by Gail Lukasik
Dearest Philomene,
That I live to pen you this letter is no small miracle. By now you know of Port Hudson. But do you know of the trap we were led into? I think the old Veteran my father looks out for me. I have sad news. Lt. John Crowder that I wrote to you of perished. His death and the treatment of his body have made me more determined to see this through. Pray for me.
Your loving husband,
Leon
The day after the battle at Port Hudson, Captain Lewis, who had failed to report the soldier for exposing himself to a woman, was arrested for cowardice—a small measure of justice.
Leon finished his three years of service and was never again listed on a muster roll as “Deserted.”
Ike Edwards emails me Leon’s service record. After the Battle at Port Hudson, he was stationed at Port Hudson until May 1864 when the First and Third Regiments were reassigned to Morganza, Louisiana, for the next eight months.
Because of the increased enlistment of black troops, the Bureau of Colored Troops created a new designation for the colored troops, United States Colored Troops (USCT) and renumbered the regiments. Leon’s First Regiment was renamed the Seventy-Third Regiment.
In February 1865, the Seventy-Third Regiment is picked by Major General Edward R. S. Canby, who replaced General Banks as commander of the Department of the Gulf, to help capture the last rebel stronghold on the Gulf Coast—Mobile, Alabama, with its two fortified positions at Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely. The Seventy-Third is one of only two black regiments chosen from Morganza.23
In a scenario similar to the assault at Port Hudson, the Seventy-Third led the charge on Fort Blakely. Although this time, the ground was level but cut up by deep ravines. The men had spent a week before the charge doing what they’d become accustomed to doing, digging approaches to the Rebel position under the constant fire of the sharpshooters.
Within five hundred yards of the main line was a Rebel rifle pit. The Seventy-Third was able to reach the rifle pit and capture several Rebel soldiers before they could escape back to their own lines. As the Seventy-Third rushed toward the Rebel fortification under heavy fire from the fort, within minutes they captured seven pieces of artillery and some prisoners.
In the last casualties of the war, the Seventy-Third suffered three killed and twenty-four wounded. These would be the last casualties the regiment would suffer. April 9, 1865, the same day as the assault, General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox in Virginia.
In writing of the regiment’s valor during the assault, Brigadier General William Anderson Pile said: “To the Seventy-Third US Colored Infantry belongs the honor of first planting their colors on the enemy parapet.”24
Mustered out of the army in September 1865, the Seventy-Third celebrated their discharge with a welcome home parade down Conti Street with fife and drum. No longer a soldier Leon settled back into civilian life. But it was an uneasy transition.
On July 30, 1866, two years after the end of the Civil War, blacks still didn’t have the right to vote. But the black veterans of the Louisiana Native Guards who fought so valiantly during the war would not let go of their belief that their service entitled them to full citizenship. Although the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1864 had granted greater freedoms to blacks, the delegates didn’t grant them the right to vote. In a backlash to the blacks’ new freedoms, early in 1866 the Louisiana state legislature, consisting mostly of former Confederates, passed a series of restrictive laws amounting to legalized slavery. Blacks needed to find a strategy to gain the vote quickly. Delegates in favor of giving blacks the vote decided to reconvene the convention on July 30, 1866, at the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans.25
While the delegates met inside the hall, outside a procession of black men neared Canal Street about one-half block from the Mechanics Institute. The parading men were demanding their civil rights. Leading the procession were three drummers and a man with a fife carrying a tattered American flag. Many of the men were army veterans who like Leon Frederic had served three years in the army and believed that entitled them to the full rights of American citizens.26 If Leon wasn’t among the marching Union army veterans, he was well aware of what was happening that day.
On the corner of Common and Dryades streets, across from the Mechanics Institute, the procession was met by a group of armed white men. This group was composed of Democrats who opposed abolition, most of whom were ex-Confederates.
No one knows who fired the first shot. But within minutes there erupted a battle in the streets. Most of the black men were unarmed; some sought refuge inside the Mechanics Hall. The battle lasted two and a half hours. In the melee the police were joined by hundreds of white men and boys who chased down blacks wherever they could find them.27 The police stormed the building and hunted blacks, shooting unarmed men huddled in corners with their hands in the air.28 By the time the riot was over, approximately thirty-eight people had been killed and 148 wounded, most of them black. “At least one of the dead and nine of the wounded were veterans of the Native Guards.”29
Similar riots in Memphis strengthened the determination of the Radical Republicans in Washington who captured control of the US Congress and subsequently passed a series of Reconstruction Acts in 1867, imposing federal military control over the ex-Confederate States. The Reconstruction Acts also gave black men the right to vote.30
But the victory would be short-lived. Within five years the whites regained control of Louisiana and by 1889 blacks would lose “all the political gains they had achieved, including the right to vote, when the state adopted a new constitution.”31
“For the first time since the war, we’ve got the nigger where we want him,” boasted a white New Orleanian in 1888.32
For Leon Frederic, who’d fought for the Union, the loss of the right to vote must have been a crushing blow. He’d taken a gamble on freedom through service to his country and lost.
