History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  She tells me how she and my father first met at an evening class at the local public library. It was 1938; half her life had taken place under the Depression. Dad was in his mid-twenties, eight years older than Mom, a handsome man who wore his fedora like Bogart. He owned a car and spent weekends at Audubon Park in his whites, perfecting sliced backhands across the red clay courts. His family lived in a neighborhood of middle-class professionals. Their solid, square house near Claiborne sat high off the road, as if it were not of the city and belonged instead to an America of modest success and restraint. They had done well enough to purchase summer cottages in Monteagle, Tennessee, a southern Chautauqua meant for relaxation, Christian reflection, and learning, nestled high up on the Cumberland Plateau. For a short while Dad attended Tulane, where the Crais men were expected to earn degrees that would ensure continued familial success, then studied for a semester at Vanderbilt before heading back to New Orleans.

  In teasing out details scattered across various archives and books, I discovered that my paternal family’s economic success and Christian footing belies a more complicated past. Suddenly I find myself researching Eastern European and Caribbean history, somehow hoping that these pasts might begin revealing the worlds that created my parents and, by a simple fact of biology, me. Genealogical work is often this way, particularly in an immigrant country like the United States. Most of us come from someplace else. I move up and down the generations and across oceans as if I were playing scales on a piano. I begin with my father’s maternal grandfather, Jacob Rosenberg, who emigrated in the 1870s from an area in northeast Poland near the border with Lithuania, a contested territory that passed from one owner to another in the fraught politics of Eastern European nationalism. Jews in particular suffered increasing persecution in the years following the 1863 Polish Uprising. Starvation followed failed nationalism and radical politics. Many perished in the famines of 1868 and 1869. After 1870 Jews began migrating to the United States, South Africa, Sweden, and South America. Those who remained in this small corner of Poland—about 7,000 by 1940—were shot in a nearby forest or murdered in the gas chambers.

  A sickly man, Jacob was meant to join his three brothers in South Africa. He made his way from Poland to Italy but ended up somehow in Texas and then in the wet lowlands of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, working on the docks or as a drayman. Jacob married into an old French family from Pointe à la Hache. Grace Agnes Martin bore him five children in their short marriage of a dozen years. Jacob wanted them to have Jewish or Polish names, some recognition of his homeland and his faith, the past that had led him to America: they named my father’s mother Sarah, after her grandmother, Sara (Chaisora) Lewenshon.

  The family had just moved to New Orleans when Jacob died at the age of thirty-five. Sarah Rosenberg was five, her baby brother barely a year old. Little of her father’s past remained beyond her name. The pogroms and starvation, Jacob’s epic journey as a very young man across Eastern Europe to Italy, Yiddish, the Torah, his beloved brothers working in South Africa, his family back in Poland—all this history faded away. Sarah grew up with her mother in New Orleans, raised in the Catholic Church until 1905, when a request for money to bury Grace led the indignant eighteen-year-old Sara down the street to the Presbyterians. Two years later, Sarah married Gustave Henry Crais. They moved into a small shotgun with Sarah’s younger brother.

  Sarah’s husband, I learn, also had forsaken Jewish roots. Gustave’s mother descended from the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Alsace and western Germany, who immigrated to the United States in the second decade of the nineteenth century: Mayers and Salzmans, Koenigs and Schocklers. All this Eastern European and Jewish past has been forgotten, as if a branch of the family tree was lopped off or never even existed. Male descent is what ended up counting, and that means Louisiana’s Catholicism and its distinctive French past. But even here there are all sorts of strange silences and elisions of time and space. “We are French,” we like to say, “Creole.” The Crais family came from France. True enough, as long as one forgets Haiti.

  I return to my genealogical spelunking, searching for records scattered halfway round the world: Aix-en-Provence, the Caribbean, and across the United States. The key is to work backward from the present to ever deeper pasts, and then, once you’ve found something, to research horizontally, situating the person in their time and place as if you were an anthropologist conducting fieldwork. Establishing a context is one of the most important challenges of all historical work. Slowly you begin dreaming up complex social worlds: the clothes people wore, what they ate, their labor—in short, their lives and deaths. From there you can begin working toward the present again, which in my case means finding out who my grandparents were, how my parents met, and wondering how these more distant pasts might have shaped later generations.

  The original American immigrant, Joseph Lange Crais, sailed to New Orleans as a young exile, among the last whites to flee Saint-Domingue’s bloody slave revolution during the final years of the eighteenth century. I can identify almost the day he arrived in New Orleans. He was a Haitian creole, not an American one. I start reading more deeply into the island’s turbulent history, push further back in time. Joseph’s father had left eastern France in the second half of the eighteenth century to make his fortune in the insufferably hot island, ending up on the northwestern tip of the island in Le Grand Dérangement, the “Great Madness,” when the British prosecuted and scattered Acadians and other French colonists across the Americas.

