When Jean Baptiste “La Chaume” Chevalier entered the New Orleans courtroom in July 1743 his puncture wound must still have been hurting. Few would have extended this soldier much sympathy since he had stabbed himself less than three weeks earlier. After months of laboring at the Natchez Post for an abusive commandant (a punishment he was serving for a prior desertion attempt), La Chaume had lashed out, was restrained, and then led towards physical disciplining. His punishment was to be administered by an enslaved African man. “To be ordered by a negro” after attempting “to get himself out of slavery” was too much for this Bohemian soldier to bear.
In 2020, I unpacked La Chaume’s experience as a Bohemian man in colonial Louisiana to consider the intersection of race, masculinity, and colonial violence. Bohemian was the word used in French for those called “Gypsies” in English, and who today are referred to as Romani people. La Chaume’s name, meaning “whiskers,” was a nickname or dit. Eighteenth-century French speakers often signaled, good naturedly, a character trait or physical characteristic when giving someone a dit. This could have meant that Jean Baptiste “La Chaume” Chevalier was especially hairy, or it could have been teasing this middle-aged soldier about his boyish facial features. Though only three short documents, preserved in the records of the Louisiana Superior Council, relate directly to his life, a micro-historical approach allows us to tell his story. This is potentially a noble end goal in and of itself, considering the dearth of historical scholarship written on Romani American lives. La Chaume’s testimony, as recorded by the court, is the only known first-hand account from a Romani person in colonial North America. Arguably even more important, however, is the way microhistories can lead to the reconsideration of seemingly settled histories. Small stories can provoke big change.
Other scholars have made use of similar sources and techniques to paint a more inclusive, and hence nuanced, understanding of early American history. Sophie White’s award-winning Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor and Longing in French Louisiana, (which you can listen to her discuss here) and the accompanying digital humanities project, provide singular access to the interior lives of enslaved people who lived alongside La Chaume. Unique from other North American places, Louisiana courts required testimony from the enslaved on their own and other’s behalf. But as Sherri V. Cummings’ recent EAS Miscellany post shows, court records from other early American places can work in similar ways.
To make the most of the benefits of microhistory, one must be able to connect a small and singular story to other histories that have been written. We can see the challenges of this in the work of two scholars who had previously encountered La Chaume in the archives. Another award-winning historian, Cécile Vidal, uses his experience to illustrate the proximity of the enslaved and convict laborers who often toiled side-by-side under similar conditions. The anthropologist and scholar of New Orleans, Shannon Lee Dawdy, considers him in the context of interracial and inter-status colonial punishment practices. While both brilliantly used his case as evidence in their larger studies, because of a dearth of Romani American historical scholarship, neither could make the most of their archival discoveries. They could recount his life as evidence in their histories but could not place his experiences into a Romani American world. This illustrates one limitation to the micro-historical approach; its fullest potential can only be reached with scholarly connections.
One way around this limitation within academic scholarship is through crowd sourcing material. A current digital history project by the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights maps Romani community memory points to connect disparate histories together. Many of these local stories run below the radar of professional academics, though the accounts carry huge meaning within local communities. Most are ripe for a micro-historical application.
As I’ve argued before for both Early American Studies and Early American Studies Miscellany , adding Romani people’s experiences to early American history not only allows us to reconsider familiar historical topics, but also positively shape lives in the present. Though source limitations can hamper writing Romani history in certain ways, a micro-historical approach amplifies archival whispers; it only takes a different instrument to make out the traces unavailable to the naked ear.
