Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  Other Louisiana Creoles and academics, such as Andrew Jolivétte, professor in the department of American Indian Studies and the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, dispute this complete separation yet still emphasize that Creoles are a very distinct people: “I’m from the region—on my father’s side—but I think this is true of the South in general but very much so in Louisiana, that Creoles are a very particular culture. While I would describe it as being a part of the African diaspora and African American culture, it also has its own sort of distinct culture as well, and so I think that creates or adds to the complications there. But, you know, generally in the United States if you’re not white, then you’re black, and if you’re anything else, then you kind of don’t exist.

  “Up to the 1850s maybe, or the 1890s, a lot of Creoles didn’t identify as being American because they weren’t, actually. So they felt the same way as Native American people. Treaties were signed, and then all of a sudden they were forced into a country they weren’t a part of, and they didn’t identify as Americans for a long time. Now I think if you talk to contemporary Creoles in 2018, you’re not going to hear very many say they are not American.”

  Another assumption from non-Creoles that Professor Jolivétte and I discussed was that Louisiana Creoles are defined by their skin color and language. Some people assume that Creoles are just French-speaking black people, but Jolivétte believes that’s an oversimplification. While Creoles may also speak French, they speak Louisiana French Creole, a mixture of French and several West African languages, including Mande, Ewe, and Yoruba.9 Creoles are also distinct in terms of their religion. While many black Southerners are Baptist or African Methodist Episcopal (AME), most Creoles are Catholic. As a child, the only black Catholic I knew in my close circle was my father. As he lived in New Jersey, my father mainly went to nondenominational and Pentecostal churches, but I never asked him why. I made yet another assumption—that he may have found it easier to commune in Pentecostal congregations because there were more black people there than in Catholic churches. He was probably more comfortable worshipping in a black Pentecostal church rather than a mixed-race Catholic church.

  As for the appearance aspect of Creole communities, Professor Jolivétte explains that the colorism runs deep: “I’ve met other people who are Creole and darker, and they go down there, and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, your family, they’re going to judge me’ or something. I’m like, ‘No, they’re not.” In fact, they’re from the country. They’re not from New Orleans, and they say they’re where the real Creoles are. They very heavily identify as black and they’re as white as—in complexion anyway—as you might want to think.” Professor Jolivétte himself is not one who I would consider light-skinned. He’s a rich brown, like my mother, letting me know that Creoles, like other African Americans, come in all different shades and hair textures. How could they not? They’ve been mixing with other races and ethnic groups for centuries.

  The conversation with Professor Jolivétte gave me one of what would become many humbling moments. I wanted to get to the root of why I made assumptions about my own people as though they all looked and acted the same way. Aren’t these the kinds of assumptions that I’ve been fighting against in my own life and through my writing? The truth is, leaning on assumptions is easier than doing the work necessary to understand a difficult and multilayered subject. For me, unpacking this was important not only for the work itself, but also for me to unlearn what I thought I knew about my ethnic identity. I was nervous because I would be going into new territory, and if I couldn’t rely on what I thought I knew about myself, what else would I have?

  At least this time I had a place of origin, a beginning. No matter what, I could use Saint Martin Parish as an anchor throughout this trip. When I asked Professor Jolivétte about Saint Martinville, he told me that it was the heart of Creole country, an acknowledgment that brought a smile to my face. I wasn’t confident in my connection, though. I’d never been there. Neither had my sisters, aunts, or uncles. It had been far too long since family had been in that area—two or three generations at least. I am fully Americanized. I’d never had gumbo or crawfish étouffée (crawfish cooked in roux then served over rice). I didn’t know what a krewe was, never listened to zydeco, and had never seen a bayou. I existed in that black-white binary because it was easier. If you looked black, you were black, no matter what ethnicity and nuance came along with it. But on the Regises’ side, in one generation, Cleveland Jr.’s generation, his relatives represented a full range—from the darkest brown to white-passing. Creoles weren’t all light-skinned blacks. They were much, much more. Toward the end of our initial conversation, Professor Jolivétte knew exactly whom to connect me with for my field research in Louisiana.

