Kinship & Longing

Edition Contents

• Stories
• Keywords
• People

§Introduction: Black Louisiana as a Template for Resistance

In 1773, when Catharina, an enslaved mulâtresse on the Destrehan plantation, appeared before colonial Louisiana officials, she could not have known that her existence would reverberate across time and space into the twenty-first century. Enslaved in 1770s Louisiana, Catharina demanded her freedom and the freedom of her five-year-old daughter, Felicité. When she confronted their enslavers, represented by future sugar master Sieur Étienne de Boré, she stood ready to use every legal tool available to her. Determined to bring her child with her into freedom, Catharina joined, together with Felicité, millions of enslaved women, children, and men whose kinship ties powered their fight for liberation in the slaveholding societies of the Atlantic African Diaspora.¹ Being enslaved did not prevent or deter her from claiming what she thought was hers and fighting for those in her charge. Catharina’s actions forced her owners to contend with her existence as a self-conscious, defiant, resourceful, and strategic actor in the ever-evolving milieu of African, Indigenous, and European society emerging on the Gulf Coast in the eighteenth-century. Her actions also forced her into the historical record. On centuries-old manuscript pages, in scrawling browning script, Catharina’s name appears over and over. Her story unfolds over several pages, leaving the mark of her humanity and imagination in an archive steeped in violence, familial rupture, and racial terror. Catharina lived and left evidence of her life that future scholars, historians, and descendants can use to understand the complicated, rich, and audacious lives of Africans in the Americas. Enslaved or free, Africans and people of African descent refused to be cowed by slavery’s violence or by colonial power.²

Catharina’s story is one of many that can be found in slavery’s archive in colonial Louisiana. Slavery’s archive is both the physical brick and mortar building that contains state-sponsored and private repositories of documentary material (text, nontext, and machine-readable, i.e., “data”) generated during the time of slavery and emancipation.³ This definition differs from, as Dorothy Berry explains and challenges, the metaphorical archive which has come to mean “broadly anything that collects/holds references to the past.”⁴ For those invested in the stories of Africans and people of African descent, understanding the archive as a physical space with documents waiting to be investigated and stories of enslaved kinship and resistance waiting to be uncovered is as important as understanding the limits, problems, and biases of the physical archive. In other words, the physical archive of manuscript documents about slavery also created a metaphorical archive, a bastion of slaveowner power, that became seen as the unbiased and true story of the Black experience of slavery. As Marisa Fuentes notes in her study of enslaved women in the Caribbean, “To trace the distortions of enslaved women’s lives inherent in the archive” inevitably “raises questions about the nature of history and the difficulties in narrating ephemeral archival presences by dwelling on the fragmentary, disfigured bodies of enslaved women.” ⁵ To turn to Black life in any archive of documents written by slaveowners and their imperial allies means challenging the precepts of the archive, archiving, documenting, and history from the bottom up.

Black Louisiana is a rich space for this kind of investigation. Throughout the colonial era (which formally stretched from LaSalle’s landing at the mouth of the Mississippi River in 1682, through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, followed by the emergence of Louisiana as a slave state in the nineteenth century), Gulf Coast enslavers used coercion, trade, and force to control enslaved, free, and freed populations of African descent.⁶ As they did, they generated reams of documentation that described Africans as property, but also, perhaps inadvertently, they captured an array of kinship and resistance practices Africans and people of African descent engaged in against them. In the French- and Spanish-language documents that comprise this archive, enslaved and free people of African descent become more than the sum of their labor or bodies. Rather than property or recorded data, they are instead mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, women and children, from Senegambia, Benin, Congo, Cuba, Martinique, Saint-Domingue, France, Spain, and beyond. They stole, ran away, hosted secret gatherings, and engaged in armed resistance. They submitted petitions, secured their freedom, built families, and acquired property of their own. Bills of sale, testaments, contracts, disputes, court cases, and criminal investigations detail a complex and human history of African diasporic life in the region.

