White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  “I’d like to show you the 1940 Louisiana census,” Kenyatta says, opening the document on the computer with her long, slender fingers. We all turn toward the large screen to see what she has revealed.

  It takes me a moment to find my mother on the census. As I stare at her name, I feel myself slip out of time. It is the first of many surprises.

  That morning I couldn’t have imagined that my appearance on Genealogy Roadshow would mark the start of an adventure involving a movie and TV producer/documentarian, historians, genealogists, archivists, librarians, women with stories similar to mine, and the discovery of a lost family. My journey would uncover ancestors spanning continents and centuries tied to important historical events—some known, some unknown—as well as stories at the heart of this country’s beginnings.

  After the taping, Stuart Krasnow, the show’s executive producer, said to us, “This story is going to be an example of what America is now. Most of us are not aware of our true ancestry.”

  I nodded my head in agreement thinking not only about my mother’s true ancestry but the countless other family stories that have been buried for generations, out of fear or shame or time. We all think we know who we are. We all believe what our parents tell us about our families. Sometimes what they don’t tell us is the real story.

  2

  Secrets and Lies

  Parma, Ohio

  WHEN I WAS a young girl, my mother would tell me about her life in New Orleans before she came north to Ohio to marry my father. Each story so carefully fashioned, so artfully told I never questioned their validity. It was one of the rare times I’d be allowed to sit on my parents’ double bed in the cramped downstairs bedroom that faced the street, its north window inches from the neighbor’s driveway where a dog barked sometimes into the night.

  The room was pristine with its satiny floral bedspread, crisscrossed white lacy curtains, and fringed shades. Area rugs surrounded the bed like islands of color over the amber shag carpet. A large dresser held my mother’s perfumes neatly arranged on a mirrored tray. An assortment of tiny prayer books rested on a side table beside a rosary. Over the bed was a painting of a street scene that could be Paris or New Orleans, colorful and dreamy. A similar painting hung in the living room.

  It wasn’t until I married and left home that my father was banished to the other first floor smaller bedroom, and even then he was an interloper in this feminine domain. His clothes were exiled to the front hall closet where he kept his rifle. On story days the room was a mother-daughter cove of confidences where my mother came as close as she ever would to telling me who she was, dropping clues like breadcrumbs that would take me decades to decipher. As I grew older, she confided intimacies of her marital life best shared with a mother or a sister. I was the substitute for the family left behind in New Orleans.

  In its orderliness, the bedroom was a microcosm of the entire eighteen hundred square foot suburban tract house where I grew up. A house she cleaned every day as if it were a jewel that would quickly tarnish if not polished and treasured. Her housekeeping so meticulous, to this day I can see her kneeling in the kitchen like a raven-haired Cinderella, her head bowed as she pinched dirt from the green linoleum floor, dirt even the broom couldn’t pick up. That only she could remove. In this small house, my mother finally found what she imagined was her haven, her safe place—small and tidy as the life she desired and sacrificed so much to have.

  To me her stories were magical and transformative. They’d begin with the white jasmine flowers she wore in her black hair as a young woman, illustrated in the black-and-white studio portrait photograph she kept in our living room on a faux marble-topped table as a reminder of that exotic Southern belle she once was. “This was who I used to be in New Orleans before I married your father and came north,” the photograph seemed to say.

  Sometimes her story would veer and we’d be in the French Quarter. The Vieux Carré, she called it, the French words as exotic as she was. She’d describe the iron lacework and the old brick buildings that she said were French. If she felt adventuresome that day, she’d tell the story of the Vieux Carré painter, a story that as a child made me uncomfortable.

  “I answered a newspaper ad for a live model. I was nineteen.”

  I didn’t know it then but later I’d understand the circumstances of her decision. She was a young woman with meager skills, poor and adrift with no one to advise her, looking for work, using the gift of her beauty.

  “He told me to take off my clothes.” She laughed as if she were searching for the humor in her story. “I told him I didn’t do that.”

  “‘That’s what live model means,’ he said, looking me over, studying my face. I started to leave. But he stopped me and said, ‘If you want to sit for portraits, I’ll give you the name of another painter.’ He must have taken pity on me.”

  “Did you sit for that other painter?” I asked, heat rushing through me at the thought of my mother posing nude for a strange man.

  “Oh, yes. You know what the other painter said? He told me he saw these colors in my skin, greens and yellows and peach.”

  I studied her face the way that painter must have, trying to see what he saw. I couldn’t see those colors. Only her warm olive skin, dark brown eyes, her deep dimples and Roman nose. And though all children think their mothers are beautiful, mine was. She never took a bad photo.

  Sometimes she’d open the tall dark dresser with the ribbed edges that I liked to run my fingers up and down, and take out her long white gloves with the pearl buttons, carefully wrapped in thin tissue paper, followed by my favorite—the tiny white beaded evening bag with the tarnished clasp and a matchbook inside as if waiting for her to resume her glamorous single life in New Orleans or across the river in Algiers.

  Each story contained a lesson at its core. The long white gloves and beaded evening bag were about chastity and being a lady at all times no matter the temptation, no matter the man’s promises or his handsomeness. “Gail, men only want one thing. That’s just how they are.”

