Pete Hamill - Loving Women

But for all the respect they gave her, Coincoin knew one terrible thing. You hear me? She was the property of other men. She and her mother, her father and sisters and brothers did other men’s work: cooked their food, plowed their fields, picked their crops, nursed their babies. And because they were property they never got paid, no more than a mule got paid. And though the Code Noir said they couldn’t, the white men could grab the girl children and make them sleep with them. And then they could sell them off the way you might sell a saddle or a cart or a mule .

One night when she was sixteen, Coincoin found herself on her own. On that single night her mother died, her father died and the master died in an epidemic that ran through the whole area and killed hundreds. They tell how the master’s wife got sick too and how Coincoin drew on the old medicine and saved that woman’s life. They say her father on his deathbed asked her to look for the kee-ah root, and Coincoin went foraging in the deep woods, was gone for four days. But when she came back with the secret root, it was too late to help her own father and mother. The Story says Coincoin hated the master and let him die. But when she was certain the man was gone, she saved his wife .

When the plague was over, her slave family was split apart. Coincoin and a brother were given to the master’s son. And The Story says that he was kind to her; after all, she had saved his mother. But for all the kindness, she was still property. And in those days, the females were like brood mares to the damned masters. The more children they had, the more human beings the master could sell at a profit, or keep around to work the plantations. So the new master made Coincoin live with a fresh new slave from the old country. She must’ve felt something for the man because she had four children with him, one after the other, and along the way, started knowing better about the true world .

And then, so The Story goes, when Coincoin was twenty-five, the Frenchman came to Natchitoches .

Her Frenchman .

He was tall and blue-eyed and kind, two years younger than Coincoin, free of family and responsibility, come to Louisiana to make his fortune. His name was Metoyer. He met Coincoin. They fell in love. And within a few months, Coincoin’s black man was gone, sold off into the country, her children by him were sold, and Coincoin was living in the Frenchman’s house .

This wasn’t easy to do, child. She was someone else’s property, not the Frenchman’s. She couldn’t come and go when and where she pleased. But the Frenchman wanted her, and she wanted the Frenchman’s wanting. So the Frenchman went to Coincoin’s owner and made a deal. He rented her, like you might rent an ox to work your fields. And there, in the Frenchman’s house, the Frenchman and Coincoin began to make The People .

They stayed together for twenty-five years. She gave him seven children. The humiliation was always there, I guess, because though he leased her, all her children belonged to the original master. Still, they lived a moral life. She was his woman, simple as that, his black wife living in the house and taking him inside her and giving him children .

It wasn’t always easy. A Spanish priest came to Natchitoches and tried to break them up. But Metoyer loved his Coincoin, and he fought the authorities and they stayed together until, when the owner was on his own deathbed, Metoyer bought Coincoin from him. Bought her outright. And then, because the Code Noir said that no owner was allowed to father a child by one of his own slaves, the Frenchman freed her. And she stayed there in the house with him and their children .

Finally, Coincoin started to get old. And the Frenchman came to her one night and said he wanted to break up with her. This was after twenty-five years and seven children. See, he was rich now and prosperous, this Metoyer, the owner of more slaves than anyone else in the region and thousands of acres of land. He said he wanted to marry a white woman that he’d met in New Orleans. That was the only way under the law that he could pass on his lands to someone, because he wasn’t allowed to pass it on to black people. Well, we just don’t know what Coincoin said to him when he brung her this news. I like to think she looked at him across a table and said, Go ahead, Frenchman, go to your white woman, but you ain’t ever gonna find no woman like me again. Not in your bed. Not by your side. Not ever .

Whatever was said, they stayed friends for the rest of their lives. He arranged to buy her some land on the banks of the Cane River. He gave her money. He made sure all their children together were free and that they carried his name and that they knew how to read and write .

And in spite of her years, Coincoin used her freedom .

She and her children, with their brown hair and blue eyes, set about making something of the wild land along the Cane. They planted tobacco, and loaded it on the boats that would take it to New Orleans and then to Havana to be made into cigars. She raised chickens and turkeys, selling them in the market at Natchitoches, and then bought more land, and planted indigo, which made the dye used in the uniforms worn by the soldiers of Europe. In the early years, she and the children acted like they had no money, lived off the land, and with the money they made, bought more land. Coincoin found empty land along the river and asked for it from the King of Spain (who now owned it all) and got herself a deed written in the king’s name. Because the king’s deed said they had to, they cleared the land, hunted off the bears, built roads and bridges during those hot and endless days .

Coincoin built two small houses, and saved her money and then went chasing through all the plantations until she found her lost black children, and she took her saved money to their masters and bought them back too. If she was free, she said, then her flesh and blood had to be free. And maybe, someday, they would all be free .

And then came the part that was like a curse, certainly a sin, because more than anyone else in the region, Coincoin knew what she was doing .

She began to buy slaves of her own .

I think of her sometimes deciding to buy that first slave. She who had been the property of others. She who had seen her black children taken off like puppies from a litter. And I wonder what she was thinking and I can’t ever get it right. She was a woman alone except for her children, and maybe she thought the only safety was in land: If you owned the land, they couldn’t take it from you. But you had to work the land to make it valuable, to defend it, see? And she was getting older, and would never have another man, and maybe she thought, well, just for now I’ll play the white man’s game, cause eventually this crime will end. I live in the white man’s world. I got no momma, no daddy, no husband, and I have to live and build and grow .

So she bought the slaves, and even had a jail built for slaves who didn’t do her bidding, she the queen bee now, the mother of the land. She lived on until 1816. It’s in the histories. You could look it up. But her slaves — well, when she died, they weren’t freed. And her children, held together so long by Coincoin, didn’t fall apart. They too wanted to grow and make themselves safe, and so they went down the river from Natchitoches and found the Isle Brevelle. It wasn’t really an island, just a giant hunk of land formed by the old and new channels of the Red River. The old channel was called the Cane. The children had been there with Coincoin (chasing bears through the unfenced wilderness) and she had showed them how deep and rich the soil was and how easy it would be to defend .