3 /  “The stain on it”: Exploring the Disposition of “Favored” Black Women

The record is vague as to why John Williams, a man approaching fifty, parted ways with his wife. Or why he was the one left with their three children, all boys, the youngest nine.¹ Williams decided to look for a new companion, but this one he would not marry. He would buy her. In 1841 he headed east from his home in New Orleans to Mobile, Alabama. While enslaved women could be found for sale in large numbers in New Orleans, he possibly decided that looking for her in Mobile was a better option. There he was unlikely to run into someone he knew who might share news of his new acquisition on the heels of a divorce. Mobile afforded him anonymity at the point of purchase and the opportunity to let neighbors become accustomed to this woman, who could be passed off as a housekeeper.

When he arrived at the Mobile facility where enslaved people were sold, his eyes landed not on a woman but someone closer to a girl. Louisa Picquet was her name. Just fourteen years old, she was of fair complexion. Her hair, however, was short because the owner she had recently irked cut it. Still, her hair was of “good quality” by the white normative standards of the society. Such standards, but also her youth and beauty, enabled her to be marketed as a fancy girl, a bondsgirl of the highest class. Years later, Picquet recalled there had been many like her in Mobile that day. “Plenty of them,” she said, as if to make a commentary on the demand for her kind, kept in a separate room away from enslaved men and less desirable women.²

When it was Picquet’s turn to be sold, the auctioneer assured would-be purchasers that she was not only “good-looking,” but a “good nurse” who was “kind and affectionate to children” and “never used to any hard work.”³ The bidding soon exceeded $1,000. Albert Clinton Horton, who within five years would become the first lieutenant governor of Texas, bid $1,400.⁴ Williams countered with $1,500, which no one topped.⁵

When he went to fetch Picquet, she was almost immediately instructed by one of the auctioneers to undress to assure Williams that he was getting his money’s worth. The practice of allowing men to examine, even to have sexual relations with, enslaved women and girls of color prior to purchasing them was widespread. Williams was so taken by Picquet, however, he declined to inspect her.⁶ Before they departed, she told him that she wanted to retrieve a floral muslin dress she owned. He told her to leave it, that he would buy her “plenty of nice dresses.”⁷

They traveled by boat to New Orleans. Along the way, Picquet recalled that he confessed that he was “getting old” and after seeing her, decided that he would spend his final days with her. He assured her that if she behaved herself, he would treat her well. If she did not, “he’d whip [her] almost to death.”⁸ Within six years, Williams was on his deathbed. Picquet recalled that it was a cold night. She helped him to a chair that was close to the fire so that he could warm himself.⁹ Beside him was a table on which he began to write.¹⁰ “He told me he was goin’ to die, and that he could not live,” Picquet remembered.¹¹ Williams said that he would give her “something for the children.”¹² He then disclosed his intention to leave her “the things in the house, the beds, and tables, and such.”¹³ He pledged, too, to free her and the two surviving children she had produced with him (another two had died). He had one condition, however. He wanted her to go to New York. He figured that if she told no one that she was of mixed race, she could easily pass as white and find a white “mechanic—someone who had a trade, and was able to take care of” her and their children.¹⁴ Picquet chose instead to go to Cincinnati, partly because she knew freedpeople there from her childhood days in Georgia and partly because she lacked the funds to go farther. “I had just enough money to get there, and a little bit over,” she recalled.¹⁵

When she arrived in Cincinnati, she, like the women discussed in the previous chapter, represented a certain kind of freedwoman, one who possessed the ability to do things other people of color could not owing to her earlier ties to Southern white men. Such women and children were not only relocated but also chose to migrate to that city, pushed by a host of factors, including kinship, ease of access by river, the chance to obtain work not easily available in slave territory, and to attend school.

The details of Picquet’s life are given in an 1861 memoir written by the Reverend Hiram Mattison, a Buffalo abolitionist. Mattison’s wish to share Picquet’s story some years after her arrival in Ohio was driven by his desire to draw attention to the horrors of slavery, which in his mind included immoral interracial relationships such as the one in which Picquet had found herself. It did not matter that her former master had freed her. To Mattison, Williams’s actions were inexcusable and representative of the evil behavior in the South. So intense was his anger at white slaveholders and their exploitation of women and girls like Picquet that he published the book himself.

The narrative Mattison published reflected the world that Picquet once inhabited. She had been a fancy girl, even though the term does not appear in any surviving record concerning her life. There, however, can be little doubt as to her status in the marketplace: she was sold as a teenager for a price that far exceeded that of most female slaves in her age group. She became the sexual companion of a white man who fathered her four children. She resided for a time in New Orleans, a city where fancies lived in great numbers.

This chapter turns to Picquet and other African American women and girls to continue examining black-white intimate unions before the Civil War but focuses more closely on the mind-set of the women and girls who entered into these unions by choice or force. Like the women and girls mentioned thus far, Picquet and the others discussed in this chapter consciously and deliberately profited from nineteenth-century ideas about womanhood that were not intended for them. In and outside urban spaces in which they moved or were taken, they were the beneficiaries of the obvious changing meaning of womanhood and motherhood. Black women were said to be promiscuous and thus fitting sex partners or sex workers. Depending on a prospective buyer’s needs, their reproductive capabilities were considered either a financial boon or a burden. Indeed, some white men wanted sex, not more children. Their selfishness and cruelty were in keeping with other outrages endured by African American women and girls over the years.¹⁶ However, though shaped in demeaning ways, some enslaved African American women and girls assertively and creatively exploited their condition. But when studied closely, it becomes apparent that such girls and women cannot be reduced to a common denominator. They were individuals who maneuvered strategically to survive and maximize the possibilities of their circumstances. Their ability to do as much reveals another way in which slavery has been America’s greatest historical problem.¹⁷ The institution was filled with contradictions. These womens white contemporaries often saw the limits of their own power and glimpsed power in oppressed women, even girls.

