Rose Nicaud was a coffee vendor or one of les vendeuses selling in New Orleans’ French Market. Her vending began on free Sundays when she, an enslaved woman, was allowed to make and sell coffee to earn money. It is said that she was to have purchased her freedom selling coffee. Upon being freed, she rented a stall inside the French Market, where it has been stated that she’d earned – by today’s standards – around $1,400 a day.
Here is what we know about Rose:
☕ Rose was the first to sell coffee in or near the French Market, predating Café du Monde and other larger, white-owned vendors
☕ She lived in the French Quarter
☕ She died of a stroke
Here is what we do not know about Rose:
☕ Where she was born
☕ Who parented her
☕ If it is true that she purchased her freedom (can’t find documentation)
☕ If she ever married or partnered
☕ If she had children, though she was documented as living with two young girls in the Census
☕ We did learn something interesting and that is she witnessed a murder that took place outside of her stall. A white customer shot and killed a Black man. He was cleared only to shoot an Irish immigrant a year later. After the shooting outside of her stall, a race riot took place in New Orleans.
☕
With sadness, Rose’s documented, publicized life boiled down to two things: her coffee and that murder. We know so little about Rose the woman, and that is a shame as well as the unfortunate result of the dehumanization of Black people. Still, everything that I could document about her, I attached to a family tree on Ancestry.com (log in to see it). And you can see her life within historical context viewing it as a Life Story.
[Originally published February 20, 2021]
