by Gail Lukasik
Not until almost one hundred years later, when Marta’s great-granddaughter Philomene Lanabere, daughter of Felicite Meyronne and Bernard Lanabere, marries Leon Frederic, Sr. will Marta’s familial line join the Frederic line.
Without doubt the mixing of African and European ancestry is present in other ancestral threads. But none that I could find appeared so early in Louisiana’s history, illustrating how some white men took advantage of their positions of power over black women. Considering the Jim Crow laws my mother lived under, how the one-drop rule determined her life choices, I see how the sins of the white fathers were laid upon their children.
But even after I discover Marta, it changes nothing about my sense of racial identity. I have no claim on black identity, no right to declare myself even mixed race. And yet, my African ancestry is there in my DNA: 7–9 percent, more than one-drop, enough that up until 1983 in Louisiana I would have been designated as black.
What does it mean for a blatantly white woman to tell the story of her distant slave ancestor? “What gives me the right?” I ask myself. Is 7–9 percent African DNA enough? Does it matter that it’s me telling her story, as long as her story is told?
My search has never been about claiming a black identity. It springs from another place—the desire to know what my enslaved ancestors endured, how they assimilated into their time and place, and how they survived. I carry their DNA like a badge of honor.
26
Breaking Up Is Hard to Do
My 1958 Diary: Parma, Ohio
August 1: Mom and dad were arguing.
August 4: My parents are at it again.
August 13: I sure wish Dad was not always feeling sorry for himself. And mom would be more affectionate.
December 31: Two of my hopes for the New Year—a happy family and no nightmares..
THE SOUNDS OF screaming wake me, filtering through the house, up the stairs to my bedroom where sleep has become unpredictable, filled with nightmares and night terrors, whispering voices calling my name. I lie still afraid to move, listening to my mother shout at my father, “You’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’re crazy.”
I hear a thud. A door slams. Motionless in my bed, I listen hard into the now quiet house for some signal—more shouting, more doors slamming—telling me what to do next. Nothing, just the wind rattling the window, wanting in.
My nightlight glows yellow on the other side of the large room cutting the darkness.
It’s hours before I fall back into a restless sleep. In the morning I study my parents’ faces and see no bruises, no sign that anything has happened.
All that day at school, I wonder why is my father crazy? What has he done to my mother that she screams it through the house in the middle of the night like a warning to us all? “You’re crazy, you’re crazy, you’re crazy.”
Soon after that incident my mother joined Al-Anon, a support and discussion group for the family of people suffering from alcoholism. She attended weekly meetings with her friend, a neighbor, whose husband was also an alcoholic. It seemed as if our neighborhood was plagued with alcoholics of every description from the binge drinker who frequented The Lincoln Inn at the corner of our street and often drank himself to unconsciousness to my father who never missed work, never binge drank, but was always buzzed.
Though my father was aware of where she went once a week, he never said anything about the meetings as if that was her problem and it had nothing to do with him.
From Al-Anon she learned how to live with an alcoholic, imparting some of that advice to me.
“Never answer them back,” she said. “That’s what they want, a fight.”
And her behavior did change as a result of Al-Anon. When my father started in on her with his alcoholic rant—the drip, drip, drip of his toxic words, repeated over and over—she’d ignore him, leave the room, put on the television or go to her bedroom, and he’d be left alone with no one to inflict his abuse on.
By then I had my own strategy: disappear. I couldn’t be in enough after-school activities from drama to ballet. And when I wasn’t doing an activity, I disappeared to my room above the house claiming homework or I rode the streets on my bike, dreaming I lived somewhere else.
But I had to come home eventually.
As committed as my mother was to the Al-Anon tenets, sometimes the pressure of living with an alcoholic and having no family support would erupt into physical violence on my mother’s part.
One Sunday after a dance rehearsal in Cleveland for the Cleveland Civic Ballet Company, I return to find the mirror that hangs in the kitchen adjacent to the sink gone. In its place is a darker yellow square where the light never reached.
“What happened to the mirror?” I ask my mother who seems subdued, sitting in the living room reading the newspaper, the house unusually quiet, my father and brother not there.
“Your father couldn’t stand that my friend and I went to hear Billy Graham. He just kept at me, picking and picking away.” She’s crying. “I went to hear Billy Graham speak, a religious person. But your father couldn’t stand that. He’s so jealous. So I picked up a soup can and threw it at him. It hit the mirror and broke it.” She dabs at her face with a tissue. “Well, that shut him up.”
I imagine my father’s boozy jealousy spiraling, as he sat alone drinking, while his wife and her friend had an enjoyable afternoon that had nothing to do with him. I see my mother snap, grabbing the soup can, and flinging it at the mirror, the need to break something, to silence my father, to stop the pain that was gnawing at her.
Not for the first or last time, I wish they would divorce and end everyone’s misery including their own.
The letter is frayed, falling apart, has been in my deceased father’s wallet for many years. It’s addressed to my father from a Cleveland lawyer who my mother retained.
After his death while cleaning out his bedroom drawer, I’m shocked to find the letter secluded in his wallet like a calling card, a reminder of how close she came to following my advice.
