by Brigitte Fielder
“I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”
—Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993
In the book I am currently writing, I have been interested in human- animal relationships and the ways that childhood becomes a key site for both racialization and humanization. In my final chapter, I discuss how the famed bird murderer, enslaver, illustrator, and taxomonizer John James Audubon becomes the authoritative ornithologist only by very deliberately racializing himself as white, a move that involves distancing himself from his birthplace and childhood relationships. It is on this— the connections of Audubon’s childhood and family—that I want to dwell. Reading his entry on the Zenaida dove, we can see how the man weaves his own biographical account into the kind of racialized self-fashioning for which he is known. But there is an erasure in his account.
In December of 1838, the Colored American newspaper reprinted a short excerpt from Audubon’s naturalist tome, the 1831 Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America. The excerpt, here called “The Pirate and the Dove,” was taken from Audubon’s musings on the Zenaida dove, a bird Audubon associates with parental care, precarity, and his own childhood. In this part of the story, doves also signal something of a call to morality, as we read about a pirate for whom “the soft and mellow cry of the dove awoke in his breast feelings which had long slumbered, melted his heart to repentance.” The pirate comes to contemplate both “the happiness of former innocence” as well as “increasing fears of futurity” as he navigates the Florida coast. The sound of the dove itself brings comfort, as “so deeply moved was he by the notes of any bird, and especially by the mellow and pensive notes of those of a dove, the only soothing sounds he ever heard during his life of horrors.” This awakens the pirate to escape his seafaring life and return to his family and to God’s work, to live a life “in peace in the midst of his friends.”
It is unsurprising that this “interesting” story circulated beyond its original publication. Historical African American newspapers such as the Colored American—like nineteenth-century newspapers more generally—reprinted a wide variety of items from other sources. This variety spoke to the breadth of editors’ and readers’ interests, which included national politics and current events as well as literature, religion, technology, history, science, nature, and the Black diaspora. Alongside this range of interests, readers encountered this snippet from Audubon’s journals. The inclusion of this piece in this venue suggests that we would do well to consider the Ornithological Biography not exclusively as the provenance of white readers, whatever Audubon’s or his publisher’s intentions or expectations for it might have been. Suffice to say that the Colored American’s editors knew their primary readership, like Black people more generally, to be capacious in their intellectual interests, and that this story about the pirate and the dove may resonate with them.
Still, the question of Black interest in Audubon—in the 1830s or today—is complicated by Audubon’s own investments in anti-Black racism. The ornithologist’s father was an enslaver in the French colony of Saint Domingue and he himself was an enslaver in Kentucky, after he moved to the United States. His writing (including in the Ornithological Biography) contained expressions of explicitly pro-slavery and otherwise anti-Black views. This was not uncommon, of course, for white men of his times. But reading Audubon’s writing as it appeared in an African American newspaper presents an opportunity to consider how this piece might have resonated for readers with different perspectives and views than Audubon’s. Black perspectives on Audubon’s racist history have been publicly apparent of late, with increasing attention to Black birders such as science writer Christian Cooper, who recorded a racist encounter in Central Park and now hosts a National Geographic Channel program about birding, to wildlife biologist and MacArthur Fellow poet J. Drew Lanham, whose poetry about Audubon openly interrogates the enslaver’s history, to artist Kerry James Marshall, whose encounter with a crow inspired his Audubonesque series of paintings, Black and Part-Black Birds in America. And, although the National Audubon Society openly acknowledges this man’s enslaver history, local Audubon Societies around the nation have taken further steps, debating (and some enacting) the removal of Audubon’s name altogether from these bird clubs, a signal deemed necessary (even if insufficient) to making them more welcoming to Black members. With regard to the pirate, it is a story about reflection and repen- tance, the possibility of changing course and even returning to a life once lost or abandoned. It is, perhaps, a very human story. Many read-ers, including the Black readers of the Colored American, may have found something familiar here, speaking to a wide spectrum of people whose “life of horrors” may prompt similar “wretchedness of guilt” and who might change their ways, seek mercy, and live in peace. The possibility that a person might change is compelling in any era or place—including the antebellum US. If we consider the dove, however, we get another point of entry. The sounds of the bird, “mellow and pensive,” “soothing,” “plaintive notes” might also speak to human concerns and emotions. The pirate’s (or Audubon’s) sympathy for the dove, contradictory and complex as it is in this account, is not an exclusively white sentiment, nor is interest in birds, more generally. Beyond this short excerpt, reprinted in this venue, Audubon’s full entry on the Zenaida dove relates details about the bird’s habitat and flight, its nests and eggs, and its parenting practices. He describes a mother bird guarding her nest with anthropomorphic sympathy as:
Her beautiful eye was steadily bent on mine, in which she must have discovered my intention, her body was gently made to retire sidewise to the farther edge of her nest, as my hand drew nearer to her, and just as I thought I had hold of her, off she glided with the quickness of thought, taking to wing at once. She would then alight within a few yards of me, and watch my motions with so much sorrow, that her wings drooped, and her whole frame trembled as if suffering from intense cold. Who could stand such a scene of despair? I left the mother to her eggs or offspring.
