54 The New York Reviewin or near the port, often for short pe-
riods before returning to the islands on
merchant ships or, on occasion, escap-
ing. Others lived with rich merchants
or former ship captains, working as ser-
vants in some of the city’s great town-
hou s e s. S o m e c a m e f ro m t he c olo n ie s t o
be trained as cooks, valets, or porters.
A few of the youngest Africans to come
to the city spent their early years as so-
called négrillons, often represented in
European art as devoted, even beloved
extended family members hovering ex-
pectantly around their masters as living
emblems of their power and opulence.
It is estimated that some four thousand
Africans or Caribbean- born Black
people passed through or lived in Bor-
deaux during the eighteenth century.
By 1738 Louis XV felt compelled to
issue a declaration clarifying the status
of these Black populations. To avoid
the fear of miscegenation, which was
already a legal and social concern in
the Caribbean, and the possibility of a
“spirit of independence,” he limited the
stays of enslaved Africans in France
to three years. He also stipulated that
those residing in France needed to be
engaged in either religious or trade-
related training. Owners who violated
either part of this decree were to be
fined a thousand livres and have their
slaves confiscated and returned to the
colonies.
In the year before the contest on
blackness was announced, provincial
parlements, including Bordeaux’s,
were called upon to ratify or reject
this declaration. The appellate judges
who composed the Bordeaux Parle-
ment—including a dozen or so men
who were simultaneously members of
the Academy—voted to accept Louis
XV’s proposal. The ostensible goal of
this statute was to control or even limit
slavery in France; what it did, how-
ever, was further codify the legality of
human bondage on French soil.The presence of enslaved Africans
in the city of Bordeaux surely contrib-
uted on some level to the genesis of the
1741 contest. Just what the Academy
discovered from the competition was
quite limited, however. Many essayists
attempted to reconcile the origin of
African skin with short biblical time-
scales, including the literalist reading
of Scripture that maintained that God
had created the earth precisely 5,741
years earlier. This powerful conviction
intersected with providentialism, the
belief that everything on earth is part
of a larger divine plan.
Despite these shared beliefs, the re-
ligiously minded writers who contrib-
uted essays to the contest produced a
wide range of explanations for black-
ness: that Adam or Eve was Black, or
Adam was half Black; that blackness
is a mark from God denoting sinful-
ness; that blackness is a gift from God
allowing people to live in the “torrid
zone.” Some of the essayists, however,
attempted to combine their scriptural
knowledge with more recent discover-
ies in the sciences. One asserted that
blackness was passed down through
the soul of the African father; another
claimed that a moral defect in Afri-
can parents had led God to make their
progeny dark.
Several possible explanations for
the source of blackness came directly
from the Book of Genesis. The first of
these was the curse of Cain, accordingto which Cain lied to God about mur-
dering his brother Abel and was there-
fore “marked” or, according to some
interpretations, “darkened”—a curse
passed on to his descendants.
Far more convincing for some of the
other essayists was the so- called curse
of Ham or, more accurately, the curse
of Canaan. According to this allegory,
Noah fell asleep one night after drink-
ing too much wine and lay naked and
exposed to his three sons. The first
two, Shem and Japheth, covered their
father’s body to preserve his modesty.
But Ham, his third son, had indiscreetly
glanced at his sleeping father, an act
of impropriety that led Noah to curse
Ham’s only son, Canaan. Canaan was
thus sentenced, with all of his descen-
dants, to a life of slavery as a “servant
of servants.” Several of the submissions
to the contest not only cited this storybut claimed that Ham had also under-
gone a physical “blackening,” a theory
that had first been proposed by early
Talmudic and Christian scholars in the
third century CE.