Finding stories of Black life in slavery’s archive is not easy. Enslavers wrote documents from their own perspective, often silencing, ignoring, and purposely erasing Black humanity. Slaveowners, colonial officials, and imperial administrators relied on obfuscation, misreadings of African culture, and willful misrepresentations of African politics, culture, and ideas to secure their control of and the commodification of African people as enslaved labor. At times, the only mention of Africans or people of African descent in a document is tally marks on the page as slave traders inventoried enslaved property alongside indigo, rice, and sugar. Other times, however, the documents include testimony or first-person narratives of love, defiance, or creativity expressed by Africans and people of African descent in their own words, as Sophie White has shown in her study of French Superior Council trials involving enslaved and free people of African and Indigenous descent.⁷ When read closely, with an attention to Black life, Africans and people of African descent can be found taking advantage of the colonial apparatus, using legal, political, and economic tools on their behalf to make new worlds. Enslavers comment on Africans and people of African descent who took up space in the streets of New Orleans, Mobile, and other outposts, who navigated along rivers and bayous, who defied them in their homes and workshops, who absconded and allied with Gulf South Native nations, and who demonstrated a learned and indigenous knowledge of plant life, terrain, and colonial political structures. Perhaps unintentionally, slaveowners’ own descriptions of Black peoples’ creativity refuted characterizations of African intellect, intelligence, or charisma as bestial, monstrous, or unfeeling property.

Documents from eighteenth century Louisiana’s archive also reveal Gulf Coast Louisiana to be an important node in a broader Atlantic African Diaspora. Colonial Louisiana’s archive is rich with descriptions of African cosmologies, Black and Black/Indigenous family structures, and diasporic and archipelagic connections to the African continent and the Caribbean. Gulf Coast Louisiana was Native ground, populated by Petite Nations ranging from a few hundred to several thousand in size, when Africans began to arrive en masse in 1719.⁸ From that moment on, Africans and people of African descent would play a critical role in shaping Gulf Coast society. From the heavily Senegambian French slave trade in the 1720s and 1730s, to the emergence of Gulf Coast-born people of African descent (Black, Black-Indigenous), to the arrival of Congo-Angolan Africans with the reopening of the slave trade during the Spanish period, to the Haitian Revolution and the migration of refugees of color to Louisiana’s shores, the kinship ties between Black society in Gulf Coast Louisiana and a broader Atlantic African diasporic world would remain strong deep into the nineteenth-century.⁹ While it might be tempting to view this archive, location, or time period as unique among archives of slavery in the New World, we argue the opposite. Gulf Coast Louisiana offers historians, scholars, teachers, artists, community organizers, genealogists, and anyone interested in the history of Africans in the Americas broadly a window into how to hold your culture close, how to find your people, and how to plot resistance even in the most constrained, dire, and surveilled circumstances. Gulf Coast Louisiana is, in the words of Kristina Kay Robinson, “a template for the bottom falling out,” a manual for how to survive and imagine something otherwise when you stand in the eye of the storm.¹⁰

Black Louisiana has shaped the story of the United States. From wars between European empires, the entanglement of African slavery and Indigenous dispossession, to the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and rise of the domestic slave trade, the dynamism of Black culture, continental expansion and connections to the Caribbean, massive historical events and historiographic questions turn on people and places shaped by slavery and colonialism in Louisiana. And yet, so little is known about how Black people in Louisiana lived, loved, resisted bondage, used the law, organized institutions, and created cultural traditions. What is known is considered niche or specific to the Gulf Coast’s context or exceptional to the history of the rest of the country, when in fact it is foundational to how the US South took shape and therefore how the United States came into being. More than that, the history of Africans and people of African descent in Louisiana connects to colonial Cuba, Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Senegambia, Benin, Congo-Angola, old Regime France, and Gulf South Indigenous histories. The list of major historical events these documents impact is seemingly endless–the Seven Years’ War, the Haitian Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase. The material documenting the everyday lives of Africans in the Americas and the evolution of Black society is immense.

