Black History Month Memories
Having returned from the Big Easy (see previous blog entry), I have begun to plow through the stack of history and culture texts that I bought during the trip. I've already finished reading a history of New Mexico, which I'll blog on sometime, but right now, I'm reading a book called Africans in Colonial Louisiana. The Louisiana colony was perhaps the most neglected of France, a nation whose history of neglected colonization was certainly worse than either Great Britain, Spain, or even Portugal. The colonists sent to Louisiana consisted mostly of outcasts, criminals, and slaves for a long period of time. Bienville, a familiar name in New Orleans history, was a self serving administrator who diverted supplies ordered by colonists to himself for a huge middleman's profit, and just as often he ordered the ship elsewhere in the Caribbean or Mexico to sell supplies at an even higher price. French military protection was spotty at best, and for lack of food and clothing soldiers frequently deserted their posts to live with the Indians. On more than one occasion, Indian chiefs pleaded on behalf of deserting soldiers who were regularly shot or hanged for their offense. Yet, if it weren't for the tenuous agreements between the Indians and the French commanders, the colony would not have survived either the incursions of Spain or hostile Indian attacks. Naturally, Bienville was eager to import slaves to work fields and shore up the levee system around New Orleans, since in the hot and humid climate of the gulf coast region, colonists were loath to work very hard. The vast majority of slaves imported came from Senegambia, and with them came traditions and spiritual beliefs that are notable in Louisiana even today. While the slaves survival rate in gulf coast was often better than the European colonists, treatment of them was harsh, causing many to run away and join the Indian tribes.
This neglect and mistreatment of African-Americans remains in many respects, as the aristocratic attitudes of the tradition white leadership in New Orleans remains intact and the government prone to corruption. During the last days of our stay in Louisiana, we visited the original settlement at Natchitoches, and just south of their, the Cane River plantations. I stopped along the country road to talk to an old black who lived in a sharecropper house, complete with a wringer washer on the stoop. This sixty year old man had lived on the Magnolia Plantation prior to its conversion to a national monument, and now rented his pitiful home from a local cotton farmer. I didn't learn much from him, but that his mother had live to age 90 and had died in that house. Soon, the farmer arrived on his Honda ATV to see what I was up to, and to provide a few hours work for the old black man. Waving goodbye, I re-entered the 21st century, mindful of the social history I had just experienced.