FIGURE 10. Cover of freedwoman Louisa Picquet’s biography, which was written and published by the Buffalo abolitionist and Methodist minister Hiram Mattison. Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon, or, Inside Views of Southern Domestic Life (New York: The Author, 1861). Courtesy of Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

As with Avenia White and Rice Ballard, it is a challenge to see the possibilities for intimacy between Picquet and John Williams. Because we are mostly privy to what happened after Ballard freed White and Johnson and their children, Picquet’s life gives us a better understanding of what happened between enslaved women or girls and the men who owned them before the former and their children were freed. Unlikely behavior, including real intimacy, can be seen between Picquet and her former master according to the story relayed by Picquet herself. If, as Williams declared on his deathbed, Picquet was fair enough to pass for “white,” she presumably could have fled to freedom with her two equally “white” children without waiting for his death. But she chose not to, perhaps out of fear of the unknown. Conversely, he, rather than freeing her and their children before dying, could have sold them all and given the proceeds to his “white” children or to his brother, from whom he had borrowed the money to buy Picquet, a debt that remained outstanding at the time of his death. But he did not.

Whatever their motives, Picquet and Williams reconciled themselves to life together for six years. A divorced white father of three who was growing older and a girl of African descent who bore him four children had to figure out how to share the same space. To be sure, given the power imbalance between an enslaved woman-child of color and the white man who owned her, she had to relinquish much even in his final hours. She helped him from his deathbed to sit closer to the fire to warm himself when she could have refused or pushed him to the floor.¹⁸ Perhaps in acknowledgment of Picquet’s assistance then and earlier, Williams promised to free her and their children. This was a huge gift. Other gifts, less momentous ones occurring in their daily lives, were important, too.

Even though he possessed the privileges and power that came from being white and male, in order to make life in his household tolerable for him and them, Williams had to treat her and their children with some measure of kindness if he was going to get part of what he hoped for in purchasing her: companionship and a caretaker for his children. Such considerations reveal the scope of white men’s concerns for enslaved people.¹⁹ Given the abuse that Piquet frequently suffered, to conjecture that love figured into her and Williams’s relationship, something almost thinkable for Ballard and White—she sent him her love—would be unwarranted. Caution is required in the reading of ail historical sources, among them interviews with former bondsmen and bondswomen. It is plausible to say, as some have, that because Mattison narrated Picquet’s tale, her power and voice were mediated and diminished.²⁰ Yet her participation in this literary project was calculated, as were her interactions with Williams.

Whereas her time with Mattison was regulated by a regimen in which she answered questions and offered information about her life in order that they might complete the book, her life with Williams required an entirely different, less orchestrated set of tactics that, too, unfold like the hidden transcript of other oppressed people about whom James Scott has written.²¹ She carefully carried out prescribed tasks—cooking, cleaning, and raising the children—attending to her own whenever possible. She also gave more of herself, and not just sexually. Williams did the same. Like the relationship between Ballard and White, the favor Picquet and her children received from Williams rested largely on what he permitted from himself, even if her wishes were considered.

In the end, Picquet’s spirit was not broken by her experiences with Williams. Throughout her life she was self-possessed. She is thus a fitting model of certain antebellum black women who benefited from white men’s generosity. Such generosity gave her the courage to speak confidently, even angrily about her ordeal. Telling of this attitude is the following exchange between her and Mattison, the abolitionist, about her sale in Mobile to Williams.

The paradoxical world both she and Mattison inhabited enabled her brazen response. She had been enslaved, but she had access to things for which white women longed: “plenty” of dresses and, more important, shelter and food for herself and her children. Indeed, Picquet exhibited the “sass” heard from many other oppressed women of color across time.²³ Suggesting the assertiveness of such women, even those who had not had coerced sexual relations with white men, was a bondswoman who chastised a Union soldier for stealing her quilts during the Civil War. She asked him why he did it if he was fighting for “niggers.”²⁴ Consider, too, an enslaved girl who had reportedly been raised to conduct herself “like a lady,” according to the Swedish reformer Frederica Bremer.²⁵ Her former owners had allowed her to learn how to embroider and play the piano. Bremer also reported that they had “treated her … as if she had been their own.” Her former owners eventually detected that the girl’s disposition eventually grew “too high for her.”²⁶ To humble her, she was taken to jail to be sold. There is also the case of Julie Tillory, an African American who resided in the South during the postbellum period. When asked by a northern missionary working for the Freedmen’s Bureau why she would prefer to leave her former master’s plantation where she had food and shelter, Tillory replied, “To ‘joy my freedom.”²⁷ Acting similarly was Dink Watkins, another freedwoman, representative of African Americans who were unwilling after emancipation to stay in marriages informally arranged by their former masters. In refusing to accept such a situation, Dink told a North Carolina court, “I am my own woman and I will do as I please.”²⁸ Like Picquet and Mattison, there was a pronounced imbalance in the distribution of power between these black girls and women and the whites to whom they spoke, even though they were sometimes aligned, in the broadest terms, on the issue of slavery. This imbalance did not prevent black women like Picquet from speaking their minds.

Black women who spent considerable time with white men intuited that they might have some of the liberties these men claimed. They were capable of making the best of a bad situation owing to their master’s proximity and sometimes of turning it into some advantage. Likewise, the resilience of the human spirit doubtless enabled many of them to adapt to their circumstances. Picquet certainly took advantage of her earlier status as a special kind of enslaved person and spoke boldly, even rudely. Throughout the exchange quoted above, she acted as if she knew more about slavery than an abolitionist and a minister. And of course she did.