  The nude modeling story was about maintaining moral standards, knowing your worth, not selling yourself for money, no matter how poor you were.

  Sometimes the stories of supper clubs and jazz music, Lake Pontchartrain and The Safari Club would shift as if she were moving closer to the real story that beat under her skin like another self. There would be the way the rain fell only on one side of the street while on the other the sun would beat down relentlessly, a confusion of weather. If I didn’t respond with enough awe, she’d tell it again. It was a story she never tired of telling me about a place where the weather was as unpredictable and quixotic as her childhood.

  On other days when I sensed a sadness in her, she’d tell me about the old black woman on Canal Street, limping home from her job as a domestic, burdened with groceries, the deep lines of a hard life etched into her dark face.

  My mother called the sidewalk a banquette. “Banquette,” she repeated the word so I would know the language of the city where she was born and raised, so I would understand how she left that language behind to make a new life in Ohio, and yet it lingered with her like a favorite song she couldn’t quite get out of her head, its lilting melody a relic of home. My ear keen to catch traces of her New Orleans accent that sometimes slipped out despite her vigilance. The soft drawl she couldn’t totally erase, always there.

  “I remember this old black woman walking on Canal Street carrying all these packages. She looked so tired and worn out. This white man was walking toward her and when she didn’t move off the banquette, he shoved her off, shouting at her in a nasty voice. ‘Get out of my way,’” my mother paused, and then added. “He called her a terrible word. You know what I mean.”

  I did know.

  I never forgot that story or the way she sat on the bed, her hands folded in her lap, her voice full of indignation tinged with sadness, her dark eyes fierce.

  “That wasn’t right,” she said. “But that’s how it was in Ne
w Orleans back then.” She shook her head as if she needed to dislodge the image of the old black woman shoved off the banquette to make way for a white man who called her nigger.

  “That poor old black woman fell down, her packages everywhere, and that white man kept walking,” she said.

  It wouldn’t be until after I appeared on Genealogy Roadshow that I understood the full significance of that story and why she told it to me.

  But even as a child, I knew the story held a special meaning for her and a message for me. This is what it’s like to be a black person in the South. Who would want to endure that?

  Only later, much later, would I understand she was seeding my life with these clues, hinting at her hidden self or maybe preparing me to accept that part of her she’d left behind in New Orleans and her reason for doing that. Or maybe she was only telling me a story about prejudice and cruelty, teaching me right from wrong as any mother would do.

  Once I asked her, “Why don’t you have a picture of your father Azemar?”

  “I just don’t.” Her abruptness was a signal to me that the subject was not to be pursued.

  She had a scattering of photos of her mother Camille, her sister Shirley, and a few cousins. But in the family photo department, she was bereft. It was as if when she left New Orleans she left all her family archives, if she had any, behind—a clean start free of family and memories.

  “Why don’t we visit New Orleans,” I’d sometimes ask, wanting to see for myself where she grew up, see the scrolled ironwork of the Vieux Carré, walk the banquettes, hear the jazz music of her city, and meet her relatives.

  “Because it depresses me to go home.”

  There was no way to bridge the finality of my mother’s reason, a woman prone to fits of depression so acute that for a time she saw a Cleveland psychiatrist. I didn’t want to make her sadder and so I stopped asking.

  But I didn’t stop wondering. There was something about the unknown that I couldn’t let rest.

  Looking back on her stories of her life growing up in New Orleans, I realize now that she wove a past for me that left out the most important part. The part about her black heritage and what she’d done to hide it.

  3

  “There’s a Nigger in Every Woodshed.”

  January 1995

  THE WINDOWLESS BASEMENT of the Buffalo Grove Family History Center had the feel of an underground bunker—fluorescent lights, cinder block walls, the musty scent of dampness. At the room’s entrance sat a gray-haired woman, birdlike and benign. With robotic precision, she meted out instructions on how to use the machines, where the microfilms were located and how to order original documents. She appeared as nondescript and gray as the walls.

  I’d come to the family history center in search of my grandfather Azemar Frederic. I was between adjunct college teaching jobs, applying for tenure track teaching positions in creative writing, and working part-time as an assistant editor for a medical journal. The year before, I’d been offered a position in creative writing at a liberal arts college in Tennessee. But I turned it down. Uprooting my life at the age of forty-nine for a position that paid in the low five figures seemed foolhardy. My husband would need to obtain a Tennessee dental license to practice dentistry, and we would have to pay out-of-state tuition at the University of Illinois for our daughter Lauren. So I resigned myself to seeking positions in the Chicago area where the competition was especially rigorous and my chances for success slim.

  I had time on my hands and an insatiable longing to find Azemar who over the years had become more and more unreal to me as if he never existed, was a figment of my mother’s imagination. Without a photograph of him, I had nothing physical to connect him to me. This need for a physical image of him was primal. It was an aching absence that I needed to fill.

  This was 1995, before the Internet, before Ancestry.com. Family research required a journey, was a physical as well as an emotional quest. I’d arrived at 10 a.m. when the center opened. I would stay as long as it took to find my grandfather Azemar Frederic of New Orleans, my mystery man.

