Mazy’s family history is an interesting one and very New Orleans.
[click on pictures for their sources and copyrights.]
Mazy Baptiste is black, to American definition, but not African American. For those confused, all African Americans are black people, but all black people are not African Americans. It is a specific ethnicity with traits such as their ancestors spoke English and were Protestants. Their history involves a caste system modeled after European medieval serfdom known as generational enslavement or slavery for shorthand. Their freed or emancipated ancestors bear British surnames, which they chose for themselves. All over the United States, African American families are typically traced back to the Southeast. Mazy’s stepfather, Dr. Davis, is African American.
Mazy’s Haitian, or Saint-Domingue, background is les gens de couleur libres, free people of color, who were wealthy and planters. They owned slaves.
Gens de couleur translates to English as ‘people of color,’ a term reintroduced in recent times, often shortened to POC by bloggers. Today it means something different than it did when the French term was used. It used to only refer to people of at least “one drop” of African blood. Among New Orleans les gens de couleur libres, this “one drop” can be almost literal, with some people looking dead on white yet were still ‘Negroes’ and subjected to the Code Noir caste system. For men, it could mean the possibility of passe blanc, passing for white. Rumor has it this was a dangerous thing to be for a woman, though, opening doors to being raped by white men who wanted to rape a white woman but were afraid of the law against this– she could not have them arrested under Code Noir!
Black Creoles of New Orleans were formerly called things such as colored Creoles, mulattos, and quadroons. Three definitions of Creole occurred over the centuries. The first referred to white colonists from France and Spain. The second to mixed people of that ancestry. And the third, today’s definition, refers to the culture of which anyone can be part.
The Haitian Revolution, as Dr. Davis calls it, or Haitian Slave Revolt, as Bootsie’s family calls it, caused her ancestors to leave. People were massacred during the Revolution, and not limited to white people. To New Orleans, both white and mixed Creoles went.
Her ancestors never owned slaves again. Her family often says they became abolitionists, which secretly may have been true, though this not being a popular thing to be in the American slave states would be an understatement.
They also claim to be part of the Underground Railroad, but this is overstated by her family – probably to compensate for the stain of previously being slave owners. Her family likes to claim it anyway, possibly to compensate for the past of slave-owning. It was another branch of the family back then – cousins. Bootsie’s direct ancestor paid for the startup money to the cousins’ furniture-making business, and in this way, her family is connected to the Underground Railroad, one degree of separation from it.
In New Orleans, the population of free people was big. After the Louisiana Purchase, Anglo businessmen came into the city, and the city grew. It became a large city for its time, filled with strangers. To run away, an enslaved person merely needed to run to the other side of the city where they weren’t known and get themselves a paid job. They were typically able to read and write, possibly even arithmetic, and, for the men, had a trade, often highly valued trades – e.g., shoemakers and saddle makers or even blacksmiths – whereby they were used as free labor by their owners and worked out of shops open to the public. This translated in the city to the ability to gain employment as free people. All they had to do was get lost. Newspaper runaway ads often specified where in the city the runaway was suspected to have gone.
The cousins – written as “God bothering do-gooders” by Bootsie’s contemporary ancestor in her diaries – helped sugar cane plantation slaves to escape. The plantations were always Creole since Anglo Americans scared the cousins too much. Sugar cane plantations had a life expectancy of up to 25 years old, they were so brutal.
As revered furniture makers with buyers all over the country, the cousins would make coffins with ornamentation hiding breathing holes. The runaway would go into the coffin. Then a shipping crate was made for invisible breathing openings. The crate was sent by boat up the Mississippi River to stops along the ‘Railroad’ line. The ultimate goal location was Quebec because they spoke French.
How did Bootsie and Mazy know this? Everyone wrote journals and letters back then. A highly literate family, they owned businesses and founded schools for girls while boys were sent to Paris for college.
