Keywords

We define keywords as the simplest encapsulations of the topics that we have identified as salient to Black life and resistance to slavery. Attentive to changes over time, space, and usage, keywords are the tools we use to name and offer insights into a wide-ranging set of observations and analyses that appear across documents. Erica R. Edwards, Roderick A. Ferguson, and Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, editors of Keywords for African American Studies, describe the process of creating keywords as "an intellectual practice that has served as a way of expanding and undoing assumptions about knowledge and power as those categories operate in our everyday lives."¹ Following this practice, the use of keywords in our project intends to articulate an (un)controlled vocabulary that is not finite or static but, rather, is capable of engaging iteratively in resistance against enclosure. The keywords we have created and chosen for the documents draw on Black intellectual and creative labor, including scholarship in Black studies, ethnic studies, and histories of Black Louisiana and the African diaspora. In other words, using keywords as an organizing tool allows us to name the range of Black kinships, communities, resistances, and livelihoods that emerge in the documents and connect those kinships and resistances in the past to current and future practices of Black living.

The four keywords that we have centered in this edition—fugitivity, kinship, manumission, and wellness—are described below. The descriptions also link to documents with excerpts tagged as specifically related to each of these terms. We invite you to consider the interactions—overlaps, tensions, and changes—between different applications of each keyword over time and across contexts.

Fugitivity Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies that captures the physical, metaphysical, armed, and everyday resistance of enslaved Africans and their allies against any and all aspects of enslavement. Rashauna Johnson, describing the “slave space” that was New Orleans, points to the specific geography of the region as lesson in fugitivity: Nonetheless, enslaved persons appropriated the places assigned them toward their own ends, a point that broadens the received gendered geographies of slave resistance. Because New Orleans was an important port city, it offered a diffuse set of pathways for escape – and recapture. If the politics of place could oppress, slaves reasoned, movement could also become an avenue to freedom. The connectedness that made the city’s location so desirable to merchants and imperial officials – its land passageways, river outlets, and Atlantic access – gave runaways an array of escape options. The fugitives redefined themselves in local “geographies of resistance,” or fled to other parts of the Atlantic World. ²

