by Gail Lukasik
The next day, Sarah Hochhauser, one of the producers, phoned to explain how this season’s show would be different from last season’s show.
“This year we want to do backstories on certain stories. So we’ll be coming to your hometown to film you for a day.” Her Welsh accent made everything she said sound important, crisp, and certain.
My stomach went tight. A day of filming me here where I live? That was not what I expected or wanted.
“We need a shooting venue. Can you suggest some place associated with your books, a beautiful place, a quaint place?”
My head was clogged with a summer cold and things seemed to be moving as if in slow motion. I told her about a local library, the Lake Forest bookstore, and the forest preserve where I walk. She’d check them out and get back to me.
Five days later La Monte Westmoreland, a senior producer, called. He questioned me at length about my story. I could sense he was also gauging my responses, how I’d be on camera.
“The show wants to do a DNA test. Is that okay?” he asked.
“Sure.” In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought.
He confirmed that Sarah and the film crew would be here August 7 and would film at my house and at the Lake Forest Bookstore. He gave me the same advice about my clothes.
After he hung up, I said, “Mom, are you working you magic? Is this the ship you always talked about finally coming in?” She’d often say, “One day, our ship will come in.” But it never seemed to arrive.
When the DNA kit and the contract came a few days later, everything seemed unreal and too serious as if I was living someone else’s life.
Two days before the filming, I located a lawyer who took a look at the contract and advised me not to sign it. “You realize you’re giving away all rights to your story? Just keep telling them you’re not going to sign the contract.”
Suddenly I realized it may have been all for nothing, the application, the Skype interview. I couldn’t give PBS my story because I planned to write a book about my mother’s family.
I called my son Chris and asked his advice. He suggested I negotiate with them. See if I could convince them to rewrite the contract. “They’re not used to dealing with writers,” he said. “Explain that this is how you make a living.”
We both laughed at that because I’d yet to make a living with my writing. I barely break even. But his strategy was a good one. Much more amenable than saying I’m not going to sign the contract.
After an afternoon of emails between the production company and me, by 6 p.m., I had an amended contract that allowed me to retain my rights to my story. The taping would take place August 7 as planned.
My back ached with tension as I read the taping schedule: 9 a.m.–11 a.m. at the Lake Forest Bookstore, 11 a.m.–4 p.m. my house. Quirky requests were made. “Do I have a typewriter and a spyglass?” Yes, on the spyglass, no on the typewriter.
I told Sarah tomorrow promised to be a lovely day. She said, “That’s disappointing.” I thought she was joking. But she explained that a rainy, foggy day would add atmosphere to the story. Family photographs and heirlooms were requested as well.
As I gathered the scant photographs and heirlooms, it struck me how these absences in my family’s story were what sent me searching nineteen years ago. I managed a handful of photographs mainly of my mother, my grandmother, and one of my Aunt Shirley when she visited us in Ohio. The only heirlooms I possessed were Aunt Laura’s engagement ring and the cut-glass rosary I received for my First Communion. I wasn’t sure who sent the rosary—my great-grandmother Ada or my great-great-grandmother. Such was the poverty of my mother’s family background.
Late in the day La Monte phoned and reassured me that I wasn’t the first person to ask for a contract revision and wouldn’t be the last. Then he told me with glee that the researchers were even now discovering more things about my family and would continue until the St. Louis taping in three weeks.
“Remember,” he said, “You have an A story.”
I took a perverse joy in having an A story, as if the A were a grade on an exam I aced.
Adrenaline gushed through me tempered by this feeling of rightness, as if parts of my life had led to this television appearance and behind it all was my mother, that quirky and difficult woman who would not talk about her racial secret, who hid her own shyness in cultivated extroversion, gleaned from books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.
A sharp memory from my childhood erupted full of meaning. My mother’s scolding me for my awkward shyness: “Speak up, Gail. Speak up.” Which meant speak for me. Say what I dare not say.
