In The Flow of Time – August 9, 2024
I’m gradually transitioning from research. More and more, I see a tidbit, I take a note, and I start imagining how this might fit into a story that doesn’t even exist yet, except in broad outline form in my imagination. There will be a central protagonist, Marie Laveaux. But the story is a braid, with four significant points of view narrating: Marie and free people of color; slaves; French Creoles (the White people); and Americans.
I’m thinking that in Marie’s “teen” years, her mother (who had a lifelong plaçage relationship) grooms her daughter to be concubine for some older, rich, white man. It worked for her, and it worked for her mother in law. This is what you do. As author I can drop you into ballrooms with candle chandeliers, beautiful dresses, gorgeously done hair… and old men drooling over beautiful young women.
Keep in mind that the grand plaçage ball is quite likely a historical myth. But, older white men absolutely had long-term relationships with younger women of color, their “left-hand” marriage. There are no contracts, no records, and what advertisements appear are most decidedly “come on down the dance hall, we have girls.”
Nonetheless, it makes a great image/story (fiction!) and to that end, I’m going to need suitors. I’m lining up René Trudeau as a serious antagonist. To keep this tight, it should be a friend of his. In fact, two. I start scouting out possible targets, real or fictitious people, but their pursuit of Marie Laveaux is complete fiction. I see a name in my current research. Legend says he was a real suitor. I pursue. He’s way too young, younger than her, and she’s 14. Ah, but his father. There we go. And we’re off, into a real world of powerful white men.
These are historical figures. All of these men know each other. For real, they are part of the network of power that runs ante-bellum Louisiana. We have the mayor, the attorney general, a plantation owner and war veteran (cavalry of course); the scion of another plantation family (a brother in law); a bank president married to his cousin; a lawyer who is a fellow cavalry fighter and part of Andrew Jackson’s personal bodyguard. They are all related by work, blood, and marriage, a club dedicated to the preservation of the natural order of things, where white men of means and power, in their 30s and 40s, ogle young and beautiful women of color who are in their teens. They’ll negotiate with a mother or aunt for far more than their hands. They’re got the money, they can get what they want.
Marie Laveaux lives in this world.
