Returning, p.5
Returning, page 5
Jacob would be arriving in a strange land built on slavery, even as he himself instantly became a white man with all the rights he hadn’t had back home—indeed, rights very few Jews had anywhere in the world—in a new nation that liked to compare itself with a biblical promised land. Was Louisiana Canaan, or was it Egypt? Was he leaving in order to return, or simply leaving? He had a lot to figure out—and also, like Abram, money to make and offspring to produce (according to a genealogy-adept cousin of mine, there are 643 people produced as a result of his marriage to Marie Berthelot alive today). But, for all the mysteries and complications of Lech Lecha, its pertinence seems clear on one point: a Jewish exile, a wanderer, is better understood as a seeker than as an escaper: someone who aspires to live a life under God’s law but in different circumstances, not to live a life unbounded by the covenant. Jacob could have made himself into an exemplar of Clermont-Tonnerre’s maxim, happily trading Jewish life for individual rights. Or he could free himself of the restrictions imposed by non-Jews and then try to find his way back to the incomparable rewards of Jewish life. That’s a choice his descendants have had to make too—including me.
Sugar Country
If it seems odd that Jacob should have chosen Louisiana, rather than some part of America closer to Europe, as his destination, it shouldn’t. During the decades before the Civil War, a distinct emigrant wave of Jews who lived along the upper reaches of the Rhine River left home and came to Louisiana. Most of them were not desperately poor, and their lives were not in immediate danger. Most of them came as single young men. Pretty much all of them had the same original occupation: some combination of peddling, shopkeeping, moneylending, and trading in livestock.
The Upper Rhine River Valley is a very pretty place. The river is narrow, constrained by steep banks containing gorgeous, pacific, green vineyards and ancient towns. Jewish immigrants like Jacob were coming to the banks of a very different river. The Mississippi in those days was wide, muddy, and flood prone. You wouldn’t have called it beautiful. Its banks were flat and weedy. The towns along its course were rough and raw. Epidemics and disastrous storms swept through regularly. Louisiana wasn’t an obviously better place to be than Germany. But some combination of the constraints of their lives back home and the opportunities in America was enough to induce these young men to find their way to Le Havre and then to spend weeks sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
When they arrived in Louisiana, they kept doing what they had been doing back home, and their culture was tight enough that they were able to maintain a network of business connections, across what would now seem to have been unimaginable distances and barriers to communication, with other German and French Jews, in other parts of the United States and in Western Europe. Louisiana was an attractive destination because many people there spoke French and some spoke German, because life in an agricultural region was familiar to this group of immigrants, because there was an economic role for the Jews to fill, and, most of all, because it was a booming area, where, if you were white and had a head for business, you could arrive with very little and quickly make money.
The reason Louisiana provided such abundant opportunity to someone like Jacob was that it had an economy and a political order that rested on slavery: the dominion, in the place where he settled, of a small number of white people over a far larger number of Black people whom they legally owned. I think of Jacob’s generation of Jewish immigrant peddlers (colporteurs, as they were called in Louisiana), trudging along rough country roads with their wagons or backpacks in the pestilential heat, alongside the leveeless Mississippi, as people God had decided to test, as He had tested the founders of our tribe. What they wanted most of all, surely, was to establish themselves and prosper. They were not particularly intellectual or artistic or scholarly. There is no sign that, before they boarded their ships, the prospect of moving to a slave society troubled them. They had no evident impulse to present themselves with a series of profound moral challenges, both about being Jews and about being human—but that is what life brought them.
In 1791, the most significant Black rebellion in the history of the New World, soon led by Toussaint-Louverture, began in Saint Domingue, the French colony that is now Haiti. Up to that point, Saint Domingue and other Caribbean islands supplied most of the Western world’s sugar from large plantations whose owners were white and whose workers were Black Africans and their descendants. That uprisings were rare didn’t mean they weren’t deeply lodged in whites’ consciousness, including even as late as during my lifetime. It’s easy for me to imagine how heavily the Haitian Revolution, whose origins could be told as a story of large numbers of escaped slaves, in hidden encampments in the woods, practicing voodoo before campfires as a prelude to doing to whites what whites had done to them, would have landed with sugarcane planters. The “devastation of the French sugar islands by servile insurrection,” as a white Southern historian put it long ago, made it look as if more Toussaints would emerge on other islands.
In 1794, during the most radical stage of the Revolution, France abolished slavery in all its colonies. (Napoleon reinstated it some years later.) Abolitionist sentiment was growing in Britain too. Where could white planters grow sugarcane, harvested with enslaved labor? Louisiana had been thought to be too far north, insufficiently tropical if less burdened by pangs of conscience about slavery. But in 1795, Etienne de Bore, a French-descended owner of an indigo plantation, demonstrated, thanks to the labor of eighty slaves, that sugarcane could be commercially grown and processed there. Quercus stands on land that is a stone’s throw from the site of de Bore’s plantation.
