Félicité

Little is known of her beyond two local histories, which is why the details matter. Writers Perrin and Bergerie describe a Black woman, earlier enslaved by the Duperier family, who nursed the sick of both races from 1839, helped by neighbors such as Mrs. Maximilien Decuir and Mrs. David Hayes. Perrin says white friends brought gifts to her cabin each January 1. When she died in 1852 her body lay in state at Duperier's home and hundreds of Black and white townspeople filed past. Neither account gives her a surname.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• African American Museum, St. Martinville — 8.3 mi
  A museum in the St. Martinville Cultural Heritage Center on the arrival of Africans in Southwest Louisiana, slavery, the free people of color and Reconstruction, with the fourteen-panel exhibit The Shackles of Memory.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 8.4 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.
• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 8.7 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.

More markers nearby

• Becoming New Iberia — steps away
• New Iberia / La Nouvelle-Ibérie — steps away
• Saint Peter's College — steps away
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — steps away