Chapter 8 - Creoles of Color, Poetry, and the Periodic Press in Union-Occupied New Orleans

Summary

One year into the Civil War, New Orleans fell to Union forces. A few months later, French-speaking Creoles of color published the first edition of L’Union. This chapter considers this as a key transitional moment for French-speaking Creoles of color in New Orleans writing at a time when the city’s old racial order of white, free, and enslaved was in transition. The Creole-of-color poetry L’Union published was positioned not only alongside news items but also with an excerpt of the US Constitution, translated into French, and a reprint of a letter Victor Hugo wrote to Haiti referencing John Brown. By returning to consider that literary production in the space of the newspaper, rather than as it is encountered now in anthologies, we can learn much more about the “hybrid spaces” these writers negotiated with “a multiplicity of voices and discursive strategies.” Returning to this publication history, when highly literate Creoles of color long shut out of publishing opportunities embarked on their own in L’Union and its successor the Tribune, also returns us to the ignored history of Creole identity and activism behind such central events as Homer Plessy’s challenge to the legality of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.