White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  “Lloyd Bridges could have been your father,” my children teased me. Were we all uncomfortable with this mother and grandmother who bore no resemblance to the one we knew?

  An undertone to all these stories and all her dates and adventures in California is a kind of boastful pride: “See, what I got away with. No one knew. Not even the boarders at Mrs. Jackson’s boarding house. I fooled a lot of people.”

  Of all her stories of that time period, there was one that had particular poignancy and made me question my mother’s commitment to my father. The soldier’s name was Michael, whose last name she could never remember but whose words she could never forget.

  From Chicago, Michael was dark-haired and swarthy, the kind of looks my mother gravitated toward. Probably he reminded her of the men from her neighborhood who she’d grown up with, the ones she determined never to marry. Though Michael was Italian not mixed race.

  After her broken engagement and before leaving for California, she met Michael in New Orleans.

  “We’d have these discussions about God. He said he didn’t believe in God. I told him I’d pray for him,” was how she explained their relationship, philosophical and deep.

  When he was shipped overseas, they continued corresponding even after she was living in Los Angeles. He was stationed in England and from there he was to be shipped to Normandy, France, to fight in the D-day invasion on June 6, 1944.

  In his last letter to her he told her he was motorcycling around England enjoying the sights. He ended the letter saying, “I was in a room full of people and I was lonely without you.”

  Michael died before the invasion. A few days before being sent to France, he was killed in a motorcycle accident in England.

  My mother received a telegram informing her of his death.

  “When I got the telegram I fell to the floor and wept.”

  By September my parents were engaged again, their wedding scheduled for October 25, 1944.

  Toward the end of my mother’s life, she talked about Michael with such yearning as if his death had robbed her of happiness, as if she wished he’d lived so she could have married him instead of my father. Would her life have turned out differently if she had married Michael from Chicago? I doubt it. As I knew too well, it was impossible for her to fully reveal who she was. And Michael, like my father, would always have sensed something being held back, some part of her that she would not share. But she had a way of denying what she did not want to see, a way of living in the fantasy she created and re-created every day. Sometimes I envied her ability to live in a world of denial.

  After my father’s death, I visited her and we went for a walk around the suburban neighborhood where I grew up. It was a late summer day when the afternoon light seemed to hold its breath, making everything look better than it was. Even the patches of lawn appeared misty with light.

  We set off from the green house weaving our way through the middle-class streets, the tract houses, and the older homes. As we walked past John Muir Elementary School where I used to play as a child, my mother said, apropos of nothing, “No man will ever love me again.”

  She was newly widowed, still struggling with losing her husband of fifty-two years. Though she admitted to me that since my father’s death she no longer felt depressed. That his death had freed her from the weight of his anger usually directed at her. I still knew she missed him if only the habit of his presence.

  I kept walking, keeping pace with her fast stride. Taken aback by her brutal honesty, her regretfulness and loss, I said nothing.

  An immense sadness welled up inside of me as I turned to look at her as if I needed to verify the truth of her words. Would no man ever love her again?

  She still wore her hair as she did in the 1960s—teased and sprayed into a dark halo around her head. Her eyebrows had thinned and were penciled in. Her beige slacks were shapeless with an elastic waistband that pouched out her stomach. She’d given way to comfort foregoing vanity. Even her shoes were white Keds so pristine in their whiteness as if she’d just taken them from their box.

  But most striking was her face—the softening of her skin that teetered on the brink of sagging. For all her creams and face exercises she was visibly aging. Yet, her gait was vigorous and quick, as she’d shared with me an intimacy I didn’t think her capable of. For those few moments walking the old neighborhood, she’d let me see a sliver of her real self.

  For a woman who’d prided herself on her beauty, who used her beauty to her advantage, was she mourning her loss of romantic love or was she mourning what she traded for that love?

  Alvera Frederic, New Orleans, Louisiana, possibly 1942.

  The Safari Room, Algiers, Louisiana, 1951. From left to right: Aunt Mickey (Mildred Kilbourne Duffaut), my grandmother’s sister; my grandmother, Camille (Kilbourne) Frederic Romero; Rhea Cruzat, Aunt Mickey’s daughter; Charles Cruzat, Rhea’s husband.

