by Edward Ball
Ms. Marsalis says she is an artist, a printmaker and painter. She says that she taught studio art for many years at Xavier University, a historically black school in New Orleans. Her sister, Alice Richard, says that she has done years of work as a seamstress, making clothes for designers. But she prefers to be a homemaker for her husband, children, and grandchildren. The third woman, Joann St. Cyr, has worked for the city of New Orleans, but she spends her real time researching Louisiana families, black and white. Her name has a beautiful ring. “St. Cyr” is the sound of the word “sincere.”
Ms. Marsalis wants to know, “How did you get my name?”
“I have reason to think your family is connected to Lucien Capla, a black activist who was present at the Mechanics Institute massacre,” I say.
“We are black,” says Joann St. Cyr. “But we don’t like to say ‘black.’ We’re Creole. Creoles are black and white.”
My mistake. Ms. St. Cyr puts the family a step away from “black,” claiming the old tribe or social caste, Creoles of color. Creoles are like the third way in race matters, from the nineteenth century and into the present. The Caplas and maybe five thousand other Creole families were free and educated before the Civil War. The living want to remember the inheritance. After the Civil War, the campaign for white dominance pushed race into a binary—black vs. white—and the one-drop rule took over. A splash of African ancestry, “black blood,” and you were black. Creoles of color disappeared into blackness, but the meaning lingered. To be Creole in Louisiana means to have membership in an antique club, the early black bourgeoisie. It is usually also a color distinction. To be Creole means to be beige, and to have hair you can comb.
“We have relatives named Capla who were in that massacre,” says Ms. Marsalis. “The Caplas are our grandmother’s family. And my father’s people, the Santiagos, they were in it, too. But how do you know about us?”
I mention research steps, and Joann St. Cyr, the family historian, nods in agreement. Ms. St. Cyr knows her way around census lists and wills, sacramental records and marriage licenses, notarial acts and city directories, death certificates and obituaries.
I tell the Capla women that I do not know the names of each of the two hundred killed in New Orleans on July 30, 1866. No one does, but there are memories of survivors that seep down to the present. I do not know the names of all the perpetrators. None of the white terrorists were prosecuted, none even arrested. No one claimed the role of race warrior and wrote down what they did. The absence of criminal evidence is itself a piece of evidence. It is a sign of the chokehold that whiteness has on public memory.
But the U.S. Congress and the Louisiana legislature held hearings and took testimony, and Lucien Capla was a witness who testified.
“I have a copy of that testimony,” says Joann St. Cyr. She pulls a photocopy from a pile of papers. “He testified Christmas Eve 1866.”
Lucien Jean-Pierre Capla was the shoe dealer who got thick into Reconstruction politics. The Caplas did well in the trades. Another in the family ran a paint store that sold to contractors. A third had a cigar-making business. When Lucien Capla testified about his experience during the massacre, he was forty-five, married to a woman named Felicie Fleury, and had four children with his wife.
A mass killing of two hundred and mass wounding of another two hundred shreds four hundred families. Supposing that each victim had twenty-five family members in her orbit—children, parents, siblings, and cousins—the crudest measure counts ten thousand people subjected to the shared trauma. Add an explosion of fear. In 1866, the killings threw a shower of terror among the city’s fifty thousand people of color. And disgust. The massacre meant fresh repugnance of whites. Revulsion toward whites spread among blacks, and soaked in.
The majority of whites, on the other hand, to judge from newspapers, seemed to feel comfort and satisfaction in the aftermath of the massacre. I mean, in the year 1866. It might be less true now.
I look for words and come up with this—
“That time was brutal for black people.”
“It was,” says Ms. Marsalis, laconic.
“I am interested in how families recovered from the trauma and what they are doing now. Family history has long effects that may still shadow us today. It is like opening a box and finding things we have not come to terms with.”
“Can I see your book?” says Ms. Marsalis. She wants to see a book with my name on it, some kind of credential. Book in hand, she nods. She puts the book aside.