Readers familiar with antislavery literature (like many nineteenth-century readers were) may well have noted similarities between the sympathy afforded to these doves and that afforded to the enslaved in writing of the era. It is no coincidence that many white authors of antislavery literature also wrote about animal welfare. Birds were national symbols of freedom and were often compared to enslaved people, especially in antislavery literature for children, holding a particular racial resonance in the antebellum US. While some may have aligned themselves with the pirate, a potential threat who nobly chooses not to capture the bird and her young, others may well have understood their own position in this familiar genre as aligned with the doves, hunted and in danger of capture.
Later, Audubon recounts robbing another nest and raising the young birds himself. And then he admits his usual hunting of the birds he draws, ultimately killing nineteen doves, “the internal and external examination of which enabled me to understand something of their structure.” Audubon killed the birds he gathered in order to illustrate, describe, and categorize them. The travelogue narratives in the Ornithological Biography were a companion to The Birds of America, the “double elephant folio” that included over 400 plates of Audubon’s illustrations of life-size birds, including this one of Zenaida doves.
Beyond reading Audubon’s writing on the Zenaida dove in this African American newspaper, we might consider how this piece resonates with Audubon’s other Black contexts. Both Zenaida doves and the man known as John James Audubon hail from the Caribbean. The former has been observed within the range from the Yucatan Peninsula to the Florida Keys to Anguilla (for which it is the national bird) to the island of Hispaniola—from which this man hails. American naturalist John James Audubon was born Jean- Jacques Rabin in 1785 in Les Cayes, in what was then still a French colony and would later become the independent, Black-led Republic of Haiti. Jean-Jacques fils was a “créole de Saint Domingue.” Audubon’s father, Jean Jacques père, owned sugar plantations, held people enslaved, and fathered children by (at least) two different women, neither of whom were the French woman to whom he was married, and at least one of whom was not white. The famous ornithologist, however, was known to be the child of a woman named Jeanne Rabin (or Rabine), a créole chambermaid, who died a few months after her son’s birth. His illegitimate paternity, the complexly racializing locale of the West Indies, and the ambiguity of the term “créole” inflected upon this man’s whiteness in a way that would later be overshadowed by his subsequent Americanization and instantiation as the authoritative ornithologist of the era.
As Gregory Nobles shows in his 2017 biography, Audubon’s project of self-fashioning depended largely upon making himself into the kind of person who could become a successful and iconic authority on birds in the nineteenth-century United States. Audubon’s position and legacy is very much dependent upon the prerequisite role of white masculinity for supposing scientific expertise. In the United States, Jean-Jacques became John James. His Americanization distanced him from the racializing space of the Caribbean and ambiguities of the descriptor “créole.” The prerequisites of race and gender gave him and his work legitimacy for people who have, historically, prioritized the scientific contributions and intellectualism of white men, often to the exclusion and erasure of others. But Audubon’s rela- tionship to whiteness was more complex than has often been acknowledged.
