White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  What motivated Bernard to leave the tiny hamlet of Serres-Castet? Perhaps he was frustrated by the area’s growing economic stagnation, which prompted many young men, particularly peasants, to leave France in search of economic opportunity.12 If he stayed in Serres-Castet, he most likely would have followed in his father’s occupation of farming, bent to a plow, eking out a substandard existence. Maybe he traveled to Bordeaux thinking the city would offer him better options, only to discover that other rural artisans, peasants, and workers, displaced by France’s recession, sought refuge there between 1830 and 1840, creating shanty towns, which were breeding grounds for cholera outbreaks.13 Faced with such grim prospects but determined not to return to Serres-Castet, Bernard booked passage on a sailing ship in steerage (between-deck).

  Likely he would have had to pay the exorbitant fare that was being charged at the time by unscrupulous European ship owners.14 It’s possible he heard of the New Orleans French community and its booming economy, incentives for a young Frenchman compelled by difficult economic circumstances. Like many of the immigrants, he traveled to New Orleans in a seasonal pattern, timing his arrival in November to avoid the summer season rampant with hurricanes, yellow fever, and malaria.15

  Traveling in steerage was not for the faint of heart. Bernard would have been required to bring his own bedding. Though food was provided, passengers had to cook it. And if it was a rough crossing, they had little time in the fresh air, confining them below deck. Steerage was crowded, dark, damp, rat infested, and rampant with insects and disease. There was limited sanitation, which made it a dirty and foul-smelling place. Passengers slept, ate, and socialized in the same spaces. Certainly steerage was a breeding ground for sickness, accounting for many deaths at sea.16

  By 1841 Bernard is living with Felicite Meyronne, a free woman of color, and they have a daughter, Philomene Lanabere, born in New Orleans in 1841. His occupation is listed as coffeehouse. Because he is a white man and Felicite is a free woman of color, they could not marry legally in New Orleans, suggesting this may have been a plaçage relationship. The same Louisiana Civil Code that prohibited free people of color from marrying slaves also banned marriages between whites and free people of color, an indication of the racial barriers in Louisiana.17 Bernard faced the same barrier to marriage as Ursin did.

  Possessed of an entrepreneurial spirit, in January of 1854, Bernard applied for a license for a cabaret at the corner of Bayou Road and Johnson. Later that year he sailed to France, returning to New Orleans October 28 on the ship Lemuel Dryer. Unlike his first voyage to New Orleans in steerage, this time he is one of only twelve cabin passengers. His occupation is listed as merchant. In eighteen years, the poor farmer’s son from Serres-Castet has turned his life around and become the immigrant success story. On the manifest his name is spelled correctly though his age is off by one year.

  By the 1860 census Barnard is a successful grocer with real estate valued at $8,000 and personal property valued at $5,000. He and Felicite have four children: Philomene, age twenty; Jules, age eighteen, who works as a clerk in his father’s grocery store; Eugenie, age fourteen; and Azemar, age twelve. That peculiar and unusual family first name, Azemar, came from Bernard Lanabere and Felicite Meyronne.

  Not until 1870 during Reconstruction is the ban against interracial marriage lifted for a brief time. In what I consider a testament to their love and devotion Bernard at age sixty-three and Felicite at age sixty marry in 1873. They will have only five years together as a married couple. Felicite dies in 1878 of bronchitis, possibly as a result of yellow fever. In 1878 a yellow fever epidemic swept through New Orleans and the first recognized case of the disease was noted in the Charity Hospital of New Orleans. That year 4,046 people died of yellow fever. It’s likely Felicite was one of them.

  By 1880 Bernard is a retail grocer living on Orleans Street. At the time of his death in March 1883, he’s residing at 163 N. Claiborne Street in the Second Ward city of Tremé.

  Reading through the list of his movable effects is a step back in time, painting a picture of middle-class life in the late nineteenth century: one mahogany hair-bottomed parlor set, one French mirror, one old piano, one dining room set composed of six cane-bottomed chairs, one mahogany bedroom set, and silver spoons and forks. The total value of his movable effects, cash, and real estate is $3,770, the equivalent of $95,000 in today’s money. However, his debts nearly exceed his assets.

  Still Bernard has to be admired for his sense of adventure, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to family. Though I have no way of knowing if Ursin Frederic would have married his consort Roxelane Arnoux if he’d been able to, the fact that Bernard legalized his union with Felicite Meyronne speaks volumes about his regard for her and their children.

  When Bernard’s daughter, Philomene, and Ursin’s son, Leon, marry in 1861, both free people of mixed race, they are the forerunners of a pattern of endogamous marriage, which continued in a direct line through generations of the Frederic family until my mother broke that pattern in 1944 by marrying a white man and stepping outside her ethnic and racial group.

