Isle of Canes

Last updated February 22, 2024

Isle of Canes ( ISBN 1-59331-306-3), a novel by Elizabeth Shown Mills, follows an African family from its importation and enslavement in 1735 through four generations of freedom in Creole Louisiana to its re-subjugation by Jim Crow at the close of the nineteenth century. Mills explores the family's "struggle to find a place in [a] tightly defined world of black and white" ^[1] — a world made more complex by the larger struggle of Louisiana's native ancien regime to preserve its culture amid the Anglo-Protestant "invasion" that followed the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the resulting battle for political and social hegemony. Isle's central theme is the ambiguous lives of those who escaped colonial slavery only to find they could not survive as free without complicity in the slave regime.

The novel's subject-family is one that has been both romanticized and excoriated by journalists, academics, descendants, and current websites over the past half-century.^[2]Isle's interpretation of their controversial role is based heavily on the author's original research across three decades in the archives of six nations, and actual documents are interspersed throughout the novel. The author's research began in 1972 when she was employed by a preservation society to document the history of one Isle landmark, Melrose Plantation.^[3]

Critical assessments of Isle of Canes focus on its upturning of stereotypes. Contemporary Lit describes the focus as "Gone with the Wind from a vastly different, more important perspective ... not that of the plantation owner or the poor white ... but homme de couleur libre and slave ... capturing the agonizing decisions which tore families and communities apart." Historical Novels Review similarly observes, "The Metoyers, a historical family both black and white and yet neither, challenge all perceptions of racial boundaries. You may never look at American History the same way again."^[4]

The Isle community is also the focus in Lalita Tademy's Oprah Book Club pick, Cane River.^[5] Mills's Isle explores the colonial roots of the community and the experience of slaves who achieved freedom prior to the onset of Louisiana's Creole-Anglo conflict. Tademy's story, whose earliest slave generations are based upon research by Mills and her daughter,^[6] portrays the mid-nineteenth– and early-twentieth-century experiences of the community's slave families who envied, respected, and resented the free status of the Isle's Creoles de couleur libre—some of whose blood they shared.

A third, much older novel, Lyle Saxon's Children of Strangers,^[7] depicts the state of servitude into which the Islanders were subjected by the early twentieth-century. Saxon's era was one in which the chatelaine of the family's last remaining manor house (Melrose Plantation, a National Historic Landmark since 1976) was an Anglo patroness of the arts, who encouraged Saxon to visit and "observe" the community first hand. Saxon's portrayal captures the mindset of that era's white population, who vacillated between economic exploitation of the Islanders, sexual attraction to their women, and a paternalistic view of the multiracial Creoles as "simple people, but our people."

Historians struggle to understand the complexities of the Peculiar Institution—particularly the motivation that compelled a significant number of freed American slaves to purchase other humans once free to do so. Edward P. Jones lays out one psychological path in The Known World^[8] creating a fictional anti-hero, the Black Virginian Henry Townsend, who is consumed by his self-centered ambition. Isle of Canes reconstructs the world of an actual family to define a radically different but equally uncomfortable trajectory by which more than a few ex-slaves survived a status many historians consider "neither slave nor free."^[9]

Major characters

Generation 1

François and Fanny, the African artisan and chieftain's daughter, captured into slavery and brought to the wilds of Louisiana in 1735. He accepted their fate and insisted that she accept it, too.^[10]

Generation 2

Coincoin ditte Marie Thérèse Metoyer, who swore over the dead bodies of her parents that one day their family would be free, rich, and proud. She kept her oath.^[11]

Generation 3

Sieur Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, f.m.c., half-African and half-French, who hacked a cane brake from the wilderness then ruled over the Isle of Canes as patriarch of a legendary colony of creoles de couleur. They lived in pillared homes, yet toiled beside the 500 slaves who tilled their 18,000 acres (73 km²).^[12]

Generation 4

Perine (Mme. François Gassion) Metoyer Metoyer Dupré, who was born to riches but aged in shame. She never forgot the heritage of her family or the brutality that destroyed it. Through the persecutions of Louisiana's Creole-Anglo conflicts and Reconstruction-era Jim Crow, hers was a different vow: Never would she allow her family to forget who they were until they could reclaim their Isle. She, too, kept her promise.^[13]

Related Research Articles

Natchitoches Parish is a parish located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. As of the 2020 census, the population was 37,515. The parish seat and most populous municipality is Natchitoches, the largest by land area is Ashland, and the most density populated area is Campti. The parish was formed in 1805.

Natchez is a village in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, United States. The population was 597 at the 2010 census. It is part of the Natchitoches Micropolitan Statistical Area. The village and parish are part of the Cane River National Heritage Area and located on Isle Brevelle.

In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.

