In Washington, DC, across Louisiana, and especially in New Orleans, I searched for the story of my father’s history...In the windowless basements of courthouses that sit at the bottom of long metal stairs; in glass-partitioned special collection areas at state and university libraries; among row upon row of microfilm readers at the National Archives; in the brightly lit Notarial Archives, wearing cotton gloves to protect 250-year-old documents from the oils in my skin; in one-room country museums staffed by terse old lady volunteers; in the aisles of the cemetery; in the Conveyance Office up some metal stairs (Careful, now, watch your head on that pipe); in the office of the church in heavy fragile ledgers that record the births, deaths, and marriages in New Orleans dating back to 1718; in question after question asked from the backseat of an old man’s taxicab; in a rental car with a different old man driving slowly down a country lane; in telephone calls made nervously to people whose names I found in the phone book; in carefully composed letters written to people from whom I never received any reply; among the millions of names posted to the hundreds of genealogical websites that, after pornography, are the most frequently searched destinations on the Web; in the index of Old Families of Louisiana; in the index of The African American Experience in Louisiana; in the footnotes of history books; in the pages of dissertations written forty or sixty years ago that I ordered on the Internet and were delivered to my door; in the middle of the woods at a Civil War battleground site; and at the kitchen tables of people for whom the name Broyard held meaning.
At the end of these travels, I had an assortment of facts: What my ancestors did for work, where they lived and with whom. I knew who could read and write and who could speak English. I learned where their parents were born and what property they passed along when they died. I found records of their military service—enlistment dates and pay stubs—that did little to illuminate their experience of fighting in a war. I came across their names in the local newspapers when they had done something particularly good or bad. In those same pages I found their obituaries, in which their lives were summed up by the names of the people they’d left behind.
Besides these facts and a few stories told by the survivors, I had little else to go on. None of my ancestors made enough of an impression on the chroniclers of their time to earn mention. No diaries or packets of letters turned up in an attic somewhere that described their feelings about themselves and the world around them. A single correspondence carrying the signature of my great-grandfather Paul Broyard appears in an 1894 New Orleans newspaper, but it is coauthored by a gentleman who was a frequent contributor to the publication and likely composed the letter mostly on his own. I had even less insight into the personal lives of my father’s female ancestors, whose domestic roles left little imprint on the official records.
Yet as my facts accumulated, distinct people started to take shape with personalities and opinions, particularly when set against the backdrop of New Orleans, an image of which was also materializing in my mind.
During the three years, from 2000 to 2002, that I regularly visited the city, I often ran in the mornings along the Mississippi River, the aspect of New Orleans’s landscape that perhaps best accounts for its unique personality. For hundreds of years, these waters delivered Americans from the rest of the country and foreigners from all over the world to the city’s shoreline, where they introduced their own customs and beliefs into the cultural mix. Shipping remains the most important commercial activity for this self-described “port at the center of the world’s busiest port complex.” New Orleans also owed its physical existence—the land on which it sits—to the river and its centuries-old habit of regularly overflowing its banks. More recently, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how the Mississippi and other waters surrounding New Orleans could also, catastrophically, snatch that land away.
I usually ran along the mile-long brick promenade that sits on top of the French Quarter’s levee—the mound of earth built up along the riverbank that is supposed to protect the surrounding areas from flooding. In the early morning hours, the benches along the promenade were often filled with homeless people, sleeping or organizing their possessions for the daily shuffle. On the other side of the walkway, a rocky slope led down to the river, which, depending on the time of year and the amount of recent rainfall, could range from five feet to twenty-five feet below the top of the levee. The Mississippi’s surface was brown, rolling, impenetrable, but the caps of waves or some debris—a bright plastic jug spinning and jerking along, or a thick branch jutting oddly out of the water as if fighting to keep its head up—called my attention to its fast-moving current.
New Orleans hugs a sharp bend in the Mississippi, earning it the nickname Crescent City, and from the promenade, the ends of the river curved out of my sight, making it difficult to recall its great length—the fourth longest in the world if you measure it from the beginning of its tributary the Missouri, and, according to Mark Twain, the most crooked. The Mississippi didn’t evoke any of my usual associations with water: the expansiveness dissolving to melancholy when standing on the edge of the ocean, or the clean deep breath of a clear flat lake. Yet as I got to know it better, I came to like it and even feel a particular kinship with it.
Algonquin Indians named the river Father of Waters, which translates literally as misi, big, and sipi, water. T. S. Eliot called it “the strong brown God.” In Life on the Mississippi, Twain called it “a wonderful book...that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.”
On a map the Mississippi River system looks like a tree with the trunk planted in New Orleans and the branches reaching up across the United States. Sometimes, when I was running, I would picture this river tree and all the traces of earth collected from all over the country that had floated down it to make up the land beneath my feet. And then I’d think of my family tree, and the traces of my ancestors’ lives that had floated down to me, and I’d try to fit together those bits and pieces into something solid, with substance and a form. And suddenly my great-great-grandfather Henry might appear in my mind’s eye, blurry and fleeting, as if he were floating by on the river beside me. I would try to imagine how he’d felt when marrying my great-great-grandmother or setting off to fight in the Civil War. I’d see him as romantic and courageous, someone who took stands at important moments in American history, someone who had a hand in making history himself. Yet how accidental my picture was, made up from this flotsam of the past that happened to dislodge and remain intact during the trip down through time. I was always waiting for some fact to appear—a criminal charge, say—that would spoil the image I had conjured.
The first piece of advice that experienced genealogists offer to beginners is to rid themselves of the expectation that they will discover a famous forebear. Most everyone, whether they admit it or not, starts out with the hope of finding in their past an accomplished artist or a military hero or at least someone who was really rich. Such secondhand glory can soften the blow of one’s own failures: I may not have amounted to much, but at least my ancestors did. People are also looking for an affirmation of the person they feel in their hearts capable of becoming. To serve your country in a war is an honorable act, but to have come from a line of men who served in wars transforms this act into an identity that a person can live by.
In the end the process of re-creating my family story was as constructed and provisional as the physical landscape of New Orleans. History, as the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci put it, “had deposited in me an infinity of traces without leaving an inventory.” As I sifted those traces, looking for the shape of my past, I was always sifting them through a screen fashioned in my likeness, so that my origins came to resemble nothing so much as my own wishful thinking about myself.