by Gail Lukasik
The next morning we set off early. It takes us most of the morning, wandering the twisting and turning paths in the sweltering sun before Jerry finds Philomene’s crypt. In desperation he’d shown the photograph of her crypt to a guard.
“Not many that look like that,” the guard said. “Try over in that section.”
Already two tour guides have stopped me and questioned what I was doing in the cemetery.
Patiently I explained that I’m searching for a family member. That explanation seemed to satisfy them.
When I see the Lanabere tomb I’m overwhelmed by its grandness, how well it’s maintained. The face of the tomb is black marble and the family names are etched into the stone. I write down the family names. Two Azemar Lanaberes are buried in the tomb: Azemar Lanabere 1848–1896, Philomene’s brother; and Azemar J. Lanabere 1893, who was the son of Azemar Lanabere and Marie Augustine Celles Reinecke Lanabere. Their son lived only four months.
After I record their names, I shove the notebook in my purse. Then I put my hand to the stone as if I could invoke Philomene’s spirit. But I only feel the warmth of the marble. As I stand there, with my head bowed, I say a prayer for her and the other Lanaberes.
Even as I pray, I know it’s my mother I’m praying for.
35
Welcome to the Family
April 10, 2015
AZEMAR KING SKILLFULLY maneuvers his large black SUV around the parking lot for the second time as the camera crew takes their positions at the entrance to the Event Room where the welcome home party will take place. He seems to be accustomed to camera crews and Stephanie’s direction, not at all annoyed, taking it in his stride.
“Everyone’s already inside,” he tells Jerry and me. “Waiting for you.”
I try not to think about the camera crew or the “new” relatives awaiting us. I try not to think about my mother or what she would think of this journey I’ve made to discover the truth of her family. I try not to think.
We pull up to the door and Azemar jumps out of the car and opens the passenger door for me. I’ve finally convinced him not to call me ma’am, but I appreciate his chivalrousness.
With the camera crew trailing us, we approach the entrance, and then stop. I take in a deep breath. Jerry opens the glass door and I walk inside. The family is lined up in a semicircle to greet us. I see Stephanie at the end of the line on my left. She’s crying. Uncle Fred walks toward me and hands me a gift. Then he hugs me.
“Thank you,” I tell him.
“No,” he says. “Thank you. We are so grateful to you. You have no idea what you’ve done for our family.”
I accept his gratitude and wonder at it. Then the rest of the family comes forward and introduces themselves, hugging me, welcoming me. Jerry and I are guided to a table and are quickly joined by Uncle Fred, Aunt Alma and her husband John, Aunt Brenda and her husband Maurice.
I can’t help myself. I can’t stop staring in wonderment at them, especially Uncle Fred. I can see my mother in his face, the same dark eyes, the same facial shape.
“Uncle Fred,” I say. “You look like my mother.”
He smiles as if proving the similarity.
I open his present. It’s a silver embossed heart with a key that inserts into the back and acts as a support. A golden plaque adorns the front of the heart, which bears the words “Grateful Heart.”
The two aunts hand me framed photographs of each of their families and Aunt Modesta and Uncle Delano’s families.
I’ve brought gifts for them as well. I give each of them copies of the ten-page research packet about the Frederic family that Rich, the genealogist from Genealogy Roadshow, prepared for the show.
As Uncle Fred pages through the packet, he says, “You know I always hated my name Azemar. Kids used to tease me at school. But now that I know how far back in the family that names goes, I’m liking it more and more.”
Stephanie comes over and tells me that some of the family members haven’t seen each other in thirty years, like Cousin Dell from Philly, Delano’s son.
“You’ve done a good thing,” she says, “bringing this family together.”
Without knowing, I was the catalyst that reunited this family, as was Genealogy Roadshow. If I hadn’t filled out that online application none of this would have been possible.
They tell me how they never knew their father had a second family. They tell me how young they were when their father died and their mother left them.
Aunt Alma says, “We were raised by Alma Reilly. It was much later we found out she was our grandmother. All those years we never knew.”
“Tell me about your father. What did he look like?” I want to know details about my grandfather, the man my mother told me so little about.
Uncle Fred jumps in first. “My father was real careful about his dress. He wore white starched shirts, shoes shined. That was my job. To shine his shoes. His hair was always combed. He worked at a furniture store. On Saturdays he and his friend would sit on the porch drinking beer. I didn’t like that.” I can see the distress in his face.
I tilt my head in surprise. This description of Azemar is radically different from my mother’s description. “My mother always told me her father never smoked or drank. That he was a hard worker.”
“Just on weekends,” Uncle Fred answers.
But something about his father’s drinking bothers him even though he concedes it was only on weekends. Perhaps as my friend Linda always says, the truth is somewhere in the middle.
“Did anyone find a photo of him?” I’m almost afraid to ask, for surely they would have given it to me along with the other framed family photographs.
They shake their heads. “All the pictures were destroyed in the fire,” Uncle Fred explains.
