Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  Louisiana Creole

  1

  WHEN ONE WRITES about one’s own life, I believe there are many doors through which to enter. Before I started to write about my mother’s family, I felt confident as to which doors might be the best. Their history felt more like a long and winding road and less like the labyrinth of my father’s side. Obviously, that’s because I lived with my mother and had access to her relatives and their conversations. Moreover, both of my paternal grandparents are dead.

  My father is fifteen years my mother’s senior. He is closer in age to Pop-Pop, my grandfather Fred, than to my mother. I never met my paternal grandfather, Cleveland Jr. He died a year after I was born, and I met my grandmother Gladys—“Gram-Gram”—only once or twice before her Alzheimer’s and dementia worsened. They were born in 1919 and 1918, respectively. Before I began this book, the only keepsakes I had of Cleveland and Gram-Gram were two photos and a letter. Cleveland was a handsome, dark-skinned man with a disarming smile, a thin moustache, and a slight gap between his two front teeth. Gram-Gram was very fair with gray eyes, her paternity catalyzing family lore that has persisted for over a hundred years.

  My strongest memory of Gram-Gram was our first time laying eyes upon each other. I was around four or five and she was around seventy-nine. I was on her lap and she was jubilant. She wrote my mother and me two separate letters soon afterward. To me, she wrote about how proud she was of me; for my mother, she wrote of her gratitude for getting us together and how praying could help get us through the “odd situation” of my dad balancing two families.

  When I say that there are many doors through which to enter a personal story, I mean it. I could start by telling you how my sisters innocently giggled when I called our grandmother Gladys instead of Gram-Gram till I was a teenager, which made me feel embarrassed that I didn’t know the Regis sisters’ ways of addressing her. I could start with the disappointment my dad felt when I refused to apply to any colleges and universities in North Carolina, where he was born—a firm stance that essentially meant that I did not want to be connected to the South at all (which I didn’t). I didn’t have any family there, and the family that I knew about through my father were abstractions. I was never close to any of them. His home was not my home.

  I could start with my first trip to North Carolina, for Gram-Gram’s funeral—seeing her home and experiencing the solemnity of a Catholic ceremony, which was quite foreign to me. But instead, I’m going to start with the easiest door: my father, Jon. Unlike on the Jerkins side, where I had to skip over my mother’s generation to gather some threads about our past, I could go directly to him.

  My dad is the first complicated love of my life. He’s the most charismatic man I’ve ever met—when he walks into a room, he commands attention. He loves to dance, drink mojitos, and talk business. One of our favorite things to do together is to debate—because we both love to talk about any and all things—and sometimes, he will troll me just to make me smile and break character in the midst of an otherwise serious conversation. Yet ironically, he had been an enigma to me. My mother, on the other hand, was extremely vulnerable and transparent during my childhood, as most Jerkins women are. The anecdotes she told me about her life growing up always came out whenever we took a drive down the Black Horse Pike in New Jersey. My dad wasn’t the same. He shared anecdotes whenever he felt like it, and I could never anticipate them. Then again, New Jersey wasn’t home to him, so maybe the recollection just wasn’t natural. The roads and landmarks simply didn’t inspire the same feelings in him.

  My dad hasn’t lived in North Carolina, his birthplace, for over thirty years. I thought homesickness might drive him to be more open about his life in North Carolina, but that’s not what happened. He mentioned small things about Gram-Gram, but he never really spoke about his father, almost as if Cleveland were a stranger, almost as if Cleveland only picked my dad up on the weekends, as he did me. I wondered if he thought of his father as an enigma too.

  When I called Aunt Pammy, my dad’s older sister, on the phone and asked about my grandfather, she hesitated in describing him. For that brief moment I was stunned. The Regises were, to me, the quintessential family unit. They were supposed to be cohesive. Unlike me, most people I knew grew up in two-parent households. There shouldn’t be any gaps or holes in the history of a two-parent household, right? Wrong. “I wish I could say that I really knew him,” Aunt Pammy said. “When you’re a child, you just grow up knowing that it’s your father. He goes to work, comes home, and we had dinner together every night.”

