by Edward Ball
Mark Roudané has a lot to cover when it comes to his family. It is a story of skin color, naming, and escape.
Louis Roudanez was not the only one who sent his family away, out of disappointment. Hundreds, then thousands of Creoles of color began to migrate out of Louisiana. They moved to Florida and to Kansas, to Mexico and to the Caribbean.
Take the case of Armand Belot. A Creole of color with a lucrative cigar-making business, and busy in Republican politics, Belot was burned out of his home and business by the Ku-klux in 1868. He sued the state of Louisiana and, surprisingly, won a big settlement from a sympathetic white Republican judge. But the windows in black politics closed, the number of victims rose, and during the 1870s, Belot moved to Chicago. About the same time, Julien Monette, ex-Louisiana senator, another black leader frustrated by inflexible white rule, moved to Panama. A few years later, a black businessman named Pascal Tourney moved to Niagara Falls. None of the three came back.
Some Creoles of color in bitter disappointment did not leave, but killed themselves. For instance, Jean Baptiste Jourdain. He and Louis Roudanez were friends. Jean Baptiste Jourdain had pretty gray eyes and delicate features. He was a free man of color who joined the Union Army and fought in the Civil War. He saw the Mechanics Institute massacre and narrowly escaped it. He was elected to the state legislature in the early 1870s. But in 1888, having been run out of politics, and despairing for black life, Jourdain shot himself. He was fifty-six, and he left a wife and young children.
A number of people committed an act that some Creoles came to call “race suicide.” They became white. New Orleans was full of Creoles of color, raised “black” and appearing “white.” In midlife, some chose to pass across the line. Blackness dies, and whiteness is born.
There was Arnold Bertonneau. He was a wine dealer in New Orleans, twenty-eight years old when the Yankee army seized the city. An African American businessman, Arnold Bertonneau was well-known and prosperous, with a large white clientele. He joined the Union Army, became a captain in the Native Guards, and fought rebels in an important battle at Port Hudson, Louisiana. For this, to many black people, Bertonneau was a war hero. Earlier I told the story of how in 1864, Arnold Bertonneau and Jean Baptiste Roudanez, brother of the newspaper publisher, traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with Abraham Lincoln. Bertonneau gave the president a petition signed by eight hundred Creoles of color that demanded the right to vote. With this, Lincoln came close to considering the vote for free men of color. Arnold Bertonneau lived a prominent kind of blackness, but the disappointments of Reconstruction weighed on him. Sometime during the 1880s, Bertonneau moved to California, and there he passed into white society. In 1912, when he died in Pasadena, his death certificate listed him as “white.”
It is not that being white, with its many fears and angers, looked like a paradise to Bertonneau. Maybe he wanted to be human, to take part in all roles of humanity, including ones left off the table by tribal whites in their ideas of blackness, its limits and its taboos.
It is difficult to estimate the numbers of people, and families, who passed from black life into white during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Probably thousands in Louisiana alone. Census figures for the “black” population grow slowly during the decades of the greatest travel from black to white. Because people seemed to disappear.
It was a mass phenomenon, enough that verbs and nouns appear in order to name it. The verb, for Creoles of color, is passer à blanc, to “pass for white.” The noun is passe-blanc, a person passing for white.
* * *
Mark Roudané has a photograph.
“This is Aimée Potens, the mother of Louis Charles Roudanez,” he says. “The picture is probably 1844 and may have been taken by Jules Lion, a daguerreotype artist in New Orleans.”
Few people hired a photographer in 1844, when the camera technology of the daguerreotype was only five years old. And almost no people of color had photographs made. Mark Roudané’s portrait of Aimée Potens, his great-great-great-grandmother, is the oldest photo of a black woman I have ever seen.
