The Opera of Emeline

When Houston judge Mark Davidson stumbled across a case file of a

young slave whod sued for her freedom in 1848, he found a story
filled with famous names and surprising twists. This month that
tale comes to life in a most unexpected way.
May 2016 By Michael Hall

Illustration by Ross MacDonald

On November 25, 1848, a young, illiterate slave claiming to be free walked into a Houston courthouse to sue
the man who owned her. The womans odds, it would have seemed, were not good.
The new state of Texas allowed slavery, and one in four households in Houston owned African Americans.
The judge in the case was a slave owner, as was the foreman of the jury. Even the womans Houston lawyer
came from a slave-owning family in Virginia and would, when Texas seceded from the Union twelve years
later, serve in the Confederate House of Representatives.
She was 26 years old, five feet five and 130 pounds, a good looking, sprightly girl, as one witness put it,
with freckles and light-colored skinyellow, in the parlance of the day. As she sat in that small courtroom
and looked around at the menthe one who owned her, the one trying to free her, the twelve on the jury about
to judge hershe probably thought about a lot of things. Her two young sons, for example, who would surely
be separated from her and sold if she lost. She doubtless reflected on her mother, who, last she knew, was
somewhere outside Nashville. She might have recalled her long, hard journey from Tennessee to Louisiana to
Texas.

But one notion certainly never entered her mind, and that was the idea that, 168 years later, in her great-greatgreat-great-great-great-grandchildrens time, not far from the spot where she now sat, this same city would
turn her life, which had all the elements of classic human dramalove, death, bondage, the ache to be free
into a stirring work of words and music, an opera, named after her, Emeline, a slave desperate to be free. But
that is exactly what happened.

A page from the file shows the X Emeline used to sign her name.
Photograph by Brain Goldman

In March 2003 Mark Davidson went searching for a good story. Davidson, a history buff, had been elected
judge of the Eleventh District Court of Harris County more than a decade earlier, and in 1995 the president of
the Houston Bar Association asked him to write some articles on local legal history for the Houston Lawyer.
Davidson agreed and went to one of the six warehouses where county court documents were stored, a building
in the Fifth Ward with no air-conditioning but abundant rats and roaches. He opened one of the hundreds of
boxes, but when he lifted out the files, they crumpled into confetti. Davidson realized these documents were
the last frontier of Texas history, so he went to the district clerk, Charles Bacarisse, and suggested they come
up with a way to preserve them. Bacarisse, himself a history buff, agreed. They eventually gathered all the
materials in one place, the five floors of the old downtown jail.
Eight years later, Davidson was exploring the archive and pulled out the biggest file he saw. The paper was
brown and had plenty of holes and torn edges, but most of it was intact. The case was titled Emeline, a free
woman of color v. Jesse P. Bolls. Davidson began reading the ornate, flowing handwriting and saw that
Emelines attorney had been Peter Gray, the founder of Houstons Baker Botts, one of the oldest law firms in
the state. Davidson noticed the X the plaintiff had used to sign her name. The case file was full of petitions
and interrogatories that themselves held facts about the lives of Emeline, her mother, and their owners in three
different states. Davidson turned to the verdict and was stunned by what he saw.
Emelines story, like that of many slaves, begins with a concupiscent plantation owner. In 1811 or 1812, some
ten years before Emeline was born, a young Louisiana planter named Donelson Caffery began fornicating
with her mother, Rhoda. Caffery, in his mid-twenties, was from Nashville, which was co-founded by his
grandfather. Cafferys aunt married Andrew Jackson. In 1808 Caffery left Nashville and went south to the
newly opened territory that would soon become the state of Louisiana and bought a plantation in the southcentral part of the state on Bayou Teche; he also became a partner in a sugar plantation in nearby Attakapas
with a Philadelphia merchant named Washington Jackson.
Jackson was Rhodas owner and a man who would eventually control a variety of interests, including a
trading company in New Orleans and a schooner to ship his goods. Jackson and Caffery were part of an
unofficial club of area planters that included John Murphy, from North Carolina, and Thomas Martin, from
Nashville, who bought land next to Jackson and Cafferys and soon became friends with them. They were all
excited about their prospects. There is no business in this country like farming, Caffery wrote to his uncle
Andrew Jackson in 1810. An industrious man with a few negroes may soon make a fortune.
In 1816 Caffery announced his engagement to Murphys daughter, Lydia. But he had a problem: he had
fathered three children with RhodaGeorge, Margaret, and Matildaall of whom, Cafferys partner said,
looked a lot like their father. Caffery went to his friend for help. He became anxious to do something for
them, Jackson later testified, and direct their removal to a free state with a view to their becoming free.
Jackson offered to take them to Philadelphia, where, by Pennsylvania law, they would be emancipated after
having lived there for six months. Caffery paid Jackson $1,000 for Rhoda and their three children, and the
merchant took the four to New Orleans and then on a ship to the Cradle of Liberty.
Caffery reckoned Rhoda could find work as a laundress in Philadelphia, and for a time she worked for
Jacksons sister. But she couldnt get enough steady employment to take care of her family, so Caffery
arranged for her and the kids to be sent to the plantation of his friend Martin, near Nashville. Rhoda was to be
a servant, not a slave, Jackson later said, and when the children were old enough, they were to learn trades, an
arrangement Martin was in full agreement with: Thomas Martin was an intimate and confidential friend of
Caffery. By 1817 Rhoda and her childrenwho Jackson said had spent more than six months in Philadelphia
were living on the Martin plantation called Locust Grove.
In the spring of 1822, Rhoda gave birth to Emeline, whose father was, in all likelihood, a white man. She later
gave birth to daughters Lucy and Julia. The Martins were members of the Tennessee aristocracy, and Rhoda
and her children would have seen many members of the upper class come through Locust Grove, including