  As for his life in Houston, according to Aunt Pammy, he never went into detail. I descend from a line of shadowy men whose mouths were citadels guarding their past lives. In these omissions, I found that my Jerkins and Regis sides were not as different as I once thought. And like the Jerkins side, the Regis line stretched deeper than I initially thought. My father’s line didn’t begin in North Carolina either, but in a place over nine hundred miles away, beyond the Mississippi River. I had to travel there, not only for me, but also for the fathers I wanted to know—to, I hoped, feel more grounded in who I was and my place in the Regis family tree.

  Here are the pieces of my paternal line that I have: Cleveland Jr. was born and raised in Frenchtown, a subcommunity within the Fifth Ward of Houston, Texas. He attended Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church. His father, Cleveland Sr., was terribly strict, and his iron-fisted rule led the son who carried his name to run away from home and join the army. He was only seventeen years old. He was either a first sergeant or sergeant first class, a part of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, stationed at Fort Bragg, where he met and eloped with Gram-Gram, whose family was many generations deep in and around the Sandhills region of North Carolina. He had an eighth-grade education but completed the New York Times crossword puzzles for fun. He had a drinking problem. He didn’t speak much about his own father. He loved making chili con carne with pinto beans and couche-couche. He was a devout Catholic and oftentimes, he’d say phrases in French. I still remember the first time my dad alluded to the fact that the Regis side had many more branches and splinters than I thought. We were at Applebee’s for dinner, and that was the first time I heard my paternal grandfather described as Creole. He was a Creole man, but he never identified as such. His family was from Saint Martinville, but like my mother’s family, neither my dad nor his relatives or their children had ever gone back home.

  The only Louisiana Creoles I’d ever seen were on-screen. Once, when I was a preteen flipping through movies to watch on HBO on a quiet weekend afternoon, I stumbled upon Eve’s Bayou. A film directed by Kasi Lemmons, Eve’s Bayou is about family secrets, the power of words, and the fallibility of memory. One of the main characters, Louis Batiste, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is the town doctor. Thinking back on this film, my heart flutters. Louis is exactly like my father: a tall, wealthy man who entertains the community. These weren’t regular black people to me. I wasn’t even sure they were black, because their many gradations of brown said otherwise. They spoke French, like Cleveland Jr. and possibly like his father, too. Their house was large, and the land surrounding it was sprawling. White people didn’t terrorize them. White people didn’t exist in this world.

  Shortly before my trip, during a phone conversation, my dad emphatically told me of his family’s socioeconomic and educational privilege. Gram-Gram’s family was comprised of landowners. Her mother’s house was a gift from the Rockefellers, but Dad wasn’t sure how the rest of the family was able to have land in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Though my aunt Pammy remembers times when her mother didn’t have two coins to rub together, they mainly lived a comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class lifestyle. Cleveland Jr. was in the military, and the respect he received from the town as a result also improved their lives. The confidence in my dad’s voice gave me the impression that the Regises weren’t new to social status. While my mother had leaped to higher status through real estate, the Regises had been perched aloft for dec
ades, maybe even centuries longer. What if the Regises’ prized social status ran much deeper than I thought? A voice-over of Eve in Eve’s Bayou says, “Memory is a selection of images. Some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. Each image is like a thread. Each thread woven together to make a tapestry of intricate texture and the tapestry tells a story and the story is our past.” All I had were a selection of images that I conjured from what my dad and his siblings could remember. But the French, the couche-couche, the Regis name, the parish, and that intergenerational privilege were all the threads I needed to return to the original ball of yarn.

