A Free Man of Color Read Online Free PDF

see New Orleans!
    Jacques Cornet, curious, peers out through the door.
    JACQUES CORNET Ahh, the lovely woman Pincepousse calls a man.
    Doña Smerelda pulls him back to bed.
    CREUX You evil black voodoo witch!
    PINCEPOUSSE ( restraining Margery )She is my wife—
    MARGERY ( as they go )I could have had more fun in Natchez and Natchez is no fun.
    Pincepousse drags her off.
    CREUX Wife! We’re leaving.
    POLISSENA To go where? We’re homeless.
    MORALES Leda!!
    LEDA appears. Creux shrieks.
    CREUX Another wife?
    MORALES Our slave.
    PINCEPOUSSE Leda, go to the guest room and costume her as a boy. An ugly boy.
    MORALES Leda’s perfectly happy here, aren’t you? For without the blessing of slavery, she wouldn’t be a Christian.
    LEDA ( to us )If I had an axe, I’d chop their heads off.
    Leda smiles and goes.
    CREUX We will go to the ball as corpses. I shall costume myself as a ghost of what the white man used to be.
    DOÑA POLISSENA Your wife looked a sweet thing.
    JACQUES CORNET ( sizing up Doña Polissena )As you look a bit of succulence. Who is she?
    Doña Smerelda pulls him back to the bed.
    CREUX Sweet? She’d slash our throats and then lick the knife. I am shocked by the laxity of morals I see in New Orleans.
    MORALES We thought if we gave the Negro some freedoms, he would be less likely to revolt.
    CREUX You’ve gone too far. Spain must come to her senses and restore le Code Noir .
    Jacques Cornet interrupts the scene and comes down to us, wrapping his cloak around him.
    JACQUES CORNET ( to us )Let me tell you about this thing called le Code Noir, promulgated by the so-called Sun King in the year 1685. A Royal Edict Touching on the State and Discipline of the Black Slaves of Louisiana, Given at Versailles in the Month of March. We have judged that it was a matterof our authority and our justice, for the conservation of this colony, to establish there a law concerning the discipline of slaves. No slaves may marry without permission of their master. No slave can sell anything without written permission of his master. Slaves of different masters who congregate in a group shall be whipped and then branded with a fleur de lys . No slaves may bear arms or large sticks. Children born of slaves belong to the master of the mother. A slave who strikes his master shall be put to death. Slaves are the master’s personal property. Oh, I’ve memorized every clause, every syllable, every letter of the notorious black code, which gave no rights to blacks, declaring them mere pieces of property.
    This stellar document shone forth from the sacred light of Louis XIV—the Sun King. What kind of sun shines this hatred? The sun that God created was made to nourish and insure life’s growth, a light as gold as a lion’s mane. But le Code Noir ? The sun of this Sun King only shrivels and dries, is a sun that never rises, a sun with no dawn—a blazing sun that puts ice around your eyelids, a burning sun that gives no heat but is up there an arctic block of ice at the heart of the universe—that sun to me is dark and silent as the moon. The sun of this Sun King is a pus-filled canker of hate, a rotting cancer, a phaeton’s chariot spewing out rot at its highest point of ascent.
    But that’s all in the past. No, we now are on fire in this Age of Enlightenment—the way a magnifying glass catches the sun’s blaze and sets paper into flame—so the free and full splendoured sun shines in our day of universal liberte, egalite, fraternite. The French Revolution and the American Revolution brought the nurturing heat back to the sun, revived the sun. We stand in its heat. Le Code Noir est mort . We can never return to those principles that were so easily strewn in the gutter years of Louis Quatorze —even to say it quatorze quatorze —like the croak of a cancerous frog—no, the head of Louis XVI, his heir, rolled into the straw basketunder the guillotine along with the foolish scepter that issued such proclamations. Le Code Noir is dead.