Commerce & Capitalism
The Case of the New Orleans Marketplace
Woman Carrying Laundry by Marion Post Wolcott, 1940. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Lately I have become preoccupied by economic questions to which there are no economic answers. The aspects of wealth that are harder to define-- its capricious nature, the way it seems to feed on human greed—have always tended to slip through the cracks of our free market. The custom of our country is to view enterprise through a quantitative lens; history has never been of much concern for economists, whose ideological pillars stand outside of time. But I want to calculate the true value of a New Orleans dollar, a currency three hundred years in the making. I want to know how many hands it has changed, the old ambitions it still serves. I want to approach the full scope of its human dimension. I want to find another way to see.
This search brought me to Cafe Rose Nicaud, where I spend the better part of a day speaking with its owners, Kenneth and Melba Ferdinand. Situated at the heart of Frenchmen Street, the cafe is named for an enslaved woman who bought her freedom two centuries ago by selling her signature coffee at the French Market. Sitting comfortably with the two of them at the large round table by the door, watching satisfied customers come and go, it occurs to me that every cup of coffee sold here is a continuation of a story that would otherwise have ended with this woman’s death in 1880.
“I think in most human activities, it’s not a question of what acts you engage in but what values are behind the act,” Kenneth tells me as his wife, Melba, brings me coffee from a freshly brewed pot. Before opening Cafe Rose Nicaud, he held a wide variety of positions, including drug counselor, educator, and a three year stint as manager of the French Market, but his work has always been defined according to his values. He is a man with an eye for the big picture. “Kenneth is the historian,” Melba tells me wryly, and this becomes increasingly evident as our conversation stretches from the morning into afternoon.
In certain ways, Melba is the more pragmatic of the two. It was Kenneth who first suggested they start a business together. “I was not the entrepreneurial spirit,” she says. “I was more of a bureaucrat. But eventually he wore me down.” No trace of her initial reticence remains in the poised gravitas of the business woman seated in front of me. As she is quick to say, her work is just as rooted in a deeper ethic as her husband, one that they both trace back to the cafe’s namesake.
“Under the Spanish you could buy your freedom without an owner’s permission,” Melba explains. “[Rose Nicaud] was brought from Haiti as a slave in the teens, and supposedly she was one of the slave women who had a lot of freedom of movement. She probably lived around Franklin Avenue, and would go to the river to buy coffee and spices for her owners’ stores, and on weekends would go to Jackson Square to sell the coffee.” According to Melba, it was when she finally began selling her trademark “café noir ou café au lait” at the French Market that her luck slowly began to turn. “We don’t know when she left, she might have been forced out during Reconstruction. But when I think about her, it encourages me. That’s our connection. When I feel like giving up, I think about her.”
As the state of Louisiana advanced an economic reign of terror based in the sugar plantations that took the exploitation of black labor to new heights, New Orleans remained one of the only places where people like Rose Nicaud could find ways to negotiate for their freedom. The French Market, established in 1791 as the heart of the city’s commercial center, provided a space for enslaved people and recent immigrants to use any resources available to transform scarcity into abundance. “Rose was at the end of the French Market, where Cafe Du Monde is.” says Melba. “We once found an article that said she was making the [modern] equivalent of between fourteen and sixteen hundred dollars a day.”
The story of commerce in New Orleans is the story of New Orleans, an epic poem told in polyrhythmic and multilingual verses. At its center is the marketplace, where New Orleanians have always gone to negotiate fiercely for power and prosperity. In Congo Square, one of the city’s first markets, enslaved people listened to drummers beating out the sounds of home as they sold their wares, each purchase a direct investment in their freedom. Elsewhere in the city, public stalls offered the occasional opportunity for enslaved people otherwise trapped on Louisiana plantations to sell their enslavers’ surplus products in town. As planters reaped the profits of these transactions, new social networks were being forged between enslaved people living all over the colony.
For buyers to negotiate with sellers to baye bon pri, give a good price, and accept it avèkplezi, a new language was needed. Louisiana Creole was born of the market women of color known as ‘Les Vendeuses’; in New Orleans as in West Africa buying and selling was largely a feminine enterprise. As Freddi Williams Evans writes in Congo Square: African Roots in New Orleans, “Market women operated stalls in public markets, trudged sidewalks and alleys, called at doors of houses and businesses, and sold their goods on the levee, street corners, and public squares, carrying their ‘shops’ on their heads, calling their wares with melodic chants, and transacting sales in the language preferred by their customers.”