I’m disappointed that I still don’t have a photograph of my grandfather. The missing photograph that started this quest so many years ago is still not found. But then I look at my two aunts and one uncle and realize that this was what I was meant to find. I glance around at the other tables, at the cousins. We are every shade of skin from darkest ebony to whitest white and all the shades in between. This is what my quest was leading me to, not a photograph of my grandfather Azemar Frederic, but his other family.
After we eat Azemar King comes over to our table holding an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph. “Cousin Gail,” he says. “Maybe you can help us. We were looking at this photograph last night of my mother and my brothers. But there’s this other woman with kids in the photograph, and no one knew who she was.”
He places the photograph on the table in front of me. I can hardly believe what I’m looking at. The sight of the woman and her children hits me hard. I blink away the tears that threaten to fall. I’m suspended in time, thrown back to my childhood.
“That’s my Aunt Shirley,” I say. “My mother’s sister. And those are her children, Margaret, Tripper, and Tony.” I don’t tell them what else I know about Aunt Shirley and her children, that they’re now deceased. And that Aunt Shirley died in a mental hospital bruised and beaten. It is too joyous an evening for sadness.
We all stare at the photograph in silence, in awe of what the photograph reveals to us. Many years ago long after my grandfather died and my mother moved north and left her family behind, Aunt Shirley and her half sister Modesta knew each other. There was once a bond between them. At one time Azemar’s two families knew each other. But something happened and the families drifted apart, taking their stories with them.
“Hey, Cousin Gail,” Azemar says, “you up for another reunion next year?”
“Sure, where?”
“Cousin Dell wants to host us in Philly.”
I catch my husband’s eye. I can see he’s on board, as I am. “Just let me know when and I’ll be there.”
36
Two Versions of One Family Story
December 2015 / January 2016
AS THE PRESENTATIONS wind down, as the book takes shape, I’m plagued with searing spi
nal pain, as if the burden of telling my mother’s story, the story of racism in this country, has become too much to bear, has lodged in my spine, has taken root. Some days I can barely get out of bed.
But there’s one family story that’s missing, another absence, another empty space that needs to be filled. That last day in New Orleans at the Café Adelaide, Aunt Alma talked about how her mother disappeared after her father died, her emotions raw as if it had happened yesterday. How can I be a part of this family without hearing that story? Without understanding how it shaped their lives.
With some trepidation, I contact Aunt Alma and set up a day and time to chat. I also contact Uncle Fred because I suspect he’ll tell me a different story than his sister. Stories and memories are like that. Although they’ve embraced me as family, I feel shy about having them relive these painful memories of childhood abandonment.
When I tell Stephanie what I intend to do, she says, “Good luck with that. They don’t share much.”
Alma Frederic Montgomery is a retired elementary school teacher who lives in the DC area. Both in appearance and actions, she’s precise and clear, probably occupational traits developed from her years of teaching young children. Though she’s kind, there’s a no nonsense attitude about her. On the ferry over to Ship Island, Mississippi, she related how she and John, her husband, volunteered to help after Katrina, traveling south and sleeping in a church.
When I ask about her father, she says wistfully, “My memories are so scattered. I think I knew more than I remembered. I don’t have a good memory of him.”
What she does remember of him is his being waked in the front room of the house on Iberville and being scared of his dead body in the house. She was seven years old when he died.
“I felt double abandonment. All within one year I lost my father and my mother.” She pauses. “We lived with Alma Riley, and I thought she’d adopted us after my father died and my mother left us. Not until fifteen years ago when I went to Vital Records in New Orleans and looked her up did I discover that she was my grandmother. My mother’s mother.”
“Why did your mother leave you? Was that after your father died?”
“Before he died. She’d come around for maybe a day. I didn’t know where she was living. I didn’t know at that time if my parents were separated or divorced. I do remember when my father was sick, he told Alma Riley, ‘If anything happens to me, will you keep the kids?’ He’d had two heart attacks already. The third one killed him. I think he was an alcoholic.”
“What about your mother, Modesta?”
“I think she left us to start a new life, maybe to marry a white man. In this school photo of her and me, she looks very white with brown hair, thick hair. All the girls have thick hair from my mom. When I looked her up in the census, every time—1920, 1930, 1940—she was listed as a boarder. She was never related to anyone. Her race was mulatto and her father was Caesar Messmer.” She takes in a deep breath and I wait.
“Music was a stabilizer for me.” There’s a lightness and pride in her voice when she talks about music. She had a full scholarship to Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, where she studied elementary education. Her musical outlet was her church. She worked part-time as an organist.
When I ask her about my mother’s decision to pass and what she thought of that, she tells her own story of passing.
“The only time I thought about passing was on a bus trip from Beeville, Texas, to Blytheville, Arkansas, where I was living at the time. I’d gone to Beeville to visit my first husband Kurt who was stationed at an army base in Texas. This was in 1960. It was a long bus ride and the bus went through Mississippi and Louisiana. I was tired. So when I got on in Texas, I decided I wasn’t going to the back of the bus where the black people were to sit. So I sat down in the front in the white section. I was doing my Rosa Parks.