  But I had little to go on. I didn’t know when he was born or when he died. My mother couldn’t or wouldn’t help me. Her memory faltered when it came to her father.

  “He might have died after you were born. I don’t remember. Maybe in the 1950s.”

  What I did know wasn’t much, birth and death place—New Orleans and the precise spelling of his first and last name. As a child my mother would spell out her maiden name for me—a school requirement on this form or that. Always stressing that there was no k at the end of Frederic.

  “That would make us German. And we’re not German,” she’d say. “We’re French. And your grandmother Camille Kilbourne is English and Scottish.” Her tone was fierce and not to be challenged. She took great pride in her French heritage, occasionally throwing out a French phrase to prove her point: tante/aunt, très bon/very good, n’est pas/isn’t it so.

  Persistent over the years, I pieced together other sparse facts about the elusive Azemar—even his name conjured mystery. My mother had a shorthand way of describing him: hard worker who didn’t smoke or drink. He and my grandmother divorced early in their marriage. They both remarried and started families.

  My mother never spoke of her father’s second family when I asked about them, except to say the oldest daughter resembled her. I didn’t know how many other children there were from Azemar’s second marriage or who his second wife was. My mother refused to talk about them. The mere mention of them made her go quiet.

  “People say I looked like him,” my mother would say, placating me as if her face replaced the one I desperately wanted to see. Then she’d add, her eyes far away, “I asked my mother once why she didn’t stay married to my father. And she said, ‘he was too jealous.’”

  And as often happened with my mother’s stories, the not telling was the telling. If I’d been older, I might have picked up on her clues. But I was a child. I accepted what she told me. She was my mother.

  The morning wore on. Time passed without notice as I scrolled through the microfilm finding Fredericks, Fredericos but no Frederics. Every once in a while I’d have to stop scrolling and close my eyes. The whirling of the microfilm and the low lights were making me queasy or maybe it was the gnawing hunger that I refused to placate. I was a woman on a mission.

  It was almost 1 p.m. I’d been there for three hours and hadn’t found Azemar. I decided to finish the 1900 Louisiana census record and return next Wednesday.

  The surname Frederic happened first. It jumped out at me, spelled exactly as my mother said: C, no K at the end. Then I spotted my grandfather’s unusual first name Azemar at the bottom of a long list of other Frederics. In 1900 Azemar Alfred Frederic was three years old and listed as a granddaughter, sex male. Finally I knew when he was born: 1897. A flutter of elation ran through me as I jotted down his information on a legal pad that until now was woefully empty.

  There were many family members living in the Girard/Frederic household. Azemar’s father was Leon Frederic, his mother Celeste Girard Frederic. I savored the beauty of her name, my great-grandmother Celeste Girard. Azemar was the youngest of five children: Louise, Leon, Leonie, and Estelle. They lived at 379 Ursuline Avenue in New Orleans. The head of the household was Albert Girard, Azemar’s maternal grandfather, my great-grandfather. There were also a number of Girards sharing the residence.

  As I traced across the grid, I stopped on the letter B, perplexed by its meaning, then I scrolled up to find the category: Race.

  My mind didn’t quite take in what I was seeing. Would the census taker use B for black in 1900? It didn’t seem likely. Then what did B mean if not black? And why would the census taker mark my grandfather and his family black? It had to be a mistake. My grandfather’s family was not black.

  Aware of the time, I hurriedly searched for Azemar in the 1930 census. When I found him, his race was no longer designated as B, now his racial designation was W. I was familiar wi
th the one-drop rule, a racial classification asserting that any person with even one ancestor of African ancestry was considered to be black no matter how far back in their family tree. But the B perplexed me, as did the W. How could Azemar be black in 1900 and white in 1930?

  I glanced back at the gray-haired lady. She was shuffling through index cards, keeping herself busy, and looking bored. I got up from the machine and walked over to her.

  “I was wondering about the racial designation B in the 1900 Louisiana census. Can that be right?” I asked reticently, purposely not mentioning that the B was attached to my mother’s family.

  “Those cards have been copied. B means black.” She looked me up and down. “You know the saying, ‘there’s a nigger in every woodshed.’”

  I was speechless. Struck dumb.

  She laughed, a tight pinched laugh full of malice. “Things were different back then. We had those candies, you know, we called them ‘nigger babies.’” She said this with some glee in her voice as if we were sharing the same joke.

  The word nigger kept reeling from her mouth like the rolls of microfilm whirling around me. I stood there, stunned, having no idea what the woman was talking about or how to respond. I’d never heard of “nigger babies.” And if I had, I’d never be spewing the term out like a sharp slap.

  All I could muster in defense of a family whose race I’d just discovered and was unsure of was a fact that sounded like an excuse. “In Louisiana,” I muttered, “you only had to have one drop of black blood to be considered black.” I felt assaulted with an experience I had no way to relate to and that I wasn’t certain I could even claim.

  She finished my thought for me as if confirming what she’d already said about race and blood. “Yes, just one drop was all that was needed. You know the saying, ‘nigger in the woodshed.’”