ABSTRACT
Although today it's a small city with a population nearing 6000, in the 1920S Marksville was a "one horse town," consisting of a center square and a small five-or six-block downtown area that catered mostly to the needs of the surrounding farms and the people who worked them. As in many rural towns in this part of Louisiana, white "Cajuns" (descendants of the Acadians who migrated south from Nova Scotia in the early 1800s) have lived side-by-side with mixed-race "Creoles" (descendants of Black slaves, many from the West Indies) for generations. They've shared the same French-based Creole patois, the same Roman Catholic religion, the same food, the same music, and they have celebrated the same holidays. It wasn't uncommon for them to sometimes even share the same lineage, if one looks back past the layers of southern respectability to the heritage of the original Louisiana Creole culture of the 18th century. There was a long-observed (although seldom spoken-of-in-politecompany tradition) of the white man with his secretive "left-handed marriage" to a black or mixed race mistress, which often lasted throughout his lifetime. This came originally out of a cultural acceptance and even respect given a white man of a higher social status keeping and supporting an "octoroon" mistress in "French" Louisiana despite the legal strictures of the day.Mulattos became part of an "elite" freeman class among other blacks, called "gens libre de couleur." Out of this heritage, some of their descendants today still retain a bit of this Creole "snobbery." Author Nick Spitzer points out that both Creoles and Cajuns spoke a mixed and broad French Creole, "using French words within a Creole grammar that came from a variety of African tongues, which probably arose in the plantations of the West Indies." Spitzer writes, "To be of mixed blood or mulatto carried greater social status than pure African ancestry. The term Creole may have come from persons claiming their European ancestry, and from an attempt to distinguish descendants of French culture from the English-speaking Americans." However, in the mid-roth century, the term "Creole" commonly meant "a person of French or Spanish ancestry, who mayor may not be of mixed blood."
