Tante Pelagie's House: On Desperately Seeking Black Femme Aesthetics of Kinship, Violence, and Affection

In 1814, Perine “Pelagie” Dauphine-Demasillier, a free woman of African descent, registered her last will and testament in New Orleans. As head of her own household, Perine distributed her property as she saw fit,... [ view full abstract ]

In 1814, Perine “Pelagie” Dauphine-Demasillier, a free woman of African descent, registered her last will and testament in New Orleans. As head of her own household, Perine distributed her property as she saw fit, transferring and manumitting slaves, real property or specie across family members, godchildren, and other free people of color. A seemingly innocuous transfer of property, I am riveted by this snapshot of Perine’s household at the end of her life, the forged and frozen (i.e. biological) kinships her distribution of wealth entailed, the careful intimacies revealed in each gift. Perine lived her last years in the twilight of Age of Revolution and the dawn of the United States as a nation-state to be reckoned with in a “territory” branded as wild, barbaric, Latin, and, worst of all, foreign. She herself, as one of several “spouses” of color associated with a white male householder, as a free casta or person of mixed(?) African descent in a world of slaves, as a “native inhabitant” in a rapidly Americanizing Louisiana, embodied the problem nineteenth century United States would spend the next several decades attempting to tame—the incivility of black free status, the defiance of black femme excess. To then go further and seek out the unanswered and unanswerable eloquence behind the scenes of a woman keeping house on her own, a tante or aunt in her element among her black female slaves and free black female dependents, almost asks too much of the archive and of her life. And yet, this paper seeks her out, indulging in the claim for black (queer?) futurity she left behind in the bare bones of her will, while engaging it as an archive of black femme affection and violence in the process.