Audubon’s full description of the Zenaida doves begins with memories of the ornithologist’s youth, arguing the strength and continuing resonances of these—impressions that apparently sparked Audubon’s interest in this particular bird:
My father often told me, that when yet a child, my first attempt at drawing was from a preserved specimen of a Dove, and many times repeated to me that birds of this kind are usually remarkable for the gentleness of their disposition, and that the manner in which they prove their mutual affection, and feed their offspring, was undoubtedly intended in part to teach other beings a lesson of connubial and parental attachment.
Audubon’s fondness for doves, he tells us, has to do with “the timidity and anxiety which they all manifest, on being disturbed during incubation, and the continuance of their mutual attachment for years.” He imbues doves with the sentiment of his own familial relationships—of parents and children, of care and mutual affection. In the larger context of Audubon’s family, this becomes more complex.
We cannot reconcile this image of familial love and care with Audubon père’s role as an enslaver. A participant in French colonialism, he held people captive and in forced labor. As he recounts his son and inheritor’s childhood endeavors at illustration, the gentleness of these birds, this scene of parental care, he is an active participant in the ongoing global assault on Black families rendered by the transatlantic slave trade. Young Audubon, of course, was an enslaver himself in the United States. (Having benefited from this system in his upbringing, he later married into another family of enslavers.) Considering their participation in this form of oppression, one has to wonder: what feelings of parental attachment—human or animal—mattered to these men? As this enslaver conversed with his son and told him about the gentleness of doves, what were the conditions of Black people’s lives and work on his plantation?
A bird could be a symbol for sympathy in the world of Atlantic slavery. But it could also be a threat. In The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution, Trinidadian historian C. L. R. James describes white colonists as “birds of prey feeding on the ignorance and inexperience of the great masses of the black labourers” who navigated the rev olution. Here people like the Audubon family are not the gentle parent bird nursing their offspring, nor are they the pirate inspired by that bird’s tenderness to repentance, but a bird of another feather entirely. This is a bird of power and position, and a danger even to other birds. In an 1861 poem about the capture of a self-emancipated women in Ohio, published in the Liberator, African American author and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper made a similar comparison of birds and white men, asking
Men of Cleveland, had a vulture Clutched a timid dove for prey,
Would ye not, with human pity, Drive the gory bird away?
Harper demands more of the white northerners she admonishes than what Audubon celebrates in the pirate inspired by doves. Describing thesame position of white supremacist power that James does with his colonialist birds of prey, Harper urges political alignment and action. To regard the dove with “human pity,” one must act on that bird’s behalf, not only in accord with naturalized power or self-interest. Harper’s dove is not unlike Audubon’s. But her poem offers something the ornithologist’s musing on the pirate and the dove does not: here birds are both the hunter and the hunted. Recogniz- ing birds not simply as symbolic figures, or even as necessarily sympathetic ones, Harper’s expectations expand the possibilities of how humans might relate to literary birds. In nineteenth-century Ohio or eighteenth-century Saint Domingue, what gory bird clutched a timid dove and what human pity did or did not move to intervene on behalf of the less-powerful?
Reading about Audubon’s familial reminiscences and ideas about doves and considering themes of prey and pity in the larger context of Black Atlantic slavery, I cannot help but think also about Audubon’s sisters—the other children of the Saint Domingue enslaver, girls whose circumstances of parentage differed from that of their half-brother. Where were this man’s daughters during this nature lesson, as he encouraged his son’s burgeoning artistry? What “lesson of connubial and parental attachment” did the children of a Black woman and a white enslaver learn in the years leading up to the Haitian Revolution? I wonder how these girls (or others like them) may have contemplated these themes, the scene of natural parental love and care or the need for powerful men to repent of the horrors in which they have participated and instead seek peace. How might they have mused on or related themselves to a bird like the Zenaida dove? Might their own alignments have allowed them to differently recognize or participate in human-animal relations of power? To consider these questions, I must make an attempt, a flight test, un essai en vol—and likely just one of many. The doves and the sisters urge me toward new directions, flight toward thoughts and questions that I have resisted trying to ground. The answers do not rest in Audubon’s archive, or perhaps any other. They pertain to birds and people who cannot there be contained. Nonetheless, the scant accounts of an unknown number of mixed-race women, Audubon’s Black sisters, deserve further exploration. I am interested in their not-fully-recovered histories despite (or per- haps because of) the improbability of their recovery. I am coming to regard these women as essential to understanding how their brother, Jean Jacques, became the iconic man later known as John James Audubon. But also, this is not part of the book I am writing. This part of my project wants to take flight, to extend itself beyond this final chapter about Audubon, bird-slave comparisons in antislavery literature, the African American folktale of flying away from slavery, and Black bird- watchers in the twenty-first century, to somehow consider these mixed- race Black girls or women who are in many ways independent of the famous man through whose history I happen to have arrived at theirs.