“Too sho-o-o-o-oh, tout chauds all hot! Belles calas tout chauds! Si vous pa gaignin l’argent, if you have no money, goutez, c’est la mem’ chose, taste, it’s all the same.”
“Pain pafatte, potato bread, Madame, pain pafatte, Madame, potato bread, Madame.”
“I have the mango, I have spinach, I have yellow squash, corn on the cob.”
And so the song of the enslaved West African market women was carried through the centuries by Creole-speaking hot fritter sellers, Irish immigrants selling potato bread, and beloved Mr. Okra, who not-so-long-ago could be seen rolling down the cracked streets of modern-day New Orleans in his colorful pick-up truck. “
A lot of these stories we look at as culture, but really it’s about the great American economy. Essentially the earliest economy was agrarian, tobacco, cotton, rice, sugar. New Orleans is right in that triangle with the sugar,” Kenneth points out. “And that macro influences the micro,” Melba adds.“
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production,” Adam Smith writes in The Wealth of Nations. To take this statement at its word is to reduce all the complex relationships surrounding human commerce to a bare transaction between consumers and producers. As British mercantilist Thomas Mun puts it in England's Treasure by Foreign Trade, "Money begets trade, and trade encreaseth money." The classical economists that succeeded him were proud children of the Enlightenment, and free-market capitalism was conceived at writing desks safely removed from the clamor and stench of the actual marketplaces teeming with life on all sides of the Atlantic.
But in New Orleans everyday commerce was largely defined by savvy men and women walking the razor’s edge of class and racial lines in spite of their subjugation by slave owners and colonial officials. “Les Vendeuses,” the market women of old New Orleans, were far from the colony’s highest earners, but it was they who wove together the social fabric of the city as they went about their daily affairs, and their value cannot be measured in dollar amounts. In a present-day New Orleans littered with vestiges of this complex past, they continue to speak in defiant opposition to the rigid dictums of economists.
The search for freedom in the New Orleans marketplace brings into sharp focus one of the city’s central historical conflicts, and that is the opposition between a colonial economy designed to maximize European profits and a diverse community of working people whose commerce tied them to each other. For those charged by European governments with imposing their dominion of Louisiana, complete control over land and labor was critical. But as Richard Campanella says in Bienville’s Dilemma, “Establishing a settlement is one thing; ensuring its survival and prosperity is quite another.” Prosperity looked different for each level of society, and those situated at the wrong end of the exploitative labor system quickly saw that their well-being depended on operating outside of the colonial order. For most of Louisiana’s early inhabitants, mutual reliance was a matter of survival.
To begin with, without the help of the native peoples living here, the already improbable founding of this colony would have been completely impossible, even for the architects of colonial society. Had the notoriously sang-froid Bienville not been well-versed in native cultures and customs, he would not have eaten. His familiarity with the ways of the Choctaw, Chitimacha, Natchez, Chippewa, and the “petites nations” who maintained their independence from larger indigenous nation states, was visible in the extensive tattoos that pierced his flesh with the visual language of the ethnically diverse peoples living along the Gulf and the rivers that fed it. “The tension between spectacle and law that would shape the city was written on the body of its founder,” Jason Barry writes in his tricentennial history of New Orleans. “Sent by the crown to tame a wilderness and impose order, Bienville’s skin illustrated his power in the clash between French interests and those of Native Americans.”
The people of Louisiana’s indigenous “petites nations” were farmers, fishermen, hunters, flint workers, salt producers, and traders, and they belonged to over 35 different nations. In the words of historian Elizabeth Ellis, “During the French era, these small nations formed close partnerships with settlers at Mobile, New Orleans, Natchez, and Pointe Coupée, and they gravitated towards French settlements to take advantage of the emerging colonial economy.” Participation in this economy meant learning each other’s languages and rituals of trade. As Campanella tells us, “scarcity, hunger, disease, natural disaster, official inattention… made life in early Louisiana a dreaded hardship.” For many French colonists, far from home in a landscape that confounded and terrified them, creating strong ties with indigenous people was basic common sense.
