Plaçage

Plaçage was an recognized extralegal system by which predominantly wealthy and white Creole men in Louisiana entered into the equivalent of common-law marriages with women of both African and white Creole descent known as placées (from the French word placer which means to place with). The system flourished during the French and Spanish Colonial periods, but it apparently reached its zenith during the former. The practice was not limited to Louisiana, but also flourished in the cities of Natchez and Biloxi, Mississippi; Mobile, Alabama, and St. Augustine and Pensacola, Florida. 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.

The plaçage system grew out of a shortage of accessible white women. France even experimented with emptying the jails of female convicts and bringing them as well as willing farm- and city-dwelling women (called cassette girls) to the colony. Native women were either traded, or stolen or captured in raids or battles. The only constant was that there were African female slaves, who also lived longer than white or Indian women, who had been imported against their will to work in the fields. Marriage between the races was forbidden according to the Code Noir, but French and Spanish explorers had become habituated to choosing native women in Asia, Africa, Mexico and the Americas as their consorts. European men during this period were not expected to marry until their early thirties, and premarital sex with an intended white bride, especially if she was of high rank, was inconceivable.

African women then became the concubines of white male colonists, who were also the younger sons of noblemen, military men, plantation owners, merchants and administrators. It became acceptable behavior for a white man to take a slave as young as twelve or fifteen as a lover. And possession over time had a way of changing the original premise of a relationship. When the women produced children, they were emancipated along with their children, and were often allowed the surnames of their fathers and lovers. When Creole men reached an age when they were expected to marry, some were content to keep their relationships with their placées. Thus, a wealthy white Creole man could possess not just one, but two (or more) families. One with a white woman to whom he was legally married, and the other with a light-skinned Creole woman of color, a placée, who was expected to be faithful to him until death. Their mixed-race children became the nucleus of the class of free people of color or gens de couleur in Louisiana, to be replenished with waves of refugees and immigrants from Haiti and other Francophone colonies. The descendants of the gens de couleur also constituted a part of what later became known as the black middle class in the United States; however, most Creoles of color deem themselves as neither white nor black and constitute a nation within a nation.

It was not unusual for a wealthy, married Creole to live primarily outside New Orleans on a plantation with his white family, with a second address to use in the city for entertaining and socializing among the white elite, while the placée and their children would live primarily in New Orleans, and participate in the society of Creoles of color. The white world might not recognize the placée as a wife legally and socially, but she was recognized as such among the Creoles of color. They even held slaves, although some of them, particularly during the Spanish colonial era, were relatives that the placées wished to manumit at a later date.

While in New Orleans, the man would 'visit' or cohabit with the placée at the Creole cottage or house he had built or bought for her either in the Faubourg Marigny and the Tremé neighborhoods. If he was not married, he kept yet another, separate residence, preferably next door or in the same or next block, housing not being as stringently segregated in New Orleans as they were in other American cities. He also took part in and arranged for the upbringing and education of their children, which meant that both boys and girls were educated in France, as there were no schools available to educate mixed-race children, and it was illegal to teach blacks to read and write. Naturally, the ideal plaçage arrangement(s) ran into the hundreds and thousands of dollars per year.

Upon the death of her protector and lover, the placée and her family could, on legal challenge, expect up to a third of the man's property. Some white lovers attempted--and succeeded--in making their mixed-race children primary heirs over white descendants or relatives. But expectation and fulfillment are two different concepts. If a white lover abandoned her or died without provision, which usually did occur, the former placée found other ways to make money for herself against these possibilities. She took in boarders, acquired property, or tried her hand as a hairdresser, as a marchande (female street or country merchant/vendor usually selling Creole cheeses, pastries, condiments, or jams) or as a seamstress. Or she brought up her own daughters to become placées. It was also entirely possible for her to legally marry or to cohabit with a Creole man of color and produce more children.

Contrary to a popular misconception, placées were not and did not become prostitutes, although in the waning years of the 19th century, the New Orleans sex industry as well as opponents of plaçage (mostly embittered white wives, children, relatives; even former male participants and religious and social activists) attempted to capitalize on or to promote this view of the placées, including linking the fates of some unlucky women to that of the tragic mulatto. Placées have been viewed through a too idealized, stereotypical and romantic prism that presents little of the reality regarding mixed-race women and about New Orleans itself.

