Turpeau goes on to say:
A rather significant thing to be noted here. My grandmother whose name was Carrie always lived on the east bank of the Teche . . . my grandfather never lived on the east bank of the Teche. There seemed to have been a mutual understanding between them and when my grandmother Carrie died, which was in my day, I only saw my grandfather at the gate of the cemetery.
This was even more strange to me, for several reasons. For one, Turpeau names Maturin’s children but does not specify which children belong to which mother. I know Isabelle Turpeau, his mother, was a child of Maturin and Carrie, and through process of elimination, she lived on the east bank of the Bayou Teche at one time, according to him. For a man to have had children with a woman but to be at the cemetery gate and never venture in when his beloved died seems intentional. And if it were intentional that he could only be at the cemetery gate, could this be the same reason as to why they lived on opposite sides of the bayou? Was their affair illicit?
The family lore is that Maturin Regis Sr. was a manumitted slave from Virginia, although when David DeWitt Turpeau Sr. did his research, he found that neither Maturin nor the Regis name was common in the state. He believed that Maturin may have picked up an alias once he came down to Louisiana and met Carrie, a Creole woman. I didn’t know why Turpeau says these lines: “Maturin did not work on the plantation known as Keystone as might be supposed; I learned from his own lips that he was ‘no plantation nigger.’ He was employed by a Mr. Labbe . . . They [the Labbes] were a very prominent family in our section and people of money.” Turpeau devotes ample space to the surnames of many families in Saint Martinville, but not once does he mention Carrie’s maiden name. He does, however, state that he has omitted certain names out of respect. To me, this was a cop-out. My intuition told me that he was omitting names to protect people, and I began to wonder if he was protecting Carrie.
I tried everything. I scrutinized the lines of his autobiography, hoping that Carrie’s identity would emerge somehow from the titles of sections or the page numbers. I pored over census after census, contacted Louisiana genealogists—who never responded to my requests for help—and attempted to extract whatever crumbs and threads I could from the oldest members of my family. The search began to turn into an obsession, and the only mantra that kept me from floundering was this: Question everything. Then I came up with a hypothesis. Let’s say that Maturin and Carrie’s union was not socially acceptable. That would explain why I couldn’t find their marriage record at the Saint Martinville Public Library and why Maturin didn’t attend Carrie’s funeral. If their union was taboo, would it be too far-fetched to believe that they tried to hide or obfuscate parts of their lives, even to their grandchildren, like David? At least with Maturin I had a last name. With Carrie, I had nothing. Her name sounded too informal in comparison to Maturin or Isabella or Amanda. Was Carrie a nickname? Was Carrie even her real name?
Then, in the midnight hour, my cousin Janice sent me an 1870 census page that I had glossed over umpteen times and thought nothing of it. The census form documents a woman named Constance Deblanc. She was a white woman whose occupation was “keeping the house,” and there were several white people listed underneath her with a different surname, suggesting that they were her children. Then, there was a black man listed as Carry Love, who was born in Virginia. The three children underneath him were Amanda, Virginia, and James Regis. James had to have been my Uncle Jimmie. Those three children were listed as mulatto. I was overwhelmed. First, what kind of name is Carry Love? That sounded fake. Second, he was listed as being born in Virginia, and according to Turpeau Sr., Maturin Sr. was born in Virginia. If the children underneath his name were mulatto and Constance was listed as white, could it be that Carry Love was Maturin Regis Sr. and Constance was grandmother Carrie? Did Maturin take on the name Carry to hide his identity and Constance then become Carrie to their children and their children’s children? Was Constance Deblanc my grandmother?
