July 30, 2000
Anonymous Louisiana Slaves Regain Identity
By DAVID FIRESTONE
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New York Times Special
The identities of Louisiana slaves are emerging from centuries of anonymity
because of the work of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, 71, at her New Orleans home.
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NEW ORLEANS --From the darkness of history they emerge out of a silver
spinning disc: two black slaves sold by a sugar plantation owner named Levi
Foster on Feb.
11, 1818, to his in-laws. The first slave, named Kit, was 28 years old, and
sold for $975. The other, named Alick, was 9, and was possibly Kit's son. He
was sold for $400.
For nearly two centuries, the names of those two slaves were lost in time,
with tens of thousands of others who worked the sugar and cotton fields of
Louisiana and made fortunes for their owners. Their identities, scratched
with quill pens on transaction records of human property, have moldered in
the basements of parish courthouses for more than 150 years, virtually
untouched by researchers who were usually put off by the difficult French and
Spanish script.
Black families often lacked the resources for the extensive detective work
required to find their original African forebears, and many white families
simply did not want to know about slaveholding ancestors. Levi Foster, in
fact, is the great-great-grandfather of Gov. Mike Foster of Louisiana, who
said recently on a radio program that it would be "news to me" if anyone in
his family had owned slaves.
Now, however, the identities and backgrounds of Louisiana slaves are
beginning to emerge from centuries of anonymity, infusing property once sold
like livestock with names like Kit and Alick. Thanks to years of painstaking
work by a 71-year-old historian who lives in a small house here surrounded by
plantain trees, an enormous amount of information is coming to light about
the captives who were brought to Louisiana in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, a New Orleans native who has devoted much of her life
to the study of slavery, spent 15 years in the courthouses of Louisiana, as
well as in archives in Spain, France and Texas, seeking all records of slave
transactions and entering them into laptop computers. Aided by several
research assistants, she amassed computerized records on more than 100,000
slaves -- the largest collection of individual slave information ever
assembled -- and in March the Louisiana State University Press published the
documents as a searchable database on a CD-ROM.
The disc has amazed historians of slavery and genealogists with the breadth
of its information about the slaves. Because the French and Spanish
proprietors of Louisiana kept far more detailed records than their British
counterparts at slave ports on the Atlantic coast, the records show not only
the names of the slaves, but also their birthplaces in Africa, their skills,
their health, and in many cases a description of their personality and degree
of rebelliousness. For historians who thought such information was lost or
could never be collected and analyzed, the database is a once-unimaginable
prize.
"This is groundbreaking work," said Ibrahim K. Sundiata, chairman of the
history department at Howard University and a scholar of African history.
"Americans have tended to think of the slaves as simply being Africans, but
now we can begin to understand where these Africans came from and who they
were. For the first time, this takes us beyond the guestimates, and it's very
exciting."
It also has a great deal of unpublished information about who owned the
slaves, which many prominent white families have never been particularly
eager to research. Marsanne Golsby, a spokeswoman for Governor Foster, said
he learned about his family's ownership of slaves after The New York Times
looked up his ancestors on the disc and found transactions involving eight
slaves, three of them children. Unrelated documents on file in the Tulane
University library show that his great-grandfather, Thomas J. Foster, owned
50 slaves in 1860, three years before emancipation. (The governor was not
particularly happy about the disclosure; Ms. Golsby said the newspaper should
not have singled out his family from the many others that owned slaves.)
Dr. Hall's database is the latest example of a recent explosion of popular
and scholarly interest in the African diaspora, the scattering of African
people after they left or were removed from their home continent. The field
has grown in part because of the availability of computerized tools that make
research a less tedious task than tracking down crumbling documents, often in
foreign languages.
Another CD-ROM, compiled at Harvard University and published in December by
Cambridge University Press, documented more than 27,000 trans-Atlantic slave
ship voyages, describing their human cargo, their points of origin and
destination, and the outcome of the voyages. A popular Web site,
www.afrigeneas.com, has collected and published large amounts of slave data
and encourages those tracing their roots to share their information with
others on the Internet. Genetic researchers have been assembling a DNA
database that may someday allow African-Americans to trace their origins to
specific regions in Africa.
Tony Burroughs, an African-American genealogist who lectures widely on the
subject, said the Louisiana database is as significant as the publication of
Alex Haley's "Roots" in 1976, in part because the demand is even greater now
for accessible information. It also provides hope to those who believed they
could never trace their origins back more than a few generations.
