by Gail Lukasik
Her ability to sit in either the black or white sections of a restaurant points out the absurdity of segregation and racial categorizations.
“Ethel and I became very good friends. Even after I left New Orleans we stayed in contact. Years later I decided that I wanted her to know who I am. So I told her that I was mixed race. She said, “I’ve been knowing that.”
Her wanting to tell her friend who she was helps me understand the pressure my mother lived under, never being able to tell anyone who she really was.
She laughs. “But I fooled a lot of people.”
Then she tells me the train story, which shows the dangers of racial ambiguity. She was taking a train to meet her husband Roy. Some black friends were going to meet her at the station. When she got on the train, the conductor wanted to put her in the white car.
“I decided it wouldn’t be right my sitting in the white car because my friends were colored. So I told him that I was colored. Well, he didn’t like that. He decided he was going to fix me. He put me in a colored car filled with burly colored railroad workers.”
“Why do you think he did that?”
“He didn’t like a colored person who looked white.”
My mother’s shame blazes up before my eyes. Would her friends and white family have reacted in the same way if after all these years she revealed her mixed race?
And would they, too, become angry and “fix” her?
What angered the railroad conductor? Was his anger related to the mixing of races or that once mixed, there was no way to know for sure what race that person was? In the failure of external markers to define Ula’s race did she come too close to being like him? Who was he punishing?
I tiptoe into my mother’s decision to pass for white and her ability to live her whole life with no one knowing who she was.
“Your mother totally crossed over when she married your dad. But she had been living as white already, working white as a waitress.”
“Do you think he ever knew?”
“I would say he didn’t know.” Her confirmation supports my own belief that he never knew.
“How do you identify your race?”
“I think of myself as mixed. My oldest son during the period when black was beautiful kept saying, ‘I’m black.’ When he tried to say I was black, I said, ‘Look at me. I’m not black.’”
What Ula is describing is the two-ness, the ambivalence that people of mixed European and African ancestry feel, which is intensified by the lack of racial classifications for people of mixed race in this country, as well as the human tendency to sort people out by external markers. Mixed-race people aren’t one thing. They don’t fit into one racial category.
Then Ula relates another family story of passing that helps solve a half-century mystery about the disappearance and demise of Aunt Laura.
13
The Case of the Disappearance of Aunt Laura
2015
IHAVE SCANT heirlooms from my mother, a parsimonious woman who’d sit at the kitchen table with the window shades drawn, her ledger book open, while she worked on the family budget. My father’s allowance being one of the line items she checked off in her ledger book. Her childhood poverty clung to her like an errant gene.
When I graduated from St. Francis de Sales, a parochial elementary school, my mother gave me a ring and with it the story of Aunt Laura, the ring’s original owner. The story was as mysterious as any mystery novel I’ve ever written. Though in this case it involved a real person, my great-aunt Laura who seemed to have disappeared into thin air sometime in the early 1950s.
The ring is over 110 years old—a delicate proposition of white gold with an intricate European setting surrounding a modest diamond. It was part of a set, passed down through two generations of women in my mother’s family. It is one of the gifts I cherish most from my mother. The ring is a gift of family history—mostly unknown.
Aunt Laura lived in Toledo, Ohio, and was the only family my mother had in the North. When I was four years old, many weekends my parents made the two-hour drive from Cleveland to Toledo to visit her. I suspect it was my father’s way of pleasing my mother. I distinctly remember the quiet of Aunt Laura’s house, its dark and heavy furniture, lacy curtains, and the window seat where I sat looking at the large tree outside. And that’s all I remember.
There must not have been anything else for me to do. But I was a child, as quiet and obedient as the house, who could sit contently for hours looking and watching and listening to the hushed voices of the adults.
As soon as we’d arrive Aunt Laura would say to my father, “Son, do your duty.” Which meant go to the store for beer. If she had lived longer, if she hadn’t disappeared, I think I would have liked Aunt Laura. She retained a bit of New Orleans—that loose, casualness that my mother worked so hard to rid herself of. I don’t remember if Aunt Laura kept her New Orleans accent, which my mother washed from her mouth like dirt.
