by Edward Ball
“I loved it. A difficult job,” he says. “I taught high school and gradually worked my way down in age. For the final twelve years I taught first grade. Age six is far and away my favorite age group.”
Mark Roudané’s brother, Matthew, is a professor of English at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. Mark Roudané and Barbara Peterson have two grown daughters. One lives in the Northwest, where, like her father, she is a labor organizer, advocating on behalf of day laborers. The other lives in California, where she works for an environmental action group that uses litigation as a political tool.
“Our children have had great interest in this discovery,” he says, “and they are really proud of this heritage. But for them the mind-blowing aspect of racial discovery wasn’t as big a deal as it was for me. They have not grown up in all-white settings, as I did.”
The phrase passer à blanc, “to pass for white,” suggests masquerade, like Carnival, or a theatrical pose. It suggests invention and disguise. I ask Mark Roudané whether it is an archaic or ugly phrase.
“I never heard the term ‘passing for white’ before learning about the Roudanez story,” he says. “But now it is an important part of understanding my own identity. Our family story is actually common, especially in New Orleans. The only thing uncommon is that our ancestor was illustrious.”
He holds up a better phrase.
“I sometimes say, ‘raised to be white.’ There is an aspect of cultivation to my whiteness,” he says. “I could be a poster boy for white privilege. I have had the wind at my back my whole life, whether I knew it or not. I was raised to be white. I appear to be white. I have all those accrued gains of whiteness. For me to say that I am not white is not credible, because I have taken benefit from whiteness. I don’t say that I am ‘mixed-race.’ In fact, I have only about five percent sub-Saharan DNA in my genes, according to genetic tests. By that metric, I am 95 percent white. Especially I don’t want to say, ‘Oh, that’s cool, isn’t it? It’s cool that I’m part black.’ Because I don’t have to deal with racism. I am not affected directly.” Roudané stops, looks away, looks back. “Wait, I am definitely affected by it, but I mean, I am not harmed by it.”
Mark Roudané
PART VII
REDEMPTION
25
The past feels like a comfortable place to make moral judgments. It is comfortable because we underestimate the people who live in it. We regard them as less than we are—or in reverse, grander than we are—but always, not like what we are. The past is a place where we can enjoy moral judgment and feel superior to a roomful of unfortunate people, not so enlightened as us, who had the bad luck to live when and where they did.
One value in spinning out the story of a plain man is to show how complex an ordinary person can be, or was; to show the multitudes a life contains. It is dreadful what this character, my unlikeable protagonist, does with himself and with others. What would it mean to say that his judgments are not different by much from our own? One value in writing this particular life is to refuse to let the past be a refuge, to decline to feel superior to it, to reject feeling good because you are better than the uncountable idiots who are conveniently dead.
The Ku Klux Klan is what everyone regards as a “bad object.” They are a repugnant social formation. People who perpetrate acts of breathtaking cruelty, which cover the national story in shame. The thing that makes violent white supremacy repugnant is not its violence alone. It is that we use the Ku-klux as a vessel for our worst ideas. The Ku-klux are the boogeymen of American history. What if this band of guerrillas is fascinating and obscene because it is a scapegoat that we force to carry all of the antiblack energies of the wide, white society? It is they who are the villains, and for that, we need them. We need to project our aggressions onto them. The villains become like a screen, a place where aggression that we can disavow seems to walk and talk and breathe.
We have caricature images of the Ku-klux. Yet people, even people who are bad objects, are thick with life and contradiction. The desires and motives of supremacist zealots are within the array of desires and interests that human beings have. Do our moral judgments depend on turning the people we judge into caricatures? If so, they do not seem like very good moral judgments.
* * *
The coup attempt with Constant Lecorgne as a gunslinger fails. Whites remain desperate to get Republicans out of office, and newspapers show their frustration. “The battle between the races for supremacy must be fought out … boldly and squarely. The issue cannot be satisfactorily adjusted by a repulsive commingling of antagonistic races,” says The Shreveport Times. In the town of Monroe, The Ouachita Telegraph sounds philosophical: “That there is a superiority of the white race over the black … is a truth the wide world over. That white men will yield this birthright for any form of government … is utopian.” Few whites can tolerate a social life that includes position, power, and respect for black people.
