The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World 9780300224696

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The Exile’s Song

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Th e E x i l e ’s S ong

 Edmond Dédé a nd t he Unfinished R e volu t ions of t he At l a n t ic Wor l d

Sally McKee

New Haven and London

Copyright © 2017 by Sally McKee. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016939400 ISBN 978-0-300-22136-7 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my classmates at Plainfield High School (Plainfield, NJ), 1970–1973

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Chapter 1. Lost 1 Chapter 2. A Family Long Free Chapter 3. City of Sound

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Chapter 4. City of Dust 75 Chapter 5. City of Song

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Chapter 6. City of Exile

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Chapter 7. The Lost Violin 180 Chapter 8. Found Notes

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Index 249

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Acknowledgments

In the mid-2000s, I decided to change my area of research from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to the nineteenth. The process repeatedly humbled me, as I struggled to master the historiography of a new period. In so doing, I accumulated debt upon debt to friends, colleagues, and strangers who helped me hack and hew my way through the thickets that divide scholarly fields. If I had not stumbled across the fascinating figure of Edmond Dédé, I doubt I would have had the courage to leave a field of study in which I had established myself and seek out a new one. However, by 2006, I had come to understand that my scholarly inquiries in the medieval period had been proxy quests to make sense of the racial conflicts of my youth. I grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, in the 1960s, when the rebellions of African Americans and, to a lesser extent, the opponents of the Vietnam War rocked my school, the Quaker meeting I grew up in, my town, and the nation. Those experiences, starting in the summer of 1967, climaxing in April 1968, and flaring up now and then thereafter until I graduated from high school in 1973, left indelible marks on my classmates, many of whom I had known since kindergarten, and myself. I undertook this project, in part, to understand what happened in Plainfield and to us, the people who lived there. In New Orleans, a great city to work in, I owe thanks to The Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, especially Christopher Harter; the City Archives of New Orleans, especially Greg Osborne; and kind staff at Historic New Orleans Collection. I regret not spending more time with Lester Sullivan, retired archivist at Xavier University, before he passed away. This would have been a lesser book without him. In France, the unfailingly gracious staff at the Archives municipales de Bordeaux, the Archives départementales de la

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Gironde, the Bibliothèque municipale de Bordeaux, the Archives nationales de France (CARAN), the Département de musique at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Archives de Ville de Paris sweetened the experience of working there. The archivists at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland, allowed me access to everything I needed. From my friends and colleagues at University of California at Davis, who had every right to be bewildered by the dramatic shift in my research, I received support, constructive advice, and encouragement: Emily Albu, Jessica Blake, Beverly Bossler, Joan Cadden, Ian Campbell, Corrie Decker, Greg Downs, Omnia El-Shakry, Nina Farnia, Jessica Fowler, Bill Hagen, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Kyu Ku Kim, Debbie Lyon, Joby Margadant, Ted Margadant, Lisa Materson, Kathy Olmsted, Annie Perez, Eric Rauchway, Rachel Reeves, Andres Reséndez, Mike Saler, Marian Schlotterbeck, Alan Taylor, Clarence Walker, Louis Warren, and Eran Zelnik. Ari Kelman steered me toward not only a good bike and a terrific dog trainer but also a helpful press. Maureen Miller shared her considerable experiences with book images. Even though Kathy Olmsted had the distracting responsibilities of department chair, she read the final draft of this work with her characteristic acuity. Dr. Beverly Wilcox taught me a lot about musicology. Professor D. Kern Holoman of the UC Davis Department of Music gave me insight into Dédé’s opera manuscript. I am grateful to UC Davis Committee on Research for the funds that supported my research trips. Grace Woods has my deepest gratitude for making the wheels of our graduate program run smoothly with modest input from me. Pierre Boulle, Clive Brown, David Geggus, Christopher Hanson, Jean Hébrard, Jennifer Heuer, Claire Jordan, James Oakes, Sue Peabody, Leon Robinson, Richard Rosenberg, Nico Schuyler, Rebecca Scott, and Tyler Stovall generously shared with me their knowledge and expertise. Diana Haney was very generous with the journals and photograph of her ancestor Clarendon Davisson. The professionals at Yale University Press—Erica Hanson, Chris Rogers, Clare Jones, and Eva Skewes—were everything an author could wish for: prompt, communicative, clear, supportive, and responsive. Having spent as much time away from home as I have in order to write this book, I found sustained refuge, with good food and wine thrown in, with friends in the United States and Europe. My cozy launchpad for continental Europe is located on Hartham Road in London, where my fairy godchildren Ava and Claudia live (with their parents, Ann Matchette and Jonathan Foyle). Logistically and emotionally, this project would have been far, far less fun and

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rewarding without their company. Since August 2006, exactly a year after Hurricane Katrina, I have stayed at Jill and Charles Abbyad’s supremely comfortable Chimes Bed and Breakfast, the best in New Orleans. During the two weeks in 2012 when I looked after their inn while they were on vacation, Hurricane Isaac struck, and I found myself preparing food in the dark and the heat for hungry reporters. Unaccountably, it only made me fonder of them. My small gang of readers saved me from most of my excesses: Allison Coudert and Rosamaria Tanghetti. Given how busy they are, they have earned my everlasting gratitude and friendship for the time they spent reading my manuscript. And my beloved family—Marcy McKee, Louis Draper, Ryan and Elle Draper, Cathy and Doug Olesen, Carol and Bill Stoy, Curt and Cheryl Stoy, Claudia Stoy, Tao Zervas, and Amy Carpenter, and, the most adorable of the whole bunch, Aiolos and Athena—may now meet the man whom I have been chasing around the Atlantic over the past eight years.

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The Exile’s Song

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1 • Lost

East of the Bahama Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, the passenger freighter Marseille crashed into a tropical storm during the night of October 9, 1893. It had been en route to New Orleans from, most recently, Bordeaux and, before that, Amsterdam. On board were 350 tons of freight, a crew of forty-seven, and forty-six passengers. Only one of the passengers occupied a first-class cabin, a fact that seems odd, given that the Marseille was no ordinary passenger freighter. It had a reputation for providing well-funded passengers with the luxurious amenities great passenger steamship lines offered on their vessels. For two days, under a gray billowing sky, the sea dealt punishing blows to the steamer. By the end of the second day, Captain August Gaudillon had maneuvered his ship into calmer waters. But by then the damage was done. A leak had sprung in the hold where the coal was stored. As soon as a crew member informed him of the leak, Gaudillon ordered all hands and passengers to work the hand pumps. Unfortunately, their efforts to staunch the water seeping into the ship failed. Before long, the level of the water reached the furnaces and extinguished the fires. At that moment the captain knew his ship was lost. Captain Gaudillon called together the passengers and crew to tell them that the ship would sink in less than twenty-four hours. Because they stood a good chance of attracting the attention of a passing ship, he assured them he would wait as long as possible before ordering the crew to lower the lifeboats. The steamer’s position in the sea lanes between the Gulf of Mexico and Europe worked in their favor. In the meantime, however, they were on a sinking ship. Captain Gaudillon ordered everyone to put on life preservers. The passengers—as many women as there were men—stayed calm. “Then we all

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tried to be brave—so brave—but it was a cruelly hard task,” remembered Sister Mary Ephrem. A nun of the Order of Perpetual Adoration, Sister Mary Ephrem was a shepherdess watching over her flock of thirteen young novitiates from the order’s headquarters in Alsace, formerly a French province that had recently come under Prussian rule. The young women were traveling to join a convent their order had recently established in New Orleans. “Two of these girls are real French, while the rest of them are from the now German French provinces,” she later explained. The novitiates were not the youngest passengers on board the ship. A seven-year-old girl was traveling with her grandfather to join her parents in New Orleans. Two small boys, oblivious to the danger, ran around the deck. The other passengers were adults, fully cognizant of the peril they faced. Determined to keep up their courage, they donned life preservers and settled down to wait, while the Atlantic Ocean pitched the ship up and then sent it sliding down the slopes of heavy swells. Around the time that Captain Gaudillon was explaining the situation to his passengers, another steamer, the Palmas, was winning its battle with the storm. After it passed unharmed through the storm, a lookout on the Palmas caught sight of topmasts in the distance. He sent word to the captain, who immediately changed course. The Marseille’s funnel appeared so suddenly over the crest of a swell that he feared the two ships would collide. “I didn’t need a signal to tell me the ship was in distress, so I hove to and cleared away my boats,” the captain later said. At the sight of the Palmas, the passengers and crew on the Marseille rejoiced. Then joy quickly turned to dread. The approaching vessel came to at a considerable distance from the sinking ship. Could the lifeboats safely traverse the huge swells? Their fears were not allayed as they watched the crew of the Palmas lower a lifeboat. Almost as soon as the boat touched the surface of the water, a wave smashed it into splinters against the side of the ship. The danger of crossing from one ship to the other now seemed as great as that of staying on the sinking ship. Losing no time, the captain of the Marseille ordered a first group of women and crewmen to board a lifeboat. The boat made it safely down the side. The crew began pulling on the oars toward the Palmas. To those waiting their turn on the Marseille, it seemed an eternity before the first lifeboat reached the other ship. When it came alongside, the Palmas crew let down ropes to two crewman who tied them around the women’s waists. One by one, the hands

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on deck hauled the passengers to safety. Another lifeboat set off from the Marseille. The ordeal of transferring passengers and crew from one ship to the other lasted seven hours. Not everyone made it. A huge swell smashed a lifeboat full of passengers against the Palmas’s hull. A sailor on deck jumped into the water to help the passengers. His mates threw him a line, which he tied around the waist of a woman. They pulled her aboard. Then another woman was hauled up the side. But the sailors could not work fast enough. Two young women under Sister Mary Ephrem’s care were engulfed by the waves. A boy, a man, and the sailor who had leaped into the water all drowned. Another of the novitiates was nearly lost as well. When it came her turn to have the rope tied around her waist, she grabbed hold without securing it. Inches from the deck, her hands let go and she fell back into the ocean. Captain Morgan described what happened next. “Her skirts spread out like a balloon and she floated like a cork. She was as cool as ice. We heaved her a line, and she put it around under her arms and life preserver and tied it. Then we hauled her aboard, my bully boy. She bowed to us and thanked us. Think of that in a woman in such a fix! There was no crying and no taking on at all.” As soon as the last passenger set foot on the Palmas’s deck, Captain Morgan turned the ship’s course for the port of Galveston, Texas. Another freighter that had passed during the passenger transfer carried ahead news of the rescue operation. Before the Palmas arrived in port, the Galveston Daily News had sent sketchy reports out over the wire services. Drawing on them verbatim, the New York Times and other papers around the country printed news of the catastrophe. Meanwhile, the Palmas, burdened by eighty-nine additional bodies, ran short of provisions. Seven days after the Marseille first entered the typhoon, its shipwrecked passengers and crew arrived at Pier 13 in the port of Galveston on Wednesday, October 18. After one day in quarantine, they were allowed to disembark. The French consul came to the wharf and assisted the French citizens among the passengers, since most had lost their passports in the shipwreck. The collector of customs supervised the delivery of the freight on board the steamer. To minimize the risk of a fine for carrying stowaways, Captain Morgan telegraphed the secretary of the Treasury in Washington for permission to release the shipwrecked passengers. When he did not receive an answer, he released them anyway. A reporter for the Daily News came to the wharf. Once he had the gist of events, he undertook to interview the survivors. He summed up Sister Mary

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Ephrem’s girls for his readers. “The novitiates were of the French peasantry. The girl whose skirts saved her is short and fat. All of them have light hair and blue eyes.” Newspapers around the country reprinted snippets from the reporter’s front-page columns. For a day or two after the Palmas arrived in port, the New York Times published updates on the victims. By Friday, the maritime disaster was over. Most of the passengers resumed their journey on the night they arrived in port. Forty men and women boarded a special train provided by the Southern Pacific Railroad, which took them to New Orleans, their original destination. Within four days, all those on board had either left town or were awaiting new orders to ship out. Since Galveston reporters rarely had the pleasure of having their articles picked up by the biggest newspapers in the country, the reporter covering this event must have regretted the end of the excitement. But it was not quite over. A few days later the reporter began to wonder about the identity of the sole first-class passenger. Whoever had occupied a deluxe cabin must have been a wealthy man. Was there one more story to wring from the disaster? In his hurry to tell the story of the plucky young Alsatian girls, the reporter nearly overlooked the one passenger on the ship whom his readers would have found truly remarkable. The reporter learned that the first-class passenger was still in town, and so he went to find him. To his surprise, that distinguished passenger turned out to be a composer, conductor, and violinist named Edmond Dédé, who also happened to be black.1 Few Americans today are aware that a black man from Louisiana, born a free man thirty-four years before the Civil War, forged a career as a composer and conductor in France over the second half of the nineteenth century. During his youth in antebellum New Orleans, Dédé trained as a violinist and composer in the European style of music. But as a black man, he could not perform before racially mixed audiences anywhere in the United States and therefore would not have been given the chance to lead the nation’s best orchestras. Barred from pursuing a career in his native land because of his skin color, Edmond Dédé worked as a musician in Mexico in the late 1840s. He returned to New Orleans for a few years, where he earned a living in a cigar factory. In 1855, he left the United States permanently. After helping a friend start a tobacco company in Belgium, he settled in Paris to study at the Conservatory of Music. Around 1860, he accepted a position at the most prestigious theater in the port city of Bordeaux. He subsequently led the orchestras of other theaters in Bordeaux, becoming for a time one of the city’s most popular music hall

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orchestra leaders. When he reached his early sixties, he relocated to Paris. By the time Edmond Dédé died in 1901, he had composed well over 250 songs, symphonic pieces, and one opera. His work survives in sheet music and manuscript form in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Amistad Research Center for African-American History at Tulane University, and Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Very little of it has been played since his death. With the exception of a few songs, a few works for cornet, and a couple of symphonic pieces, Dédé’s music remains largely unrecorded and so unavailable. That is the merest outline of the little-known composer’s life and career. He was one of the very few African Americans born prior to the American Civil War who acquired a measure of fame for something other than antislavery work and public speaking. It is the aim of this reconstruction of his life to gauge those accomplishments in relation to his times and to his own expectations as far as they can be inferred. His story, however, forms one small part of a much larger narrative concerning expatriates and refugees of color in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Migrants tend to leave few traces of themselves and their experiences, and so it is difficult for us in the present to perceive the extent or limits of their hopes. It is important to understand the political and the personal aspirations of people in that century in order to assess what might or might not have been possible. Dédé had no model of a black man who competed successfully against his white peers in the elite music circles he aspired to enter. Yet somehow, thanks to where he was born, the family he was born into, when he was born, luck, and hard work, he turned himself into a professional musician the likes of which he had never met. For that reason, the African Americans of New Orleans followed his career to imbibe his example and make of him a model for others. Edmond Dédé represented a model of achievement not possible for the overwhelming majority of black Americans, but it was enough that his attainments had become conceivable to them: a black American man working outside the constraints of U.S. segregation and discrimination could compete against Europeans and succeed. His life demonstrated that at least once it happened in practice, and it is all the more remarkable when contrasted with the high ideals of the minor U.S. diplomat he met at the beginning of his professional working life. In early 1864, for reasons that will emerge later in this book, Clarendon Davisson, the U.S. consul at Bordeaux, expressed to Edmond Dédé his belief that their war-torn, suffering country had need of all its people, both white and black. The distance between theory and practice, in this belief, could not have

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been greater. With the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857, which deprived all people of African descent of citizenship, the law flatly contradicted Davisson’s belief and, furthermore, validated the way state and federal officials had been treating African Americans for decades. The question is, then, how did a man like Davisson come to view people of color as fully American as those of European descent? Not even most abolitionists at the time would have been that broad-minded. But the fact that one white man expressed this belief gives us in the present a benchmark against which to measure the political vision and humanity of Davisson’s contemporaries. The only way to account for Clarendon Davisson’s stance is for us to situate him in his life story and examine closely the circumstances in which he and Dédé met. The details of his life, it turns out, are as elusive as Dédé’s. In spite of the fragmentary nature of the traces he left us, Edmond Dédé offers an unmatched opportunity to explore the horizons that migrants and exiles of color saw as they traveled in search of asylum. Although Dédé was extraordinary in that he achieved during his lifetime an unusual degree of recognition for an African American man, his life was ordinary enough that many of his experiences were shared by other free expatriates of color. He faced the same challenges in crossing borders and establishing residence in foreign cities that other African Americans and people of color from the Western Hemisphere encountered in their travels around the northern Atlantic. The nineteenth-century nation-states of Europe and the United States had not yet mastered bureaucratic techniques in monitoring migrants, but they were trying hard to. Political agitators—activists who fought for suffrage, republicanism, and the abolition of slavery—were the targets of the state’s concern. Travelers of color, who tended to be political activists, also had to contend with the color prejudice and racism that marred all societies implicated in the economies of slavery. Even a man like Dédé, whose motives for travel had nothing to do with political activism, had to confront the extra-close scrutiny of officials who were suspicious of migrants of color and the ideological baggage they carried. Few people of color had the means to travel in the nineteenth century, which makes Edmond Dédé’s case so fascinating to uncover. He was one of the few African Americans born before 1860 who traveled to Europe and built a professional career there before slavery in his native land was abolished, yet who had nothing to do with the abolitionist movement. Unlike Frederick Douglass, the renowned public speaker and political activist, and about whose travels we know something, Dédé had gone abroad simply to study music and make a living.2

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Far more is known about the free and enslaved people of African descent who remained in the United States. Thanks to the work of historians like Ira Berlin, Sybil Kein, and, more recently, Julie Winch, the urban free communities of the U.S. South and the rural ones in the North, each with deep roots in their specific locations, stand out more clearly against the backdrop of the antebellum and post–Civil War United States than do the migrants who landed in Europe, Africa, Haiti, and Latin America.3 When enslaved African Americans escaped, they tended to go to the northern states, westward, or to Canada. Dating back to the Revolutionary War, escaped and freed slaves established communities in eastern British North America, the terminus of the collective escape routes known as the Underground Railroad. Their efforts to rescue family members and recover lost rights and property in the aftermath of the British defeat are preserved in written records.4 But the largest movement of people of color occurred long after the legal end of slavery in 1865, after spending decades in extralegal servitude. When African Americans finally started to migrate, they moved in droves. The Great Migration, a movement of six million people from the South to the North and the West over six decades—in Isabel Wilkerson’s words, “the biggest underreported story of the twentieth century”—would not begin until 1915.5 Until then, for the entire second half of the nineteenth century, the violence of white supremacists, the weight of custom, and the crushing shackles of poverty and enforced labor induced the vast majority of African Americans to stay put and stay subjugated in conditions little changed from the time of legal slavery. The migrations of free people of color within the United States and across the border into Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century are relatively easy to track because the U.S. government tried to monitor their numbers and movements through the use of racial labels like “mulatto” and “black,” which pigeonholed people of color in the United States. These labels also make it easy to find them in U.S. sources and to study their movements in the aggregate. In the United States, a person’s racial classification mattered to county recording clerks, public notaries, customs officials, border police, court recorders, census takers, and other inscribers of legal actions and bureaucratic data. Regardless of whether it was legally required—and before 1865 it was— office clerks often deemed people to be black or mulatto on no more evidence than the impression a person’s skin color made on them. The racial categories used in the United States in official documents like the federal census derived from Americans’ obsession with race. Before the Emancipation Proclamation, issued in 1863, and the Fourteenth Amendment of

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1868, racial labels signaled the formal legal status and rights of the names to which they were attached. A “B” after a name in the federal census, for example, indicates that the name belonged to a free black man or woman, whereas an “M,” for “mulatto,” indicates a mixed-race person. Slaves were counted separately in lists called slave schedules. After 1868, the continued use of racial labels in public documents was rationalized by the federal and state governments’ need to collect demographic data about the people within their jurisdictions. But it is also the case that old obsessions and prejudices of ordinary citizens, including those working in government bureaucracy, died hard. They are still dying. A clerk’s notation of the race to which he or she assigned an applicant, plaintiff, or petitioner no longer formally signaled a person’s legal standing. Instead, racial and ethnic labels affixed a stigma on those to whom they were applied. In private life, many race-conscious individuals (that is to say, most white and black Americans) felt the need to note in their correspondence, journals, and private papers the racial categories they deemed other, non-white persons to fit in. Those contemporary obsessions were discriminating. When no racial label accompanies a name in a public or private document, the implication was (and often still is) that the person behind the name was assumed by default to be white. Once people of color left the United States, however, it is as if they disappeared from our history, because public record keepers in other countries did not employ racial labels similarly or as consistently as American officials did. But if European officials did not always or consistently record the race of the black and mixed-race Americans and Caribbean men and women who came there, it was not because they were color-blind. European involvement and investment in the international slave trade and the reliance on slaves in their colonies buttressed centuries-old color prejudice among the French and the British just as it did among Americans of European descent—with one significant difference. Unlike many people in the U.S. South, who lived in the proximity of slaves, British and French subjects kept their slaves for the most part out of Britain and France and confined them to their overseas colonies, where racial labels were applied in ways similar to those in the United States. “Out of sight, out of mind” applies here in a peculiar way. Neither France nor Britain developed a body of laws that regulated the management and mastery over slaves living alongside the free population in the metropolis. Indeed, in the case of France, they adjusted their laws to discourage slave owners from bringing their slaves to the metropolitan country. Because French officials had for decades sought to keep people of color out of France, with the result that

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they had relatively few to keep track of, there was no requirement to record the race of the non-white people seeking entry. A more pressing concern was the political refugees from eastern Europe. Racial labels did not apply to Europeans, although national ones did. As a result, there is no way to reliably identify people of color, especially those of mixed race who would have been considered black in the United States, among the names in European passenger lists, border police records of arriving and departing travelers, hotel registers, and other archival sources. This inability to track black and mixed-race people outside of the United States makes Edmond Dédé’s case all the more interesting. He was not alone, but because of the public nature of his occupation we can find him more easily than more ordinary people of color in contemporary accounts. A little digging in the archives reveals that more people of color from North America and the Caribbean were in France than is usually thought. For instance, historians have known that once the revolt on the island of Saint-Domingue began in 1791, black and mixed-race men and women from the former French colony came to France, many of them settling in the city of Bordeaux. Among those refugees was the family of General Toussaint Louverture, the best-known and most charismatic ex-slave, and one who commanded the troops of several armies, including for a time those of France. Decades later, Dédé had an intriguing encounter with the long-dead commander’s widowed daughter-in-law, Louise Chancy, known as Madame Isaac Louverture. Long before Dédé’s residence in that port city, the presence of Isaac Louverture and his wife attracted black and mixed-race refugees escaping the toxic racial environment of the Western Hemisphere. Free African Americans also went to Paris, Nantes, and Le Havre, as well as to Bordeaux, where they were able to live more cheaply and freely than in the United States. They included the Louisianan poet Camille Thierry and other free Creoles of color. Absent the legally codified racial segregation they faced at home, Edmond Dédé and other black and mixed-race émigrés were able to engage in the cultural life of French society. Dédé’s desire to succeed and prosper in France on terms defined by European cultural standards took shape in the city where he was born and raised. New Orleans had its own distinctive racial and musical culture. For most of the nineteenth century, the music produced in the city and enjoyed by all levels of society, from top to bottom, adhered closely to the musical traditions of Europe. Most people today associate New Orleans with the confluence of the blues, ragtime, and jazz, whereas in the antebellum period the Crescent City was a center for the genre of music we now call “classical.”6 More white and black

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New Orleanians attended operas, concerts, recitals, and balls than any other urban population in the country except for New York. European artists touring the Western Hemisphere knew they would find there discerning audiences. And the city was the only one in the country to allow African Americans to attend the same opera performances that white audiences attended—although they were segregated in the highest galleries. Thus, it is not by chance that New Orleans produced a small cadre of composers of color in the European tradition of music, with Edmond Dédé considered the most successful.7 Following Dédé from the music halls of New Orleans to France means we enter into yet another lost world, that of the cafés-concerts, those songdance-and-drinking establishments that emerged during France’s Second Empire and remained popular for the rest of the century. Patrons of all social levels sang along with romantic or satirical songs and waltzed to the music of small orchestras. Very few musicians had the luxury of devoting themselves exclusively to composing or playing art music, the more complex, prestigious pieces we would call symphonic, operatic, or chamber music. Yet Dédé was able to make a living conducting, composing, and managing orchestras of Bordeaux’s cafés-concerts as well as composing occasionally for the more prestigious theaters. In the end, however, the recognition he sought for the art music he composed did not match the fame he enjoyed in Bordeaux for his conducting of orchestras in the city’s most popular music halls. When his career is considered in light of the social, economic, and legal limitations placed on free African Americans in the U.S. South, the wonder is that he managed to succeed as well as he did. Dédé prospered in France far better than one might expect of someone raised in an environment where horizons were extremely limited. How did this dark-skinned black man, native son of a city that grudgingly tolerated the free people of color who lived there, develop enough confidence and ambition, and acquire sufficient training, to compete with European musicians on European terms in Europe? That is part of the story that will unfold in the following pages. Edmond Dédé’s story gives the lie to nineteenthcentury estimations of what African Americans were capable of achieving. To the people of color in New Orleans who followed his career, his example served as a powerful riposte to the tragedy of stifled potential. During his lifetime, the free people of color in New Orleans pointed to him as an example of what African Americans could achieve if given opportunities like the ones he found in France. Sometimes they exaggerated the news they heard about him; at other times, the news arrived already inflated. It was

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reported that he was enrolled in the Conservatory of Music in Paris. Better than that, some said Dédé won medals for his outstanding performances in the Conservatory competitions. Some claimed that he was the close friend of Charles Gounod, one of contemporary opera’s most popular composers. When word of his employment in Bordeaux crossed the Atlantic, his Creole compatriots boasted that New Orleans’s gifted son had become one of France’s most celebrated musicians. His personal life came in for discussion as well. Edmond Dédé did not marry an ordinary French girl “of a Caucasian family,” as a New Orleans newspaper described her to its readers. Rather, he married a daughter of one of France’s best families.8 To the end of his life, Creoles of color thought Dédé was so unusually accomplished for an American black man that they elevated what little they knew about his life in France to the level of drama. What his Creole compatriots were really doing was collating the reports about Dédé’s life into an index of their own hopes. Problems for the historian start with the realization that although the reports about his life were certainly exaggerated by his friends and admirers, some of the enhancements to his life story came from Dédé himself. And who can blame him? For those who seek to understand his opportunities and his choices within their historical context, the process of separating fact from wishful thinking awakens a sympathy for the man who risked all and mustered the resources to act on his dreams. To the free people of color in New Orleans who also dared to dream but for various real, palpable reasons were unable to escape, Dédé’s life was not simply a vindication. They thought he hit the jackpot. The enhancement of Edmond Dédé’s biography continued after his death in 1901. Over generations, Dédé’s admirers invested new meaning in his experiences after the foundering of the Marseille in 1893. Forty years after the disaster, the writer, musicologist, and civil rights advocate, Maude Cuney-Hare, author of an important survey of African American contributions to American music, Negro Musicians and Their Music, concluded her chapter on African American musical pioneers of the nineteenth century with a summary of Dédé’s career in France, in the course of which she mentioned the shipwreck and his subsequent visit to New Orleans. At the bottom of the two pages she devoted to the composer’s career and compositions, she appended a footnote to a footnote, visually and actually the last words of her chapter. Dédé was the owner of a valuable Cremona violin which was lost when he was shipwrecked.9

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Over the twentieth century, the few encyclopedia entries about Dédé, the two or three scholarly articles in which his career is discussed, the odd website devoted to him, and anyone who has had occasion to rehearse the details of Dédé’s life all relied on Maude Cuney-Hare’s biographical sketch. The few people who have sought to restore Dédé’s name and accomplishments to public memory saw reflected in the loss of his violin off the Bahama reef in 1893 the belief of African Americans that, contrary to promises made, the Union had shared so little of its vaunted liberty with them. But was his violin lost?

2 • A Family Long Free

In 1785, two years after the American colonies won their freedom from Britain, an African couple was in the process of acquiring theirs. Francisco Dédé, a free black man living in Spanish Louisiana, purchased the freedom of his thirty-four-year-old wife, Maria. In compensation for the loss of her labor, her master, Robert Montreuil, accepted the substantial sum of 800 pesos.1 Sixteen years later, in 1801, Dédé, who had himself once been the property of Montreuil, tried to buy the freedom of another slave for $800 from Francisca Carriere Montreuil, Robert’s widow.2 This time he sought the freedom of Juana, a thirty-six-year-old black slave, native to New Orleans. Unfortunately for Juana, the sale was voided when an official noticed that a free black man was a party to a legal document. By that time it was against the law for free men of African descent to enter into contracts.3 But at least Edmond Dédé’s great-grandparents, Francisco and Maria, managed to cross the border between the state of slavery and the free world. No family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dédé family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dédé, possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could some African American families trace their family’s history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Even fewer can claim that their family’s forebears had been free for three-quarters of a century by the time the Civil War began in 1861. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dédé was the son of West Indian refugees, he belongs instead to a family with roots in North America as old as the nation itself.4

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When the freedman Francisco Dédé and his newly freed wife Maria embarked on their new life, in 1785, New Orleans was little more than a reclaimed swamp, and it stayed that way for decades. It took more than half a century for New Orleans to grow into the bustling town that Francisco’s and Maria’s children and grandchildren would know. And late eighteenth-century New Orleans resembled still less the crowded metropolis that their great-grandson Edmond would abandon in the 1850s. The foundation for this anomalous city was laid during Francisco and Maria’s lifetimes, a span of decades during which slavery became the dominant form of labor along the Mississippi River in Spanish Louisiana, a territory encompassing all of the continental land mass to the west of the Mississippi and north of the borderlands between the United States and Mexico.5 New Orleans began as a French colonial outpost. Established in 1718 by French explorers on a crescent-shaped bend in the Mississippi River one hundred miles upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, the settlement functioned less like a town and more like a rustic military and commercial staging post, through which passed furs headed for European markets.6 Then, in 1769, six years after the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War between France and Britain, France ceded possession of Louisiana to Spain. Louis XV’s ministers realized that the territory gained in the course of that war was more than France could control or occupy. France relinquished its claim on the territory in North America in order to concentrate its forces and resources on its more profitable sugar-producing Caribbean islands. When New Orleans came under Spanish rule in 1769, it was a square grid of streets sloping away from the natural levee along the Mississippi riverbank. In this square—one day to be called the Vieux Carré (old square) by French Creoles, or the French Quarter by Americans—lived the town’s nearly fiftyfour hundred inhabitants. Settlers built one-story, wooden cottages whose steep pitched roofs ran parallel with the street. Few of these eighteenth-century Creole cottages survive today, but those that do lend New Orleans its characteristic look, which derives as much from Spanish as from French colonial architecture. Even nineteenth-century visitors noticed that the Creole cottages in the Vieux Carré resembled those in the French and Spanish Caribbean colonies.7 The residents of New Orleans built their houses and shops within the grid, and when they ran out of room, they expanded up- and downriver rather than back toward the swamps, marshes, and murky ground closer to Lake Pontchartrain. Close to the levee, the church dedicated to Saint Louis stood to one

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side of an open military parade ground, the Place d’Armes (the future Jackson Square). A devastating fire in 1788 reduced to ashes most of the city’s buildings, including the cathedral. Whether or not Francisco and Maria were among the 70 percent of the population who lost their homes, their lives were undoubtedly affected by the necessity of rebuilding New Orleans from the ground up.8 Francisco, a mason by trade, must have found opportunity for work. A new, bigger town under Spanish rule rose on the charred ruins. Not long after the rebuilding began, a café opened up on the corner of Chartres and St. Louis Streets—a hint of what was to come. Over the last decade of the eighteenth century, the number of white, black, and native residents crept up to eight thousand. Spanish merchants used the town as an entrepôt for the goods they sold in the continental interior. As they did in the days of French rule, flatboats brought furs from the upper Mississippi River valley and returned there with goods offloaded from ships arriving from the gulf. The river also served as a military highway. During the American War of Independence (1775–83), Spanish authorities allowed arms intended for the Continental Army to pass through this riverine back door.9 New Orleans’s economic future was linked from this time on to the passage of goods and people in and out of its port, and local agriculture played an increasing role in the city’s economy. In the 1770s and 1780s, Spanish authorities encouraged colonists to buy land upriver from New Orleans and grow tobacco and indigo. It was not long before the planters came to depend heavily on the labor of slaves, a dependence that intensified in 1789, when King Charles IV of Spain lifted the duties the planters had been paying on imported slaves.10 From then on, the number of slaves in Louisiana rose far faster than the number of white males settling in the territory. At the end of the century, half the population of New Orleans and its environs were people of color, the majority of them slaves. Prior to Spanish rule, people of African ancestry in French colonial New Orleans were either enslaved or freed. Neither position was in the least bit enviable. When France claimed Louisiana as its territory in 1724, colonial officials already had at their disposal a legal code, the Code Noir, compiled in 1685, that they adapted to the slave-owning society. The French colonial regimes in the Caribbean had been using for over a century the Code Noir, comprising fiftyfour statutes relating to the ownership and activities of slaves and free people of color, to regulate slave owning.11 The code’s first statute, which expelled all Jews from French colonial territory, set the racial tone for all that followed. From that first exclusion, the code went on to forbid “blacks”—meaning both

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enslaved and freed people—from adhering to any religion other than Roman Catholicism, carrying weapons, testifying against white people, and playing any role in public life. The Code Noir allowed, with some restrictions, sexual relations and marriages between Frenchmen and indigenous and African women. The code adapted for Louisiana in 1724 reflects the growing opposition of French officials to the liaisons, both formal and informal, between French colonists and women of African descent: intermarriage and concubinage were now prohibited. Furthermore, the language of the revised code indicates that slave status and African ancestry were synonymous. To be black was to be enslaved or formerly a slave. The Louisiana Code succeeded in ending marriages between Frenchmen and black and native women, but when it came to informal relations, the laws prohibiting concubinage reveal as much about what was happening in fact as what was deemed socially and legally acceptable. Although the stigma of engaging in sexual relationships with African women was strong, a few mixed-race people are recorded in the colony’s census.12 At the same time that the Louisiana Code outlawed sexual relations between Frenchmen and African women, it also determined when and under which conditions masters could manumit slaves. The two concerns were indeed related. The French Louisiana regime wanted to discourage owners from manumitting their slaves and thereby reduce the size of the free African and mixedrace community, whose members were likely to agitate for political rights. France’s colonies in the Caribbean—where the number of slaves would eventually surpass the number of white people—showed just how the potential for an alliance between a sizable community of politically aware free people of color and slaves could lead to compromises on political representation and even citizenship.13 On the pretext of depriving slaves of the motivation to steal money, the Louisiana Code made it very difficult for slaves to purchase their freedom. Slave owners had to apply to the colonial regime for permission to manumit a slave. Thus a master’s decision to free a slave depended not only on his or her own wish but on the willingness of the colonial authorities to accede to that wish. Once a slave obtained free status, the government supposedly granted “the same rights and privileges, and immunities which are enjoyed by free-born persons,” but in reality freed people of color were considered inferior to white French colonists. Re-enslavement was a persistent danger.14 By most measures, Louisiana’s free people of color fared better under Spanish rule than they had under French rule. Although sexual relations between whites and blacks continued to be illegal, the Spanish regime’s more liberal policy on manumission led to an increase in the number of freed people of

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color living and working alongside white residents.15 The planters themselves did not welcome these changes. They resented the Spanish crown’s interference in their preferred way of managing a slave society, which adhered to the old French policy of severely limiting the slaves’ pathways to freedom. However, the Spanish government drew on an ancient and well-tested set of laws that had served its purpose both in Iberia and in South America. The Siete Partitas, the thirteenth-century law code by which the eighteenth-century regime regulated slave owning in their colonies, provided for the practice of coartación. This practice allowed slaves to buy their freedom with or without the permission of their masters. Slaves could apply to the colonial governors for manumission after many years of service or for performing meritorious acts, without their owners’ approval. Contrary to the slave owners’ view, the colonial administration considered the existence of a small, prosperous free community of color to be in its best interest. It preferred to hold out the slight possibility of freedom as a way to undermine a potential sense of solidarity between slaves and freed people. In Spanish hands, manumission was a tool of slave management. The Spanish policy of coartación over the last two decades of the eighteenth century resulted in the manumission of approximately two thousand slaves, while over the same period the number of slaves reached nearly thirty thousand. With the creation of another couple of thousand ex-slaves, free people of color came to make up 15 percent of the total population of New Orleans at the end of Spanish rule in 1801.16 Francisco and Maria Dédé were among the lucky ones who gained their freedom. Like other freed people of color, they worked for wages and farmed their food. When they made a profit from their endeavors, they invested it in real estate. This generation’s prosperity formed the foundation on which subsequent generations built their own, in spite of the deterioration of black people’s status under American rule. In retrospect, the passage of the Louisiana Territory from French to Spanish rule, back briefly to the French, and then finally to the Americans reinforced certain trends in the population already evident at the beginning of the nineteenth century. New Orleans was attracting a growing number of migrants from the northern states, Europe, and the Caribbean islands, especially from the French colony of Saint-Domingue. The people who came to the city tended to settle together in their own areas of the city. Linguistic differences buttressed the emerging residential patterns. The result of these demographic trends was the emergence of rivalries that were economic and political in nature and cultural in expression. Two cultural blocs took shape: Spanish and French

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Creole families gathered in one part of the city, and Anglo-Scottish-IrishAmerican traders from the North settled in another. The arrival of refugees from the war in Saint-Domingue during the first decade of the nineteenth century reinforced the French Creole culture of New Orleans while the economic opportunities that drew migrants from Western Europe and the northern United States complicated the landscape of New Orleans even more so. These migrations and their after-effects would directly touch each generation of the Dédé family. With their promise of liberty, the American and French Revolutions raised expectations on both sides of the Atlantic that one day all might become fully enfranchised citizens of their native or adopted homelands. In the long run, those expectations were disappointed. Once the American colonists won their independence in 1783, they balked at abolishing slavery and scarcely considered extending the franchise to women. Six years later, the revolutionaries who overthrew the Bourbon monarchy proposed in the new National Assembly the issue of abolishing slavery in the French colonies. They faced strong opposition from within their own ranks. Yet despite the opposition of politicians who owned plantations, the National Assembly abolished slavery in 1794, only to see Napoleon Bonaparte reinstate it several years later. It took another, later French revolution, that of 1848, to end it definitively in all French territory. If the American and French upheavals are representative of revolutions in general, it would seem that their nature is to satisfy the ambitions of a few but leave most people with a sense of unfulfilled promise. One group of people, the slaves of Saint-Domingue, decided that they would not be thwarted in their aspirations. On the eve of their revolt, which sent shock waves around the Atlantic world, nearly half a million African slaves, most living and working in harsh conditions on sugarcane plantations, inhabited the French colony on the western half of the island of Hispaniola.17 Those wretched slaves, toiling in the especially brutal conditions of sugar refineries, did not wait for revolutionary rhetoric and example to start their journey to freedom, but the events in France bolstered the slaves’ cause in the minds of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. In August 1791, groups of slaves in the northern province of Saint-Domingue attacked sugar plantations, destroyed machinery, and slaughtered planter families. Six months later, the bands of marauding slaves had transformed themselves into trained contingents, forming an army of fifteen thousand slaves who had freed themselves. The French government grasped the uprising’s po-

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tential. So, too, did the colony’s administrators, the planters, the merchants, the shopkeepers, the free people of color, and, lastly but certainly not least, the other slaves in the colony. Reactions to the revolt, however, differed. The wealthy white planters, even the ones who supported political reform in France, preferred the model of the former British colonies of North America, whose successful movement for independence did not lead to the abolition of slavery.18 Saint-Domingue’s free population of color felt their economic interests threatened by the revolt. They tried to forge an alliance with the white planters, but their efforts were spurned. The governments of the United States, Britain, and Spain saw in the Saint-Domingue revolt a far more radical overturning of the old order than the Americans, the British, or the French had achieved or desired in their revolutions. What began as a slave revolt turned into a long war between the armies of self-freed slaves, on one side, and, at various times, French forces, the Spanish army, and British troops, on the other. The British and the Spanish sought to take the colony for themselves. The leaders of the revolutionary armies played the Spanish off the British and both against the French. So seriously did Britain and Spain compromise France’s efforts to reclaim Saint-Domingue at any price that the revolutionary government in Paris abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1794, in a gambit to win the loyalty of the ex-slaves’ armies. The chief leader of the armies at that point was a former slave, Toussaint, who around that time adopted his nickname, “L’Ouverture” (the Opening), as his last name. The National Assembly’s abolition of slavery (and the desire for the return of his sons, who were being held hostage in France under the guise of being educated) prompted Toussaint, who had been colluding with the Spanish and the British, to switch his loyalty to France.19 With the French momentarily neutralized, Toussaint faced the challenge of unifying under his leadership the ex-slave armies, whose loyalties were divided among himself, the Spanish, and personal allegiance to the other ex-slave military leaders. At the same time, Toussaint also took a political risk by compelling ex-slaves to return to work on the sugar plantations, in an effort to rebuild the shattered economy. Not everyone saw it that way. Some supporters accused him of trying to subjugate anew the former slaves. Others in the revolutionary government in France viewed him as a man intent on becoming absolute master of the colony. The war over Saint-Domingue had been going on for a decade when Napoleon Bonaparte appointed himself First Consul in 1799. The new First Consul decided to make an all-out effort to end the conflict so that he could turn his attention to other expansionist projects. He placed his brother-in-law General

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Charles Victoire Emmanuel Leclerc at the head of a large expeditionary force with instructions to remove Toussaint from power and defeat the rebel armies. Leclerc and his expeditionary force succeeded in the former but failed in the latter. Neither Leclerc’s forces nor the rebel armies were able to gain a decisive military advantage. Subterfuge seemed to be the only way for Leclerc to achieve his purpose. In late spring 1802 a few of Leclerc’s senior officers put into action a ruse to lure Toussaint into a parley. The simple scheme worked. The former slave known to Haitians as “the Liberator” was captured and swiftly deported to France. Accompanying Toussaint into exile were his wife, Suzanne Baptiste, and his sons, Placide, Isaac, and St. Jean. Also with them was Toussaint’s nineteen-year-old niece, Louise Chancy, whom Edmond Dédé would come to know years later as Madame Isaac Louverture. Meanwhile, barely six months after Toussaint’s capture, Leclerc and the majority of his troops died of fever. The French army’s position deteriorated so disastrously that Napoleon Bonaparte relinquished any hope of expanding French imperial power in the Americas. He withdrew the remainder of his forces from Saint-Domingue and started negotiations for the sale of Louisiana to the Americans. On January 1, 1804, Haiti declared its independence. General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, one of the revolt’s military leaders, claimed the title “emperor-for-life.” The last remaining planters and merchants fled the island or were killed. The dispersal of white and mixed-race Saint-Dominguans, many accompanied by slaves, was nearly complete. Over the decadelong war, tens of thousands of refugees moved from port to port before finally settling, scattershot, along the coasts of the Atlantic. In time, the war in Saint-Domingue had great consequences for Louisiana. For reasons similar to those that drove France to relinquish its possession of the Mississippi River valley in 1763, Spain decided that Louisiana and New Orleans were less vital to its interests than its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Governing the territory had drained Spain’s resources to such an extent that the king and his ministers secretly ceded Spain’s claim to the territory back to France in 1801, while Napoleon Bonaparte was still dreaming of a French empire in the Western Hemisphere. The quickly worsening situation in Saint-Domingue punctured that balloon. Leclerc’s defeat in late 1803 led the man who would crown himself emperor in 1804 to cut his losses and sell the vast Louisiana Territory to the Americans. With the acquisition of Louisiana, the United States increased its size by 830,000 square miles of land, most of it occupied by native peoples and families from the newly independent United States or from Europe.20 Once the territory came

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under U.S. rule, the pace of Americans migrating south to Louisiana picked up. This change of government did not bode well in the long run for people of color like Francisco and Maria Dédé and their children. To judge by their children’s endeavors, Francisco and Maria were able to give their offspring a good start in life once Louisiana came into the possession of the United States. From this freed husband and wife descended the two paternal lines that retained the Dédé name. We are interested in their son Basile, the grandfather of Edmond Dédé. Basile turns up in the public record more often than his siblings for one simple reason: humble, law-abiding people are easily forgotten, if they have bought no property and obeyed the law. The public record has little space for law-abiding people. Folk who repeatedly try to evade the law avoid oblivion more easily because they provoke legal suits and court cases, into whose records their names are inscribed for posterity. Basile was the sort of man whose name was pronounced in the courts on more than one occasion. Although he made his principal living as a bricklayer, he seems to have been a bit of a schemer. In the year 1806, Basile ran into difficulties with the law. One man accused him of attempting to repay a debt of $173 with counterfeit bills. Another took him to court after Basile denied that he owed him $300.21 The most serious charge laid against him came from a livery operator, Caleb Fowler, who had rented to Basile a carriage and pair of horses. Fowler sued Basile for having driven the carriage, at break-neck speed and laden with timber, well beyond the mutually agreed distance and far beyond the endurance of the rented horses. One poor beast, the stable owner claimed, was as good as dead.22 Fowler claimed $1,000 in damages, a large sum that Basile was very unlikely to have possessed. Clapped in jail, Basile evidently soon broke out and escaped detection for a few years. Occasionally using an alias, “Basile Françoise,” he worked as a mason in nearby St. Tammany parish, an indication of how even in a society as small as colonial New Orleans a person’s official identity could easily come unmoored from his or her person.23 Four years later in 1810, a grand jury declined to issue a bill of indictment against him for escaping from jail.24 We can only hope that he put his troubles with the law behind him after that. Basile did not weather his years of legal troubles alone. In 1804, he married Maria de la Encarnacion, or, as she was later known in her adopted city of New Orleans, Marie Incarnación. Basile’s new wife, their marriage record tells us, was born out of wedlock to a free black mother and an unknown father in Havana, Cuba, in 1785. It may seem odd that Marie Incarnación would leave a more cosmopolitan Spanish colony with a robust economy and come to a rustic

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settlement like New Orleans. But considered in the light of revolutionary events taking place in France, the British colonies of North American, and the Caribbean, her migration makes better sense. Thousands of people were dislodged from their homes in the 1780s and 1790s. Maria and her mother were merely two passengers in a mass transit in search of liberty. In New Orleans, Maria and her husband Basile settled on the Bayou Road (today’s Esplanade Avenue), in the section of town that would become Faubourg Treme.25 In its first years under the authority of the United States, New Orleans was starting to feel like a boom town. Between 1791 and 1803—years which coincided with the war in Saint-Domingue—the population of the city of New Orleans rose from 5,000 to a little more than 8,000. Over the subsequent six years, the rate of growth was even faster. By 1809, the population of the city of New Orleans and its surrounding territory had jumped to 24,500.26 The number of Anglo-Americans in Louisiana was clearly heading toward a majority. The American War for Independence had created a slow exodus from the colonies and, later, from the United States of those loyal to the British crown. In the 1790s, the French Revolution and its turbulent aftermath created another stream of émigrés seeking safe havens in the Atlantic world.27 Many of these migrants chose the port of New Orleans as a point of departure for other places in the gulf region or the continental interior. Some French émigrés saw better opportunities in Spanish Louisiana than in the well-established Caribbean French colonies. From the north, American merchants saw trading opportunities in the town itself. This group of migrants came gradually and singly down the river to set up business there. Some of them, not content with having challenged the authority of one monarch, moved into Louisiana while it still belonged to Spain with the idea of undermining another. The American settlers’ encroachments grew aggressive—pushing Indian villages off land they wanted to settle—and the Spanish response was obdurate. The Spanish colonial authorities closed the Mississippi River to nonSpanish boat traffic. The tensions in the Mississippi Valley grew to the point that, by 1790, the governments of the United States and Spain found they were dealing not with a collection of rowdy migrants but with secessionists who wanted nothing to do with either power.28 The Spanish regime eventually granted permission to Americans to settle in Louisiana. The majority of those Americans who came to the territory were considered white by the Louisiana authorities. Their other noticeable feature was that they kept coming. With people pouring in from the north, New Orleans acquired the features of a frontier town. In 1808, a traveler from New Jersey, who admired the

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architecture of the houses and public buildings, nevertheless noted the city’s rough character and economic dependence on the northern states. “New Orleans, of late years,” he wrote, “has been thriving astonishingly. Emigrants from all parts of the United States, are constantly roving the western and southern country, and naturally descend to New-Orleans. . . . This city is wholly dependent on the upper states, namely, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, for their produce, which is corn-meal, flour, beef, pork, butter, potatoes, apples, cider, whiskey, etc. etc. . . . In their dress they prefer the rugged leggings and huntingshirt, of a ground colour, trimmed with yellow. With this suit and their rifle, they feel always perfectly at home.”29 While Anglo-Scottish migrants flowed downriver in the 1790s, small groups of migrants began to arrive from a southeasterly direction. But unlike the Americans from the North, who came to Louisiana to enrich themselves, these newcomers had their sights set on safety. They were refugees from the revolution taking place in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Between May 1809 and March 1810, five years after the Louisiana Purchase and the birth of Haiti, over ten thousand refugees originally from Saint-Domingue arrived in the Mississippi delta below New Orleans on thirty ships. In the 1790s, during early stages of the Saint-Domingue revolt, only a few white planter families from Saint-Domingue fled to Louisiana. New Orleans did not have much to recommend it in those years, compared with other, relatively more cosmopolitan cities along the eastern coast of the United States, like Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. Small Saint-Domingue communities took root in those cities farther north.30 The refugees who came to New Orleans enjoyed the advantages of being in the only city in the United States where the French language was as prevalent as English. They overlooked the mud, the fetid air, and buckskin clothing worn by many of the men. New Orleans’s climate, too, would have felt familiar to them. If they were optimistic, they might have focused on the goods piled on the wharf, the new residences on the upand downriver edges of the city, and the proliferation of boardinghouses—all signs of greater prosperity to come. As the first decade of the nineteenth century progressed, more refugees turned up in Louisiana, especially after the transfer of Louisiana to U.S. control in 1803 and the declaration of independence by the new nation of Haiti. Ships also brought Saint-Domingue refugees from British-ruled Jamaica, where they had sought temporary shelter.31 The unexpected mass of white, mixed-race, and black refugees who arrived in Louisiana in May 1809, six years after the Haitian Revolution had ended, came from Cuba. They had settled at the eastern end of the island, in the

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coastal towns of Santiago and Baracoa, a mere two hundred miles from the coastline of their former home. Bonaparte’s invasion of Spain in 1807 made them the objects of the Spanish authorities’ suspicion. When the rebellion in Spain against the Bonapartist occupation turned into a full-fledged war, with Spain and England allied on one side, and France on the other, the Spanish colonial governor of Cuba decided that the French refugees from SaintDomingue were a threat to the island’s security. In early spring 1809 he expelled the Saint-Dominguan families, many of whom had purchased property.32 For the remainder of the year, ship after ship, loaded with families, as many of their possessions as they could carry, and their slaves, sailed from Cuban ports in search of new homes. Most of them sailed to Louisiana. Receiving word that the refugees were on their way, committees of concerned New Orleans citizens organized benefits to prepare blankets and clothing, raise funds, and set up tables in the fish market where the impending immigrants would register their presence in the territory.33 When the first ships arrived, Louisiana’s political authorities prevented the Saint-Dominguan refugees from disembarking until they had immigration procedures in place. They had two problems to resolve. The first concerned the slaves who accompanied their masters. According to a recently enacted ban on importing slaves from outside U.S. borders, the refugees could not bring their slaves with them. The governor of Louisiana at the time, W. C. C. Claiborne, was on the side of the slave owners. He applied to the Congress in Washington, D.C., for exemptions to the ban “on humanitarian grounds,” which in swift course were received.34 The governor was nevertheless distrustful of those slaves, whom he feared had been contaminated by the virus of revolt. He therefore demanded that slave owners post bonds for any slave they brought into the territory.35 The second problem Claiborne faced was what to do with the free people of color who sought entry. Of the ten thousand total, around thirteen hundred were judged to be free people of color.36 The authorities set the bar high when it came to proving free status, demanding from those in whose complexion they detected African ancestry proof that they were free. This meant that for some of the people leaving Cuba, sailing to Louisiana posed a danger of enslavement. They had already faced this threat in Cuba. During the initial transfer from Saint-Domingue to Cuba, people who fled the island without papers documenting their identity and legal status ran the high risk of being enslaved by the colonial authorities in Cuba. In most cases, the refugees who had papers, mostly mixed-race women, preserved their free status. Relocating yet

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again, this time from Cuba to Louisiana, started the nightmarish process all over again. Still, it must have come as a shock to the refugees waiting on the ships in the Mississippi delta to learn that their free status might not transfer reliably across national borders. Many had lost whatever personal identity documents they had had. Without documentation—in some cases, even with documentation—people who had secured their freedom in Cuba lost it in the United States. When the refugees stepped off the boats that brought them from the ships moored at Fort Plaquemines, as Rebecca Scott and Jean Hébrard delicately put it, “2,731 people who in the context of New Orleans in 1809 could convincingly portray themselves as white” were allowed to register at the tables set up in the fish market. Thanks to the congressional exemptions, white refugees were allowed to bring into Louisiana 3,226 people they claimed were their slaves. In addition, 1,377 women, 428 men, and 1,297 children under the age of fifteen, deemed by Louisiana authorities as mixed race or black, “managed to persuade those around them that they were free.”37 From that time on, free women of color far outnumbered the men in their community until the Civil War.38 Whatever their ancestry, the people from Saint-Domingue found in New Orleans a society far more sensitive to cultural and racial difference than their island colonial one had been. Broadly speaking, the ethnically, racially, and linguistically diverse population gradually divided themselves into two major cultural blocs, the “French Creole” and the “American.” The white French Creoles had the prestige; their Anglo neighbors from the north had the money. People of European descent turned the racial prism through which they viewed those of African descent on themselves and saw two broadly defined types, the “Latins” and the “Anglo-Saxons.” In their solipsistic view of their world, they obscured almost completely the presence of native peoples and all other nonEuropean migrants. The English-speaking Anglo-Americans and the Frenchspeaking Creoles, the latter buttressed by the Saint-Dominguan cohort, jostled against each other for social, economic, and cultural dominance and cast their grievances against one another in ethnic terms. Geographically, the two blocs arrayed themselves on either side of New Orleans’s main artery, Canal Street: French Creoles lived on its downriver side in the Vieux Carré, and the AngloAmericans resided upriver in the commercial district and the former city of Lafayette. Woven into the tensions between the different communities, particularly between the French Creoles and the Americans and between the West Indian families and the families of longer standing in New Orleans, were class concerns and competition for status. Edmond Dédé came from a family that

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occupied one of the lowest rungs of free society in the city. That background will make him stand out among the exiles of color in his adopted city of Bordeaux, where he will make acquaintances that he would not have made on the other side of the Atlantic. Visitors to the city took their cues from their hosts. In 1806, while the city’s French and Spanish colonial past was still very recent, an Englishman visiting New Orleans perceived French and Spanish residents to one side and Americans on the other: “The religion is Roman Catholic: that is, the religion of the French and Spanish is Catholic: as for the Americans they have none. They disregard the Sabbath entirely; or, if they go to the Catholic church, there not being any other, they go as to a spectacle, where fine women are to be seen, and where fine music is to be heard!”39 The impiety he attributed to the Americans spilled over into commerce. The influx of American speculators was so great in the first instance, that the character of commerce instantaneously changed, and violence and competition, which in America means contention, reigned triumphantly abroad. . . . The trade of the city is conducted, for the most part, by four classes of men. Virginians and Kentuckyans reign over the brokerage and commission business; the Scotch and Irish absorb all the respectable commerce of exportation and importation; the French keep magazines and stores; and the Spaniards do all the small retail of grocers’ shops, cabants [café?], and lowest order of drinking-house. People of colour, and free negroes, also keep inferior shops and sell goods and fruits.40 Clearly, in the years immediately before the refugees arrived, New Orleans was still the kind of settlement where frontiersmen like the famous Daniel Boone would have felt at home. It was not, however, the sort of place that inspired the cosmopolitan planters to feel similarly. When the ships from Cuba turned up in the delta, the ten thousand white, black, and mixed-race francophone Roman Catholic refugees from Saint-Domingue via Cuba at first seemed to smother New Orleans like French perfume. They more than doubled the city’s population. Each of the officially recognized racial groups— slaves, free people of color, and whites—increased in more or less equal proportion. The French Creole/Anglo-American dichotomy was strengthened, but in real economic terms, the Anglo-Americans were on the ascendant. That was not yet apparent when the Saint-Dominguans arrived. The West Indian families, whether white, black, or mixed race, found the low level of culture in New Orleans discouraging. Before their arrival, New

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Orleans had few schools, no newspaper, and a provisional, slap-dash theater.41 Only two public buildings had been built by 1806—the church that would later be consecrated a cathedral and the town hall (cabildo). Apart from a military hospital and a poorhouse, city services were practically nonexistent. The one establishment New Orleans could boast it had in abundance, the tavern, or tippling house as it was called at the time, added little burnish to the river port’s faint luster except among the rowdiest elements of the population.42 The Saint-Domingue refugees spoke a French dialect, as did the majority of the Creole residents of New Orleans. There the common ground ended. They made political alliances with their fellow francophones but French Creole fathers tended not to marry their sons to the daughters of Saint-Domingue immigrants.43 That clannishness had much to do with the reality that the Caribbean newcomers, regardless of race, were better educated and had higher standards for refinement and gentility than did the town’s longer-settled residents. In addition to the slave-owning planters and their families, among the new arrivals were white and mixed-race teachers, newspaper editors, musicians, artisans, and theatrical and musical impresarios, as well as merchants and artisans. To make their exile more bearable, the refugees got right down to the business of shaping—in their minds, raising—the cultural standards of their new city. Their aim was to refashion the urban landscape until it resembled their former home. Very quickly the more theatrical and entrepreneurial among them turned the makeshift theater into a permanent structure. Another refugee set up the city’s first newspaper. Thereafter, Saint-Dominguan refugees bankrolled the building of bigger theaters, new opera houses, and schools. Their imprint on the city was permanent. Their political preeminence in the city was not. For the next half century, three topics preoccupied nearly everyone who published an account of his or her visit to New Orleans: the evils of slavery, the debilitating climate, and the animosity between the French Creoles and the Anglo-Americans. When she arrived in New Orleans in 1834, the well-known English author Harriet Martineau noticed that polite society was distinctly rude. “The division between the American and French factions is visible even in the drawing room. The French complain that the Americans will not speak French, will not meet their neighbours even half way in accommodation of speech. The Americans ridicule the toilette practices of the French ladies,— their liberal use of rouge and pearl powder.”44 The Saint-Domingue refugees turned up in New Orleans at just the right moment to slow down the cultural influence of the American migrants from

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the north. If they had not arrived when they did, the built environment of New Orleans and its culture would look no more characteristically colonial than Charleston and Boston do today. The influx in 1809 of francophone, Roman Catholic refugees from the Caribbean had the effect of slowing New Orleans’s inexorable slide into near-complete Anglo-Americanization, a process begun on the flatboats carrying Anglo-American settlers down the Mississippi Valley in the 1790s. Starting in the 1830s, the Anglo-Americans were aided in their efforts to sideline the French Creoles by another, bigger wave of immigrants. Whereas the influx in 1809 boosted the cultural ascendency of the French Creoles, this one counteracted it. Between 1820 and 1860, over two hundred thousand indigent and unskilled migrants from Ireland and Germany arrived by ship in New Orleans. The Irish settled near where the New Basin Canal emptied into the Mississippi, an area that acquired the name “the Irish Channel” later in the century. Many of the German families congregated into an area bordering Felicity Street, amid the Anglo-Americans, on the city’s limits. The immigrants from France crowded into the old center of town, where the old French Creole families were concentrated, making the oldest part of the city also the most densely populated. Poor immigrants who could not find or afford lodgings in the French or American districts crossed the Bayou Road (today Esplanade Avenue) into the Third Municipality and the Faubourg Marigny. Every European country seemed to be represented by a large delegation in New Orleans. A New Yorker visiting in the late 1840s wryly observed that should anyone wish to convene a congress of the world’s nations, they would save a great deal of money by holding it in New Orleans, where the would-be delegates were already assembled. Less charitably, he called the river port the “the Calcutta of America.”45 New Orleans now measured about a mile along the eastern bank of the Mississippi and barely half a mile wide from the levee sloping downward toward the swamp and Lake Pontchartrain behind. As the decades passed, the AngloAmericans and the French Creoles continued to plant their flags in different parts of the city. French Creoles of European and African descent were still concentrated in the Vieux Carré. The well-to-do among them lived in the old and characteristic colonial one-story cottages and shotgun houses, but, increasingly, they built multistoried Greek Revival townhouses, with yellow or white painted stucco covering their brickwork.46 Their residences lined the streets surrounding the Place d’Armes, where the ceremony marking the transfer to U.S. authority had taken place in December 1803.47 Behind the Vieux Carré, in the area perennially known as “back of town,” lived humble,

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free French-speaking Creoles of color in simpler versions of the well-to-do Creole cottages and shotgun houses. White and black French Creoles directed their commercial energies toward shop keeping, artisanal trades, and real estate speculation. On the upriver side of Canal Street—still the demarcation line between “French” and “American” New Orleans—the Anglo-Americans lived and worked. The houses they built in the 1830s and 1840s were made of wood or stucco. More spacious than the cottages and townhouses in the French district, the larger lots allowed for bigger households, gardens, stables, kitchens, and slaves’ quarters. Closer to Canal Street, the commercial district was dominated by Anglo-American brokerage firms that handled the distribution of goods, like tobacco, indigo, and the newly emergent cash crop, cotton produced on plantations across the South. Anglo-American brokerage businesses became vital to the economic health of the city and helped the American merchants wield considerable clout in municipal government. In their view, their commercial interests and the city’s were identical. African Americans lived in circumstances parallel but by no means equal to those of the European communities. Before the Saint-Domingue refugees came to New Orleans, English-speaking people of African descent tended overwhelmingly to be enslaved. In contrast, the majority of the French-speaking black and mixed-race population, like the Dédé family, were free. The thirteen hundred or so free refugees of color from Saint-Domingue only reinforced this distinction; after they were admitted, they made the free community of color, on the whole, lighter in complexion, solidly French, and more economically diverse. Reflecting the group as a whole, the refugees of color tended to be better educated and had more skills than the free people of color already in the city. Caribbean mixed-race women, outnumbering the male refugees of color by more than two to one, set up business as seamstresses, boardinghouse keepers, and teachers. Among the four hundred or so mixed-race refugee men were teachers, tailors, architects, and cabinetmakers.48 They opened grocery stores, novelty shops, and custom-made clothing stores. With their profits, they entered the real estate market. A few of them succeeded so well that they became wealthy even by the standards of the white community. By mid-century, the value of the property owned by the wealthiest free people of color topped $2 million. Poor people of color, however, far outnumbered the wealthy. Until the late 1830s, when European immigrants began to take their place, unskilled black men and women performed the most menial labor. At the wharf, they did heavy lifting. They swept the streets, hawked

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wares, served grog in taverns, and scrubbed and cooked as domestic servants. Market women, wearing scarves tied round their heads, spread blankets on the ground and laid out the fruit and vegetables they grew. The poverty of the majority notwithstanding, these working free people of color made up the most prosperous free community of color in the United States.49 One of the most revealing, albeit offensive, descriptions of the complexity of New Orleans society at mid-century appears in Frederick Law Olmsted’s account of his tour through the slave states, published in 1854. Olmsted, who was opposed to slavery, reprinted a short article from the New Orleans Crescent to show the challenges slave owners faced in a city that counted a large number of free people of color among its inhabitants. In the following extract, which Olmsted reproduced at length in his account, we have to look past the ugly phrasing without condoning its racist language, to glimpse a neighborhood in New Orleans that people of color clearly felt was theirs. “Guinea-like—Passing along Baronne street, between Perdido and Poydras streets, any Sunday afternoon, the white passer-by might easily suppose himself in Guinea, Caffraría, or any other thickly-peopled region in the land of Ham. Where the darkies all come from, what they do there, or where they go to, constitute a problem somewhat beyond our algebra. It seems to be a sort of nigger exchange. We know there are in the vicinity a coloured church, coloured ice-cream saloon, coloured restaurant, coloured coffee-houses, and a coloured barber-shop, which, we have heard say, has a back communication with one of the groggeries, for the benefit of slaves; but as the police haven’t found it out yet, we suppose it ain’t so. However, if the ebony dandies who attend Sunday evening ’change, would keep within their various retreats, or leave a path about three feet wide on the side-walk, for the free passage of people who are so unlucky as to be white, we wouldn’t complain; but to have to elbow one’s way through a crowd of woolly-heads on such a day as yesterday, their natural muskiness made more villainous by the fumes of whisky, is too much for delicate olfactories like ours. A fight, last evening, between two white men at one of the groggeries, afforded much edification to the darkies standing around, and seemed to confirm them in their opinion, that white folks, after all, ain’t much.”50 The African Americans described here acted as if they were in charge of a particular bit of turf. What makes this extract especially revealing is that Olmsted visited New Orleans in the early 1850s, when the conditions and legal

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standing of African Americans, both enslaved and free, were at their worst. If the writer of this newspaper item is to be believed—and why not?—in this neighborhood free people of color did not step off the banquette to allow white people to pass. They had their own shops and places to socialize in public. They derided in public the behavior of white drunks. The old territorial law of 1806 that required free people of color never to “conceive themselves equal” to whites seems to have been forgotten on Baronne Street fifty years later.51 On the other side of Canal Street, deep in the French Quarter, the area around the intersection of Bourbon and Orleans Streets was known to be one of the most integrated in the city, where white and black families reportedly lived in easy proximity of one another.52 As we will see in chapter 3, the majority of the city’s musicians lived in that area. Olmsted’s account shows that African Americans were intricately woven into the social fabric of the city. Meanwhile, the city kept growing. According to the federal census, the population of New Orleans rose to forty-six thousand by 1830. The steamboats that now crowded the mile-long levee made a strong impression on first-time visitors, like a young Englishman who visited the city at the start of the decade. “There are sometimes 1500 flat boats lying at the sides of the levee at a time, and frequently at the same moment 5000 or 6000 boatmen. Steamboats are arriving every hour. I have seen fifty steam-boats at one point.”53 At the end of that decade, in 1839, a twelve-year-old newly freed African American boy, James Thomas, saw New Orleans for the first time from the deck of a paddlewheel steamer heading down the Mississippi from Nashville. Many years later, when writing an account of his travels around the United States, he remembered feeling awe at the sight of the “wilderness of masts” along the levee. On shore, after climbing over freight piled on the levee, he got his first glimpse of New Orleans and quickly realized that he was in a unique American city. The street signs with names derived from Native American languages confused him. Their pronunciation confused him more. He called the distinctive architecture “Spanish.” He wrote, “The pretty little French shops were the delight of the rustics. Those old Spanish houses with their tile roofs and the air of neatness observable everywhere, with the neatly dressed people. More French spoken than English. New Orleans still retained much of the old Spanish air, was strongly impregnated with French, and caused it to be unlike any other city in the United States and a most desirable place to visit.”54 Not everyone appreciated the vestiges of the French and Spanish periods. The English-speaking migrants who continued to arrive from the northern states looked askance at what they viewed as a moribund civilization. In return,

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the French Creoles had little regard for what they viewed as crass Yankee touches the northerners contributed to the city’s culture. In economic terms, the city was now second only to New York in port activity. As the proprietors of most of the cotton and tobacco brokerage firms, Anglo-Americans held the strings that tied the Louisiana economy to domestic and foreign markets. They brought business to New Orleans and amassed fortunes, which exacerbated relations with the established French Creole families, whose businesses tended not to make much money. The white Anglo-Americans and the white French Creoles were growing heartily sick of each other. Foreshadowing a far more traumatic secession a quarter-century later, the American, French Creole, and working-poor districts of New Orleans seceded from one another in 1836, forming three autonomous municipalities. The French, including many free people of color, occupied the First Municipality; the Anglo-Americans the Second; and free black families and poor European immigrants congregated in the Third. These three municipalities, drawing on unequal tax bases, competed for previously shared municipal resources for sixteen years. It took city leaders that long to figure out that the experiment was not working. In contrast to the effort it took to reunite the greater Union only thirteen years later, New Orleans’s three municipalities were reunited peacefully in 1852. The newly reconstituted municipal government took advantage of the reunification process to redraw and renumber the districts to better reflect the city’s demographic changes. Now the numbering of the municipalities and wards started upriver and proceeded down. The Anglo-American residential and commercial sector, incorporating the formerly independent town of Lafayette, became the First Municipality. In the Second (formerly the First), the French Creoles now had a growing number of Anglo-American neighbors who chose not to live in the traditional Anglo-American district. From this point on, the French Creoles ceased to exercise significant political power in the rest of the city. And everyone else—poor free blacks, working-poor European immigrants—lived downriver in the area that still made up the Third Municipality. In the swap of the First for the Second and the Second for the First, the new districting merely reflected new demographic realities (fig. 1). The Anglo-Americans and French Creoles were no more reconciled to each another after reunification than they had been before.55 Indeed, tensions that were economic and racial in their nature divided the city population along several axes. White French Creole men managed their shops, worked as notaries, and occasionally did business in the American sector, but their families

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Figure 1. “New Orleans, L.A. Showing Area Built in 1841.” From Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, compiled by George E. Waring, Jr., United States. Census Office, Part II, 1886. (Courtesy of University of Texas at Austin, Perry-Castañeda Library, Map Collection)

married into other French Creole families and created networks of relatives within whose circles they socialized. Anglo-American families did likewise in the rapidly expanding residential neighborhoods uptown. Poor European immigrant groups clustered in pockets throughout the city, but especially back of town. The free community of color, too, was divided economically and culturally, and mixed-race descendants of Saint-Domingue refugees still preferred their own company to that of free families of color with a longer history in New Orleans. All free families of color felt culturally attuned to the French Creoles, but the sympathy was not reciprocated. Both groups put as much daylight as possible between themselves and the over eighteen thousand slaves. Even if the free men and women of color were proud of their African ancestry, they adhered in practice to the white population’s standards of upward social mobility and looked down on their enslaved and poor dark-skinned brethren. Racism and slavery are embedded in New Orleans’s built environment. Today, throughout the city of New Orleans, but especially in the French Quarter where the Creole cottages, shotgun houses, and Greek Revival townhouses

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survive, visitors can see where white families lived with their black slaves, usually lodged behind the main house in the buildings that also housed their kitchens. A visitor can walk around the French Quarter, the Garden District, and neighborhoods farther uptown and see narrow two-story structures behind the main houses. Many have been converted into apartments, bed-and-breakfasts, guest houses, or garages. Slaves once lived in those structures. A walk through the French Quarter and across Ramparts Street into Treme will reveal in old houses the evidence of the squalor and poverty in which many free people of color lived. In the same quarter, graceful mansions, like the one at the corner of Governor Nicholls and Villere Streets, retain remnants of slave quarters behind them, a reminder that some wealthy people of color also owned slaves. Back in the Quarter, at the corner of Chartres Street and Esplanade Avenue, with a little bit of invention a pedestrian can imagine on one of those corners a building that functioned as a holding pen for slaves prior to their sale at auction. In the same period, just around the corner stood a grocery store, whose proprietor was a man of color.56 Then as now, New Orleans neighborhoods were mixed, so that poor white families might live down the street from a well-to-do free family of color, or a mixed-race woman in her own home might live only a block from a well-to-do and prominent white Creole family.57 Farther downriver free people of color lived next door to recently arrived European immigrants. In the uptown American district, there were so few free African Americans that white residents assumed every person of color they saw in their neighborhood was a slave. In the Exchange building in the Anglo-American commercial center off Canal Street, slave auctions took place daily. Thomas Hamilton, a Scotsman visiting there in the late 1820s, found the auctions distasteful, particularly when female slaves came on the block. The auctioneer, he sniffed, “usually puts his audience in good humor by a few indecent jokes.”58 What did families of color like Francisco and Marie Dédé and their children make of the changes in their city occasioned by the influx of refugees from the north and the Caribbean? At first the community responded willingly to the appeals for aid issued by New Orleans’s mayor. People raised funds and volunteered aid to weary migrants. Later, in the same way that the white French Creoles came to resent the predominance of the Anglo-Americans, the Creoles of color came to regret that the refugees, their slaves, and the free people of color from Saint-Domingue served as pretexts for harsher laws regulating the movement and civic capacities of all people of African descent. City leaders, viewing people of color from the West Indies as potential troublemakers, fomenters of rebellion, and disseminators of revolutionary ideas,

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took steps to lessen the danger. Moreover, the growing but relative prosperity of the free community of color worried city leaders. In fact, the number of laws restricting the movements of free people of color had increased since 1803, when Louisiana joined the Union. Even before the influx of 1809, at the first session of the territorial legislature in 1806, legislators passed a law requiring free people of color from “Hispaniola,” the name of the island today comprising Haiti and the Dominican Republic, to produce witnesses who would attest to their free status. Failing that, they would be “considered a fugitive slave, and employed at the public works until they shall prove their freedom, or be claimed by their owner by virtue of good titles, in which last case they shall be given up to such owners.” After 1809 it became mandatory for free people of color living in the Louisiana Territory to carry proof of their free status.59 All free men of color newly arrived in the territory had to post a bond as surety that they would leave the state within a stipulated period of time.60 Two years later, when Louisiana had become a state, the legislature added to the Louisiana Civil Code the requirement that black and mixed-race residents of the state place “f.p.c.” (free person of color) or “g.c.l.” (gens de couleur libre) after their names in official documents. And as we have seen, the Louisiana Code also prohibited mixed-race marriages.61 The condition of African Americans grew even worse after the discovery in 1822 of Denmark Vesey’s failed slave rebellion in South Carolina, prompting the municipal government to increase its vigilance and suppress all tendencies toward sedition. State legislators continued to pass laws that nudged them closer and closer to the status of slaves. The free black civic militias, once the pride of the free community of color, were disbanded in 1834. New laws made it harder to emancipate slaves, thereby increasing the burden of free families with enslaved relatives. Those slaves who were manumitted had to leave the state within thirty days of receiving their freedom.62 By the 1850s, free people of color had to carry passes when walking on the streets or carrying arms. In practice, for most of the 1840s city police ignored the presence of non-native people of color who had not obtained permission to enter the state. After 1852, free blacks from other states had to carry passports, which state officials reluctantly granted.63 While free immigrant blacks had greater difficulty entering the state, native free African Americans for the first time had to seek permission to leave it. By the end of the decade, free blacks had to observe the same nine o’clock curfew observed by all slaves. The number of children of color enrolled in the schools designated for them dropped from a thousand to under three hundred.64 Larger economic trends were also working to their disadvantage.

