Navigating the turbulent political and social waters of their various contexts, members of the Tinchant family often found themselves in 'delicate position, ' as in Joseph's attempt to sustain amiable contacts with the white customers of his retail store in New Orleans at the height of the Civil War.
As people of color, the Tinchants struggled, survived, and flourished-in Senegal, Cuba, New Orleans, Antwerp, and Paris and through the Haitian Revolution, French Revolution of 1848, the Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S., and WWII in Europe. In this well-researched and readable family history, Scott and Hébrard recount the remarkable story of the Tinchants across generations and continents.
They persuasively argue the cross-national connections, as well as the fragility of freedom and citizenship.- () There are an Atlantic map, a genealogical tree, and family pictures. Scott and Hébrard impressively spin the family's web from documents culled from local/national archives in the U.S., France, Spain, Belgium, Cuba, Senegal, England, and Haiti. It's a brilliant book.-Henry Louis Gates, Jr."Boston Globe" () The strategies they used to overcome the constraints of slavery, war, and colonialism suggest the contours of the lives of people of color across the Atlantic world during this turbulent epoch.Ī sweeping tale of a fascinating family and the complex history of the African diaspora.-Vanessa Bush"Booklist" () Yet the fragility of freedom and security became clear when, a century later, Rosalie's great-great-granddaughter Marie-Jos was arrested by Nazi forces occupying Belgium.įreedom Papers follows the Tinchants as each generation tries to use the power and legitimacy of documents to help secure freedom and respect. Subsequent generations of Tinchants fought in the Union Army, argued for equal rights at Louisiana's state constitutional convention, and created a transatlantic tobacco network that turned their Creole past into a commercial asset. In the 1830s, with tension rising against free persons of color, they left for France. A few years later, Elisabeth departed for New Orleans, where she married a carpenter, Jacques Tinchant.
Freedom Papers sets the saga of Rosalie and her descendants against the background of three great antiracist struggles of the nineteenth century: the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution of 1848, and the Civil War and Reconstruction in the United States.įreed during the Haitian Revolution, Rosalie and her daughter Elisabeth fled to Cuba in 1803. Her later efforts to escape slavery were the beginning of a family's quest, across five generations and three continents, for lives of dignity and equality. Those who enslaved her there named her Rosalie. Around 1785, a woman was taken from her home in Senegambia and sent to Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean.
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