How a Few Shades of Skin Color Changed Everything for One Family

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: We turn now to a deeply personal story of race in America. 100 years ago, two black brothers from New Orleans were separated by the harsh reality of the Jim Crow laws. One lived as a black man in Louisiana. The other, with lighter skin, moved to Chicago, passing as white. Journalist Susan Saulny uncovered this story by tracing her own ancestry. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss the legacy of this long-buried family secret.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Bianna. Susan Saulny, thank you so much for joining us.

 

SUSAN SAULNY: Thank you for having me.

 

MARTIN: And I understand that you are joining us from a very meaningful and very beautiful location. Where, where are you?

 

SAULNY: I’m in the lower Garden District of New Orleans. I’m on Pyrtania Street inside the home, believe it or not, of my great great grandfather, Colonel Joseph H. DeGrange.

 

MARTIN: Amazing. Amazing. And one of the reasons this is amazing is that your article begins with a family mystery, and it ends with a family reunion.

 

SAULNY: And the reunion was right here in this house. 

 

MARTIN: Right there in that house. So let me start with what was the mystery?

 

SAULNY: Well, my grandfather and his brother spent time in an orphanage in New Orleans in the 1910s. And it was a pretty grim existence. They aged out of the orphanage at a time of harsh segregation in the South. And one of the brothers, Edward, who was just a few shades lighter than my grandfather, George, decided to take a chance on a better life in Chicago as a white man. And his skin color allowed him to do that. 

 

My grandfather being just a shade or two darker didn’t make that choice. I don’t know if he wanted to, or chose not to, but the reality is he stayed in New Orleans and lived as a Black man. So what we have from that point are parallel lives of one brother living in New Orleans and having children and grandchildren, and one brother living as white in Chicago and having children and grandchildren. We have a very neat 100-year arc to look at. So that Edward left the family and passed for white in another city, that was the secret, that was the secret that I’ve known since I was a little girl, and we were taught not to talk about.

 

MARTIN: That’s so for — I have so many questions. How did this come up when you were a child?

 

SAULNY: Well, my grandfather still loved his brother, and I think he wished him the best in life. And if Edward thought that this was his opportunity to go chase the American dream, George wanted him to do it. George was a protective older brother, and he wanted us to protect Edward by not talking about it, because there was tremendous amount of risk involved. And we’re talking about a time when a man, a Black man, found to be posing as white could face enormous violence — mob violence, perhaps even lynching. He could be accused of race fraud, lose his job, lose his home. So in my grandfather’s time, this secret was truly life and death. And he passed that sense onto his children who knew that their uncle passed, but that they weren’t to talk about it. And then my parents’ generation passed it on to me and my cousins, of which there are 30. So yes, George created a really big family.

 

MARTIN: He may not have been rich in possessions, but he was rich in love.

 

SAULNY: Right. We see that both brothers were able to create things from scratch. In Edward’s case, there was a smooth trajectory to the middle class and home ownership and buying a car. And the children went to college, some went onto law school. Everyone had a nice amount of success and achievement, comfortable lifestyle summers on Lake Michigan. 

 

In George’s case — now, remember, same upbringing of these boys just a few shades apart in color — George didn’t have those opportunities in New Orleans. George couldn’t find work except as a brick layer. And he laid bricks until he retired. He was living in poverty for quite a lot of time during the Depression. And I’ve heard stories about how he burned his own furniture for firewood when it was cold, or how he would go look for food that had fallen off of cargo ships unloading at the Mississippi River docks. 

 

And this was a man who had a good amount of intelligence and ambition. But you can see how race plays out across time, across families. And that’s what I was hoping this article would show. That, you know, we know passing happened as a historical fact. But what was the emotional toll, the psychological toll, and how did the pain morph and mutate over generations? That’s what I was hoping my story would show to add to the conversation, to see the real lived experiences of an actual family going through this Black and white, North and South.

 

MARTIN: But the immediate spark, as I understand it, was Pope Leo the first American pope. His family had Creole roots in, in New Orleans. And how, how did that make you kind of think differently about your family? Or, or did it?