Bootsie’s direct ancestor was certainly not a “God bothering do-gooder.” The cousins called her names in their journals, which included “fallen woman,” “Jezebel,” and “whore.” Her ancestor used her beauty to become the second family of a wealthy Creole man. She was merciless in the acquisition of money and valuables from him – this was a business arrangement in her eyes. Her charm and graces were well practiced and well rewarded. The wealthy men often liked their mistresses/second wives more than their legal first wives. The legal first wife was for heirs; the second wife was for love.
She brought a lot of money into the community this way, including startup funding of people’s businesses and collecting a percentage of the profit. A wealthy businesswoman by the time her lover, the father of her children, died. Her children, who the wealthy man acknowledged, received an inheritance from their father, a Creole tradition.
This female ancestor set a precedent in the line. Some of her descendants did the same thing, always mindful of the acquisition of money and valuables, and making a profit from businesses. But consistently scorned and insulted by the moralistic church-goers of the extended family. One of these women, so angered by the hypocrisy of such people who’d take her money but despise her, walked into church in a bright purple dress and a big hat with a peacock feather in it. Her illegitimate, more white than black, children trailing behind her, wearing the finest suits and dresses available. She set tongues wagging for months.
The line’s strong matriarchal business-minded family would not permit their house in the French Quarter to be lost. When the Anglo Americans began moving into the Quarter, they would not tolerate living among free people of color and pushed them into the neighboring Treme to gather all the “colored people” together. That would not do at all. So the matriarch owner wrote to her grandson in Paris, ordering him to immediately return. He did. She sighed the house over to him and ordered him to pass for white. He could, and he did. Since white Creoles would not piss on Anglos if they were on fire, anyone who would have known who the young man actually was would never tell them. The young man passe blanc so well that he married a white woman.
Unfortunately, he was a moron and a lay-about. He enjoyed enjoyment rather than work. He even screwed up what kind of white woman he married. An Irish immigrant. His mother and aunts went through the roof. He married what was at that time the lowest rung of white people, so low that they were below slaves. They ranked as equal to the Chinese immigrants.
The only thing the young man seemed good at was fathering children. They had eight. Six survived, since children under five died a lot back then. The matriarch clan posed as “mammies” to the children to control the family and the house.
Every generation since fleeing Haiti had to swear on the family Bible that they would not participate in slavery or own any slaves. The lay-about and the Irish girl did not know about this, and they bought a house slave. After giving both a whooping with switches, the matriarchs ordered them to immediately free the girl and pay her wages as a servant. The Irish girl caught on and then started making a mess of things. She hired a runaway from across town. That would not do either. The family did not want trouble brought down on their heads, especially if the trouble came from the Anglo Americans – the girl spoke French and English. So they smuggled the girl further away into the city and had some other family deal with that trouble.
The French-speaking maid – the one bought and then freed – was known for laughing at the antics of the family. The matriarchs whooping her monsieur and madam with switches, she found particularly amusing. In reality, the matriarchs paid her wages, so her loyalty went to them. She did things such as helping them hide riches in walls and under floorboards and kept the secret. The more she kept secrets, the more money she was paid. Then she wanted to get married and start her own family. The man wanted a business. Whether he was in love with the maid or he wanted her connections, no one knew for sure, but there were a lot of suspicions. If he was clever enough to connive that way, then he’d make a good business owner. The girl’s heart was set on this guy, so the matriarchs gave the guy the wedding present of startup funding for his business, with, of course, the receiving percentage of profit from his business.
The next hired maid, somebody got her pregnant. A whooping of the lay-about, suspecting it was his penis that did this. The Irish girl left him and moved in with the matriarchs in Treme. Fortunately, no one cared what the Irish did back then, and since the family had a lot of white-looking people anyway, the eyebrows of troublemakers did not raise by her living with them. She, unfortunately, brought six kids with her and filled the house to the rafters. Hardly an inch to move without tripping over children. Other children lived there, too. This generation was not the second family of wealthy men, since they could never lore a man to a household filled with children anyway. They could not lore a poor man from the neighborhood near the house, never mind a wealthy man.