Famous placées

• Marie Tereze Coincoin or Marie Tereze Metoyer whose son, Nicolas Augustin Metoyer was the patriarch of the large Cane River community of Creoles of color located in Nachitoches, Louisiana. Born in 1742 as a slave in the household of Sieur Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the founder of Nachitoches, Coincoin was the placée of a French colonial administrator, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer for over 25 years; she already was the mother of four children and was two years older when she met Claude Metoyer, but she bore him ten more children. Metoyer freed Coincoin in 1778, but she continued to run his household until he decided to marry a Frenchwoman in 1788. Earlier, Metoyer had gifted Coincoin 68 acres on which she grew indigo and tobacco, a valuable commodity in the colony, and despite having lived most of her life as a house servant learned to trap bear and other animals. From this trade, she accumulated a small fortune and progressively bought her children's freedom and sixteen slaves to help her. Later, she petitioned and won a vast land grant from the Spanish crown on Metoyer's instigation, on which she created a prosperous dairy farm. Her large estates on the Cane and Red Rivers also included the properties Melrose Plantation, Yucca House, and African House, the only African dwelling extant in North America, built in 1796. She died around 1817.

• There were also examples of white Creole fathers who raised and then carefully and quietly placed their daughters of color with the sons of known friends or family members. This occurred with Eulalie Mandeville, the elder half-sister of color to the eccentric nobleman, gambler and land speculator Bernard Xavier de Marigny de Mandeville who introduced the game of craps to the United States (and some say, helped to invent the cocktail). Taken from her slave mother as a baby, and partly raised by a white grandmother, Eulalie was "placed" by her father, Count Pierre Enguerrand Philippe de Mandeville Ecuyer, Sieur de Marigny with Eugène Macarty, a member of the famous French-Irish clan in 1796, in an alliance that resulted in five children and lasted almost fifty years. Macarty, like some white Creoles who were already fulfilled in their relationships with their placées, did not care to legally marry a white woman and produce suitable heirs. On his deathbed, Eugène Macarty married Eulalie and then willed her all of his money and property worth $12,000; both actions were later contested by his white relatives, including the notorious Delphine Macarty LaLaurie, his niece. But the terms of the will favoring Eulalie was upheld by the courts, and after she died, their surviving children were able to beat back a second attempt to claim a fortune that had ballooned to over $150,000. Eulalie Mandeville Macarty was a successful and prosperous marchande, and she also ran a dairy. She died in 1848.

• Marie Laveau, who was known as the voodoo queen of New Orleans died in 1881, but she was born sometime between 1794-1801 as the daughter of a white Haitian plantation owner, Charles Leveaux and his mixed black and Indian placée Marguerite Darcantel (or D'Arcantel). (Because there were so many whites as well as free people of color in Haiti with the same names, Leveaux could have been a free man of color who owned slaves and property as well.) All three may have escaped Haiti along with thousands of other Creole whites and Creoles of color during the slave uprisings that culminated in the French colony's becoming the only independent black republic in the New World. At 17, Marie married a Creole man of color, Jacques Paris, but Paris either died, disappeared or deliberately abandoned her (some accounts say that he was a seaman or sailor). Laveau was styling herself the widow Paris and was a hairdresser for white matrons (she was also reckoned to be an herbalist and yellow fever nurse) when she met Louis Christophe Duminy de Glapion and sometime during the early 1820s, they became lovers. Marie was just beginning her spectacular career as a voodoo practitioner (she would not be declared a 'queen' until the 1830s), and Duminy de Glapion was a fiftyish white Creole veteran of the Battle of New Orleans with relatives on both sides of the color line. Recently, it was discovered that Duminy de Glapion was so in love with Marie, he refused to live separately from her according to racial custom. In an unusual decision, Duminy de Glapion passed as a man of color in order to live with her under respectable circumstances--thus explaining the confusion many historians have had whether he was truly white or black. Although it is popularly thought that Marie bore Duminy de Glapion fifteen children, only five are listed in vital statistics and of these, two daughters--one the famous Marie Eucharist or Marie Laveau II--lived to adulthood. Marie Eucharist closely resembled her mother and startled many who thought that Marie Laveau had been resurrected by the black arts, or could be at two places at once, beliefs that the daughter did little to correct.

The quadroon balls

Opportunities for engaging in interracial relationships seemed to accelerate when the Spanish held Louisiana between 1769-1803. There were taverns, opera houses, dance halls, theatres, and meeting places for socializing that accommodated and accepted all races and classes. The famous bals de cordon bleu or quadroon balls actually resembled debutante balls with one or two differences: attractive women of color, many groomed from girlhood for this event, were publicly presented only to white Creole men, and that they were masked balls. Men of color were only admitted to these events as waiters or musicians, who played minuets and waltzes. (Later, when the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, white, well-to-do, and wealthy American men also began attending the balls.) The bals were held in locations like the Théâtre St. Philippe and the Théâtre d'Orléans, once located between Royal and Bourbon Streets. Admission was high, sometimes fixed at two dollars, so that only certain men of means and manners could enter.

