by Gail Lukasik
The black-and-white eight-by-ten photograph was professionally shot in 1951 at the Safari Room supper club in Algiers, Louisiana. During that time period, it wasn’t uncommon for an upscale supper club to hire a freelance photographer to snap photographs of patrons and then offer them an opportunity to buy the souvenir photo to memorialize the occasion.
In the foreground sit my grandmother Camille, her sister, my Aunt Mickey, Mickey’s daughter Rhea, and her husband Charles. Camille and Mickey each hold their cocktail glass firmly as if it anchors them. Rhea and Charles hold hands—his hand over her hand. The leather-quilted circular booth looks lush. Though it must have been a special night, none of them can manage a smile. Only Rhea has a wistfulness about her, her eyes faraway, her mouth relaxed. The photograph evokes another era when men wore suits and ties to supper clubs and women donned their best dresses, silk stockings, and jewelry.
My mother had little information to add to the photograph, no knowledge of the Safari Room, the occasion of the photograph, or where Camille’s second husband Arthur Romero was. I took the photograph for what it appeared to be, my mother’s close family members having a night out on the town.
I’d met Cousin Charles and Cousin Rhea once as a young child and visited them in California when I was an adult. I don’t remember meeting Aunt Mickey prior to 1951. My grandmother had visited us in Ohio on several occasions. I never thought of them as anything but white like me. I was a child. I accepted what I was told.
When my first mystery Destroying Angels was released in 2006, I began getting requests from libraries and various adult writing groups to conduct mystery-writing workshops. After all I’d been university trained to teach writing workshops and had taught on the university level for over fourteen years. Often I’d use a photograph as a writing tool to teach characterization in mystery writing. If I knew in advance that the participants might be an older group and not young adults, I’d use the Safari Room photograph.
What I’d tell the writers to do was study the photograph. The only facts I’d give them was the year 1951 and the place the Safari Room, Algiers, Louisiana. I’d jokingly tell them that all the people in the photo were my relatives and to be kind. But I didn’t tell them how I was related to them.
One spring, in 2012, I was teaching a mystery-writing workshop at the Women’s Exchange (WEX) in Winnetka, Illinois, a posh North Shore Chicago suburb. I liked teaching at WEX. The building was an old mansion with the patina of a former time. As I climbed the stairs to the second floor, I’d smell the heavy scent of lunch being prepared for the day care center on the first floor.
The writing group was small, composed of middle-aged women who had the luxury of taking a morning workshop. We were to meet once a week. So that first day I decided to use the Safari Room photograph for the characterization exercise.
When I handed them the photograph, I could tell by their expressions and the way they studied the photograph that they were intrigued by it. Some smiled, some oohed and aahed. Someone said, “Look at those clothes.”
As always, I began with a tantalizing hook. “One of these people will be murdered before the night is over,” I paused. “You are to choose the murder victim, the murderer, and the sleuth. Don’t think too long about it. Go by your instincts. Then, write a character sketch of the sleuth that goes beyond just that person’s physical appearance, describe things like how they hold their drink, how they walk.” I paused again while they finished writing down my instructions. “Finally,” I said, “give the murderer a dark secret he or she is hiding.”
When they finished writing and they discussed their choices and why they made those choices, one of the women asked me about the people in the photo, who were they in relationship to me. After I explained who everyone was, she didn’t seem satisfied with my explanation, her eyes searching my face.
“Is your family Creole?” she asked. “Your cousin looks Creole.”
A shock of panic went up my spine. My mother’s secret raising its uncertain head. Before I knew my mom’s secret, I would have shrugged the woman’s question off, answering nonchalantly. But I did know her secret. I was stymied how to answer her. I didn’t even know what constituted a Creole. But I did know that my mother’s birth certificate said she was colored and that she believed she was colored.
Was the woman asking if my cousin was Black, or mixed, or Spanish? Was she asking if the other women in the photograph were also Creoles?
I stumbled around an answer that sounded disingenuous even to me. “He’s my cousin by marriage. So I don’t know.”
She shook her head as if she understood and said nothing more.
“Let’s go over next week’s assignment,” I said, grateful the moment had passed, fairly sure she picked up on my discomfort.
Other than that bigoted woman at the family research center and this nosey writing student, no one had ever suggested to me that I was anything other than a white woman. I was ill prepared for such questions.
Later I wondered what the writing student had seen in my cousin’s appearance that made her ask if he were Creole and by extension was my family Creole. To me he looked Spanish or possibly Italian, as did Aunt Mickey and Cousin Rhea. My grandmother looked white.
What surprised me was my own reaction to her question, the fear I felt at being caught out, not wanting to share my bloodline with strangers, who might judge me unkindly, possibly question even my writing accomplishments and educational pedigree. And beating below the fear was anger. What does their being Creole have to do with anything? And if they were Creole, what’s it to you?
My vow to my mother was taking an odd toll on me, tamping down the response I wanted to give. “Just like so many of us in America my family is a blending of many different cultures and races, Creole being just one of them.” But I couldn’t say that. I’d made a promise. I was complicit in my mother’s deception.
