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Micro-Edition | DOI: 10.55520/YSF9HQNH
Mama Comba's Gombeau September 4, 1764 Jessica Marie Johnson Leila K. Blackbird Jessica Marie Johnson Transcribed by Jessica Marie Johnson Leila K. Blackbird Eola Dance Translated by Jessica Marie Johnson Leila K. Blackbird Eola Dance Annotated by Leila K. Blackbird Jessica Marie Johnson Encoded by E. G. Palazzolo Leila K. Blackbird 2024 Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing http://www.scholarlyediting.org Association for Documentary Editing 2024 kol kol Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing is freely distributed by the Association for Documentary Editing and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing Co-Editor in Chief Noelle Baker Kathryn Tomasek Consulting Editor Silvia Glick Co-Managing Editor Robert Riter Jenifer Ishee Technical Editor Micro-Editions Editor Raffaele Viglianti 41 2167-1257 Louisiana Historical Center 1764-09-04-01 Facsimle available online at the Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project. https://www.lacolonialdocs.org/document/10603. 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.
No description provided.
 “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%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 JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Kinship 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 DiseaseCatalina Swears She Hasn’t Harbored María JuanaJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomMama Comba's GombeauJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Manumission 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 JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Wellness 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).
No description provided.
 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=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.
No description provided.
 “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-e00a18064a99. Stories with this keywordMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionThe King's Doctor Certifies that Hypolite Is Very SickHypolite Seeks Treatment from the King's DoctorGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down In Africans in Colonial Louisiana, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall argues that this document offers the first Gulf Coast reference to gumbo (un Gombeau) in the archive.1 This is the testimony of Mama “Julie” Comba2, a fifty-year-old négresse, an African woman of the Mandinga Nation who lived in the Hospital for the Poor (L'Hôpital des Pauvres) and was enslaved to the Capuchin priests. Mama Comba appears before the French Superior Council in this, her second interrogation, as a result of the arrest of two runaways, the nègre Cézar, and the nègre Louis, called Foy (dit Foÿ). The runaways were caught and accused of murder, but ultimately charged with public drunkenness, theft, and firing weapons into the air (no one was killed), and with being fugitives. Mama Comba was interrogated because she hosted a feast that Cézar and Louis were guests at, bringing with them a pig that Louis allegedly stole and that the guests all took part in cooking and eating. The document below is drawn from part of Mama Comba's testimony.
Le Gumbeaux de Mama Comba 4 septembre 1764 Transcription
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 4 Septembre 1764 Interrogatoire de la négresse Comba. N.o 1835 du 7.bre 1764 Interrogatoire fait par nous Conseiller Commissaire En Cette partie a La Requette du procureur General Du Roy et En Vertu de Lordonnance de Monsieur Dabbadie, a La Negresse nommée Comba Contre Le Negre nommé Louis accusé detenu en prisons de Cette Ville ainsi quil ensuit A Eté Emmené des prisons La Negresse nommée Comba demeurant a Lhopital des pauvres , Laquelle après serment par elle fait de Dire Verité sur laquelle seroit par nous interrogée La été ainsi quil ensuit Interrogée de Son nom age qualité et Demeure a Dit sappeller Julie autrement Comba agée de Cinquante ans nation manenga demeurant a lhopital Des pauvres Interrogée Si elle Connoit Le nommé Loüis ou foÿ a Dit qu'elle Le Connoit depuis qu'il est dans ce pais Cÿ et nous pas auparavant Interrogée depuis quand elle n'avoit pas vü Le dit Loüis a Dit ne L'avoir pas Vü depuis Deux mois qui etoit avant destre mise en prison Interrogée Commant est ce quelle Connoissoit Louis a Dit qu'après que Loüis fut dessendü des illinois elle avoit Coutume Daller Souvant Voir Louison Dans Le Jardin Cantrelle, quun jour elle ÿ füt Elle ÿ füt et ÿ trouva plusieurs Negres Bambaras quils Samuserent beaucoup.. quensuite La Negresse Louison fut La chercher une autre fois Foucault Garic, Greffier