Mattison eventually abandoned the question-and-answer format of the memoir in order to steer readers to the parts of her life that he felt were most important. Because she needed him, she wisely worked with him. She had done the same with Williams. What follows are more details from her narrative, which allow us to see more of what Williams had engendered when fostering a level of intimacy with her. Her and her children’s resulting manumission deepens our understanding of the complexities of black-white intimacies, as well as race and class affairs in and outside the Old South.

* * *

Picquet was the daughter of an enslaved seamstress of mixed race named Elizabeth who was in fact still alive at the time Piquet met Mattison. In fact, Picquet wanted to use the proceeds from the book’s sale to purchase her mother, who was still enslaved in Texas.²⁹ Elizabeth gave birth to Picquet in 1828 in Columbia, South Carolina.³⁰ The white man who owned them was Picquet’s father. This led to problems in his household. Two months after she was born, his wife noticed that Picquet bore an uncanny resemblance to the child she had given birth to two weeks earlier. She ordered her husband to remove Elizabeth and her young child from their home. “Then I was sold to Georgia,” Picquet told Mattison.³¹

If the sudden departure of a fair-skinned child from a home announced more than that of any dark-skinned child that a household had witnessed both exploitation and domestic tension, the arrival of such a child and her mother to a new household broadcast the same. The bondspeople residing on a cotton plantation in Monticello, Georgia, sixty miles southeast of Atlanta, probably decided as much about Elizabeth and her infant upon their arrival. A white man named “Mr. Cook,” their new owner, owned the property.

Elizabeth nursed Picquet and the child to whom Cook’s wife had recently given birth and eventually became a cook. As she grew older, Picquet herself tended to the Cooks’ children.³² While living in Georgia, her mother became pregnant by Cook, who not only sexually abused Elizabeth, but whipped Picquet. His disagreeable disposition was obvious to others. Cook liked to throw lavish parties but did not like to pay his bills. In 1841 creditors arrived and claimed his plantation. They also took the warehouse he owned. Cook sent his wife to live with her sister in another part of the state. With Picquet, her mother, a fair-skinned blue-eyed enslaved woman named Lucy, and Lucy’s four children beside him, Cook left for Mobile.³³

The arrival of the eight individuals may not have appeared too unusual in Mobile, which, like New Orleans, had a reputation as a city in which race mixing occurred. The first capital of French Louisiana in 1702, Mobile was distinguished by its large number of free people of color, among them Afro-Creole residents of French and Spanish descent who were fair-skinned.³⁴ While living in Mobile, Cook impregnated Picquet’s mother again. As had been the case with the child she had carried in Georgia, she lost this baby. There would be yet another pregnancy. This time Elizabeth gave birth to a boy she named John.³⁵

Picquet soon discovered that she and her mother and Lucy and Lucy’s children lived in a particular milieu, one in which Southern white men frequently took black women or girls as their sexual partners. After Cook hired out Picquet and the others to work for local residents, she encountered another person in this very situation. While working as a domestic servant in one home, Picquet observed a frequent male visitor who owned a “very light” girl from Charleston.³⁶ He did not share a home with her but “kept her boarding out” so as to not draw attention to himself. Picquet discovered their living arrangement from a young enslaved man of mixed race who served as this visitors driver. Upon discovering that she, too, was of mixed race and not white, the driver was attracted to Picquet. He began to visit on Sundays and soon asked her to marry him. She mulled over his proposal, recalling, “I liked him very well.”³⁷

Perhaps because he was interested in Picquet, too, a white servant who also worked for her beau’s master grew jealous and told their master that Picquet’s young man was actually interested in the Charleston girl, who was sent to New Orleans where she almost certainly was marketed as a fancy girl.³⁸ Picquet’s beau was whipped. Seeing this sequence of events, Picquet and her beau decided that they would escape. According to Picquet, an “Englishman, or Scotchman,” told her beau that given his complexion, he could easily escape to free territory and that he should take Picquet with him. Revealing the degree to which she had her own mind, Picquet refused, for one reason: her beau could not read or write. Because of his illiteracy, she was afraid that they would be discovered to be people of color. Picquet did talk to him for two hours before bidding him farewell, however.³⁹

Picquet’s awareness of the opportunities to improve her life was evident not only in her decision to not leave with her beau, but in the telling of this story. For example, she announced the skin complexion of the girl from Charleston and her beau or provided those details after being asked. She thus revealed the hardships but also the advantages of people of mixed race, especially females. Because she and the Charleston girl had fair complexions, they were desirable to men, both white and black, and therefore vulnerable to the exploitation that often accompanied that desirability. On the other hand, some of them could pass as white and possibly escape to free territory.

Interestingly, Mattison failed to make much of either fact because doing so would reveal the degree to which Picquet herself bought into prevailing ideas concerning power in people of mixed race, a status Mattison himself deplored as it announced immoral behavior between white men and women of color. Noting how Picquet capitalized on her unfortunate condition to enhance her life would not further his goals of condemning Southern white men and the institution of slavery. If he drew attention to her views, Picquet and other enslaved women and girls would seem to be accomplices in, rather than victims of, one of the most degrading, morally repugnant, and exploitative aspects of slavery. Rather than present them as individuals who were consciously attempting to control their destinies, something he was doubtless aware of, Mattison remained silent. He needed Picquet to conform to the role he envisioned for her, not an unequal partner in a relationship in which she sought to maximize her well-being.