one man who would change the course of Texas history and possibly Emelines as well: Sam Houston. On a
snowy January night in 1829, Houston, then the governor of Tennessee, arrived with his new bride, Eliza
Allen, to spend the night. The next morning, before getting back on the road, Houston had a snowball fight
with the Martin children.
Nine years later, one of those children, Eliza Martin, became Emelines owner. How this could have
happened, since Thomas Martin had been so supportive of the free status of Rhoda and her children, is one of
several mysteries in Emelines case. The record does show that Martin died in 1835 and didnt leave a will,
and when the chancery court listed Martins property three years later, Emeline, now sixteen and valued at
$650, was the property of Eliza, and Rhoda and her other children were owned by Elizas brother, William
Martin. By then Caffery had died too, and Jackson had moved to New Orleans, where he was buying and
selling cotton. No one was around to speak up for Rhoda, Emeline, and their family.
In 1839 Eliza married John Seip, who soon purchased a plantation in Rapides Parish, Louisiana. The couple
moved there, taking Emeline. She wasnt the only free Negro coerced into working the sugar and cotton
plantations of the area; Solomon Northup, whose harrowing account of being forced into slavery would
become the book 12 Years a Slave, was sold to a man in the same parish around that time. Over the next few
years Emeline would bear two children of her own, James and William.
Her time in Louisiana came to an abrupt end in 1846, when the Seips sent Emeline and her sons with an
overseer to Houston to sell them. The overseer transported the small family west, and a few days before
Christmas, Emeline, William, and James had a new owner, a farmer named Jesse P. Bolls. But in her new
home, Emeline hatched an audacious plan. She would sue for her freedom.
In an even more audacious move, Emeline got the best lawyer in town. Peter Gray was youngat 29, he was
only a few years older than his client. He had come to Texas in 1838, when it was still a republic; his father,
the Virginia lawyer William Fairfax Gray, was already here, having helped negotiate a loan to the government
that paid for the army. The Grays settled in Houston, where Texas president Mirabeau B. Lamar made Gray
the first district attorney of Harris County. Father taught son the law, and when William died, in 1841, Sam
Houston appointed 22-year-old Peter to take his place as DA. Peter was also elected to the first Legislature, in
1846, where he wrote the Practice Act, the states first rules of civil procedure.
On May 4, 1847, Gray filed suit on Emelines behalf, claiming that Bolls with force and arms assaulted her
and took, imprisoned, and restrained her and her children of their liberty. Emeline asked for $500. She
signed the pleading with an X. Six weeks later Gray, the expert on the new states civil procedure, filed an
injunction to prevent Bolls from taking Emeline outside the county and selling her into slavery again. The
petition noted that Emelines sister Lucy Thompson, who had earned her freedom and was living in New
Orleans, had come to Houston and was helping her by consulting with the lawyers. Judge C.W.
Buckley
granted the injunction.
Both sides built their cases, sending out interrogatories. Gray sent them to witnesses in Tennessee and
Louisiana who had known Emeline when she was growing up on the Martin plantation, including Washington
Jackson in New Orleans and Jacksons sister in Philadelphia. Several supported Emelines claims. Jackson
swore that both Caffery and Martin understood that Rhoda and her children were to stay free while they
worked for him. The service of Rhoda was to be a free and sufficient compensation for her and the childrens
support, until the latter should be of ages proper to be put at to learn trades, he testified, adding, I am
confident that [Caffery] could not in any way . . . have been induced to sell Rhoda and her children as slaves.
He was a kind, honorable, and honest man.
Bollss lawyers found witnesses to support his property claims, such as Robert Chappell, of Washington
County, who said hed seen Emeline in Houston in late 1846 and Emeline said to me that she was willing to
be sold . . . she induced me to believe that Beckham [the overseer] had come honestly by her. Elizas sister

