White Like Her

by Gail Lukasik

  The women wait in the wings, eager to have their stories told. I wait with them, whispering that they will not be forgotten, that it won’t be as if they were never here, that someone will know them, will acknowledge their existence—these voiceless women. Isn’t that what we do for our family—tell their stories so they’re not forgotten? And in telling their stories, I tell my mother’s story as well.

  The Newberry is my last resort. In advance of my research days, I request the specific volumes of the sacramental records related to the baptism of Catherine’s children closest in age to Aimee Felicitas. Because of Judy’s warning, I’m expecting to spend at least two days, maybe more, at the library.

  The genealogical collections are housed on the second floor. Once I obtain my reader’s card on the third floor, I gingerly take the steps down to the second floor, the warmth of the heat pack easing my back pain. After I present my card and copy of my online request to the librarian, she hands me two yellow pencils for note taking, and directs me to table F14.

  “Someone will bring the books to you,” the dark-haired, petite young woman explains.

  It’s nearly 2 p.m. I’ll have three hours to read through the books. If I can’t find anything, I’ll return tomorrow at 9 a.m. As I wait patiently for the librarian to bring me Volumes 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, I read through the list of Catherine’s children, reading and rereading baptismal dates, sponsor (godparent) names, and Judy’s suggestion about tracking down Catherine’s other children.

  Children of Catherine Dauphin, native of New Orleans

  1.

  Maria Luisa Isavel, b.?, godmother to brother Evaristo in 1821

  2.

  Guiellmo, bt. 14 July 1799, age 4 months. Sponsors: Juan Joy, Englishman, and Margarita Sinetre

  3.

  Constancia Catarina, b. 15 Dec. 1800, bt. 25 Jan. 1801. Sponsors: Felix Tala and Constancia Tala

  4.

  Johan Baptista, b. 15 Dec. 1802, bt. 15 Feb. 1805. Sponsors: Baptiste Dauphin and Maria Theresia Dauphin

  5.

  Terrence, b. 1 Dec. 1806, bt. 25 Nov. 1807. Sponsors: Pierre St. Dos and Marie Claire Boute

  6.

  Aimee Felicitas, b. 15 Nov. 1808, bt. 2 May 1810. Sponsors: Juan Castille and Martina Dauphin, child’s aunt

  7.

  Joseph, b. 1 Nov. 1810, bt. 5 Jan. 1813. Sponsors: Luis D’Auterive and Maria Rosa D’Auterive, la joven

  8.

  Marthe, bt. 27 Oct. 1815. Sponsors: Jean Vernoir and Constance Catherine Rilieux. Bd. 30 Oct. 1815

  9.

  Leonard, twin of Louise Elisabeth, b. 30 Sept. 1816, bt. 3 June 1817. Sponsors: Leon Dauphin and Eugenie Porera?

  10.

  Louise Elisabeth, twin of Leonard, b. 30 Sept. 1816, bt. 3 June 1817. Sponsors: Gaspar Borasse and Felicite D’Autrive

  11.

  Alphrede, bd. 27 June 1819, age 8 months

  12.

  Evaristo, b. 26 Oct. 1821, bt. 24 Aug. 1824. Sponsors: Augusto Boundet and Maria Luisa Ysavel Dauphin, child’s sister

  Then it hits me. I’ve made a mistake. A wave of panic rushes through me. Searching through the sacramental records isn’t going to tell me anything I don’t already know about Catherine’s children. Judy’s already given me that information. What was I thinking? Why am I here? My lower back begins to ache and throb.

  Carefully, I push back the heavy wood chair and stand, feeling sick. I can’t leave, I tell myself. I have to at least look through the books. Maybe Judy missed something. Though I doubt that. She’s extremely meticulous.

  The books are a light gray with black lettering. With resignation, I lift the heavy book, Volume 8, 1804–1806, and turn to page eighty-two: “Johann Baptiste; Sponsors Baptiste Dauphin and Maria Theresia Dauphin.” The information matches Judy’s information. As expected, there are no informational variations in Volumes 9, 10, and 11.

