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Chapter 1

Becoming Audubon, Becoming American

The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me, and I can only say what I have often heard my father repeat to me on this subject.

—John James Audubon, “Myself”

In 1827, when Audubon was in his early forties and just beginning to enjoy the fame that would come his way for the rest of his life, he wrote about his newfound sense of self: “What a curious interesting book a Biographer—well acquainted with my Life could write, it is still more wonderfull and extraordinary than that of my Father!”¹ Comparisons to his father aside—and they both lived “curious interesting” lives, albeit in different ways—the problem for any “Biographer” would be that Audubon made it difficult, nearly impossible, to become fully acquainted with several critical aspects of his life. He hid some of his basic biographical information behind a veil of unanswered questions and even outright deception, shading some of the essential elements of his life’s story from historical view. His written depictions of himself, both published and unpublished, offer enough discernible details for a “curious interesting book,” to be sure, but they also suggest a quiet resistance to a deeper level of personal revelation.

Audubon would not by any means be the first or last person to devise an incomplete or misleading self-portrait, of course. People often shape their identities to suit different circumstances, sometimes assuming a dissembling image for a particular situation, occasionally adopting an enduring disguise for life. The bookshelves of autobiography have become heavy with self-serving stories that fabricate various fictions about the writer’s life, and the very act of constructing a narrative requires constructing a selective, sometimes even secretive, sense of the self.² But in Audubon’s case, this evasive behavior invites us to consider what must be the central irony of his life: For a man who spent so much time and trouble depicting birds so carefully and colorfully, presented in scientifically accurate and life-size detail, he left his own self-portrait remarkably incomplete and ambiguous by comparison, often rendered in sketchy contrasts of black and white.

The Ambiguities of Origin

In the introduction to his major written work, Ornithological Biography, Audubon offers only one short sentence about his beginning: “I received life and light in the New World.” He follows that line with a brief paragraph about his early exposure to nature and “the power of those early impressions,” but he provides little more than that. By locating his first “life and light” in “the New World,” he vaguely creates the impression that he was born in North America; it remains for the reader to infer. A few pages later, he writes that, as a young man, he “returned to the woods of the New World with fresh ardour, and commenced a collection of drawings,” which would eventually become his life’s major achievement, a massive collection of avian art, The Birds of America.³ In both instances, “New World” is a geographically elastic and usefully evasive term, allowing him to avoid being more specific about a particular location. We are left to ask, then, when was he born, and where? Almost immediately, we also ask, who were his parents? And what do we know about Audubon’s birth and boyhood that would shape his later life as the “American Woodsman”? Audubon could not—or, perhaps more to the point, would not—tell us all we might want to know.

He wouldn’t even tell his own family. In a memoir called “Myself,” first written initially for his sons, Victor and John, in 1835, and published only posthumously, in 1893, Audubon opens with an evasion: “The precise period of my birth is yet an enigma to me, and I can only say what I have heard my father repeat to me on this subject.” He continues with an air of uncertainty: “It seems that my father had large properties in Santo Domingo,” he notes, but adds that the elder Audubon also traveled on occasion to Louisiana, where “he married a lady of Spanish extraction, whom I have been led to understand was as beautiful as she was wealthy, and otherwise attractive.” She bore three sons and a daughter, Audubon writes, but only he, the youngest of the sons, “survived extreme youth.”⁴ Audubon enhances the enigma of his nativity by casually but carefully accepting no direct responsibility for the information he gives his own sons about his origins—“I can only say what I have heard” … “It seems” … “I have been led to understand”—and subtly transferring the only authority for this part of his life story to his long-dead father.

But Audubon goes on, and the story gets better. As an infant, he writes, he accompanied his parents back to “Santo Domingo,” or Saint-Domingue, and the family estate, where his mother soon met her doom as “one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of the negro insurrection on that island.” With the help of “some faithful servants,” the elder Audubon and his young son escaped the insurrection and made their way back to New Orleans and then back to France, where Audubon’s father had a home in the city of Nantes in the Loire Valley. He also had a wife in Nantes, an apparently tolerant and understanding woman who accepted the young boy into the household and raised him as her own; she was, Audubon writes, “the only mother I have ever known.” Audubon then spent his early years in Nantes “much cherished by my dear stepmother … [and] constantly attended by one or two black servants, who had followed my father from Santo Domingo to New Orleans and afterwards to Nantes.”⁵ Audubon spins quite an exciting story for his sons: of being born to a Spanish mother on one side of the Atlantic (presumably in Louisiana) and being raised by a French stepmother on the other side, in France; of losing his birth mother in a major slave revolt in a French colony and escaping with his father, thanks to the help of loyal slaves; and coming to safety in a French city, where he found a loving and generous stepmother who immediately cherished him—and he does it all in four short paragraphs. It is, in essence, a broad-reaching tale of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, beginning with a North American birth, followed by a brief but dramatic West Indian incident, leading to a longer French interlude, and, as Audubon’s sons (and we) would know, culminating in a return to America, where he would eventually enjoy a comfortable outcome by gaining artistic and scientific fame. It would have made a promising outline for a popular novel, and perhaps it should have been a work of fiction: Important parts of it were simply untrue.