  19

  Interracial Marriage Hidden

  Cleveland, Ohio, 1944

  ON A WARM, breezy October day, my parents were married in Cleveland, Ohio, at St. Boniface Catholic Church. My mother wore a borrowed white dress and veil. No one from my mother’s family attended the ceremony. Her two bridesmaids were my father’s sisters, Bernice and Delores. All the men in the photographs, except my grandfather and Uncle Stephen, are dressed in military uniforms.

  Though passably white, my mother’s mother didn’t attend the wedding of her oldest daughter. Maybe she wasn’t invited. Maybe my mother feared her mother would drink too much, or worse, bring her husband, Mr. Arthur, or maybe it just wasn’t important to her? My father’s insistence that they marry in Cleveland, Ohio, must have delighted my mother, allowing her to keep her race hidden.

  If she had any qualms about her deception, her brief stay with my father’s family must have convinced her that they would never approve or accept her mixed race. Nor could she come clean with my father who was devoted to his family and would never go against their wishes. But social stigma was only half of the problem my mother faced, making marrying in Ohio her only option.

  In 1944, the year my parents were married, intermarriage between a white person and anyone with even the slightest drop of racial mixture was still illegal in most Southern states, including Louisiana. The law stated: “If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years.”1 That law wasn’t overturned until 1967.

  Had my mother and father married in Louisiana, there is every possibility she would have been required to produce a birth certificate, which would have shown her race as colored and they would have been prohibited from marrying.

  Though couples were rarely legally prosecuted, they were socially shunned. The case of Richard and Mildred Loving was an exception and became a landmark case for the Supreme Court. Though from Virginia, the Lovings were married in 1958 in Washington, DC, to evade Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. Mildred was of African American descent and Richard was white. Upon their return to their home in Virginia, three armed police officers burst into their bedroom and arrested them. Mildred, who was pregnant with their first child, spent several days in jail. They were found guilty. The presiding judge told Mildred, “as long as you live you will be known as a felon.” The Lovings with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union were able to have the law overturned by the Supreme Court who ruled in 1967 that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional.2

  On my parents’ marriage certificate from St. Boniface Church there was no mention of race. In marrying my father whose complexion was so white it seemed translucent, my mother genetically assured herself that her children would not be dar
k skinned. That whatever percentage of African blood she carried, it would be diluted enough not to be visible. She’d crossed over permanently.

  But still she must have worried. Ula told me that they used to wait and see what color the baby would be. Always there was that fear that a distant gene would suddenly rear its dark head and appear, visually proclaiming racial heritage.

  In Nella Larsen’s book Passing, published in 1929, Clare Kendry, who’s been passing and is married to a white man who thinks she’s white, explains to her girlhood friend, Irene Redfield, why she’s decided to have only one child.

  “After taking up her own glass, she informed them: ‘No, I have no boys and I don’t think I’ll ever have any. I’m afraid. I nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I’ll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too—too hellish.”3

  I once asked my mother why she had only two children. She answered vaguely, blaming God. “That’s all God gave me.”

  It would take her two years after her marriage to conceive me, then five years before my brother was born. Those five years between my birth and my brother’s was she calculating her risks, watching my skin color, assuring herself that she could chance a second child?

  Though I’m as porcelain white as my father, my brother favors my mother, his skin more olive toned like hers. After my brother’s birth, perhaps she thought she’d better not risk another child, whose skin might be darker and might give away her secret, causing my father to question her race.

  Her sister Shirley’s first child, Margaret, was a “throwback,” dark skinned with flat features but “good” hair. I’m sure my father accepted that Margaret’s skin and features were from her father, Alfred Coignet, who lived openly as a mixed-race person.

  Even contemporary novels deal with this issue of a throwback, as Toni Morrison calls her character Lula Ann in her novel God Help the Child. Lula Ann is “midnight black, Sudanese black.” Her mother, Sweetness, and her father, Louis, are light-skinned with good hair. Sweetness asks the question: “Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood running and hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty percent, I heard.”

  Because of Lula Ann’s skin color, Louis abandons the family. Sweetness is embarrassed by her daughter’s dark color and distances herself from her child. The novel isn’t set in the 1920s or 1930s. It’s set in the 1990s. As Sweetness explains, “Back in the nineties when Lula Ann was born, the law was against discriminating in who you could rent to, but not many landlords paid attention to it.”4

  After their wedding my parents honeymooned under Army sponsorship in Miami, Florida, for a week. Even now the photographs of their honeymoon make me uncomfortable. Their slim bodies clad in bathing suits as if those were all the clothes they could manage. There’s a humorously awkward photo of my father attempting to throw my mother into a water fountain. I have a vague memory of mother saying they didn’t leave the room very much during their honeymoon.

  The Saturday after their wedding, my father reported to his army unit for reassignment. He was assigned to a new outfit, the 1526th SU in Australia. V-J Day was ten months away. The war was not over yet for him.

  On November 21, 1944, less than a month after my parents’ wedding on October 25, 1944, my father was hospitalized at Billings General Hospital, Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. He’d found a way out of his personal hell.