Audubon’s relation to whiteness, blackness, family, humans, and birds is complicated by the fact of his mixed-race half-siblings. Audubon père also fathered children with a woman named Catherine Bouffard, (sometimes called “Sanitte”), a free mixed-race woman who worked as the femme de ménage or housekeeper to the Audubon household. One of these daughters, Muguet, was sent to France in 1791, where on the ship’s passenger list she was re-named Rose, and listed as the daughter of the deceased Jeanne Rabin(e) (young Jean’s mother), in a move apparently meant to facilitate her passing as white. Contrary to his later (rather sensationalist and historically inaccurate) accounts of fleeing the island during the Haitian Revolution, Jean junior had been sent to France a few years earlier, in 1788. The biologically childless Anne Moynet Audubon (Audubon père’s legal wife), with her husband (an illegitimate father), later legally adopted both Jean and his sister Rose.
Young Jean Jacques was sent from France to the United States in 1803 (possibly to avoid being conscripted into Napoleon’s army) and he became a US citizen in 1812—John James. Some early biog- raphers would list his birthplace as New Orleans, or even New York. He navigated the US landscape and his new Anglicized identity in a way that seems deliberately poised to thwart any semblance of his own racial ambiguity—an ambiguity that was exacerbated by his biological relationship to people who were not white. As a result, his white-self- fashioning involves distancing himself from mixed-race Black women.
In a contribution to the Mississippi River Journal, Audubon recounted time he had spent in New Orleans in early 1821. In this piece he distinctly distances himself from the créoles “of all Sorts as well as Colors” who he sees at the Market, adding also an entirely unnecessary disparagement of mixed-race Black women. He continues, “I saw however no handsome Woman and the Citron hüe of almost all is very disgusting to one who Likes the rosy Yankée or English Cheeks.” This disparagement of light-skinned Black women is odd in this context, in which “Citron hüed” women were more often hypersexualized to the point of fetishization, deliberately targeted for sexual slavery in what was called the “fancy trade,” and celebrated for features that met, or approached, white supremacist standards of beauty, in accordance with the particular brand of anti-Black racism known as colorism. It is notable, then, that Audubon confesses such an apparent distaste for mixed-race Black women. He is perhaps too eager to deny association with them.
Audubon had, of course, married a wealthy white woman. And his relationship to his mixed-race (though white-passing) sister Rose is obscured in the historical record. In his writing on “Audubon’s Haiti” in Public Domain Review, Christopher Irmscher notes Rose’s absence from Audubon’s autobiography, writing that “It is likely that Audubon would have worried at least occasionally that, no matter what he had been told about his mother, he was ‘gens de couleur,’ too, like his half-sister.” Moreover, Rose’s brother solidified his whiteness by marrying in such a way that allowed him to become more American—and also a Kentucky enslaver. This is a position that, as we all know, did not rule out the possibility of various relationships to mixed-race Black people (biological, sexual, or otherwise), but which nevertheless signaled (and fairly secured) Audubon’s own whiteness, as constructed and upheld also by his participation in the race-based system of chattel slavery.