The stories we highlight in this micro-edition, from Catharina and her daughter Felicité, to the saga of María Juana and her battle against her owner, to the gatherings hosted by women like Mama Comba, to the resistance of men like Antoine, and more, are only a few of the stories that can be recovered from the tens of thousands of manuscript documents in archives across Louisiana’s archival institutions. This micro-edition barely scratches the surface of that deep and broad trove of documentation, just as we have barely scratched the surface of transcribing and translating Black life where we encounter it in this archive. We hope that the translations and transcriptions here encourage further interest in the history of Black life in the region, and spur language and paleographic study that will allow young scholars to engage these documents. We also hope that, whatever may have brought you to this micro-edition, you get what you need in order to continue to work on behalf of Black life, Black history, and Black study in these dire times when these histories are under attack. And we hope that, if your study of this topic goes no further than these internet pages, these documents can be useful to you; that you share the stories here in conversation, in workshops, in classrooms, with your organization, and join us in the broader study of histories of slavery and resistance in the African diaspora.

There is more work to be done. We work in the tradition of scholars like Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Kimberley Hanger, Jennifer Spear, Sophie White, Ibrahima Seck, Leon Waters, Kathe Hambrick, Mona Lisa Saloy, Malik Bartholomew, and more, who have committed to deep study of documents, archives, and the stories of Black life therein. We work in solidarity with community members and with descendants of enslaved and free people of African descent whose lives appear in these archives, with culture bearers across Louisiana’s sixty-four parishes who keep the flame of history and memory of Black resistance alive. Our work is deeply informed by the tenets of Black digital humanities and Black digital studies, and those practices have informed our construction of this micro-edition, from the metadata descriptions to the TEI annotation.¹¹ We hope that this micro-edition, like all our work, will be accessible, useful, and used by the community we are most accountable to: Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous women, children, and men of the Gulf Coast. This is their history.

§About Keywords for Black Louisiana

This micro-edition offers a glimpse into some of the stories and Black lives we have encountered as members of a collective of researchers called Keywords for Black Louisiana (K4BL). Beginning in 2020 as part of LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure (lifexcode.org), and most recently through funding from a National Historic Publications and Records Commission grant, we have embarked on research in Gulf Coast Louisiana’s archive, seeking to expand our historical practice and learn from what eighteenth-century Gulf Coast Louisiana has to teach us. This micro-edition is a short excerpt of work that has been ongoing toward building a community-engaged digital edition of annotated, transcribed, and translated manuscript documents from eighteenth-century French and Spanish Louisiana. The stories in these documents describe the lives and resistance of enslaved and free people of African descent against bondage, colonialism, and the everyday terror of slavery. Access to the stories of Black life in these documents has been limited to those trained in paleography with French and/or Spanish translation skills. Our hope is that by providing access to the stories in these documents through English-language translations, we can offer researchers, teachers, public historians, and artists access to the centuries-long freedom struggle Black communities have been engaged in.

With support from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, K4BL is honored to be building, with our partners on the ground, a digital home for more transcribed and translated stories of Black Louisiana life in slavery’s archive. The digital edition will be a tremendous resource for descended communities in Louisiana whose ancestors fueled some of the most important moments in American history.

K4BL centers descended communities and accountability to Black humanity at every level of the project, from the annual Black History Summer Workshop for Black public historians in Louisiana, to our collaborations with team members at Louisiana’s historically black colleges and universities, to our intergenerational and decentralized leadership structure. Guided by Black digital humanities principles, K4BL provides a model for community-engaged digital recovery and preservation that can be remixed and reused by digital historians, computational humanists, data scientists, and digital humanities practitioners broadly who are looking for ethical and humane ways to center the needs of Black communities and institutions on the ground in the work of creation and curation.¹²

The members of K4BL involved in this micro-edition include Founding Director/Editor Jessica Marie Johnson (Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University), Co-Project Manager and Digital Curation Fellow E.G. Palazzolo (doctoral candidate, Johns Hopkins University), Senior Research Editor Leila K. Blackbird (doctoral candidate, University of Chicago), Associate Editor Olivia Barnard (doctoral candidate, Johns Hopkins University), and Keywords alumnus Emma Katherine Bilski (doctoral candidate, Johns Hopkins University). Members of the research team and transcription/translation teams were also involved in transcribing, translating, and annotating selected documents. We are grateful to the New Orleans Jazz Museum which has partnered with us on this project and is the source for the digitized images we use for transcription and translation, and which appear here in this micro-edition with their permission.¹³ For more on the work, see keywordsforblacklouisiana.org.