  St. Ann Street, New Orleans, Louisiana, possibly 1927. From left to right: Shirley Frederic, Homer Frederic, and Alvera Frederic.

  Camp Shelby, Mississippi, 1941. Alvera Frederic and Harold Kalina.

  Jackson household picnic, Los Angeles, California, 1944. Coleen Gray, the noir film star, is in the foreground. My mother is fourth in from the right.

  My parent’s wedding photograph. Cleveland, Ohio, October 25, 1944.

  Photograph of my parents taken by a Cleveland Plain Dealer photographer to accompany the October, 1944 article, “October Wedding Offsets Sadness Month Once Brought Soldier.”

  Edward Kilbourne, my mother’s maternal uncle, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  Homer Frederic, my mother’s brother, and Ula Duffaut, my mother’s maternal first cousin. New Orleans, Louisiana, 1946.

  Leon Frederic, Sr.’s enlistment document for the Union Army, First Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards, September 3, 1862, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  Alvera Frederic’s birth certificate, October 21, 1921, designating her as “colored.”

  Alvera Frederic, Meal-A Minit restaurant, Canal Street, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  Harold Kalina, Technical Sergeant, United States Army, Co. A, 114th Engineer Combat Battalion, WW II.

  Camille (Kilbourne) Frederic Romero, New Orleans, Louisiana.

  18

  Antebellum Love and Sex

  The Cabinetmaker and the French Grocer

  KENYATTA BRINGS UP on the screen Leon Frederic and his wife Philomene Lanabere Frederic. She explains that Philomene’s father was Bernard Lanabere who was born in France. So my mother didn’t lie. We are French. In the nest of half-truths and deceptions, she told the truth about her French heritage.

  Then she brings up another screen that sends a quiver of excitement up my spine. Ursin Frederic, born in New Orleans, 1790; his wife/consort, Roxelane Arnoux, born in 1808 in Santiago de Cuba. Ursin and Roxelane are Leon Frederic’s parents.

  In the whirlwind of the moment with the cameras running, the low buzz in the Grand Hall, and my family surrounding me, it hits me: the Frederics have been in this country since 1790. My mother’s family has deep roots in Louisiana. Ursin Frederic, born 1790.

  I wait for the next revelation, Ursin’s parents. But it never comes. It will be up to me to find his parents. My search will prove to be more difficult and astonishing than I could have anticipated, elucidating the complex story of race in America.

  My hunt for Ursin Frederic begins with the baptismal records of the Archdiocese of New Orleans Office of Archives and Records. But the archives turn out to be the first of many stumbling blocks in finding Ursin Frederic and his parents. There’s no record of Ursin Frederic in the baptismal records for 1784–1795. The researcher/archivist, Jack Belsom, who I’ll become friendly with over the next six months, writes: “The early records of the Archdiocese show references to the Frederic family in St. Charles Parish, on the so-called “German Coast.” Then he adds that the baptismal records were destroyed in a fire in the nineteenth century.

  I puzzled over the German Coast
Frederics. Who were they? Are we related to them? If so, could my mother have gotten it wrong? Were the Frederics German and not French?

  Ancestry.com offers no link between the German Coast Frederics and Ursin. I’m at an impasse and realize that I have two choices: go to Baton Rouge where the archives are stored or hire an onsite genealogist.

  I reach out to Rich Venezia, the Roadshow’s genealogist who did our family research. Rich and I have kept in contact since the taping of the show. He’s an affable and generous man who once was an aspiring actor. I’ve written a testimonial for his website, Rich Roots, lauding his research skills. He suggests several genealogists, one of whom is Judy Riffel, a Baton Rouge genealogist who specializes in Louisiana records and research. She’s also done genealogical and historical research for numerous television shows including Genealogy Roadshow. She is the perfect fit for my research project. For the next four months she and I will travel a genealogical road together full of bumps and turns and surprises, emailing and talking on the phone. Though she makes many amazing genealogical discoveries about the Frederic family line, one discovery eludes her: Ursin’s parentage.

