American Routes by Angel Adams Parham

Author:Angel Adams Parham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A.P.: You mentioned that the ________ [family] see themselves as Creole. Would they say that publicly do you think?

N.M.: They would probably be reluctant—for racial reasons.

A.P.: They’re white?

N.M.: Yes.

A.P.: The perception that there might be African descent in their family?

N.M.: That has not changed at all, since after the Civil War.20

The Civil War, as we saw in Chapter 3, was indeed the turning point in the struggle white Creoles waged with Anglo-Americans in their efforts to hold on to a beloved cultural identity without, at the same time, giving up the benefits of being white in Anglo-American society.

Jerry Gandolfo, in fact, refers directly to this time period in his discussion of race and Creole identity.

You’ve got to remember after the end of Reconstruction is when for the first time the whole black-white thing became really severe. Prior to that time people didn’t mind having black relatives and family… . But at that point in the 1880s on it, the black-white thing, got to be severe and before then New Orleans had a three-part society. Black, white, and free people of color and after that it kind of evolved into two.

Jerry’s grandmother was unusual, however, in her willingness to hold together the idea of being white but also having some black family members.

[My grandmother’s] also very big on making it a point … I don’t know either by immunization or by explanation or by what purpose it was but always making a point about the plaçage system. And the fact that I would run into people with my name, same last name and they would be black and they would be here in New Orleans and other places. That she was not embarrassed by it, she just wanted it to be known from her rather than to run into it, bump into it kind of thing.

Which is interesting because that whole concept at one point was considered OK until George Washington Cable wrote the book The Grandissimes, accusing them and then everybody suddenly started denying it. She never denied it. She was almost proud of that. It was like this is our culture. This was how life was. What we did. She made a point of the fact that we spoke English as a practical means but it wasn’t our language, that French was our language.

Jerry packs a lot of Creole history, identity, and racial politics into this tiny excerpt. With the plaçage system, it was indeed quite possible to have black and white branches of the same family. This is exactly the racial phenomenon that Cable played up in The Grandissimes. The difference, however, is that Cable went farther than saying that there were some families where one branch was mixed race and another was white. He pushed the envelope, insinuating that all Creoles were actually mixed race but were concealing this mixture. This, no doubt, is the reason that he opens the novel with a masquerade ball and continues throughout the book to play up the theme of masking and concealment around issues of true identity.

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