Freedom Papers: Truth, History, & Context

     Rebecca Scott's Freedom Papers plots the traces of citizenship and personhood among multiple generations of one family between the countries of what is now Senegal, Haiti, the United States, Mexico, France, and Belgium. Beginning with Rosalie, a woman sold into slavery in Haiti after being brought over from west Africa on the Middle Passage, the importance of historical context with respect to rights, slave status, and social labeling is made clear. The latter aspect is what I found most intriguing about the reading; no matter the location or color of the person being discussed, some sort of labeling system accompanied their existence. These statuses ranged from color (white/black/mulatto) to freedom status (freeborn/freeperson/slave) to citizenship (African/Spanish/French/American/etc). The status of a person was usually determined by their color unless they had papers to prove otherwise.
     What was even more interesting than the labeling system itself was the maleability of its structure; it was determined not by regulations or legal mandates, but by political atmosphere, foreign occupation, and shifting social stigmas. Smith addresses this early on when she writes that the term "Poulard," traditionally thought of as a positive word, could mean both freedom and slavery. This unstable system resulted in both sociatal unrest and individual anxiety about what one's status was at any given time. Social labeling, not surprisingly, was structured to benefit those in power; even men who had been freed from slavery took advatage of men labeled as slaves for the purpose of their own militias! In New Orleans, any dark-skinned man or woman with French heritage was banned from disembarking from ships, for they were thought to have dangerous ideas. For those who wished to live in New Orleans who did not have French heritage, their status of either free of slave was determined upon further examination of their skin. In almost every story that Smith recounted, skin color and name trumped the importance of offical papers, thus signaling the immense fear and racial stratifciation upon which labeling was built. Interstingly enough, though, freedom or personhood status rarely ever coincided with class status. Freed persons like Rosalie went on to travel, marry, and have children just as Edouard Tinchant, a Black man with ties to Belgium, the Union, and Mexico, participated fully in commerce and voting. What was the real reason, then, for such strict labeling and need for paperwork if it did not rob people of power, resources, or money? Was a negative social stigma really the only goal?
     After concluding the epilogue, I could not help but wonder what Trouillot would have thought about the story. After all, the book's structure mixes the two elements he is concerned with most: what happened (Rosalie's family's story, backed up by documents and evidence) and what is said to have happened (overall historical context). Would Trouillot view Rosalie's lineage through the constructivist lens, framing it as one fiction among others? Or would he choose to discount the presented facts because there is still "the need for a different type of credibility" (Trouillot 8)?