Beyond Rose, who crosses the sea and passes into whiteness, information about Audubon’s other Black sisters is more sparse. Audubon’s biographers vary in their accounts of how many daughters Catherine Bouffard bore to his father. These range from not mentioning these other children born out-of-wedlock at all to naming two girls whose names are available in the archive to the even vaguer accounting that scholars, including Shirley Streshinsky and Gregory Nobles, describe as “several” children. Nevertheless, historians have shown that Audubon fils had at least two Black sisters, at least one of whom remained in Saint Domingue rather than traveling to France with her or their two siblings. Audubon père and Catherine Bouffard’s oldest daugh- ter (the only sister besides Muguet/Rose whose name is included in most accounts of the family) was called Marie-Madeline. This sister apparently died during the uprisings that were to become the Haitian Revolution.
My questions about these girls’ or women’s lives are likely not those that would be recorded in print; they are more mundane. I consider Tara Bynum’s inquiries about Phillis Wheatley’s everyday habits, like brushing her teeth, as I wonder: what did these women look like? How did they arrange their hair? Was their skin brown or pale? What was their path after that first sisterly departure? And I speculate. Might one or more Sisters have themselves relocated from Saint Domingue to Cuba? Or might they have joined the steeply increasing population of gens de coleurs libres in early nineteenth-century New Orleans? How old were they? If they joined the population of Afro-Créoles in the US, might they (or their children) have lived long enough to read bilingual newspapers like L’Union or La Tribune or the first African American poetry anthology, Les Cenelles? Might they have read of their brother’s travels in the Mississippi River Journal? Could they have been among the city’s “Citron hüed” women? Or did they remain in Haiti, where they would have helped the place of their birth to become a free Black republic?
Did these sisters ever come across Audubon’s reflections on the Zenaida dove, either in his original monograph or as it circulated elsewhere, like in the Colored American? Would they recall or imagine themselves just beyond the scene Audubon recounts with his father? Is it likely that they would recognize the base and disgusting irony that lingers as enslavers and their children note the “connubial and parental attachment” of the winged creatures in the sky but not necessarily the darker humans who lived among them, who were even their biological kin? What were their own encounters with doves like? What did they see, hear, draw, write, sing, feel about these birds? How were—or weren’t—these encounters with nature inflected by their human relations, biological or otherwise?
Ultimately, my methodologies—my explorations—turn toward the literary, rather than the historical. In her forward to Doris Kadish and Deborah Jenson’s collection Poetry of Haitian Independence, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat has called poetry “an alternate draft” of history. What poetic drafts might tell these sisters’ stories? One possibility is nineteenth-century Haitian romantic poetry—Coriolan Ardouin (“Quand le soir un oiseau / Chante petit et beau”), Ignace Nau (“La femme! hélas!—vois-tu l’oiseau dans ses caprices”). But I am frustrated by the masculinism and colorism of some of these poems. Early Haitian women poets are sparse among the available literary history. Virginie Sampeur, often recognized as the first among these, sits among a sea of men, seeming not to have (recorded) poetic sisters in that canon. Her best-known poem, “L’abandonnée,” is one of mourning, and without doves.
Another flight to test as I imagine these sisters is historical fiction about Haiti. Audubon is slandering the créole women of New Orleans in a moment in which African American writers would imagine strategies of solidarity among Black people. I consider Madame Paulina in an anonymously-authored short story, “Theresa—a Haytian Tale,” published serially in the pages of another African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1828. As this story’s heroines navigate the uprising that became the Haitian Revolution and attempt to evade the French military, we read of the terror faced by Paulina and her daughters, Theresa and Amanda. These are two sisters who perhaps could not pass for white, whose mother hid them in plain sight (posing as a French officer with the girls as her supposed prisoners) to protect them from the threat of white, French men. The natural flora and fauna offer comfort as mother and daughters pause in the shade to escape the July heat. “The hummingbird skipping capriciously from blossom to blossom, displayed its magnificent plumage, and for a while diverted the minds of the unhappy fugitives from grief and from ominous forebodings.” (I wonder what, in an absent scene of my own speculation, Madame Paulina might have told her daughters about hummingbirds as they sat, temporarily safe, in the grove that afternoon.) Upon waking, Amanda finds Theresa gone, perhaps never to return, off to aid the revolutionary efforts. But at the story’s close, the pertinent information having been delivered by Theresa to the Haitian revolutionaries, mother and sisters are reunited. Reading about these fictional sisters, I now think about Audubon’s. I wonder, how those sisters might have mourned Muguet/Rose when she left for France. What other losses or departures or flights among them followed this departure? Perhaps the motherly and sisterly care with which they were left—as with Paulina and her daughters, Amanda and Theresa—was enough.