For that reason, it makes sense to explore more fully the ambiguities of Audubon’s autobiography to appreciate the place of the evasions and omissions about his origins in the longer trajectory of his life. It may well be, of course, that the “enigma” of his birth explains it all, that Audubon knew only what he had “been led to understand” by his father. If so, he apparently didn’t press his father for details, and if he did, he certainly didn’t share them with his own sons—or anyone else, for that matter. Questions about Audubon’s origins persisted throughout his lifetime, and he never made much of an effort to answer them in print.

Audubon was always very vague about something as basic as his age, for instance, usually overstating it by a few years, perhaps because he hoped to mislead for some reason or probably because he just didn’t know for sure.⁶ Some of the contemporary official sources don’t offer much help. His 1806 application for American naturalization described him as “a free white person of the Age of Twenty three Years … born at Aux Cayes in the Island of St. Domingo sometime in the Year one thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty three.” Six years later, in 1812, his record of naturalization referred to him as “John Audubon of the District of Pennsylvania a native of the Island of St. Domingo aged about Twenty Six years.” Finally, Audubon’s American passport for his second journey to Great Britain in 1830 noted that he was “46 years, 5 feet 8 1/2 inches, common forehead, hazel eyes, prominent nose, common mouth, pointed chin, greyish hair, brown complexion, oval face.”⁷ The age never seems to come to rest on any definite number—twenty-three in 1806, “about” twenty-six in 1812, and forty-six in 1830—or even on any specific year of birth. The differences may have as much to do with the vagaries of record keeping in various parts of the Atlantic world as with any attempt on Audubon’s part to deceive, but the point remains: On such a basic issue as birth date, even birth year, the documentary evidence on Audubon could be, at best, uneven.

Whatever variation there may have been about when Audubon was born, the question of where seems even more salient. By the 1830s, when Audubon had begun to gain decent notoriety on both sides of the Atlantic, the uncertainty surrounding his birth and national identity became a perplexing part of his story in the popular press. Despite the recognition of his birth in Saint-Domingue in his passport and other official documents, the more enduring narrative of his life—the one he created and the one that seemed to stick in the popular press—located his birth in the United States. To be sure, an 1832 essay in the American Monthly Review did raise the issue of the ambiguous information in Audubon’s “auto-biographical sketch” in Ornithological Biography, observing that “Mr. Audubon says that he was born in the New World; but does not inform [the reader] in what part of this wide New World, or at what time the event happened.” At about the same time, almost in response, a writer in the New American Review sought to clarify the location of his birth, reporting that “Mr. Audubon was born in America, but was descended from a French family, and was sent early in life, to receive his education in France.” The following year, a Philadelphia-area newspaper took a different position, trying to rectify an apparently erroneous report that Audubon had been born in Pennsylvania; instead, the author noted that a “gentleman of this vicinity … informs us, that France is his native country.” A decade later, however, a correspondent for another newspaper, who claimed to have interviewed Audubon in person, stated flatly that “Mr. Audubon was born in New Orleans” and that “nothing would give him more displeasure than to be even suspected of being an European.”⁸ These differing accounts likewise remained a bit vague on his birth year—“about 1775,” “about 1780,” “about 1782”—but they came increasingly to reflect a clear consensus around locating Audubon’s origins in North America.

By the time Audubon died, his American-based birth narrative had gained considerable currency in the country, and his obituaries increasingly connected him not only to North America, but to the United States, giving him implicit citizenship in the new nation. An 1852 book, The Homes of American Authors, located Audubon’s origins “on a plantation in Louisiana, then a French possession,” and noted that he had been “born the same year the Declaration of Independence was made (1776),” thus rooting his Frenchness in the soil of an emerging Americanness. An 1851 death notice associated Audubon’s birth more directly with the new nation, noting that “Mr. Audubon was born about 1775, in the State of Louisiana,” thus anticipating by some twenty-eight years Louisiana’s acquisition by the United States, much less formal statehood. Another likewise located Audubon’s birth in Louisiana, in 1775, and insisted that “Audubon was a native of this country, and not an adopted citizen.”⁹ Whatever questions might remain about the exact date or location—New Orleans, somewhere else in Louisiana, or in the United States, at any rate—written accounts had made him a fully naturalized native of the nation, and any suggestion of his origins in Saint-Domingue never appeared in print.