But Aunt Laura was not blood. She married my grandmother Camille’s only uncle, Edward Nichols. Both Laura and Edward were born and raised in New Orleans. What I was told by my mother, clearly an unreliable narrator, was that Edward worked for the railroad and that he and Laura left New Orleans for a railroad job in Ohio. By the time we were visiting Aunt Laura, Uncle Eddie, as my mother referred to him, was already dead.
When my mother became pregnant with my brother in 1951, we didn’t go see Aunt Laura for about a year or so. I don’t think they talked on the phone. Maybe they exchanged Christmas cards. They must have been close. Why else would she have given my mother her engagement ring?
One Saturday when my brother was old enough to travel the two hours to Toledo, we drove north again to visit Aunt Laura.
I can see my father standing on the porch of the old house, his startled expression as a black man answered the door.
When he returned to the car, my mother asked, “Where’s Aunt Laura?”
“She’s not there,” my father answered as perplexed as my mother.
“Well, where is she? Did that man say?”
“He doesn’t know. He thinks maybe she died.”
And then we drove away. We drove home to Cleveland.
After my mother gave me Aunt Laura’s ring, I questioned her about what happened to her, stunned by the story.
“She probably died. And those people bought her house from the state.”
Her response only added to my curiosity. “But why didn’t you or Dad try to find out what happened to her?” Something wasn’t right here. I could feel it.
My mother answered sheepishly, “We should have. But things were different back then. I think we might have called the police. But they didn’t know anything.” She paused. “Aunt Laura always said she’d leave us something in her will.” There was regret in her voice. I wasn’t sure if it was for Aunt Laura or the inheritance.
Over the years whenever I wore Aunt Laura’s ring I considered the transitory nature of my mother’s family—how easily people passed in and out of it as if they’d never even been here. It wasn’t until Ula mentioned Uncle Eddie in one of our conversations about passing that part of the mystery of their story became clearer to me. And I realized that once again my mother had told me another story of our family that left out the most important part.
“Uncle Eddie lived as white,” Ula told me. “He went north like your mother and passed. Laura did too. They both lived as white. He never went back. Though he did send his mother money. But he never went back home. Never saw his mother again.”
Fellow travelers, I thought, sharing a common journey away from family toward a better life. But in Uncle Eddie’s case he never returned home.
The facts of his life as recorded by state governmental documents provide the outline of his life, giving me no depth. Edward Joseph Nichols/McNickel was born in New Orleans in 1883 to Joseph McNickel and Mary Brown, the woman who raised my mother, the woman Ula called Mama and described as a Choctaw Indian. She was born in Louisiana in
St. James Parish in 1866. On every census record Mary Brown/McNickel/Williams is listed as black. Joseph McNickel, Edward’s father, was born in Ireland.
Laura Baker Nickels/McNickel was born in 1884. Her father Pat Baker was born in Germany. Although they both had white fathers, their mothers were women of color.
By the time of their wedding in 1905, decades after Reconstruction, people of color experienced increased violence, segregation, economic exploitation, and denial of citizenship rights, forcing many to pass for economic reasons.1 If the census records are to be believed Eddie achieved a seventh grade education and Laura only a third grade education.
In 1910 they are living on Chartres Street in New Orleans’ Fifth Ward, which at that time was one of the wards at the heart of the mulatto community. However, Eddie and Laura are designated as white on the 1910 census, as are their neighbors. His occupation is plumber. In the prior 1900 Louisiana census, Eddie, who was living with his mother Mary Williams, was designated black.
Residing in a city where race was scrutinized and escaping your racial community difficult, his opportunities for upward mobility were limited. As a person of mixed race, he couldn’t drive a bus, work for the telephone company or the public service.2
What finally made them decide to leave New Orleans and move to Ohio and live as white? Most likely their decision was based on economics. They had no children that might tie them to their families, and they would remain childless. Possibly economics outweighed family. Or maybe like Ula, they were tired of being hemmed in by race and segregation, judged at every turn.
