The origin story of Saint Augustine Roman Church goes like this: Claude Metoyer sent Nicolas Augustin to France, where he was enchanted by the way churches were the center of social life. Nicolas Augustin donated the land, and his brother Louis built the church for free people of color. The exact date still unknown. It was the first church in the United States built by nonwhites to be used by nonwhites. In 1856, the year of Nicolas Augustin’s death, the parish was established, as well as a mission to serve an all-white congregation on Old River. Saint Augustine was the first nonwhite church in the states to have authority over a religious mission of whites.
Although I could see paintings of Marie Coin Coin’s descendants at Melrose Plantation, they were smaller than what I was about to see next. Unlike that plantation tour guide, Tracey wanted to draw my attention to her family’s most famous artifact: a large portrait of Augustin Metoyer. One can find Augustin on the left side of the church upon entering the sanctuary. The life-size portrait hangs on the right-hand wall of its niche, adjacent to photographs of the filth in the barn where the painting had been left to spoil. The only other time I had seen an image that large and overwhelming was at the Louvre. Nicolas Augustin Metoyer stands on a blue-checkered floor dressed in a black coat, suit, bow tie, and leather shoes. He is holding a top hat in his left hand. His skin is light brown, hair thick and gray, and dark eyes unyieldingly confident. His right hand is presenting his church in the background of the painting. The size of the painting alone demonstrates wealth. Augustin’s prominence is most likely the reason why the Cane River Creoles have this memory of what he looked like.
Tracey stood underneath the painting with her hands on her hips in contemplative and reverent silence. She is at home in this part of the sanctuary.
“It was very significant for people to come to actually see the painting. One of his Metoyer descendants, Mr. Charles Metoyer . . . they took a picture of him standing next to this painting. He looks exactly like him. The hair—everything. He looks exactly like him. It’s scary how much they look alike.” She showed me a picture of Charles, and I was at a loss for words. “But it means a whole lot to a whole lot of people because they have a picture of him and you can look at him, which is different than a lot of these other free people of color. You can see that he was brown and looked like us.”
“This is what we look like. We’re not white Creoles. This is who we came from. More than anything in this life, just like they [Augustin Metoyer’s grandchildren] were tired of people coming and literally taking stuff. His grandchildren had a right to it. That’s like somebody coming into your apartment and saying, ‘This table would look really good in my house’ and taking it. It’s the same thing, to me. So that happened a whole bunch of times. We ain’t bothering y’all. Don’t come here and bother us. This is an emotional experience for people to finally come here and just be in this space when you know that you have that connection. My daddy said we are “the Man without a Country.” We don’t come from anywhere. And that does make us feel lost and forgotten sometimes.”
Tracey gave me some time to sit in front of the painting, and I was thankful for every moment of that solitude. I looked up at Nicolas Augustin with his self-satisfied smirk and felt small underneath the grandeur of this painting. Of course, I knew that Tracey was telling the truth about her family history. I had been studying the Metoyers through censuses and books for months. But being in Saint Augustine Church and observing this painting gave me another level of understanding. It wasn’t enough to believe this history of Cane River Creoles. I didn’t just believe, I was confronted and cornered. There was no physical space within those sixteen thousand acres of land where I could run away from the influence of black slave owners. My internal dialogue was filled with questions that looped on repeat. Why was I wrestling with the truth that black slave owners existed? I couldn’t handle the idea that there were black people who benefited under a white supremacist system by enslaving other black people. But this isn’t new. West African elites sold other black people into slavery. Sometimes slavery was an equal-opportunity atrocity. I was gaining a history lesson and maturing as a person and researcher all at once. I could grasp how Creole history became erased in the binary system by first abandoning that binary in my mind. I felt able to shed these polarities when I saw this painting. I’d never seen a painting of a black man that was this large. Even if I had no idea who Augustin was, I would have known, just from the sheer size of it, that he was important. Men of importance usually are wealthy, and if he was wealthy when this portrait was painted, then that undermined part of what I “knew” about slavery. I was staring directly into history as he stared at me, an African American woman whose tongue was gradually becoming strong enough to hold the word Creole in her mouth.