My thoughts about these sisters mingle with thoughts of Audubon’s birds. As I cease to care as much about the man with whose story I began and more for his unacknowledged relations, I also think about the birds he felled in thousands—maybe millions. How do I locate, consider, admire these, or the birds that escaped him? After all, these birds are all long dead—some in droves, like the passenger pigeon—despite their seeming abundance in Audubon’s lifetime. Thinking beyond the dove, I look to other birds more familiar to myself: the raven, the red-winged blackbird, the white-throated sparrow.
The last of these draws me in because of both their familiarity and their abundance. But lest I make the same mistake Audubon does with the passenger pigeon, I hold the knowledge that an abundance of birds can quickly turn to scarcity if there is a threat. Even if abundant, sparrows are precarious. The white-throated sparrow was, Audubon writes, a “pretty little bird” characterized by its sociality, gathering in groups of thirty to fifty in which they “live together in harmony.” Their tone, he writes, is a “plaintive softness” that he cannot fully describe. Principal enemies of the white-throated sparrow are birds of prey—various types of hawks. And Audubon himself recommends their consumption.
This sparrow is also a “visitor of Louisiana and all the southern districts.” These birds must have shared spaces with the “Citron hüed” women of that city about whom Audubon complains. Sparrows observed—and were observed by—Black people of “all Sorts as well as Colors” in those spaces. The white ornithologists’ is not the only gaze. Frances Harper also wrote of sparrows, in “The Sparrow’s Fall,” first published in 1894 or 1895. In what its later editor, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, regarded as a children’s poem, we read about the bird’s fragility, its fall to earth, and its observation by God, who loves and cares for all creatures and brings the bird to rest in His parental bosom. Harper notes also the ordinariness of sparrows in comparison with other, grander birds:
‘Twas not a bird with plumage gay,
Filling the air with its morning lay;
‘Twas not an eagle bold and strong,
Borne on the tempest’s wing along:
Only a brown and weesome thing,
With drooping head and listless wing.
The sparrow is small, frail, humble. Its life is not triumphant. But it is loved no less for these things. Maybe even more so because of them, it evokes sympathy and protection.
~
The birds and the sisters are not the same, but they contend with similar misconceptions about their likenesses or import. They deserve love and care and consideration. They might share the same dangers from colonialist hunters, Audubons, and other birds of prey. Birds and sisters might occupy the same spaces and encounter and contemplate one another, even in the midst of these hierarchies of racialized human power. I may need to rest content with the contemplation (though not the comprehension) of birds and sisters, particularly those for whom I have no names and, sisterless myself, will never fully comprehend, will never grasp, even in an archive. They, too, fly away to places unknown. My imagination and my wordcraft are insufficient to this task.
Still, I wonder if, in Saint Domingue in 1791, one or more girls held tight to her sister who would become Rose, would become white, would become lost—at least to them, wondering too if she would ever see their Sister again? I wonder what revolutionary afterlife she may have had in the free, Black republic of the new century, what allegiances of color or class or genealogy or past enslavement she and her Sisters might have held. What futures, hopeful or otherwise, her life and her line may have (re)produced. What Sister may have sat outdoors and seen a dove or hummingbird or sparrow in flight or heard its song, thinking not to kill it, not to catch and categorize it, not to consume it or capture its image, and perhaps not even to name it, but just to observe its movements and listen to its song?
Perhaps she simply loved the bird for its life, as she likely loved her own.