Cynthia Hogue

Ars Cora

Author’s Note:

In 1995, I lived in New Orleans and happened upon a slave story I never forgot.   It was the case of Arsene vs. Pignéguy, preserved in the records of the Louisiana Supreme Court. In 1836, Arsene traveled with her owners, the Pignéguys, to France, where slavery was illegal. As soon as she stepped onto French soil, she was free. She continued to function as a personal servant upon returning to New Orleans. Eight years later, when Louis Pignéguy reclaimed ownership in order to sell Arsene, she sued for her freedom (and her back wages). She was not the first slave to do so, but she had the unique distinction of being the last. She began her litigation in the same year as Dred Scott, 1846, and on similar grounds, but she won at the level of the state courts, and Pignéguy settled. Dred Scott, we know, lost in both the Missouri and the U.S. Supreme Courts. On the eve of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, Arsene won her case and disappeared from all records.

The fact of her name, “Arsene (alias Cora),” as it is always referred to in the court documents: In lower Louisiana in 1846, the Napoleonic Code still enforced and Creole French still in use, slave-plaintiffs were referred to by their given names, the owner-defendants by their surnames. Arsene known as Cora, an alias that seems also to be a given name rather than a surname. Is it perhaps the name that she gave herself when, upon learning to read in France, she first read of James Fenimore Cooper’s mixed-raced heroine? We don’t know; we cannot know her. Alias, L. otherwise, elsewhere : “Arsene (alias Cora)” is the only sign we have that she lived.

Chora  is, according to Julia Kristeva in Revolution in Poetic Language, the trace of the archaic feminine in poetic language that disrupts the Law.  

Ars Cora (New Orleans 1838/2008)

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.
                                                               Susan Howe

She isn’t here, nor her page of exertion.
                                                              Kathleen Fraser

1836

An owned
     person leaving
            New Orleans,
few paved roads or lights,
levees “lined with a forest of masts”:
No other city of the world had advanced
with such gigantic:
     “Burgeoning on
          the bayou”
Eric Fleury: Easy mobility
on waterways “pervasive swamps”
to escape enslavement
(and survive) Chaotic
     prevailing
         mixing
Indian African Spanish
then French after which
American rule erased
 — the Code Noir and Las Partidas Siete —
 — which defined as “bondsmen” and “bondswomen” —
 — by legal definition slaves had souls (and therefore —
 — productivity encouraged manumission —
 — illegal “barbarous and inhuman treatment” —

Eugene Genovese (Roll, Jordan . . .):
     “paternalism not to be con-
          fused with actual kind-
liness”: no Fabled
     Golden Age of Good,
         always only goods

    ***

Arsene (alias Cora)
     traveled to New York
          with the white Creole
couple who owned
     her [own, adj. intensifier,
         as in: to thine own self be,
and verb, to possess,
     used with object,
          as in: to own something
or (this case) someone,
     and verb, to acknowledge,
          as in: to own a fault]
All three
     boarded a schooner for
          a sojourn in France.

    ***

                                  Arsene (alias Cora) walked off the ship
                                     where — "Tout individu est libre
                                       aussitôt qu’ il est en France"--
                                       and was by French law free(d)

1838

In Paris  
     “a distinct effort
          of the imagination
is required to visualize”
cobbled
streets and be-
grimed spires that horse-
drawn along river to
Place of  /  Concord /  Arc of  /
Triumph   /   at Étoile (a-
round which still
woods) the mentality
of liberty /  free
passage all
over every-
body self-
evident lightenment
post-revolut  /  and ideal-
ized  /  thought  /  that Cora’d have heard
Learned letters (one at
least survives by account
in court documents:
“A”
on a note she handed one
of her witnesses)

Returned with her own-
erwas be-
foreFrance “a good
servant” and described as such
after sojourn “im-
pertinent and insolent” (irre-
vocably ob-
durate)Arsene (alias Cora) when re-
enslaved 8 yrs later
(put up for
     sale) herself refused
          to comply

   ***

1846

became the last slave to
hired the best lawyer who wd take
“such cases”o used the courts
o sued for freedom--
plaintiff gave witness
on her behalf, J. Ducourneau,
small piece of paper
marked with the letter “A.”
“2 or3front teeth ar missing.”

ARsene (alias Cora) a mulatto woman
or in some records quarteron—
the same year as Dre(a)d
Scott before the Misery Com-
promise(1848) passed U.S.
Congress and was signed into
Law (a long history
of at-
times immoral):

***

                                                     Compromise is politic
                                                     and also complicity in
                                                       oppression, an ab-
                                                       use of power and
                                                   privilege in this country’s
                                                    history is (color coded).

***

1831

Marcus Christian (History of
the Creoles of New Orleans):
“be emancipated and their children born free”  
“sizeable population of free people of color was to”
“the Americans’ consternation propertied”
“assertive confident”
“often armed, and numerous (12,000 by 1830)”
“although eroded that confidence and”
“wealth in the antebellum”

***

                                                           1848

                                                  Arsene (alias Cora)
                       a name in census rolls in New Orleans and a Supreme
                                                 Court of Louisiana
                                         decision (also Appeals) wherein
                                                 both courts ruled
                          “. . . cannot affect and destroy the donation of freedom
                made in France by the consent of the master.  No law can be en-
                              forced retroactively; it can only be made for
                                                       the future.”

***

2008

I am speaking My words cannot find her If she is not at the center it is not her story

of her I write in silence or become her I speak to the margins instead of

               the center;
           makes no difference:
                she’s (not) t/
                here:

***

A-
          spiration towards
Artistic
And, in particular . . . a woman’s desire for
Affirmation
          now sometimes the truth
An otherwise repressed,
          nocturnal secret
And unconscious universe of the unsaid, the uncanny . . .
          This identification with the potency
          of the imaginary . . .
          bears witness . . .
          lifts the weight of
          what is sacrificial . . .
          nourishes with
          A more flexible and free discourse
          (of the silenced . . . )

***

And to transform the “implacable violence"
          (practical: revolutionary
          to turn
Around through shamanism, esoterism, and carnivals —
          unifying opera
          of language —
          The chor-
A)
(Alias Cora)
          Traces in the vocalic
          beyond figure (can not be figured
         ours)
Articulates contra-
          diction and di-
         vision linked to morph-
          ology, the body in/
As sign: there is this
A which is
A sign in script:
          it is itself
Although the original
A — the note of
“A” — was witnessed but not kept in court
          which is the choral chora of or for or with
Arsene
(Alias Cora)
An owned
          person who in suing for
          her freedom then,
          having won, dis-
Appeared: One in-
Alienable.

                                                     After which no trace of her in censusry
                                                                      , off record

Cynthia Hogue is the co-editor of Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews(2006). In 2010, two new collections of poems, Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina (interview-poems and photographs), will be published. She teaches English and creative writing at Arizona State University (USA).