Marie Thérèse Metoyer

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Marie Thérèse ditte Coincoin was born in August 1742 at the Louisiana French outpost of Natchitoches, as the fourth of eleven children produced by François and Marie Françoise, an African-born couple held in slavery by the post's founder and commandant, Chevalier Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. As a child, Coincoin and her sister Marie Louise ditte[1] Mariotte[2] were trained in pharmacology and nursing, skills that would eventually lead to their freedom and provide a livelihood for them afterward. As the young mother of five children (born of a union with an Indian slave, according to tradition), Coincoin was rented from her mistress in 1765 by a young French merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, who made Coincoin his concubine. Although Metoyer freed her in 1778, the liaison continued until he married another Marie Thérèse, a white Creole widow, in 1788. In exchange for Coincoin's "good services," Metoyer gave her a tract of 68 acres of alluvial river-bottom land and eventually manumitted[3]their eight (of ten) children who survived childhood.

As a free woman, Coincoin earned her livelihood as a médicine[4], a planter of indigo and tobacco, and a trapper, selling meat at the post and shipping barrels of oil and barge-loads of tobacco to market at New Orleans. With the assistance of Metoyer, she applied for a Spanish grant and was awarded the standard 800 arpents (about 666 acres) of land in the piney hills, which she used as vacherie[5]. Like many other freed slaves in colonial Louisiana, she bought slaves of her own to labor for her as her own health began to fail. By the time she divided her property among her children in Spring 1816, in anticipation of death, the three African-born adults whom she had purchased had created a household of 16 slaves.

Coincoin has long been a popular figure in Louisiana lore, but much of what has been written about her in popular forums since the 1960s misrepresents her true legacy. She is frequently, but erroneously, said to have accumulated a vast fortune and to have owned large estates, including Cane River's fabled Melrose Plantation that was actually granted to and built by her son, Louis Metoyer. In reality, Coincoin lived a life of frugality and service to others, investing all her income into the purchase of freedom for her pre-Metoyer children, grandchildren, and other youth in the neighborhood. The examples that she set and the religious and moral values that she instilled in her offspring were the guiding forces of an exceptional community her children and grandchildren built on Cane River—a community that includes America's first church built by African-Americans for African-Americans (St. Augustine, established 1829 on Isle Brevelle)[6]. Coincoin's grave is no longer marked and the little bousillage[7] cabin that is shown for her on a contemporary land survey no longer stands, although its site has been identified and is being archaeologically studied. Her legacy lives on in more than 10,000 offspring whose forebears, across two centuries of racial bias and persecution, drew strength and inspiration from her memory.

[edit] African origin

Tradition holds that Coincoin's African-born parents retained their culture, with a strong sense of pride, and some evidence supports that. No known document identifies the African birthplace of either parent. However, Coincoin and four of her siblings carried African names as dits. [8] One African linguist proposed in the 1970s that the African Coincoin (spelled variously by French and Spanish scribes but pronounced KoKwe) was the name used by second-born daughters among those who speak the Glidzi dialect among the Ewe of Coastal Togo; [9] and historians Mills and Mills proved that Coincoin was indeed the second-born daughter in her birth family. However, other possible origins of the name Coincoin, together with the sibling names uncovered by the Millses, are currently being pursued by the Africanist Kevin MacDonald at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London.[10]

[edit] Sources for Coincoin

  • Mills, Elizabeth Shown. "Marie Thérèse Coincoin (1742–1816): Slave, Slaveowner, and Paradox," Chapter 1 in Janet Allred and Judy Gentry, Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, at press).
  • Mills, Elizabeth Shown. "Which Marie Louise is Mariotte? Sorting Slaves with Common Names," National Genealogical Society Quarterly 94 (September 2006): 183–204.
  • Mills, Gary B. The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. ISBN 978-0807102879
  • Mills, Gary B. “Coincoin: An Eighteenth-Century ‘Liberated’ Woman.” Journal of Southern History 42 (May 1976): 203–22. Reprinted in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in United States History. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990. ISBN 978-0926019140
  • Mills, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown. Melrose. Natchitoches: Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches, 1973. (Drawn by the authors from their historic-site documentation project that earned Melrose its National Historical Landmark designation in 1976.)
  • Mills, Elizabeth Shown and Gary B. "Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers." National Genealogical Society Quarterly 70 (September 1982): 163-89. (A four-generation genealogy of the offspring of François and Marie Françoise, focusing on the Metoyer line.)
  • Mills, Elizabeth Shown and Gary B. “Missionaries Compromised: Early Evangelization of Slaves and Free People of Color in North Louisiana.” Cross, Crozier, and Crucible. Glenn R. Conrad. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Historical Association and Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993. Pages 30–47.
  • Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Isle of Canes. Provo, Utah: Ancestry, 2006. ISBN 978-1593311759

[edit] References

  1. ^ In this context, "ditte" can be translated as "called" and it effectively indicates a nickname or alias
  2. ^ Mills, "Which Marie Louise Is Mariotte?," provides a four-generation genealogy of the slave and freeborn offspring of Coincoin's sister Mariotte and additional information on Coincoin's parents.
  3. ^ freed —see Manumission.
  4. ^ doctor
  5. ^ cattle range
  6. ^ Although some writers assert the church was built in 1803, the evidence unambiguously dates the founding of the church to 1829. See Mills, Forgotten People, 145–50, for an analysis of that evidence
  7. ^ A mixture of Spanish moss and mud used as infill material in Cajun dwellings.
  8. ^ Mills and Mills, "Slaves and Masters," identifies four of these dits; E. S. Mills, "Marie Thérèse Coincoin (1742–1816: Slave, Slaveowner, and Paradox," adds the fifth of these African names that she has discovered for the family.
  9. ^ Jan Vansina of the University of Michigan, as reported in Mills, Forgotten People, 3.
  10. ^ MacDonald to E. S. Mills, 19 February 2008.