by Edward Ball
Congo Square is a place of pleasure and worship for blacks. It is the living heart of barbarism for whites. The trance and delirium. The loincloth over the penis. It is a scene with a double nature. People like the Le Corgnes are attracted, and they are repelled. Some whites move their feet, some are mesmerized. Congo Square is a place of wonderment and of revulsion. It might be that people pretend to be repelled.
It is like a sexual habit, this watching of the blacks in Congo Square. I can picture P.C. Le Corgne making his way with his parents along the banquette, the wooden sidewalk. The little white boy looks at the women who dance. The blacks say, Bel tignons pas fait bel négresse, “It isn’t the fine headdress that makes the fine negress.” The boy looks at the women, and he feels. He puts together emotions about the colored people and who they are. He puts together the feeling of what it is to be white. It is a feeling that depends on a scene that is black. The dancers look to the edge and see the whites.
I think I can begin to see, in Congo Square, a script and a stage, a place where blackness and whiteness meet. The two characters come together. Complications ensue. They move apart. Eventually the script calls for a crescendo. Blackness and whiteness collide, and the ending, for our Klansman, is an explosion.
Benjamin Latrobe, the architect, finishes his drawings.
“I have never seen anything more brutally savage, and at the same time dull and stupid than this whole exhibition,” he writes after his day of immersion. Latrobe is absorbed enough to make his pictures, and he is angry with himself for looking. The blacks cannot restrain themselves, the civilized whites who go among them can. The blacks must be taught by the civilized.
At sunset, patrolmen from the city guard show themselves at the edge of Congo Square. Their swords are dangling, their epaulets have a glint of gold. The patrol walks through the square, and the crowd slowly dissolves into the streets, back home to maître and maîtresse, master and mistress.
* * *
In October 1839, P.C.’s grandfather Jean-Louis Zeringue dies, age seventy. His grown children travel out from New Orleans to the plantation on the Mississippi to grieve. Two of his four daughters are dead, two are left. One is P.C.’s mother, Marguerite, the other her sister Mélicent. There is an appraisal of the Zeringue estate. Marguerite and Mélicent have the money and the people to themselves.
The Le Corgnes make a showing, and P.C. is on hand. Slaves are the inheritance of his parents, so they are his inheritance, too.
I look for the probate records. It seems Jean-Louis Zeringue has been busy at the slave auctions. Since his wife died, thirteen years earlier, the widowed patriarch has bought and sold a cabin full of people. He leaves a community of sixteen workers: Josephine, Jules, Seraphim, Henriette, Eugene, Celeste, Rachel, Job, Coralie, Damas, Estelle, Frances, Joseph, Charlotte, Agatha, and Cocotte.
Cocotte—the slattern, in French. Jean-Louis calls his people what he wants. Cocotte is not a name her mother chose, whoever might be her mother. Sixteen, a generous gift to leave for your daughters. The dead man’s papers call them “items.”
The scene is common in the law, the inspection and appraisal of property. Maybe P.C. goes with his mother, Marguerite, to see the blacks sized up and prices placed on them. Oh, but it was a different time, you might say. You have to accept the dead and their doings on their terms. Do not judge the past by the measure of the present. Yes, I know all of that. And still, it is a nasty business.
It is the buckra way.
Another family member appears. Everyone knows him. He is Camille Zeringue, Marguerite’s first cousin. Camille, age thirty-four, lives at his plantation a quarter mile downriver. He is Creole, but he acts like an American. He has named his land. He calls it Seven Oaks, for the old trees around the house. Camille enslaves forty people, but he wants more.
The sixteen slaves must be divided between the two daughters. Yves and Marguerite are set to inherit eight, a windfall. The first thoughts of many white couples in their position would be something like this. Cash them in. Sell them. They are a roomful of living money. Pocket a fortune.
It would be easy to cash in. By this time, the year 1840, New Orleans has become the largest market in the country for people on sale. A new and grand auction house has just opened. It is called the City Exchange, and it stands on St. Louis Street. The City Exchange auction—slaves, land, anything valuable—occupies a rotunda in the middle of a beautiful hotel. The City Exchange auction house does splendid business in the “nigger trade.”
