Creole: the History and Legacy of Louisiana's Free People of Color.

Edited by Sybil Kein. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000. Pp. xxiv, 344. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2601-2; cloth, $47.50, ISBN 0-8071-2532-6.)

Sybil Kein traces the genesis of this multidisciplinary collection of fifteen articles to a 1992 conference on "African-Americans and Europe" held in Paris. Three lively sessions on Creole Louisianians convinced Kein of the need to clarify the identity of the region's renowned gens de couleur. Building upon the spirit of the Parisian conference, Kein introduces the collection with a discussion of the noun "creole," a term generally applied to persons of African or European ancestry born in the Americas. The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Stephan Thernstrom, ed.; Cambridge, Mass., 1980), she concludes, best conveyed its meaning. The encyclopedia explained that "in the [twentieth] century, Creole most often refers to the Louisiana Creoles of color," persons who "constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United States" (quoted on p. xiii).

French scholar Michel Fabre, folklorist Barbara Rosendale Duggal, and linguist Fehintola Mosadomi reach deep into Louisiana's African, Antillean, and Latin European past to illuminate the historical and cultural legacy of Afro-Creole Louisianians. Contributions from Arthe A. Anthony, Mary L. Morton, and Violet Harrington Bryan attest to the culture's twentieth-century vibrancy. Bryan's study of Marcus B. Christian, a Depression-era poet whose intellectual orbit included literary artists Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker, is particularly insightful. Bryan describes a household in which Christian's father, a rural schoolteacher, taught his children to write poetry from an early age. She quotes Christian's recollection of "being perched upon one knee and my little twin-sister on the other, while he [Christian's father] read French poetry to us amid screams of childish laughter" (p. 43).

Bryan's study reveals a Creole identity that valued artistic and scholarly pursuits--an identity that produced the nation's first known African American short story, Victor Sejour's "Le Mulatre" (1837), and the nation's first anthology of African American poetry, Armand Lanusse's Les Cenelles (1845). That identity is very much in evidence in Creole with its numerous Afro-Creole contributors.

Kein's Creole also refutes recent revisionist scholarship that minimizes Louisiana's French/Caribbean heritage and downplays the exceptionalism of New Orleans gens de couleur. Caroline Senter, for instance, demonstrates the key role of the city's Afro-Creole leadership in Reconstruction politics. She explains the centrality of revolutionary republicanism (in both its European and Caribbean incarnations) to the Afro-Creole formulation of an "imagined American future" of liberte, egalite, fraternite (p. 278). Seizing upon the postwar era's revolutionary possibilities, the Creole intelligentsia directed its considerable literary talents to winning public support for a reconstructed nation of racial equality and universal male suffrage. Tragically, Senter concludes, Reconstruction's egalitarian promise of a multiracial "nation imagined" collapsed into a white supremacist "nation enacted" of segregation laws and statutory disfranchisement (p. 294).

Still, Afro-Creole radicals made remarkable Reconstruction gains, including the passage of an 1870 law sanctioning interracial marriages. As Anthony G. Barthelemy and Joan M. Martin show in separate essays, the statute, though short-lived, acknowledged long-standing practices. Despite French and Spanish bans on mixed-race sexual contact, colonial authorities rarely enforced such prohibitions. Interracial unions proliferated even after the Louisiana Purchase and the imposition of an Anglo-American, two-tiered racial order.

Authors Michel Fabre, Mary Gehman, and Lester Sullivan shed light on the extent of interracial kinship ties. Louisiana senator Pierre Soule, for instance, furnished numerous letters of recommendation to assist his prominent white allies in advancing the careers of their mixed-race sons. Such a phenomenon was surely unique to the nation's "Creole Capital." Beginning in 1843 with the publication in New Orleans of an interracial literary journal, L'Album Litteraire, Creole Louisianians of African descent have brought an international, multiethnic perspective to race relations. Kein's Creole is another important contribution to that historic tradition.

CARYN COSSE BELL
University of Massachusetts-Lowell