History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  I call Mom again, now suspecting that something loathsome happened to my aunt. Had she been molested, even raped? Mom begins to remember, acknowledging his existence but adding very little. Men move on, she tells me. By marriage families lose sons but gain daughters. Men are always disappearing, wandering into someone else’s life, wandering away. I find her answer unsatisfactory, even irksome, though I realize I myself have drifted away. Independence has always required a certain distance, even a measure of disavowal.

  Searching for Arthur Mullan leads to census records, police reports, reels of microfilm whirling before my eyes, even a plane trip to Salt Lake City and the Mormon’s Family History Library with its vast repository of genealogical records. There’s not much to go on. Crucial documents seem incomplete, even contradictory. It doesn’t help that he switched around his first and second names. I learn he qualified as a pharmacist in 1901 following two years of college; in 1909 he married the thirty-one-year-old Cora Peterson; and in 1915 their first child died while the couple was living in New Orleans. Arthur registered for the draft at the end of World War I before heading west, first to Arizona and finally settling down in central Los Angeles, where the couple rented various houses and Arthur plied his trade as a druggist. He died at the end of 1942; depending on the record he was in his fifties or sixties. Cecile would have known Arthur only as a young child of six or eight years old. Her uncle was long dead by the time she became pregnant with her last child.

  The research leaves me feeling bereft, and a little troubled. It’s not that I’ve wasted too much time on a wild goose chase. Or that a hypothesis has turned out to be incorrect. Developing theories of causation is at the center of much historical work, and theories are meant to be tested. Rather, I’ve committed a common error that befalls historians: the belief that we can discover an origin that explains everything else. I wanted to be able to say that incest led to my aunt’s insanity, as if I could draw a line connecting two dots separated in time. I would engage in the recuperative project of history, figure out what happened, and understand the tumult of her heartbroken life. I was more than willing to jump to conclusions. All I needed to do was uncover an unsavory family secret— a single traumatic moment—and all else would be explained. The rest of Cecile’s life would fall neatly into place, however tragically. Now it seems impossible to understand my aunt’s life. In some basic, resolute way, her past, perhaps every past, continuously slips away.

  This research also leaves me feeling dirty, not only from prying into the lives of others but by association—too close to a chasm of tragedies from which I want to escape but seem instead to be falling into. Cecile was undoubtedly insane: she heard voices and spoke to them; she thought she “might be her own twin”; she combined “bizarre sexual” and religious ideas; she was filled with “grandiose delusions,” “preoccupied with self-improvement, education and seems to have a great deal of underlying insecurity.” Her dead siblings were living in the house with Jesus, who had assumed the name of “Dr. King.” At times she disowned one of her children, at other times insisted she had six children, not five. Arthur Mullan becomes her brother, a brother murdered by her husband in a fight over a $60,000 house he had constructed for his secretary and lover. Everyone in my family seems a little crazy, though: people pulling guns on each other, jumping off bridges, dressing up, lying down on the bathroom floor and turning on the gas. The madness never ends.

  I find myself wondering if my aunt’s delusions have some deeper location in the stories and longings of her mother, my beloved grandmother—stories that led Cecile to a house on Esplanade. Were all the performances—the outbursts, the clothes, the phone calls and the trips downtown—actually embodying an unspeakable past, a past not known but somehow remembered? Did madness steal into a space that language abandoned? I wonder what has been lost, even silenced, in the making and remaking of family memory.

  I work backward from what appears settled to ever more distant and murkier times. Published census records make it relatively easy to identify where Grandmother lived, household size, occupation, and whether or not her family rented or owned their residence. Soon I am poring over address books, registers of birth, marriage, and death, wills, church records, phone calls and emails to genealogists, and scholarly tomes on the early history of Louisiana. I keep expecting to find the house on Esplanade, as well as information that will explain how the family fell from the Creole bourgeoisie into the ranks of the urban poor white class. There are a few precious family documents Grandmother kept that stretch back into the nineteenth century, which include a list of births and deaths and where people lived, and a miscellany of writings in English and French: poems, stories, a few French ditties. The trick is to place these materials into a kind of conversation. The easy part is identifying instances where one source confirms another. The more difficult challenge is understanding the relationship of the written archive to the storehouse of family memory.