  The first surprise concerning Ursin comes from the War of 1812 pension applications at the Louisiana State Archives. Roxelane Arnoux, Ursin’s consort, applied for a pension as Ursin Frederic’s widow. Judy reconfirms that Ursin Frederic is my third great-grandfather and that Roxelane Arnoux is my third great-grandmother.

  Ursin was a private in the company of Captain Saint Gems, Colonel de la Ronde’s regiment, under the command of General J. B. Plauche. From Powell Casey’s book, Louisiana in the War of 1812, Judy pinpoints that Colonel P. Denis de la Ronde of Plaquemines Parish commanded the third regiment of the General Militia of uniformed men.

  “In light of this,” she writes, “I believe Ursin Frederic was most likely a white man.”

  Her conclusion destroys the narrative I’ve begun to construct about Ursin and Roxelane, as both being free people of color. I stare at her revelation experiencing in reverse my initial surprise at discovering that Azemar Frederic was mixed race.

  In a follow-up email, I ask for clarification of her belief. Her answer is clear. “The regiments in the General Militia on the list I sent you were white. The free men of color were organized in separate battalions. I checked those and none of them matched the description Roxelane Arnoux gave for Ursin’s service. The Third Regiment under P. de la Ronde was the closest match.”

  If Ursin Frederic was indeed a white man, as it appears he was, then that explains why he never married Roxelane Arnoux, making her his consort. At that time, marriage between whites and free people of color was illegal in Louisiana. Although Ursin and Roxelane never married, they have four children together: John Frederick born 1829, Rosa Frederick born 1834, Gustave Leon Frederick born 1836 (my second great-grandfather), and Hermina Frederick born 1843.

  I examine more closely Roxelane’s legal application for a widow’s pension and receive another jolt. Near the end of the document, the clerk notes: “Personally appeared before me Bernard Lanabere and Simon Picolle, which are creditable persons.” The document states that these two men attest to Roxelane Arnoux being the widow of Ursin Frederic.

  Bernard Lanabere (my third great-grandfather) is the father of Leon Frederic’s wife Philomene Lanabere Frederic. Bernard, like Ursin, is another white man in my mother’s paternal family tree who had children with women of color. Their stories converge and merge, demonstrating the closeness of the family’s two branches.

  “Papa, you have to help Leon’s mother obtain her widow’s pension,” Philomene must have pleaded. “You have standing in this community and you are a white man. The court will listen to you.”

  That April day in 1873 Bernard Lanabere, a white man, appeared in court before the clerk of the Supreme Court in New Orleans and attested that Roxelane Arnoux, a free woman of color, was the widow of Ursin Frederic. The term widow throws me. How can Roxelane be a widow if she and Ursin were never married? Clearly, the clerk who approved her right to receive Ursin’s pension accepted Roxelane as his widow.

  Whatever the definition of Roxelane’s cohabitation with Ursin Frederic was, the Frederic lineage of free people of color can be traced back to the union of Ursin Frederic and Roxelane Arnoux. Their story is embedded in Louisiana’s history of sexual relationships and racial blending during the early American and antebellum years. Their interracial union, like so many others of the time, contributed to Louisiana’s three-tier caste system: white, free person of color, and slave.

  When Roxelane Arnoux applied for a widow’s pension, she was acknowledging her place in that caste system as a free woman of color and relying on the status that accompanied her place. Inherent in that caste system, as races blended over time, was the light skin and European features that would be the outcome of some of these relationships, creating people like my mother who could pass for white if they desired to cross over the color line and rejoin their white ancestors, breaching the racial barriers that Louisiana and other Southern states chiseled into law.

  Armed with the knowledge that Ursin was a white man and using New Orleans city directories and the 1798 census of Faubourg Sainte-Marie, Judy fleshes out Ursin’s life, compiling evidence that he may have descended from the German Coast Frederics, as Jack Belsom suggested.