I didn’t stop using the evocative photo. It was too good to give up. Students always responded strongly to it. It inspired their imaginations. But I steeled myself for that question: Is your cousin Creole? My answer next time: What do you mean by Creole?
Ticking away behind that mildly confrontational retort was another question: What was a Creole?
There’s little consensus on a conclusive definition of the term Creole. “Most scholars agree that the term creole comes from the Spanish or Portuguese crillo or crioulo meaning created in America, in the New World, as opposed to being created or born in Europe.1 “The Harvard Encyclopedia of Ethnic Groups explains the word ‘Creoles’ refers not only to people but also to culture, food, music and language.”
In referring to people of Louisiana, it states: “In the United States, in the twentieth century, Creole often refers to the Louisiana Creoles of color. Ranging in appearance from mulattos to European whites, the Creoles of color constitute a Caribbean phenomenon in the United States. The product of miscegenation in a seigniorial society, they achieved elite status in Louisiana, and in the early nineteenth century some were slaveholders. Many, educated in France, were patrons of the opera and of literary societies. . . . Louisiana Creoles of color thus constitute a self-conscious group. Who are perceived in their locale as different and separate. They live in New Orleans and in a number of bayou towns. Historically, they have been endogamous, and until late in the nineteenth century spoke mostly French. . . . Their ethnicity is exceedingly difficult to maintain outside of the New Orleans area. Over time, a great many have passed into white groups in other parts of the country, and others have become integrated as blacks. This latter choice is not based wholly on appearance, for many Creoles who choose to identify as Afro-Americans are white in appearance.”2
I doubt that inquisitive writing student who asked if my family was Creole had that definition in mind. She wasn’t referring to an ethnic identity but a racial identity, possibly a mixed racial identity.
I dug deeper into the history of the Creoles of color, both an ethnic and racial classification, tr
ying to understand the nuances of racial designation, learning of Louisiana’s shifting laws on what constitutes a black person.
In a concession to the one-drop rule that dominated the Jim Crow South, Louisiana enacted a less stringent mathematical formula for race in 1970, which was enforced until 1984. The statute read: “In signifying race a person having one-thirty-second or less of Negro blood, shall not be deemed, described, or designated by any public official in the State of Louisiana as ‘colored,’ a ‘mulatto,’ a ‘black,’ a ‘negro,’ a ‘griffe,’ an ‘Afro-American,’ a ‘quadroon,’ a ‘mestizo,’ a ‘colored person,’ or a ‘person of color.’”3
Surprisingly, this mathematical formula for race was more stringent than the Nuremberg law initiated by the Nazis during World War II that said anyone with one-sixteenth Jewish blood was Jewish. The stringency of the Louisiana statute in comparison to the Nuremberg law says a great deal about governmental bigotry.
Trying to understand the statute’s racial classification, I looked up the race terms I was unfamiliar with, terms as archaic as the statue. A griffe has three-quarter black and one-quarter white ancestry. A mestizo is “a person of mixed racial or ethnic ancestry, especially, in Latin America, of mixed American Indian and European descent or, in the Philippines, of mixed native and foreign descent.”
I already knew mulatto meant a person with one white parent and one black parent. But I wasn’t aware that the word came from the Spanish word for mule, carrying all the negative connotations associated with mules. The offspring of a donkey and a horse, a mule is usually sterile and used as a beast of burden. It rankles me that my grandmother and her parents were listed on several US Census reports as Mulatto. Behind all these designations by Louisiana were fear and the need to keep people of color in their place.
This wasn’t 1921 when my mother was born, a period of deep segregation that lasted until the 1960s. This was 1970–1984.
I took out my DNA results to see where I fall in the less stringent racial period. I’m 86 percent European, 4 percent Central/South Asian, 2 percent Middle Eastern, and 9 percent African. My husband works out the mathematical formula. In 1970, I would have been designated as black, a colored, a colored person, a person of color, a Negro. It’s almost laughable.
Harvard’s definition of Creole also touches on the other question that sits at the heart of my mother’s story about passing for white. “Over time, a great many have passed into white groups in other parts of the country, and others have become integrated as blacks. This latter choice is not based wholly on appearance, for many Creoles who choose to identify as Afro-Americans are white in appearance.”
Why does a mixed-race person who looks white choose either to pass as white or not to pass as white? To me it is a “Sophie’s Choice” question. I understand the economic and social reasons why a person passes. But there is something else involved in whether a person decides to pass or not to pass, more basic, more fundamental that goes to the heart of identity and family.
W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the paradox of “two-ness,” the ambivalence of people with mixed European and African ancestry.4 If a mixed-race person is white enough to pass, how does that person deal with the trappings of a racist culture where you’re forced to choose a side? Cross over to the white side and gain white privilege but lose family and your authentic self, or remain on the black side and suffer economically and socially.
My mother made her “Sophie’s Choice” when she decided to pass for white. In living a double life, never having the freedom to be her authentic self, she must have developed a tolerance for racism, staying silent to the racial barbs she heard at work, and from friends and family. If she spoke out, she risked discovery.