“I have an oral history, taken down in 1911, in St. James Parish,” Mark goes on. “It says that Aimée Potens was born in 1791 in Saint-Domingue, on a coffee plantation at a place called Dondon. The Haitian Revolution got going the same year, and a slave army came to Dondon, killing whites and people of color close to them.” Aimée Potens, an infant at the time, is whisked away on a boat with her enslaved black mother and white French father. The exiles get to Louisiana and make their way to a sugar estate called Maison Blanche, or “White Hall,” sixty-five miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans. Aimée’s white father knows the master of Maison Blanche, the rich sugar planter Marius Bringier. Aimée Potens was raised to serve but not to work in the sugar fields of Maison Blanche. She is freed in her youth and becomes a working woman of color.
Aimée Potens of the Roudanez family, about 1844
“Aimée became an accoucheuse, or midwife,” Roudané says. “She usually dressed in black and she was erect and stately in her bearing, described in papers as ‘a tall mulatress.’ But she kept the tignon.” Roudané means that Aimée Potens continued to wear the headscarf worn by enslaved women, although she was free.
It is rare to know so much about an Afro-Caribbean woman born in slavery more than two hundred years ago. When I follow some of Roudané’s research notes, good sources corroborate what he says.
In the early 1800s, a man named Louis Roudanez lived at Maison Blanche. Like Aimée Potens, Louis Roudanez was also an exile who fled the Saint-Domingue revolt as a child. He was also mixed-race. Aimée Potens and Louis Roudanez became a couple. They had two children with the surname Roudanez—Jean Baptiste, born in 1815, and Louis Charles, born in 1823; they adopted a third child, named Louise. It is the first child who would one day present the petition to Abraham Lincoln; it is the middle child who would one day run the Tribune newspaper.
The children grew up as free people of color, possibly in the big house at Maison Blanche. They had white grandparents and “mulatto” uncles and aunts, but no kin among field hands. The boys were carefully educated, with money from their white grandfather, Augustin Tureaud. About 1843, Louis Charles was sent to France so that he could enroll at the Université de Paris. He remained in Paris for some ten years. According to Paul Trévigne, editor of the Tribune, who knew him well, in 1848, during the uprising that seized Paris that summer, young Roudanez joined the popular rebellion and spent his time in the working-class districts and on the barricades. But the revolution collapsed, with thousands killed and seizure of power by Louis Napoleon, a mediocrity who gave himself the title “prince-president” of France. Twenty-five-year-old Roudanez was said to be dejected by these events. But Paris in 1848 gave him a glimpse of what could happen when an old world is turned upside down.
Roudanez finished his medical degree and came back to the United States in the early 1850s. He stopped at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and there he enrolled in another medical program, acquiring a second medical degree. At Dartmouth, Roudanez wrote his thesis, in French, in obstetrics. His mother, Aimée Potens, had been a midwife. He returned to New Orleans in 1857.
“Here is a guy who is witness to a revolution,” says Mark Roudané. “He saw liberty, and he saw the French government abolish slavery in all its colonies. The colonies in the Caribbean, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Roudanez came home to New Orleans, started a medical practice, got married, and began to have children.”
Mark Roudané sits at his dining room table. The corner cabinets have glass doors, and behind them are rows of pretty things—little sculptures, bowls, silver. He tells the story of Louis Roudanez, his great-great-grandfather, as though he has known it from childhood. In truth, Roudané did not know much about his father’s family for most of his life. He had not even known the name “Roudanez” until he came upon it, at the age of fifty-five. He says it was “life-changing.”
Mark Roudané is white. He was
raised white, and he appears white. He has whiteness in his speech, whiteness in his manners. What he wants to convey is this. In middle age, he learned that according to the one-drop rule of blackness, he was not white.
Before the Civil War, Dr. Louis Roudanez, Mark Roudané’s impressive ancestor, was an homme de couleur libre. Dr. Roudanez married a free woman of color named Célie Saulay, and the couple eventually had three daughters and two sons. The first son, also named Louis, followed in his father’s footsteps, got a medical degree from Dartmouth, and set up a practice in New Orleans—an African American doctor serving black patients in a now harshly segregated city. This Dr. Louis Roudanez, Jr., has a son, named Rudolph.
