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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, a story about how American racism tore a family apart and how Pope Leo XIV was the catalyst for bringing them together. Last spring, when the news broke that the newly elected pope had Creole roots in New Orleans and that his own grandparents had quietly become a white family in Chicago, journalist Susan Salney recognized the story immediately.
Her family had lived a version of it. Her grandfather, George, was a black bricklayer who raised his children in New Orleans. His brother, Edward, was black, too, but a shade lighter, light enough to leave for Chicago in the early 1920s, remake himself as a white man, and never come back.
Susan grew up with just one picture of him, a young man, barely 19, propped on her grandfather's china cabinet. Five words in Creole did all the work of explaining. Edward, passe blanc, white passing. A century later, Susan set out to find the white family Edward built in Chicago and to see whether what racism had broken could be put back together.
Her piece in The New York Times is called A Family Secret No More. Susan Salney, welcome to Fresh Air. Oh, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. Take me to the moment you saw the headline about the new pope.
I was at home in Washington, D.C., and I saw this news in like a lot of America. I was stunned. And I'm in touch with a lot of people in New Orleans over Twitter. different social media channels or text threads. And immediately I saw an eruption of excitement.
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Chapter 2: How did Pope Leo XIV's family roots influence Susan Saulny's story?
And I figured that's completely normal for a city as Catholic as New Orleans, you know. But what I began to see is that, hey, everybody, he's got roots here. He's Creole. And I thought, Tanya, you know the amount of misinformation.
But that same night, a historian in New Orleans, a very well-known researcher who helped me on the story, who went on to do that, and the Archdiocese of New Orleans confirmed that news. So it was an amazing feeling.
Here's what you also recognized instantly, and I find this really fascinating. The Pope's family, they didn't just have roots in New Orleans. They moved to Chicago, and so did your great-uncle Edward. Why do you think you never went looking before the Pope headline for this particular story about your family?
You know, my grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectiveness for him. He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky thing that Edward was doing. And when Edward left, he was just a teenager or a very young man in his 20s. My grandfather was the oldest and I think felt a real sense of protection toward him.
And that's the feeling that he passed down to all of us. We don't talk much about Edward. We don't want this to get out. We protect Edward because black men who are found to be posing as white could face. all sorts of violence, even death in the Jim Crow era.
So to my grandfather, this was a matter of life and death, and he passed that feeling on to my mother's generation, and then they passed it on to me. So when I lived in Chicago, I was very busy with other things news-related and finding family.
That's a point I just want to step in just for a moment to say. You lived in Chicago, the same city where your relatives were living, several years ago. And so you kind of knew about this, but go ahead, continue from there.
Yes, I knew about it, but I didn't look into it at the time because I think I had a little bit of my grandfather's voice still in my head saying, leave well enough alone. What made this moment different, it's the confluence of a lot of things. It's my mother's age and that she never knew what happened to Edward. And she's 85 and she's losing her memory.
And I wanted her to know what happened to her uncle and the Pope's announcement. And the fact that this generation of Chicago cousins, this third generation, they have a new attitude and a new spirit. And I had a feeling that they might be open to hearing this information. And sure enough, my hunch was right.
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Chapter 3: What motivated Susan Saulny to search for her great-uncle Edward?
It was often frustrating, but he had his reasons, I understand now. And I think back and I wonder, how would the truth have helped a little black girl that he's trying to raise with pride and ambition change? I think he was trying, just like he was trying to protect Edward, he was trying to protect me. So you did this thing that you had
not necessarily been avoiding, but you hadn't come to yet in your mind on actually covering and digging yourself. And you turned your reporter's tools toward this story, this family. And you didn't just find your missing great uncle. You went back generations, starting with one of the early settlers of your family, a French wine merchant named who steps off a boat in New Orleans in 1834.
Who was that first de Grange that you found?
Jacques de Grange came from the Alpine region of what is now southeastern France. And he prospered almost immediately selling wine in New Orleans. And prior to this reporting, I didn't know much about him. What we found was he came to America and did well and almost immediately enslaved women and children. And his son went on to be one of the first men to volunteer to fight in the Civil War.
So what I learned that I hadn't known was that my family on the French side, they were diehard defenders of the Confederacy. They weren't just in New Orleans and sort of going along for the ride. They were very much a part of the active fight for the South. And the extent of that had never been clear to me.
The colonel, your great-great-grandfather, he was one of the first men to volunteer, as you said, in the Confederacy. And by the end, he had like a house that was 8,000 square feet, right? Back then, it was a big house. Yes. Yes. And his hands were kind of in just about everything in New Orleans. That's true. Who was he behind all of that?