  20

  War’s Aftermath

  2015

  SEVEN MONTHS AFTER I’d written my father’s war years section of the book, his military personnel records arrive. I don’t expect any additional information about his time in combat, mainly because a fire destroyed most of his records that were kept at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri. Even the letter informing me that there is information regarding my father’s service record warns me that because of the fire the records may be incomplete. Even though I don’t know what is in the surviving records, I can’t leave any stone unturned. If there’s a chance that I could learn something about my father’s combat service during World War II, other than what he told me and what I’d read, I have to take it. What I’m hoping to find are the battle reports that his commanding officers filled out after major incursions.

  Why this is so important to me is because what happened to him in the war might explain his descent into alcoholism.

  The packet I receive from the archives is thick and bolsters my confidence that the battle reports are part of the packet. But as I page through the contents, my hopes are deflated. Instead of battle reports, there are pages and pages of my father’s medical records, beginning with his honorable discharge from the army dated December 18, 1944.

  At the time of his discharge the records state that he was in poor physical condition. The reason for his discharge was medical. His diagnosis was “psychoneurosis, anxiety-type, severe.” The clinical record’s final diagnosis, signed by a doctor, was “combat exhaustion, severe, cause undetermined, following duty under enemy fire in New Guinea, July to November 1942, manifested by tremors, restlessness, irritability, battle dreams, and insomnia.”

  Prior to his medical discharge, he’d been hospitalized for a month. The precipitating factor for his hospitalization was an incident involving his newly assigned first sergeant. He complained to an army doctor about the first sergeant.

  “I am so disgusted with my new outfit and the First Sergeant I feel like going AWOL,” he complained. “This guy will either be a changed man within a week or else dead were he put in a combat area.”

  It’s not mentioned in his medical records but I suspect this first sergeant was the man he punched in the face in order to be termed “crazy,” his words. He’d taken this drastic action to get help for his severe psychoneurosis.

  I’m not surprised by his diagnosis. But what I am surprised by and not prepared for are the details of his medical condition, casting my father, if not in a new light, then in a different light, glaring and troubling, sapping some of my anger at him for his years of alcoholism and the damage it did to our family.

  For weeks afterward I’m haunted by what my father told the doctors and the doctor’s observations. My father died overseas and his ghost returned, a ghost as disturbed as he was disturbing.

  Other than recurrent bouts of malaria, my father had no other discernable physical maladies. He entered the hospital complaining of frequent headaches, nausea, blurring of vision in the right eye, restlessness, irritability, startled reaction to sudden noises, and nightmares.

  The doctor wrote that his history revealed that he spent two and a half years in the South Pacific, of this period over six months in front-line combat. He also had, during this time, twenty-one admissions for recurrent malaria. “Interview with soldier indicates that he is extremely tense, apprehensive, and confused about his own physical and mental states. The headaches, nausea, and general malaise he dates from the onset of his malaria. Since his removal from the overseas theater, his symptoms have remained constant in severity.”

  But what devastates me is my father’s description of his own mental state—nervous, tense, and jittery—which he attributes to his time in combat.

  “I’m so irritable, I can’t get along with no one. I feel like going over the hill,” he said. “Since I’ve gotten back to the states in November, I have a lot of trouble concentrating and I lose my head at sudden noises.”

  He described to the doctor several “narrow escapes” that he experienced during the six months and two weeks he was in combat as an infantry squad leader. On one occasion a Japanese bomber sank a corvette that his unit was being transported on as it moved up the New Guinea coast. After the ship was torpedoed, he had to swim ashore. Only one-third of the men survived. On two occasions he was almost buried alive in his foxhole by shell explosions. While on reconnaissance patrol, he fell twenty feet off a log injuring his right ankle. At the termination of his combat duty
, of the initial 126 men, only thirteen survived.

  He told the doctors that he has nightmares, which are described to him by others, but he does not recall. He gets a nauseated feeling, which comes and goes without apparent reason.

  “Sudden noises make me lose my head completely and my entire body has a queer but real feeling of being a dish rag,” he stated. “Some afternoons, I get this chill and blurring in my right eye and headaches. That’s when I think the malaria is coming back. I’ve gotten very irritable and I have these temper outbursts that leave me shaky and nervous.”

  And in what I consider the most telling of my father’s observations of himself, he said, “I’m fed up with the army and all through with it. I find it hard to understand myself now because I worked so hard overseas and was promoted from private to technical sergeant while serving in the South Pacific. I guess I’ll never be the same anymore.”

  The doctor’s progress notes dated December 1944 concluded: “The impression conveyed by the solider was that he scarcely understands his own conduct. He obviously realizes that he is not the man he was.”

  While hospitalized he was given Nembutal capsules, ephedrine, and phenobarbital, all addictive drugs. On his discharge form the doctor wrote, “Maximum benefit from hospitalization has been attained. Further care in an army hospital is not indicated since after prolonged hospitalization the soldier cannot be restored to a duty status. Further institutional care is not necessary and the soldier can be released to his own care without danger to himself or others.”