“That’s my grandfather,” says Mark Roudané. “Rudolph Roudanez is born in 1901. I never met him. His birth certificate said ‘Col.,’ for colored. Which is something I did not know until I was in middle age. It was the family secret.”
Mark Roudané was born in 1951 in New Orleans. His parents, Louis Charles Roudané and Orient Fox Roudané, were city natives. On his birth certificate, Mark Roudané was “white.”
“When my father died, in 2005, I was going through his papers and throwing stuff away, and I found an unmarked binder,” he remembers.
Roudané’s parents had retired to Asheville, North Carolina. His mother survived her husband and lived in the house. Her son Mark was tasked with helping to filter his father’s things. Roudané’s father was in the habit of filing documents in plastic sleeves, compiling them in three-ring binders, and labeling each cover with the contents. At his death, Roudané’s father had hundreds of binders, all of them labeled but one, which had no label. Roudané describes what he calls “the discovery,” in January 2006, after the funeral.
“I opened the binder, and the first image I see is the oldest photograph of Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez. I don’t know who he is, or was. I am looking at the image and clearly he looks black to me. Underneath the picture is a caption—‘Louis Charles Roudanez, founder of the New Orleans Tribune.’ It is the first time I see our name with a ‘Z.’ And after the picture comes page after page of birth certificates, photographs, notes on the Roudanez family. I thought, whoa, Dad, you are holding out on me. I didn’t know any of this. It’s a miracle I didn’t throw the secret binder away, because I was just tossing stuff.”
Roudané says that his father was born in New Orleans in the Seventh Ward, a part of the city with many Creoles of color. His name at birth was Louis Charles Roudanez III, after the physician and newspaperman. He grew up as an only child on a street named Hope.
“I assume my dad knew about his father’s ancestry,” Roudané says, “but I don’t know, he never talked about his father. And if the subject ever came up, he was upset by it. I never met my dad’s father, whose name was Rudolph Roudanez.” The family story was that Rudolph Roudanez had abandoned his wife, Mark’s grandmother, and left her in New Orleans during the Depression, where she raised her son as a single mother. “For that reason, he was said to be a bad dude,” says Roudané about his grandfather. “Whether that was true, I don’t know. It could be a smokescreen. Rudolph Roudanez was born in New Orleans in 1901. ‘Colored,’ by the record.”
Rudolph Roudanez moved to Los Angeles. Many Creoles of color moved to California to passer à blanc. In Los Angeles, state records called him “white.”
The son he left behind—Roudané’s father, Louis Charles Roudanez III—grew up in New Orleans. Jim Crow meant the hardest caste distinction and strict inequality, white over black, all good things for one caste, leftovers for the other. As a young man, Roudané’s father applied to Tulane University, the best school in the state, where he hoped to study mechanical engineering. Had the admissions office at Tulane possessed word of the “Negro ancestry” of Louis Charles Roudanez III, he would not have been admitted. At this point, the year 1946, the nineteen-year-old’s father, Rudolph, was gone to California. So the young man and his mother, Irene Warner, went to court. They arranged to have the Z dropped from the Roudanez name and an accent placed on the last letter—“Roudané.” Mother and son erased the color of blackness.
“The papers for the name change were in the secret binder I found,” says Mark Roudané.
As it happens, in New Orleans during the 1940s and ’50s, there was a registrar in charge of birth and naming records. Her name was Naomi Drake. Under her leadership, the registrar’s office performed “race” research, verifying the authenticity of claims of whiteness. Naomi Drake was a bureaucrat notorious for outing the blackness of many Creoles who lived as passe-blancs. But somehow, Louis Roudanez III and his mother, Irene Warner, escaped the punishing judgment of Registrar Blake.
Roudané’s father was admitted to Tulane, graduated, and went to work for a New Orleans company called Simplex. He married Roudané’s mother, Orient Fox, in 1950.
Mark Roudané and his father, Louis Charles Roudané III, Mardi Gras 1954
When the fifty-five-year-old Mark Roudané discovered his father’s (and his own) African American ancestry, he was stunned.
