by Gail Lukasik
This strange fluidity of racial designation for individuals who could pass for white was evidenced in Azemar’s subversive act in 1918 during World War I. When he filled out his draft registration card to work at Inland Steel in East Chicago, Indiana, as a pipe fitter, under race he checked white. The handwriting on the card matches his signature. There’s no question he was the one who checked the white box. The card bears the stamp of the Local Board of the City of East Chicago.
Was he laughing up his sleeve as he passed for white in a Northern city far beyond the reach of his New Orleans roots and Jim Crow laws? Or was his hand trembling with anxiety as he boldly checked the white box? Regardless, he passed. And on his return to New Orleans, on the 1930 census his race was designated as white. But by the 1940 census, he was once again black.
Without a photograph of my grandfather, it’s impossible for me to judge how white he looked. Like my mother, he’d been able to pass as white. But unlike my mother, who died as a white woman in Mercy Hospital in Ohio, he died a black man in Charity Hospital in New Orleans. She had permanently crossed over the color line. He hadn’t.
How had she accomplished this audacious transformation undetected? And why had she risked such a high stakes gamble built on secrecy? What sacrifices had she and the people she left behind made so she could live as white? The image of my mother shrinking into herself with fear and shame spoke volumes about the toll she’d paid to pass and had continued to pay.
There were so many unknowns that couldn’t be explained or elucidated by a racial designation on a census record or a birth certificate.
As her daughter I had no frame of reference for understanding her choices. I’d never suffered from racial discrimination except for those uncomfortable moments in the family history center when the old bigoted woman used the word “nigger” repeatedly. I’d never claimed to be any other race but white. I’d enjoyed white privilege all my life.
I needed to know more. I wanted to understand why even after she passed successfully into whiteness, she couldn’t shake the shame or the fear. I wanted to know how and why she decided to cross over the color line. What about her life in New Orleans made her want to leave it? And what had leaving her family and denying her true racial heritage cost her?
Perhaps I also wanted redemption for my mother and all mixed-race people in this country who, if they’d been white enough to pass, had been forced to choose one race or another. Forced to decide where they sat on the bus, whom they married, and whom they could trust with their secret.
11
Nothing Left to Lose
THE ONLY PHOTOGRAPH that survived from my mother’s childhood is cracked and fading to a greenish tint, the three children sitting together in the yard on St. Ann Street blurry with time. My mother, Shirley, and Homer huddle in a semi-circle, only my mother looks angry, impatient with the process of posing, her two siblings sit closer together apart from her. Had the later separation of the siblings already begun?
My mother is perhaps six years old. Her pose is defiant: crossed arms, a knowing expression, lack of a smile. Her dark hair is plastered to her head as if it needed washing or maybe it was my grandmother’s attempt to tame her daughter’s curly hair. None of the children look happy.
The neglected condition of the aged photograph seems to reflect what was about to happen to the three children on St. Ann Street. The photo would become a relic, one my mother cherished, filled with the longing for a time that would never return and that ended too quickly.
In 1934 after Camille and Azemar were separated for seven years, Azemar Frederic petitioned for a divorce. The petition states that he and his said wife became separated on April 3, 1927, and had never returned to live together. The children were living with the defendant’s grandmother.
What strikes me most about the petition is the last paragraph. “Wherefore, petitioner prays that his said wife, Camille Kilbourn Frederic, be duly cited to appear and answer this petition.” The word “prays,” though commonly used in Louisiana documents, seems particularly apropos of my grandfather’s level of desperation, to be divorced, to end the limbo of his marriage.
My grandmother never appeared to answer the petition. It’s difficult to comprehend her decision not to appear when the custody of her three children was in jeopardy. On November 5, 1934, my grandfather was granted his divorce. In the divorce decree Azemar was also granted “permanent care, custody and control of the three minor children, Elvera Frederic, Shirley Frederic, and Homer Frederic; costs to be paid by the defendant.”
Did my mother know that her father asked for and was granted custody of her and her siblings? If so, she never told me. In a time when custody almost always went to the mother, how had Azemar convinced the court to grant him custody? Was my grandmother an unfit mother? Is that why she didn’t appear at the hearing? Was she afraid to answer questions about her competence to raise her children? Or as a poor woman with a seventh grade education was she intimidated by the legal system? An even bigger question, why didn’t Azemar retain custody of his children? Why did my mother and her siblings go back to living with members of their maternal family: my mother and Shirley with their great-grandmother Mary Williams or Mama (accent on the second syllable)—who in 1934 was sixty years old—and Homer with his grandmother Ada Daste, his mother, and her second husband?
A story about a kidnapping trickles back to me as if it had been waiting for me to decipher its meaning like an unearthed artifact. When I imagine the children’s kidnapping, it’s a chilly December night. The day’s storm leaves the taste of frisson in the air, everything unsettled. The streets guttered with oak leaves, scattered like so many promises.