“The bus driver looked at me but doesn’t say anything, but he kept looking at me. Not until the third stop did he say anything.
“‘What are you?’ he said.
“‘What do you mean?’ I answered.
“‘You know what I mean. Are you colored or white?’
“‘I’m an American.’
“‘Go to the back of the bus or I’ll call the police.’
“I believe if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here today. I do believe that.”
I believe it too, having heard a similar story of a WWII black GI who was taken off a bus in the South and beaten to death because he refused to sit in the “colored” section. But Aunt Alma’s story takes place in 1960 not 1945.
I remember Aunt Alma crying at Café Adelaide that last day we were in New Orleans when we had lunch with her, John, Cousin Azemar, and his wife Lauren. She was talking about her mother’s abandonment, how her older sister Modesta went to the church where their mother worshiped to see her. Modesta did see her, but her mother didn’t see her or pretended not to.
“For all I know, my mother could still be alive, living in some nursing home. I’ve tried over the years to find her. But she just disappeared.”
How can a woman abandon her five children and never look back? How could she never visit them, leaving them to be raised by her mother? As a mother it seems incomprehensible to me. Maybe what Aunt Alma said about her always being a lodger, never belonging to anyone, explains what seems to me heartless.
“The main thing about all of this happening with you and the Roadshow is I finally found someone who was looking for us as I was looking for them.”
When I talk to Uncle Fred I get another piece of this family’s broken puzzle, another insight into their mother and father.
“I was there when my father passed away,” Uncle Fred says for the second time, leading me back to the story he wants to tell. I let him. Something about his witnessing his father’s death at the age of ten needs to be heard.
“That must have been hard for you,” I encourage him. “He died at Charity Hospital, right?” I don’t mention what else I know about my grandfather’s death, that before his death he’d stayed at Charity for 105 days and that he died of coronary occlusion, heart disease, and gangrene. This is Uncle Fred’s story. I’m only here to listen.
“My father had heart trouble, which could have been caused by his drinking. My mother left him nine months to a year before he passed. She might have left because when he drank he got abusive, not physically.”
“Emotionally?”
“Yes, emotionally abusive.”
Could his emotional abuse have been ignited by his jealousy, the reason my grandmother gave for leaving him?
“It was a July day, and I was the only family member visiting my father. My grandmother gave me fourteen cents to take the trolley to the hospital. I didn’t understand at the time that Alma Riley was my grandmother. But I didn’t take the trolley. I saved the fourteen cents and walked from Iberville to the hospital.”
He’s gradually easing himself into the story of his father’s death. “When I got to the hospital my father was having trouble breathing. I could tell. Then the nurse ran over, looked at him, and then called for the doctor. My father took in a long breath and then let it out. It was his last breath. I saw it. Real quick they put me in a wheelchair that was always by his bed and wheeled me out of there.” He gathers his thoughts. “I was the first one to know he died. I didn’t know how I was going to tell the family. When I got home they already knew. Someone from the hospital must have called.”
I ask him about his mother. I expect him to say that after she left that was the last he heard from her. But he surprises me.
“After she left, she called and told me where she was.”
This is a different story than the one Alma told me, that her mother cut off all contact with the family. I wonder if the siblings ever shared their different stories.
“She never said why she left my father. We’d ride the trolley car and talk. We’d ride to the end of the line and back. I asked her if she was okay. She said yes. I asked he
r if she was happy. I’ll never forget what she said. ‘I’m content, not happy.’ I always remember that word, content.”
There’s no rancor or resentment or even sadness that Alma expressed. Fred seems more resigned to his mother’s abandonment. He keeps repeating that he always wanted to be a person who was independent, a person who called his own shots. To prove that, he relates a series of jobs he had as a child: from whitewashing graves at St. Louis No. Three cemetery to working in the meat department at the corner market to helping his grandmother set up for the school in her backyard where she taught people to read in the evenings and on Saturdays. Even his joining the air force after high school is another sign of his fierce need to be independent, to travel the world, to get an education on the government’s dime, not to burden his grandmother with his education.
“My mother was very pretty, very attractive, very fair. When my mother and I would ride the trolley, we’d sit behind the screen, in the section for the colored people. Sometimes older people would get on and move the screen so we would be sitting in the white section. One time I sat in the white section. No one said anything.”
I also ask him his thoughts about my mother’s passing. “Your mother saw an opportunity to better herself and she seized the opportunity. That was an individual opinion and desire. If it helped you for your goals, why should a person be held back.”
He chuckles. “I passed. I’ll give you an example. There’s this hotel in New Orleans, the Roosevelt, very elegant hotel. When I was a child, blacks had to go in the back way. When I’d pay the water bill downtown for my grandmother, I’d go into the front entrance of the Roosevelt Hotel and sit on this circular bench and look at the beautiful tapestries. I thought to myself that was their law not mine. One time a clerk said to me, ‘Son, you need anything?’ I said, ‘No, I’m just waiting.’”