According to historian R. Halliburton Jr., black people have owned slaves in each of the thirteen original colonies as well as all the states where slavery was allowed. Sometimes black slave owners obtained slaves through inheritance or as gifts from white or black relatives. Some bought women with the intent to marry them, and others bought family members with the intent to free them. But not all black slave owners participated in the system out of the goodness of their hearts. Some were in it for profit just as much as their white counterparts. In 1830, in twenty-four states, including Louisiana, New Jersey, Alabama, and New Hampshire, there were 3,775 black owners of 12,760 slaves.10
As Tracey said, it’s important for Marie Coin Coin’s descendants to return to this church to remember who they were—a mélange of brown-skinned slaves and slave owners—and how much their ancestors had achieved. Just as in the Lowcountry, I learned that coming back home is a crucial healing pilgrimage. Today the Metoyers are spread out all over the country, especially in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, California, and Illinois.
Upon further research, I’ve found that much of their land passed into white hands during the Great Migration. After the death of her husband, John, in 1918, Cammie Henry turned Melrose Plantation into an artists’ colony. When Cammie’s son, the manager of the plantation, died in 1970, usually considered the last year of the Great Migration, the plantation was sold at public auction, and all of Clementine Hunter’s murals, except those in the African House, were stripped and sold as well.11
Tracey herself is the daughter of those who migrated but came back to Louisiana. Her father, Oswald, an olive-skinned man whose eighty years were belied by his irreverent jokes and sharp memory, is known around Natchitoches mostly for being the filé man. He plucks, destems, and pounds leaves from sassafras trees, then sifts and bottles them for three weeks. He uses it to make gumbo, adding it just before serving to thicken the stew and impart a spicy, earthy flavor—a process that he learned from his mother, Veronica Metoyer.12
Oswald Colson crossed color lines wherever he moved. He reminded me of a slightly darker-skinned version of the late actor Anthony Quinn, whose long career was partly attributed to his being racially ambiguous. Oswald left Louisiana when the price of cotton per pound dropped precipitously. Agricultural mechanization led many like him to flock to the West and North before and after World War II for better opportunities.13 His parents let someone else take care of the land. He first moved to Chicago, where he was often mistaken for Italian; he made car parts. Then he drove his ’55 Ford from Saint Louis to California, where he claimed that there was no job discrimination. On his off days, he’d play guitar and piano on La Cienega and Sunset Boulevards.
Oswald’s wife, Janet, was born and raised in Los Angeles, where hordes of Creoles migrated, starting in the 1920s. On what was supposed to be a simple trip back to Louisiana in March, she met Oswald, and they got married in July. I was able to meet Tracey’s parents along with her extended-family members at Mass. I gathered that, like Our Mother of Mercy and Saint Augustine, Saint Anthony was central to the Creole community because Tracey’s relatives swarmed her in the parking lot. One parishioner mistook me for kin: “Are you Agnes’s daughter?” My eyebrows cur
ved inward in confusion, though I smiled and politely told her no. Tracey told me that Creoles can recognize their own, and though that woman mistook me for someone else, she wouldn’t have made that mistake if she hadn’t thought that I resemble another Creole person, maybe even someone connected to Cane River. But I’ve been in many situations where I remind someone of a loved one, so I didn’t think much of it. At least, not at that moment.
I was too focused on the larger picture, seeing quite a few of Marie Coin Coin’s descendants together in one place and knowing that they weren’t all erased, no matter what tour guides said. They were here and lively as ever. They carried themselves with pride in a way that could only come from those who knew their history well. They all looked well-to-do. They walked with a certain command, like my father.