Origin Stories

Before we allow Audubon or any of the contemporary sources to tell more of his origins, we might well turn to more recent writers. By the twentieth century, the story of Audubon’s background had become clearer, and his modern biographers reached a reasonable measure of agreement on most—but still not all—of the basic details of his birth. In 1917, Francis Hobart Herrick, one of the earliest and most thorough of the twentieth-century Audubon biographers, wrote that Audubon was born on April 26, 1785, in Saint-Domingue; on that there now seems to be no modern scholarly dispute. Unfortunately, there was no birth certificate or baptismal record to document his birth, because Audubon was born out of wedlock—an important issue in itself—and local officials did not give formal sanction to such births. The only documentary evidence for his birth, then, comes from the records of the doctor who attended Audubon’s mother, Jeanne Rabin (also spelled Rabine), who was ailing with some sort of tropical sickness during the last days of her pregnancy. On April 26, the physician’s entry showed that Jeanne Rabin had delivered a child—but only that, with no name or even description of the child. Still, Herrick safely asserts that the child must have been the future avian artist. Indeed, the baby was her last child; soon after giving birth to the infant son, she died, but as a result of sickness and not, as Audubon would later tell it, at the hands of rebellious slaves. As Herrick explains, “Much other documentary evidence which also has recently come to light is all in harmony with these facts.”¹⁰

Herrick also devotes a good deal of space to the identity of Audubon’s father, Jean Audubon: He was a Frenchman, born in 1744 in a village on the Bay of Biscay, who rose from being a cod fisherman to a sailor to a ship captain. But Audubon père’s most important career move proved to be his marriage, in 1772, to Anne Moynet, a prosperous widow nine years older (or twelve or fourteen, according to other sources), whose wealth and wifely indulgence allowed him to spend months at a time at sea or, increasingly, on a sugar plantation he purchased in Aux Cayes (now Les Cayes), a port town on the southern coast of Saint-Domingue, which had become the largest sugar-producing island in the world.¹¹ There he, like so many other Europeans, took full financial advantage of the enormous economic opportunities of the West Indies, turning enough profit to provide quite a comfortable living, albeit one built on the infamous brutality and misery inflicted upon Saint-Domingue’s rapidly rising slave population.¹² Jean Audubon came to describe himself as a négociant, a merchant, but in addition to trading in sugar and a variety of wares, he also traded in slaves, sometimes dozens at a time. “Great numbers of negroes must have passed through Jean Audubon’s hands,” Herrick observes, “which strangely reflect the customs of a much later and sadder day on the North American continent.” Herrick later adds, with considerable charity, “Jean Audubon, who spent a good part of his life at sea and in a country almost totally devoid of morals, must be considered as a product of his time.”¹³

And like other powerful European inhabitants of this “country almost totally devoid of morals,” Jean Audubon also took sexual advantage of the dependent women in Saint-Domingue, a highly sexualized society that one scholar has described as a “libertine colony.”¹⁴ The elder Audubon maintained a long-standing domestic relationship with a mixed-race woman variously described as a creole or a quadroon and variously called Catharine or Marguerite or, more commonly, “Sanitte” Bouffard, who bore him three children, all girls. Sanitte, the ménagère (housewife) of Audubon’s household, apparently accepted the entrance of another woman into the domestic scene: Jeanne Rabin, who moved in with Captain Audubon and Sanitte in 1784 and who, two years later, became the mother of Jean Audubon’s only son. Or so documentary evidence for Audubon’s birth story seemed to suggest. But as Herrick observed, the birth story had long seemed murky: “Much of the mystery which hitherto has shrouded the early life of John James Audubon is involved in the West Indian period of his father’s career”—and, one might add, his father’s relationships with women in Saint-Domingue.¹⁵

By 1788, the stability of Jean Audubon’s island estate may have begun to seem much less secure. Even though Les Cayes seemed safe for the time being, Jean Audubon sent his three-year-old son, originally called Fougère (French for “fern”), to France for safekeeping. In 1789, the elder Audubon signed up as a soldier in the Les Cayes troop of the National Guard, but before he had to face the prospect of real service, he left Saint-Domingue, first to do some business in the United States, then to go back to France, where his toddler son was awaiting him. He would also have his and Sanitte’s daughter, Rose, or Muguet, brought to France in 1791, when the slave insurrection began. He would, however, leave behind Sanitte and the other offspring he had had with her to face their fate on the island.