* * *
He has one of those thick names—P.B.S. Pinchback. He uses initials only, in the style of important people. And initials are easier than his name, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback. P.B.S. Pinchback is one African American leader that white terror does not target. Maybe he is good with security. Pinchback, age thirty-six, will live long and die rich in a fine house.
His father was a white slaveholder in Mississippi, his mother the man’s enslaved concubine. Those facts point to one thing that helps P.B.S. Pinchback survive. He possesses the phenotype of whiteness, as a race scientist would put it. He appears to be white, with a tincture of blackness. It is blunt to say it, yet that is how he is perceived and moves through the world.
Pinchback feels rivalry with Louis Roudanez, another successful “black” man, publisher of the Tribune. In 1870, Pinchback starts a weekly newspaper, the Louisianian. He is a politician who also runs a newsroom.
The Lecorgnes probably do not know P.B.S. Pinchback, at least not personally. They certainly know of him. It is possible Constant and his siblings dislike very much what they know about Pinchback. He is the man serving as lieutenant governor when the white governor, Henry Warmoth, is impeached and steps down. Pinchback becomes governor. He seems to have some luck.
In fall 1872, Pinchback runs for the U.S. House and wins a seat as a Republican. He becomes the first nonwhite elected to Congress from Louisiana. But Democrats challenge the election, and the House refuses to give Pinchback his seat. A man named George Sheridan, his rival, is seated instead. In early 1873, Pinchback puts his name in for the U.S. Senate. It is the era before direct election, when state legislatures appoint U.S. senators. In Louisiana, the new state legislature, dominated by Republicans, appoints Pinchback to the Senate. He returns to Washington and awaits his desk. If seated, Pinchback would become only the second African American senator, after Hiram Revels of Mississippi.
Hearings are held in the Capitol. Pinchback lingers in Washington with his wife, Nina Hawthorne, and their children. He lobbies. “It is possible,” Pinchback writes in a newspaper, “that there may be Senators … who suppose I might desire to take advantage of my official position to force myself unasked on their social life.” He seems to apologize for his blackness, the tincture.
The Senate Committee on Privileges and Elections does not buy that the Republican state government in Louisiana, elected by black votes, won its 1872 election. Vote fraud is accused, but not proved. The Louisiana legislature, some loud senators argue, lacks the legitimacy to send its black politician to Washington. That is the excuse for the delay. Month passes month, as the Senate stalls and argues and stalls.
James Rapier, a black congressman from Alabama, watches the drama from his seat in the House of Representatives. Rapier gives a speech on the floor of the House about his own experiences.
“There is a cowardly propensity in the human heart that delights in oppressing somebody else, and in the gratification of this base desire we always select a victim that can be outraged with safety,” Rapier says, accord
ing to the Congressional Record. “Here the negro is the most available for this purpose.” Rapier takes a wide view. “This whole thing grows out of a desire to establish a system of caste,” he says.
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, turned away by the House, is never seated in the Senate, which eventually votes him out the door. The Senate refuses to admit a tainted and tinctured politician. After two years of waiting in Washington, Pinchback and his family go home to Louisiana. He has one consolation: he remains alive.
* * *
During the years after the Civil War, industrialization rolls through the North—steel, railroads, and manufacturing. The many textile mills in New England, having closed during the war for lack of cotton, reopen and expand. They process raw material grown by black hands in the Reconstruction South. North of Virginia, the white working class or caste triples in size, and a tiny master elite of money lords begins to form. It is a period of capital accumulation, when some of the rich become superrich. Meanwhile, Louisiana and the South remain what they have always been, rural and agricultural, the land and the staple crops of cotton, rice, and sugar more important than factories and finance.