Yves and Marguerite have to decide. City Exchange is just down the street from the house on Dauphine. When they walk past, Yves and Marguerite can see, filing into the side door, a continual stream of black farmworkers and milkmaids, hostlers and carpenters, cooks and porters, nurses and seamstresses, valets and footmen, their hands tied or chained to one another. Inside, beneath the seventy-five-foot dome, people step up onto the block. The auctioneer starts his patter, a few lines in French, a few in English. Sold in two minutes. Prices are good.
Camille Zeringue, the rich cousin on Seven Oaks, distracts Yves and Marguerite from their get-rich dreams. Camille wants the slaves, all of them. He offers an amount lower than the appraisals.
Yves Le Corgne may rationalize. It is for the children. Sell them to Camille so that our children will have something. What can be done with eight people? There is not enough work for them in the city. Where would they sleep? Let Camille buy them. The money they bring is a chance to build something. Camille Zeringue offers $7,200, more or less—$3,600 for Mélicent, the same for Marguerite.
Cousin Camille Zeringue is not the gentlest man with slave humanity. In fact, he has a record at Seven Oaks plantation of people trying to get away from his grip. In July one year, three men steal away from Seven Oaks and take to the swamp. One is named Frank. He is in his early twenties, according to the newspaper, “of middle size, thin, rather reddish, with a black mole on his forehead.” Another is Handison, also early twenties, “of middle size, robust and fat.” Third is “the mulatto Jarret, about 25 or 30 years, 5 feet 7 or 8 inches high, strong built.” Frank, Handison, and Jarret are new to Louisiana and “speak English only,” an advertisement says. Probably they were shipped to New Orleans, “sold down the river,” as they say, meaning down the Mississippi from some other place. The month of July, when the three escape Cousin Camille, is cutting time for sugarcane. Camille drives his workers through twelve-hour days in crushing heat, and the men do not like it. Camille offers a $75 reward to anyone who will drag the men back to his fields.
Yves and Marguerite decide they will sell half of their “items” to Camille—four people—and they will keep the other four. The transaction is written.
P.C. is nine years old. The items are his, too, in a manner of speaking. They are his inheritance.
The four people Marguerite sells do not move out of their cabins. They stay with Camille at Seven Oaks. The four that Marguerite keeps go back with the Le Corgnes to New Orleans. There, Marguerite will lease them to renters, like real estate. To possess four slaves in the city is like owning four houses to rent. It is like becoming a landlord. It is like you are Marie Hinard, the sang-mêlé you resent.
P.C. goes home with his parents. Now he can say something that a few little boys like to say to other little boys. Nous sommes riches—we are rich.
5
Some say the first Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans occurs in the year 1838. If true, P.C. Le Corgne is not yet ten when a delirious procession goes past his front door. It is Tuesday, March 6. He sees masked and costumed women and men, marching and stumbling through the streets of the Vieux Carré. Men in harlequin costumes, women as fishmongers or harlots. Men dressed as Turks with a saber and red kepi; women in cheap gowns, playing Marie Antoinette. Papier-mâché figures, like a pig that flies, an alligator that sings. P.C. watches animals walking, but they wear shoes and rabbit fur, and they are not animals. He sees women walking, but they are men who dress as women.
Carniv
al is a festival that arises in Europe, only to be brought to Louisiana by louche French immigrants. It unfolds over six or eight weeks during winter. Most whites take part in Carnival, as do most blacks. I can see the Le Corgnes in it easily, somewhere.
The festival culminates on Shrove Tuesday, the day before the start of Lent, the austere forty days in the Christian calendar. On Shrove Tuesday, believers can wallow in sin, then confess everything, and still be “shriven,” shorn of sin and forgiven. The church gives us the word “carnival” itself: carne vale, or “goodbye to meat.” Meaning, goodbye to bloody pleasures—and fish only, during Lent.
For many whites during this time, and for many blacks, a month of costume balls and gluttony ends with a blast. It is Shrove Tuesday to the priests and scribes but another name to the crowd—Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday.