  Reading the 1815 baptismal record for Catherine’s eighth child Marthe, my eyes flick back and forth between the book’s baptismal record for Marthe and Judy’s notes, my heart sinking as I realize the records also are exactly the same. I have only more volume to check, Volume 12. It’s nearly two forty-five. It’ll be a short research day.

  Then my eyes light on an entry above Marthe under a different surname: D’Autarive. Below that name is a marriage record dated November 22, 1815. The record reads: “Isavel Virginia (Luis and Felicite Meyronne) native and resident married Luis Bouligne.” Felicite Meyronne’s married name is D’Autarive. Of course, the woman isn’t my Felicite Meyronne because in 1815, she was still a child. But is she related to Manuel Meyronne, I wonder?

  Then I move on to Volume 12, the last volume. “Louise Elisabeth (Catherine), twin of Leonard, b. September 30, 1816, bt. June 3, 1817. Sponsors: Gaspar Borasse and Felicite D’Autrive.” I double check the information with Judy’s, see that it’s the same, and am about to close the book when it hits me. Felicite D’Autrive née Meyronne is Louise Elisabeth’s sponsor.

  My mind floods with the historical significance of sponsors in nineteenth-century New Orleans. How they were often chosen by parents to help raise the status of their child, to gain social advantages. My heart beats wildly as I go back through the books and look for D’Autrives. The surname has four alternative spellings: Dauterive, D’Auterive, D’Autarive, and D’Autrive. Using the D’Autrive marriage, baptismal, and death records, I piece together Victoria Felicite Mayronne D’Autrive’s life. Without question she is Manuel Meyronne’s sister. They share the same parents and he is the sponsor for the baptism of her daughter Felicite Fanel.

  With only an hour left before the library closes, I quickly order the other volumes of the sacramental records, Volumes 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, and 16. Every entry for the D’Auterives adds more direct primary proof that Felicite Meyronne D’Autrive is the sister of Manuel Meyronne. In sponsoring Catherine Dauphin’s tenth child Louise Elisabeth in 1815, Felicite D’Autrive, Manuel Meyronne’s sister, confirms the link between the Meyronne family and Catherine Dauphin. The quality and weight of evidence proves that Aimee Felicitas Dauphin is Felicite Meyronne Lanabere. They are the same woman.

  I marvel at the serendipity of the discovery, the “what ifs” that had to occur for me to make this discovery: If my eyes hadn’t momentarily strayed to the entry above the Dauphin entry; if Catherine Dauphin hadn’t asked Felicite D’Autrive to be the godmother of her child Louise. And even stranger, if Felicite Meyronne hadn’t married a man whose surname was D’Autrive, alphabetically placing it before Dauphin in the sacramental books.

  How am I to explain these bizarre serendipitous happenings? How am I to explain that not only was my hunch right, but that Felicite has been waiting over two hundred years for me to find her so I can tell her mother’s story of enslavement and freedom?

  24

  Modeling Whiteness

  “Looking white is, in many ways, contingent on doing white.”

  —Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile.

  MY MOTHER HAD no manual on how to act white, no guidebook, and no set of instructions. Her light skin said white, but she knew that whiteness was more than a skin color. If she was to pass successfully, she had to not only look white but also act white. Movies were her training ground as well as her escape.

  In the era of double features, she went to the movies sometimes twice a week. From the time I was six years old until adolescence, I was her companion and escort to the Friday night double feature at the local movie house. She favored the dark, moody dramas of unrequited love where the heroine retained her honor at all costs or the dark Hitchcock mysteries with their secrets and surprising revelations.

  During my childhood I remember vividly Giant, The Night of the Hunter, Mogambo, The Caine Mutiny, and A Place in the Sun, movies that were too mature for me and sometimes frightened me with their disturbing themes about tough choices, sexuality, and evil. The eerie image of Shelley Winters’s drowned body at the bottom of the lake, her hair floating around her, disturbed me for years.

 
; From movies she learned how white women dressed, styled their hair, spoke, gestured, and dealt with troublesome men. Though she seldom smoked, when she did she mirrored Bette Davis, flicking her cigarette ash coyly with that frisky glint in her eye that said, “I’m in charge but you can try.” Smart brunettes like Rosaline Russell and Joan Crawford intrigued her with their sassy remarks and independence.

