[In the following essay, first published in 1974, Hatch and Shine stress the historical importance of Séjour's works.]

Born in New Orleans on June 2, 1817, of a Creole quadroon mother and a free Black man from Santo Dominigo, Juan Victor Séjour Marcon et Ferrand demonstrated a talent for writing poetry early on, at Saint Barbe Academy. At age seventeen, to complete his education, Victor was sent to Paris to remove him from the humiliation imposed upon men of color, even freed men. For the remaining thirty-eight years of his adult life, Séjour acted in plays and wrote dramas for the Parisian theatre. 'Tall, handsome and distinguished, with sparkling brown eyes and a complexion too dark and lips too large for him to be mistaken for Caucasian, Séjour was an impressive figure in Paris in the heyday of his glory."¹ Within two years, he had published a novella, "Le Mulatre" ("The Mulatto"), but it was his long poem about the return of Emperor Napoleon's body to Paris, Le Retour de Napoléon, published in 1824, that brought the young man his fame.

Popular with important literary figures of the day—among them Alexander Dumas père, and the playwright Emile Augier—Séjour began his theatre career in 1844 with a verse drama, Diégarias, at the Théâtre Français. Over the following years he wrote twenty other produced plays, many of them full-length romantic historical dramas in the manner of Victor Hugo, whom he admired. In his plays Séjour "dwells on love of parents and their children, and on the beauty of romantic and marital love. Amid his successes, he dutifully and devotedly brought his parents to Paris, where they lived out their last years. In spite of his plays' high appreciation for marriage and their attractive portrayal of fidelity, Séjour fathered three sons of three mothers out of wedlock."²

The reports that Séjour wrote one play with Blacks as characters, Le Volunteers of 1814, are false. The play does not concern itself with the siege of New Orleans, but with Napoleon in Europe. He did, however, write a play in 1858, Le Martyre du Coeur (The Martyrdom of the Heart), with one Black character, a Jamaican. It was reported he wrote a five-act drama entitled L'Esclave (The Slave), but the script has never been found.

Séjour penned The Brown Overcoat the same year that William Wells Brown published The Escape (1858), and it was produced the following year. It is a typical artificial comedy in what was then the degenerated tradition of Molière and Beaumarchais. The dialogue is sometimes witty, often relying on puns that cannot be duplicated in translation. The play has nothing to do with race and little to do with the world.³

Yet the play is significant in a collection of this kind, for it was written by a Black American playwright who led a successful nonracial artist's life. Unlike [Ira] Aldridge, he seems to have left the "problem" of racism behind. He integrated into French society and was honored with the title Chevalier and made a member of the Légion d'Honneur. On September 10, 1874, he fulfilled the nineteenth-century's image of the artist by dying in a charity hospital of tuberculosis.

Few of Séjour's plays have been produced, although The Brown Overcoat, translated by Townsend Brewster, was produced Off-Broadway on December 6, 1972. The centenary of his death was commemorated with a Séjour production at Loyola University in New Orleans, and at Southern University his likeness appears in a mural of "great Negroes of Louisiana." Along with Ira Aldridge, Séjour pioneered the tradition that if an African American artist could achieve in Europe, that artist might then find some respect at home. Paris in particular became the mecca for many, including Josephine Baker, Chester Hines, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.

Notes

¹Charles Rousseve, The Negro in Louisiana (New Orleans: Xavier Press, 1937.)

²Charles Edwards O'Neill, Directory of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.)

³In this European tradition, Paul Laurence Dunbar also wrote one play entitled Robert Herrick (c. 1899). The comedy, written in the style of Sheridan and using the poet Robert Herrick as its hero, remains unproduced and unpublished.