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Recent Irish and German immigrants took many of the unskilled and lowpaying jobs that had traditionally been filled by free blacks. The restrictive laws had their intended effect, but they could not erase all vestiges of decades-long close proximity. People of color amounted to half the population in 1820 and 56 percent in 1830. During the 1840s, the official count of free people of color dropped by almost half. Census takers counted 15,072 of them in 1840. By 1850, their numbers had fallen to 9,905. But New Orleans’s free people of color, once one-fifth of the city’s population, continued to believe that they belonged in and to New Orleans as much as any other group did, an attitude reflected in the observation of one visitor: the free people and even some slaves were “singularly free of that deference and circumspection which might have been expected in a slave community.”65 Visitors to New Orleans marveled at free blacks, slaves, and white families sitting near one another, sometimes in the same pew, in the St. Louis Cathedral of the Catholic Church. Harriet Martineau wrote approvingly of the shared worship she witnessed.66 The Scotsman Thomas Hamilton disapproved of the city’s segregated Protestant churches in which people of color were compelled to sit in a balcony, if they were not excluded altogether. “It is impossible to forget their degraded condition for even a moment,” he observed.67 In spite of the repressive measures, the influence over the free community of color of the well-educated and egalitarian-minded among the SaintDomingue community lingered. The men who founded New Orleans’s bilingual newspaper L’Abeille, or the Bee, came from Saint-Domingue. The paper’s editorials took a progressive stance on issues of race.68 Some of the refugees had been educated in France, where they imbibed the sentiments of the Romantic and republican movements. A similar tradition of an education in France took hold among the French Creole community. More commonly, white French Creoles sent their sons to Paris, but in the antebellum period, it was not unusual for white fathers also to send their sons by their mixed-race mistresses to school in France. Some of them brought home ideas about abolition, socialism, and republicanism. In particular, the writings of Alphonse de Lamartine, especially his play about Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, inspired New Orleans’s free people of color.69 For a short period in the early 1840s, a vibrant literary circle of free men of color and progressive white writers formed around a publication, L’Album Littéraire, which lasted only a few years. After the journal closed, one of its editors, a mixed-race man, Armand Lanusse, compiled Les Cenelles, an anthology of poetry by seventeen free poets of color that appeared in 1845. Lanusse also played an active

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role in the movement to provide education for free children of color in the city. Several of the contributors to Les Cenelles abandoned the United States for France. Among them was the poet Camille Thierry, a mixed-race man who owned enough real estate in New Orleans to live on his income in Bordeaux, where his white father had been a wine dealer. He will be there in that French river port when Edmond Dédé arrives. Fraternization between whites and blacks was likewise impossible to prevent altogether. No better evidence of that is found than the statutes meant to prevent socializing between the races. One statute, in particular, inadvertently presents a vivid picture of just how much fraternization between blacks and whites was in fact taking place on some streets of New Orleans. That all keeps of cabarets, grog-shops, groceries, or coffee-houses be, and are hereby forbidden to permit or allow white persons, free persons of color, and slaves to play together, cards, dominoes, or any other game whatsoever in their premises, under the penalty of a fine of fifty dollars for the first offense, one hundred dollars for the second offense, for the third offense one hundred dollars, and to forfeit his license, and shall be deprived of the right of obtaining a license for two years thereafter. It shall be the duty of such policemen or watchmen who may discover white persons, free persons of color and slaves playing cards, etc., as foresaid, to arrest, without distinction, all persons found so assembled.70 There was nothing as effective as gambling to lower the barrier a little between black and white men. How successful the ordinances were in suppressing such behavior is unclear. Eyewitness accounts of city life in the 1840s, however, give the impression that tavern keepers surreptitiously sold alcoholic drinks to black men loitering outside the doors of their establishments, where only white men were allowed. And the railing of newspaper editors against white men patronizing grog shops where people of color drank and listened to music is evidence of that behavior.71 That was the shifting legal and social environment into which Francisco and Marie Dédé’s descendants were born. They lived most of their lives as Spanish subjects. Their children were born under Spanish rule but experienced a transition in 1801 to French and in 1803 to U.S. authority. The national status of the children of Basile Dédé and his wife Marie Incarnación underwent similar changes. Once they came under U.S. law (as distinct from becoming U.S. citizens, a status not all jurists would have agreed African Americans held before the Thirteenth Amendment), the Dédé family lived

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under a series of legal systems, each of which was inimical to free people of color. Marie Incarnación bore her husband two daughters, Marie Therese and Rose, both of whom, as adults, paired with free men of color. In 1838, Marie Therese bore a daughter out of wedlock, not an unusual event in the free community of color in that period. Illegitimacy in the early years of American New Orleans did not carry the stigma among free people of color that it would later in the century. Later, Marie Therese married Jean Bernard Goux, by whom she had a son in 1841.72 Marie Therese’s sister, Rose, born in 1813, married Celestin Alexis, also a free man of color. She died at some point before 1851.73 Basile and Marie also had two sons. The younger of the two, Pedro or Pierre, likely died in his youth shortly after his baptism in 1806.74 The child of Basile and Marie who interests us most was the eldest son, who was given his father’s name and known throughout his life as Basile fils (meaning “son,” the French form of “junior”). His birth in 1804 or 1805 occurred less than two years after the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, which means that he was six years old when the ten thousand Saint-Dominguans arrived from Cuba.75 Basile Dédé fils did not follow his father into the building trades. Only twice in his life did he record how he principally made his living. Decades later, in 1856, when a new law required free people of color to register their name and occupation with the city government, the fifty-two-year-old Basile fils described himself as a merchant. Four years later, in the federal census of 1860, Basile fils described himself as a poultry dealer.76 In the 1840s, Basile is listed in the city directory as residing at the corner of Ursulines and Dauphin Streets on the downriver end of the French district. By then, his father, the senior Basile, was listed as deceased and survived by his widow.77 Somewhere in the neighborhood now known as Treme, Edmond Dédé was born on November 27, 1827, to a woman identified in his baptismal record only as “Jeane,” a free black woman. The baby’s father, Basile fils, was not married to the mother. Nevertheless, Edmond Dédé belonged to the fourth generation of a free family. He could claim that his father and his grandparents, the oncewayward mason Basile and Marie Incarnación, had all been free people, whereas his great-grandparents, Francisco and Maria Dédé, had been freed.78 Edmond’s father, Basile fils, had two other sons, neither of whose mothers he married. Marie Joseph Lambert, a “black” woman, gave birth in 1831 to St. Florien Basile, known throughout his life simply as Basile, like his father and grandfather. Later in life when he registered as a free colored person, the seventeen-year-old Basile described himself as a “mason,” like his grandfa-

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ther.79 Two years after the birth of the youngest Basile, another black woman, Justine Michel, gave birth to the elder Basile’s third son, François, in 1833. That son, too, entered the construction trade. Labeled “black” women in the census, the mothers of Basile’s sons belonged to the lowest social level of the free community. Their family names suggest connections with the respectable mixedrace families of Lambert and Michel, but there is no way of knowing what those connections might have been (they may have been servants or even freed slaves of the mixed-race Lambert and Michel families). Because of their low status, the market man and poultry dealer Basile Dédé fils had little incentive to marry the women who bore him children.80 When little or no property was at stake, men and women of color carried on liaisons with each other with little interference from churches and government. Property was a stronger incentive to enter matrimony, although it is true that children and property were closely linked. When Basile fils did marry, it was not to one of the mothers of his sons but to a woman who owned real estate. Within three years of his youngest son’s birth, Basile fils married a widow, Marie Louise Dupré, a free woman of color, known to her family as Louise. Basile Dédé and his wife Louise Dupré made deals rather than children. Not long after they married, Basile began dabbling in New Orleans’s real estate market, selling off his wife’s property and buying other lots. In 1836 and 1837, Basile sold lots in Faubourg Treme and Faubourg Washington (today’s Bywater neighborhood), worth $3,625, payable to him in annuities over several years. Over the same period, he bought property in the same areas of the city worth $3,429, payable over similar lengths of time. This was the same period in which the real estate owned by free people of color was valued at $2.5 million.81 The wealthiest of those real estate moguls, Cuban-born François Lacroix, a very successful tailor just a few years younger than Basile Dédé fils, owned real estate worth $250,000, a very respectable fortune in those days. That made him one of the city’s largest real estate owners of any race.82 Basile fils did not, however, play in Lacroix’s league. His investments were far more modest. But the difference between what he owed and the amount he was owed likely provided him with enough income to support himself and his wife in reasonable comfort for someone whose professed occupation was selling chickens. If children were not a sufficient motive for Basile to marry, property was certainly a reason for him to legitimize his sons. According to Louisiana law, which retained many French and Spanish legal characteristics, children born to parents who were not married to each other were called “natural” children. A “natural” child differed from an “illegitimate” one in that the latter’s parents were

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legally incapable of marrying, either because one or both were already married to others or because they were too closely related. A natural child was one who was born to parents with no legal impediments to marrying each other. Natural children could have more claims on their fathers’ property than illegitimate children had over theirs. Edmond and his half-brothers fell into the category of natural children, a precarious status nonetheless. Their father Basile fils was not required to support them financially, unless they were in dire need. Before 1831, the law prohibited fathers from legitimizing their natural children, which meant that those children had very limited claims on their fathers’ estates after their fathers died.83 If it had not been for a change in the law in that year, Edmond and his brothers would have been out of luck, even though Basile publicly acknowledged that he was their father. From 1831 on, however, fathers were allowed to legitimize their natural children. Since Basile had no other legitimate heirs, all he had to do was declare his sons legitimate before a notary with two witnesses.84 But Basile Dédé never legitimized Edmond, Basile, or François.85 He acknowledged his paternity when they were baptized, but that meant little. If he had had children by Louise Dupré, who was young enough to bear children when they married, the three brothers would have inherited nothing. Only at the end of his life, when his sons were all in their thirties, did he take any steps to secure their claim on his estate. In 1865, Louise Dupré Dédé died at the age of sixty-five. In the will she made in 1849, she appointed her husband as her universal heir and executor. If Basile fils had predeceased her, then her heirs and executors would have been her husband’s children or those living at the time, an indication that some familial ties existed between Louise and her stepsons.86 A few months later, Basile fils made a will, in which he named his natural sons as his heirs. By that time, it was scarcely necessary. Since Basile had publicly acknowledged his sons early in their lives and because he had no other living relatives, Edmond and his half-brothers would have automatically inherited their natural father’s goods. It must have been a small consolation. Does this indifference to his sons’ ability to inherit from him mean that Basile was an indifferent father? He was certainly physically detached from two of them. The federal census taker found only Edmond living with Basile fils and Marie Louise Dupré in 1850.87 That same year, the seventeen-year-old Basile appears in the same census, already identifying himself as a mason and living with his thirty-eight-year-old mother Marie Joseph Lambert. She was living with her companion, Jean-Louis Jazon, thirty-five, a black cart man, and his son, Theopile Jazon, sixteen years old, a bricklayer and also described as “black.”88 Basile’s youngest son, François, who would have been only sixteen that year,

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must also have been living with his mother, since he is not listed as a member of his father’s household. Yet eighteen years later, Basile fils died in his son François’s home. From these glimpses of the Dédé men emerges a sense of the fluidity and, at times, instability of family life in the free community of color.89 The city was slowly changing in ways that boded ill for the community of free people of color. The half million European immigrants, arriving over a span of fifty years, pushed them further and further to the margins of New Orleans society.90 White tourists from the northern states and from abroad marveled at the city’s rich cultural diversity, most of them oblivious to the reality that the immigrants were replacing free African Americans in low-paying, unskilled jobs. The Irish, Germans, French, and Italians were willing to work as hotel porters. They replaced the African American stevedores on the levee. Restaurants, taverns, and other public houses dispensed with African American employees. Over the 1840s, the majority of African Americans living in New Orleans slid down the slope of unemployment toward poverty. Their native city was becoming increasingly unrecognizable and inhospitable to them.91 They were becoming a people under siege. For the first two decades of Edmond Dédé’s life, people of color in New Orleans endured increasing restrictions on their mobility and their property. The harsh laws prescribing the behavior of slaves, the strict laws discouraging free people of color from settling in the state, and the pervasive and palpable culture of the slave economy made for an undeniably repressive atmosphere. Public spaces and buildings were restricted for white people or for people of color, but rarely for both. No city statute required separate streetcars for whites and blacks, but the companies that operated them either put separate cars in service for non-white riders or reserved seats for them at the rear.92 The city government allowed restaurants, taverns, theaters, hospitals, jails, hotels, and schools to determine for themselves whether their patrons would be white people or people of color, and it enforced those restrictions by statute. People of color were subject to a fine of five dollars if found in places reserved for white people. Conversely, white people could expect a fine if caught in areas reserved for people of color, a sure sign that not all white people found the company of African Americans antipathetic.93 Free African Americans and white people received stiff fines of twenty-five dollars or a month in jail if they were found in the company of slaves.94 Free people of color had to pay a heavy fine if ever a slave was found attending one of their public balls.95 The offending slave would receive ten lashes as his or her punishment.

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The Haitian Revolution had ended a quarter of a century before Dédé was born, but it remained a vivid memory with different meanings for both whites and blacks in New Orleans. The unsuccessful efforts of the Caribbean freeman of color Denmark Vesey to ignite a similar rebellion against slavery in South Carolina in 1822, five years before Dédé’s birth, made it clear to state authorities precisely how powerful the Haitian example still was. Dédé was born in a city in which white people’s fear of the consequences of slavery—rebellion— constrained the range of choices he would make in life. White New Orleanians feared the precedent as much as they deplored the fact of the slave revolt. The combined numbers of enslaved and free African Americans, equaling about half the population, kept the other half of the population—designated “white” in the federal census, no matter where they came from—in a perpetual state of anxiety. Would that black majority, ranging from the most wretched slave to the most prosperous mixed-race merchant, combine forces one day to demand equal treatment? The white slave-owning population had good reason to worry that they would. Many families of color in Louisiana received the message loud and clear that they were not welcome and so they left. The increasingly violent atmosphere drove many families of color to go so far as to leave the United States, or to at least send their sons and daughters out of the country. The wealthier members of the community contributed money to those seeking to leave. The exiles headed to Europe, to Latin America, and to Cuba. Nearly three hundred free people of color—some think there might have been more—chose Haiti as their destination.96 The city that made Dédé the man he would become was now inducing him to leave.

3 • City of Sound

Imagine, if you will, a young Frenchman on the deck of a steamer gliding down the Mississippi River in the autumn of 1851. He is imaginary, a composite of the many accounts by European travelers arriving at New Orleans by river from the north. After leaving Baton Rouge, he spent the following day at the deck rail, watching the high banks of the river slide by almost at eye level. Occasionally he saw someone walking on top of the levee, silhouetted against the sky. Each turn of the river—and there are quite a few of them—increased his impatience to see the famous city. Now, in the late morning, he notices that the number of small craft tied up along the levee is increasing. When the steamer turns to starboard around a big bend in the river, he sees vessels of every type—sailing ships, skiffs, flatboats, paddle-wheel steamboats like the one he is on, barges, rowboats—moored alongside a long wharf, all crammed together, like a litter of pups nosing their way to their mother’s teats. He is confident the city will soon appear. Still no metropolis in sight, the steamer slows. Somewhere on board ship a bell clangs to announce the steamer’s imminent arrival; the crew prepares the ropes. If New Orleans has a skyline, he thinks, it must be an especially low one. So many masts and funnels of tall sailing ships and paddle-wheel boats obscure his view that he can barely see what is happening on the wharf as the steamer slides up to the levee. It is only then that he realizes why he cannot see the skyline: when viewed from the river, New Orleans has none. The city lies below the top of the levee, on the far side away from the river. The only sign of habitation visible over the levee top is a church spire puncturing the horizon. At last, the steamer gently heaves to, coming close enough to the riverbank to drop a gangway on to the bank. Our passenger hears the bells of other

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arriving ships, men hollering, and commotion caused by the steamboat crew at work. Standing on the upper deck, he watches the scene on the expanse of the wharf: stevedores with short-billed caps shout to the crew; businessmen in high hats walk by the moored vessels; well-dressed couples, poorly dressed families, and workingmen in smocks walk briskly or stroll around the broad levee top (it looks like a big, muddy field). He notices passengers from other steamers stepping gingerly around cotton bales stacked as high and wide as one-story buildings. Others stride down rows of hogshead barrels. They all must navigate a labyrinth of crates of all shapes and sizes. Mountains of baggage disgorged from the holds of passenger steamers block their way at several points, compelling them to find a way through to the customs office. When our passenger disembarks, he walks down the gangway and with his first step on the none-too-dry land, his expensive Parisian calfskin boots sink into mud.1 The Frenchman has arrived at the second busiest port and the fifth largest city in the United States in the fall of 1851. Here, now, on the levee, it occurs to him that the stevedores working on the wharf all look like white men. He expected to see Negroes, either slaves (it is, after all, the South’s largest slave market), or free black laborers—not that he is sure he would be able to tell one from the other. He walks toward the port commissioner’s building where he will present his travel documents. Since they are all in order, he hopes to complete the tedious process as quickly as possible. In his satchel, he carries a passport issued by the municipality of the sixth arrondissement, the quarter where his family lives in Paris. He also carries letters of introduction to his father’s commercial associates. When his turn comes to present them to the port official, he takes them out of his satchel. The official barks a terse welcome in an oddly accented French, reviews the documents, and then looks over the Frenchman’s shoulder to beckon to the next passenger. Outside the building, he must find his baggage. A clerk sends him back to the area where his ship moored. There he finds his trunk and large leather bag. A porter who does not speak French—an Irishman, he subsequently informs the visitor—arrives with a cart to carry the luggage over the edge of the levee and down the steps to the street, where, he learns, cabs for hire will take him to his hotel. Once the young man and his luggage reach the street at the bottom of the levee, he sees a line of horse-drawn cabs in front of a square park surrounded on all sides by a tall wrought-iron fence. Seated on benches inside the park, Negro nurses—slaves, perhaps?—monitor children playing in the wide sandy paths that crisscross the square. A statue of a military commander seated

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on a rearing horse and extending a cocked hat in salute occupies the center of the park. On the far side, now seen clearly, is the church whose spire he saw from the ship’s railing. It is the city’s cathedral, dedicated to Saint Louis, he later learns. Before leaving him in the hands of a cab driver, the porter tells him that the garden, once called the Place d’Armes, has recently been renamed Jackson Square in honor of the former president, Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans in 1812 and the figure on the horse at the garden’s center. Before he steps into the cab, the Frenchman notices on either side of the park two rows of elegant red-brick townhouses. Shops occupy the ground floor of both buildings. Arcades with slender columns running the length of the buildings promise shelter to pedestrians in case of inclement weather. He considers the buildings handsome. In fact, the park and its surroundings remind him faintly of the Place des Vosges at home. Now that it is late afternoon, many couples and families are promenading along the streets and around the park. Except for the fashion of their attire, the people look indistinguishable from his own countrymen, which we should take to mean that they look like white people to him. Before he left Paris, some of his friends warned him, half in jest, that a good many New Orleanians have Negro blood in them. Now that he is here, he realizes that the appearance of the men and women he sees around him neither supports nor belies that rumor. He cannot tell, even though he has acquaintances at home who claim they are experts in spotting the mulatto element in families from the French colonies. Not that he particularly cares. Still, given that New Orleans is famous for its slave auctions, he is a little disappointed not to see more evidence of slaves. He had expected to see more men and women with obvious African ancestry. He takes note of the black women tending to the children in the park; a black man dressed in humble clothing walking behind a white couple; several brown and black women, kerchiefs tied around their heads, seated in doorways with blankets spread out before them on which they have placed vegetables for sale. Perhaps they frequent other parts of the city. At the same time, he is surprised by how un-American New Orleans seems. The number of European languages he overhears in the street exceeds his expectations. French, yes; English, of course. But Italian, German, Spanish, and who knows what others? If he had not known where his steamer had deposited him, he would be hard pressed to identify which was the city’s main language. He delays no longer in climbing into a cab that takes him to the St. Louis Hotel, where he expects to find rooms prepared for him. Although the ride

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lasts only a few minutes, he observes from inside his cab the shop signs in French, an Italian grocery, stores advertising novelties and notions from Paris, tailors’ shops, and shoemakers. Here and there a sign in English hints at the presence of Anglo-Saxons among these French and Italian Creoles. How similar, he thinks, is its architecture to the colonies he has visited in the Caribbean. Some of the houses he passes—one-story dwellings with pitched roofs that run parallel to the street—remind him of the style of cottage he saw on the island of Martinique. The traffic of taxicabs, carts, and carriages, all clattering along the stonepaved streets, makes it impossible to understand what the driver is yelling over his shoulder. A pack of dogs trots down the street like a gang of boys, wending their way around horses’ hooves and carriage wheels. He notices goats rummaging in piles of garbage in the alleyways between buildings. Respectably dressed ladies walking unaccompanied through the city make him wonder how respectable they are. The aromas of roasted coffee beans from coffeehouses and of grilled meat from caterers’ shops attack him in the depths of the cab and arouse his appetite. The cab passes a tavern with a group of black and white men standing on the wooden sidewalk outside the entrance. Over the clop and clatter of the traffic, the voice of one of them seemingly narrating a story in what sounds like French reaches him in the cab. New Orleans, he decides, is a noisy city. When the cab arrives at the St. Louis Hotel, nothing inside its lobby diminishes his sense of wonder. Entering the foyer, he is assaulted by incongruent sights. A reception desk fills the foreground while, farther back in the interior of the building, he sees the windows of bank tellers to the left. To the right, through a portal leading to a large open space under an elaborately painted dome at the center of the building, he is startled to see, at last, indisputable signs of slavery—an auctioneer on a platform is taking bids on a male slave dressed in coarse clothing.2 A white hotel clerk accompanies him to the two rooms he has rented for the duration of his visit. He asks the clerk to wait while he writes a note to his Creole cousins to inform them of his arrival. Alone, he stretches out on the horsehair mattress to take a nap before he descends to the ground floor dining room for the table d’hôte, the communal dinner for those guests not taking meals in their rooms. Over the next several days, his Creole relatives warmly welcome the Frenchman. He renews his friendships with his uncle and male cousins; he spends evenings in his aunt’s parlor. His cousins and their spouses invite him to dine with them at one or the other of their houses. They all impress him as culti-

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vated people. The men speak excellent French, as well they should, since they were educated in Paris, where the young man came to know them well. The women of the family also speak correct French, although they learned it at home. The black servants—slaves, he assumes, but no one uses the word— speak a French that is incomprehensible to the Parisian. However, the family members understand it and use it when dispensing orders to them. His cousins and their wives invite him to attend the opera with them in the coming days. He agrees with enthusiasm, not simply because he is a regular at the opera in Paris. He is also curious and, frankly, a little skeptical about the quality of the performances and the productions in a city still so unfamiliar and seemingly lacking in refinement. A few nights later, after dark, he accompanies his cousins by carriage to the Orleans Theater. He alights on the banquette in front of two buildings standing side by side. To one side is the popular Orleans ballroom, where both Creoles and Anglo-Americans come to dance. On the other side stands a taller building with a broader facade, the opera hall itself, one of two in the city. Within a few years there will be others, most notably the French Opera House. The hall he now enters, slowly filing in, will burn down in 1866. At this moment, it has a plain stucco facade with rounded windows and a colonnaded arcade that offers shelter to operagoers. On this night in antebellum New Orleans, the theater’s windows are lit up by gaslight.3 Down the street in the distance he sees the back of the cathedral, its spire outlined against moonlit clouds. Men and women dressed in fine apparel greet one another in French. He notices Negroes entering the theater through a separate, side entrance. His cousins prophesize that he is about to see the finest production and hear the finest orchestra in the United States. He keeps his doubts to himself, and yet where else in this young republic are French standards so ingrained? Nowhere. The Frenchman joins his cousins as they escort their wives into the oval hall that thrums with the shifting of chairs on the bare wooden floors, the tuning of instruments, and the murmurs of greetings and small talk. Men in black evening jackets and white ties escort bare-shouldered women in lownecked white gowns trimmed with ribbon into the box seats that ring the rear of the theater. The ladies sweep their wide skirts through narrow doorways as they move to their chairs. The gentlemen either stand behind them or look for seats on the center floor. The parquet, as the area on the theater’s ground floor in front of the stage is called, is where he looks for a seat. The members of the orchestra sit with their backs to the audience. No balustrade or barrier separates them from members of the audience.

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While waiting for the performance to begin, he strolls over to the orchestra. For a few moments, he watches the players tune their instruments. Then he turns around to take in the spectacle of the parquet level and the three galleries rising to the ceiling. The theater holds perhaps two thousand people, he estimates. And it is only at that moment, as he casually surveys the gas-lit room, that it dawns on him: the scene in front of his eyes is a near-perfect representation of Louisiana society. Leaving aside several young white men of apparently modest means (to judge, at any rate, by their manner of dress) sitting on benches in front of the lowest box circle at the back of the parquet, the rest of the audience is arranged in order of social precedence. Looking up at the three tiers of galleries above the parquet, he notices that the closer to the ground level an audience member sits, the higher is his or her rank in society. Parisian theaters are arranged similarly, but he perceives another sort of ranking at work here as well. The higher the seats, the darker the skin of the people sitting in them. The seats on the parquet and in the first row of boxes that ring the parquet are filled by free white citizens exclusively. The second tier of boxes is reserved for free people of color, many of whom appear to be mixed race, some would be mistaken for white, and nearly all of them well-dressed women. Above them in the third gallery sit black and other mixed-race people. Rumor has it that slaves are among them. How strange, he thinks, to live in a society so blatantly color-coded. The lack of nuance strikes him as vulgar, but he does not find it objectionable. When, later, he describes to his cousins his perceptions, they claim they would not have it any other way. Our imaginary Frenchman, if he had actually lived, would have had no way of knowing that in the third, highest gallery above the parquet Edmond Dédé, recently returned from a sojourn in Mexico, was likely to be sitting. The way the visiting Frenchman—in truth, an avatar for you, the all-seeing twenty-firstcentury reader (whatever your ancestry might be)—experienced the sights and sounds of antebellum New Orleans differed profoundly from the ways Dédé and his African American contemporaries, both black and mixed race, acted in and reacted to their city. Free African Americans, especially dark-skinned ones, followed paths through New Orleans and through the interwoven webs of black and white Creole society that were demarcated by both law and custom. In the practice of day-to-day life, they may have often strayed from those paths, but in doing so they risked attracting physical violence, reprimand, jail, fines, confiscation of their property, deportation, or enslavement.4 African Americans and European Americans, imbued with different assumptions

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about their place in the world around them, moved through their public and private spaces side by side in real time but acted as if they existed in parallel, impermeable, and palpably different dimensions of the physical world. To demonstrate that difference, if, instead of a young Frenchman, you the reader assume the avatar of a young African American man arriving on New Orleans’s levee in late October of 1851, his sense of anticipation about the hazards of his arrival and his interactions with officials and the built environment around him will diverge radically from those of the Frenchman. Rather than gaze in reverie at the scene on the levee, as the steamer prepares to come to, he mentally prepares himself for what he is likely to encounter on shore. Before he steps off the gangway, the captain of the steamer warns him again that his papers had better be in order. Otherwise he will have to pay a stiff fine for delivering a free Negro to a city intent on reducing their numbers. It is bad enough, the captain grouses, having to deliver the black members of his crew to the county jail where they will stay until he leaves port. After the young man disembarks, with bag in hand, he crosses the wide, muddy top of the levee to the port commissioner’s office. Something may yet go wrong. Perhaps, he worries once again, the laws have changed yet again while he was absent from his native city, and his father or one of his brothers neglected to mention it in their last letters. Is there anything in his papers to suggest to the port officials that while he was in Mexico he established domicile there, an act that bars all free people of color from entering New Orleans?5 The reality is that he is not presumed to be free. Therein lies the source of his deep anxiety. Freedom is a condition he has always had to prove as well as protect at a moment’s notice.6 All his life he has carried a document asserting that he is a free man. More than once, he has had to show it to white authorities, because it is rare for a man with skin color as dark as his to be a free-born man. He does not have the option of blending into the white populations, like some mulattoes and many quadroons he knows. Dark-skinned people like him almost always turn out to be slaves or recently freed men. Or, worse, runaway slaves. That is what the young man bears the burden of proving. The official at the desk in the customs office studies his document with a look of frank skepticism on his face. If this white man refuses to accept the authenticity of his papers, the young man runs the risk, at the very least, of deportation back to Mexico or, in the worst case, imprisonment or even enslavement. However small the chances of the latter happening are, in the back of his mind is the fear of not being allowed back into New Orleans. In the end, the port official writes his name in his ledger at the end of the list of passengers

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arriving in New Orleans. Beside the black man’s name, he enters a “B,” connoting that he is black, as the law requires him to do. Now the young African American man may enter the city. Once outside, he moves quickly away from the levee. When he reaches the streets beyond, he trudges home with his bag instead of hiring a cab. No one will accept him as a fare. Along the wooden banquettes lining the streets, he remembers to step down into the street to move out of the way of white people coming toward him. Even if he has not had to do so for a few years, his childhood training in evincing a subservient demeanor comes quickly back. He knows not to look a white person in the eye. As he walks through the French Creole district, he passes shops he knows he cannot enter. Here and there, he passes small groups of white and black men, talking, loitering or seated on chairs at street corners and in front of taverns. At one street corner on his route, a tavern keeper brings out a tankard and hands it to a black man on the banquette. In this part of town, neither he nor the black men relaxing on the banquette in front of a tavern or café can go through its door. Only the white men are permitted inside. Even if he were to enter, no one would serve him, not even in the shops owned by mulattoes or quadroons. He would be asked to leave, perhaps threatened with arrest. He knows the grill houses he passes will not serve him. None of the many boardinghouses along the route would rent him a room, even though free women of color own most of them. He cannot stop for a coffee until he arrives at the rear of the Creole quarter. It is only when he sees more people of his skin color and his father’s house down the street that he begins to feel a sense of anything like ease. It is almost nine o’clock, when the curfew for people of color begins, so his timing is good. From the moment he walks into his father’s house, the only thing that really concerns him is, how long will it be before he can leave again? Edmond Dédé did indeed return from Mexico to his native city on a steamer in late October 1851, although not quite with the documentation we imagine him to have carried. We will circle back to his arrival in due course. His return from Mexico was the end of his first foray outside the United States, away from the restrictions and constraints of the racially segregated society he grew up in. He went to Mexico to work as a musician. How had he acquired the musical training to do that, given the obstacles all black people faced in antebellum America? Exceedingly few African Americans had access to or could afford artistic training to the extent virtuosity or genius demands. Before 1865, Ira Aldridge (1807–67), the classical actor from New York City who made his

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reputation in Europe, and another New Yorker, Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), who, after studying art at Oberlin, emigrated to Italy to continue her studies in sculpture, were among the very few African Americans to gain recognition for their contribution to the arts. But Aldridge would not have performed in front of a racially mixed audience, and Lewis had so few commissions that very few Americans saw her work at all. The only mixed audiences before which African Americans could appear were those gathered at events organized by antislavery groups. Otherwise, American cities in the first half of the nineteenth century contained exceedingly few public spaces where black and white people experienced together a theatrical or musical performance or an art exhibition.7 In this regard, as in so many others, the city of New Orleans was different. Dédé had the good fortune to have been born and raised not only in the nation’s biggest and most prosperous free African American community but also in one of the its musical capitals. Unlike New York and Boston, the other major centers of music in America, New Orleans had a musical culture that was as anomalous as its history and its people. Practically speaking, the size and prosperity of the free community of color made segregating black, white, and mixed-race people impractical and difficult. As a consequence, free people of color and even slaves participated more fully in their city’s musical life than African Americans were allowed to do anywhere else in the country. At least since 1809, when impresarios, singers, and musicians arrived among the refugees from Saint-Domingue, music dominated the cultural life of the people of New Orleans. So many residents participated in music in one way or another—singing, dancing in taverns, playing instruments in dance bands—that the distinction between professional and amateur musicians was always blurred. Moreover, music so pervaded city life that it was the one cultural form that transcended the boundaries of race.8 At one end of the musical spectrum, musicians who played European art music (Beethoven’s, for instance) enjoyed the highest prestige. At the other end, slaves produced music that derived from their diverse African origins. Between the two ends fell the white population and the free community of color. In reality, every white or black native or longtime denizen of New Orleans was familiar if not intimate with the entire musical spectrum. Unlike printed texts, which required literacy of their users, the idiosyncrasies of African, Native, Caribbean, and European rhythms, which wafted freely through the air, were accessible to all.9 Their absorption of sounds along the spectrum, however unequal, was real. The music that dominated the city’s cultural life was European, but the white people of New Orleans, like the composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk

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(who had five mixed-race siblings), could not help but hear various forms of African music.10 Enslaved people of African descent appreciated the European music they heard being played on pianos in the homes in which they served. Many free African Americans were aficionados of the European music they heard at concerts, balls, and operas, albeit in segregated seating. Residents of New Orleans took in a variety of musical traditions each day, walking through the streets, sitting in backyards, dancing in ballrooms, playing pianos at home, drinking in barrooms, and attending the theater. Everyone heard and assessed the music differently, according to race and social aspiration. But everyone heard it. How could they not? White, black, and mixed-race people lived within constant earshot of one another. Eyewitnesses make it clear that it was hard not to hear the clanging of cultures colliding, or so Albert James Pickett, a young Alabaman, would have us believe. All is hurry, jostling and confusion; the very drums of your ears ache with eternal jargon—with the cursing swearing, whooping, hollowing, caviling, laughing crying, cheating and stealing, which are all in full blast. The screams of parrots, the music of birds, the barking of dogs, the cries of oystermen, the screams of children, the Dutch girl’s organ, the French negro humming a piece of the last opera—all are doing it, increasing the novelty of this novel place.11 Music was an integral part of the aural landscape. It also had a close association with public space in the experience and memory of the people of New Orleans. The city space that retained the strongest association over time with music was not an opera house or symphony hall. It was a square, really a field, where Africans came together on their so-called day of rest. Under French and then Spanish rule, slaves were accustomed to gather on Sundays in the open area back of town called Congo Square (in today’s Louis Armstrong Park). Over time, the square served a variety of purposes—cemetery, parade ground, marketplace, place of execution—but until the 1830s, it was the primary place where slaves gathered on Sundays to socialize, play music, sing, pitch the woo, and dance. Onlookers from all segments of New Orleans free society and visitors to the city watched the slaves form circles around couples who danced to the music of drums or bones (animal ribs used percussively like castanets), marimbas, the banza (the forerunner of the banjo), and windpipes. Louis Moreau Gottschalk grew so interested in what he heard that the rhythms of the Caribbean and Afro-Louisiana Creoles found

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their way into some of his compositions. In his mind and in the view of locals and visitors, the gatherings of slaves embodied what was unique about the city of New Orleans. Although the civic authorities’ heightened fears of slave revolts in the long aftermath of the Haitian Revolution brought an end to the gatherings by 1840, the music of Congo Square lived on.12 It drifted into the homes and social settings of free African Americans and European Americans. What that music sounded like can be inferred from contemporary descriptions.13 The clues we have can be seen (if not exactly heard) in the distorted mirror of, first, the blackface minstrel music of white performers and, then, the African American performers who adapted the blackface minstrel tradition for their own purposes. Since the early 1830s, white performers blackened their faces with burnt cork and performed music supposedly heard in the slave quarters on plantations. The banjo, tambourine, violin, and bones—genuinely instruments played by enslaved people—formed the backbone of the blackface minstrel troupe.14 The music itself differed from European sounds in its constant pulse, the use of slides on the fret board of the banjo, and syncopation (an accent on the note preceding the one on which the beat usually fell).15 White minstrel performers reinterpreted or distorted, one should more accurately describe it, in their songs and instrumentation the music of slaves in such a way that minstrel music came to be associated not just with African slaves but with the culture of the South as a whole. For better and for worse, blackface minstrelsy was the first nationally popular form of musical entertainment in the young United States, catching on first in New York City theaters in the late 1830s through the 1840s. White and black American audiences recognized that it was new and different from European music. It was not long before this new and different music was also characterized, both positively and negatively at the same time, as “American.” The early ensembles of white minstrel musicians, like the Virginia Minstrels, performed in blackface for enthusiastic audiences throughout the North and the South. In their performances, minstrels sang songs like “Jump Jim Crow” and “Ole Dan Tucker” and employed exaggerated verbal and gestural mannerisms that white Americans believed were characteristic of the way slaves spoke and sang. By turning slaves into objects of laughter, the minstrels imbued audiences with false and reassuring impressions of slave life. Blackface minstrelsy purveyed to white Americans stereotypes of African men and women that reduced them to lazy, cunning, imbecilic, and sexually menacing caricatures.16

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That the minstrels worked to make their audiences laugh by denigrating, demeaning, and mocking African Americans cannot be denied. And yet the popularity of blackface minstrel groups also reflected a sneaking fondness among the white public for the so-called slave music. White audiences laughed at the minstrels’ vicious stereotypes of black men and women at the same time that they tapped their feet in time to the music and sometimes even danced. The scholar Eric Lott calls this ambivalence a “dialectic” of denigration and appreciation that created “a peculiarly American structure of racial feeling.”17 Over the nineteenth century, that peculiarly American feeling helps explain why, in spite of their low opinion of African Americans and their culture, composers and the musically astute members of the public heard in the music emanating from slaves’ quarters the foundational elements of an original American style. Better to find our own music among the lowest elements, so the thinking of white progressives ran, than to perpetuate a derivative style always trailing behind European innovation.18 Willing or not, welcoming or not, white Americans assimilated the sounds they heard in minstrel music, which itself was a backhanded tribute to slaves’ music. Many of them liked what they heard, in spite of their prejudices or against their supposedly better aesthetic judgment. As you might imagine, African Americans felt conflicted about minstrelsy. Similar to black actors in early twentieth-century Hollywood, who accepted demeaning roles in films in order to keep working, a few African American performers made blackface minstrelsy pay. An early African American minstrel, Mr. Cornmeal, performed before appreciative audiences in the St. Charles Theater in New Orleans as early as 1837.19 Conforming to the expectations of white audiences was just about the only way troupes of black performers, like the Ethiopian Serenaders, could reach large audiences and thereby make a living. Even so, opportunities to perform for white audiences (and earn more money than they would by appearing only before black audiences) were so rare that Frederick Douglass, who loathed blackface minstrelsy, momentarily set aside his repugnance in 1849. In a largely negative review of the Ethiopian Serenaders, he tried to convince the readers of his journal, the North Star, that there were benefits to black performers pandering to white people’s stereotypes. It is something gained when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prejudice against our race. But they must

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cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man as he is, than as Ethiopian Minstrels usually represent him to be. They will then command the respect of both races; whereas now they only shock the taste of the one, and provoke the disgust of the other.20 Minstrel music, then, was the vehicle that delivered southern African American rhythms, however distorted, to white and black people outside of the South. The songs that have survived in sheet music convey to us only a fragmentary sense of the tunes African and European Americans in New Orleans picked up in their backyards, taverns, parlors, dance halls, and concert rooms. Minstrelsy played a part in the growing distinction between art music and popular song outside of the music hall. In such songs as “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and “Oh, Susanna,” Stephen Foster sought to confer on minstrel music a little genteel respectability. Songs were not easily classifiable, as they are today, by the categories of “popular” versus “serious,” or music as “light” versus “classical.” Distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow were only beginning to emerge in the first half of the nineteenth century. Listeners increasingly perceived a difference between the songs of Stephen Foster and the musical poems of, say, Franz Schubert. Foster’s songs could be sung by ordinary people untutored in singing, whereas Schubert composed his lieder for trained singers. The difference between then and now lies in the greater number of ordinary people then who appreciated both light music and art music. An American squeamishness toward art music and most other forms of avant-garde artistic or intellectual innovation emerged early in the country’s history, as is reflected in the term “highfalutin,” which emerged in the late 1830s. The music of Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Giuseppe Verdi, Charles Gounod, Johannes Brahms, Hector Berlioz, and Jules Massenet, and all the other contemporary European composers considered highfalutin today were increasingly viewed then as hoity-toity—another idiom coined in the early nineteenth century. Fond of songs that reflected back to them an image of themselves as plainspoken, simple folk, most Americans both loved and distrusted art music at the same time. Despite this ambivalence, art music had far broader appeal across the country and social levels throughout the nineteenth century than it did in the twentieth.21 When it came to music of all kinds, including art music, the people of New Orleans were different from the rest of the country, as they were in so many

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other respects. Although one can scarcely describe attending operas and concerts in the nineteenth century as a passive activity—it took the entire century for conductors to train American audiences to arrive on time, sit still, and be silent during performances—the people of New Orleans preferred to move to music rather than listen to it.22 It is not an exaggeration to say that New Orleanians loved to dance—and dance and dance. By 1805, the eight thousand residents of New Orleans could choose from fifteen public ballrooms when they felt like stepping out. Forty years later, there were more than eighty ballrooms across the city. Public dance halls by no means exhausted the possibilities for dancing. When concerts and plays ended, audiences often stayed to attend a ball on the theater’s parquet, once the seats were cleared out of the way. Privately sponsored balls supplemented those held in the public halls. Philanthropic, temperance, religious, as well as theatrical and music, societies organized series of balls, for which they charged subscription fees. Theater producers raised money for future productions by organizing and selling tickets to dances. Small orchestras, made up mainly of five to eight instrumentalists (clarinet, violins, tambourines, and bass drum, typically), played music for dances like the quadrille and the cotillion (partnered dancing in square formation), or the more exhilarating galop in 2/4 time, all popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. Those were the dances the respectable, well-to-do segments of society enjoyed at the public balls they attended. For most of the antebellum period, at their balls, white New Orleanians danced to the music of all-black dance orchestras.23 By mid-century, both in America and in Europe, people wanted to dance and sing in lighthearted, lively, and even comedic ways that did not suit the gilt chambers and theaters patronized by the aristocracy of the eighteenth century. American popular music was beginning to diverge from the symphonic and operatic kind, just as the champagne-effervescence of Johannes Strauss’s waltzes endeared themselves to the Viennese dancers in a way that Richard Wagner’s operas did not. Dance music of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—minuets, jigs, and cotillions—helped bridge the transition to the waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles of the mid-nineteenth, the kind of dance music popular when Edmond Dédé was starting his career. Dancing in New Orleans was supposed to be segregated. The musicologist Henry Kmen maintained that people of color were allowed to observe but not participate in the grand balls of the upper levels of white society.24 Otherwise, only at the edges of respectable society did white and black people dance together surreptitiously in saloons and taverns. Taverns for people of color also

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attracted white men, perhaps not all of them there to prey sexually on the mixed-race women in attendance but rather to enjoy the liquor, the music, and the dancing.25 Dancing’s power to promote comity between white and black people was tacitly acknowledged by the city government in 1828, when it banned white men from public balls open to people of color. The ban was also an attempt to discourage social and sexual intercourse between white men and women of color at dances once described as “quadroon balls,” which were privately sponsored dances.26 At these events, small ensembles of free African American musicians provided the music that couples danced to.27 Everyone, including visitors from Europe, suspected the quadrilles and cotillions were not the only partnering that took place. Rumors of white men selecting mixedrace partners at these dances for the purpose of making them their mistresses, or placées, as they were called, contributed to New Orleans’s louche reputation abroad. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, an Englishwoman visiting the city in the late 1840s, noted archly in her account, “The Quadroon Balls are very much resorted to by white gentlemen, but neither white ladies, nor black men ever attend them: the reason for this is obvious, and need not be commented upon.”28 The so-called quadroon balls were formally banned in 1828, but the free men of color associated with the short-lived literary journal L’Album Littéraire continued to express their resentment toward the relationships formed between white men and free women of color.29 As the legal and social standing of free people of color deteriorated over the 1840s and 1850s, every kind of interracial gathering was banned. Note for note, the people of New Orleans, both black and white, matched New Yorkers in their patronage and appreciation of European art music. Yet the Mississippi port rarely makes more than a brief appearance in surveys of American classical music in the nineteenth century. Musicologists have tended to focus on New York, Boston, and Chicago, all cities with wellestablished European music cultures—Boston’s, perhaps, more conservative than that of New York. Those cities became centers of music education in the young republic. Most tellingly over time, European-trained musicians early on established philharmonic societies that evolved into permanent orchestras closely associated with those cities. In 1842, the violinist Ureli Corelli Hill founded the Philharmonic Society of New York, the direct ancestor of today’s New York Philharmonic. Boston’s Brahmin families took a leading role in setting up the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881. Other cities followed

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suit: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra began in 1889 and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in 1895.30 America’s new millionaires and social elite put their money into orchestras that played the music of European composers, most notably Ludwig van Beethoven’s, Josef Haydn’s, and that of the nearly forgotten Ludwig Spohr. New Orleans, in contrast, never developed a strong orchestral tradition, which may account, in part, for its neglect in histories of classical music in the United States. Kmen counted only two hundred concerts between 1805 and 1841, a less than impressive reckoning compared with the northern cities. Musicians in New Orleans formed orchestras mainly on an ad hoc basis and mainly for balls and dances. Mutual aid societies sponsored orchestras that proved to be temporary. The only permanent large ensembles were those employed by the city’s theaters and opera houses. But from the late 1830s on, the only sizable and semi-permanent orchestra was found in the free community of color. The Negro Philharmonic Society at times could boast one hundred members, a few of whom were white musicians.31 Like the ad hoc orchestras that put on concerts for the white community, the musicians of the Negro Philharmonic played works by Haydn, Beethoven, Cherubini, Rossini, and more contemporary European composers—but, surprisingly given today’s tastes, they eschewed the music of Mozart.32 The dominant music of nineteenthcentury New Orleans ranged from military marches and popular songs to opera, all in the European tradition. What New Orleans lacked in prestige, it made up for in abundance and enthusiasm. The city had the immigrants from Saint-Domingue to thank for that. Among the refugees were the theater managers, or impresarios, responsible for launching the city’s music scene. They put their efforts and their money mainly into opera. Two rather provisional opera theaters opened for business in New Orleans. Bad management led to their repeated failure and reopening. Soon after arriving in Louisiana in 1804, Louis Tabary, a Saint-Dominguan, assumed the management of the St. Peter Street Theater. It did not take him long to drive it into bankruptcy.33 But before he relinquished management of the theater he produced, in seven months spanning 1805 and 1806, twentythree operas. In 1808, a second opera house opened. As more and more welltrained instrumentalists arrived, philanthropic societies and private groups were able to supplement their own bands and small orchestras with a European-trained musician or two. Once their companies were established, the impresarios sent for European musicians to join them. They kept themselves informed of the movements of touring European musicians.

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A significant moment in the history of New Orleans music came in 1837, when an itinerant academy of music, made up of seven Italian musicians, stepped off a steamer from Mexico. Twenty-six-year-old Ludovico Gabici called himself a “professor of violin.” Joseph Burci, 24, gave his occupation as a “professor of music.” Giovanni Lucciani, 25, came prepared to teach oboe. Francesco Sapignoli, 32, and Elisa Rossi, 25, sang for a living, along with her two children, Pepe and Ellena Rossi, ages 10 and 7, respectively.34 Gabici and his fellow Italians came to New Orleans at the invitation of the manager of the St. Charles Theater, who wanted them to join his new opera company. Of this group of seven, Gabici the violinist became the best known. Within a few years of his arrival, he was conducting the orchestra at the best theater in the city, the Théâtre d’Orléans. He also started a successful sheet music publishing business. It is impossible to know how many other European musicians besides Gabici and his colleagues were working in New Orleans during the 1830s. We have to wait until the federal census of 1850, which gives us a good idea of their number in the late 1840s. For the 1850 census, the enumerators collected for the first time in the census’s history information about a range of topics, including the occupations of the people they counted.35 Musicians were among them. These numbers, drawn from the census data on professions, shed new light on the world of the working musician in New Orleans. Out of a total population of 119,460, a paltry 117 city residents (less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population) declared “musician” as their occupation. All but 4 came from Europe: Germany (70), France (16), the Italian peninsula (15), Spain (5), England (5), Ireland (2), and Denmark (1). Of the remaining 4, 1 was born in New York and 3 in Louisiana. A further 26 New Orleans residents described their occupation as “music teacher.” Twelve of those instructors came from France, 5 from Germany, and 1 from Spain. Five were natives of Louisiana and the last 3 came from Alabama, New York, and Illinois. In total, of the 143 musicians and music teachers in New Orleans, 131 were European immigrants. These numbers complement, in part, the patterns in New Orleans’s ethnic diversity found in the 1850 census. Two-thirds of the city’s population were not born in the city. Ireland supplied more immigrants (20,200)—the largest single immigrant group—than migrants to New Orleans from elsewhere in the United States (16,369). Germany, Prussia, and Austria provided 11,554 immigrants and France even fewer (7,522). New Orleans was the most ethnically and racially diverse city in the nation.36 The data in the federal census point clearly to the preference of theater and orchestra managers for European musicians. The 117 European players

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worked for the four or five major theater companies operating in 1849–50. Managers and conductors would have filled out their orchestras with white native-born musicians, who depended for their primary income on other daytime employment. The competition among native musicians for positions in the best orchestras must have been intense. Both players and audiences, however, had a lot to learn from their immigrant colleagues about the latest European trends in music composition. European musicians looking to expand their opportunities knew they would find work in New Orleans. The fact that so many of them came to the United States had as much to do with job opportunities as it did with the political situation in Europe. The political unrest and revolutions occurring in European states in 1847 and 1848 and the repression they provoked impelled many men and women to migrate. Some people simply crossed borders within Europe to escape political persecution. A good number crossed the Atlantic to avoid arrest, imprisonment, or execution. At its founding in 1842, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra consisted largely of German musicians, whose majority grew as a result of the political upheavals in the German states. A group of German musicians called the Germania Musical Society arrived in New York in 1848 with a clear and ambitious goal: “to further in the hearts of this politically free people the love of the fine art of music through performance of masterpieces of the greatest German composers as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Spohr, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann; also, Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner.”37 They spent six years performing music for that purpose by touring the northeastern United States, where their music fell on appreciative ears.38 The political changes in Europe led to cultural shifts on both sides of the Atlantic, some of them in the form of new kinds of social prestige associated with the arts. In Europe, the new cultural brokers were the bourgeoisie, who preferred the music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Donizetti, and Rossini. But keeping up with the output of prolific and challenging Romantic composers like Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Giuseppe Verdi, and the young Johannes Brahms also became a marker of taste. The better-informed lovers of new art music responded sympathetically to the contemporary composers’ rejection of eighteenth-century aristocratic ideals, as reflected in the small-scale cabinet music of Bourbon and Hapsburg court culture. In search of social validation of their new elevated status, the bourgeoisie worked hard to keep up with the changing styles of art music. Yet, those status-conscious bourgeoisie, those same nouveau-riche families, succeeded in becoming the new arbiters of conventional good taste and

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thus served as a focus for the most progressive European musicians’ contempt. The intellectuals, artists, journalists, and radical thinkers despised the tastes and values of a class of people they viewed as enriched shopkeepers— forgetting that they themselves came from the bourgeoisie and would, when they acquired financial stability, return to it. In Henri Murger’s collection of stories of life on the margins of Parisian society during the 1840s, Scènes de la vie de bohème, the raffish, penniless, bohemian poets, composers, and writers sneer at bourgeois respectability as they drink and love.39 Both the bourgeois search for respectability and the bohemian temporary rejection of it traveled in tandem with the immigrants who left Europe in search of new lives on the other side of the ocean. The new music appealed to the Americans who heard it, despite missing the context from which it emerged. No matter how eager the so-called Forty-Eighters—the political exiles who happened also to be musicians—were to share their revolutionary music with audiences in the United States, most Americans did not care about the European revolutionary politics that inspired the music. The great changes taking place in music in Europe in the nineteenth century were not merely revolutionary in content and context. The production of music itself was changing. Composers were asserting more authorial control over the performance of their works than those of the classical age had been able to do. They were aided in this by the invention and availability from the 1820s of tempo-markers, like Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s metronome, which gave composers a stable unit of time against which to measure beats.40 Now, tempi were less susceptible to the whims and interpretations of conductors and instrumentalists. This change took place over time as composers gradually devised a clearer system of dictating the speed at which they wished their compositions to be played. Those notations became standardized through the publication of sheet music, an important new niche in the publishing industry both in the United States and in Europe.41 The ongoing process of fixed tempi and standardized notation contributed to the technical side of what Lawrence Levine called the “sacralization of culture.” In other words, a composer’s no less than an author’s composition became a sacred text that could be interpreted within limits but not adjusted.42 Composers who demanded fidelity to their scores had one trend in the latest music working to their advantage. Much of the new music was simply too difficult for many musicians to play, thus far more effort was put into mastering rather than adapting the score. This was, after all, the period of Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who composed violin pieces of breathtaking difficulty. Frédéric Chopin (1810–49) and Franz

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Liszt (1811–86) composed piano pieces that forced pianists everywhere to struggle hard to meet their high, exacting standards of technical virtuosity. Touring and immigrant European musicians introduced Americans to the piano works of Franz Liszt and his colleagues. As long as they heard nothing in the new music that offended their mostly Protestant morality, the American public eagerly welcomed the musical visitors. In fact, we might even say that they responded in a big way. In the spirit of “more is better,” the public welcomed the increased size of orchestras, a trend begun in Europe. Contemporary symphonic works, like those of Beethoven, Berlioz, and, in particular, Wagner, were meant to produce a capacious, awe-inspiring sound, far larger than the smaller orchestras of the eighteenth century could have or indeed endeavored to produce. Now orchestras comprised thirty or more members, divided into strings, brass, and winds—but not yet much percussion.43 In the United States, concert producers took the trend to extremes. Both in Europe and in the United States, the equation of bigger with better manifested itself most clearly at piano recitals. Soloists satisfied—some critics even then preferred the phrase “pandered to”—the public’s ardor for musical extravaganzas with events where musicians sat at five, ten, twenty, or even more pianos crowded together on a stage and simultaneously played the same piece. Multiple piano concerts became as popular in the United States as they had been in Europe. The concert soloists visiting from Europe were happy to comply for a fee. Henri Herz, the French pianist most responsible for making such mass events popular in the United States, ended his five-year tour of North America at a farewell concert in New York in early 1847. He led fifteen other pianists in the performance of the overture of Rossini’s opera, William Tell. Many critics deplored the gang approach to the music. The young nation, however, took to the musical free-for-alls with gusto. Touring soloists from Europe boosted ticket sales to their multiple piano concerts by recruiting local nonprofessional pianists—many of them women—to accompany them on the other pianos on stage and bask for a brief moment in the spotlight of public acclaim. Artistry was beside the point. The concerts were great fun.44 While multiple piano recitals were one of the few venues where women pianists might perform in public without being burdened by the stigma usually attached to women on the stage, men had a military option. On both sides of the Atlantic, military marches and patriotic songs were in vogue for much of the nineteenth century. Military music owed its popularity, in part, to its relative ease of playing. Men who played portable instruments, like clarinets

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or trumpets, joined volunteer militias or military bands that outside of working hours marched up and down, back and forth, in public parks, fields, and streets. Musical inventors devised new instruments, like the cornet, the tuba, the concertina, and later the saxophone, all of which could be carried in a parade.45 No city was more receptive to these innovations than New Orleans. The city had a tradition of civic defense that dated back to the War of 1812. Citizens formed militias, whose mission was to preserve the peace and resist invaders, and each had its own band and bandmaster. The majority were made up of white volunteers. In the early decades of the century, free people of color, too, had their own militias, dating back to the time when a troop of black soldiers took part in the Battle of New Orleans in 1812.46 As free people of color endured ever more restrictions on their movements, their militias came to be viewed by civic authorities as potential instruments of sedition. By the end of the 1840s, these militias had been disbanded, and with them their bands—at least formally. Musicologists consider the militia bands of the nineteenth century as the direct ancestor of the brass bands that came to characterize the sound of New Orleans in the twentieth century.47 From the drumbeats tapped out at the Battle of New Orleans to clarinets in second-lines heading to and from the cemeteries to the first blare of notes in Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” the thread of continuity frayed but endured. Opera, too, was guaranteed to be popular in New Orleans. Practically every account of a visit to New Orleans published in the first half of the nineteenth century recommends a night at the opera among the tourist highlights. The theater most travel writers and guides to the city mention was the Théâtre d’Orléans, first opened in 1815, the year of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Visitors from Britain and the northern United States found the French Creoles in the audience to be exotic. The theater’s monopoly on quality did not last, even if its preeminence did. Competition came from the upriver side of Canal Street in the American district. The growing population of immigrants from the northern states demanded a theater company whose management operated in the English language. On Camp Street in the American district, an opera house and theater opened in 1824 that catered to English-speaking music lovers. The rivalry between the French-language and English-language theaters was at times intense, giving rise to a vibrant music scene. By 1860, this midsized city boasted three companies that mounted major operatic productions.48 Opera companies and theaters needed skilled workers to build the sets, sew the costumes, and carry out the myriad other tasks necessary to bringing to life the sung stories often set in exotic locations. The small business economy

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and theaters were intertwined. Producers depended on local tailors, seamstresses, painters, carpenters, and other craftsmen and -women. Between 1821 and 1841, eleven shops specializing in theatrical costumes opened in town.49 Musicians and actors depended on printers for sheet music and opera librettos. Music publishing, in fact, became big business in New Orleans as a consequence, in part, of the demand for professional performances. New theaters opened all over the city—and closed, too, as the competition grew fierce. A list of the operas produced in New Orleans before 1860 contains familiar and unfamiliar works. Gioacchino Rossini’s operas are there. In fact, the American premiere of Barber of Seville took place in New Orleans in 1823.50 The operas of Gaetano Donizetti and Vicenzo Bellini were also popular. As we have noted, the operas and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart were seldom heard in the city. But more than that omission, the people of New Orleans had a decided taste for the most up-to-date composers. With extremely few exceptions, no eighteenth-century composer of the classical period had his music presented in New Orleans for most of the nineteenth century. The composers whose music did enjoy popularity were cutting-edge, mostly French, or they composed in French—Charles Gounod and Felix Mendelssohn, to name two well-known examples. Some are little known today: Daniel Auber, PierreAlexandre Monsigny, Nicolas Dalayrac, and André Grétry, to name only a few.51 One name in the list of now-obscure composers we will encounter again—Fromental Halévy, then a well-known composer, whose opera La Juive (The Jewess) was performed thirteen times in New Orleans in the late 1830s.52 Did Basile Dédé fils take his son Edmond to hear Halévy’s work? It would be nice to think so, since Dédé would later claim the distinguished French composer as one of his teachers. In New Orleans, the free community of color—and surreptitiously some slaves—joined white patrons of opera, sitting far above the stage during the same performances. It was a social convention that some visitors preferred not to notice. Like many other visitors to antebellum New Orleans, Abraham Oakey Hall, a New Yorker, was fascinated by the demographics of the audience on the night he attended the opera in the late 1840s. The parquet is already filled with critical young Creoles, and here and there a representative of “Young America,” ambitious of connoisseurship in music; the well-brushed heads about, principally belong to scions of Creole aristocracy; family incomes, or salaries of genteel clerks, supplying the allowance of tri-weekly visits to the opera. Behind them, upon simple benches, are the unwashed patrons of Auber, Donizetti,

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and Halevy, who, for a dollar a head (less by a half the payments from the remainder of the audience) have left their ground-floor lodgings and red-curtained retreats, to gratify their love of harmony. The loges above— some latticed for privacy, most of them open—are filled with rich dresses, fairy forms, sparkling eyes, and animated countenances.53 How well did Hall understand the spectacle in the stalls that he witnessed? He seems to have understood that the “Young Americans” that he spotted in the crowd would have crossed Canal Street from the Anglo-American district to attend the opera in the French district. And he recognized that the French Creoles belonged to the still culturally dominant cream of New Orleans society.54 But he does not spell out for his readers that white members of the audience sat on the parquet area and the first gallery, above them sat prominent mixed-race families, and still higher yet mixed-race and black ticket holders sat in the galleries. Unlike the British and European travelogue writers who found the presence of African Americans at performances of European music exotic, Hall passed over them in silence. James Thomas, the ex-slave who as a boy visited New Orleans, had a clearer memory. “In the galerie of the opera house any grand Opera night were about three hundred of those handerkerchief wearing colored people of the servant class who were deeply interested and many of them could not only whistle or sing the airs of many of the operas but were fair critics.”55 Calling the people of color in the audience “of the servant class” may have been Thomas’s euphemism for “slave.” Yet nearly all of those African Americans he saw there would have been free. For a city whose visitors attested the abundance of opera, dances, public and private orchestra concerts, and bands, the 135 professional musicians and music teachers in the federal census could not have been sufficient to meet the demand for instrumentalists and singers. It is impossible to accept that the 8 natives of Louisiana who gave their occupation as musician were the only working ones in the city. Of those 8 musical Louisianans, 3 were listed as white and 5 were classified as mixed race (mulatto). Among the latter was the wellknown New Orleans composer Eugene Macarty. The better-known mixed-race composer Charles-Richard Lambert is listed in the census, but he was born in New York.56 The paucity of native musicians in the census means only that there were few people in the city who could earn a living at it full time. To eke out a living, black and white musicians supplemented their earnings from their day jobs by playing in the city’s bands and orchestras at night. But black musicians had no chance of employment in the orchestras of the major theaters, even in the opera houses with seats for African Americans in the upper galleries.

