This essay uses a deceptively discrete category—“women of African descent in antebellum New Orleans”—to highlight the instabilities within all social categories, even those premised on unities of time and space, gender and race. Unfortunately, sociocultural histories of the antebellum South devote precious little attention to women of African descent, let alone to the diverse, multidimensional modes of hierarchy that subdivided them. This essay writes into that silence by using one free woman of color's household and neighborhood as a microcosm in which frontier Louisiana's hierarchies of race and gender conspired with cleavages of class and status to produce vastly different life experiences for women of African descent. This microlevel analysis ultimately illustrates the workings of social hierarchy in daily life, the domesticity and intimacy of power, and the modalities of inequality within perceived “good times.”

Meet Melanie Drouet, free woman of color, unmarried mother of two, and owner of a colorful Faubourg Marigny household. This freewheeling former plantation took its name from Bernard Marigny, the neighborhood's onetime owner whose claim to fame, aside from his enormous fortune, was his equally sizable affinity for gambling. Though contemporaries thought the new neighborhood an atypical and open space on an urban frontier, it nonetheless operated on the bedrock of structural inequality, including—but not limited to—chattel slavery. Rather than view inequality within perceived permissiveness as a contradiction, this work centers the codependence between the selective flouting of some social and economic norms—taboos about visible interracial sex, disproportionate property ownership by free women of color, for example—within a scene defined by human bondage, the elevation of phenotype to juridical status, and the sexual availability of the relatively less privileged.