Back in France, Jean Audubon would find another eruption of unrest, the dramatic revolution that toppled the monarchy, divided the people, and cast the country into carnage. In 1793, his particular part of the country, the Vendée, which included Nantes and its environs, became hotly contested between supporters of the revolution and counterrevolutionary royalists, and the bloodshed continued throughout most of the 1790s. Jean Audubon once again joined the local National Guard, this one organized to defend the revolution against its reactionary enemies in the Vendée. He remained a solid ally of the new French republic, serving on local revolutionary committees and enlisting once again in the navy; as his son later wrote, Jean Audubon “continued in the employ of the naval department of that country” throughout the 1790s and on into the new century.¹⁶ Even with the roiling violence of the revolution, France seemed safer ground for the Audubon family than Saint-Domingue.

It also seemed a safer starting place for family-friendly Audubon biographies. In 1954, for instance, two children’s books opened Audubon’s boyhood story when he was already in the comparative familiarity of France. Margaret Kieran and John Kieran’s John James Audubon, a Landmark Book, opens the story on “a warm May afternoon in 1793” in Nantes, which was “beginning to show the beauty of spring.” Readers first see young Audubon, still called Fougère at this point, out enjoying the birds and flowers, but as every youngster must know, such freedom has to come to an end with the inevitable call to dinner. “Around the table that night it was a typical family gathering,” the story continues, with Fougère and his younger stepsister, Muguet, seated with their kindly and beloved stepmother and the sterner-seeming Captain Audubon. After grilling his young son about his studies and fretting to his wife that the boy “needs careful watching,” the captain let his attention drift with “a faraway expression in his eyes … thinking, no doubt, about his stay in Santo Domingo where young Audubon was born and where the boy’s mother had died not long afterward.” Bringing him back to France, he provided Fougère with a new stepmother, Madame Audubon, who “lavished as much affection on him as though he had been her own son,” making sure the boy had everything he could want: “his own room, his own nurse, and the finest clothes she could buy.” The chapter then concludes on a note of erasure: “Soon he had forgotten all about that far-away tropical island.” Whether the “he” in the sentence refers to Captain Audubon or young Fougère remains, however, unclear.¹⁷ Joan Howard’s The Story of John J. Audubon begins almost a year later, in March 1794, on a “cold bleak day” when the weather seems as ominous as the revolutionary political situation in the Vendée region. As the menace of violence swirls around the Audubon household, Madame Audubon again appears as a source of comfort and kind support. Still, young Fougère “wished he could remember who his real mother was.” Staring into a flickering fire, struggling to make sense of stories his father has told him about “the island of Santo Domingo,” with its tall mountain, fields of sugarcane, and brightly colored birds, Fougère also flashes on the image of a woman: “There was a lady who was so much different from stout Madame Audubon. She was much younger and prettier. She wore wide satin skirts. Her curls were powdered white and piled on a small, proud head. Was that lady his own mother? Fougère did not know.”¹⁸

Thus 1950s-era children’s literature dispensed with the ambiguities of Audubon’s origins, perhaps predictably so. At a time when Father Knows Best defined the televised standard for the normal postwar family, too much talk of a distant and dead mother, whoever she was, might undermine the integrity of the intact, albeit blended, four-person Audubon household, with its stern but loving father, doting and indulgent stepmother, and two mischievous but charming children, one of them a boy with an incipient penchant for birds and, apparently, vague questions, if not memories, about his birth mother.

But for adult readers, questions about Audubon’s mother remained on the table. As late as 1966, another Audubon biographer, Alexander Adams, asked, “Who exactly was Mlle. Rabin?” only to answer, “No one really knows.” Jeanne Rabin’s background, like that of her famous son, has been shaded with uncertainty, and, as Adams continued, “she may have been … a Creole, one of those women of European descent who were famous for their beauty, their charm, and also their competence.” But “creole” could be a rather elastic term, especially in an eighteenth-century slave society, sometimes referring to people of African descent born on the western side of the Atlantic or to those with varying mixtures of European and African blood, typically the product of unions between white men and women of color. Herrick, for instance, likewise describes Catharine “Sanitte” Bouffard, Jean Audubon’s mixed-race ménagère, as a “creole de Saint-Domingue.”¹⁹ As one of the leading historians of early American slavery has observed, the mixture of so many diverse peoples in slave societies often resulted in fluid forms of self-definition, rendering identity “a garment which might be worn or discarded, rather than a skin which never changed its spots.”²⁰ Race mattered, to be sure, but it also defied the fixed categories so often assigned to racial identity in modern times.