Susan Flint said Rhoda was held by my father as a slave and that Emeline belonged to my father, and my
sister received her as part of her share of my fathers estate.
The case finally went to trial on November 25, 1848. There is no transcript of the proceedings, but Gray did
ask the court for a jury charge: that if its members believed Rhoda was sent to Philadelphia to be free, that she
was free, and that if they believed Emeline was Rhodas daughter, then she too should be considered free. The
jury, it seems, followed this logic, coming back the same day with a verdict. We, the jury, find for the
plaintiff Emeline that she and her children are free as claimed by her and assess her damages at one dollar.

Davidson stumbled across Emelines case file in 2003, more than 150 years after the verdict.
Photograph by Brian Goldman
Davidson had never heard Emelines storyit hadnt been written about in the newspapers of the day. No
one knew about it at Baker Botts, the firm that Gray had founded, either. We have two histories written about
Baker Botts, says Bill Kroger, whos been at the firm since 1989, and numerous lawyers have written stories
about cases theyve done. But nobody mentioned Emeline. The firm donated $5,000 to help preserve the case
file, and the project helped spur other initiatives to preserve county history.
Researchers found additional cases that were similar to Emelines, including that of Nelly Norrisa woman
with two children who had been enslaved in Tennessee and later freed but then enslaved againwho went to
court for her freedom in Harris County in 1838 and won. One of her lawyers was William Fairfax Gray,
Peters father. That same year in Houston, Sally Vince sued her owner, Allen Vince, and won when the judge
ruled that her previous owner had set her free. In Moore v. Minerva, from 1856, a slave freed in Ohio had
come with her former owner to Texas. After he died, she was forced back into slavery by the administrator of
his estate, who said that Texass law prohibiting free Negroes from immigrating meant she remained a slave.
The state Supreme Court ruled in her favor, declaring that she was still free. In the 1850 case of Gess v.
Lubbock, a female slave had had a child with her owner, who later signed a document emancipating her. After
he died, his nephew claimed her as his slave through inheritance. She lost, but on appeal before the state
Supreme Court, she was awarded a new trialand won.
The courts of preCivil War Texas, especially the Supreme Court, were extremely favorable to people of
color, says Davidson. That view is echoed by other historians and political scientists, such as A.E. Keir
Nash, who wrote in 1971 of the courts remarkable antebellum tradition of fair treatment of blacks. But
Gonzaga law professor Jason Gillmer, who is working on a book about Texas courts and slavery, cautions
about seeing too much honor in these court decisions. A lot of these cases came about because of a will, he
says. This is about property rights, whether a person can free someone who is his property. If a man cant do

