In Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall argues, “In the Americas, new cultures were formed through intense, and often violent, contacts among peoples of varied nations, races, classes, languages, and traditions” (pg. xiii). She continues, “The Louisiana experience calls into question the assumption that African slaves could not regroup themselves in language and social communities derived partly from the sending cultures” (pg. xiv). Further, “Colonial Louisiana left behind a heritage and tradition of official corruption, defiance of authority by the poor of all races, and violence, as well as a brutal, racist tradition that was viewed by its ruling groups as the only means of containing its competent, well-organized, self-confident, and defiant Afro-Creole population. But it also left behind a tradition of racial openness that could never be entirely repressed” (pg. xiv-xv).
Hall writes, “In French Louisiana, usefulness was the overriding virtue for immigrants, transcending race, nation, humanity, and any other consideration” (pg. 6-7). Further, “Both the proportions of particular African nations present in early Louisiana and the conditions in Africa, as well as in Louisiana, molded the formation of Afro-Creole culture” (pg. 31). To this end, Hall offers extensive demographic evidence in tracking the development of creole populations. She further argues, “The survival of French Louisiana was due not only to African labor but also to African technology. The introduction from Africa of rice seeds and of slaves who knew how to cultivate rice assured the only reliable food crop that could be grown in the swamplands in and around New Orleans” (pg. 121). Additionally, “The Africans arrived in an extremely fluid society where a socio-racial hierarchy was ill defined and hard to enforce” (pg. 128). Hall cautions, “French New Orleans was a brutal, violent place. But it cannot be understood by projecting contemporary attitudes toward race backward in time. There is no evidence of the racial exclusiveness and contempt that characterizes more recent times” (pg. 155).
Hall writes, “After the United States took over Louisiana, creole cultural identification became a means of distinguishing that which was truly native to Louisiana from that which was Anglo. Creole has come to mean the language and the folk culture that was native to the southern part of Louisiana where African, French, and Spanish influence was most deeply rooted historically and culturally” (pg. 157). She continues, “The debt that poor whites of Louisiana owe to the maroon communities of the eighteenth century is engraved on the language they still speak today. The Cajuns and the Canary Islanders, poverty-stricken immigrants who came to Louisiana during the last half of the eighteenth century, had to learn to adapt to the swamps, an environment that was totally foreign to them. The ancestors of the fiercely defiant and independent people who live in the swamps of Louisiana learned to survive, physically and economically, from the runaway slaves who first sought refuge there” (pg. 236).
Following the Spanish takeover of New Orleans, Hall writes, “There is no doubt that Africans were, by far, the largest group of people introduced into Spanish Louisiana” (pg. 277). She continues, “The cultural impact of the Africans introduced into Spanish Louisiana was magnified by conditions prevailing in the colony. While it has become a truism that masters separated slaves who were from the same African nations, in Pointe Coupee, slaves from the same nations and/or who spoke mutually intelligible languages were often clustered on the same estates” (pg. 293-294). While violence continued, Hall writes, “The tradition of violence and brutality did not, however, include hysteria about the purity of white womanhood and paranoic fears about the rape of white women by black men” (pg. 313).
Hall concludes, “The Point Coupee Conspiracy of 1795 was a turning point in the attitude toward slave control in Louisiana” (pg. 376). In this event, “The slaves proved themselves to be both competent and indomitable. The semi-egalitarian tradition among masters and salves born on the insecure frontier gave way to systematic, preventative terror” (pg. 376). ( )

A wonderful work, although there are some problems with her methodology. First, the overall impression of the book is that Africans have a wonderful culture and the French had a horrid one. Second, she beats her argument like it was a dead horse. Two or three examples are plenty - not fifteen. Third, she makes a few jumps. Besides that, she has done an amazing job with the records of slavers and describes what truly is an oddity in the New World slave economies: Louisiana. ( )