More money and valuables stashed behind walls and under floorboards in the Treme house too. This generation was the biggest of the hoarders until the Civil War generation.
Meanwhile, the lay-about and the maid lived as husband and wife in the Quarter house, and that rather defeated the purpose of his passing. The place needed upkeep, so the matriarchs hired a light-skinned black handyman who would sleep in the house, and suspicion rested on him as the father of the maid’s babies – the matriarchs started the rumor. The handyman knew this cover story was part of the deal and why he was paid a little extra, and he went along with it, despite the priest and his mother reprimanding him for living in sin and being a bad Catholic for it.
There always seemed to be God-bothering devout Catholic relatives, no matter what went on. A lot of the sons became this, leaving the house to go marry and be respectable businessmen, who then turned into God-bothering devotes, looking with disapproval at the women of the family.
Hardly a single marriage happened among the matriarch clan’s daughters. A lot of babies, not a lot of husbands. This was heavily disapproved of by the devouts. The family began to get a reputation, especially since the lovers of the daughters were not wealthy men – no one benefited financially from this arrangement. The matriarchs sent their granddaughters to convent schools in France to stop this bed hoping mess their mothers did. That nipped it in the bud. But now they had more God botherers.
The bloodline had practiced syncretism of Catholicism and Voodoo since Haiti The family knew Marie Laveau, called the “Voodoo Queen” centuries later. The God bothering nun-taught girls really disapproved of this Voodoo stuff. But the aging matriarchs controlled the purse strings. The naughty daughters, growing older, took after their mothers, including practicing syncretism. Unless someone moved far away, there was no escaping the influences of the grandmothers. The next generation practiced syncretism, jumping right over the nun-taught generation.
The naughty daughters married to become respectable as their time to reign approached. The men had no idea what they were in for. Blinded by the women’s beauty, they did not notice the hierarchy of the family.
One of the daughters killed her husband via oleander poisoning. He cheated on her, so she killed him. She was hung for first-degree murder. The family was gaining a very bad reputation. But they were wealthy, so that compensated for a lot. Their investments in businesses made them one of the wealthiest free people families.
Then the Civil War happened. New Orleans was captured by the Union early, which allowed free men of color to enlist in the Union Army. The men of the family did, while the women of the family hoarded both Union and Confederate money under the floorboards, hedging their bets. Halfway through the war, Lincoln emancipated the slaves, and newly freed New Orleans black men could enlist in the Union Army as well. That went over like a lead balloon for the people with Confederate soldiers in their families. The women of the family purchased firearms, foreseeing danger lurking around corners.
By this time, the lay-about, the maid, two children, and the handyman had all died from tuberculosis, called consumption, which was believed to be caused by vampires – not the Bram Stoker kind, but more like the George Romero living dead. The aged Irish woman and her grown daughters moved back to the Quarter house, and she was the grand dame widow. Some of her daughters were married to Union soldiers, and they soon became widows too. The whole place wore black dresses and black veils. They attended mass regularly, and also practiced Voodoo, which the Irish woman took a liking to while living in Treme.
There was nothing about this family that did not annoy Anglo Americans, who lived in areas such as the Garden District. The family began to keep low profiles, knowing this could get ugly.
The Union won the war, the surviving men came home, and Reconstruction began. With this, the Radical Republicans also began. Republicans were the left back then. One of the men of the family ran for office. In New Orleans, white Creoles stood up for black Creoles. The year was 1866, and the New Orleans Massacre occurred. A peaceful demonstration of mostly black freedmen was attacked by a mob of white rioters, many of whom had been soldiers of the recently defeated Confederate States. The beginning of the passionate hatred between Republicans and Democrats was born – no matter which wing they would be since they later flipped positions.
The massacre gained sympathy votes for the Republicans, many of whom were New Orleans black Creole men, including a man of the family.
