Marie-Cessette Dumas

Marie-Cessette Dumas, called by one writer a "great matriarch to a saga of distinguished men," was the mother of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, the grandmother of novelist Alexandre Dumas, and the great-grandmother of playwright Alexandre Dumas, fils. She was a slave of African descent owned by the Marquis (26 February 1714, Belleville-en-Caux – 15 June 1786, Saint-Germain-en-Laye). They lived at a plantation called La Guinaudée (or Guinodée) near Jérémie of the French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), until Antoine's departure in 1775.

Two primary source documents show that Marie-Cessette Dumas was a slave. One is a 1776 letter from a retired royal prosecutor in Jérémie to the Count de Maulde, the son-in-law of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas's uncle, Charles Davy de la Pailleterie. The letter states that Dumas’s father (Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, then known as Antoine de l’Isle) "bought from a certain Monsieur de Mirribielle a negress named Cesette at an exorbitant price," then, after living with her for some years, "sold ...  the negress Cezette" along with her two daughters "to a ... baron from Nantes." The second is a legal judgment signed by Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, then known as Thomas Retoré or Rethoré, and his recently widowed step-mother Marie Retou Davy de la Pailleterie, which attests officially that Retou gave up her property rights over Marie-Cessette Dumas and her two daughters.

The only source for her full name with the spelling "Marie-Cessette Dumas," is General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas's marriage certificate and contract. The name Marie is given in some sources as Louise. Cessette is also spelled Cecette and Cezette in one primary source and given in others as Cécile. There has been some speculation that the family name "Dumas," rather than representing a family name for Marie-Cessette, instead means "of the farm" (du mas) and constitutes a descriptive addition to her first names meant to signify that she belonged to the property. Others have proposed that the name Cessette may have originated in Gabon, where Marie-Cessette might have been captured by slave traders. According to Francophone novelist Calixthe Beyala, the name "Dumas" was initially "Dûma," of Fang origin, meaning "dignity." Hans Werner Debrunner has written that she would have been Yoruba or Dahomeyan.

...
Wikipedia