“I called my brother in Atlanta. It was very disorienting for both of us. It was a thrill to find out about our father’s side of the family. Then it was mind-boggling to see the racial breaks in the family, to see that we were descended from people of color. The thing that really stunned me, on top of all that, was that we were linked to Louis Charles Roudanez, a significant figure in nineteenth-century American history. That turned my life around.”
Roudané says that his father “lived white his whole life.” In 1957, Louis-now-Roudané got a job in Dayton, Ohio, and moved his family out of New Orleans. He sold construction equipment. The Roudanés next moved to Chicago.
“Dad sold machinery, then worked himself up over the years to be CEO of a small corporation with a small factory. We became upper middle class. We were very comfortable,” says Roudané. “Ours was an all-white environment.” The family lived in Glen Ellyn, a pale suburb west of Chicago.
“My dad was a conservative Republican. He voted for Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon for president. And also he was overtly racist his whole life. It was always a thing that bugged me about my father, even as a young boy,” says Roudané. “I did not understand race and racism, and he was such a nice guy. He was very present, very warm, very loving to his two sons. But when it came to talking about black people, who were not part of our world, all this venom would come out. I thought, ‘Why is my dad being ugly?’ I didn’t understand it, the tone.”
It is risky to measure the behavior of a man you never met and who lived decades ago. But the reflex of anger about blackness sounds like a symptom to me, a defensive reaction. I ask Roudané to explain his father’s bitterness toward black people.
“My theory is that he was an overt racist as a way to distance himself, to make himself as white as he could, to create as many barriers as he could to that history in the family,” he says.
He was a white, bourgeois, successful businessman, and blackness puts that teetering ladder at risk.
* * *
Mark Roudané tells a side story to the “whitening” of his family, one that involves his mother. In June 2006, “five months after the discovery,” he says, Roudané visited his father’s grave with his brother, Matthew, and their mother, Orient Fox Roudané. Their mother was frail and in a wheelchair. At graveside, Roudané’s mother volunteered her version of the “family secret.”
“My mother said that in 1948, after my parents had married, she would go to the public library and check out two or three novels to read every week, romance novels. She read a book by a writer named Frank Yerby, called The Vixens. A love triangle, set in post–Civil War New Orleans. In the story, a character unexpectedly popped up, which she remembered as ‘the Negro doctor Louis Charles Roudanez.’ She said she confronted my father with it: ‘Look, he has your name and he is a Negro.’ And my father exploded, and shouted, ‘Do I look like a nigger?’ She backed down. But afterwards, she secretly read books on Rec
onstruction and the Civil War.”
Roudané’s mother educated herself about the blackness in her husband’s family, taking notes and filing them. She and her husband had a tacit understanding that it was never to be mentioned. Twenty years passed.
“My mother called my dad ‘Charlie.’ In the late 1960s,” Roudané says, “according to my mother, ‘Charlie wanted to tell you, but he was hesitating.’ At the time, the cities were exploding with riots, race was the big national issue, along with Vietnam. And she said that she told our father, ‘Don’t tell the boys.’ Her reasoning was that we were going off into the world, and that if we understood we had black ancestry, that might increase the odds we would have relationships with black people. And it would increase the odds that we might fall in love with a black woman. She said that even if it was a small possibility—and my father went along with it—they shouldn’t tell us.”
Mark Roudané attended Lawrence University, a liberal arts school in Appleton, Wisconsin. After college, Roudané moved back to Chicago, where he lived with a group of political activists and became a community organizer. For five years, he ran a small school in uptown Chicago, in a poor white neighborhood.
“A lot of people I worked with came from the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia, and I did organizing with the Black Lung Association. I went back and forth from Chicago to West Virginia to get documentation, so they could get the benefits paid to miners suffering from lung disease,” he says. Mark Roudané married his partner, Barbara Peterson, and they had children—two daughters. When young children and labor organizing in Chicago became “less viable,” as he put it, the family moved to St. Paul, Minnesota. There, in 1990, Roudané became a teacher in the public schools.