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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Creole Slave Owners

Creoles of color emerged in antebellum Louisiana as a distinct group of free people who enjoyed some of the same rights as whites, including the right to own slaves. For instance, thirteen members of the Metoyer family collectively owned 215 slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Augustine Metoyer issued this bill of sale, written in French, to M. In. Baptiste Florantin in 1818. The matriarch of the family was notable medic, planter, and business woman Marie Thérèse Metoyer.

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Contents of this tag:
1. Oprah Links Miss Jane and Obama
2. Emancipation Proclamation
3. Louisiana Code Noir of 1724
4. Second Wave Ku Klux Klan The parade pictured here contributed to the second, and largest, wave of Ku Klux Klan activity, which emerged in the 1920s. This event took place just outside of Washington D.C. The KKK elected hundreds of officials into every level of government in every region of the United States. They were known as the “Invisible Empire” during this time and worked to terrorize Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an organization founded by a small group of former Confederate soldiers in Pulanski, Tennessee in 1866. Originally the group was created to invoke fear into freed slaves and the white people that helped them, but it expanded into much more. They are known for horrendous acts like the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls. They are also known for their symbols and strange titles (Grand Duke, Imperial Wizard, Grand Cyclops, etc). The use of these symbols was “to pose as ghosts or ‘spectral’ figures, drawing on then-resonant symbols in folklore to play ‘pranks’ against African Americans and others” (David Cunningham). They used hoods, masks, and burned crosses. The symbol of the burning cross was only added in to their symbols after The Birth of A Nation depicted a cross burning scene and the KKK adopted it to spur membership. Scandals and the rigidity of the KKK caused for membership to have difficulty increasing. However, they remain affiliated with other, similar groups (Neo-Nazis, and other organizations that use the Klan name). Today, though some continue to be blatant in their approach, others try to disguise their racist tactics through rhetoric (“rights for whites”). The KKK continues to be relevant today in many ways including through support of the current president.
5. Loving v. Virginia
6. Creole Slave Owners Creoles of color emerged in antebellum Louisiana as a distinct group of free people who enjoyed some of the same rights as whites, including the right to own slaves. For instance, thirteen members of the Metoyer family collectively owned 215 slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Augustine Metoyer issued this bill of sale, written in French, to M. In. Baptiste Florantin in 1818. The matriarch of the family was notable medic, planter, and business woman Marie Thérèse Metoyer.
7. Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
8. Jackie Robinson Breaks the Color Line
9. Slave Auction
10. Segregated South
11. Beginnings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
12. Miss Jane Pittman Adaptation Airs
13. Huey P. Long Assassinated
14. Ernest Gaines Born Gaines was born in Oscar, LA on January 15, 1933. He wrote about sitting on the porches of Cherie Quarters as a child, drafting letters for his elders. His exposure to their stories informed much of his writing and provided a link to slavery in the United States. Although his family moved to California when he was a teen, he visited in the 1960s to see his people and take pictures of the area, such as this image of “The Quarters” of Riverlake Plantation. He later described it as “where we lived for five generations.”
15. The Spanish-American War
16. Frederick Douglass's First Speech
17. Marie Laveau Baptismal Certificate Marie Laveau was baptized on September 16, 1801 (no birth certificate exists). Known popularly as “the Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, she is, arguably, the most famous practitioner of folk magic in American history. She was born at the end of Spanish control of Louisiana, shortly before the Louisiana Purchase, which explains why her baptismal certificate appears in Spanish. Her entry appears at the top of the page, under entry 320.
18. Student Protests at Southern University
19. Plessy v. Ferguson
20. Booker T. Washington
21. The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner initiated the genre of neo-slave narrative. Styron, a white author, came in for criticism because the novel perpetuated racial stereotypes, sparking controversy about how to represent slavery in literature. Some scholars read Miss Jane Pittman, along with contemporaries such as Roots, as a response to Styron’s vision of kindly slaveowners and a blundering revolutionary.
22. Reconstruction Ends
23. Brown v. Board of Education
Contents of this tag:
2. Creole Slave Owners Creoles of color emerged in antebellum Louisiana as a distinct group of free people who enjoyed some of the same rights as whites, including the right to own slaves. For instance, thirteen members of the Metoyer family collectively owned 215 slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Augustine Metoyer issued this bill of sale, written in French, to M. In. Baptiste Florantin in 1818. The matriarch of the family was notable medic, planter, and business woman Marie Thérèse Metoyer.

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Novel Connections In the novel, Creoles of color isolate themselves from both white and black communities. This isolation appoints privilege and superiority over the African Americans outside of the Creole community and autonomy from the white community. For example, the chapter introducing Creoles into the story, “The LeFabre Family,” highlights instances where the group exerts superiority over other black, non-Creole people. Readers gain insight into the history of one former, Creole Place resident and the new Samson Plantation teacher, Mary Agnes. Historically, New Orleans was home to much of the Creole population, before the Civil War. However, Gaines’s Creoles have chosen to relocate from New Orleans. Pittman is unsure what causes the dispersion of Agnes’s family from their home but considers Creole Place as a type of “settlement for them” because other Creoles live there as well (167). Through dispersion, a new community forms, a community Pittman explains as for them only: “Creole Place was for the mulattoes there; everybody else keep out” (107). The postbellum introduction does not provide much insight into why the Creole community is isolated or mostly autonomous.

Additionally, the small window into antebellum Creole life explained through the grandmother of Mary Agnes reveals a concession placed on lighter Creole women. Pittman explains the type of events the grandmother would have had to attend before the Civil War: "a ball where “white men used to go to choose their colored women.” After the selection, “sometimes they kept them the rest of their life,” and in doing so, she would inherit, “money and property—even slaves” (166). Historically, this is also true of Creole or free people of color in the southern parts of Louisiana.

Later in the novel, dialect is used to distinguish the two groups. The Creole dialect is a blending of languages, chiefly French, which appears in the concluding chapter of the novel. After hearing "takalapala," Jimmy, who does not speak Creole, “was interested in the way the words sounded” (286). Other Creole characters speak the language as readers discover through Pittman. However, this is the only instance the languages is directly included in the novel.

Physical, economic, and linguistically separations are clear marks of distinction between the two groups, while colonial beauty standards are subtle marks of distinction. Pittman identifies black women by their physical stature, size, or skin color. For example, “Big Laura,” is “big just like her name say, and she was tough as any man I ever seen” (17). “Black Harriet” is “tall, straight, tough, and blue-black” (137). When Pittman introduces Creoles or Cajuns, their beauty or attractiveness is among the first descriptors given. Pittman considers “someone pretty like [Mary Agnes]” too attractive to concern herself with fixing her ancestor’s mistakes (166). Adeline Cluveau, who is a Cajun woman of color, is described as a “big fine gal, big pretty legs” (129). Those examples are all subtle but concrete references to the physical appearance of women of color in the novel.

The inclusion of Creoles in the novel acts as another patch weaved into Pittman’s historical tapestries, and by proxy Louisiana’s as well.