And wasn’t that what I was about to do?
9
Taping Day, Libertyville, Illinois
August 7, 2014
MY LIVING ROOM resembled the backdrop from a 60 Minutes interview. Window blinds drawn, furniture rearranged, huge photographic light screens strategically placed. A large boom mike dangled overhead, held by Dave, the sound guy from Woodstock, Illinois.
Sarah sat across from me well out of camera range, giving me instructions on how to respond to her questions. In her lap were her interview questions, the sight of them made me jumpy with anxiety.
“Answer my questions fully. Don’t use pronouns. Use names. For example don’t say ‘she’ if I ask you a question about your mother. Say ‘my mother.’ And make sure you repeat my question because my voice will be edited out of the tape.”
“I think I can do that.” Who was I trying to convince Sarah or me? My only saving grace was that the interview would be edited and any mistakes I made would be fixed. I didn’t have to be perfect. But I couldn’t quell the roiling in my gut.
I realized that the morning’s shoot at the Lake Forest Bookstore—posing before the large water fountain in the town’s square, walking the cobblestone pathways between the quaint buildings, pointing to my book inside the bookstore—was the easy part of the taping day. Now it was serious. Now I had to talk. I had to reveal my mother’s secret while the camera rolled. I had to be myself on camera—a herculean task for an introverted writer.
And then there were the shards of doubt that kept jabbing at me. Even now I couldn’t rid myself of them as ridiculous as that seemed with a camera crew in my living room and a binding contract. My mother was dead. I was free of my vow. But her shame and fear still lingered.
Earlier in the down time between takes, I learned that over a thousand people applied for Genealogy Roadshow’s second season. Of the people accepted for the show, about one-quarter were having their backstories told. Seven people were chosen for the St. Louis segment. Sarah bragged that Genealogy Roadshow was the most popular show in its category. None of this was helping my nervousness.
Raoul, the cameraman, said, “I’m ready.”
Sarah nodded. “Make sure you look at me when you answer my questions. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Why did you apply to the Roadshow?”
When the show airs in January, I’m surprised by how little of that interview is used, how our family story is edited and fashioned into a narrative that I’d not necessarily intended but one that leads to unexpected results that change my life.
10
Difficult Beginnings
Genealogy Roadshow, 2014
“For all persons of any known black lineage, however, assimilation is blocked and is not promoted by miscegenation. Barriers to full opportunity and participation for blacks are still formidable, and a fractionally black person cannot escape these obstacles without passing as white and cutting off all ties to the black family and community. The pain of this separation, and condemnation by the black family and community, are major reasons why many or most of those who could pass as white choose not to. Loss of security within the minority community, and fear and distrust of the white world are also factors.”
—F. James Davis, Who Is Black?: One Nation’s Definition
KENYATTA OPENS THE first document. The 194
0 Louisiana census appears on the large screen to my right. It takes me a moment to focus as I’m wondering why she begins our family story in 1940.
“Your mother Elvira Frederic is living with a cousin. She works as a maid in a teashop. And her race is listed as ‘Neg’ for Negro.”
I’m stunned. A bevy of contradictions and half-truths course through my mind—the first one about her racial designation in 1940. In the 1930 census she’s listed as white. How can she be white in 1930 and Negro in 1940?
But I don’t show my surprise, aware of the multiple cameras, how my reaction is being recorded and later will be broadcast on national television. Instead I say that her name is really Alvera not Elvira, not sharing how much she hated when people called her Elvira as if her identity was so fragile even mispronouncing her name could destroy it.
Kenyatta points out that census takers often misspelled names. As I look closer I see my mother’s sister Shirley is listed as well. Theresa Spikes is the head of the household and Mary Williams is listed as an aunt. All the women are designated as Neg. They reside on Bienville Avenue, one block from Canal Street. I don’t know whom these other women are that my mother and my Aunt Shirley are living with. The chaotic shuffle of my mother’s upbringing still playing out in 1940.
