John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
she died, but as a result of sickness and not, as Audubon would later tell it, at the hands of rebellious slaves. As Herrick explains, “Much other documentary evidence which also has recently come to light is all in harmony with these facts.”10
Herrick also devotes a good deal of space to the identity of Audubon’s father, Jean Audubon: He was a Frenchman, born in 1744 in a village on the Bay of Biscay, who rose from being a cod fisherman to a sailor to a ship captain. But Audubon père’s most important career move proved to be his marriage, in 1772, to Anne Moynet, a prosperous widow nine years older (or twelve or fourteen, according to other sources), whose wealth and wifely indulgence allowed him to spend months at a time at sea or, increasingly, on a sugar plantation he purchased in Aux Cayes (now Les Cayes), a port town on the southern coast of Saint-Domingue, which had become the largest sugar-producing island in the world.11 There he, like so many other Europeans, took full financial advantage of the enormous economic opportunities of the West Indies, turning enough profit to provide quite a comfortable living, albeit one built on the infamous brutality and misery inflicted upon Saint-Domingue’s rapidly rising slave population.12 Jean Audubon came to describe himself as a négociant, a merchant, but in addition to trading in sugar and a variety of wares, he also traded in slaves, sometimes dozens at a time. “Great numbers of negroes must have passed through Jean Audubon’s hands,” Herrick observes, “which strangely reflect the customs of a much later and sadder day on the North American continent.” Herrick later adds, with considerable charity, “Jean Audubon, who spent a good part of his life at sea and in a country almost totally devoid of morals, must be considered as a product of his time.”13
And like other powerful European inhabitants of this “country almost totally devoid of morals,” Jean Audubon also took sexual advantage of the dependent women in Saint-Domingue, a highly sexualized society that one scholar has described as a “libertine colony.”14 The elder Audubon maintained a long-standing domestic relationship with a mixed-race woman variously described as a creole or a quadroon and variously called Catharine or Marguerite or, more commonly, “Sanitte” Bouffard, who bore him three children, all girls. Sanitte, the ménagère (housewife) of Audubon’s household, apparently accepted the entrance of another woman into the domestic scene: Jeanne Rabin, who moved in with Captain Audubon and Sanitte in 1784 and who, two years later, became the mother of Jean Audubon’s only son. Or so documentary evidence for Audubon’s birth story seemed to suggest. But as Herrick observed, the birth story had long seemed murky: “Much of the mystery which hitherto has shrouded the early life of John James Audubon is involved in the West Indian period of his father’s career”—and, one might add, his father’s relationships with women in Saint-Domingue.15
By 1788, the stability of Jean Audubon’s island estate may have begun to seem much less secure. Even though Les Cayes seemed safe for the time being, Jean Audubon sent his three-year-old son, originally called Fougère (French for “fern”), to France for safekeeping. In 1789, the elder Audubon signed up as a soldier in the Les Cayes troop of the National Guard, but before he had to face the prospect of real service, he left Saint-Domingue, first to do some business in the United States, then to go back to France, where his toddler son was awaiting him. He would also have his and Sanitte’s daughter, Rose, or Muguet, brought to France in 1791, when the slave insurrection began. He would, however, leave behind Sanitte and the other offspring he had had with her to face their fate on the island.
Back in France, Jean Audubon would find another eruption of unrest, the dramatic revolution that toppled the monarchy, divided the people, and cast the country into carnage. In 1793, his particular part of the country, the Vendée, which included Nantes and its environs, became hotly contested between supporters of the revolution and counterrevolutionary royalists, and the bloodshed continued throughout most of the 1790s. Jean Audubon once again joined the local National Guard, this one organized to defend the revolution against its reactionary enemies in the Vendée. He remained a solid ally of the new French republic, serving on local revolutionary committees and enlisting once again in the navy; as his son later wrote, Jean Audubon “continued in the employ of the naval department of that country” throughout the 1790s and on into the new century.16 Even with the roiling violence of the revolution, France seemed safer ground for the Audubon family than Saint-Domingue.
It also seemed a safer starting place for family-friendly Audubon biographies. In 1954, for instance, two children’s books opened Audubon’s boyhood story when he was already in the comparative familiarity of France. Margaret Kieran and John Kieran’s John James Audubon, a Landmark Book, opens the story on “a warm May afternoon in 1793” in Nantes, which was “beginning to show the beauty of spring.” Readers first see young Audubon, still called Fougère at this point, out enjoying the birds and flowers, but as every youngster must know, such freedom has to come to an end with the inevitable call to dinner. “Around the table that night it was a typical family gathering,” the story continues, with Fougère and his younger stepsister, Muguet, seated with their kindly and beloved stepmother and the sterner-seeming Captain Audubon. After grilling his young son about his studies and fretting to his wife that the boy “needs careful watching,” the captain let his attention drift with “a faraway expression in his eyes … thinking, no doubt, about his stay in Santo Domingo where young Audubon was born and where the boy’s mother had died not long afterward.” Bringing him back to France, he provided Fougère with a new stepmother, Madame Audubon, who “lavished as much affection on him as though he had been her own son,” making sure the boy had everything he could want: “his own room, his own nurse, and the finest clothes she could buy.” The chapter then concludes on a note of erasure: “Soon he had forgotten all about that far-away tropical island.” Whether the “he” in the sentence refers to Captain Audubon or young Fougère remains, however, unclear.17 Joan Howard’s The Story of John J. Audubon begins almost a year later, in March 1794, on a “cold bleak day” when the weather seems as ominous as the revolutionary political situation in the Vendée region. As the menace of violence swirls around the Audubon household, Madame Audubon again appears as a source of comfort and kind support. Still, young Fougère “wished he could remember who his real mother was.” Staring into a flickering fire, struggling to make sense of stories his father has told him about “the island of Santo Domingo,” with its tall mountain, fields of sugarcane, and brightly colored birds, Fougère also flashes on the image of a woman: “There was a lady who was so much different from stout Madame Audubon. She was much younger and prettier. She wore wide satin skirts. Her curls were powdered white and piled on a small, proud head. Was that lady his own mother? Fougère did not know.”18
Thus 1950s-era children’s literature dispensed with the ambiguities of Audubon’s origins, perhaps predictably so. At a time when Father Knows Best defined the televised standard for the normal postwar family, too much talk of a distant and dead mother, whoever she was, might undermine the integrity of the intact, albeit blended, four-person Audubon household, with its stern but loving father, doting and indulgent stepmother, and two mischievous but charming children, one of them a boy with an incipient penchant for birds and, apparently, vague questions, if not memories, about his birth mother.
But for adult readers, questions about Audubon’s mother remained on the table. As late as 1966, another Audubon biographer, Alexander Adams, asked, “Who exactly was Mlle. Rabin?” only to answer, “No one really knows.” Jeanne Rabin’s background, like that of her famous son, has been shaded with uncertainty, and, as Adams continued, “she may have been … a Creole, one of those women of European descent who were famous for their beauty, their charm, and also their competence.” But “creole” could be a rather elastic term, especially in an eighteenth-century slave society, sometimes referring to people of African descent born on the western side of the Atlantic or to those with varying mixtures of European and African blood, typically the product of unions between white men and women of color. Herrick, for instance, likewise describes Catharine “Sanitte” Bouffard, Jean Audubon’s mixed-race ménagère, as a “creole de Saint-Domingue.”19 As one of the leading historians of early American slavery has observed, the mixture of so many diverse peoples in slave societies often resulted in fluid forms of self-definition, rendering identity “a garment which might be worn or discarded, rather