Anglo Americans had long been uneasy about the large class of free people of color in New Orleans – the by-far largest population of free people of color in the United States before emancipation. Despite the black Creole politicians were vastly more educated than the average white person of the time, and most could be perceived as white from appearance in the modern North, they were still one drop and that made them ‘Negroes.’
The White League began, filled with white Confederate soldiers. They were responsible for widespread violent attacks on both white and black Republicans.
Knowing the times had changed, the women of the family took to even more conservative behaviors to draw the least amount of attention to themselves. Being a wealthy black family whose money came from black people’s businesses, they did not want to rock the boat. But the men of the family most certainly did want to rock that boat. Rock it, tip it over, chop it into firewood – they were hungry for full citizenship to the United States, which meant the vote. During the whole time of building businesses and accumulating wealth, their households lacked any say whatsoever in government, for they had no vote even in local government’s politics. They could read about the government of the United States, but they could not participate in it. From 1803 onward, the year of the Louisiana Purchase, they could not participate in the touted American liberty system. After the war, up North, they could vote. But down South, that Constitutional right was taken away from them after two seconds of having it. They were pissed.
And that promised to bring trouble to the family, which now hoarded valuables further, and primarily things that would not burn like gold. Every bit of expensive jewelry permanently resided inside the walls of the two houses. Women had personal one-shot pistols they carried in their purses, and loaded rifles throughout the house as if planning to fight off a siege. Trouble promised to come their way. But if they shot a white man in self-defense, the ladies would hang, no matter what. The goal was to protect the children and the houses, knowing they would hang for the effort. Their attendance at mass skyrocketed. Their dresses always muted and conservative. Respectable married women, they became more like their God-bothering cousins than the women of their past.
The Irish woman’s eldest son inherited the Quarter house after her death. He was a Radical Republican, so that did not help in protecting the house. The new generation of matriarchs wanted him to schmooze the Irish of New Orleans, who stopped being lower than slaves. But he turned out to be a big mouth and at some point let his real heritage slip out. He grew into a bigger target as a passer. After his wife, an Irish American, was slapped across the face in public by a white nationalist with a myriad of insults pertaining to race, in front of his toddlers, the young man decided to draw less attention to himself and quietly supported from the background. His immediate family was in danger.
A young woman had been murdered by the White League. She was a seventeen-year-old black teacher. The White League operated out in the open and with their identities known. They sought to run the Republicans out of the state and place the Democrats (Dixiecrats) back into power. They used violence and acts of terrorism to accomplish their goals.
By the 1890s, hordes of off-the-boat immigrant Catholic Europeans began to enter New Orleans. Tons of them were Italians and Sicilians. To the white nationalist eyes, the Italians and Sicilians were the same as the black Creoles, containing the same wide diversity of coloration and appearance – from blond-blues to light-skinned obvious black features. They were also believed to be criminals, specifically the mafia. Every single one of them was believed to be in the mafia. People of Color didn’t believe that. The Italians liked to show up at their jute joints and dance with the girls – starting the Italian American jazz musicians that would eventually create the Rat Pack, with men such as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennet, and Sammy Davis, Jr.
In 1891, eleven Italian and Italian American men were broad daylight lynched in the city by a white mob into the thousands. Their bodies were mutilated. No convictions. Like all the lynchings that would occur after, the accusation was criminality. This one was for killing the Irish American police chief Hennesy. The Irish had radically moved up in rank since their first en masse arrival during the Potato Famine.
Everyone who was not white or acceptable white lived in fear. The era of the Southern lynchings had begun.
The family lost several men to lynchings, including one hung from a lamp post in Treme outside his shop that was firebombed – an obvious message. Jim Crow began. A family free for centuries and always prestigious now had to use the outhouse behind restaurants. The women grew massively conservative in their clothing and behavior. They too could be attacked in broad daylight. They had lost more rights than they had even under Code Noir during slavery.
Though their ancestors did not particularly reckon kin with slaves, especially not with African Americans, who spoke English and practiced Protestantism, the shared experience created a bond. They were forced in together and faced the same lack of rights and threats of violence. They were perceived as one people, so the very slow process of becoming one people began.
