TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya 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 Saulny 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. 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 Saulny, welcome to FRESH AIR.
SUSAN SAULNY: Oh, thank you. And it's a pleasure to be here.
MOSLEY: Take me to the moment you saw the headline about the new pope.
SAULNY: I was at home in Washington, D.C., and I saw this news. And, like, a lot of America, I was stunned. And I'm in touch with a lot of people in New Orleans over different social media channels or text threads. And immediately, I saw an eruption of excitement. 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, Tonya, 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.
MOSLEY: 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?
SAULNY: 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 well, 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 were 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...
MOSLEY: 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.
SAULNY: 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. But 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.
MOSLEY: That's one of the more fascinating parts of this story that we're going to get to. But I want to know a little bit more about the protective nature that your grandfather had for his brother, how you saw it, because you would sometimes be in conversation with him. Can you describe how he would actually say this thing, passe blanc and c'est la vie? Was it sort of a resignation? Was it bitter? Was it resigned?
SAULNY: My grandfather was someone who sort of - he didn't do a lot of complaining. He took what life gave him and tried to do the best he could. He walked a lot with me and other grandchildren because he never owned a car. He never learned how to drive. So I have lots of memories of walking around different parts of New Orleans with him. And one walk that we liked to make was toward Bayou St. John to see the water. And I remember on one of these days, I just asked him, there were so many people in my family. Everyone had brothers and sisters, and there's so many aunts and uncles. I said, you know, something like, Grandpa, why don't you have any brothers and sisters? And he said, I do. And that was a surprise to me. And he said - he often spoke in little French or Creole phrases, little catchphrases. And the one he said then was passe blanc and c'est la vie.
MOSLEY: As a child, how did you interpret that?
SAULNY: 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? I think he was trying. Just like he was trying to protect Edward, he was trying to protect me.
MOSLEY: 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 who steps off a boat in New Orleans in 1834. Who was that first DeGrange that you found?
SAULNY: Jacques DeGrange (ph) 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. But 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 die-hard 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.
MOSLEY: 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?
SAULNY: Back then.
MOSLEY: On...
SAULNY: It was a big house (laughter).
MOSLEY: Yes. And his hands were kind of in just about everything in New Orleans.
SAULNY: That's true.
MOSLEY: Who was he behind all of that?
SAULNY: 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 times, 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 with - relationship with his son once he realized his son was having an open relationship with a Black woman.
MOSLEY: And that's your great-grandfather Ned.
SAULNY: Yes.
MOSLEY: He starts a relationship with a Black woman, which is almost unthinkable at the time. An open relationship...
SAULNY: Right.
MOSLEY: ...As you said. And what surprising details did you learn about that relationship, that family that he essentially built? That's your grandfather's family.
SAULNY: Yes. I think we know from history that a lot of white men had secret families or a second family or, you know, perhaps a mistress. But that's not the relationship he had with Minerva, based on all of the evidence that I found. He had a very open relationship with her. They were public. That's what was different about this relationship. And when they had kids, he didn't hide them. He brought them around town in his buggy. He even brought them to places where his father was a patron. Like, he exposed them to opera. My grandfather had a lifelong love of opera that comes from the exposure he got back then.
Ned and Minerva had something special that I don't think I can even understand now. They were both Catholic. They were both French-speaking. And I think that having those two things in common might have helped bridge some of the social gulf between them because, you know, even if she was educated and a woman of some means, they were not on equal social footing, just by law in New Orleans. So what they were doing was still somewhat risky and courageous.
MOSLEY: What did you find out about Minerva?
SAULNY: Minerva's father was enslaved on a huge plantation south of New Orleans called Bellevue. It was a sugar plantation. And after the war, after the Civil War, the widow who was running this plantation - I'm guessing it was just too much for her. So she started selling off parcels of the plantation to people who had worked on it, including some of the formerly enslaved. Minerva Davis' dad - smart man - bought a piece - on credit bought a piece of prime riverfront property. 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'll 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.
MOSLEY: Our guest today is journalist Susan Saulny. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALLEN TOUSSAINT'S "EGYPTIAN FANTASY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking with journalist Susan Saulny. Her piece in The New York Times "A Family Secret No More" traces what happened when a single decision a century ago split her family in two, and her own journey to put those two halves back together. When we left off, we were talking about her white great-grandfather Ned DeGrange and her Black great-grandmother, Minerva, and their four children.
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?
SAULNY: 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 his family...
MOSLEY: And this was around 1912, right? This is...
SAULNY: And his family...
MOSLEY: Yes.
SAULNY: ...Won't open the door to take in these children, despite having 8,000 square feet of space, I might add. Once Ned's family rejected the idea of taking in the children, and he was a white man alone with four Black kids, 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.
MOSLEY: How did your grandpa - did he ever talk about his childhood when you were a kid?
SAULNY: 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? So on one level, he was honest with me. He said his mother died, and he went and he lived with the nuns. And he made it sound as though, you know, they saved him, in a way.
