Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, May 25,1999

Definition of creole can depend upon who's defining it

by Jim Bradshaw

In Louisiana, it is generally agreed that the word creole can be used as a noun to refer a people, a language, or a culture.  It can also be used as an adjective to describe a variety of things that are either native born, native grown, or created here.  But there is also widespread confusion, if not outright disagreement, over who can properly be called Creole, which things and animals and plants can properly be identified with the adjective, and, indeed, when or if it should be used with a capital or lowercase "c."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word comes down from the Latin creare, which means "to create." In Spanish America it became criollo, which the OED says was a Latin American corruption of criadillo, which means "bred, brought up, reared, domesticated." In French it became creole, with the general meaning of "native to the locality." 

The dictionary says criollo was originally "applied by South American negroes to their own children born in America as distinguished from negroes freshly imported from Africa, "but that by 1590, it was also used to designate white Spaniards born in the West Indies.

In the West Indies and America, according to the OED, creole means "a person born and naturalized in the country, but of European (usually Spanish or French) or of African Negro race; the name having no connotation of color."

As an adjective, the OED says, creole refers to persons "born and naturalized in the West Indies, etc., but of European (or negro descent) ... Now chiefly applied to the native whites in the West Indies, the native French population in Louisiana, Mauritius, etc." It can also describe animals and plants "bred or grown in the West Indies, etc., but not of indigenous origin."

Louisiana linguist William A. Read, in his 1931 study, "Louisiana-French," gives definitions that were traditional and current in Louisiana at the time of his writing.

A Creole, Read says, is a "white descendant of the French or Spanish settlers in Louisiana during the Colonial Period (1699-1803). He says the word can also be used to describe "the Negro-French patois," but he did not include black people themselves in his definition of the word when it stands along.  Un negre creole, Read says, "is a negro who speaks Negro French, and who was born in the New World."

As an adjective, Read says, "Creole designates anything manufactured or produced by the Creoles and considered therefore of peculiar excellence. Thus des oeufs creoles are presumably fresh eggs.  Melee creole is a fine fish chowder, and des poules creoles are hardy chickens that have proved to be well adapted to the Louisiana climate."

James H. Dorman offers a broader definition in his book, "Creoles of Color of the Gulf South," published in 1996.

He says, "In Louisiana throughout the colonial period, Creole ... referred in a general sense to persons born in the colony of either African or European descent, or to any miscegen (i.e., product of miscegenation), including African and Native American mixtures. ... The most common colonial usage, however, was as a reference to persons born into slavery in a given colony, differentiating such Creole slaves from slaves born elsewhere.

"In the later 18th century, and more especially in the 19th, 'Creole' took on variant meanings depending largely on the situation and the circumstances of the speaker employing the term."  Dorman says.  "As a means of differentiating themselves from the foreign born, and especially the Anglo-Americans, native Louisianians (black, white, and mixed) began referring to themselves as Creoles.  This terminology held throughout the antebellum period, though by the 1820s, one group of such Creoles began to distinguish themselves from all other.  The growing community of Afro-European miscegens who were descended from colonial free persons of color and who occupied a special, intermediate place in the racial and social order of antebellum Louisiana ... began referring to themselves as 'Creoles of Color.'"

In his essay, "Creoles and Americans" in the book "Creole New Orleans," Joseph G. Tregle Jr. is even more explicit in criticizing what he calls a "veritable creole mythology."

"This almost mystical set of beliefs has become so deeply entrenched in New Orleans folklore, and indeed even in the state's judicial pronouncements, that to challenge it is to court ridicule and recrimination," Tregle says.  He says the folklore maintains that " the word can never be used except to descended from the French and Spanish pioneers who came directly from Europe to colonize the New World.  Thus even Acadians ... are rigorously excluded, having arrived in the colony not straight from the Continent but by way of Canada.

"The core race purity of the definition receives magnified confirmation in the specific instance that no black or person of mixed blood can or ever could have been correctly termed a creole, no matter his parentage, place of birth, language, or cultural orientation," Tregle continues.  "To accommodate the inescapable fact that some persons of color have been and indeed still are called creoles, the myth maintains that such error in usage stems from pre-Civil War association of members of this class with the true creole population, giving them identity as 'creole negroes,' much in the same way that one refers to 'creole tomatoes' or 'creole cattle,' signifying origin in Louisiana soil.  Orthodoxy makes clear, however, that in this adaptation, creole serves only as an adjective, in no way implying admission of blacks into the group itself."

According to Tregle, however,"... creole identity actually figured very little in the community's concerns during the whole of Louisiana's colonial experience.  It was the clash between original Louisianians and migrant Anglo-Americans after the Louisiana Purchase which for the first time made place of birth a critical issue and gave the creole label its crucial significance."  He says further, "The myth's exclusive 'pure white, French or Spanish descent' definition ... loses all credence in the voluminous evidence of contrary usage in the historical record of New Orleans itself, as well as in that extending over long periods of time in widely separated regions of the New World.

"One simply does not find ... any antebellum insistence in Louisiana on pure whiteness as a condition for acceptance as creole, there being not the slightest possibility that (the simple fact of ) local birth might ... confer political or social status (equal to that of whit antebellum society) upon the black or colored man," Tregle says.  "To be sure, white creoles troubled over the common impression abroad that creole always implied mixed or Negro Blood, though they were diligent in warning against it.  This explains, no doubt, why during pre-Civil War years, it is only in travel accounts that one finds any reference to creoles as pure white, testimony to a probably overzealous instruction by hosts mindful of the usual foreign misconception on the point."

This article is copyrighted © by the Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser and is used with permission.  This web site was originated through a grant awarded to Carencro High School (Joel Hilbun/Bobbi Marino, Grant Administrators) by the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from the Louisiana Quality Education Support Fund - 8(g).