The fact that Uncle Eddie never returned home to visit his mother but sent her money indicates the permanence of his decision. Maybe the money mitigated his guilt. Other than the money he sent his mother, he might as well have been dead. He truly passed on from his family.
By 1920 Eddie and Laura are living in Adams, Ohio, on Oak Grove Street. He’s working as a plumber and owns his home, no longer renting as he did in New Orleans. By 1935 Eddie attains a position of advancement as a steam fitter for the railroad. In the 1940 census Eddie works as a plumber for a private concern. They no longer own their home and are living on Woodland Avenue in Toledo, most likely the house I visited as a young child. Even today large oak trees line the street. The neighborhood is modest, clearly in decline. The houses date from the late 1800s to early 1900s.
For reasons I can’t explain my mother sent me a photograph of Uncle Eddie years after I questioned her about her mixed racial heritage. With no photo of her father to share and my continued silence about her racial heritage, maybe she wanted to give me some visual proof of one man in her family, a visual reward for keeping her secret.
He’s a striking man with white features, high cheekbones, a deeply dimpled chin, and dark wavy hair. He looks Native American. But he could easily pass as white.
Ula described Eddie’s mother Mary Brown as very dark. Based on Mary Brown’s marriage certificate, which names her mother as Elizabeth Johnson, born in 1832 in South Carolina, there’s a possibility that Elizabeth Johnson was born into slavery.
My curiosity about Uncle Eddie and Aunt Laura isn’t satisfied. The mystery remains: what happened to Aunt Laura? Tracking down details about Uncle Eddie proves easier than I anticipated with the help of Ancestry.com, Family Search, and the Ohio death records. Uncle Eddie died at home in 1948 of a coronary occlusion at the age of sixty-four. His death certificate reads white for race. Laura buried him at Calvary Cemetery in Toledo, a Catholic cemetery.
When I call the cemetery to ask which church they might have belonged to, the woman tells me they don’t keep records of the churches. I also ask if his wife Laura Nichols is buried in the cemetery. It takes her a scant few minutes to tell me no. Another blind alley in my search for what happened to Aunt Laura.
From the Find A Grave website, I discover his headstone. A volunteer had kindly taken a photograph of it. The headstone reads “Edwin J. Nichols, 1883–1948.” In death his first name is misspelled. But he fared better than his wife Laura, who died without family to properly bury her. At least that’s what I assume since I can’t find a record of her death yet.
With no clear death date for Aunt Laura, I search Ancestry.com, Family Search, and Ohio vital records in vain. Relying on my mother’s story of what happened to Aunt Laura, I guess at her death occurring a year after my brother’s birth, which would be 1952. All my searches are fruitless. In my mind, I see her dying alone in the dark house with the side bay window, her body discovered by neighbors, the county disposing of her body and her possessions. She becomes for me a cautionary tale of passing and loss.
As if I can redeem her story, I take her ring to a local jeweler and have it appraised. Perhaps its antiquity, over one hundred years old, might be valuable, adding a gloss over her lonely death. When I get the appraisal, I’m disappointed. The ring is valued at 435 dollars. “One bead-set, Old European cut diamond. Diamond weight is 0.19 carat,” the appraisal reads.
In my initial enthusiasm when I dropped the ring off to be appraised, I told the jeweler the story of Aunt Laura who disappeared and was never found. Now I realize that the ring’s value is the story, which I’ll pass down to my daughter along with the ring and she’ll pass it down to one of her daughters. In this way Aunt Laura will live on through the women in my family who will know this piece of my mother’s family history of passing.
But I can’t let the story end here. In a last-ditch effort to find out what happened to Aunt Laura, I enlist the aid of two librarians. Sonia Schoenfield is the genealogy librarian at Cook Memorial Library in Libertyville, Illinois, who offered her services after I gave two presentations about my appearance on Genealogy Roadshow and my mother’s story at the library. The other librarian is Becky Hill, Head Librarian at the Rutherford B. Hayes Library in Fremont, Ohio. Though I ask for their help a week apart, their discoveries come within a day of each other. And what they discover is a surprising ending to the disappearance of Aunt Laura.