MOSLEY: After your great-grandpa puts his children in this orphanage, he dies really shortly after. It's around, like, 1920. And in his will, he leaves his four children nothing. What did you find out about the contents of that will and actually what happened?
SAULNY: Right. Well, just finding the will was a shocking thing in itself. And to read the words, that he was leaving everything in his estate to his father, Colonel Joseph DeGrange, was just a punch in the gut. I have no way of knowing how that will came to be, so it's hard to make any concrete judgment. I just know that that's the will, and reality played out from there - four destitute children.
MOSLEY: When George got out of the orphanage - just so I have this correctly - he went to his grandparents' house - right? - hoping that they kind of their feelings of rejection towards him would have eased. And can you talk about what happened in those early days when he was trying to find his footing and he actually went there to try to get help from them?
SAULNY: Yes. So what I've been told by the older people in the family, his oldest daughter, my aunt, Evelyn, was that he was absolutely destitute. And he thought that since so much time had passed since Minerva died and Ned died that maybe his grandfather's attitude would have softened toward him, that maybe he would open the door and say, you know what? Let me give you a hug, so glad to see you. You remind me of my son - or something. I guess he had his hopes set really high and thought that this could be a moment for some sort of reconciliation. But that didn't happen at all. In fact, it was just the opposite that happened. My aunt said that he was told in no uncertain terms to never show his face around there again and, you know, to get off the property.
MOSLEY: So you've got these two boys - your grandpa, George, and his brother Edward - in the same building, and they have younger siblings who are in another building, another orphanage. In the Times article, it's very visual because there are these pictures side by side of your grandpa, George, and then his brother. And it is so clear that they're siblings. I mean, the only difference is that they're kind of a few shades apart, which, of course, the country sorts them differently, solely based on their skin color. That's the fork of the whole story. Take me to the story you've been able to construct about how Edward ends up on a train to Chicago, where he ends up living the rest of his life as a white man.
SAULNY: I wanted to show that these two men were basically the same in terms of upbringing and DNA, right? But for a bit more time in the sun, the difference of color that for anyone might just be a dark sun tan, they had completely different lives because one could be classified as white and the other as Black. And I was hoping that by laying out the very stark contrast, the arcs that their lives took, I could help show how arbitrary and absurd it is to sort people by race and color.
MOSLEY: I now want to talk to you about what is such an interesting step that happened next. You finally do the thing that you've circled 20 years. You find Edward's family and set up a dinner in Chicago. And you write that right up until the last minute, you aren't even sure you could go through with it.
SAULNY: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: You even brought with you to this meeting notes on a piece of paper on how you were going to talk to them. Tell me about what happened when you saw them, when you first laid eyes on them.
SAULNY: Right. Well, I was nervous going into that because, you know, I was raised by Grandpa George, and that little voice was still in the back of my head, saying, leave well enough alone. But I thought, you know, if I could talk to you, Grandpa, I would tell you that the world is a different place and that this might be the time to do this. I have a feeling it is. So I walked into the restaurant and I looked around. I asked the hostess if the DeGranges were there and was trying to figure out who they are. And I see three women who are already, like, zeroed in on me. They're looking like they recognized me before I recognized them. And once I laid eyes on them, I knew immediately as well. One of the cousins sitting there says, oh, she's with us. And she tells the hostess, because there was something about us that just seemed cousinly, for lack of a better word.
MOSLEY: I mean, it's interesting. You guys look so much alike, even down to the skin tone.
SAULNY: (Laughter) Yeah. They reminded me of people I knew from home. Like, every one of them had a twin back in New Orleans. And one of the women at the table, we have the same height and body type. I mean, it was just - just physically, it was a moment.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Susan Saulny. Her New York Times piece, "A Family Secret No More," traces what happened when a single decision a century ago split her family in two. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JON-ERIK KELLSO'S "CREOLE LOVE CALL")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is journalist Susan Saulny. A New Orleans native, she spent more than a decade as a national correspondent for The New York Times and contributed to the team that won the Pulitzer for the paper's coverage of September 11. She's also the author of a 2010 series called "Race Remixed" about the rise of multicultural America and a generation rejecting the old color lines. Her latest piece in The New York Times, "A Family Secret No More," traces how a single decision a century ago split her family in two - one brother who passed for white in Chicago, and one who identified as a Black man in New Orleans - and her own attempt, generations later, to bring the two halves back together. When we left off, Saulny was describing her meeting with her Chicago family for the first time at a restaurant.
You were searching for them. And you also found out, though, in a way, that they were searching for you and your family, too.
SAULNY: Right. That was a revelation because I thought going into this that I had some information and I was going to be sharing it with them. But what really happened is that information flowed in both directions. And I learned things about my own side that I had misunderstood. So it was just new understanding all around. But what I learned specifically from them is that they had an inkling, suspicions, long-standing, and they were hoping to know more. They were asking their parents questions that their parents wouldn't answer. You know, so they hit certain walls in trying to figure out their past. They weren't told an accurate story, and they had a feeling it wasn't accurate. But they were at somewhat of a loss to figure it out because Edward passed away in the '70s, and a lot of the people who knew the real story weren't around anymore.
