by Gail Lukasik
Please give us a call. We can’t wait to meet you.
Love,
Your family,
Stephanie Frederic
As I finish reading Stephanie Frederic’s email, I swipe at the tears running down my face. The house is too quiet, my husband still asleep. There’s no one to tell yet.
I reread her email as if I missed something or misunderstood.
No, I didn’t miss anything. My grandfather’s other family, the one I knew little to nothing about, has found me. All the loss and grief from my mother’s death isn’t washed away, only intensified, but something else has been added to my life: another family.
“What did I always tell you, Gail?” I can almost hear my mother whisper. “When one door closes, another door opens.”
My “new” cousin, Stephanie Frederic, welcomes me to the family, a family my mother left so long ago in New Orleans, a family she never talked about, a family she had nothing to do with, may never have known. The joy of discovery is tinged with sadness for her loss and mine and for all the years we never knew each other.
I keep returning to the words “Your family.” In losing my mother and being freed from my vow, I’ve opened the door to family.
Stephanie’s father’s name is Azemar, that strange name that intrigued me for so long has been passed down through the Frederic family.
When my husband stumbles into the kitchen, I tell him about Stephanie Frederic.
“I never thought that would happen,” he says as he pours himself a cup of coffee, then walks over and reads the email over my shoulder.
“So what do you think?” I ask, turning around to see his reaction.
“What about?”
I’m not sure what he’s asking. “About Stephanie Frederic emailing me and her friend seeing the show.”
He straightens up and takes a long swig of his coffee before he answers. “What are the odds, huh?”
“You mean of her friend seeing the show?”
“Of her seeing the show, making the connection to Stephanie, telling her about it, and Stephanie emailing you. So many things had to happen. Kinda amazing.”
Two hours later I receive another email from another Frederic family member, Aunt Alma.
I was excited to learn that you and I both were trying to find info on our family. My journey was about as long as yours; however, in locating my parents’ marriage certificate, it was confirmed who we belonged to. Looking forward to meeting you.
Love,
Aunt Alma
“Aunt Alma.” I roll her name around on my tongue. All my aunts from my father’s family and my mother’s family are dead. I have an aunt. I have an uncle. What other family do I have?
Around noon LaChanta, another cousin I never knew I had, emails me.
Hi, I saw your story on the Genealogy Roadshow and Azemar Frederic was my Granddad on my father’s side. I currently live in Philadelphia, Pa., and my dad is Delano Frederic. I hope that one day we can meet because there are a lot of us to know. This is so exciting and I look forward to talking to you soon. LaChanta
I study the family Facebook photos Stephanie and LaChanta post, searching for my mother’s face, similarities that identify us as blood. I can see my mother in an early photo of Delano Frederic and in a later photo of Azemar Frederic, Stephanie’s father.
My mother’s words come back to me. “People always said I looked like my father.” Then they too must look their father, Azemar. It’s not the photo I’ve been searching for, but it’s close.
In the afternoon when I phone Stephanie in Los Angeles, Aunt Alma joins the call. We talk for almost two hours. We are learning the outlines of each other’s lives.
Aunt Alma is a retired elementary school teacher and lives near Washington, DC. Stephanie runs her own film production company, FGW Productions, in Los Angeles and specializes in documentaries. She and Alma chat about the documentary she made about Katrina. Aunt Alma comments about how brave she was in filming it.
Then they ask when they can meet me.
“I’ll be in New Orleans in April. I’m going there to do research for the book I’m writing about my mother and her family.”
“Just tell us the dates,” they both say. “And we’ll be there.”
Really? I think. They’ll drop everything and fly to meet me in New Orleans?
After I hang up, I check out Stephanie’s website and am blown away. Her production company is FGW Productions. In another coincidental occurrence, her documentary White Girls aired last Monday, one day before our Roadshow segment. I watch it, fascinated by a topic I’m now very familiar with—passing for white.
Maybe it’s the first flush of friendship in the rush to get to know each other, but over the next few months I begin to see that we share more than a paternal grandfather, that I’ve found a kindred creative soul.
About a month before Jerry and I are scheduled to leave for New Orleans, I receive an itinerary from Lauren King, my first cousin Azemar’s wife. The itinerary is titled “Welcome to the Family.” My stomach drops when I read through the elaborately planned schedule from the meet and greet dinner on Friday, April 10, to the Sunday church service at the Greater Mount Calvary Baptist Church. My introverted writer self curls into a shell. A party in my honor is the last thing I want. But then the other part of my writerly self asserts itself. What an adventure and so much to write about.
34
Crossing Back Over
April 7–8, 2015
Prayer to my mother asking her for a sign that I’m doing the right thing:
“Be the fingerprint on the window,
the breath behind the curtain,
the shadow that lingers after the light leaves.”
THE AIRPORT LIMO is scheduled to arrive in fifteen minutes and I still can’t decide which outfit to wear for the photograph Cousin Stephanie asked me to take. She needs my photo for the camera crew who is meeting us at the New Orleans airport.