In 1803 Louisiana became part of the United States, which was far more friendly to slavery than France, its former owner. A few years later, Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade, which elevated the importance of the large slave market in New Orleans, whose commerce in humans included enslaved people marched down from the Upper South in coffles by traders to be sold to plantation owners in the Lower South. At the market, enslaved Black people would be paraded before buyers who would poke and prod them, inspecting them for signs of their potential for hard physical labor, childbearing, and rebelliousness—this last criterion checked by inspecting their backs for marks of the lash.
Beginning in the earliest years of the United States, Congress placed a series of heavy tariffs on imported sugar, in order to encourage domestic production—which really meant subsidizing slaveholding plantations in Louisiana. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Civil War, sugar cultivation in one small section of southern Louisiana was a bonanza for the planters. Louisiana sugar country, which had more than 1500 planters and nearly 140,000 enslaved Black people by 1850, accounted for 95 percent of sugar production in the South and 25 percent in the world. Donaldsonville, where Jacob settled, was the principal town in sugar country. It was this circumstance that drew him there.
The largest of the Louisiana sugar planters were among the richest people in the United States. Some of them, even if they had started with nothing, learned to get themselves up as aristocrats. They built grand plantation houses placed so as to be on display to people passing by in boats on the river, bred racehorses, entertained opulently with wines, china, and silver imported from Europe. (Most movies you’ve seen that are set on Southern plantations—12 Years a Slave, Interview with the Vampire, Django Unchained, Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte—were filmed on Louisiana sugarcane plantations, not far from Palo Alto, that had been built in the decades before the Civil War; in the most recent film version of All the King’s Men, a sugarcane plantation represents a house in Burden’s Landing.) An awestruck Southern historian writing in the 1950s captured the planters’ preferred way of presenting themselves: “In approaching by steamboat a typical sugar plantation, one first saw ‘the house,’ the master’s dwelling. It was an institution of the Southern scene glorified in literature and lore. . . . Within high-ceilinged rooms and shaded verandas flowed the domestic and social life of the plantation community. Like the manor house of an earlier day, it was and yet remains the highest symbol of the grandeur of the ante-bellum sugar civilization.” It was an automatic assumption in the milieu of my childhood that the people who lived in these plantation houses really were aristocrats, people of ease and refinement, deserving automatic admiration and even deference. The plantations were seen as monuments of civilization, worth preserving and honoring, even past the middle of the twentieth century.
Such was the façade. Behind it lay, primarily, slavery. The planters always insisted that the only way to operate their plantations was with enslaved, African-descended labor. They justified themselves with not just economic necessity but also supposedly inviolable historical and biological laws and even biblical sanction that permitted their systematic dehumanization of fellow humans. Many planters had no trouble keeping their own children, the result of the sexual aspect of their total dominion over the people they owned, in slavery, or selling them away from the people who cared about them. They usually claimed that most slaves appreciated the system and led far better lives than white laborers in the North. But events gave the lie to that. In 1811 the largest slave uprising in American history took place just a few miles down the Mississippi from Donaldsonville, in an area called the German Coast. A group of two hundred Black people gathered on a sugar plantation and began marching toward New Orleans, killing two white planters and burning down five plantation houses as they went. Within a few days, a larger and better armed white force had put the rebellion down. The Blacks’ main leader, Charles Deslondes, was hunted down by dogs in a swamp. The white militia that caught him first cut off his hands and then burned him alive.
In all, ninety-five Black people were either killed on the spot or executed later after a trial. Their heads were cut off and put on pikes for the world to see. Afterward the planters did everything they could to make sure that future uprisings by sugar country’s heavy Black majority would be impossible. They forbade or tightly restricted slaves’ movements between plantations, even to see their spouses and children. They formed patrols to travel through the swamps looking for escapees. They limited Black people’s access to anything that might be empowering, like marriage, literacy, and religion. Occasionally the planters experimented with importing European immigrant labor, but repeated experiments failed and that redoubled their determination to defend slavery at all costs.
Sugar plantations were factories as well as farms. On Southern cotton plantations, the cotton left in the form of ginned bales, lightly processed. On sugar plantations, the cane left as hogsheads of refined sugar and barrels of molasses. That meant a plantation had to have a sugarhouse, running around the clock at the year-end harvest season and staffed by skilled craftsmen, to turn cane into sugar, quickly, before it spoiled. The demand for labor—to drain swamps for cultivation, to plant and cut cane, to cut down trees so the wood could be burned in sugar refineries, and to operate the sugarhouse—was relentless. Solomon Northrup, the author of Twelve Years a Slave, was rented out by his cotton-planting owner to a Louisiana sugar plantation that was desperate for workers, and there, he reported, he was paid a small quantity of cash in return for working on Sundays, because the sugarhouse had to operate seven days a week.