From census records, it appears that he was adrift. Five years after the war, he’s no longer plying his trade as a shoemaker. Historian Loren Schweinger points out that after the Civil War, Creoles of color in the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth wards, the heart of the free mulatto community, “experienced losses” or “lost everything,” and this included the skilled craftsmen.33
In 1870 Leon works as a saloonkeeper, living in the Fifth Ward, and for the first time his race is listed as white. By the 1880 census he’s a cigar maker, race Mulatto. The cigar-making trade was a typical trade for free men of color.34 In the 1886 and 1892 city directory he’s a grocer living on St. Philip Street, possibly working for his father-in-law, Bernard Lanabere, who owned a grocery store. Then in 1891 his wife Philomene dies.
Six years later he’s arrested. The 1897 newspaper headline reads: “A Police Spurt to Catch Gamblers.” Under the subhead—“French Market Gambling”—Leon Frederic’s name appears.
“Last Saturday night two negro laborers Charles Brown and George Banks reported to Captain Walsh that they had been swindled out of about thirty dollars in a gambling game that was going on at the corner of St. Philip and Decatur streets. The captain, Corporal Driscoll and Officer J. Roach went to the place and arrested Leon Frederic, a collector, and Antonio Juan, a fish dealer, and locked them up on a charge of gambling. The negroes were also arrested and held as material witnesses.”
Perhaps gambling was a lifelong vice for Leon who was first arrested for gambling in August 1878. The Roadshow’s genealogist’s research notes confirm that the Leon Frederic who was arrested for gambling in 1878 and 1897 is our Leon Frederic.
Whether gambling was a lifelong problem for Leon or whether after the war he was damaged and broken like so many soldiers and turned to gambling as an outlet, it’s impossible to know. Without question my mother would have viewed her war hero ancestor in a less than favorable light because of his gambling and arrests.
But what cheers me is that by the time of Leon’s death in 1905, his life is back on track. He’s working as a clerk, living at 22
07 Ursuline Avenue, and designated colored. The last mention of his occupation of collector is in 1900. When a severe bout of bronchitis takes him, he’s residing with his daughter Rita Philomene and her children.
His obituary in the Times-Picayune is as brief as his life was full.
16
The Vagaries of War
1941–1943
ON DECEMBER 8, 1941, one day after Pearl Harbor, when the United States declared war on Japan, my father, Harold John Kalina, must have felt like the unluckiest man alive. On the advice of his father, Stephen Kalina, he enlisted in the National Guard on January 29, 1941. Though Congress had passed legislation the previous August to order the National Guard into active duty, it was for no more than twelve months and confined to the Western Hemisphere.
“It’s just a year,” his father assured him. “And you’ll learn a trade.”
The economy still hadn’t fully recovered from the Great Depression despite Roosevelt’s best efforts. A skilled trade not only would provide him with a viable income but also put him squarely in the Kalina family lineage of skilled workers. Since arriving in Cleveland, Ohio, in the late 1880s most of the Kalina men worked in one of the skilled trades from carpentry to welding.
Then the dominoes started to fall. In August 1941, by a narrow margin, Congress passed another legislation to extend the National Guard service from twelve to eighteen months and allowed for transport outside the Western Hemisphere.
By this time my father had been training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, for eight months. He must have felt the noose tightening around his neck as his dream of one year and out was snatched away.
I imagine him writing home to his family putting a good spin on his extended enlistment that they saw right through.
Dear Folks,
By now you’ve heard the news. It’s only three more months, and I’ll be home.
Love, Hal
Whatever he said or didn’t say in that letter prompted his younger brother Stephen to write a letter of his own to the Cleveland Plain Dealer expressing his frustration about the injustice of the extension. The letter is a snapshot of the country’s sentiments just prior to our involvement in World War II, demonstrating that the scars from World War I still were not healed.
The letter is titled “Feels that Draft Extension is Mistake.” Stephen quotes a silver-tongued orator, who I can only assume is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had assured the mothers and fathers of these young men currently in camps that there wouldn’t be an extension of their service.
“Your boys are not going into war, they are going to a year’s training and after twelve months will be home again and back at their jobs. I say it again and again, your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”
Stephen ends his letter by recalling a similar situation that occurred at the beginning of the US’s involvement in WWI. With bitterness, he says that the men in WWI called to serve their country had but twelve weeks training before they were shipped to France. He calls for the leaders of the country to be honest.
“Well, now, if we need these men for any other purpose than training. Why don’t our leaders come out and tell . . . the boys and we will be better Americans and better soldiers.” He points out that some of these men had high draft numbers and left good jobs to serve in the National Guard, trusting the government’s pledge of one-year service.
In a surprising close to his letter, he asks the reader, “Have you any idea how these men feel today? Don’t be surprised if we have civil war in some of these camps after January 1942.”
On the precipice of war, before Americans knew the full extent of what lie ahead, from the perspective of my uncle, my father was getting a raw deal and had been lied to by his government. What comes through to me is my uncle’s plea for honesty. Tell us why these men are in these camps. Tell us if they’ll be sent into war as ill prepared as the men who served in WWI with eight or twelve weeks training.
