The Notorious Bras Coupé: A Slave Rebellion Replayed in Memory, History, and Anxiety

Abstract

Bras Coupé is one of the most influential, yet most understudied, American folk characters. In around 1834, a one-armed enslaved man named Squire escaped into New Orleans's outlying swamps, captivating the city's attention by repeatedly eluding recapture. Rumor had it that he led a large band of fugitive slaves and had murdered countless whites. Locals nicknamed him Bras Coupé, French for severed arm.Following Squire's 1837 murder, slaves and enslavers circulated dynamic accounts of this disfigured man, murderous and magical, haunting a marshy lair. By the late nineteenth century, Squire's legendary counterpart had leapt from contested memory into literature, and renowned novelists, including

Black Freedom, Black Markets: Notes on New Orleans Black Masking Indian Tradition

“…Emerging from a year of disciplined daily sewing and significant material costs, the now animated suit was fashioned in homage to Bras Coupé-the legendary one-armed maroon "bandit" whose infamy generated hysterias of racialized fear in white colonial New Orleans. By contrast, Bras Coupé's legacy of Black radical freedom was embraced by some nineteenth-century enslaved and their descendants as a mythic figure of folkloric heroism (Bardes 2020;Wagner 2019). In line with such oppositional readings, the apron frames Bras Coupé's figure amid broken chains, a multicolored halo, and a collage of images, including a slave ship and a West African styled "chief" throne chair.…”