§What Are Keywords? Why Do We Use Them?

Keywords are the boats we use to navigate the ocean that is slavery’s archive. We define keywords as the simplest encapsulation of a topic that we have identified as salient to Black life and resistance to slavery. We use keywords to teach, draw attention to, and challenge the documented narrative about Black people. While only four keywords appear in this edition—kinship, manumission, fugitivity, and wellness—our broader, ever-growing corpus of keywords currently contains over one hundred terms.¹⁴ Keywords operate as metadata that allow us to categorize stories in the documents using methodologies and theoretical concepts drawn from histories of slavery, as well as Black studies, ethnic studies, and feminist and queer scholarship. For example, the keywords we have chosen here are key theoretical concepts and categories of analysis in histories of slavery that have challenged ideas of the Black family as pathology and the Black community as nonexistent (kinship), that foreground the unique legacy of legal resistance along the Gulf Coast (manumission), that draw from slavery scholars’ impressive scholarship around extralegal strategies of resistance (fugitivity), and that explore a wide array of practices of care that enslaved and free used to survive their enslavement, whether they ran away or did not (wellness). Like controlled vocabularies in data and digital humanities (DH), keywords do organize the data of the stories of Black life. However, they very much differ from controlled vocabularies in that keywords in our work are iterative and citational. They do and continue to expand as the stories in the archive reveal themselves. They emerge from scholarship on Black life that continues to deepen and challenge our assumptions about the experience of bondage and Black resistance to it. And they are a corpus we are constantly adding to as we continue to create metadata that centers Black life.

Keywords also allow us to organize transcribed and translated documents into stories of Black life experiences for readers. The colonial Louisiana archive is massive. References to individuals of African and African descent often stretch across multiple documents, sometimes multiple languages. The records transcribed and translated for this micro-edition are housed at the Louisiana Historical Center (LHC). The LHC, part of the Louisiana State Museum and housed in the New Orleans Jazz Museum (all institutional partners), is home to two-thirds of the colonial documents relating to the French Superior Council and Spanish Cabildo. Approximately another three-fifths of Louisiana’s colonial records are housed at the New Orleans Notarial Archives, and a smaller subset is preserved by the City Archives at the New Orleans Public Library.¹⁵ Although the full number of colonial documents remains unclear, the Louisiana Colonial Digitization Project, which claims to have digitized all the extant documents held by the Louisiana Historical Center, holds approximately 200,000 manuscript pages related to colonial Louisiana. If this is two-thirds of the documentation on colonial Louisiana, there are over 500,000 manuscript pages with material related to the eighteenth-century Gulf Coast held in archives across New Orleans. Additional material is available in the parish and county archives across the state, in France, Senegal, Florida, Washington, DC, and across the Caribbean. Keywords help the reader navigate this massive set of documents. Keywords assist in knitting documents, and even references within documents, as we, the researchers, knit the documents together into stories, revealing the many layers of meaning and relevance that can be found about Black life even in slavery’s archive.

Much of the information in the colonial documents is not specific to Africans and people of African descent. Even where enslaved and free people of color are mentioned, their complicated humanities are not always legible in the narratives told about them by enslavers. Keywords allow us to “designate collective thoughts, ideas, arguments, and experiences that might otherwise stand alone or be quickly subsumed.” In the digital form of this micro-edition, keywords, like hashtags, become data about Black life in Gulf Coast Louisiana and the African diaspora broadly. They offer a machine-readable node of information that provides “a searchable shortcut that can link people and ideas together.”¹⁶ Employing keywords as an alternative form of structuring the massive textual and nontextual information found in the colonial archive draws readers’ attention to the parts of documents that feature individuals and communities of African descent. Keywords reorient readers’ engagement with the document to the complicated and intricate lived experiences of enslaved and free Africans and people of African descent otherwise obscured by colonial archives.