Established in 1994, the Cane River Creole National Historical Park serves to preserve the resources and cultural landscapes of the Cane River region in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Located along the Cane River Lake, the park is approximately 63 acres and includes two French Creole cotton plantations, Oakland and Magnolia. Both plantations are complete in their historic settings, including landscapes, outbuildings, structures, furnishings, and artifacts; and they are the most intact French Creole cotton plantations in the United States. In total, 65 historic structures and over a million artifacts enhance the National Park Service mission as it strives to tell the story of the evolution of plantation agriculture through the perspective of the land owners, enslaved workers, overseers, skilled workers, and tenant farmers who resided along the Cane River for over two hundred years. This park is included as a site on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

Plaçage was a recognized extralegal system in French and Spanish slave colonies of North America by which ethnic European men entered into civil unions with non-Europeans of African, Native American and mixed-race descent. The term comes from the French placer meaning "to place with". The women were not legally recognized as wives but were known as placées; their relationships were recognized among the free people of color as mariages de la main gauche or left-handed marriages. They became institutionalized with contracts or negotiations that settled property on the woman and her children and, in some cases, gave them freedom if they were enslaved. The system flourished throughout the French and Spanish colonial periods, reaching its zenith during the latter, between 1769 and 1803.

The Cane River is a 30-mile-long (48 km) river in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, originating from a portion of the Red River. Historically, in the 19th and 20th centuries, it gained prominence as the locus of a notable Creole de couleur (multiracial) culture, centered around the National Historic Landmark, Melrose Plantation, and the adjacent St. Augustine Parish Church.

Louisiana Creoles are a Louisiana French ethnic group descended from the inhabitants of colonial Louisiana before it became a part of the United States during the period of both French and Spanish rule. They share cultural ties such as the traditional use of the French, Spanish, and Creole languages and predominant practice of Catholicism. Some mistakenly think the term is a racial designation, while in fact people of European, of African, and of mixed ancestry have all been termed "Creole" since the 18th century.

Marie Thérèse Coincoin, born as Coincoin, also known as Marie Thérèse dite Coincoin, and Marie Thérèse Métoyer, was a planter, slave owner, and businesswoman at the colonial Louisiana outpost of Natchitoches.

The Creoles of color are a historic ethnic group of Louisiana Creoles that developed in the former French and Spanish colonies of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Northwestern Florida, in what is now the United States. French colonists in Louisiana first used the term "Creole" to refer to people born in the colony, rather than in France.

Oakland Plantation, originally known as the Jean Pierre Emmanuel Prud'homme Plantation, and also known as Bermuda, is a historic plantation in an unincorporated area of Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Founded as a forced-labor farm worked by enslaved Black people for White owners, it is one of the nation's best and most intact examples of a French Creole cotton plantation complex. The Oakland Plantation is now owned by the National Park Service as part of the Cane River Creole National Historical Park.

Melrose Plantation, also known as Yucca Plantation, is a National Historic Landmark located in the unincorporated community of Melrose in Natchitoches Parish in north central Louisiana. This is one of the largest plantations in the United States built by and for free blacks. The land was granted to Louis Metoyer, who had the "Big House" built beginning about 1832. He was a son of Marie Thérèse Coincoin, a former slave who became a wealthy businesswoman in the area, and Claude Thomas Pierre Métoyer. The house was completed in 1833 after Louis' death by his son Jean Baptiste Louis Metoyer. The Metoyers were free people of color for four generations before the American Civil War.

St. Augustine Catholic Church and Cemetery, or the Isle Brevelle Church, is a historic Catholic parish property founded in 1829 near Melrose, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. It is the cultural center of the Cane River area's historic French, Spanish, Native American and Black Creole community. It is also the oldest surviving Black Catholic church in the United States.

<i>Cane River</i> (novel) 2001 novel by Lalita Tademy

Cane River is a 2001 family saga by Lalita Tademy. It was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection.

Cyrille Bissette (1795–1858) was a French abolitionist, politician and publisher. A free person of color from Martinique, his radical activities and publications galvanized the abolition movement in France and its colonies. He represented Martinique in the French National Assembly from 1848 to 1851.

Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Slavery was then established by European colonists.

The Badin-Roque House is a historic house located along Louisiana Highway 484, about 6.6 miles (10.6 km) southeast of Natchez in the community of Isle Brevelle.

Rosette Rochon (1767–1863) was an American placée and businesswoman, who was an important figure in the Gens de couleur libres society of New Orleans. She belonged to the most famous of the placées of New Orleans alongside Eulalie de Mandéville and Marie Thérèse Metoyer, and made a fortune on investments in dry goods, cattle, banking, slave trade and real estate business.

Isle Brevelle is an ethnically and culturally diverse community, which began as a Native American and Louisiana Creole settlement and is located in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. For many years this area was known as Côte Joyeuse. It is considered the birthplace of Creole culture and remains the epicenter of Creole art and literature blending European, African, and Native American cultures. It is home to the Cane River Creole National Historical Park and part of the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

Anne des Cadeaux (unknown—1754), was a Native American and devout Catholic. She was enslaved but later gained her freedom. She was active in early colonial Louisiana, and was from one of the early Louisiana Creole families.

