Chapter 1
My People Had Pride in Themselves
The sound of a horse-drawn wagon along the dirt road was nothing new for Audley Moore. But there was something off about the familiar rhythm. Audley’s family always urged her and her two sisters, Eloise and Loretta, to be models of propriety. They were never to gawk or stare. But the eldest Moore girl couldn’t resist. She ran to the window to see what was coming down their street. Excitement quickly turned to horror when the spectacle came into view: white men on horses “hollered like wolves” as they dragged a Black man by his feet off the back of a wagon. Another gaggle of them followed close behind, yelling and screaming with animalistic fervor. Audley would soon come to recognize the screams of a lynch mob and what it meant for any Black person caught in its path.
Moore’s grandmother was all too familiar with what the young girls were witnessing. She quickly shut the windows and hissed at them to get down. “I remember Grandma allowing us to look through the shutter,” Audley later said, so long as they were careful not to be seen. Crouched down low with her sisters, Audley tried to be still and quiet her breathing as she peered through a small opening in the blinds. Her eyes widened and her mouth fell open as she watched the man’s head “bumping up and down on the clay, the hard, crusty road.” Moments like this—witnessing the horrors of white supremacy from the safety and protection of her household—defined Audley Moore’s early life.
The eldest child of St. Cyr and Ella Moore, Audley was born in New Iberia, Louisiana, on July 27, 1898. Her well-to-do family taught Audley the value of Black empowerment and the price many would pay to get it. With their twenty-year age difference, St. Cyr, born in slavery, and Ella, who came from a free Black community, made for an unlikely union. They were brought together by their families, who had willed themselves forward during Reconstruction, desperate to take advantage of all the possibilities that emancipation had to offer. As they stepped out of the shadows of slavery, both sides of Audley Moore’s family pushed against the constraints of southern racism, took pride in their ability to obtain an education and property, and defended their rights at the ballot box, all in an effort to secure a piece of the American pie.
Still, the idea that Black people could and should forge a separate nation of their own would have been anathema to St. Cyr Moore. Born in the early 1850s to Arsene and Anderson Moore, Audley’s father likely spent the first years of his life enslaved in what is now known as Iberia Parish but at the time was part of St. Mary and St. Martin Parish. Though St. Cyr could hardly imagine Black people claiming Louisiana as their own nation, plenty others already had. The land he and his family worked on first belonged to the Indigenous Ishak or Atakapa people. The French and Spanish crowns alternately claimed it as part of their empires from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, each seeking to control its rich soil, large mineral salt deposits, and proximity to the Bayou Teche—a 125-mile-long waterway that snaked through southern Louisiana’s remote interior, connecting the sole of the Louisiana boot to the Mississippi River.
By 1850, plantations lined the bayou all across the parish, and sugar production governed the Moores’ lives. Rising early and dressing in master-issued plain cotton sleeveless shirts and pants, they would have trudged from their slave cabins to the fields with knives in hand and spent hours in ankle-deep mud, slicing cane at the stalk and loading it onto mule-drawn wagons. When it was time to grind, they’d feed the cane into horse-powered mills, unless they worked for a master who had purchased a steam mill and a vacuum pan, which produced sugar faster, whiter, and of higher quality. No matter how they worked, the systematized violence of slavery made one thing clear to the Moores: they were the true engine that powered America’s sugar seat.
“My father’s father was a white man. His mother had been raped, you see, on the plantation,” Audley explained. His parentage could have brought St. Cyr either security or scrutiny. As the master’s child, St. Cyr might have lived in the “big house”—a multistory brick structure that was a unique commingling of French colonial architecture and Greek flourishes with a row of windows, a veranda on the top floor, and several large doors on the bottom. Then again, he and his mother could have been the bane of the mistress’s existence. The master’s wife would have banished them to the far corners of the plantation, where “rectilinear rows of whitewashed slave cabins seemed to stretch into the distance.”
