"Gumbo YA YA" a 18th century Creole New Orleans kitchen

Gumbo YA YA by Andrew LaMar Hopkins

"Gumbo YA YA" my latest finished painting is the third in a  series of Louisiana Creole kitchen paintings. Each painting has sold before i was finished painting it. Including this one. The first Creole kitchen painting was a commission. I was a little hesitant to paint it as I did not consider the kitchen a fine room of a house like my parlor or bedroom paintings. But once I started painting them. I have really got into thyme, each new kitchen painting is better then the other.  The kitchen is a room that just about everyone can relate too.  18th and 19th century kitchens were fascinating room filled with interesting cooking apparatus. 

 The lady of the house A Free woman of color has a pearl choker on and wears a tignon a type of headscarf, she gestures to a fashionably dressed Free man of color enjoying a flute of Dom Perignon champagne. 

This painting titled after the famous book by the same name that chronicles Louisiana folk tales and customs. The painting Gumbo YA YA! shows a 18th century New Orleans Creole kitchen. Owned by Free people of color, the lady of the house to the right hand corner of the painting has a pearl choker and wears a tignon a type of headscarf, a large piece of material tied or wrapped around the head to form a kind of turban that somewhat resembles the West African gélé. It was worn by Creole women in Louisiana beginning in the Spanish colonial period, and continuing to a lesser extent to the present day. She gestures to a fashionably dressed Free man of color enjoying a flute of Dom Perignon champagne. 

A quadroon house servant get's ready to pour Dom Perignon champagne into two crystal champagne flute's in anticipation of the meal of seafood gumbo being dished out of a large copper pot into a Louis XV porcelain soup tureen by the cook. 

A free person of color in the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, is a person of full or partial African descent who was not enslaved. In the United States, such persons were referred to as "free Negroes," though many were of mixed race (in the terminology of the day, mulattos, generally of European and African descent).

Free people of color or in French "gens de couleur libres" was especially a term used in New Orleans and the former Louisiana Territory, where a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. There were also free people of color in Caribbean and Latin American slave societies. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to appearance and to the proportion of African ancestry.

 A fashionably dressed mulatto boy holds a flower garland up to his dog. He is wearing a gray satin sailor suit tied at the wast with a pink gold fringe sash. French Queen Marie Antoinette was one of the first parents to dress her children in sailor suit's. A fashion that continued well into the 20th century. The potted orange tree was a symbol of wealth in the 18th century.

The center piece of the room is the elevated stuccoed bricked stove. Firewood would have been stored in the arches beneath the platform. A fire would have been started on the top platform for cooking. Smoke would have been vented up in the pyramid top flute and out of the kitchen.  Over the stove is a wrought iron chandelier.  

To show the Roman Catholic culture of Colonial Louisiana next to the stove is a copy of a bust of Christ by Italian artist Guido Reni. In the 18th century copies of famous paintings were not considered  valuable. The gold leaf frames were considered more costly then the painting.

A quadroon house servant get's ready to pour Dom Perignon champagne into two crystal champagne flute's in anticipation of the meal of seafood gumbo being dished out of a large copper pot into a Louis XV porcelain soup tureen by the cook. A fashionably dressed mulatto boy holds a flower garland up to his dog. He is wearing a gray satin sailor suit tied at the wast with a pink gold fringe sash. French Queen Marie Antoinette was one of the first parents to dress her children in sailor suit's. A fashion that continued well into the 20th century. 

The buffet a deux corps. The name is literally translated to “buffet with two bodies”, which provided an ingenious type of storage and sometimes display case in the upper part, plus it was able to be split into its component parts making it much easier to transport and deliver into the narrow doorways of homes of past centuries. 

The boy is standing next to a terracotta potted orange tree a symbol of wealth in the 18th century. Although furniture was being made locally in 18th century Louisiana, finer households had locally made French style Creole furniture mixed with imported furniture from Europe like the buffet a deux corps. The name is literally translated to “buffet with two bodies”, which provided an ingenious type of storage and sometimes display case in the upper part, plus it was able to be split into its component parts making it much easier to transport and deliver into the narrow doorways of homes of past centuries. 