A recent historian who is not a Southerner described life on the plantation without a hint of grace or ease: “Louisiana’s sugar order left a brutal imprint on those who worked the line and whose days were atomized, routinized, and divided by the ticking clock. . . . Late antebellum sugar plantations hummed with the energy of the machine age and reverberated with the groans of exhausted slaves; field work and mill labor continued day in and day out with oppressive regularity and mind-numbing monotony. As ruthless and intrusive capitalists, the sugar masters modernized their immense agricultural enterprises and exploited the clock, the plantation layout, shift work, and the division of labor coldly and rationally to maximize slave labor.” Some plantation owners would press older female slaves into service as wet nurses, so as to put young mothers back to work earlier and to avoid the natural contraceptive effects of nursing, in the hope of hastening the next pregnancy. Nonetheless, the work was so relentless and harsh that the natural population increase of slaves on sugar plantations was below what it was on cotton plantations. One way to account for the incompatibility of accounts of life on sugarcane plantations would be to say that the planters were either evil or morally impaired. Another would be to say that the planters chose to see what they wanted to see. The owner of a plantation that was substantial enough to afford him aristocratic pretensions often thought of himself as the benign protector of a grateful flock of simple Black peasants, not so different from feudal lords in Europe, many of whom deluded themselves in the same way. (Back in the Germany that Jacob Lemann left, when a large piece of agricultural land was sold, the peasants on the land, though not technically enslaved, were conveyed to the new owner.)
The person who carried out the daily brutality of slavery was usually the plantation overseer, who functioned as a shield from unpleasantness for the owner. William Minor, a leading Louisiana sugar planter, wrote out a lengthy list of instructions for his overseers, which began this way: “He must treat all the Negroes with kindness and humanity both in sickness and in health.” If an overseer didn’t do that, surely he would understand that Minor, and people like him, preferred not to know about it. And the overseer had his own overseer, an enslaved Black man called a driver, who was charged with keeping his own people in line in return for a measure of special treatment. An eyewitness to life on the Louisiana sugarcane plantations during the heyday of slavery was the Connecticut-born Frederick Law Olmsted, later to become America’s leading landscape designer, but then a young journalist. Olmsted, a clear-eyed young adventurer with flowing hair and a moustache, spent several years in the 1850s traveling through the South and filing dispatches to the just-founded New York Times, under the byline “Yeoman.” He described the social ordering of a labor gang on a Louisiana plantation this way:
First came, led by an old driver carrying a whip, forty of largest and strongest women I ever saw together. They were all in a simple uniform dress of a bluish check stuff, the skirts reaching little below the knee; their legs and feet were bare; they carried themselves loftily, each having a hoe over the shoulder, and walked with a free, powerful swing, like chasseurs on the march. Behind them came the cavalry, thirty strong, mostly men, but a few of them women, two of whom rode astride on the plow mules. A lean and vigilant white overseer, on a brisk pony, brought up the rear.
Like many visitors, Olmsted found sugar country to be a kind of supercharged version of what the antebellum South was generally, with more extreme conditions, more dramatic disparities between the condition of the fortunate few and the unfortunate many, and more heated justifications of the system from the people who controlled it. He spent a good deal of time with planters, receiving their celebrated gracious hospitality and listening to their apologia. Olmsted personally came down here: “I must confess that there seems to me room for grave doubts if the capital, labor, and especially the human life, which have been and which continue to be spent in converting the swamps of Louisiana into sugar plantations, and in defending them against the annual assaults of the river, and the fever and the cholera, could not have been better employed somewhere else.” That would be my own preferred interpretation, too, but I have to contend with knowing that if, as Olmsted preferred, the Louisiana sugarcane plantations had never been created, Jacob Lemann might not have been motivated to come to America, and I wouldn’t be here. In Germany, my generation of Jews was never born.
Sugar country was perpetually desperate for credit, because running a plantation required constant infusions of money and the crop was sold only once a year. Financially, slavery may have been even more important to planters as a source of credit than as a source of forced labor. Enslaved people were not only bought, sold, and traded, they were financial assets, used as collateral for the loans the planters always needed. The major planters in sugar country borrowed from factors in New Orleans—financiers who would lend them money and help them take their crops to market. Planters who were too small to get the factors’ attention dealt with people like Jacob Lemann, Jews who moved through the countryside selling them goods, making small-scale loans, buying loans and reselling them, and trading: what they knew how to do because it was what their forebears had been doing for centuries back in France and Germany. Because slaves in sugar country sometimes made a little cash, Jewish peddlers sold goods and extended credit to them too. In a country with no stores, the Jews established stores. The timing of Jacob’s arrival in Louisiana was especially propitious because it closely preceded a banking crisis, whose result was that for fifteen years sugar country had a severe shortage of traditional lenders, which opened the way for nontraditional lenders like him.