I’ve changed my clothes twice already. In the first photograph Jerry snapped, I look washed out, drained of color. It doesn’t help that I’m still recovering from a two-week bout of bronchitis. I’m not usually this vain. But so much is riding on this trip to New Orleans.
Originally the trip was to be a pilgrimage to discover the city that shaped my mother, to soak in the atmosphere, breathe in the air, feel the light and heat on my skin, eat the Creole food, in the hope of conjuring her, or at the least the spirit of her. How can I write a book about her if I don’t immerse myself in her city?
The week of April 7–14 was chosen to coincide with the possible ceremony on Ship Island, Mississippi, honoring the Second Regiment of the Native Guards who were stationed at the garrison during the Civil War (and for a brief time the Third Regiment, Leon’s regiment) guarding the Confederate prisoners of war housed on the island, as well as protecting the Mississippi River from Confederate soldiers. Ike told me that the first weekend in April the National Park Service sponsors a memorial service. I want to attend as much for my mother as the book I’m writing. Another connection to family and the past that she refused to acknowledge.
Besides the welcome home party and the ferry trip to Ship Island, I plan to visit the St. Ann house where my mother was born and St. Louis Cemetery No. One to locate Philomene Lanabere’s crypt. The remainder of my free time I’ll spend at the New Orleans Public Library doing research.
But all that changed ten days ago when Stephanie phoned me with an idea.
“I’m flying back from New York after meeting with the executives at HBO and it dawns on me,” Stephanie said. “I have a story for them right here in my own family. I wished I’d thought of it sooner when they asked, ‘What else have you got?’”
I listened to her distinctive speaking voice. She still sounds like the TV journalist she once was, strong, confident, and trustworthy. “What do you think about going into a partnership with me?”
As she explained how our partnership would work, a feeling of disbelief yet ri
ghtness came over me. The same feeling I had when the Roadshow called and said we’d been chosen for the show.
“So Cousin Gail you want to be partners in a documentary?”
After the initial thrill of her proposal, I brought up my one caveat about the documentary: that it would trump the publication of my book. Why would a publisher want the book if the documentary had already told the story? I reasoned.
“I’ll put in the contract that the book and the doc have to come out at the same time,” she answered without hesitation. “I want you to be comfortable with this.”
I’m comfortable—a bundle of nerves but comfortable.
Quickly, Jerry takes the second photograph and emails it to Stephanie. The limo driver pulls into the driveway. One of the biggest adventures of my life is about to begin.
As the limo heads for the expressway, I think that it’s no coincidence that two days ago was the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Something serendipitous is happening, yet again. When I booked this trip on January 13, I never expected that my mother’s lost family, my lost family, would find me or that they’d be hosting a “Welcome Home” party. And without question I never expected to be making a documentary with my Cousin Stephanie, who four months ago I didn’t know existed.
“We can’t re-create these moments,” Stephanie explained to me when we discussed the filming of my New Orleans trip. “We need to capture them spontaneously as they’re happening.”
It’s the second day in New Orleans, and I’m standing on St. Ann Street in front of the house where my mother was born, waiting for the camera crew to set up. We spent the morning at the New Orleans Public Library, where Lisa Martin, the doc’s producer, conducted an impromptu interview that felt awkward and strange to me. I had to repeat several times the story of my mother’s secret. It’s starting to feel like a script that I can’t quite get right.
I just can’t seem to relax—too aware of the camera. It didn’t help my nerves when my cousin Azemar King and his son A. J. showed up in the middle of the interview. I kept trying to catch a glimpse of him and his son and kept losing my train of thought. He’s the first Frederic family member I meet. And we both seem to be at a loss for words.
On our drive from the New Orleans Public Library to St. Ann Street, Azemar told me that all the Frederic men are short as if I’d been questioning his height. He’s a handsome guy with warm caramel-colored skin and European features. His deceased mother Modesta Frederic King was my grandfather’s oldest child from his second marriage, my mother’s half sister.
“They say the oldest girl looks like me,” my mother once told me. “That’s all I know about her.” She never said there were more children. She never told me Modesta’s name. She never told me much of anything.
When I asked Azemar what his mother died of, he said, “She was just worn down.” I don’t pursue it.
Azemar has an electric personality. Though his arm is in a sling, it doesn’t seem to tame his energy or his fast driving. He’s a marine and has seen several tours of duty in Iraq.
As we wait for an airplane to pass overhead before filming, Azemar says, “The house is razed.”
I’m not sure what he means. “Is it going to be torn down?” A warning sign festoons the chain link fence surrounding the house: Private Property No Trespassing.
He points to the cinder blocks supporting the house. “No, rehabbed.”
I’m relieved as if the house should never be torn down, should never be lost, should remain a monument to my mother’s family. Trickles of sweat run down my back, and I curse myself for wearing black jeans, for being nervous, for stealing glances at Azemar trying to find some semblance of my mother but I can see no resemblance.
“This is a shotgun house,” Cousin Azemar explains. “That means if the front door and back door were both open and you stood at the front and fired straight into the house, the bullet would pass straight through.”