  The German Coast Frederics were one of the first families of Louisiana. In the early 1720s, about eighty years before Louisiana became a part of the United States, Johann Conrad Friederich, his wife Ursula Freyen, and their three children immigrated to Louisiana’s German Coast, most likely lured there by the Company of the Indies who brought Rhenish, Palantine, Alsatian, and Swiss German expert farmers to feed the starving, fledgling French colony. They settled on the right bank of the Mississippi River in the German village of Hoffen, ten leagues above New Orleans. Conrad was from Rothenberg, Germany, and was Catholic. The German Coast was one of the earliest settled areas of the Louisiana territory.

  At the time of the 1724 census, Conrad was fifty years old, had a wife, Ursula Freyen, and three children. Sebastian, the youngest, was five years old (born 1719). The census describes Conrad as “a good worker.”1

  The Friederich name throws me until I talk to Jack Belsom who explains that French officials often “frenchified” German surnames. An amusing anecdote explains the changing of the German surname Zweig. In the marriage contract between Jean Zweig and Susanna Marchand, the French notary changed Zweig to Labranche. Probably the French notary found the German surname difficult to pronounce and write and asked what the name meant. The marriage contract noted that Jean Zweig wasn’t able to write. When Zweig told the notary that Zweig meant branch, the notary wrote Labranche as his surname. And the name Labranche was never changed back to Zweig.

  In my search for German Coast Frederics, I find another Friederich listed in the 1724 census, Mathias from Wingersheim, Alsace. It’s unclear what the familial relationship is between Conrad and Mathias or whether there is one or if Ursin is descended from either line.

  According to Richard Stringfield’s book, Le Pays de Fleurs Oranges, in 1750, Jean Adam Frederic, Johann Conrad Friederich’s grandson and possibly Ursin’s grandfather, left the German Coast at the age of ten and went to live in Plaquemines Parish.2 Whether Jean Adam was sent away to learn a trade or was a recalcitrant boy, ten seems a young age for a child to leave his parental home, suggesting the strictures of the time when children often died young and were expected to grow up fast to assume adult responsibilities. Even portraits of children of the period show them dressed in adult style clothing as if they skipped childhood altogether.

  Jean Adam Frederic married Genevieve Millet, whose parents emigrated from France to Louisiana prior to 1745. When the hurricane of August 18, 1793, hit the area, Jean Adam and the extended Frederic family, numbering forty-one people, sustained significant losses. Crop losses included rice, corn, indigo, and oranges. Livestock such as sheep, chickens, turkey, and pigs were also lost in
the devastating hurricane.

  Spanish archival documents show that a collection was taken up in New Orleans for the family’s benefit. The documents refer to the Adam (Frederic) family as unfortunate, describing their circumstances as “reduced to the utmost distress having lost everything in the hurricane.” The direness of their loss is evident in two charitable gifts: various types of fabric from Mr. Lisle Sarpy and seven red coats from Mr. Colin L’Anve. The hurricane had literally taken the clothes off their backs. The hurricane was a turning point for many of the extended Adam Frederic family. Some of the family decided to leave Plaquemines Parish and try their fortunes in New Orleans.

  In the 1798 census Jean Adam Frederic (age fifty-eight) is living in the Faubourg Sainte-Marie. In that same census, a Jean Frederic, carpenter, is living just two households away from Jean Adam Frederic at the corner of St. Philip and Rampart. Considering their proximity of residences, ages and same last name, it’s possible Jean Fredric is Jean Adam’s son. But is Jean Frederic Ursin’s father?

  Adding to the evidence that Ursin is related to the German Coast Frederics, in the 1811 city directory there is a J. L. Frederick residing at the corner of St. Philip and Rampart, the same address that Ursin will reside at in 1822. Most likely J. L. Frederick is Jean Frederic who lived two households away from Jean Adam Frederic in 1798. The 1822 city directory lists Ursin as a cabinetmaker. Perhaps he learned the trade of cabinet making from Jean Frederic, carpenter, who may have been his father. That the building at the corner of Rampart and St. Philip was a carpenter’s shop is supported by an 1828 advertisement for the sale of several lots at auction, one of which is between Rampart and Phillippa Street, where the carpenter’s shop was lately burnt.