§The Technology Behind the Edition

§Solidarity with Black DH TEI Approaches

The most important tags used in this edition are for keywords and people. For keywords, we use the tag <seg ana="#keyword">. The TEI documentation describes <seg> as “(arbitrary segment) represents any segmentation of text below the ‘chunk’ level.”¹⁷ The specific designation through the attribute @ana (analysis) allows for the specification at the keyword level. For the sake of readability and commitment to a minimal edition, we have chosen short tags and four keywords, a small selection of the corpus. On the menu of the micro-edition, you will find a link to the keywords and their definitions, along with links to the documents where each keyword can be found. We also chose to annotate the sentences in the documents that relate to different keywords, so readers can see how keywords appear in and across different stories of individuals and in different kinds of documents.

Another key intervention made by our micro-edition (and forthcoming digital edition) is creating metadata for named and unnamed Africans and people of African descent in the documents. We use <persName ref="#kl001"> with a corresponding set of Reference IDs to mark up individuals in the documents. Numbering, even beyond counting or quantifying Black data and slavery’s archives, raises a series of critical questions around the reiteration of archival violence, datafication, and surveillance of Black life.¹⁸ On the one hand, the addition of the acronym “kl” for the project name “kinship and longing” mitigates the aesthetic of a fully numerical logic. More significantly, the Reference IDs also offer a new tool to attempt to name previously unnamed individuals.

There are four unnamed individuals in this micro-edition. In the story “The Two-Year-Old Son of Marianne Dies from Worm Disease,” the two-year-old is designated only by his age and relationship to Marianne. Looking at the document itself, this is a distinct difference from the naming of Marianne, not to mention the enslavers who are also in the document. The story “Mama Comba’s Gombeau” identifies numerous enslaved people by name, as well as two unnamed women. One woman is described as “another nègresse,” and the other in relation to her enslaver. This was also the case for the fourth unnamed person, a fugitive about whom the Superior Council asked Jeannot in “Jeannot’s Freedom Song.” All five people in the document have a comparable identifier, share the documents in which they appear, and have descriptions that include kinship relationship and other historical information. In other words, despite remaining unnamed, we make an effort not to ignore the role these individuals played in the events described in the documents, and therefore in the story that unfolds. They lived, they are part of the story, and our goal is to find ways to make the data and edition reflect those lives.

While it is clear that none of these unnamed individuals might be the same person, their designation in our Reference ID list, which we will also assemble for the more extensive forthcoming edition, opens possibilities for new connections. As we gather more information about ages, dates of major life events (birth and death), enslavers they worked for, and type of labor they engaged in on a daily basis, at least two possibilities emerge. We could trace the threads of an unnamed person through the archive, and/or correspond a reference to an unnamed person in one place with a name that might appear in relation to a person who fits similar circumstances or descriptions elsewhere. We have found that making these kinds of connections has required deep analysis and understanding of the history beyond the document, including the linguistic and cultural conventions of the time and place, archival conventions, and historical context grounded in African, Indigenous, and diaspora histories. In this endeavor, we align ourselves with work happening in Black data, Black digital humanities, and computational humanities that demands that slavery and data projects be rooted in the research on, and in conversation with, the communities most impacted by the archive under study.

In a more conventional editorial sense, we have used TEI in three ways. First, the abbreviation (<abbr>) and expansion (<ex> and <expan>) tags make possible a full rendering of shorthand terms in the original transcriptions, which can often be hard to read or understand without experience with the script of the notaries who penned the document. Second, we used the <supplied> tag to insert clarifying context, most often proper nouns or duplicates of earlier text, to clarify vague or uncertain references in the original documents. Third, we used the <gap> tag to indicate when the text was impossible to replicate due to damage to the original manuscript or illegibility of the script.

The encoding of this edition accords with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) P5 Guidelines. The documentation, XML schema, and TEI files can be downloaded by clicking on the TEI button in the lower right corner on the edition’s pages.

