Catharina Knows Her WorthJune 25, 1773Jessica Marie JohnsonLeila K. BlackbirdJessica Marie JohnsonTranscribed byJessica Marie JohnsonLeila K. BlackbirdChristina M. VillarrealTranslated byJessica Marie JohnsonLeila K. BlackbirdChristina M. VillarrealKaillee ColemanAnnotated byLeila K. BlackbirdJessica Marie JohnsonEncoded byLeila K. BlackbirdE. G. Palazzolo2024Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editinghttp://www.scholarlyediting.orgAssociation for Documentary Editing2024kolkolScholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing is freely
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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary EditingCo-Editor in ChiefNoelle BakerKathryn TomasekConsulting EditorSilvia GlickCo-Managing EditorRobert RiterJenifer IsheeTechnical EditorMicro-Editions EditorRaffaele Viglianti412167-1257Louisiana Historical Center1773-06-25-01
Facsimle available online at the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project.
https://www.lacolonialdocs.org/document/14161https://www.lacolonialdocs.org/document/14161.
Fugitivity
Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies that captures the physical, metaphysical, armed, and everyday resistance of enslaved Africans and their allies against any and all aspects of enslavement. Rashauna Johnson, describing the “slave space” that was New Orleans, points to the specific geography of the region as lesson in fugitivity: Nonetheless, enslaved persons appropriated the places assigned them toward their own ends, a point that broadens the received gendered geographies of slave resistance. Because New Orleans was an important port city, it offered a diffuse set of pathways for escape – and recapture. If the politics of place could oppress, slaves reasoned, movement could also become an avenue to freedom. The connectedness that made the city’s location so desirable to merchants and imperial officials – its land passageways, river outlets, and Atlantic access – gave runaways an array of escape options. The fugitives redefined themselves in local “geographies of resistance,” or fled to other parts of the Atlantic World.
“Camera looking from water to stand of cypress along shore.” Louisiana Ecology and Conservation: Percy Viosca Jr. Collection, Louisiana Digital Library, Baton Rouge. https://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/lsu-sea-pvc%3A263https://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/lsu-sea-pvc%3A263.
However, fugitivity is a term encompassing more than marronnage (which is the act of absconding from enslavers and being out of reach of slaveholding authorities, even if temporarily). Fugitivity describes active and intentional resistance, as well as the acts of imagination and refusal that Africans and people of African descent engaged in against slaveholders’ gendered racial capitalistic regime.
Fred Moten writes: What's at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.
Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies, and Keywords for Black Louisiana draws on insights from Black studies to better understand the sources Africans and their descendants appeared in, as well as to better interpret the individual and communal acts of resistance.
Stories with this keywordMiguel and Pedro Escaped with María JuanaMiguel and Pedro Escaped with María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMama Comba's GombeauMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomLuison Claims Her FreedomJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownKinship
Keywords for Black Louisiana views “kinship” and the battle for kin as central to Black life in the so-called New World. Kinship is the glue that knit Africans together in Gulf Coast Louisiana. Building and rebuilding fictive, chosen, and biological kin that reshaped bonds broken through the slave trade and the forced relocations of bondage in the New World occupied Africans and people of African descent from the moment of their initial capture on the African continent to the end of their lives.
Larry Powell writes: Few aspects of African tradition were felt more strongly by slaves fresh from the homeland than a commitment to kinship. Severed from bloodlines, they invented new family ties on the spot. Fictive kinship was one type. Slaves acquired new siblings and new elders. But these arrangements were ad hoc and informal, anchored in nothing more solid than the sands of sentiment.
Gender, age, and reproductive capacity played an important role in kinship relations and rebuilding kinship and community.
As Jessica Marie Johnson writes, Understanding the role intimacy and kinship played in black women’s lives highlights black women’s everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their progeny. Safety, particularly safety from intimate violence, and security lay at the heart of decisions to secure or reject patrons, partners, lovers, and other kin. Black women’s intimacy with individuals ranged along the spectrum of coerced to strategic, from fraternal to sexual. Determined to build community and make generations, imagining futures that were, if not beyond bondage, at least buttressed against harm, they cultivated, protected, and defended kinship networks. They engaged in a range of practices meant to safeguard their bodies and their legacies. At times this included legitimating kinship ties through formal sacred institutions like the Catholic Church.Stories with this keywordThe Two-Year-Old Son of Marianne Dies from Worm DiseaseThe Two-Year-Old Son of Marianne Dies from Worm DiseaseCatalina Swears She Hasn’t Harbored María JuanaCatalina Swears She Hasn’t Harbored María JuanaJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomMama Comba's GombeauMama Comba's GombeauJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownManumission
Manumission is the act of freeing and being freed from slavery “while the institution of slavery continues,” as described by Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks. Manumission was a critical act and strategy enslaved people engaged in as they struggled for control over their lives, selves, and kinship networks. It was differentiated from emancipation, the legislative acts and actions (i.e., US Civil War) nominally freeing all enslaved people, wholesale or conditionally (i.e., with apprenticeship), across a given slaveholding society. Manumission was executed by individual enslavers on behalf of their respective property (enslaved people) through formal (i.e., legal) action. Manumission was regulated by imperial and national officials in all slaveholding societies, but the rules of manumission varied across empire, region, and even between towns or colonial outposts. In French Louisiana, manumission was regulated by a succession of Code Noirs (1685, 1724) which determined the guidelines enslavers needed to follow to complete an act of manumission. In Spanish Louisiana, the French ordinances were replaced by Spanish manumission law guided by the Siete Partidas, eighteenth-century Spanish imperial law, and the bandos de buen gobierno. The differences were stark between the two colonial periods. For example, during the French period, enslavers were required to secure ratification of the Superior Council for any manumissions. In the Spanish period, not only could enslavers directly manumit their enslaved property, but enslaved people could also appeal to the Spanish Cabildo (Louisiana's governing body during the Spanish period) for their freedom. Coartación, the process of appealing for your freedom, allowed a critical mass of Africans and people of African descent to secure their freedom. The audacity, creativity, and resistance practice of enslaved people demanding their legal freedom from their owners through coartación laid the foundation for the free population of color that would emerge in the later years of the eighteenth century.