“Are you sure about this?” Mickey asks Camille as she parks the pickup truck in front of the Iberville house.
“I can’t let him keep my kids. They’re mine. I don’t want that woman raising them.” Camille stares at the house. All the windows are dark. Everyone is asleep.
“You should have gone to the courthouse and fought for them,” Mickey whispers. “Why didn’t you go?”
“Would it have made a difference?” Camille looks at her sister.
“You’ll never know will you?”
Camille can feel her courage wane. “Those are my children in there. It’s not right what the court did.”
“What if he wakes up?”
“Have you forgotten what a deep sleeper he is?”
“Let’s hope she is too.”
“You worry too much, sis.” Camille pats her sister’s hand. “I won’t be long.”
She opens the passenger door and steps out, feeling the chill night on her bare skin like a warning. I should have worn a sweater. I should have fought for my children.
She doesn’t need to look back to know her sister’s eyes are watching her as she moves toward the house. She feels the weight of their judgment. Somewhere nearby a dog starts barking and she quickens her pace moving into the shadow of the house and around the back where the children sleep.
Alvera told her she sleeps in a back bedroom with Shirley and Homer and that the room is yellow, her favorite color. She glared at her as if to say I don’t need you. That dark glare was what convinced her to steal her children away from their father. Already he was giving them things beyond her. Soon they would forget her, as if they were motherless.
When she tries the back door, she finds it unlocked as she thought it would be. Azemar and his carelessness. Once inside she stands and listens. She hears the familiar snoring of her ex-husband coming from a front bedroom, pictures the woman sleeping beside him. Maybe she can tolerate his jealousy.
The children’s room is small, the beds close together. In the soft glow of the bedside lamp, she sees the yellow walls and their sleeping bodies. Gently she wakes them, putting her finger to her lips, signaling that they should be quiet. There’s no time for shoes or street clothes. She carries Homer in her arms and gestures to the girls that they should follow her.
As she leads
them out of the house, down the back steps and around the side of the house, Alvera lags behind, her usual obstinate self. There’s no time to cajole her. She sifts Homer to her other arm and grabs Alvera roughly by her shoulder, tugging her forward. Shirley has started to cry. The dog begins to howl.
When they reach the street, she sees a light go on in the house. She hustles the children into the cab of the truck then jumps into the passenger side.
“Go, go,” she tells her sister.
As they pull away from the curb, Azemar is running after them shouting something she can’t hear, something she doesn’t want to hear.
“Now what?” Mickey asks.
Camille kneels on the seat to look back at her three children huddled together, shivering in their nightclothes.
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that part out yet.”
After that night my mother would never live with her father again.
What precipitated the kidnapping I can’t be sure—desperation, anger, fear? Maybe my grandmother Camille knew about Azemar’s marriage and didn’t want her three children raised by another woman. Even more perplexing is why she kidnapped her three children and then relinquished two of them to another relative to raise. Was her action one of spite or misguided love?
My mother related the kidnapping story several times to me. And each time she told the story it was as if the kidnapping had happened to someone else. Her light tone and the mischievous expression on her face made her appear detached from what was obviously a story of loss and confusion. Her past seemed to belong to someone else.
“We were stolen from my father, in the middle of the night,” she said.
“Weren’t you upset and scared.”
“No.”
She never wavered in her belief that being stolen from her father by her mother was anything but an amusing anecdote.
In 1936 when her mother married her second husband Arthur Romero, the possibility of a stable home was once again dangled in front of my mother and her siblings. But my grandmother seemed to have no knack for picking husbands or keeping her family under one roof.
Four years after her marriage to Arthur, my grandmother was residing in the same house with Arthur, her mother Ada, stepfather Homer, her son Homer from her first marriage and her one-year-old son Warren Romero from her second marriage. My mother and her sister Shirley were living apart from their mother, grandmother, and brother, in a boarding house run by their great-grandmother Mary Williams.
“Wasn’t it sad for you not living with your mother?” I once asked her.
She shook her head. “Not really. I could visit her whenever I wanted and if they started drinking I could leave and go home.”
Again, I felt she wasn’t being totally honest, denying the pain she must have felt as a child not living with either of her parents. But I wasn’t able to question her any further because with alacrity she was on to a story about Mr. Arthur, whose name she could barely say without contempt.
“I called the police on him once. I was glad I did. I’m the only one who had the courage to do that.” Her back bristled with angry self-righteousness.
“Why did you call the police? Was he beating on your mother?” I’d known for years about the physical abuse my grandmother endured from Mr. Arthur.
“He called me a bastard. I yelled at him, ‘I’m no bastard. I have a father.’ Then he tried to hit me. No man was going to hit me. There was this talcum can nearby. I picked it up and threw it at his head. That’s when I called the police. The police came and took him away. Mother begged me to go down to the station and talk to the police so he could come home. I didn’t want to do it. But she kept saying, ‘He’s my husband. He didn’t mean it.’ So I got him out of jail. He never messed with me again.”
