Slavery in Louisiana, however, was unique. In the first place, it arrived nearly a century later than on the East Coast. In the second place, it initially fared badly. Between 1719 and 1731, the French who colonized Louisiana imported 6,000 Africans. Slaves soon composed 60 percent of the population. But the disease, starvation and cruelty they encountered hacking plantations from virgin forest led hundreds to flee into the nearby wilderness. So many renegade "maroon" settlements took root in the lower Mississippi Valley, raiding French settlements periodically, that after the 1729 Natchez rebellion, in which escaped slaves and Native Americans left more than 200 settlers dead, the shaken French ceased importing slaves for 30 years.
With most of their fledgling colony in shambles, they made rudimentary moves to pacify their remaining bondsmen. Louisiana's Code Noir specified that slave families were to be kept together when possible and all slaves instructed in the Catholic church. Children younger than 14 were not to be separated from their parents. In addition, any master who fathered children by his own slave was to lose both slave and child; they would be sold to benefit the local hospital and never allowed freedom.
Coincoin's eldest son, Nicolas Augustin Metoyer, founded the Church of St. Augustine near Melrose. Whites sat in back.
(Northwestern State University of Louisiana - Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center)
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While such rules were often ignored, they shaped the life of Marie Therese Coincoin. She was born in 1742 into the household of Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, the French founder-governor of Natchitoches (pronounced NAK-i-tush), and promptly was baptized in the Catholic church.
By then, New Orleans, 250 miles southeast, had eclipsed this tiny watchdog settlement on the Red River, just 15 miles from the easternmost outpost of Spanish Texas. But St. Denis managed his isolated territory with skill, prospering through trade with the Indians and Spanish.
Little is known of Coincoin's early years, not even who fathered her black children. Family lore says she was a skilled herbalist and healer, so well trained by her African mother that she nursed her owner through yellow fever, winning the woman's lifelong loyalty. Her strength and self-possession were also such, the family's oral history says, that as a 16-year-old she cut open the body of her pregnant mother after death to deliver her baby brother.
By the time Metoyer arrived, in 1767, St. Denis was dead and Coincoin had been inherited by his youngest daughter, Marie de Nieges de Soto. From her Metoyer leased Coincoin in return for nothing more than the slave's room and board.
"Was it love?" wonders Mills. "Clearly it was on his side. You can see it in his subsequent actions, none of which he had to take. On her side? We'll never really know, of course. . . . Obviously the people were very conflicted, both blacks and whites, but what you see from the archival records is the extraordinarily moving way they handled those conflicts. It's a very human story . . . .
"I think she went into this thing as a business relationship, maybe with a promise of eventual freedom. But it must have developed into love because she could have walked away from him. . . . She had other protectors in the white community."
When a Spanish priest, outraged at the "open concubinage" of Metoyer and Coincoin, tried to force officials to end the relationship, de Soto flew to the defense of her slave. In a letter to the commandant, she accused the priest of meddling, hypocrisy and -- not least -- delivering tedious sermons in atrociously mispronounced French. The matter died down, but not before Metoyer, in 1778, purchased Coincoin and her latest infant and quietly executed a deed setting them free.
The manumission was highly unusual. Of Natchitoches' nonwhite population of 430, only eight were free.
Metoyer and Coincoin lived together eight more years. But, increasingly aware that he had no legitimate son to inherit his growing fortune, the Frenchman decided to marry a friend's widow. Before the wedding, however, he executed documents safeguarding the freedom of Coincoin and the future of their children. One was the grant of 68 acres along the Red River south of town.
A New Lease
In 1786 Coincoin settled in a small cabin on the property and set out to grow tobacco. After 44 years as a slave and 14 children, nothing could have been easy, but tobacco was a more demanding crop than most. Despairing of making its colony pay its way, France had given Louisiana to Spain in 1762 and the Spanish had set up rigorous controls to preserve the quality of the Louisiana tobacco used in Havana cigars. From planting to drying, each step required extensive labor.
Coincoin, however, was not alone. Metoyer had guaranteed her a tiny annuity of $120 a year -- equivalent to half the pay of a military drummer. Her first act as an independent woman was to pledge this for three years to buy freedom for her oldest black child, a crippled 27-year-old daughter, who would help her in the fields.
But even with that debt she saved $50 in four years and walked 120 miles to negotiate freedom for a second daughter and grandchild, on the condition that the two care for their invalid owner as long as she lived.
