Henriette DeLille was born in New Orleans in 1813 into the city's class of free people of colour, and was raised for <em>plaçage</em> — the arrangement by which such women became the acknowledged unmarried partners of white men, since the law would not let them marry. Her mother and her grandmother had lived that way. She refused it, on the ground that it was not marriage, and the refusal cost her her family's support.
Instead she taught. She was catechising enslaved people, which was against Louisiana law, by her teens, and in 1836, at twenty-three, she wrote in the flyleaf of a prayer book the only words of hers that survive: <em>Je crois en Dieu. J'espère en Dieu. J'aime. Je v[eux] vivre et mourir pour Dieu.</em> I believe in God. I hope in God. I love. I want to live and die for God.
With a small group of Creole women she began a community that was recognised in 1842 as the Sisters of the Holy Family. They were not allowed to wear a habit in public or make their vows openly, because a religious order of Black women was more than New Orleans would tolerate; they wore ordinary dress and did the work anyway — teaching, nursing, and opening what is reckoned the first Catholic home for the elderly in the United States. She died worn out at forty-nine on 17 November 1862, with twelve sisters. The obituary in the New Orleans paper said she had died 'a victim of her zeal and charity'. Benedict XVI declared her Venerable on 27 March 2010, and her congregation still keeps its houses in the city.