§Black Data and Slavery

In the field-defining 2016 article “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” literary scholar and digital humanist Kim Gallon contends that foundational to Black digital scholarship is the same “technology of recovery” that undergirds Black studies. The politics of recovery, which have operated to reclaim Black literary heritage and humanity, nonetheless remain in tension with the racializing possibilities of digital tools. “The black digital humanities,” writes Gallon, “therefore foregrounds the digital as a mutual host for racism and resistance and brings to light the ‘role of race as a metalanguage’ that shapes the digital terrain, fostering hegemonic structures that are both new and old and replicate and transcend analog ones.”¹⁹ As we have learned and adapted to the tools that made this edition possible—TEI, VSCode, and GitLab—we have had a chance to reflect on how we are able to use these tools to tell the stories that the documents otherwise conceal. We have also had a chance to reflect on where further interventions could occur.

Creating strategies for identifying named and unnamed Africans and women, children, and men of African descent in the documents is an important intervention we seek to make through the publication of this micro-edition. The use of Reference IDs has acted as an important way to create a sense of digital parity across actors in the documents, taking the same form for each person regardless of race or the presence of a name in the document. But the Reference IDs are far from perfect. There are many names, first names only, that appear across the archive and even the micro-edition. It can be a distinct challenge to determine how many Reference IDs to create for a name. Take for example the name Marie, an iconic Louisiana name for female/femme-identified persons. There are four women named Marie in the micro-edition documents alone. Marie Aram appears with her husband, François Tiocou; Marie Paget seeks her freedom with her family members in 1790; and there is a Marie without a last name, the sister of Antoine Sarrazin, also in the 1790s. In this particular instance, these are known to be different women because of their last names and some chronological information. But in the corpus overall there are more individuals and more references to some of the same, or different, individuals. This question is compounded by the multiplicity of spellings and orthography that might be used for a single name across periods and notaries (i.e., Maria under Spanish governance and Marie under French governance). For consistency in this micro-edition, we use a modernized version of these names when referring to them in story titles, abstracts, and notes.

The question of the Reference IDs surfaced a second concern as well. We have struggled to come up with tagging for groups or collectives of unnamed Black and Black-Native peoples that does the same work of designating each member as an individual. We have instead designated each group with a Reference ID, and the tag <rs>. Using the tag <personGrp>, the conventional TEI designation for “a group of individuals treated as a single person for analytic purposes” does not work for the complexity of named and unnamed individuals in slavery’s archive.²⁰ For example, one collective noun that appears in “François Became More Ill Along the Way” is “quatro negros” or “four negros”; this reference to four unnamed individuals, in a project dedicated to identifying unnamed Black actors, might more aptly include four individual IDs or <persName> tags. At the same time, while <persName> might seem to be appropriate to tag racialized groups as “collectives,” we found that doing so failed to capture the constructed and contingent nature of racial designations, contingencies that multiplied exponentially when we worked across multilingual translations of racial terms. As a result, we chose not to use <personGrp> to tag abstract references to demographic groups (i.e., les blancs, les nègres, les gens de couleur libres) and determined to keep racial designations in their original language even in translation.

Foreshadowing the final section on transcription and translation, we use the tag <emph xml:lang="fr"> or <emph xml:lang="es"> to designate when we carried over into the translation a term in the original language for race. The TEI guidelines suggest “foreign” rather than “emph.” However, “foreign” as a linguistic designation is awkward here because we are working in a multilingual edition, and none of the three languages across which we work merits the connotation of othering that the term “foreign” supplies. This tag is mostly used for italics in formatting, something that may be better designating by simply using <emph> as a more precise indicator of a carried translation rather than a linguistic incorporation connoted as far afield from the language of the document. As such, we have made the editorial choice to use the <emph> tag, rather than the <foreign> tag, as an intervention on the prescriptiveness of TEI and the limitations it may present when coding culturally sensitive materials.

§How We Transcribe and Translate

All transcriptions in this edition are strictly diplomatic, retaining fidelity to the original notations in the documents.²¹ The line breaks, spellings, capitalizations, punctuation, accent marks, superscripts, insertions outside the main line of the text, and abbreviations align with how the notaries wrote the original documents.

We have taken a different approach with translations, rendering them in their modernized forms with accessibility and digital searchability in mind. The line breaks have been aligned as effectively as possible for the sake of synoptic view. Grammar, punctuation, and capitalization have been revised to align with modern (American) English.