If he was favored, then his master might have sent St. Cyr on errands to Jeanerette, a smaller town about twelve miles south of New Iberia. Down a dirt road lined with large, looming oak trees, the town took its name from the tutor turned plantation owner John W. Jeanerette. Lining the bank of the Bayou Teche, the area quickly gained the nickname Sugar City because of all the sugar plantations nearby. By the 1840s, Jeanerette attracted more young white men looking to make their fortunes on the backs of slaves like the Moores. On the eve of the Civil War, St. Cyr would have found himself surrounded by plantations in the New Iberia–Jeanerette area—the Weeks, Richardson, and Loisel estates the most “prized” among them.
Thus, it came as no surprise when these planters grabbed their guns as war broke out. Louisiana, and especially New Orleans, was a geographical and financial stronghold for the Confederacy, and slaveholders in the Bayou Teche joined their southern brethren in building an army to defend their state and their way of life. Some of them signed up when, on January 26, 1861, delegates from across Louisiana convened in Baton Rouge and voted to leave the Union. Nearly eight weeks later, on March 21, 1861, even more cheered as Louisiana joined the Confederate States of America.
Lincoln expressly excluded St. Cyr, his parents, and any enslaved person living in Teche country when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. The president intended to free only those in Confederate regions, and he, somewhat optimistically, believed the Teche to be under Union control. His soldiers had indeed made a battleground of the bayou. On April 15, 1863, federal troops stormed through Jeanerette, confiscating animals, sugar, and other staple crops. They also captured New Iberia and seized the Weeks family plantation as their headquarters. St. Cyr, now about ten years old, might have heard rumors of the Union soldiers’ imminent arrival. Perhaps he prepared to leave with them, like the hundreds of thousands of other self-emancipated men and women who set up camps near Union forces for protection and sustenance. It is also possible that the Moores changed their minds about fleeing to Union lines when the rebels recaptured the town and held it from June to October 1863. But Jeanerette was soon under Union control again, and the Moore family stayed put. With the Union army’s presence as strong as it was, they gambled on waiting to see what would become of the Teche after the war.
Many in the Moore family’s shoes turned to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency created in 1865 to help the newly emancipated integrate into the American polity. Bureau leaders established its Louisiana headquarters in New Orleans and sent Union soldiers turned agents throughout the parishes to negotiate labor contracts, establish schools, issue marriage certificates, and locate family members. But the bureau offered spotty protection at best. Its promise of paid labor often meant apprenticing Black children as young as four to white planters, and quelling violence often meant putting down ex-slave “insurrections” as opposed to challenging white mobs. But most important, the bureau lacked the funds, infrastructure, and progressive personnel to truly assist the millions of freed men and women who came calling.
Where the government failed families like the Moores, Black people in the bayou stepped in. St. James Methodist Church, the oldest Black congregation in New Iberia, supported residents as they transitioned to freedom, offering worship services, community programs, and material aid, while Young Union and Solid Rock benevolent societies, among others, helped them care for the sick and bury the dead. Now a teenager, St. Cyr could have made the journey from Jeanerette to New Iberia for annual “turn outs,” citywide social gatherings in which the Black community dressed in white suits, church hats, and dresses and paraded through town to collect money for their social and cultural institutions. Or perhaps he enjoyed Easter Sunday traditions, where he could get some food and admire the local women dressed in their Sunday best as they came out to sell “gumbo, cakes, pralines, and coffee at tables or booths immediately in front of St. Peter’s Church.” This kind of community building made Jeanerette and New Iberia vibrant, albeit precarious, spaces for St. Cyr to make a life.