Stories with this keywordJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomCatharina Knows Her WorthCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownWellness
Keywords for Black Louisiana views “wellness” expansively and radically to encompass an array of practices. For Africans in Gulf Coast Louisiana, wellness meant more than their physical health. Enslavers demanded control over Africans’ bodies, minds, and futures (via their reproductive labor). Wellness, for Africans, meant wresting control of their whole selves from enslavers. Wellness could mean body autonomy (laboring as they wished, playing as they wished, imbibing food and drink as they wished). It could mean spiritual practices that protected and preserved African systems of belief or maintained ways of organizing the supernatural that varied from Catholic doctrine. It could mean play, mischief, or even behavior the French marked as crimes, such as theft or running away, since these crimes often created space for broader wellness practices (feasts, gatherings, and marronnage).
Plate 23 of David Boilat’s Esquisses sénégalaises: physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1853). Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed September 6, 2023, https://slaveryimages.org/database/image-result.php?objectid=998https://slaveryimages.org/database/image-result.php?objectid=998.
Along with misreading wellness practices as crimes, enslavers also misread wellness practices as superstition. In 1734 Le Page du Pratz, for example, described the creation of gris-gris, protective devices composed of natural and inanimate materials, as being “very superstitious and attached to their prejudices.” As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes, Reference to grigri is found in New Orleans court records in 1773. Charms ritually fabricated and worn for protection, as well as charms intended to harm others, have kept their African names to the present day. Zinzin, an amulet of support or power in Louisiana Creole, has the same name and meaning in Bambara. Grisgris, a harmful charm, comes from the Mande word gerregerys. The words zvanga and grisgris are still widely used in New Orleans by speakers of English as well as by Creoles.
“Grisgris, Water Bottle & Pouch,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed September 6, 2023, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-6eda-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-6eda-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.Stories with this keywordMama Comba's GombeauMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomLuison Claims Her FreedomJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionThe King's Doctor Certifies that Hypolite Is Very SickThe King's Doctor Certifies that Hypolite Is Very SickHypolite Seeks Treatment from the King's DoctorHypolite Seeks Treatment from the King's DoctorGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthCatharina Knows Her WorthAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All DownThe shift from French to Spanish dominion brought with it new laws, new customs, and new strategies for enslaved resistance. In 1773, CatharinaCatharina, enslaved on the Destrehan Plantation, claimed her freedom based on a new system of manumission that came to be called coartación. Coartación was a system of manumission through purchase. It allowed enslaved women, children, and men to force their owners to enter into agreements with them that set a purchase price they could pay down to acquire manumission. CatharinaCatharina, a woman in one of the earliest of these cases, pursued manumission in this exact fashion.1A few things are important to note in her story. First, throughout the case, CatharinaCatharinaargued for and defended her right to a lower self-purchase price based on an unspecified infirmity. How the participants reacted to her claims of disability is of interest to anyone studying the history of disability and how it intersects with race, gender, and bondage. Second, the enslaver of note in this case is none other than Étienne de BoréÉtienne de Boré, the man known in the history of United States slavery as the innovator of sugar cultivation in Lower Louisiana. This makes CatharinaCatharina's case a critical part of the history of the plantation in the United States. Third, CatharinaCatharina is not arguing just for herself in her battle for freedom; included in her claim is her five-year old daughter, FelicitéFelicité. Once again, kinship remains the tie that binds and sustains, inspiring resistance, refusals, and challenges that might have been impossible to imagine otherwise.
Catherina sabe lo que vale25 de junio de 1773Transcripción
Show Facsimile
Lo pres.to la
p.teexp.te no sa
ver firmar
nueva orléans25 de Junio de
1773 doy feé___
AlmonseterAlmonseterCatharinaCatharina mulata esclava de los
bienes de D. Juan Bautista DestrehanD. Juan Bautista Destrehan, en
la mejor forma que haya lugar en drõante V.U. paresco y digo que por
hacerme bien algunas personas y en
recompensa de beneficios y servicios
queles ha prometrar hacer me quieren
aprontar el dinero a que pueda hacen
der el valor demi de libertad y la de mi
hija nom.daFelicitéFelicité de edad de cinco a.sen cuya atencion Suplico a A.V.S. se
sirva mandar a D. Gabriel FacensdaD. Gabriel Facensday a D. Estevan BoréD. Estevan Boré que administran
dichos bienes, nombren un terrero para
que hagan mi estimacion y la de mi
hijami
hija, que yo por mi parte nombró a S.
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[ripped] me otorguen la carta
[ripped] conforme a drõ por tanto
[ripped] se sirva proveer y man
dar [ripped]llevo pedir por ser refusar
lo sitios y tuvo en lo necessario &.aTraslado___
UnzagaUnzagaProveio lo el S.rD. Luis de Unzaga y
AmezagaS.rD. Luis de Unzaga y
AmezagaBrig.r de los rsEx.os y Gov.orGrãl de esta Prov.a por S.M. que lo fir
mo en veinte y cinco de junio de mil siete cientos sesenta y tres
Andrés Almonester
y RoxasAndrés Almonester
y RoxasS.nopu.coEn el mismo dia hise saver el decreto
Q. ante de esta a la mulata CathalinaCathalinadoy Fée___
AlmonesterAlmonester