The academy also received a num-
ber of climate- based explanations for
blackness, all of which can be traced
to the Greek physician Hippocrates
and his belief that there was a causal
relationship between extreme environ-
ments and the bodies of people living
in such lands. Some of the contributors
made use of these ideas to render the
biblical story of Noah’s children slightly
more scientific. This same understand-
ing of the impact of the environment
also allowed one thinker to identify
the temperate European zone as the
source of white people’s cognitive, aes-
thetic, and ethical preeminence. Antic-
ipating what Montesquieu (a memberof the Bordeaux Academy at the time
of the contest) would write in his 1748
Spirit of the Laws, this contestant
claimed, “It is only in intermediate re-
gions, especially the warmer ones, that
we find fertility and agile minds, an
agreeable activity in external manners,
and a delicate sensibility in pleasures.”
These Eurocentric uses of climate the-
ory were accompanied by more prop-
erly proto- racist and humoral notions
that asserted that the heat, sun, and/or
humidity of the torrid zone, bounded
on the north by the Tropic of Cancer
and on the south by the Tropic of Cap-
ricorn, had not only darkened African
skin but may have thrown African
bodies out of equilibrium, introducing
imbalances that produced an excess of
black bile, a condition supposedly lead-
ing to melancholia.
Climate theory also allowed some
of the essayists to propose a far more
dynamic understanding of nature and
thus of humankind’s many varieties.
One essayist not only claimed that an
original white prototype group had de-
generated in extreme climates; he pro-
posed himself as a living example of
climate’s ability to change one human
type into another over time:Although my [skin] color is the
same as that of my [European]
people, I am nevertheless the great-
great- grandson of an Ethiopian who
was brought from Africa to Ger-
many by Emperor Charles V during
the war in Mauritania, and whose
children gradually turned from a
black to a white color. Therefore,
the truth is confirmed: the color of
the Ethiopians is not inherent.^1Similar statements were also made
about the potential mutability of white
populations during the era: transport
a family of Englishmen to the Congo,
it was commonly asserted, and over
the next two hundred years or so their
descendants would degenerate and be-
come black.
In May of 1741 the academicians met
to discuss and debate the sixteen man-
uscripts in the academy’s headquarters.
After a lengthy discussion—which was
so shambolically recorded by the in-
stitution’s secretary that the resulting
manuscript is virtually unreadable—
they were disappointed to find that(^1) The unnamed ancestor of the Bor-
deaux essayist was presumably taken
back to Germany in the aftermath
of the conquest of Tunisia in 1535 by
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
His subsequent success and integra-
tion into European society, while not
common, was not entirely extraordi-
nary. Other famous people of color
in this category include Juan Latino,
the sixteenth- century Spanish scholar
of classical Latin at the University of
Granada; Abram Petrovich Gannibal,
who not only served at the court of the
reformist tsar Peter the Great but was
the great- grandfather of the renowned
novelist and poet Alexander Pushkin;
the philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo,
who held important teaching posts at
the universities of Jena and Halle, in
Germany, in the mid- eighteenth cen-
tury; Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein,
who studied at the University of Leiden
and in 1742 produced a dissertation on
the Christian defense of slavery with
no apparent irony; and Angelo Soli-
man, born Mmadi Make in 1721, who
became an upper- class member of En-
lightenment Viennese society.
MY EURYDICE
1967, New York City, East River
From Jackson Pollock, I had learned to hate
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus—
those white, white sheets—
thrown back covers
of the breakers’ unmade bed, and Venus
uncombed, unkempt, always just
decanted from sleep, that hair—
a serpentine peignoir tossed across her shoulders—
I scrubbed my palette down to nothing
but the colors of wash water and zinc bucket
and embraced the iron light
between Broadway and Bowery,
and, beneath the streetlights,
the junkies, fellow bees in a hive of misery—
I loved my oppression,
walked Cherry Street to the docks and
—there—washed out,
dreamy, creepy,
drowned in her last experiment,
was a rat—
the dry clove of her eye glaring up.
If I bent down I would see
into the broken
hive of bones—
I did not look at her
staring at me from the window of her underworld.
About death
I didn’t give a damn.
I believed my hand
could open any lock.
And even if not,
as I forged ahead,
I did not once look back.
—Lynn Emanuel
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