“I make art,” she says. “I am the first person of color to receive an M.F.A. at Tulane University, and I paint portraits. I am finishing one commissioned by the city of New Orleans for its 300th anniversary. The painting depicts Dr. Norman Francis, the first African American president of Xavier University, here in New Orleans. My branch of the family, coming from the Caplas, the Santiagos, has been a family of musicians and businesspeople. But I am the first in our group to focus on the visual arts.”
Janel Marsalis uses the words “musician” and “artist.” Joann St. Cyr uses the word “Creole.” A picture forms. In the nineteenth century, the Caplas were educated, creative, and professional. Which they remain today.
Ms. Marsalis turns to Ms. St. Cyr.
“Joann is the family historian. She is running over with information.”
“From a little girl I was always a nosy child,” says Ms. St. Cyr. “I wanted to know who, and I wanted to know why.”
“Are you still nosy?” I ask. “Yes,” she answers.
Some laughter.
“What are your names? I mean, your family names in New Orleans?” Ms. St. Cyr asks.
It is the family history question. The names of families are the front doors of history. Most historians, however, enter the house of memory through the garage, where papers and artifacts are stored. I mention two names—Rowley, my mother’s surname, and Lecorgne, my grandmother’s.
“I see,” says Ms. St. Cyr. “That’s the English and the French influence. I believe that before we had a present, we had to have a past. It’s good to go back, no matter what you find. Everybody finds so many different things. Nobody is just one thing. That’s a fiction.”
She means, I think, that nobody living is only what her grandmother the pretty hostess used to be. And no one living is just what the marauder in the family used to be and do, in the old days.
Photographs of Lucien Capla have not survived, and no picture of his son Alfred. But a family member from the same era named Edward Capla sat for a portrait. The image is a photograph worked over by hand to make it look like a drawing, a technique of the day. Edward Capla’s picture gives an idea of what Alfred Capla might have looked like—long-faced, self-possessed, and high-toned—had he not been shot in the face.
“It’s a miracle that Alfred survived,” says Alice Richard. “We wouldn’t even be here if things had turned out differently.”
Pencil drawing on photograph of Edward Capla
Alfred’s father, Lucien Capla, stayed in politics. In December 1866, four months after the killing, he was appointed to the state’s Republican executive committee. The goal of the party at the time was to get the vote for people of color.
His son Alfred lost his right eye and suffered terrible head injuries in the Mechanics Institute massacre. It took time, but he recovered. Then he learned a trade, tailoring. Despite having one-eyed vision, Alfred Capla trained to become a clothier and a good hand at needlework. He planned to open a store and make formal clothes for men. Alfred also followed his father, Lucien, into politics. In his early twenties, he represented the Sixth Ward of New Orleans at the state convention of the Republican Party. A reporter who knew Alfred Capla described his personality: “industrious and efficient.”
A few years later, another act of violence coming from a white man almost ended the life of the boy who survived the massacre. In 1873, Alfred Capla, now twenty-five, single and living alone, was working as a clerk in the city’s Recorder’s Court, processing
filings and small claims. It was a second job. He had begun in the tailoring trade and was gathering customers. On a Wednesday night in July, on Burgundy Street in the French Quarter, Capla was walking home. He happened to pass a Creole woman of color, and then a white man named Adam Navarre. It was about 10:00 p.m. Capla overheard Adam Navarre make a sexual remark to the woman. Capla knew the woman, and he told Adam Navarre to quit harassing her. It was not common at the time for a black man to chastise a white stranger about anything, let alone tell him to shut down his lust. Capla continued on his way and reached home. A half hour later, the street harasser Adam Navarre turned up at the front door holding a gun.
It turns out that Adam Navarre had served time for murder and had recently been released from prison. Alfred Capla possibly knew this, possibly did not. At the door, Navarre cursed Capla before firing a single shot at him, which missed. The industrious and efficient tailor flew into rage and fear, and a hand-to-hand fight followed. Capla found his way to a knife during the fight and stabbed Navarre three times. The man with the gun bled to death on the sidewalk in front of the house. With that, Alfred Capla walked to the Third Precinct police station and turned himself in.