  Cleveland Sr., my great-great-grandfather, lived on 2828 Davis Street. Davis Street was within the four square blocks that comprised Frenchtown, a subcommunity of the Fifth Ward that was created in 1922 when five hundred Louisiana Creoles migrated to Houston in search of better economic opportunities. Frenchtown locals worked in many different professions, such as carpentry, mechanics, sawmill work, and bricklaying. Cleveland Sr. worked, like many of his cohorts, at a railroad company. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 displaced some two hundred thousand African Americans, and part of this black population, the Creoles, poured into Houston and many other cities in search of safer ground. Our Mother of Mercy Catholic Church was the social hub of Frenchtown, and those within this community often distanced themselves from other black people with segregated streets and neighborhoods based on their lighter skin. At the same time, Frenchtown residents refrained from teaching their children French, because they were teased for it by other black children.1 This may be why neither my father nor his siblings grew up with French being spoken in the home.

  To this day, my dad facetiously refers to Creoles and our culture as “Creole crap,” believing the Creole label is a thinly veiled attempt by black people to disavow their blackness. Perhaps to him, Creoles don’t need their own label. It’s a subset of African American, not a separate category. After all, my grandfather never defined himself as a Creole man yet brought elements of his Creole heritage to North Carolina. From the little bit that I learned of Creoles in New Jersey, I assumed that they were nothing more than uppity, light-skinned blacks who thought they were better than everybody else. There were no Creoles I knew of in South Jersey, so it was easy to make this assumption and maintain it all the way to adulthood. But such a framing is far from the truth. Not all Creoles are light-skinned, but there was no one up north to tell me that because Creoles aren’t common where I’m from. I had to go to Louisiana to get the nuance. But before I could travel there, I needed to understand how unique Louisiana was before the land became American and its people were subjected to binary rules of racial classification.

  In America, black and white are polar opposites. Though race is a social construct, we assume someone’s race from their parents and phenotype. The “one-drop rule” meant that one black ancestor anywhere in your family tree—one drop of black blood or DNA—ruined your chances of being considered 100 percent white and placed you among the oppressed so as to maintain social order. Even Ivory soap, “9944∕100 percent pure,” was technically black. Whites were at the top of hierarchy of institutional power and privilege, and blacks were at the bottom. But in the beginning, when Africans were first brought to the English colonies in the seventeenth century, this disparity was less extreme. Blacks and poor whites were indentured servants. Black and white women worked side by side in the fields, and black and white men who broke their contracts were given the same punishments. After indentured servants served their time, they could move on and buy their own land. This ability threatened to dilute the elite. And the wealthy whose servants had moved on needed replacements for their lost laborers. In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery; others followed.2

  Race then started to take precedence. The poor whites, whom the black, formerly indentured servants once worked with, were, before their voyage to the colonies, a part of the English working class. The black people, however, were seen as outsiders under English colonial law, so no one knew how they should be treated with respect to everyone else. In 1654 a black indentured servant, John Casor, was bound to his master for life in a civil suit, Johnson v. Parker. This decision solved two problems: (1) It ensured that black people could not become wealthy property owners, like their white counterparts. (2) It maintained the control by wealthy whites of their black, non-English constituents. The courts then made this fate hereditary, beginning with the Virginia colony in 1662. Because of the courts, if you were black and brought to the colonies by force, you were a slave. If you had children, they would be slaves, too. From then on, the terms black and slave were interchangeable.3 The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is a prime example of how the judicial system made the two synonymous. Free black people could not provide documentation that they were legally free, as in the famous case of Solomon Northup recounted in Northup’s book 12 Years a Slave, and if they were captured, they were denied rights to a trial.

  Furthermore, in 1676, a wealthy white planter in Virginia named Nathanial Bacon rebelled against Governor William Berkeley’s policies, particularly with regards to Native Americans. Bacon gathered both black and white indentured servants and enslaved blacks to fight. Although the rebellion famously known as Bacon’s Rebellion was ultimately unsuccessful, Virginia lawmakers legally separated whites and blacks and gave poor whites more rights and privileges in hopes that they would never band together to challenge the colonial government again.4 In grade school, I was never taught about the different social milieus that black people occupied in nineteenth-century America and earlier, and I was definitely never taught that free black people existed prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. My parents never spoke of such a thing either. But in Louisiana, there were many free blacks, because the racial and ethnic classifications were different than those elsewhere.