  Christened Cecile Samuela Salvant, Grandmother was one of ten children, a few of whom did pretty well. One sister moved out to California with her husband, an Irishman named Sweeny. During the Depression she sent bags of clothes back home to New Orleans until her husband ended up in federal prison convicted of fraud. Another sister, the beautiful Mae, opened up a typing school for secretaries. Mae lived not too far from Esplanade, in a double shotgun with a yard filled with peach and fig trees.

  Cecile Samuela attended the Louisiana Normal School for Teachers, working through her twenties until she met Zeno Mullan, a ne’er-do-well son of a Scots-Irishman. The Mullans were all working-class New Orleanians: peddlers, grocers, shop employees, and common laborers, some of whom at least pretended they were descended from American aristocracy all the way to the Mayflower.

  My mother’s parents married and had their first child, a daughter, at the beginning of 1911; Grandmother was then twenty-nine. Louisiana law forced women to give up teaching once they married, so she lost whatever financial independence she once had enjoyed. The couple lived week to week and fought often. Zeno wandered from one job to the next. Sometimes he simply disappeared. At the height of the Depression he abandoned the family for a few months, hoboing trains to the Chicago World’s Fair. He ended up working as a night watchman at Charity Hospital until his death in the spring of 1957.

  Children offered little solace to this broken marriage. Grandmother lost one child in infancy, a son barely six months old. Her oldest and beloved daughter Rowena died at eighteen from a burst appendix. In June of 1946, her son Russell jumped off the Huey P. Long Bridge. He was twenty-nine, married, father to two daughters, and had just returned from the war in Europe. For a while Russell, too, had spent time in a mental hospital. This left her with her namesake Cecile, Henry, and my mother, Yvonne.

  Of six children, only two survived Grandmother: my mother and her brother, both alcoholics. Henry had gone to war divorced and with a fondness for drink. He returned to New Orleans and remarried, took up odd jobs, lived in various apartments in the city, and slowly drank himself to death. Henry ended up escaping the prison where he’d been sent for pulling the Colt on Louis in 1952, and in later years he managed to eke out an existence Uptown, in the end running one of the city’s many tiny neighborhood corner stores, where people bought dry goods, cool drinks, beer, and cigarettes. When I met him in the late 1970s, Henry was hallucinating wildly and holding elaborate conversations with a Chihuahua that he kept in his sweater in the middle of the New Orleans summer. A robber had blown half his head off. Most of his lower jaw and one side of his face had collapsed in on itself, so it was impossible to understand much of anything he said. He looked like a Lucian Freud painting, with the asymmetries of his face and slackened folds of flesh. He died a few years later of alcoholism.

  Grandmother’s personal history feels as if it is easy to discern. I can conjure within my mind a sense of the Depression’s hard years and the decades of living month to month, perhaps because that world, bequeathed to my mother, for so
me time became my own. I wanted to know though about what had come before, the splendor contained in the stories of a more distant past that had led Cecile to someone’s porch on Esplanade.

  “Well, son, I remember my mother telling me about Joseph the cotton broker,” my mother tells me. “He was rich! Real New Orleans elite. Aristocrats. They had one of those great big houses, and a slave who served them dinner.”

  “I remember Grandmother telling me she lived in a big house,” a sister informs me, her eyes glistening. Stories passed from one generation to the next declare the Salvants to have been a family of good, pure, French stock—solid New Orleans Creoles, as my grandmother had told her children and everyone else who would listen. Her father, Joseph Moliere Salvant Jr., has been a comforting apparition to those generations who have lived by their wits but remain forever certain that good fortune lies both in the past and just around the corner. Mom talks of Joseph as if he were sitting by her bed dressed in a fine suit and hat, describing his life as a cotton broker. She descends into a time when the labor of slaves created a New Orleans grandeur of fancy mansions and servants tending to the family’s needs, resplendent masked balls, banquets that went into the morning hours, and cases of precious Bordeaux and Burgundy wines for the fine cellars of restaurants like Antoine’s.

