In The Flow of Time – February 8, 2025
I’m about to go climb into my imaginary world of 1818. Imaginary? This chapter is about a woman who escapes slavery by going to Mexico with her children.
FACTS
Benedicte dit Robinette was a slave, along with her son. Her mother bought her, then emancipated her. But the law changed. It was illegal to emancipate anyone under 28, and Robinette was younger. The case went to the Supreme Court of Louisiana. She lost because she had no legal standing to complain. I quote the law court, “a slave is a thing.”
When it was all said and done, she and her four children were seized and sold back into slavery. The man who brought the case to send her back into slavery was a relative of mine.
Robinette had a lifelong relationship with a white man, Espirito Joseph Gardette. He owned her at one point. Odds are really good he was the father of her four children. I have records, she liked him. They were life partners.
FICTION
When Robinette is sold back into slavery, Espirito is hidden behind a cutout, but he owns Robinette and her children. They live out in the middle of nowhere until, 18 months later, he dies. She is property, and the heirs will sell her.
FACT
They don’t call it the Underground Railroad in 1818, it isn’t that, not yet. But it is real. There were advertisements every day in the local newspapers offering rewards for information leading to the recapture of runaways.
REAL: Barthélemy Lafon, pirate, smuggler, architect, Renaissance man, and next door neighbor to Robinette’s mother…
FICTION: …will facilitate her escape through the bayous to the coast, and freedom…
REAL: …because his friends the Lafitte brothers are still in business, having relocated to an island near Galveston, which in 1818 is Mexico.
Robinette’s escape to Mexico is fiction. For real, in 1832 she shows up in the New Orleans as Benedicte Robin, living on Magazine Street. She’s in the 1840 census (but not 1830.) Sometime between 1816 and 1832 she is emancipated. I don’t know how that happens. I have an astonishing database of tens of thousands of slave transactions in New Orleans. It’s how I know so much about Robinette and what happened to her and her children. That database ends in 1820. I have dribs and drabs of slave transactions after that time.
The lack of data enables my flight of fancy, in the world of slavery in New Orleans. Because, you know, nothing like that is happening anywhere in the United States now, with a need for sanctuary from an oppressive legal system. Guess I’ll go make something up.