“Camera looking from water to stand of cypress along shore.” Louisiana Ecology and Conservation: Percy Viosca Jr. Collection, Louisiana Digital Library, Baton Rouge. https://louisianadigitallibrary.org/islandora/object/lsu-sea-pvc%3A263. However, fugitivity is a term encompassing more than marronnage (which is the act of absconding from enslavers and being out of reach of slaveholding authorities, even if temporarily). Fugitivity describes active and intentional resistance, as well as the acts of imagination and refusal that Africans and people of African descent engaged in against slaveholders’ gendered racial capitalistic regime. Fred Moten writes: What's at stake is fugitive movement in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure. This fugitive movement is stolen life, and its relation to law is reducible neither to simple interdiction nor bare transgression. Part of what can be attained in this zone of unattainability, to which the eminently attainable ones have been relegated, which they occupy but cannot (and refuse to) own, is some sense of the fugitive law of movement that makes black social life ungovernable, that demands a para-ontological disruption of the supposed connection between explanation and resistance.³ Fugitivity is a keyword in Black studies, and Keywords for Black Louisiana draws on insights from Black studies to better understand the sources Africans and their descendants appeared in, as well as to better interpret the individual and communal acts of resistance. Stories with this keywordMiguel and Pedro Escaped with María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Kinship Keywords for Black Louisiana views “kinship” and the battle for kin as central to Black life in the so-called New World. Kinship is the glue that knit Africans together in Gulf Coast Louisiana. Building and rebuilding fictive, chosen, and biological kin that reshaped bonds broken through the slave trade and the forced relocations of bondage in the New World occupied Africans and people of African descent from the moment of their initial capture on the African continent to the end of their lives. Larry Powell writes: Few aspects of African tradition were felt more strongly by slaves fresh from the homeland than a commitment to kinship. Severed from bloodlines, they invented new family ties on the spot. Fictive kinship was one type. Slaves acquired new siblings and new elders. But these arrangements were ad hoc and informal, anchored in nothing more solid than the sands of sentiment. Gender, age, and reproductive capacity played an important role in kinship relations and rebuilding kinship and community.⁴ As Jessica Marie Johnson writes, Understanding the role intimacy and kinship played in black women’s lives highlights black women’s everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their progeny. Safety, particularly safety from intimate violence, and security lay at the heart of decisions to secure or reject patrons, partners, lovers, and other kin. Black women’s intimacy with individuals ranged along the spectrum of coerced to strategic, from fraternal to sexual. Determined to build community and make generations, imagining futures that were, if not beyond bondage, at least buttressed against harm, they cultivated, protected, and defended kinship networks. They engaged in a range of practices meant to safeguard their bodies and their legacies. At times this included legitimating kinship ties through formal sacred institutions like the Catholic Church.⁵ Stories with this keywordThe Two-Year-Old Son of Marianne Dies from Worm DiseaseCatalina Swears She Hasn’t Harbored María JuanaJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomMama Comba's GombeauJeannot Testifies in the Case of the Disappearance of Enslaver CorbinJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Manumission Manumission is the act of freeing and being freed from slavery “while the institution of slavery continues,” as described by Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks.⁶ Manumission was a critical act and strategy enslaved people engaged in as they struggled for control over their lives, selves, and kinship networks. It was differentiated from emancipation, the legislative acts and actions (i.e., US Civil War) nominally freeing all enslaved people, wholesale or conditionally (i.e., with apprenticeship), across a given slaveholding society. Manumission was executed by individual enslavers on behalf of their respective property (enslaved people) through formal (i.e., legal) action. Manumission was regulated by imperial and national officials in all slaveholding societies, but the rules of manumission varied across empire, region, and even between towns or colonial outposts. In French Louisiana, manumission was regulated by a succession of Code Noirs (1685, 1724) which determined the guidelines enslavers needed to follow to complete an act of manumission. In Spanish Louisiana, the French ordinances were replaced by Spanish manumission law guided by the Siete Partidas, eighteenth-century Spanish imperial law, and the bandos de buen gobierno. The differences were stark between the two colonial periods. For example, during the French period, enslavers were required to secure ratification of the Superior Council for any manumissions. In the Spanish period, not only could enslavers directly manumit their enslaved property, but enslaved people could also appeal to the Spanish Cabildo (Louisiana's governing body during the Spanish period) for their freedom. Coartación, the process of appealing for your freedom, allowed a critical mass of Africans and people of African descent to secure their freedom. The audacity, creativity, and resistance practice of enslaved people demanding their legal freedom from their owners through coartación laid the foundation for the free population of color that would emerge in the later years of the eighteenth century.⁷ Stories with this keywordJuan Francisco Is Interrogated about María JuanaMaría Juana Sues for Her FreedomMarie Aram Secures Her FreedomMaria and Carlota Gain Their FreedomCatharina Knows Her WorthBaptiste Is Freed by the Spanish GovernorAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down Wellness Keywords for Black Louisiana views “wellness” expansively and radically to encompass an array of practices. For Africans in Gulf Coast Louisiana, wellness meant more than their physical health. Enslavers demanded control over Africans’ bodies, minds, and futures (via their reproductive labor). Wellness, for Africans, meant wresting control of their whole selves from enslavers. Wellness could mean body autonomy (laboring as they wished, playing as they wished, imbibing food and drink as they wished). It could mean spiritual practices that protected and preserved African systems of belief or maintained ways of organizing the supernatural that varied from Catholic doctrine. It could mean play, mischief, or even behavior the French marked as crimes, such as theft or running away, since these crimes often created space for broader wellness practices (feasts, gatherings, and marronnage).

Plate 23 of David Boilat’s Esquisses sénégalaises: physionomie du pays, peuplades, commerce, religions, passé et avenir, récits et légendes (Paris: P. Bertrand, 1853). Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora, accessed September 6, 2023, https://slaveryimages.org/database/image-result.php?objectid=998. Along with misreading wellness practices as crimes, enslavers also misread wellness practices as superstition. In 1734 Le Page du Pratz, for example, described the creation of gris-gris, protective devices composed of natural and inanimate materials, as being “very superstitious and attached to their prejudices.” As Gwendolyn Midlo Hall notes, Reference to grigri is found in New Orleans court records in 1773. Charms ritually fabricated and worn for protection, as well as charms intended to harm others, have kept their African names to the present day. Zinzin, an amulet of support or power in Louisiana Creole, has the same name and meaning in Bambara. Grisgris, a harmful charm, comes from the Mande word gerregerys. The words zvanga and grisgris are still widely used in New Orleans by speakers of English as well as by Creoles.⁸

“Grisgris, Water Bottle & Pouch,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, New York Public Library. New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed September 6, 2023, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-6eda-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Stories with this keywordMama Comba's GombeauLuison Claims Her FreedomJanette and Pierre: Children Enslaved on the Same PlantationHypolite Is Sold at Public AuctionThe King's Doctor Certifies that Hypolite Is Very SickHypolite Seeks Treatment from the King's DoctorGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are Sold at AuctionGuillermo, Catalina, and Her Children Are InventoriedFrançois Became More Ill Along the WayChef Dominique and Family Stay TogetherCatharina Knows Her WorthAntoine Is Willing to Burn It All Down