by Richard Peck
Their ranks were increased at the time of the Louisiana Purchase when free black people fled the slave uprising in Santo Domingo, the French colony that became independent Haiti. A number of these women, who were known in story and song as the “sirens,” were renowned for their beauty.
The journalist Lafcadio Hearn described them in trembling prose: “Uncommonly tall were these famous beauties—citrine-hued, elegant of stature as palmettos. . . . Never organized to enter the iron struggle for life unassisted and unprotracted, they vanished forever with the social system that made them a place apart.”1
But only the outcome of the Civil War erased them. The system of plaçage flourished through the American nineteenth century in New Orleans. The American regime that imposed new strictures on the free people of color—curfews and identity cards—was silent on the subject.
The loss of the Civil War destroyed New Orleans’s economy. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 gave the free people of color a crisis of identity, since they were themselves often slave owners.
Most stayed on in New Orleans to rebuild. The system of plaçage, hardly mentioned in polite society, went further underground and was largely eliminated by the financial disaster of the war.
An unknown number of the women and girls who had been the quadroons—daughters and granddaughters of the sirens—went north if they could pass for white. Others who appeared Spanish were said to have gone to California. Some went to Mexico. They vanished from view to live among strangers, silent about their origins—leaving writers to imagine their fates.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Eordonna D’Andrea
for helping me find Calinda’s song,
to Berthe and Jimmy Amoss of New Orleans
and
Patsy and Ron Perritt of Baton Rouge for shelter and hospitality,
to Susan Overstreet Stevens for direction,
and to Richard Hughes
for his hometown, Grand Tower.
1 Creole Sketches, 1904.
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