I shield my eyes from the late morning sun beating through the large oak trees and study the cream-colored house—the neatly trimmed windows edged in red, the plywood where the front steps should be, the gravel drive. The unreality of the situation blunts my reaction to seeing my mother’s birth house.
If my mother were here with me, would she even recognize this house after all this time, after so many other families have lived here, after so many reinventions? This was the house she never returned to. Though I try to summon her, I feel nothing but the incredible heat and humidity.
“Would you like me to take a picture of you in front of the house?” Azemar asks.
“Sure.” I hand him my camera.
Months later when I look at the photo closely, I’ll notice how overgrown the trees are in the backyard where my mother and her two siblings posed for that other photograph so long ago. That cherished photograph that she brought with her from New Orleans north to Ohio that I’ll pass down to my children. Finally, sewing the tattered ends of her story back together with the silkiest of threads, the thinnest of needles, the finest of stitches.
“We’re ready,” Lisa says. “Gail, why don’t you stand in front of the house, and I’ll interview you with the house as backdrop.” She wears a black jacket and black studded boots that seem at odds with the hot day and the spring season.
George, the cameraman, hoists the large, bulky camera on his shoulder while Blake, the boom guy, holds the large muffled boom steady.
While we shoot, a rooster walks across the street. Then a black man at the end of the block shouts at us. “Don’t put me on TV! If the police see me on TV, I might have to go to jail. There are warrants out for me.”
The crew stops shooting and we wait patiently for the man to go back into his house. Then Lisa says, “How do you feel seeing your mother’s house?”
I bumble through an answer, not able to access my feelings that seem to have gone underground. I’m not an actress, I want to tell her. I’m a person. I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m overwhelmed.
Toward the end of the interview, I strike one of my mother’s theatrical poses and say, “I’m channeling my mother.” Everyone smiles. But I can find my mother nowhere. She seems beyond this house, this place that she never wanted to see again.
Did she know that this house is only a mile from the Iberville house where her father lived with his second family? I wonder. Azemar drove by the Iberville house before coming here, telling me about the house fire that destroyed all the family photographs.
“So there’s no photograph of our grandfather?” I say as if I have to confirm what he just said.
“We’re still looking. Maybe at the welcome party one of the family members from out of town will bring a photograph.”
“Have you ever seen a photograph of him?”
“No. But there has to be one somewhere.”
In the evening, sitting in our hotel room on Magazine Street, my underground emotions surface. In my journal I write about the melancholy and tremendous sadness I felt seeing the house on St. Ann Street. Because I know my mother will never grow up in this house and that her parents will separate when she’s six. That her mother will lose custody and she and her sister Shirley will be shuffled around from one relative to another. Then in 1940 they’ll be living with Cousin Theresa Spikes, the schoolteacher. That this house will be the first and last place they will live together as a family.
If only I had been able to tell Lisa that while the camera rolled and the heat poured down and the crazy man shouted at us.
Getting permission to enter St. Louis Cemetery turns out to be an ordeal, an almost insurmountable hurdle. The cemetery has been in lock down since 2013, because of the defacement that year of Marie Laveau’s tomb—the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans. Someone snuck into the cemetery at night and coated her tomb with thick pink latex paint. The three-month restoration of her tomb cost the Archdiocese of New Orleans $10,000. Because of the defacement, only family members who have ancestors buried in the cemetery or those taking guided tours
are allowed entry. Family members must obtain passes from the archdiocese and prove that they have a relative buried in the cemetery.
The defacement of Marie Laveau’s tomb, though extreme, has been building for years. Decades ago someone started the rumor that if people wanted a wish granted by Laveau, they should draw an X on the tomb, turn around three times, knock on the tomb, and shout out their wish. Such is the power of New Orleans and voodoo and the careless stupidity of tourists.
Lisa Martin, who has no luck getting the camera crew and us into the cemetery, tells me of other acts of vandalism that seem beyond belief—people reaching into the vaults and pulling out bones, removing rocks from the gravesites. I take it personally since I know that my third great-grandmother is buried here.
Prior to the trip to New Orleans, the only family grave I’ve located via the Internet is Philomene Lanabere Frederic. Even the Civil War veteran Leon Frederic eludes me. Finding her grave takes on an unexpected importance to me. I want some physical marker that my ancestors existed other than census reports and vital records. I want to touch something that links me to them. If I can’t have a photograph of them in life, then at least I can have an image of where they lie in eternity.
I call the Archdiocese of New Orleans and explain that I’d like permission to visit the grave of my ancestor Philomene Frederic who’s buried in St. Louis No. One. From Find a Grave, I located her tomb and have a photograph of it in case I need to show proof. Though I suppose anyone could print out a photograph and claim an ancestor.
It takes over a day to reach someone by phone, and I’m losing hope. When I reach someone at the diocese, the woman tells me I have to come to the archdiocese to pick up family passes.
For spring, the weather has been unusually hot and humid, most days reaching ninety degrees. But I will not be deterred. From our hotel on Magazine Street, Jerry and I meander the streets for close to an hour before we find the building on Walmsley. The passes are waiting for us inside the wonderfully chill office. We’re told that we could use the passes, made of durable plastic, again and again.