New Orleans's freemen of color: a forgotten generation of cabinetmakers rediscovered.(African American history)

On the second floor of the Louisiana State Museum, just off the famed Jackson Square in New Orleans's French Quarter, stands a simple chest of drawers--a semainier--beautifully handcrafted of yellow pine with mahogany veneer (Fig. 1). (1) It was constructed in New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century and represents a form that was not commonly made there in the antebellum period. A trained eye will immediately note the skilled craftsmanship and Biedermeier influence it exhibits.

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But the real story of this particular piece of furniture is not its characteristics, but rather the craftsman who made it--Dutreuil Barjon Jr., a "free man of color." Over the years historians interested in the material culture of the lower Mississippi River valley have catalogued the region's furniture extensively, yet few efforts have focused on the products of New Orleans and its environs, with the exception of Stephen Harrison's definitive 1997 thesis on the New Orleans furniture trade. (2) And even fewer include the work of the little known but highly influential group of freemen of color who worked as cabinetmakers in New Orleans before the Civil War.

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To begin exploring this lost generation requires first shedding the conception that the racial divisions and institutional slavery of the day were simple issues of black and white. In some regions of the American South, albeit very few, free people of color lived in an economic, cultural, and social realm somewhere between the brutality of slavery and a semblance of daily freedom. "There is no state in the Union," Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935), a Creole descendant, wrote of Louisiana, "where the man of color has ... made so much progress, been of such historical importance and yet about who so comparatively little is known." (3)

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