John James Audubon. Gregory Nobles
questions about the category of “creole” have thus contributed considerably to suggestions, even assumptions, that Rabin’s identity—and therefore her son’s—might well reflect at least some degree of African descent. These notions have become most prominent in African American tradition. In recent times, for instance, The Negro Almanac (1989) included Audubon as its first alphabetic entry under “Outstanding Black Artists” and described him as “the son of a French merchant sea captain and planter and his Afro-Caribbean mistress.” Similarly, the Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections has placed Audubon on its list of “African Americans on U.S. Stamps,” noting that “Audubon’s mother was a Creole (mixed heritage) from Domenica.” Among academic institutions, the African American Cultural Center Library at Indiana University of Pennsylvania currently lists Audubon in its Biography File.21 On the other hand, the Dictionary of Negro Biography (1970) contains no entry for Audubon nor does the more recent Black Biography, 1790–1950 (1991). The Journal of African American History (formerly the Journal of Negro History) has never carried an article on Audubon since its inception in 1916. The differences among such sources in the African American scholarly community do not indicate a consensus, of course, on the exact biographical accuracy of Audubon’s racial identity—or, indeed, his mother’s. They do suggest, however, that Audubon has had a persistent place in African American memory.
Questions about Audubon’s racial identity apparently never sat well with Alice Ford, the Audubon biographer who wrote the most definitive (and certainly most defensive) account of Audubon’s origins—and who has also been the most insistent about his whiteness. In her 1964 biography of Audubon, she sought to erase the uncertainties surrounding Rabin’s identity by arguing that she was not a creole woman but a French immigrant to Saint-Domingue, a twenty-five-year-old chambermaid from Les Touches parish in Nantes. According to Ford, Jeanne traveled to the West Indies on the same ship as Captain Audubon, and it was there they first began their relationship—or, at least, within the cramped but ever-exposed social circumstances of an eighteenth-century ocean voyage, their friendship.22
Hoping no doubt to close the matter once and for all, Ford offered even more detailed information on the Audubon-Rabin relationship in 1988, in a revised edition of her Audubon biography. As the text on the book’s dust jacket put it, “The most startling revelation is the positive identification of Audubon’s mother, which leads to clarification of the mystery of Audubon’s early life.” In this edition, Ford addressed the “mystery” by once again making her case for Rabin’s being a French chambermaid, but this time she enhanced the documentation with imagination. She speculated that Jeanne, a young woman of “pious upbringing,” might have worried about how Anne Moynet Audubon, Captain Audubon’s legal wife back in France, would have taken the news of her husband’s various infidelities in Saint-Domingue: “The presence of a black mistress was one thing,” Ford fretted for Jeanne, but “the imagined intrusion of a white woman, known by some to be the mother of her husband’s expected child, quite another.”23 Getting inside the mind of this young woman of “pious upbringing” was not the only point of that sentence: It was also to assert her racial identity. Indeed, the very crux of Jeanne Rabin’s imagined moral quandary hinged on race, the contrast between, on one side, the “black mistress,” Sanitte, and, on the other, this pious “white woman,” Jeanne, who had nonetheless found herself in a similar situation of extramarital motherhood.
There remains one small, final piece of the parental puzzle. As Ford also notes, Captain Audubon had yet another child with Sanitte, this one a daughter named Rose (or Rosa or Muguet), born on April 29, 1786, almost exactly a year after young Audubon, or Fougère. When Captain Audubon later sent the young girl to France, she was entered on the ship’s list as “Demoiselle Rose Bonitte, aged four, natural daughter and orphan of Demoiselle Rabin, white.” Ford explained this identity change for the young Rose by suggesting that not mentioning the part-African Sanitte as the girl’s mother and instead using Rabin’s name served as a “protective shield” for her entry into white society in France; just to make the point clearer, Rose was also given the designation “white” in the ship’s list.24 Ford let the issue go with that, without taking the possible implications one step further: If one child of Captain Audubon could be given a new racial identity by assigning her to a different mother and calling her “white,” could not another? But Ford failed to entertain, much less explore, that prospect, and her version of the young boy Audubon’s birth still defined him as the white son of a white French father and a white French mother. As one observer has noted, Alice Ford “was the first to bleach Audubon completely.”25
In fact, Audubon himself was the first. Despite his French–West Indian origins, Audubon would always define himself as decidedly American. Just as he sometimes depicted his birds in odd, even distorted postures in order to fit them within the dimensions of his paintings, so Audubon reshaped and shaded his own identity to conform to the common assumptions of what it meant to be an American—above all, a white American—in the antebellum era. By the time he became famous and, in his own estimation, a superb subject for a “Biographer,” he had adopted the identity of the American Woodsman, a free man of the American frontier, an artistic cousin of the Common Man. “America will always be my land,” he wrote his wife during his residency in England in the late 1820s. “I never close my eyes without travelling thousands of miles along our noble streams and traversing our noble forests.” Wrapping himself both rhetorically and visually in the garb of the American Woodsman, he located himself not just in the natural environment, but also in the social environment of the new nation.26 Audubon’s consistent, sometimes insistent assertion of this selective self-identity became the critical element of his persona, both in his writings and in his more general engagement with Euro-American culture. Being a free, white frontiersman was one of the most valuable identities a man could have.
French Foundation
Before Audubon could become fully American, however, he would freely acknowledge being French. Despite his vague evasions about what he had “been led to understand” by his father about his “New World” birth, he took more ownership of his memory in describing his early life on the far side of the Atlantic. “The first of my recollective powers placed me in the central portion of the city of Nantes, on the Loire River, in France,” he wrote, “where I still recollect particularly that I was much cherished by my dear stepmother, who had no children of her own.”27 Madame Audubon, the wealthy widow whose fortune allowed her second husband to have both a sugar plantation and other women in the West Indies, found herself with a three-year-old toddler when young Fougère arrived in France in August 1788. In another three years, she also acquired Fougère’s half sister, Rose. Madame Audubon never had children of her own, and she never asked to become a stepmother to these two young children born out of wedlock to two different mothers in the West Indies; still she apparently accepted their presence with a good measure of maternal affection, and she became, Audubon attested, “the only mother I have ever known.”28
She seems to have been a good one, or certainly an indulgent one, “devotedly attached to me,” and, Audubon admitted, “far too much so for my own good.” By the time she acquired these two surprise stepchildren from her husband, she was at least in her late fifties, living in the comfortable circumstances first assured by her own inherited wealth and then supplemented by her second husband’s sea ventures and slaveholding. She was also happy enough to spend some of the Audubon family wealth on her young stepson, believing, he said, “that fine clothes and filled pockets were the only requisites” to his becoming a gentleman. The only other requisite she insisted upon was that he become confirmed as a Catholic, which he dutifully did at age seventeen; even though young Audubon was “surprised and indifferent” about taking his parents’ faith, he learned the catechism and acceded to the confirmation ceremony so that “all was performed to her liking.” Audubon himself was much to her liking, too, and she spoiled him, giving him “carte blanche at all the confectionary shops in the town,” boasting to others of his accomplishments and good looks, and providing him a youth, he said, in which “all my wishes and idle notions were at once gratified.”29
Among those “idle notions,” none proved to be more important than skipping school and heading