The light-skinned mixed heritage black Creoles had always been a more privileged class of black people. To a degree, they retained this during Jim Crow. But not if they stirred the pot by pushing for the vote.
The family retained their high education level. Many of the women became school teachers, and they would tutor at home, after hours, their own children to be more educated. There was no more sending children to France to be educated anymore. They were on their own.
As Creoles, they retained a separate identity from the Anglos, including African Americans, and continued a relationship with white Creoles. Their language and their religion set them apart. Newspapers in Creole French were readily available.
However, not all white Creoles kept this relationship. Many joined the white nationalist organizations, further racially dividing the city. Educated black Creoles were caught in the mesh of feelings towards freed slaves, many of whom were field slaves and illiterate.
By the 1960s, ancestors would not have recognized their descendants. Decades of Jim Crow destroyed some of the prestigious black Creole families, such as Mazy’s father’s side. They became poorly educated and lower class, involved in drugs, booze, and prostitution. Her father died when she and her sister were very young. Bootsie always claimed he had a stroke, but they would learn as adults from their paternal grandmother that he accidentally overdosed on heroin after years of being clean.
Bootsie’s line would regain ownership of the Quarter house and discovered the hoard of wealth there. This hoard existed in the Treme house, too, which just missed being among the houses razed to build a highway overpass. The wealth paid for the upkeep of the houses, the repairs and preservation of paintings, and college tuition.
As Mazy’s Tulane University senior year departmental honor’s thesis in language, she translated the decaying family diaries into English, preserving their words. Few spoke Creole French by then. The Anglo Americans disapproved of bilingualism to the harshest degree. The Cajuns would fight this, beginning in the 1960s, but the Creoles, divided by race and the bad blood of the past, would not. The white Creoles mostly faded into the Anglo Southerners, leaving only the black Creoles to preserve their identity. This identity became a culture that anyone could join.
In the 21st century, the city of New Orleans officially apologized to Italian Americans for the lynching. They had remained angered over it. After World War Two, they would begin to gain white privilege. Even their mafia stereotype would eventually vanish. But there was never any apology given to anyone else. The city would remain racially divided. The haters would continue.
Part of Treme, in addition to being razed for the overpass, would be razed to build a park. The Treme house just missed that razing too – a good thing, since all the wealth had not been discovered.
For the family, they identified themselves as black, no matter their appearance. Suffering and oppression earned the right, even when most people thought an individual member of the family was white. Big gatherings of all the relatives showed a rainbow of skin hues, hair color and texture, and eye color. The Irish line added an Irish chip on their shoulder. Mazy did not hail from that line, or she would gladly take that on.
Whatever her father was, apart from Houma Indian, obvious from his mother, Bootsie did not know. She was not close with her late husband’s family, mostly because they called for bail money or for drugs with the usual addict lies and promises. Mazy’s grandmother, who came from the swamps, returned to the swamps, leaving her good-for-nothing albeit very handsome husband. She lived out her days far from the mess that was her children. She did not even have a landline phone, so they could not get in touch with her. To arrange a visit for the girls with their grandmother, Bootsie had to call her neighbor.
In the city of New Orleans, some things overcame everything: food, music, and the love of the good times. If the White League and Jim Crow had never happened, everything may have been different. But such things did happen, and everything was as it was. A very poor state riddled with crime and poverty. Hit by devastating hurricanes, made worse by overdevelopment, and a cheating government lying over levee repairs. Ignored by the rest of the nation as a strange anomaly, and disowned by much of the South – those who did not rank good food, good music, and good times too high on their list of priorities.
Dr. Davis would always say that Jim Crow kept the South backward and behind the rest of the country. All that energy wasted on hate and oppression could have been put to positive usage. He believed that was the opposite of Southern pride, because they wrecked the South and would not allow the South to come together as one to advance themselves and claim their seat at the American table. From on the onset of the Civil War to the FBI army breaking the hold of the white nationalist terrorist autocracy, it took a hundred years. A hundred years dedicated to oppression and violence. A damn waste of energy and resources, he always said, viewing things as a historian rather than an inheritor.