“How will I hold my head up with my friends if they know?” Her words keep coming back to me—her shame, and her feelings of being tainted.
In not answering the inquisitive student truthfully, I kept my vow to my mother, but was keeping that vow tainting me with her shame?
7
Taking Her Secret to the Grave
Avon, Ohio, 2014
THE LAST YEAR of my mother’s life she asked me one question over and over, “Why won’t God take me?” Then she always added with a wistful smile, “He must have a plan for me. But what that is, I can’t figure it out.”
Deeply religious, her mind failing her, prone to falls, confined to a walker, she was in and out of hospitals and rehab centers, finally living out her last year in an assisted-living facility in Avon, Ohio, under hospice care, which meant she was always ninety days from death. Every ninety days she was evaluated and if she met the hospice criteria, they let her keep her free hospital bed, drug coverage, and routine visits from the hospice nurse. It was a strange bargain. One predicated on the signs and numerical values of death and dying.
She was beset with one medical crisis after another, but she rallied back from each one as if God was indeed pulling her from death, telling her there were still things she needed to do. That he did have a plan for her. Her blood pressure skyrocketed to 192/92, and then plummeted to 110/90, numbers that would kill most elderly people. Her body swelled with fluid, her mind rattled, little by little turning off. She wanted to die, but her body wouldn’t let her.
Whether from the constant urinary tract infections, her medications, or her dementia, she was beset with hallucinations that seem prophetic, full of portents—people climbing the walls, calling her name; my father pushing her down a flight of stairs; ants filling her room. She mumbled to people not there, long dead. The last ten months of her life she lost control of her bathroom functions and couldn’t bathe herself. For a woman who prided herself on her appearance and her cleanliness, it was a cruel indignity. I tried to convince myself that her dementia mitigated these indignities, that she wasn’t fully aware of what was happening in her body. But there was no way to be sure.
I lived in fear of “the phone call.” Every time the phone rang I let out a sigh of relief when it wasn’t my brother’s phone number on the screen. My mother was still alive. She wasn’t dead.
The summer before my mother died, my daughter Lauren and I visited her in the assisted-living facility in Avon, the last place she would reside before being rushed to a hospice unit at a nearby hospital, where she died. Although under hospice care, her care numbers were good enough to keep her in the assisted-living wing and out of the more costly nursing wing. Her room was a private suite with a sitting area, separate bedroom and bathroom. There was a small refrigerator where she stocked her bags of chocolate kisses. A treat she seldom allowed herself before the dementia.
That summer day when I entered her room, at first I couldn’t find her. I called out “Mom.” No one answered. My daughter waited in the sitting room, while I peeked into her bedroom. I caught a glimpse of her through the open bathroom door, sitting on the toilet.
She looked up startled. “Who are you?”
I was taken aback. “I’m your daughter, Gail.”
“Oh,” she said, clearly confused. Though she’d been told I was coming that day, her mind had forgotten, and even worse, she had forgotten that she had a daughter and that I was that daughter.
It was a humiliating and disturbing moment for both of us.
By lunchtime, she’d remembered her granddaughter, Lauren and me. But still her mind remained a maze of confusion. When we reached the elevator to the dining room, she couldn’t remember which floor it was on though she’d taken that elevator every day for over a year.
At lunch she was chatty and confided in us. “You see that woman sitting at the table behind us. Every time I say something she repeats it. Do you hear her? She’s doing it now.”
My daughter and I nodded our heads then exchanged looks of bewilderment and helplessness.
It was crushing to witness her mind’s deterioration. She’d been a fiercely independent woman who liked to discuss politics with anyone who would listen. At any given time she’d have CNN blaring in her kitchen or living room.
She read two newspapers a day. When my husband and I would visit her, she loved to engage my husband in political discussions.
“I love politics. Even as a girl, I loved politics.” She prided herself on keeping up with the world around her, politically, culturally, and socially. She prized books and street smarts—her survival skills. When she moved from her home to my brother’s house, I cleared out over two hundred self-help books. She was in a constant state of self-improvement.
After that summer visit, our phone conversations became like a Samuel Beckett play, but instead of Waiting for Godot, we were waiting for death, parsing it out, as it circled and circled like an eddy around her.
“How are you feeling?” I asked.
“My head feels weird.”
“Does it hurt?”
“No, strange. Weird.”
“Are you afraid?”
“No, not afraid.”
“Do you feel confused?”
“They tell me I was seeing things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember falling?”
“No, not falling. My head feels weird.”
I mourned the lucidity of our weekly phone calls so reminiscent of those times we sat together in her bedroom, in our cove of confidences. Separated by distance all our lives, those phones calls kept us close, breached that distance. Now in her dementia the distance lengthened. I couldn’t reach her.
In those last waning months of her life she had little to say, the conversation one-sided. It didn’t matter to me. I just wanted to hear her voice, know that she was still there, the physicality of love. Our conversations dwindled down to the mundane—the weather, what she had for lunch, and the past.