Creole Folklore and the Federal Writers￢ﾀﾙ Project

“I TALK MORE OF THE FRENCH” Creole Folklore and the Federal Writers’ Project by Nicholas T Rinehart So the legend of the wild men came gradually back to town, brought by the men who would ride out to watch what was going on, who began to tell how Sutpen would take stand beside a game trail with the pistols and send the negroes in to drive the swamp like a pack of hounds. The negroes could speak no English yet and doubtless there were more than Akers who did not know that the language in which they and Sutpen communicated was a sort of French and not some dark and fatal tongue of their own. —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! It is a recurring lament. “We have at our disposal not a single written testimony on the reality of slavery coming from a slave,” writes Louis Sala-Molins in Le code noir (1987), a history of the 1685 decree that offcially established racial slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean (qtd. in Miller 35). Refecting two decades later, Christopher Miller arrives at the same dire conclusion. “In the English-speaking world, and especially in the United States, the problem of silence [in the historical record of slavery] is signifcantly offset by testimonies and narratives, beginning with Equiano’s,” he explains. “But in French the problem is far more serious, for there are no real slave narratives in French—not as we know them in the Anglophone Atlantic, not that have yet been discovered. That absence, for now at least, haunts any inquiry into the history of slavery” (34). Doris Kadish, consider- ing the cultural history of slavery in the Francophone Caribbean, echoes this refrain: “The paucity and fragmentation of Francophone material stands in sharp contrast to the rich supply of American slave narratives, for which there is no French-language equivalent” (Slavery xiii). And in the words of Deborah Jenson, in her survey of Haitian letters of the Revolutionary period, this “silence of the slave in the French/Francophone print traditions contrasts with the existence of a considerable body . of slave and ex-slave narratives in the Anglophone arena . dating from the mid-eighteenth century through the 1930s” (2). But these exclusively Anglophone texts—more than 6,000 extant sources written, dictated, or otherwise produced by slaves and ex-slaves throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early-twentieth centuries—shed light primarily on the history of slavery in the United States, England, the British Caribbean, and Canada.1 Without French-language equivalents, however, the history of slavery in the Francophone arena (the French Caribbean, New France, and Canada) poses considerable interpretative challenges. “What would African American history and historiography be without the testimonies of Olaudah Equiano, Callaloo 39.2 (2016) 439–456 C A L L A L O O Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or the dozens of narratives of former slaves?” Miller asks. “That is the condition of the African diaspora in the French Atlantic” (36–37). These supposed defcits, gaps, lacks, and silences are deeply troubling perhaps most importantly for the unproductive ways in which they have framed and dictated scholarly inquiry into the history and culture of French slavery in the Americas. Miller’s framework, for example, is self-limiting. He considers hypothetically, “Why is there no Francophone Equiano?” and later bemoans that “there is no French Uncle Tom’s Cabin, no singularly infuential literary work from which abolitionism gathered strength in its own times and which can serve as a compelling aide-mémoire now” (33, 37). Miller may be correct that there is no Francophone Equiano and no French Uncle Tom’s Cabin, at least according to the terms of his analysis.2 And there are specifc and observable historical explanations for why that is the case. But when literary history concerns itself with questions of strict equivalence rather than deeper considerations of resonance—of affnity, kinship, and resemblance—it creates puzzles without viable solutions. The “epistemological challenge” posed by the history of French colonial slavery is both real and imagined (Miller 53). Sala-Molins, Miller, Kadish, Jenson, and the numerous other critics and scholars who have been on the lookout for the Francophone Equiano or the French Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and from various critical perspectives and orientations—may have doomed themselves from the start. Herein lies a thorny paradox: The supposed absence of Francophone slave narratives veils or obscures the history of the French Atlantic, yet, as I will show, the collective quest for French-language equivalents to the antebellum slave narrative has prevented the con- sideration of legitimate testimonial sources in the Francophone tradition. In searching for the Francophone Equiano—or Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs or even Harriet Beecher Stowe—we have overlooked forms of testimony produced by slaves and ex-slaves in the New World that do not conform to the generic conventions of the American slave narrative. Scholarly inquiry into the history of slavery in the French Atlantic has emphasized either the overseas colonial experience of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the imaginative evocation of this experience in works by later twentieth-century writers and flmmakers like Maryse Condé, Édouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Conf- ant, and Ousmane Sembène. More pointedly, the critical framework constructed around Olaudah Equiano and Harriet Beecher Stowe—the two pillars of Miller’s historicist cri- tique—privileges the long-eighteenth century and American antebellum period as sources for Francophone testimony. This chronological tunnel vision betrays an undeniable fact that the American slave narrative tradition is deeply fssured. Indeed, simple generic division of the “slave narrative” into two larger bodies of work—nineteenth-century autobiographies and twentieth-century interviews—tends to skew historical analysis in favor of one or the other (Bailey 383).3 Literary studies, too, must contend with this schism. The two waves of slave narrative production arose from vastly different historical contexts: the abolition of slavery and the Great Depression.4 Few considerations of the “slave narrative” and its signifcance in American literary history have attempted to reconcile this necessarily bifurcated tradition (Hill 68). Yet those in search of authentic French slave narratives would have done well to turn their attention to this second group, the “other slave narratives”—the approximately 4,000 ex-slave interviews collected and compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), between roughly 1936 and 1938. 440 C A L L A L O O The FWP narratives of Louisiana and its neighboring regions comprise Francophone texts of various forms: dictated accounts that were translated into English from the original French or Creole (often referred to as Louisiana patois), that include entire passages or turns-of-phrase in French or Creole, or that shed new light on the history of French slavery in the United States. This material demonstrates how French colonial slavery overlapped with its American counterpart to produce a Francophone testimonial literature that now exists as a highly compromised—linguistically and contextually—shadow in the archive of slavery in the New World. In order to begin to understand the massive body of work assembled by the FWP in the frst decades of the twentieth century, it is critical to see the WPA narratives as completely distinct from their antebellum antecedents. They are an altogether different beast.5 What truly distinguishes the two traditions besides the obvious fact of chronology is the editorial intent of their production.6 The antebellum slave narrative—especially in the boom years of 1830 to 1865—was processed largely if not completely through the presses of Anglophone abolitionism.7 The WPA narrative, on the other hand, was designed to document and preserve Negro folklore—including folk tales, games, songs, myths and superstitions, spiritual practices, and even the use of language. Indeed, “what most clearly distinguished these [ex-slave testimonies] from earlier efforts was their sociological character,” writes Norman Yetman of the WPA collection. “While ideological factors were never totally eliminated, and indeed, often inspired interest in their collection, the single-minded moralism that had pervaded earlier narratives was substantially diminished. The typical supplanted the dramatic as the primary focus of inquiry” (“The Background” 537). The appearance of the French language and its cognates—Creole or Louisiana patois—in the ex-slave narratives of Louisiana can be credited to the editorial effort to archive and champion vanishing Louisiana Creole cultural and linguistic practices. Ethnography displaced abolitionism.8 Exeunt William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, enter John A. Lomax and Lyle Saxon. Lomax rose to prominence as a folklorist and ethnomusicologist who traveled the American South with phonograph in hand, documenting vernacular American song forms from the cowboy ballad to the blues of the Mississippi Delta. He worked as National Ad- visor on Folklore and Folkways for the FWP and prepared the initial questionnaire used by feld workers to conduct interviews with former slaves.9 He “was especially intrigued by the spontaneity and uniqueness of Negro lore” and “was chiefy responsible for the inclusion of this activity as an integral aspect of the FWP program.” Under Lomax’s

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