An 1870 United States federal census that lists some of the Regises—Virginia, James, and Amanda—a man whose name, Carry Love, I believe to be an alias for my great-great-great-grandfather Maturin Regis, and the one who is the head of the household and the potential mother of the Regis children, Constance DeBlanc. Martinville, Louisiana Post Office, June 13th, 1870
David DeWitt Turpeau Sr. said that Maturin never lived on the east bank, but how would he have known? He was born in 1874, and this census was taken in 1870. Carry Love is listed as a laborer. Why would Turpeau Sr. mention Maturin working on Keystone Plantation when Keystone Plantation was formerly known as Deblanc Plantation?3 Deeper, I told myself. Deeper. Upon further research, I found that the Deblancs owned much land, many plantations from Saint Martin Parish to New Iberia. Maturin was not a slave in Louisiana, but he could have worked on Keystone, or any of the Deblanc properties, where he met and fell in love with Constance. But the Deblancs’ story didn’t begin there. No. The Deblancs in Louisiana began in Natchitoches, of all places. One of Constance’s ancestors, Caesar de Blanc, married Marie Des Douleurs Simone Juchereau St. Denis. She was the daughter of Pierre Antoine Juchereau de St. Denis. Pierre’s father, Louis, was said to have been the first owner of Marie Coin Coin. One of the De Blancs, Louis Charles, son of Caesar and Marie, was a commandant of the post in Natchitoches before serving as commandant of the post in Attakapas, also known as Saint Martinville. Legend has it that he was the one who granted Louis Metoyer title to the 912-acre tract of land known as Melrose.4 The Deblancs were connected to the Metoyers not only professionally but also personally. The Deblancs are also linked by marriage to the LaCours, one of the earliest families of Cane River. When I reminisce on being mistaken for Agnes’s daughter back at Saint Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, perhaps I wasn’t being mistaken for someone else at all, but rather being identified. I’m a half-moon child, the daughter of a Regis, the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of a Deblanc, whose lineages are indelibly woven among those of the Metoyers.
I wish there were a word to adequately describe the ecstasy that happens alongside a sense of mourning for what was lost. I could now trace my father’s line back to the 1700s, all the way to Natchitoches, where my fieldwork in Louisiana began. But the longer I sat in that happiness, the more I tried to force myself to feel shame, too. Why should I be relieved and happy that I found this information, knowing that one of my ancestors, Louis Juchereau St. Denis, leased a black woman, Marie Coin Coin, to a French merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer? Yes, she was manumitted and became wealthy through land and slave owning, but shouldn’t I be upset that the foundation for this history of Cane River Creoles was rape? I’ve always been told that any sexual relationship between white slave owners and black enslaved women was rape. When Beyoncé, a fellow Creole and African American woman, wrote an essay in Vogue stating that her family line began when a white slave owner fell in love with a slave and married her, I watched as the internet attempted to correct her on her own oral history.5 But no one can say for sure what happened. Rape of enslaved black women was rampant, but we cannot assume that every relation between a white slave owner and black female slave was nonconsensual.
Such a thought is explosive, however, and ruffles a lot of feathers. According to Treva B. Lindsey, associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Ohio State University, and Jessica Marie Johnson, associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University:
Despite the increasing rigor with which scholars are approaching slavery and erotics, the pervasiveness of intellectual skepticism reflects how deeply entrenched narratives of violation, violence, and trauma are to our understanding of black female sexuality. Emphasizing subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization, however, cannot preclude fuller incorporation of pleasure and erotic possibility in the lives of enslaved black women. Sex acts happened often during slavery. Political goals of the moment do not rewrite the sexual lives, desires, and choices of enslaved and free women of color, but they can obscur
e those lives to our detriment. . . . To search for this in chattel slavery by interrogating these possibilities . . . does not lessen the traumatic, terrorizing, and horrific nature of slavery. Such inquiries allow for the interior lives and erotic subjectivities of enslaved blacks to matter.6
No one can ever know if a specific woman like Marie Coin Coin was a victim of rape. From a historical standpoint, it’s very likely. However, my trip to Louisiana taught me that intimate details may vary from historical norms. With the story of Tracey and her family, history was more personalized. I wasn’t reading about these people in textbooks. I was seeing them up close. I was seeing Marie Thérèse Coin Coin and Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer’s descendants in the flesh, walking along the fields their children once owned. I can’t slap labels on relationships hundreds of years prior. All I can do is give what I’ve found of the true and complicated intimate lives of my family and black people in general, testifying that we’re more connected than we think. I was afraid to write about this part of my father’s family, because I didn’t want to ruffle feathers. But that’s what historical research does: it makes a person uncomfortable. I can’t be beholden to an unknown’s feelings, because unlike facts, emotions are fickle. All I can ask is, did I tell the truth? Did I tell my truth? And I did.
