Courtesy of New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University
Moderator Gwen Thompkins, left, and authors Fatima Shaik and Michael Tisserand discuss the Black and Creole influence on New Orleans.
Local writers Fatima Shaik and Michel Tisserand sat down on Friday (March 11) to talk about “Hidden History: Black and Creole Influence and Culture in New Orleansat the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University.
Shaik’s book chronicles the history of black New Orleans through a group of free men of color, the Societe d’Economie et d’Assistance Mutuelle.
“Hidden” is part of the title because this society and its activities were little known even though the men of the Association Economique et d’Entraide community were important figures in the city from the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s until the creation of jazz at the beginning of the 20th century. The name “Economy Hall” refers to the Tremé building where the association met and held events.
Tisserand is the author ofKrazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and Whitethe acclaimed biography of New Orleans-born illustrator, journalist, and cartoonist George Herriman, the creator of “Krazy Kat,” a newspaper comic strip that ran from 1913 to 1944. The book investigates his life in sailing – or hiding – from the color line at the start of the 20th century.
Shaik says they discovered many affinities due to their extensive research and dedication to the unknown stories of New Orleans.
Tisserand said reading Shaik’s book deepened his understanding of George Herriman’s family, though it raised even more questions about how Herriman’s work might relate to his family’s experiences in New Orleans. .
“Mark Roudane, the descendant of the founder of the black-owned 19th century New Orleans Tribune, says he keeps the two books together on his bookshelf,” he said. “I like this.”
Herriman hid his racial identity throughout his professional life. A quarter century after his death, Herriman’s birth certificate has been found, indicating that he was born “colored” to mixed-race parents.
“When I was editor of Gambit, I planned to write a cover story about George Herriman and try to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his 19th century childhood in Tremé,” Tisserand said. Later he was able to piece together Herriman’s genealogy and he wrote a book instead.
The New York Times wrote of Tisserand’s work on “Krazy”: “Writing the biography of a black person who passed as white in 20th-century America adds an extra layer of difficulty to the detective work that any biographer This is all the more true since Herriman seems never to have spoken of his trickery.
Tisserand’s research hints at how Herriman’s Creole mulatto background influenced his life and work. Descendant of free people of color highlighted how he would have understood, on a gut level, how categories of social identity are about who has the power to construct and enforce those categories.
“It suggests ways an artist might push back against those categories,” Tisserand said. “And, so, Herriman gave us Kat, a character so innocent that throwing a brick is interpreted as a love missile, and whose color changes as frequently as the desert landscape in the background, and whose gender is stubbornly non-binary.”
Likewise, Shaik’s investigative work behind “Economy Hall” conveys a revived history of New Orleans. After years of research, the author suggests that the city’s known prior history requires reassessment.
A treasure inspired Shaik, a discovery that would delight any historian. In the 1950s, his father saved and became the owner of 24 historical leather-bound manuscript books. The records were left in the rain in the back of an old van.
She later learned that the old leather books she was not allowed to touch as a child were the handwritten records of the Economy Hall Association from 1836 to 1935.
New Orleans’ free people of color made up nearly half of the population of African descent at the time of the city’s entry into the United States in 1803 until the decade before the Civil War. Blacks also made up about two-thirds of the city during the first three decades of this American city, Shaik said.
“But we don’t have the same amount of historical knowledge about the majority of the population,” Shaik said. “This book seeks to begin to remedy that.”
“Economy Hall” describes people and places in Louisiana that are familiar to us on the surface, but a deeper dig reveals a much deeper story. The book describes the most successful and influential organization of free blacks in the South before the Civil War and probably after.
The book provides a window into the multi-ethnic members of New Orleans society, including progressive Germans and Italians.
Shaik also says New Orleans residents should look through names in records to find out their ancestry. She recently let Tisserand know that George Herriman’s uncle was a member of Economics.
The reaction to Shaik’s book has been overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times said, “‘Economy Hall’ is so inviting that the true depth of its scholarship is revealed only in its bibliography, which lists dozens of archival and other sources. Shaik’s monumental book… is lyrical and mysterious and always gripping. It was a Louisiana endowment for Humanities Book of the Year in 2022, and Kirkus Reviews and the Washington Independent Review of Books named it among their top books of 2021.
“Krazy” won the 2017 Eisner Award for Best Comic-Related Book, a 2017 New York Times Outstanding Book, a 2017 LEH Book of the Year, and numerous other accolades.
Both books are available locally at Octavia’s Books and the Garden District Bookstore.