Other imported furniture in the kitchen include the the Provincial tall case clock and the turned legged work table in the center of the room. Locally made Creole pieces of furniture would include the ladder back chair and the cabriole leg table holding the copper water cistern. The center piece of the room is the elevated stuccoed bricked stove. Firewood would have been stored in the arches beneath the platform. A fire would have been started on the top platform for cooking. Smoke would have been vented up in the pyramid top flute and out of the kitchen.  Over the stove is a wrought iron chandelier.  

On the shelf of the pyramid flute of the stove, displayed are 18th century French pottery and beautiful hand-painted faience and ceramics that were instant sources of pride for the local populace and a large green glass wine jar. To show the Roman Catholic culture of Colonial Louisiana next to the stove is a copy of a bust of Christ by Italian artist Guido Reni. In the 18th century copies of famous paintings were not considered  valuable. The gold leaf frames were considered more costly then the painting.  A collection of copper pots and pans are displayed on the walls. Two French olive jars were used for food storage. On the top of the buffet a deux corps are woven baskets. The architecture of the rooms features a terracotta tile floor. A beamed ceiling showing the upper cypress floor. A French door. The walls are painted a light French blue popular in the 18th century.  

Bon Séjour/Oak Alley Plantation 1837-1839 part 2 Slavery

The first time I visited Oak Alley plantation in the mid 1990's Slavery was hardly talked about during the tour. All of the slaves were called servants.  The local tour guides seem very uncomfortable talking about slavery in the 1990's. Today that has all changed. On my recent visit. Slavery has been incorporated in the tour. On all other sugar plantations in Louisiana, the workforce of enslaved laborers was critical to the success of any plantation and that was no different at Oak Alley.

 The slaves were housed in 20 white-washed cypress cabins located in two rows of 10 behind the Big House. Theses cabins have recently been reconstructed as you can see in my photo's. Each slave cabin was a double cabin housing two slave family's built of wood with a central brick fireplace that heated both halves of the cabin. The slaves were thus housed in 40 units. House slaves, referred to as servants, were likely housed in or near the Big House.

Over the years Jacques Télésphore Roman accrued an inventory of 20 house slaves and 93 field slaves, including children. Slavery spanned three decades at Oak Alley and ended in 1865 with the Civil War. A devastated land and the madness of haphazard methods of reconstruction wreaked havoc on former masters and slaves alike, while a whole culture was swept into the uncertainty of a new way of life.

The most noted slave who lived on Oak Alley Plantation was a field slave named Antoine. He was listed as "Antoine, 38, Creole Negro gardener/expert grafter of pecan trees", with a value of $1,000 in the inventory of the estate conducted on J.T. Roman's death in 1848. Antoine was a master of the techniques of grafting and, after trial with several trees, succeeded in the winter of 1846 in producing a variety of pecan that could be cracked with one's bare hands; the shell was so thin it was dubbed the "paper shell" pecan. 

It was later named the Centennial Variety when entered in competition at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where it won a prize. The trees may be found throughout southern Louisiana, where the pecan was once a considerable cash crop. Although Antoine's original trees were cleared for more sugarcane fields after the Civil War, a commercial grove had been planted at nearby Anita Plantation. Unfortunately, the Anita Crevasse (river break) of 1990 washed away Anita Plantation and all remains of the original Centennial pecans.

The Research and Collections Department at Oak Alley is currently conducting an extensive research effort into these lesser-known plantation residents. How did they live? What did they think of their status as property? Were they families in the modern sense of the word? While we will never know the answers to some of these questions, we are gradually gaining a better understanding of the way slavery functioned socially and economically on this sugar plantation. We have learned that infants were always baptized, there was a strong separation between house and field duties, and the most common punishment was imprisonment. These discoveries, and others, will help illuminate the lives of 158 plus individuals who for many years have been a mystery.