When I was twelve, I went on a road trip with my grandparents through the South. One of our stops was New Orleans. We took a steamboat ride down the Mississippi, ate beignets at Café Du Monde, and walked through the colorful streets of the French Quarter. I was immediately smitten. Over the years, I’ve returned to the city half a dozen times, drawn by the fascinating history and the sense that there is no other place quite like it. When I had to pick a place and subject for my story, I knew immediately that I wanted to write about New Orleans and the gens de couleur libres.
New Orleans in the early nineteenth century had three distinct castes: white, slave, and the gens de couleur libres, the free people of color. While the last are often remembered for the infamous quadroon balls and the arrangements between white men and free women of color, many were respected middle-class tradesmen and business owners. One very mythologized free woman of color was the voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. To read more about her, I recommend Carolyn Morrow Long’s A New Orleans Voudou Priestess: The Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau, and to learn more about the femmes de couleur libres, I recommend Emily Clark’s The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World.
FOLKS AROUND HERE LIKE TO SAY WE came from the stars. Perhaps it’s simpler to think of us not as human but as creatures made of stardust — that if you cut us, not blood but constellations will pour from our wounds. And though I’ve never admitted to having such a thought to my sisters, when I stand under the night sky, with the infinite heavens stretched out above me like a shroud — it’s hard to imagine we came from anywhere else.
Many years ago, when creatures made of rock and fire roamed the earth, both gods and mortals trembled in our presence. In the southern lands of Europe, they appeased us with figs and olives plucked from low drooping branches, and we licked the juices off our fingers with delight. A season passed, or perhaps it was a lifetime, and we closed our weary eyes and awoke to a world of snow and ice. In the north we were giants, dark and stoic. We sat at the foot of the Tree of the World as the frost turned our limbs black with cold.
But even in our most formidable forms, we couldn’t compare to the vastness of the desert sky. It is a sacred thing even on the most ordinary of nights, with Mamá huddled over her colcha embroidery and the vaqueros singing Spanish love songs around the fire.
On first sight, that sky was where fear came to rest. It was a sleeping beast we tried not to wake as we stumbled alone in the darkness, catching cactus spines in the heels of our naked feet as the coyotes screamed in the moonlight. My sister Maria Elena was screaming too, only I didn’t know her as Maria Elena then, and I didn’t know why she was screaming. I hadn’t yet seen the damage, the way her foot was turned in on itself.
I’m not sure where we would be now had Papá not found us that night. At first glance, we must have looked like a creature with three heads huddled together under a mesquite tree, all fixated on what were once the hands of old women and were now those of young girls.
Of course, he knew who we were. What we were. Everyone always does. There has rarely been a time when our appearance hasn’t been preceded by our reputation; our arrival comes with a change in the air, a scent on the breeze that brings both peace and desolation. But Papá had a young wife with a baby she’d just buried in his baptism gown, so when he found three monsters disguised as little girls, he took us home to his morose wife, who didn’t seem to mind that the stench of death still lingered in our hair long after she bathed us with yucca root. After all, death was something she’d seen her fair share of, and besides, we have just as much to do with life as we do with death. Or so she reminds herself when she thinks we aren’t listening.
But that’s the thing about monsters; we’re often in places you don’t expect. Or want.