Matrilineal Sororities, Spiritual Kinship, and Racialization in Early 18th-Century French Saint-Domingue

Demographic historians have traditionally used parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials to obtain quantitative data about population trends, but these sources can also be read by cultural historians as multi-authored artifacts containing cumulative and at times contested claims about identity, kinship, and social affiliation. Surviving registers from early eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue are particularly precious, because few other sources exist with which to reconstruct family dynamics in the region during that period. Painstaking analysis of the registers reveals three distinctly colonial and imperial phenomena. First, multiple baptisms were often performed on the same day – not always a Sunday – often with reciprocal acts of godparenting. This suggests that within the hostile, challenging, and brutally exploitative colonial environment, spiritual kinship was an important mechanism for establishing networks of mutual support not explicitly encoded in traditional customary law governing marriage and inheritance. Second, when combined with marriages to creole sisters and half-sisters, spiritual kinship could generate matrilocal and matrilineal sororities that bound recently arrived male immigrants, otherwise strangers, into networks of association. Anecdotal evidence drawn from transatlantic litigation suggests that French males, shaped by gendered metropolitan fantasies of colonial domination, sometimes misunderstand these networks, but often at their own cost. Other men successfully adapted themselves to the system. Third and finally, creole wives who centered these networks used godparenting to reinforce vertical and horizontal sociability, providing communal stability at a local level amid heightened levels of male mortality and mobility. These networks continued to transcend putative boundaries of “race” across the eighteenth century, even as colonial legislation and administrative policy increasingly attempted to formalize distinctions of freedom, class, and color. Taken together, these phenomena suggest that eighteenth-century French Caribbean social order should not be naively read through legislative texts and notarized acts alone.