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We have noted that Basile Dédé and his son Edmond were possibly in the upper galleries of the opera because New Orleans was one of the very few cities in the United States where people of color were allowed to attend the same performances as white people. In the realm of public culture, New Orleans’s policy of segregation was more liberal than other cities in the South and even those in the North. Elsewhere in the country, audiences were either all white or all black; they were not mixed. The only other southern city with a sizable free black population, Charleston, practiced strict segregation between the white and free black people in public spaces like concert halls and theaters.57 In cosmopolitan Manhattan, too, audiences were segregated. In 1853, publicity for a recital by the singer Elizabeth Greenfield, an African American woman, at New York City’s Metropolitan Hall stipulated, “No colored person can be admitted as there is no part of the house appropriated for them.”58 In that instance, the African American community pushed back. Leaders there publicly criticized Greenfield, whom the white press called “the Black Swan,” for performing before a white-only audience.59 New Orleans’s racial climate and culture differed markedly from that of cities elsewhere in the United States. White authorities in New Orleans made allowances for African Americans’ appreciation of European music that no other city in the country made. Although African American musicians could not perform before white audiences in the venues presenting art music, white and black audiences did occupy the same public space in common enjoyment of European art music—in segregated seating. Moreover, free people of color developed their own spaces and organizations for the enjoyment and cultivation of European music. They formed orchestras and bands to play Europeanstyle music. They had their own teachers and composers; they held their own balls and concerts. For most of the nineteenth century, educated and uneducated African Americans cultivated their understanding and performance of European music, elevating it above the music that slaves made. White people could shield themselves from the influence of African sounds—by banishing enslaved black people from their social space—but black people could not shield themselves from the sounds of European culture because they had very little control over their exposure to it. Only toward the end of the century did a new valuation of an indigenous African American sound prepare the ground for the emergence of the widespread acceptance of the blues, ragtime, and, in the twentieth century, jazz. Until then, the music of Paganini, Rossini, and other European composers—in other words, the music of the slave masters—took precedence in the sentiments

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of both the white and black publics. But in contrast to white Americans, who caricatured and denigrated the music of enslaved African Americans in minstrelsy, free African Americans appropriated white culture without caricaturizing it, at least in public. The extent to which they subtly transformed the music tradition they embraced is open to question. Yet it would have been hard for musically gifted African Americans to resist the appeal of the overwhelmingly dominant European music, since they were immersed in it and heard no socially viable alternative with the allure of prestige. New Orleans differed, too, from other American cities in that the involvement of free people of color in the city’s musical life was encouraged by the European immigrant musicians. Ludovico Gabici, the Italian professor of music who arrived with his itinerant band of musicians and singers in 1837, became one of the most sought-after music teachers in the city, and one of the very few instructors of European ancestry willing to teach African American students.60 Less than two weeks after Gabici and his colleagues set their bags down on the levee, Edmond Dédé turned ten years old. His father Basile fils had already started the boy on his own preferred instrument, the clarinet, and reportedly Edmond played it well. But Edmond eventually switched to the violin. At some point after Gabici arrived in 1837 and before Dédé set off for Mexico in 1848, the immigrant violin teacher accepted the young prodigy as his pupil. According to James Trotter, who wrote the first survey of African American musicians, Dédé studied with Gabici and with Constantin Deburque, an African American conductor well known in New Orleans and the founder of the Negro Philharmonic in the 1830s.61 Late in life, however, Dédé credited only two teachers in New Orleans for the musical education of his youth: his father and Ludovico Gabici. Gabici was not the only European immigrant to teach African Americans. In the neighborhood where Dédé grew up, he was surrounded by the majority of the European-born musicians working in New Orleans. In 1850, the largest concentration of the city’s musicians (thirty-three) lived in the First Municipality, Ward 6, an area bounded by St. Philip Street, Rampart Street, Esplanade Avenue, and the river (within the boundaries of today’s French Quarter). This was the same ward where Basile Dédé fils, his wife Louise Dupré, and Edmond Dédé lived in 1850. Neighboring Ward 4 (St. Peter Street, N. Rampart, St. Philip, and the river) and Ward 5 (St. Louis Street, City Park Avenue, St. Philip, and N. Rampart—today’s Treme) were home to thirty-two more. Thus, a little more than half of the city’s musicians and music teachers lived in the area of New Orleans with the highest concentration of free people of color. A

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music teacher from France, J. B. Kroll, age forty-one, lived with Helene Ricardo, a twenty-six-year-old mixed-race native of Louisiana, and their two young mixed-race (mulatto) children. It would have been illegal for Kroll and Ricardo to marry, but they lived together nonetheless. Charles Paisson, a thirty-nine-year-old musician from France, lived with three free mixed-race people, including Anna Hervé. These households are among the extremely few in which white residents lived with free mixed-race or black people who were not their servants. Growing up in the one section of the city where European musicians tended to congregate must have had an impact on Edmond Dédé. Late in life, Edmond Dédé claimed that his father had been a militia bandmaster, a claim that was consonant with the great affection free people of color had for military band music in the 1830s and 1840s.62 Perhaps the musical instruments found among Basile’s possessions when he died in 1868 are evidence of that status—three “clarionets” worth together thirty dollars, and a collection of “old musical instruments” worth only eight dollars. The fact that Basile played clarinet, the preferred instrument of militia bandmasters, seems to back up Edmond’s claim. It is more likely, however, that Basile offered music lessons to supplement his income as a market man. Basile Dédé does not appear in any of the muster rolls of the militias open to people of color in antebellum New Orleans, although scholars have identified other bandmasters in those same lists.63 The son may have touched up the narrative of his own life, for nowhere does he mention the documented fact that his father was also a market man. Bandmaster or not, Basile guided his son Edmond first to the clarinet and then toward the violin, a more prestigious instrument. Only the piano matched the violin for prestige. In that direction lay the path to acclaim. In the nineteenth century, violin and piano virtuosi could choose from a wider range of compositions than players of other instruments. In encouraging Edmond to master the violin, Basile fils was teaching him to aim high. Becoming a composer was an even higher ambition. Over the 1840s and 1850s, free people of color were pushed out of the music halls and deeper into the margins of New Orleans society more than ever before. The touring pianist Henri Herz received a taste of what that cultural isolation meant to the community when he spent several weeks there in August 1846. In the account of his travels published after he returned to Paris, Herz described an encounter with free African American leaders. Having settled into his rooms in the St. Charles Hotel, one day he received a message

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that a delegation of free “negroes” wished to speak to him. Bewildered, he invited them into his suite of rooms. The members of the delegation, he informed his readers, bore themselves “like perfect gentlemen.” One of them stepped forward. Sir—he said to me—we come to ask you to perform for us, the people of color. You must know that it is forbidden us to mix with whites in public places, and we would like so much to hear you play. If an auditorium of people of color would not be unworthy of your talent, and if you think that the soul of men of our race ought not to be deprived of the sweet, healing powers of art, we beseech you not to refuse our request and to grant us one day. You may set the compensation that we would owe you, and one of us will remit it to you with our gratitude the night before the concert.64 Henri Herz’s priority was not equal access. His eye was on ticket sales. Promising to give the delegation an answer on the following day, he consulted his booking agent on the matter. Do not do it, the agent counseled. Holding a separate concert for free people of color, he insisted, would antagonize the white population. Herz admits that he followed his manager’s advice. The free people of color were among the “five hundred or so persons” turned away at the theater door, according to the New Orleans Bee.65 Little wonder, then, that the over fifteen thousand free people of color in New Orleans counted in the federal census dropped by more than a third by the time of the next enumeration in 1850, as African American families trickled out of Louisiana.66 But leaving entailed risks. To those who established permanent domicile abroad, the state of Louisiana offered no legal way to return. Many of those who left relocated to Mexico, especially after 1848. In that year, the U.S. government imposed a peace on a conquered Mexico after two years of bloody fighting. A newly pacified Mexico must have looked auspicious to Americans, including those of African descent, because at some point in 1848 Edmond Dédé boarded a steamer in New Orleans bound for Mexico. Many Americans saw in Mexico wide-ranging possibilities to get rich, start new lives, or simply disappear. Once U.S. troops withdrew from Mexico City in early 1848, steamers once again carried white and black New Orleans merchants who had long-standing commercial ties to Mexican gulf ports, like Veracruz, Matamoros, and Tampico. Schemers and entrepreneurs from all over the United States took advantage of the political uncertainty in the postwar

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period to foment local support for new nation-states independent of both Mexico and the United States. To free people of color looking for somewhere to start new lives with fewer constraints on them, postwar Mexico seemed a better place than many. It was close enough to Louisiana to keep in relatively close touch with family and friends. And it was preferable to Cuba and other Caribbean islands under Spanish rule, where slavery was still legal. In Mexico, slavery had been abolished. Over the two decades following the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, hundreds of families of color from Louisiana made their way across or around the gulf to Mexico. The country was recovering from having been conquered on September 14, 1847. In the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mexican government had signed over to the United States territory that became the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas and agreed on the Rio Grande as the border between the two countries. The atrocities committed by U.S. troops on their march toward the capital and their occupation of it make it highly unlikely that American immigrants to Mexico would have received a warm welcome. But perhaps refugees from slavery would have encountered less hostility.67 In 1859, a free man of color from New Orleans named Louis Nelson Foucher offered those willing and able to enter exile a place to settle. Foucher bought tracts of land on the gulf coast north of Veracruz and made it available to families leaving Louisiana. The area where the families settled, consisting of small villages in the mountains above the coast, became known as the colony of Eureka. Many of the families that joined the venture stuck it out in spite of the pestilential climate. Others returned to New Orleans during the hopeful period after the Civil War. With the failure of Reconstruction, more families began to migrate to the Mexican coast. A significant number remained and their descendants live there today.68 In the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-Mexican War, once the troops withdrew and the dangers of war diminished, the people of Mexico City once again enjoyed concerts, opera, and theater. Still on his tour of North America, the pianist Henri Herz arrived in Mexico about a year after Edmond Dédé. Much later, in the 1880s, Dédé claimed to have met both Herz and the famous soprano Henriette Sontag, who was also touring Mexico. Not surprisingly, Herz does not mention the young African American violinist and composer in his travelogue for reasons more likely having to do with Dédé’s youth and inexperience than race. But it suggests that Dédé was a go-getter, seeking the acquaintance of well-known European musicians. And a talented young musician like Dédé, trained by New Orleans’s finest teachers, was unlikely to have had diffi-

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culty finding employment in a war-ravaged Mexico City seeking to reignite its cultural life. The fact that he remained there for over two years suggests that he was able to make a living. But it cannot have been an easy one. Herz, the celebrity pianist, focused in his memoirs on the jubilant welcome he received at the city gates when he arrived from Veracruz in 1849.69 His manager, Bernard Ullman, in contrast, recalled only the discomfort of traveling by mules on dusty roads from town to town and the constant threat of disease. Illness was in fact a real danger. Several years later, in 1854, Sontag, still performing in Mexico, succumbed to disease and died.70 Dédé was luckier. An unspecified illness compelled him to quit Mexico and return to New Orleans. On October 12, 1851, he boarded a steamer in Veracruz bound for New Orleans.71 The question hanging over him as his ship stopped in at Matamoros and then Galveston before it arrived at his native city was: would he be let in? Although he later claimed that he went there to give concerts, it seems more likely that the young musician went to Mexico in search of work as a musician. And so Dédé’s nearly three-year sojourn in Mexico created a serious problem for him. Dédé must have been aware that while he was in Mexico the city of New Orleans had passed a law that blocked the reentry of African American travelers who had established legal domicile elsewhere.72 Whether or not Dédé intended to remain in Mexico, he bore the burden of proving to Louisiana officials that he had not established permanent residence there. The awareness that he would be denied reentry may be indirectly related to Dédé’s otherwise inexplicable appearance in the 1850 federal census for Orleans Parish. It is a curious appearance. Among the households of the Sixth Ward, First Municipality, there appears one with three members. The head of the household is listed as Basille “Rélé,” forty-five years old, a black Louisiana native market man with property worth $2,000. Below his name appears that of Marie Dupré, forty-seven, black, also born in Louisiana. On the next line is written “Edmond” followed by double quotation marks, meaning “ditto” or “as above.” The double quotation marks next to Edmond’s name have understandably led the transcribers of the handwritten census forms to enter him into the database of the federal census as “Edmond Dupré.” This Edmond was twentythree years old, black, a cigar maker by occupation, and born in Louisiana. The similarities are too pronounced to be ignored. The misspelling of Basile’s family name and the attribution of Dupré to the Edmond in that household are outweighed by a greater number of agreements with the details of the Dédé family. The ward and municipality match the last

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documented location of Basile’s business. No other free black man named Basile was married to or living with a woman named Marie Dupré in New Orleans at that time or previously. Basile Dédé’s occupation as well as that of Edmond’s, documented elsewhere, match those in the “Rélé-Dupré” household. The ages of Basile Dédé, his wife Marie Dupré, and his son Edmond match the ages given for the members of the “Rélé-Dupré” household. There is, then, every reason to suspect that the census taker wrote down the wrong name and misattributed Edmond’s name—hardly a rare occurrence. Census takers made mistakes all the time. The question is, were the discrepancies intentional? Did Basile and Marie intentionally mislead the census taker? And why would they have done so? It is extremely unlikely that, when Dédé returned in late 1851, officials would have had the notion, much less the ability, to check the census to see whether he had been a resident of the city in recent years. Basile Dédé probably claimed that his emigrant son was living with him out of a sense of caution. Concerned that Edmond might not have been allowed to return to New Orleans, Basile may have felt the less said about his son’s whereabouts the better. It was a policy based on prudence and reserve. It is hard to imagine that under the circumstances Basile’s inclination was unusual. At a time when the city and state governments were making it increasingly difficult for African American families to stay in the city, Basile’s reticence makes sense. If, then, Basile was not unusual, then there may have been fewer free people of color in the city than the 9,961 listed in the 1850 census. At the very least, we can be reasonably certain that one young African American was living outside the United States at a time when his father named him as a member of his household. When the census taker asked for their occupations, Basile described himself as a market man, owning property worth $2,000. That situated him among the moderately well-to-do in his community. “Cigar maker” is listed as Edmond’s occupation, something he had in common with many people of color. Cigar manufacturing was an industry in which free African Americans were involved at all levels, from humble cigar roller to proprietor. It must have been in this period that Dédé began working for a remarkable mixed-race family that was in the process of launching a cigar manufacturing and distribution company in this same period. In the early 1850s, two brothers, Louis and Joseph Tinchant, set up a cigarmaking business in New Orleans. The Tinchants, originally from SaintDomingue, were a free family of color with business interests on both sides of the Atlantic. Their mixed-race parents, Jacques Tinchant and Elizabeth Vincent,

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immigrated to France from Louisiana in 1840, leaving their eldest son, Louis, in New Orleans to look after the family’s properties. Jacques and Elizabeth settled with their five other children on a farm in southwestern France. Joseph, the second eldest, who emigrated with his parents, received an excellent education in the classics at the collège royal in the southwestern provincial town of Pau. When he graduated, Joseph moved to Paris. After spending a year there, Joseph left Paris shortly before revolution broke out in February 1848 and joined his brother Louis in New Orleans. It was a risky venture for Joseph. In France, no one labeled him a mulatto in official documents. That would change in New Orleans. There, the “M” for “mulatto” or h.c.l. (homme de couleur libre) was almost always placed after his name. In the early 1850s, Joseph and Louis, subsidized by the sale of their parents’ property, rented a warehouse, bought a forty-five-year-old slave who knew how to roll cigars, and began to buy tobacco. Soon they were also hiring independent contractors, men and women who rolled cigars in their homes.73 At some point in the process of establishing L & J Tinchant Cigar Manufacturers, the Tinchant brothers met and took Edmond Dédé into the business. Like many in the free community of color who had neither artisanal skills nor an income derived from annuities, Dédé had been making a living in the cigar industry before the Tinchant brothers set up their business. The 1850 federal census lists Edmond Dédé’s occupation as “cigar maker,” which is the job he likely performed when he first began working for the Tinchants. When he left New Orleans for good in 1855, he still called himself a “cegar maker,” but by 1857 Joseph Tinchant was describing Dédé to Belgian authorities as “his friend and bookkeeper.”74 This was a friendship that had evidently evolved. The two young men, born in the same year, may have felt like kindred spirits, even if Dédé had not had a classical education like Joseph’s. Dédé worked as a cigar roller by day and dedicated himself to his avocation in the after-hours. In this period between his return to New Orleans in late 1851 and his departure for Europe, he published a song, “Mon pauvre coeur” (My poor heart). It was a mélodie, a form of art song most closely associated with Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod and similar to the German lieder of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. The printed song makes it, according to Lester Sullivan, “the oldest piece of sheet music by a New Orleans Creole of color,” thereby making it very likely among the oldest, if not the oldest, published music by an African American.75 Unlike the European variety of mélodies, whose composers drew on Romantic poetry for lyrics, the first verse of Dédé’s mélodie sets out a banal trope of unrequited love with one detail worth noting:

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Quand je te vois Oh! ma blonde creole! Sur ton balcon, Oh! je crois voir une vive aureole Orner ton front Divine enfant chaque jour je t’implore Avec ardeur Des partager la flamine qui dévore [sic] Mon pauvre coeur. [When I see you Oh! my blond Creole woman On your balcony, Oh, I see a glow Adorning your face Divine child, every day I beg you passionately To share the burden of the flame that devours My poor heart.]76 It is hard to imagine a clearer sign of Dédé’s commercial intentions in 1852 than this love song to a “blond creole.” The identity of the song’s lyricist, C. Sentmanat, is unknown. Whether Sentmanat was white or black is unknown, although the odds are weighted in favor of his having been a white man, given that the addressee in his ode was a blonde. Thus, all we can conclude from this song is that Dédé was composing stately mélodies for a white and black audience at a time when most music lovers were responding to more lively, foot-tapping kinds of songs.77 Dédé was a published composer of art music before he left Louisiana. It was four years after his return to New Orleans in fall 1851 that he made his final break with his family, friends, and native ground. He later gave the impression that Europe was the next obvious step. All he had to do was save the money to make the jump from a slave society to one that did not use race as an organizing principle. The timing, however, is suggestive. In 1856, his employer and friend, Joseph Tinchant, and Tinchant’s brother Louis were themselves in the process of leaving New Orleans. Their parents had sold the family farm in southwestern France. They had the connections in Cuba for the tobacco. All they needed was a European base of operation. By the fall of 1856, Joseph Tinchant was in Paris. Edmond Dédé had already arrived there. The question worth asking is how did they arrive there? By boat, of course. The less obvious answer involves the documents he and Tinchant carried.

4 • City of Dust

When next in Paris, set aside a morning to take the 12 line to the NotreDame-de-Lorette Métro stop in today’s ninth arrondissement. For much of the nineteenth century, that neighborhood on the Right Bank was known as Nouvelles Athènes—New Athens. The name fits the area, not least because the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, standing at the top of the Métro steps, resembles a Greek temple more than a Christian church. In the surrounding streets, neoclassical cornices and pilasters decorate the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century facades of the buildings. After admiring the church, walk to the rear along its western exterior wall. Stop a moment at the intersection where five narrow streets converge. This stroll has taken the visitor along the rue du Faubourg Montmartre. Rue Lamartine comes in from the right, rue Saint-Lazare from the left, rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette obliquely from the northwest, and straight ahead lies the lower end of rue des Martyrs, Street of the Martyrs.1 Today, tourists trudge up rue des Martyrs to reach the boulevard de Clichy, the boundary between Paris and the village of Montmartre before the city annexed it in 1861. In the 1850s, however, sightseers to the French capital had little reason to pass through the area. Rue des Martyrs was a modest residential and commercial street that ran from Notre-Dame-de-Lorette to the then city limits. On the street level, the buildings contained a crockery store, at least one caterer who prepared food for the local residents, fruit and vegetable stands, groceries, a paint store—the kinds of businesses, in fact, that line the street today. But nowadays, mixed in with the more quotidian businesses, there are high-end food shops that stock expensive comestibles from Provence or the Auvergne. They pull in a better-heeled clientele than the locals who shopped on the street one hundred and sixty years or more ago.

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On this same street, one short block up from the church of Notre-Dame-deLorette, where rue Hippolyte Lebas dead-ends into rue des Martyrs, stands number 11. Here, the painter and collector Jules-Robert Auguste hosted a salon in the 1850s, where Eugène Delacroix and other painters met to discuss art late into the night.2 At number 7 stood a popular cabaret, the Golden Pheasant, which opened in 1787 and offered its humble clientele food, wine, and, later in the nineteenth century, singers, much like the small nightclubs of the twentieth century. In between those buildings, at number 9, another workers’ eating establishment, a brasserie, opened for business in 1861. That establishment attracted serious talkers who liked to drink more than serious drinkers who liked to talk. Both a serious talker and a serious drinker, the poet and journalist Charles Baudelaire was a regular patron.3 By the time the brasserie opened in number 9, the composer from Louisiana, Edmond Dédé, had already moved out of his room on one of the floors above. It cannot be a coincidence that the only address in Paris that we have for Dédé situates him not far from the Champs-Elysées, in the already longestablished heart of Romantic Paris, Nouvelles Athènes. In the mornings, laborers and tradesmen residing in the quarter fortified themselves for the workday ahead of them—or the one they just finished—with cognac in the quarter’s brasseries. During the day, housewives and domestic servants shopped for produce and groceries. Carriages and delivery carts clattered up and down the narrow cobblestone thoroughfare. Outwardly, Nouvelles Athènes looked like any of the other working-class, petit-bourgeois districts in the city. At night, however, the atmosphere of the street and the surrounding neighborhood lost the humble respectability it enjoyed during daylight hours. Lessthan-respectable women of the demimonde were known to live in the quarter’s apartment buildings. Kept women, known as lorettes, received their patrons, lovers, or well-to-do clients in their rooms. Loitering on the streets below their windows, prostitutes watched for potential customers. The quarter’s louche and shabby nocturnal associations tainted the reputations of all women who lived and worked there. Nouvelles Athénes was Paris’s most romantic, most bohemian home, where the demimondaines lived next door to opera singers, musicians, authors, poets, and painters. Those who placed a higher premium on creativity and passion than on convention and social status gravitated toward the quarter. There at the heart of Romantic Paris, in 1842, the author George Sand settled with her children in the building complex known as the square d’Orléans, at 80 rue Taibout. Her lover at the time, the Polish composer and

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pianist Frédéric Chopin, took an adjoining apartment, where he died in 1849. One street over, on rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, the painter Eugène Delacroix worked in his atelier. The great Victor Hugo wrote some of his most famous works a few streets farther west in his home on rue de la Rochefoucauld. When the neighboring district of the Chausée d’Antin became fashionable in the 1830s and 1840s—thanks to the splendid mansions of the city’s new money men and industrialists—the more successful of the artistic denizens of New Athens moved several streets to the south. The residences of the composers Charles-François Gounod, Hector Berlioz, and the elderly Gioacchino Rossini; the author Alexandre Dumas père; the diarists the Goncourt brothers; and, later on, the painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; and many other lesserknown artists were spread across the two adjacent quarters.4 They drank and smoked in the working-class cafés-concerts of nearby Montmartre. The betteroff among them rode carriages down the hill to the first arrondissement to attend plays in the gilded theater of the Comédie française. It was the kind of liminal quarter where the celebrated and occasionally notorious residents could have their cake and eat it in semi-respectability.5 The address at 9 rue des Martyrs is the only documented evidence of Edmond Dédé’s presence in Paris before he moved to Bordeaux in 1860. In fact, there is no trace of Dédé anywhere in the public record between his departure from Mexico in late 1851 and his residence at 9 rue des Martyrs in 1856. All we have is his own indirect account of his whereabouts. Many years later, unsigned articles about him appeared in two arts newspapers of the city of Bordeaux, where Dédé was employed as a music hall manager. The earlier of the two articles is undated, but the details in it suggest a publication date in the late 1870s or early 1880s. The other, later article bears only the date, “1887– 1888,” when Dédé was sixty-one years old.6 Despite the lack of direct quotations, there can be little doubt that the composer himself supplied the details of these two biographical sketches. Although they are as close to an autobiographical statement as we are likely to have, they require some interrogation. For instance, from the earlier article we learn that after leaving Mexico, Dédé spent four years working in a cigar factory in New Orleans before crossing the Atlantic Ocean. The young musician arrived in Paris, the article continues, “when the Exposition was in full swing: the curiosities or marvels interested him only mildly.” This statement tells us that he arrived in Paris during the summer of 1855, when France’s first Exposition universelle, or Universal Exposition, was being held, an event that attracted five million visitors between

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May and November of that year.7 It was a heady moment indeed to encounter the French capital. Whatever their social standing at home, all Americans newly arrived in Paris during the summer of 1855 would have had a hard time deciding which sight to give their attention to first. Was the first priority a visit to the Louvre, crowded with tourists gaping at gallery walls crowded with paintings? Not far from the Louvre lay the gardens of the Palais-Royal, residence of the last king, Louis Philippe. Then again, perhaps the best way to begin would be to cross the bridge to the old medieval quarter, the Ile de la Cité, and make one’s way to the cathedral of Notre Dame, still the tallest structure in the city. The view from the parapet between the bell towers was reputed to be very fine. From there, it was possible to see not far away Sainte-Chapelle, where a reliquary containing Christ’s crown of thorns was kept. In that year, more tourists came to Paris than ever before. To accommodate the visitors to the Universal Exposition the Hôtel du Louvre, the first of the large luxury hotels, opened in 1855, heralding a dramatic rise in the number of visitors to Paris in that decade.8 The new hotel’s seven hundred rooms accommodated well-to-do tourists who came to see the sights of the city. Of course, attending the Universal Exposition at least once was a must. The second world’s fair was an extravagant display of the industrial, technological, agricultural, and artistic innovations of France and thirty-four other countries. The newspaper critics echoed the public’s conviction that this Parisian event outdid the first international Great Exhibition of 1851, held in the glass-andiron Crystal Palace in London. Paris’s principal exhibition hall, the Palace of Industry, was eight hundred and fifty feet in length and covered thirty-nine acres of the Champs-Elysées, a public park to the west of today’s Place de la Concorde. Another immense hall, the Palace of Fine Arts, contained art works. In advance of the fair, would-be French and foreign exhibitors submitted their inventions and art works to juries made up of members of France’s prestigious academies and institutes. Creativity and innovation received more approval from the industrial and agricultural jurors than from the artistic ones. The jurors from the Academy of Fine Arts judged the submissions according to the standards of beauty promoted by the art establishment of the period. Like the public, the academicians tended to prefer paintings and sculptures that depicted identifiable people, figures from history or classical myths, and pastoral landscapes so realistically painted that a viewer could not discern a brushstroke. Evidently, many, many artists satisfied those standards. There was almost as large a throng of paintings and sculptures as there were

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spectators. The walls of the hall were obscured from floor to ceiling by far more oil paintings than any person could absorb in one viewing. The only logical thing to do was to return at least once. An entrance fee did not deter the public.9 The newspapers daily referred to the fair; everyone talked as though they had already worn themselves out trying to visit all the exhibits in the halls. In short, there was a lot, nay, too much, to see in Paris. If, as he later claimed, Edmond Dédé took only mild interest in the wonders of the Exposition, there was plenty else in the vicinity that would have interested him. In the summertime, the Champs-Elysées was the site not only of the exhibition but also of a circus and several open-air cafés where Parisians drank, danced, and listened to singers and orchestras. Thick with trees but dusty from the unpaved ground, the Champs-Elysées was fairground, circus, and theater district with outdoor seating all in one vicinity.10 Where aristocrats in powdered wigs had once strolled in the previous century, now acrobats, jugglers, mimes, and hucksters stationed themselves along the broad packed-dirt paths that stretched across the park, along which Parisians were likely to pass, stop, watch, and, if they felt so inclined, toss down some coins. Alert to the work of pickpockets and thieves, policemen in the area kept their eyes on the groups of bystanders gathered around the street musicians.11 Six thousand street musicians wandered the streets of Paris, and many of them gravitated to this concentration of strolling people.12 At tables in the park’s cafés, children dripped ice cream down their dresses, men downed stronger quaff, and humble families picnicked on benches and patches of grass. To the music of small orchestras, couples danced energetic polkas in sunlight gently filtered through the branches of elm trees. “The Champs Elysées especially are at the center of this excess of harmony, with which Paris overflows in summertime. One cannot take a step,” the flâneur Victor Fournel wrote, “between the Rond-Point and as far as the Place de la Concorde, without receiving the full impact, like artillery fire, of a romance here, a little song there, and further on a great aria or an opera overture.”13 The improvements to the Champs-Elysées in the 1850s stimulated changes in the cafés situated there, known as cafés-chantants, forerunners of the caféconcert. An outdoor establishment where people sat at small tables, ordered drinks, and listened to singers performing on rudimentary stages, the caféchantant was the direct descendant of the goguette, a humble café where working men and women gathered to sing popular and political songs or to listen to singing musicos who strolled from table to table. In the Champs-Elysées, the proprietors of the cafés-chantants sought to raise the tone of their establishments by

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excluding the acrobatic and circus-like acts performing elsewhere in the gardens. Patrons could still drink, smoke, sing along with or heckle the singers, but the performers, wearing evening attire by the 1840s, pitched their songs to a higher social level than the one occupied by the members of the audience. In cafés near the Universal Exposition of 1855, the proprietors were paying more attention to the décor of their establishments. The Café des Ambassadeurs and the Chalet Morel, both in business since the 1830s, now contained purpose-built tables and chairs arranged in the space in front of a stage.14 Trees, shrubbery, and ornamental plants served as the café’s walls and ceiling. After every half hour of song, the performers, garbed in formal evening wear, went from table to table to solicit contributions from the clientele. The patrons of these cafés tended to come from the working poor segments of the Parisian population. But in this same period, a growing number of bourgeois men and women, too, showed up to partake in the light and pleasant entertainment at the café tables. Singers knew not to expect an attentive, silent, or appreciative audience. Making themselves heard over the full-throated conversation, laughter, clash of glasses, arguments, movement of chairs, and bellowed orders for more rounds of drinks forced them to project their voices and made them energetic if not better performers (fig. 2).15 Louis Veuillot, a devout and conservative Roman Catholic, recalled the first time he entered a café-chantant. Through the smoke we saw two or three empty tables, which we got to not without some difficulty. What a scene! What an odor of tobacco, liquor, beer, and gas! It was the first time I had ever been in such a place and the first time I saw women in a café where men smoked. We were surrounded by not only women, but Ladies who had dragged their vanquished husbands there. . . . With still a half hour to go, all the places were taken. Some inferior acts came on, yelpers, mewlers, nothing that justified the price of the beer. A tenor sang something unrecognisable; a young lady, followed by two others, sang I have no idea what.16 Such were the affordable music venues that Dédé first encountered in 1855, by which time the makeshift cafés-chantants had evolved into the more permanently housed cafés-concerts in the newly laid out gardens of the ChampsElysées. As for the setting, the Champs-Elysées and the city itself were about to change dramatically from how they looked when Edmond Dédé first saw it in the summer of 1855. The pleasure gardens of the Champs-Elysées lay directly

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Figure 2. Le Café des Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Elysées, 1853. Engraving. (Scala/White Images / Art Resource, NY)

in the path of plans for a ceremonial corridor between the Tuileries Palace, where Emperor Napoleon III resided, and the Arc de Triomphe, the monument commemorating the military victories of the emperor’s uncle, the first Napoleon Bonaparte. Soon after the Universal Exposition ended in fall 1855, construction crews set to work widening the avenue, cutting down trees, laying out new boulevards, and imposing geometric order on the gardens that were left in place.17 The changes occurring in the bucolic if congested environs of the ChampsElysées caused anguish in the breasts of some respectable bourgeois men and women. The humorist Henry Monnier satirized this sentiment in his widely read stories in which figured a popular fictional character, Joseph Prudhomme, a pompous nitwit. In one story, Prudhomme expresses regret at the pace at which his city was changing before his eyes. He objects to the effects of modernization on Paris. Where will the acrobats go when the Champs Elysées is carved up into streets, covered with houses, and its elms replaced by portes-cochères [carriage entrances]? They will take refuge in the bois de Boulogne, as if a woodland could ever become a fairground!18

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In fact, neither the acrobats, the musicians, nor the dancers went anywhere. Although the wide thoroughfare being laid out did eventually become the avenue des Champs-Elysées and did obliterate parts of the gardens, opportunities for Parisians and visitors to dance, sing, eat, and drink in the outdoor theaters along the lower end of the Champs-Elysées continued unabated. Given his subsequent career in music halls, it is hard to believe that Edmond Dédé did not take advantage of those opportunities. No matter which district he might have settled in, the young musician from Louisiana must have found Paris overwhelming. The scale of the city would have struck awe into anyone from the United States. No American city in the first half of the nineteenth century—and certainly not New Orleans—could have prepared Dédé for the scale of the urban expanse, the crowds, the congestion, the decadence, the sheer pandemonium, and without looking too hard for it, the depravity of the French capital. Dédé left New Orleans, a relatively small city of 120,000, for a crowded metropolis of over one million people. Like the majority of Parisians, he chose to live on the Right Bank of the Seine.19 The Left Bank was where the noblesse poudrée—the old aristocratic families who dusted their hair with talcum powder and still dressed in silk—shared their district with the college students of Paris. How the city first affected him can be imagined by turning to the experiences of another young New Orleanian, who wrote home soon after he reached Paris in 1856, a year after Dédé’s arrival. Victor Grima, the son of a prominent slave-owning white Creole lawyer and notary, settled into rooms on rue Napoleon in the Latin Quarter. Like Dédé’s, his native tongue was French. But in contrast to the artistic Dédé, who was ten years older, the nineteen-year-old Grima had come to study medicine. His world of dissection clinics and the salons of white Louisianan expatriate families on the Left Bank differed markedly from the one that Dédé inhabited on the Right Bank. Still, different though their lives were, the two men might have crossed paths without realizing it as they circulated through the city along different but occasionally intersecting circuits. Shortly after he arrived in Paris, Victor Grima wrote to one of his younger brothers in New Orleans a sardonic description of life in the big city. 16 October 1856 . . . So you want me to tell you about this pitiful city of Paris? Listen, out on the boulevard, it’s harder to get around on that broad thoroughfare than it is on the narrower side streets. You don’t dare cross it without first making your last confession. To make it from one side to the other

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is like making it through Thermopylae. At least a dozen times two or three hundred vehicles, . . . a thousand horses, an army of dragons, several thousand policemen, and a swarm of street urchins swirl around you. People yell, swear, push, crush each other, and butt asses. They stop and go fifteen times. Thirty-six times they get stuck and can’t move. One thousand and three people ask for directions. Two hundred of them sustain injuries and three times as many of them die. If you survive the carnage, then the sight of the boulevard is really lovely. The pavements are spacious, planted with small, dry, meager trees stripped of their leaves. Parisians love them. Lining the boulevard on either side are the superb stores, with all kinds of lovely things laid out for sale.20 Grima and Dédé arrived in the French capital in a period when it and its inhabitants were being pushed into an embrace with modernity. Grima was scarcely exaggerating in his letter home. Daily, ten thousand carriages created traffic jams along the boulevard des Capucines. The rue de Rivoli, running from the Louvre east to the working-class districts surrounding the Place de la Bastille, was nearly as congested.21 After 1845 the municipality laid more and more pavements along Paris’s major thoroughfares, thereby raising pedestrians above the slick cobblestones and muddy streets.22 In the same period, Parisians applauded the gradual replacement of cobblestones in the streets with smoother gravel-and-sand macadamized road surfaces. They savored the reduction of the infernal din created by carriage and cart wheels and horses’ hooves striking cobblestone.23 The dawn of public transportation in Paris, in the form of horse-drawn omnibuses, had exacerbated the noise created by the private carriages and commercial carts. Once a street had been macadamized, it took only one cycle of four seasons for the dust clouds kicked up in summers and the mud created in rainy winters to make the Parisians of the district look back on their cobblestones with nostalgia. City traffic daunted even that poet of modernity, Charles Baudelaire. In “Loss of a Halo,” one of his prose poems collected under the title Paris Spleen, he complains about it to an admirer he encounters in an unsavory location (most likely a brothel). My friend, you know how terrified I am of horses and vehicles? Well, just now as I was crossing the boulevard in a great hurry, splashing through the mud, in the midst of a moving chaos, with death galloping at me from every side, I made a sudden move and my halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam. I was much too scared

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to pick it up. I thought it was less unpleasant to lose my insignia than to get my bones broken.24 In 1855, the year of Dédé’s arrival, construction work made moving around the city hazardous. The changes Paris underwent in the 1850s were the most disruptive residents and visitors had ever experienced. To accommodate the increased people and traffic, Paris was having to remove one arm from its tattered medieval garb while simultaneously shoving the other into a stiffly elegant military tunic. The denizens of the city started noticing changes in the late 1840s, when the municipality launched a large project to broaden the streets connecting the royal palaces—the Louvre, Tuileries, and PalaisRoyal—to the central markets of Les Halles. In the next decade, another massive, municipal, multiphased project dramatically altered the look and feel of the city even further. Mallet-swinging crews of migrant workers from the provinces smashed down entire blocks of buildings, many of them among the city’s most ancient, leaving deep craters and mountains of rubble in their place. Paris offered to visitors a landscape that resembled a battlefield more than a great city. And every battlefield has its scavengers. The demolition firms contracted to demolish the buildings and rip up the streets greatly enhanced their profits by selling the architectural remnants of the debris they created. Branded the bande noire (the black gang) by the politically engaged writer Victor Hugo, these entrepreneurs picked through the rubble they created for anything that could be resold.25 As a result of the demolitions, Paris was blanketed in dust. Clouds of pulverized stone and concrete choked the populace, who were forced to circumnavigate construction sites on their way to work. When the dust settled, Parisians beheld broad vistas down rectilinear passages from one end of the city to the other. By 1860, more than four thousand buildings—around 13 percent of the city—had been demolished.26 Another thirty thousand buildings would be razed over the next decade.27 The new boulevards, the lengths of which were planted with saplings, were wide enough to accommodate regiments of troops—which, in fact, was what the two men responsible for the upheaval partially had in mind when they planned the massive project. The man most directly responsible for shredding and then restitching the urban fabric of Paris was Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the former prefect of the department of the Gironde, who moved from Bordeaux to Paris in order to become the prefect of the Seine.28 He devised an ambitious program of demolition and reconstruction for much of the city on both sides of the

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river. On maps he drew long straight lines across entire sections of the city where he intended the boulevards to lay. He greatly broadened the ChampsElysées. He ordered a wide swathe of ground cleared in preparation for a new opera house that would stand at one end of a new avenue leading straight to the Louvre and the Tuileries. The decision that had the greatest impact on the look of Paris was his commissioning the construction of hundreds of apartment buildings of uniform appearance to line the boulevards. They, more than any other of Haussmann’s changes, gave the city the look it retains to this day. To effect these changes, a third of the city’s population was uprooted from their homes. Shantytowns of homeless people sprang up on the outskirts, hastening the annexation of the adjoining villages, like Montmartre in 1860.29 Lifelong Parisians had to learn their way around the city all over again. The change below the streets was nearly as extensive as it was above ground. The prefect replaced and extended the system of underground tunnels that washed Parisians’ effluvia out of the city. By gutting the city’s viscera, he rendered Paris more modern than its chief competitor, London. At the end of the Second Empire, in 1871, Paris had nearly three hundred and fifty miles of sewers under its streets.30 In effect, Haussmann modernized Paris before modernity had taken full shape. The reaction to these harbingers of modernity were mixed. Honoré de Balzac lamented the rapid disappearance of “Old Paris,” the vestiges of the prenineteenth-century city.31 Some felt Haussmann’s alteration of Paris’s cosmetic appearance made the city’s beauty both conventional and conformist. Imposing a rectilinear grid on a city whose charm derived from its serendipitous evolution over many centuries constituted an aesthetic sin in some critics’ eyes. One called Haussmann “the Attila of the Straight Line.”32 The annexation of the surrounding villages, on top of the unrelenting construction, dust, and noise, made many believe that the metropolis had grown too chaotic and unmanageable. Then again, others experienced a ghoulish thrill when they witnessed what the demolitions uncovered. One day in the fall of 1853 while walking home, the painter Eugène Delacroix passed a demolition crew preparing the ground for the widening of the rue de Rivoli. “As I went past the Tour Saint-Jacques,” he wrote in his journal, “I saw men digging up a great quantity of bones that were still in their original position. How our minds love scenes of this kind.”33 Very little of Paris’s medieval built environment remains today. To conjure a vision of what was lost, it’s necessary to wander down the old rue de

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la Montaigne Sainte Geneviève, which retains its pre-Haussmann character and radiates downhill from the Pantheon toward the river on the Left Bank. But the photographer Charles Marville made images of Paris streets in the late 1850s and early 1860s and thereby created a lasting record of what was soon to disappear.34 Walk the old rue or view Marville’s photographs—those are the only ways to recover “Old Paris.” That city is gone. France’s new ruler, the man who set Baron Haussmann to work, was responsible for its loss. He destroyed and rebuilt the city in order to secure for himself political stability, achieved at the cost of the French people’s liberty. By the 1850s, Parisians were well used to political upheaval. Baron Haussmann’s destruction and rebuilding of Paris was not simply a plan to modernize and beautify the city. One aim of his project was to gain purchase for the government on the citizenry and the urban landscape in times of social upheaval and war. After more than half a century of revolutions and coups d’état, political instability had come to characterize French society to such a degree that a foreign first-time visitor might reasonably have assumed that Haussmann’s demolition work sites were the result of war or insurrection instead of urban renewal. The Revolution of 1789, leading to the overthrow and subsequent execution of the Bourbon king, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1799 and wars of expansion, which followed shortly thereafter, were only the first phases of dramatic political change in France. Thereafter, the government passed from two younger brothers of Louis XVI to his cousin and then to a Bonaparte nephew. In 1815, the allied victors of Waterloo ushered onto the throne Louis XVI’s younger brother, Louis XVIII, who was succeeded by an even younger but more unpopular brother, Charles X, in 1824. An insurrection compelled him to abdicate in July 1830. Through political machination, Louis Philippe of the house of Orléans, a cousin of the Bourbon kings, successfully engineered his ascension to the throne. Over the course of the eighteen-year so-called July Monarchy, Louis Philippe banned political dissent in any form at a time when France was in the midst of an economic depression. Masses of people lacked the means to make a living, yet Louis Philippe amassed an enormous personal fortune through financial speculation. His unpopularity grew so intense that when, in early 1848, he outlawed political banquets, the last legal means of public protest against the government, thousands of Parisians took to the streets. Expecting to be attacked by the national guard, they erected barricades of debris and cobblestones across narrow streets throughout the city. At the Ministry of Foreign

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Affairs, a crowd waited to challenge the minister, who had resigned under pressure. Guards at the entrance shot into the crowd, leaving fifty-two dead. The violence quickly spread throughout the city. Within days, the last king of France and his family fled to England. The organized liberal opposition proclaimed the Second Republic.35 In the same year, 1848, the main political parties called an election for a president of the new republic. Napoleon I’s nephew, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, an obscure figure until that moment, won the election largely on the basis of name recognition and imperial nostalgia. Now France had a new Napoleon, who orchestrated his own coup d’état in December 1851, which took most observers by surprise. The democratically elected president of the Second Republic undemocratically proclaimed himself emperor. The transformation of President Louis-Napoleon’s Second Republic into Napoleon III’s Second Empire provoked the political economist and philosopher Karl Marx—then living in London—to remark that history was repeating itself. The first time was tragedy; this second time was farce.36 The new emperor began his reign in 1852 no more tolerant of political dissent than the now-exiled king, Louis Philippe, had been. As far as we know, Edmond Dédé was no political activist. But he had come to France to seek education and employment in a country where, in contrast to his native country, active republicanism was suppressed. The police squelched expressions of outrage over Louis-Napoleon’s coup. It became dangerous for French citizens to espouse republican sentiment. They risked deportation and imprisonment. Movement within France was restricted. Citizens were not allowed to travel from one department to another without the permission of their municipality. Only in the 1860s, in an effort to promote free trade within France, did Napoleon III’s government cease requiring its citizens to obtain permission or travel passes to move within its borders.37 A bigger but related problem for the French government was the large number of foreigners entering the country. Much earlier, across the Atlantic, the revolution that had transformed the French colony of Saint-Domingue into the nation of Haiti in 1804 created a flow of refugees: expropriated white planter families, white and mixed-race merchants, and other free people of color, whose entry into France very much concerned the authorities. Within Europe, the revolutions of 1848 in Poland and in the Italian peninsula had turned dissidents into political refugees, Frédéric Chopin among the best known of them. The migrations set in motion over a half century of political turmoil meant that by the time of the coup d’état of 1851, Napoleon III had to

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contend not just with the malcontents among his own citizenry; he also faced the problem of monitoring the revolutionary activities of foreign nationals within France. With good reason, he and his ministers feared the influence on French republicans of the politically radical exiles entering the country. Thus, new times seemed to call for a redoubled effort in monitoring the population, an activity the French government in its various incarnations had been engaged in since before the French Revolution. The French government had as early as 1791 tried to be selective about those permitted to enter France. It set up procedures at border crossings whereby foreigners had to show written permission obtained from the prefect of the police in Paris before they could enter France.38 The system proved to be very imperfect and laid bare a more fundamental need. The government needed to be able to distinguish French nationals from non-nationals, and therein lay one of its biggest challenges. Identifying its own citizens was no easy task. Dating back to 1792, when the legislative assembly issued criteria to regulate civil status, municipalities bore most of the burden of identifying and tracking the population. The government’s efforts were only moderately successful. Its efforts were hampered by bureaucratic incompetence, widespread illiteracy, the limits of communication technology, and forgery. Not that France was special in this regard. Nation-states on both sides of the Atlantic grappled with similar limitations. Also at work in France was the passive resistance of the French people to the post-revolution transfer of vital statistics—records of births, marriages, and deaths—from the church to the state.39 Tens perhaps hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen and -women simply neglected to register major family events with the municipality in which they lived. Working with error-ridden, incomplete, or falsified registers of demographic information, state bureaucrats and police officials had their work cut out for them. Even if the municipal ledgers had been consistently and accurately filled in, the form they took constituted in itself a barrier to the retrieval of usable information. Before the widespread adoption in the 1880s of the file card, and its alphabetical arrangement in a drawer or a box, police, customs, and state bureaucratic officials were at the mercy of their ledgers of minimally alphabetized names.40 Florant, the main protagonist in Emile Zola’s novel The Belly of Paris (Le ventre de Paris, 1871), returns to Paris after escaping from Devil’s Island, where he was unjustly incarcerated for seven years after Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état. The injustice was a stroke of realism in Zola’s novel. The coup d’état led to the arrest of over twenty-six thousand people, many of whom

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were deported to penal colonies.41 Florant fears the police will detain him, but not through any process of identification and cross-referencing; he did need identity papers—which he did not have—to pass through the city gates. To enter Paris, he hides under a pile of cabbage in a cart en route to the city’s public markets, Les Halles. Thereafter, the chances of his being caught depend almost entirely on someone recognizing him and turning him in. However present the danger of the police and government inspectors are in the story, Florant displays no fear of a cache of data from which his name might easily be extracted. Instead, he feared informants. The nineteenth-century police state was perhaps the more insidious for being reliant on informants than for the effective collection of information on its own. Known and feared as mouches (“flies,” or “rats” in twentieth-century American slang), informants fed the police administrators information about friends, families, and acquaintances. One journalist quipped, “a young man has principally to guard against three things in Paris: thieves, carriages, and flies.” But in his estimation, the rats (to use our parlance) were politically motivated. Rising every morning intent on safeguarding the government from great danger, the Flies work together to bring this about. Relying on an admirable logic, they say to themselves: “in order to protect the government, let’s first try to put it in danger. Let’s organize a nice conspiracy or a delicious little riot!” And, what do you know? Ever since the creation of the world and riots, there have always been plenty of simpletons who walk right into the trap.42 Police informants, then, were more effective and feared than police records and surveillance. A year before Dédé’s arrival in Paris in 1855, in conjunction with Haussmann’s urban renewal, the government instituted a major overhaul of the system of Paris police. Inspired by similar reforms to police administration in London made in 1830, the emperor’s ministers appointed a prefect of police to oversee the reorganization. Paris was divided up into beats, a cluster of city blocks around which uniformed policemen would patrol on a regular basis. But originally, during the Restoration, the idea of putting police on the streets derived not from a need to conduct surveillance. Rather, the visibility of policemen walking their beat was meant to reassure the city’s residents, especially the growing bourgeoisie, that the government was protecting them from thieves and murderers and keeping the peace. Pandering to the fears of the bourgeoisie, Napoleon III was simply reinforcing and enhancing

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an already established presence in Parisian life. In 1854, the year of the reform, the number of gendarmes rose from 750 to 2,770. Six years later, the force had grown to 4,600, as the city swallowed its suburbs. At the birth of the Second Empire, its duty was also to prevent insurrection and maintain public order. That effort called for patrolling the streets, cafés, and all other settings of public congregation. The newly reformed Paris police proved to be as corrupt as its earlier incarnation.43 And it remained that way well into the Third Republic. Nevertheless, under the regime of Napoleon III, whose ambition was to stifle and suppress dissent, Edmond Dédé would enjoy far more liberty of movement and professional opportunities than he ever experienced in the country of his birth. As we shall learn, he entered France with identity papers not entirely on the up-and-up and made the most of his chances once he was there. The ambitious composer from New Orleans arrived in this city of observed citizens and suspected exiles during the summer of 1855. But the earliest record of Dédé’s presence in Europe—the source of his Parisian address on rue des Martyrs—comes from Belgium, not from France. The police records of foreigners entering the Belgian city of Antwerp show that on December 22, 1856, Joseph Tinchant, Dédé’s cigar-manufacturer friend from New Orleans, arrived there from Paris and handed over to the Belgian police a passport issued to him the previous June by the governor of Louisiana. Two days later, Edmond Dédé presented his own identity document to the police in Antwerp. His passport, oddly, was not issued by any U.S. official. He handed over a Mexican passport he had obtained in Veracruz on February 1, 1851, nine months before he boarded a steamer bound for New Orleans and four years before he left New Orleans for Europe.44 Moreover, his age in the Mexican passport is given as twenty-four, five years younger than his actual age. More significantly, for the moment, Veracruz is listed as his place of birth. Why was Dédé carrying a falsified passport? His true birthplace and age are easily documented. No city in Europe presented a barrier that would necessitate changing his age or his birthplace. The reason lay in Louisiana rather than Europe. Simply put, the issuance of this document by Mexico suggests that Dédé misled the Louisiana authorities when he returned to his native city in late 1851. On closer inspection, his motives are not hard to understand. As discussed in chapter 3, the laws of Louisiana at that time barred free people of color from returning if they had established domicile in another country. Dédé’s years in Mexico very likely would have looked to an official as though Dédé had established domicile there. Anticipating that the authorities were

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unlikely to allow him entry, he instead obtained a Mexican passport with false place and date of birth for his return to New Orleans. In this respect, Dédé was not unusual, since forgery of identity and travel documents was exceedingly common throughout the nineteenth century.45 Here it is worth recalling that according to the 1850 U.S. census, he was supposedly still physically present in his hometown. The conflicting dates of Dédé’s identity papers and his appearance in the federal census as a current member of his father’s household under the name “Edmond Dupré” (his stepmother’s family name) open a window on to the ways free people of color, whose movements were constrained by law, could avail themselves of the limitations of government bureaucracy and surveillance in order to evade detection. The punitive legal restrictions placed on free people of color in the antebellum period compelled them to adopt evasive strategies. Thinking about these discrepancies a little further before we return to Antwerp, the greater wonder is that in 1856 his friend Joseph Tinchant obtained a United States passport—and just in the nick of time. For that year was a turning point in the U.S. passport’s history. Before 1856, no laws existed that regulated the issuing of passports.46 Whether the lack of regulation was the cause or effect, there was scarcely consensus within the federal government as to the passport’s purpose and fundamental disagreement over who had the authority to issue one. Was its purpose to certify the national status of its bearer? Or was it meant to validate its citizens’ claims to the protection of the U.S. government outside of U.S. borders? Underlying the question of which branch of government had the authority to issue the document was the complementary question of who was entitled to carry one. Could a citizen of another country carry a U.S. passport? Was the primary purpose of the passport proof of citizenship? Or did it promise safe passage to its bearer? For much of the first half of the nineteenth century, there was little agreement on the answers to these questions. Since the founding of the republic, the federal government, state governors, and city mayors had issued passports to U.S. citizens and occasionally to non-U.S. citizens. Federal officials believed that verifying the national status of the people within U.S. borders was their exclusive right. Like other governments of newly emerging nation-states on either side of the Atlantic, the U.S. government viewed the passport as a certificate of citizenship, but not a requirement for crossing borders. The only period in the nineteenth century when U.S. citizens were required to show a passport when they left or entered the country was during the Civil War. In 1861, Secretary of State William H.

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Seward made carrying a passport mandatory for U.S. citizens leaving or entering the country. Patently military in purpose, the regulations were meant to prevent draft-age men from leaving the country.47 Until that time, possession of a passport when traveling was optional. On the level of the state and municipalities, governors and mayors also claimed the authority to issue passports to the residents of their states. Although U.S. authorities did not require citizens to possess passports when abroad, travelers nevertheless had strong incentives to carry one. Some European nation-states would not allow visitors to cross their borders without proof of their national status. American visitors to France in the early nineteenth century, when France and Britain were at war, appreciated the value of carrying a U.S. passport when they needed to convince French authorities that they were not British, in other words, enemy aliens.48 In the debate about the federal government’s exclusive authority to issue passports, equal rights activists saw an opportunity to advance their cause. The Department of State routinely turned down passport applications from free African Americans on the grounds that they were not U.S. citizens. At least since the administration of President John Tyler (1841–45), the secretary of state was loath to set any precedent that could be used to support claims of free people of color to citizenship.49 The strong reluctance at the federal level to issue passports to African Americans created a pressure point activists could exploit. With the support of their white abolitionist colleagues, free African Americans applied for passports on the federal, state, and municipal levels, with the paradoxical result that African Americans often had more success on the local level, even in the slave states, than on the federal level. In southern cities with large communities of free people of color—Charleston, Baltimore, and, of course, New Orleans—officials were more responsive to the local community’s pressure.50 Then, on August 18, 1856, the federal government’s stance on the issue prevailed: Congress passed a law that reorganized the Foreign Service and regulated passports.51 The act granted the State Department exclusive authority to determine the national status of individuals and to issue passports to U.S. citizens.52 That act set the stage for a setback for African Americans in their fight for the full rights of citizenship. Less than a year after the passage of the bill, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford. According to Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the majority opinion, anyone who was of African descent, whether free or not, was not a citizen of the United States and thus had no right to a U.S. passport. Is it any

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wonder, then, Edmond Dédé reentered and subsequently exited the United States through subterfuge? His friend Joseph Tinchant received one of the last passports issued on the state level and one of the last passports issued to a man of color before the Dred Scott decision was nullified in 1862. Now the composer’s passage from his homeland into exile comes into clearer focus. According to the Belgian police record, Dédé gave 9 rue des Martyrs as his address. Tinchant indicated that he resided about a mile away in the second arrondissement, close to Les Halles, at 44 rue du Petit Lion St. Saveur (now rue Tiquetonne). Since, as we have already noted, Dédé arrived in the summer of 1855 during the Exposition, he had been in residence for at least a year when Tinchant arrived in the late summer or fall of 1856 (his Louisiana passport had been issued in June of that year). Even so, Dédé was not in a position to condescend to his newly arrived friend. Tinchant knew the French capital well, for he spent two years there after completing his education in 1846 at the collège royal in the provincial town of Pau in southwest France. Those two years coincided with the exhilarating events of the revolution of 1848, when a new revolutionary government forced King Louis Philippe into exile, abolished slavery in the colonies once and for all, and declared elections for the Second Republic. By the end of that year, however, Joseph Tinchant was on his way to the city of his birth, New Orleans, where he would be when Edmond Dédé returned from Mexico in late 1851. New Orleans was not, one would have thought, a propitious destination for a man like Tinchant, whom the authorities of Louisiana deemed “a free man of color.” But it is a gauge of Tinchant’s hopes for his family’s tobacco business that in late 1848 he voluntarily returned to the slave emporium of the American South.53 Eight years later, in December 1856, Tinchant returned to Europe to set up the family’s cigar-manufacturing business in Belgium. On coming to Antwerp to join him, Edmond Dédé identified himself as the Tinchant firm’s “bookkeeper.” When he headed back to Paris a few months later, he described himself as a “cigar maker.” These two occupations suggest that he contributed to the Tinchant start-up venture in a variety of ways in order to make a little money. It is also likely that putting a reputable-sounding employment on the police record was preferable to calling himself a musician. European officials looked askance at musicians, artists, and other cultural workers without regular employment. They suspected a political agitator lurked behind the exterior of an artist seeking entry into a country. The police in France and in Belgium were particularly concerned to limit the activities of such supposed agitators.54

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The weeks Dédé spent in Antwerp gave him a chance to earn money and help a friend at the same time. Both his Parisian and especially his Belgian addresses make it clear that Dédé had very little money. To survive meant that he had to hitch his fortunes temporarily to the Tinchant family enterprise, an undertaking that was none too secure. Joseph Tinchant apparently had not many more funds than his friend did. The pair moved into rooms at 188 Boeksteeg (Book Alley), Antwerp’s largest slum with the highest concentration of people, many of them migrants, on public relief.55 They were soon joined in their lodgings by a young Dutch Jew, Salomon Benni, whom Tinchant hired to roll cigars.56 Over the first three months of 1857, Dédé and Benni helped Tinchant roll and then sell cigars made with tobacco acquired by Joseph’s brother Louis, who was still based in New Orleans. Once the business began to take off, Joseph’s other brothers and sisters began to arrive one by one from southern France, where the Tinchant parents had settled their family after leaving Louisiana years before. And then, in 1858, the family decided to reshuffle the responsibilities of its members. The brother left in New Orleans, Louis, came to Antwerp to handle the import end of the business. Two years later, Joseph and two of his other brothers returned to New Orleans to look after the export side. If Joseph’s return to New Orleans in 1848, when free people of color were enduring the most severe restrictions on their movements thus far, serves as evidence of his bad timing, then his decision to return there yet again in the year 1860 confirms it. The three mixed-race Tinchant brothers landed in New Orleans not long before the southern states seceded from the Union. Within three years, Joseph Tinchant and his brothers would find themselves living under Confederate rule. Edmond Dédé did not remain in Antwerp long enough to encounter Tinchant’s siblings. The Belgian police record shows that in early April 1856 Dédé returned to Paris.57 On his way out of Belgium, however, his year of birth and his birthplace were correctly recorded, a sure indication that the way the arrival and departure ledgers were compiled mitigated the usefulness of both. He did not stay in Paris long. Five months later, in September, he boarded a ferry, the Princess Helena, which carried him from Boulogne to the English port of Folkestone. From there, a train would have taken him to London, where he went in search of work. He remained in the United Kingdom only a few months, since Paris was, by his own account, “his goal and his dream.”58 On his return from the United Kingdom in 1856, Dédé remained in Paris until 1859 or 1860. His goal was to find teachers who would help him become

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a composer and conductor. He later claimed that he was able to achieve this goal because he possessed “resources that protected him from material want.” This seems doubtful.59 Although Tinchant probably compensated him for his three months in Antwerp, the budding cigar merchant was not in a position to have paid Dédé much, certainly not enough to eliminate the need to work. After all, the two men rented rooms in the worst slum in Antwerp. And yet, somehow he did survive in Paris and he did achieve his goal. That accomplishment appears all the more remarkable given the challenges he faced. Edmond Dédé was different from the people around him in two significant ways: he was not a French citizen, and he was a black man in an overwhelmingly white society. His national status was not immediately obvious to those with whom he came into contact. Looking at him and hearing his speech, Parisians would have noticed that French was his first language, even if they may not have recognized his accent or dialect. The people Dédé met were more likely to have assumed he came from one of the French colonies among the Caribbean islands. Although he carried a document that identified him as a Mexican national, which he used to travel beyond Paris, within the city he had no need of maintaining the fiction. Parisians were unlikely to associate him with the United States, and even if they did, no one was likely to have cared. Indeed, not even the majority of his own white or black compatriots were likely to take him for a fellow American, unless they knew him or came from Louisiana themselves. The relatively few U.S. citizens residing in Paris during those years were almost all white and well-to-do, and most of them came from the northern states. One historian estimates that thirty thousand Americans traveled to France between 1814 and 1848, although many of them traveled beyond France as well.60 By some contemporary estimates, of the one million or so residents in Paris in the mid-1850s, fewer than five hundred were U.S. citizens.61 The majority of them were there on business or as tourists. The records of the U.S. legation in Paris tell a similar story. It was customary for visitors from the United States to come to the legation and sign their name and local address in a ledger. By the late 1850s, a growing number of visitors gave as their residence the addresses of hotels, pointing to the rise in this new form of temporary accommodation, which those with means came to prefer over boardinghouses (pensions). It also points to the gradual rise in the number of American tourists.62 While not every American who came to Paris made the effort to stop by the legation, the number of names in those ledgers nevertheless gives an idea of how relatively few Americans traveled to Europe

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at mid-century. By my count, in 1855, 548 U.S. citizens (some of them long-term residents) registered their presence in Paris; a mere 108 turned up at the legation in 1856.63 Prior to the 1860s, so few Americans were in Paris in any given year that Parisians hearing them speak English often mistook them for British—a mistake that, as we have seen, in times of war between France and Britain made carrying U.S. passports that much more appealing. If there were few Americans in the city, there were even fewer African Americans. Very nearly all of the names in the legation records belonged to white Americans, made clear by the fact that none of the black and mixed-race people known to be in Paris in the years covered by the registers appears there. Prominent among those absences was the playwright and poet Victor Séjour, a mixed-race native of New Orleans whose plays were acclaimed by Paris’s demanding art critics. In July 1856, the summer of Dédé’s return to the city from Great Britain, Séjour’s play, Son of Night, opened at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin. Set in sixteenth-century Naples, the play’s protagonists included a duke, a noblewoman, Arab pirates, and a foundling whose father is revealed in the dénouement to be the duke. Parisian audiences loved it. Théophile Gautier, the most important critic of his time, gave the play high marks for drama, action, ballet, and poetry.64 When Victor Séjour died in Paris in 1874, he was buried in Père Lachaise cemetery. Whether Dédé personally knew Séjour is impossible to say. There are reasons to doubt that they were acquainted, despite both being free men of color from the same relatively small community of New Orleans. Séjour’s family was from Saint-Domingue, a subset of the free community of color that tended not to associate with the older Creole of color community.65 The playwright was also ten years older than Dédé, had been educated in Paris, and had been living there since the early 1840s. Victor Séjour, a member of a well-to-do mixed-race family with ties to the Caribbean, inhabited a different world from that of the poorer, darker-skinned Edmond Dédé, whose family’s roots went deep in the Louisiana soil. African Americans, especially those deemed black and not mulatto, were closely associated with slavery in the minds of diplomats, tourists, businessmen, as well as mixed-race Americans and the French. Whether the mixed-race Victor Séjour would have wanted to be associated with a black man like Edmond Dédé, even in Paris, is doubtful. Recent histories and popular films about African American expatriates at both ends of the nineteenth century give the impression France was a haven for men and women escaping the constraints of slavery and prejudice. In

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some ways, particularly in ways that counted most, that was true. The now well-known story of Sally Hemings’s relationship with Thomas Jefferson hinges on the bargain Jefferson struck with Sally and her brother James at the turn of the nineteenth century. Because France’s free soil law meant that the Hemings siblings had the right to apply for their freedom by virtue of being on French soil, Thomas promised James that he would sponsor his training as a cook and Sally that he would free the children she bore him.66 A little over a century later, the French welcomed with enthusiasm the new musical genre of jazz and its practitioners, most notably the cabaret star Josephine Baker, but also Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet. The general public on both sides of the Atlantic came to believe that if white Americans could not appreciate the native-born talented people of color dwelling in their midst, the French at least had enough delicacy to recognize genius when they heard it.67 Contrary to the impression recent generations have of France as a safe haven for African Americans, the French have been intimately acquainted with slavery, racism, and color prejudice since at least the first day they put African slaves to work in their colonies. Before the end of the Bourbon monarchy, the kings’ ministers had debated how to handle people of color seeking entrance into France for much of the eighteenth century.68 At first, the government’s concern centered on the presence and status of the slaves of colonial planters resident in France. As the association between slave status and African ancestry tightened over the eighteenth century, that concern broadened to encompass all people of color, whether they were enslaved or free. Subsequent legislation in 1777 limited the number of black people allowed to enter the kingdom.69 After the French Revolution of 1789, the new National Assembly debated whether or not to abolish slavery, but many in the government expressed concern about the presence of people of color in France and the possibility that they might marry French women. The legal situation of people of color in France stabilized only in 1848. Eight years before Dédé arrived in Paris, the Provisional Government, which replaced the government of Louis-Phillippe, made it illegal for all French citizens to own slaves anywhere.70 Although it was France’s definitive and last formal step toward abolition, it was not its first. The first attempt at abolishing slavery, led by gens de couleur from the Caribbean and white republicans among the revolutionaries, came in the wake of the 1789 revolution, a measure that was undone by Napoleon I’s reinstatement of slavery in 1802. What began as a debate about the morality of slavery gradually turned into a debate about the fetters slavery imposed on an economy impatient to grow.71

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From the reinstatement of slavery in the colonies to its abolition in 1848, the metropolitan government enforced the older laws that considered all enslaved men and women who entered France to be free, in part as a point of principle but in larger part as a way of motivating slave owners to keep their slaves out of France. Several times in the first half of the century the Ministry of the Marine, or the Admiralty, restricted the number of black people allowed to cross French borders, while making exceptions for some mixed-race people. To help in that task, the Admiralty directed the surveillance of people from the French colonies in the Caribbean. They exchanged information with municipal authorities about the people, many of them indigent, who were moving around within French borders. With each regime change, the policy to monitor movements of all migrants across the nation’s borders remained largely the same. Until 1828, marriages between French citizens and people labeled “black” were prohibited.72 Thereafter, there were no restrictions. But the abolition of slavery in 1848 did not mean the outright emancipation of slaves owned by French citizens. While it is true that forty years before, the Second Republic made possession of slaves illegal for all French nationals, Napoleon III’s government caved in to the pressures of France’s families with colonial property, including enslaved men and women, and extended the deadline by which those families were required to dispose of their slaves from three years to ten. The abolitionist and historian Victor Schoelcher estimated that around twenty thousand French citizens still owned slaves in 1851 and would continue to do so until 1858, three years after Dédé arrived in Paris.73 A larger consensus against slavery certainly existed in France than did in the United States, but attitudes toward people of African descent were similar. The government’s strategy of exclusion in the first two decades of the nineteenth century succeeded only partially. People of African descent continued to find ways into France, where they attempted to prosper. A census found 763 people of color in Paris between 1777 and 1790.74 Two decades later, another census taken in 1807 of all people of color then living in France counted five thousand black and mixed-race men and women (although that number does not include the ones who lived in Paris, where the largest group of people of color was based). Putting the maximum number of black and mixed race in France at any given moment in the first half of the nineteenth century somewhere between five and eight thousand seems like a safe estimate.75 Even if their numbers were in the thousands, they nevertheless constituted a minute fraction of the population. The darkest-skinned men and women among them would have been conspicuous in a Parisian crowd even more so.