St. Cyr likely saw his hometown as a place of potential prosperity. Postwar rebuilding had brought new industries to Jeanerette and New Iberia, including lumber factories, sawmills, and, most notably, a Tabasco sauce factory, made possible by Edmund McIlhenny’s “discovery” of pepper plants. In fact, many New Iberians, both Black and white, believed their area was on the rise but that parish officials were trying to keep them down. Despite dutifully paying their taxes, white folk in the area grew tired of what they saw as a lack of infrastructure—the roads, bridges, and ferries needed to expand industry. And so, they did what many people often do when they want to take control of their futures: they seceded. Residents separated and formed Iberia Parish in 1868.
Perhaps St. Cyr was hopeful when he got wind of the split. Although his hometown was still largely segregated, Iberia Parish was a Republican stronghold. Thirteen years after the end of the Civil War, Republicans were still known as the party of Lincoln, and white lawmakers carried this liberatory spirit into the 1870s, allowing for a bevy of Black men across the South to gain a foothold in American politics through the party. Not only did the county separation portend more potential opportunities for entrepreneurial men like St. Cyr, but he likely felt an added sense of security given the party’s track record on Black rights.
Radical Reconstruction bolstered St. Cyr’s belief in a prosperous future. After the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency and attempted to resume business as usual. Under Presidential Reconstruction, Johnson forced Confederate states to abolish slavery. But he required only 10 percent of the voters in these rebelling states to swear allegiance to the Union before reentering and reconstructing their state governments. This left the door open for former white Confederates turned politicians to enshrine racism in state laws and courts. Aghast at their leaders’ leniency, the radical wing of the Republican Party tried to seize control of Congress in the 1866 election. They were successful, and a faction of Black and white Republicans spent the next decade passing legislation that propelled America toward its founding ideals with unparalleled fervor. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments outlawed slavery, granted Black citizenship, and extended the franchise to Black men. Radical Republicans also passed the Reconstruction Acts of 1867–68 and divided the former Confederacy into five Union army–patrolled military districts to enforce these amendments and other measures, like the Enforcement Act of 1871, also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, designed to combat white hate groups.
St. Cyr certainly took advantage of the opportunities available to newly freed and enfranchised Black men. Now in his twenties, he was considered among Jeanerette’s finest Black men. Many classified St. Cyr as a Creole of Color, a mixed-race group that occupied the middle social, political, and cultural ground in a socially stratified society that included the formally enslaved, white and European landowners, and everyone in between. Some white people saw him as a “respectable-looking colored man” because of his fair skin, tailored clothes, and fine hair that he kept short on the sides with a coiffed swoop in front and a bushy but well-groomed mustache. Still others described him as “powerfully built,” forceful, and “uppity” because he refused to accept his “place” in society—a trait he would pass along to his daughter Audley.
St. Cyr began earning a living working in the growing local lumber business. He also tried his hand at being a constable in New Iberia, a position that allowed him to command respect from his white counterparts and, at least in theory, protect his Black ones. His position would become a source of pride for young Audley, who continually pointed to St. Cyr’s time on the force as evidence of his commitment to armed Black self-defense.
The Moore patriarch married his first wife, Rebecca Keller, in the late 1870s and began building a life as New Iberians built their new town. The first iteration of the Moore family lived in Jeanerette, where St. Cyr worked as a carpenter and Rebecca as a seamstress while raising three children. Their first son, Henry, was born in 1880. A daughter, Mattie, followed three years later, and little Clarence came as the decade closed in 1889. Perhaps because St. Cyr had waited to wade into parenthood until he was in his thirties, his first set of children enjoyed some privilege. He was able to put a roof over their heads, albeit with the help of a wife who worked, too, in a racially mixed neighborhood. Henry, Mattie, and Clarence might have had some schooling. Perhaps they played with the Childresses, a Creole family on the block, or talked about the latest news they heard in town with the Porters and the Browns, two large Black families down the street who survived the transition from slavery to freedom by working as washerwomen, farmworkers, and carpenters in town. Audley’s half-siblings were ten to twenty years older than her, and they inhabited a racially fluid world that she could never have imagined. But it wouldn’t last.
Copyright © 2025 by Ashley D. Farmer. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
