In The Flow of Time – September 8, 2024
I’m plotting (devious SOB that I am). It is 1818. At this point, Robinette and her children have been pulled back into slavery (because slaves are things) and resold. The nasty antagonist making this happen is René Trudeau. He is historical, so is Robinette and her fate. This all happened.
From a narrative perspective, I need to answer the question what happens to Robinette. A mom and her four kids being sold into slavery… that is not a happy ending. I’ve set it up so that Robinette is like a big sister to Marie Laveaux. Fiction, plausible given the personalities. Also for real, the man purchasing Robinette and kids is Antoine Abat. He was part of the purchase chain that led to her emancipation. And here he is again. My little brain says, someone is still working on getting her freedom. Given the huge number of slave transactions, it’s odd that the same guy is involved both times.
One of the real people is Eulalie Delassize (Trudeau). She is René’s mother. For fiction, Mom didn’t like Dad AT ALL, and son René is a chip off the old block. Her husband Zénon (now dead) is Robinette’s father. Eulalie LIKES Robinette much more than she does her own son. Robinette is a decent human being. Her son René is a prick. She actively schemed to fund the legal defense trying to preserve Robinette’s freedom, which failed. I’m not expecting her to do anything more. She tried. That’s all plotted.
(Edit: nah, she is not a decent human being. I wrote it that way, and it sucked. She’s a racist just like her son and her dead husband, but in her own way.)
So, I ponder, bought by Antoine Abat. I imagine that the family is quietly relocated somewhere out of town, to live with her plaçage partner and father to her children, Espirito Gardette. That’s fine, where?
I haul out an 1815 map. Let’s find a spot. René’s plantation is up river. So we’ll look down. There’s a nice dry strip and settlements between cypress swamps called, in effect, Beef Land. Yes, I’ve read about that elsewhere, beef cattle. OK. That seems fine. It’s about 15 miles away, in the right direction. There’s a landing and small town at a bend in the river. That looks perfect. Zoom in to find the name of that location.
Lassize. Eulalie de Lassize. This could be where she’s from!
OOH OOH 🙂 Pure serendipity. So now, having failed in her attempt to secure Robinette’s freedom, Plan B is to still do right by Robinette. Eulalie sets them up among folks she knows and trusts, in her home town, far enough away that no one is ever likely to find the “runaway” slave Robinette. On the modern map, this is a town named Poydras. The label “Lassize” is lost to history, and a map two centuries old.
Wrapping up this story, Gardette dies. That woman living with him, her kids, there will be inquiries, inventories, noses poking around. Legal shit. Uh oh. So Marie and her boy friend will get a wagon load of beef, pack up the family under tarps, and ride through the full moon night back to New Orleans.
Where Père Antonio Sedella has purchased tickets for Robinette and her kids to get on a packet boat for Veracruz, Mexico. He will provide false papers, just in case, but no one will question the kindly old Capuchin monk. Everyone loves Père Antoine, and while this is complete fiction, this behavior is absolutely in line with the kind of man he was. The family escapes south on what we now call the Underground Railroad. It went south to Mexico, too.
Edit: Making Eulalie true to herself as a racist wife of a plantation owner, all of this changed. Robinette still escapes to Mexico, but by a very different path that has nothing to do with Père Antoine. I use the Lassize plantation, for an entirely different purpose in the narrative. It’s fiction, I can do that. 🙂