Many of the women and girls who participated in the quadroon balls were not all quadroons, or women with one-quarter black ancestry. There seems to have been some fascination with that amalgam of ancestry. Some participants were actually mulattoes; some had mixed Native American as well as African blood, and some were even octoroons. The assembled women were not all light-skinned; there was a variety of skin tones from dark to yellow and beige, and they were by no means all resembling white women or having Caucasian features, otherwise they could have easily passed into the white population. Gradations of ancestry did not always produce the expected gradation of skin color. These women were invariably described by contemporary travellers and tourists as diverse as Frederick Olmstead, C.C. Robin, and Bernhard, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar Eisenach as modest, feminine and soft-spoken and at times, extremely well-dressed and adorned. Yet not one observer could name a single woman who had participated at these balls, possibly because they were afraid of being exposed for taking an active part in these events.

During a ball, a prospective suitor would be allowed to dance with, pay court to and then express an interest in a particular woman to her chaperone, guardian or mother. The man would then be interrogated or investigated as to his fitness and financial stability. If the woman and her mother approved of the match, a formal, sometimes verbal contract would then be agreed upon, after which the woman, within days, would become the placée of the white Creole man. The placée could even experience a kind of bridal shower or reception before she left her mother's home.

The quadroon balls, however, did not become a common occurrence until after 1805, the date when the first handbills were printed and circulated for such an event. Moreover, despite their fame, a white man did not have to rely on the quadroon balls in order to select a placée and mate. There is no truth to local lore that the Orleans Ballroom, also the site of the former Convent of the Congregation of the Holy Family located in the French Quarter was a location for the quadroon balls. However, the founder of the Congregation, a Creole woman of color named Henriette DeLille was being prepared to enter the plaçage system like her grandmother and mother before her; DeLille resisted these plans, preferring to remain chaste and fulfill her vocation as a nun. (DeLille is now being considered for sainthood.)

The Civil War and Reconstruction, along with several crop failures on the big Louisiana plantations between the 1830s and 1850s, sounded the death knell of the plaçage system. After 1865, the system largely collapsed; and what remained passed into myth and memory. Unfortunately, few of the placées left first-hand experiences in diaries or letters.

External links

• [1] February 2006 Louisiana Weekly article about archivist and historian Greg Osborne's findings about the prevalence of interracial relationships in the colony that debunks the quadroon balls.
• [2] Review of history of Marie Laveau, including her relationship with Louis Christophe Duminy de Glapion.
• [3] Information about the life of Marie Tereze Coincoin Metoyer.
• [4] Thesis, "La Madame et la Mademoiselle: Creole Women in Louisiana, 1718-1865," by Katy Morlas, also describes the relationship between Eulalie Mandeville and Eugéne Macarty and the tension between white and black Creoles who were related yet lived in separate communities.
• [5] Website of Louisiana Creoles of color.
• [6] Short story, Sister Josepha by Alice Dunbar-Nelson that touches on a mixed-race girl tempted by plaçage.
• [7] Short story, Little Miss Sophie by Alice Dunbar-Nelson about a poor, former placée who seeks to restore the fortunes of now married white lover.

Books

• The Free People of Color of New Orleans, An Introduction, by Mary Gehman and Lloyd Dennis, Margaret Media, Inc., 1994.
• Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color, written and edited by Sybil Kein, Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
• Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Louisiana State University Press, 1995.
• (more)
• (more)
• Chained to the Rock of Adversity, To Be Free, Black & Female in the Old South, edited by Virginia Meacham Gould, The University of Georgia Press, 1998.

Fiction

• Property, by Valerie Martin, Nan Talese, 2003. Novel from the point-of-view of a white slaveowning widow who obsessively pursues the former slave lover/placée of the husband she loathed.
• Saratoga Trunk, by Edna Ferber. Ferber was hampered by stereotypes, by how much she really knew and what she could reveal about Creole women of color in this novel regarding a placée's daughter, a near-white Clio Dulaine, who returns from exile in France to wreck revenge on her father's white family and to marry a rich man in the 1880s (and thus, pass into whiteness). The book was later made into a film starring Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper. But it, like the film, falls apart after the action and the heroine move on to Saratoga Springs, New York.

gab 19:31, 17 March 2006 (UTC)