Bayou Brevelle is a series of interconnected, natural waterways totaling over 18 miles in length in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Its main channel is at Old River at Montrose to Natchez near the Cane River. During heavy rains or floods, Bayou Brevelle joins the Cane River. The bayou is flanked by Interstate 49 on the west and the Cane River on the east, and is one of the many waterways on Isle Brevelle.

References

↑ Rolling On, July 2004
↑ For a basic bibliography of the most-used works, see "Isle of Canes". Archived from the original on 2008-06-20. Retrieved 2008-03-02.. Annotations identify those that are peer reviewed or otherwise carry extensive documentation.
↑ "Foreword," Isle of Canes, xi-xiii.
↑ Sarah Johnson, Historical Novels Review, 28 (May 2004), 42.
↑ New York: Warner Books, 2001.
↑ That research is chronicled in Rachal Mills Lennon and Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Mother, Thy Name is Mystery! Finding the Slave who Bore Philomene Daurat," in Reassembling Female Lives, a Special Issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly 88 (September 2000): 201–28.
↑ New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1937.
↑ New York: Amistad, 2003.
↑ Pioneers of this theme are David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); and Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Book, 1974). More recently, H. Sophie Burton has analyzed the struggle for economic viability by freed slaves in colonial Louisiana in "Free People of Color in Spanish Colonial Natchitoches: Manumission and Dependency on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1766–1863," Louisiana History 45 (Spring 2004): 173-97.
↑ For four-generation genealogies of the descendants of François and Fanny see Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Which Marie Louise Is Mariotte? Sorting Slaves with Common Names," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 94 (September 2006): 183-204; and Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary B. Mills, "Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 70 (September 1982): 163-89.
↑ Ken Ringle (12 May 2002). "Up through Slavery: Marie Therese Coincoin". Washington Post. This Washington Post feature article presents an historical overview of the family, drawing upon past research done by Isle of Cane' s author and her husband/research partner.^{[ dead link ]}
↑ Gary B. Mills, "A Portrait of Achievement: Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, f.m.c.," Red River Valley Historical Review 2 (Fall 1975): 332–48.
↑ For an anthropological view of the twentieth-century generations that followed Perine, see Sister Frances Jerome Woods, Marginality and Identity: A Colored Creole Family through Ten Generations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972). Woods' portrayal, in which she uses the pseudonym "Letoyant" for "Metoyer," is heavily colored by racial views of the mid-twentieth century and presents the family against a backdrop of imaginative and contradictory local lore.

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[1] Rolling On, July 2004

[2] For a basic bibliography of the most-used works, see "Isle of Canes". Archived from the original on 2008-06-20. Retrieved 2008-03-02.. Annotations identify those that are peer reviewed or otherwise carry extensive documentation.

[3] "Foreword," Isle of Canes, xi-xiii.

[4] Sarah Johnson, Historical Novels Review, 28 (May 2004), 42.

[5] New York: Warner Books, 2001.

[6] That research is chronicled in Rachal Mills Lennon and Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Mother, Thy Name is Mystery! Finding the Slave who Bore Philomene Daurat," in Reassembling Female Lives, a Special Issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly 88 (September 2000): 201–28.

[7] New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1937.

[8] New York: Amistad, 2003.

[9] Pioneers of this theme are David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedmen of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); and Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Pantheon Book, 1974). More recently, H. Sophie Burton has analyzed the struggle for economic viability by freed slaves in colonial Louisiana in "Free People of Color in Spanish Colonial Natchitoches: Manumission and Dependency on the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1766–1863," Louisiana History 45 (Spring 2004): 173-97.

[10] For four-generation genealogies of the descendants of François and Fanny see Elizabeth Shown Mills, "Which Marie Louise Is Mariotte? Sorting Slaves with Common Names," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 94 (September 2006): 183-204; and Elizabeth Shown Mills and Gary B. Mills, "Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 70 (September 1982): 163-89.

[11] Ken Ringle (12 May 2002). "Up through Slavery: Marie Therese Coincoin". Washington Post. This Washington Post feature article presents an historical overview of the family, drawing upon past research done by Isle of Cane' s author and her husband/research partner.^{[ dead link ]}

[12] Gary B. Mills, "A Portrait of Achievement: Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, f.m.c.," Red River Valley Historical Review 2 (Fall 1975): 332–48.

[13] For an anthropological view of the twentieth-century generations that followed Perine, see Sister Frances Jerome Woods, Marginality and Identity: A Colored Creole Family through Ten Generations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972). Woods' portrayal, in which she uses the pseudonym "Letoyant" for "Metoyer," is heavily colored by racial views of the mid-twentieth century and presents the family against a backdrop of imaginative and contradictory local lore.

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