History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  Census data and marriage and probate records allow me to reconstruct in some detail the early history of my grandmother’s family and of Louisiana’s rural economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This research has delivered me to a past that exists beyond stories of a family firmly rooted in New Orleans proper and the urban world of the Creole elite. Neither the few records nor our family stories lead to Plaquemines Parish. Oral history often acts this way. Time gets compressed in a process scholars refer to as “telescoping.” What might be recounted as a generation, in fact traverses many decades and multiple generations. A far more complex and distant past gets simplified or even disappears within a single historical narrative that rests on a mythic charter, in our case the simple assertion (which is both true and false) that “we came to New Orleans from France.”

  Historians work to slow down and understand this foreshortening. I want to know something of the world of Plaquemines Parish, including the intimacies that unfolded among the Salvants and the human beings they possessed, like the seventeen-year-old Madeline who ran away from Jean Salvant III with a bounty of twenty dollars on her head. Slaves took the Salvant name. One mulatto slave gained his freedom and by 1860 became a slave owner himself. It’s clear that miscegenation took place; one of Jean’s sons would marry a mulatto woman. By the late nineteenth century black and mulatto Salvants lived and labored in Plaquemines and in New Orleans. Ultimately prejudice and exploitation pulled people apart; families scattered around the country tied by history, and sometimes blood, but mostly separated by race and oppression. There is some lineament that connects me to an African American professor of English teaching in the northeast, just as there is a shared history stretching across the Gulf of Mexico to an impoverished corner of Haiti.

  The Civil War destroyed Louisiana’s slave-based sugar industry, though Plaquemines already had seen its best days. The value of farms declined between 1850 and 1860 by nearly 40 percent. War brought a definitive end to the parish’s economic fortunes. In April 1862, the Union Navy took forts Jackson and St. Philip near the mouth of the Mississippi in what proved to be a crucial moment in the war. As their men and ships moved north through Plaquemines to New Orleans, Northern forces met little resistance, giving them control of the Mississippi. Free blacks in the parish formed a militia to assist the Union.

  New Orleans witnessed a rapid migration of people following the destruction of farms and the end of slavery. Many of the Salvants—white, black, and mulatto—moved to the city. Most joined the urban working class. One became a cattle driver, living with his mulatto wife Josephine. Those with some money used their knowledge of sugar to work in one of the city’s merchant exchanges. A few prospered, such as Thomas J. Salvant and his cousin R. M. Salvant, who owned a large house at 3201 Ursulines. Others pursued different trades. One son of Joseph Moliere Salvant Sr. entered the retail shoe business, managing Dunn’s shoe store.

  For the fifty-year-old Joseph Moliere Sr., the Civil War ended his economic dreams. When war broke out in 1861 he had just entered the class of small planters in Jesuit Bend, wealthy enough to send his namesake away to a Jesuit school in Kentucky. Sometime around 1862 he left Plaquemines Parish for the city, along with the rest of his family. At the beginning of 1867 he purchased a modest single-story house in the city, on the corner of Columbus and Johnson Streets, and four lots of adjoining property. In 1870 he described himself as a “retail merchant.” The value of his personal property stood at a mere $800 (about $12,000 today), a mere fraction of what he had possessed just a few years earlier. Josephine died in 1880 of cancer of the “womb.” Joseph followed her fifteen years later. He left no will. A month after his passing, the seven surviving children petitioned the court to be recognized as heirs and to inherit the estate, which was then sold off.

  His son Joseph Jr., my grandmother’s father, began work as a retail grocer in 1870 with an estate valued at $500 (today just over $7,000). Six years later, he was laboring not as a cotton broker, as the family stories have it, but in the sugar trade. He had married the beautiful twenty-three-year-old Marie Antoinette Chevillon, whose French father worked as a carpenter and had taken a local girl as his wife. The couple first lived in the Third Ward, a relatively poor area of mulattos, free blacks, and immigrants, and the birthplace of Louis Armstrong. By 1882 they had moved into the Sixth Ward, the Tremé, renting a small house on Villere Street, where Antoinette gave birth to my grandmother, Mary Cecile Samuella Salvant, in late 1882.