Throughout her narrative, Picquet presented herself as someone who constantly assessed how powerful or weak she really was in relation to each person she encountered. Avenia White did something similar, revealing how such careful thinking figured into their ability to establish or resist intimacy with white men. Recall White’s worries about Mary January, the woman who slandered her. It is impossible to know how White and January measured up beside each other. For example, both women may have had fair complexions, giving them relatively equal social advantages. Or one of them may have been dark-skinned and thus less privileged socially. But given the amount of time White spent with Ballard, which permitted their evident closeness, White cleverly maneuvered and made appeals to him, often mentioning the children as a means to gain his attention. Picquet found other ways to maneuver. In fact, she was compelled to do as much when Cook, her master, eventually made advances toward her.

Cook did so when he hired her out to work as a servant for a couple who ran the boardinghouse in which he resided. “One day Mr. Cook told me I must come to his room … and take care of him,” Picquet told Mattison. Without offering details, it was understood that “take care of him” meant more than attending to Mr. Cook’s feigned illness. He wanted to have sex with her.

Picquet shared her suspicions with the mistress of the house, who conspired to help Picquet, now fourteen years old, avoid Mr. Cook. When he called for Picquet, the mistress sent one of Lucy’s sons, who also worked in the house. Upon seeing this child, Cook demanded that Picquet be sent to him instead. She went but only during the daylight and thus managed to avoid his advances.⁴⁰ Aware of Picquet’s tactics, Cook reminded her that she “belonged” to him. He then whipped her. “Around your shoulders, or how?” Mattison asked. Picquet replied that he had whipped her around her shoulders. She noted that at the time she was wearing a “very thin” and “low-neck’d dress.”⁴¹

Cook grew desperate. After a night of drinking with male friends, he offered to give her “a whole handful of half-dollars” if she promised to visit him later. Though Mattison never admitted as much, because to do so would reveal that some enslaved African American women and girls did consent to sexual relations with their masters in exchange for something, in this case, money, Picquet agreed to do so. She wanted to use the money to purchase some muslin cloth to make a dress.⁴² This was the dress she wanted to retrieve after she was sold to Williams in Mobile. But after she failed to come to his room as promised, Cook beat her once more.⁴³

Picquet’s troubles in Mobile with Mr. Cook ended when a sheriff apprehended him on behalf of his creditors. Picquet, her mother, her brother, John, who was now two months old, and Cook’s other slaves were put up for sale. They had been in Mobile not even a year. It was at the auction facility that Williams saw Picquet and the other bondspeople that Cook brought from Georgia. The soon-to-be lieutenant governor of Texas bought her mother. He also purchased her little brother and three others, including a male carriage driver who later became her mother’s husband.⁴⁴ Interestingly, some of Lucy’s siblings, who were evidently free people, purchased and freed Lucy.⁴⁵

What happens next reveals the frequency with which white men acknowledged black children, even those who were owned by other white men—something that was not uncommon given the proximity of many enslaved women to their master’s white male associates and friends. Two white men with whom Lucy had had her children arrived to purchase two of them. “Mr. Moore bought his, and Mr. Hale bought his,” Picquet recalled.⁴⁶ In addition, a man who owned two of Lucy’s sisters purchased her two remaining children. It is worth noting that one of her sisters had been taught to read and write, something of which Picquet was aware and unafraid to mention, although, again, Mattison, made little of the fact. Lucy’s sister was even allowed to “learn music” before her death, upon which her master made the other sister his sexual companion. His capacity to care at the same time that he exploited his female slaves was elsewhere evident in his traveling to Mobile with Lucy’s relatives, who might have been raped or resold into slavery themselves. While his own interests were uppermost in his mind, in accompanying them he provided protection against serious risks.

Picquet herself was purchased by her final owner, the newly divorced John Williams. As she and Williams walked away, Picquet’s mother cried and prayed aloud to “the Lord” to go “with her only daughter.”⁴⁷ Feeling helpless to calm her mother, Picquet left with Williams. She was just fourteen.

During her time in New Orleans Williams exploited Picquet sexually but also tormented her through his possessiveness. He sometimes accused her of wanting to be with others when white men appeared to make advances to her.⁴⁸ Many attempted to sweet-talk African American women and girls into being their partners, even if they were already “spoken for.” For example, one 1820 advertisement in a Natchez newspaper asked for the return of a sixteen-year-old girl of mixed race named Octavia who was wearing a light calico frock and a red-striped handkerchief on her head when she disappeared. Her owner, a Kentucky man, promised $10 to anyone who could help him find her. He seemed equally interested in the person who “seduced her away,” and warned that if he could prove that this happened, the responsible person would be “brought to justice.”⁴⁹

Williams evidently thought Picquet would be open to such an overture. He grew so suspicious that Picquet began to pray that he would die. There was irony in this, for she had learned how to pray from her former mistress in Georgia. Mrs. Cook read the Bible to her and other slaves. Even following the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion, which was the impetus for many prohibitions on enslaved people, including restrictions on independent religious gatherings, the prevailing racial ideology of the day regarded people of African descent as being unintelligent. This belief led some whites, perhaps including Mrs. Cook, to conclude that the enslaved would not internalize what they heard. There may have been another motive, social control. Many Bible verses instruct readers and listeners to accept their lot in life without protest or resistance because their reward will come in the next life. Mrs. Cook almost certainly picked such verses, although Picquet appropriated biblical instruction for her own purposes. She learned that if she prayed the beatings she received from her master would not hurt so badly.⁵⁰

It is worth noting in reading Biblical verses, Mrs. Cook shared something else that stayed with Picquet: the sinfulness of adultery. Her mistress pointed to Lucy, the blue-eyed bondswoman, as an example of an adulteress, although she never revealed white men’s role in Lucy having four children. Mrs. Cook’s self-righteousness suggests again the degree to which white women helped maintain the racial hierarchy in the Old South, oppressing African Americans as did men.

