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ABSTRACT
In June of 1788, nine enslaved children in French-colonial Haiti identified as ‘orphans’ were leased by their enslaver alongside enslaved adults. How might these enslaved people have described their relationship to each other? While enslavers found biological families a category of sufficient economic importance to record in words, leasing contracts omit the broader familial connections African diasporans made. Under slavery’s logic of human commodification, enslavers used the human beings they enslaved as conduits through which their investment capital could travel to increase in value. Aspects of enslaved African descendants’ humanity became relevant to enslavers only inasmuch as those aspects could increase profits. But what if non-biological family connections were important enough to affect the economics of leasing even if enslavers failed to record those relationships in words? Embracing a Black digital humanistic approach, this article uses statistical regression to read ‘along the bias grain’ of leasing contracts to argue that the so-called ‘orphaned’ children were, in fact, cared for by the adults in their lease. Engaging with histories of the African diaspora, this article argues that Marguerite and Augustine, the adult women in the lease, may have occupied community positions that incorporated elements of the Yoruba concept of ‘Public Mothers’.
Acknowledgements
I thank Michael Kwass, Jean Hébrard, Jessica Marie Johnson, Sasha Turner, and Bryce Corrigan for their generous advice, feedback, and support with the project.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 G.J. Afolabi Ojo, Yoruba Culture: A Geographical Analysis (London: University of Ife and University of London Press Ltd, 1996), 56–132; Kevin Roberts, ‘The Influential Yoruba Past in Haiti’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Matt D. Childs and Toyin Falola (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–84; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 85–110; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 207–20.
2 Thomas Haskell, ‘The True & Tragical Tale of “Time on the Cross”’ The New York Review (1975); Jennifer L. Morgan, ‘Accounting for “The Most Excruciating Torment”: Gender, Slavery, & Trans-Atlantic Passages’, History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 6, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 184–207, https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0184; Jessica Marie Johnson, ‘Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads’, Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658/.
3 ANOM NOT SDOM 1678 contracts dated June 13, 1788 and June 20, 1788. The contracts use the designation ‘orphelin’, the French word for orphan. According to a contemporary dictionary, ‘orphelin’ means ‘a child of a young age, who has lost their father and their mother, or one of the two, most especially the father … ’ ‘Orphelin’ in Dictionnaire critique de la langue française, v. 3 O-Z (Marseille: Jean Mossy Père et Fils, 1788), 37.
4 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
5 Michel Rolph-Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
6 Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Modern Black Atlantic (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
7 The Notaries, their cities, and their call numbers in the Archives nationales d’outre mer (ANOM) are Beaudoulx in Mirebalais, NOT SDOM 82–87; Bordier Jeune in Le Cap NOT SDOM 173–203; Michel in Limonade, NOT SDOM 1393–1405; Michel in Port-au-Prince, NOT SDOM 1382–1392; Moreau in Les Cayes, NOT SDOM 1438–1442; Seovaud in Les Cayes, NOT SDOM 1594–1603; Tach in Le Cap, NOT SDOM 1622–1637; and Thomin in Port-au-Prince NOT SDOM 1658–1681.
8 Johnson, ‘Markup Bodies’, especially 58–9, 61, 65–6, 71.
9 Dominique Rogers, ‘Les libres de couleur dans les capitals de Saint-Domingue: fortune, mentalités et integration à la fin de l’Ancien Régime (1776–1789)’, doctoral thesis Université Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, 1999, 98–102.
10 Robert Louis Stein, The French Slave Trade in the Eighteenth Century: An Old Regime Business (The University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 24–42; Rogers, ‘Les libres de couleur’, 98–102. Stuart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia press, 2001), 115–16.
11 Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Basse-Terre: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974), 374–5.
12 ANOM NOT SDOM 1594 ‘Reglement de Compte entre le Sr Verdier de Mornes … ’ 16 March 1778.
13 ANOM NOT SDOM 1630 ‘Remise de Bail à Ferme’ 24 August 1783.
14 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 139.
15 Archives Départementales de la Gironde [ADG], 73 J 99, ‘Mon Compte avec mon Oncle Desmé du Buisson, Ch de St Louis pour l’année 1765 (par l’abbé Desmé) ; ‘Compte de Gestion 1766 par l’Abbé Desmé’.
16 ADG 73 J 99.
17 Paul Cheney, Cul de Sac: Patrimony, Capitalism, and Slavery in French Saint-Domingue (University of Chicago Press, 2017), 71.
18 Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston: Heinemann Publishers, 1990); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New-World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). The works on gender, womanhood, and slavery in the French Caribbean are Gautier, Les Soeurs; Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
19 Francois Olivier-Martin, Histoire du Droit Français : des origines à la Révolution, deuxième tirage (Paris : Editions Domat Montchrestien, 1951); Edith Géraud-Llorca, ‘La Coutume de Paris outre-mer : l’habitation antillaise sous l’Ancien Régime’, Revue historique de droit français et étranger 60, no. 2 (April-June 1982): 207–59, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43846719.
