In The Flow of Time – August 8, 2024
Along the way I’ve read two standard biographies of Marie Laveaux. One was very academic, a dissertation turned into book, and written through a lens of female empowerment. The other had extensive footnotes referencing parish and historical records. That’s the one I’ve gone to again and again for canonically correct information. Next up, another nonfiction work focused on her Voudou practice. This will be fun. I started this morning. Part I is, essentially, the historical Marie. The author uses the same two primary sources that I have. Cool. I figure, this will be a breeze, not like there will be much new in the history.
So I sit down, and within two pages I’m digging deep into my earlier research, to confirm or deny my own conclusions. The author is talking about the impact of slavery on women. The people in question are Marie’s great grandmother Marguerite (slave), her grandmother Catherine (born a slave bought her own freedom), and her mother Marguerite D’Arcantal (born a slave but emancipated). This statement is true: “Women were viewed as property, and sexual abuse and exploitation were rampant.” But she then says…
“Catherine Henry was at most thirteen years old when she gave birth to Marguerite, her first-born, who in turn was also at most thirteen when she had her first child.”
That powerful and horrific assertion, that these women were thirteen years old when forced to bear their masters’ children… wow. I would have/should have noticed that. So, off I go, digging. This gets pedantic, but this is what I require of myself, to know the facts before I create the fiction.
The author’s statement requires that Catherine Henry be born in 1770, her daughter Marguerite in 1783, and Marguerite’s firstborn in 1796. All of those are wrong. How do I know she’s wrong?
We have a 1756 property inventory on which Marie’s great-grandmother appears. It lists Catherine’s mother Marguerite as about 20. She has a two year old daughter, Catherine. So that puts Catherine born in 1754. We have Catherine’s own last testament, dated 1831, where she herself says that she is 77 years old. Again, 1754. So Catherine, Marie Laveaux’s grandmother, was born in 1754, not 1770.
Her daughter Marguerite appears in a probate inventory in 1782, as a 10 year old girl. That puts Marguerite’s birth year as 1772, not 1783. Her firstborn (not Marie) appears in the 1795 Spanish census. So that child was born before 1795. Marguerite was emancipated on 10/16/1790, and this child is (based on name) fathered by the Frenchman with whom she established a plaçage relationship, Henry D’Arcantel. So reasonable, a 1791 birth date for her firstborn. Could be later. Her third child was born in 1795.
So I spent a couple of hours recreating what I had already concluded, and the documentary evidence in one is far more compelling than assertions in the other. The two biographies have different insights, but when they differ on facts, guess where I go.
You don’t have to invent that these women were 13 years old. Age in no way diminishes the truth: “Women were viewed as property, and sexual abuse and exploitation were rampant.”
But I’m rather fussy when it comes to facts, if we can ascertain them. Any reasonable person reading about these three women, Marguerite, Catherine, and the younger Marguerite, all of them slaves, realizes that their masters used them, whether it involved physical violence or not. It is fundamentally horrific no matter what age they were.
FWIW, as I’m starting to plot out Marie Laveaux’s journey, she is going to have a choice, and makes it. She refuses to accept powerlessness. She was born a free woman. It’s part of why she’s such a fascinating, powerful legend. But that history of family trauma, that EVERY significant woman in her life (happens on the father’s side as well) was the powerless victim of white oppression will in part define her.