He was a force in the city. He had amassed a lot of wealth and a lot of economic and cultural power. If you name a board or an organization from that point of time, you can almost be sure that he's on it. You know, whether it was the library or the volunteer firefighters or the French opera, different Mardi Gras crews, people who throw the parades. He was... just everywhere and in everything.
And it seems as though from reading newspapers of the time, he was very well known in the city. People followed him socially, wrote about when he went abroad and when he went on business trips. People were very much interested in his life. I think he, to some of the Confederate sympathizers who were still in New Orleans, they looked up to him in some way.
He had a very complicated life, and I'm sure a very complicated relationship with his son. once he realized his son was having an open relationship with a black woman.
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Chapter 4: How did racism impact the lives of Susan's grandfather and great-uncle?
So he became a landowner in 1868, and I have the records to prove it. That is, to me, extraordinary. And imagine if that had happened across the board. Now, I'm imagining he didn't have the cash outright, but the person who owned this plantation sold it to him on credit and said, I'm sure the land will produce and you'll be able to pay it off. And he did.
And so by the time Minerva was born, she grew up in a family that owned its land outright instead of having to be sharecropping or, you know, or worse. So she had the benefit of some education and a solid foundation, some stability in life when she decided to move to New Orleans where she met Ned DeGrange.
Minerva does not live very long. She dies at the age of 41 of pneumonia. And Ned takes his children after he can't take them to his home of his white father to an orphanage. And what does that set in motion?
A terrible turn of events for these children who had been a happy family in Treme at their mother's cottage on North Robertson Street, knowing their mother and their father. Yeah, Minerva's death caused everything to spiral. Ned was all of a sudden alone with four black children in a city with segregated housing. And this is around 1912.
He turned to an order of Catholic nuns in the French Quarter who ran orphanages, and he proposed they take the children as boarders. Now, I can't imagine the tears, the trauma, the screaming that must have been involved when these kids who had lived a happy family life with their mother and sometimes their father at a cottage in Treme were suddenly handed over to an orphanage.
And the youngest two were quite little, the youngest maybe just a little more than two. So to be institutionalized at what was called an orphan asylum, just the cruelty of it, the awfulness of it. Honestly, once I realized what the place was called, that it was the Lafon Orphan Asylum for Colored Boys, my stomach turned.
How did your grandpa, did he ever talk about his childhood when you were a kid?
So not in these terms. He told me that after his mother died, he went to live with the sisters. And he put it in very gentle terms. And being a kid, I thought, oh, with the sisters, like in The Sound of Music or something like that. That couldn't have been farther from the truth, right? The orphanage was pretty grim. He didn't tell me the full story. No one did.
And again, I think this was an effort on his part, if I can speculate for a moment, to not pass on his pain and trauma to a new generation. You know, I'm having this conversation with him. I'm somewhere between 7 or 11 years old. And I'm guessing that he thought to himself, what good would it do her to know about all the pain I've been through right at this moment in time?
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Chapter 5: What secrets did Susan uncover about her family's past?
But there was so much lost. by the fact that they were an isolated island. And they talked to you about that, that they actually felt that loss of not having extended family and cousins. Yes.
You know, so many people in the aftermath of the story ask me, but no, really, who do you think was better off? Was it worth it in the end? And I say... Okay, first of all, I think it's an unanswerable question. But if someone were to force that, it depends on what standard you're using. What is your measuring stick?
Is your measuring stick community and kinship and culture and building a family from nothing? You know, if that's the measuring stick, might lead you in one direction. If your measuring stick is purely financial success and property and accomplishment in business or law, then that's, you know, going to lead you to a different answer. I don't answer that question because I think it's unanswerable.
And I think they both had hard times and I think they both had things that they wanted to achieve that they achieved. Now, I think George's riches, just because I spent the most time with him and can speak to what I think he thought made his life rich, it was kinship and culture.
And it sort of makes me think that that's why African-American kinship and culture is as strong as it is, because it augmented some of the poverty of what was there, some of what was taken away, some of what was lost. We doubled down on that, and look what it produced.
I mean, in New Orleans, it produced wonderful things if you consider the food, the music, the impact on, oh gosh, too many things to even name.
You end your story with your mother finally being able to speak to her first cousin, Arthur, in Chicago. Tell me a little bit about that phone call.
So from the moment I discovered that Arthur existed, I knew I wanted to get them together. But we're talking about an 85-year-old and a 95-year-old, right? But it was just so stunning that my mother didn't know she had a first cousin who could have been in her life. She was so happy to hear about him when I said, guess what? I found you have a first cousin.
One of Edward's children is alive in Chicago, and he wants to talk to you. And, you know, her face just flushed. She was like, I have a cousin. And similarly, when I visited Arthur in Chicago, arms were just outstretched toward me. And he said, I would love to know your mother. And so we thought about having him come to the reunion in New Orleans, but he wasn't doing well health wise.
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