"We've got all these baby boomers now who want to learn about their families'
past, and they want to use a computer," said Mr. Burroughs, who teaches
genealogy at Chicago State University and was a consultant on the PBS
"Ancestors" series. "They can't go around and find all the old
documents and
do the translations, but now we're starting to get these amazing databases
like Gwen Hall's, and people can use them. If you have ancestors from
Louisiana, it's like a treasure chest."
Dr. Hall's odyssey through the whispered history of her state shows how
daunting such research can be. She had taught Caribbean and African-Latin
history for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey when she began
researching a book in 1984on the development of Creole culture in Louisiana.
In the courthouse at New Roads, La., the seat of Pointe Coupee Parish, she
discovered a cache of documents set down by French-speaking notaries in the
1770's that showed the ethnicity of hundreds of slaves.
"I was astounded at how much information there was in the records," said Dr.
Hall, whose eventual book "Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of
Afro-Creole Culture in the 18th Century," on the Louisiana Africans won
several history prizes in 1992. "In the English colonies, there was almost no
information like this. The French just seemed more interested in the origins
of people, who they were and where they came from. Maybe it's because they
had a much longer history of slave trading posts in Africa."
After deciding to pursue the potential of such records around Louisiana, she
won a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and began
a lengthy trek through every courthouse and archives depot in the state,
where slave transactions were recorded as carefully as exchanges of real
estate.
Clerks would frequently tell her that the documents were unusable because
they were in French or Spanish, although she is fluent in both languages.
Often, she and her assistants would find old record books on a shelf next to
a heater, or in a damp basement. In one courthouse, she said, someone had
tried to burn the records, apparently afraid they would expose a black family
that had been passing for white for several generations.
The years of staring at documents and computer screens took a toll on Dr.
Hall's eyesight, which deteriorated to the point that she could barely make
out black ink on a white page. A pair of specially designed eyeglasses has
since improved her ability to see contrasting colors.
She also had to familiarize herself with the design of computer databases,
working to make the collection of information as flexible as possible to
answer any conceivable question a researcher might ask. Using the disc
requires a separate database program but with a little experience it is
possible to enter a first or last name and find out a great deal about a
matching slave or owner.
The disc is available from major Internet book sellers for $45.
An entry for a slave named Hector is typical: Born in the Congo, he was sold
by St. Pierre Etier on Jan. 1, 1797, for 400 piastre gourdes (about $700) to
Francois Prevost, in St. Martin Parish. But the bill of sale went on to note
that Hector was a chronic runaway who was at large at the time of sale. The
buyer "will be responsible for his care if he is found and is suffering from
any illnesses or wounds," the document says in French.
Many of the records were originally produced for trials or other legal
actions regarding slaves. One describes an accusation against two slaves,
Pierrot, of the Bamana ethnic group from Senegambia, and Nicolas, a Louisiana
Creole, for killing and eating their owner's cow in 1764 in the New Orleans
region. Both were publicly flogged.
"Finally we're going to be able to recover these workers as people with
pasts, with names and families," said Michael Gomez, a professor of history
at New York University and a leader of the growing movement to study the
African diaspora. "These records humanize people who were thought of as a
kind of undifferentiated mass."
Beyond the light that the collection has strewn on individuals, it has also
illuminated many larger cultural questions. Dr. Hall and other experts in the
field say the data have conclusively proved that two-thirds of African
captives brought to Louisiana in the early part of the slave trade, before
1730, were from the Senegambia area of West Africa, unlike other ethnic
groups that went to the East Coast. The culture they brought with them --
music, language, food, folklore -- became the foundation of Louisiana's
distinctive Creole culture, a way of life for both whites and blacks for
hundreds of years to this day.
"Even the Uncle Remus stories were originally Wolof folktales which were
first written down in Louisiana," Dr. Hall said, referring to one of the
Senegambian ethnic groups. "For so long there was this tendency, even in the
most prestigious academic circles, to see Africans as an abstraction, coming
from a simple single place. But now we're starting to see it as a place of
great complexity, and the different ethnicities greatly affected the
development of African-American culture."
Dr. Hall, who is white, has never hesitated to buck academic or social
conventions. The daughter of Herman Midlo, a labor and civil rights lawyer in
New Orleans who defended many black clients in the 1930's and 40's when other
white lawyers would not, she became radicalized as a young woman by the
segregation she had observed growing up. After a brief flirtation with the
Communist Party in the 1950's, she married Harry Haywood, an outspoken black
Communist, who died in 1985.
She championed the study of African ethnicities at a time when mainstream
scholarly opinion was not interested, and says she is delighted that the
field has finally caught up.
"I'm hoping this database will help smooth the path for others to make
Africans concrete as human beings," she said. "Some day, people will be
asking this database questions that I can't even imagine right now."