20 Jean-François Niort et Jérémy Richard, ‘L’Édit royal de mars 1685 touchant la police des îles de l’Amérique française dit ‘Code Noir’: Comparaison des éditions anciennes à partir de la version ‘Guadeloupe’, Bulletin de la Société de la Guadeloupe 156 (mai-août, 2010): 73–89, https://doi.org/10.7202/1036845ar.
21 Médéric-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, Loix et constitutions des colonies françaises de l’Amérique sous le vent (Paris: by the author, 1784–1790) (hereafter cited as ‘MSM LC’), t. 2, p. 243, 1711.
22 ANOM NOT SDOM 175, 26 May 1779; NOT SDOM 178, 11 July 1781; NOT SDOM 178 31 July 1781; NOT SDOM 180, 31 May 1782; NOT SDOM 180, 31 July 1782; NOT SDOM 192, 6 December 1785; NOT SDOM 197, 27 January 1787; NOT SDOM 1385, 1 January 1779; NOT SDOM 1404, 1 March 1787.
23 NOT SDOM 175, 26 May 1779.
24 Archives départementales de la Gironde [ADG] 73J 93, Bretton des Chappelles à Delhaunay Mahé, September 19, 1780.
25 Johnson, ‘Markup Bodies’, 58–59, 64–65.
26 ANOM NOT SDOM 1678 June 13, 1788.
27 The r2 value of the regression was .636. This means that the independent variables collective account for 63.6% of the variation in lease prices (dependent variable).
28 Such a stipulation became relevant when determining the reduced rent owed by the lessee if any of the people being leased died. While the lessee was then responsible for reimbursing the lessor for the deceased captive’s assessed value, they were no longer required to pay rent for that captive. Setting the children’s rent at zero indicated that if they were to die during the lease, the lessee’s rent obligation would remain the same.
29 Ronald L. Wasserstein, Allen L. Schirm and Nicole A. Lazar, ‘Moving to a World Beyond “p<.05”’, The American Statistician 73 (March 2019): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/00031305.2019.1583913.
30 I received tremendous help, guidance, and advice from Dr. Bryce Corrigan, Senior Statistician and Lecturer at the SNF Angora Institute at Johns Hopkins University when building this regression model. This project would not be the same were it not for his patient stewardship and enthusiasm for the project.
31 Below are the results of the regression model, showing the effect of each independent variable (first column) on the price of a lease. 
32 Vasconcellos, Slavery, 9.
33 B.W. Higman, ‘African and Creole Slave Family Patterns in Trinidad’, Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 163–80, https://doi.org/10.1177/036319907800300205; Barbara Bush, ‘African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children: Traumas of Dislocation and Enslavement Across the Atlantic World’, Caribbean Quarterly 56, no. 1/2 (March-June, 2010), 69–94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40654953; Thorntons, Africa and Africans, 207, 218–19.
34 Morgan, Laboring Women, 3; Philip Morgan, A Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake & Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
35 Deborah Gray White, Arn’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Nortan Company, 1999), 106–8; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 11; Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South; Morgan, Laboring Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 20004), 114; Turner, Contested Bodies, 106.
36 Turner, Contested Bodies.
37 Jennifer Morgan, ‘“Some Could Suckle Over Their Shoulder”: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Genering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770’, The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 167–92, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953316; MSM 1797 (Vol 1), 38–42; Crystal Eddins, Rituals, Runaways, and the Haitian Revolution: Collective Action in the African Diaspora (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 94; Gautier, Les Soeurs, 117.
38 Vasconcellos, Slavery, 26; MSM (1797), Vol. 1, 38.
39 Valérie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 37–53.
40 Lorelle D. Semley, Mother is Gold, Father is Glass: Gender and Colonialism in a Yoruba Town (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Africa wo/man palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
41 David Eltis, ‘The Diaspora of Yoruba Speakers, 1650–1865: Dimensions and Implications’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 17–18, 17–39; G.J. Afolabi Ojo, Yoruba Culture: A Geographical Analysis (London: University of Ife and University of London Press Ltd, 1996), 18–20.
42 Robin Law, The Oyo Empire c.1600-c.1836: A West African Imperialism in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 1–5.
43 Law, Oyo Empire, 26–8.
44 Ogunyemi, Africa wo/man, 17–26.
45 Eltis, ‘The Diaspora’; Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘The Yoruba Factor in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 40–56; Eddings, Rituals, 37–44, 112–20, 294; Law, Oyo Empire, ch. 9.
46 Semley, Mother is Gold, 135–52, shows how public motherhood continued to be a cultural tradition among enslaved people in Brazil.
47 Semley, Mother is Gold; Kevin Roberts, ‘The Influential Yoruba Past in Haiti’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–84; Kevin Roberts, ‘Yoruba Family, Gender, and Kinship Roles in New World Slavery’, in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 248–59.
48 Archives départemntales de Loire-Atlantique [ADLA] 173 J 12.
49 Sasha Turner, ‘The Nameless and the Forgotten: Maternal Grief, Sacred Protection, and the Archive of Slavery’, Slavery & Abolition 38 (2017).
50 ANOM NOT SDOM 1667, 11 April 1783.
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Gregory Jamian Smaldone
Gregory Jamian Smaldone is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles St, Baltimore, MD, 21218, USA.