  The field researcher’s name is Tracey Colson Antee. She is the seventeenth descendant of Marie Thérèse Coin, a woman whose power and wealth is responsible for a whole community of Creoles of color near the Cane River. Marie Thérèse was born in 1742, the fourth child of first-generation slaves. No record of her parents’ names has been found. Researchers have claimed that she was a part of the St. Denis family, but because Marie Thérèse was a common name and the St. Denises were the largest slave owners in the county, her ties to this group are debatable. Her biological family’s origins are also disputable. Some say they came from the Congo or Angola, from which many captured Africans landed in the Lowcountry. The most widely accepted story of Marie Thérèse’s history is that she was owned by Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a bourgeois French merchant, became attracted to Marie Thérèse, and Louis Juchereau rented her out to Metoyer as a housekeeper. Several children resulted from their relationship. Religious authorities tried to break up their union by threatening to sell Marie to someone in New Orleans. To thwart this transaction, Claude manumitted, or freed, Marie and gifted her with sixty-eight acres of land, on which she cultivated tobacco. One of her sons, Louis Metoyer, was deeded over nine hundred acres of land, which became Melrose Plantation.10 The Metoyer line became the wealthiest free people of color in the nation.11 Because Marie Thérèse’s grave is unmarked and its whereabouts are unknown, she has been the focus of much imagination about Creole people for centuries. It is a fascination that puts those like Tracey Colson at odds with the general public.

  Tracey’s mother, Janet Ravare Colson was assistant director of the Louisiana Creole Heritage Center at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. The center was founded in 1991 by Terrell Delphin Jr., an icon whose efforts to promote Cane River’s culture and history through ethnographic studies and organizations greatly benefited the community. Janet got involved with the center, along with the Saint Augustine Historical Society, her church, and other organizations responsible for maintaining the cemetery, where many Metoyer descendants are buried, and other sites in and around Cane River. Because more and more visitors began to visit Natchitoches, she and others created a proposal for the potential center to the state Board of Regents and were able to secure funding.

  Janet’s steadfastness is due largely to her concern that Creoles would be erased from the public landscape and collective memory. Janet’s apprehension has been passed down to Tracey, who recalls an earlier time, before the center was created, when Creoles and their culture were invisible in other institutions, such as the school system. There were few documents on their history. Tracey told me that ever since turning forty, she has lost her filter, a disclaimer that only excited me. To elucidate the complications of her ethnicity, she refers to an anecdote from her childhood:

  “When I started seventh grade, I had to do my little papers. I was in my homeroom class, and my homeroom teacher was a middle-aged black man. It was the little card where you put your name and address and all that. It said gender, and it said race, and I was like, ‘Hmm,’ and I remember the panic started. My heart started beating really fast. I was like, ‘What do I put?’ because I literally had never thought about it. Never. In fac
t the conversation had never happened. I just knew that we were Creole, but I didn’t know, like . . . do I put that? So I put tan.”

  “OK.”

  “He looks at my card and starts yelling at me. ‘You goddamn Geechees from down the river. I can’t stand y’all. Pretending to be somebody else, with your light skin and your good hair. Y’all just think this and you think you better than everybody else, and you ain’t.’ I’m scared to death, trying to be a big girl.”

  And then, the class proceeded normally. As it turns out, my rebuff of Creoles as a distinct people is not only because of my Northern upbringing. No, this condemnation persists even in Louisiana. Tracey and her mother’s worry was justifiable: people in their own birthplace were trying to erase them. And if a teacher could get in on it, who knows what other people could do?

  Throughout Tracey’s life, there was an emphasis on ethnicity, not race. Her Creoleness was at the forefront. A certain grooming was expected from someone whose earliest ancestor was responsible for an entire Creole community, but to call her a Geechee was an insult, as JR Grovner had mentioned to me back on Sapelo Island. This pejorative spanned several states and African American ethnic groups. The belief that Creoles think they’re better than blacks is persistent, no doubt because they were in fact higher in social rank. Tracey never tried to deny her blackness, but often Creole and black are an either/or when they should be a both/and.

