01 A Free Man of Color

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In any work of fiction dealing with the American South, a writer runs into the problem of language and attitudes -specifically not only words and phrases but outlook, upbringing, and unspoken assumptions, which, though widely held and considered normal at the time, are appalling today.

The early 1830s were a time of great change in America. President Andrew Jackson's view of democracy was very different from the eighteenth-century vision of the country's founders. Civil War and Reconstruction lay a generation in the future, and the perception of blacks- by the whites and by the blacks themselves-was changing, too.

In New Orleans for most of the nineteenth century, it would have been as offensive to call a colored-that is, mixed-race-man or woman "black," as it would be today to call a black person "colored." Both words had connotations then that they do not have now; both words are freighted now with history, implications, and inferences unimaginable then.

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