Gentilly - by Nathalie Dessens & Virginia Meacham Gould (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Between 1818 and 1851, Auvignac Dorville, a Louisiana Creole, managed the day-to-day operations of the Gentilly plantation, located a few miles from New Orleans along Bayou St. John. The plantation belonged to Henri and Marguerite de Sainte-Gême, who entrusted their property to Dorville's careful supervision when they left Louisiana for the Sainte-Gême ancestral home in France. Dorville wrote to the Sainte-Gêmes for more than thirty years, offering detailed glimpses of the plantation's crops, financial situation, environmental challenges, and events surrounding the two dozen enslaved men, women, and children working there. Expertly translated and annotated by Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould, Dorville's letters illuminate nineteenth-century life on an urban plantation that connected the rural world of Louisiana to the urban sphere of New Orleans and reached far into the Atlantic world.

Review Quotes

"The Gentilly plantation, though one of New Orleans's oldest, was never grand. It kept the town in beer, stocked it with fowl and firewood, supplied oranges to the locals. It was still at it in 1850, when John McDonogh purchased the property. But as the fifty-four, carefully annotated letters reproduced here show, the plantation was also a small window onto a larger reality. The correspondence between Gentilly's resident manager and absentee owners in France serves up plenty of gossip about what the Marignys and the Beauregards were up to. Then the reader is stunned by the casualness with which the manager itemizes the prenatal balance sheet of pregnancies and miscarriages in Gentilly's slave cabins, and we are reminded anew of human bondage's bottom line. Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Gould deserve applause for assembling and framing these letters with an extraordinarily helpful introduction."--Lawrence Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans

"How rare it is to hear voices from two hundred years ago--not from the famed French Quarter or Garden District, like many archival sources, but from Gentilly, a neighborhood known today for its modern subdivisions and highway interchanges. Through the meticulous translation and editing of letters sent to France over thirty-three years, Dessens and Gould bring to life the daily experiences on a multi-use plantation on the rural outskirts of antebellum New Orleans. Gentilly is a treasure trove of important insights into everything from enslaved labor and race relations to banking and household finances, as well as health and foodways, ecology, infrastructure, and urban development."--Richard Campanella, author of Crossroads, Cutoffs, and Confluences: The Origins of Louisiana Cities, Towns, and Villages

"What a remarkable collection of documents! I know of nothing comparable in the historical record. These letters written by Auvignac Dorville between 1818 and 1851--when he managed the Gentilly plantation on the outskirts of New Orleans--contain a wealth of information on the plantation, its enslaved labor force, and the expansion of the city and its economic growth. Nathalie Dessens and Virginia Meacham Gould have ably situated the letters in the history of the city, the region, and the wider Atlantic world. This unique and important collection offers invaluable insights on the region's history."--Randy J. Sparks, author of Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic World

About the Author

Nathalie Dessens is professor of history at the University of Toulouse and the author of Creole City: A Chronicle of Early American New Orleans.

Virginia Meacham Gould is a lecturer in history at Tulane University and the editor of Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South.