Revealing the extent to which she had internalized what she learned about adultery from the Bible, Picquet regarded her relations with Williams as living in sin. On the day he died, she dressed up and went to church. Doing so allowed her publicly to express her independence and also to make amends for behavior that, although coerced, she nonetheless regarded as immoral.

She headed to a Methodist chapel where a minister who had known of her situation presided. At one point, he referred to Williams as “her husband.” Evidently even he acknowledged that an enslaved woman had access to some of the privileges of married white women, revealing the complexities of race and class in New Orleans. Even Southern whites struggled to describe the “favor” of certain enslaved women and girls. Picquet, however, was more open to acknowledging the truth about her situation. “He wan’t my husband,” she said to herself then, and later to Mattison.⁵¹ She was right. While she had exchanged subsistence for sex, given Louisiana’s miscegenation laws, Williams could not give her the full legal protection of matrimony, a fact borne out shortly after his death when his brother arrived. He ordered Picquet out of the house in which they had lived, saying he would not pay the rent.

While she pondered her options, Picquet longed to see her mother, who she had heard from just once in the six years she had been with Williams. In fact, Williams read the one letter from her mother, who was still owned by the Texas lieutenant governor. In the letter, her mother requested sugar and tea.⁵² Aware of her daughters living situation, she had evidently decided that Picquet could provide such things. That she asked for minor luxuries possibly reflected her awareness, too, that certain goods were “rewards” for female slaves who engaged, willingly or not, in relations with white men. In asking for tea, Picquet’s mother also disturbed stereotypes. While tea in the Western world was originally a fashionable drink associated with the highly cultured, it eventually became an item of mass consumption in Britain and America.⁵³ By the nineteenth century, the elite championed it to decrease alcohol consumption, which was becoming an urban problem.⁵⁴ Tea therefore continued to be associated with respectability, a quality not typically associated with African American women. Still, this Old World indulgence and ritual allowed an aging, once desirable bondswoman to connect to another kind of life, one that she might have felt she deserved. From a plantation in Texas, she thirsted for a small luxury. “She could always get it in Georgia, if she had to take in workin and do it at night,” Picquet said, before expressing her regret that she was not able to fulfill her mother’s request.. “I had no money,” she stated. “I could not send her anything.”⁵⁵

We may wonder why Picquet did not do as her mother had. Why did she not take in laundry or sewing as a means of earning money? Perhaps because she and Williams had established some sort of rapport that Picquet had helped foster. She was almost certainly wary of any undertaking that might give independence. Although her passiveness can be criticized, she acted strategically because she did not want to upset him. She was probably not alone in having done this. Sella Martin, a former bondsman from North Carolina, recalled that his mother “had a separate cabin set up” for herself on her master’s estate, which was “very rare.” He added that his mother’s duties “around the house were merely nominal.”⁵⁶

As was the case with Picquet, we may wonder whether the circumstances of Martin’s mother’s life were also due to a level of intimacy between her and her master. Martin’s mother had a separate cabin in which she lived, and her work duties were light. Neither would have been forthcoming had she displeased him. These visible privileges were related to something occurring behind closed doors. Whatever one thinks of someone who bartered her body in return for privileged treatment, the critical point is that she received something in return, and those around her recognized as much. Martin’s son indeed carried the memory of it for the rest of his life.

Martin’s mother had to give up something to receive favor, but her owner did, too. That the agreement was manifestly unequal—Martin’s mother must have offered much more than she received in return—does not alter the fact that she was a participant in a bargain and that the bargain itself was evidence that white supremacy was not absolute. Something similar happened with Picquet, who nonetheless prayed that her master would die.

Williams indeed grew ill.⁵⁷ But she did not leave him. An unarticulated agreement between them resulted in enough trust that enabled her to endure her situation and to enhance his as well. After all, he was a divorced father of three sons. He acquired someone to look after him and his children, and she acquired things—a home, meals, and clothing—that made her life more bearable. In fact, had she been with her second master, Cook, longer, a similar agreement might have been reached. She had already demonstrated her ability to bargain concerning that floral muslin dress. She agreed to have sex with him in exchange for money, although she did not keep her end of the deal.

In Williams’s case, it appears she offered her body but also her companionship and labor until he died. That she did not run away with her children, all of whom, like her, could have “passed,” suggests that something kept her with him, probably security. It may have been inertia. Possibly, too, she resigned herself to suffering. We do not know every detail of her life, but their relationship was surely typical of many others in their day. Even for many white wives, marriage and subservience to their husbands was a fate to be endured rather than enjoyed, one to which they submitted because the alternative—financial insecurity and all that went with spinsterhood—was worse. Such black-white intimacies and the inconsistencies they revealed were visible to those close to them who could see the benefits and costs incurred, among them, Helene Hopkins, a “colored” New Orleans laundress who befriended Picquet. “She was very kind to me, and used to give me victuals when I did not know where to get it,” said Picquet. Knowing that Picquet’s security had ended with Williams’s death, Hopkins told her to leave for Cincinnati after his brother announced that “by rights,” she “belonged to him.”⁵⁸ At Hopkins’s urging, Picquet left New Orleans, curiously with funds provided by her former master’s brother.

Suggesting that an unrecorded agreement existed between her and Williams, his brother sold the furniture he had given her to a secondhand store and gave her the proceeds to enable her to leave the South.⁵⁹ We may wonder how she secured the favor of her deceased master’s brother. Quite possibly her faithfulness to Williams elicited his sympathy and support. Moreover, in helping her and her children he was respecting his brother’s wishes.