Kenyatta opens another document. It’s the 1910 census. “In the 1910 census Camille Frederic Romero is designated ‘MU’ for Mulatto.”
I hadn’t expected this revelation. My research and questions had been so focused on my mystery man Azemar Frederic, I never questioned my grandmother’s race, believing not only what my mother said about her mother’s heritage, Scottish and English, but I’d seen photographs of my grandmother and met her several times when I was a child. She was fair-skinned with narrow features and straight fine hair, much like my own hair. How can she be mulatto?
What else don’t I know? I wonder as Kenyatta closes the document and opens another document.
My mother, Alvera Rita Frederic, was born at home on October 21, 1921, at 2921 St. Ann Street in New Orleans in an area known as Bayou St. John. The area predates the founding of New Orleans by ten years, making it the city’s oldest site. Originally it was a distributary channel of the Mississippi River. In the nineteenth century, St. Ann Street was the residence of the Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau, and it was reputed that she performed many rituals in the area.1 Census records indicate that in 1921 Bayou St. John was a mixed neighborhood—“colored” and white. And until the 1930s, residents were building houseboats along the bayou.
As picturesque as that sounds, there was nothing charming about my grandmother Camille Kilbourne’s impetuous decision to marry Azemar Frederic on January 3, 1921, two days shy of her sixteenth birthday. They were married by a justice of the peace in St. Bernard Parish. Witnesses were Azemar’s brother Paul, the justice of the peace’s wife Mrs. Gowland, and Frank Nobles. Why did they marry in St. Bernard Parish instead of New Orleans where they both resided? Was Camille avoiding parental interference and censure? Though her mother Ada could hardly object to her daughter marrying at sixteen when she had married Edward Kilbourne at age sixteen in 1900. Perhaps it was a spontaneous decision, borne out by the fact that Camille had no family members as witnesses. Regardless, Camille’s flair for reckless, impulsive behavior would haunt her the rest of her life.
At the time of Camille’s marriage, her father Edward Kilbourne was already dead. Seven years prior, in 1914, he died from “severe paralysis” caused by an accident that occurred on the dock where he worked as a freight handler. Not long after Edward’s death, Camille’s mother, Ada McNicholls Kilbourne, married Homer Daste, a carpenter. On the 1920 census, Homer, Ada, and her two daughters Camille and Mildred are living in the St. Ann house where my mother will be born one year later. All the family members are listed as white. Besides the 1930 census, that is the only census where they are designated white. On all the other census records, they are listed as either Negro or mulatto.
Camille gave birth to my mother nine months after her marriage, almost to the day. How eager my grandmother must have been to start her own life and how ill prepared.
Her husband Azemar at twenty-two years of age was more mature and experienced, ready to settle down to a domestic life, working as a shipping clerk in a furniture store. My grandmother was still a child, now saddled with a child of her own. From the onset, theirs was a troubled match.
The vital records clerk who filled out my mother’s birth certificate marked her race as colored. Why was she given that designation? Did the midwife have a hand in that determination? If so, in a mixed-race neighborhood what about my mother’s physical appearance made the midwife believe that she was “colored”—the olive complexion, her curly hair? Was it only her physical appearance? Whatever the reason for my mother being designated colored, her destiny was legalized and hemmed in by the three letters in parenthesis: (col).
By the time of my mother’s birth in 1921, legalized segregation was entrenched in the Southern states. After all the high hopes and optimism of Reconstruction, the South had succumbed to the Jim Crow era cemented by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896, which upheld the Louisiana law requiring railroad companies to provide racially segregated accommodations, thus enshrining the doctrine of “separate but equal.”2
The name Jim Crow was derived from a minstrel routine performed beginning in 1828 by Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice and other imitators. Rice was a white man who performed in blackface. As the Encyclopaedia Britannica explains: “The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.” Many of these laws of segregation and racial designation would not be overturned until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
In Plessy v. Ferguson, Homer Plessy, a Creole of color who could pass for white, challenged Louisiana’s first segregation law requiring separate railway cars for whites and blacks by boarding a white car and refusing to move. If the stories are to be believed, this was different than Rosa Parks’s decision to sit in the white section of the bus because she was tired. Plessy set out to test the separate but equal law and lost his legal case.
