What is Creole?

(From Kristi):

     Today I attended a panel presentation on the subject of Creole, in the heart of its lifeline, New Orleans, with esteemed local hosts to provide context and clarity.  The moderator was Herman Fuselier, who projected his own perspective from being a park ranger at the local Atchafalaya National Heritage Center, as well as a radio host of locally-sourced music.  Also in attendance were three musicians on accordion and banjo, each with very impressive credentials both in the spheres of academia and their own local Creole family histories.   And I got some of what I wanted in trying to get at the mystery of all that encompasses the word Creole.  It’s a language with elements of French and English, which is not yet extinct.  It includes many kinds of very popular and thriving cuisine, which I have yet to sample here in its famous center of the universe.  It is music, some of which I had the great pleasure of hearing at the panel, played by studied, impassioned experts.  The music, food and the language appear to be carefully preserved by scholars and beloved by many.  All three elements of culture have distinct origins: Spanish, French, Haitian, African-American and German with a sprinkling of Italian.  And that said, it can’t be denied as its own distinct culture with multi-faceted beauty.   The panelists all claimed that it comes from a diaspora and that the racial mix is shared by all.  That last claim is no doubt based on the recently-discovered fact that we all share DNA that is racially mixed.   And Creoles by definition since antebellum days have been characterized as being of mixed race.  The Creoles on the panel were indeed of varied hues, and each could rightfully claim deep local roots in the culture, with easy familiarity in the languages, music and lore of all that is Creole.  One panelist briefly mentioned that Creoles emerged from subjugation.  I daresay almost no one in the white audience could guess all that was swept under the rug beneath that one short sentence.  And there’s the rub, I think.   It’s a sin of omission, as they say.  My reading of Alan Lomax’s edited version of Jellyroll Morton’s autobiography gave me some more information on how Creoles emerged from antebellum New Orleans.  When the slave-owning townspeople of New Orleans felt the need to clean up their sexual scandals they came up with a unique and insidiously evil plan.  They in some cases freed their concubine slaves who had light-skinned children  and allowed them to raise them with training in various crafts.  Eventually an educated, highly skilled sub-group emerged who were paid a living wage, and were convinced that they were superior to their darker contemporaries.  Needless to say they were the children of rapist white slave-owners.  Presumably light skin color was an embarrassment to their fathers who thus, as masters felt compelled to free them from slavery.  The old practice of divide-and-conquer worked, and some proud members of what is called the Creole culture believed themselves to be better than the rest of the local dark brown-skinned people for another hundred or more years.   Jellyroll himself believed it; he, among many others, never considered himself to be black and expressed pride in being superior to his darker peers.  When I as a young woman first ran into a Creole woman I found myself shuddering in disbelief.  I was an activities director in a nursing home and had an encounter with a resident who wanted me to know in no uncertain terms that she was not to be considered black like the nurse’s aides who took care of her.   She wanted me to consider her to be a proud Louisiana Creole woman of fine breeding.  She did leave an unmistakable impression on me.  While I can appreciate the panelists creating a newly finessed perspective on the subject, I have to wonder how many Creoles still have a lingering belief in their own racial superiority.  Something tells me those cultural undertones are still around.  And I don’t believe in sweeping them under the rug.  The argument that we all share mixed races in our DNA dilutes and diverts the sources of subjugation and oppression in racism I see all around me in New Orleans.  Positions of authority in this little world of hoteliers and folk music administration are still held by white people while positions of service in housekeeping and restaurant work are held by people of color.  As a culturally-assigned white person I feel a need to call it out.  Without knowledge of the origins of the many aspects of racism it will continue to sprout up between the cracks like noxious weeds in the fabric of American culture.  Somehow here in New Orleans it feels especially shameful.  This city joyfully claims to have given birth both to jazz and blues music.  Jellyroll Morton claimed to have single-handedly created jazz.  His roots were in the popular dance tunes he was required to learn making a living playing for Spanish and French dance halls.  To deny those as well as the African rhythmic contributions from Congo Square would be sins of omission in the great stories and lore of the roots of American jazz.  But to omit the story of subjugation in the mixed racial history of the Creole culture would an equal sin.  And as strange and evil as the story is, it’s essential to the understanding of American musical culture.  I believe that the continuing anxiety associated with living as a black American is enough of a burden and it is, to make an understatement, unfair to expect blacks to do all this explaining to the majority of white people who are ignorant of the many aspects of the sources of racism here. 

     The city beckons and repels me simultaneously.  Since adolescence I began to see the South as drenched in multiple layers of hypocrisy, beauty, and culture that made its way to my life in the North in countless ways.  I was drawn to the great and rich legacy of literature that attempted to explain it to me in works of Tennessee Williams among others.  I knew someday I needed to come here to experience it first-hand because in so many ways I had inherited what began here and lived with it for all of my life.  I’m glad to be here.  I’m still learning.