  The Tremé was home to former slaves, Haitian creoles, gens de couleur, and a few whites. At the time 3, 214 people lived there, only 176 of them white. During the antebellum period, the ward had the largest urban free black community in the South. It would become one of the most politically active and culturally rich communities in the country: the birthplace of jazz, home to black newspapers, and where African Americans protests over segregation in transportation would lead to one of the country’s most momentous Supreme Court decisions, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the “separate but equal” doctrine that made Jim Crow possible.

  It was a rough, wild place, redolent with smells, sounds, and bacchanalian delights: jambalayas and étouffées, music tumbling down the streets, drunkenness and revelry. Grandmother’s childhood coincided with the time when the Tremé became world-famous for its prostitutes in what became known as Storyville, the largest red-light district in North America. Across the street from their Tremé home sat one of the city’s most famous brothels, at a time when virgins sold for as much as $800 and elite madams might make $140 a night. Through the day and well into the evening men visited “The Firm,” where they drank and took their sexual pleasures. The Firm, went one advertisement, “is also noted for its selectness. You make no mistake in visiting The Firm. Everybody must be of some importance.” Down the street men cavorted with “first class Octoroons … Any person out for fun among a lot of pretty Creole damsels, here is the place to have it.” Kate Armstrong operated on Villere Street. She arrived in New Orleans a beautiful young woman with a particularly well-endowed bosom, and became one of the city’s most sought-after strumpets. Armstrong ran a renowned brothel furnished with marble tables, pianos, damask curtains, expensive oil paintings and gilt-framed French mirrors. Around the corner in some of the city’s roughest areas were the lesser-known brothels and cribs, where some prostitutes practiced erotic voodoo ceremonies and accommodated anyone who had a few coins in his pocket.

  A stone’s throw from the rented house sat Congo Square, where on Sundays slaves had once danced and played on log drums, mule’s jawbones, kalimbas, and xylophones. Grandmother grew up surrounded by people in the streets performing African dances and the improvisational sounds that would become known as jazz, songs like “Bucktown Slow Drag” and “Te-Na-Na” (“Little Nothing”) by musicians who laid it on thick with their drums, trombones, trumpets, and saxophones.

  Take that pork chop to your Pa

  Take that sausage to your Ma

  Mommy’s got a baby

  Te-na-na, te-na-na.

  I’ve got a girl living on the hill

  If she won’t, her sister will

  Te-na-na, te-na-na.

  Joseph and Antoinette married at St. Augustine Church with its Ursuline nuns and pews arranged in a circular pattern around the altar in the middle. Slaves and gens de couleur libres had attended the church, the liberated slaves purchasing pews so that blacks and whites sat close to one another. The couple prayed alongside Homer Plessy and other members of the black elite. To more and more whites, the ending of slavery had created too much wildness. Blacks began shouting during sermons. Others fell to the ground, writhing before the sacrament. Emancipation erased the ability of whites to enforce separation. My great-grandparents were among the disenchanted, and the family moved to the German Chapel on the corner of Galvez and Laharpe, outside the Tremé and across Esplanade, in the better—and whiter—part of town.

  My grandmother spent her childhood in the city’s violen
t red-light district when white and black Salvants lived near each other in the fabulously racially complicated city. Over the course of Joseph’s married life the family lived in eight or more houses, all in the Tremé. Grandmother never told anyone of growing up amongst the blacks, prostitutes, street musicians, dockworkers, gamblers, and petty crooks, perhaps because her own parents disavowed the city’s rough-and-tumble bacchanalia. Racism would divide people who shared the same last name and, in so many cases, the same blood. Those who could became definitively white. Connections to Africa and the rich history of living in Plaquemines disappeared. Over the decades, living in one shotgun after another, Grandmother created a story of herself and her family redolent in details of vanished wealth and pure French ancestry. The stories became true in the telling. She believed them. Cecile believed them. So has everyone else. We were once rich, New Orleans aristocrats, upstanding members of the Creole elite in our Esplanade house tended by servants.