After receiving the proceeds from the sale of her owner’s furniture, and following Hopkins’s advice, Picquet headed to Cincinnati. She went there rather than to New York as her master had instructed because she knew that people she had known in Georgia as a child lived there. Like Avenia White and countless other women in their circumstances, Picquet realized it was not enough simply to be free. In order to exploit her life as a free woman, she needed assistance, especially because she no longer had a male head of household.

Fortunately, by the time Picquet reached Cincinnati the city’s black community had formed several benevolent associations to help new arrivals, unmarried mothers included. In 1848 fifty African American women of the city formed the Female American Association to care for invalid and sick people of color.⁶⁰ A year later, the state’s legislature repealed many of the city’s black codes.⁶¹ A law was passed in 1849 allowing the opening of black schools, and black Cincinnatians quickly did so.⁶² Picquet’s four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, her only surviving child—shortly after her arrival, her baby boy died—attended such a school even though racism remained endemic in Cincinnati, as it did throughout the country.

Racism did not prevent African Americans from unleashing their own brand of race-based resentment on each other, adding to the complexities of race and class relations in antebellum America. Cincinnati was a city in which mixed-race people had certain advantages, just as they had in the South. Many advantages turned on skin complexion. In keeping with contemporary views of race and the caste hierarchy of the African American community, people of mixed race tended to marry other people of mixed race, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century. If they married other blacks, it was usually a dark-skinned man marrying a fair-skinned woman.⁶³ This was the case despite their willingness to assist other African Americans, including their darker-skinned brethren, in the face of outside threats that they themselves confronted. Picquet herself was hyperalert to such things. She met and married Henry Picquet, a man of mixed race from Augusta, giving her the surname by which she is remembered.⁶⁴

Indicative of such marriage patterns by individuals of mixed race is an 1853 letter to the American Colonization Society, which helped free blacks emigrate to Africa as an alternative to enduring racism in the United States:

The author of this letter was of mixed race and had married a woman of similar ancestry. Like other African Americans, he had experienced enough white hostility to consider leaving the country. Equally significant, no matter the level of racism he encountered, like Picquet, he possibly exhibited his own racial prejudice by marrying a mixed-race rather than a dark-skinned woman. Picquet’s husband might have felt the same about marrying her, and her sensitivity to complexion suggests that she did, too. Their fair skin was not the only thing they had in common. Henry was also the product of a black-white union that resulted in enslaved women and children receiving favor. Indeed, Henry’s father was a white Frenchman. His mother, a dark-skinned woman, had been his father’s enslaved companion. But after the latter’s marriage to a white woman, Henry, his mother, and her four siblings were freed and sent to Cincinnati.⁶⁶ Though free, Henry subsequently returned to the South and married a slave woman. There he watched her become the mistress of a white man, this one from Macon, Georgia. Henry’s father then helped him purchase his daughter from his wife’s new owner. Henry went on to raise the child. Said Picquet, he worked all day “and then [worried with] the child all night.”⁶⁷

Henry’s child was not as fair as Picquet or her young Elizabeth. Again revealing her hyperawareness of skin complexion was her response to Mattison’s inquiry concerning Elizabeth’s appearance. He asked whether she appeared as “white” as Picquet. Picquet replied, “Oh yes; and a great deal whiter.”⁶⁸ She also stated that Henry’s child was “the darkest one in the house.” But wishing to emphasize her white ancestry, she noted, too, that her hair was “only little bit wavy.”⁶⁹

Given her attitude concerning skin color, it is reasonable to wonder whether Picquet herself would have been less compassionate—as was the case with some fair-skinned African Americans in the South who enslaved other African Americans—had she not suffered in the manner that she had.⁷⁰ In other words, it is reasonable to ask, what would Picquet have been like if she had possessed all the advantages of some women of mixed race?

She had once resided in New Orleans, with its three-tiered social order, whites, free people of color, or libres, and slaves. A free person of color’s status rested not just on her legal status, but on her skin. Picquet herself certainly thought that fair-skinned African Americans were of a higher status than those who were “colored” like her friend Helene Hopkins, even if the latter were free. Yet, despite having bought into the caste culture that placed a premium on “whiteness,” she and Hopkins bonded like other African American women in New Orleans and elsewhere who forged a kinship networks in and outside plantation communities.⁷¹ However, the bond between these two across complexion and possibly class lines may have been less likely to have formed had Picquet not been in dire straits following Williams’s death.

But fair-skinned women like Picquet still had a unique status, no matter their suffering, because they intrigued others. The caricature of the tragic mulatto appeared in numerous mid-nineteenth-century imagined works, some produced for stage. Some such works were midcentury fiction, including antebellum German “urban mystery” novels, which were set in major cities.⁷² These urban mysteries evidently filled a gap left by midcentury American novels, which generally focused on rural and frontier regions. Their basic plot was to present the urban space as something recognizably sinister. But this space also revealed the dramatic impact of the New World generally and urban life specifically on German immigrants who shared with other whites a fascination with women of mixed race.⁷³ For example, one serialized German novel in a New Orleans newspaper described the freed offspring of a white planter and his “favorite” slave:

Literary descriptions of women of mixed race were not restricted to German writers. In an 1856 novel, Captain Mayne Reid, a British writer, presented the tragic mulatta archetype in a character being chased by a young Englishman who was attracted to “her golden tresses.”⁷⁵ In noting her physical features, Reid, as did others in the United States and Europe, objectified her. Though aware of such objectification, real-life women like Picquet recognized the advantages it brought. In order fully to understand Picquet’s personality in this regard and generally, it is necessary to know more about her life after she fled to Cincinnati.