The questions about the category of “creole” have thus contributed considerably to suggestions, even assumptions, that Rabin’s identity—and therefore her son’s—might well reflect at least some degree of African descent. These notions have become most prominent in African American tradition. In recent times, for instance, The Negro Almanac (1989) included Audubon as its first alphabetic entry under “Outstanding Black Artists” and described him as “the son of a French merchant sea captain and planter and his Afro-Caribbean mistress.” Similarly, the Ebony Society of Philatelic Events and Reflections has placed Audubon on its list of “African Americans on U.S. Stamps,” noting that “Audubon’s mother was a Creole (mixed heritage) from Domenica.” Among academic institutions, the African American Cultural Center Library at Indiana University of Pennsylvania currently lists Audubon in its Biography File.²¹ On the other hand, the Dictionary of Negro Biography (1970) contains no entry for Audubon nor does the more recent Black Biography, 1790–1950 (1991). The Journal of African American History (formerly the Journal of Negro History) has never carried an article on Audubon since its inception in 1916. The differences among such sources in the African American scholarly community do not indicate a consensus, of course, on the exact biographical accuracy of Audubon’s racial identity—or, indeed, his mother’s. They do suggest, however, that Audubon has had a persistent place in African American memory.

Questions about Audubon’s racial identity apparently never sat well with Alice Ford, the Audubon biographer who wrote the most definitive (and certainly most defensive) account of Audubon’s origins—and who has also been the most insistent about his whiteness. In her 1964 biography of Audubon, she sought to erase the uncertainties surrounding Rabin’s identity by arguing that she was not a creole woman but a French immigrant to Saint-Domingue, a twenty-five-year-old chambermaid from Les Touches parish in Nantes. According to Ford, Jeanne traveled to the West Indies on the same ship as Captain Audubon, and it was there they first began their relationship—or, at least, within the cramped but ever-exposed social circumstances of an eighteenth-century ocean voyage, their friendship.²²

Hoping no doubt to close the matter once and for all, Ford offered even more detailed information on the Audubon-Rabin relationship in 1988, in a revised edition of her Audubon biography. As the text on the book’s dust jacket put it, “The most startling revelation is the positive identification of Audubon’s mother, which leads to clarification of the mystery of Audubon’s early life.” In this edition, Ford addressed the “mystery” by once again making her case for Rabin’s being a French chambermaid, but this time she enhanced the documentation with imagination. She speculated that Jeanne, a young woman of “pious upbringing,” might have worried about how Anne Moynet Audubon, Captain Audubon’s legal wife back in France, would have taken the news of her husband’s various infidelities in Saint-Domingue: “The presence of a black mistress was one thing,” Ford fretted for Jeanne, but “the imagined intrusion of a white woman, known by some to be the mother of her husband’s expected child, quite another.”²³ Getting inside the mind of this young woman of “pious upbringing” was not the only point of that sentence: It was also to assert her racial identity. Indeed, the very crux of Jeanne Rabin’s imagined moral quandary hinged on race, the contrast between, on one side, the “black mistress,” Sanitte, and, on the other, this pious “white woman,” Jeanne, who had nonetheless found herself in a similar situation of extramarital motherhood.

There remains one small, final piece of the parental puzzle. As Ford also notes, Captain Audubon had yet another child with Sanitte, this one a daughter named Rose (or Rosa or Muguet), born on April 29, 1786, almost exactly a year after young Audubon, or Fougère. When Captain Audubon later sent the young girl to France, she was entered on the ship’s list as “Demoiselle Rose Bonitte, aged four, natural daughter and orphan of Demoiselle Rabin, white.” Ford explained this identity change for the young Rose by suggesting that not mentioning the part-African Sanitte as the girl’s mother and instead using Rabin’s name served as a “protective shield” for her entry into white society in France; just to make the point clearer, Rose was also given the designation “white” in the ship’s list.²⁴ Ford let the issue go with that, without taking the possible implications one step further: If one child of Captain Audubon could be given a new racial identity by assigning her to a different mother and calling her “white,” could not another? But Ford failed to entertain, much less explore, that prospect, and her version of the young boy Audubon’s birth still defined him as the white son of a white French father and a white French mother. As one observer has noted, Alice Ford “was the first to bleach Audubon completely.”²⁵

In fact, Audubon himself was the first. Despite his French–West Indian origins, Audubon would always define himself as decidedly American. Just as he sometimes depicted his birds in odd, even distorted postures in order to fit them within the dimensions of his paintings, so Audubon reshaped and shaded his own identity to conform to the common assumptions of what it meant to be an American—above all, a white American—in the antebellum era. By the time he became famous and, in his own estimation, a superb subject for a “Biographer,” he had adopted the identity of the American Woodsman, a free man of the American frontier, an artistic cousin of the Common Man. “America will always be my land,” he wrote his wife during his residency in England in the late 1820s. “I never close my eyes without travelling thousands of miles along our noble streams and traversing our noble forests.” Wrapping himself both rhetorically and visually in the garb of the American Woodsman, he located himself not just in the natural environment, but also in the social environment of the new nation.²⁶ Audubon’s consistent, sometimes insistent assertion of this selective self-identity became the critical element of his persona, both in his writings and in his more general engagement with Euro-American culture. Being a free, white frontiersman was one of the most valuable identities a man could have.