To add to these family surprises, I learned that Maturin Regis’s story didn’t start in Virginia. Maturin Regis was born in Saint Lucia, where he joined his mother, Angelique, and his sister, Maturine, under the ownership of Reverend William John Jolliffe. From an English political dynasty, in 1822 Reverend Jolliffe owned 249 acres and 250 slaves.7 I am not completely sure where his plantation was, but his name is associated with Balenbouche, which is now a family-run guesthouse in Laborie, on the southeastern coast of the island. Maturin is listed as being seven months old on an 1819 slave register. The Jolliffe family also owned land in Virginia. Maybe, just maybe, Maturin told his children and grandchildren that he was from Virginia because he didn’t remember Saint Lucia and because neither his mother nor his sister followed him on his journey north.
The slave register of Reverend W. J. Jolliffe of London. Thirty-one-year-old Angelique Regis, the earliest ancestor that I can trace on my father’s side, is listed third from the bottom on the left. Her children, three-year-old Maturine and seven-month-old Maturin, my great-great-great-great grandfather, are listed beneath her. Legacies of British Slave-ownership, University of College London Department of History
There you are, ancestors, I said to myself. There you are. I was both elated and sad at my discovery. I don’t believe Constance ever wanted me to find her. I believe that there were elements about my family history that were hidden for a reason. The aliases shared between Maturin and Constance changed the course of their descendants’ lives for centuries. The love between a white plantation owner and a manumitted black man—two Creoles, one from Louisiana and the other from the Antilles—changed their families forever. Amanda and Virginia Regis disappeared after that 1870 census. James, on the other hand, lived with his older brother, Maturin Jr., and was recategorized as black in 1880. Depending on the household, one’s identity changed along with the times. Maybe Amanda and Virginia changed their surnames or names entirely and chose to pass for white like the daughter of my great-aunt Evelyn. Maybe that’s why my grandfather Cleveland Sr. didn’t speak much about being Creole. Whether or not he consciously knew of the divide, our family story was fragmented before we left Saint Martin Parish. Though Cleveland Sr. left Frenchtown, he would inadvertently re-create its caste system by marrying a North Carolina woman descended from free people of color on both sides of her family.
I was meant to meet Tracey Colson and to uncover how she and I were linked centuries before our time on Earth. It is nothing short of divine. I entered into Louisiana as Morgan Jerkins. I returned to New York City as Morgan Simone Régis Jerkins. I am a black and Creole woman, a descendant of slaves, slave owners, and free people of color. I need to say this not only for myself but for those fighting for Creole preservation and for my numerous family lines out there, those whom I may never meet due to racial boundaries or lack of time or travel opportunities. I know my father, my father’s father, and the fathers before him. As for Maturin Régis Sr., juggling multiple families like my own father, my cousin Janice laughed and said to me, unprompted, “He was definitely the milkman.”
And I am his baby.
Part III
Oklahoma
1
WHEN I RETURNED to my mother’s side of the family to gather more oral history, I thought I was back at square one. As I mentioned earlier, I learned about Creoleness first through disdain. I assumed that Creoles identified themselves as such because they didn’t want to be black. I assumed this partly because I didn’t grow up around any other self-identified Creoles. New Jersey, unlike Louisiana, had existed in a strict black-white racial binary. But there was a greater contradiction. While I was conditioned to feel that all African Americans disdained Creoleness, I found that every black family I knew, including my own, claimed that they “had Indian in ’em.”
