The Louisiana Metoyers

American Visions, June, 2000 by Elizabeth Shown Mills, Gary B. Mills

Melrose's Story of Land and Slaves

The Metoyer family of Louisiana provides an intriguing ample of the degree to which class, race and economic lines were blurred in early America. The Metoyers were both slaves and masters; in that regard, they were not unique. They were singular in the degree of their success. In the pre-Civil War South, they were, as a family unit, the wealthiest of all free families of color in the nation. After the war, they endured generations of poverty but preserved a rich store of oral history, much of which has been documented at Melrose Plantation in Melrose, La. The Metoyer family has been nationally conspicuous since 1975--the year that Melrose, the last of at least a dozen pillared, two-story "mansion houses" that they built on their plantations, was declared a National Historic Landmark.

On January 8, 1736, Francoise (a slave belonging to Chevalier Louis Juchereau de St. Denis) and Marie Francoise were married in Natchitoches, La. The only clues indicating the origins of this African couple are the names of four of their children: Dgimby, Choera, Yandon and Coincoin. These names can be attributed to the Ewe linguistic group of the Gold Coast-Dahomey region of Africa. Although Catholic custom required all baptized Christians to bear a saint's name, popular custom among the French permitted a variety of nicknames, or dits, as the French called them. The custom extended to the slave population as well, and a number of slaves are identified in official records by the African name that French masters permitted them to retain.

The pronunciation of Coincoin is close to that of Ko-kwe, a name given to all second-born daughters by those who speak the Glidzi dialect of the Ewe language. Marie Therese dite Coincoin, the second daughter born to Francois and Marie Francoise, was baptized at the Natchitoches Post on August 24, 1742. Colonial Louisiana's Code Noir (Black Laws), which did not permit the separation by sale of a husband and wife or of a child under 14 from its mother, kept the family of Francois and Marie Francoise together as a stable unit until April 18, 1758, when the couple died together in an epidemic that also killed their mistress.

At the division of the St. Denis slaves in 1758, the adolescent Coincoin was inherited by the young Chevalier de St. Denis, and for the next several years little is known of her life. Her master was a military officer, an Indian trader, and still a bachelor. It is probable that she performed domestic rather than agricultural services on his sizable ranch and tobacco farm. Five children were born to her during this period, of an unknown father. The records indicate only that the children were not of mixed black-white parentage.

Between 1761 and 1766, for unknown reasons, the Chevalier de St. Denis gave, sold or traded Coincoin and her children to his youngest sister, Mme. Marie de Soto (Coincoin's godmother). The conveyance was apparently made by private act; the document is neither on file nor listed in the index to the colonial archives. (Her children were later sold to other owners.) Also during this interval, there arrived at the post a young French merchant, a native of La Rochelle, France, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer. In 1766, he rented Coincoin from Mme. de Soto, and the slave moved into the home he shared with a bachelor friend. Ostensibly, Coincoin was to be their housekeeper; in actuality, she became Metoyer's concubine. An enduring relationship developed between them.

In the 20 years that followed, Coincoin bore 10 children to this man, whom she could not marry under the anti-miscegenation marital codes of colonial Louisiana. Their open relationship was challenged by a scandalized church, and both parties were charged with criminal behavior by the provincial government--as was Coincoin's mistress-godmother, who condoned and aided the relationship. Evidence suggests that Coincoin was sentenced to "ride the wooden horse" in public shame and that she suffered a lashing for the crime of licentiousness.

Her white paramour, who denied all allegations, was ordered only "to abandon her." The ultimate penalty of the law--the confiscation of Coincoin and her children and their sale at New Orleans for the benefit of the provincial hospital--was thwarted when Metoyer bought Coincoin and their offspring and gave Coincoin and their youngest child their freedom. Metoyer did not manumit their other halfFrench, slave-born children, however, until they reached adulthood.

Ultimately, the unsanctioned alliance ended of its own accord, and Metoyer took a legal wife by whom he raised a second family. Even after this marriage, he remained close to Coincoin and their children, and he provided for them in the will that he drew up after his marriage, as he had in the one that was secretly drafted during the course of their relationship. Metoyer at no time acknowledged his relationship with Coincoin or his paternity of the halfFrench, half-African children who took his name. Indeed, in his first will he stated tersely that he was a bachelor and therefore had no children, but then he proceeded to devote the remainder of his testament to provisions for the "Negress Coincoin" and "her mulatto children." Documentary confirmation of his obvious paternity did not occur until almost a century later, at which time a white granddaughter--one of the most prominent matrons of the region--testified under oath that her grandfather did sire the "colored" children who used his name.