 

SAULNY: It did. I remember when the American Pope was announced and the amount of excitement I saw in the media all across the country. And then later that night for it to be confirmed by a local historian here in New Orleans and also the Archdiocese of New Orleans, that in fact, Pope Leo’s maternal grandparents lived in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. This is a historic center of Afro-Creole culture, and that they identified as Black and mulatto while here, but then as lived as a white family in Chicago. It really, it sort of felt like the quiet part of so many Creole family histories was just said out loud. And I thought I could help explain, not the Pope’s story in particular, but the circumstances of the time that might lead someone to make a decision that way. I could focus on my own family and just provide some historical context that might be helpful in this moment.

 

That was one reason. And my mother has never known — she’s 85 now, what happened to her Uncle Edward? She didn’t know if he died young or lived to an old age, how many children he had, if he had children at all. And I wanted to give her some peace of mind as she and, you know, enters her final years. And I had a feeling that since the secret now is not a matter of life and death, that this third generation of descendants of Edward would probably be more open to having more information about their family. And it turns out that all of that was true.

 

MARTIN: Well, hold on that thought for a second. Just let’s go back to where you are. That is a grand house. How is it that your grandfathers were living in poverty if their grandfather lived in that house? What’s the story there?

 

SAULNY: That’s a really great question, and that’s the crux of it all. So this house was built in the mid 1800s, and the owner, my great-great-grandfather, used enslaved labor to build wealth and was someone who fought for the South in the Civil War. And he had really strong and certain ideas about the separation of the races. His son thought differently. And his son, my great-grandfather Ned, ended up having a very open relationship with a Black woman in the city who lived just a few miles away in Treme, which is, you know, the historic heart of Creole culture. 

 

I would say a lot of white men at the time had second families or secret families. But what was different about this relationship is that Ned and Minerva lived openly. Ned was different for his time. And I’ve tried to figure out why. And I think that maybe some of his formative years were during Reconstruction, and maybe he had a more optimistic spirit about what the future was gonna be like for African Americans. Maybe he thought it would be easier over the long run than indeed it turned out to be. But long story short, Ned and his father had a falling out over this. Because you can imagine a Confederate veteran son who is openly living and having children with a Black woman. He, the colonel who lived here in this house did not approve. And so when the children’s mother died young, and Ned found himself alone with those children, my great-great-grandfather who lived here in 8,000 square feet of space, did not take them in. And that’s how they ended up in an orphanage called the Lafon Asylum for Colored Boys.

 

MARTIN: So how did Edward wind up getting to Chicago? How did that happen?

 

SAULNY: I think Edward, through his father, had some exposure to the white world and probably picked up on how to pretend to be a part of it. And with his light complexion, I think one day in his late teens or early twenties, he decided there’s nothing for me in New Orleans. No parents, no money, no job opportunities, not much education. I haven’t interviewed him since he died in the 1970s, but I’m imagining that he had to make a very hard choice between family and survival. And he chose survival. And I don’t know as well whether my grandfather was upset about this or distraught or supported it, but however, he felt in the end, he decided to keep the secret and wish for the best for his brother.

 

MARTIN: So let’s fast forward you always knew that you had this ancestor who, passe blanc, right? You weren’t really sure how the, for want of a better term, I’ll call it the white branch of the family would react to your queries. What were you anxious about or worried about?

 

SAULNY: I think there were a lot of things. I think my grandfather’s voice was still in the back of my, it was in my ear somewhere saying, We just leave well enough alone. For what reason? Just leave, leave things alone. And so I was going against my grandfather’s wishes. So just personally as a granddaughter who’s somewhat obedient — somewhat — I was, I knew I was doing something that great grand grandpa George might not have approved of, right? And then there’s the fact that 20 years or so ago, I lived in Chicago and I could have reached out to them. But yeah, think of the amount of racial animus in our country right now and the polarization. And the fact that hate crimes based on race are rising and not going down. I remember thinking, Hmm, maybe this is something I just don’t wanna touch. 

 

I prioritized it now for a whole host of different reasons that have to do with you know, being more mature myself and dropping those assumptions about how the other side would react. My mother’s age, and the Pope’s announcement. And also I thought, we are in a society now that is so deeply connected online and in every other way. It’s hard to keep a secret these days. I had a feeling that I’d be giving them information that maybe they already knew or at least had an inkling of. And sure enough, that turned out to be the case.

 

MARTIN: How did you go about finding them? And you know, of course here, the big reveal. How did they react when you reached out?

