In The Flow of Time – July 20, 2024
This cringe-worthy statement is from a mid-20th century white New Orleans author: “No true Creole ever had colored blood.”
This sums up one of my challenges. Race is at the heart of New Orleans. So are race words and—far more importantly—the experience of race. Per that writer, a Creole is (was) a person of European descent born in Louisiana, pure white folk, no black heritage allowed. He was wrong.
The modern word “Creole” represents a lot of concepts: cuisine, location, race heritage, and language. I’m skipping cuisine in this little missive. If I say to you, “So-and-so is a Creole,” what you think is (likely) that this is a person of mixed ancestry. It also means a cultural blend from all the cultures and races that made 18th century Louisiana. By 1800, Creole was an identifiable culture, and a language.
In primary sources from the 1800s, I learned to be very careful of the term “Creole.” It was primarily a term of geography, meaning “born here.” It had, in principle, nothing to do with racial origins. But the road to hell is paved with… Many writers did use the term to mean “white,” because the people who mattered (supposedly) were all white. Benjamin Latrobe, writing in 1819, used “creole” as both a description of the classic French heritage in the city, and as a pejorative for the miserable patois of the cypress swamp. Not white. Words are slippery things.
For real, in 1800s New Orleans there were people of all kinds, and words carried different meanings. The word Negro meant “from Africa” (geography) and also “100% black” (race). In the early 1800s, Marie Laveau’s grandmother Maria was a Negress (born in Africa), and no one would ever call her a Creole. Marie was a Creole, a mulatto, and a free woman of color. All of those labels apply. There were more labels.
This is a linguistic problem of major proportions. Skin pigmentation is an unpredictable and unreliable variable. Nonetheless, people being people, the language had words for every color combination. These are not “just words,” some are now freighted with serious pejorative connotations. There were words for pure white, 75/25, 50/50, 50% Black and Native American, a quarter Black, an eighth Black; very specific words and everyone knew what they meant. The white Creoles had other words, meaning lost to modern times, so I can put them here and likely not offend anyone. Keeping the people of color in their place by calling them chacks, chacas, catchoupines, chacalatas, bambaras and bitacaux.
While all this linguistic bullshit is going on, for real we have white people passing as colored, colored people passing as white, black slaves running away or passing themselves off as free, and most people accepting who they are and just living life, despite the shit that society dumps on them.
Beyond color or national origin, there’s a whole other dimension to the word “Creole.” It’s a language, spoken by all those people regardless of skin color. Louisiana Creole is not a pidgin, it is a full language growing out of French (Canadian mostly), Spanish, African languages, and toss in some Native American for good measure. The dominant origin language is French. (lucky for me). It is properly called Kouri-Vini, and although there’s a lot of overlap, it is not Cajun.
Creole, applied to language, has come to mean any blended language, and there are dozens. Michif is a creole from Canadian French and Cree. Gullah on the US southeast coast is a creole.
So me as a writer moving myself into a racially diverse and cosmopolitan New Orleans in the 1800s, with my protagonist being a free woman of color with a rich African heritage, who owned her own slaves and spoke Kouri-Vini, who spent her life navigating an increasingly white supremacist society… there are a few challenges for the old white guy, and they pervade life and language at all levels.
Here’s a good example, the words for grandma. From several options, at least for now, I chose “mami.” That’s a correct, unfreighted, Kouri-Vini term. I like how this one is spelled (it’s phonetic for the English ear) and has an overlap with the term “mammy,” but without the racial stereotypes.
When the time comes, I’ll find first readers who know, who can keep me honest. I have to remember that I know French, and my gentle reader does not. When I see Kouri-Vini les ti-zenfan, I can hear it, I know precisely what it means, and I’m absolutely comfortable with it. You, I suspect not so much. 🙂 It’s the word for grandchildren, in French, les petits enfants. (Or, as spoken in French, les ’tis-enfants” and that s in the middle morphs into a z sound.)
History, and language, are messy.
(Edit: I got rid of Mami, it sounds too much like a racist stereotype. As I wrote, more and more I went for words based in French which, to English readers, are much less fraught. Not quadroon, but quarteron. Not mulatto but sang-melée.