  Joseph Jr. was one of eight children born to Marie Josephine Veillon and Joseph Moliere Salvant Sr., the namesake and treasured oldest. I discover that his childhood in the 1840s lay not in New Orleans but on a small ribbon of land in the swamps of Plaquemines (Atakapa Indian for “persimmon”) Parish along the west bank of the Mississippi River, twenty or so miles south of the city.

  Going further back in time I learn about Jean Salvant II, the father of Joseph Moliere Salvant Sr., who was born in Plaquemines in 1785. He married Rosalia Daubard in 1803, whose father had migrated from Bourgogne and, in the New World, taken Rosa Charles as his wife, a woman of likely mixed-race descent. Jean passed away by 1827 when Joseph Moliere Sr. was twelve. Little is known of the pioneer Jean Salvant I. He arrived in Louisiana as a soldier during the middle years of the eighteenth century, probably from central or eastern France. In 1770, he owned just over three acres of land in Plaquemines granted to him in return for his military service, along with four hogs and a rifle. He married Maria Luisa Lambre. In 1796, one of their sons sought a special dispensation from the church in order to marry his cousin, a common practice in early colonial Louisiana.

  Plaquemines was a poor, rough, backwater area along the river that stretched down to the French fort and settlement at La Balise near the Gulf of Mexico. Early colonial farmers cultivated the black soils along the river bank, planting corn and vegetables that they sold whenever they could in New Orleans. They built small houses of swamp cypress and yellow pine with broad roofs to protect them in the hot summers. They hunted and fished, raised a few pigs and cattle, and in the cooler months stood in pirogues raking the legendary Plaquemines oysters that hid in the muddy, brackish waters. Experienced river men helped ships navigate the Mississippi’s treacherous and ever-moving sandbars. Others turned to pirating and robbed boats bringing goods up to New Orleans. Most lived and died poor.

  For the early pioneers Plaquemines was a foreboding, primordial place, more Africa than France. Fevers from the miasma drifting out of the swamps and sea marshes took many colonists to an early grave, especially the young. The “infinity of mosquitoes” turned the night air into an incessant drumbeat. Settlers had to contend with alligators, water moccasins, black bears, and outlaw pirates, who hid in the back waters waiting for boats moving up and down from New Orleans.

  Most of all they worried about the weather. In the summer thick courses of raven clouds formed along the southern horizon. In the great hurricanes the ocean rose into the sky. The sea would fall into a tumult. First the light would turn a buttery yellow, and the wind would circle around the top of the trees as if it had lost its way. Then clouds would rush over the forest low and heavy, and the rains would turn roofs into beating drums. Pine trees whistled shrilly until the world became a roar, with trees uprooted and the sea marching inland to sweep the innocent away.

  For a short while, especially during the Spanish period (1762 to 1802), the acrid smell of indigo leaves boiling in vats drifted across Plaquemines, the plant’s radiant blue dye destined for European finery. Indigo brought slavery. For a few colonists it brought an early taste of wealth. The parish became a gumbo of people: colonists, virtually all Roman Catholics from France, marginal men now free from feudal restraint, a few from Spain, Cuba, and Mexico; slaves brought directly from Senegambia and Congo or from the Caribbean; free blacks; and the maroons who joined the few remaining Chitimacha Indians deep in the swamplands.

  Southern Louisiana had a uniquely high degree of miscegenation, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century. Louisiana has one of the most complicated racial histories in the United States, more akin to Cuba than to the other Southern states. Plaçage they called it, left-handed marriages, mariages de la main gauche, involving European settlers, Creoles, slaves, and Indians. Miscegenation produced mulattos, quadroons, and octoroons in the colony’s finely gradated racial system that was remarkably different than the rest of the American South. A Daubard son married a woman who descended from a “negress” slave born in Africa at the beginning of the eighteenth century; one of their children, St. Luc, became a mulatto sugar farmer and owner of some sixteen slaves in 1850.

