Creole Women Quotes

I was owned by Johnson Bell and born in New Orleans, in Loisiana. Cordin to the bill of sale, I'm eighty-six years old, and my master was a Frenchman and was real mean to me. He ran saloon and kept bad women. I don't know nothing 'bout my folks, if I had any, 'crept my mama. They done tell me she was a bad woman and a French Creole. I worked 'round master's saloon, kep everything cleaned up after they'd have all night drinkin' parties, men and women.

Advance Praise for THE GREAT NEW ORLEANS KIDNAPPING CASE: RACE, LAW, AND JUSTICE IN THE RECONSTRUCTION ERA "Michael Ross' The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case has all the elements one might expect from a legal thriller set in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Child abduction and voodoo. 'Quadroons.' A national headline-grabbing trial. Plus an intrepid creole detective.... A terrific job of sleuthing and storytelling, right through to the stunning epilogue." --Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans "When little Mollie Digby went missing from her New Orleans home in the summer of 1870, her disappearance became a national sensation. In his compelling new book Michael Ross brings Mollie back. Read The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case for the extraordinary story it tells--and the complex world it reveals." --Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age "Michael Ross's account of the 1870 New Orleans kidnapping of a white baby by two African-American women is a gripping narrative of one of the most sensational trials of the post-Civil War South. Even as he draws his readers into an engrossing mystery and detective story, Ross skillfully illuminates some of the most fundamental conflicts of race and class in New Orleans and the region." --Dan T. Carter, University of South Carolina "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is a masterwork of narration, with twists, turns, cliff-hangers, and an impeccable level of telling detail about a fascinating cast of characters. The reader comes away from this immersive experience with a deeper and sadder understanding of the possibilities and limits of Reconstruction." --Stephen Berry, author of House of Abraham: Lincoln and The Todds, a Family Divided by War "The Great New Orleans Kidnapping Case is such a great read that it is easy to forget that the book is a work of history, not fiction. Who kidnapped Mollie Digby? The book, however, is compelling because it is great history. As Ross explores the mystery of Digby's disappearance, he reconstructs the lives not just of the Irish immigrant parents of Mollie Digby and the women of color accused of her kidnapping, but also the broad range of New Orleanians who became involved in the case. The kidnapping thus serves as a lens on the possibilities and uncertainties of Reconstruction, which take on new meanings because of Ross's skillful research and masterful storytelling." --Laura F. Edwards, Duke University

We all know that the survivors of war rarely speak of their experience. We tell ourselves they do not want to relive the horror of the battlefield. I think the greater reason for their reticence lies in their charity, because they know that the average person cannot deal with the images of a straw village worked over by a Gatling gun or Zippo-tracks, or women and children

Frankly, I don’t care what happens to your father, Varina. He’s an ignorant, stupid man, a racist, and a bully who molested black women and jailed and beat their men. His sin lies not in his ignorance and stupidity but in his choice to stay ignorant and stupid.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

Africanization marked the arrival of the plantation revolution in the lower Mississippi Valley, and, as elsewhere on mainland North America, black life became debased. Slaves became little more than cogs in a vast agricultural machine. Planters showed little interest in fostering family life among their slaves. Almost all the men and women sold at Natchez during the last quarter of the eighteenth century were purchased as individuals, and only rarely as families or even as couples. Those few slaves who arrived as whole families, or as mothers with children, were often separated, even when the children had barely reached their teens. Planters wanted a labor force heavily weighted toward men, and the influx of slave men - many of them African - upset the sexual balance of the long-established creole population, undermining the integrity of existing slave families and denying many the opportunity to form new unions. Men and women, particularly among the newly arrived, had difficulty finding spouses. The newcomers also faced a new disease environment which left them susceptible to a variety of ailments. Mortality rates increased and fertility fell as the new plantation order took shape.

Fanny’s Plan. Fanny was Hazel’s mother. Her plan was to use whatever methods she could to give the younger generation the means to start businesses and schooling, which in turn would guarantee they and their children would never face the challenges Fanny and her children faced growing up. And she didn’t care if she had to beg, borrow, or steal to accomplish that. Hazel marrying into the family of that rich Creole had been part of that plan. All the money made off the swindling, the gambling, and the other enterprises are ensuring the young have a future.

She hated when people asked about her ethnicity, if she was Creole. Like that had anything to do with how well you could hex someone if you knew what you were doing.

A few steps from the St. Charles Hotel, in New Orleans, brings you to and across Canal Street, the central avenue of the city, and to that corner where the flower-women sit at the inner and outer edges of the arcaded sidewalk, and make the air sweet with their fragrant merchandise.

Fanon would write in Black Skin, White Masks. “In his collective unconscious, the West Indian has made all the European archetypes his own.” In their nightmares of rape and sexual aggression, Creole women, the “almost white,” invariably imagined a Senegalese or “so-called inferior.” It was nearly always “in reference to the essence of the white man” that West Indians perceived one another’s skin color, even their character.

These men(there were very few women among these forces), and everyone else who wore a uniform, wielded a baton and carried a gun, inspired both awe and fear in Maxo and my uncle, for they were part of a constant pull and release, or what my uncle might have in Creole called “mòde soufle,”where those who are most able to obliterate you are also the only ones offering some illusion of shelter and protection, a shred of hope—even if false—for possible restoration.