She and her husband initially lived on Third Street, near Race Street, in the Fourth Ward, which by midcentury encompassed the city’s busy central waterfront district. This area had the second highest concentration of people of mixed race in Cincinnati, behind only Bucktown, the heart of the black business community. Picquet and Henry shared their home with her daughter, Elizabeth, and his daughter, Harriet. Sarah, another daughter, was born in 1852 and Thomas, a son, in 1856.

While African Americans made inroads as businesspeople in Cincinnati—for example, the black-owned Iron Chest Company possessed three brick buildings leased to whites—most, like the Picquets, were confined to menial positions. Even though those of mixed race sometimes had better paying and skilled work, this was not always the case. Picquet worked as a laundress and her husband worked as a janitor in the Carlisle Building on Fourth and Walnut Streets, two blocks east and one block north of their home.⁷⁶ Pervasive racism had an impact on the quality of the Picquets’ lives, although they were better positioned than many African Americans in Cincinnati, some of whom lived in makeshift homes.⁷⁷

Picquet was aware of the suffering of her brethren and said she worked hard to lessen it, in keeping with her religious beliefs. She became a member of Cincinnati’s Zion Baptist Church, a fact of which she was proud. As she told Mattison, her church did not welcome slaveholders, as did some others. In fact, her pastor once announced from the pulpit that slave catchers were in the area looking for a runaway named Mary White. As it turned out, Picquet and her husband had taken in White, who was a “real genteel” woman. Almost gossipy, because she herself was deeply familiar with the range of lifestyles for women in her condition, Picquet told Mattison that White “tried to make me believe she was free.” Picquet, who had lived in New Orleans and had seen many like her, knew otherwise; White only went out on Sunday evenings, suggesting that she was hiding from someone or something. With the assistance of a local Quaker, the Picquets disguised White and sent her on to Canada. Others in White’s circumstance also found refuge in their home. Though she did not state how many she assisted, Picquet said she helped as many as she could.⁷⁸

Seeing such escapes and reflecting on her freedom made Picquet long even more for her mother. In 1859, more than a decade after her arrival in Cincinnati, she decided to find her. She did so through a local man who sent his shirts to her for washing. This man had announced that he was going to Texas. Picquet and her husband discovered that he knew Albert Horton, her mother’s master. With his assistance, Picquet sent a letter to her mother, Elizabeth. She received a reply in a letter on “tough blue paper” within three weeks.⁷⁹ She learned that her mother still lived on Horton’s Sycamore Grove Plantation in Wharton County, Texas.⁸⁰ Horton almost surely wrote the letter, as little space was wasted before suggesting that Elizabeth could be purchased. He announced that she could either be bought for $1,000 or swapped for another woman—surely a younger woman who could provide faster service than the aging Elizabeth, who also sent love via Horton from Picquet’s brother, John, now a boy of fifteen, who could also be purchased for $1,500. Elizabeth also sent “100 kisses” to Picquet’s own son, Thomas.⁸¹

Not even a week after this letter arrived, another was sent. The purchase prices for Elizabeth and John were repeated. Within three months, another letter arrived, this one signed by Horton. He stated that Elizabeth was “as fine a washer, cook and ironer as there is in the United States,” and though she was “getting old,” he insisted on the amount requested since she carried “her age well” He included a daguerreotype of her and John, who were apparently well dressed.⁸²

Picquet set out to purchase her mother. The rest of her memoir describes her attempts in 1860 to raise the funds to do so, in the process describing her unassuming life as a laundress in Cincinnati. The allure and mystique of women of mixed race concealed the ordinariness of many of their lives. However, she was a well-positioned person of mixed race and could move through space in ways denied to most other African Americans, especially the enslaved. She traveled first throughout Ohio, finding subscribers, often in churches. Her efforts were aided by a letter of support from Levi Coffin, who, as did Mattison, attested to her good character.⁸³

As she traveled, her past caught up with her twice in surprising ways. On a train from Xenia to Springfield, Ohio, she met a man who asked her, “Were you ever in Mobile?” This traveler remembered her from the days when she was hired out in that city.⁸⁴ Picquet subsequently traveled east, to Brooklyn. There another man took notice of her as she sat on a bus. When she got off, he walked with her for a while and finally also asked whether she had ever lived in Mobile. To her surprise, he turned out to be her first love, whom she had not seen since their parting nearly twenty years earlier.⁸⁵ He was now the married father of two children and “passing” as white. Excited to share details about his new life, he asked her to wait in a park so as to not provoke the suspicions of his wife. He returned with his two children. One of them, a boy, was darker than the other. “That one has the stain on it,” Picquet said of this child, once more revealing her awareness of her unique place in America’s racial hierarchy as had, obviously, her old love. In marrying a white woman, he demonstrated a degree of freedom impossible for their darker-skinned brethren. She and her old love shared a laugh and then parted again.

Though she faced difficulties with her fund-raising efforts, Picquet was eventually able to purchase her mother. She publicly thanked her supporters in a letter published in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette on October 13, 1860.⁸⁶ However, Picquet’s gratitude hid the sorrow she also felt. Horton had decided he wanted her brother John to run one of his plantations.⁸⁷

The Civil War began the following year. Henry Picquet became a private in the 42nd United States Colored Regiment.⁸⁸ Meanwhile, African Americans continued to migrate to Cincinnati, although in fewer numbers. Black women continued to outnumber black men, though not by much: 1,900 to 1,831 according to the 1860 census.⁸⁹ Fearing that the war might cause these numbers to rise, in 1862 the Cincinnati Enquirer, a newspaper with Democratic leanings, printed a sentiment with which many white Cincinnatians probably agreed: “Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of slaves … will come North and West and will either be competitors with our white mechanics and laborers, degrading them by competition, or they will have to be supported as paupers and criminals at the public expense.”⁹⁰

