by Gail Lukasik
She seemed to think I agreed with her, that the one-drop rule was correct, leaving no doubt about my race and in her eyes my tainted blood. It was evident to me it would be useless to continue this conversation with this bigoted God-lugging woman.
For a long second she stared through her glasses at me as if she was searching for a physical confirmation of my heritage. “Oh,” she finally said as if a light bulb had gone on in her head, “You’re the one with the slaves in your family.”
Slaves? I never said anything about slaves in my family. She’d made her own logical leap—black ancestry equaled slaves. This was a logical leap I was not prepared to accept. This was not how I saw my family or myself.
Shaken, I returned to the microfiche machine, rewound the role of microfilm, placed it back in its box, and refiled it in the steel drawer, avoiding the woman like a contagion, afraid of what other derogatory racial expressions she’d resurrect from her arsenal of bigotry.
Outside, the cold January wind was like a tonic, snapping me back to the ordinariness of winter—snow and cold, the need for shelter. I hurried to my car, shut the door, and started the engine. But I didn’t leave. I sat staring at the silvery sky, the mottled clouds, the uncertainty of light that made a Midwest January day bearable—when the sun disappears for days.
What just happened? I felt like I’d had an out-of-body experience. In a split second I became someone else, my identity in question. When I walked into the squat, brown building I was a white woman. When I left I didn’t know who I was. Was I still a white woman but a white woman with black ancestors? Were Azemar Frederic and his entire family the “niggers” in my woodshed?
Why hadn’t my mother told me? Was this the reason she didn’t have a picture of her father, fearing I would see the physical evidence of his blackness? That I would see what she’d been hiding? Was this why she never took us to New Orleans to visit her family?
I couldn’t get it into my head that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I wasn’t this white woman. Or I was this white woman who was also this black woman. Or I was neither? Who was I really? And what did my racial mixture mean?
As I pulled out of the driveway, I glanced at myself in the rear view mirror. Nothing had changed. I looked the same. Anyone could see what I was.
4
Getting Proof
1995
WHAT YOU NEED to do,” my friend Linda Andrews said, “is send a letter to the state of Louisiana and request a copy of your mother’s birth certificate.”
I’d confided in her my need for certainty. How I couldn’t ask my mother about her race without more proof than several census records. How reliable were census records anyway if the names weren’t even spelled correctly and children’s sexes were misidentified?
Linda humored me, going along for the ride. She was the perfect friend for this journey, having found out in adulthood that she was adopted. Her story was as startling and life changing as mine. Toward the end of her mother’s life, she suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and in a moment of frustration with Linda blurted out, “I should have never adopted you.” It was a stunning moment for Linda. Like me, her life-altering event made her question her identity, another secret withheld. Sometimes I think we sense things about people who become our friends, some psychic understanding about each other, like twins separated at birth.
“Why would they give me a copy of her birth certificate?” I wanted reassurances I was doing the right thing. I wanted handholding.
“Here’s what you do. You write as your mother. You say you lost your birth certificate and need a copy. They don’t know where your mother is living.” Linda was a former Chicago Tribune reporter, who now worked at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she taught nonfiction writing courses in the English department and ran the internship program. She had the canny, curious determination of a journalist.
“You really think they’ll buy it?” I felt a rush of excitement at this ruse. Usually I’d run the charge, fearless and jacked up on adrenaline. But when it came to my mother, I treaded softly, not wanting to displease or hurt her.
“What do you have to lose?”
She was right. “Nothing, I guess.”
“Then do it. And call me when you get an answer. This is too juicy.”
When the letter arrived, I was prepared to be disappointed. But I wasn’t disappointed, only more confused. Inside the envelope was my mother’s birth certificate with the official seal of Louisiana at the bottom and stamp dated February 2, 1995. Holding the document was like holding a piece of my mother’s life—a piece I knew little to nothing about.
Her parents were living at 2921 St. Ann Street. Camille was sixteen years old and Azemar was twenty-two years old. The midwife Mrs. O’Koenkel delivered my mother Alvera Rita Frederic on October 21, 1921. In parenthesis was written “(col).” It would not be too dramatic to say that I gasped at the sight of those three letters.
No B, but “col,” which more than likely designated her race as “colored.” As stunned as I was by this other piece of evidence, again, I reminded myself that in the state of Louisiana in 1921 there was the one-drop rule.
But my mother didn’t look black. Why would she be designated as such? Who made that decision and what was it based on? And does col really mean colored or could it mean other races?
“Write another letter to the state asking them to explain what col means,” Linda advised me when I told her my confusion about col on the birth certificate. “Who knows what it meant back then.”
“By the way have you said anything to your mother?” I could hear the urging in her question.
“Not until I know for sure about the col.” I knew my mother too well. To confront her about her racial designations over the phone would be a mistake. I wanted to see her face when I told her what I found. I needed to judge her reaction. On the phone she could easily change the subject, brush me off, claim ignorance, or worse, become indignant and angry.