As mentioned, we have decided not to translate racial designations from Spanish or French into English (i.e., “nègre” or “negro” into “Black,” or “mulato” or “mulata” into “mixed race”); the malleability of racial categories in eighteenth-century Louisiana and the position of such designations as ontological terms which objectify people and efface how racialization has changed over time requires that these subjective translations are avoided.²² In other words, there is no way to meaningfully translate eighteenth-century racial designations into modern racial designations and retain the integrity of their historical context (and everything we learn from that historical context). We see these as important terms for critique, for teaching, and for learning about how Blackness is constructed, how that has changed over time, and how we know what we know about race in the present based on the experiences of the past.

Digitized images of the original documents are incorporated in the edition page by page above the transcriptions and translations in order to facilitate comparison and to provide the micro-edition with the potential to be used as a pedagogical tool for eighteenth-century paleography. We included a synoptic view to better allow our readers to compare the original texts to our translations.

§To Black Louisiana, With Thanks

Everywhere there was slavery, Black people resisted. The stories in these documents describe the lives and resistance of enslaved and free people of African descent against bondage, colonialism, and the everyday terror of slavery. Access to the stories of Black life in these documents has been limited to those trained in paleography as well as those with French and/or Spanish translation skills. Providing access to the stories in these documents through English-language translations does more than offer researchers, teachers, public historians, and artists access to the centuries-long freedom struggle Black communities have been engaged in. It offers a tool for repair, for memorialization, for teaching future generations about how to fight for your kin and your community in the face of overwhelming odds. We hope this micro-edition can be a resource for all, but especially for descended communities in Louisiana whose ancestors fueled some of the most important moments in American history and whose Black lives continue to matter today.

We are grateful to the editors of Scholarly Editing and technical editor Raff Viglianti, who have helped us make these transcriptions and translations accessible and discoverable through venues like the journal Scholarly Editing. Thank you also to Alex Gil, digital coach at Keywords for Black Louisiana, and to the Keywords for Black Louisiana core team members (Eola Dance, Maya Hogarth, Chenise Calhoun, Christina Marie Villarreal, Kaillee Coleman, Guadalupe García, Laura Rosanne Adderely, Eva Baham, Wendy Gaudin, and Margaret Burri), who offered insight, assistance, and feedback as the edition came together. Thank you to the Keywords Community Circle and Advisory Board, our community partners who offered insights on how to read the stories of Black kinship and liberation in the archive in a way that would be authentic to the unique and complex legacy of resistance in Louisiana. This micro-edition received financial support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Mellon Foundation, Diaspora Solidarities Lab (DSL), Johns Hopkins University Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, and Tulane University. Thank you to our institutional partners, the New Orleans Jazz Museum and the Louisiana Historical Center, home of the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project (lacolonialdocs.org), which gave us permission to use the digitized images of the documents for our work. Keywords for Black Louisiana is part of the LifexCode: Digital Humanities Against Enclosure collective of labs and projects (lifexcode.org).

§Footnotes

1. The Atlantic African diaspora describes the communities of Africans and people of African descent of the Americas, Europe, and the Atlantic African littoral who shaped and were shaped by the events of the slave trade, forced migration, colonization, and emancipation struggles, from the fifteenth century into the nineteenth century. On the African diaspora as a concept, see Colin Palmer, “The African Diaspora,” Black Scholar 30, no. 3/4 (2000): 56–59; Kim D. Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–219; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, reissue edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1984). For histories of African diaspora societies, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). ↩

2. To read more about Catharina, see Halle-Mackenzie Ashby and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Injury and Value: Black Mothering in Slavery and Its Afterlife,” History of the Present 14, no. 1 (2024): 138–55. ↩

3. The “Who Owns Black Data?” Editorial Collective defines archives “when used without a modifier [as] the institutional or proto-institutional efforts to collect and organize documents or data with the goal of preserving them across generations.” Write-In Session, Who Owns Black Data?, March 29, 2024, Morgan State University and Johns Hopkins University, hosted by the Black Beyond Data Ecosystem, wobd.blackbeyondata.org. ↩