I wondered if these Cane River Creoles still conducted themselves as though they were socially different, despite the much different racial legal system in the twenty-first century. This Catholic church was their social hub, and they were a cohesive bunch. Yes, Natchitoches is a small town, but the ambience was distinguishable here. They were united by a single woman, her blood running through their veins, no matter if the dominant narrative about her life downplays her influence. But I noticed—and maybe this is why someone mistook me for another—that every last one of them was quite light, doubtless a major factor behind their wealth and power. I felt as if a thorn had pierced my side, forcing me to confront a long-standing pain about my complexion and how it relates to my father and my identity as a whole.
3
NOW THAT I had learned something about Creole identity and the social stratum Creoles occupied in the plantation economy, I had to deal with skin color. Although I wasn’t told by my parents until I was older that my father called me “the milkman’s baby” because of my lightness at birth, my light skin had always intrigued people in South Jersey. Whenever my mother would introduce me to friends, black or white, they would assume that my father was white. Friends from church joked that I was white, and their playful jabs bothered me because, unlike them, only one of my parents sat in a pew every Sunday morning. I couldn’t show the actual proof to the skeptics. I knew exactly who I was, yet I hated when people would ask what I was mixed with, as if my skin couldn’t be the product of two black parents, as if blackness always looks a certain way, as if two black parents having a child lighter than either of them was an aberration in the natural order of things.
No one ever doubted that I was black, but how black was up for debate. However, tomorrow I was going to learn how color is wielded at the opposite end of the spectrum, where blackness is invisible. I assumed that Tracey would take me to visit another cultural landmark, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, this day was going to further unravel my preconceived notions about Creoles, what they look like, and how they relate to my ideas about blackness, but in a much more intimate setting.
I suppose Tracey wanted me to see how consequences of the American way of defining race stretch into the present day. She introduced me to her friend Kelly Clayton. We drove out of Natchitoches, made a pit stop in Opelousas to see Tracey’s husband and children, then continued to Lafayette. Kelly lived on a quaint street corner on the North side of the city, the predominantly black side, and all sorts of herbs and fruits grew in her yard. Originally from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Kelly had a long stint in Brooklyn before returning to Louisiana. When she emerged from the back porch, I was confused. Did Tracey take me to a white woman’s house? Kelly was very pale and slender with an aquiline nose. Maybe in her youth she could have been a model. But her hair was the most peculiar attribute about her. She had gray dreadlocks that reached down her back. I had never seen a white person’s dreadlocks that neat and maintained, especially around the edges. Then it hit me: this woman was not white.
Kelly’s dog, Maybelline, who was about the same size as me, greeted us. She steered Maybelline to the side and yelled for her son to come and get her. As she guided us into the kitchen, I saw an immaculate altar next to her work desk. Morris Day was playing from a stereo in the kitchen. There was Obama iconography behind the dining-room table. Two magazines, one Vogue and the other Allure, had women of color on the cover (Amal Clooney and Zoe Lane, respectively). She fixed me a strong mint julep before pulling a chair beside mine, readying herself to be interviewed. I scooted farther to the edge of my seat to hear about her earlier, runaway life.
“Mmm! We can unpack that one. Well I married somebody really young. First of all, I was a very, very young mother. I have a thirty-six-year-old son, a thirty-year-old son, a twenty-eight-year-old son, and that’s the babiest of babies,” she said as her fifteen-year-old son moved in and out of the dining room, preoccupied with all he had to do for the Festival International de Louisiane, an annual francophone arts and music festival in town.
