The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
of women of color, free and enslaved, was one of the most enduring tropes of colonial life. This trope was especially well expressed in accounts of the urban environment, where the overwhelmingly male colonial population plus the thousands of European sailors and soldiers based in its cities created a lively sexual marketplace. Enslaved prostitutes earned money for their masters and mistresses—and male colonists sought free or enslaved women of color as housekeepers, a position that was widely considered to involve sexual services. In 1776 Hilliard d’Auberteuil estimated that of 23,100 free people living in Saint-Domingue’s cities, there were two thousand married white women and one thousand married free mulatto or black women. He also noted a slightly larger population of thirty-two hundred “prostitutes or women living as concubines” comprising twelve hundred whites and two thousand free mulattos or blacks.129 These numbers may not be accurate, but they reveal the highly charged sexual atmosphere of Saint-Domingue’s towns.
Yet this sexualized image of free women of color is incorrect, for they occupied a variety of economic niches besides sex work. Surviving leases, receipts, and inventories reveal that free women managed slaves and business interests; they built networks of patronage and affection with whites that did not involve sex, as business clients, neighbors, landlords, tenants, employers, and employees. Because many free women of color never married, especially those in the cities, some were able to escape male control and direct their own business interests.130 Being a housekeeper or concubine to a male colonial was often just one stage of a woman’s life. Many women used these positions to acquire real estate and slaves, which they then used in their own businesses. Although white male colonists created a narrative in which they used and discarded women of color as objects of pleasure, there is ample evidence that such men formed valuable partnerships and emotional relationships with concubines and mistresses, as well as with free colored neighbors, business partners, and friends.131
Saint-Domingue’s lively theater scene, the area of colonial life in which Phillips made her mark in Jamaica, illustrates how free women of color operated in spaces in which they were a sometimes conspicuous minority. Besides Freemasonry, theater was Saint-Domingue’s other distinctive urban institution. In Bordeaux and Paris in the 1780s, the ratio of theater seats to city residents was one to forty-six. In Saint-Domingue, Lauren Clay calculates, the comparable ratio was one to seventeen, including whites and free people of color. She also notes that colonials in the parterre paid five times what Frenchmen in the provinces would have paid; free colored theatergoers paid twice the price they would have paid in French provincial cities for equivalent seats.132 Cap Français and Port-au-Prince alone had more than twelve hundred theatrical and musical performances in the 1780s, according to surviving newspaper accounts.133 Actors and touring groups from Europe arrived regularly. Like theaters in provincial French cities, these colonial playhouses received many of the most popular plays from Paris soon after their premiers. In 1765, for example, after the Seven Years’ War, Saint-Domingue’s governor arranged for the patriotic play The Siege of Calais to be performed in Saint-Domingue, just four months after it debuted at the Comédie Française.134 Although there were performances in creole, and companies sometimes adapted European scenes to colonial settings, performances in Cap Français remained closely aligned with French metropolitan styles.135
Like Freemasonry, theatrical performances provided an occasion for socializing in an urban society marked by individualism and a scramble for wealth. For Moreau de Saint-Méry, “one cannot miss a show at Cap Français, especially since [attending] has become the custom. There is little social life in this city and [at the theater] we are at least assembled if not united.”136 Unsurprisingly, the board of directors of the Cap Français Comédie touted the business advantages this sociability created for the colony: “A harmony of minds and an agreeable ease of conducting business, the custom of seeing and talking to one another prevents and dissipates personality [clashes] and often gives rise to new projects and new business which favors the growth of the country and the advantage of its residents.”137
The theater was such a central institution in the social lives of colonial cities that after 1770 it became a prominent site for attempts to segregate whites and free people of color, a phenomenon whose political context is described in Chapter 6. The Cap Français theater admitted free men and women of mixed race, who sat in the upper lodges. After 1775 free black women obtained a legal ruling allowing them to attend the theater as well. Mixed-race women refused to sit with them, however, so the petitioners were assigned their own separate section.138 Most theater attendees, however, were white men. Moreau described as extraordinary a performance during the carnival season attended by as many as 130 women, this in a room with 1,500 seats. Moreover at Cap Français there were only 60–80 places out of 1,500 for people of color, compared with 90–120 out of 750 in Port-au-Prince and 7 out of 400 in Léogane.139 Racial borders were thus drawn carefully in this later period.
The appearance of women in the theater audience, especially, was very sexualized, as was fitting for the town where the redoutes des filles de couleur were invented. These dances, where white men could enjoy the charms of seductive women of color, were later translated to New Orleans, becoming the famous “quadroon balls” of the nineteenth century.140 Moreau emphasized how the public display of feminine beauty at the theater overcame even the color line that had become so important by the 1780s. Writing about both white and mixed-race women, he observed, “They go to the show to parade their charms and their suitors; one notes that nearly all women dress with the same elegance, which shows that in the colony the charming sex is divided into only two classes, those who are pretty and those who are not.”141 Indeed, the Comédie was just one of those public spaces in which the city’s role as a sexual marketplace was on full display: “Publicity, I will repeat, is one of their greatest pleasures and it is to this pleasure that we owe the custom that every night at bedtime, one sees the girls of color leave their homes, often lit by a lantern carried by a slave, to go to spend the night with the man they love the best or who pays them the most.”142 Yet Moreau condemned the sexuality of street life in Cap Français and praised the public decorum of women of color in the much smaller port city of Saint-Marc. He observed that “the small number of colored courtesans and the way they dress show that Saint-Marc has not arrived at that excess of civilization where there is a kind of pleasure in offending public decency.”143
Because women of color were on display for white males in the audiences of colonial theaters, as well as on the streets, it is interesting that in the 1780s an actress of color emerged as one of Saint-Domingue’s best-known performers, mentioned some forty times in the colonial press during in a nine-year career. Minette, whose real name was Elizabeth Alexandrine Louise, was born in 1767. Although most free people of color in Saint-Domingue’s cities were poor, Minette’s grandmother was a propertied free woman of color, and her mother, described sometimes as a free quadroon, sometimes as a “mestive,” meaning her ancestry was mostly European, had a widely acknowledged concubinage relationship with Minette’s father, a white naval accountant in Port-au-Prince. The couple had two girls, both of whom had elite white godparents. In 1770 the colonial governor and intendant granted permission for Minette’s mother to accompany her father back to France, though it isn’t clear if the couple also took their daughters there.144
Trained to sing and act by a white actress named Mme. Acquaire, Minette first appeared on stage in 1780 at the age of fourteen to sing arias in a Christmas performance in Port-au-Prince. Two months later, the director of the city’s theater hired her for 8,000 livres or £347 per year, a sizeable sum for a beginning performer in this colony where singers regularly earned between 3,000 and 12,000 livres annually. Although free colored and enslaved musicians and singers did perform in colonial theaters, Minette’s leading roles on the stage were still controversial. Moreau de Saint-Méry, despite his opinions about the dangers free colored courtesans posed to the colonial public, celebrated Minette’s “triumph” over colonial prejudices.145 We know little about Minette’s private life. Like most free women of color she did not marry. In 1786 a French mapmaker in Port-au-Prince gave her two enslaved girls in his will, specifying that “she was the only person who helped me in this country where I had no family [and] where I would have