  Môle-Saint-Nicolas was a dreadful spot. Over half of the seven hundred people who first landed there perished within a year, the “air putrid with the dead.” Joseph’s father became a petit blanc, a “small white,” most likely a ship builder, successful enough to own a modest house. At the time Saint-Domingue was France’s most valuable North American possession, by the end of the century the world’s largest producer of sugar and coffee, thanks in no small part to the 160,000 slaves toiling on its plantations. The island had the most brutal system of slavery anywhere in the New World: laborers worked to death digging canals and cutting cane, arms torn off by the mill, fugitives burned alive in Le Cap’s public square. Slaves resisted, some escaping to the remote jungles of the interior. In 1791, a year before Joseph’s birth, they rebelled. Inspired by the French Revolution and memories of ancestral homelands, slave armies attacked Le Cap. A thousand plantations burned to the ground. Two thousand whites died. Upwards of ten thousand slave rebels died, their leaders’ heads mounted on stakes in the main square. The Black Jacobin Toussaint Louverture emerged as the new leader, declaring in 1793 that he would accept nothing less than emancipation for the island, while putting down revolts in the north with spectacular violence. Napoleon’s attempt to restore white rule in 1802–3 led to a vicious war. Louverture died in 1803, his soul returning to lead an army of African dead. In 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti’s independence, black revolutionaries massacred many of the remaining white planters in a spasm of racial violence and retribution.

  The revolution sent waves of exiles into the Caribbean and the United States. Joseph was one of nearly 20,000 people who left the sugar island for the lower Mississippi River, a group that included not only whites but also slaves and especially free people of color. The migration nearly doubled New Orleans’s population. In his early thirties Joseph married another exile, Emilie Doucet, nearly a decade his senior. He became a shipwright during a time of explosive growth in the river traffic moving up and down the Mississippi. The refugee couple thrived in their new home. Joseph brought into his marriage at least one slave; by 1840 the couple owned ten slaves, a considerable number for an urban family. A decade later, when the household included four mulatto children, Joseph owned real estate valued at $10,000, today a quarter million dollars. His twenty-eight-year-old son, my great-great grandfather, owned property worth $3,000 and a house on Bourbon Street, and worked as a “professor.”

  My father’s father began work as a clerk
in an insurance agency at the young age of fourteen. He became the head of the fire insurance department at Black, Rogers and Company, where he worked for twenty-two years until his death in 1939. By this time, memory of these immigrant pasts had long since disappeared within the making and remaking of familial history, as if their kind of American success demanded a certain silencing. A stolid, white, Christian, middle-class life of quiet accomplishment could not contain histories of European Jewry, Caribbean slavery, and exile. In the decades following the Civil War, Haiti came to be seen as too marginal, too poor, and most of all too black, in a period also associated with rising anti-Semitism. In any event, when my parents met in the late 1930s, Dad was a racist and an anti-Semite.

  Dad’s parents looked askance at this young woman entering their errant son’s life. They hoped he would return to college, marry someone of similar respectability, and make something of himself. My mother and father dated through the summer heat and humidity and spent Labor Day of 1939 on the coast, alone and happy. Dad’s father died two months later, and two months after that, the couple married. They soon left for New York City. Mom was nineteen. She got her coat, not a mink but at least one with a fur collar.

  Dad enlisted in the Merchant Marines after the birth of their first child, Susan, in 1941. Mom loved New York: the change of seasons, the first snow, the city’s hustle and bustle. The Merchant Marines brought the couple a regular paycheck—the first time in Mom’s life she could make ends meet, though with it came the dreadful fear that a German torpedo would sink her husband’s convoy somewhere in the North Atlantic. The end of the war returned them to New Orleans, and after that, children began to arrive every few years: Marie in 1945, my brother Gus four years later, the twins Catherine and Mary born prematurely and dead from holes in their hearts, followed by three children amidst a collapsing marriage: Kinta in 1952, Sabrina in 1955. I was born five years later.

  Across Louisiana and Texas the petrochemical industry was booming. Refineries converted millions of gallons of oil into gasoline for America’s automobile revolution. After a short time in New Orleans, the family moved to a dreaded suburb outside Houston, where rattlesnakes cooled themselves under the house, then moved again to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where low tide waters raced to the horizon. At least until Houston Mom tried hiding her frustrations over the constant moves and living month to month. Dad was good with numbers, and jobs were easily had, but he could never keep one for much longer than a year. He argued with his employers, complained about his coworkers. Nothing was ever good enough, and a better job was always around the corner. He also borrowed money against his paycheck. In the late 1950s the Continental Oil and Transportation Company pursued in him court, securing a judgment for $181.53.

  Mom can’t name all the different companies Dad worked for, or all the addresses where they lived, though just talking about it still makes her angry. I know that for some time she tried being a dutiful wife and mother. There were cakes to bake, Mardi Gras costumes to sew from white, purple, and green cloth that hung in strips across the old Singer. For days her feet rocked up and down. The pulley whirled until she had made her children into princesses, heroes, jesters. She insisted on celebrating Mardi Gras even in Texas and Mississippi. Neighborhood children dressed up. For a long day, the house they were renting became a carnival ground filled with games, children running to and fro, fried chicken and potato salad, and plenty of sweets.

