An Hour With Mother Henriette Delille

Born in 1812, Henriette Delille Sarpy was from one of the oldest and affluent racially mixed Catholic Creole families in nineteenth-century New Orleans. Her great-great-grandmother was an African slave brought to Louisiana who subsequently won her freedom. Her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother also had children by white men so Henriette, her mother, and her brother could “pass for white.” A French missionary nun taught Henriette and her friend Juliette Gaudin. The girls prayed, fed the p