A writer in the city when P.C. is a boy describes what he sees on Mardi Gras—
“Men and boys, women and girls, slave and free, white and black, yellow and brown … appear in grotesque, quizzical, diabolical, horrible, humorous, strange, masks and disguises. Human bodies are seen with heads of beasts and birds; beasts and birds with human heads … mermaids, satyrs, beggars, monks, and robbers, parade and march on foot, on horseback, in wagons, carts, coaches, cars in rich confusion, up and down the streets, wildly shouting, singing, laughing, drumming, fiddling, fifeing, and all throwing flour.…”
The flour custom is one that boys fall in love with. A handful of white flour thrown at strangers—to humiliate them, to decorate them. Black men cannot throw flour on whites. That is a privilege reserved for the whites themselves.
I can see P.C. with a bag of flour, powdering the heads and gowns of strangers the whitest white.
The Carnival crowds that stream past the Le Corgnes’ door are like rolling theater. Some weave down the street and end the night at a dance hall, packing inside for a bal masqué, a masked ball. On Mardi Gras, the world turns upside down, briefly, without challenging the law. A Catholic priest casts his eyes over the children in the choir and chooses a “boy bishop” to act the role of high priest. The boy climbs into the pulpit and preaches a ridiculous sermon. His text is the same every year. It is Ecclesiastes 1:15, “The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite.”
Fool societies meet and dress up in foolish costume. A men’s club or a workers’ guild draws lots, and the winner reigns as king for a day. The pretend monarch in cheap fur gives orders to everyone, whatever their place on the social ladder. He is the “Lord of Misrule.”
I wonder whether P.C. sings in the choir at St. Louis Cathedral, where he once was baptized. I wonder whether he plays the boy bishop and contemplates the number of fools.
* * *
I am trying to make this thing visible, whiteness. It looks transparent and flimsy, maybe. Some would say it does not even exist. But I am trying to make it conspicuous, as visible and as plain as blackness. I have to keep working at it.
Enter now, from a side door, the scientists. They are coming into the room with an idea. They are holding in hand the idea of race. Let us begin with the first one who enters. He is a man named Samuel Morton.
It is 1840, in Philadelphia. Samuel Morton is a natural historian and a forty-year-old professor at the Pennsylvania Medical College. He teaches for the income, but his real love is anatomy. The first thing to learn about Samuel Morton is that he collects skulls. Bony heads are lined up like sentinels along the shelves of his study at the medical college. This might seem too far from the disposition of whites and blacks in the South, a little remote from the trajectory of little P.C. into the figure of our Klansman. But there is a synchrony between the skulls and the terror of the Ku-klux.
Samuel Morton, who is blond and has a high forehead, is a scientist who wishes to tell the story of human evolution. His chief samples are human heads. Most of the skulls he studies come from the U.S. Army, which is variously at war with the Iroquois, Narragansett, and Cherokee people in the north, and the Seminole, Yamasee, Choctaw, and Creeks in the southeast. As whites push south, southwest, and west over the Appalachians, taking land from Native Americans, seizing captives, and killing some who fight the invasion, officers and physicians in the military gather the bodies of Indians, decapitate them, and send the skulls to Morton. Science feeds on war.
“By the kindness of Dr. Satterlee, of the U.S. Army, I received eight specimens of Menominee skulls,” Morton writes in a typical thank-you note for a shipment of heads. Morton possesses more than six hundred skulls. He adds the skulls of African Americans, some of them taken from the death marches of enslaved people through the Appalachian range as they are sold “down the river” to New Orleans. He adds the skulls of whites. The white heads are borrowed from paupers’ graves and not returned. Morton builds a family tree of humans with his specimens.
He makes a family ladder of races. “The grouping of mankind into races has occupied the ingenuity of many of the best naturalists of the past and present century,” Morton writes in his 1839 book, Crania Americana.
The tongues of intellectuals have fluttered with race talk for centuries. The innovation of Samuel Morton is not that he coins the idea. His role is that he uses skulls to extend race backward, into the story of human origins. Morton develops a fable, the idea that humanity has many births. The fable is known as “polygenesis.” The anatomist wishes to show that many versions of humanity, which Morton calls races or “varieties,” appeared simultaneously. He measures his collection of heads, and measures them again. “It is proposed,” he writes, “to consider the human as consisting of twenty-two families.”