French Foundation

Before Audubon could become fully American, however, he would freely acknowledge being French. Despite his vague evasions about what he had “been led to understand” by his father about his “New World” birth, he took more ownership of his memory in describing his early life on the far side of the Atlantic. “The first of my recollective powers placed me in the central portion of the city of Nantes, on the Loire River, in France,” he wrote, “where I still recollect particularly that I was much cherished by my dear stepmother, who had no children of her own.”²⁷ Madame Audubon, the wealthy widow whose fortune allowed her second husband to have both a sugar plantation and other women in the West Indies, found herself with a three-year-old toddler when young Fougère arrived in France in August 1788. In another three years, she also acquired Fougère’s half sister, Rose. Madame Audubon never had children of her own, and she never asked to become a stepmother to these two young children born out of wedlock to two different mothers in the West Indies; still she apparently accepted their presence with a good measure of maternal affection, and she became, Audubon attested, “the only mother I have ever known.”²⁸

She seems to have been a good one, or certainly an indulgent one, “devotedly attached to me,” and, Audubon admitted, “far too much so for my own good.” By the time she acquired these two surprise stepchildren from her husband, she was at least in her late fifties, living in the comfortable circumstances first assured by her own inherited wealth and then supplemented by her second husband’s sea ventures and slaveholding. She was also happy enough to spend some of the Audubon family wealth on her young stepson, believing, he said, “that fine clothes and filled pockets were the only requisites” to his becoming a gentleman. The only other requisite she insisted upon was that he become confirmed as a Catholic, which he dutifully did at age seventeen; even though young Audubon was “surprised and indifferent” about taking his parents’ faith, he learned the catechism and acceded to the confirmation ceremony so that “all was performed to her liking.” Audubon himself was much to her liking, too, and she spoiled him, giving him “carte blanche at all the confectionary shops in the town,” boasting to others of his accomplishments and good looks, and providing him a youth, he said, in which “all my wishes and idle notions were at once gratified.”²⁹

Among those “idle notions,” none proved to be more important than skipping school and heading into the woods with other boys who, like Audubon, “were more fond of going in search of birds’ nests, fishing, or shooting, than of better studies.” Throughout his youth, Audubon explained, “there existed within me a tendency to follow Nature in her walks.” Follow them he did, eventually beginning to make pictures of birds until he had, by his own count and artistic estimation, “upward of two hundred drawings, all bad enough, my dear sons, yet they were representations of birds, and I felt pleased with them.”³⁰ (Audubon would later claim to have studied painting with the great French artist Jacques-Louis David, but there seems to be no definite evidence of his having done so. As in so many other aspects of Audubon’s autobiographical “facts,” this tutelage under his “honoured Mentor” seems to be a fiction of his self-fashioning.³¹)

Audubon’s stepmother may have allowed him the latitude to pursue his early passion for nature, but her place in the narrative paled in comparison to an even greater parental influence in Audubon’s life: “But now, my dear children, I must tell you somewhat of my father.” When Audubon wrote his wife, in 1827, about his notion that his own life might be “still more wonderful and extraordinary than that of my father,” he acknowledged the standard that he would explore more fully for his sons eight years later, in “Myself.” The story Audubon spins there about his father, Jean Audubon, is an almost classic rags-toriches tale, some of it true, some not, but all of it useful for giving Audubon—and his sons—a way to locate the family lineage in an eighteenth-century success story.

Born into a household of twenty-one children, all of them boys except for one girl, young Jean had to leave home at twelve, Audubon wrote, sent off by his father with “a shirt, a dress of coarse material, a stick, and his blessing.” Thus cast into the world, Jean went to sea on fishing boats, soon rising to the level of able seaman at age seventeen, and eventually coming to own several of his own ships by the time he was twenty-five. His fortunes improved dramatically three years later, in 1772, when “at twenty-eight [he] sailed for Santo Domingo with his little flotilla heavily loaded with the produce of the deep.” At that point in the tale, Audubon shifts to a direct quotation from his father: “I did well in this enterprise,” Audubon père tells his son, “and after a few more voyages of the same sort gave up the sea, and purchased a small estate on the Isle à Vaches; the prosperity of Santo Domingo was at its zenith, and in the course of ten years I had realized something very considerable.” Left unsaid—probably because it hardly needed saying—was that the prosperity of Saint-Domingue as a whole, along with the Audubon estate in particular, reached its zenith on the backs of enslaved black workers on the sugar plantations.³²