  She disliked Marilyn Monroe for her overt and crass sexuality and dumb blond act. Though one year for the neighborhood Halloween party she masqueraded as Monroe, donning a platinum wig, red satin dress with a thigh-high slit, black gloves, fishnet stockings, and a long cigarette holder she pretended to smoke, inhaling and blowing out nothing. I was transfixed by how her personality changed, how seamlessly she became another person. Gushing in a breathless Monroe voice she asked, “How do I look?”

  Her obsession with movies ran so deep she named me after a movie starlet, Gail Russell, a 1950s actress who succumbed to alcoholism and died alone in 1961 at the age of thirty-six in her apartment surrounded by empty liquor bottles.

  When I asked her why she chose Gail as my name, she answered that when I was born I had blue eyes and dark hair just like Gail Russell, whose beauty she desired for me. She shrugged her shoulders. “But your eyes changed and so did your hair.”

  The movies were a release for my mother. In the dark theater she could cry without explanation, something I rarely saw her do at home. Her identification with the women on the screen was transformative, as well as instructive, blurring the line between the real and the imaginative. For those two hours she was Susan Hayworth, Hedy Lamar, Lana Turner, women faced with impossible decisions who manage to survive. For the time we sat together in the darkness she could also be herself, appreciating her own performance. How she’d tricked a society intent on putting her in her racial place.

  Whether from the movies or from growing up in a boarding house schooled by her great-grandmother, my mother viewed good manners as a sign of good breeding. From the time I could talk, I was instructed to say “thank you” and “please.” A swift reprimand would follow my failure to do so.

  “Manners will take you anywhere in society, even further than money,” was one of her mantras.

  I always attributed her strict emphasis on manners solely to her Southern upbringing. But acting white is part of appearing white. Being so polite, so well bred, how could anyone doubt her whiteness.

  If manners and good breeding were my mother’s interpretation of what it meant to look white, she reasoned that her daughter, who was a reflection of her, should have all the grace and charm that her own childhood had lacked. Though I’d been taking ballet and tap classes since I was four with the intention of imbuing me with grace, my mother felt I needed an extra polish. In the summer before I turned fourteen, she enrolled me in charm school—an eight-week class for young ladies given by Higbee’s department store in downtown Cleveland.

  According to my mother, charm school would teach me how to be a lady. She was convinced that anyone could escape the prison of poverty and class if they were privy to the secrets of good breeding.

  But at thirteen I was wise to her true intentions. As much as charm school had to do with good breeding, it had just as much to do with her dream of me being a beauty queen, which now in light of her racial secret seems both subversive and vaguely risky.

  Every once in a while my mother would suggest I fill out an application for a beauty pageant. And whenever she did, I knew she wasn’t seeing me, what she was seeing was herself or how she wanted to be seen. My mother was beauty queen material, not me.

  Tall and thin with heavy glasses and fine, wavy hair that had a mind of its own, I preferred the company of books and close friends. To walk down a runway in a bathing suit being judged seemed to me demeaning and horrifying. Maybe I was her stand-in, her last chance, her doppelgänger—the white self no one could doubt or question. My whiteness was unbreechable. I was the payoff for her passing—a white daughter who could walk a runway with other white girls—no questions asked.

  In 1960 African American women were barred from competing in the quintessential beauty pageant, the Miss America competition. And not until 1984 would Vanessa L. Williams become the first African American to win the title of Miss America, thirteen years after the Miss America contest allowed African American women to enter.

  My mother revered beauty contests and felt that for a woman to win a beauty contest was an achievement worth pursuing. So she was not to be deterred. Every Saturday for eight weeks, I went to charm school—a thirty-five-minute bus ride from Parma to downtown Cleveland. In her zeal, my mother convinced my aunt, my father’s sister, that her eldest daughter, Yvonne, needed charm as well. Yvonne was three months younger than me and we both had been named for movie stars. I was named after Gail Russell, and Yvonne was named after Yvonne De Carlo. Clearly, our mothers had agendas when it came to their oldest daughters.

