Sugar Daddy

One of the biggest surprises I unearthed while researching my book Creole Son was the black branch of artist Edgar Degas’s Creole family tree. The revelation had nothing to do with racial intermingling, commonplace enough in nineteenth-century Louisiana, but everything to do with someone almost as famous as the Impressionist himself. In a state where miscegenation was was illegal, Degas’s great uncle Vincent Rillieux and his love, a femme de coleur libre, or  free woman of color, named Constance Vivant, had no choice but to live together outside of marriage. Their union was long, happy and produced six children. Their third, Norbert, would achieve international acclaim with an invention as innovative as the cotton gin.

Born in New Orleans, Norbert Rillieux was pigeon-holed in Louisiana’s complicated caste system as a Creole of color. As the son of a wealthy white planter, he was baptized in prestigious St. Louis Cathedral, wore fine clothes and was well-educated in a private Catholic school. In the 1820s, Rillieux joined the so-called Louisiana Colony in Paris created by other Creoles de coleur libre seeking greater personal freedoms in France. He studied physics and mechanics at École Centrale, Paris’s most prestigious engineering school, and at age twenty became a professor there. It was then that his genius truly began to emerge.

Having grown up on a sugar plantation, Rillieux knew the refining process was costly, wasteful and dangerous. After being pressed from cane, the sugar juice was boiled in huge kettles until most of the water evaporated. In a dangerous process called the “Jamaica train,” the hot liquid was poured into a succession of smaller pots until a sweet residue remained. A good deal of the sugar evaporated or was spilled in the process, and workers were often scalded when handling the thick liquid. Rillieux addressed these issues when he returned to Louisiana in 1833 and, nine years later, patented an invention using an energy-efficient, evaporation system which safely sealed the liquid in a series of vacuum chambers. His creation revolutionized the sugar industry, and by 1849, processing plants across Louisiana were turning greater-than-ever profits.

One of the first men to recognize and employ Rillieux’s ingenious device was Judah Benjamin, a prominent attorney, statesman and owner of Bellechasse plantation below New Orleans. Their business partnership deepened into a strong but unlikely friendship, given that Benjamin was a Jewish slave-owner who became Secretary of State of the Confederacy. No doubt the men found common ground as social outcasts shunned by the rigid Creole society, and one can only imagine what these disparate intellectuals discussed. With sugar processing conquered, Rillieux turned his attention to, of all things, New Orleans’s sewerage system. The discovery that mosquitoes caused yellow fever was still decades away, but after the city suffered an 1853 epidemic killing 7,849 people, Rillieux, among others, suspected a connection. He proposed reworking the system after draining the mosquito-ridden swamps surrounding New Orleans, but his ambitious plan was stonewalled by Edmund Forstall, a planter rival of his father. Demoralized over this defeat, bitter over having to carry papers identifying himself as a man of color and with civil war looming, Rillieux left Louisiana forever.

Back in France, Rillieux successfully applied his refining process to sugar beets, soap, gelatin, glue and condensed milk, among other things. Sadly, he lost the patent rights to his inventions, which became known as the “French Process,” but he lived comfortably to age 88. He and his wife Emily are buried in Paris’s illustrious Pére Lachaise Cemetery. He is honored in his native New Orleans with a bronze plaque at the Louisiana State Museum, and in 2004 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In celebration of Black History Month, I salute Norbert Rillieux, visionary and engineering genius.