasp of what African American identity was supposed to be. I was nearing the end of my research in New Orleans and I was worried. If I couldn’t pinpoint the place from which my father had fled, was he going to elude me too? As I kept discovering, nothing in New Orleans was as simple as black and white.