with his property what he sees fit, that would be government tyranny at its worst. These cases are a
complicated mix of property rights, white supremacy, and individual exceptions, where juries came to a
decision that reflected local circumstances. Maybe members of the community got to know the slave and saw
her as an individual.
In 2004 the Houston Chronicle published a series of stories on Davidson, the preservation project, and
Emeline; Davidsons own story was published the next year in the Houston Lawyer. Emelines tale eventually
reached Andrea White, the wife of former mayor Bill White. She relayed it to her friend Sandra Bernhard,
who founded the Houston Grand Operas community outreach program, which turns Houston stories into
operas and performs them at various places in the community. Bernhard was interested in telling Emelines
story and asked White to write it. White, who had written childrens books, volunteered to do a version of
Emelines story. She went to Davidson, who gave her a copy of the court file; she also read other stories on
Emeline, including Davidsons.
One thing he had focused on was the mystery of Emelines jury. For every case before and after hers, the jury
had been drawn from a pool of 36 men. However, the 12 members of her jury, Davidson wrote, had been
seemingly handpicked and included important local figures like Andrew Briscoe, a former judge, and Joseph
Harris, whose uncle was the namesake of the county. Davidson says that in all his research hes never seen a
special jury seated like that. Gray was a powerful, well-known man, the former DA and the representative to
the Texas Legislature from the county. The only two people who could have appointed this special jury were
the judge and the district clerk, says Davidson. Would they have done it for Peter Gray? They would have
probably done a lot of things for Peter Gray. White was also fascinated by Emelines jury. The only thing I
could figure out is the judge and Gray worked together to do that, she says.
When White finished her book, in 2014, she gave it to Bernhard, and the HGO reached out to Richard
Husseini, a tax partner at Baker Botts and an opera lover, about underwriting an opera. The firm agreed.
Meanwhile, Kroger had been doing further research on his own at Baker Botts, helping to solve another
puzzle: why Emeline and her children had been sent to Texas in the first place. Kroger found a 1943 article by
Andrew Muir titled The Free Negro in Harris County, in which he wrote about Emelines casebut also, in
a surprising footnote, her mothers. It turned out that in April 1844 Rhoda had sued the Martin family in
Davidson County, Tennessee, on behalf of her and her children, claiming that, since she had been a free
woman of color back in 1816 in Philadelphia, she and her children should be free then. The trial was held in
1846, and on September 21, Rhoda and her children won, with the court declaring, The plaintiffs are free
persons of colour and not slaves of the defendant. That, Kroger concluded, was why the Seips unloaded
Emeline and her kids in Texas: they were afraid they would lose them if they stayed in Louisiana.
Emelines story was so much grander nowthe timeless fight for freedom heightened by a mothers influence
on a daughter and a fathers on a son. Everyone who heard it was transfixed, and it was as if the city of
Houston was coming togetherlawyers, historians, journalists, the wife of a former mayor, the local opera
companyto tell it.
Gwendolyn Alfred, who will perform the role of Emeline, photographed in Houston on April 1, 2016.
What would an opera about a Texas slave suing for her freedom sound like? Banjo and violin? Gospel choir?
Hip-hop string quartet? What Wings They Were: The Case of Emeline is not a period piece or a hybrid. Its an
actual opera, with contemporary melodies and dramatic voices, the kind youd see onstage in Paris or Rome.
Emeline is a chamber opera, a small-scale production. In fact, the only instrument is a piano. The music was
written by John Cornelius II, an associate professor at Prairie View A&M University. He is a large man who
looks like hed sing baritone; he has written opera and chamber music before as well as song cyclesboth
music and words. His writing partner was Janine Joseph, a young poet and professor who got her Ph.D. in
literature and creative writing from the University of Houston.