  Creoles are indeed between two worlds. Tracey says, “I couldn’t date nobody. I wasn’t black enough. I wasn’t white enough. Or I was too black or I was too white. People get mad at you if you say you’re black. People get mad at you if you say you’re white. People get mad at you if you say you’re Creole. They want to argue with you all the time. I’m Creole. I am black, but what I am is African, French, Hispanic, and Native. I’m a whole lot of different things, and if I say just one of these things, I’m denying so many other parts of myself.”

  Over the years, Tracey has been passionate about genealogical research and Creole culture preservation. She and her mother travel throughout the country to make presentations and create events to show that Creoles still exist. There is often a voyeuristic quality to interest in her people, which she detests. One of her colleagues, who is a tour guide, was once asked by white tourists if Creoles still existed and where they could see some. Such tourists travel down to Natchitoches just to drive past a group of Creoles and point at them.

  Stories about Cane River were published without the Creoles knowing that they’d been interview subjects. Allegedly, there was a nun who hid a tape recorder in her habit to collect stories. Rumors circulated that some white people would go as far to steal artifacts from families, some of which would wind up in museums.

  I said to Tracey, “You had these self-contained communities that didn’t bother anybody. Nobody bothered them. Then you started having these outsiders coming in and taking people’s possessions without bringing them back. That created tension.”

  “Yeah, it was much more of a paranoia, like, ‘What are you here for?’ You know, people are very skeptical. They were not open at all. People wanted to know, how come these colored people are so light-skinned? How come these colored people got all this land? This is why so much of Creole culture has been lost and people are scared to share anything.”

  What fuels her persistence in spite of even other Creoles jokingly asking why she keeps doing her “Creole stuff” is the way the antebellum era is overly simplified as being everywhere a strictly binary white-equals-master, black-equals-slave system.

  Tracey wants to dispel myths like the one that says black people were never slave owners. Some even owned family members whom they eventually set free. Much of the region where her parents live is stuck in a cycle of sanitization for the public. In any case, white people hold most of the capital, and the Creoles who gave Cane River its prominence are pushed toward the margins. At the end of our conversation, I realized that this trip was more than a reclamation of the Regises’ past and my own. It was also a disentanglement of black ethnic identity as it twists and turns under the powers and laws of white supremacy.

  2

  ONCE I WAS able to understand Creole identity and its flexible definitions across centuries, it was time for me to assess how much of that heritage and history have been erased, using the Metoyer line as the example. I wanted to know more about the robust Creole communities of the past, their collapse after the Civil War and during Jim Crow, and the consequences for those who stayed and those who moved away. First, I was going to dig into my father’s history by talking with my great-great-aunt, whose life combines migration, Creole elitism, and disappearance in the twentieth century. It was through her life, connected with the lives of the Metoyers, that I was confronted with my own hesitation to tell the truth about Creole people’s vested interest in white supremacy.

  Evelyn Jewell Regis Navarre was a beauty for the ages. In the only image I could recover of her, from a cousin, she’s dressed up in a Glen plaid two-piece outfit. Her jet-black hair is styled in a smooth upswept roll in front while the rest falls past her shoulders. She’s sitting on top of her ottoman with her legs swung to the right side as though she wanted the photographer to get the scale of her body more accurately. Born in 1922 in Harris County, Texas, one of my grandfather Cleveland’s younger sisters, Evelyn had dreams of being a movie star and singer. Maybe that’s why in this photograph she is looking beyond the center, smiling at an imagined future that only she can see. She married Henry Navarre, who also migrated to Texas but from Lafayette, when she was eighteen and he twenty-one. The name Navarre belongs to one of the oldest Creole families originating in New Orleans. One of the many neighborhoods in New Orleans is named in their honor. I am related to the Navarres in two ways: (1) through my great-aunt Evelyn and (2) through my great-great-great-aunt Rose Rochon, née Regis, who married Honoré Rochon, a grandson of Charlotte Rochon and Jean-Baptiste Navarre. I’m not sure if Evelyn and Henry knew that they were distantly related, but that’s what certain Creoles did in those days.