The white legal establishment knew Capla, the courthouse clerk. Capla produced witnesses of the shooting and the fight. Police and prosecutor, seldom friendly to people of color, declined to bring charges. The case was ruled one of self-defense. Capla went back to his quiet life.
In 1876, Alfred’s father, Lucien, died, age fifty-five. The same year, Alfred married a woman named Harriet Phillips. He opened his tailor shop and ran it for twenty years.
Janel Marsalis has among her things a big ledger from Alfred Capla’s tailoring business. It is a handwritten pattern book, dating from about 1890, a kind of manual for making and altering men’s formal wear. The book is organized with headlines, like these: “To measure a stout man…” “Comments on drafting the sleeve…” “The revised 19th-century pant and vest system…” “Directions for drafting the oversack…” Alfred Capla sketched dozens of tailoring problems and steps to solve each, how to cut and sew, alter and trim. The pattern book amounts to an encyclopedia of late-1800s fashion.
Alfred Capla and his wife, Harriet Philips, became pillars of Creole society, taking a place like that of Alfred’s parents. The tailor continued in politics, joining the Republican Party’s executive committee, like his father before him. Alfred Capla’s life was short, however. He died at age forty-five, in 1892.
“Alfred died and his wife Harriet both died,” says Alice Richard, Ms. Marsalis’s sister, shaking her head. They left four young children. Their maternal grandmother, a widowed chambermaid named Julia Philips, stepped in to raise them. It was a rough passage. When Alfred’s children lost their parents, they fell out of the comfort of the black bourgeoisie and into poverty. The children lived in a crammed single room, looked after by a struggling grandmother who could not read. Alfred’s children grew up speaking “Creole,” the dialect of the working and black poor. It was a language that absorbed the Gombo of the ex-slaves and kept black speech alive and separate from the French of the white elite.
Creole is a language that can no longer be found. The dialect blended West African syntax with French nouns and verbs, and bent them in the adoption. It is possible to guess at the number of Creole speakers. After 1820, approximately seven hundred thousand blacks came to Louisiana from Virginia, Maryland, and elsewhere on the East Coast, during the domestic slave trade; they spoke black English. During the same period, approximately two hundred thousand blacks native to Louisiana, enslaved by French-speaking whites, spoke Gombo, or Creole.
The sound of the language has vanished, but pieces survive in folktales and verse. In 1885, the writer Lafcadio Hearn published a book of Creole proverbs, used by blacks and whites, like this one—
Neg’ porté maïs dan so lapoche pou volé poule;
Milâte porté cordon dan so lapoche pou volé choual;
N’homme blanc porté larzan dan so lapoche pou trompé fille.
Nigger carries corn in his pocket to steal a chicken;
Mulatto carries a rope in his pocket to steal a horse;
White man carries money in his pocket to seduce a girl.
I do not know whether this is the kind of Creole that Julia Philips spoke. If so, I want more of it.
It is on to the story of Constant Lecorgne, our Klansman. I am not sure how to approach the subject, so I dribble out the pieces.
“I am interested in a difficult time in New Orleans history, Reconstruction,” I say to the three women. “It is when enslaved people have freedom, when African American men get the vote, and there is a backlash. White people are angry and resentful at new freedoms African Americans have. Now, I have read about the Mechanics Institute massacre and found the names of people—”
Joann St. Cyr speaks up.
“I have other people who was in that massacre, ancestors, but they wasn’t hurt, as far as I know. They was at Mechanics Hall, too.”
I share some of the white side of the story. “Now, my mother’s people, I mean, a branch of them, the Lecorgnes, they were simple people,” I say. “The men were carpenters—in the trades, like the Caplas. I have evidence that one or more men in the family were in white militia groups during Reconstruction. One group was called the White League.”
Joann St. Cyr says, “Oh, yes.”
“Circumstantial evidence and court records say that a man called Constant Lecorgne, a predecessor of mine, was in white militias—they called them all ‘Ku-klux’—and he was arrested for it. The Ku-klux were attacking politicians of color, they were night riding, and doing all sorts of things to abuse people of color.”