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Most people of color in France were mixed race, the children of white fathers and black or mixed-race mothers, and having lighter skin color than Dédé’s, they would have endured less color prejudice. They were the sons sent to France and elsewhere in Europe to be educated. The dark-skinned Dédé lacked the advantages that most other emigrants of color in Paris had.76 They had financial resources that Dédé did not. He contended with color prejudice among the French that formed a barrier between black and mixed-race people on one side and the French on the other. Light-skinned mixed-race men and women, who tended to have more financial resources, found it easier to surmount the barrier and attain social acceptance than did those deemed black. The common perception that the French were color-blind a century or more ago persists, because examples of notable mixed-race people in France come to mind more easily than they do in the United States. Many black and mixed-race men and women in France worked in cultural spheres. At the time of the French Revolution, the Chevalier de Saint-George (1739–99), the mixedrace son of a French nobleman and an enslaved woman from the island of Guadeloupe, earned a reputation for expert swordsmanship and musical composition. Perhaps the best known among them in nineteenth-century France was Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70), author of countless popular novels, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers among them. His grandmother had been an African slave in Saint-Domingue. The public knew that his son and namesake, the author of The Lady of the Camellias, was likewise of African descent.77 The painter Edgar Degas portrayed a well-known African American acrobat and strong lady in his painting Miss Lala at the Cirque Fernando.78 Charles Baudelaire’s longtime mistress, Jeanne Duval, was a well-known stage actress. Her precise origins are lost, but she was known to be a mixed-race woman. In the series of poems he composed about her that form part of Les fleurs du mal (1857), Baudelaire expresses his fraught and conflicted feelings about her in racialized imagery. Edouard Manet’s painting Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining, controversial in its time and since then, is believed by most art historians to be a portrait of Duval.79 Late in the nineteenth century, a black male dancer from Cuba called Chocolat made a name for himself in cafés-concerts and music halls like the Moulin Rouge. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s poster image of him in mid-dance seeped into twentieth-century culture when Gene Kelly danced a supposed reenactment of Chocolat’s routine in the film An American in Paris (1955).80 To James Smalls, their relative scarcity and their difference turned people of color in France into public spectacles. They were in and of themselves

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conspicuous. The French public responded to them in ambivalent ways. Similar to Eric Lott’s understanding of blackface minstrelsy as reflecting “a peculiarly American structure of racial feeling,” so, too, Smalls perceives in French society attitudes of contempt and appreciation toward the black and mixedrace people among them.81 As subjects of modernity and as objects of spectacle, people of color in France absorbed the ambivalence they felt directed at them from the surrounding society. People of color in France did not, however, have to contend with a society organized to differentiate and discriminate bureaucratically between them and those of purely European descent. The difference between American and French ambivalent attitudes toward the black and mixed-race men and women who lived among them rested on a fundamental difference between the slave society in the United States and the one in France. The peculiar structure of racial feeling that Lott referred to was formed in a nation cohabited by people of European descent and the people they enslaved.82 Even if not everyone in the United States lived among or near slaves, every American was aware of an incessant discourse about slavery and worried for bad reasons and good about the Africans in the United States. In contrast, the majority of the British and French populations preferred not to live with or near the people they enslaved or subjugated. The distance at which European nations kept enslaved and subjugated black men and women had the effect of diffusing fears about racial difference and the relatively few people of color in their midst. In the nineteenth century, color prejudice in France was undeniably toxic, but it was not as lethal as it was in French colonies and in the United States, mainly because slavery was a phenomenon that the vast majority of the French were not immersed in. Black and mixed-race people in France during the nineteenth century had to contend with color prejudice and vicious racial caricature, but those elements of discourse were not tethered to legal or political restraints on the ability of people of African descent to prosper and move about as they were in the United States. Edmond Dédé, then, climbed out of the fire of the American South and into the frying pan of imperial metropolitan France. He had emigrated to a society that had recently abolished slavery, but still regarded people of color with hostility and condescension. To a black man raised in the antebellum South, it was a familiar message yet not strong enough to discourage him from migrating there. For in spite of the color prejudice of government bureaucrats and the public at large, post-abolition France did hold out significantly more opportunities to a man like Dédé than were open to him in the United States.

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The young black man from New Orleans, with little money, arrived in Paris with his Mexican passport, intent on acquiring a far better music education than he could have received anywhere in his native country and better than he would have found elsewhere in Europe. Moving from one city besotted with singing and dancing to another, Dédé came to Paris, one of the two major centers of music in Europe, the other being Vienna, in a period when the most avant-garde composers insisted that their music be performed, listened to, and experienced in ways different from the public’s enjoyment of popular music and song. To describe the change in economic terms, the emerging distinctions in prestige among musical genres boiled down to commerce: composers of songs and dance music catered to the tastes of the public and therefore made money doing so; composers of art music felt accountable principally to their own muses and therefore had to rely on the support of wealthy or royal patrons. But the growing distinction between composers of popular song and those of grand opera or symphonic music was permeable. All composers had to make a living. Some, like Dédé, composed popular songs for a living in addition to composing pieces for grander halls on the side. Few composers could afford to limit themselves to producing only art music. Then as now, the size of the market for uncomplicated, unchallenging music exceeded that of the market for art music. By the mid-nineteenth century, both in America and in Europe, people wanted to dance and sing in lighthearted, lively, and even comedic ways that did not suit the gilt chambers and theaters patronized by the aristocracy of the Old Regime. Popular music diverged more and more from serious, symphonic works, becoming a genre unto itself. As in the United States, French bourgeois men and women danced waltzes, polkas, and quadrilles, the dance music popular when Dédé was beginning his career.83 Composing songs offered the best chance for an aspiring musician and composer to make a living and draw attention to himself. In the cafés-chantants and, in the 1860s, the cafés-concerts, singers offered a kind of light song called a romance, analogous to the German lied, whose themes evoked a sense of small-town nostalgia in audiences, many of whom were laboring migrants from the provinces.84 People around the country and in Europe, especially those in the major cities where musical tastes and trends coalesced, were coming to prefer romances to opera. In Louis-Napoleon’s France, with its strengthened system of informants and police presence, the songs with political subtexts that made public authorities nervous ceded space

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on stage to lighter fare. With the vigorous suppression of republican sentiment, worker organizations, and political gatherings in cafés and public places in the early years of the Second Empire, the music-loving members of the public succumbed to the temptation to enjoy themselves as best they could.85 Somewhere in the middle of the musical spectrum could be heard the light operas of Gioacchino Rossini, whose Barber of Seville had been delighting opera lovers ever since its premier in 1816, and the dance music of the two Johann Strausses, senior and junior. At the other end of the spectrum, while Johann Strauss, Jr.’s waltz “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” (1867) sent well-dressed, bourgeois Viennese couples spinning around dance floors, music by composers like the famous three Bs (Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms) could be heard in the splendid public and private halls and the chambers of private homes. A concert hall, the Salle Barthélemy, that could seat an audience of three thousand opened in the early 1850s. It became a well-established venue for recitals and balls.86 All along the musical spectrum songs played a part of the repertoire—from the elegant lieder of Schubert to the raucous tunes of the music hall. In Europe and the United States, families below the rank of the highest aristocracy entertained themselves at home by singing and performing on the piano. A piano in the home was as much a marker of bourgeois comfort as a television would become after the mid-twentieth century. The prestige that clustered at one end of the musical spectrum stretched increasingly toward the middle as ordinary people took part in and enjoyed music in the home, café, opera house, and concert hall. Edmond Dédé was determined to situate his compositions on the prestigious end of the spectrum, but the insecurity intrinsic to a musician’s career compelled him to take employment up and down the spectrum. His first task on arriving in Europe was to find teachers who would train him. Dédé’s musical studies began once he returned from his sojourn in the United Kingdom in 1856, a year after he first arrived in Paris. What took him so long to begin his pursuit of a career in music? He certainly knew where to go. For a young, ambitious composer, there was only one place to study: the prestigious National Conservatory of Music and Acting (Conservatoire national de musique et de declamation), founded in its nineteenth-century form in 1795. Located in the ninth arrondissement on rue Bergère (now rue du Conservatoire) and half a mile from Dédé’s residence on the rue des Martyrs, the Conservatory was one of two musical centers in Europe. Its curriculum was unvarying; admission was carefully regulated. The orchestra formed by its faculty was considered the finest in the city.87 An education in this institution would have placed

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Dédé on a secure professional footing from which to launch a career. Of course, no academy of music in the United States—such as there were in the 1850s—would have accepted him as a student. The question is, would he, in fact, have been allowed to enroll in the Conservatory of Paris? The short answer is no. But the obstacle was not his status as a foreigner nor the color of his skin. Every year, a few musicians from elsewhere in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas were allowed to enroll. Over the entire nineteenth century, between 8 and 17 percent of the matriculated students each year were not French citizens.88 Twenty-eight male and female students came from the United States, including five born in New Orleans.89 The problem for Dédé was his age. The regulations stipulated that applicants under the age of ten or over the age of twenty-two would not be admitted as full students.90 Dédé turned twenty-nine in the November after he arrived in Paris. At least, that was his real age. Recall here that the year of birth given in the Mexican passport he presented in Antwerp gave his age as only twenty-three, still too old to fully enroll in the Conservatory. He or someone else must have subsequently doctored the year of his birth. As we have noted, forged and false passports were a common problem faced by the U.S. and European governments alike.91 If so, what did he gain from using a falsified passport in Paris? In his history of notable African Americans published in 1911, Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, a prominent man of color from New Orleans, provides us with the answer to this question: “Thanks to the intervention of good friends, he was promptly admitted into the Conservatory of Music of Paris as an auditor.”92 Dédé’s status as “auditor” at the Conservatory explains rather a lot. Whereas full-fledged students could not enroll for the first time in the Conservatory if they were older than twenty-two, auditors could be as old as twentyfive at their first enrollment. Dédé’s passport gave his age as twenty-three when he arrived in Antwerp. Furthermore, the regulations of the Conservatory required that before foreign prospective auditors could apply for the status of auditor, they had to establish a year’s residency in Paris.93 Here we have an explanation for Dédé’s arrival in Paris in summer 1855 and his temporary absences from his fixed address in Paris. He was establishing residency. When he returned to Paris from England, presumably in the latter half of 1856, he would have been, according to his false papers, just a few months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, a full year under the cutoff age for entering auditors, and he would have been an official resident of Paris for a year. Becoming an auditor through such a ruse means either he looked considerably younger

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than his nearly thirty years or his talent made the officials of the Conservatory turn a blind eye to his falsified identity documents. In neither of the profiles appearing in the Bordeaux arts newspapers does Dédé claim to have matriculated at the Conservatory, but he does identify his teachers. The musicians he named lend weight to the possibility that his talent caught the attention of the faculty. To the author of the first article, which appeared in L’Artiste de Bordeaux, Dédé named three faculty members with whom he studied in Paris in the late 1850s. He began with the composer Adolphe Adam, who accepted him as a student on the basis of a letter of recommendation that Dédé brought with him from New Orleans. Adam, who died in the same year, 1856, recommended the young man to the composer Jacques-Fromental Halévy (1799–1862). Studying with Halévy would have been a coup for this young man from America. At the end of his career, the senior composer had assumed the demanding position of life secretary of the Académie des beaux-arts.94 But like all members of the Conservatory faculty, he offered private lessons to supplement his income. In 1855, a year before Dédé began studying with him, Eugène Delacroix, who seems to have known everyone of note in Paris, wondered how the man got any work done. His wretched wife has crammed his house with bric-à-brac [sic] and old furniture, and this new craze will end by driving him into a lunatic asylum. He has changed and looks much older, like a man who is being dragged along against his will. How can he possibly do serious work in all this confusion? His new position at the Academy must take up a great deal of his time, and make it more and more difficult for him to find the peace and quiet he needs for his work.95 Evidently Halévy was past his most productive period when Dédé came to study with him. In fact, he died in 1862, not long after his young protégé left Paris to seek employment in the provinces. But before Dédé left, he studied with one more Conservatory faculty member, the acclaimed violinist Jean-Delphin Alard (1815–88). This musician was a renowned virtuoso as well as teacher. Napoleon III honored him with an appointment as first soloist in the imperial chapel. Adam, Halévy, and Alard were the best teachers available in the city, certainly in France, and possibly in all of Europe.96 In addition to lessons with these masters, Dédé’s status as an auditor gave him limited access to the curriculum offered at the Conservatory. Fully enrolled students followed a strict curriculum that was established in 1822, when Luigi Cherubini, the Italian composer, served as director of the Conservatory.

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Over the course of four years, students progressed from basic classes in theoretical and practical harmony, counterpoint, and fugue to advanced classes in composition.97 They received instruction in their preferred instruments, be it violin, piano, or voice. Singers had the option of specializing in solfège, a method of sight-singing instruction that emphasized precision of pitch. But the institution’s program of study was rigid and inadequate, especially for musicians with Dédé’s compositional interests. Hector Berlioz remembered later in life that during his years at the Conservatory in the late 1820s he learned nothing about instrumentation, the blending of two or more instruments into symphonic sound. “Moreover,” he complained in his memoirs published in 1865, “this part of our education, today still not covered at the Conservatory, fell outside the curriculum, which concentrated only on counterpoint and fugue.”98 In spite of its drawbacks, even Berlioz would not have denied that, apart from the Vienna Conservatory, Paris offered the best program of study in Europe for aspiring musicians. As good as the Conservatory’s program was, the regulations made it difficult for the auditors to benefit from that training. As a rule, only two seats in the instruments class were reserved for auditors, who had to compete for them. To be selected for a seat in a class devoted to a particular instrument, the auditor had to play sufficiently well to convince the instructor that he or she would benefit simply by sitting and listening to the fully enrolled students receiving instruction. Auditors gained the benefit of an instructor’s direct attention only when a matriculated student was absent. Private lessons with the faculty were therefore necessary for any auditor who hoped to make progress in their education. How Dédé managed to afford private instruction is a mystery. Later it was thought that a subscription was raised among the free community of color in New Orleans that allowed Dédé to support himself and his lessons. But he must have supplemented his funds with jobs playing in orchestras in Paris. In the later of the two profiles published in Bordeaux, the writer draws a line between the “amateur” and the “professional” phase of Dédé’s time in Paris. He led an amateur musician’s life in Paris, in search of anything that would improve his artistry. To get ahead in his plans, he spent a few months in London followed by a stay of the same length in Brussels. Then, suddenly from a student he turned professional.99 Not exactly. The sixty-year-old conductor’s memory in 1887 was either letting him down or accommodating his wish to touch up a picture of his journeyman’s

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years in a faintly heroic tint. For one thing, the public record, as we have seen, reveals his sojourns to have taken place in reverse order. He arrived in Paris, established an address, moved on to Antwerp for a few months, returned briefly to Paris, and then went to the United Kingdom. Moreover, Dédé fudged the number of years he spent as a student in Paris and as a peripatetic musician. The “six years studying his art in Paris” actually amounted to around three before he began to wander “from chair to chair,” or, as we would say today, from podium to podium, “trading the conductor’s baton for the violin soloist’s spot on stage, then returning to conducting and then directing, all the while never ceasing to compose music.” He found employment in Rouen at the Théâtre des Arts, followed by a stint in the town of Angers. And then, after a few years of moving from job to job, the article continues, in 1859—that is to say, only three years after he returned from Antwerp and London and became an auditor at the Conservatory—he received an offer of a position at Bordeaux’s principal music venue, the Grand Théâtre. He accepted the offer and immediately regretted doing so, because his former employer at the theater in Rouen called him back for another job there. Preferring employment in a town like Rouen to one in a city where he had never worked, Dédé attempted to break his contract with the theater in Bordeaux. Rouen’s proximity to Paris undoubtedly played a part in his preference for staying in the north. However, it was not to be. The director of the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux refused to release him. Around 1860, Dédé had no choice but to relocate far to the southwest of Paris, to France’s largest provincial city, where one lonely trunk line of the railroad had only recently arrived. As the writer of the 1888 article acerbically noted, “Our excellent maestro had no suspicion that the city for which he felt an instinctive repugnance should become his city of choice, his permanent residence.”100

5 • City of Song

An audacious man-of-the-people opened a new theater in Bordeaux on May 30, 1861. Martial Leglise, better known to his contemporaries by his nickname “Bazas,” modeled his new enterprise on the elaborate and extremely popular cafés-concerts of Paris. He was convinced that what worked for the Parisians would work equally well for the people of Bordeaux. His Alcazar Theater stood in Place Napoleon (now place Stalingrad) at the other end of the Pont de Pierre that links the city center to the right bank of the Garonne River (fig. 3). It was no lonely outpost of morally dubious entertainment. It fit right in with the changing times, and the theater building itself reflected those times. A large clock surmounted the neoclassical, symmetrical facade, reminding theatergoers of a subtle but palpable shift in their lives—the increasingly firm demarcation between work time and leisure time. Bazas, who oversaw the construction of the Alcazar Theater, was as attuned to the bourgeois expression “time is money” as he was to the lucrative potential of drinks mixed with songs therein.1 But when that perspicacious entrepreneur opened the doors of Bordeaux’s first café-concert, he alienated some high-minded theatergoers and most of the city’s theater managers. The former thought he was adulterating high culture; the latter were convinced he was drawing away their customers. The authorities feared he was corrupting the moral standards of and encouraging political dissent among the workers. Au contraire, Bazas retorted. The astute businessman claimed he was raising standards, not lowering them, and he was making the workers happy. Bazas claimed to well understand what respectable working men and women enjoyed and, more important, what they aspired to. He was, in fact, one of them.

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Figure 3. Exterior of the former Alcazar Theater, place Stalingrad, La Bastide, Bordeaux. (Photograph by author, 2014)

Martial Leglise grew up on the streets of early nineteenth-century Bordeaux. Either orphaned or abandoned when he was an infant and a self-confessed illiterate, he turned out to be an enterprising youngster. His working life began as a messenger boy for the company that operated stagecoaches—diligences, as they were called in French—between Bordeaux and the town of Bazas, upriver and inland about forty miles. Over time, he worked his way up to the position of driver. He became so well known along the route that people began to call him by the name of his daily destination. The job of driving a stagecoach provided him with opportunities to make money on the side. Remunerations for carrying messages or packages, both licit and illicit, and the odd job now and then led to new opportunities. Eventually, Bazas saved enough money to build and open the Alcazar Theater. Why this stagecoach driver felt competent to start a theater is inexplicable, but he seems to have known what he was doing. A good director of a theater, he wrote a few years later, had to have a good head for business and the energy to travel ceaselessly in search of talented performers.2 He also had to have trustworthy lieutenants to oversee the functioning of the theater on a day-to-day basis. To handle the business operations and accounts, Bazas hired a man by the name of Monsieur Marville. Then he looked around for someone to oversee the singers, music, and actors, about

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which he admitted he knew little. Whomever he initially hired must have been up to the job, because the Alcazar was a success from the start. Over the next few decades, France’s best, most famous performers all trod the boards of Bazas’s theater. The impresario himself became a local celebrity, albeit a raffish one. According to the cultural newspaper Bordeaux-Artiste, the street urchin who, as we would say today, reinvented himself became one of the city’s best-loved characters. Within a few years of the theater’s opening in the mid-1860s, Bazas lured Edmond Dédé away from the most prestigious theater in the city and appointed him the music director of the Alcazar Theater. Going to work for Bazas was a turning point in Dédé’s career. Over the course of his more than three decades in Bordeaux, Dédé tried to make a living catering to popular tastes for light songs, polkas, and waltzes and also to pursue his own ambition to compose music that met the more exacting standards of art music critics. Today, we would characterize his efforts as working both sides of the street: popular music on one side and art (or, classical) music on the other. By the 1860s, that street he had to cross was already wide and growing increasingly wider. The wider the gap grew between highbrow and lowbrow music, the more difficult it became for composers to bridge that gap. For a while, Edmond Dédé succeeded as well as and even better than most of his European peers. Given a choice, Edmond Dédé would not have settled in Bordeaux. Although one of France’s major cities, then and now, it lies near the southwestern Atlantic coast, too far from Paris to make an impression on the music world there. To attain musical celebrity in any genre, a musician had to be in the French capital, where the best schools, halls, critics, sheet music publishers, and musicians were. A job somewhere in northern France would have been preferable to one in Bordeaux. By the time he arrived in southwest France in 1860, a new rail line had reduced travel time to the capital. But although it was certainly more comfortable than stagecoach, the train still took around forty-eight hours to reach Paris, stopping in Poitiers, Tours, and Orléans. Thus, he had to make the most of his first contract in Bordeaux, the one that prevented him from accepting a job offer in Rouen, less than a day’s journey from Paris. As consolation prizes go, however, the position as répetiteur (assistant conductor) of the ballet orchestra at the Grand Théâtre, one of the best provincial theaters in the country, was not a bad start for an up-and-coming composer. Settling in another major river city was a mixed blessing for the ambitious composer. On the positive side, Bordeaux’s port, like New Orleans’s, served its

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prosperous middling and well-to-do mercantile families, whose fortunes were founded on transatlantic trade. And like the Crescent City, Bordeaux had a culturally diverse and economically variegated population. On the negative side, the prosperity of both cities derived directly and indirectly from the labor of enslaved men and women. New Orleans had been the chief slave emporium of the U.S. South; Bordeaux relied heavily on products produced by enslaved labor in the U.S. South and the French Caribbean colonies. The synergy between the positive and negative facets of Bordeaux’s society fostered an urban culture that was as cosmopolitan as it was complicit in the worst aspects of the nineteenth-century global economy. A dark-skinned man of African descent like Dédé would have endured many affronts to his dignity in Bordeaux, just as he would have in his native city even after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1868 that abolished slavery. But in his native country, legal segregation and entrenched racism would have prevented him from pursuing his ambitions of becoming a successful and respected composer and conductor. In France, no law, no system of segregation prevented him from trying. Achieving his goals was an altogether different matter. Dédé arrived in Bordeaux at a time when the city’s and the region’s economy were adjusting to shifts in transatlantic trading networks. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Bordeaux served as France’s main port of entry for sugar from French Caribbean colonies and the principal one for exports heading back to island markets. During the Napoleonic and SaintDomingue wars, American and French merchants developed good relations as they worked together to minimize the risks they faced at a time when war imperiled seaborne trade.3 Even after the loss of Saint-Domingue, two-thirds of the vessels leaving Bordeaux headed to the colonies in the Caribbean. Key colonial commodities—sugar, especially—fed local industries in the Aquitaine: sugar refineries, chocolate manufacturing, and the production of sea biscuits. But from 1815 on, Bordeaux’s sugar refineries fared increasingly poorly against British, Danish, and German competitors, and lost business to rivals in other French ports.4 To compensate for their declining hold on the Caribbean sugar market, bordelais merchants improved trade relations with the United States. Cotton and tobacco from the southern states arrived on steamers from New York, where the majority of cotton brokerage firms were based. In return, bordelais merchants sold to the Americans their colonial commodities, such as tea, cacao, pepper, indigo, coffee, and sugar. Before 1862, trade with the United States had grown so important to the city that only the British had more steamers moored along the riverfront.5

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By 1862, when the blockade of southern U.S. ports began, Bordeaux’s economy was showing signs of slowing down. Although the city’s economy had been relatively immune from Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup d’état in 1851 and the economic slump that affected the rest of France, the business and elected leaders of the city government moved too slowly to modernize the river’s port. To accommodate the growing number of steamships with deeper drafts, Bordeaux’s city industrialists funded the conversion of the sloping, muddy riverbanks, which suited the anchorage of the older, increasingly outmoded sailing vessels, into concrete vertical piers (fig. 4). But the pace of the conversion was too slow, and the city was soon unable to compete with Nantes and Le Havre in the north. For much of the 1860s, gangplanks continued to bridge the gap between the decks of ships and the riverfront. The reluctance of the city leaders to invest in the piers contributed to the collapse of the region’s naval construction industry, starting in 1865 and continuing into the next decade.6

Figure 4. The waterfront of Bordeaux with the vertical piers visible. (Photograph by author, 2014)

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The U.S. Civil War initially made Bordeaux’s economic position worse. The flow of cotton and tobacco to France was cut off by the northern blockade of southern ports. Losing access to U.S. cotton damaged the bank accounts of French industrialists, which encouraged many of them, and some politicians (including the emperor), to favor the Confederates. But France’s official position of neutrality during the war obliged the industrialists to offer only covert support to the rebels. At the same time, forced to find new sources of raw materials, French textile manufacturers began to look toward the eastern Mediterranean and India. After the end of the American Civil War, only one in five vessels leaving Bordeaux set its course for the northern Western Hemisphere. The majority of them went to South America, northern Europe, west Africa, southeast Asia, and the Pacific. They went laden with bottles of wine and handcrafts and returned with raw commodities. Bordeaux’s economy no longer rested on textiles and shipbuilding; now viticulture, wine production, and handicrafts industries in the smaller provincial towns became the region’s healthiest sectors.7 The reliance of Bordeaux and the region of Gascony on the fruits of slave labor, as well as its distance from the centers of political turmoil in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, reinforced a conservative strain in bordelais politics, economy, and culture. Going as far back as the French Revolution, the loose association of revolutionaries called the Girondists (hailing, as they did, from the Gironde, the department of which Bordeaux is the capital), met their end on the guillotine for not being revolutionary enough for the radicals. The subsequent revolutions of 1830 and 1848 made little impression on the city. The political programs of republicans and socialists resonated with few people, including workers in the port and shipyards of Bordeaux. When Napoléon III launched his empire, the city scarcely flinched. That quiescence characterized the bordelais response to the events of the second half of the nineteenth century. During the Second Empire, the advocates of republicanism in Bordeaux went silent for fear of arrest and imprisonment. The major newspapers reflected the gamut of political opinion between monarchist and Catholic, on one side, and lukewarm supporters of the government, on the other. It seems fitting, then, to recall that Baron Haussmann not only served as the prefect of the Gironde but was born and raised there. The beige limestone regularity of the city’s facades made a lasting impression on the staid, cautious character of the “Attila of the Straight Line,” whose changes to the Paris landscape had much in common with the appearance of Bordeaux’s city center. Napoleon III’s downfall in 1871, followed by the establish-

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ment and suppression of the Paris Commune in the same year, and then the formation of the Third Republic were political events of enormous consequence for the nation as a whole, but the rough waters of political change in the capital did not reach as far as Bordeaux. The toppling of Napoleon III’s statue at his ouster in 1871 was the bordelaise citizenry’s most energetic response to events. In this relatively placid river city, removed from the political center in many ways, Dédé established a career and a life that was also remote from the concerns of his family and friends in New Orleans. The outbreak of the Civil War and the capture and occupation of New Orleans by federal troops in 1862 slowed down contact between Americans in Europe and their families at home until 1865, when the war ended. Some of Dédé’s family and at least one of his friends joined the Union forces occupying New Orleans. When the occupying governor, Major General Benjamin F. Butler, created regiments for men of color, Dédé’s brothers, cousins, and his old friend Joseph Tinchant enlisted.8 News of the death of his grandmother, Maria Incarnación, the widow of Basile senior, on Christmas Eve 1863 undoubtedly took longer to reach him than it would have before the war.9 Within five years of that loss, Louise Dupré, the wife of Basile fils, died on April 1, 1865, at the age of sixty-five, in the home she shared with her husband on the corner of St. Claude and Barrack Streets in Treme.10 Basile fils outlived his wife by only three years, dying at the age of sixty-four in the home of his son François, at 381 St. Ann Street in Treme, on February 28, 1868. The few instruments that formed his personal effects and the two pieces of real estate he owned brought the worth of his total assets to $4,273.40. Once his executors deducted his debts and their fees, each of the three natural sons of the late Basile fils inherited $300.11 His youth in Louisiana was behind him. For the first five years or so in Bordeaux, the Louisiana musician and composer, now in his thirties, had steady employment at the Grand Théâtre. People started paying attention to the newcomer soon after he started working in the prestigious theater that still stands where the cours de l’Intendance meets the allée de Tourny. The position of répétiteur of the ballet entailed playing a ballet’s music on the piano during the dancers’ rehearsals. So positioned, he had the chance to compose his own ballet music and have it performed. The first piece of his to be produced at the Grand Théâtre was a one-act ballet, Nénéha, Queen of the Fairies, presented there in 1863. That ballet was the only one he received credit for, but at least one member of the public had the impression that he composed most of the music of the Grand Théâtre’s ballets, probably the one-act

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productions.12 Nénéha was judged a success, but one critic issued a caution: “Monsieur Dédé understands marvelously well the great art of orchestration; this young man possesses the least that is required, inspiration. Imagination grounded in training can perform miracles. We foresee great things for M. Dédé, but he must not indulge in excess. The queen of the fairies should not complain at length to the sound of a drum and a bass drum; she prefers melodies that take flight, the wisp of a breeze, a shimmering steam of silver.”13 This was not the last time a critic would express the wish that Dédé tone his music down. It is interesting that the critic touched on percussion, the very feature of the ballet that, had the music survived, might have allowed us to tie his music to his roots in Louisiana. Perhaps if he had stayed at the Grand Théâtre, he might have adjusted his compositions more to the tastes of the art music critics. However, he moved on. According to the profile of him in Bordeaux-Artiste from 1887–88, Dédé spent six years at the Grand Théâtre. This is difficult to credit. He is listed in the Bordeaux city directory as répetiteur of the Grand Théâtre in 1863 and 1864. Thereafter, his name does not reappear in the almanac until 1871, which suggests that 1865 is the year he went to work for the enterprising Bazas at the Alcazar Theater.14 He remained at the Alcazar Theater for a further five years. And then, in 1870, a tumultuous year in French history, he managed a small café-concert. After that, we lose sight of him until 1877, when he turns up as the composer of a well-received ballet at the Grand Théâtre. Throughout this period, he continued to work both sides of the street, composing two ballets for the more prestigious hall and one-act operettas for the cafés-concerts. By 1880 or 1881, he had moved to the Folies-Bordelaises, a big café-concert whose offerings shifted—some said declined—from extracts of opera to the popular precincts of vaudeville. The shift reflected the pressure on musicians and theater management to cater to the changing tastes of the broadest swathe of the public. As a consequence, the relentless commercialization of music increasingly forced musicians and composers to choose one side of the street or the other. On one side lay the elegant but highly competitive world of art music and on the other the brassy, lurid colors of the crowd. Dédé’s attempt to cross back and forth could not, in the long run, succeed, for reasons that had less to do with him and more to do with the changing market for popular music. Of its kind, the Alcazar was the best theater in Bordeaux. Indeed, for a while it was the only one of its kind. By moving from the Grand Théâtre to the Alcazar, Dédé did more than change employers. He moved from a low-level job in a first-rate music hall to high-level position in a low-brow music hall,

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where light, accessible songs, one-act operettas and ballets, and excerpts from grand operas were the standard fare. His decision is not hard to understand. He needed the money, or, at any rate, he needed more of it than he could earn at the Grand Théâtre. If he had only himself to support, he likely would have stayed. But after the summer of 1864, he was no longer alone. On June 18, 1864, four or five years after settling in the city, the thirty-sevenyear-old Edmond Dédé married twenty-nine-year-old Anne Catherine Antoinette Sylvia Leflet, a white Frenchwoman who, like a lot of working-class single women, was living in a rented furnished room.15 The bridegroom brought along to the marriage ceremony four friends, three of whom were music teachers. His bride, Sylvie Leflet, as she was called, was born in Toulouse on October 7, 1835, to unwed parents. At the time of her marriage to Edmond, her father, Antoine Leflet, a gardener, was living in Havana, Cuba, and her mother, Catherine Claverie, was deceased. Antoine Leflet’s presence in the Western Hemisphere in 1864, recorded in the marriage record, tempts us to match the gardener from Toulouse with the French-born fifty-year-old laborer of the same name enumerated in the 1850 federal census in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana.16 It is a curious possibility that Dédé’s father-in-law was in the vicinity of New Orleans when the young composer returned from Mexico. Did they meet? Aside from that possible coincidence, within four years or so of his arrival in Bordeaux Dédé had married a woman of illegitimate birth who claimed no profession. Although he, like Sylvie, was a natural child of unwed parents, he claimed for himself a more respectable past, insofar as he identified Basile and his wife, Louise, as his father and mother. This was not, as we know by now, the first time Dédé counted on the limits of communication technology to obscure details about his past. He asserted his respectability in a city whose inhabitants were more socially and religiously conservative than those in New Orleans. And now that he was changing jobs—moving from an art music venue to a less socially prestigious theater, he gathered all the respectability that he could muster out of his past. In 1864, the need for a larger salary must have made working for Bazas appealing. Three years after their marriage, his need for money grew more urgent when, on January 13, 1867, Sylvie gave birth to a son, Eugène Arcade Dédé.17 Eugène was to be their only child. The marriage between these two people of humble origins had special significance for Americans of both African and European descent who heard the news. A few months after the wedding, the New Orleans Tribune, a short-lived newspaper launched during the Civil War years by leaders of the local free community of color and associated with the Louisiana Republican Party, announced

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the nuptials, which were reported to have taken place in the Church of St. Dominic (now the Church of Notre-Dame).18 A year later, in 1865, one of the principal abolitionist newspapers in the United States, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, also reported Dédé’s marriage. That piece stressed that “Mr. Dede is a black man, as black as any one can be. Driven from his country by the stubbornness of prejudice, he went to France, and is now leader of an orchestra in one of the Bordeaux Theatres. His fame as an artist is European. He contracted matrimony, in legitimate bonds, before the Mayor of the Imperial city, with a young lady of accomplishment, belonging to one of the best families, and, of course, of Caucasian blood.”19 For the white editors and the mainly white abolitionist readership, as well as for Dédé himself, the assumed gold standard of cultural achievement was measured in European currency. But the reference to Dédé’s dark complexion and Leflet’s “Caucasian blood” is more remarkable than it might first appear. In an age when many European Americans were moved to pity by images of seemingly “white” and light-skinned enslaved men, women, and children, but rejected the so-called “amalgamation of the races,” positive references to darkskinned people of African descent marrying European women were exceedingly rare. To the overwhelming majority of white and black Americans, Edmond Dédé looked more like one of the masses of recently emancipated slaves, whose successful assimilation into free society was very much in doubt among white Americans, than the mostly mixed-race people who led the fight for equal rights. From the perspective of all Americans, Dédé was and would always be conspicuous for his darkness. Meanwhile, while shouldering the ordinary burden of supporting a family, Dédé got on with his work. Whereas the ambience at the Grand Théâtre was rarified but cash poor, Bazas’s Alcazar Theater was of the people, for the people, and sustained by the people’s demand for drink and diversion. Bazas himself, in fact, had much to say in print about the difficulty of the business of running art music theaters and the low wages of musicians who worked in them. In 1863, when Dédé was still working at the Grand Théâtre, Bazas published a pamphlet in which he proposed solutions to what he, an outsider really, saw as the main problems faced by the managers of Bordeaux’s traditional theaters.20 In his view, the chief obstacles to turning a profit in theater were the lack of sufficient seating in the halls, the rising salaries of performing artists, and the government-imposed obligation on theater managers to mount four expensive productions in the summer season. These issues were close to

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the hearts of all theater managers. But Bazas’s little pamphlet does not tell the whole story. The gamut of theater and music halls in Bordeaux ranged from the prestigious halls like the Grand Théâtre to the lowly working-class cafés-chantants or cafés-concerts, many of which were little more than storefronts. When it was built in the 1780s, the Grand Théâtre could seat 1,750 people. Subsequent remodeling and restorations had reduced the number of seats to 1,150 by 1864. Fewer tickets meant higher prices and fewer ticket buyers. In his pamphlet, Bazas urged the municipal government to allow each of the larger theaters to install 300 additional seats. Ticket prices, he predicted, would go down, more people would buy them, and profits would go up.21 Only then would managers be in a position to confront the other problem he identified, the soaring fees demanded by the most sought-after performer. According to his calculations, between 1858 and 1864, the fees demanded by singers more than doubled while the number of their performances fell. Whereas in the past a singing star would agree to perform twenty-seven times in a month and receive 700 to 800 francs in compensation, now singers mounted the stage only sixteen to eighteen times a month for fees ranging between 1,800 and 2,000 francs. Singers’ fees were the single most expensive item in a theater manager’s budget. Bazas rolled out the figures. The salaries paid to the stage manager (machiniste), painter, cashier, wardrobe supervisor, prop man, librarian (to keep track of all those libretti, scores, and sheet music), concierge, fireman, maintenance, and contrôleurs, not forgetting the 100 francs a night for the gas lighting and the obligatory contribution to the city’s poor relief fund, left barely 278 francs to pay the chorus, the musicians, and the dancers—at least fifty people in a theater like the Grand Théâtre. Songwriters and authors also demanded their share of a theater’s profit. Ever since the creation in 1851 of the Society of Authors, Composers, and Music Editors (Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique, or SACEM), theaters paid the organization fees for the use of songs and plays written by its members (Edmond Dédé became a member after he arrived in Bordeaux). It is hard to imagine that the management of the Grand Théâtre could afford to pay a living wage to a répétiteur like Edmond Dédé. Added to these fiscal burdens was the requirement that the Grand Théâtre, the Théâtre Français, and the other art music halls mount each summer, whether the demand was there or not, four major productions (troupes complètes): an opera, an operetta (or comic opera), a ballet, and a stage play. The costumes, scenery, and performers’ salaries were hugely expensive.

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Although his own café-concert theater was exempt from these requirements, Bazas nonetheless had to pay for a similar battery of skilled workers and celebrated artists, gas to light the hall, and authors’ rights. In a real sense, as the owner-manager of Bordeaux’s biggest café-concert, Bazas had entered as an outsider into the debate about art music theaters and their regulation. The underlying and self-serving message he purveyed in his pamphlet was: “Don’t blame me for your lack of box-office receipts. Blame the government.” It was true that his stage did not sag under the weight of four mounted full productions every summer, as the art music houses did. His theater was a topof-the-line café-concert, where patrons entered for free, paid to drink, and stayed for the show. Until his theater opened, cafés-concerts in Bordeaux had been small, humble places, often little more than dingy corner bars where only the working poor were not ashamed to be seen. Now his café-concert was the first to take on airs. But he operated under an entirely different set of regulations from those imposed on the Grand Théâtre. Bazas came into the business at a moment when those restrictions were about to undergo reform, partly as a result of the resistance from him and other café-concert managers. When cafés-concerts evolved from the open-air summer cafés on the Champs-Elysées and suburban goguettes to the large, ornate indoor winter theaters that stayed open all year, their managers faced a hostile environment more powerful than the one that Bazas encountered in his provincial city. Viewing the cafés-concerts as competition, the traditional theaters pressured the government to restrict what café-concert performers could and could not do, wear, and perform on stage. Before 1867, no scenery was allowed on the stage behind the performers. At most, potted plants adorned the singers’ backdrop. Cafés-concerts could not present plays or operas in their entirety. Singers were forbidden to wear anything other than formal evening wear for men and low-necked ball gowns and fancy hats for women. No costumes appropriate for the play or opera excerpts they performed were allowed. The singers had to make the most of the limited range of visual expression they were granted. For the first fifteen years, café-concert shows followed a standard pattern of performance. The women singers, dressed to the nines, sat fanning themselves on chairs arranged in a semi-circle stretching across the stage, called the corbeille (basket). While the male singers stood behind them and awaited their turn, the women one by one rose, stepped to the footlights and sang and flirted (but not too much) with the men in the audience. Like earlier forms of singing cafés, when the singers took a break, they descended from the stage and wandered among the tables soliciting tips, a practice known as la quête

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(quêter means “to beg”). Toward the end of the 1850s, the quête was replaced by contracts with café management for a predetermined fee and number of performances. And the corbeille was also disappearing around the same time that the café-concert star (la vedette) took center stage. The first such celebrity was a wildly popular singer, Thérésa, who began her career in the 1860s and lasted all the way into the early twentieth century, the dawn of the golden era of Josephine Baker and the Folies-Bergères.22 The practice of having all the performers seated on stage gave way in the 1860s to a succession of acts that were mostly songs and ballet and opera extracts. In Dédé’s first years at the Alcazar, over the course of an evening, quite a long list of performers moved on and off stage. To take a typical show, on July 27, 1863, the public started arriving at the Alcazar around five o’clock in the late afternoon, when the orchestra opened the program with dance music, usually a quadrille, to enliven the mood. That piece was followed by a pas de deux from a ballet. A succession of three singers came on after that, followed by a couple who danced a polka on stage, two more singers, and a comic sketch. The first part of the program came to an end with the last pas de deux from a ballet. To begin the second part of the program, the orchestra played an overture. A soprano then performed an aria from an opera, followed by a trio of ballet dancers, a duet from an opera, a comic singer, another pas de deux, and, to conclude, a comic sketch. But the evening was not over. For the final segment of the evening, the Alcazar offered what it called a “pantomime-parody-mythological burlesque,” entitled “Pygmalion et Galathea.” By the end of the six-hour show, twenty-seven performers in solos, pairs, and trios had taken part.23 Prospects for more varied programs improved when the director of theater administration (under the Prefecture of Police) in Paris loosened the regulations on March 31, 1867. In a decree that applied to the provinces as well as to Paris, the government now permitted café-concert singers to wear costumes appropriate to the opera excerpts they performed.24 Café-concert managers had finally convinced the traditional theater managers—or the government— that they were not competitors. Bazas himself argued—with a large dose of self-interest—that his theater aided ticket sales at the Grand Théâtre by acculturating the workers who attended his shows to appreciate serious opera and fine singing.25 Ignoring the question of whether they could afford the tickets to hear the music to which they had now been supposedly acculturated, he as much as claimed that he was performing an undervalued public service. Bazas broadened the appeal of the café-concert beyond workers with shows of singers and dancers performing opera and light classical songs as well as

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more popular pieces. Many singers worked in both cafés-concerts and the more prestigious halls but assumed stage names when they appeared in the more down-market venues.26 Workers, students, office clerks, off-duty soldiers, and women indifferent to their reputations entered for free and stayed for as long as they could afford to pay for drinks. Over the course of the evening, they sipped their beverages, chatted with friends, and listened to singers and watched the dancers. This, in Bazas’s view, was adult education. Though he might have been sincere, the relaxation of the regulations seemed to be an implicit acknowledgment that the traditional theaters had little to lose. As the century progressed, cafés-concerts all over France, but especially in Paris and French provincial cities, started to become more like what Americans and the British would term vaudeville or music hall. In the transition from café-concert to music hall, audiences still had tables on which to place their drinks while watching a show, the nature of which kept changing. The taxonomy of café-concert, music hall, and vaudeville grew ever more confused and confusing. Acrobats, gymnasts, folk dancers, child prodigies, and other acts were interspersed with the singers and ballet dancers. Later, in the late 1880s, off-shoots of the cafés-concerts, like the Moulin Rouge, which opened in Paris in 1889, provided space in front of the stage where customers could dance. In the music halls of Bordeaux, too, men and women danced the polka and the mazurka, or swayed in their seats to the overtures of Offenbach’s or Dédé’s operettas, and drank. If the management and performers at the cafés-concerts gained respectability over time, in the front of the house, barely controlled anarchy reigned and was tempered only, if at all, by the presence of the police. These representatives of the state had as their first priority the suppression of political expression. Before the Second Empire, drinking establishments patronized by workers were the principal venues where political dissent was aired.27 Once Louis-Napoleon took power in 1851, political songs were banned altogether but especially in cafés-concerts. Flag-waving, patriotic jingoistic military music was approved, although, interestingly, singing the Marseillaise was not. Perhaps it was too evocative of political unrest for the government. Only secondarily did the police presence discourage licentious or disruptive behavior. What the government wanted especially to avoid was the airing of criticism of its foreign policy, commentary on religious debates, and references to the French Revolution and its ideals.28 When late in his reign Napoléon III instituted liberal reforms, allowing some expressions of dissent in public, political songs on the stages of cafés-concerts continued to be prohibited, such

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was the power of satirical song. Only in the brief interlude of the Paris Commune of 1871 were songs satirizing foreign and domestic policy decisions allowed to be performed on stage. After 1871, the Third Republic again imposed censorship on performances in theaters and cafés-concerts.29 Freedom of expression remained thwarted for most of the nineteenth century. On the national, Parisian, and provincial levels, the Ministry of the Interior exerted its authority over cafés-concerts principally by two means: censorship and repression.30 Those two approaches were buttressed by reports from informants and commentary in the press. Whether in Paris or on a local level, the prefect of the police required theater managers to get approval of all singers they hired and all songs and texts to be performed in their theaters. Each time the prefect of the police in Bordeaux granted permission to a theater manager to hire a singer, he reiterated in his letter of approval the regulations under which the theater had to operate: theaters could present no more than one act from any play or opera once in an evening, and no more than three of four persons were to perform in it. Repression of political content meant surveillance, which seems to have been as effective in maintaining order as surveillance at the borders was in monitoring the movement of migrants. Which is to say, it was not very effective. A policeman had to be present at all performances to ensure that political malcontents and seditious material were not slipped into the program. Efforts to blacklist certain performers were evaded by the relatively widespread use of stage names. Maintaining order in theaters was equally a chimera. As a fallback, the state relied on an informal network of informants, similar to the way illegal migrants were or were not tracked down.31 Police records in Bordeaux contain anonymous letters from police spies—the dreaded mouches—and outraged busybodies. Sometimes the most reliable reports were those the police authorities read in the newspapers. That the efforts of the police to regulate and monitor the cafés-concerts often failed, at least in terms of maintaining public order, newspaper coverage makes abundantly clear. Reports of incidents in theaters are nearly as common as critiques of the performances on stage. The presence of the police did not dampen the ardor of theatergoers, who were not shy in expressing their opinions of performances. If the first singer on the bill happened to be a novice—a placard reading “Audition” signaled to the audience a singer’s debut—she or he suffered the hoots and catcalls of a raucous audience.32 All singers had to contend with spontaneous audience sing-alongs, less than charitably referred to as “bellowing” (beugler) by those who sneered at the cafés-concerts.33 Indeed,

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as was true in Paris, the majority of the clientele of the caf’-conc’s, as they were called in slang, came from the humble strata of bordelais society, but café management set aside tables for better-off patrons who were prepared to pay for champagne and exclusivity.34 Risqué material was forbidden, yet it was a stretch to depict a theater like the Alcazar as family-friendly, as Bazas did. An advertising leaflet for the Alcazar Theater in the 1860s shows a mother and father standing with their children in the interior of the theater while a show goes on in the background (fig. 5). But the bourgeois respectability Bazas and other café-concert managers claimed for themselves could not change the fact that the typical atmosphere in a café-concert remained raffish, bohemian, and not quite respectable.

Figure 5. The interior of the Alcazar Theater. (By permission of Archives municipales de Bordeaux, Théâtres)

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Political censorship was a process that Edmond Dédé, as a novice manager of a café-concert, had to negotiate. In 1870, he assumed the direction of the Café Delta, a small café-concert at 16 rue Voltaire, off the cours de l’Intendance. The Café Delta was likely another undertaking of Bazas’s, and he put it in the hands of his employee, whom he had hired away from the Grand Théâtre around 1865. The Bordeaux city directories list Dédé as the Delta’s manager for 1871 and 1872.35 While he ran the Delta, some of the greatest stars of the café-concert circuit throughout France stepped on to this stage. Accounts differ as to how long the café-concert lasted, but the most reliable of them claims that it lasted until 1877.36 Dédé was there at its opening as the manager, but it is less clear that he stayed until it closed. A more interesting question, however, is whether he had anything to do with the café’s name. What did “Delta” refer to? Within the context of bordelais society, it had no apparent significance. Bordeaux could not be called a delta river port. New Orleans, in contrast, could. It is an intriguing notion that Dédé, if he had a hand in naming the café-concert, might have been paying tribute to the Mississippi delta, future home of the blues. Putting together a timeline of Dédé’s movements based on the sketchy dates provided by the profiles in L’Artiste de Bordeaux and Bordeaux-Artiste is difficult. Of the two profiles, the later one, from 1887–88, contains more details. It starts with his birth in New Orleans and moves on to his emigration to France, his studies in Paris, and the intricacies of his employment history leading to Bordeaux. At least a third of the article recounts Bazas’s story. Once the narrative reaches Dédé’s move to the Alcazar in 1865, the dates begin to deviate from dates documented elsewhere. Since Dédé was undoubtedly the source of the narrative, it is his version of his past. The author of the profile claims that Dédé was “an assiduous and devoted collaboration of Bazas” for over ten years. But the year 1870 with its turmoil led to the closing of the Delta. The moment for the brassy sound of the café-concert had passed. When his café closed he had to accept a job as a violin-soloist at the Grand Théâtre in Algiers. Some years later, he picked up his bow again with the same determination he had shown in the past. This time, his sojourn was temporary and the following year he went to fight the battle at the Casino of Marseille. But he soon returned here [Bordeaux] and after spending 1880 at the Alcazar, he was engaged by M. Verdier of the FoliesBordelaises, where he remains to this day.

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As he had when he went to Mexico City in 1848, Dédé again availed himself of an imperial opportunity.37 Except in this instance, the port city of Algiers, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, had a more promising job market for a musician like Dédé than what Mexico City offered nearly twenty years before. Over the decades since its conquest by France in 1830, Algeria had received a large influx of Europeans. With the encouragement of the French government, working-class immigrants from all over Europe went in search of work and settled there, like the Americans who went to Mexico in 1848. The number of European settlers in Algeria rose from 131,000 in 1851 to 230,000 in 1871, around the time that Dédé left Bordeaux.38 He arrived there in the early 1870s, in the aftermath of a series of environmental disasters and periods of famine. The political climate was unstable, especially during the transition from the Second Empire to the Third Republic. During the Second Empire, the divergent interests of the French government, the permanent settlers, or colons as they were called, and the indigenous Muslim population created friction. Napoleon III’s imperial government hoped to avoid alienating the indigenous Muslim landowners of Algeria by granting them a limited form of property law, but the settlers had no interest in making such accommodations. They wanted to be in charge, to the extent that they wanted to fully incorporate Algeria into France, fully endowed with French law. To them, the indigenous Muslim population were irrelevant, except insofar as they were workers for the Europeans. The Muslim landowners might have resigned themselves to French colonial rule if they had been allowed to exercise even in a limited way their own form of property rights, but the European settlers fought vigorously against their participation in the government.39 These tensions led to an insurrection in 1871 by the Muslim population against the government and the settlers that was quickly suppressed. Well-to-do Europeans went to Algiers and elsewhere in Algeria for the resorts, the thermal baths, and the allure of a familiar French culture superimposed on a locale perceived as exotic. They found there a well-established European music culture. Five or so years before Dédé arrived, the composer Salvador Daniel, son of a Spanish refugee to France, ended a decadelong sojourn in Algiers, where he taught music, studied indigenous music, and composed his own pieces. He acquired enough of a reputation that he met Napoleon III on more than one occasion. It is unlikely that Edmond Dédé met him as their time as students at the Conservatory in Paris did not overlap. Daniel returned to Paris in 1866 and subsequently accepted the position of director of the Conservatory during the Paris Commune in 1871. Along with

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thousands of others, he was executed during the week the Commune fell and the Third Republic was born. Not long after Dédé arrived in north Africa, another composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, first visited Algiers; he returned there annually for the next eighteen years.40 Dédé’s decision to go to Algiers to look for work is therefore not surprising. Unfortunately, nothing is known about Dédé’s time in Algiers. Nor does any trace of his subsequent stint at the Casino in Marseille survive. However, we do know that Dédé and his wife Sylvie obtained passports in 1871, declaring Lisbon as their destination.41 In fact, they were probably on their way to Algiers. After that date, Dédé disappears from view until we find him back in the conductor’s chair at the Alcazar Theater in 1877. Three years after that, he made his last move, to the Folies-Bordelaises, where he worked as one of two orchestra conductors until 1889. Dédé’s move to the Folies-Bordelaises around 1880 appears to have been a step down in prestige, but it is hard to be sure. On the one hand, the FoliesBordelaises was one of the most popular theaters in the city. On the other, it was even further removed from the world of the Grand Théâtre, where he wanted to be. Certainly, the Folies-Bordelaises lacked the ambience of the Grand Théâtre. Indeed, the singers, the conductor, the management, and the ever-present policemen fought a losing battle to impose even a slight sense of decorum on the proceedings at the Folies. Despite the presence of policemen, the theater’s clientele occasionally took control of performances, much to the annoyance of the music director. Nightly battles with an unruly bordelais crowd took a greater toll on the conductors than the strain of living under political censure in the Third Republic, as made clear by an account, published in one of the major newspapers in 1884, of an altercation during a performance at the Folies-Bordelaises. In the second half of the show, the baritone finished singing and was called back for an encore. He returned to sing the last couplet. The audience, who wanted him to sing something new, applauded again to make him return. Instead of the baritone, a female singer appeared. The audience energetically renewed their call for the baritone. Cries, hoots, whistles, and the stamping of walking sticks drowned out the woman’s voice and the brass of the orchestra. The deafening noise continued until the singer left the stage. Once she was off, the baritone stepped forward and announced that as soon as the last note of the program had sounded, he would accede to the wishes of those in attendance.

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Satisfied, the audience applauded, but the conductor was not pleased. He expressed his displeasure aloud in disagreeable terms. He then admonished the audience and even threatened them. The performance continued peacefully enough. Then the curtain fell before the baritone reappeared. But before it fell completely the conductor began playing the exit music. New and not less lively protestations from the audience demanded that he keep his promise. The curtain went back up. The musicians continued to play the retreat. The acclaimed artist appeared finally, and the conductor, now very angry, abandoned the podium and disappeared. The performance went on and ended without fuss. The attitude assumed by the conductor in this incident is entirely at fault, and it was severely criticized by the audience members on their way out.42 Such were the occupational hazards of a musician who took his work seriously. And in this instance Edmond Dédé, one of the theater’s two conductors, may have been the one taking umbrage at the audience’s interference with the performance. The Folies-Bordelaises had an ambiguous reputation among the cafésconcerts in the city. The best that newspaper reviewers could say was that the theater manager, Fernand Bory, really knew how to show the public a good time. But on the margins of the theater, particularly at the entrance on the busy thoroughfare, rue Sainte Catherine, chaos threatened. Anonymous letters from people living in the vicinity of the theater appear in police files. They contain complaints about prostitutes working the crowd at the FoliesBordelaises in the 1870s. The police clipped from local newspapers letters to the editor calling for more police effort to clear the street of the women whose disorderly conduct at the theater’s entrance disrupted the entire neighborhood. One clipping consisted of a newspaper editorial: “There, the courtesan and the streetwalker openly engage in the shameful come-ons that their less well tricked-out comrades practice on the rue Dauphine and the cours d’Albret.” The complaint, the editors wanted to make clear, was not directed at the management of the Folies-Bordelaises; rather it pointed to the confusing and overlapping jurisdictions of the theater police, the morals police, and drinking establishments police—none of whom had authority over the space outside the theater where the offensive behavior was taking place.43 Still, no one thought the Folies-Bordelaises was a wholesome place.