  My late great-aunt Evelyn Jewell Regis Navarre. Janice Bradley

  One of my late cousins, David DeWitt Turpeau, wrote in his autobiography, Up from the Cane-Brakes, about the Creole caste system. Remember, many Creoles married among themselves, and because they were mindful of social status and rank, the stakes were high to ensure continued prominence and wealth:

  . . . the one upon whom the caste is practiced as well as the one practicing it are all the victims of a superstition that deprived them of the natural process of a free choice of their associates and kept them within the narrow limits of a prescribed circle. . . .

  . . . when ever you meet a Creole you know him by his rigid adherence to some phrase of the caste system and if he is not too far removed by years of different culture and other habit forming influences, he still is a strong believer in some form of caste. . . . 1

  I don’t know if Henry went through an intense screening process, complete with thorough family trees and pedigrees, to receive Evelyn’s hand in marriage, but I do believe that their respective families were familiar with each other, whether or not their links were fully known to both parties.

  Lafayette, the town Evelyn moved to, is less than twenty-five miles from Saint Martin Parish. As Evelyn and Henry were growing up in Houston, the Fifth Ward was flourishing with Creoles who sought to re-create the communities they left back in Louisiana. This reconstruction of community came through zydeco music, the accordion-based dance music of Louisiana Creoles, and through cuisine and architecture. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that these storied families from the distant past wanted to maintain their caste system by marrying people with names that they already recognized.

  I couldn’t find any other documentation on Evelyn, but I did find a death certificate for Henry in Santa Clara. The missing pieces between their move to California and Henry’s death made me feel as if the young couple had vanished after beginning what was su
pposed to be a new and exciting chapter of their lives together. Evelyn and her children’s fate have been whispered about throughout my family across generations. Evelyn’s father, Cleveland Sr., had a strict personality that motivated not only my grandfather—Evelyn’s brother Cleveland Jr.—but also Evelyn to flee. Though instead of migrating east, she went west to California, like many other Creoles during the early to mid-twentieth century. She never became a movie star or actress. She died at the young age of forty-seven after spiraling into alcohol and drug addictions. Though Henry and Evelyn both identified themselves as Negro, in 1930 and 1940 respectively, in the US Census, many in the Navarre family were classified in their day as mulattos, including Evelyn, who was very fair. Evelyn and Henry’s daughter Gwen chose to pass as white, and because of that decision, that part of my family has been severed with no possibility of reconciliation. Years later, one of my cousins tried to reach out to Gwen’s children, who had been hurt in that their family had been ravaged by substance abuse and parental neglect. They became even more hurt that their black family came looking for them when it was far too late and the wounds were far too deep.

  Many Creoles left Louisiana for better economic conditions, but better conditions were easier to attain where they were recognized legally and socially as Creole rather than black. After migrating, they re-created their cloistered communities in hopes of resurrecting this advantage, but their sense of Creoleness could dissipate if they didn’t have a tight-knit community where they landed. A prime example was Anatole Broyard, author and New York Times book critic, whose family migrated from New Orleans to the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn. His family was Creole with mixed-race ancestry, and his blackness was an open secret in his circles. In other words, he was passing. Even his daughter, Bliss Broyard, didn’t know about her black lineage; she wrote about discovering it in One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life—a Story of Race and Family Secrets. The reasons why he was coy about his blackness are still speculative. Perhaps he didn’t want to be labeled a black writer instead of just a writer, or maybe he never saw himself as black but as Creole. Whatever the case may have been, to some, like one of Broyard’s friends, black scholar and dramatist W. F. Lucas, “He was black when he got into the subway in Brooklyn, but as soon as he got out at West Fourth Street, he became white.” Never Creole. There was no comfortable space for the in-between, no relief from the pressure of a migrant to conform to a racial binary.