These laws of separation were anything but equal. Relegated to the back of the bus, to separate railway cars and separate seating areas in restaurants, and to “Colored” washrooms and drinking fountains that were poorly maintained must have put immense pressure on those people of color in the South who could pass for white. The simplest decisions such as which bathroom or water fountain to use were fraught with psychological identity issues, as well as the fear of being caught passing for white.
The 1920s saw the flourishing of the eugenics movement. Eugenics is the science that seeks to improve hereditary qualities of a race or breed by the control of human mating.3 Aimed at maintaining white superiority in the United States, the eugenics movement touted the biological and physiological inferiority of African Americans. The fanatical desire to preserve and improve the dominant white race led to laws banning interracial marriage between whites and anyone with even a trace of black blood, leading to the legalization of the one-drop rule.
As Allyson Hobbs points out in her book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, the 1924 passage in the Virginia state legislature of the Act to Preserve Racial Integrity, enshrined the “‘one-drop rule’ into law by defining a white person as one with ‘no trace of other blood.’”4 Hobbs quotes one eugenicist fear as evidenced in the law, “Many thousands of white Negroes . . . were quietly and persistently passing over the line.”5 Visible whiteness was not to be trusted. And to sully one’s pure white ancestry with even a tinge of black blood must not be allowed. How else could the white race retain its superiority?
As outlined in the act: “If there is reasonable cause to disbelieve that applicants are of pure white race, when that fact is stated, the clerk or deputy clerk shall withhold the granting of the license until satisfactory proof is produced that both applicants are ‘white persons’ as provided for
in this act.”6
The law “required that the racial makeup of persons to be recorded at birth, and prevented marriage between ‘white persons’ and non-white persons. The law was the most famous ban on miscegenation in the Unites States.”7
Labeled colored on her birth certificate, my mother’s future was defined not by its expansiveness but by its legal and civil restrictions, as well as the economic restrictions of her designated race and gender.
In what can only be described as a defining moment for people of mixed race, the 1930 census removed the category Mulatto that my grandmother Camille, along with her mother Ada Kilbourne, her father Edward Kilbourne, and her sister Mildred Kilbourne, had been designated as in 1910. With the elimination of Mulatto as a racial category, the racial line was now cleanly divided between white and black with no place for people of mixed race like my mother’s family. Also, with the category Mulatto removed from the census, there was no legal language to define a mixed-race person, essentially erasing mixed-race peoples’ racial identities. In keeping with the one-drop rule of white superiority, people of mixed race were defined racially as black. If there were any doubts about a persons’ race, even if they looked white, they would be designated black.
Though the one-drop rule is no longer law, even today mixed race is defined by the minority race. An example is former president Barack Obama. Though his father was black and his mother was white, he is referred to as the first black president, as if his father’s blackness erased his mother’s whiteness.
Is it any wonder my grandfather Azemar Frederic on the 1930 census declared his race as white? And as Kenyatta explained during the show’s taping, census takers were often unreliable sources, if Azemar couldn’t visibly pass for white, then he would have been marked as Negro.
Then why had my mother been designated “colored” at her birth? Had the midwife and/or clerk been following the “one-drop” rule when he or she penned “col” on my mother’s birth certificate, as well as my Aunt Shirley’s birth certificate over a year later, erring on the side of caution? Then how do I understand my Uncle Homer’s racial designation at birth? Born in 1924, having the same parents as his sisters, his race was marked as white. Had the midwife been convinced of his race by his blond hair? Even more perplexing is his 1990 death certificate, which stipulates his race as black. How can a person be born white and die black?