Michelle Obama's white, Native American roots would be common in New Orleans

October 9, 8:04 PMNew Orleans Literature ExaminerNordette Adams

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Photo of Michelle Obama's parents with their babies.

With the October 7 New York Times article "In First Lady’s Roots, a Complex Path From Slavery," some people are discussing again race mixing between the sheets. The article examines the First Lady's ancestry, revealing that Mrs. Obama is of mixed heritage.

While President Obama’s biracial background has drawn considerable attention, his wife’s pedigree, which includes American Indian strands, highlights the complicated history of racial intermingling, sometimes born of violence or coercion, that lingers in the bloodlines of many African-Americans. Mrs. Obama and her family declined to comment for this article, aides said, in part because of the personal nature of the subject.

“She is representative of how we have evolved and who we are,” said Edward Ball, a historian who discovered that he had black relatives — the descendants of his white slave-owning ancestors — when he researched his memoir, “Slaves in the Family.”

“We are not separate tribes of Latinos and whites and blacks in America,” Mr. Ball said. “We’ve all mingled, and we have done so for generations.”

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes at The Root.com that Mrs. Obama's ancestry is additional evidence that more "race mixing" went on than Americans are willing to acknowledge. He writes that "what all this means is that in defiance of the law and social convention, and just what some “believe,” an enormous amount of “race mixing” has long been occurring in the United States." (Yes, he is  that same Gates, the Harvard Professor who was in the news this summer for his encounter with the Cambridge Police.) 

The New Orleans Literature Examiner contends that while the rest of America may call the notion of race mixing in the 1800s news, people in southern Louisiana, particularly the New Orleans metropolitan area, would not find such information newsworthy about one of its own. The old practice of plaçage down here gave southern Louisiana a larger than average group of "mixed raced people" and people who study Louisiana history are aware of that system's legacy.

Plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in which white French and Spanish and later Creole men entered into the equivalent of common-law marriages with women of African, Indian and white (European) Creole descent. The term comes from the French placer meaning "to place with." The women were not legally recognized as wives, but were known as placées; their relationships were recognized among the free people of color as mariages de la main gauche or left-handed marriages. Many were often quarteronnes or quadroons, the offspring of a European and a mulatto, but plaçage did occur between whites and mulattoes and blacks. The system flourished throughout the French and Spanish colonial periods, but apparently reached its zenith during the latter, between 1769 and 1803. It was not limited to Louisiana, but also flourished in the cities of Natchez and Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama; St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida;[1] as well as Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Plaçage, however, drew most of its fame—and notoriety—from its open application in New Orleans. Despite the prevalence of interracial encounters in the colony, not all Creole women of color were or became placées. (Wikipedia)

Plaçage is credited with creating a black middle class in Louisiana before the end of slavery. The white fathers of these children frequently sent their sons off to France to be educated, saw their daughters groomed to become future placées, and upon death left their black mistresses money and property in their wills. Some provided them with houses while still living.

The result of this systematic sexual intermingling was a group of people who run the gamut in skin color and hair texture from fair skin with straight hair and blue eyes to deeper brown skin tones with curly hair and eye color from green to hazel to brown. Some of these people who trace their lineage back to left-handed marriages consider themselves to be a separate race of people, black Creoles. Indeed, differentiations in skin color along with the obvious privilege afforded those who were lighter has often caused discomfort in Louisiana's black community.

Multiple books have been written on placées as well as the free people of color in Louisiana. Here is a passage from the book Louisiana Creoles: cultural recovery and mixed-race Native American identity (Lexington Books, 2007, 123 pgs) by Andrew Jolivétte:

Both nonfiction and fiction books have covered the topic of race mixing and the black Creole culture that resulted from placées bearing children. Here are four such books:

• Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color (Louisiana State University Press, 2000, paperback, 344 pgs, $25.95) by Sybil Kein, editor. A book of essays.

  Sybil Kein traces the genesis of this multidisciplinary collection of fifteen articles to a 1992 conference on "African-Americans and Europe" held in Paris. Three lively sessions on Creole Louisianians convinced Kein of the need to clarify the identity of the region's renowned gens de couleur. Building upon the spirit of the Parisian conference, Kein introduces the collection with a discussion of the noun "creole," a term generally applied to persons of African or European ancestry born in the Americas. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Stephan Thernstrom, ed.; Cambridge, Mass., 1980), she concludes, best conveyed its meaning. The encyclopedia explained that "in the [twentieth] century, Creole most often refers to the Louisiana Creoles of color," persons who "constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United States" (quoted on p. xiii) [FreeLibrary].

• Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country (University Press of Mississippi, 1996, 192 pgs.) by Carl A. Brasseaux, Claude F. Oubre, Keith P. Fontenot.

  Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention. ... This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials. ... During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state's three-tiered society--white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region's economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community. (Publisher's description)

• While fiction, Anne Rice's first novel, The Feast of All Saints (first published in 1979 by Ballantine Books), should be included.

  Before the Civil War, there lived in Louisiana, people unique in Southern history. For though they were descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. In this dazzling historical novel, Anne Rice chronicles four of these so-called Free People of Color--men and women caught periolously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain. ... "Anne Rice seems to be at home everywhere....She makes us believe everything she sees." wrote a New York Times reviewer.

• The novel Cane River (Warner Books, 2002, 529 pgs) by Lalita Tademy, an Oprah Book Club selection, also covers the history of an African-American family in Louisiana, including distinctions of skin color within the black community.

Michelle Obama's roots do not run through Louisiana with Spanish or French blood, and so she would not be considered to have black Creole heritage, but her family's history that seems to both fascinate and surprise some Americans is not as unusual as some believe. Nevertheless, having a family in the White House that can trace its roots backs to slavery in America offers tremendous opportunities to educate the nation about a part of its history it avoids. Indeed, the significance of the Obama Family visiting Africa in July and touring a slave port gave Americans another opportunity to visit its troubling past that still influences today's race relations.

Lagniappe:
Scenes from Anne Rice's Feast of All Saints, the movie.

Nordette Adams is also a BlogHer.com CE, and more of her work may be found through Her411.com. You may subscribe to New Orleans Literature Examiner articles at this link.