Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

This is an excellent book that will appeal to anyone interested in the cultural history of Louisiana. It tells a little know story about the people who helped develop and build Louisiana. If you are from Louisiana and a Creole of Color yourself then Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country will be a means of connecting your roots.

This book provides many answers and insights into an area I often visited during my childhood. I am the child of a black creole from The Washington Plaisance area. This book gave me insight into some of the values and quirkiness I have today.

This is a fine piece of scholarship, as well as one that sheds light on an all-but-forgotten aspect of Louisiana's Creole history. The authors provide a wonderfully detailed treatment of the Southwestern Louisiana Creoles of Color that adds to a growing body of scholarship on the topic. This book stands as a good counter-point to studies of New Orleans's Creoles of Color, and further proves that the Colored Creole identity was not the same as the African American identity, and that the free black community of the state, not just that of New Orleans, was far from a monolithic group unified by racial oppression. The authors describe a community dedicated to maintaining their shared social status above dark-skinned free blacks and slaves, and assuredly below the white community. However, the authors are sure to mention that the color line was not as established in the Bayou Country, or in Louisiana as a whole, as many people have previously believed. Rather, Colored Creoles and whites worked together, intermarried (most often common-law marriages), had children, and inherited property from each other. The Creoles of Color of the Bayou Country provide yet another fine example of a mixed-race population recognizing and treating itself as different from both blacks and whites, inhabiting an ambiguous, complex position in the social hierarchy, and struggling to protect the few privileges (what we would call rights today) granted them by a white-dominated society. This books goes well with the only other first-rate study of Creoles of Color outside of New Orleans, Gary B. Mills's "The Forgotten People" (LSU Press, 1977).

Great read. Its very informative and give great incite of pass life,

painstakingly. Did the Creole of Colour speak creole?How do their Mardi Gras differ from other South Louisiana practices? How do they relate to their African roots? This great book makes you hungry for more.

I love reading about the families we know in this area and their rich history. Makes you proud to be a part of Creoles of Color in Bayou Country!

Good read. Disappointed there was no reference at any point to the Indigenous population and the interconnection between the Attakapa and the Creoles

A good read for those interested in a little spoken about part of Louisiana history. Well researched book. Good for the Genealogist out there.