The letter from Louisiana Vital Records dated March 15, 1995 explaining the letters col spelled it out for me, leaving little doubt what col meant.
Zelma W. Lombard, Deputy Director of Vital Records wrote: “The letters ‘col’ is an abbreviation for the designation ‘colored.’ Our records indicate that during the 1920s and perhaps through the 1940s, ‘col’ was a term applied to anyone “of color”, i.e., Native Americans, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc.”
As I read this section of the letter, I thought maybe my mother was of Native American heritage. But then I read on.
“The use of the term ‘colored’ has been ambiguous over time, however did become more closely associated with the Black race.”
The last paragraph threw me.
“If you consider your genealogy different or more specific to one race, you may submit a request for change of racial designation. You will be required to submit information, which shows a preponderance of evidence to support this. We will be happy to review it.”
Did my mother ever submit that evidence? I doubted it. And before the advent of online DNA tests how would someone go about disproving a racial designation if a person felt it was erroneous? Later when I delved deeper into Louisiana’s racial designations for people of color, I learned of another woman who tried to do this very thing in 1982 with little personal success.
The state of Louisiana had unequivocally designated my mother as colored or black. But still I was struggling with my mother’s racial identity and my own racial identity. The initial shock had started to wear off and in its place was denial. My mother was not black. She couldn’t be. This was a governmental mistake. You had only to look at my mother to see that she was white.
What did it say about me that I couldn’t accept the designation of my mother’s race? I wasn’t a bigot, of that I was certain. I’d taught my children to accept all people regardless of their color. My refusal stemmed from psychological issues of identity. I identified myself as a white woman. I also couldn’t believe my mother
could be that duplicitous.
That evening, I told my husband that it was almost certain my mother had passed as white. He grinned. “I always wanted to do a black chick.”
“That’s not funny,“ I said, laughing despite myself. Then I realized how his humor was easing my anxiety. That he was telling me that it didn’t matter to him what racial blend I was. “Well, maybe it’s a little funny.”
Black chick? Was that what I was? Was that how people would see me if I revealed my family’s racial designation on a 1900 census record and my mother’s birth certificate that read “col”? What did it mean to be “colored” in the eyes of the state of Louisiana in 1921 and yet look white? I had to find out. I had to talk to my mother.
5
The Vow
Spring 1997
TWO YEARS WENT by. I let them. I started a new job in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, overseeing the internship program and teaching writing, the job my friend Linda had had. At the urging of my son Chris who was pursuing a master’s degree in English at the University of Washington in Seattle, I began writing a mystery novel. Leigh Girard was the name I gave my amateur sleuth. My grandfather’s family still haunted me.
In December 1996, my father died from throat cancer, a protracted, agonizing death. Even after his death, I didn’t say anything to my mother about her family’s racial heritage. I’d told my children and a few very close friends. It was another fact about me like my dark brown hair and hazel eyes. I could think of no way to talk to my mother about this. Though I desperately wanted to.
But certain family mysteries were solved, mysteries my husband and I accepted and never questioned. Though my husband is blond and blue-eyed and my skin is porcelain white, our son, Chris, is olive-skinned with curly black hair and dark eyes. We sometimes joked that he was switched at birth, because he didn’t look like my husband or me. Our daughter Lauren, on the other hand, is a blend of us, with my husband’s straight hair and my fair coloring. Chris related how a friend of his had asked him why he and his sister looked so different, implying that he was adopted. And then there was my mother’s affinity for Chris, often saying that he was the only grandchild who looked like her.
Peculiarities about my mother that I’d chalked up to her quirky personality suddenly made sense. Her aversion to the sun, how she’d never go outside without a hat, claiming she didn’t want to get wrinkles. Her adamancy about never visiting New Orleans because it would depress her took on a different interpretation. To go home would risk discovery of her racial secret. Though she did suffer from acute depression, she had another equally valid reason for her not to visit New Orleans. Again she was cleverly telling a half-truth, while hiding another truth.
Finally in the spring of 1997 I got my chance to ask her about her birth certificate and the Frederic family’s race. My father had been dead for over a year. She seemed stronger, less fragile. And then there was her disturbing admission to me that after my father’s death, she was no longer depressed. His alcoholism and subsequent erratic behavior had plagued their marriage. Even after he’d stopped drinking, he was still difficult, still angry. Their marriage had not been a love match.
We agreed that she’d fly to Chicago over my spring break. We’d moved from suburban Libertyville to Wadsworth, a semi-rural area close to the Wisconsin border. The weather would be warm. She was no longer depressed and vulnerable like she’d been for so long. It would be an opportune time to find out the truth from my evasive mother.
After she arrived, I waited a day or two to let her settle in. My husband had left for work and we had the house to ourselves. After lunch we sat in the family room with the TV playing in the background. The dog dozed in a rectangle of light near the north facing windows.
My mother looked so comfortable in the oversized green plush chair that I hesitated for a moment, considering what I was about to do. I knew that once I broached the subject of her racial heritage, there would no turning back. No matter what her response was our relationship would be different. What we knew about each other would change.
