New Orleans native Rashauna Johnson, author of "Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans during the Age of Revolutions" uses an archival style to piece together a complex history in her new book, "Sweet Home Feliciana."
Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Chicago, is a historian of the 19th-century African diaspora, with an emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the United States South and Atlantic World.
"Sweet Home Feliciana" is a community study that looks at the Feliciana Parishes' families, region and the world to which the region belonged from 1700 to 1900. Johnson incorporates Indigenous, European, African and American history throughout the book. Through her use of primary documents and archives, Johnson illuminates an important region that is often overlooked. Johnson writes,
"Now more than ever, it is important to use the broadest range of sources and interpretive techniques to offer fresh perspectives that do not simply recover and describe archival findings in the name of detached empiricism... In fact, innovative readings of traditional sources along with broadened definitions of what counts as a source both allow us to tell fresh and powerful stories. Here I draw on thousands of periodicals, police jury records, probate and marriage records, personal correspondence, family papers and similar documents from multiple archives. Most sources offer limited access to the interior lives of the dispossessed, so I read against the grain for how they shed light on the experiences of those in whom I am most interested."
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
"Sweet Home Feliciana," the latest book from New Orleans native and historian Rashauna Johnson.
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What inspired you to write "Sweet Home Feliciana?"
I grew up in New Orleans, but I have these family connections that are broader. I have to confess my ignorance: I didn't know just how much happened in that region before I started this project. I didn't expect the book to be this long. The more I learned, the bigger it got.
So much happens there, and so many people come there. I wanted to use this work to say that there are other very important areas with their own histories in addition to New Orleans.
There is something interesting going on here in its own right, and that's part of what I wanted to say. There's more to h than New Orleans. I'm just trying to bring that to the fore because, especially when I'm in other places outside of the state, I don't think people always understand.
What is something that you want your readers to take away from this book?
I want them to understand the complexity of those sorts of places. It's very easy to break into the urban versus rural, or Black versus White, or free versus enslaved. There are reasons for those categories, and I use them, but there are other layers.
There's so much complexity in what, today, might feel like a uniformly rural area. But there are so many personal stories, so many global developments, that we can track through these rural areas.
In my own fields and different fields of study, we've been very urban for a long time, focusing on Atlantic port cities and so on. For many reasons, many of us are saying, "Wait a minute, we need to think about what's going on outside of these large cities, and to think about the longer histories and the struggles and the triumphs and the losses and the tensions."
I certainly talk a lot about hard stuff, but I also hope to find joy and think about the ways people continue to live even despite difficult circumstances. I do believe in the power of learning about these stories to help us understand one another, to understand our histories, and to understand that we have the ability to rethink our own histories.
Things haven't always been one way. They don't always have to be one way, and we get to decide how we want to create a society that works for us.
How long did it take you to research and write "Sweet Home Feliciana?"
The real germ of this project started when I was an undergraduate at Howard, and I had an assignment to interview my oldest family member. I interviewed my grandmother, which is how this started. That was the early 2000s when I was in undergrad.
Off and on, just little pieces of talking to her and getting the facts before she passed.
Then I started researching in earnest, with the archival side, in about 2015. I was just changing my backpack to my work bag, and I found my LSU parking pass from my last big research trip to LSU in 2022. I spent a lot of time on the LSU campus with their special collections, which is just wonderful, and some time at the State Archives.
Baton Rouge was probably the center of where I did a lot of my archival work.
Was there a particular part of your research that stuck with you, something that you were surprised to learn?
At the end of the book, one historian calls it the nadir of Black history, there was this source about the local fair — and it was segregated. There were days for White people and days for Black people. It listed out some of the things that these African Americans did at the parish fair, like bringing their preserves and their quilts and engaging in sports.
I think that really stuck with me, because it is the kind of both/and.
There's no romanticizing that this is a tough time for so many reasons, but there's also something really lovely about thinking of the ways people would have taken pride in their preserves, or taken pride in their ability to compete athletically, that is moving.
It reminds you that, even in these times in the heart of the Jim Crow era in rural h, these people were still living and making meaning and figuring out how to enjoy some version of their lives. Not ignorant of or somehow removed from this larger context, but within it.