While accumulating wealth in the West Indies, Audubon’s father also went to war. While serving with the French forces in the American Revolution, Audubon claimed, the elder Audubon was presented with a portrait of George Washington by the general himself, “a few days only before the memorable battle of Valley Forge.” The battle is hardly memorable, of course, because it never took place. More to the point, while Washington and his ragged troops were shivering through the frigid winter at Valley Forge in 1778, Jean Audubon was still basking in the warmth of Les Cayes. He sailed away from there in the spring of 1779, only to be captured and imprisoned by the British. Once French officials had negotiated his release a year later, he did assume command of a French fighting ship, and he happened to be on hand, although presumably on the water, when the combined French and American forces surrounded Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781 and extracted from him the surrender that effectively ended the British war effort.³³ Perhaps Jean Audubon met George Washington somehow in the process; perhaps he received a gift portrait from the general, but perhaps not. And perhaps his son got his military history confused or, like so many other people of the era, simply invented an encounter with Washington that never took place. For his sons’ sake, however, Audubon’s story of his father’s favor with Washington helped establish an early and certainly valuable-seeming association with the creation of the United States.

Slaveowning, seafaring, and military service made the elder Audubon an absentee parent for much of the time, but when he did come home, he seemed an imposing presence in the eyes of his young son. Indeed, the son saw an impressive image of himself in the father: “In personal appearance my father and I were of the same height and stature,” Audubon wrote, “say about five feet ten inches, erect, and with muscles of steel.” He also saw something of his own personality: “In temper we much resembled each other also, being warm, irascible, and at times violent; but it was like the blast of a hurricane, dreadful for a time, when calm almost instantly returned.”³⁴

The contrast of violence and calm in his father’s character seemed to reflect the turbulence of the times, and the father’s experience in the revolutions of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world seemed to have lodged deep in the son’s memory. “The different changes occurring at the time of the American Revolution, and afterward that in France, seem to have sent him from one place to another as if a foot-ball.” For all that bouncing around between revolutions, however, the Audubon holdings in Saint-Domingue kept increasing in value—until, Audubon noted, “the liberation of the black slaves there.” Audubon even quoted his father directly about the impact of revolutions, which, the elder Audubon told his son, “too often take place in the lives of individuals, and they are apt to lose in one day the fortune they before possessed.” In writing to his own sons much later in “Myself,” Audubon described the “thunders of the Revolution” in France, when “the Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child.”³⁵

He could just as easily have been writing about the revolution in Saint-Domingue, where, as he had already said in the previous pages, his mother “was one of the victims during the ever-to-be-lamented period of negro insurrection on the island.” She wasn’t, but his mulatto half sister was: Marie-Madeleine, Sanitte’s first daughter with Audubon’s father, still lived at Les Cayes with her mother when the slave insurgents ransacked the Audubon estate in 1792, and she died in the violence. Perhaps neither Audubon, father or son, ever learned of her death.³⁶ At any rate, Audubon the son abruptly dropped the topic of revolutions altogether in writing for his own sons and turned away from saying anything more: “To think of those dreadful days is too terrible, and would be too horrible and painful for me to relate to you, my dear sons.”³⁷

Still, whatever the “horrible and painful” elements of his father’s experience, Audubon seemed to be able to recall the deeds, achievements, and, on occasion, the exact words of his father with considerable clarity. This apparent memory for detail stands in sharp, perhaps surprising, contrast to the vague, secondhand, somewhat offhand information he offered his sons about his own mother and the circumstances of his birth. Again, he claimed to rely on his father for information about the “enigma” of his origins, but in conveying that information he gave it almost no authority, leaving it shrouded in the mystery of hearsay: “I can only say what I have often heard my father repeat to me,” or “I have been led to understand.” On the whole, in writing “Myself,” Audubon used his father as a valuable narrative device. When he needed a way to illustrate the virtues of strong character, the vicissitudes of life, or the violence of revolutionary times, he had his father for that. When he needed a way to evade the personal details and social disadvantages of his West Indian origins, he had his father for that, too.

