Aimée later lived as a femme de couleur libre—free woman of color—in antebellum New Orleans. By then a single mother, she raised her children in the largest and most prosperous free black community in the United States. The proud, dynamic gens de couleur libres were Francophone and Catholic and lived within tightly knit enclaves of the French Quarter and Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny. Legally free, they were a caste apart, existing on the conflicted borderlines between American and French, white and black, free and enslaved. Frequently more affluent, educated, and cultured than whites, free people of color were profoundly influenced by the values of liberté, egalitié, et fraternité that emerged from the French, American, and Haitian revolutions.

Madame Potens proudly wore a tignon, the headscarf required in colonial times as a reminder of “inferior” status. In the 19th century, Marie Laveau and other New Orleans women of African descent defiantly sported the tignon as a symbol of beauty. And family lore reveals that Aimée, like the voodoo priestess, was a powerful and proud healer who walked the streets liked she owned the city. And indeed, in her day, free women of color were powerful in many ways, often owning property and managing businesses in the French Quarter and the Faubourgs Tremé and Marigny.

Louis Charles Roudanez, Aimée’s youngest child, grew up in this dynamic Afro-Creole world. He was likely influenced by the confidence that shone in Aimée’s eyes and her prowess as a healer and midwife. Young Louis was sent to Paris, where he earned a degree at the prestigious faculté de medicine. A student of prominent republican activists, Roudanez reportedly “took to the barricades” during the 1848 French revolution.

Returning as an adult to an increasingly polarized New Orleans in the late 1850s, he was infuriated by the many indignities of white supremacy that France had spared him. White people would likely have addressed Louis Charles with the familiar form tu instead of the formal vous. But such micro-aggressions would have been of small consequence compared to the flagrant racism he faced. Tax-paying free people of color, while enjoying some measure of liberty, could not vote. They were denied “privileges” of citizenship, such as interracial marriage, public education, and public accommodation. Many whites worried that free and autonomous blacks might offer the enslaved hope for their own freedom, or even assist them in retaliating against their masters. The young doctor’s very existence as a prosperous and confident free black man directly contradicted the foundational idea of slave society—that servitude was passed down through blood and that racial inferiority was part of the natural order.

Aimée’s eyes next fixed upon the howling madness of Civil War. In the spring of 1862, she saw many thousands of enslaved refugees pour into the city following Union occupation. With the Confederacy collapsing around her family, she watched her sons—Jean Baptiste and Louis Charles—emerge as leaders in an entirely new and powerful black movement to replace slavery with a fundamentally different and racially democratic society. In September, the Roudanez brothers and fellow Afro-Creole activists started the journal L’Union, the South’s first black newspaper. The front page of the inaugural edition condemned slavery and published passionate correspondence from Victor Hugo. A black narrative was born, and immediately the free black community coalesced around the newspaper.