From the age of twelve my mother sought my counsel asking me if I thought she should divorce my father. I was twelve, what did I know of these things? All I knew was she was patently unhappy and that our home life was chaotic and my father’s drinking escalating along with his emotional abuse. I had no knowledge of finances, how we would live without my father’s income. Where we would live. I felt she wanted me to say “yes,” to assure her that this was the right thing to do. And so I said “yes.”
Sometimes she’d counter my yes, questioning how we would live without his paycheck. And then I’d know that it was just talk, that she would never divorce him.
Only now do I realize that in that question of divorce was another question. Can I go home to my people if I can’t make it on my own? Maybe that’s what stopped her—the prospect of crossing back over to the other side.
The letter is dated May 2, 1961.
I have been retained by your wife, Alvera, for the purpose of filing an action against you for separate maintenance and support.
In view of the fact that there are two minor children involved, I feel it is my duty to do all in my power to attempt to affect a reconciliation before filing my petition.
I am confident that a great deal of trouble and expense can be avoided for both you and your wife if you are interested in saving your marriage and preserving your family unity, by you coming in and discussing this matter with me before Friday, May 5.
I am sending this letter in a plain envelope so that your wife needn’t know that I have written to you. I strongly suggest that you see me for the mutual welfare of your family.
The letter is a man-to-man correspondence. The little woman is out of control. Your wife wants a divorce. You need to nip this nonsense in the bud. The deception of the plain envelope infuriates me.
The way I see it, the letter is a betrayal of my mother’s confidence in the lawyer. It had taken her a long time to seek a divorce. It had taken her knowing that the coffee I p
oured from his thermos while he drove me to high school was laced with alcohol. At six thirty in the morning his need for drink was all consuming. Morning to night he was always slightly intoxicated. When I’d pour the coffee I’d catch the pungent scent of whiskey.
There was never a divorce or even a separation, just this frail letter, this relic. This fragment of a different mother, who for a brief time stepped out of the shadow she’d lived under for so long, the shadow of an alcoholic husband, decent provider, suburban home—her safe harbor turned treacherous. Perhaps my father promised not to drink anymore while driving his daughter to school, a promise he wasn’t physiologically or psychologically able to keep without help.
I like to think, but I’m most likely wrong, that if she’d divorced my father, she might have had the courage to tell me who she really was. Or was that identity so erased that it no longer had anything to do with her? Had she divorced my father, I doubt that she would have returned to New Orleans. She’d left that part of herself forever. There was no going back. Under the crush of her childhood, the isolated years of passing and secrecy, maybe she didn’t have the strength for one more journey, one more crossing.
It occurs to me that the shame she felt about her mixed race might have tinged her belief that she deserved a better life. Perhaps she was doing penance for the secret she kept from her husband.
Sometimes I wonder if my parents’ troubled marriage was only a troubled marriage, that my mother’s secret was beside the point in their mélange of misery and had nothing to do with her unhappiness.
Yet I persist in shifting through the past, looking for clues like an archeologist digging through the layers of time, piecing together the past with nothing but pottery shards, animal bones, and hunches, nothing definitive to go on, just debris laid out on a steel table that could mean anything or nothing, depending on how you looked at it.
27
Who’s Your Daddy?
Fall 2015
“YOU’RE GONNA WANT to see this.” My husband, Jerry, pokes his head into my office, a converted bedroom cocooned in bookcases, painted a flamboyant turquoise as if the walls were a tropical sea. From the look on his face, I can tell he’s found something significant about Ursin Frederic, my other mystery man.
Most days while I write in my upstairs office—where over my desk hangs an Edward Curtis photograph of a Native American in a canoe waiting as I wait every day for the words to come—my husband is in the kitchen tediously combing the notary archives. Sometimes jazz music fills the empty silence of the kitchen, sometimes the low hum of the television.
For weeks, he’s been scrolling through the online Historical Notaries’ Indexes, by Notary for the Parish of Orleans. The volumes are listed by the notaries’ names and are dated 1770–1966, covering the French, Spanish, and American periods. In total, there are eighty-seven notaries with multiple volumes, ranging from 1 to 276. Of course, he’s confined his search from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth century, the period of Ursin’s life. Surprisingly, he’s taken to the task, allotting one to two hours most days. He keeps meticulous notes of any reference to a Frederic, an Arnoux, and a Dauphin, though the main focus of his search is Ursin Frederic. What began for him as an onerous task has become an addictive obsession. He’s as determined to find Ursin’s parents as I am.
This colossal undertaking is a last-ditch effort to locate documentary proof of Ursin’s parentage. I’m betting that buried in one of the historical entries is a succession record naming Ursin Frederic as an heir and proving decidedly that Ursin is related to the Frederic family that settled on the German Coast in the 1720s, which would make my mother’s paternal line one of the first white settlers in Louisiana. There are bragging rights associated with being descended from the German Coast Frederic family. But it’s more than that. The possibility of being a descendent of these first settlers might mitigate some of the shame my mother bequeathed to me about her heritage and any lingering uncertainty I still harbor about revealing my mother’s secret. Though my mother is gone, I still feel the sting of her shame.