The deepening relationships between natives and French traders in the early years of the colony was of serious concern for colonial leaders; in their eyes, this mutual dependency was a threat to colonial control. Antoine Simone Le Page du Pratz, who wrote Louisiana’s first history, saw danger in conducting “too familiar intercourse” with native Louisianans. This familiarity often meant intermarriage and the formation of new multi-ethnic communities that would leave these colonists with little incentive to remain loyal to France. “The French traffickers, or traders, are generally young people without experience, who in order to gain the good-will of these [native] people, afford them lights, or instruction, prejudicial to our interest,” Du Pratz warns.
What Du Pratz does not mention in his isolationist call for order is the predatory ideological standpoint of those whose interests he represented. Within the mercantilist worldview that dominated European thought at the turn of the 18th century, commerce was a state-controlled zero-sum game, and for each of Europe’s colonial powers, increasing the nation’s wealth at the expense of its rivals was a single-minded pursuit. In the words of the French mercantilist Financial Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, “It is simply, and solely, the abundance of money within a state [which] makes the difference in its grandeur and power.”
In practice, this worldview largely expressed itself through the organized theft of African labor and American resources, even if early economic theorists avoided saying so outright. By the time Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776-- which proposed an end to state interventions in economies he saw as fully capable of equally supporting all its participants without coercion-- it was too late. Whatever its merits, free market capitalism as articulated by Smith and his successors would not, or could not, address the fact that in the free market of the Atlantic world, international commerce was completely dependent on the depravities of the Transatlantic slave trade and ruthless exploitation of land and labor in the Americas.
The free market in New Orleans took on a wholly different meaning; freedom in these marketplaces came from the sale of goods scraped together from bits and pieces wrested from the wealthy and powerful, and these transactions represented a daily subversion of an extractive global economic order. Creole was both the language and culture of the markets, and it linked New Orleans to people negotiating a multiplicity of identities throughout the Caribbean long after the Louisiana Purchase. “Creolization is first and foremost complexity,” says Patrick Chamoiseau, a Martinican writer who helped found the creolité literary movement in the 1980’s. “Creolization is chaos, shock, mixture, combination, alchemy… [it] allows people to express their newfound diversity, and live it fluidly.”
At Cafe Rose Nicaud, Kenneth strongly echoes this sentiment. “It’s simple but complex the way all these things hook up—economics and the cultural side,” he says. “Heterogeneous space allows for the creativity. We had everybody here. If you didn’t get it, you didn’t understand the complexity of the human experience, you couldn’t be comfortable here. This had to be the place where jazz was born. Jazz is all about complexity in simple spaces.” In New Orleans, as in other Creole societies, culture and economic survival came together in a collective ethos that understood the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts. Even once New Orleans was ushered into the industrial age, the marketplace ethic forged in the early days of Congo Square continued to thread through the daily lives of its citizens.
In 1916, the New Orleans Daily Picayune writer Catharine Cole described the French Market in florid prose as the place where “all the varied people of a city that was born cosmopolitan” came to shop. Cole’s Story of the Old French Market is a breathless depiction of a French Market “soaked and steeped in romance” that represents 20th century New Orleanians’ continued attachment to the marketplace. As the city expanded into a bustling port situated at the center of the global industrial economy, it began to build new public markets, starting with St. Mary’s Market in the Central Business District.
Today, many of the city’s public market buildings still stand, though many of them are serving very different purposes. The building once occupied by the Dryads Market on Oretha Castle Haley, for instance, now houses the Southern Food and Beverage Museum, which has organized its exhibits in market stalls to pay homage to this past. Liz Williams, the founder of the museum, sees the vibrant New Orleans public market system as central to the city’s growth. “The city seemed really willing to open a market every time a new neighborhood opened, and it allowed the city to develop in this neighborhood oriented way.” The city was in charge of operating the stalls; feeding its people through public markets became an important source of city revenue. This mutually beneficial system led to the creation of the country’s most extensive public market system. Other American cities might have only one or two public markets, but just about every New Orleanian made their groceries at a market in walking distance of their house.
Markets in different neighborhoods developed their own character and specialties. “My grandparents were here in the 19th century,” Liz tells me, “and my grandmother told me stories about going from market to market for the best goods. If you were paying a visit across town, you would always detour to the market in that neighborhood and buy the best thing they sold there.” The intimacy of New Orleans markets also assured their quality. As Liz puts it, “the best protection you have as a consumer is to know who is selling to you. That was just part of being in the neighborhood—everyone was ensuring the best food because they were taking care of each other.”