Then she added, almost wistfully, as if she couldn’t let the story end here, with an abusive man who was arrested because he called her a bastard and tried to hit her.
“That man loved his job at the A&P. Never missed a day of work in his life. That’s all he talked about was that job at the A&P.” Her eyes had that far away look of memory. “When I was a child sometimes I visited them, my mother would give me a nickel for a bucket of beer and tell me to go get it. I didn’t like that. Because I knew they’d be drinking and I knew where that would lead. I didn’t like that at all.”
“I asked my mother how she could stay with that man,” my mother said.
“Because I love him,” she said.
My mother took in a sharp breath as if smelling something foul. “I never understood how she could stay with him.”
Though Camille and Arthur remained married until his death in 1973, their marriage continued to be fraught with physical abuse fueled by their bouts of drinking. To my mother’s dismay, Mr. Arthur died peacefully in his sleep. My grandmother woke to find his cold body beside her in their marital bed.
I remember with clarity my mother receiving the phone call from my grandmother about Mr. Arthur’s death. I listened to the clipped tone of her responses, the lack of sympathy for her mother.
After she hung up, she seemed burdened not by Mr. Arthur’s death but what her mother said to her.
“You have to understand Alvera, he was my husband.”
My grandmother remained an enigma to me as well. She was always kind and loving toward me, and for a short time when I was in grammar school, we exchanged letters. At the time, she was the only adult who thought a monkey would make a good pet. I loved that about her, her willingness to enter my world.
The few scant photos of her tell me little. In every photo, she struggles to smile, a look of bewilderment on her face as if life has left her stunned, unable to respond.
The photograph I gave the Roadshow is dated December 24, 1951, six days after my brother was born. My grandmother had come to Ohio to help care for me while my mother convalesced in the hospital after giving birth. The color photo was taken in the upstairs apartment of my father’s cousin’s house, where my parents lived before purchasing their first house.
Camille sits on a couch festooned with a flowery, splashy slipcover that she made during her two-week visit. At forty-six she’s plump, waistless with fine thin hair. She gazes down at my brother whom she holds with one hand as if uncertain what to do with him, her other hand grasps me close to her. She’s as pale skinned as I am.
My father must have taken the photograph. As he steadied the camera and looked through the lens, he had no idea that his mother-in-law was mixed race. He was seeing a light-skinned woman with European features. As a passable mixed-race person she could visit her daughter who was living on the other side. She was complicit in my mother’s deception.
What fascinated me about my grandmother and what I took pride in were her artistic skills. Like me she wrote poetry. No one else in the family on either side wrote poems. She was an extraordinary seamstress who worked for an awning company in New Orleans sewing. Her eye for spatial measurements was so acute she could sew anything without a pattern. She was credited with second sight, which meant she was born with the caul over her face, giving her powers of precognition. Her psychic insights would visit her in dreams.
But whatever gifts she possessed, as I grew older I realized she was her own worst enemy. She seemed the embodiment of the New Orleans motto of letting the good times roll. My mother called her a flapper, a good time girl. The closest she would come to criticizing her mother.
Years before my grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she sold her body to a medical school for fifty dollars. According to my mother, she spent the fifty dollars at the racetrack that day. After her death, I could never locate a gravesite for her, giving credence to her donating her body to science.
Her carpe diem attitude toward life eventually was the death of her. When a doctor cautioned Camille to have a biopsy on a lump she’d found in her breast, she ignored his advice. By the time she returned to the doctor, he recommended a double mastectomy. But she’d waited too long. The double mas
tectomy only bought her a few years.
While she was dying, my mother resisted going home to see her. The thought of New Orleans, of home, filled her with dread and foreboding. It took my father to convince her to fly to New Orleans to see her mother one last time.
“You’ll regret it if you don’t,” he said.
What emotional barrier stood in the way of my mother seeing her mother before she died? For all her protestations to the contrary, did she harbor resentment toward her? Was it too overwhelming to confront her jumbled feelings about her mother?
Reluctantly she went. It didn’t go well. Her mother’s cancer had metastasized throughout her body and into her bones. She was in great pain.
When my mother tried to sit on Camille’s bed to give her a hug, Camille told her not to sit on her bed, not to hug her. My mother was wounded by what she viewed as rejection.
The sting of her childhood abandonment was evident in her inability to understand that her mother wasn’t rejecting her. Sitting on her bed would have increased her mother’s pain and hugging her would be torture. In death, mother and daughter were beyond those intimacies.
When my mother returned from New Orleans, she sank into a depression.
My grandmother died in 1982 at the age of seventy-seven. In the aftermath of her death and my mother’s subsequent depression, I tried to make sense of my grandmother’s life and her relationship with Mr. Arthur in a poem. The violence that underpinned their marriage, that caused my mother to lose respect for her mother, I saw as a violent duet, an apache dance that neither could escape.