As my genetic research revealed, complexity is not all morally black and white either. We can forget about the law and how that forced changed. My grandfather’s grandfather was a grandchild of a Senegalese slave and a French man in Louisiana, but also became Governor of the state in 1850-1853, Joseph Walker, whose picture hung on my father’s wall growing up in Newark, NJ where his father escaped to. His was wife was also a mulatto, but when they were born in French-spanish Louisiana black, whites, and mulattos were allowed to marry by law. The French and spanish laws were not so strict to forbid interracial marriage and his father was an Englishman who arrived in Louisiana to side with the French during the American Revolution. He married a French-Senegalese woman legally and had a baby to become governor. It was the American’s takeover of Louisiana in 1803 where a struggle began between the two different cultures shaped by different legal systems, with the Anglo system of law became much stricter after Bacon’s Rebellion. He fought in the 1812 war under Jackson, a horrible racist, and the “native” Louisianan troops had struggled to keep their all black militia as a fighting force, first cancel reflexively by the America overlords and then restored a few years later.
Unfortunately, the complexity was that he inherited a plantation estate with slaves, his wife died, and he had children with a young slave who had no last name but married a white Irish man after the Civil War who had an Irish last name and a law degree from Tulane in the 1880s. The laws got worse with the stricter one drop rules taking effect after 1900 and so my grandfather left with his mother and “darker” sister, passing the color line to New York and Newark to hide their past. Yes, there is a “shameful” part of slavery, but there is a worse shame of watching the new laws America imposed on the state when taking it over, coming increasingly angry and violent against the native indigenous and creole/mixed race population. This has all brought mixed emotions and difficult dilemmas for me, as finding out what should have been a past with something to talk about became for my father something to hide where he told us part of the story but left the other part behind the colored line. Even today, scholars still say Governor Pritchard after the Civil War was the “first” mixed race governor in the US, but that is clearly not true as my testing has shown and he was no more “black” than my grandfather’s grandfather, and is written on various websites. We still tend to push any complexity out of the American story and history, trying to keep a simplified purely “white” past that buries the uncomfortable questions and conflicting histories that show the white take over of Louisiana imposed a cruelty worse and less free than what was there before it arrived.