Like everyone else trying to tell Emelines story, the two didnt have a lot of source material, so they began
with her mark. What struck me was her X, says Joseph. Thats where I started. She wrote the prologue
and the first two sections of the opera and sent the words to Cornelius:
I sign my name not Emeline
but with an X
because I am now not free.
The music of Emeline is emotional and dramatic, over the top, flitting up and down over jarring piano chords
and melodies while the characters sing with all the Sturm und Drang we expect from opera singers. The
challenge with doing a historical piece, says Cornelius, is you have to do research and know the subject, but
research can be boring. Whats it about? What do they care about? What are their motivations? What do they
want, what do they need? Gwendolyn Alfred plays Emeline, and her voice is warm and high, sweet but full
of sadness. Sometimes she sounds like a bird trying to break free, her powerful notes descending and then
taking off again. Christopher Besch plays Gray, and his beard resembles the DAs. Beschs voice is impossibly
deep, quavering with angst and booming with lawyerly outrage:
Gentlemen of the jury
who here dares call
this free woman of color
anything but free?
Brian Yeakley plays a composite of Bolls, Seip, and a shadowy presence called the Figure, who represents
society and the peculiar institution of slavery.
The opera will debut April 30 at the Ensemble Theater. On May 3 and 4 it will be performed at a Harris
County courthouse, near the spot where Emeline sat to be judged in 1848, and later at various middle schools
and high schools. Emeline is a stirring form of community outreach, a way to get Houstonians to engage with
their history in a creative way, to reach back into the past and witness a story that needs to be told.
But it wont solve the two biggest mysteries of Emelines story. First, what happened to her after she won her
freedom? She almost certainly left town. Free blacks were forbidden to live in Harris County unless they had
permission from the Legislature. And even though most local constables ignored the law and a handful of free
blacks were known to live quietly in Houston, its safe to assume that after Emelines experience in Texas, she
wanted to get out. Maybe she went to New Orleans, where Lucy lived, or back to Tennessee. Unfortunately,
she didnt have a given last name, and Emeline was popular for both black and white girls, so its almost
impossible to track her down.
The other riddle well probably never answer is how such a powerless woman got such a powerful man to be
her lawyer. Kroger thinks Washington Jackson may have played a role. Jackson saw himself as a champion of
both mother and daughter, having taken Rhoda and her children to Philadelphia and testifying in Emelines
case. Jackson knew all of Emelines witnesses and would have known how to guide Gray in finding them;
indeed, it seems he was active in putting her case together. In one of Bollss interrogatories, his lawyer asks
James Kirkman, Jacksons nephew, Did not Washington Jackson . . . say to you that he wished you to give
testimony? Kroger speculates further that Jackson, who was a well-connected businessman living in New
Orleans, would have known Gray or known that he was one of the best lawyers in Houstonand that he may
have accompanied Lucy to Houston.
Or maybe, Davidson suggests, it was Sam Houston who got Gray the gig. Houston certainly knew the former
DA and also knew the trial judge, C.W. Buckley, who had been Houstons attorney in his 1839 suit against
Mirabeau Lamar for destroying furniture Houston had left behind at the presidents mansion. Houston
probably knew all the prominent residents in the city that bore his name, which at the time had only 4,500

people and no more than twenty lawyers. And of course he had known Thomas Martin and maybe even come
across Emeline or Rhoda that day in 1829 at Locust Grove.
Its hard to say exactly what was the motivation for Gray, who was certainly no abolitionist. I think Peter was
trying to live up to his fathers reputation, says Kroger, and do the right thing. Also, he was trying to
establish a state where the rule of law governed.
There are no such puzzles when we look at Emeline, whose reasons couldnt be more obvious and whose
courage is, to this day, electrifying. Its hard to imagine that kind of struggle in 2016, says the operas
director, Eileen Morris. Emeline was willing to sacrifice everything for her freedom.
- See more at: http://www.texasmonthly.com/the-culture/the-opera-of-emeline/#sthash.8HOKHI4L.dpuf