Kelly was talking a mile a minute, as if she’d been waiting for me. Turned out she had been following me on Twitter for quite some time and was a fan of my work. Needless to say, I was relieved. I knew I could expect Southern hospitality but not this depth of vulnerability. Kelly told me that she married into an Italian Catholic family, though she wasn’t a great pick because of her background. I didn’t understand. She looked white to me. Many Louisianans, like Italians, are Catholic, and those who aren’t are familiar with the protocols and rituals of the faith. Her relatives didn’t understand why Kelly wouldn’t pass and have an easier life. The older folks, Kelly said, would “break you down” with their swipes about how ethnic you looked: “I wanted an ass I could carry a beer on. I was so disappointed in my allotment of features. But my grandmother used to say, ‘Look at her. She’s got good hair and she’s so pale’ but then she would say, ‘But that nose. I’m sorry about that nose.’” Tracey interjected to tell me that the older generation would celebrate if a child looked light enough to pass, and Kelly admittedly felt that pressure. If she ever wore braids, her mother told her to take them out. Her hair was constantly “ironed,” as she called it, to smooth out any kinkiness. I could relate to that hair story, though I cannot pass. I realized again how much bullshit race is. The more I try to make sense of who is black or white, the less sense it makes.
Before sitting down and speaking to her, I thought this white woman was performing blackness—playing black music and adorning her walls with black iconography—just because I couldn’t see any reflection of my physical self in her. The humbling truth is that I don’t know all black people. I haven’t traveled to every state and met every black person in every town. I’m sure if I did, I would come away with the same impression that I had upon meeting Kelly: blackness is complicated by one’s sense of place and history. Kelly was pressured to be respectable and assimilate, as I was. Why else would her family want her to change her appearance, if they hadn’t thought it would be easier for her to survive in this world by hiding? While Kelly does enjoy certain privileges due to her skin color—and most likely had been socialized as white for the majority of her life—I could relate to the pressure to conform as a black woman.
Then I pondered some more when I realized I was black. I knew that the community in which I was raised was brown, but I didn’t know the full weight of being black until I was compared to an animal as a preteen. I didn’t make the all-white cheerleading squad, and a friend told me it was because “monkeys” like me didn’t make the team. That was my entrée into what blackness meant in the larger sense. It was not the reflection of my beautiful family but rather the constant reminder of being misunderstood and mislabeled or in need of correction. I didn’t grow up in a family where white-passing children were celebrated. I am the lightest person in my immediate family on my mother’s side. I seldom encountered other light-skinned people. One aunt even encouraged me to date and marry a darker-skinned man—to balance me out.
I have spent my career trying to tease out the interwoven threads of who I am as a black woman. Kelly has tried to become a writer to explore her own identity, but with much tr
ouble: “I began to teach myself how to write, and I spent my life in libraries and applied to Hedgebrook and VONA [Voices of Our Nation’s Arts Foundation], and I got in. I was gonna write about what it feels like—this Creole heritage. I had a story. But I got scared. When people look at me and say something on Twitter, they get savage, and I didn’t want to explain like, well wait a minute, I’m not exactly what you think I am. I didn’t want to live my life defending myself, and I backed up and I stopped writing for a long time.” Kelly embodied what Tracey told me back on the waterfront in downtown Natchitoches—the exhaustion of having to explain herself over and over and over again. It didn’t matter whether the people who harassed her were white or people of color. We all have our preconceived notions of what people of the diaspora are supposed to look like, and often we don’t admit that our sample sizes are way too small to support these assumptions.
“There’s only one Creole and that’s mixed. The end. You Creole, you black. There is no white creole. That’s a stupid, stupid designation, and you know . . . We’re mixed people, and once you see that in your genealogy, what is the problem? I don’t get it. It’s important to me. It’s important because it’s not stamped on my face. It’s not stamped on my skin. I have to make a statement. Otherwise I disappear.” I noticed Kelly’s word choices. Creoles are black people and they’re a mixed people. There is no either/or. There is no black American who is 100 percent black because blackness has nothing to do with blood purity. We became black through systems. New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie once said, taking from W.E.B. Du Bois, with regard to one of these systems, namely Jim Crow, that “people weren’t subjected to Jim Crow because they were black. Rather, what made them black is that they were a subject of Jim Crow.”1
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 13