  In the fall of 1891 a horse-drawn cart carried the body of forty-four-year-old Antoinette across town from the house near Congo Square to St. Louis cemetery, where she was laid to rest in the Chevillon tomb next to gamblers, pirates, politicians, and voodoo priestesses. Grandmother was nine. Her oldest sister Stella tended the house. A few years later, Joseph Moliere Sr.’s estate provided some income for his children. Joseph Jr. soon thereafter married the young Mary Louise Gamotis, the daughter of a well-established apothecary owner who had emigrated from France. They married very near the sixth anniversary of Antoinette’s death. Mary was in her early twenties, half the age of her husband and not much older than Grandmother. The couple had one child, Emilie, born in late 1898, near Congo Square.

  Joseph Jr. finally escaped the Tremé to a sizeable home a few blocks from Esplanade and near where his father had once lived. He had worked hard to improve his fortunes in the years after the Civil War, using his family’s earlier history in the sugar business. By the time he married his second wife, Joseph Jr. was working as a broker for one of the many industrial refineries that processed the cane along the Mississippi River. He took an active part in the Catholic Church and had become an upstanding member of the white New Orleans community. He finally owned a property he could call his own. The following year, in his mid-fifties, he died, his youngest child barely a year old. Grandmother was seventeen.

  Under Louisiana’s rococo inheritance laws, Mary controlled the estate, which passed, upon her death many years later, to her daughter and only child Emilie. The nine surviving children of Joseph Salvant Jr. and Marie Antoinette Chevillon, who had grown up in the working-class and racially mixed Tremé, inherited nothing. Not long after his death Grandmother and the other children left their father’s house and moved in with one of her older brothers, renting a house a few blocks from Storyville. She soon began work as a teacher. Emilie died in 1968, leaving an estate valued at $7,565, which Grandmother inherited as the sole survivor of her parents, though the estate’s dispensation still remained unresolved when she suffered a fatal stroke three years later.

  As I walk past the faded resplendence of Esplanade, I wonder what forces sustained the making of familial myth and the silencing of history. Grandmother, who loved her father, seldom if ever spoke of her stepmother or stepsister. I suspect that the appearance of this new young woman in her father’s life was unsettling, and that his death and the disposition of the estate estranged Mary from her stepchildren. I can conjure an image of Grandmother packing her bags and leaving her father’s house for yet another rental in yet another rough part of New Orleans. Did this tumult in my grandmother’s life—the unexpected death of a beloved parent, economic distress when she had only recently tasted prosperity—somehow sustain desires that grew into fantasy, including the archetypal stepmother who steals one’s birthright?

  Her father had actually achieved some success, though neither Joseph Jr. nor anyone else ever lived on Esplanade. Perhaps this brief period was enough to nurture rich imaginings of a lost world that might return any day, a past purloined. Perhaps she inherited her father’s pearlescent dreams born in an Antebellum south of sugar and slavery, dreams his family had just begun realizing when Union forces made their way up the Mississippi.

  Grandmother came of age during an important moment of historical myth-making in New Orleans. The era of white Creole dominance was coming to an end. Affluence moved away from the historic center of the city to the grand homes of the new elite along Saint Charles Avenue. In some respects New Orleans was becoming a more American city, and more racially intolerant. The din of prejudice made it difficult if not impossible to discuss the complexities of race and slavery in Louisiana and urban life in New Orleans. White Creoles invented narratives that simultaneously regaled their French heritage and denied the mixing that so powerfully shaped the region’s history.