In the years leading up to World War II, markets began to get a reputation as unclean and antiquated compared to the grocery stores becoming popular around the country, and in the post-war period, the flourishing public market system in New Orleans came to an end. But food purveyors like the Circle Food Store, the former St. Bernard Market, continued to be community anchors, and as Liz Williams points out, the grocery store structure supported community needs in new ways; “You could pay your light bill while you were grocery shopping.” At Circle Foods, friends and neighbors were still able to come together around food. As Melba remembers, “Everyone from downtown went to the Circle. Everything you wanted at a supermarket you could get there. And you had that big community around there that supported them. But the interstate broke all that up.”
It is hard not to see the city’s direct assault on the prosperity of the historically black 7th Ward community in building the I-10 on Claiborne Avenue as the beginning of the end of the kind collective resistance that has been embedded in New Orleanian commerce since Congo Square. Today, the gentrification ravaging black neighborhoods all over the city has reached such a velocity that it takes the breath away. I think about the St. Roch Market, whose fresh produce once fed a diverse and thriving neighborhood, but now operates within a predatory business model created in complete disregard for the community it was built to serve.
As a friend of mine who works there puts it, “Without tourists it doesn’t function. On any given day you see people wheeling suitcases in there. They’ve come in an Uber from the AirBnB where they’re staying to consume some idea of Creole food that fetishizes New Orleans identity.”
Though it is technically still publicly owned, it has been so stripped of its vitality that just stepping inside the St. Roch Market practically guarantees a bout with clinical depression. Its modern fixtures shine a blinding light onto an immaculate space that bears no trace of the dirt and imperfections of growing things. The revolving door of gourmet food vendors are frantically pitted against each other as they struggle to attract the consumer dollars necessary to meet the impossibly high daily quotas imposed by the market’s operators. Situated firmly within the exploitative value system of the gig economy metastasizing as we speak all over the country, the St. Roch Market looms large as a dark symbol of the city’s greater loss. “
History is important,” Kenneth tells me from across the table at Cafe Rose Nicaud, “because if you know what to study, you won’t grow up ignorant about who people are.” But I speak for myself when I say that at times, this knowledge can feel like a heavy burden. Knowing what I do, there is nowhere I can go where the ghosts of our dark economic history cannot find me. I might be standing in line at the bank or the supermarket, preparing to make a simple transaction, and the terrible prices paid by our predecessors to generate the currency I hold in my hand will appear to me as a deluge of blood, visibly soaking through the bills that I must then use to pay for a cup of coffee, a new pair of shoes, or this month’s rent. Even as I manage to make polite conversation with tillers and cashiers, I am nauseated by the sight of the cash I am giving them. It is all I can do to resist the urge to run to the nearest faucet and scrub my hands raw like a hysterical, 21st century Lady Macbeth.
But the more I hold in my mind the people whose legacy of resistance built this city, the less my double vision feels like an affliction. As the afternoon light slants through the windows of Cafe Rose Nicaud, I look at two New Orleanians who have woven their stories together with a spiritual ancestress whose resourceful enterprise offered her community the chance to help her buy back her freedom, one cup of coffee at a time. I can see Rose Nicaud sitting right beside them at the large wooden round table at the center of the cafe, nodding her approval at the steaming cups of coffee scenting the air with their rich aroma, an active participant in the life of her city even in death. “We found our real expression when we found Rose,” they tell me. “She guided us to what made sense.”
Melba and Kenneth have made room at their table for every New Orleanian who understands commerce to be more than just production and consumption. As they put it, “we have a stronger value system that has us go beyond ourselves. We want to serve everyone present in this community.” They remind us that consumers have more power than we think, that “The consequence of your retail can broaden social equity and bring that economy to people who need it.” The economy of this city is in so many ways a desperate affair, with so little of our collective wealth reaching those in greatest need. But every dollar we can put towards places and people that sustain our spirit presents an opportunity to reverse the damage. As we make groceries and cultivate home economies, we must honor the ancestors by remembering to feed each other while we are feeding ourselves. As so many New Orleanians have known from the beginning, it may be the only hope we have of survival.