New Orleans provides the context for this chapter’s reading of Les Cenelles in relation to the concerns of the city’s community of francophone free people of color. As this chapter shows, the 1845 collection of poetry not only emerged from discussions over how to provide an education to the city’s Black francophone children, but also articulated a specific theory of education that would later find an institutional home in the city’s first school for free children of color.

Two texts bookend the major phase of literary activity by Creoles of color in New Orleans, the first book of poetry by US citizens of African descent, Les cenelles (1845) and Nos Hommes et Notres Histoires (1911). The first – a collection of poems – evokes sexual and romantic relationships between people of different races, a notion that runs radically counter to the racial politics of the rest of the US South. The second emerged as polemic as the Jim Crow Era gained full ascendance and marginalized nonwhite people in ways that ran counter to long-standing cultural patterns in New Orleans regarding the elite Creoles of color.