In The Flow of Time – July 9, 2024
The largest slave revolt in US history started on the Woodland plantation in 1811, today the Kid Ory Historic House. I’m pretty sure that revolt is going to make it into my novel. The man who owned it in 1811 was Manuel Andry. The leader of the rebellion was Charles Deslondes.
The rebels killed Andry’s son, and badly injured him, but he escaped. Three days later the militia and the army put down the rebellion, by then hundreds of slaves seeking freedom and heading toward New Orleans. Many were killed (casualties among the whites, zero). Those captured were tried, executed (hanging), beheaded, and the heads put on pikes on the New Orleans waterfront as a warning to slaves.
Marie Laveau was young, a free person of color. She saw those heads.
In 1816 Manuel Andry, whose treatment of his slaves instigated the revolt, married my distant cousin, Marie Josephine Trudeau. She and her sisters were among the very privileged elite. Three of them married into white power. Can you imagine, marrying a slave owner so vile… because, to them, that behavior didn’t matter. It wasn’t awful, or evil, or even bad. It was the natural order of things.
The youngest sister went the other way. I have done no plotting, but having both extremes inside my family, I can work with that. Thank you, Manette, for being aware.
I have no idea how I can convey the two sides. On one, unthinking entitlement, the righteous imposition of physical, emotional, and mental cruelty with no more awareness than breathing. On the other, seeing the horror of what slave owners were doing. And worse, what it was to be a slave.
Marie Laveau, free woman of color, and her partner Christophe Glapion, a white man pretending to be colored so he could live with the woman he loved, owned slaves. Plural.
The circumstances of life in New Orleans antebellum were not binary.