I don’t know the date of my uncle’s letter that appeared in the newspaper. He probably wrote it shortly after my father’s draft was extended. Did my father have a high draft number? He never said, and I never asked.
When my father related this story to me of bad luck or bad timing, the irony was still with him twenty years later. But he always added, as if afraid I wouldn’t understand, the importance of duty to one’s country. “I never regretted it, being in the war. It helped me mature.”
After my dad’s death, my mother asked me to go through his dresser drawers in his bedroom. By then my parents had been keeping separate bedrooms for decades.
When I found my Uncle Stephen’s letter scotch taped in an old photo album, the yellowing tape its own comment on time and memory, I felt that old pang of sorrow I always felt when I thought about my dad and WWII. With a daughter’s longing, I wished I’d known him before the war, if not destroyed him, then altered him drastically. I wished I’d known that dad, not the one who came home shell-shocked and suffering from bouts of malaria, determined to ease his pain with alcohol.
But if he hadn’t been stationed at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, from January 31, 1941, to March 31, 1942, he would have never met my mother.
In my dad’s photo album are a number of newspaper articles all connected to the war in some way. Though I can only guess where my parents met, one article reveals when they met. The article bears the poignantly awkward heading, “October Wedding Offsets Sadness Month Once Brought to Soldier.”
“It was three years ago, in October, 1941, that I met Alvera in New Orleans,” the sergeant said. “Before I went overseas the following April, we were engaged to be married.”
The swiftness of their courtship (six months) still stuns me. When my parents became engaged, they barely knew each other. In what could only be described as facile optimism, the reporter states that my father’s war experiences, as dire as they were, would be offset by his upcoming nuptials. “The ledger will be evened up on the side of happiness.”
I’ll never know with certainty where my father met my mother. Though two scenarios are possible. Each giving a historical glimpse into New Orleans during the war years and how the city accommodated the soldiers before they were shipped off to war.
While stationed at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, my father was given a plum assignment as a truck driver, which allowed him to make deliveries and transport men for R & R from Camp Shelby to New Orleans. He was in the Thirty-Second Division, Company E, 112th Engineers (Red Arrow Division), part of the engineer truck drivers who supplied canteen routinely in New Orleans in half-ton trucks. He was also part of the Red and Blue armies who participated in the “Louisiana Maneuvers,” which were the largest war games held in the US. One of his duties was to set up tents at the Lake Pontchartrain area for the troops to billet in as temporary quarters.
He had set hours of work and could go into New Orleans, staying overnight as long as he returned by 8 a.m. to base camp. On one of these overnight jaunts into New Orleans, he could have met my mother.
New Orleans hosted a series of chaperoned dances for the troops arranged by various organizations such as the Council of Catholic Women, Young Women’s Christian Association, St. Mark’s Community Center, New Orleans Junior League, and Veterans of Foreign Wars. The organizations supplied the women for the dances.
A Times-Picayune article dated July 5, 1941, and titled, “5127 Soldiers Storm City in 3-Day July 4th Holiday” describes the arrival of the soldiers. “Military convoys, composed of about fifty motor vehicles each, started arriving at the army recreation center at the lake near Elysian Fields Avenue . . . until a total of approximately six hundred vehicles had been parked.” Without question my father had driven one of those vehicles into the city.
The pre-war festivities sparked with innocence, hospitality, and humor. A shrimp and crab boil was held in the City Park Stadium for a thousand soldiers. “This will be a new experience for many of the men and a number of chaperones will be on hand to show the soldiers how to ‘o
perate’ on the seafood.”
The day ended with a dance at 9:30 p.m. at the Jung Hotel for fifteen hundred soldiers with partners furnished by an inter-organization volunteer committee. Was my mother at this dance? If she was, she didn’t meet my dad that evening.
All I know about their meeting is my father was too shy to approach my mother and sent his army buddy over as his emissary. Or was their meeting more casual, less orchestrated by a city accommodating the large numbers of soldiers soon to be shipped off to war?
The other possible scenario is they met at the Meal-a-Minit at 1717 Canal Street, where my mother was a hostess. The restaurant’s name was purposely misspelled to make it quicker to read, just as Joseph Gruber’s meals were served quickly. Gruber advertised in large print Seating for 1,000, and at the bottom of the sign in small print was the catch phrase TEN AT A TIME.1 As Ula explained to me, at this time my mother was working as white and was transitioning into her white identity.
Over the six months of their courtship my mother learned of my father’s tightly knit family on the west side of Cleveland, his two sisters, and one brother, and the extended family all clustered together in their Eastern-European neighborhood. The promise of family stability that my father represented must have been alluring to my mother.
There’s an autumnal photo of them at Camp Shelby dated 1941. I can tell by their clothes—my father in full dress Army uniform, his cap sitting jauntily on his head; my mother wearing a plaid suit and a white open-collared blouse—that an occasion has brought them together this day. They stand at the junction of two tents, in the background a tall fir tree as delicate as the moment. Already my father wears the red arrow insignia of his unit.
In all the years to follow, in all the years I’ll witness them together, I’ll never see my mother stand so softly beside him, so shyly, both so hesitant with feeling, a moment gentle with promise, never to return.