In 1813 a free man of color named Charles Decoudreau living in New Orleans went to court to repossess a house on the edge of town he had sold two years before to Charles Lamerenx, a white man from Saint Domingue. Despite being on opposite sides of a racial divide, the men and their families had much in common as “Atlantic creoles.” In this study, I test the meaning and explanatory power of Ira Berlin's concept of “Atlantic creole” by telling the story of two families, one “black” and one “white,” whose paths briefly crossed in New Orleans in 1811. Berlin's work on “Atlantic creoles” is a powerful intervention in this field because it begins by telling a familiar story and proceeds with a much less familiar one. The familiar story is that of Africans being forcibly taken to America and stripped of their African identities, and developing a new creole or African American culture that was the product of their experience as slaves working in the plantations. Important as this story is, it captures “only a portion of the history of black life in colonial North America, and that imperfectly.” The story as usually told begins with an unadulterated “African” identity that was somehow erased or transformed by the experience of slavery and gave way to a creole identity that was a mix of various African, European, and Native American components. Inverting this story of origins, Berlin shows that the Africans of the charter generations were always already creole: their experiences and attitudes “were more akin to that of confident, sophisticated natives than of vulnerable newcomers.” Atlantic creoles originated in the encounters between Europeans and Africans on the western coast of Africa, starting in the fifteenth century, well before Christopher Columbus sailed to America. In a few coastal enclaves, groups of multilingual Eurafricans acted as intermediaries between Europeans, North African Muslims, and inland Africans. The first generations of slaves brought to America came from these enclaves. Atlantic societies predating the plantation system were societies with slaves rather than slave societies, and there were important social and cultural similarities between the European enclaves on the western coast of Africa (Elmina and Saint-Louis, for example) and the European enclaves in North America and the Caribbean (New Orleans, Charleston, Cartagena, and Cap-Français, for example). Those who circulated among these enclaves, whether slave or free, were likely to be multilingual and highly skilled. Manumissions were frequent, and, no matter how brutal master-slave relations may have been, the distance between master and slave was not incommensurable. Berlin explains his choice of the term creole by referring to the etymology of the Portuguese term crioulo meaning, according to him, “a person of African descent born in the New World.” Among the competing and mutually exclusive definitions of the term, he uses creole to mean “black people of native American birth,” while Atlantic creole includes “those who by experience or chance, as well as by birth, became part of a new culture that emerged along the Atlantic littoral—in Africa, Europe, or the Americas—beginning in the 16th century.”1