THE LOST GERMAN SLAVE GIRL

An immigrant family’s struggles bring a web of intrigue leading to a cause célèbre in antebellum New Orleans, known then as America’s “Sin City.”

In his dogged dissection of one of the most ornate and convoluted legal cases ever played out in an American slave state, Bailey, who originally published this in his native Australia, does a fine job of resurrecting the ambience and cultural atmosphere of New Orleans in the 1840s. The dominant Creoles’ lifestyle in the Vieux Carré is luxuriously carefree; the poor, on the other hand, are scourged by yellow fever, harried by constant threat of floods, and preyed on by landholders, river-men, and other opportunists. And beneath even the poor are the slaves, locked into their fates by Louisiana’s elaborate system of racist legal codes administered by courts as corrupt as the municipal power structure that populated them. Into this mix, in 1843, suddenly walks a young woman immediately recognized in a German neighborhood as Salomé Müller, the long-lost daughter of fellow immigrants arriving in 1818. She responds by giving her name as Sally Miller and reporting that she is in fact the property—a slave—of the owner of a nearby cabaret. Thus begins the epic struggle of the German community to reclaim one of its own and, in the process, impugn the honor of a plantation owner who supposedly took advantage of an orphaned white girl. But, the court inquires, is she really white? Is she really who she claims to be—or a light-skinned runaway slave imposter? Bailey’s trial narrative is a virtual education on the bizarre legalisms once regularly applied to human chattel; when, for instance, freedom eventually comes to Sally—or whoever she was—it is denied her children.

An eye-opener to the racism that’s so deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.