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The year 1870 was a watershed for Dédé, for reasons having to do with his compositions and the changes in popular demand for certain kinds of music. During the 1860s and 1870s, he composed most of the pieces that made contemporary musicologists take note of him. He drew praise for La Sensitive, a two-act ballet, which debuted at the Grand Théâtre in late April 1877, while he was conducting at the Alcazar Theater.44 Judging by the names he gave to the characters in the ballet, the now-lost plot resembled that of Giuseppe Verdi’s grand opera set in ancient Egypt, Aïda (1871). The principal ballerinas’ roles were called “Naïda,” “Néméa,” “Demona,” “Ophélia,” and “Krydja,” all but the last derivative of Verdi or Shakespeare. The corps was rounded out by two high priests and an Indian. Reviewing the ballet, Anatole Loquin, a critic and editor of a short-lived monthly music journal La musique à Bordeaux, wrote, “There are some pretty motifs in the occasionally rather loud [brayante] music of the head conductor of the orchestra at the Alcazar Theater.”45 Loquin’s condescension suggests that it was by then unusual for a professional musician to produce pieces for both the cafés-concerts and an art music hall like the Grand Théâtre. Most of the titles of Dédé’s works that survive from this period were typical of songs and music heard in venues like the Alcazar and the Folies-Bordelaises rather than the Grand Théâtre. Lester Sullivan, the scholar who has produced the most accurate summary of Dédé’s biographical details, counted over 250 dances, songs, ballet music, and orchestral works written during his exile in France. Between 1865 and 1881, Dédé and the lyricists with whom he worked published their songs in Bordeaux.46 From 1880 on, however, Dédé had most of his songs published in the urban market that mattered most to him, Paris. He was aiming at two different geographic markets simultaneously as the printed inscriptions on the sheet music make clear. To take one example, the cover of the sheet music for “My Handsome Tyrolian” (1876) bears the inscription, “Dedicated to Madame Maria Rivière of the Eldorado; sung by Mlle Marquet at the Alcazar.” The Eldorado was one of the largest and most popular cafésconcerts in Paris, but Mademoiselle Marquet toured the country and performed at Bourdeaux cafés-concerts like the Alcazar. Other examples of his surviving sheet music contain dedications to theater managers and performers based in Paris and also to colleagues in the business both in Bordeaux and in Paris. Dédé, then, was intending to bring his songs to the Parisian market as early as 1880. Despite his productivity and the occasional reviews of his work in the bordelais press, his celebrity in Bordeaux’s art music circles faded as the years passed. The critic Anatole Loquin pointed to the inclusion of Dédé and two

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other Bordeaux composers in the 1878 edition of Fétis’s Biographie universelle des musiciens (referred to informally as “Fétis,” it is the nineteenth-century French equivalent to Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians) as evidence of the editor’s comprehensiveness, the implication being that Dédé was not well known in art music circles.47 If Dédé had become relatively unknown in Bordeaux by 1878, he moved deeper into obscurity in the following decade. A list of his major compositions printed in an 1886 issue of The Minstrel, a periodical published in Bordeaux, differs from that in the 1878 edition of Fétis only in the addition of his four-act opera. As the writer in The Minstrel put it, “Monsieur Edmond Dédé, whose name and talent are utterly unknown in Paris, is a Negro [nègre] artiste, who has made something of himself in Bordeaux over twenty years and has a certain reputation as a composer and orchestra leader.”48 As will be made clear further on, to be called a “Negro” had more negative connotations than the rendering of the word into English conveys. His reputation in Bordeaux suffered from his attempt to compose both art music and popular music. Even while he worked for Bazas in the 1860s and most of the 1870s, and then after he moved to the Folies-Bordelaises, he composed orchestral pieces, of which “Mephisto masque” (1889) and “Rêverie champêtre” (1891, a fantasy for violin and cello or flute and bassoon) are two examples that survive. In Fétis, Dédé’s entry lists only two ballets, Nénéha (1862) and La Sensitive (1877), both produced at the Grand Théâtre.49 During his time at the Alcazar and the Folies-Bordelaises, Dédé also composed several comic operettas. Many of them conformed to the regulations for cafés-concerts in that they were one-act productions and quite fantastical. In 1877, the Alcazar Theater produced two of them, Il faut passer le pont and Le voisin de Thérèse, each one having a run of a week to ten days. In the following year, Dédé’s one-act operetta Chik-Kang-Fô, described as a chinoiserie musical, had nine performances at the Alcazar. The comic potential of this orientalist parody, which predated Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado by less than a decade, is suggested in the singers’ characters. The caricatural Chinese names Dédé gave his characters—“Fo-li-chon,” “The Executor,” “Pepita the Phyloxereuse” (undoubtedly an evil character; an infestation of phylloxera was killing the grape stock in the Aquitaine between 1875 and 1892), “Ka-Ko-Fé,” “Kok-Ké,” “Ka-Ko-Li,” and a band of female singers, the “Kè-Ka-Ka-Ka-Fè-Ko”—suggest just how silly the production was meant to be.50 As a rule, Dédé left the lyrics to someone else. His usual collaborators were his colleagues in the theaters where he worked. None of them gained a lasting

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reputation. There is one surviving song, however, whose lyrics and music were likely composed by Dédé. “Bikina” is described as “health advice” (conseil hygienique) on the cover of the sheet music.51 The illustration shows a young bordelais swell, or gommeux, dressed in a tight-waist jacket, trousers flared at the bottom, vest, bow tie, and high winged collar. His hat rests jauntily on the back of his head. In his left hand he holds a bottle labeled “Bikina.” With the other he points to a poster advertising the drink. Over his shoulder in the background appears the faint interior of a café-concert with a man in a top hat seated at a table, a woman standing beside him, and what looks like a waiter holding a bottle (of Bikina, presumably). An inscription under the title, “Donné par Callen aux Folies-Bordelaises,” indicates that it was performed by a singer named Callen where Dédé was working (fig. 6). The lyrics explain that the qualities of “Bikina” will not get you as drunk as absinthe will. The cover illustration and the lyrics make it clear that Dédé had composed a commercial jingle to be performed during a Folies-Bordelaises show. The sheet music of “Bikina” is interesting both for what it reveals about the trajectory of Dédé’s career and for the lyricist named on the cover. The year 1881 coincides with the period when he began to have his songs published in Paris, although this one was published in Bordeaux. Nevertheless, Dédé’s compositions were taking an increasingly commercial turn. Paris was not only where the music of greatest prestige was performed, it was also the capital of the commercial music market. The intense commodification of music— tickets sales, sheet music sales—from the middle of the nineteenth century into the twentieth erected a fence between art music and popular music, patrolled by critics and the wealthy. In the music business, fueled by the desire to increase profits, many composers, musicians, theater managers, and publishers were willing to be led by, rather than lead, public opinion when they made creative or artistic choices. Those musicians who refused to capitulate to public tastes faced the uphill challenge of either finding a patron who would support them in their noble, artistic endeavors (think Richard Wagner and Ludwig II of Bavaria) or occasionally giving in to market demands in order to survive (think Jacques Offenbach). Each musician’s goal was to capitulate as seldom as possible, but very few composers and virtuosi were lucky enough to avoid playing or composing for the commercial market in popular music.52 Edmond Dédé did not capitulate so much as he was ineluctably drawn into the powerful undertow of the popular music market. He pivoted toward the sectors of the music world that best compensated him financially, even though he never lost sight of his original ambition, which was to be recognized for his

Figure 6. Sheet music cover, “Bikina,” 1881, by Edmond Dédé. (By permission of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de musique)

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opera and symphonic pieces. With the success of his ballet, La Sensitive, behind him, Dédé, now in his fifties, began to plan a two-pronged approach to the music world beyond Bordeaux, specifically in Paris. His initial portal was through the Paris song market. His songs, ballets, and orchestral pieces appear to be the markers Dédé was staking along a road leading back to the capital, where he hoped to have a grand opera produced. He had already composed a prodigious amount of music, thereby achieving far more than he ever could have back in the United States. He chose to pursue a career in a popular genre so that he would not have to endure the poverty incumbent on musicians devoted exclusively to their “art.” This strategy cannot have been an easy one. A reflection of that effort may be hidden in the name of the lyricist of “Bikina.” On the cover of the sheet music, Dédé is named as the composer; the lyrics are attributed to “Quasimodo.” “Quasimodo,” however, is likely to be Dédé in disguise. “Bikina” is the only one of his songs whose lyricist uses a pseudonym. Quasimodo, the main character in Victor Hugo’s novel Nôtre Dame de Paris (1831), translated into English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, is a hunchback with a facial disfigurement, whose occupation as bell-ringer of Notre-Dame has made him deaf. Dédé has a previous association with the name. In the 1860s, he entitled a symphony “The Quasimodo Symphony.” Did his use of the name conceal his feelings about his place in French society? Coupled with the likelihood that Dédé composed the “Bikina” lyrics under the name “Quasimodo,” it seems plausible that he was expressing, ironically or plaintively, a sense of how he felt in his adopted country. If the songs were Dédé’s ticket back to Paris, the staging of his opera would redeem the fare he paid to get there. But the timing of his move to Paris at the end of the 1880s indicates that, in the end, it was a retrenchment. It is hardly surprising that Dédé composed a grand opera. That genre potentially garnered the greatest prestige.53 Unfortunately, the opera went missing for the last decade of the nineteenth and for all of the twentieth century. Happily, in 2010 it turned up in Harvard University’s Houghton Library, among a collection of nineteenthcentury opera scores purchased by the library from a collector in Paris.54 The handwritten score of Dédé’s four-act opera, Morgiane, ou, Le sultan d’Ispahan, is divided between two bound manuscripts, with acts 1 and 2 in one volume and acts 3 and 4 in another. Three different copyists were involved in their production. One scribe entered the notation and instrumentation. Either the librettist, Louis Brunet, or another scribe filled in the libretto. The third hand belongs to Edmond Dédé, who extensively edited, crossed out entire pages, glued new insertions on top of superseded sections of the score, and

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entered his own conductor’s notes in his distinctive script, including in blue pencil. This manuscript is the earliest complete opera score by an African American composer and for that reason alone is worthy of further attention. A close examination of the title page suggests a rethinking on the composer’s part. In a bold, firm hand, the professional scribe had written in the center of the page, “Le Sultan d’Ispahan Opéra en 4 Actes. Paroles de: Louis Brunet. Musique de: Edmond Dédé.” But Dédé wrote above the title, at a slightly haphazard angle, the supertitle, “Morgiane,” the year of composition, “1887,” and place of composition, Bordeaux. This suggests that in 1887, while still living in Bordeaux, Dédé decided rather late in the compositional process that the thematic heart of his one opera lay in the character of Morgiane and not in that of the Sultan of Ispahan. The extent to which Dédé had control over the text is uncertain, but the number of amendments in his hand suggests that he considered it his work. The librettist, Louis Brunet, was the editor of Le Nouvelliste, one of Bordeaux’s minor newspapers.55 In most respects, the opera’s plot is entirely conventional for the nineteenth century. It requires as much suspension of credulity as any other grand opera of the period. Set during an undisclosed period in Ispahan (modern Iran’s Isafan), the Safavid capital of the Persian empire, Morgiane, or, the Sultan of Ispahan opens during the wedding of a young couple, Amine and Ali. Amine’s father, Hagi Hassan, reveals to the couple a long-held secret. Long ago, while returning from Mecca, he encountered a beautiful woman, Morgiane, who was fleeing a detested husband, holding a newborn infant in her arms. Hassan carried her and her baby off to a new life. Amine understands immediately that she is the infant Morgiane carried. Who, then, she implores her mother, is her father, if not Hassan? Morgiane promises to tell her one day. Amine asks her new husband, Ali, whether he now regrets their marriage. But Ali replies that as an orphan, he has no greater claim to honor than she. They swear fidelity to each other. Suddenly, Beher, the sultan of Ispahan’s henchman, enters to claim Amine for the sultan. In vain, the family resists. Beher drags Amine away while Ali and Hassan curse the sultan and swear revenge. Act 2 brings the protagonists to Ispahan, where they will attempt a rescue of Amine. Hassan, Ali, and Morgiane witness the arrival in Ispahan of Beher and his troop with Amine in tow. Her distraught parents and husband plot to gain an audience with the sultan in order to assassinate him. In act 3, the sultan of Ispahan, Kourouscha, is in a courtyard of his palace, where he laments that his love for Amine has made him feel powerless. In the scene’s prologue,

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the chorus furnishes the information that the sultan has long been a widower. When Amine is brought before the sultan, she declares her fidelity to her husband. In turn, the sultan swears she will become his sultane that same day. To the sounds of martial music, the coronation of Amine begins with a ballet, which we would expect from a composer who worked as the Grand Théâtre’s ballet répetiteur. A trio of Arabian singers arrive, who soon reveal themselves to be Ali, Hassan, and Morgiane in disguise. Ali declares that he will foretell the sultan’s future in song. The sultan demurs, having no desire to learn his fate on the day when his new sultane is to be crowned. Ali persists in singing a parable about a Judean shepherd who loved nothing in life so much as his little white lamb, whose beauty made everyone who saw the lamb desire her. The shepherd’s lamb is kidnapped, provoking him to swear vengeance. The story very quickly deteriorates into a declaration of Ali’s own revenge on the sultan. Within a few measures, Ali, Hassan, and Morgiane are led off to the sultan’s dungeon. The denouement of act 4, as any opera lover in the twenty-first century will have guessed by now, occurs when Morgiane confesses at the moment they are all about to be killed that the sultan has fallen in love with his own daughter. The sultan forgives Ali and Amine, Ali forgives the sultan, and, although at first Amine understandably resists embracing her biological father, Ali convinces her to forgive him. Morgiane and Hassan are relegated to the sidelines of the stage and the plot as the curtain descends on a scene of filial mercy. The contrived plot and the moralizing of Dédé’s Morgiane would have appeared hackneyed and outdated to some contemporaries. In 1870, seventeen years before Dédé put the final touches on his opera, Wagner’s hero Siegfried first “passionately embraced” his twin sister, Sieglinde, in the premiere of Die Walkerie and thus destroyed what little was left of opera’s innocence. Jacques Offenbach’s cynical Tales of Hoffmann premiered in Paris eleven years later in 1881. Like other opera composers of the time, Dédé very likely was going for the big effect by setting the plot of his opera in the Persian empire. Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco (1841) and Aïda (1871), Georges Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers (1863), and, several decades later, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot (1924) offered audiences colorful and splendid spectacles on stage. In his case, however, Dédé had internalized the same kind of essentializing stereotypes that white Europeans projected on to people who looked like him, whom they classified as “exotic.” For this reason, until we know more about the opera and how it sounded, we do not have to read too deeply into opera’s setting and lyrics to see how invested he was in common orientalist stereotypes and tropes.56

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He had been internalizing “exotic” tropes for years by the time he finished his opera. The exotic Orient was not a new genre for Dédé. He had set the operettas he composed for the Folies-Bordelaises in settings—like China—that were considered exotic. Lester Sullivan has speculated that Dédé might have decided on the setting after the season he worked in Algiers, but Dédé was just as likely to have settled upon such a theme without having left France.57 Yet the time spent in Algiers may account for the specificity of certain details, in particular, Hassan’s honorific “Hagi” to indicate his fulfillment of the Hajj; the use of “Allah” to refer to God; and the sultan’s name, Kourouschah, which contains the word “shah,” the highest title of the rulers of the Persian empire. The arresting element of the story concerns the use of white imagery. Several times in his text, the librettist Brunet deploys the color white to signify beauty and purity. When Hassan recalls discovering the distraught refugee mother, he describes Morgiane cradling her infant “in her arms that are whiter than alabaster.” Ali’s parable of the simple shepherd describes his beloved pet as “the whitest of lambs.” And at the end of act 4, after Morgiane has informed Kourouschah that he is about to take his own daughter as his bride, the sultan asks pardon of Amine: That my impure breath on your face would mar its color, whiter than a lily, pardon me, my remorse is sincere, pardon me, dear child, sweet treasure. Come to my arms and embrace your father Come embrace him, if he is still worthy.58 The association of the color white with innocence and purity was the stock-in-trade of poets, lyricists, songwriters, authors, and just about every member of Western societies that viewed and still views a universal moral order in terms of black and white. Edmond Dédé was no exception. He was a professional musician and showman who knew how to communicate with his public. The cost to his amour propre employing such imagery can only be imagined. For a black man to deploy such imagery was tantamount to inflicting on himself little nicks similar to those that he felt every time he read or heard a disparaging comment about black skin. One, two, three nicks are not particularly painful. But a lifetime of steady nicks, some big, some small, leads to open wounds that never heal. Contemporary accounts suggest that a full production of Edmond Dédé’s opera was never mounted on stage in either Bordeaux or Paris. In 1886, a year

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before the date on the title page in the Houghton Library manuscript, the cultural magazine the Minstrel reported that “a colleague of ours informs us that a grand opera in four acts, the ‘Sultan of Ispahan,’ has just been submitted for the appreciation of M. Graviere, director of the Grand Théâtre of Bordeaux.”59 Over a year later, the opera had still not been presented there. The author of the profile of Dédé in Bordeaux-Artiste in 1888 chose his words carefully when he wrote, “Some time ago, the maestro has had accepted at the Grand Théâtre an opera in four acts, entitled Le sultan d’Ispanhan [sic], which awaits only the chance to face the footlights and make the scimitars of his oriental characters shine.”60 Evidently, the management chose not to produce the opera at the theater. It does not appear on the list of productions. Unable to find a producer for the production, Dédé and his wife moved to Paris around 1889. But he had no better luck in the French capital.61 We know relatively little about what Dédé’s music sounded like. Only twice has his music been recorded. In 2000, the classical music label Naxos released on compact disc Edmond Dédé: Mon Pauvre Coeur, a selection of his songs and orchestral works recorded by the Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Richard Rosenberg. With the exception of the title track, “Mon pauvre coeur,” published in New Orleans prior to his departure for France in 1855, the compositions include several of the many comic and military songs that Dédé wrote for the theaters where he worked, such as “Fight in the Fields,” “Cora, the Girl from Bordeaux,” and “My Corporal!” Also included in the recording are the overture, rondeau, duet, and finale of a saynète (a short operetta) called Françoise et Tortillard. The only other recording of a composition by Dédé was released in 2005, Turn-of-the-Century Cornet Favorites, among which figures Dédé’s polka for orchestra, “Mephisto masqué,” also included in the Naxos recording. Given Dédé’s productivity, these nineteen or so recorded pieces offer merely a hint of his talent.62 Only two photographs of Edmond Dédé are known to have survived. They accompany the profiles of him in L’Artiste de Bordeaux and Bordeaux-Artiste. The earlier issue lacks a date, so it takes a little cross-checking to calculate when it appeared. The list of his compositions whose dates we know, like Chik-Kang-Fô (1878), allow us to date the piece and the photograph to 1878 at the earliest but not later than 1882. In this first profile, Dédé’s orchestral works, ballet music, and operettas are placed in the foreground. His popular songs come in for mention only at the end: “Let us add to these principal works one hundred and fifty ballet pieces in all genres, numerous fantasies,

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ninety-five songs, for the most part published in Paris and Bordeaux” (emphasis in the original). The writer stresses his work ethic: “Dédé’s passion for his art is well known. Not a day goes by without his composing a page or two. Composition is, for him, a vital necessity. Thanks to his excellent foundation, serious music studies, and also an astonishing talent, Edmond Dédé deserves to be considered a composer of true merit.” The profile bears all the hallmarks of a self-promoting job application, which it probably was, in spite of its being signed “Aristée.”63 It seems clear, in any case, from the inclusion of works premiered at his second stint at the Alcazar and the absence of references to the Folies-Bordelaises that he was, at the time of the issue’s publication, either looking for work or looking to change jobs. Nowhere in the first profile does the writer mention that Edmond Dédé is a man of African descent. It was not necessary; the photograph made it apparent (fig. 7). In the now damaged, only surviving copy of the newspaper, the photograph reveals a solid, full-fleshed, dark-skinned man with his hair parted down the center, seated in three-quarter pose. His gaze is directed over his shoulder to his left and slightly downward. He is bundled up in clothing: a buttoned wool jacket, a loose Ascot tie held down with a tie pin, the pointed tips of a white collar obtruding from the jacket’s neckline, and a heavier coat draped over his shoulders. Dédé’s face bears a proud, even haughty expression, so much so that it is hard to believe he is the same man who “Aristée” claims made many dancers “jiggle under the influence of his diabolical quadrilles!” Without reading too much more into the image, Dédé certainly looks the part of a serious, art music composer. The second photograph accompanies the later and longer profile, this one unsigned and published in Bordeaux-Artiste at some point in either 1887 or 1888 (fig. 8).64 Even a cursory comparison of the two photographs will convince a skeptical viewer that Dédé’s fortunes had changed in the intervening years. Wearing an ordinary jacket with a narrow, smooth velvet collar, a tie held in place by a tie pin under a stiff, detachable band collar, he sits not quite facing the camera, with his shoulders slumped, gazing in the distance to his left. What looks like the chain of a fob watch, with a small ornament attached, hangs at a buttonhole in the vest under his jacket. A folded handkerchief stands erect out of the jacket front pocket. His natural, untreated hair is no longer divided as it was in the earlier photograph. The composer looks older, more care-worn, a slight furrow in his brow. He has the look of a man who has encountered disappointment. Some of that disappointment must have involved the uncertain fate of his opera, but attitudes like the one expressed at the beginning of the profile also

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Figure 7. Earliest known photograph of Edmond Dédé, appearing in L’Artiste de Bordeaux, c. late 1870s or early 1880s. (By permission of the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University)

had an impact. Whereas the earlier profile, written a few years before or after 1880, contains no reference to Dédé’s ancestry (no doubt in part because he had a hand in writing or directing the writing of it), the writer of this piece, less than a decade later, took another tack. Agreeable personality, a plebe’s physiognomy, a real bordelais celebrity; perhaps the best-known man in Bordeaux. There are two explanations for it. First, M. Dédé is a Negro [nègre] of the finest black, which helps more than a little, we’re convinced, to make him stand out in a crowd of “pale faces,” as Fenimore Cooper, Gabriel Ferry and Gustave Aimard call them. And, secondly, over a good number of years, he has been exposed to the view of thousands and thousands of spectators, whether at the

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Figure 8. Edmond Dédé, original on galley copy of Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88. (By permission of Archives municipales de Bordeaux)

Alcazar, the Grand Théâtre or the Folies-Bordelaises, in his conductor’s chair, rising well above the level of the musicians and the parterre. Ask yourself: how weary had the nearly sixty-year-old Dédé become of the jokey and ungenerous references to his skin color? The offense he might have

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taken at the suggestion that he owed his success as much to his skin color as to his music will always be a matter of speculation. But that the French people harbored negative stereotypes of people of color was a reality he must have experienced frequently. At the start of his piece, the writer of the Bordeaux-Artiste profile identifies Dédé as a nègre, a commonly used noun that was not quite interchangeable with noir. While nègre did not have the same force as the worst racist epithet in English, noir was the more polite usage and the preferred term in official documents.65 And yet French newspapers in the nineteenth century tended to used nègre to refer to people of African ancestry. In the columns of Bordeaux’s most reputable papers the choice of that term worked fist-in-glove with the derogatory, denigrating, and paternalistic tones used to report on the behavior of black and mixed-race people. To take one example, one that verges exceedingly close to Dédé’s working world, there appeared in 1882 in La Nouvelliste de Bordeaux, edited by, we should recall, his librettist, Louis Brunet, among the miscellaneous news this item: BETWEEN NEGROES [Nègres]—Two men of color, engaged until recently as gymnastes at the Alcazar de la Bastide, got into a quarrel last evening in a bar on rue d’Ares. One of them, named Prouès [Prowess], accused his colleague Taylor, who was always late, of causing him to miss a job that he had contracted for in Angoulême. He pulled out a gun and shot him. The bullet lodged in Taylor’s arm. The murderer was almost immediately arrested. Before being placed in the city jail, he declared that he had bought the gun with the intention of killing Taylor. This confession, shorn of artifice, does not seem to have whiten this vindictive black [noir].66

Or the following from 1889: [Pauvre Nègre]: The civilization of Negroes is making real progress. We know that in other times travelers obtained from them trinkets and beads; that is no longer the case today. They want puppets at 7 francs, 75 centimes each and richly bound books. But while their tastes are changing, their methods remain the same. They love to steal as much as they ever did before. Unfortunately for them, they do not take into account the place where they are and what works in the center of Africa—where there are no policemen—presents a bit more POOR BLACK

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of a problem in the center of Paris, especially in the shopping area of the Hotel de Ville. However, it was there that a Negro with the finest black skin named Virgile was surprised, having hidden under his frock coat along his back a puppet and under his arm a book. His alluring features remarked upon, and the hump of the puppet looked none the less bizarre, he was hauled in to the police station. There, all was explained, and this little adventure ended with the new Virgile receiving a sentence of ten months in prison.67 These two newspaper items, chosen somewhat at random from similar examples, might have appeared in any French newspaper or anywhere in the United States for that matter. The attitude of intellectual and cultural superiority, the well-worn play on the association of white with innocence and black with evil, and the condescension were and continue to be familiar to anyone who has ever read a newspaper. Newspapers, then and now, tend to reflect back to their readers what society’s dominant ethnic or racial group thinks or what the editors want them to think. Nearly two centuries after Dédé’s birth, it ought not to be necessary to point out that the humor displayed in these examples was not benign even in their own time. Behind the seemingly gentle poking fun at the visually distinct people in an overwhelmingly light-skinned or white population lies a set of old attitudes reinforced by geopolitical events around the globe, to which the French people were by no means immune.68 Among the bordelais population—with the roots of their city’s economy embedded in the fruits of slave labor—were a small number of men and women of African descent, most of whom most likely were not as dark-skinned as Edmond Dédé. As one of the principal ports of entry into France, Bordeaux had a population that was in constant flux. There are no statistical records of the number of foreigners living in Bordeaux before 1888, when the national government, in a particularly xenophobic mood, decreed that all municipalities had to register the foreigners in their jurisdiction. The first such registration and subsequent survey in Bordeaux, carried out between October and December of 1889, found 6,700 foreign nationals in a city with over 200,000 inhabitants. The largest group, not surprisingly, were Spaniards. The Germans, Italians, British, and Swiss formed the next largest national groups. There were 213 U.S. citizens residing in Bordeaux that year.69 Of them 87 were men, 52 were women, and 74 were children. Other sources show that many of them belonged to families attached to companies with branches in Bordeaux. Since

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there is no record of Dédé applying for naturalization as a French citizen, he must have been counted among them. But he was unlikely to have sought French citizenship, since it was a long, complicated, and costly process that discouraged all but the well-to-do.70 Regardless of his national status, as a Creole of color whose first language was French, he would not necessarily have had much of a common bond with those other Americans in Bordeaux, the majority of whom would have been white and English-speaking. Conscious of his dignity, Dédé was unlikely to have made common cause with the poor migrants who were black or mixed race passing through or settled in Bordeaux. By the time he moved to the Folies-Bordelaises, mixed-race people may not have seen an association with him as advantageous. Small numbers of people of color had settled in Bordeaux since the eighteenth century. The port’s location at a terminus of the transatlantic route connecting France to the Caribbean made it a key entry for economic and political refugees from Saint-Domingue and Cuba. Many of the people of color who came to Bordeaux were sailors in transit and did not stay in the port. With the growth of cafés-concerts and music halls over the second half of the nineteenth century, black performers, many of them gymnasts and specialty acts, like Prouès and the murdered Taylor in the newspaper article, passed through the city.71 Whatever prejudice Dédé confronted in France paled in comparison to what he would have experienced back in New Orleans. With the exception of a few years in the 1870s, he had steady employment as an orchestra leader throughout the 1860s, late 1870s, and 1880s, perhaps not in the professional milieu he would have preferred, but he competed against French musicians for jobs and won them. Popular music has always been popular chiefly among the young and the not-so-young. Growing older, then, cannot have been easy for him, as styles changed and the imperative of keeping up with the public’s taste required a young person’s energy. His son, Eugène, who helped his father rehearse the orchestra at the FoliesBordelaises, was already swimming in the current of the popular music business and would make the move to Paris at the end of the 1880s. The chance for the son to make a name for himself was coming; the father’s was passing. The elder Dédé turned sixty in 1887, the year the second profile of him, with the image of his downcast face and slumped shoulders, appeared in print. As the decade of the 1880s drew to a close, his name was mentioned less and less often in the theater and music sections of the newspapers. Certainly there were no more premieres at either the Folies-Bordelaises or the Grand Théâtre. What was there for him in Bordeaux if he was not working?

6 • City of Exile

Clarendon Davisson, the U.S. consul at Bordeaux, was peeved. An energetic man in his late forties, he did not take satisfaction, much less pleasure, in fulfilling the bureaucratic duties of his office: recording the arrivals and departures of American vessels, inspecting the paperwork of and collecting fees from French exporters, issuing licenses to brokerage firms, and various other duties. He and his two aides had spent the past few days preparing the quarterly report on American shipping, compiled from data they kept on vessels visiting Bordeaux, and an updated statistical analysis of the Gironde economy for Secretary of State William H. Seward and his aides back in Washington, D.C. There were additional letters to write that would accompany his reports, supplements to inform the secretary of miscellaneous matters that had arisen in the consulate, such as a request from a Frenchman for permission to visit his properties in New Orleans. Davisson also had a few matters he wished to raise with the secretary on his own account. The Civil War at home had had an adverse impact on trade links with Bordeaux. The secession of the southern states and the resulting declaration of war led to a significant reduction of commerce between U.S. ports and Europe. With Confederate merchant vessels penned in their southern ports by Union warships, the Confederate navy—such as it was—took every chance it came upon to exact revenge on Yankee merchant ships. No ship from the United States was safe on the high seas. Davisson had not anticipated this state of affairs, with its fiscal consequences for the consulate, when he accepted his post. Over the previous year, the number of American vessels anchoring in the Garonne River had dwindled, and the number of French vessels heading to U.S. ports had practically ceased. Davisson depended heavily on

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those vessels and the registration fees he collected from captains of American ships arriving at Bordeaux, to fund the operating expenses of the consulate, including the salary of his two clerks. The fewer American vessels in port, the fewer fees he collected, and the more Davisson had to pay expenses out of his own salary. The U.S. consul, therefore, had personal and professional reasons to regret the reduction in shipping between Bordeaux and the United States caused by the war at home (fig. 9). His frustration was sharpened by a lack of reliable, up-to-date news of the war. The items that appeared in the French newspapers were often inaccurate, frequently premature, or maddeningly incomplete. His immediate superior, William L. Dayton, minister plenipotentiary to the court of emperor Napoleon III in Paris, seldom wrote to him, even though he, Davisson, was expected to send regular consular reports to Paris. English newspapers and American-funded ones

Figure 9. Formerly the U.S. Consulate at Bordeaux, pavé des Chartrons (now le cours Xavier-Arnozan). (Photograph by author, 2014)

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printed in London and sent to the English bookstores in Paris were frustratingly out of date by the time they reached him at his diplomatic outpost. The telegraph was too insecure and too expensive to rely on. In late January 1864, for all he knew one side was as likely to win as the other. For the North—the side Davisson supported, and not just because he was indebted to President Abraham Lincoln for his diplomatic appointment—the probability of victory changed from week to week. By January 1864, the Union army had been occupying New Orleans for nearly two years. The year before, on New Year’s Day 1863, the president issued his Emancipation Proclamation. In the ensuing year, the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg had rendered up to heaven a staggering number of souls. In the past summer, the federal army took possession of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, both on the Mississippi River and strategically vital. Most recently, the French press informed the public, the Confederates had defeated Union forces at Chickamauga, only to be crushed two months later by Grant’s avenging army at Chattanooga. New Year’s 1864, then, was an anxious time for Americans at home and abroad. No one, least of all a minor member of the U.S. Foreign Service stationed far from the battlefields, could have predicted the outcome of the conflict. Clarendon Davisson was preoccupied with these concerns when a man bearing a letter for him came to the consulate. The visitor’s letter contained an offer from the eighty-two-year-old widowed daughter-in-law of General Toussaint Louverture, the hero of the Saint-Domingue slave revolt, which had ended sixty years before. The abolition of slavery there and the creation of the nation of Haiti were that war’s chief results. Now Madame Isaac Louverture had a proposal for President Lincoln: she offered to put freed slaves from the United States to work on her lands in Haiti. She possessed many estates, so her emissary claimed. The offer took Davisson aback. To be so far from home and presented with what amounted to a colonization scheme—consonant with other proposals to resettle freed and free African Americans in various parts of the Atlantic world—and one proposed by a relative of a famous, even illustrious, long-dead figure at that, was a moment well worth recording. In the days after the man left, Davisson drafted an account of the visit in a letter to Secretary Seward that accompanied the quarterly report. Dear Sir, I beg to mention a proposition recently made to me, which is of interest from the character of those connected with it, though probably of little importance otherwise.

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A black Haytian woman, aged 82 years, widow of Gen. Toussaint Louverture’s son Isaac, lives in this city. She has large landed estates in Hayti & being anxious to have them cultivated & also to do something for the freed black men of the United States, she wishes me to apply to my Government, through you, to have an arrangement of this matter considered. Then Davisson changed the subject. The widow’s emissary made as much of an impression on him as did her extraordinary offer. She made known her wishes to me through a singular agent, a black man named Edmond Dédé. This man, black as ink, is a New Orleanian, but now leads the orchestra of the Grand Theatre in this city, writes all the ballets for it, is an excellent musician, & being quite a gentleman is treated as such by all.1 Once again, confronted with the reality of a man like Dédé, another American exaggerated when describing him, starting with “black as ink.” The exaggerations continued. The composer neither led the orchestra of the Grand Théâtre nor did he write all the ballets for it, claims that perhaps reveal more about Davisson’s sketchy familiarity with Bordeaux’s music scene than anything Dédé might have told him. More reliably, he called his visitor an excellent musician. If Dédé had been white, chances are Davisson would not have made the comment about “being quite a gentleman” or that the musician was treated as such by all. To understand the assumptions undergirding the consul’s observations, we would do well to think of what is often implied today when a white American praises an African American for being articulate or well-spoken. Then and now, such a comment reflects the low expectations of the person praising more than it reflects the high qualities of the person described. Furthermore, it seems clear that Davisson was familiar with the musician’s reputation, but it is also clear that his overstatements are the products of the clash between his preconceived assumptions about dark-skinned African Americans and what he learned in the meeting with Dédé. During his visit to the consulate, Dédé revealed details about himself and his family, as valuable to us as those in the two profiles published in the Bordeaux arts newspaper. Dédé also presented an undated letter in English, written in his own hand and addressed to the consul, which Davisson included in the packet to Seward (fig. 10). Dédé’s written English reflects the exclusively francophone world in which he had lived the majority of his life.

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To the Honorable American Consul Honorable Consul, The Widow of Mr Isaac Louverture (the Daughter in Law of Genl. Toussaint Louverture.) Send me to you Honorable Consul for ask you, if it will be not possible to obtain from the President of the United States that the American government farm, for a limited times, the great Properties she is the owner in the Island of Haiti? This Lady believe Sir, that this could be a very good business for the American government, in this present Political case: Because these Properties wich [sic] is consisting in estate-land and occupying a great part of the Island could be exploited by the African proceeding persons wich [sic] will be sented there from the U. States after the Civil War will be over. To the Honorable American consul, For Widow Isaac Louverture born Chancy, 8 rue neuve de ll’Intendence Edmond Dédé From Louisiana U.S. The consul’s letter to Seward and the one written by Dédé open a new window into Dédé’s situation. Thus far we have seen in Dédé’s actions little sign of engagement with the political circumstances that compelled him to leave his homeland and move to Europe. His peregrinations have been the movements of a man focused on his own personal course. In the two interviews he gave to the Bordeaux arts newspaper, he never let on that he came to Paris for any reason other than to study music with the best teachers. There is no question that his migrations were the result of racial policies and adverse economic forces in his native country, but his decision to live in exile was not a political act of the first order. And yet here in Clarendon Davisson’s letter we find him in contact with a survivor of a revolutionary age, who was also an exile of ambiguous prestige. We can now situate Dédé in or near a community of refugees from slavery, of which Madame Louverture would have been a leading figure. In the consul’s letter, Dédé the exile—in contrast to Dédé the musician in search of work— now becomes visible. The narrative of his life up to this point has stressed the disjuncture of exile—the falsified documents used to slip through bureaucratic cracks, the death of family members back home. Now we have stumbled across him in a context in which he found solace in the company of at least one other exile. His letter gives no sign of what he thought of Madame Louverture’s offer, but the fact that she asked him to convey her offer and that he agreed to do it stands as testimony to their mutual regard and respect.

Figure 10. Letter from Edmond Dédé to “the Honorable American Consul” in Bordeaux, Clarendon Davisson, January 1864. (NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Records, Consular Correspondence, Bordeaux, microfilm)

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It was Dédé’s anomalous position as an acclaimed African American in a European country, however, that served as the bridge between Madame Isaac Louverture and Clarendon Davisson. On one side sat an old, proud relic of the Haitian Revolution. On the other stood the idealistic agent of a distant and distracted president, the scope of whose Emancipation Proclamation a year earlier freed only the slaves in the Confederate states not occupied by federal troops, an act driven by military tactics more than morality.2 In the same years, another compatriot of Dédé’s resided in Bordeaux, a mixed-race man by the name of Camille Thierry. He came and went from France more or less as he pleased, but he, too, was an exile from slavery and its environment. He appears to have experienced the color line dividing people of African descent from those of European as permeable. When Thierry crossed a national border, he left more than his native land behind. He had the option of sloughing off the racial identity his native land imposed on him. Dédé, Madame Louverture, Davisson, and Thierry were each induced in different ways to enter exile by forces greater than themselves. Edmond Dédé’s exile was partially self-imposed, in that if he had acquiesced to social pressures in antebellum New Orleans, he would have remained a struggling, jobbing semi-professional musician working under the formal constraints of segregation. In France, he became a struggling, jobbing fully professional musician working under the heavy nevertheless informal, extralegal constraints of prejudice. Madame Isaac Louverture’s exile was involuntary, at least when it began. Why she remained in France long after the travel restrictions placed on her were lifted is not clear. But her family’s fame and her status as a former political prisoner ensured that she would always be known by officials and fellow exiles. As for Davisson, the unexpected shortcomings of his job and the limits of communication made him feel at times very much like an exile. He remained in his underpaid, isolated post out of a sense of duty to a higher cause, which appears to have been not just the restoration of the Union but also the abolition of slavery. Like Davisson, Camille Thierry voluntarily entered exile and lived outside of the categories that restricted his movements at home. In their brief moments of convergence, the consul, the widow, and Dédé found common ground that made them members of the same genus, the Exile, but different species within it. Until misfortune struck him, Thierry had the advantage of inconspicuousness, unlike Dédé. Each one in his or her own way came to Bordeaux in the wake of wars to end slavery. Dédé and Thierry fled a society poisoned by it; Madame Louverture was snatched from Saint-Domingue

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because her family fought against it; and Clarendon Davisson owed his position as consul to his commitment to end it. All four were the products of two incomplete revolutions—the American and the Haitian—who came to live as exiles in the shell of an unfulfilled third. At the start of 1864, these four exiles lived in the same city. Dédé knew Madame Louverture and the U.S. consul. Davisson does not appear to have met Louise Chancy personally. And although there is no evidence that any of the three knew Thierry, it is likely that they did. The different worlds they inhabited—music, political exile, and diplomacy in wartime—converged in a way that can enrich our appreciation for that moment’s political potential, regardless of whether it was fulfilled. Out of what context did a woman of color’s offer to put freed slaves to work on her estates in Haiti emerge? And why did a white minor diplomat respond to her offer in the way we will see he did? How did Camille Thierry, known as a man of color in New Orleans, manage to travel at a time when the movements of free people of color were so restricted? The sum of their encounter will be miscalculated if their individual parts are not better understood. To that end, we will let the exile we already know well, Edmond Dédé, leave the consulate and return to his rehearsals at the Grand Théâtre on that late January day in 1864. Our attention will be given to the other three figures, who we learn about from very different types of sources. Madame Louverture’s story derives mostly but not exclusively from historical narratives drafted in retrospect by some of the participants. In contrast, the particular kind of exile that Clarendon Davisson experienced lies below the surface of his consular correspondence. The traces of Thierry lie in the paperwork of property and border crossings. Like four small tributaries feeding into the same great river, the stories of Edmond Dédé’s years in France, the Louverture family’s life in exile, Davisson’s contributions to the Civil War, and Thierry’s search for stability nourish the greater story of the still unfulfilled promise of the Atlantic revolutions. In February 1802, when General Leclerc’s troop-laden fleet arrived with no prior notice off the northern coast of Saint-Domingue, two young men, Isaac Louverture, eighteen, and his brother Placide, older by a year, waited on the deck of Leclerc’s vessel for the moment they would be set ashore. The brothers had spent the last six years in France. One consequence of Toussaint’s decision to shift his allegiance from Spain to France in late 1794 was the decision of the minister of the navy and the colonies to transport the sons of some rebel military commanders, Toussaint Louverture’s included, to France, where they

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would be educated. An initial group of seven youngsters, including Isaac and Placide, were settled at the College de la Marche, an elite secondary school on Paris’s Left Bank. A distinguished scholar and former head of the college, Jean-Baptiste Coisnon, was assigned to tutor the young men separately, since their age and previous education did not match that of the other students. Their education consisted of the full panoply of the seven liberal arts— mathematics, logic, classical languages—for which the Sorbonne was renowned. They also received political indoctrination. “France has made you free men,” the minister of the interior reminded them—a clear instance of incomplete instruction, since France was also responsible for their and their families’ enslavement. “The French Government wishes to make you useful and virtuous men. . . . You are all destined to carry to the tropics the example of your devotion to the Nation, the love of liberty, equality, and knowledge of law, which alone can assure happiness. You will be the conductors of this electricity which will arouse in all the peoples of the world the beneficial stirrings of republicanism.”3 Stirring republican rhetoric did not change the reality that the sons were hostages. Their safety depended on their fathers’ cooperation with the French government and the army. Before long, sons of other Haitian leaders joined the first seven. Within a year of Isaac’s arrival in Paris, another fifty young men of color from Saint-Domingue were receiving an education under the direction of Coisnon. Thus was born the National Institute of the Colonies. Over the next few years, the young Creoles, as the French called them, worked hard on their studies. The Louverture brothers won praise for the speed with which they acquired a high degree of erudition. Word of their progress and the growing fame of their father attracted the attention of notables. On more than one occasion Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, Joséphine, invited them to dine with her. They were invited to visit the abolitionist and supporter of the revolution, the Abbé Grégoire, from whom Toussaint counseled his sons by letter to learn. Bonapartist Paris made a strong impression on the Louverture sons and appears to have instilled in them a long-lasting loyalty to France in its republican, imperial, and monarchical forms. In late 1801, the First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte summoned Toussaint’s sons and the director of their education, Coisnon, to the Tuileries Palace. He informed them that they and their tutor would soon be returning to SaintDomingue with the expeditionary military forces under General Leclerc. The purpose of Leclerc’s expedition, Bonaparte reassured them, was to reinforce the French troops already there. According to Isaac’s memoir, the First Consul

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insisted that the purpose was not to usurp their father’s position. In fact, Napoleon was planning exactly that. But Isaac later claimed that the future emperor displayed no hint of the hostility and antagonism toward his father that Bonaparte showed later on. When Leclerc’s fleet anchored in the harbor of Cap Français, the sons were reunited with their father and mother. In the first two months of the expedition, after Leclerc was unable to achieve any military advantage, the two sides were forced to come to terms. Toussaint then withdrew to his plantations high in the mountains between Gonaïves on the west coast and Le Cap on the northern coast. There he attended to the management of his lands, while continuing to coordinate from a distance the harassment of French forces. Leclerc lured Toussaint into the open with the promise of a meeting. In June 1802, Toussaint was arrested en route to meet Leclerc. French soldiers placed Toussaint on a ship in the port of Gonaïves. On the same evening, French soldiers arrested Placide Louverture. Another group of soldiers were sent to round up the other members of the family. The morning after Toussaint’s capture, Isaac Louverture awoke, unaware that his father and brother had been arrested. His mother Suzanne Baptiste and his eighteen-year-old mixed-race cousin Louise Chancy were close by at another plantation in the Ennery district. As Isaac described it, he was passing a leisurely hour reading, when gunfire and screams shattered the morning’s peace.4 He ran to the door and saw field workers, servants, women, and children scrambling to hide from the French soldiers who fired their rifles as they approached the house. A young man ran inside the house, grabbed guns, and urged Isaac to flee. Isaac later remembered that, believing his father was already dead, he was prepared to stand his ground. But when the soldiers informed him that his father was still alive and a prisoner, he surrendered as well. The troops ransacked the house. Half plundering, half searching for information, they broke open armoires and Toussaint’s desk, sweeping up the money and papers they found. When they were finished, they took Isaac to the village of Ennery, where he saw some of his father’s officers under arrest. At saber point, Isaac accompanied a squadron dispatched to arrest his mother and his cousin Louise. Throwing her arms around her son’s neck, Suzanne wept. While an aide-de-camp assured Suzanne that her husband was safe, soldiers searched the house methodically, gathering up—filling their pockets, Isaac recalled—papers, fine lace, and jewelry. They broke into the family’s chapel and carried out a statue of the Virgin Mary that was adorned with pearls, a ring with a precious stone, and a gilded crown. An aide-de-camp

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ripped the gold crown from the Virgin’s head and slapped and cursed it. To mock the young man, he stuck one of the plumes from his hat in Isaac’s hair and took away his spurs, an act that symbolized a loss of manhood. Isaac reported that the battalion commander whose men carried out the arrest felt his colleague had gone too far, but he was too ineffectual to prevent it. In retrospect, we recognize in the details Isaac provided signs of how comparatively affluent Toussaint’s family had become since he was freed in 1776. In Isaac’s retelling, this affluence was an affront to the French soldiers’ sense of propriety, as if the Louverture family had no right to respectability and prosperity. Suzanne, Louise, Isaac, his younger brother Seraphin St. Jean, and two servants joined Placide on the ship anchored in the harbor of Gonaïves, which set sail for Cap Français before their belongings could reach the ship. In the port of Cap Français, the family was transferred to the aptly named Héros, the vessel on which Toussaint was held. Within hours, their voyage into exile began. General Leclerc and Napoleon Bonaparte had little time to savor the capture of Toussaint. His departure created a breach in political power into which everyone on all sides leapt. Jean Jacques Dessalines, one of Toussaint’s senior officers, profited from the confusion by eliminating his rival Charles Belair, another general on Toussaint’s staff. Each of the other rebel commanders consolidated his own base of power throughout the colony. In the months following Toussaint’s capture, fifty thousand French soldiers fell in combat or succumbed to disease, including Leclerc himself. Bonaparte realized further effort was futile. In 1803, he withdrew the remainder of French troops and initiated talks with the U.S. government for the sale of Louisiana. On January 1, 1804, the republic of Haiti, with Dessalines as its first president, was born. The long, bloody war that began as a slave revolt had ended with the advocates of slavery on the losing side for the first time in history. Toussaint, however, would not live long enough to hear of Haiti’s existence. Twenty-five days after the Héros left Saint-Domingue, it dropped anchor in the French harbor of Brest, on the west coast of Brittany. Because several passengers had died during the voyage—soldiers, most likely—the ship entered a month-long quarantine. The days the family spent in quarantine were the last they had together. On August 16, a company of soldiers escorted Toussaint and his servant, Mars Plaisir, across France in a coach. Their destination was a prison six hundred miles away in the French Alps. According to one account, French army officers and ordinary soldiers who had served in Saint-Domingue stood along the route to pay tribute to Toussaint Louverture on his journey

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into exile. In one town, the officers of the local garrison had served in SaintDomingue under Toussaint’s command. In anticipation of Toussaint’s carriage passing through the town, they asked their commander for permission to salute the general. Former comrades-in-arms were not the only ones who wished to pay their respects to the vanquished hero. In every city where Toussaint Louverture and his escort spent the night, local dignitaries came to pay their respects to the man known in France as the Liberator. Toussaint Louverture was a hero to abolitionists, republicans, and all those who valued the revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. In this period before Bonaparte crowned himself emperor of the French, it was still relatively safe for antislavery republicans among the military to express their admiration for the heroic figure of Toussaint.5 It may also be the case that the marks of respect shown him derived from a related but distinct motivation. The historian Jacques de Cauna, however, sees another point of unity between Toussaint and the French military, one that we now suspect also had a bearing on the reception the Louverture family received when it arrived in southwestern France to begin life in exile. Scottish-rite freemasonry linked the colony of Saint-Domingue and Bordeaux. The masonic lodges established in the French Caribbean were part of a transatlantic network, whose mother lodge was located in Bordeaux. In 1800, when Toussaint switched his allegiance from Spain to France but before the Leclerc expedition arrived, he incorporated into his staff French army officers. Cauna believes that the loyalty shown by the black and white officers on Toussaint’s staff to their former commander can be attributed to their being freemasons or to their origins in Gascony (the region surrounding Bordeaux), or a combination of both factors.6 Unlikely as it was for Toussaint to have been a freemason himself—masonic lodges were strictly segregated in French colonies as they were in the United States—that members of his staff might have been sheds light on the tributes from soldiers along the route. It also may explain the otherwise inexplicable welcome that his wife and children received when they arrived in southwestern France. In one way or another the respect shown to the ex-slave general on his way to prison may reflect the republican aspirations in the men and women who lined the route. Toussaint’s valedictory journey came to an end on August 23 at the medieval fortress of Joux. An isolated fortress overlooking a mountain pass, it was as far from the Atlantic shoreline as it was possible to be within French borders. The Swiss frontier lay only seven miles away. The commander of the fortress led Toussaint to a cell, twenty-by-twelve feet, with a low vaulted

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ceiling, a hearth, and a partially bricked-in window that let in light only through a top slit. For furnishings, he had a wood-framed bed, a night commode, two chairs, a dresser, and a small table. During the first few weeks, his servant, books, papers, and wood for a fire scarcely softened the quick descent into winter. Little by little everything was taken from him. Two weeks after they arrived, Mars Plaisir was sent back across France, in chains, to a prison in Nantes, close to the Atlantic coast. The guards made Toussaint exchange his uniform for prisoner’s clothing. Then they removed his books and writing materials. A little more than six months later, in April 1803, Toussaint Louverture died, alone in his cell, his health ruined by too little food, too low temperatures, and an altitude to which he was not accustomed. While Toussaint was en route to the prison cell in the French Alps, the rest of the family began its own journey into exile. Placide was taken to a prison fortress on Belle-Ile-en-Mer, a small island off the coast of Brittany. Suzanne Baptiste, Isaac, Seraphin St. Jean, Louise Chancy, and a servant boarded a vessel that sailed south to the port of Bayonne, close to the Spanish border. Just as veterans of the war in Saint-Domingue had paid their respects to Toussaint along the route to his prison cell, so, too, veterans of the Saint-Domingue war residing in and around Bayonne came to pay their respects to his wife and family. While still on board the ship, Suzanne received the port commissioner, who escorted her and her family ashore in a boat festooned with crimson velvet. Waiting on the wharf to welcome them were the mayor of Bayonne, city functionaries, the troops of the garrison stationed in the city, and a large crowd of onlookers. According to Isaac, the mayor offered his arm to Madame Louverture and walked with her to the former residence of the bishop of Bayonne, where they were to reside until the authorities decided where they would settle permanently. Over the following days, Isaac and his mother received more visitors—the mayor again, more veterans of Saint-Domingue, and an old school friend of Isaac’s from Paris. The veterans among the visitors reported to the family that all along Toussaint’s route people cheered him. The representative of the Ministry of the Navy, under whose surveillance and authority the Louverture family would spend the next decade, came to visit. From him the captives learned something of the life that lay ahead of them.7 The visitors softened the sense of isolation and grief the Louverture family felt. It is interesting to note that the American public was receiving fairly precise information very soon after Suzanne Baptiste and her family arrived in Bayonne. Before then, the name of Toussaint Louverture appeared frequently

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in American newspapers when the military leader began to distinguish himself from the other ex-slave leaders. When he was captured, short articles appeared in newspapers around the country, tracking as best they could the progress of his journey to the prison at Joux. The newspapers began to pay attention to his wife and children soon after. The Commercial Register of Norfolk, Virginia, published on October 29, 1802, a surprisingly detailed report of the family’s arrival in Bayonne. Bourdeaux [sic], Sept. 5. We learn by letters from Bayonne, the arrival of a corvette coming from Brest, having on board the wife of Toussaint Louverture, two of her children, one of her nieces, and some servants; they went on shore the 2nd of September, at ten o’clock in the forenoon.—Mrs. Toussaint was received on the wharf by the mayor of Bayonne, the commander of the troops, with a detachment of grenadiers, and conducted to the hotel of Providence. They are now preparing apartments for her in one of the castles. A centinel has been placed at the door of the hotel.8 Suzanne, her two younger sons, her niece, and servants lived in Bayonne for most of 1803. They learned of Toussaint’s death in late spring of that year. Placide continued to languish in the prison on Belle-Isle-en-Mer. In September, the minister of the navy received orders to relocate Suzanne and her family farther inland. The war was ending badly for the French in Saint-Domingue. Napoleon and his ministers wanted to make sure that no member of Toussaint’s family would ever return to Saint-Domingue. To ensure they did not escape, they were relocated away from the coast. Their new place of exile was the town of Agen, on a river plain about one hundred and fifty miles northeast of Bayonne and ninety miles southeast of Bordeaux. Once they were settled in Agen, twenty-two-year-old Isaac Louverture married his twenty-one-year-old first cousin and companion in exile, Louise Chancy, on December 19, 1804.9 The family was kept under close surveillance, although several times Isaac was allowed to travel to resorts in the Pyrenees for his health. The annuity granted them by the government was cut. When they first were settled in Agen, the government granted Suzanne Baptiste and Isaac Louverture a monthly pension of 450 francs. This amount struck the official in charge of their custody as excessive for a black woman (cette négresse—“this negress”). She had not been trained, he reasoned, to maintain a household (pour tenir un train de maison), and so he reduced their pension.10 Seraphin St. Jean, Toussaint’s youngest son, died shortly after they arrived in Agen. According to

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Isaac’s memoir, his wife Louise nursed his younger brother to the end. Suzanne Baptiste intensified her pleas to the authorities for Placide’s release from Belle-Isle. His health broken, Placide rejoined his family in Agen in 1804. The reunited family gradually disintegrated. First, Suzanne Baptiste contracted an illness—breast cancer perhaps—that required an operation on one of her breasts. The widow of Toussaint Louverture died in 1816, twelve years after their resettlement in Agen.11 The brothers went their separate ways and soon severed ties with each other. In the year that their mother died, Isaac requested permission from the new Bourbon government to relocate with his wife Louise to Bordeaux. The government granted permission and, at the same time, effectively ended the surveillance under which they had lived since arriving in France. Placide, by then in his mid-thirties, also sent an appeal to the government that year—for permission to marry a white Frenchwoman. His appeal was not initially successful: he had to wait until May 1821 to marry twenty-three-year-old Joséphine de Lacaze, the daughter of a local Agenaise nobleman.12 He and his new wife settled into the chateau belonging to his wife’s family at Astaffort, south of Agen. The breakup of the household signaled the erosion of family solidarity after Suzanne Baptiste’s death. Isaac took his brother to court to prevent him from using the Louverture name, since Placide was Suzanne Baptiste’s child by Jean Marie Clère. However, Toussaint treated Placide as his own son from the time that he and Suzanne married. Indeed, in the memoir he wrote in his prison cell, Toussaint calls Placide “my son” with no qualification.13 Nevertheless, twice between 1821 and 1825 the court upheld Isaac’s claim. At stake was more than the Louverture name. Their father’s patrimony was equally at issue. In 1817, only a few months after Suzanne Baptiste died, one of his father’s fellow generals, Etienne Magny, wrote to Isaac to encourage him to return to his native island. By this time, the former colony had been divided between the Kingdom of Haiti in the north, under the rule of Henri I, who proclaimed himself king in 1811, and the Republic of Haiti in the south. The president of the republic in 1817, Alexandre Pétion, urged General Magny to remind Isaac of his duty as his father’s son and a citizen of the new nation. Isaac was in debt to his native country, Magny argued, in an adjustment of recent history. Preserve yourself for your friends and for your country, then return to its bosom and share with your compatriots the enlightenment and knowledge you acquired in Europe. It is a debt you will pay to your country and you will fulfill the goal of your fellow citizens, who sent you to France in search of the education that your native land, too young then, did not possess.14

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But he had a warning for Isaac. Do not, he wrote in a postscript, go to the kingdom in the north, where his father’s estates were located. The king “believes you know where your father’s treasures are hidden.”15 Many Haitians believed that, before he was captured, Toussaint had buried money and precious objects on his lands. There was, in any event, little danger of Isaac returning to Haiti, given the restrictions on his and Louise’s movements. But it is clear that Isaac considered himself his father’s sole legitimate heir.16 The properties he counted on reclaiming one day were the same lands to which nearly half a century later his elderly widow would try to attract freed slaves from the United States. From then on, the estranged brothers strove to return to Haiti and claim their father’s patrimony for themselves. The income from their father’s estates would have supplemented the meager pensions they both received from the government, so Isaac and Placide repeatedly applied for permission to go to Haiti. Ultimately, Isaac won that race. In 1823, the government granted Isaac’s wife, Louise, permission to travel to Haiti. Why the French government refused to allow Isaac to return is not clear, since Haiti had been independent for two decades by then. But Louise Chancy left that year and remained in Haiti for over three years. The timing of the visit coincided with the election of a new president, Jean-Pierre Boyer, who conquered the Kingdom of Haiti in the north and incorporated it into the republic. In this way, all the Louverture lands came into the possession of Isaac’s allies at home. Ahead of his wife’s departure, Isaac sent several letters of introduction for her to his father’s former colleagues. One letter announced her impending arrival to the new president Boyer. In it, Isaac made clear that the purpose of Louise’s visit to Haiti was to take possession, on his behalf, of Toussaint’s estates. He impressed upon President Boyer that he had complete confidence in her. “I cannot recommend too much,” he wrote, “this half of myself, to whom I have several times owed my life, and who, while my mother and myself were ill when we first arrived in Agen, had the courage to care for my younger brother and feel his last sigh.”17 During the three years that she spent in Haiti, Louise converted much of her father-in-law’s property into cash and reportedly had it sent back to Isaac in France. Two years into Louise’s stay in Haiti, Placide received a letter from an old friend, a surveyor from Santiago de Cuba who was visiting Haiti at the time. He reported to Placide that Louise was selling off property, including coffee plantations, in the town of Gonaïves. According to the surveyor’s informants, Placide’s energetic sister-in-law had already sold over a hundred

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thousand pounds of coffee in a period when the price of coffee was good.18 Leaving Isaac’s remaining property in Haiti in the care of her sister’s husband, General Léon Legros, Louise Chancy returned to France in the company of her longtime servant in 1827. When they arrived at Le Havre, they were temporarily detained until the authorities cleared their journey home with the Ministry of the Marine.19 Surveillance of Isaac and Louise Louverture had officially ended a decade earlier, but the government still exercised caution by restricting their ability to cross borders without inspection. Once reunited in Bordeaux, the couple settled in an apartment at 44 rue Fondaudège, about a mile from the city center, where they lived until Isaac’s death in 1854. Today, a plaque recalling their residence hangs on the facade of the apartment building. Their life in Bordeaux showed little evidence of the revenue Louise supposedly sent back to France. Their residence was modest. It is possible that they gave much of it away. Once the news of the couple’s resettlement in Bordeaux had spread among refugees of color from the Caribbean entering France, many of them made their way to Isaac and Louise’s home. Since 1818, when the Minister of the Marine ended the requirement that people of color entering France post a bond redeemable only when they left the country, many more people of color from the colonies and former colonies entered France. A rough estimate found around five thousand people of color in France (not counting those in Paris) in the first decades of the century. The trend continued. With the final abolition of slavery in French territories in 1848, France and Paris became even more attractive to refugees from slavery.20 So many indigent migrants went to Bordeaux in search of Isaac and Louis Louverture’s home in the 1830s and 1840s that their residence was called the Poor House. The nickname might also have described their own circumstances. Both Isaac and Placide continued to receive pensions from the French government after their mother’s death, but the amounts they received were not enough to live on. Placide continued to apply for permission to travel to Haiti but was repeatedly denied until shortly before his death in 1841 at the age of sixty. By then, he was too ill to travel. The years of imprisonment and deprivation had rendered him an invalid. Placide never recovered a share of his father’s property. Prevented by the French authorities and then illness from leaving France, he lived in semi-poverty with the knowledge that his brother and sister-in-law had won the race back to the island and Toussaint’s property. When Placide died in 1841, he had nothing to leave his wife and child. For the rest of the nineteenth century, Placide’s daughter, Rose, his sole surviving heir, appealed repeatedly but without success to the Haitian government for

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the restitution of her father’s share of his patrimony. When Rose, by then an elderly grandmother, died in 1900, she was still waiting for an answer. By the time Isaac died at the age of seventy in 1854, he had spent close to fifty-eight years in France. His body was interred in a communal grave, where it stayed for twelve years. Then, in 1866, the consul-general of Haiti in Bordeaux, a local merchant by the name of Thomas Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, who had befriended the widow and wrote his own account of the Louverture family’s fate in France, took charge of the transfer of Isaac’s remains from the communal plot to his own family’s plot in the municipal cemetery of Chartreuse.21 For some years, people believed that he had also had the remains of Toussaint Louverture himself interred with his son, but this proved to be a false rumor. Gragnon-Lacoste expected to lay the remains of Isaac’s widow next to her husband in the same grave. Outliving her husband by almost two decades, Louise spent her last years living with lodgers. Her name turns up in the Bordeaux city directories only in 1865, when she was in her eighties. How soon after the death of Isaac she moved into this apartment is not known. She is listed as a rentière—a woman of private income. Perhaps she received a pension from the French government independent of the one Isaac received, but, if so, it was barely enough to live on. Between 1865 and her death in 1871, she lived in an apartment with four other boarders—a clockmaker, a surveyor, a courier and his florist wife, all humble occupations—at 8 rue Guillaume Brochon, in the city center, very close to the Grand Théâtre.22 Her name appears in the middle of the list of residents at that address, indicating she was not the head of the household nor was she a servant. Louise Chancy and her fellow lodgers formed a stable household of sorts. They were all still at that address when she died six years later in summer 1871. Lodging with strangers indicates that she had taken at least one step further down the social scale after Isaac’s death. Isaac Louverture and Louise may have lived close to destitution during his lifetime, but there is no question that she spent her last years in even more straitened circumstances. Rooming houses were far more common in the nineteenth century than they were in the twentieth. In the first half of the nineteenth century, boarding with strangers was not uncommon for economically disadvantaged people. Cities on both sides of the Atlantic were filled with boardinghouse lodgers.23 However, boardinghouses fulfilled another need that was equally important. They received men and women who lived outside of kinship groups and had no children or siblings to care for them. Moving into a boardinghouse may have been the

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only alternative for an elderly widow of seventy-two, her age at Isaac’s death, with limited means. With no children to support her, she must have either received portions of her and Isaac’s Haitian income or she relied on donations from people in Bordeaux who wished to honor the memory of the family’s travails. Given Louise’s careful management of Toussaint’s property when she went to Haiti, why were they poor? Their own charity toward others undoubtedly played a part in reducing their means. However, Louise’s humble circumstances at the end of her life had another cause. In 1868, three years before her death, her brother-in-law General Léon Legros, in whose care she had left the Louverture estates in Haiti, took advantage of the distance separating his sister-in-law from her property. Perhaps he had been skimming off a share of her revenue for years. Perhaps they had an arrangement by which he received a share in return for his stewardship. Eventually, the general felt he was owed more. He petitioned the Haitian government to invoke an article of Haiti’s constitution, which declared all Haitians who received pensions from foreign governments forfeit their citizenship and property in Haiti.24 The government granted his petition, and as a result, his wife, who was Toussaint’s niece as well as Louise’s sister, assumed full rights to the estates. Louise had no one on the other side of the Atlantic to defend her rights. Not even her friend and Haiti’s consul in Bordeaux, Thomas Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, could help. Louise Chancy died poor, but she did not die friendless. In the summer of 1871, nearly ninety years old, she passed away in the room where she had long resided. Acting as her executor, Gragnon-Lacoste registered her death with the city. Anonymous friends placed in the July 22 edition of the Guienne, one of Bordeaux’s major newspapers, the kind of funeral notice only notable, wealthy, or well-respected people earned: “The friends and acquaintances of Madame Widow Isaac Louverture, niece and daughter-in-law of General ToussaintLouverture, former governor of Saint-Domingue, are summoned to the services for Mme Widow Louverture, which will take place on the 24th.” On that day at six in the evening the mourners were to gather at her residence, from which the cortege was scheduled to set out precisely at seven. Edmond Dédé was unlikely one of the mourners, since he and his wife Sylvie had their passports and had left for Lisbon and Algiers. Louise Chancy was buried in a communal grave in the city cemetery of Chartreuse and quickly forgotten by the bordelais public. In 1878, seven years after her death, Louise Chancy’s body was exhumed and placed in the Gragnon-Lacoste plot alongside her husband.25

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The mystery of her offer to the U.S. consul remains. But given that General Legros appropriated the property she had inherited from her husband, Louise Chancy, Madame Louverture, was not in a position to accept freed slaves on the estates in Haiti. Is it possible that she did not know that she had forfeited her land? It seems unlikely. What, then, was Louise Chancy’s intent when she sent Dédé to the U.S. consulate with her offer in January 1864? We can infer from her entrusting the task to a man like Dédé, who at that point was making a name for himself in art music circles, that she would not deign to deliver her message herself. In sending an emissary, she shows awareness of her honor and her status among other survivors and refugees from slavery, however humble her living situation might have been. As for the man she chose to carry her offer, is there any way to infer how sympathetic Dédé was to the proposal he carried there? On first consideration, her offer was well timed. Only the year before, on January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed the slaves in the unoccupied states of the South. The year before that, the U.S. Government officially recognized Haiti—sixty years after its founding. That the official recognition of Haiti’s existence was so slow in coming indicates how disturbing the federal government found it to acknowledge a successful slave rebellion so close to its own shoreline. But there were many people in the United States who viewed a nation founded by slaves as an appropriate place to send or deport free and freed people of African descent after the Civil War. Colonization plans had proponents in high places. Madame Louverture had very likely read in the newspapers or received news from Haiti that supporters of colonization—most notably President Abraham Lincoln himself—were trying to foster the emigration of free blacks to Haiti, West Africa, and South America.26 The colonization movement had a number of factors working against it. Local conditions in the places selected for settlement in many cases were not suitable. Indeed, hundreds of African American families from all over the United States voluntarily moved to Haiti over the 1850s and 1860s. But political instability and the low standard of living in Haiti propelled many of those African Americans back across the water.27 The strongest factor working against the movement was the general sentiment among people of African ancestry that they belonged in the United States. Many black people, including, most vocally, Frederick Douglass, were offended by the notion that they should leave. Their task, once slavery was ended, was to fight for political rights. The widow of Isaac Louverture either ignored or was unaware of these political nuances. Her offer reveals more about the image of herself that she

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wished to project to others. That image derived from the place her family occupied in memory and from a set of ideal circumstances, seemingly in conflict with the hard facts of her situation. She had been dispossessed by members of her family in Haiti. Louise Chancy had no land to offer the U.S. government. And what of Clarendon Davisson, to whom she made this offer? How did this white American man receive the offer from a woman of color via the agency of a man he described as “black as ink”? Clarendon Davisson added one more paragraph to his January 20 letter to Secretary Seward. Moreover, he [Dédé] has two brothers who fought bravely at Port Hudson as sub-officers in a black regiment, & half a dozen black cousins, in the same loyal cause. He communicated with me in person and by letter. Enclosing you the letter as rather a curiosity. I refer the matter to your attention without comment. I expressed my own belief in the matter to them, that I thought such proposition could not be successful, as the United States had need of all its people, white and black. I am, Sir, Respectfully Your obedient Servant C. Davisson U.S. Consul. From the consul’s letter, we learn for the first time that Edmond Dédé’s halfbrothers, Basile and François, and his cousins fought at the siege of Port Hudson. This protracted battle is now remembered chiefly for its strategic importance to the control of the Mississippi River. After a month and a half of fighting, Union forces under General Nathaniel Banks captured the Confederate batteries at Port Hudson, located at a bend in the river to the north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and south of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on July 9, 1863. A few days before Banks’s victory, General Ulysses S. Grant accepted the surrender of General Franklin Gardner at Vicksburg, farther upriver. The capture of these two points on the Mississippi gave the Union army control over the Mississippi.28 Equally important, during the siege of Port Hudson African American regiments took part in combat for the first time during the Civil War.29 The First and Third Regiments of the Louisiana Native Guard, the only units on either side of the war to consist entirely of men of color, including the officers, marched up from New Orleans with little assurance that they would be sent into battle. General Banks and some members of his staff had very little

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confidence in the troops’ ability to fight. The Confederates’ fierce resistance to the Union assaults persuaded Banks to rethink his stance on the issue. He could not afford to hold back any of the forces at his disposal. On May 27, the companies of the First and Third Regiments, the latter under the command of Captain André Cailloux, a mixed-race free man from New Orleans, charged the Confederate defenses and faced unrelenting artillery fire. Cailloux died leading his men. The attempt to breach Confederate lines failed. The Native Guard suffered 105 casualties, including 26 dead.30 Further attempts would also fail over the subsequent forty days until the rebel forces lost the will to fight after hearing of the fall of Vicksburg. Edmond Dédé informed the consul that his two brothers and “half a dozen” cousins fought in the battle. Davisson took that to mean that Dédé’s family fought for the Union cause. Let us pause for a moment to consider why Dédé told the consul about his family’s participation at Port Hudson. Furthermore, why did Davisson evidently feel it necessary to vouchsafe the loyalty of a freeborn black man? Would not he and Seward have been safe in assuming that a man from Dédé’s background would be loyal to the federal cause? Why mention loyalty at all? Dédé’s motivation in mentioning the battle was, at the very least, that of pride in the bravery of his kinsmen. Beyond that, the issue of loyalty turned out to be a thorny issue at the start of the Civil War because of the anomalous social relations within New Orleans’s free community of color. The military records of Edmond’s brothers, Basile and François, on the one hand, and those of their second cousins, François and Simphorien, descendants of Francisco and Marie Dédé’s other son, Luis, on the other, reflect the complicated history of the Louisiana Native Guard. When Louisiana first seceded in 1861, some free people of color in New Orleans formed a militia, called the Native Guard, to help the white Confederate militias defend the city and the state against an expected invasion from the north. Why they did so has been debated since the time they volunteered. After the war was over, some of them defended their decision to support the secessionists by claiming they felt pressured to do so. They claimed they felt especially vulnerable at an extremely tense time. Others were more frank about wanting to protect their property. The historian James G. Hollandsworth makes the case that the wealthy and well-to-do free men of color in New Orleans joined the Confederates initially out of a sense of solidarity with their fellow denizens. “Because skin color and free status was highly correlated,” he argued, “many free blacks identified more closely with Southern whites than with African blacks.”31

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Hollandsworth’s insight obscures more than it reveals. Does the verb “identify” sufficiently or even accurately describe how the free, light-skinned men and women classified as “colored” viewed the white population? Leaving aside the biological ties many of them had with white families, the sense of subordination they were never allowed to forget, combined with the desire to appropriate for their own uses some of the dominant group’s culture, Hollandsworth gives scant attention to the socially variegated character of the free community of color. To wit, men like the Dédé men. Two sets of Dédé brothers turn up in the records of military service during the Civil War. Edmond’s half-brothers, Basile and François Dédé, are there. The younger of them, François, held the rank of corporal in the muster roll of Company E of the First Louisiana Native Guard, the same regiment that Andre Cailloux captained.32 From enlistment to discharge, his half-brother Basile held the rank of private. The other set of Dédé brothers included another François Dédé, a sergeant in the same regiment as Edmond’s brother, the corporal. This François and his brother Simphorien Dédé were the grandsons of Luis Dédé, Edmond’s great-uncle, a black man who owned and sold slaves earlier in the century.33 They are listed in the muster roll of the First Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guard. Edmond’s cousins Francois and Simphorien were among the free men of color who volunteered to defend the city alongside the secessionists, for they appear in a 1861 list of Confederate soldiers.34 Is it a coincidence that they belonged to the only branch of the Dédé family for which there is evidence that they traded in slaves earlier in the century? As for Edmond’s half-brother Basile, he did not join the militia before the federal army captured the city in March 1862. At that point, all four men joined the newly reconstituted Louisiana Native Guard, Third Regiment, within the federal army.35 Edmond Dédé apparently did not mention to the consul that his two cousins had switched sides. Perhaps, given the distance and confusion of the times, his family did not put sensitive information like that in letters. Regardless of how much Dédé himself knew about his extended family’s allegiances, it is clear from the public record that the Dédé men in New Orleans did not all react in the same ways to the imminent danger of invasion by Union troops. But once New Orleans came under federal control they all fought on the Union side. Thus, Clarendon Davisson’s assurance of Dédé’s loyalty was informed by the impression many Northerners and Union supporters had about New Orleans’s free people of color: it was not initially clear whose side they were on. Certainly, Davisson does not seem surprised that Dédé offered his own bona fides as a loyalist to the cause.