So many African Americans have shared oral histories of their part-indigenous relatives that I couldn’t help but wonder if our elders were often making things up, yet I refused to believe that everyone was suffering from some collective delusion. Hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were forcibly removed from the Southeast to the Midwest, to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Since about 1.5 million black people1 were enslaved at the time of this Native American migration, could there have been intermingling along the Trail of Tears? When, a century later, millions of African Americans moved from the South, did they have some Native American ties, whether they knew it or not? Maybe that’s why I heard such assertions so often.
But when families like mine made these claims, generally the remark wouldn’t go any further than that, for two reasons: (1) the usual response was admiration rather than a request for more information, and anyway (2) no one in my circles could test the claim by anything other than looks. If and when you claimed indigeneity, looks were everything.
Growing up, my mother, Sybil, and her sister Sharene were assumed to have Native American ancestry because of the hue of their brown skin and slick, dark hair. Other relatives of mine were assumed to have Indian in ’em because they had reddish-brown skin and high cheekbones. But growing up, I saw Native Americans only in history texts and Hollywood movies, and no one in my community looks like the ones depicted in book illustrations and on-screen. But then again, I was operating under the assumption that Native Americans all look like actors Wes Studi or Eric Schweig. Louisiana taught me that race is arbitrary and appearances are deceitful. Indigenous people, like black people, do not have one look.
I never fully believed that my family was part indigenous, but after my Louisiana fieldwork, I found it interesting that one label (Creole) is downplayed while another (Native American) is flaunted. Perhaps this is because blackness is part of Creole but native seemed entirely separate, more exotic. I didn’t speak any indigenous languages. I didn’t know of or wear any regalia. Moreover, I thought that any African Americans who claimed indigeneity were trying to renounce being “just black” in the belief that their lineage wasn’t interesting unless mixed with something else—even though no American is 100 percent of anything.
If more black Americans have Native American lineage than I initially believed, then perhaps there was a place I could go to find people to tell me what happened during and after these migrations, which kinships and customs were kept and which were lost. It was a formidable undertaking, because I didn’t have many threads to follow starting out from my family, but I always say gaps can be passes instead of impasses. If many blacks have this claim in their family stories but no substantive proof, could that history have been erased or altered to force us further into a narrow, binary understanding of our identities?
I came across a blog by a man named Terry Ligon, who wrote about the connection
between black and indigenous people. I e-mailed him and we soon connected in a phone conversation. The son of a migrant, his father, Warren, told Terry that when Terry’s grandfather passed away, Warren and his brother went down to the local courthouse because they had heard through other family members that their father had land. But when they inquired about this supposed land at the courthouse, officials told them to “get away from here,” that nothing belonged to them. They weren’t even allowed to look through files to prove or disprove this rumor, and the officials weren’t about to do it either. When Warren thought that he was dying, he wanted to leave family heirlooms to his children. At the time, Terry was into photography and found boxes of those heirlooms: pictures, obituaries, and documents. Warren figured Terry would be the most responsible sibling to handle all of his archives. In the process of sorting through the photos and negatives—a task that took over a year—Terry came across a picture of a woman he considered to be white. When Terry described the picture to his father, his father told him that the woman in the picture was in fact his Indian grandmother. Initially, Terry dismissed the claim: “Being a student of African American studies, I took the position that black people were always trying to distance themselves from slavery.” I’ve also often assumed that black people have claimed other races and ethnic identities as a historical buffer against the horrors of slavery. The response shows how often black identity is demonized and denigrated, even in our own communities.
Terry and his family migrated to California in the 1960s. The racism that led black Americans to flee the South combined with the rise of black communities and ghettos in the North provided the perfect climate for the civil rights movement, which began in 1954.2 As a teenager and then a young adult, Terry was empowered by all the activism and wanted to firmly root himself in a strong African American identity. Besides, his father had never discussed his indigenous background to Terry before. Terry didn’t even know his paternal grandparents’ names. His belief that the Ligon family was black and nothing else persisted for decades, until he found those heirlooms.
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 15