I’d waited two years to have this conversation. I took in a deep breath and began. “Mom, I have something to ask you.” I tried to sound casual as if I were asking her advice on a recipe or a dress style. But inside I felt as if I were ten years old, anxiety pumping through my body, making me shaky.
“I’ve been researching your dad, Azemar. And I found something confusing.” I plunged ahead. “It said on the 1900 census that he was black. I thought it might be an error. So I sent away to Louisiana for your birth certificate,” I paused. “And it said you’re colored.”
There was a stunned silence into which everything seemed to tumble. Even the TV’s drone faded away. Her spine went rigid. She gave me that haughty, angry look I recognized too well. Her dark eyes like arrows aimed at me. “I don’t know what birth certificate you were looking at but mine says I’m white.”
I couldn’t let it go. There was this need to know that overcame the ten-year-old girl who cowered and obeyed her mother out of love and fear. “Well, I wrote a letter to the state of Louisiana and asked them what col meant. And they said it meant black. I don’t think it’s a mistake. If you’d like to see the letter and your birth certificate I can go get them.”
For a long moment, she said nothing. I watched her fingers curl on the chair arms and her shoulders bunch protectively. She seemed to be shrinking into herself. There was a catch in her throat when she said, “How will I hold my head up with my friends.” The pleading in her voice caught me off guard. I’d hurt her.
“Mom, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. I think it’s a good thing.”
“You can’t tell anyone. Promise me. You can’t tell anyone in the family until after I die.” She sounded desperate, cornered. Her voice was tinged with fear and shame.
“What about my brother?” I thought he should know. It was his heritage too.
“Not even him. Promise me.”
It was a promise I didn’t want to make. A promise I didn’t fully understand. But she looked so small in the large chair that seemed to have swallowed her. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise.”
Satisfied she stood and left the room.
We didn’t speak of it again during her visit. And this began the longest held secret of my life. A promise made to my mother whose shame and fear were so frightening and painful to witness, my conscience left me no other choice but to honor her wishes.
Not until after her death and after I’d read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man did I gain insight into the shame I witnessed that day when I confronted my mother with the truth of her racial heritage.
Near the end of the book, the narrator, so light-skinned he can pass for white, makes a momentous decision after witnessing a crowd of Southern white people burn a black man alive. The narrator catches a train to New York and decides neither to disclaim his own race nor claim the white race. “Let the world take me for what it would.” Then he explains what drove him out of the Negro race was shame. “Shame at being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals. For certainly the law would restrain and punish the malicious burning alive of animals.”1
In the silence of the next seventeen years, I began to reexamine, replay all her stories of New Orleans. I started to see them in a different light, shadowed with what was missing, nuanced, and meant to deceive. I began to delve into the mother I didn’t know, piecing her together from what wasn’t said. Her silence left me reeling.
Who was she? I wondered. Was the obsessively neat woman whose floors you could eat off of, who made a display of entering St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church every Sunday front and center decked out in her veiled hat and white gloves, orchestrating our entrance so we genuflected as a family, insisting we sit in the first pew, was that her disguise or her real self? Did she even know anymore? Had she fallen for her own story?
One neighbor called us the royal family, half jokingl
y, referring to our dramatic entrances and our Sunday clothes. I squirmed under the spotlight of my mother’s theatricality. I longed to sit in the last pew far from the altar. I was a watcher by nature, not a performer.
After the encounter with my mother and the vow, my children bragged to their friends about our mixed race, seemingly unencumbered with the same identity issues and not bound by my vow.
My son took up the mantle of family research. He’d earned his master’s degree from the University of Washington and was now living on the East Coast beginning his PhD in English at Johns Hopkins University. In his down time, he combed the National Archives, tracing my mother’s family back to the nineteenth century, noting the racial designations, black or mulatto or white—a potpourri of racial fluidity. A gifted researcher, he fleshed out the family tree, stockpiling his research in a binder.
And then we all seemed to let it go. Not that we forgot about the discovery of our racial heritage. It just wasn’t central to our everyday lives. We’d done as much as we could do. My mother wouldn’t talk. That door was permanently closed. We resigned ourselves to never knowing with any certainty about our mixed-race heritage or what it meant.
Then my mother started to die, slowly but surely, and that changed everything.
As my mother often said to me when I was reeling from some disappointment in life, “When one door closes, another door opens.”
That door would be Genealogy Roadshow.
But before Genealogy Roadshow, I’d make one last attempt to break through my mother’s silence.
6
Creole, Anyone?
2012
THOUGH MY MOTHER refused to talk to me about her racial heritage, occasionally she’d appease me by mailing me photographs of her family. I’d been asking her for a photograph of her mother Camille Frederic Romero. The only photos of her I had were mostly black and white, small, and grainy. It would be months, but eventually she found one that she felt she could trust me with, one that didn’t give away any family secrets. When I opened the package I was surprised and pleased by her generous spirit in sharing with me this piece of her past. But the seemingly innocuous photograph led to my questioning my own feelings about my mother’s racial secret.