  The indigo economy collapsed within decades, done in by crop diseases and competition from India. Rice, introduced by African slaves from Senegambia in the early decades of the eighteenth century, proved more dependable and was in high demand throughout the Atlantic world. The Daubards became early rice planters, the sweat of their slaves building levees to create paddies and protect the crops from salty waters. It was sugar, however, that utterly transformed Plaquemines Parish. Sugar took off spectacularly at the turn of the century, following the slave revolution in Saint-Domingue that destroyed what had been France’s Caribbean gem and sent thousands of slave owners and their slaves to the United States. Louisiana would become a leading producer of sugar, the largest in the country, creating fabulously wealthy plantations up and down the Mississippi River. The average plantation was worth more than three million in today’s dollars and the larger ones were far wealthier, producing thousands of hogsheads of sugar and exploiting hundreds of slaves. Elsewhere Louisiana colonists had adopted cotton, a far more reliable crop than sugar, though less spectacularly profitable. Nonetheless, during the sugar boom many cotton plantation owners rolled the dice on the cane.

  The Plaquemines population grew steadily in the early 1800s in response to the sugar boom. By 1820 the population had risen to 661 whites, 1,566 slaves, and 151 free blacks; the slave population would increase steadily in the following years. Sugar required huge investments in slaves and equipment. Hurricanes could destroy men’s entire fortunes. (Ten major hurricanes hit Louisiana between 1780 and 1830, the crucial years of sugar cane expansion.) Animals ate away at the crops. Fields required constant weeding. Most of all, sugar brutalized: lives cut short by overwork, bodies pulled apart by machinery and the whip, kin torn from one another, the indifference born of lucre. Slaves resisted, protesting the brutal work and harsh discipline, often absconding at crucial moments, though in the nineteenth century the swamps no longer offered much safety. At the beginning of Carnival season in 1811, while planters ate lavish meals, drank, gambled, and danced, upward of 500 slaves deserted sugar plantations near New Orleans in the largest slave revolt in American history. Led by Kwaku and Kwamina, two Asante kingdom warriors, the slaves marched on the city dressed in military uniforms carrying guns and cane knives, the ideas of the French Revolution and Saint-Domingue’s slave revolt in their heads: egalité, fraternité, most of all liberté. A planter militia defeated the rebels five days later. The heads of Kwaku and Kwamina ended up on poles, along with a hundred others.

  Few pioneer families had
the capital to become large sugar planters. Wealthy Anglo-American merchants from New Orleans and men from across the South descended on Plaquemines, buying up most of the good land, their slaves planting the new ribbon and Otahiti cane that would make Louisiana famous, and building stately homes at the end of tree-lined roads. The fineries of success lay just outside the reach of men like Jean Salvant II. Jean became a sugar maker on a plantation near Jesuit Bend, where priests first introduced sugar to Louisiana. The job offered a way of escaping his father’s poverty. Sugar making was an important, technical job. Experienced sugar makers could make as much as $1,500 a year, an impressive salary at the time. The work in the sugar house went on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for as long as three months. It was brutal, dangerous work: limbs could be caught in the mill, or men scalded by the boiling syrup. Tempers flared. Overseers carried guns and whips to enforce discipline. Jean slept in the sugar house to oversee the labor. Slaves pressed the cane and boiled the juice in a series of four to six wrought-iron kettles. Lime forced impurities to the top and was crucial to granulation. At the perfect moment, when the juice was sufficiently concentrated, Jean would order a “strike.” Striking too soon affected crystallization. Striking too late altered the sugar’s taste and coloration. Slaves then ladled the juice into cooling vats, where it turned into various sugars and molasses.

  Jean’s work on the plantation brought a modicum of improved fortune. His sons learned the world of sugar, and each did better than his father. They began purchasing slaves, though none entered the great planter class with its columned mansions and double-storied balconies. By mid-century the Salvant men in the parish owned a total of twenty-two slaves, including four mulattos, a number that was still half of what was needed to run a viable sugar farm. Jean Salvant III owned eleven slaves in 1850; he became the most prosperous Salvant, with real estate valued at $60,000 two decades later, a small fortune equivalent to more than $750,000 today. Jean’s other son, Joseph Moliere Salvant Sr., struggled to become a small sugar planter in Jesuit Bend. Between 1850 and 1860 he increased his worth from $5,000 to $20,000, a not inconsiderable sum (the equivalent of about $125,000 to $500,000, respectively) though still only a tenth of the worth of the wealthiest planters in the parish. His wife Marie Josephine Veillon bore him eight children, including Grandmother’s father.