4. Dorothy Berry. “The House Archives Built,” Up//Root (blog), June 22, 2021, https://www.uproot.space/features/the-house-archives-built. ↩

5. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). ↩

6. While Louisiana’s colonial period officially ends with US statehood, settler colonialism is an ongoing genocidal process of domination that violently disrupts human relationships with the land through various forms of embodied and spatial violence. For more on this and the intersection of Black and Native geographies, see Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2006); J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral 5.1 (2016): n.p.; and Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formation of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩

7. Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). ↩

8. Elizabeth N. Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). ↩

9. The first documented transatlantic slave ships that arrived in Louisiana were Le Duc du Maine and L’Aurore in June of 1719. The first enslaved people of African descent arrived in Louisiana earlier, likely via the transshipment trades from the Caribbean or other parts of mainland North America (Carolinas, Spanish Florida). Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995). While Petite Nations did trade in Africans, the most populous enslaved population at the French outposts were enslaved Indigenous people, traded from Gulf South Native nations to the French. See Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations. ↩

10. Kristina Kay Robinson, “Black New Orleans: History x Art x Culture,” Taller Electric Marronage, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igiOpWNRXm8. ↩

11. Black DH (Gallon, Risam, Pollock and Lu) Design, Development, and Documentation: Hacking TEI for Black Digital Humanities: Jessica Lu & Caitlin Pollock Digital Dialogue – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, https://mith.umd.edu/digital-dialogues/dd-fall-2019-jessica-h-lu-caitlin-pollock/. ↩

12. For more on centering Black communities and knowledge in the digital humanities, see Abdul Alkhalimat. “The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital,” in The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021); Kim Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 42–50; Marisa Parham “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/0fa03a28-d067-40b3-8ab1-b94d46bf00b6; Catherine Knight Steele, Kevin C. Winstead, and Jessica H. Lu, “I Don’t Love DH; I Love Black Folks: Building Black DH Programming,” in Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality (New York: Routledge, 2023); Bergis Jules et al., “Architecting Sustainable Futures: Exploring Funding Models for Community-Based Archives,” February 2019, https://shiftdesign.org/content/uploads/2019/02/ArchitectingSustainableFutures-2019-report.pdf ↩

13. Thanks to a 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, the Louisiana State Museum was able to begin the multi-year project of digitizing more than 220,000 documents from colonial Louisiana. Their repository is available here: https://www.lacolonialdocs.org/. All images in this micro-edition come from this Louisiana Historical Center database and are used with permission. ↩

14. The keywords that we have elected to use for this micro-edition are a small subset of the overall list that our researchers use for the larger project. For an elaboration on our linguistic tags, please see “List: 100 Keywords Generated by K4BL” and “Glossary of Terms” on our GitHub site: https://github.com/lxcprojects/k4bl/tree/main/docs. ↩

15. Howard Margot, “Historical Peregrinations of New Orleans’s French Superior Council and Spanish Judicial Records,” Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals 11, no. 3 (June 2015): 171–84, https://doi.org/10.1177/155019061501100304. ↩

16. Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles, #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020). Keywords, unlike metadata, are annotations that index themes in the selected documents. See also Keywords for Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Keywords for African American Studies ed. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar (New York: New York University Press, 2018), and Keywords for Caribbean Studies. ↩

17. “<seg>” in “P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange,” version 4.6.0. Last updated April 4, 2023, https://tei-c.org/Vault/P5/4.6.0/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-seg.html. ↩

18. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (December 2018): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658. ↩

19. Gallon, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,”, https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctt1cn6thb. ↩

20. “<persGrp>” in “P5: Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange,” version 4.6.0 last updated April 4, 2023, https://tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/ref-personGrp.html. ↩

21. M. J. Driscoll, “Electronic Textual Editing: Levels of Transcription,” https://tei-c.org/Vault/ETE/Preview/driscoll.html. ↩

22. Blackbird, Leila K. “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages’: The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769-1803.” William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 3 (July 2023): 525-58. https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903166. ↩