The year 1873 brings a national economic crisis. That fall, a bank in Philadelphia called Jay Cooke & Company fails to raise money in a railroad deal. Jay Cooke declares bankruptcy. The New York Stock Exchange closes, and other banks collapse. By Christmas, American credit markets are frozen, and industrial growth creaks to a halt. Meantime, the agriculture of the South sits on several years of surpluses. When the textile mills of the North that once gulped the raw cotton of the South start to waver, cotton prices fall by half, along with the other Louisiana staples, sugar and rice. Among the casualties in New Orleans is the family firm of painter Edgar Degas—the cotton factorage run by Degas’s uncle, Michel Musson—which goes out of business, leaving the artist himself with a pile of debt.
Constant and Gabrielle fall farther down the income ladder, as construction and river traffic slow. Craftsmen like carpenters cannot make a living. The Lecorgnes move again. They load their belongings onto wagons, take them down to the river. Their new address, Tchoupitoulas at Cadiz Street, facing the levee, is two blocks from Lecorgne row. The rent is $20 per month.
* * *
Gabrielle and Constant are unpacking when word comes that Joseph Lecorgne is dying. Joseph and his family live three houses up the block, on Tchoupitoulas near Valence Street. Joseph is just thirty-nine. He has been sick for some time with nephritis, what doctors call “Bright’s disease.” He and his wife, Estelle Daunoy, have been together for thirteen years, and they have three children, the youngest ten months old, the oldest twelve.
Joseph ends badly, because treatments for Bright’s disease do nothing. He might have convulsions; he might go blind; he might have a hemorrhage that sends him into a seizure. He dies November 20, leaving another house of fatherless young kids.
The day Joseph dies, a political meeting is gaveled to order downtown. It is the Colored Men’s Convention. Several hundred black politicians and preachers, businesspeople and activists come together at Mechanics Hall to talk politics, and to plan. Louis Roudanez of the Tribune is there; and the politician Caesar Antoine; and the senator-in-waiting P.B.S. Pinchback; and Aristide Mary, a black activist; and many black legislators and aspirants in the Republican Party. The men talk about the never-ending attacks of the Ku-klux. They vote a resolution—
Resolved. We deplore with sorrow the atrocities, indignities, insults and murders that have been committed during the past year in the various parishes of this state, on those of our race who have dared to assert their opinions.
Resolved. That the odious distinctions made and ostracisms practiced in various parts of this country on our people on account of color renders the passage by Congress of [the] Civil Rights bill absolutely necessary for our protection [and] for the perfect obliteration of race antagonisms.
Four miles uptown, on Tchoupitoulas Street, Constant appears at the house of his brother. Joseph’s widow, Estelle, bends over the body of her husband. The next day, Constant and Yves of God and their sisters, plus the children of all the siblings, numbering some twenty, gather for the funeral at St. Stephen.
Downtown, the black convention talks about the new civil rights bill that is making its way through Congress. The legislation promises much and it is certain to carry. The convention passes another resolution that calls the civil rights law “the last special legislation that we trust we shall need.” But in Washington, there are signs that the law will not be enough. A month after the Colored Men’s Convention, and Joseph’s funeral, President Grant sends a signal that he is getting tired of all the troubles down South. In an interview with The New York Herald, in January 1874, the president says that he is losing patience with the bloody resistance to Reconstruction.
“I begin to think it is time for the Republican Party to unload. There has been too much dead weight carried by it,” Grant tells a reporter. “I am tired of this nonsense.” By “nonsense,” he means the night-riding and gang rule, the fights over elections, the targeted beatings and killings, the bloody trails of the militias. “Let Louisiana take care of herself, as Texas will also have to do. I do not want any quarrel about Mississippi matters to be referred to me,” he says. “The nursing of monstrosities has nearly exhausted the life of the Republican Party. I am done with them, and they will have to take care of themselves.”