The Specter of Saint-Domingue

Perhaps most important, he had his father to orchestrate his exit from France and his entrée into the United States, allegedly as a lad from Louisiana. Audubon’s father “greatly approved of the change in France during the time of Napoleon,” his son wrote, but the elder Audubon’s admiration of Napoleon apparently stopped short of committing his teenaged son to the First Consul’s military service. Because Napoleon had become determined to reverse the direction of the insurrection in Saint-Domingue—and to restore slavery there in the process—he began pouring upward of thirty thousand troops into Saint-Domingue in late 1801. In short order, about half of them quickly succumbed to the island’s most deadly disease, yellow fever, and thousands more fell to the revolutionary forces.³⁸ Then, needing more and more money to fund this desperate military effort, he decided to sell a huge swath of North American territory he had recently acquired from Spain, and at the end of April 1803, France concluded the Louisiana Purchase with the United States. What those high-level decisions might mean to ordinary people in France seemed a bit unclear at the time, but Jean Audubon knew that he didn’t want his son to become cannon fodder (or, equally likely, fever fodder) for Napoleon’s West Indian venture. In the summer of 1803, the elder Audubon booked passage for his son to cross the Atlantic on the American brig Hope. He also provided his son with another sort of hope, arranging for a passport that described the teenaged boy as a “citizen of Louisiana,” thus helping him dodge conscription and the unhappy prospect of being sent back to Saint-Domingue, the real place of his birth, as a soldier.

In the following year, 1804, the “negro insurrection” eventually enabled Saint-Domingue’s people of color to gain their freedom from European colonizers. By that time, the movement from insurrection to independence had come to represent a menacing specter of black power for white people on both sides of the Atlantic, and the residual racial anxiety endured well into the century. Audubon had to know that. No matter what he knew about his early days in Saint-Domingue, he also knew that, as someone with a Haitian association in his background, he clearly needed to establish himself on the white side of the racial divide. Thus in his memoir, “Myself,” Audubon plays loose with the dates and details. His beautiful “Spanish” mother dies as a victim of the slaves’ violence, he writes, and he and his father have to flee to France to escape the uprising—along with their black “servants,” to be sure. Time is out of joint in Audubon’s story—the slave insurrection did not begin until 1791, but his mother actually died in 1785, soon after his birth, and his father sent the three-year-old boy to France in 1788—but chronology is not the issue. The more important point is to portray his family—and therefore himself—as white victims of the black unrest.

In the end, the task is not to seek some essential, absolute truth about who Audubon really was, how “American” he was, or what sort of American he was, black or white, or whether he might have passed for white. Both in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and in twenty-first-century scholarship, questions about someone’s exact identity can often lead back to ambiguity, even with DNA-based findings. The point, rather, is to accept ambiguity as a possible element of individual identity and to see what the individual does with it. In Audubon’s case, the ambiguity of his background—not to mention his inventive, often evasive, sometimes duplicitous discussion of his origins—offers a valuable avenue of biographical approach. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in the preface to his poem Audubon: A Vision, “By the age of ten Audubon knew the true story, but prompted, it would seem, by a variety of impulses, including some sound practical ones, he encouraged the other version, along with a number of flattering embellishments.” Whatever the “true story” of Audubon’s background might have been, the real fascination still lies in the “embellishments,” including Audubon’s role as, to use Warren’s term, a “fantasist of talent.”³⁹

Audubon kept up the deception throughout his life. In 1837, when he had become a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic, he wrote to a close friend, “I am glad, and proud Too; that I have at last been Acknowledged by the public prints as a Native Citizen of Louisianna.”⁴⁰ For his own part, he never took to the public prints to acknowledge his own West Indian origins, nor did he discuss the larger geopolitical implications that might be attached to his place of origin. He offered only a simple explanation in the privacy of his personal memoir, noting that his father “found it necessary to send me back to my own beloved country, the United States of America.”⁴¹ In that regard, Audubon was coming “back” to a place he had never been. The United States, his “beloved country,” had indeed acquired Louisiana, allegedly the place of his birth, but he would not set foot in Louisiana until 1819, sixteen years later. Instead, he first came ashore in the United States in late August 1803, when the Hope docked in New York City.⁴²

It turned out to be a bad time to arrive. Audubon immediately came down with a case of yellow fever, an epidemic disease that swept through the city between mid-July and late October, sickening over 1,600 people and killing upward of 700. At the time, physicians debated the origins of yellow fever, some saying that it stemmed from urban filth, particularly decomposing animal and vegetable matter in hot weather, with others arguing that it came in from outside the country. We now know that the latter explanation makes more sense: Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne illness that first came into North American seaports on ships from the West Indies, including Saint-Domingue.⁴³ Luckily enough, Audubon survived yellow fever, thus gaining a lifetime immunity. Still, he never noted the obvious irony of his illness. Before this West Indian–born, French-speaking immigrant could begin to fashion a new identity as an American—and eventually, as the American Woodsman—he first had to recover from a malady that stemmed, quite unpleasantly, from the place of his origin, the French West Indies. Try as Audubon might, there was no escaping the specter of Saint-Domingue.