Marie Thérèse Coincoin

Marie Thérèze dite Coincoin was born in August 1742 at the Louisiana French outpost of Natchitoches, as the fourth of eleven children produced by François and Marie Françoise, an African-born couple held in slavery by the post's founder and commandant, Louis Juchereau de St. Denis. As a child, Coincoin and her sister Marie Louise dite Mariotte were trained in pharmacology and nursing, skills that would eventually lead to their freedom and provide a livelihood for them afterward. As the young mother of five children (born of a union with an Indian slave, according to tradition), Coincoin was rented from her mistress in 1765 by a young French merchant, Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, who made Coincoin his concubine. Although Metoyer freed her in 1778, the liaison continued until he married another Marie Thérèse in 1788, a white Creole widow. In exchange for Coincoin's "good services," Metoyer gave her a tract of 68 acres of alluvial river-bottom land and eventually manumittedtheir eight (of ten) children who survived childhood.

As a free woman, Coincoin earned her livelihood as a médicine, a planter of indigo and tobacco, and a trapper, selling meat at the post and shipping barrels of oil and barge-loads of tobacco to market at New Orleans. With the assistance of Metoyer, she applied for a Spanish grant and was awarded the standard 800 arpents (about 666 acres) of land in the piney hills, which she used as vacherie. Like many other freed slaves in colonial Louisiana, she bought slaves of her own to labor for her as her own health began to fail. By the time she divided her property among her children in Spring 1816, in anticipation of death, the three African-born adults whom she had purchased had created a household of 16 slaves.

Coincoin has long been a popular figure in Louisiana lore, but much of what has been written about her in popular forums since the 1960s misrepresents her true legacy. She is frequently, but erroneously, said to have accumulated a vast fortune and to have owned large estates, including Cane River's fabled Melrose Plantation that was actually granted to and built by her son, Louis Metoyer. In reality, Coincoin lived a life of frugality and service to others, investing all her income into the purchase of freedom for her pre-Metoyer children, grandchildren, and other youth in the neighborhood. The examples that she set and the religious and moral values that she instilled in her offspring were the guiding forces of an exceptional community her children and grandchildren built on Cane River—a community that includes America's first church built by African-Americans for African-Americans (St. Augustine, on Isle Brevelle). Coincoin's grave is no longer marked and the little bousillage cabin that is shown for her on a contemporary land survey no longer stands, although its site has been identified and is being archaeologically studied. Her legacy lives on in more than 10,000 offspring whose forebears, across two centuries of racial bias and persecution, drew strength and inspiration from her memory.

African origin

Even though she was born in Louisiana, both her parents were born in Africa. Her African parents were said to have still retained their culture with a strong sense of pride. One of their traditions was in their naming. By Thereze having the name CoinCoin (although changed from time to time by the French and Spanish throughout her history), this proves her African origin. Since she was the second child name CoinCoin this also aids in finding their origins. This linguistic naming system is that of the Ewe people of Togo. Further since the Ewe people have populations in more than just Togo, it is said that their origins can be from anywhere in the Gold Coast (region).

Sources for Coincoin

• Mills, Gary B. The Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. ISBN 978-0807102879
• Mills, Gary B. “Coincoin: An Eighteenth-Century ‘Liberated’ Woman.” Journal of Southern History 42 (May 1976): 203–22. Reprinted in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., Black Women in United States History. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990. ISBN 978-0926019140
• Mills, Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown. Melrose. Natchitoches: Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches, 1973. (Drawn by the authors from their historic-site documentation project that earned Melrose its National Historical Landmark designation in 1976.)
• Mills, Elizabeth Shown and Gary B. "Slaves and Masters: The Louisiana Metoyers." National Genealogical Society Quarterly 70 (September 1982): 163-89. (A four-generation genealogy of the offspring of François and Marie Françoise, focusing on the Metoyer line.)
• Mills, Elizabeth Shown and Gary B. “Missionaries Compromised: Early Evangelization of Slaves and Free People of Color in North Louisiana.” Cross, Crozier, and Crucible. Glenn R. Conrad. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Historical Association and Archdiocese of New Orleans, 1993. Pages 30–47.
• Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Isle of Canes. Provo, Utah: Ancestry, 2006. ISBN 978-1593311759