I’ve never found any birth, baptismal, or succession records to support my supposition that Ursin is related to the German Coast Frederics except two verifiable but inconclusive facts. The first concerns Ursin’s military service. In 1814 he joined a militia unit raised in Plaquemines Parish to fight in the War of 1812. Plaquemines Parish is where Adam Frederic, grandson of first settler Johann Conrad Friedrich, lived until the hurricane of 1793. After which Adam and his family moved to Faubourg Sainte-Marie, New Orleans. Although Ursin lived in New Orleans at the time of his enlistment, his decision to enlist with the men of Plaquemines Parish suggests familial ties to the parish and to Adam Frederic.
The other fact is just as indeterminate. In the 1811 New Orleans City Directory, a J. L. Frederick resided at the corner of St. Philip and Rampart. This is the same address given for Ursin Frederic, cabinetmaker, in the 1822 New Orleans city directory. Also, Jean Adam Frederic and J. L. Frederic lived two households away from each other. But I was never able to prove that any of Jean Adam’s sons was the father of Ursin; the birth dates didn’t match. Nor was I able to locate a J. L. Frederic. It’s as if the man never existed.
Even with these tenuous facts, I’m confident enough that Ursin is descended from the German Coast Frederics that I’ve included that information in my genealogy presentations, reasoning that even if I don’t have undeniable proof, the journey is as important as the destination. Standing in front of an audience, I feel a sense of satisfaction, if not pride, in being descended from the German Coast Frederics who fed New Orleans, saving the city from starvation and helping to settle the Louisiana colony, adding their unique story to America. I joke that my mother who insisted there was no K at the end of her name because that would make us German was wrong. The original Frederics were German. The lighthearted joke strikes at the heart of my story. The state of Louisiana caged my mother into a life of hiding and secrets based on only a part of her heritage. The German Coast ancestors balance that story—a teachable moment, a way of saying nothing is black and white, literally.
Jerry and I puzzle over the notary record dated May 14, 1827. The notary is Louis T. Caire. The transaction is a sale between Ursin Frederick dit Lestinet and John Gabaroche: “Sale Gabaroche (John) de Ursin Frederick dit Lestinet.”
My husband shows me another notarial record using the name Ursin Frederick alias Lestinet as one of the involved parties: “Sale Frederick (U. dit Lestinet) des Heritier de M. te Piernas.”
My first thought is that this is Ursin Celestin Frederick. It can’t be my Ursin Frederick. I’ve never seen any document using the name Lestinet. I run upstairs, page through my notes to check Ursin Celestin’s death date. He’s still alive in 1827. Ursin Frederick could be Ursin Celestin. But wouldn’t he use his middle name Celestin in any legal transaction?
When I return to the kitchen, Jerry is jotting down the information on the two sales transactions. I tell him that it could be Ursin Celestin and not my Ursin.
As I stare at the heavily inked entry by Caire, I ask him. “Do you think alias means what it means in English?”
He says maybe.
“But what does dit mean?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Why don’t you look them up online?”
Besides dit and alias, there are other perplexing French words in the Caire entry: heritier de. Does that mean inherited from? Have I found a succession record?
“I’m going to finish up Caire.” Jerry’s attention has already moved on, back to the notary entries.
Once back in my office, I close the chapter I was working on and Google the French term alias, fairly certain it has the same meaning as the English word alias. I’m right. Alias in French means, “also called,” “otherwise known as.” Why would Ursin be using an alias?
Next, I Google the French word dit. What I find sheds some light on the mystery of Ursin’s alias Lestinet. A dit name is an alias
given to a family name. But unlike alias names, a dit name is given to many persons. “Dit in French means ‘say’ and in this context, it means ‘called.’”1
Applying that definition of dit to Ursin means Ursin Frederick dit Lestinet had an ancestor named Fredrick, but he chose to use the name Lestinet instead. So he is Ursin Frederick called Lestinet. The original surname was Frederick, passed down to him from an ancestor, while the dit name is the name he and/or the family is actually called or known as. But why use a dit name? And who is Lestinet? And is this my Ursin Frederic?
My mystery writer self immediately creates crime scenarios in which Ursin is engaged in criminal activities that necessitate an alias, a dit name. It’s not that far fetched considering his son Leon Frederic’s penchant for gambling and subsequent arrest. As tempting as it is, I hold off on casting Ursin in such a nefarious light and continue researching the significance of dit names.
The website Genealogy Today calls the use of dit names in French, French-Canadian, or Acadian ancestral research the “dit” phenomenon: a unique but straightforward French-naming convention. “Within a French culture, it is possible to know a family by two, interchangeable surnames or by the two surnames linked as one family name.” The dit name could be acquired in many ways, one of which was from the family’s regional place of origin. Was Ursin distinguishing himself from the other family branch of German Coast Frederics? Is he still related to them? The German Coast Frederics originated from Rotenburg, Baden-Wurttenberg, Germany. If Lestinet refers to the place of origin, then it’s looking less and less likely that Ursin is descended from them.2