Bootsie was the first to not practice syncretized Catholicism and Voodoo, though she was raised in it and her daughters knew a thing or two as well. Married to a Southern Baptist church deacon, Davis had no tolerance whatsoever for that “black magic,” which he kind of meant both in a supernatural way and a race way. He believed his entire lineage was straight-up African American without Catholics, Voodoo, or French speakers. His ancestors were owned by Anglo Americans who came into New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase – the hated uptight, arrogant Anglos; a street even divided the Anglo area from the Creole area.
Dr. Davis lord it over his wife that she came from Voodoo people. Never a missed an opportunity to say something about it. He was the type of Christian who would have run out of town the Voodoo trinket-selling stores in the French Quarter, such as those on Bourbon Street targeting tourists. The only thing worse than Voodoo was selling those tricks to the gullible.
Lo and behold. He never knew much about his mother’s mother. Out of the blue, his sister called him to tell him their grandmother was in a hospice in Lafayette, which was bayou and Cajun country. He drove out there and found his mother at the bedside of some ancient woman he had never seen before in his life. She introduced him to his grandmother. His brow raised when the weak old lady said the affectionate term of the Cajuns, “cher.” Maybe she just absorbed it from her neighbors or something.
As the old woman came in and out of awareness, she began rattling off in French. Solely due to Mazy’s interest in language did he recognize this was not Cajun French learned from her neighbors. A bad feeling stirred in the pit of his stomach.
At the after-the-funeral party, he met cousins he never knew he had. And his worst nightmare came true, assuming he had no white cousins and they were in the Klan or politicians. The first sign was a chicken bones windchime hanging on the front porch. The next was a line of brick dust across the threshold. Bootsie, who accompanied him, tried hard to hide her smirk and keep in her laughter.
Turned out, they were French-speaking Voodoo swamp people. Worse, they had a long history of selling the tricks to the gullible – even locally known as the people to go to for love spells and curses and any other gris-gris needs. Bootsie laughed her ass off. He kept calling them, “Half backwards, no shoe wearing, black magic selling, French swamp Negroes.” Bootsie laughed every time he ranted.
Though that line barely had any legal records before the 1960s, and therefore nothing he could track down about their history, he figured they may have descended from maroons – slaves that ran away in the early days of slavery. The swamps were a big runaway destination, starting with Africans recently brought over to those a couple generations born to slavery. As long as no one caused them any trouble, the Cajuns kept the maroon camps to themselves. The swamps were impossible to navigate for outsiders. A maze of bayous that all looked the same to an outsider’s eye, devoid of any distinguishing landmarks. “Oh, look, a cypress tree, how rare in this swamp forest of them!” Only the Cajuns, Hauma, and maroons could navigate. By land was even more perilous.
The swamps posed a fantastic place for maroons to live out their whole lives, making generational villages. And Dr. Davis came from them. Most likely his ancestors were born a couple of generations into slavery, since they spoke French and had syncretic Catholicism-Voodoo, or so he reckoned. Who knew in actuality? Not that the cousins would tell him much. They perceived him as a mildly amusing city boy with high and mighty judgmental morals who transparently believed himself better than them.
They ate creatures Davis did not believe were edible, such as nutria. An invasive species of a giant swamp rat, related to South America’s coypu and looked like a beaver. Nutria had been imported for the fur trade, after nearly hunting beavers into extinction. They grew into destructive pests throughout the swamps. Additionally, his cousins ate snakes and all kinds of crap that turned Davis’s stomach. He kept saying, “Well, the good Lord tells us waste not, want not.”
Davis could never again hold Bootsie’s Voodoo practicing family over her head again. At least they weren’t swamp people and they always wore shoes throughout the generations. “Not once in my family’s history did they discover a new invention called ‘the shoe.’” She’d laugh at him.
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