Initially, Sonia locates an obituary for a Laura Nicholas in 1968 in the Toledo Lucas County Public Library. I tell her it can’t be my aunt. The death date is wrong, and I’m certain she was buried in a pauper’s grave and her estate was turned over to the state of Ohio. Sonia also finds Edward Nichols’s obituary, and I order it, thinking it may hold clues to Laura.
The next day Becky Hill’s email arrives solving the sixty-three-year-old mystery of Aunt Laura. Mrs. Laura Nichols died in Perrysburg, Ohio, in 1968 at the age of eighty-five. At the time of her death she was living in a Perrysburg nursing home. She was buried at St. Rose Catholic Church Cemetery.
I’m stunned. Because I’d relied solely on my mother’s account of Aunt Laura’s disappearance, I rejected Sonia’s finding of a 1968 death date. But there’s no denying the obituary in the Daily Sentinel Tribune, dated April 29, 1968.
Questions race through my mind all leading back to my mother’s conviction that Laura died alone in her house in Toledo in the early 1950s. I order the obituary, which may contain more information about Laura. What I want to know is her mother’s name. The marriage license says her father was Pat Baker. I know he was from Germany. But I can’t decipher her mother’s first name.
When the obituary arrives in the mail, it provides no new information about Aunt Laura. It ends: “She was born in New Orleans, but spent most of her life in the Toledo area.”
The solution of the mystery of Aunt Laura’s disappearance is bittersweet. All those years lost I could have visited my New Orleans aunt, gotten to know her, learned about her and my Uncle Eddie. I could have had a window into my mother’s family.
Other questions that will never be answered trouble me. Why didn’t my mother, who claimed she was in Laura’s will and who was given her engagement ring, ever try to find her? Was there a falling out? Why wouldn’t Aunt Laura tell my mother that she was moving? There’s a missing piece.
Or was my mother following the familial pattern that had been established so early in
her life? Family slipping in and out, not to be relied upon or sought after, the rejection too deep to matter, better to let them go, consider them dead.
I reject out of hand any notion that my mother feared Aunt Laura would reveal her secret because in doing so, she’d be revealing her own secret. They were complicit in each other’s deceit.
With what slyness they must have sat in the shadowy living room among the heavy furniture, the lacy white curtains, chatting while the oblivious husband contentedly drank his beer.
Or was their transformation so complete, so a part of their psyches, it never occurred to them that they were anything but what they appeared, what they were playing at: two white women from New Orleans who made good by coming north to Ohio.
I’ll never know why my mother lost touch with Aunt Laura or why she didn’t try to find her. But I find consolation in knowing she didn’t die alone in her house and wasn’t buried in a pauper’s grave—which would have been a terrible price to pay for permanently passing as white. Someone had looked out for her. Someone had stood in for family.
As I place the ring back in the turquoise velvet box where I keep it, I wonder if Laura or Edward ever regretted their decision to live as white and turn their backs on their families. Or like Ula they regretted the circumstances. One thing I’m certain of is they served as trailblazers for my mother. They showed her a way to escape her “one drop” of African blood, how to capitalize on her white appearance, and how to disappear into whiteness.
14
Gens de Couleur Libre
“Neither Black Nor White, Neither Slave Nor Entirely Free.”
—Mary Gehman, The Free People of Color of New Orleans.
GROWING UP IN New Orleans’ mixed-race and black neighborhoods, my mother lived the color-caste system. There’s little doubt that she knew of the paper-bag skin test: if your skin color was the color of a brown paper bag or lighter then you were allowed to join certain social organizations, fraternities, and sororities. Dr. Audrey Kerr in her book The Paper Bag Principle notes that in New Orleans there were “paper bag parties” where you had to be a certain complexion to attend. I don’t know if my mother attended paper bag parties, but if she did, she would have passed easily.