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Moreover, the tenor of Davisson’s response to Dédé and Madame Louverture has a remarkably modern, we might even say a liberal, ring to it. It is a little surprising, first of all, that the consul declined her offer on the spot, given, at least in principle, the international implications of the proposed venture. But he may have been aware of the widow’s straitened circumstances and realized how unrealistic the plan was. The more interesting facet of the way he handled the situation is Davisson’s expressed belief that “the United States had need of all its people, white and black.” It is revealing that a politically sophisticated, constitutionally generous American of European descent like Clarendon Davisson voiced his opposition to the scheme. Edmond Dédé, on the other hand, may have taken a contrary view. He embodied a colonization scheme all on his own, except that he was surely a minority in attempting to colonize Europe. His view of his homeland was likely to have been more pessimistic than Frederick Douglass’s. A rising sentiment in favor of abolition did not coincide with an improvement in most white Americans’ estimation of their black compatriots. Before and after the Civil War, most white opponents of slavery believed African Americans were different from and inferior to white people. Only a minority of President Lincoln’s Republican Party believed in political and social equality for African Americans. Furthermore, even fewer white Americans believed that slaves, once freed, would make good citizens. A few years before the war, the legal establishment of the country encoded liabilities into the law that were intended to exclude African Americans permanently from the body politic. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision that denied, among other things, citizenship to people of African ancestry. Thus, for a time the term “African American” was exclusively an ethnic description rather than a status in which ethnic identity and citizenship cohered. As mentioned in the previous chapter, four years after the Dred Scott ruling, in the second year of the war, Secretary Seward’s fellow cabinet member, Attorney General Edward Bates, nullified the court’s ruling. But despite that minimal rectification of the law, which opened the way for black people to apply for passports, white popular opinion about the civic potential of African Americans did not improve. Davisson must have known about Bate’s nullification, given how much a consul’s responsibilities involved the passports and visas of Americans abroad. Even so, Davisson was a broad-minded, enlightened man. Such opinions were not the kind, however, that a low-level diplomat would normally have shared with the head of the State Department. A letter such as the one Davisson wrote to the secretary of state is remarkable for its tone,

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given his minor diplomatic post and in comparison especially to the letters he wrote to his immediate superior, William L. Dayton, the U.S. minister plenipotentiary in Paris. In his letters to Dayton, the consul rarely took liberties. No doubt Davisson knew he had a sympathetic reader in Secretary Seward, although no one would have called Lincoln’s closest political ally an unflinching abolitionist.36 On the contrary, Seward was more of a reluctant supporter of emancipation than the Great Emancipator had been before political forces guided Lincoln’s hand to the paper. If anything, Davisson’s expression of his belief that the United States “had need of all its people, white and black” may have been a slight dig at the secretary. The liberty with which he expressed his opinion to Seward suggests that he and the secretary may have been more to each other than an outspoken subordinate and a high state functionary. Since Davisson expressed his remarkably modern political opinion, the political view that “the United States had need of all its people, white and black,” to a member of President Lincoln’s cabinet, we should try to account for the man and his views. Like Edmond Dédé and Madame Louverture, each in their own way, the U.S. consul seems anomalous for his time. But how anomalous? The best evidence of the man’s mettle comes from his own words in his consular correspondence. In his letters to Secretary Seward, Davisson reveals more of himself than diplomats are encouraged to do. In addition to the one we have just read regarding Dédé and Madame Louverture, the consul wrote three other letters that day. The purpose of one of them was to complain that in spite of repeated entreaties, he was still out of the printed forms he needed to keep the records that the Department of State expected him to keep. He wrote another one in which he informed the officials of the State Department of the identity of the two clerks he employed to help him with the paperwork. The fourth letter is the one that reveals the passion, commitment, and past experience that led him to Bordeaux. Read in the light of the few existing traces of Davisson’s life, the letter gives clear voice to this unusually broad-minded and humane man. This fourth letter contains all the peevishness Clarendon Davisson had been feeling of late when Dédé walked into the consulate. January 20, 1864 Dear Sir: While the Government has the war on its hands, I am sorry to be forced to lay before you the following facts: During the whole 2½ years of my residence here I have been made sensible that this consulate was poorly compensated, but so long as it was not

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self-sustaining, during the war, I determined to be silent, or resign rather than ask an increased salary for filling the office I had volunteered to fill.37 In spite of the restraint he felt he exercised at his post, this letter of the U.S. consul contains clear evidence that Clarendon Davisson was not cut out for diplomacy. He did not like bureaucracy and he did not like acting the martyr. Born in Xenia, Ohio, in 1817, Davisson was forty-four years old when he accepted the appointment of U.S. consul at Bordeaux (fig. 11). By that time, he had passed two decades working, first as a lawyer, then as a journalist, and finally as a newspaper editor. He married an Indianan native, Mary McIntire, in 1845. Four year later, they had a daughter, Frances. After practicing law for two years in Petersburg, Indiana, he switched to journalism, a field of work that fit his temperament much better than law. His new career took him from job to job in what was then considered the West: from the Bloomington Herald to the Indianapolis Journal, then on to the San Francisco Call, back to the Chicago Tribune, and then the St. Louis Democrat.38 He had experience as a surveyor, too, reporting on the proposed routes across the Rockies for the Pike’s Peak Express Company (the forerunner of the Pony Express).39 An honorary membership in the “Historical and Geological Society of France” (presumably the Société géologique de France, founded in 1830) indicates the broad range of his interests. But above all, Davisson was a Republican Party loyalist. In a letter to the minister in Paris, William Dayton, he described himself as an “old-fashioned Whig.”40 The highest praise he could give a Frenchmen was to label him a “republican.” Davisson counted the republican editor of one of Bordeaux’s largest newspapers among his closest friends in France. Now, in 1864, that he had been in Bordeaux for a few years, his job as U.S. consul was trying his patience. In his letters to Dayton, he hid how frustrated he felt, but now in this January letter Seward received the brunt of his resentment. This Consulate, you will perceive, now more than pays to Government its expenses, bids fair to still further increase its receipts—but the increased amount of work, (made by the Triplicate Invoice Law of March last) requiring me to employ two clerks at my expense, changes it from the pretty little office I sought at the hands of you and Mr. Lincoln, to one which requires yearly aid $500 to $1000 from my relatives (the signers of my bond) to sustain the dignity of the Government & keep me from starvation. We are reminded here of how small scaled the U.S. government was in the mid-nineteenth century. Government officials were adapting with difficulty to changing systems of information storage and retrieval. Increased demands for

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Figure 11. Clarendon Davisson. Date unknown. (By permission of Diana Haney, the owner)

information stored in records demanded additional labor at the recording end and additional labor at the storing and retrieval end. As state bureaucracy grew in complexity, however, the number of people working in government was still small enough for personal relationships to be sustained up and down the hierarchy. The president and the secretary of state still handpicked minor functionaries, like U.S. consuls, from among their campaign supporters. Abraham Lincoln noticed Davisson on the campaign trail in the lead-up to the presidential election of 1860. At the time, Davisson was working as an editor on the St. Louis newspaper the Missouri Democrat.41 The central mandate Lincoln and Seward gave him and the other newly appointed consuls dispatched to legations and consulates in Europe was to reverse on the local level the

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impression made by years of proslavery diplomats appointed by Democratic administrations prior to the election of 1860.42 The job, however, had taken its toll and that made Davisson warm to his present task. During more than twenty years’ connection with the Whig & Republican press—from the time I helped put your first Governor’s Message in type in the Albany Journal office until the present war, I was necessarily schooled in economy; & yet, less than $2500 per year will not sustain me in Bordeaux with only a wife and daughter to support. Here we learn that he had known Seward for nearly a quarter of a century, from 1838, when Seward was first elected governor of New York. We understand also that he knew the secretary well enough to administer the complaint common to all political hacks: a paltry salary. Davisson’s letter begins to read like the screed of one old comrade-in-arms (if not friend) to a more senior one. He knew the secretary of state well enough to lecture him. The salary here should be $3,000. I could live on $2,500, without being pecuniarily mean—but could save nothing. I receive but $2000 per year, and 4.50 to $75 in notarial fees, say, $2,075. I pay out of this for two clerks (and all the time & live most of the time) $250 each, say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $500. I pay nearly $1 a day rent for the 5th & part of 6th (3rd & 4th above the ground floor & entresol) for my residence in a respectable part of the city, or per year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $328. Marketing (besides tea, coffee, wine, milk & bread bill etc) per day $1.50 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $550. Bread & milk bills, tea, coffee, wine etc, say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $220. Cook’s wages per year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $60. Wash bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $75. Fuel (Coal & particularly wood, being very high here) per year. . .$125. Oil & candles for light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $20. Cigars (you know this is a necessity) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $10. The daily French paper (another necessity). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $8. The U.S. Papers (more of a necessity). Donations to the poor, always claimed of consuls. Innumerable et ceteras . . . .

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Thus far, Davisson’s annual household expenses, including the cost of employing two clerks and the glad-handing people expected from political operatives, amounted to approximately $1,900 a year. For the sake of comparison, Davisson’s salary and expenses come close to those of a “New York businessman”—meaning a merchant—in 1857, whose annual income of $1,500 was considered sufficient for a “frugal family of four.”43 A typical New York businessman paid $550 a year in rent. A typical frugal family of four’s annual budget for food and beverage came to $415. Servants cost the New York businessman $96 a year. He spent $226 a year on fuel and light. By one calculus, this income would have the purchasing power of $38,000 in annual salary today.44 Davisson, in other words, earned less than a professional, such as a doctor or a lawyer, but more than what a small businessman in New York would have earned. I give you accurately the leading items. Schooling, clothing (I am sorry I cannot afford to dress as plainly as Mr Seward or Ben Franklin; & not to be odd I go in costume when others do, doctor’s bills, & the thousand smaller and irregular calls, swell out the account. Just this minute I received a Doctor’s bill of 100 francs ($20) for 3 visits. It is exorbitant, but I can’t help that and must pay it. Then as now, it helps to be wealthy when performing public service. As the consul indicated earlier in the letter, he had to rely on subventions from his relatives to make ends meet. At this point in the letter, his grievances began to take a toll on his grammar and syntax. Davisson delivered to the secretary his final lecture—a lesson in economics couched in a tone more casual than the one he used in his official report. The abundance of gold in France for the passed [sic] five years has caused an elevation of salaries of French Gov’t officers, civil & military, to be necessary. Railroads have made Bordeaux prices of living very much higher than formerly. Market gardeners that could scarcely live before are now made independent by their Paris shipments. In the last two years I see a marked increase in prices of everything purchased. They are generally higher than at Paris, Havre or Marseille. The hundreds of Bordeaux merchants who visit my office in shipping goods to the United States, would, were I to ask them (which I will not consent to do) testify to this, and say my salary is entirely too small. The British Consul here, with no more work, gets $5000. The other consuls are mostly merchants & independent.

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Although money was of paramount concern to Davisson, he then raised a subject that had increasingly worried him over the last six months of 1863: the mounting evidence of Confederate activity in Bordeaux. In the previous year, an ironclad steamer, the Circassian, built in the shipyards at Nantes in northern France, had been captured by the Union navy, thanks largely to Davisson’s vigilance, as he reminded Seward. But he alludes here for the first time in his correspondence to a new problem. Confederate agents had commissioned two new armored war vessels from one of Bordeaux’s major shipbuilders, JeanLucien Arman, who was also an elected representative to the National Assembly in Paris. Keeping those ships out of enemy hands would become Davisson’s prime concern—obsession even—over the course of 1864. In addition to doing my duty relative to the blockade runner “Circassian” (for which I received your thanks) which steamer since being caught is earning laurels & money by her speed, much of my labor and pains have been required the last year (and are still required) to watch the progress of the war vessels building here by the French congressman & shipbuilder, Arman, and keep Mr. Dayton posted thereon. In the months before and after he wrote this letter, Davisson summoned up his inner investigative journalist, dormant behind the diplomat’s facade. Earlier, in 1863 the Confederacy had sent agents to Bordeaux to commission two warships from Arman’s shipyard, located downriver from the city. After learning this news from his contacts in the shipyards, Davisson asked them to monitor the progress of the construction, turning them into regular informants. But as he warned Seward in his January letter, building support for the Union among the merchant class of Bordeaux was a hard sell. To get the merchant masses here to understand, even in a small degree, the character & cause of our war, I have had to constantly try to enlighten & interest the conductors of the paper which most circulate among them, by giving them my maps, causing them to read my U.S. papers, books, Consul Bigelow’s French history of the US, Count de Gasparin and other liberal and enlightened Frenchman’s writings correcting false dispatches etc etc. Winning the hearts and minds of the French took nearly as much of his time as the shipping paperwork and surveillance of the shipyards. He had to contend with Napoleon III’s sympathy for the Confederacy—an open secret since the French government was officially neutral—and the business sector’s

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general antipathy to the Union cause.45 The sympathy of the French for the Confederates had much to do with their reliance on the cotton produced in the American South. However, that ship had already sailed. Deprived of access to U.S. cotton, French textile producers turned to Egypt and elsewhere.46 The antipathy French merchants felt toward U.S. merchants and their government representatives extended beyond the sectional dispute, as Davisson’s letter to Seward alludes. While judging from what travellers & captains of vessels tell me, and otherwise, I believe many of our consuls are not sufficiently remunerated (as at Marseille, Lyon & Rome for instance). I cannot see why the Marseilles or even Hâvre & Paris, as well as some others should be paid so much more than the Bordeaux consul. Why should Marseilles be paid any more?—Not that it should be reduced, for it should be raised $500.— Gov’t has saved $1500 per annum (& lost nothing) by adding the useless consulate of Bayonne to Bordeaux. It should save $500 more by adding the almost equally useless one of La Rochelle to this. The extra work of this would be but little. Possibly this should not be done during the war; but some of its agencies as that at the villages of Cognac, Royan, etc should be abolished and turned to this; for, complaints are made by merchants of those small places, of having to expose their business to consular agents in the same trade with themselves—a thing felt more by Frenchmen than other nationalities—and as the fees go to the agents, the Gov’t would save them as well as the Frenchmen’s feelings by the change which would make it to raise my salary to a living rate without loss. Davisson had thrown himself into a futile campaign of pointing out the corruption inherent in the system. Administering the import-export trade between the United States and France was one of the most important responsibilities of a U.S. consul. To save on costs, the U.S. government allowed consulates to supplement their operating budgets with the fees consuls collected from French and American importers and exporters. Because French merchants paid for licenses to export goods to the United States, to avoid a conflict of interest, consuls were not allowed by law to personally profit from the same trade in goods they were meant to regulate. But many of them did. A rudimentary filing system made oversight of their activities almost impossible. To paraphrase Charles Dickens’s Mr. Bumble, bureaucracy, like law, is an ass. Having disgorged his rancor, Davisson brought his letter to a close. He composed a peroration that was meant to instill in Seward’s heart a sense of

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guilt and remorse for treating his junior colleague in what he felt to be a shabby way. Davisson’s tone, it might be said, shows how isolated he indeed was, since the secretary he hectored in this way was assisting the president in prosecuting a war to restore the Union. The financial woes of a faraway consul did not count a great deal in Seward’s list of priorities. Were I not over 46 years old, I should prefer taking part in the army at home: yet everyone has his place, & I believe I am serving my country well enough here: while 36 relatives (brother & nephews & cousins) in the Western army are doing the full share of one family in the fighting line. Asking pardon for troubling you thus, I will work in hope that by your influencing an Act of Congress or otherwise, you will render me what I know you so much like to be, independent. If my hopes cannot be fulfilled, I shall still “watch & pray.” Yours truly, C. Davisson Clarendon Davisson never received a raise. For the remainder of his tenure as consul, he never again wrote to Seward in so personal and emotional terms as in these letters of late January 1864. But the inveterate reporter in him did not rest. He continued to carry out surveillance of the shipyards belonging to Arman, one of the most influential industrialists of the Second Empire.47 He kept up with the informants among the workers. The forty-seven-year-old consul even occasionally ventured out at night to row a boat downriver and see for himself the progress made on the vessels. His bordelais friends filled him in on the conversations at dinner parties where Arman was a guest. He wrote long reports urging Dayton to act quickly to have the vessels intercepted.48 Dayton, the U.S. representative to the emperor’s court, rarely replied.49 Like all managers then and now, the minister dispensed information on a need-toknow basis, leaving Davisson guessing the outcomes of his warnings. Toward the end of the war, when the Confederate warships, the Yeddo and the Osacca, had been launched, armed, and sent to sea, his letters once again read like a man pounding furiously on a door that refused to open. The consul remained in his position into the Andrew Johnson administration. But his financial situation never improved. In January 1866, in yet another letter to William H. Seward, still secretary of state, he wrote as if he felt lucky to still be employed. I am under obligations to you & the President (to whom I am not personally known) [i.e., Andrew Johnson] for retaining me here. It would have been a great distress to me to have been removed, in my pecuniary

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circumstances. I trust the good services I performed during our blockading troubles (a portion of which at least are known to you) added to the continued faithful discharge of the duties appertaining to this inadequately paid office in future, may secure my retention at least throughout your administration.50 Eight months later, the State Department dispatched William Gleeson to Bordeaux to replace him as U.S. consul without warning Davisson beforehand. Unlike his predecessor in 1861, Davisson got wind of Gleeson’s appointment before his replacement arrived. His time in France having come to what must have felt like an ignoble end, the consul left. United State Consulate Bordeaux August 20, 1866 Sir: I have the honor to report that I arrived at Bordeaux yesterday Sunday, and today assumed the duties of the Consulate. My predecessor Mr. Davisson did not await the official notification of his recall but left for the United States upon advice received through the newspapers of that fact. I was unable in consequence to present him your letter entrusted to my care requiring of him the delivery of the archive, books, seal, etc. pertaining to the consulate, but have taken charge of all the public property in the office, an inventory of which I have the honor herewith to transmit. Yours William Gleeson51 Once back in the United States, Davisson scarcely settled down. He spent several years in New Orleans working as an editor of the Republican Party’s newspaper and is reported to have been active in the city’s school district during Reconstruction. He worked for a time in Chicago and then in the 1870s returned to St. Louis. Memories of his frustrations in Bordeaux must have faded, because in early 1869, we find him marshalling letters of support from prominent men for his application for the position of minister resident to Portugal, a position he did not obtain. Nor did he obtain similar open positions at Calcutta and Jamaica, and minor postings in Central and South America. The Grant administration had no use for Clarendon Davisson, despite the warm testimonials to his Republican connections. In 1876, then fifty-eight years old, he is listed among registered voters in San Francisco.52 At some point after 1874, Davisson retired to Broughton Island, Georgia, where he died in 1878.

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The exile Clarendon Davisson endured was a self-inflicted one. Idealistic and pragmatic, he volunteered to serve his country in time of war. Just how slender the rewards of his position turned out to be came as a surprise to him. The infrequent communication with Washington and Paris annoyed and perplexed him. The insufficient funds infuriated him. Back home, he had worked for years as a newspaper editor, who directed the flow of information between his reporters and the reading public. In Bordeaux, he performed simply as one node in an imperfectly connected network of consulates in France. More information flowed from him than to him. If he had been adequately compensated for service, if he had had better, more frequent communication with Seward and Dayton, he might not have felt marooned so far from home. Until pushed to the last straw, he would not have left his post without feeling he was deserting it. Unlike Louise Chancy, he did have the option to leave, which he exercised at the last minute, as soon as he heard that he was being recalled. In most respects, Davisson was an ordinary man, full of energy, politically engaged, and intellectually curious. He was a Republican, very likely a Radical Republican, and before that a Whig, but he does not appear to have been immersed in abolitionist circles, even though one of the men who recommended him for a diplomatic post mentioned that he was “an intimate and life-long friend” of Horace Greeley.53 Nowhere in his biography, as much as it can be pieced together, is it indicated that he spent time around or worked with people of color. But at one moment, confronted by a free black man from New Orleans bearing a message from a member of a family that abolitionists in the North would have hailed but ordinary white citizens would have been leery of, Clarendon Davisson regarded them together and described a vision of a country in which white and black Americans counted as compatriots. In his mind, one plus one equaled one. The inclusive sentiments of a good man struggling against an immoral system in the nineteenth century are admirable, but we have no basis for feeling heartened by them. Rather, it is disheartening that one hundred and fifty years later we have to point to the little vein of humanity Davisson displayed as if it were a rare and precious ore. Well-intentioned people have always existed. However, “Forget about intentions,” a commentator recently advised his young son. “’Good intention’ is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.”54 If anything, such an old and unrealized aspiration as Davisson’s reminds us that good intentions alone do not result in necessary structural change. But at the time Davisson wrote, such good intentions would have earned him the admiration of beleaguered African Americans, including the

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mixed-race poet and property owner Camille Thierry. This Creole of color, however, approached the matter of race pragmatically. Born free in New Orleans in 1814—and so thirteen years older than Dédé— Thierry was the son of Jean Baptiste Simon Thierry, a bordelais wholesale liquor merchant who traveled regularly between Bordeaux and New Orleans.55 While in Louisiana, the senior Thierry formed a relationship with Elizabeth Phélise Lahogue, a New Orleans octoroon woman from Saint-Domingue, which made her son Camille one-sixteenth black. Chances are few people would have taken Camille Thierry for a man of color by looking at him. When she gave birth to Camille, Lahogue already had a son, Michel Séligny, who became a published poet and resident of Bordeaux, like his younger halfbrother would do after him.56 Beginning his working life as a shoemaker, Thierry accumulated a respectable fortune from real estate dealings and an inheritance from his mother. He left for Paris in 1855, as did Dédé. Within a short time, he joined his brother in Bordeaux and drew on a comfortable income from his investments in New Orleans. Although he contributed to Les Cenelles, the collection of poetry by Creoles of color that Armand Lanusse published in the 1840s, he produced no new poetry during his years in Bordeaux.57 He published a collection of his poems, Les Vagabondes, in 1874, perhaps in the hope of increasing his income.58 One of his poems, “The Exile’s Song,” written on the eve of his emigration in 1855, suggests that he reluctantly entered exile, but his regrets, perhaps conventional, had seemingly more to do with an unsatisfactory love life in New Orleans than with social injustice—at least upon a first reading of the poem. The poem evokes in equally eloquent imagery his reluctance to leave his homeland, his modest hope of sanctuary, and the expectation that somewhere he will be welcome. Exile, my friend, I dread it so. But am I forced to stay here? . . . No!. . . So I will leave before the time When the last light forsakes my path. And who can shackle me to shores Where I live only on regrets? . . . My songs, belongings, I shall pack, Then I shall say: “Let us depart.”

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To steer my ship without a sail, To nourish with a little hope, One lonely star remains to me, A lodestar in a somber sky! . . . See, over there, the young brown girl Displays no weeping in her eyes, And in the evening, in her bower Her songs of love can yet be heard . . . For now, my exile fills my sails, And now my steeple seems to flee, When I arrive, the stranger’s door Will open its threshold to me . . .59 In the long run, the move to Bordeaux did not improve Thierry’s financial situation or his love life. He turned out to be as unlucky in love as he was in his business affairs. First, a prospective father-in-law rejected Thierry’s request for his daughter’s hand. Then his agent in New Orleans, the lawyer Sydney Thézan, bilked him of his fortune. Thézan went bankrupt before Thierry could extract his money. Shortly after returning from a quick voyage to New Orleans to investigate the situation, the sixty-one-year-old Thierry was found dead on April 23, 1875, at midday before lunch, in his apartment of rented rooms at 3 rue Buffon, a few steps from the Café Delta, where Dédé was working. A friend of Thierry’s in Bordeaux, who broke the news of his death in a letter, described his death as sudden and unexpected.60 Since the Bordeaux press took a prurient interest in reporting suicides, the lack of any mention of Thierry’s death suggests that he died of a natural cause, like a heart attack or stroke. Thierry’s problems in France had to do with love and money. Dédé’s problems had to do with the insecurity of his chosen profession. But both men had, in different ways, to step around the elephant in the salon: race. For Thierry, it was a small pachyderm relative to the one Dédé faced. Dédé’s skin color was impossible to ignore. This difference between them is best illustrated by how they appear in the public record. Thierry spent long periods in Bordeaux, but occasionally he returned to New Orleans. In 1857, he requested a safe-travel passport from the Bordeaux police for travel to Paris and thence to the United States. He showed them a U.S. passport obtained from the governor of Louisiana (the date is not given). Two years later, on July 11, 1859, Thierry received

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a passport from the U.S. consul in Paris, on his way back to Bordeaux. Three days later, after receiving a visa from the U.S. consul in Bordeaux, he applied to the police for permission to travel to the shrine of the Holy Savior in Tarbes, close to the pilgrimage city of Lourdes.61 There is no mention of his status in New Orleans as a free person of color in the U.S. consular records—where we expect it—or in the French police records—where we do not. Yet the same U.S. records in the same years identify other people of color with racial labels. It is remarkable to find a man well known in his native city as a mixed-race man receiving, first, a U.S. passport in Paris and then confirmation of that passport (the visa) from the consulate in Bordeaux two years after the Dred Scott ruling, which made Thierry ineligible to hold one, and two years before the ruling’s nullification by Attorney General Bates. Either the consulate officials were complicit in his passing as “white”—an unlikely possibility before the election of Abraham Lincoln, whose administration installed antislavery diplomats in Foreign Service posts—or Thierry simply slipped through U.S. recordkeeping unnoticed. No one identified him by sight as a man of color. In France, it did not matter bureaucratically. In the United States before the Civil War, it did. Dédé did not have that option. Although he would not have been the only dark-skinned man of African descent in Bordeaux, he was very likely the black man with the highest social status. The others would have been sailors or servants. That he was the only dark-skinned man of African descent who achieved professional recognition in nineteenth-century France, as opposed to mixedrace men like the Dumas father and son, must have been dubious compensation for the strain of being constantly conspicuous. Even in the supposedly color-blind public records of his adopted country he could not escape notice. Only one official record of his movements while living in Bordeaux exists. When Dédé was heading to Algiers, in 1871, while he was manager of the Café Delta, he and his wife Sylvie applied for passports to travel to Lisbon. Unlike fifteen years earlier when he traveled from Paris to Antwerp, this time he named New Orleans as his place of birth and gave his correct age, forty-three. The application contains the standard list of distinguishing traits, which are pleasing to read today because they add a dimension to the two photographs of him that exist. His height is given as seventy-five centimeters (or five feet, seven inches). He had black hair and eyebrows, a large mouth, a round face, a broad nose, and a black skin color (teint noir). Under the section for “unusual marks” (signes particuliers), an official wrote, sujet de couleur. A person of color. The description of physical traits on passports—especially before

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the inclusion of photographs—helped border officials to verify whether the bearer of the passport matched the description it contained. Sujet de couleur, however, goes a step beyond. The French official did more than describe Dédé; he classified him. Classification occurs, formally and informally, when distinctions are thought necessary. Apparently, in the supposedly more democratic, post-slavery Third Republic, Dédé’s skin color mattered to the police.62 Given how closely in parallel the two men traveled to France and then to Bordeaux and how long they lived in the same city, living steps from each other, it is difficult to imagine that Edmond Dédé and Camille Thierry, two francophone Creoles, did not know each other. Still, race had a way of distorting what otherwise might otherwise have been a sympathy between them. Thierry, with his one-sixteenth African ancestry, may not have wished to associate with a black man like Dédé. The number of Bordeaux residents who were black or mixed race was very small, but Thierry may have chosen to forge friendships outside of that group. We do not know Dédé’s preference, but he may have found relief in associating with other people of color. In late January 1864, Edmond Dédé put the dancers through their paces in the Grand Théâtre. Madame Isaac Louverture sat in her room two blocks away. Over toward the river, Clarendon Davisson finished his letters. Closer to the Grand Théâtre, Camille Thierry sat in a café with friends. They were all out of place in Bordeaux. Although it is hard to believe that in 1864 any one of them would have called Bordeaux, much less France, home, the evidence of their actions and the choices they made suggest that the meaning of “home” had shifted since they had been in their native lands. As Edward Said has written, “The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional.” But equally germane, he observed earlier in the same essay, “The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.”63 Of the four, Dédé had the deepest investment—career, family, recognition—in the place of exile where he spent decades. After the three-year interlude of sorting out her husband’s affairs in Haiti, Louise Chancy never again went “home,” even though she might have. Clarendon Davisson went home, but he never again felt at home there. And Thierry died a disappointed man, bilked of his fortune. As for Dédé, what was there in Louisiana for him? His father had died. New Orleans, as well as the past, was a foreign country to him now. Nevertheless, at the age of sixty-six, he had, apparently, some unfinished business.

7 • The Lost Violin

On Sunday, October 22, 1893, three days after the rescue ship Palmas arrived in Galveston, the reporter from the Daily News found Edmond Dédé, the only first-class passenger on the shipwrecked Marseille, several blocks from the port. The sixty-six-year-old musician was recovering from his ordeal at the home of his cousin Jane, Mrs. Florencio Erado, whose husband was a cigar maker, as Dédé once had been. The balmy air, the flat landscape, the seamless continuity of sea and sky, and gusty winds rustling the tops of the palm trees lining the streets no doubt evoked memories of Louisiana. Although he had not yet reached his native city, Dédé would have known from the feel of the air on his skin, the smell of the sea, and the look of the sky that he had arrived in the Gulf. Dédé handed his business card to the reporter, who had no trouble understanding the French word for “composer” but was less sure of how to render into English Dédé’s remaining credentials: “a chief of orchestra of the Grand theater of Bordeaux, member of the society of authors and editors of music and a member of the society of authors and composers of dramatic music, professeur de violon.”1 As should be clear by now, Dédé had never been a “chef d’orchestre” at the Grand Théâtre in Bordeaux. Since the most he could have claimed was répetiteur of the ballet and an occasional composer of ballet music performed there, Dédé’s business card presented the composer as he wished to be seen. Furthermore, the card was more out of date than the reporter could know. He had no way of knowing that Dédé and his wife Sylvie had left Bordeaux and resettled in Paris. Nor was he a member of the opera composers and librettists’ guild, the Société des auteurs et compiteurs dramatiques (SACD), as far as the society’s own records show, but, as we have seen, he did

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belong to SACEM, the organization of songwriters. The possibility that Dédé earned money by giving violin lessons seems entirely plausible. Stranded in Galveston, Texas, Dédé was already working on making an impression. In his short piece about Dédé, the Daily News reporter described the composer as one of France’s “leading musicians” and then misspelled the titles of Dédé’s ballets and comic operas. “In all,” the reporter recorded, “he has composed over 250 waltzes operas, ballets and other musical compositions that have made in France fame and money for him.” Dédé was pushing his art music to the foreground and leaving the bread-and-butter music in the background. Then the reporter turned to the subject of the maritime disaster, the reason Dédé was in Galveston. It was a great pity, he wrote, that, when the Marseille sank, all of Dédé’s baggage and sheet music went with it. However, “Mons. Dede succeeded fortunately in saving his valuable violin, which is an Amati, purchased in France for 2000 francs.” The preservation of his instrument looked like the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal and terrifying story. But that last piece of good news disappeared into the archives of the Galveston Daily News immediately after the reporter’s profile of Dédé appeared in the Monday, October 23, edition. By the end of the weekend, the shipwreck was yesterday’s news. By then the New Orleans newspapers and the other dailies around the country ceased printing updates on the Marseille. The last bulletin had appeared in the bilingual L’Abeille/Bee of New Orleans on Saturday, October 21, the day before the reporter showed up at Mrs. Erado’s house. In two long columns, the editor in New Orleans had stitched together the Galveston reporter’s several articles into one long dramatic account. Toward the end of the piece the New Orleans editor inserted the following information: “Among the passengers is the famous colored composer, Ed. Dédé, who was returning to New Orleans, his native city, after an absence of 39 years. He has lost a violin of great value.”2 How the editor received that information before the reporter paid a visit to the composer is not hard to imagine. Dédé or his cousin and hostess must have telegraphed or perhaps telephoned someone in New Orleans with the news. But the story as it was relayed over that weekend is contradictory. For the readers in New Orleans, the story foundered there; no New Orleans editor printed the Daily News’s profile of Dédé, issued two days later on Monday, which contained the information that his violin had been saved. How the rumor of its loss started, in the first place, will never be known for certain. When Dédé arrived in New Orleans in November, he may have informed his hosts of the survival of the violin, since his instrument was all he salvaged

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from the wreckage, according to the Galveston reporter. Yet the impression that the violin went down with the ship stuck. Anyone looking up the event in the Bee’s archives would be justified in thinking that the violin had been lost, because no New Orleans paper had corrected that impression. For more than a century, Dédé’s violin lay on the ocean floor in memory if not in fact. In retrospect, two authors share the responsibility—such as it is—for the memory of Dédé’s lost violin. News of its loss was reported only in the New Orleans Bee, in its last story, published before the Galveston reporter’s profile of Dédé appeared. Their interest in Dédé and the intersection of his path with theirs took place along the same sight lines that had long before brought Madame Isaac Louverture, that survivor of the revolutionary age, into contact with Edmond Dédé in Bordeaux. So few African American artists and political activists circulated in and between the nations lining the Atlantic coastlines that they might be said to have existed in a dimension of their own, like wraiths who are visible to one another but invisible to those less sensitive to their presence. Communities of color hosted itinerant speakers, actors, and musicians and organized public events at which they appeared. The same transatlantic circuits that made likely Dédé’s acquaintance with Madame Louverture in Bordeaux brought Dédé to the attention of Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes and Maud Cuney-Hare, both African Americans well connected to the struggle for civil rights and social justice in Gilded Age America. Desdunes met Dédé in person; Cuney-Hare learned about him from her parents. Desdunes and CuneyHare’s parents probably meant little to Dédé. He certainly meant more to them than vice versa. But what did he mean or represent to them? And what did this black Ulysses find in his homeland when he washed up on Ithaca’s shore? Starting his journey in Galveston had the potential to disorient Dédé. This gulf port, perched on a spit of land off the Texas shoreline, had a population of only thirty thousand people, but it was the state’s main port and economic capital at the end of the nineteenth century. Galveston also claimed to be one of the state’s political hubs, a status linked to the port’s importance to the state economy and the presence of a large, prosperous and politically active African American community that amounted to more than 10 percent of the city’s population. Most prominent among the African American residents was a remarkable man—Norris Wright Cuney—whom Dédé met during his recuperation in Galveston. Cuney was born in 1846 on a plantation along the Brazos River in east Texas. Over the late 1840s and 1850s, his mother, Adelina Stuart, a mixed-race

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enslaved woman, bore eight children to her master, Philip Cuney, who was momentarily a widower when he began impregnating Adelina. During the time Adelina bore him children, he became one of the wealthiest landowners in the state and one of the top slave owners as well. As Adelina’s children grew, Philip Cuney freed all the ones she bore him who survived childhood, while at the same time he started another family with a second, white wife. The blue eyes and blond hair of his two daughters by Adelina inclined him to train them to be accepted as “white” by European Americans. After spending a few years at a school for young women in Mannheim, Germany, one of the daughters, Jenny, returned to Texas and disappeared into the white community, leaving no trace of further contact with her mother and siblings.3 For his sons by Adelina, Philip Cuney had a different plan. He sent them to a school for African American boys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The eldest, Joseph, became an attorney when he returned to Galveston. Norris Wright, his fourth child, who went by his middle name, Wright, returned from the school in Pittsburgh. During the Civil War and after its conclusion, he worked on steamboats traveling up and down the Mississippi, a line of work that deposited him in New Orleans for long stretches of time. While there he immersed himself in the city’s politics of Reconstruction. After participating in the fight for integrated public education (in the same years Clarendon Davisson was in New Orleans) and in the attempts of Creoles of color to enter electoral politics, he returned to Galveston and threw himself into organizing African American dockworkers into a labor union. His growing reputation stemmed as much from his labor organizing as from his involvement in Galveston’s political life. During the 1870s, Cuney became active in Texas statewide politics, rising within the state Republican Party to its top position. In 1872, he was a delegate to the party’s state convention. A year later, he was appointed to the executive committee of the state Republican Party. His status among state Republicans rose higher and higher until, in 1886, he was elected chairman of the party, a position that gained him both national attention and statewide animosity. He was the only African American in the former Confederate states to attain such a position in the nineteenth century. At the same time, Wright Cuney’s political influence within the Republican Party led to his appointment in 1889 as U.S. collector of customs, no small triumph for an African American man in one of the country’s major ports. He married Adelina Dowdie, an African American woman, who was an amateur singer, performing frequently at Galveston’s social events. They had two children: daughter Maud, who went north to study

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at the Boston Conservatory of Music, which had only recently begun to admit students of color; and son Lloyd Garrison, named after one of the country’s most famous abolitionists. Is it any wonder, then, that in 1893 the man who was the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, the representative from Texas to the party’s national committee, and the chief representative of the federal government in the port of Galveston, who also happened to be one of the best-known African American political activists in the United States, invited to his home the unexpected and distinguished visitor from France? The African American community in Galveston organized concerts on Dédé’s behalf, which delayed his departure for New Orleans until late November.4 He was feted during his time in Galveston, while in the care of relatives, and thus his recovery from the trauma of his transatlantic crossing was made easier. But Galveston was not the place for Dédé to take an accurate sounding of how much the United States had changed in the three and a half decades since he had last been there. The African American community in Galveston, with its strong labor unions and political engagement, lived segregated from the white community but less so in comparison with the rest of the country. The lack of severe persecution and the taste of prosperity enjoyed by many of Galveston’s African American residents are reflected in the early life of the first African American boxing champion, Jack Johnson (1878–1946), who grew up across the street from Wright’s elder brother Joseph in the Twelfth Ward. Later in life, after years of harassment by white Americans for his success in the ring and marriages to white women, Johnson looked back on his childhood as a time when African and European American children played together and ate at each other’s homes with the blessings of their parents.5 Thanks in large part to Wright Cuney’s leadership and efforts, Galveston enjoyed its own racial microclimate, distinct from the rest of the South and probably better than most of the North. Having grown up in a city with its own economically and socially diverse African American community, Dédé had yet to experience the consequences of Reconstruction’s failure. Perhaps the people of Galveston warned him of what he should expect. Eventually Dédé boarded the train to New Orleans. How long did it take before the familiar landscape of the Gulf Coast became unfamiliar to him? Did the scrubbed coastline and watery bayous he saw through the train window evoke pleasure or dread? How heavy were the expectations he carried of his native country, his native city, and his people, now that the Atlantic Ocean had divested him of all his possessions except supposedly one, his violin? The

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train to New Orleans took him inland and eastward along the coast of Texas into Louisiana. He rode past fields, swamps, and large bodies of water, like Lake Charles. Since he left for France, a Louisiana town he might have known, Vermillionville, had changed its name in 1884 to Lafayette. The only Lafayette he could have remembered was a suburb of New Orleans since swallowed up by the city. So much looked the same; so much was unfamiliar. Dédé had a lot to catch up on. Over the decades since he entered exile, his compatriots had been to hell and back and now many of them were being pushed over the precipice once again. French newspapers could not have sufficiently warned him. Perhaps he learned something about the changes in the United States in letters from his family—if they corresponded. He left the United States two years before the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford that declared him and everyone of African ancestry a noncitizen. He had not been there in 1862, when the Union army captured New Orleans. He had not gone with his brothers to enlist in the first regiments of African American soldiers in 1863. He did not fight at Port Hudson as they had that same summer. Reconstruction (1866–77) would always be an abstraction to him, because he was not in New Orleans when black and white Radical Republicans undertook to rewrite the state constitution along more egalitarian lines. Dédé did not vote for the African American candidates who ran for statewide offices and Congress, because he was not there. And he was not there when his compatriots’ hopes of reaching the top of the mountain began to falter. After the Great Depression of 1873 and the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, which killed 2 percent of New Orleans’s population, he was not there to watch a resurgent generation of white Southern Democrats kick aside all the political advances made by and for men and women who looked more like him than not. The three decades that he spent in France coincided with the success and then the failure of America’s second revolution. Of all the states of the defunct Confederacy, Louisiana was well positioned to reap the benefits of Reconstruction, the federal government’s program to shepherd states back into the Union and to build upon the newly won freedom of slaves. Which rights and privileges the former slaves—and the African Americans who had been free before 1865—would be granted had yet to be decided, and the success of Reconstruction largely depended on how those questions were resolved. The process of restoring Louisiana to the Union began soon after federal troops took possession of the city in 1862. The southern Republican Party, dominated by white antislavery Radical Republicans and African American activists, rose to political power, thanks in part to

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Louisiana’s black majority, which came to the polls massively in favor of the party of Abraham Lincoln. On the national level, the founding of the Freedman’s Bureau in 1865 signaled that the federal government was committed, for a time at any rate, to making real the promises of the Fourteenth and, later, the Fifteenth Amendments, which promised equal protection and due process and deemed illegal discrimination in voting on the basis of race (but not gender, to the chagrin of women’s rights proponents). At the start of Reconstruction, schools for African American children opened in New Orleans, where Clarendon Davisson, the former consul at Bordeaux, worked for the Republican Party newspaper and became active in education reform for a few years after his return to the United States in 1868.6 The Radical Republicans succeeded, at first, in integrating New Orleans’s schools, but the citywide experiment did not withstand the opposition of the white population. Meanwhile, in upstate plantation country, African American field workers refused to go back to work without being paid wages or given land. The planters devised ways—withholding wages and sharecropping—to gain back some of their leverage over the former slaves. On the electoral front, the leaders of the African American community were eager to run for city, state, and federal offices. The historian Eric Foner called the election of over six hundred African Americans, who “served as legislators—the large majority, except in Louisiana and Virginia, former slaves,” throughout the South “a stunning departure in American politics.” The people of Louisiana elected more African Americans to state office than in any other state: Oscar J. Dunn as lieutenant governor and Antoine Dubuclet as treasurer in 1868, followed by P. B. S. Pinchback, elected lieutenant governor. Pinchback stepped into the office of governor for one month, after Governor Henry C. Warmoth was impeached and suspended from office for corruption in December 1872.7 The entire project of Reconstruction met with stiff resistance from white Southern Democrats, who played a long game in their efforts to win back control of the southern states on all levels of government and public life. Violence was the cudgel the white supremacists among the Democrats and the business sector used to regain mastery over the labor of African Americans and to secure their exclusion from the franchise. The vigilantes used physical intimidation, arson, and murder to prevent African Americans and white Radical Republicans from voting, serving in elected office, and promoting equality. It became apparent early that those opposed to Reconstruction were prepared to openly flout the law and commit murder to stop political and social

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change. In 1866, New Orleans’s police force, made up largely of former Confederate soldiers, mounted an organized assault on the delegates to the state constitutional convention and on every African American within sight. A massacre ensued, ending with thirty-four black men and three white delegates killed.8 In the same year, the Ku Klux Klan was formed. Klan members murdered, tortured, and brutalized both African Americans and white Republican candidates and elected politicians, but African Americans suffered the brunt of their cruelty.9 In spite of organized efforts by communities in some areas to protect themselves from Klan attacks, the terrorists succeeded in making the exercise of the franchise a risk to the lives of black people throughout the South. The Southern Democrats’ unwillingness to suppress the violence and their complicity made the Klan’s strategy effective. After the Klan was temporarily suppressed in 1872, other armed groups with the same agenda were formed. By 1876, not only had white supremacist groups prevented many African Americans from voting, but the white voting electorate turned away from the Republican Party toward state and congressional candidates of the Democratic Party, called Redeemers, whose goal was to bring to power pro-business, conservative white men. Their aim was to disenfranchise African American men through state and local laws that put obstacles—like literacy tests and poll taxes—between African American voters and the polls. In the end, the determination of white supremacists to prevent by any means, including violence, the economic and political empowerment of African Americans overcame the efforts of Radical Republicans and the newly created African American electorate to achieve those goals. Resistance to Reconstruction was inadvertently aided by divisions between Radical Republicans and moderates within the party and by divisions within African American communities around the South, but particularly in New Orleans. The issues that divided both the Republican Party and the African American communities were the same: should all African Americans have the rights of full citizenship, including the right to vote, or only a portion of them initially, the ones who had been free before the war and were best educated? Some moderate Republicans, wishing to improve their standing among white southern voters, favored limited enfranchisement. Radicals pushed for extending the right to vote to all male African Americans, independent of literacy and economic worth. Among the leaders of New Orleans’s African American community a similar split occurred. Men like P. B. S. Pinchback, who had moved to New Orleans during the Civil War and served for a time in the regiment for African American troops before entering politics after the war, were typical of

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the elitist position. They argued for petitioning the Louisiana legislature to grant the franchise to mixed-race men who had been free before the Civil War. That position was strongly opposed by many Creole men of color—mostly francophone and mixed race—who had formed a chapter of the National Equal Rights League and had their own newspaper, the Tribune, to promote their platform. They advocated full suffrage for all African American men.10 Their faction went down in defeat. The city that Edmond Dédé found when he stepped off the train in New Orleans fifteen years after the end of Reconstruction was probably still too familiar. New Orleans in the 1890s was not changed as much as its residents might have wished. The population had doubled since 1857, reaching 242,000 inhabitants in 1890, not far from Bordeaux’s population of a quarter of a million inhabitants in the same year. And like Bordeaux, New Orleans was being surpassed by other major cities: in 1860, it was the sixth largest city in the country; thirty years later, it ranked twelfth. Fewer immigrants arrived at the port than had before the war. In 1860, 38 percent of New Orleans’s population was foreign-born; in 1900, only 11 percent were immigrants. Economically, the port remained important. The dredging of the Mississippi delta made it possible for bigger oceangoing ships to make their way upriver and anchor off the levee. In 1883, railroad tracks reached the levee. Now dockworkers transferred goods from transatlantic steamers directly to train cars headed out of state. They were mostly the same goods as those that had dominated the Louisiana economy before the war: cotton, rice, and sugar. If, in 1893, Dédé had arrived at the wharf instead of the new train station at South Ramparts Street, it would have looked much the same to him, except for the larger ships and the train cars.11 But there was not much difference between the city’s past and its present. Dédé would have been struck more by the lack of change. Although the city had swallowed up smaller municipalities—Carrollton, Lafayette—thereby increasing its tax base, it still did not adequately deliver basic utilities to its citizens. A telephone exchange opened for business in 1879, but twenty years later there were only around 1,600 telephones in the city, or one telephone for every two thousand residents.12 The streets were as much of a muddy mess as they had been in the antebellum period. Potholes were everywhere, and stray farm and domestic animals made moving around the city hazardous to carriage axles and people’s footwear. The holes in the streets were the main impediment to the expansion of the streetcar lines. In the 1890s, people on bicycles, whose technological improvements in the 1880s led to a rise in their

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popularity around the country, navigated the streets more easily than did streetcars or carriages. New Orleans was no healthier a city than it had been before the Civil War. Garbage was strewn everywhere; municipally funded garbage collection was minimal. The city government did not begin to install sewer pipes until the very end of the century: residents still drew their drinking water from cisterns. Such unsanitary conditions largely accounted for the continued high mortality rate among infants, regardless of race, and the recurring epidemics of yellow fever. Electricity was the one utility in which New Orleans excelled. Electric street lights had been illuminating a few streets in New Orleans since 1881. By the time Dédé returned, the city had been experimenting with electric power for ten years. In February 1893, the St. Charles streetcars were powered entirely by electricity. The streets of New Orleans were as dirty, smelly, and muddy as they had been when he left, but at least they were well-lit. Almost immediately after the Civil War, the “Americanization” of New Orleans that had begun before the war was renewed and intensified. The process continued during Reconstruction, as investors and reformers, known as carpetbaggers, came from the North and settled in the Crescent City. This Americanization of the city manifested itself primarily in political and economic ways. The “Americans” dominated city government. The largest fortunes in the city were in the hands of the “Americans,” the so-called Anglo-Saxons, and the economy continued to be centered in the American district on the upriver side of Canal Street. But the change was felt in cultural ways as well. Increasingly French Creoles, black and white, communicated with one another in English. From the end of the Civil War on, it was something of a conscious effort to maintain their French cultural distinctiveness.13 The young French Creole who went to France in 1856 to study medicine, Victor Grima, who described in a letter how overwhelming he found Paris to be, had a visit in 1866 from a younger brother he had not seen in ten years. In a letter to his mother, he remarked on his brother Alfred’s “very pronounced American accent,” the single greatest change he noticed. That was Grima’s first indication that, as a Creole, he would find that his city had lost a lot of its French flavor when he returned to it in 1868.14 The African American community Dédé found in New Orleans of the 1890s resembled only superficially the one he left. The African American community in New Orleans was still dominated by the sons and daughters of the old, mixed-race francophone free people of color, but fewer of them spoke

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French. More of them spoke English and were Protestant. Like the white French Creoles, the Creoles of color had become “Americanized” over the decades after Reconstruction. As a group, they were no wealthier than they had been before the Civil War. Furthermore, they had been enfranchised and then disenfranchised. They could no longer vote or run for office. The reality was that African Americans were at a greater economic disadvantage than at any time since the 1860s. They lived in a city plagued by periodic bouts of violence directed at them and at southern European immigrants. As the twentieth century approached, their social standing continued to deteriorate. Segregated services and facilities were the norm in public space. The political and racial climate in the city and throughout the South was worse than it had been since before the Civil War. Dédé was returning to a city in the throes of an economic downturn and an upsurge in racist and antiimmigrant sentiment and violence. The African American community, now almost 27 percent of the population, was just beginning to feel the effects of new laws whose intent was to push them as far away from the white population as possible. European immigrants, too, were not prospering much more. The death of a police chief in 1891 led to one of the worst riots in the city’s history and the lynching of a group of Italian immigrants who were being held in jail on suspicion of his murder. Education in New Orleans had once again become segregated in 1879, without opposition from the former governor, now state representative, P. B. S. Pinchback and the other accommodationists among the African American community leaders. In the first half of the 1880s, white residents of New Orleans could choose among forty-two schools for their children. African Americans had twelve. Straight University, founded during Reconstruction by the American Missionary Association, was the only institution of higher learning open to African American men in New Orleans. In 1886, it closed its law program, in which both black and white lawyers received training. The African American graduates who completed their degrees before the program closed would play a significant role in the fight against Jim Crow segregation.15 The trends in Louisiana were typical of the South. Lynchings occurred across the region.16 A few weeks before Dédé arrived in New Orleans, on November 4, 1893, the front page of the New Orleans Daily Item carried the headline “LYNCHED” above an article describing the discovery in Tennessee of four African Americans, three men and one woman, hanging from the same tree. This morning at daybreak the bodies of Ned Waggoner, Sisson William, his daughter Mary and his son-in-law Jim Motlow, were found. DANGLING

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FROM THE SAME TREE.

Barn burning has been of frequent occurrence in this section lately and suspicion points to this family as the guilty parties. Indications show that Ned, the oldest negro, has been hanged twice. THE ROPE BREAKING. In the first attempt, another was secured from a well bucket of a near by neighbor. The citizens of the community in which it occurred were not aroused from their slumbers.17 Here was a reality that was too reminiscent of the American South he fled. Even before he arrived, he would have encountered the Louisiana variety of Jim Crow in a very direct way. The first law to codify segregation in the state was passed by the legislature in 1890. Known as the Separate Car Act, it called for “separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” on railway passenger coaches.18 Dédé would have been compelled to sit in a segregated passenger coach once the train from Galveston crossed into Louisiana. It was not a coincidence that members of the committee to welcome him and organize his visit to New Orleans were the same men who were challenging Jim Crow on the national level. New Orleans’s African American political activists were also the community’s cultural leaders. They were men who had been trained in law at Straight University in the late 1870s and early 1880s. When Dédé arrived, they were engaged in an ongoing campaign to challenge the constitutionality of the Separate Car Act. The composer made an impression on one key activist in particular. Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes (1849–1912) was born free in New Orleans to mixed-race parents from Saint-Domingue and Cuba. After the Civil War, he worked for a few years as a policeman at an extremely dangerous time for an African American to be in law enforcement. In the late 1870s, he studied for a degree in law at Straight University, supporting himself by working at the U.S. Customs House and in his family’s cigar company. Angered by the accommodationist policies of Pinchback and his allies and fed up with the corruption in the increasingly conservative Republican Party, Desdunes organized the Young Men’s Progressive Association in 1878. In an editorial that the Louisianan newspaper published in 1882, he pronounced his belief that “it is the duty of colored men to fight for an equal chance in the race of life and not depend upon the generosity of others to do so for them.” Desdunes and another French Creole of color, Louis André Martinet, launched in 1889 a bilingual newspaper, the Crusader, whose readership was mainly New Orleans’s African American community and whose avowed interests were “Labor and Republican.” Through their paper, Desdunes and Martinet built support for campaigns against laws that deprived African Americans of the vote, codified

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segregation, and prohibited interracial marriage. Their strategy was to defeat Jim Crow in the courts by pressing legal suits that challenged the constitutionality of literacy tests, poll taxes, all-white juries, and segregated public facilities.19 In September 1891, Desdunes and seventeen other African American lawyers and activists in New Orleans formed the Comité des citoyens, as it was called locally, or the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law, as it became known throughout the country. The Citizens’ Committee took up a range of issues involving discrimination against African Americans, but the law calling for segregated seating in railway cars became their priority. Their first attempt to challenge the law failed. With the cooperation of the railroad company (which opposed the Separate Car Act because of the expense of providing additional coaches), Desdunes’s son, Daniel, was arrested for sitting in a whites-only train car traveling from New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. But when the Supreme Court of Louisiana ruled in another case that the Separate Car Act did not apply to interstate travel, Daniel Desdunes’s case was dismissed. The committee made a second attempt in June 7, 1892. Homer Plessy, another member of the Citizens’ Committee, boarded a train in New Orleans bound for the Louisiana town of Covington and sat in a whites-only car. This time the tactic worked. Plessy was arrested and fined. By the end of the year, Louisiana Supreme Court Justice John Howard Ferguson confirmed the lower court’s ruling, thereby allowing an appeal to move up to the U.S. Supreme Court.20 It was four years before Homer Plessy’s lawyers made their arguments before the justices. On May 18, 1896, in a landmark ruling henceforth known as Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that the Separate Car Act did not violate the Thirteenth and the Fourteenth Amendments. Thenceforth, the policy of “separate but equal” was the law of the land until the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka reached the Supreme Court in 1954. When Edmond Dédé arrived in New Orleans by train in late 1893, the Citizens’ Committee was in the process of preparing the arguments its members would make before the U.S. Supreme Court. Some of the key activists involved in the Homer Plessy case served on the committee that arranged the events of Dédé’s visit. Among them was the committee secretary, Paul Trévigne, one of the founders and investors of the Tribune, the Republican Party newspaper that flew the banner for African American men’s suffrage during the Civil War and for a few years afterward. George Roudanez, a physician and the son of the cofounder of the Tribune, Dr. Louis-Charles Roudanez, who died in 1890,

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was also involved in the planning of Dédé’s visit. Daniel Desdunes was also on the committee. His interest in Dédé’s visit extended beyond the political to the musical. In the prehistory of New Orleans jazz, Dan Desdunes plays a minor but distinct part. Around twenty-three years old in 1893, he was the leader of the Creole Onward Brass Band and, later, the cofounder and leader of the Cousto & Desdunes Dance Band. As the front man of one of the most popular dance bands in New Orleans, he was an heir to the blended traditions that gave rise to jazz.21 His generation of young musicians was beginning to experiment by departing from the notes printed on their song sheets in order to find the more expressive byways of songs. A pioneering ensemble, the Excelsior Cornet Band led by Theogène Baquet, was already in existence by 1891.22 In a 1949 interview, an elderly New Orleans trombonist, George Filhe, spoke about his first years as a musician in Desdunes’s group. “They played quadrilles, schottisches, straight. Onward Brass Band. Younger musicians about 1892 began to ‘swing.’ Older men used lots of Mexican music.”23 Filhe does not explain what he means by “swing,” but he contrasted the way younger musicians were then playing with the older generation’s source of inspiration without implying that the two were mutually exclusive. The musicologist Lawrence Gushee, however, finds in Filhe’s comments “a drastic shift, from Mexican music to a new kind that, by contrast, swung.”24 The music of the 1890s could not yet be called jazz, not least because the word did not come into use until after the turn of the twentieth century. There is a bigger problem in determining when the “Africanization of American music,” as the jazz historian Ted Gioia calls the emergence of the new sound, began: before recorded music, the only hint of what musicians were playing comes from sheet music (for the actual notes) and anecdotes (for descriptions of the way those notes were played).25 To the extent that a consensus exists on the matter, most musicologists date the beginning of jazz to around 1905. They do, however, almost all agree that the various ingredients that went into the making of jazz music in the first decades of the twentieth century were already in the pot and simmering by the early 1890s. Mexican, Caribbean, European, and African rhythms, representing the oldest components of the jazz sound, can be heard in the music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829–69), although musicologists disagree about how much of non-European music he actually absorbed.26 Brass band music, an important source of New Orleans’s particular brand of jazz, had been popular in New Orleans since the Battle of New Orleans in 1812. At the same time, the people of the Crescent City were

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dancing quadrilles and waltzes to European music as much as they had been in the first half of the century. But when the big pinch of rustic sound coming from the delta—what was later called the blues—was added few historians agree on. All agree that the various ingredients that made up the finished gumbo called jazz were actively cooking long before anyone saw it on the menu. If, as early as 1892, the Onward Brass Band was stepping up the tempo of and improvising on a tune—a reasonable interpretation of Filhe’s use of the word “swing”—then some of the earliest experimenters in jazz participated in the concerts for and with Dédé. Dan Desdunes, one of the innovators, was part of New Orleans’s music scene at a time when a noticeable musical shift was taking place. Dédé must have noticed the changes. He certainly met Dan Desdunes, since the young man was a member of the welcome committee. Desdunes positioned himself somewhere on the more popular, melodic side of the divide between popular music and embryonic jazz. Long after Dédé returned to France, Daniel Desdunes moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where for more than twenty years he led an integrated school band at Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. He also recruited players from Omaha’s African American community for his brass band, which continued playing after his death at the age of fifty-six in 1929. The Dan Desdunes Band finally disbanded at some point in the 1990s.27 During his visit to New Orleans, Edmond Dédé took part in three concerts organized by the reception committee. As the newspaper reports make clear, these events were meant to showcase Dédé’s talents. They also provided the African American community an opportunity to demonstrate to Dédé what the local talent sounded like after all the years he had been away. The bilingual newspaper, the Bee, and the newspapers read by white residents of New Orleans, the Daily Picayune and the Daily Item, sent reporters to the three events, all sponsored by African American fraternal clubs. The first concert took place on December 10, 1893, in a hall belonging to the Friends of Hope. It began with a recital by Dédé on violin. Accompanying him on piano was Basile Barès (1845–1902), a New Orleans composer and musician whose career offers an interesting comparison with Dédé’s. Their family background differed in fundamental ways: Dédé belonged to a family that had been free for four generations, whereas Barès’s father was a French immigrant and his mother the slave of music store proprietors, whose pianos her son was allowed to play. Basile was a slave until the end of the Civil War.

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His master, and then his master’s widow, supported his musical studies, and Barès continued to work as an employee of the music emporium after the war. Like the older composer, Barès studied music with New Orleans’s best music teachers, including Eugène Prevost, the French-born music director of the Orleans Theater and reportedly one of Dédé’s teachers. And like Dédé, he, too, was something of a prodigy. In 1860—that is, before the end of slavery— Basile Barès’s piece for piano, “Grand Polka des Chasseurs à Pied de la Louisiane,” was published as sheet music under the name “Basile” and copyrighted. Contrary to laws that made it illegal for a slave to own property, the sixteenyear-old slave held the copyright to his song, a fact that must have depended on the negligence of the recording clerk in the federal district court, as Lester Sullivan surmised.28 In his early twenties, Barès made several trips to Paris, and during the first he performed at the Universal Exposition of 1867. Unlike Dédé, however, he returned home. The Civil War and Emancipation made it possible for Barès to publish the many pieces of dance music he composed, and he conducted bands and small orchestras for both black and white balls. Most African American musicians could not support themselves solely by playing or composing music, and Barès was no exception. For most of his life, he worked in various music stores and taught music. His reputation in the nineteenth century did not exceed the city limits. But when Dédé came back to New Orleans, Barès was one of the most respected and popular musicians there.29 Even for its time, the music played that winter night in 1893, two weeks before Christmas, seems conservative. Almost exactly one year earlier Antonín Dvorˇák premiered his Symphony no. 9 in E Minor, From the New World, at Carnegie Hall. The symphony contains musical and thematic references to African American music and Longfellow’s narrative poem The Song of Hiawatha. One prominent critic, Henry Edward Krehbiel, praised the Czech composer for drawing on musical themes derived from African American spirituals, which were just beginning to attract the interest of music critics. But a critic from Boston panned the composer and his symphony as “negrophile.” Dvorˇák’s inclusion of such nontraditional themes in his music reflects an emerging recognition among musicians and music lovers that if the United States were ever to develop its own indigenous, national music, independent of European styles, it would be grounded in the music of the former slaves.30 That was not Dédé’s aspiration, as far as it is possible to tell. In December 1893 he preferred to stick to the European music he loved. With Barès on piano, he performed violin pieces, none of which he composed: a fantasy on

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the theme of Faust (1868), by his old violin teacher in Paris, Jean-Delphin Alard; Carl Maria von Weber’s arrangement of “Freyschutz” (1863); and two pieces by composers either who are obscure or whose names the reporter misspelled. The second part of the program consisted of a quintet of singers. None of the reviewers indicate what they sang. Among the singers was Rodolphe Desdunes’s twenty-year-old daughter Agnes. The evening ended with the orchestra of the Club Ida playing under the direction of “Professor W. Nickerson.” This last name further indicates the presence at these concerts of two generations of New Orleans musicians. The older generation is embodied in Basile Barès and William J. Nickerson (1865–1928), both of whom adhered to the preference among elite African Americans for art music and popular music in the European style. The rising generation of young musicians was represented by Dan Desdunes, who, the musician George Filhe claimed, was beginning to experiment rhythmically and extemporaneously. But William J. Nickerson himself served as a bridge spanning generations. The most eminent music teacher in the city, he took a leave of absence from the music faculty of Straight University to tour with Richards and Pringles’s Famous Georgia Minstrels in 1887, scarcely six years before Dédé’s visit.31 He later taught piano to the young Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe (c. 1890–1941), better known as Jelly Roll Morton. Adapting ragtime to the emerging jazz form, Morton’s stride piano later gained him a national reputation as one of the early innovators of jazz.32 On that night in December 1893—when the New Orleans cornetists Charles “Buddy” Bolden would have been sixteen and Joe “King” Oliver around eight—those present at the concert to honor Dédé unwittingly stood at the crossroads of New Orleans’s sound. In the review that appeared in the Daily Item the next day, the reporter had little to note other than the particulars of the program and the fact that the event “was largely attended by people of his own race who were loud in their applause.” Twenty-eight years after the end of slavery, Dédé still could not reach an audience beyond his own community in his hometown. The critic for the Bee, reporting to the community of French Creoles, both white and black, was more effusive, although, unfortunately for us, he does not seem to have stayed for the entire program. We gratified ourself in the course of duty by attending, at least in part, the concert given in the hall of the Friends of Hope, Treme Road, for the benefit of Professor Edmond Dédé, a true musician, an artist of merit, an excellent violinist, a student of the most renowned French masters of the past fifty years.