Such escalating racial tension and an injury that Henry received during the war probably contributed to the Picquets’ leaving Cincinnati. In 1865 he received a medical discharge, temporarily forcing his wife to become the sole supporter of the household. Two years later, they moved to New Richmond, Ohio, a river town about twenty miles southeast of Cincinnati, a bastion for white liberals from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania and seemingly a more hospitable place for people of color.⁹¹

Like many others in New Richmond, whose economy relied on river commerce, Henry went to work on a steamboat. After several unsuccessful attempts to claim his service pension, he began receiving $6 per month in 1885.⁹² Following his death in 1889, Picquet received a widow’s pension of $12 a month. At the time of her death five years later, she owned her home in New Richmond.⁹³

Though she had helped support her family as a laundress, even purchasing her mother from slavery with a memoir she participated in producing, Picquet is remembered most for having once been a white’s man sexual partner or an exotic creature. Indeed, the words “Louisa Picquet, The Octoroon,” appeared on the cover of her memoir, displaying her as a spectacle rather than a woman who served as proof of the ways in which the distribution of power between antebellum whites and blacks was in constant negotiation. This dynamic had deep implications for certain enslaved women who had more influence over their future than others because of their intimate ties to white men. Williams and his brother could have sold her and her children. Neither man did, revealing again the contradictions between what men of their day said and what they actually did. They thus emerge as complex characters, like many people of color, among them women like Picquet, who in buying into white normative standards that favorably positioned her acted to enhance her own status. Because of the closeness she experienced with white men, she, like other women in her situation, saw the gaps in the authority of such men, creating space for her to achieve a degree of security if not autonomy.⁹⁴

We have no proof that women like her reflected on their experiences with the same kind of energy as modern researchers. Most of them probably did what was needed to survive without prolonged introspection. Some may have had more detachment. But whether they did or not, all maneuvered strategically, appropriating specific tactics for their own purposes, sometimes at their oppressors invitation. While they did not overturn the racial and gender ideologies that prevented them from fully blossoming as citizens of a still young nation, they chipped away at them, drawing on support from others who shared their condition but also on the social capital accumulated from their proximity to white men.

Picquet’s calculated complacency while waiting for her master to die is a particularly noteworthy episode because it displays the confidence born from seeing up close the inconsistencies in human beings, white men in particular. This confidence is also plainly visible in Eliza Potter, the hairdresser of mixed race whose own memoir was published two years before Picquet s. Upon being accused once of aiding a fugitive boy and asked to accompany authorities to a Kentucky jail, Potter refused until she could find a caretaker for her child.⁹⁵ After being in a Covington jail for three days and a Louisville one for three months, Potter convinced a judge she had committed no wrong. We might ask why she was pardoned when many were not. Her confidence, born partly from her status as a free woman of mixed race—she was born in the North, not the South—was similar to that of Picquet. Her familiarity with white behavior owing to her profession and extensive travels gave her the confidence to face down the Kentucky authorities despite the obvious perils to her.

As if to emphasize the hydra-headed monster of racism that led even African Americans to discriminate against other African Americans, if given the chance, Potter pointed to a Cincinnati “black” woman who became a slaveholder in New Orleans. According to Potter, this woman was “the most tyrannical, overbearing, cruel task-mistress that ever existed; so you can see color makes no difference … those who have been oppressed themselves, are the sorest oppressors.… [I]f they can get mulattoes for slaves … the first word is my nigger.”⁹⁶ Potter also recalled a Pennsylvania man of high standing who reportedly went South to purchase a woman of color as a “housekeeper.” Upon becoming his “mistress,” the woman “became hard to please.”⁹⁷ In fact, the woman once whipped the servant’s back “almost to pieces.” Though we do not know whether she was light- or dark-skinned, this woman is yet another example of how proximity to white men seemed to produce assertiveness, even callousness, in some African American women and girls. Such women were well aware of strategies of survival that could bring them benefits even as they exacted costs on others.⁹⁸

It is quite possible that Mary Chesnuts report of seeing an enslaved mixed-race girl ogle men from the selling block was accurate and not the result of Chesnut’s own prejudices. The girl may also have been deliberately trying to make the best of a wretched situation. What appeared to be ogling may have been an effort to size up prospective buyers.⁹⁹ She may well have been doing all in her power to find the best master, as would most if not all women and girls in her predicament.

Potter described the attempted sale of another woman of mixed race who was “put up to the highest bidder.” This woman reportedly told the man who was bidding on her that she would “never serve him.” When he threatened her, she added that “she did not like his looks, and that she had been raised by a lady, and always led a virtuous life.” The woman was so enraged that her sale was “put off till the next day.” She was eventually sold to a family with two girls who reportedly treated her well and eventually freed her. They even asked a friend of their family to relocate her to Cincinnati.¹⁰⁰

The woman who talked backed to her prospective buyer, like Avenia White, Louisa Picquet, Lucile Tucker, and many others discussed thus far, had fostered enough familiarity with whites, white men in particular, that she was emboldened to speak confidently, even assertively. Although regarded as promiscuous, she emphatically stated that she was not. When their virtue was challenged, White and Picquet had acted similarly. White insisted she had acted uprightly when a Cincinnati woman slandered her. Picquet sought solace and forgiveness in a church to make amends for being in a sexual relationship that she regarded as sinful. These women’s experiences expand our understanding of black-white unions and the personalities of the women coerced into them, as well as the inconsistent nature of race and class relations in and outside America in urban and rural spaces. The next chapter continues to explore such unions by focusing on the children born from them.