  It is important to remember that Louisiana was not originally a part of the United States. The territory exchanged hands between the French and Spanish until 1803, when the US government acquired the land via the Louisiana Purchase. European settlers poured into the territory and purchased African slaves. The children that resulted from the relations between European white settlers and enslaved African women were caught between two worlds, creating a need for a social category between white and black. Although white settlers couldn’t marry their slaves, some did end up freeing them and buying property for them. Both white and black, their children were called free people of color, gens de couleur libre. Their whiteness allowed these people to learn to read and write, testify in court, take up a profession, and own property.5 But their blackness excluded them from other opportunities, such as owning businesses that sold alcohol. Separate railroad cars also had to be used to transport corpses of different races.6 Because these free people of color oscillated between white and black spaces, never entirely fitting into one or the other, they often married other free people of color and created their own communities.

  To define Creole is to invite ambiguity, because the definition has changed over time and across different cultures. In 1929, a Creole was defined in the Larousse French dictionary as pertaining only to white people. In 1992, the American Heritage Dictionary gave five definitions:

  a person of European descent who was born in the West Indies or Spanish America

  a person descended from or culturally related to the original French settlers of the southern U.S., especially Louisiana

  a person descended from or culturally related to the Spanish and Portuguese settlers of the gulf states (such as Mississippi)

  a person of mixed black and European ancestry who speaks a creolized language

  an enslaved African who was born in the Americas

  In Louisiana, a Creole person was one of distinction. As long as you were not a slave and had at least one parent of Spanish or French parentage, you were entitled to social rank and considered a Creole. By this logic, many white people and gens de couleur libre were Creole. Later on, the term was
expanded to mean anyone of mixed heritage, including any Native American ancestry. In other words, anyone born in Louisiana, whether white or black, enslaved or free, could be Creole.7

  After learning this, I was confused. If a Creole could be anyone born in Louisiana, then why didn’t my grandfather identify as one? Why did my father and I believe that Creoles were just uppity black people? Uppity implies that black people considered themselves superior, but if any Louisiana person, irrespective of social status, could be Creole, then where did this idea of uppityness come from? Maybe it was because the Creoles I’d heard of—though never met—didn’t identify as black people despite blackness being a part of their ethnic makeup. The Gullah Geechee people owed their retention of West African customs to their isolation from the mainland. In Louisiana, this retention was due to the instability between white masters and black slaves. The waterways in lower Louisiana helped slaves escape through the swamps; moreover, the black slave population vastly outnumbered the elite who controlled the colony. Because of this imbalance, Africans were able to have cultural autonomy,8 and yet also have relations with Europeans and indigenous people, giving rise to the people we now know as Creole. I suppose my indignation toward Creole people arose from the idea that by asserting the Creole label, they were implicitly trying to separate themselves from their blackness, and that meant they didn’t want to carry the weight of being black in America.

  When I started searching for interview subjects, I thought this desire for separation was confirmed when I reached out to Alexandre Guillory, who I later found to be a distant relative of mine. A Louisiana Creole man and genealogy researcher, Guillory disavows his Americanness and went so far as to say that Creoles were a non–African American ethnic group. I was gobsmacked. He sounded ridiculous to me. Since he wasn’t born prior to the Louisiana Purchase, didn’t that make him an American? Creole culture is part African, and since Creoles are a part of Louisiana, which has been American since 1803, Creole culture is by definition part of African American culture. Creole people are not a race—at least not in the way America defines race. They are neither white nor black. But I now believe Guillory was trying to express his need to define himself as just Creole, not a compound nationality like African American, in order to not feel erased. Perhaps being Creole did in fact hold different social, legal, and cultural implications than being African American.