I spill the story, running at the mouth, because I feel uncomfortable with it, and because it disgusts me.
“During Reconstruction, people of color began to exercise power. They faced violent reaction. I do not have fingerprints, but there is evidence the Lecorgnes were involved in mob violence. So, I want to reach out to families who were active, like the Caplas, who lifted their heads and fought. The Caplas were almost killed. It is for personal reasons, because my family might have done damage. And it is for social reasons. I think white folks have to come to terms with our inheritance of violence. It would be good for us, good for society.”
Some silence around the table. The three women look at one another.
Ms. St. Cyr says, “I know about all that.” She means, I think, that she knows the story in all its wretched parts.
Ms. Marsalis looks up. “I have a question. I don’t want to add to your guilt.”
“You can add to my guilt if you like,” I say.
“Did your ancestors take part in that massacre?” Ms. Marsalis is poised and discreet, as I imagine the Caplas were in their time.
“I have not found direct evidence, but circumstantial evidence is strong they did. I have not found direct proof, because the perpetrators got off. The police helped with the massacre, and then arrested two or three dozen black people, and charged them with riot. The evidence is that this man Constant Lecorgne was probably on the scene. A terrible and terrifying thought. I cannot say that yes, he was a trigger man. And I do not say he was not.”
The women look at me, then at one another. Ms. St. Cyr smiles thinly. “I wouldn’t have made it in those days,” she says. “They probably would have killed me. I would have been too defiant. A few years before that, and I would have been with Harriet Tubman. I would have been out there in the swamp, trying to smuggle people.” More silence. Ms. St. Cyr looks up. She nods at the revelation that a massacre lies on the table between us. It is a bitter dish.
“So, if your family did that,” she says, “and you are trying to do something to mend the pain, that’s all right. My mother didn’t raise me to hate anybody. And I have prayed. And I love everybody.”
Joann St. Cyr deflects with a non sequitur. “Back then, men of color were voting. I mean, during Reconstruction. By the time of jazz,
they were taking the vote away. During Reconstruction, black men were Republicans. My grandfather was a jazz musician. He used to say, ‘Don’t vote Republican. The Republicans are going to turn on us.’ And of course they did turn on us, eventually.”
* * *
Over a few months, I visit descendants of the Caplas in New Orleans several times. We meet at kitchen tables and on sofas, with scattered papers and albums. Sometimes the memorabilia are stained and warped from soaking in the flood of Katrina. On one visit, I spend more time with Janel Marsalis, the artist in the family. Janel Marsalis paints in acrylic, paints in watercolor, and makes prints from engraved plates. She asks me to see the work and to visit her studio.
Ms. Marsalis leads the way into her garage, and from it into her art studio. It is twenty feet square, with a wall of shelves covered in paint tubes and brushes, racks of canvases, and a chest of shallow drawers to hold prints. She pulls out picture after picture that had soaked in Katrina’s water. Finally she lifts a big, rolled-up canvas and lays it out—an acrylic painting four feet wide and nearly six feet tall. It shows the face of an ageless woman, somewhat resigned.
“A portrait of my great-grandmother, Melanie Gardner. It was on the wall during the flood, and the bottom of it is rotted.” The subject of the portrait, Melanie Gardner, was born in 1860. She was grandmother to the painter’s mother, and illiterate, according to the U.S. Census.
More pictures come out.
“Much of my work was destroyed by the flood, by Katrina,” says Janel Santiago Marsalis, shaking her head. For many in New Orleans, the memory of the 2005 disaster is a trauma as big as any. “My things stayed underwater for weeks. When I went to salvage, sculptures crumbled in my hand, paint dripped off the canvas.”
Janel Santiago Marsalis with her portrait of Melanie Gardner, her great-grandmother
Ms. Marsalis brings out a print cycle from that time, what she calls the “Boxed” series. The prints are two feet square, fine line drawings in black and white of people compressed into small spaces, confined.