It is an apt phrase, the “nursing of monstrosities.” Are the monsters the fights, or the fighters themselves? Is it the Ku-klux that must be nursed?
* * *
The Colfax massacre, in which some 150 blacks die in Grant Parish, north of New Orleans, is a fresh memory. After the killings, U.S. troops round up one hundred whites around Colfax. The Justice Department wants to push the Ku-klux into a box, doing the same in Louisiana as it did in South Carolina. Almost a year after the massacre, however, only nine men go on trial. And in February 1874, the nine share a smile of relief when a judge in New Orleans declares a mistrial in the case.
White opinion is lifted. “We shall not pretend to conceal our gratification at the summary and hopeful lesson the Negroes have been taught,” says The Shreveport Times. “The wonder is not that there was one Colfax, but that there is not one in every parish.”
Constant and his comrades, I imagine, celebrate the good news. A disappointed Governor William Kellogg says the mistrial “establishes the principle that no white man could be punished for killing a negro, and virtually wipes the Ku-Klux laws off the statute books.” One of the commanders at the killing field in Colfax, and one of the nine prosecuted, is a man named George Waters Stafford. Stafford is inspired. He returns to his hometown of Alexandria to start a newspaper. He calls it The Caucasian.
“The Caucasian will be a white man’s paper,” he writes. It is “devoted to the interests of the white people of the state, and opposed to the aggrandizement of the negro to the prejudice of the Caucasian race, which is the superior of the African race in every particular, except the endurance of physical labor.”
The Caucasian calls for a new movement, another wave of guerrilla subversion. Guerrillas are needed to bring back white command once and for all. George Stafford says that his paper, The Caucasian, “will lend its aid and espouse the cause of that white man’s party—by whatever name it may be called—which shall seem most likely to relieve our downtrodden state from … negro ignorance and impudence.”
And so it is with a four-page broadsheet that is published only on Saturdays in a country town in Louisiana that the national experiment of Reconstruction begins to unravel.
The “white man’s party” is supposed to be a new thing, not yet formed. But the vessel already exists among the ad hoc Ku-klux. Within a few weeks, after meetings of enthusiasts, the thing itself comes together. It is a political party; but also, it is yet another militia. The guerrillas choose a name, like others before, that cannot be mistaken. They call themselves the White League.
It is spring 1874. Constant and Gabrielle have a full house on Tchoupitoulas Street. The forty-two-year-old carpenter and thirty-eight-year-old seamstress are raising six children: Numa, Louis, Estelle, George, St. Mark, and Corinne. At sixteen, Numa is the oldest; the youngest, Corinne, is two. But April brings cruelty. On the fifteenth, daughter Estelle, age ten, has a birthday. Estelle is the war child. During the Civil War, when the city was occupied, Gabrielle made her way across enemy lines to join Constant, encamped on Bayou Teche, and she gave birth to Estelle. Now it is her birthday in 1874, and Estelle is quite sick. In fact, she has been sick for years: she has tuberculosis. In April, the girl goes into steep decline. Her breathing grows heavy, and blood comes up with every cough. She dies April 24, nine days after turning eleven.
Constant steps into his workshop—here is a job, finally. It is time to build another casket for another child. I wonder what it is like to build a coffin for your own daughter. This box has to be bigger than the one for daughter Mathilde, who died back in 1861, when she was only eighteen months. The casket for Estelle must look good, must be lined with nice material. The Ocean Sawmill, on Tchoupitoulas, is right across the street. They know him there, and they have good poplar. If he can afford it, Constant might add a veneer of mahogany to Estelle’s box. They have that, too. He can pay and then pick up the things at the Ocean lumberyard, corner of Magazine Street and Valence. Maybe Gabrielle contributes to the design. Maybe Estelle’s mother puts aside her piecework as a seamstress to make the soft interior of the box, a quilted cushion for Estelle to lay her head. I think about the scene. Is it strange that a violent militant can have a dead child, and he can weep? No, it is what a father would do. It is what we would expect, given that people then are like people now, like us.