He finds that things like shape, jaw length, and skull capacity, how much tissue the brain case holds, correlate with places of origin for humans—in southern Africa, in the Americas, in eastern Asia, and (he says) in the region of the Caucasus. He determines that there are five races, with each “born” at a different place and time. Morton says that the “Mongolian” is a race “ingenious, imitative, and highly susceptible of cultivation”; the “Malay race” is “active and ingenious”; the “American” race, “averse to cultivation … restless, revengeful, and fond of war”; and the “Ethiopian,” clearly “joyous, flexible, and indolent.”
The fifth race, so-called Caucasians, “surpass all other people.” Morton saw Caucasians as peoples in Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, and the eastern horn of Africa.
After Morton’s book Crania Americana appears (partly subtitled An Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species), the idea of polygenesis spreads from Philadelphia and New York to other enclaves of learning. It streams into the Deep South, where polygenesis receives a warm welcome. In South Carolina, the Charleston Medical Journal and Review says, “We of the South should consider Samuel Morton as our benefactor for aiding most materially in giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.” It spreads to a man named Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born ethnographer who becomes Samuel Morton’s disciple. Agassiz, a professor of zoology at Harvard, writes and teaches for fifty years about the separation of the races in their origins.
Samuel Morton sees himself as an impartial measurer of forms, a hunter who gathers evidence. In fact, he is among the early American philosophers of white supremacy. He is one of the first in this country to recruit the authority of science in praise of whiteness.
* * *
The windfall is in, the hoard from the Le Corgnes’ inheritance. Marguerite and Yves take some of their money and look for real estate. It is 1839. The couple has five children—Yves of God, Ézilda, P.C., Joseph, and Aurore. Marguerite is pregnant with a sixth. They shop for six lots of land.
The Le Corgnes enslave seven: Polly, Valentin, a new woman named Dinah, and four others. There is nowhere to put everyone in the Vieux Carré. The French Quarter boils with people—the porters with their wheeling carts, black and ignorant. The women who spill out of the brothels on Burgundy Street, down the block, loud and lewd. The shopkeepers of St. Claude Street, gens
de couleur, mulattoes with watch chains and attitude, fops who pretend white style. It is twenty-five years since the Le Corgnes married, and it is time to get off the street of the sang-mêlés.
New Orleans is growing east and downstream along the river, also west and upstream. The Le Corgnes look west, to a faubourg upstream, or “uptown.” There is a suburb there that is new and nearly all white. A rail line is going in, and the train, loud and steam-powered, runs along a road called Nayades. Passenger service brings the uptown faubourgs quite close. The places cropping up west of the old city have names like DeLord, Annunciation, Foucher, and Lafayette. Stretches of fields separate them, but the gaps are filling. Faubourg Lafayette is booming, its wharfs lined with boats, and shipping companies are hiring. If they head that direction, Yves will have work.
In April 1840, Yves Le Corgne, teacher and supercargo, buys six empty lots uptown for $1,700. It is nearly the amount they pocket from the sale of people his wife inherited. They trade four nègres for six pieces of land in a new section of uptown called Bouligny.
A man named Joseph Vincent sells the land to the Le Corgnes. The empty lots sit on a dirt road called Lyons Street. The river is a block away. Industry and warehouses are moving in. At the end of Lyons Street, on the levee of the river, there is a lumberyard. Next to it stands a big brick factory known as a cotton press, a place that takes a bargeload of raw cotton and compresses it into boxlike five-hundred-pound bales. A family named Dufossat runs a brick kiln nearby, and someone else is building a slaughterhouse. When the Le Corgne boys grow, the trades will be at their fingertips.
Of course, the boys will not be in the trades. They will be grands blancs, like their grandparents.
Six lots, one each for the children. Six lots for six houses, six futures. That is the plan. Maybe the Le Corgnes see it as a fresh start, and maybe they see it as moving to get free of les nègres. Maybe it is both. The section called Bouligny is a world distant from the cramped, Creole, and colored streets of the Vieux Carré. Bouligny and other parts of uptown are white. Blacks, free people of color, and slaves remain crowded into the old city and jammed into a section to the north of it, Tremé. The Le Corgnes move for work, and space, and maybe for the absence of black people.
