Scott's Freedom Papers

In Rebecca Scott’s Freedom Papers, she traces the lineage of five generations to explain how paper documents often have the power to grant one freedom as well as alter the life course of an individual. As a “micro-history,” she also demonstrates the change in political power in Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe. I have never encountered a text as such before, and although it was an ambitious project, I took away a few interesting concepts from her work.

Most glaring to me was the complexities of labeling a person based upon their color. It seemed as though how the Tinchant family defined themselves in terms of race, was often trumped by how they were legally defined on paper. Throughout the history, Scott examines how these categories were never fixed, but always fluid—changing based upon territory, states, regions, countries, and so on. For instance, in France, Joseph had no title of color, but back in New Orleans, he was listed as mulatto. Generally, a person of mixed race was harder to classify as the British planter Venault de Charmilly explains that mulatresses and negresses seemed to be “an element of dissolution in the colony, and a disruption of the proper order of things” (Scott 37). Because of the inability to classify individuals of mixed race into nice, neat categories, this often led to racial angst among those in power.

The category that I found most intriguing was the term affranchi, which “although signaling free status, could be intentionally disrespectful, publicly recalling that an individual had once been enslaved” (29). This label was generally rejected by many and those that would be called thus referred the label personne de couleur. It goes to show that all of the legal distinctions in terms of color could not be used in isolation, as Scott explains. As such, the Tinchant’s were able at times to use these distinctions, or the lack thereof, to their benefit when they found it advantageous.