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It will be enough to cite Halevy, the celebrated composer and Alard, one of the first [virtuosi] on the violin, both his teachers, to give a good idea of the worth of the student, now a professor himself. Professor Dédé was born here, in New Orleans, in 1827, but he was trained almost entirely in Paris at the Conservatory. It is there that he carried off his first successes, which would be followed by many others. We will not rehearse all of Professor Dédé’s excursions through Europe, whether as a virtuoso or as a conductor. We present him simply as we heard him, in rather unfavorable circumstances. The hall of Friends of Hope is acoustically bad; the sounds are muffled. A musician really has to have talent in order to be appreciated when he plays in it. Happily, to accompany him he had a pianist of great talent, whom we have known for a long time as one of our best accompanists. We refer to Monsieur Basile Barès . . . . We hope to have an opportunity to hear M. Dédé perform the compositions in which he excels before he departs. We understand that he wishes to return as soon as possible to France. He feels out of place here [il n’est pas lui à sa place], and to be frank, his voyage had not been a happy one; he nearly lost his life in the terrible wreck of the steamer “Marseille.” M. Dédé is decidedly a violinist of the highest quality and a distinguished composer, whom we wish had had a better welcome. Il n’est pas lui à sa place. That sense of being out of place can certainly be attributed in part to his disastrous arrival. It was not an auspicious start to a homecoming. The comment—for it seems like the reporter had interviewed Dédé—hints at something more unsettling about being back in his native city. Only a few weeks into his visit, Dédé was realizing that he no longer belonged there. The next concert took place on the following Sunday, December 17, this time at the hall of the Society of Free Friends (Société des Francs Amis), another African American fraternal organization. In the intervening days, Dédé’s performance apparently had been criticized, for the Bee’s reporter launched his review of the second concert from a defensive posture: “Those who hold him to be merely a simple violinist are mistaken at least by half. He is at once a musician in the broadest sense of the term, a distinguished harmonist, an able composer; we have read of him that his compositions prove that he possesses a great feeling for melody.”33 The hall where this second concert took place was packed. Accompanied by Basile Barès once again, Dédé first performed a fantasy based on motifs from

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Verdi’s La Traviata (1853). Then he performed one of his own compositions, an overture for solo violin and orchestra entitled “Sylvia,” no doubt dedicated to his wife. Unfortunately again, the critic did not hear the title of the third solo piece. Maybe like his colleague he left the concert early. The violinist was followed by two daughters of Barès, who performed Daniel Auber’s “The Crown Diamonds” (1841), a piece for four-handed piano. At the end of the program that included other musicians and spoken word recitations, Dédé returned to the stage, violin in hand, where he played an encore. No one commented on his violin. Dédé did not appear again in public in New Orleans until a month later, on Sunday evening, January 21, 1894. The event was billed as his “farewell concert.” The distinguished guest was, according to the Bee’s critic, on the point of returning to France. The concert took place in the hall with the poor acoustics, where the first one had been held. So many people crowded into the hall that “the receipts must have been very advantageous, in spite of the modest price of admission,” so the critic wrote. The music critic’s account of the program differs from the complete program obtained years later by Maud Cuney-Hare, presumably from Dédé’s cousin, Mrs. Jane Erado in Galveston, who had written to her with other information about her cousin. Ist concerto de Violin Op. 64 ........ Mendelssohn Accompagné par Mme. Serge “Rigoletto” de Verdi ............ D. Alard Par Mlle. Lucie Barés et le Prof. E. Dédé Il Trovatore—Verdi—Fantasie pour violin, exécuté par Ed. Dédé, Accompagnement de quatuor par MM. Nickerson, Mauret, E. Colin et P. Dominguez. Si J’étais Lui (nocturne) Poésie de M. V. E. Rillieux, musique de Ed. Dédé Chante par M. H. Beaurepaire. L’orchestre soul la direction du Prof. Nickerson Le piano sera tenu par Mme. Serge et M. Basile Barés, Professeurs.34 New Orleans’s best classical musicians had turned out to honor the departing guest. William J. Nickerson returned to direct the orchestra and to participate in a quintet made up of Dédé on violin, himself on piano, Paul Dominguez senior on bass, and two other musicians, Mauret and E. Colin, neither of whom can be identified.35 Like the concert for Dédé in December, this one also

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contained the past and the future: Nickerson, Desdunes father and son, and Paul Dominguez, Sr., whose son and namesake became an early pioneer of pre-jazz, “hot” music on his preferred instrument, the violin. The Daily Picayune critic’s account of the evening differs from the program in Cuney-Hare’s possession in one significant respect: “The audience was very much delighted with his [i.e., Dédé’s] guitar, banjo and violin playing.”36 In the program as Cuney-Hare reproduced it, neither the guitar nor the banjo appears. That Dédé played the guitar is not especially surprising, given the popularity and availability of Spanish music in Bordeaux, especially on the stage of the Folies-Bordelaises.37 The banjo in his hands is more surprising. Possibly, he picked it up during the encore. The music typically played on banjos in this period does not accord with Dédé’s preference for art music or with his desire to be seen as a composer of art music. Since many New Orleans concerts of art music turned into balls after the program ended, perhaps in the transition from the formal performances to the dancing part the encores allowed for improvised playing, in this instance, on Dédé’s part. As a farewell concert, it might have had a festive air, a one-for-the-road atmosphere that persuaded him to lower his art musical standards. Furthermore, it is very unlikely that he was playing the banjo for the first time. The possibility that it featured in the music he directed in the Folies-Bordelaises in Bordeaux during the 1880s seems real. But what kind of banjo music were the French hearing? For most of the nineteenth century, proponents and practitioners of art music in France despised minstrel music and its instruments as the lowest form of popular music. The genre did not catch on there to the extent it did in the United Kingdom. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century, almost a decade after Dédé’s visit to New Orleans, that the French supposedly paid close attention for the first time to a new strain of African American music and dance, when John Philip Sousa introduced Parisians to ragtime at the Universal Exposition of 1900. When they started to take notice of the evolution of minstrelsy into ragtime and eventually into jazz, as was the case earlier with white Americans, French appreciation was likewise a backhanded compliment. They derided it but enjoyed it, too. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, that new appreciation dovetailed with artistic movements that were breaking away from the strictures of academic painting and music. The musicians, poets, and visual artists, who felt stifled by the formalism demanded of music, literature, and visual art, formed the protomodernist avant-garde. The more avant-garde artists, whether musicians, painters, or poets, found in, first, minstrelsy and, later, ragtime and jazz

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antidotes to the inelastic strictures of the Academy. They wanted to break the rules, and so they looked to West African music and dance, which they admired for seemingly having no rules, unaware that the various forms of African music and dance had structures of their own.38 They valorized them as “uncivilized” and “primitive.” It is not a coincidence that this so-called appreciation of “savage” Africa grew in tandem with France’s imperial projects in Africa. The French folded their appreciation of what they thought was African American culture into their appropriation of African motifs. French music hall producers showcased the new sounds and movements coming from the United States in caricatured tableaux of slave life on the old plantations. The majority considered the denigration of African Americans on stage benign. In 1902, Parisians began learning the danse du gâteau, or cakewalk, “the high stepping, back-arching” rhythmical strut, believed to have been inspired by slaves’ imitation of the minuets they saw white people dance.39 Five years later, Pablo Picasso completed his revolutionary painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in which he painted the faces of two of the prostitutes as African masks—a choice that was inexplicable only to those who were not following the vogue in music hall performance. Its culmination was in the 1920s, when Josephine Baker appeared on stage alternately in a skirt made of bananas and then dressed like a sexed-up plantation slave. And in this same period André Breton collected African artifacts, and his deployment of them in his surrealist project drew upon popular notions of “primitive” art that had been current for two decades at least. Such reductive conflations of African and African American cultural forms in the visual arts and music emerged slowly, not suddenly and fully formed out of the psyches of the modernists. Dédé was witness to the evolving French taste for the “exotic” over the second half of the nineteenth century. In the 1870s, he catered to the exoticism of the “Orient” with his chinoiserie operetta Chik-Kang-Fô. In the 1880s, he set his grand opera in the bazaars of Persia. By the last decade of his life, he had witnessed the transformation of minstrelsy and orientalism into African and African American caricatures. And he participated in it. The slow process of melding the various musical traditions into the form that eventually became known in the twentieth century as jazz began as “hot” music in New Orleans around the time that Dédé performed on a banjo during the last concert in his honor. European art music was still the gold standard among the African American community of New Orleans, but the antecedents of ragtime and jazz were perceptibly appreciating in value. It was

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in such settings as the concerts for Dédé that the experimental intermingling of generations took place. The confluence of European notation with the structures of African rhythms could be heard in the improvisations of musicians ready to break with the older traditions. Despite the Bee’s assertion that at the end of January 1894, Dédé was “about to leave for France,” in fact he did no such thing. It is certain that he was still in the city on February 5, 1894, when he stopped at a notary’s office to have a document drawn up for his son, Eugène, in Paris. Eugène was getting married. In order to do so, he needed his father’s written permission, since his father would be absent at the ceremony. And it is certain that he had not arrived in Paris by March 6, when the wedding occurred at the mairie of the fourteenth arrondissement. Edmond and Sylvie Dédé had relocated to Paris at some point after 1888 and before late 1893, when Dédé embarked on his voyage to the United States. Their son, Eugène, who was pursuing a career of his own in songwriting and music hall conducting, may have already settled there. His new world was the one reflected in the posters of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, depicting the highkicking latest stars of the cafés-concerts and music halls in the 1890s. Eugène found work at one of the most popular cafés-concerts in Paris, indeed the biggest one on the Left Bank, the Théâtre Gaîté-Montparnasse, which first opened in 1867. In the last years of the nineteenth century, an experienced café-concert manager, Georges Corrard-Dorfeuil, took over the operations of the Gaîté-Montparnasse and lifted it to a level of popularity it had not previously known.40 Ten years before his early death in 1904 at the age of fifty-two, Dorfeuil had evidently befriended his young employee. Eugène Dédé asked him to serve as witness to his marriage. At the civil wedding ceremony on that day in early March, the twenty-sixyear-old Eugène, describing himself as an artiste musicien, married a twentyfive-year-old hatmaker, Ilka Fuchs. The witnesses to the marriage were all older men: Georges Corrand-Dorfeuil, age forty-five, café-concert director; Olivier Houzelot, thirty-seven, city inspector; Antoine Garçon, forty-nine, a singer; and Eugène Honch, fifty-four, an inspector on the Paris-Orléans railroad. Only one of the young couple’s four parents was present, Eugène’s mother, Sylvie, who now listed her occupation as a seamstress (couturière), unlike her declaration of no profession when she married Edmond in 1864. Ilka’s parents, Maurice and Régine Fuchs, both furriers, were living in Budapest, Hungary.41 The father of the groom, Edmond Dédé, had sent from New Orleans a notarized

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letter granting his son permission to marry in his absence.42 Eugène must have decided to marry, then, between November and January. And where was the father? Maud Cuney-Hare claimed that he traveled, “playing in many cities as far North as Chicago,” but no trace of those performances in the newspapers of other cities, including Chicago, has survived. But if his location during February 1894 is a mystery, his frame of mind before he left New Orleans is not. He indicated to the Bee reporter that he felt out of place. All he had managed to salvage from the venture was his Cremona violin. Still, it is odd that Desdunes, who was there with him throughout his visit, and Cuney-Hare, who heard firsthand from her parents, assert categorically that he lost it. Would Dédé not have bruited the news, as he did to the Galveston reporter, to his friends and hosts of his expensive violin’s survival and made a point of playing it at the concerts? Apart from the Bee’s initial report in its columns in October 1893, Rodolphe Desdunes was the first to refer to the lost violin. In his 1911 collection of pen portraits of notable Creoles of color, translated much later into English as Our People, Our History, he devoted a chapter to musicians. Of the four he discussed—Eugene Macarty, Samuel Snaër, Basile Barès, and Dédé—the first sentence of three of those profiles places the focus squarely on their talent or reputation. In contrast, his first sentence about Dédé draws attention to his skin color, underlining right away the composer’s status as an anomaly. Edmond Dédé was a black man [un noir], born in New Orleans around the year 1829, a contemporary of Macarty and of Snaër. He was always spoken of as a violin prodigy. His first music lessons were in New Orleans, under the tutelage of able and conscientious teachers. From there, Desdunes describes Dédé’s studies at the Conservatory of Paris as an auditor, his position as “chef d’orchestre au Théâtre de Bordeaux,” and then the saga of his return visit to New Orleans in 1893. During this experience Dédé lost his favorite violin, a Cremona. This misfortune, however, did not prevent his appearance in New Orleans— often in concert halls with poor acoustics—where he captivated his audiences with a borrowed instrument greatly inferior to his lost Cremona. But this contretemps did not prevent him, even in halls with less than ideal acoustics, from charming and captivating the audience with the seductive stroke of his bow, while playing on a borrowed instrument of far less artistic value.43

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Then, twenty-five years later, the early twentieth-century American folklorist and musicologist Maud Cuney-Hare, daughter of Norris Wright Cuney, U.S. customs collector at Galveston and Republican Party leader, repeated Desdunes’s story of the lost violin in her work published in 1936, Negro Musicians and Their Music. There was no reason for her to doubt an eyewitness like Desdunes. And, in turn, there was no reason for anyone to doubt her. So few Americans had heard of Edmond Dédé by the time her study appeared in print that no one would have thought of going to Galveston to check the archives of the Daily News. Not even the Galveston native herself. For Cuney-Hare, herself a concert pianist who combined recitals with lectures on the untapped art-musical potential in African American folk music, Edmond Dédé’s life had a meaning beyond the music, although his music was key to her interest in him. His training and compositions, or at least what she knew of them, fit into her program for “racial uplift” through the improvement (i.e., assimilation) of African American traditional music to European standards of music. She was not alone in this view. Initially after the Civil War, well-educated African American leaders deemed slave spirituals to be more intrinsically worthy than slave work songs. Cuney-Hare considered the work songs of field hands and the “so-called social songs of the Negro underworld” to be vulgar and of little importance to the history of Negro music.44 During the 1870s, early African American choral groups, like the Fisk Jubilee Singers, introduced spirituals, first adapted to European harmonies, to African American audiences in the North, who responded warmly to them. There were those who avoided the amalgam of European and spirituals altogether and sought acceptance in the elite world of classical music. The number of African Americans throughout the country who became accomplished musicians in the European classical tradition increased in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Music academies for people of color established after the Civil War trained singers, pianists, violinists, and other instrumentalists. One of the better known among them belonged to an illustrious family. Joseph Douglass, grandson of the abolitionist and renowned public speaker Frederick Douglass, built a career as a professional violinist. He and his wife Fannie Howard Douglass, who accompanied him on the piano, spent their married life touring the country. It was a change from the time of Edmond Dédé’s youth, except in one respect. Joseph Douglass performed almost exclusively before audiences at African American colleges and churches. The world of classical music remained intractably segregated until well into the twentieth century. The 1939 open-air concert that the contralto Marian Anderson gave on the steps of the

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Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in protest of her exclusion from the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Constitution Hall shows just how long African American musicians were waiting to perform before integrated audiences.45 The leaders of African American education and music education adhered to a course they felt maintained the dignity of their people. In the early twentieth century, Cuney-Hare, a close friend and correspondent of the scholar and NAACP founder W. E. B. Du Bois, belonged to a circle of well-to-do, educated African Americans, who deplored the popularity of ragtime, jazz, and the blues. To Cuney-Hare and her friends, like Harriet Gibbs Marshall (1865– 1941), Oberlin School of Music graduate and founder of the Washington Conservatory of Music, African American music would assume spiritual and intellectual beauty only with the marriage of African American folk music and music training in the European tradition. Leaders like Cuney-Hare and Marshall heard the works songs, the blues, and jazz through the trumpet speaker of class. This explains Cuney-Hare’s failure to mention any jazz or blues musician in her study of African American musicians, published eight years after Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five recorded the still astonishing “West End Blues,” a watershed recording in the history of jazz, in particular, and music, in general.46 Thus, in Cuney-Hare’s eyes, Dédé had achieved what no African American had done in the United States, namely, built a career as a professional musician and conductor of music in the European tradition. Her biographical sketch of him appears at the end of the section on Creole composers in New Orleans in the chapter “Musical Pioneers.” It was a major source, even more than Rodolphe Desdunes’s profile, for the few subsequent encyclopedia entries and scholarly articles written about Dédé in the second half of the twentieth century. The two pages, however, contain several errors, beginning with the year of his birth and ending with the year of his death. Dédé’s parents, she claims, “migrated from the French West Indies,” a background we now know to be incorrect. She reviews his music education in New Orleans but asserts that “he entered the Conservatory” when he arrived in Paris and “won a number of medals,” which, as an auditor, Dédé was not eligible to compete for. The date she gives for his death—1903—is off by two years. She gives his son’s name as “George.” And she recounted in the very last sentences of her portrait of Dédé the story of his having lost his Cremona violin. These mistakes do not reflect a lack of conscientiousness on her part. They instead reveal the inaccessibility of the necessary sources.

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The significance of the Cremona violin to Dédé, Desdunes, and Cuney-Hare extended beyond its age and value. For Dédé, who made sure to mention to the Galveston reporter how much he paid for it, the violin served as proof of his credibility as a composer of note, like the business card he carried identifying him as the chef d’orchestre at the Grand Théâtre. It announced to the world, “Here am I,” a respected composer. No one whom he met in Texas or Louisiana would have wondered how Dédé could have afforded a violin worth 2,000 francs, which is likely to have been at least three to four times his annual salary in his top-earning years. Perhaps now is the moment to entertain the possibility that while in Galveston Dédé claimed he had a Cremona violin when, in fact, he did not. And then he changed his story when he arrived in New Orleans and told his hosts that he had lost his Cremona violin in the shipwreck once he arrived in New Orleans. Who knows? Do we just give the man the benefit of the doubt? And yet a pattern dimly emerges from what can scarcely be called a chain of events and more properly a chain of surmises that runs as follows: disappointed that the Grand Théâtre would not stage his opera, Dédé moved to Paris around 1890, where he was also unable to convince a company to take it on. More disappointed than ever, Dédé decided to make a trip back to New Orleans and present himself to his family and his former community as the esteemed musician, conductor, and composer he longed to be recognized as in France. He got carried away and had business cards printed with credentials that stretched the truth. He packed up much of his sheet music (but not the opera manuscript). In the chaotic rescue of the shipwreck, shorn of the feathers he had hoped to preen, he boasted of losing a Cremona violin to one person, of saving it to the reporter, and of losing it again to his friends and family in New Orleans. Who knows? Perhaps before his arrival he toyed with the idea of remaining in New Orleans—until he arrived and discovered to his sorrow that not enough had changed since he left. Whatever the truth or existence of the Cremona violin, its significance to Dédé was not concessive. His claim to own a 250-year-old violin was not motivated by the fact that he was a black man and men like him were not expected to own such rarities much less play them exceptionally well. All his adult life he sought to present himself outside the two prevailing frameworks of race in which he lived, both the unavoidable one he left in 1855 and the one in France that was slightly easier to ignore. More than anything, there is a palpable wish in his self-presentations on this voyage to America to have a happy ending for himself. It was bad enough that he missed the chance of striding off a steamer to collect his trunks of clothing and sheet music and greet family and friends.

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The loss of everything, encapsulated by the violin, would have rendered the return of this native son a tragedy from which little dignity could have been salvaged. The elderly man was returning to New Orleans only partly in order to offer an example of what a talented person could achieve in a less racist environment than that of New Orleans and the United States of America. He intended also to boast on his own account. Edmond Dédé had made his way through French society on the strengths of his own talent and ferocious hard work, and he wanted everyone at home to know it. Rodolphe Desdunes and Maud Cuney-Hare did not view him in that light. They recognized the talent, the training, and the dignity of the man. But Desdunes’s admiration gained warmth from the color of Dédé’s skin. What mattered to him was the disparity between the modest expectations all Americans had of men who looked like Dédé and what he understood Dédé to have become. For Desdunes, the Cremona violin became a metonym in Dédé’s hands for the potential of his people. Cuney-Hare places the story of the violin within the broader context of Dédé’s disappointment. The shipwreck, the loss of his possessions, and especially the loss of his violin added insult to the injury of learning just how racist America was forty years after the war to end slavery. Her profile of Dédé and the chapter on pioneer musicians ends on a note of loss. In that, Cuney-Hare got the essential point right. Dédé returned to France a disillusioned man. Shortly before her death in 1920, Mme. Erado, an aunt of Dédé, sent the author the words of a song which he had written as his farewell. The burden of the poem was his return to France: “My adopted mother, France, who so often has consoled me—Eternal is my destiny to live far from my native country, the land of my birth; but the prejudice that pursues, it is implacable—my country which refuses my love, it is the land of my birth.” Apart from the mistaken relationship between Dédé and Jane Erado, everything else rings true (if slightly stilted—the wording suggests that the poem was written in French, which Cuney-Hare may not have known well enough to translate smoothly). What Dédé found when he arrived in the United States was discouraging enough to make him want to return to Paris as soon as possible. Perhaps, when he finished whatever touring he undertook in February, for the first time in his life, he went home—to France. France had indeed become his home. It was where his work was. France was the country that allowed him to make a living doing what he loved best,

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making music. He had spent half his life there. His wife, son, and new daughter-in-law were waiting for him. Paris was the center of the commercial music world in France, and it became, once again, the center of Dédé’s world. The dream of achieving recognition for his music revived.47 His home address was printed on some of the sheet music surviving from this period, showing that he was publishing his own less commercial compositions. In 1891, at the bottom of the sheet music cover for “Rêverie champêtre, fantaisie en duo pour violon et violoncelle ou flûte et bassoon” appears the publication information “Paris, chez l’Auteur, 188, Avenue du Maine.”48 Dédé seems to have considered the move to Paris not as a retirement but as another chance to make his mark in art music circles. Dédé’s time, however, was past. The music he composed belonged to a fading music hall tradition. Dédé grew up during a time when African American Creoles could not perceive a socially viable alternative to European cultural models, so it may be anachronistic to characterize him as a cultural conservative. Working both sides of the street, he availed himself of American popular culture in his music hall work and continued to aim his instrumental pieces at the market for art music in France. His visit to New Orleans in 1893 occurred before the next generation of musicians pointed to a new musical form in which European elements inhered but did not dominate. But knowing what we do about his immersion in the commercial world of popular music and his predilection for European art music, it seems possible that, had he lived longer, he would have continued to regard European art music as superior, the arrangements of spirituals admirable, and he would have considered ragtime and jazz as commercially viable, if inferior to European art music. He and Cuney-Hare would probably have gotten along well. The 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century were the years of his son Eugène’s achievements. At first, the elderly couple lived with him on avenue du Maine in the Montparnasse district of Paris. But after their marriage, Eugène and his wife, Ilka, moved to a place of their own nearby at 115 rue Boulard, where they began their family. A boy, Maurice Sylvain Georges, was born in 1895, followed in 1897 by a daughter, Charlotte Anna Regina. Sadly, the infant girl lived less than a year.49 It is interesting to note that in naming these children, honor was paid to three of the four grandparents: Sylvia, Maurice, and Regina are all present but not Edmond. Eugène was well embarked on a career as a music hall conductor like his father. Only he seemed more at peace with the commercial and popular facets of the music world. In 1896, he dedicated to his father one of his pieces for piano, “If You Please? (S’il vous

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plait?), polka gigue Américaine pour piano.”50 An imperial theme shows up in his work from the same year. He published an arrangement of the Madagascan national hymn, “La marche des Hovas.”51 In 1904, he dedicated a song to the wife of the French governor of the colony of Sénégal, Camille Guy.52 Eventually, Eugène left Paris. A song sheet from 1893, “Sous la pluie,” identifies him as the chef d’orchestre at the Gaîté-Montparnasse.53 A later piece, from 1909, “Extase d’amour,” a slow waltz, identifies him as the conductor at the Kursaal in Geneva and at the Municipal Casino in Nice.54 But Paris remained his base. Eugène Dédé died in Paris ten years later, in 1919, at the age of fifty-two. There are signs that suggest Edmond Dédé struggled to get by in the last years of his life. By 1897, when Eugène’s daughter was born, three generations of Dédés were living together at 48 rue Liancourt. Their new home was a modern apartment building, built in 1893 and decorated in the art nouveau style, close to the Gaïté-Montparnasse where Eugène worked. Perhaps because of his parents’ age and health, Eugène had them move in with his family. The arrangement lasted a few years, until late 1900 when Dédé entered the Hospital Necker for Sick Children, the hospital nearest to their home. There, at the age of seventy-three, he died on January 5, 1901, at five thirty in the evening.55 His death certificate, issued at the hospital, lists him as the son of “Bazile Dédé and of Jeanne Marie Louise Dupré, deceased spouses,” a last elision of identity, this time of his birth mother and his stepmother. Since they must have provided the information to the authorities, one wonders whether Edmond Dédé ever told his wife or son about his family. Was he a stranger to them too? No announcement of his death appeared in the Paris papers or in the Bordeaux newspapers most likely to have carried it. He had been forgotten by the bordelais public long before. No last will was filed with the city of Paris that would have set in motion a postmortem inventory of his goods. His wife, Sylvie, and his son, Eugène, inherited whatever he had. Whether the Cremona violin was among his possessions at the end of his life will very likely never be known.

8 • Found

I made several attempts to find the graves of Edmond Dédé and Louise Chancy. The earliest was in 2008, when I went to Bordeaux’s historic cemetery of Chartreuse, down the street from the municipal library. Louise Chancy, Madame Isaac Louverture, is buried there, but neither her name nor Isaac’s appears in the main list of concessions. In his history of the Louverture family, the historian Alfred Nemours reported that after Louise died in 1871, Thomas Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, Bordeaux native and merchant as well as the Haitian consul, had the body of Isaac Louverture disinterred from the unmarked grave where it had lain since 1854 and reburied, along with his wife’s body, in the Gragnon-Lacoste family’s mausoleum. The cemetery office clerk looked for the names I supplied him, but found no record of a family called Gragnon-Lacoste or any version of that name. He knew nothing about Isaac Louverture, much less his widow. Some families with the name Lacoste were buried there, but the dates and the names did not match the consul’s. So many bordelais families have been buried in Chartreuse over the past three hundred years that some family plots have passed into the possession of other, unrelated families. Two years later, I found online an image of a plaque on a grave in the Chartreuse cemetery that was identified as Isaac’s. Memorizing the details of the image—what the plaque looked like, the color of the stone it laid against— I thought I might find it on my own. On a second visit to the Chartreuse cemetery, I walked up and down, row after row of tombs, with no success for almost three hours. As I walked out of the cemetery, I gave up. In the summer of 2014, I decided to give it one more try, starting again with the Chartreuse cemetery administrative office. This time, the woman at the

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front desk to whom I explained my quest retreated to a back office and reemerged with a yellowed, stiff paper card, nearly the size of an eight-and-a-half inch-by-eleven notebook page. On it were listed the names of the people buried in concession of “Gragnon-Lacoste, Prosper.”1 The card now served as a record of the deceased members of another Bordeaux family, the Mondenard, who had buried someone in the plot as recently as 2009. But it was the same card used to record the burials of the Gragnon-Lacoste family. Third in the list of burials was “Toussaint Louverture—Isaac, his son,” buried in the plot on May 13, 1866, twelve years after he died. Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste must have arranged with his widow, Louise Chancy, for the inclusion in his family plot. I read several lines below Isaac’s name, “Louise Chancy, widow of Isaac Louverture,” next to the date September 17, 1878. Why Gragnon-Lacoste waited seven years to place Louise’s body in the grave must have had something to do with the management of the plot. Gragnon-Lacoste himself joined his friends in the plot in 1895. With the concession number and a photocopy of the card, I went to the quadrant where the plot was located and spent half an hour peering at innumerable tombs and gravestones until I found it. The top of the grave was covered with numerous memorial plaques dedicated to the individual members of the Mondenard family (fig. 12). At the back I noticed one small white marble plaque, propped upright, with gilded chiseled letters: “In homage to Toussaint-Louverture (1743–1803), hero of the first abolition of slavery, revolutionary, liberator of Saint-Domingue. Here rests his son ISAAC, who died in Bordeaux in 1854.” There was no sign or indication of who might have commissioned the plaque. Louise, who stayed with Isaac, her cousin and husband, throughout the years of exile except for her few years in Haiti putting her husband’s inheritance in order, was still invisible. We know she’s there only because she’s listed on the carte des concessionnaires. Locating Dédé’s grave took less time but was no more satisfactory. In early September 2010, midway through the writing of this book, I took the Paris Métro to Bagneux, a suburb south of the highway that encircles the city. Paris had already woken from its summer nap. Outside the Métro station, passersby pointed me in the direction of the cemetery, which lay about a quarter of a mile down the road. When I first came across the location of Dédé’s grave in the Archives of the City of Paris, I was surprised to find him in the cemetery of Bagneux. Why, I wondered, wasn’t he buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse, two and half miles closer to the city center and less than a quarter of a mile from 48 rue Liancourt, his last address?

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Figure 12. The Gragnon-Lacoste and Mondenard grave site with a white marble plaque (in the right rear of the plot) inscribed with the names of Isaac and Toussaint Louverture, Cimetière de Chartreuse. (Photograph by author, 2014)

I stood inside the gates of the cemetery in Bagneux and looked at the raised tombs. French cemeteries always make me think of New Orleans rather than the other way around. I walked toward the administrative offices. Behind a counter, a man seated at a desk shook his mouse awake. The computer screen lit up. He typed in Dédé’s name, stared at the screen for a minute, and then stepped into the back offices. When he returned a few minutes later, he carried a large, old ledger, which he placed on the counter between us. Running his finger down several pages of columns of handwritten, partially alphabetized names, he eventually stopped and spun the ledger around for me to read. Edmond Dédé had been buried in a communal grave. Why? I asked. What could that mean? Why here and not in the cemetery of Montparnasse? The

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clerk explained to me that a plot in the Montparnasse cemetery was more expensive than one in Bagneux. Then he proposed two possible explanations for the communal grave. Families who could not afford the cost of a grave and a stone marker consigned their deceased relatives to the communal graves in which the anonymous dead and the destitute were buried. The other possibility, he told me, was related. Families had the bodies of their deceased relatives placed in mass graves temporarily until they could raise the money for a headstone or until one could be prepared. Sometimes it took months and even years. Occasionally, families failed to follow through on their intention. Deflated, I headed back to Paris. I considered the possible explanations for Dédé’s invisible grave. In the end, did the move to Paris prove to be a financial mistake for the family? By 1901, Eugène was well established in his career as a chef d’orchestre, but perhaps he did not earn enough to be able to afford a headstone or marker for his father. Had there been a falling out within the family, traces of which we perhaps detect in the voyage Dédé made by himself to New Orleans and the absence of Edmond’s name among the names of his grandchildren? Or is it unrealistic to think that bad family relations would have so eroded Eugène’s filial sense of duty? The most likely answer seemed to be that the family—consisting of Eugène, Ilka, their son Maurice, and Eugène’s mother, Sylvie, at the time of Dédé’s death—could not afford to bury their father, grandfather, and husband with dignity. Eight months after Edmond Dédé died in Paris in 1901, Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans on August 4. Both men had to leave New Orleans in order to fulfill their ambitions to become professional musicians. Edmond Dédé had no choice but to leave the country to pursue his ambition. Had he stayed, he would more than likely have spent his life working a day job in a cigar factory, composing music on the side, and playing violin at night in orchestras before mainly African American audiences. In Armstrong’s case, the pioneering jazz cornet player and trumpeter had to follow Joe “King” Oliver to Chicago to jump-start his career and distance his sound a little from his hometown. Separated by two or three generations, Dédé was old enough to be Armstrong’s grandfather. The difference between the two men’s choices and careers had much to do with the professional spheres in which they chose to compete against other musicians for acceptance and financial reward.2 However much his compositions may have contained echoes of his Creole heritage—and until we hear more of them that will remain a debatable question—Edmond Dédé aspired to become a respected composer of music

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in the European art tradition, in particular the French Romantic style. In the United States, white musicians and audiences, both natives and immigrants from Europe, dominated the production of that socially prestigious form of music. When the young Dédé and other black musicians in New Orleans embraced European music, white New Orleanians relegated them to the upper balconies, to their own orchestras, and to the margins of their musical culture. Edmond Dédé sought entry into the most exclusive circle in the music world from which people like him—black and humble—were barred. By contrast, Louis Armstrong successfully negotiated a transition from one African-influenced musical milieu to another at an auspicious moment in the history of American popular music. At just the right time, he jumped directly from the basin of the Mississippi blues into a big cauldron of hot Chicago jazz. His virtuosity in the combined styles of African and European instrumentation brought him national prestige for his new kind of playing. In the 1920s, when his catchy rhythms lured America’s black youth onto dance floors in Chicago, New York, and other cities, white youngsters soon followed them. White America wanted in on the action within black communities, whether or not they were welcomed by black America. Armstrong’s playing accelerated the process of bringing African American music to the attention of European Americans. He came from a historically multicultural city—the most multicultural city in the United States—where “crossover” music emerged long before anyone called it that. Long before Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong were born, Dédé, too, was a crossover musician—only he attempted to cross over in a direction few white Americans approved of. Once he settled in France, his compositions for ballet were performed for the Bordeaux public at the same time that his lighter songs enjoyed popularity in the far less prestigious cafésconcerts. The titles of some of his instrumental pieces, like “Chicago Waltz,” suggest that he sought to please high and low cultural expectations as well as possibly evoke an American sound, whatever that might have been. He played the guitar and even the banjo, that decidedly indigenous American instrument. He seems to have drawn on his cultural and national heritage to stand out from his competitors, which raises the possibility that the vogue for an American sound began in Bordeaux decades before it was thought to have begun in Paris. And for all that, the color of his skin preoccupied his contemporaries. We saw how the editors of the New Orleans Tribune drew attention to his dark skin. His complexion made an immediate impression on Clarendon Davisson, the

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U.S. consul. The writer of the later profile of him in the Bordeaux arts newspaper could not resist attributing Dédé’s popularity to the degree to which he stood out in a crowd of “palefaces.” Even to the African American equal rights activist Rodolph Desdunes Dédé’s skin color mattered enough that he mentioned it in the first sentence of his profile of him. But Desdunes’s focus on Dédé’s skin color differed fundamentally from that of the others. He referred to Dédé’s black skin as a way to emphasize the composer’s achievement, by tacitly acknowledging most everyone’s low expectations of black people and contrasting them with the heights to which Dédé had supposedly climbed. Slavery, not the Tribune, nor Clarendon Davisson, nor the writer of the profile in L’Bordeaux-Artiste, nor Rodolph Desdunes, was responsible for making Edmond Dédé’s skin color an issue of consequence. The institution of slavery and the concept of race placed the bars on the epistemological cages within which white and black Americans thought and perceived people around them. The tragedy we in the United States and in the West in general have been living with ever since lies in the inability of most Americans to see the bars through which they peered and still peer out at the world. Race still forms the implicit framework through which people regard one another. Its power as a lens is distorting to a degree that we are scarcely cognizant of it, so pervasive is it in American culture. We have great difficulty in seeing beyond the human categories we have created. We categorize one another and focus on the categories rather than the people in them. The problem is that we cannot ignore the existence of those categories as long as their consequences remain embedded in political and economic structures—in housing and education. A man like Dédé lived with the double tension of conspicuousness and invisibility his entire life. In New Orleans, his talent made him conspicuous in a positive way within his community and among broad-minded discerning European Americans. Most free people of color were of mixed race, and so he stood out in another way among the free community. Legal constraints and custom taught him where not to go and how to be self-effacing in the presence of white people. Long before he arrived in France, he was used to being remarkable more for the color of his skin than for his talent. Negotiating French society, then, must have seemed at first like a cakewalk. It turned out that he was just as conspicuous, if not more so, in France as he had been in New Orleans. The percentage of people of color in the French population was far smaller than in Louisiana. But the scarcity of people who looked like him did not lead to a scarcity of racism. Indeed, he endured cutting

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references to his color throughout his time there. France no longer structured its laws and bureaucracy to prevent black people from entering France, but old unwelcoming attitudes lingered long past their expiry date. New imperial projects in the continent of Africa, if anything, revived and exacerbated those old paternalistic and outright racist notions of difference. As they did at home, people gazed at him through the prism of race with all its distorting effects. They were not seeing his self, the man behind the black mask. They saw a Black Man. At the same time that he stood out in French society, the man himself behind the black mask remained invisible. He learned to employ that invisibility and conspicuousness for his own benefit. Like many people in that age, he crossed borders with falsified papers. He altered his birth year to gain access to the Conservatory. He promoted himself in puff pieces in Bordeaux’s art periodicals. Rather than be confined by how others regarded him, he shaped what they saw with misleading business cards, timelines given to reporters that do not match the public record, and perhaps even inventing the Cremona violin. Much of the exaggerated information that appeared in the New Orleans press in the 1860s and 1870s more than likely came from him through his family. On the strength of what they thought they knew about his accomplishments, the African American community rolled out the welcome wagon when he came back at last. We can never be sure of how he felt when he boarded the segregated rail car on his way from Galveston to New Orleans. Whether he was disappointed to be playing before segregated audiences in his post-slavery hometown can only be surmised. His discovery that hierarchies of skin color still applied within and without his community very likely factored into that feeling of being out of place he expressed to a New Orleans reporter. The light-skinned, mixed-race Creoles of color, the arbiters of high culture among African Americans in New Orleans, embraced him, because he and they adhered to similar cultural norms. One of the most prominent among them, Rodophe Lucien Desdunes, found it remarkable that a black man did so. Nevertheless, even if they were unaware that his family had been free for over a century, or that the ambit of his success was in the world of French popular music and not that of serious art music, the African Americans of New Orleans made it clear to the native son that he was playing for all African Americans. And in a sense the rare violin that he had reportedly lost during his Atlantic crossing represented to all those interested in Dédé’s story the denial of opportunity to musicians of color who sought to compete alongside white musicians in the most privileged sphere of music, what came to be called the European classical tradition.

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All his life, the contradictory forces of invisibility and conspicuousness that worked incessantly upon dark-skinned black men and women living in societies dominated by European cultural values shaped Edmond Dédé’s interactions with the people he encountered. They defined people’s expectations of him and provoked him to adopt strategies to evade those forces. He may not have prospered to the extent or in the way that he would have preferred to, but in the end the people who used him as an index of their hopes were right to do so. Conspicuousness was a permanent, indelible quality of his life in an overwhelmingly white society. Likewise, because his skin color consistently drew the attention of white, black, and mixed-race observers away from his work, the creative self would be always behind the mask. The invisible man had little choice in the matter. He still doesn’t. On the night of his last concert in January 1894, who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, he played for you?

Notes

Abbreviations AANO ADG AMB AP BnF-M HNOC NARA NONA/CO RG

Archives of the Archdiocese of New Orleans Archives départementales de la Gironde Archives municipales de Bordeaux Archives de Paris Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département de musique Historic New Orleans Collection National Archives and Records Administration New Orleans Notarial Archive, Conveyance Office Record Group

Chapter 1. Lost 1. I reconstructed these events from the series of articles that appeared in the Galveston (TX) Daily News on October 20 and 28, 1893, and in the New York Times, October 18 and 29, 1893. 2. Patricia Ferreira, “All but ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine,” Journal of American Studies 37, no. 2 (1999): 69–83; Robert S. Levine, “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’ Rome,” African American Review 34, no. 2 (2000): 217–31; Bill Rolston, “Frederick Douglass: A Black Abolitionist in Ireland,” History Today 53, no. 6 (2003): 45–51. 3. Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sybil Kein, Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Julie Winch, Between Slavery and Freedom: Free People of Color in America from Settlement to the Civil War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).

217

218

notes to pages 7–14

4. Alan S. Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014). 5. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 9. See also James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 6. Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a spirited discussion of the origins of jazz, see Lawrence Gushee, “The NineteenthCentury Origins of Jazz,” Black Music Research Journal 22 (2002), Supplement, 151–74; Lawrence Gushee, Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 16–18. 7. Lester Sullivan, “Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History behind the Music,” Black Music Research Journal 8, no. 1 (1988): 51–82, reprinted in Kein, Creole, 71–100; Lucius R. Wyatt, “Six Composers of NineteenthCentury New Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (1990): 125–40. 8. New Orleans Tribune, September 6 and 8, 1864, unavailable, but cited in Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 55. 9. Maude Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music (Washington, DC: Associate Publishers, 1936; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1996), 238.

Chapter 2. A Family Long Free 1. Louisiana Freed Slave Records, 1719–1820, no. 556, July 13, 1785, notary Rodriguez. 2. Louisiana Slave Records, 1719–1820, no. 321, October 21, 1801, notary Broutin. Dédé’s name as given in this document shows him to have been a former slave belonging to Robert Montreuil: “Francisco, free negro Montreuil alias Dede.” 3. Maria, Francisco, and Juana were not the only slaves Robert Montreuil manumitted. He had previously freed a slave, Francisca, in 1775, also in exchange for 800 pesos and three more slaves: a fifteen-year-old mixed-race woman and her infant for $1,025 and a sixty-year-old black man named Luis at no cost, “for services, love, and loyalty.” Kimberley Hanger, Bounded Places: Free Black Society in Colonial New Orleans, 1769–1803 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 47. 4. Arthur LaBrew raises the possibility: “Notes toward a Complete Biography,” Afro-American Music Review 1 (1984): 76–98, 81; Curtis D. Jerde, “Black Music in New Orleans: A Historical Overview,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 18–24, 20; Pamela Lee Gray, “Dédé, Edmond,” in African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 621–22. 5. Lawrence Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 331–32; Walter Johnson, Dark River of Dreams: Slavery and

notes to pages 14–19

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Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2006). 6. Powell, Accidental City, 19–20. 7. Architectural historians have debated the origins of the Creole cottage. Did the style develop independently in French and Spanish Louisiana? Or did it originate in the Caribbean where both African and European elements of domestic architecture merged? See Jay D. Edwards, “Shotgun: The Most Contested House in America,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 16, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 62–96. See also the works of John Michael Vlach: “Sources of the Shotgun House: African and Caribbean Antecedents,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1975); John Michael Vlach, “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy,” Pioneer American (now Material Culture) 8, no. 1: 47–56, and 8, no. 2: 57–70. For the view that shotgun houses were little influenced by African architecture, see Sam Wilson, Jr., et al., New Orleans Architecture: The Creole Faubourgs (Metairie, LA: Pelican Press, 1984), 71. 8. The demographic data here come from Richard Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2008), 24, 127. 9. Powell, Accidental City, 183–84. 10. Ibid., 229. 11. B. F. French, Historical Collections of Louisiana: Embracing Translations of Many Rare and Valuable Documents Relating to the Natural, Civil, and Political History of That State (New York: D. Appleton, 1851). 12. Guillaume Aubert, “ ‘The Blood of France’: Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 61, no. 3 (July 2004): 439–78, 473–75. 13. Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 112–14; Aubert, “ ‘Blood of France,’ ” 474. 14. Le Code noir: Edit du Roi sur les esclaves des îles de l’Amérique (1680) (Paris, 1685), art. 59; B. F. French, Historical Collections of Louisiana, art. 6; Aubert, “ ‘Blood of France,’ ” 476. 15. Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 111. 16. Kimberley S. Hanger, “Patronage, Property and Persistence: The Emergence of a Free Black Elite in Spanish New Orleans,” in Against the Odds: Free Blacks in the Slave Societies of the Americas, ed. Jane G. Landers (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 44–64, 57. 17. Frédéric Régent, La France et ses esclaves de la colonisation aux abolitions (1620– 1848) (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2007), 337. 18. Natalie Dessens, From Saint Domingue to New Orleans: Migration and Influences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), 11.

220

notes to pages 19–23

19. Or so Philippe R. Girard argues in “Black Talleyrand: Toussaint Louverture’s Diplomacy, 1798–1802,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 66, no. 1 (January 2009): 87–124, 117. 20. For an account of the Louisiana Purchase and its implications for free people of color, see John Kukla, A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Destiny of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 336–37. 21. Territory of Orleans County: Civil Suit Record no. 327, Jean Baptiste Nicollet v. Bazile Dede, 1806; Civil Suit Record no. 417, Pierre Gueno v. Bazile François Dede, 1806. 22. Territory of Orleans, Civil Suit Record no. 341, Caleb Fowler v. Bazile Dede, 1806. 23. Dell Upton and Johan Michael Vlach, eds., Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 63. 24. A judge fined him for escaping from jail: Territory of Orleans, Criminal case file no. 172, Territory of Orleans v. Bazile Françoise (alias Bazile Dade). Indictment, set forth in the New Orleans City Court, of Bazile Françoise for escaping from the parish jail on October 29, 1806, signed “no Bill” written by grand jury foreman, filed July 14, 1810. 25. AANO, Orleans Parish, Marriages, no. 93, Basilio negro libre con Maria Josefa de la Encarnacion, negra libre, September 18, 1804. 26. Paul F. Lachance, “The 1809 Immigration of Saint-Domingue Refugees to New Orleans: Reception, Integration and Impact,” Louisiana History 4, no. 1 (1988): 109–41, 111–12. 27. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 28. Powell, Accidental City, 316–18; Andres Reséndez, “Texas and the Spread of That Troublesome Secessionist Spirit through the Gulf of Mexico Basin,” in Secession as an International Phenomenon (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 192–213, 194. 29. Henry Ker, Travels through the Western Interior of the United States, from the Year 1808 up to the Year 1816 (Elizabethtown, NJ, 1816), 48, 50. 30. Claude Bonaparte Auguste and Marcel Auguste, Les déportés de Saint-Domingue: Contribution à l’histoire de l’expédition Française de Saint-Domingue, 1802–1803 (Sherbrooke, Québec: Editions Naaman, 1979); John Davies, “Class, Culture, and Color: Black Saint Dominguans in Philadelphia,” Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850: Proceedings (2006), 112–20; Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Althéa de Puech Parham, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two Revolutions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959). 31. Paul F. Lachance, “The Foreign French,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 104.

notes to pages 24–32

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32. Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 58–59. 33. Lachance, “1809 Immigration,” 113. 34. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 59–60, 66 35. Rebecca J. Scott, “She . . . Refuses to Deliver Up Herself as the Slave of Your Petitioner”: Emigrés, Enslavement, and the 1808 Louisiana Digest of the Civil Laws,” Tulane European and Civil Law Forum 24 (2009): 115–36, 120. 36. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma: A Historical Geography of New Orleans (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2008), 26. 37. Lachance, “1809 Immigration,” 111; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 68. 38. John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860–1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 14. 39. Thomas Ashe, Travels in America, Performed in the Year 1806, for the Purpose of Exploring the Rivers Alleghany, Monongahela, Ohio, and Mississippi (London, 1809), 306. 40. Ashe, Travels in America, 341. 41. Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans, 40. 42. Pierre-Louis Berquin-Duvallon, Travels in Louisiana and the Floridas, in the Year 1802, Giving a Correct Picture of Those Countries, trans. John Davis (New York: I. Riley, 1806). 43. Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 91–92. 44. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 150. 45. Abraham Oakey Hall, The Manhattaner in New Orleans; or, Phases of “Crescent City” Life (New York: J. S. Redfield, Clinton Hall, 1851), 23, 32. 46. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 142. 47. James Stuart, Three Years in North America (R. Cadell, 1833), 197. 48. Dessens, From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans; Robert C. Reinders, “The Free Negro in the New Orleans Economy, 1850–1860.” Louisiana History 6, no. 3 (1965): 273–85. 49. Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 129–30. 50. Frederick Law Olmsted, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States; with Remarks on Their Economy (London: Sampson Low, Son, 1856), 592. 51. Caryn Cossé Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), 75. 52. Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 262. 53. Stuart, Three Years in North America, 198. 54. James P. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, ed. Loren Schweninger (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), 109. 55. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 150.

222

notes to pages 34–38

56. Shirley Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home. The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 141. 57. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 174. 58. Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1833), 216. 59. The Louisiana Digest: Embracing the Laws of the Legislature of a General Nature, Enacted from the Year 1804 to 1841, Inclusive, and in Force at This Last Period (New Orleans: B. Levy, 1841), section “Free People of Color,” art. 1513, p. 220; Mary Gehman, The Free People of Color of New Orleans (New Orleans: Margaret Media, 1994), 51. 60. Scott, “She . . . Refuses to Deliver,” 119. 61. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 11; Reinders, “Free Negro,” 274; Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 76. 62. Gehman, Free People of Color, 66. 63. Richard Tansey, “Out-of-State Free Blacks in Late Antebellum New Orleans,” Louisiana History 22, no. 4 (1981): 369–86, 81. 64. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 126. 65. Roger A. Fischer, “Racial Segregation in Ante Bellum New Orleans,” American Historical Review 74, no. 3 (1969): 926–37, 930. 66. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 128. See also Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 209. 67. Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 210. 68. Gehman, Free People of Color, 53. 69. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 99. 70. Henry J. Leovy, The Laws and General Ordinances of the City of New Orleans, Together with the Acts of the Legislature, Decisions of the Supreme Court, and Constitutional Provisions, Relating to the City Government (New Orleans, 1857). 71. Fischer, “Racial Segregation in Ante Bellum New Orleans,” 930. 72. AANO, Orleans Parish Birth Index, Jean Dalmassi Goux, son of Jean Bernard Gous and Marie Therese Dede, colored, May 13, 1841, vol. 6, 595. 73. NONA/CO, sale of Rose and Celestin Alexis’s property, book 52, p. 353. 74. AANO, Orleans Parish Records, Baptisms, Slaves and Free Persons of Color, vol. 9, part 1, 1805–1806, Pedro Dédé, negro libre legitimo. 75. The birth year of Basile Dédé fils is calculated on the basis of his age in 1865, when he made his will: Louisiana, Second District Court, Orleans Parish, Probate Record 31.920. 76. Basile Dede, 1860 census, New Orleans, Louisiana, Ward 6, Orleans, Louisiana, roll M653_419, page 135, image 135, Family History Library Film: 803419, Ancestry. com (March 25, 2016). 77. NONA/CO, March 21, 1844, book 35, p. 140, sale of property resulting from litigation between the widow of B. Dédé and her son B. Dédé fils, on one side, and François Boquille, on the other.

notes to pages 38–41

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78. Two months later, on January 20 in the new year, Basile fils had his son Edmond baptized at the Cathedral of St. Louis. AANO, Orleans Parish Records, Baptisms, Slaves and Free Persons of Color, vol. 21, part 1, 1827–1828, no. 254, p. 57. 79. Basile Dede, 1850 census, New Orleans, Municipality 3, Ward 2, Orleans, Louisiana, roll M432_238, page 136A, image 276, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). 80. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 14. 81. Reinders, “Free Negro” 280. 82. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 115. 83. According to the French Civil Code, chap. 3, sec. 1, art. 331, “Children born out of wedlock, other than such as are the fruit of an incestuous or adulterous intercourse, may be legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their father and mother, whenever the latter shall have legally acknowledged them before their marriage, or shall have recognized them in the act itself of celebration.” For a short but helpful comparative analysis of the legal standing of children born out of wedlock, see James M. Dozier, Jr., “Family Law—The Different Uses of the Term ‘Natural Child’ in the Civil Code,” Louisiana Law Review 15, no. 1 (December 1954): 221–27. 84. The relevant statutes are Louisiana Civil Code, art. 217, and chap. 3, art. 913: “Natural children are called to the inheritance of their natural father, who has duly acknowledged them, when he has left no descendants nor ascendants, nor collateral relations, nor surviving wife, and to the exclusion only of the State.” See Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 77. 85. The probate record of Basile Dédé fils contains two affidavits attesting the deceased’s lack of legitimate heirs. Louisiana, Second District Court, Orleans Parish, General index of all successions (1846–1880), Dede, Bazil, fils, file no. 31.920. 86. AANO, Orleans Parish Index, Deaths, 1804–1949, Marie Louise Dupré, April 1, 1865; Louise Dédé, Record of Wills, 1807–1901, Louisiana, Probate Court, Orleans Parish, no. 25316. 87. Bazile Dede (also listed incorrectly as “Banlle Kile”), 1850 census, New Orleans, Municipality 1, Ward 6, Orleans, Louisiana, roll M432_236, page 259A, image 182, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). See the discussion of this entry in the next chapter. In short, although Basile’s name is given as “Relé” and, as of March 25, 2016, also “Kile,” it is clearly a transcription error. He is identified as a “market man.” Marie Dupré’s name appears below his, and Edmond’s name appears below hers, giving the impression that his last name is “Dupré.” As a further sign that a transcription error has occurred, Edmond is identified as a “cigar maker,” an occupation we shall see Edmond pursue before leaving for Europe. See discussion of this census entry in chapter 3. 88. Jean Louis Jazon, 1850 census, New Orleans, Municipality 3, Ward 2, Orleans, Louisiana, roll M432_238, page 136A, image 276, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). 89. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 112.

224

notes to pages 41–51

90. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 34; Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 173. 91. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 228. 92. Fischer, “Racial Segregation in Ante Bellum New Orleans,” 932. 93. Leovy, Laws and General Ordinances, art. 765, p. 260. 94. Ibid., arts. 755, 756, pp. 258–59. 95. Ibid. 96. Reinders, “Free Negro,” 284.

Chapter 3. City of Sound 1. This passage is a composite of details drawn from contemporary travelogues and photographs, including Hall, Manhattaner in New Orleans, 27, and Gary A. Van Zante, New Orleans 1867 (London: Merrell Publishers, 2008). 2. Matilda Charlotte Houstoun, Hesperos; or, Travel in the West (London, 1850), 56. Campanella describes exchange hotels in Bienville’s Dilemma, 32. 3. Gas lighting was introduced in private dwellings in New Orleans for the first time in 1834. Campanella, Bienville’s Dilemma, 31. Street lamps first appeared in 1881: Joy J. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age: Politics and Urban Progress, 1880–1896 (Lafayette: Louisiana Historical Association and the Center for Louisiana Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1969). 4. Emily West, “Free People of Color, Expulsion, and Enslavement in the Antebellum South,” in Creating Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century South, ed. William A. Link, David Brown, Brian Ward, and Martyn Bone (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 64–83, 76. 5. Leovy, Laws and General Ordinances, secs. 96 and 97, p. 273; Tansey, “Out-of-State Free Blacks in Late Antebellum New Orleans,” 372. 6. Five years after 1851, the Supreme Court of Louisiana codified in 1856 what most people assumed already, namely, that light-skinned people of color must be presumed to be free. See Ted Tunnel, Crucible of Reconstruction: War, Radicalism and Race in Louisiana, 1862–77 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 67. 7. Bernth Lindfors, Ira Aldridge. vol. 1: The Early Years, 1807–1833, and vol. 2: The Vagabond Years, 1833–1852 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011); Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Henry A. Kmen, Music in New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), 52. 9. See Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 162–65, for “black noise” and the attempts to regulate it in New Orleans.

notes to pages 52–56

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10. S. Frederick Starr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 24. Starr is not sure Gottschalk knew about his half-siblings. For a review of the expectations musicologists have had of Dédé’s work, see Christopher T. F. Hanson, “A Survey of Sources Related to Edmond Dédé: Nineteenth-Century New Orleans Violinist, Composer and Conductor” (master’s thesis, Texas State University–San Marcos, 2009). 11. Albert James Pickett, “Eight Days in New Orleans in February 1847,” pamphlet, no date or place of publication, held by the Huntington Library. 12. Freddi Williams Evans, Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans (Lafayette: University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, 2011), 26–28, 63–71; Ted Widmer, “The Invention of a Memory: Congo Square and African Music in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 98 (2003): 69–78; Starr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 39–40. 13. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 230; Gushee, “Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” 3. 14. Robert B. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music, 1843–1852,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 141–62, 142; Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 15. Derek Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 147. 16. Winans, “Early Minstrel Show Music,” 142; William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 17. Eric Lott, “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 3–32, 6. 18. Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 223. 19. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans. A History, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 94. 20. Frederick Douglass, “Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders,” North Star, June 29, 1849. 21. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981); Karen Haltunnen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 22. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 187–90.

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notes to pages 56–60

23. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 6–7, 39; Southern, Music of Black Americans, 135. 24. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 232. 25. The city ordinances are the main evidence that such intermingling in taverns was frequent enough to draw the attention of the authorities. Leovy, Laws and General Ordinances, art. 765 (16), p. 260: “That all keepers of cabarets, grog-shops, groceries, or coffee-houses be, and are hereby forbidden to permit or allow white persons, free persons of color, and slaves to play together, cards, dominoes, or any other game whatsoever in their premises.” 26. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 78; Monique Guillory, “Under One Roof: The Sins and Sanctity of the New Orleans Quadroon Balls,” in Race Consciousness: African American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 80; Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 49. 27. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 231. 28. Houstoun, Hesperos, 74. 29. Thompson, Exiles at Home, 180–84. Emily Clark offers a new analysis of the quadroon balls in Strange History of the American Quadroon, 172–80. 30. Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 172–76. 31. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 235–36; Jerde, “Black Music in New Orleans,” 20. 32. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 139, 221–22. 33. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America, 69. 34. NARA, Work Projects Administration Transcript of Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New Orleans, Louisiana, 1813–1949, National Archives Microfilm Publication M2009, roll 1. Gabici and his colleagues arrived in New Orleans from Havana on March 30, 1837. Kmen, relying on newspaper passenger lists, mistakenly dated Gabici’s arrival April 1, 1837; he claims they made their debut a few days later. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 151. 35. For an overview of the statistical strengths and limitations of the 1850 census— considered the first “modern” one—see Donald A. Debats, “Hide and Seek: The Historian and Nineteenth-Century Social Accounting,” Social Science History 15, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 545–63. 36. The point is noted by Richard Campanella in Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics before the Storm (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), 196–98. 37. Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 149. The stated purpose of the Germania Musical Society appears in Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 110–11. 38. Timothy Mason Roberts, Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Hugh Macdonald, Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2012); Horowitz, Classical Music in America, 149; Nancy Newman, Good Music for a Free People: The Germania Musical Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010).

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39. Henri Murger’s collection of stories is the basis of Giacomo Puccini’s opera, La Bohème, which premièred in 1896. For critical distinctions between bohemians and the avant-garde in the nineteenth century, see Lisa Tickner, “Bohemianism and the Cultural Field: Trilby and Tarr,” Art History 34, no. 5 (2011): 979–1011, and David Cottington, The Avant-Garde: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 40. Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 303. 41. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 24–25. 42. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 167. 43. John Spitzer, ed., American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), from which New Orleans’s orchestral history is absent. 44. R. Allen Lott, From Paris to Peoria: How European Piano Virtuosos Brought Classical Music to the American Heartland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 63–65 and 72. As a manufacturer of pianos as well as a virtuoso, Herz had a financial interest in the fashion for concerts with multiple pianos: R. Allen Lott, From Paris to Peoria, 56. 45. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 18, 42, 53. 46. Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 47. Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 36; Mary Ellison, “African-American Music and Muskets in Civil War New Orleans.” Louisiana History 35, no. 3 (1994): 285–319; David C. Estes, “Traditional Dances and Processions of Blacks in New Orleans as Witnessed by Antebellum Travelers,” Louisiana Folklore Miscellany 6, no. 3 (1990): [n. p.]; Jerde, “Black Music in New Orleans,” 20; Charles E. Kinzer, “The Band of Music of the First Battalion of Free Men of Color and the Siege of New Orleans, 1814–1815,” American Music 10, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 348–69. 48. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 83. 49. Ibid., 36. 50. Ibid., 97. 51. Ibid., 57, 62–69. 52. Ibid., 163. 53. Hall, Manhattaner in New Orleans, 91–93. 54. Robert C. Clark, “At the Corner of Bourbon and Toulouse Street: The Historical Context of Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s ‘M’sieu Fortier’s Violin,’ ” American Literary Realism 41, no. 2 (2009): 163–79. 55. Thomas, From Tennessee Slave, 111. 56. Two of Lambert’s sons would later become well-known composers. Lambert’s son Sydney, the future composer and pianist, was only twelve at the time he was enumerated. See James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1881), 338–39, for biographical material on the Lambert family.

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57. Ivan D Steen, “Charleston in the 1850’s: As Described by British Travelers,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 71, no. 1 (1970): 36–45, 43. 58. George E. Walker, The Afro-American in New York City, 1827–1860 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1993), 25. 59. In the same year, 1853, Greenfield participated in a public recital in London, organized by Harriet Beecher Stowe. See Macdonald, Music in 1853, 24. 60. Kmen, Music in New Orleans, 234; Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 75. 61. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People, 340–41. 62. “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 188788, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Favolle, 42 S 6041. 63. Kinzer, “Band of Music of the First Battalion,” 349. 64. Henri Herz, Mes voyages en Amérique (Paris: Achille Faure, Libraire-éditeur, 1866), 291, my translation. 65. R. Allen Lott, From Paris to Peoria, 79. Herz is undoubtedly reconstructing from memory what the delegation told him. 66. Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans, 198; Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition, 78. 67. Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (New York: Vintage, 2013), 210–11. 68. Mary Gehman, “The Mexico-Louisiana Creole Connection,” Louisiana Cultural Vistas (2002–2001), 68–75. 69. Enrique Olavarña y Ferrari, Reseña Histórica del Teatro en México, 5 vols. (México: La Europea, 1895), 2:484; R. Allen Lott, From Paris to Peoria, 98. 70. Bernard Ullman, “Leaves from My Diary,” Musical Pioneer 11 (March 1866): 42. 71. Archivo General de la nacion de Mexico, Instituciones Gubernamentales: época moderna y contemporénea, Administración Pública Federal, s. XIX, Movimento Marítimo, Pasaportes y Cartas de Seguridad (129), Contenedor 5, vol. 23, fols. 125–26, October 4, 1851. 72. Leovy, Laws and General Ordinances, art. 92, p. 272: “That free persons of color, legal residents of this State, shall be permitted to depart from and return thereto, as their business may require; provided they shall not have established their domicile in a free State or country.” 73. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 102–5. 74. Stadsarchief, FelixArchief, Etat civil, Burgerlijke Stand, Antwerp, 1856–1866, Bevolking 4WK, MA-BZA-B. For the letter in which Dédé is described as Tinchant’s friend and bookkeeper, Stadsarchief, FelixArchief, Police de la Ville d’Anvers, 4e section, no. 2069, January 10, 1857. 75. Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 54–55. 76. Edmond Dédé: Mon Pauvre Coeur/ Françoise et Tortillard / Mefisto Masqué, Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra, Naxos, June 1, 2000, ASIN: B007TJRFP8. Since the French verse as reproduced in the recording’s liner notes contains transcription

notes to pages 74–79

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errors (“des” for “de” and “flamine” for “flame”), I have used my own translation, which, if less graceful, is more faithful to the wording. 77. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 37.

Chapter 4. City of Dust 1. Readers with no immediate plans to visit Paris will easily find the Métro stop and its eponymous church on a map search engine. 2. Michael Marrinan, Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800–1850 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 233. 3. Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1997), 2 vols., 8th ed., vol. 2, 108. 4. David Tunley, Salons, Singers, and Songs: A Background to Romantic French Song, 1830–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 18–19. 5. Eric Hazan, The Invention of Paris: A History in Footsteps (New York: Verso Books, 2010), 144–45. 6. “Edmond Dédé,” L’Artiste de Bordeaux [no date], copy held by the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University; “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Fayolle, 42 S 2814. 7. “Edmond Dédé,” L’Artiste de Bordeaux [no date]. Dédé’s contemporary, the African American, Boston-based writer James Trotter (who does not seem to have known Dédé personally), was undoubtedly passing on secondhand information when he dated Dédé’s arrival in Paris in 1857. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People (Boston: Lee and Shepard; New York: Charles T. Dillingham, 1880), 340–41. 8. Laurence Irurzun, “Les grands hôtels,” in Autour de l’Opèra: Naissance de la ville modern; Paris et son patrimoine, ed. François Loyer (Paris: Délégation à l’action artistique de la ville de Paris, n.d.), 178–89, 178. This kind of hotel had its origins in the United States. See A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel: An American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 9. Rapport sur l’exposition universelle de 1855 présenté à l’Empereur par S. A. I. le Prince Napoléon, président de la commission (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1856), 81 and 108. See also Patricia Mainardi, Art and Politics of the Second Empire: The Universal Expositions of 1855 and 1867 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). 10. The Champs-Elysées and, at the other end of Paris’s east-west axis, the Place des Vosges were the only municipal parks in the city. Parisians had access to the gardens of the royal palaces “on sufferance,” as Pinkney writes. David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 93. 11. Quentin Deluermoz, Policiers dans la ville: La construction d’un ordre public à Paris, 1854–1914 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2012), 37. 12. François Caradec and Alain Weill, Le café-concert, 1848–1914 (Paris: Fayard, 2007), 18.