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 quelle ÿ Retourna et quelle ÿ trouva encore Le negre Loüis quils ÿ Souperent ensemble, que La négresse nommée fatema appartenant a M.r de Lafrenière avoir preparé Le Soupér, qu'alors elle dit a Louis quetce quil fezoit La quil etois marron, que Loüis Luy dit quil etoit Dessendu avec sa Maitress des illinois quil netoit pas marron qu'elle Luÿ dit Commant Li gagner a vivre puis que iL ne travaillait point que Le dit Louis Luÿ dit que Sa maitress Le Laissoit Libre parce quil avoit mal a une Jambe et Jusquà ce quil fut Guerÿ que pour manger Il n'en manquoit point quil en trouvoit par tout dans La Ville; aDit Deplus que Ladite Louison avoir permission de son maitre pour le Souper Oü ils ne mangerent que Du Cochon qui apartenoit aLa Négresse Louison Interrogée sils etoient plusieurs a Dit quils etoient plusieurs mais quelle ne Les connnoit point Interrogée si elle na Jamais vü Le dit Louis a lhopital des pauvres aDit quelle L'y a vü plusiers fois. Interrogée Si Le negre Louis n'avoit pas Couchée avec elle Dans Sa Cabane A Dit quon ÿ quil ÿ avoit Couché quelle ne Scavoit Pas quil fut marron Interrogée Si elle ne Luy avoir pas donné un Gombeau avec Cezar et une autre negresse a Dit qu'ouÿ Cela etoit Vraÿ qu'ils etoient quatre Interrogée que Cezar meme Donna a Louis Cinquante sols pour aller chercher Le filet quil ÿ fut et Burent tous ensemble Foucault Garic, Greffier
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 Interrogée Si Louis ne Luÿ avoit pas donné une Carotte de tabac a Dit quon ÿ quil Luy en avoit Donné une mais quil La reprit apres quil en avoir Volé Dix avec de La toile Dont il a fait des chemises et des Culottes quil ne Se Cachoit point quil Les Cousoit devant La porte de Lhopital quelle Luÿ avoir donné des Eguilles Interrogée Si Elle ne scait pas Si Louis avoit Volé ailleurs A Dit quelle scait que Louis avoit Vollé des hardes A La Negresse au Sr. Baschemin, mais quil avoit Ensuite vendu Les hardes mais non pas Largent qu'il avoit Volé aussi quil Lavoit employé en taffia. Interrogée si elle na pas fut que Louis avoir Volé un Cochon aux Jesuits a Dit que Cela etoit Vraÿ que Louis avoit tué un Cochon, mais Comme Ce Cochon etoit gros il ne Peut Le faire Sortir par dessus La palissade que Luÿ et Cesar Le partagerent, et chacun fit passer sa portion, par dessüs La palissade et que Louïs fut vendre La Sienne au bayou quau surplus Ce Louis Luÿ en Donna un morceau qu'ils mangerent ensemble tous Les Deux. Interrogée Si elle na pas Connoissance que Le negre Louis au volé ch'z La Dame Daneville a Dit qu'etant a Laver au fossé elle avoit vü beaucoup de Linge a secher dans Le Jardin au Sr. Cantrelle quelle avoit demandé a Louison Si elle avoit Lavé qu'elle Luÿ dit que non, que Cetoit du Linge au Negre Louis, mais que Ce Linge Foucault Garic, Greffier
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 n'avoit jamais eté porté elle. Interrogée si elle n'a pas Connoissance que Le negre Louis Couchoit souvant ch'z Louison dans La Cabanne ou jardin de Cantrelle a Dit que depuis que Louis etoit dessendu des illinois il Couchoit dans Lad.e Cabanne ou ch'z elle quil ÿ avoit même Couché plusieurs fois que est tout Ce qu'elle a Dit Scavoir. Lecture a elle faite du present interrogatoire aDit Le bien entendu Ses reponses Contenir Verité Et ÿ a persisté et Na Sçu Signer Foucault Garic, Greffier
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ISSN 2167-1257 | DOI 10.55520/6ZH06EW2
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