  Back on the porch in Jacksonville, a smile begins to form, and almost as suddenly something happens. Her eyes blink two or three times as if her vision has gone blurry; I wonder if a speck of dirt has tumbled into them. Her mind turns to the period around my birth and young childhood, when I was needy and she was sick.

  “You see, son,” Mom begins, going on to explain how hard life was in the final years of her marriage to my father, and how much she despised the way Dad constantly moved the family around as he looked for jobs that were never good enough. My mother craved stability, anything that might take her away from her life’s poverty. She wanted a house, family suppers at six, vacations on the Gulf Coast, a middle-class life where she would no longer worry about how to make it month to month. Dad never finished college, never kept a job for long, never earned enough to buy a house. Mom came to think her prince was a coward.

  I imagine how difficult being divorced must have been: a housewife for nearly two decades, no qualifications, not even a high school education, a clutch of children. She expected marriage to last forever and to always be cared for, no matter what happened. Divorce was anathema. Louisiana’s legal system had very few safeguards for women. Divorce meant abandonment, not least from the Roman Catholic Church.

  Words drift away from our relationship to the context within which it unfolded. Mom looks at me, sees my successes: a tenured professor at a prestigious institution, a stable and fulfilling marriage of over twenty years, two wonderful children.

  “We all suffer. It does you good, builds character. Look at you, how well you’ve done. We’re all so proud. And she’s so beautiful. And those children of yours …”

  How lucky you are, she tells me, how intelligent and successful. I don’t respond; I am not sure I would know how.

  My mother looks at me again. This walk through the ruins has wearied her. She returns to where we began, memory’s disavowal. I realize her memory seems to unravel around the time of my birth and childhood, a very late child coming into a broken marriage. She has a hard time remembering all the bad stuff—alcoholism, suicide attempts, the divorce, the abuse of her children, the incalculable damage she has wrought on others—but I also wonder if she fears being devoured by the past, by all those unrequited longings and endless disappointments.

  “Do you remember that time when I was two or three years old, and you drew a bath in the old enameled cast-iron tub until the water reached nearly halfway up? We always used Ivory Soap. It’s one of the things I remember from childhood. I liked the way the soap bobbed up and down and left white trails in the water. For a little while you washed me, until you pushed my head under the water and kept me there. I struggled, kicked, slapped at the water, flailed about helplessly.”

  I am not sure why I want to ask her this. I know the facts of what happened, but not why. Decades later, I ended up in the arms of a woman, a close friend of one of my sisters, in a cheap New Orleans hotel, and she told me this story about me. All of this now seems as real as a 5mm family film projected against a white sheet in endless loops of yesterday, today, next week. And now I am talking to the person who tried to kill me, wanting to know why, wanting to rail against her. But somehow I can’t get the words out, and so it is a secret we both keep.

  Water under the bridge, Mom likes to say, let sleeping dogs lie. When we are together, once or maybe twice a year, we are mostly lost to each other, as though we were islands along some archipelago made of family, connected certainly, but also ineluctably separated by our silences. My mother wants to forget. She thanks the doctor for helping in the effort. Forgetting is her defense. It may be her way of life, a mode of existence. But I want to know. I want Mom, or rather the two of us, to create a past, to tell a story of us together, no matter how painful and incomplete. I have conducted research, done other interviews, looked at photographs, examined documents, assembled chronologies, chased sources from France to Haiti and beyond. I know about her family’s history, as well as my father’s. But I want something more than what documents can tell me, much more. I want her to take me back to the abyss. She is the only one who can do it. Mom is an original source. With the other information I have gathered, I hope I can produce a proximate history of what happened, and a possible reason for my inability to remember.

  I wonder if neuroscience might offer some clues, might in some way help me imagine what happened all those years ago and answer the question of how I became me. Researchers have discovered that depressed mothers alter the brains of their babies by the way they look at them, by their very eyes. Experiments ha
ve shown that anxious or conflicted early attachments may result in the overproduction of biochemicals that shape neural growth and the biological processes involved in memory, fear, and forgetting. The medial temporal lobe, which scientists have identified as central to the creation and storing of memory, undergoes terrific transformation in childhood and is especially susceptible to the effects of neurotransmitters and other biochemicals.

  The child’s external world of emergent relations unfolds inside the brain in a kind of biological conversation with genetic inheritance. Certain genes switch on, others turn off. Synaptic connections are made, pared down, remade. Entire structures evolve that shape how we remember, how we tell the story of our selves, of who we really are. These stories—the mental histories we assemble over the course of our lives—become our “selves.” We sift through the remains of our being, assigning particular importance to this or that recollection, or discarding pasts we once thought determined who we are. Stories change, often in the telling. In this way, no matter how fragmentary and unreliable, memory functions as the archive from which we produce a history of who we have become. The autobiographies we create shape the way we live our lives.