  Charm school was held on one of the department store’s top floors where large windows opened onto the city, flanking the room, casting unflinching light on every flaw that needed to be corrected.

  The first class, we were given black spiral-ringed notebooks with “The Higbee Charm School” emblazoned on the cover in gold letters. The teacher, Miss McGuire, was a tall woman with a long, graceful neck who walked as if she barely inhabited her clothes, which were always dark and tailored. She instructed us to record our progress in our notebooks. We were to paste in clothes cut from magazines and write down ways to improve our physical appearance.

  That first Saturday Miss McGuire measured and weighed us. One by one in front of the other girls, we had to submit to the tape measure and the scale. With the precision of a surgeon she wrote down the numbers next to the outline of a woman’s body—breast, waist, hips, height, and weight.

  For some inexplicable reason I still have this charm school notebook, a relic of a bygone era, when beauty was defined by grace, a part of my girlhood that explained my unrelenting self-criticism that still dogs me today. And in light of what I know about my mother’s mixed race, the notebook is also a document of 1959’s white middle-class America, at least the white America I knew, defining the narrow goals set for white middle-class young women, all centered on physical appearance.

  Statistically speaking, in August 1959 I was five feet three and a half inches tall and weighed 105 pounds. My body proportions were symmetrical, both bust and hips thirty-three inches. Next to the outline of my body and my measurements was a quote: “When you praised her as charming, some asked what you meant. But the charm of her presence was felt where she went.”

  We were cautioned to watch these numbers and that at the end of the eight weeks Miss McGuire would measure and weigh us again to check our progress. It was all about before and after, the notion that a woman was evaluated by her body stats. The reward for all this watching and self-discipline would be a fashion show where we would walk a runway and model a Higbee’s outfit.

  My notebook had headings like: “Charming of Form,” “Grace in Motion,” “Charming of Face,” and “Charming of Dress.” There was a cautionary play on the word charm: “Remember: Charm – C = Harm.” There were body and hand exercises, examples of how to stand and sit, how to enter and exit a room, how to glide walk, how to ascend and descend stairs, how to apply makeup, how to use accessories, how to achieve a bandbox look.

  The most important lesson I learned in charm school wasn’t in my notebook and wasn’t intended. The last class before our runway show, Miss McGuire demonstrated on each girl how to pluck our eyebrows. It was going well until she came to the last girl who had thick eyebrows that nearly ran together. This poor girl also had a faint mustache.

  As Miss McGuire began to pluck and pluck away, the girl flinched in pain. Finally exhausted, clearly frustrated, Miss McGuire gave up. She put her silver tweezers down in defeat and in front of the class said to the girl that it was impossible, that she couldn’t do it, there was just too much hair, and that
the girl would have to seek professional help with her eyebrows.

  The girl hung her head in embarrassment, her face red, biting her lip, trying not to cry. We all shifted in our seats nervously, careful to keep our legs together, our ankles crossed, not wanting to call attention to ourselves.

  The girl never returned for the runway show. I have no memory of that fashion show. But charm school solidified my determination never to enter a beauty contest. I couldn’t stand up to the scrutiny. Charm school reinforced my self-consciousness, fostered by my mother, her belief that every hair had to be in place and every movement choreographed, not so much in a pursuit of perfection, but of uniformity. To stand out in an uncharming manner might suggest other unsavory things about you.

  On the last page of the notebook is the solitary outline of the same woman’s body I’d outlined on the first page. The word After is written above her head. In eight weeks I grew half an inch, my weight was still 105, my bust and hips now thirty-four inches. Instead of a startled expression on the woman’s face, now she smiles. Miss McGuire gave me a “Very Good” rating. I showed my mother the rating. She nodded her approval but said nothing. I’d passed but I could have done better, “Very Good” isn’t “Excellent,” obviously there was room for improvement in the never-ending quest for charm and beauty.

  To my mother’s dismay, a few years after charm school one of my best girl friends from Miss Angela’s dance studio, Judy Adams, not only entered a beauty contest but was crowned Miss Teen USA. Judy was a natural beauty with long wavy blonde hair and that beauty queen smile, toothy and sincere.