 

SAULNY: Right. Well, I had a good amount of research help. And I thank the New York Times for that. So we used all sorts of ancestry tools and beyond that, I looked for obituaries. I looked on social media. We looked in old newspapers. There was a lot written in ancient French in New Orleans. We just tried to gather every bit of information we could about my grandparents and great grandparents and their descendants. And then it just came down to the very gentle reaching out and just hoping for the best. And I reached out with short messages, either over social media or, you know, if I found an email address or maybe in a search we’d come up with a phone number. But I broke through, I’ll say first with one cousin. Her name is Christine. And I got such a positive reaction from her. I was really encouraged to keep going. As soon as she saw the message, she wrote back, like something to the effect of, Oh, hey, yes, of course, I would love to, when can we talk? And then through Christine, I found out that she had longstanding questions that she wanted answered. And she said, cousin Laura feels this way too. And cousin Lauren feels this way too. And so, through one person, I learned of other people, and I just slowly made my way through the family tree, introducing myself as someone who shared a common ancestor, and also pointing out pretty quickly that I was a writer and reporter. And that I’d wanna share our story. 

 

MARTIN: When you first encountered some of the family members, when you all first met each other, there were tears.

 

SAULNY: Oh, yes.

 

MARIN: There were tears. 

 

SAULNY: Yes. 

 

MARTIN: Say, say more about that. It was surprisingly emotional.

 

SAULNY: When Edward left Louisiana and New Orleans. He left his culture, he left his kinship ties, he carried a secret along with his wife. She was also a very light complexion Creole from Louisiana, who was passing in Chicago as a white woman. So the two of them were bonded by their cover stories. And I think they must have lived with quite a bit of isolation because of fear. If you get too close to someone, maybe they’ll figure something out. So one thing Christine described to me was always wanting extended family and wanting to know more about where they came from and who their grandparents were and things like that. And they didn’t have that sense that I grew up with in New Orleans of an enormous sprawling family and very clear lineage. And I think they wanted that. And when you long for that all your life — and then one day it’s finally explained to you why you didn’t have it, and then you have it because we were all there with open arms — I think the emotion of it was just overwhelming to them. 

 

MARTIN: Does anyone not feel that way? 

 

SAULNY: It’s a totally understandable, legitimate question. I think anger is among the responses that a person could have, especially in the past, right? You know, why him and not us? And was it a selfish and escapist thing to do? I think when I was a little girl and I first heard the story of the man in the picture who left the family, say, I’m like eight, nine, or 10. I thought, What? We weren’t good enough for him? Why did he leave, you know? And I may have had these feelings that were anger, but I didn’t understand everything. Then as I grew up, I understood more, and I can see him as a fuller person and with a lot of empathy. And now of course, I totally understand that he was stuck in a terrible system that forced hard choices on people who I’m sure would’ve rather do other things with their lives. 

 

But I, the system of judging people along color lines and then metting out opportunity along those lines is illogical, absurd, and completely arbitrary. And that’s what I want to show with this family story and what I’d hope you know, that the story gives us an opportunity to, to think deeply about our own racial history in this country and how it plays out in families across time.

 

MARTIN: So before we let you go, you know, the country is beginning to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Your story encompasses almost all of it. You know, slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, it’s just — the great migration. And I just wonder if there’s something that you are thinking about as the country enters this period of commemoration as you thought about how your own family story fits into that bigger story. What, what comes to mind and what, what would you like us to be thinking about?

 

SAULNY: That we’re always working towards something better, right? My story, our story, so many people’s story, is about race and poverty and injustice and a shameful part of the American past. But it is equally about love and loyalty and resilience and the possibility of new beginnings, of joy, of hope. And that latter part is the part I’m trying to focus on. And I think the more empathy we have for people who are not exactly like us. And in our case, it’s me being southern and Black and opening myself up to cousins in Chicago who are Midwestern and white. Them doing the same, vice versa. The more we can see other people as extensions of ourselves, the more we will move our country forward out of the polarization and gridlock that we’re seeing right now, and especially out of the the pits of racial animus that have gripped some of us in the wake of the last several years of many prominent people in this nation trying to pit us against one another and framing things in terms of us versus them. I think this is an opportunity to look at our past and get a deeper understanding of what still needs to be healed in America.

 

MARTIN: Susan Saulny, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

SAULNY: Oh, my pleasure, Michel. Thank you.