  The archive reveals little of the interior worlds of my grandmother and her family, and nothing to explain my aunt’s dreams and the still powerful insistence by family members of lost wealth and refined descent. The evidence that composes a reliquary of lost times—the records of births, deaths, and estates, the forms completed by census officials, the documentary minutiae that fill countless repositories—still beckons, the ceaseless yearning to speak with ghosts. History, like memory, is time travel. We bump into others and into our selves, and yet they are never quite our selves, never quite the other.

  THREE

  SECOND STREET

  KINTA BEGINS CRYING BEFORE I’VE EVEN BEGUN THE interview. Each word brings a new tear, etching mascara lines across her face.

  “There was no touching. All of our lives there was no touching. Mother can’t touch. Hugging is real awkward … you don’t even want to try.”

  I stop the recorder, walk to the kitchen for some tissues and a glass of water. Drinking water helps you stop crying, my sister Marie always says. “C’mon, c’mon, drink another glass,” she likes to say. “Ya gotta drink water, lots and lots of water, when you cry. It’ll help ya stop.” But as I walk back to the living room, and Marie reaches for another whisky, I wonder if I am not simply replenishing some hidden aquifer of sorrow. Kinta will drink from the glass and never stop crying.

  My sister Sabrina also remembers the absence of maternal touching. Mom cooked meals, stitched clothes, and of course certainly held us, but she generally avoided physical contact, at least from about the mid-1950s, when she abandoned her dreams of financial security for a bottle of Bourbon and a pack of Salems. A decade earlier there were Mardi Gras costumes and birthday parties and stories shared around a meal of roast chicken on early Sunday evenings. But with each day it seemed as if her dreams were slipping through her fingers. She would never stop moving, never own a house, and never cease worrying about the bills that came each month. By the time Sabrina was born in 1955, Mom was drinking heavily. Children she had once welcomed into her life now seemed like burdens, unwelcomed if not yet disavowed.

  During the 1950s the expected motions of family life dissolved. Mom and Dad still sat at the table, but miles could have separated them. Dad did not want to be there; he was in his forties, living month to month, and by the end of the decade he would be faced with a lawsuit for failing to pay his debts. Dad would try remaining still, indefatigably still, as Mom railed against him, calling him a coward, a failure, the invective turning to a boozy slur until one day he got up and walked away. Dishes stacked up in the sink, children were left unsupervised, and Mom retreated to her bottle and bed.

  We still try reaching out to her, hoping for some physical connection, perhaps even comfort, a fantasy that at some moment she will return to being a mother. “Hi Mom,” we say, as we bring our arms over her shrinking body. But she never puts her arms around us. There’s no reciprocating affection. She just stands there. It’s as if we are holding onto an apparition.

  I don’t know why Kinta began this way, and I don’t ask why sitting down at an appointed time to discuss the past suddenly unleashed such emotion. I didn’t intend on start
ing the interview by trying to reconstruct my sister’s relationship with Mom, or expect that she would want to talk about something as simple as a mother’s touch. I sense Kinta didn’t mean to start this way either, though I wonder if her taciturn demeanor doesn’t hide a torrent of emotion just beneath the surface.

  Historical research often unfolds surreptitiously. You never know what you’re going to find when you open up an archival file or begin speaking with someone. The historian’s professional image suggests something different—that we know exactly what we are doing as we labor to master a particular past. In fact, research is rather messier work, which is one reason we feel the need to have methodologies, some way to order the chaos, some way to organize our disquiet. And yet it’s in the unexpected things and furtive glimpses into people’s entangled lives that we sometimes discover what is really important.

  This sense of the past as here and not here is at the center of our consciousness and our historical imagination, which may explain why behind all history lies philosophy. Historians may begin with a few general questions, but they usually end up confronting larger issues: What is the nature of memory and its relationship to history? What are the possibilities and limits of our understanding about some distant time, a century ago, or just yesterday? Does the past in some basic way remain forever hidden and unknowable? What is truly past? What remains still present?