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13. François Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris (Paris: Adolphe Delahays, Libraire-Editeur, 1858), 27. A romance was a kind of popular song. 14. Steven Moore Whiting, Satie the Bohemian: From Cabaret to Concert Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11–14. 15. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 61. For a lively contemporary account (and defense) of the café-concert, see Emile Mathieu, Les cafés-concerts (Paris, 1863), 6–7; 17. 16. Louis Veuillot, Les odeurs de Paris (Paris: Palmé, 1867). 142–43. My translation of Veuillot differs from Whiting’s in small but significant ways: Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 15. 17. David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995), 38. 18. Henry Monnier, Mémoires de Monsieur Joseph Prudhomme (Paris: Librarie Nouvelle, 1857), 415. 19. David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), 95; Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 13. 20. HNOC, Grima Family Papers, MS 99, folder 3, October 6, 1856. Victor Grima to his brother Alfred (my translation): “Paris 6 octobre 1856. Tu veux donc toujours que je te parle de ce malheureux Paris? Ecoute: si je prends la boulevard? Une allée large, où l’on circules plus difficilement que dans les plus étroits carrefours, où l’on n’ose jamais traverser la rue avant d’avoir fait un acte de contrition; passer d’un côté à l’autre, c’est franchir les Thermopyles; on se trouve en touré pour le moins une douzaine de fois de deux ou trois cents voitures, [ . . . ] ou dix cents cheveux et toute une armée de dragons, de plusieurs milliers d’agent de police, et d’une pluie de gamins: on crie, on jure, on pousse, on écrase, on culbutte, on fait quinze arrestations, trente-six emprisonnements, mille et trois equêtes, on emporte deux cents blessés, et trois fais autant de morts. Si tu parviens à échapper au carnarge, l’aspect des boulevards est assez beau; les trottoirs sont spacieux, plantés d’arbres mesquins, dépouillés, secs, brûles, tout petits, presque sans feuilles: rien n’est plus beau aux yeux des Parisiens: les deux côtés sont bordés de superbe magasins [ou] l’on étale tout ce qu’il y a de plus beau en tous genres.” 21. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 71. 22. Deluermoz, Policiers dans la ville, 11, note 2. 23. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 71. 24. Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen, no. 66, 94. In All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982, rpt. ed., 1988), 155–56, Berman draws attention to the poet’s complaint about the condition of the recently macadamized road surfaces as a reflection of Baudelaire’s sensitivity to modern life. But macadamized streets did lessen the din if not the dust of modernity as well as deprived the populace of their traditional weapon, the cobblestone. 25. Eric Fournier, Paris en ruines: du Paris Haussmannien au Paris communard (Paris: Editions Imago, 2008), 14, note 3. 26. Ibid., 19–22.

notes to pages 84–91

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27. Ibid.; Roger Price, The French Second Empire: An Anatomy of Political Power (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 223. 28. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, 43. 29. Fournier, Paris en ruines, 25. 30. Price, French Second Empire, 223. 31. Honoré de Balzac, Les petits bourgeois (Paris: Furne, Dubochet et Cie, Hetzel et Paulin, 1854), 137. 32. Fournier, Paris en ruines, 18. 33. Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Eugene Delacroix, ed. Hubert Wellington, trans. Lucy Norton (London: Phaidon, 1951; rpt. 2010), November 14, 1853, 220. 34. Sarah Kennel and Anne de Mondenard, eds., Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 35. Price, A Concise History of France, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 193–98. 36. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 15. 37. John Torpey, “Revolutions and Freedom of Movement: An Analysis of Passport Controls in the French, Russian, and Chinese Revolutions,” Theory and Society 26, no. 6 (December 1997): 837–68, 848; Andreas Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens: Foreigners and the Law in Britain and the German States, 1789–1870 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2000), 102. 38. Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens, 102. 39. Gérard Noiriel, “The Identification of the Citizen: The Birth of Republican Civil Status in France,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 28–48. 40. Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 41. Price, French Second Empire, 146. 42. Louis Huart, Muséum parisien: Histoire physiologique, pittoresque, philosophique et grotesque de toutes les bêtes curieuses de Paris et de la banlieue, pour faire suite à toutes les éditions des oeuvres de M. de Buffon (Paris: Beauger, 1841), 52–53. 43. Deluermoz, Policiers dans la ville, 13–14, 29, 32, 36, 39; Price, French Second Empire, 134–36. 44. For Joseph Tinchant, see record number 14046, December 22, 1856, and for Edmond Dédé, record number 14012, December 24, 1856, both in the microfilm collection of the Vreemdelingendossiers, 1856–1857, Modern Archief, FelixArchief, Antwerp. Stadtsarchiv, Ville d’Anvers, Administration de la Sureté publique, 14012. 45. Andreas Fahrmeir, “Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, ed. Jane Caplan and John Torpey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 218–34, 231.

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notes to pages 91–95

46. John Bassett Moore, A Digest of International Law, vol. 3, chap. 12: Passports, section 2, art. 493, 862. 47. Craig Robertson, The Passport in America: The History of a Document (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 142. 48. William L. Chew, “Life before Fodor and Frommer: Americans in Paris from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams,” French History 18, no. 1 (2004): 25–49, 35. 49. Robertson, Passport in America, 133, 143, 147. 50. Ibid., 131–33. 51. Martha S. Jones, “Leave of Court: African American Claims-Making in the Era of Dred Scott v. Sanford,” in Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race and Power in American History, ed. M. Sinha and P. Von Eschen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 54–74, 62; Robertson, Passport in America, 141. 52. Robertson, Passport in America, 131–34. 53. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 93 and 99. 54. Price, French Second Empire, 164. 55. Catharina Lis, Social Change and the Labouring Poor, Antwerp, 1770–1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 71; Anne Winter, Migrants and Urban Change: Newcomers to Antwerp, 1760–1860 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), 267, note 110. 56. Modern Archief, FelixArchief, Antwerp, Burgerlijke Stand, 1856–1866, entry for 188 Boeksteeg. 57. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 106–7. 58. National Archives, Public Record Office, Foreign Office, England, Alien Arrivals, 1810–1869, 83/21–22, accessed through Ancestry.com; “Edmond Dédé,” L’Artiste de Bordeaux, copy held by the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, and “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88 AMB, Fonds Evrard de Fayolle, 42 S 2814. 59. Ibid.: “L’élève musicien avait des ressources qui le mettaient à l’abri des soucis de la vie matérielle.” 60. Nancy L. Green, “The Comparative Gaze: Travelers in France before the Age of Mass Tourism,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 3 (2002): 423–40, 425. 61. G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, La France et les Français vus par les voyageurs américains, 1814–1848, 2 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), vol. 1, 11, 17, 21. 62. The American community in Paris around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries has drawn the most attention. The community at mid-century merits closer scrutiny. A selective list of readings includes Kathleen Adler, Erica E. Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg, Americans in Paris, 1860–1900 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery, 2006); François Boucher and Frances Wilson Huard, American Footprints in Paris: A Guide Book of Historical Data Pertaining to Americans in the French Capital from the Earliest Days to the Present Times (New York: George H. Doran, 1921); Chew, “Life before Fodor and Frommer”; Ernest Earnest, Expatriates and Patriots: American Artists, Scholars, and Writers in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

notes to pages 96–99

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1968); Lois Fink, “American Artists in France, 1850–1870,” American Art Journal 5, no. 2 (1973): 32–49; Nicole Fouchè, “La presence américaine en France (XIXe–XX siècles) à la recherche d’une problematique,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 59 (1994): 7–10; Isabelle Gournay and Elliott Pavlos, “Americans in Paris,” Journal of Architectural Education 38, no. 4 (1985): 22–26; Russell M. Jones, “American Doctors in Paris, 1820– 1861: A Statistical Profile,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 25 (1970): 143–157; Russell M. Jones, “American Painters in Paris, 1825–1848,” Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750–1850: Proceedings (n.d.); André Léo (pseud. of Léodile de Champceix), The American Colony in Paris in 1867: From the French of André Léo (Boston, 1868); John Sanderson, The American in Paris, vols. 1-2 (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847); Robert C. L. Scott, “American Travellers in France, 1830–1860: A Study of Some American Ideas against a European Background” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1940); H. Barbara Weinberg, “Nineteenth-Century American Painters at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” American Art Journal 13, no. 4 (1981): 66–84; William Wiser, The Great Good Place: American Expatriate Women in Paris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 63. I culled these figures from the NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Posts, Registry of Visitors, RG 84, France, vol. 1727. 64. Charles Edwards O’Neill, Victor Séjour: Parisian Playwright from Louisiana (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1995), 43–45. 65. Clark, Strange History of the American Quadroon, 61–62. 66. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 347–50. 67. This attitude is fully realized in Bernard Tavernier’s Round Midnight (1986), a fictional account of a 1950s bebop jazz musician, played by Dexter Gordon, in Paris. 68. Pierre H. Boulle, Race et esclavage dans la France de l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 2007), 87. 69. Boulle, Race et esclavage, 106. 70. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 97. 71. Régent, La France et ses esclaves, 284. 72. Jennifer Heuer, “One-Drop Rule in Reverse? Interracial Marriages in Napoleonic and Restoration France,” Law and History Review 27, no. 3 (2009): 515–48, 517. 73. Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in France (Louisville: University of Kentucky Press), 157. 74. See Boulle, Race et esclavage, 127; Michael Sibalis, “Les Noirs en France sous Napoléon: L’enquête de 1807,” in 1802: Le rétablissement de l’esclavage dans les colonies Françaises, ed. Marcel Dorigny and Yves Benot (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2003), 95–106. 75. Heuer, “One-Drop Rule in Reverse,” 517. 76. Few traces of African American travelers: David F. Dorr and Malini Johar Schueller, A Colored Man Round the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Ernest Dunbar, The Black Expatriates: A Study of American Negroes in Exile (New York:

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notes to pages 99–103

Pocket Books, 1969); Janet J. Ewald, “Crossers of the Sea: Slaves, Freedmen, and Other Migrants in the Northwestern Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1914,” American Historical Review 105, no. 1 (2000): 69–91; Cheryl J. Fish, Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Levine, “Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass’ Rome”; Nancy Prince, A Black Woman’s Odyssey through Russia and Jamaica: The Narrative of Nancy Prince (New York: Markus Wiener, 1990); Rolston, “Frederick Douglass”; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Ferreira, “All but ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair.’ ” 77. For the Chevalier de Saint-George, Alain Guédé, Monsieur de Saint-George: Virtuoso, Swordsman, Revolutionary: A Legendary Life Rediscovered, trans. Gilda M. Roberts (London: Picador, 2003). For Dumas father and son, see Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (New York: Broadway Books, 2013). 78. Christopher Benfey, Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 137–38; James Smalls, “ ‘Race’ as Spectacle in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 2 (2003): 352–82, 369. 79. Edward J. Ahearn, “Black Woman, White Poet: Exile and Exploitation in Baudelaire’s Jeanne Duval Poems,” French Review 51 (December 1977): 212–20; Therese Dolan, “Skirting the Issue: Manet’s Portrait of Baudelaire’s Mistress, Reclining,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 4 (December 1997): 611–29. 80. Gerard Noiriel, Chocolat clown nègre: L’histoire oubliée du premier artiste noir de la scène française (Paris: Bayard Jeunesse, 2012). 81. Smalls, “ ‘Race’ as Spectacle,” 382. See chapter 2, “City of Sound,” for Lott’s framing of minstrelsy. 82. Lott, “Blackface and Blackness,” 6. 83. Tunley, Salons, Singers, and Songs, 12. 84. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 17; Tunley, Salons, Singers, and Songs, 58. 85. Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 13; Tunley, Salons, Singers, and Songs, 11. 86. Tunley, Salons, Singers, and Songs, 9 and 13. 87. D. Kern Holoman, The Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, 1828–1967, 1st ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 88. Emmanuel Hondré, ed., Le conservatoire de musique de Paris: regards sur une institution et son histoire (Paris: Association du bureau des étudiants du Conservatoire nation supérieur de musique, 1995), 213. 89. Constant Pierre, Le conservatoire national de musique et de déclamation: Documents historiques et administratifs, recueillis ou reconstitués par Constant Pierre; Sous-chef du secrétariat (Paris: Imprimerie national, 1900). The five musicians born in New Orleans are: Adélaïde Bayon (b. 1840), Pierre Désiré Delcroix (b. 1836), OdalieMarguerite Elie (b. 1847), Ernest Guiraud (b. 1837), Gustave Vitras dit Sujol (b. 1825). 90. Pierre, Le conservatoire national de musique, 252. 91. Fahrmeir, Citizens and Aliens, 119.

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92. From the English translation of Desdunes, Nos hommes and notre histoire: Our People and Our History: Fifty Creole Portraits, ed. Dorothea Olga McCants (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 85–86. 93. Pierre, Le conservatoire national de Musique, 248. 94. Ruth Jordan, Fromenthal Halévy: His Life & Music, 1799–1862 (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 161, 170. 95. Journal of Eugène Delacroix, 288–89. 96. James Trotter was the first author to apply journalistic and scholarly standards to the music of African Americans. In his pioneering history of African American music and musicians, published in 1878, he included the only biographical profile of Dédé published in English while the composer was alive. He did not claim that Dédé was a student at the Conservatory but did identify his teachers. James M. Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People, 340–41. 97. Hondré, Le conversatoire de musique de Paris, 125–30. 98. Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Harmoniques Flammarion, 1991), 87: “D’ailleurs, cette partie de l’enseignement, qui n’est point encore maintenant représentée au Conservatoire, était étrangère à son cours, où il avait à s’occuper seulement du contre-point et de la fugue” (my translation). Instrumentation was added to the curriculum in 1878. See Hondré, Le Conservatoire de musique de Paris, 134. 99. “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Fayolle, 42 S 2814. 100. Ibid.: “La saison suivante, il occupait les mêmes fonctions au théâtre d’Angers, et l’années d’après, 1859, un engagement l’appelait, au même titre, au Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux. Cependant le théâtre des Arts se souvenait de son chef d’orchestre et voulait le reconquérir. Les offres faites par l’impressario de Rouen étaient meilleures que celles du directeur bordelais et, en outre, M. Dédé préférait retourner dans une ville dont il savait posséder la sympathie, plutôt que d’affronter l’aléa d’un nouveau début. Il essaya de rèsilier avec Bordeaux, mais le procès ne tourna pas à son avantage et force fût au chef d’orchestre récalcitrant de venir bon gré, mal gré, conduire le ballet de notre première scène. Notre excellent maestro était loin de se douter alors que la ville pour laquelle il manifestait une instinctive répugnance devait être sa ville de prédilection, sa résidence définitive.”

Chapter 5. City of Song 1. Simone Delattre, Les douze heures noires: La nuit à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). For the same growing consciousness of time in American cities, see Peter C. Baldwin, In the Watches of the Night: Life in the Nocturnal city, 1820–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 66. 2. These details are provided in “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Favolle, 42 S 6041, and in

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notes to pages 110–15

Martial Léglise, dit Bazas, Des théâtres de Bordeaux (Bordeaux: Imprimerie commerciale, 1864), 12. 3. See Silvia Marzagalli, “Establishing Transatlantic Trade Networks in Time of War: Bordeaux and the United States, 1793–1815,” Business History Review 79, no. 4 (2005): 811–44. 4. Louis Desgraves and G. Dupeux, eds., Bordeaux au XIXe siècle (Bordeaux: Delmas, 1969), 191; Jacques Girault, Bordeaux and la Commune, 1870–1871 (Périgueux: FANLAC, 2008), 29. 5. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 23–24; Michael Stephen Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 37–38; Stéphane Herrero, Le développement des relations maritimes entre Bordeaux et les Etats-Unis de 1815 à 1914 (master of arts diss., Université Bordeaux III, Bordeaux, 2005), 74. 6. Desgraves and Depeux, Bordeaux au XIX siècle, 197–98; Michel Suffran, Bordeaux naguère, 1859–1945 (Anglet, France: Edition Aubéron, 2002), 23 and 34. Herrero, Le développement des relations maritimes, 61. See also Marzagalli, “Establishing Transatlantic Trade Networks”; Alain Cabantous, Les citoyens du large: Les identités maritimes en France (XVIIe–XIXe siècles) (Paris: Editions Aubier, 1993), esp. 96; Eric Saugera, Bordeaux, port nègrier: Chronologie, èconomie, idèologie, XVIIe–XIXe siècles (Biarritze and Paris: J & D Editions; Karthala, 1995). 7. Desgraves and Depeux, Bordeaux au XIXe siècle, 195; Girault, Bordeaux et la Commune, 29–31, 35. 8. NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Records, RG 59, Consular Letters Bordeaux; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers, 115. 9. AANO, Orleans Parish, Death Index, vol. 32, 139. 10. New Orleans, Second District Court of New Orleans, Probate Record, 2DC 25.316: Dupré, Marie L., wife of Dédé, Bazile, Jr. (fpc) (succ.), 1865. 11. New Orleans, City Archives, Second District Court of New Orleans, Probate Record 31.920. 12. NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Records, RG 59, Consular Letters Bordeaux, to be discussed in chapter 6. 13. Quoted in the New Orleans L’Union, April 16, 1863. The original review has not survived. 14. Annuaire general du commerce et de l’industrie de la Gironde, sous série 105 CA 3 (1864) and 4 (1865) (Bordeaux). The 1863 volume was the first in the series. With the exception of the Grand Théâtre, only proprietors and managers of businesses, including theaters, were listed in Bordeaux’s Annuaire or almanac. 15. AMB, Etat civil, Marriages, serie 2 E 225. 16. Antoine Leflet, 1850 census, St Bernard, Louisiana, roll M432_239, page 161A, image 325, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). Support for the identification of the

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Antoine Leflet named in the census is found in the death record of Antoine Leflet of Toulouse, which gives his age as seventy-one in the year that he died, 1871. Repatriation was not unusual for immigrants to the United States. 17. AMB, Etat civil, Naissances, January 13, 1867. 18. New Orleans Tribune, September 6 and 8, 1864, no longer available, cited in Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 55. 19. National Anti-Slavery Standard, NY, Saturday, August 12, 1865. In a review of a concert in New Orleans that included a work by Dédé, the editors in Philadelphia mistakenly assumed the composer was present. See Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 55, but note that the publication date for the newspaper notice he gives is incorrect. 20. Léglise, dit Bazas, Des théâtres de Bordeaux. 21. Ibid., 5–6. 22. Caradec and Weill, Le café-concert, 25, 29, 37; Jean-Louis Mabit, “Du caféconcert à la chanson chez soi: Quelques repères en guise de il d’Ariana,” in CaféConcert et Music Hall de Paris à Bordeaux (Paris: Somogy Editions, 2004), 13; Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 34. For Josephine Baker and Jazz-Age Paris, see Stovall, Paris Noir. 23. A poster with details of the program at the Alcazar Theater on the evening of July 7, 1863, is in AMB, Spectacles de Bordeaux, Alcazar—papiers divers, 1862–1915, 1175 R 1. 24. Caradec and Andrew Weill, Le café-concert, 97; Concetta Condemi, Les cafesconcerts: Histoire d’un divertissement (Paris: Quai Voltaire Histoire, 1992), 84; Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 49. 25. Léglise, dit Bazas, Des théâtres de Bordeaux, 15. 26. Caradec and Weill, Le café-concert, 38, 94; Whiting, Satie the Bohemian, 21. Emile Mathieu, Les cafés-concerts, 17–18. 27. Price, French Second Empire, 157. 28. Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 29. 29. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 76; Caradec and Weill, Le café-concert, 142. 30. Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 31. 31. Condemi, Les cafés-concerts, 29–33; AMB, Folies-Bordelaises, 4724–25, for requests for permission to hire singers. See also Price, French Second Empire, 139. 32. Caradec and Weill, Le café-concert, 98. 33. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 51. 34. Ibid., 49–50, 71. 35. Annuaires, 1871 and 1872, Dédé is listed as “directeur, Café-Concert du Delta.” In Café-Concert et Music Hall de Paris à Bordeaux, 88, the caption of a photo of the Théâtre La Scala, formerly the Delta, contains the information that the Delta “had as director a certain Dédé who was also the conductor at the Alcazar and at the Folies-Bordelaises, rue Sainte-Catherine.” 36. Annuaires, 1871 and 1872; Café-Concert et Music Hall de Paris à Bordeaux, 88.

238

notes to pages 124–31

37. Price, Concise History of France; Jennifer Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 38. For population figures, Robert and Marianne Cornevin, La France and les Français outre-mer (Paris: Edition Tallandier, 1990). 39. Charles Ageron, Modern Algeria: A History from 1830 to the Present, trans. Michael Brett (London: Hurst, 1991), 44–47. 40. For a fascinating study of French composers in French Algeria during the Second Empire and the Third Republic, see Kristy Barbacane, “On Colonial Textuality and Difference: Musical Encounters with French Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Algeria” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2012). Rebecca Rogers, A Frenchwoman’s Imperial Story: Madame Luce in Nineteenth-Century Algeria (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 60. 41. ADG, Police générale, passe-port à l’étranger, reg. 93, n. 159, passeport de Edmond Dédé, 4M 757/159, March 25, 1871; passeport de Sylvie Dédé (autorisée de son mari; avec son enfant de quatre ans), 4M 757/58, February 25, 1871. 42. AMB, Théâtres, Folies-Bordelaises, 4733 R 2, January 8, 1884. 43. AMB, Théâtres, Folies-Bordelaises, Affaires généraux, 1872–1893, 1774 R 2, “La Police des Théâtres,” La Féderation, November 21, 1883. 44. Dédé was included among the biographical notices of local notables: Edouard Feret, Statistique générale topographie, scientifique, administrative, industrielle commerciale, agricole historique, archéologique et biographie du Département de la Gironde, vol. 3, part 1: Biographie (Bordeaux: Feret et fils, 1889). AMB, Grand Théâtre, 1742 R 8, Recettes. La Sensitive was performed twice, on April 27 and May 1, 1877. 45. Anatole Loquin, ed., La musique à Bordeaux, revue mensuelle, 1877 (Bordeaux, 1878), 100 and 216. 46. Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 55–56. 47. Loquin, La musique à Bordeaux, 58. 48. Le Ménestrel, no. 40, September 5, 1886, 323–24. My translation. 49. F. J. Fétis, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique, vol. 1 (Paris: Librairie de Firmin-Didot, 1881), 246 50. Loquin, La musique à Bordeaux, 252. 51. BnF-M, K 41558, “Bikina.” 52. Scott, Sounds of the Metropolis, 87. 53. David Grayson, “Finding a Stage for French Opera,” in Music, Theater, and Cultural Transfer. Paris, 1830–1914, ed. Annegret Fauser and Mark Everist (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009), 127–54, 128. 54. Edmond Dédé, “Morgiane, ou, Le sultan d’Ispahan: opéra en 4 actes: paroles de Louis Brunet, musique de Edmond Dédé”: manuscript, M1500.D295 S8 1887, Houghton Library, Harvard University. In 2010, Lester Sullivan, then the archivist of Xavier University in New Orleans learned from a librarian at another university of the opera manuscript located in a large collection of nineteenth-century opera manuscripts acquired by Harvard University’s Houghton Library in 2000. In the summer of 2010, he

notes to pages 132–36

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handed me the email correspondence containing the reference, which I then emailed to the conductor Richard Rosenberg, who was in the Boston area at the time. That summer, Rosenberg examined the manuscript, confirmed that it was indeed Dédé’s opera in its entirety, and had digital copies made, one of which he sent to me and the other to Xavier University, which partially subsidized the cost of reproduction. In the summer of 2013, I examined the manuscript myself in Houghton Library. 55. Mentioned in Le Ménestrel, September 5, 1886, cited and quoted in Arthur R. LaBrew, “Edmond Dédé (dit Charentos), 1827–1901,” Afro-American Music Review 1 (1984): 76–98, 95. The source of LaBrew’s attribution of a nickname to Dédé is unknown. 56. There is, however, a growing literature on “orientalism” and “the exotic” in Western art music: Jonathan D. Bellman, “Musical Voyages and Their Baggage: Orientalism in Music and Critical Musicology,” Music Quarterly 94, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 417–38; Karen Henson, “Of Men, Women and Others: Exotic Opera in Late Nineteenth-Century France” (Ph.D. diss., Oxford University, 1999); Derek B. Scott, “Orientalism and Musical Style,” Music Quarterly 82, no. 2 (1998), 309–35. 57. Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 58. 58. Act 4. Neither manuscript is paginated. 59. Le Ménestrel, September 5, 1886, cited and quoted in LaBrew, “Edmond Dédé, 95. 60. “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887–88, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Fayolle, 42 S 2814. 61. A sure sign that the opera was never produced comes from the Society of Dramatic Authors and Composers (Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, or SACD), the professional organization, founded in 1829, that protects the rights and royalties of playwrights and opera composers. At the society’s offices—just steps from the Moulin Rouge on the boulevard de Clichy—the society’s librarian looked for but could not find Dédé’s name among the list of members in the nineteenth century. Had his opera been staged, he would have been eligible to become a member, whether in Paris or Bordeaux. As Fétis, the profile in Bordeaux-Artiste, and the organization itself attest, he was a member only of the Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de musique, which represents the interests of songwriters and composers. The twovolume manuscript “Morgiane, ou, Le sultan d’Ispahan” kept in Houghton Library must represent the copy Dédé used to try to convince the management of the Grand Théâtre and theaters in Paris to produce his opera. 62. Edmond Dédé: Mon Pauvre Coeur/ Françoise et Tortillard / Mefisto Masqué, Hot Springs Music Festival Symphony Orchestra, Naxos, June 1, 2000, ASIN: B007TJRFP8; “Turn of the Century Cornet Favorites,” Gerard Schwarz, Gunther Schuller, Columbia Chamber Ensemble (Sony Classical, August 30, 2005). 63. The only surviving copy of this issue of L’Artiste de Bordeaux is kept in the Amistad Center for Research at Tulane University. Quotations in the following paragraph are from this profile. 64. “Edmond Dédé, chef d’orchestre, Folies Bordelaises,” Bordeaux-Artiste, 1887– 88, AMB, Fonds Evrard de Fayolle, 42 S 2814.

240

notes to pages 139–56

65. Heuer, “One Drop in Reverse,” 525. 66. La Nouvelliste de Bordeaux, March 17, 188, supplèment illustré du dimanche. 67. La Nouvelliste de Bordeaux, January 13, 1889, supplèment illustré du dimanche. 68. Two treatments evoke the racism embedded in depictions of people of African descent in nineteenth-century France: Smalls, “Race as Spectacle”; Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, “Cursed Mimicry: France and Haiti, Again (1848–51), Art History 38 (February 2015): 68–105. 69. AMB, Police, Etrangers, series 1, 3615–1. 70. Patrick Weil, How to Be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 32. 71. Smalls, “ ‘Race’ as Spectacle,” 358.

Chapter 6. City of Exile 1. NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Records, Diplomatic Posts, RG 59, T-164, roll 7, Clarendon Davisson to William H. Seward, January 20, 1864. The letters from the U.S. consuls to the secretaries of state are on microfilm. 2. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011). 3. Michel Roussier, “L’éducation des enfants de Toussaint Louverture et l’Institution nationale des colonies,” Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 64, no. 3 (1977): 308– 49, rpt. in Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendance d’Haïti: Témoignages pour un bicentenaire, ed. Jacques de Cauna (Paris: Karthala, 2004), 206–47, 211–14; Bernard Gainot, “Un projet avorté d’intégration républicaine: L’institution nationale des colonies, 1797–1802,” Dix-huitième siècle 32 (2000): 271–402. 4. Isaac Louverture’s account of his education and his family’s capture and entry into exile appears as an appendix, “Memoires d’Isaac Toussaint,” in Métral, Histoire de l’expédition des Français à Saint-Domingue (Paris: Editions Karthala, 1985), 227–324. 5. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 210. 6. Cauna, ed., Toussaint Louverture et l’indépendence d’Haïti, 198–99. 7. Cauna, Histoire de l’expédition, 204. Isaac Louverture’s account of his family’s arrival in France begins in Métral, Histoire de l’expédition, 317. 8. Norfolk (VA) Commercial Register, October 29, 1802, p. 3. 9. Archives départementales de Lot et Garonne, Etat civil, An XI–An XIV, Mariages, no. 21, 28 frimaire an XIII (December 19, 1804), 4/E/1/60. 10. Auguste and Auguste, Les déportés de Saint-Domingue, 98–99. 11. See Isaac Louverture’s letters of introduction for his wife, in which he describes her role as the family nurse. Alain Turnier, Quand la nation demande des comptes (Portau-Prince: Editions Le Natal, 1989) 29–30.

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12. The details about Isaac and Louise’s relocation to Bordeaux and Placide’s attempt to marry come from Jennifer Heuer’s unpublished paper, “Race, Law and Contested Heritage: Toussaint Louverture’s Family in France,” 7–8. I am very grateful to the author for permission to cite from it. 13. Toussaint refers to “un de mes fils Placide” in Memoirs du général Toussaint L’Ouverture, écrits par lui-même . . . d’une étude historique et critique . . . avec un appendice contenant les opinions de l’empéreur Napoléon 1er sur les événements de Saint-Domingue, ed. Joseph Saint-Rémy (Port-au-Prince: Pagnerre, 1853), 75. 14. Turnier, Quand la nation demande des comptes, 25–26. My translation. 15. Ibid., letter from General Magny to Isaac Louverture, May 28, 1817, 25–26. 16. Ibid., letter from Isaac Louverture to Boyer, president of Haiti, undated but written in 1821, 29. 17. Ibid., 29. 18. Nemours, Histoire de la famille, 89-90. Nemours cites a letter that Louise sent 120–130 “milliers de café” to France. In that year, coffee was worth 20 gourds per 100, which, when converted, was worth approximately 20,000 francs. 19. Archives nationales de France, series F/7/11206: “Les dames Louise et Isaac Louverture arrivées au Hâvre le 5 de ce mois, venant de St. Domingue, ont obtenu des passes pour Bordeaux. La première est niece et belle fille de Toussaint Louverture. Les passeports de ces dames n’étant pas susceptibles de recevoir un visa, restront déposés au B[ordeaux] d’ordres. Le 11 juillet 1825.” 20. Heuer, “One Drop Rule in Reverse,” 517 and 540; McCloy, Negro in France, 145. 21. Thomas Prosper Gragnon-Lacoste, “La famille Toussaint-Louverture à Agen,” Revue de l’Agenais (1883): 97–104; Carte de concessionnaires, Cimetière de Chartreuse, Bordeaux, 29e série, no. 68bis, côté E, March 13, 1866. Toussaint’s final resting place remains a mystery. The record in the Cemetery of Chartreuse showing “Toussaint Louverture Isaac” as having been exhumed from a temporary burial site and reburied in the Gragnon-Lacoste plot on March, 13, 1866, has led some to believe that some portion of the father’s remains joined his son’s in the same plot. 22. In the nineteenth century, this street was called the rue de l’Intendance before the name was transferred to the broad thoroughfare at one end of the short street. 23. Wendy Gamber, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Sandoval-Strausz, Hotel. 24. Nemours, Histoire de la famille, 101. 25. Ibid., 59, discusses the issue of where Toussaint, Isaac, and Louise were buried. The body of Louise Chancy was transferred from a communal gave to the GragnonLacoste plot on September 17, 1878. Cimetière de Chartreuses, 29e série, no. 68bis, September 17, 1878. 26. Eric Foner, Fiery Trial, 184–86. 27. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper Perennial Classics), 6.

242

notes to pages 162–67

28. For an overview of the Vicksburg campaign and the siege of Port Hudson, see James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 626–38, esp. 637–38; Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Port Hudson: Confederate Bastion on the Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987). 29. Ten days after Port Hudson fell, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw led the African American soldiers of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the assault on Fort Wagner, Georgia. See Russell Duncan, Where Death and Glory Met: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999). 30. For an account of the Louisiana Native Guard’s participation in the siege of Port Hudson, see Ochs, Black Patriot and a White Priest, 137–48. See also Mary F. Berry, “Negro Troops in Blue and Gray: The Louisiana Native Guard, 1861–1863,” Louisiana History 8 (1967): 165–90. 31. James G. Hollandsworth, Jr., The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 5. 32. Ochs, Black Patriot and a White Priest, 270. 33. Louisiana Slave Records, 1719–1820, no. 406, May 13, 1806, notary Pedesclaux, Louis Dédé sells to François Girod a slave named Joseph, 24, blacksmith, for 1,650 piastres; no. 469, August 22, 1810, notary Broutin, Louis Dédé sells to Pierre Gueno a slave named Adelaide, newly arrived from Africa, for 550 piastres. Louis Dede, 1810 census, New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, roll 10, page 289, image 00251, Family History Library Film 0181355, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). Accessed through Ancestry.com. In 1806, Louis Dédé sold to a white man a twenty-four-year-old blacksmith named Joseph. Four years later, he sold to another white man the twenty-five-year-old Adelaide, described as recently arrived from Africa. According to the federal census of the same year, Louis had living in his household one slave, possibly one of the two he sold that year. 34. Records for both François and Simphorien Dédé can be found in “U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861–1865,” database, accessible on Ancestry.com. 35. National Park Service. “U.S. Civil War Soldiers, 1861–1865,” database, accessed through Ancestry.com. 36. Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 338–39. 37. NARA, Department of State, Foreign Service Records, Diplomatic Posts, RG 59, T-164, roll 7, Clarendon Davisson to William H. Seward, January 20, 1864. 38. Theophilus A. Wylie, Indiana University, Its History from 1820, When Founded, to 1890, Biographical Sketches of Its Presidents, Professors and Graduates, and a List of Its Students from 1820 to 1887 (Indianapolis: William B. Bukford, 1890), 311; Clarendon Davisson, 1850 census, Bloomington, Indiana, roll M432_161, page 224A, image 16, Ancestry.com (March 25, 2016). 39. George A. Root and Russell K. Hickman, “Pike’s Peak Express Companies. Part 1: The Solomon and Republican Route,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 13, no. 3 (August 1944): 163–95, 185.

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40. NARA, Foreign Service Records, Consular Letters, RG 59, Clarendon Davisson to William L. Dayton, October 2, 1863, National Archives Microfilm Publication T-164, roll 7. 41. Michael Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln: A Life, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), vol. 1, 1465. 42. Catharine Newbold, “The Antislavery Background of the Principal State Department Appointees in the Lincoln Administration” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1962). 43. Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860 (Chicago.: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 395. Davisson’s annual income is confirmed by The National Almanac and Annual Record for the Year 1863 (Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1863), 76. 44. As estimated on MeasuringWorth.com. 45. George M. Blackburn, French Newspaper Opinion on the American Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997); Warren Reed West, Contemporary French Opinion on the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924). See also the recently published Don H. Doyle, Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2014). 46. Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 47. Hubert Bonin, Les patrons du Second Empire, 8 vols. (Paris: Picard; Editions Cenomane, 1999), vol. 6: Bordeaux et la Gironde, 45–51. 48. For a brief account of Seward’s and Dayton’s efforts to prevent other British and French shipbuilders from supplying the Confederacy with vessels, see Kevin J. Foster, “The Diplomats Who Sank a Fleet: The Confederacy’s Undelivered European Fleet and the Union Consular Service,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration 33, no. 3 (2001): 180–93. 49. Davisson’s letters to Dayton are in NARA, Foreign Service Records, Diplomatic Posts, RG 84, vol. 0455. Davisson sent Secretary Seward a report of his communications with Minister Dayton: National Archives Microfilm Publication T-164, roll 7, June 22, 1864. 50. NARA, Foreign Service Records, Diplomatic Posts, RG 84, vol. 0455, Bordeaux, Clarendon Davisson to William H. Seward, January 10, 1866. 51. NARA, Foreign Service Records, Diplomatic Posts, RG 84, vol. 0455, Bordeaux, William Gleeson to William H. Seward, August 20, 1866. 52. Letter fragment, Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Correspondence re: Davisson, Clarendon, file no. 111249, letters to U. S. Grant, RG59, 1869–77. 53. Unsigned letter fragment, dated October 27, 1872, from a correspondent in New Orleans, LA, Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University, Correspondence from Henry Bross re: Davisson, Clarendon, file no. 111249, letters to U. S. Grant, RG59, 1869–77.

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notes to pages 175–84

54. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015), 33. 55. The Annuaires of Bordeaux in 1860 and 1870 list a wholesale wine exporter company owned by a E. Thierry, undoubtedly a relative of Camille’s. 56. Michel Séligny, Nouvelles et récits: Michel Séligny; Homme libre de couleur de La Nouvelle-Orléans, ed. Frans C. Amelincks (Laval, Canada: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998). 57. Biographical detail taken from Frans Amelincks and May Rush Gwin Waggoner, “Introduction,” in Les Vagabondes, ed. Amelincks and Waggoner (Shreveport, LA: Editions Tintamarre, 2004), 35–38; Thompson, Exiles at Home, 151. 58. Camille Thierry, Les vagabondes: Poésies américaines (Paris and Bordeaux, 1874), 41–42. 59. Thierry, Les vagabondes (2004 ed.), 98–101. With permission of Les Editions Tintamarre, Shreveport, LA. 60. ADG, Table décennale des actes de décès, no. 532, Thierry, Camille, April 23, 1875; New Orleans, City Archives, Second District Court, Probate Records, docket 38009, letter. 61. ADG, Passports, 1857; July 14, 1859; NARA, Records of Foreign Service Posts, Diplomatic Posts, RG 84, vol. 89, Passports, no. 8492, July 11, 1859. 62. ADG, Police générale, passe-port à l’étranger, reg. 93, no. 159, passeport de Edmond Dédé, 4M 757/159, March 25, 1871; passeport de Sylvie Dédé (autorisée de son mari; avec son enfant de quatre ans), 4M 757/58, February 25, 1871. 63. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173–85.

Chapter 7. The Lost Violin 1. Galveston Daily News, October 23, 1893, “His business card introduced him as a composer of music and a chief of orchestra of the Grand theater of Bordeaux, member of the society of authors and editors of music and a member of the society of authors and composers of dramatic music, professeur de violon.” For Jane Erado, see U.S. City Directories, 1821–1989, accessed through Ancestry.com. How Jane Erado and her mother, Josephine Victor, were related to Dédé remains a mystery. Given their relative ages, it is more likely that both women were his cousins. 2. L’Abeille, October 21, 1893: “Parmi les passagers se trouve le fameux compositeur de couleur, Ed. Dédé, qui va rentrer à la Nouvelle Orléans, sa ville natale, après une absence de 39 ans. Il a perdu un violon d’un grand prix.” 3. Douglas Hales, A Southern Family in White and Black: The Cuneys of Texas (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2003), 12. 4. Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music, 236. 5. Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage, 2010), 8.

notes to pages 186–95

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6. Wylie, Indiana University, 311. 7. Foner, Reconstruction, 354. 8. Ibid., 262–63. 9. Ibid., 342. 10. Ibid., 27; Tunnel, Crucible of Reconstruction, 78, 91. 11. This details of this economic snapshot come from Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 2, 6–7, 158. 12. Ibid., 108–10. 13. Joseph G. Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” in Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization, ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 131–85; Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850–1900,” in Creole New Orleans, 201–61, 242. 14. HNOC, Grima Family Papers, MS 99, folder 222, Victor Grima to Adelaide Grima, July 6, 1866: “Alfred parle le Français avec un accent américain très prononcé, quoi qu’il prétende que je sois le premier à faire cette observation. Je ne sais pas si quelqu’un d’entre vous aura fait cette remarque, mais il est bien certain que c’est le changement le plus frappant que je puisse signaler chez lui.” 15. Tregle, “Creoles and Americans,” 188. 16. Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011). 17. New Orleans, Daily Item, November 4, 1893. 18. Acts Passed by the General Assembly of the State of Louisiana at the Regular Session, 1890 (New Orleans: State Printer, 1899), Act No. 111, 153–54. 19. Logsdon and Bell, “Americanization of Black New Orleans” in Creole New Orleans, 255–58; Lester Sullivan, “The Unknown Rodolphe Desdunes: Writings in the New Orleans Crusader,” Xavier Review 10, nos. 1–2 (1990): 1–17. 20. Jackson, New Orleans in the Gilded Age, 201–2. 21. Sullivan, “Unknown Rodolphe Desdunes,” 4. “Desdoumes” and “Cousto” are variant spellings of “Desdunes” and “Constant,” the latter name also appearing among the members of Dédé’s welcome committee. 22. Southern, Music of Black Americans, 342. 23. Quoted in Rudi Blesh and Harriet Janis, They All Played Ragtime (New York: Oak Publications, 1971), and cited in Gushee, “Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” 166. 24. Gushee, “Nineteenth-Century Origins of Jazz,” 17. 25. Gioia, History of Jazz, 5. 26. Find Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols., vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 377–78; Starr, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, 74–77. 27. Jesse J. Otto, “Dan Desdunes: New Orleans Civil Rights Activist and ‘The Father of Negro Musicians of Omaha,’ ” Nebraska History (Fall 2011), 106–17, 115–16. 28. Sullivan, “Composers of Color,” 65.

246

notes to pages 195–207

29. Ibid., 65–70, including the only known photograph of Barès; Lucius R. Wyatt, “Six Composers of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans,” Black Music Research Journal 10, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 125–40, 126–27. 30. Joseph Horowitz, “Sorrow on the Prairie: Hiawatha and Dvorˇák’s New World Symphony,” Times Literary Supplement, August 1, 2014, 14–15. 31. Lawrence Gushee, “Black Professional Musicians in New Orleans, c. 1880,” Inter-American Music Review 11, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 1991): 53–63, 57. 32. Interview, Jelly Roll Morton and Alan Lomax, 1938, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings, Rounder Select, AFS 611888. Although Gushee does not mention Nickerson in his chronology, Morton’s narrative suggests that he studied with Nickerson after 1903. Lawrence Gushee, “A Preliminary Chronology of the Early Career of Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton,” American Music 3, 4 (Winter 1985): 389–412, 392. 33. L’Abeille, Sunday, December 17, 1893, “Concert du Prof. Dédé.” 34. Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music, 236. 35. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and Inventor of Jazz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 70. 36. New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 22, 1894. 37. La Nouvelliste, July 20, 1882: “La Estudiantina espagnole, dont la réputaton est européene, donnera sa première preprésentation aux Folies-Bordelaises ce soir, mercredi 19 juillet. Ces jeune gens vêtus du costume classique des étudiants de Salamanque au XVIe siècle, armés de mandolines, guitares, banduras, pandaretas et castagnettes, forment un orchestre charmant sous tous les rapports.” 38. Jody Blake, Le Tumulte Noir: Modernist Art and Popular Entertainment in Jazz-Age Paris, 1900–1930 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 56. 39. Blake, Tumulte noir, 15. 40. “Historique du Théâtre,” website Théâtre Gaîté-Montparnasse, http://www. gaite.fr/theatre-la-gaite.php. 41. AP, Etat civil, Mariages, 14e arrondissement, March 6, 1894, V4E 9638. The names and the occupation of Ilka Fuchs’s parents suggest that they were Jews. 42. That document does not appear in the registers of any notary named Le Gardeur in that year. 43. Desdunes, Nos hommes et notre histoire, 86. 44. Cuney-Hare, Negro Musicians and Their Music, 78. 45. Southern, Music of Black Americans, 283–84 and 412. 46. Iain Anderson, “Reworking Images of a Southern Past: The Commemoration of Slave Music after the Civil War,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 2 (October, 1996): 167–83, 172–73; Sarah Schmalenberger, “Shaping Uplift through Music,” Black Music Research Journal 28, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 57–83, 59. Gioia, History of Jazz, 218, 250. 47. Andrea Musk, “Regionalism, Latinité and the French Musical Tradition: Déodat de Séverac’s Héliogabale,” in Nineteenth-Century Music: Selected Proceedings of the Tenth

notes to pages 207–12

247

International Conference, ed. Jim Samson and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 226–49, 227. 48. BnF-M, K 41484, “Rêverie champêtre.” 49. AP, Etat civil, Naissances, 14e arrondissement, February 5, 1895, V4E 9647, and September 15, 1897, V4E 6249; Décès, July 11, 1898. 50. BnF-M, no. 1373, “If You Please? (S’il vous plait?), polka gigue Américaine pour piano,” 1896. 51. BnF-M, no. 1561, “La marche des Hovas,” 1896. 52. Eugène Dédé, “Les libellules (Caprice),” BnF-M, no. unknown, 1904. Dedication reads: “Hommage de l’Auteur à Madame CAMILLE GUY, du Sénégal.” See Wesley Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal: The Struggle for Power in the Four Communes (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 116–17; Christopher Harrison, France and Islam in West Africa, 1860–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57–58. 53. BnF-M, no. 4871, 1893, “Sou la pluie, polka.” 54. BnF-M, no. 15152, 1909, “Extase d’amour, valse lente.” 55. AP, Actes de décès, 14e arrondissement, V4E 9803.

Chapter 8. Found 1. Municipal cemetery of Chartreuse, Concession series 29, no. 68bis, Côté E. 2. The best overviews of Louis Armstrong’s life and music are Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006); Thomas Brothers, Louis Armstrong, Master of Modernism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015); Terry Teachout, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).

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Index

Armstrong, Louis, 63, 97, 212 Auber, Daniel, 6, 198 Auguste, Jules-Robert, 76

Adam, Adolphe, 104 African Americans: in France, 96–97; in Galveston, 182–84; music academies for, 203–4; as musical influence, 213; in New Orleans, 13–14, 29–31, 189–92; passports not issued to, 92–93; as perceived by white Americans during the Civil War, 165; after Reconstruction, 186–88; as travelers and migrants, 6–7. See also free people of color in France; free people of color in New Orleans; racial labels in the U.S. Alard, Jean-Delphin, 104, 196, 197 Alcazar Theater, 107–9; Dédé as music director of, 109, 119 Aldridge, Ira, 50–51 Alexis, Celestin, 38 Algeria, Dédé in, 124–25 American War for Independence, 22 Amistad Research Center for AfricanAmerican History (Tulane), 5 Anderson, Marian, 203–4 Anglo-Americans: in New Orleans, 25, 28, 29; and tensions with French Creoles, 32–33 Arman, Jean-Lucien, 171, 173

Baker, Josephine, 97, 200 Balzac, Honoré de, 85 Banks, General Nathaniel, 162–63 Baptiste, Suzanne, 20, 151, 152; death of, 156; in France, 154–56 Baquet, Theogène, 193 Barès, Basile, 194–96, 197–98, 202 Bates, Edward, 165, 178 Baudelaire, Charles, 76, 83–84, 99 Bazas. See Leglise, Martial “Bazas” Bechet, Sidney, 97 Bellini, Vicenzo, 64 Benni, Salomon, 94 Berlin, Ira, 7 Berlioz, Hector, 77, 105 Bibliothèque nationale de France, 5 Biographie universelle des musiciens (Fétis), 128 Bizet, Georges, The Pearl Fishers, 133 blackface minstrel music, 53–55, 100 Bolden, Charles “Buddy,” 196 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon Bonaparte

249

250

Bordeaux, France: boardinghouses in, 159–60; cafés-concerts in, 107, 109– 10, 113–17, 123; Confederate activity in, 171–72; cultural diversity in, 110; Dédé in, 10, 106, 109–10, 113–17, 123; exiles in, 179; foreigners in, 140–41; impact of American Civil War on, 112, 142– 43; as port city, 109–12, 140–41; refugees in, 9. See also Chancy, Louise (Madame Isaac Louverture); Davisson, Clarendon; Louverture, Isaac Bory, Fernand, 126 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 157 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 192 Brunet, Louis, 132, 139 Burci, Joseph, 59 Butler, Benjamin F., 113 cafés-chantants, 79–80 cafés-concerts, 10, 79; in Bordeaux, 101, 107, 114, 117, 118–23; government regulation of, 120–23; in Paris, 80; respectability of, 122 Cailloux, André, 163 Cauna, Jacques de, 153 Champs-Elysées, 78, 79; improvements to, 79–82, 85 Chancy, Louise (Madame Isaac Louverture), 9, 20, 151, 154, 156; in Bordeaux, 158, 179; death of, 159; grave of, 209, 210; and proposal made to U.S. consul, 144–45, 161–62; and return to Haiti, 157 Charles IV, King of Spain, 15 Charles X, King of France, 86 Cherubini, Luigi, 104 Chocolat (male dancer), 99 Chopin, Frédéric, 61–62, 76–77, 87 Citizens’ Committee (New Orleans), 192–93

index

Civil War, American, 112, 144; African American regiments in, 162–63; Dédé brothers’ involvement in, 162, 163–64; impact of on Bordeaux, 112, 142–43, 171–72; impact of on New Orleans, 113; shifting loyalties during, 164 Claiborne, W. C. C., 24 Claverie, Catherine, 115 Clère, Jean Marie, 156 Code Noir, 15–16 Coisnon, Jean-Baptiste, 150 Congo Square, 52 Corrard-Dorfeuil, 201 Cuba, refugees from, 23–24 Cuney, Jenny, 183 Cuney, Joseph, 183, 184 Cuney, Lloyd Garrison, 184 Cuney, Norris Wright, 182–83 Cuney, Philip, 183 Cuney, Wright, political involvement of, 183–84 Cuney-Hare, Maud, 11–12, 182, 183–84, 198, 199, 202, 203, 204 Dalayrac, Nicolas, 64 dance halls, in New Orleans, 56–57 Daniel, Salvador, 124 Davisson, Clarendon: background of, 167, 186; death of, 174; as exile, 148– 49, 175; response of to Louise Chancy, 165–66; as U.S. consul at Bordeaux, 5–6, 142–44, 162, 166–74, 175, 179, 213–14 Davisson, Frances, 167 Davisson, Mary McIntire, 167 Dayton, William L., 143, 167, 173 Deburque, Constantin, 67 Dédé, Basile (brother), 38–39, 162, 163, 164

index

Dédé, Basile (fils) (Edmond Dédé’s father), 38–41, 67, 71–72, 113; as musician, 68 Dédé, Basile (grandfather), 21–22, 37–38, 113, 115 Dédé, Carlotta, 37 Dédé, Charlotte Anna Regina (granddaughter), 207 Dédé, Edmond, 20, 25–26, 37, 48; at the Alcazar Theater, 109, 114–15; in Algeria, 124–25; in Antwerp, 90, 94; in Bordeaux, 10, 107, 109–10, 113–17, 123, 206–7; at the Café Delta, 123; career of, 4–5; as cigar maker, 72–73, 77; as composer, 5, 73–74, 109–10, 127–35; Cuney-Hare’s profile of, 204, 206; death of, 208; as emissary for Madame Isaac Louverture, 144–48, 161; exaggerated biography of, 11–12; as exile, 146; falsified documents used by, 90–91; family of, 13–14, 37–41, 113; at the Folies-Bordelaises, 125–26; in Galveston, 180–82, 184; Galveston Daily News article about, 180–82; at the Grand Théâtre, 113–14, 179; grave of, 209–12; marriage of, 115–16; in Mexico, 50; musical education of, 67, 68, 102–5; in Paris, 77–78, 82–83, 93, 94–95, 100–101, 102–6; as passenger on the Marseille, 4, 180; performances by, 194–99; photographs of, 135–38; profiles of, 104, 105, 114, 123, 135–40; references to skin color of, 137–40, 145, 178–79, 202, 213–15; violin belonging to, 11– 12, 181–82, 202–3, 205–6, 215. See also New Orleans, Louisiana Dédé, Edmond, compositions of: “Bikina,” 129, 130, 131; Chik-Kang-Fô, 128, 135, 200; commercial aspects of, 129–31; critics’ responses to, 114, 127;

251

exotic tropes in, 133–34; Françoise et Tortillard, 135; Il faut passer le pont, 128; La Sensitive, 127, 128; Le voisin de Thérèse, 128; “Mephisto masque,” 128, 135; “Mon pauvre coeur,” 135; Morgiane, ou, Le sultan d’Ispahan, 131– 35; Nénéha, Queen of the Fairies, 113, 128; recordings of, 135; “Rêverie champêtre,” 128, 207 Dédé, Eugène Arcade (son), 115, 141; death of, 208; marriage of, 201–2; as musician and songwriter, 201, 207–8 Dédé family, 37–41, 113. See also Incarnación, Marie (Dédé’s grandmother) Dédé, Francisco, 13–14, 15, 17, 21, 37, 38 Dédé, François (brother), 39, 40–41, 113, 162, 163, 164 Dédé, François (cousin), 163, 164 Dédé, Louis, 37 Dédé, Luis (great-uncle), 163, 164 Dédé, Maria (great-grandmother), 13–14, 17, 21, 37, 38 Dédé, Marie Therese (aunt), 38 Dédé, Maurice Sylvain Georges (grandson), 207 Dédé, Rose (aunt), 38 Dédé, Simphorien (cousin), 163, 164 Dédé, Sylvie Leflet (wife), 115–16, 125, 178, 201 Delacroix, Eugène, 76, 85, 104 Desdunes, Agnes, 196 Desdunes, Daniel, 192, 193, 194, 199 Desdunes, Rodolphe Lucien, 103, 182, 191–92, 199, 202–3, 214, 215 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 20, 152 Dominguez, Paul, Sr., 199 Donizetti, Gaetano, 64 Douglass, Frederick, 6, 54, 161, 203 Douglass, Joseph, 203 Dowdie, Adelina, 183

252

Dred Scott decision, 6, 92–93, 165, 185 Du Bois, W. E. B., 204 Dubuclet, Antoine, 186 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 99 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 77, 99 Dunn, Oscar J., 186 Dupré, Marie Louise, 39, 40, 67, 71, 72, 113, 115 Duval, Jeanne, 99 Dvořák, Antonín, 195 Emancipation Proclamation, 144 Ephrem, Sister Mary, 2, 3–4 Erado, Jane, 180, 181, 198, 206 Ethiopian Serenaders, 54–55 Europe, musicians from, 55, 57–62 European art music: African American influences on, 195, 199–201, 204; in New Orleans, 55, 57–58 Excelsior Cornet Band, 193 Exposition universelle, 1855 (Paris), 77–78 Famous Georgia Minstrels, 196 Ferguson, John Howard, 192 Fétis, François-Joseph, 128 Filhe, George, 193, 194, 196 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 203 Folies-Bordelaises, 114, 123, 141; Dédé at, 125–26 Foner, Eric, 186 Foster, Stephen, 55 Foucher, Louis Nelson, 70 Fournel, Victor, 79 Fowler, Caleb, 21 France: African Americans in, 96–97; migrants entering, 87–88; political upheaval in, 86–90; racial prejudice in, 98–100; recordkeeping in, 88–89; slavery as issue in, 97–98, 100. See also Bordeaux, France; Paris, France

index

free people of color in France, 98–100 free people of color in New Orleans, 29–31, 33, 34–38; laws affecting, 35–36, 41–42, 48–50, 90–91; as patrons of music, 64–66; and relocation to Mexico, 69–71. See also African Americans French Creoles: in New Orleans, 25, 28–29, 36–37; and tensions with Anglo-Americans, 32–33 French Quarter (Vieux Carré), 14, 28–29, 33–34 French Revolution, 22, 86 Fuchs, Ilka, 201 Fuchs, Maurice, 201 Fuchs, Régine, 201 Gabici, Ludovico, 59, 67 Galveston, Texas, African American community in, 182–84 Garçon, Antoine, 201 Gaudillon, August, 1–2 Gautier, Théophile, 96 German migrants in New Orleans, 28 Germania Musical Society, 60 Gilbert and Sullivan, 128 Gioia, Ted, 193 Girondists, 112 Gleeson, William, 174 Goncourt brothers, 77 Gottschalk, Louis Moreau, 51–53, 193 Gounod, Charles, 11, 64, 77 Goux, Jean Bernard, 38 Gragnon-Lacoste, Thomas-Prosper, 159, 160, 209, 210 Grand Théâtre (Bordeaux), 117; Dédé as conductor at, 106, 109, 113–14 Grant, General Ulysses S., 144, 162, 174 Great Migration, 7 Greeley, Horace, 175 Greenfield, Elizabeth, 66

index

Grétry, André, 64 Grima, Alfred, 189 Grima, Victor, 82–83, 189 Guadalupe Hidalgo, treaty of, 70 Gushee, Lawrence, 193 Guy, Camille, 208 Haiti: independence achieved by, 23, 152; revolution in, 18–20, 42; U.S. government recognition of, 161. See also Saint-Domingue Halévy, Jacques-Fromental, 64, 104, 197 Hall, Abraham Oakley, 64–65 Hamilton, Thomas, 34, 36 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène, 84–86, 112 Hébrard, Jean, 25 Hemings, Sally, 97 Hervé, Anna, 68 Herz, Henri, 62, 68–69, 70, 71 Hill, Ureli Corelli, 57 Hollandsworth, James G., 163–64 Honch, Eugène, 201 Houghton Library (Harvard), 5 Houstoun, Matilda Charlotte, 57 Houzelot, Olivier, 201 Hugo, Victor, 77, 84, 131 Incarnación, Marie (Dédé’s grandmother), 21–22, 37–38, 113 interracial marriage: Dédé’s marriage, as reported in the U.S., 115–16; in Louisiana, 16, 35 Irish migrants in New Orleans, 28 Jackson Square (Place d’Armes), 15 Jazon, Jean-Louis, 40 Jazon, Theopile, 40 jazz, musical ingredients for, 193–94 Jefferson, Thomas, 97

253

Jim Crow segregation, 190–91 Johnson, Jack, 184 Kein, Sybil, 7 Kelly, Gene, 99 Kmen, Henry, 56, 58 Krehbiel, Henry Edward, 195 Kroll, J. B., 68 Ku Klux Klan, 187 Lacaze, Joséphine, 156 Lacroix, François, 39 Lafayette, Louisiana, 32, 185 Lahogue, Elizabeth Phélise, 176 L’Album Littéraire, 36, 57 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 36 Lambert, Charles-Richard, 65 Lambert, Marie Joseph, 38, 40 LaMothe, Ferdinand Joseph. See Morton, Jelly Roll Lanusse, Armand, 36–37, 176 Leclerc, Charles Victoire Emmanuel, 19–20, 149, 150, 151, 153 Leflet, Antoine, 115 Leglise, Martial “Bazas”: and the Alcazar Theater, 107–9; on the challenges of the theater business, 116–17, 118, 119 Legros, Léon, 158, 160, 161 Les Cenelles (poetry anthology), 36–37, 176 Levine, Lawrence, 61 Lewis, Edmonia, 51 Lincoln, Abraham, 144, 161 Liszt, Franz, 61–62 Loquin, Anatole, 127–28 Lott, Eric, 54, 100 Louis XVI, King of France, 86 Louis XVIII, King of France, 86 Louis Armstrong Park, 52 Louis-Napoleon, President, 87, 111, 120 Louis Philippe, King of France, 86, 93

254

Louisiana: under American authority, 20–21; migration to, 22–23; Native Guard in, 162–64; racial codes in, 15–17; refugees in, 23–25. See also New Orleans, Louisiana Louisiana Code, 16, 35 Louisiana Purchase, 20–21 Louverture, Isaac, 9, 20, 151–52; death of, 159; in exile, 154, 155–59; in France, 149; grave of, 209, 210; urged to return to Haiti, 156–57 Louverture, Madame Isaac. See Chancy, Louise (Madame Isaac Louverture) Louverture, Placide, 20; arrest of, 151, 152; death of, 158; in exile, 154, 156; in France, 149–51 Louverture, Rose, 158–59 Louverture, St. Jean, 20, 152, 154, 155 Louverture, Toussaint, 9, 19–20, 36, 144, 149–50, 210; arrest of, 151, 152–55; death of, 155 Lucciani, Giovanni, 59 lynchings, 190–92 Macarty, Eugene, 65, 202 Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk, 61 Magny, Etienne, 156 Manet, Edouard, 99 Marquet, Mademoiselle, 127 Marshall, Harriet Gibbs, 204 Martineau, Harriet, 27, 36 Martinet, Louis André, 191–92 Marville, Charles, 86 Marx, Karl, 87 mélodies, Dédé as composer of, 72–73 Mendelssohn, Felix, 64 metronome, invention of, 61 Mexico: Dédé’s departure for, 69; Dédé’s return from, 50, 71–72;

index

as destination for free people of color, 69–71 Michel, Justine, 39 migrations of people of color within the U.S., 7–8 militia music, 62–63, 68 minstrel music. See blackface minstrel music Monnier, Henry, 81 Monsigny, Pierre-Alexandre, 64 Montreuil, Francisca Carriere, 13 Montreuil, Robert, 13 Morgan, Captain, 3 Morton, Jelly Roll, 196 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 64 Murger, Henri, 61 musical culture in New Orleans, 9–10, 51–60, 66–68; multiple influences on, 51–57. See also European art music Napoleon III, Emperor, 87–88, 104, 112–13, 120, 124 Napoleon Bonaparte, 18, 19–20, 24, 86 National Conservatory of Music and Acting (Paris), 102–5 National Institute of the Colonies, 150 Native Guard, 162–64 Negro Philharmonic Society, 58, 67 Nemours, Alfred, 209 New Orleans, Louisiana: African Americans in, 13–14, 189–92; during the Civil War, 113; class differences in, 25–27; dance halls in, 56–57; Dédé’s performances in, 194–99; Dédé’s return to, 184–85; education in, 190; ethnic and cultural diversity in, 22– 23, 25–27, 34, 45–48, 59; European art music in, 55, 57–58; European musicians in, 59–60, 67; free people

index

of color in, 29–31, 33, 34–38, 41–42, 48–50, 64–66; gambling in, 37; growth of, 22–23, 31–32; migrants to, 22–24, 31–32; militia bands in, 63, 68; musical culture in, 9–10, 51–60, 66–68, 193–94, 199–201; opera in, 63–64; as port city, 15, 32; professional musicians in, 65; race relations in, 36–37; racial segregation in, 66, 69; during Reconstruction, 185–87; after Reconstruction, 188–89; residential patterns in, 17–18, 28–29, 33–34; as seen by European visitors, 43–48; under Spanish rule, 14–15 New York Philharmonic, 60 Nickerson, William J., 196, 198 Nouvelles Athènes, 75–77 Oliver, Joe “King,” 196, 212 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 30–31 Onward Brass Band, 193, 194 opera in New Orleans, 58, 63–64 Paganini, Niccolò, 61 Paisson, Charles, 68 Paris, France: Americans in, 95–96; Dédé in, 77–78, 82–83, 93, 94–95, 100–101, 102–6; demolition in, 84–86; in the 1850s, 75–84; police and police informants in, 89–90; popular music in, 101–2 passports, U.S., regulation of, 91–92 Pétion, Alexandre, 156 piano recitals, 62 Picasso, Pablo, 200 Pickett, Albert James, 52 Pinchback, P. B. S., 186, 187 Plaisir, Mars, 152, 154 Plessy, Homer, 192 Plessy v. Ferguson, 192

255

Prevost, Eugène, 195 Puccini, Giacomo, Turandot, 133 quadroon balls, 57 racial labels in the U.S., 7–8, 214 Reconstruction: in New Orleans, 185–86; resistance to, 186–87 refugees: from eastern Europe, 9; from Saint-Domingue, 23–25, 26–28, 58 Ricardo, Helene, 68 romances (light songs), 101–2 Rosenberg, Richard, 135 Rossi, Elisa, 59 Rossi, Ellena, 59 Rossi, Pepe, 59 Rossini, Gioacchino, 64, 77, 102 Roudanez, George, 192 Roudanez, Louis-Charles, 192–93 rue des Martyrs, 75–76 Said, Edward, 179 St. Charles Theater, 54, 59 Saint-Domingue: refugees from, 23–25, 26–28, 58; slave revolt and war in, 18–20. See also Louverture, Toussaint Saint-George, Chevalier de, 99 St. Peter Street Theater, 58 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 125 Salle Bartélemy, 102 Sand, George, 76 Sapignoli, Francesco, 59 Schoelcher, Victor, 98 Scott, Rebecca, 25 Séjour, Victor, 96 Séligny, Michel, 176 Sentmanat, C., 74 Separate Car Act, 191 Seward, William H., 91–92, 144–45, 146; Davisson’s letters to, 162, 166–74 Siete Partitas, 17

256

slavery and slaves, 8–9, 14; under colonial rule, 15–17; France’s position on, 97–98, 100; laws affecting, 35–36; legacy of, 214; and revolt in Saint-Domingue, 18–20 Smalls, James, 99–100 Snaër, Samuel, 202 Society of Authors, Composers, and Music Editors (France), 117 songs. See cafés-chantants; romances (light songs) Sontag, Henriette, 70, 72 Sousa, John Philip, 199 Straight University, 190 Strauss, Johann, Jr., 102 Strauss, Johann, Sr., 102 Stuart, Adelina, 182–83 Sullivan, Lester, 73, 127, 134, 195 symphony orchestras, American, 57–58 Tabary, Louis, 58 Taney, Roger, 92 Théâtre d’Orléans, 59, 63 Thézan, Sydney, 177 Thierry, Camille, 37; in Bordeaux, 148–49; death of, 177; family background of, 176; passport of, 177–78; as poet, 176–77 Thierry, Jean Baptiste Simon, 176 Thomas, James, 31, 65 Tinchant, Jacques, 72–73

index

Tinchant, Joseph, 72–73, 74, 90, 91, 93, 113 Tinchant, Louis, 72–73, 74, 94 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 77, 99, 201 Trotter, James, 67 Tyler, John, 92 Ullman, Bernard, 71 Underground Railroad, 7 United States, racial labels in, 7–8, 214. See also Civil War, American Universal Exposition, 1855 (Paris), 77–78 Verdi, Giuseppe: Aïda, 127, 133; La Traviata, 198; Nabucco, 133 Vesey, Denmark, 35, 42 Veuillot, Louis, 80 Vieux Carré. See French Quarter (Vieux Carré) Vincent, Elizabeth, 72–73 Virginia Minstrels, 53 Wagner, Richard, Die Walkerie, 133 Warmoth, Henry C., 186 Weber, Carl Maria von, 196 Winch, Julie, 7 Young Men’s Progressive Association, 191 Zola, Emile, 88–89