MOSLEY: Let's break this down a little bit, though. So what's the story, first off, that their dad and granddad, Edward, told them about his origins?
SAULNY: He told them that he was from New Orleans, that he was the son of a French doctor who had, you know, a relationship with someone but then had to leave for France. And some had him coming from Montreal. You know, different cousins on the Chicago side had different versions of story. None of it fit together to make any kind of sense. That's what it had in common across the many cousins. They knew there was some connection to New Orleans, and Christine, one of Edward's grandchildren in my generation, she actually tried to reach out sometime around Hurricane Katrina, but she had an uncle who was disapproving of this connection who shut that down. He made it clear that he did not want her to do that.
MOSLEY: The white DeGranges have a fascinating story all on their own because your great-uncle, Edward's wife, Laura, she was also passing. So they were kind of partners in this cover story.
SAULNY: Yes, they were bonded by marriage and their cover stories. Now, I don't know if they met in the South or amongst the many considerable number of white passing Creoles in Chicago, but they found each other somehow, and they were both doing the same thing - passing as white. And they didn't let their children know. And when I thought about doing this story, I really wanted to go beyond just saying passing happened because as a historical fact, we know that, right? It's already been well documented. What I wanted to do was show the psychological toll of that decision on Edward's line and on George's line. And I thought, if I could do that and to show the real lived experiences of an actual family, then maybe I'd be adding something to the conversation. And someone might assume, oh, well, once Edward left, it was all sunshine and rainbows for him. When he succeeded, it wasn't that way at all, and there was a lot of trauma and stress in the family that got passed straight through his children, right to the grandchildren. So when I think about who suffered in this story, everyone suffered. Everyone suffered because of racism. White or Black, if you go back to my great-grandfather, everyone suffered because of racism. And that's so sad.
MOSLEY: It's really astounding to read, especially the fact that the white side of your family in Chicago just always knew that they were not being told a complete story. They may have looked white, but one detail that I thought was actually sort of funny was the cooking told another story.
SAULNY: (Laughter).
MOSLEY: So they're passing, but Laura - one of the sons told you that...
SAULNY: She was quite...
MOSLEY: ...His mom's gumbo...
SAULNY: ...A good gumbo...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SAULNY: ...Cook, apparently. And it stayed with him. The taste of that gumbo, long after she had passed away, he told me that he went from restaurant to restaurant, looking for the taste of his mother's gumbo. I mean, wow, doesn't that just hit you? He was unaware. When he was growing up eating that gumbo, he thought his mother was a white woman from Chicago that just found a good recipe, I guess.
MOSLEY: Just happened to know how to...
(LAUGHTER)
SAULNY: But he said he found the taste of her gumbo once on a camping trip along the Gulf of Mexico. And he had no way of knowing at the time, but he was very close to where she was actually born.
MOSLEY: Gosh. I mean, and obviously, that was an imprint. It's not just that, Oh, this is so close to my mom, it stayed with him all these years because there was something in the knowing that he knew he didn't know. That's what it sounded like to me.
SAULNY: Yes. Yes. And Edward and Laura, it seems that they were only able to be themselves fully in the kitchen. And their children and grandchildren remember them spending long hours in the kitchen together. And they would make things like red beans and rice and bread pudding and all these Southern specialties.
MOSLEY: How does a white woman in the Midwest know how to cook like this? Right.
SAULNY: Yes.
MOSLEY: You know, the thing about holding a secret like this is that sometimes genes tell the story. So, I mean, two light skinned, white passing people can't really guarantee that their children will come out looking white. And that was the case for at least one of Edward's children, specifically Charles. What did you find out about him?
SAULNY: Yes. People described Charles to me as having moderately brown skin without being in the sun. You know, so as a result of that, he hardly ever wanted to be in the sun and would wear long sleeves and long pants and hats. And among his own children, most had fair skin, but he had one daughter with especially curly hair. And I guess he didn't like that. So as a chemist by profession, he started mixing his own concoctions and different potions that he thought could straighten her hair. And even as a little girl, he would put these things, these mixtures on her hair and try to make it straight and slick it back into a pony tail. And the other members of her family told me they'd watch this and just shake their head in horror. Like, her hair was, first of all, beautiful as it was, and they could see that there was something painful going on inside of him that was causing him to react this way. And it was another one of those moments that led to a deep sense of suspicion that they didn't know the whole story.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Susan Saulny. Her New York Times piece "A Family Secret No More" traces what happened when a single decision a century ago split her family in two. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIJAY IYER'S "BLACK & TAN FANTASY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR, and today, I am talking with journalist Susan Saulny. Her piece in The New York Times "A Family Secret No More" traces what happened when a single decision a century ago split her family in two - one brother who passed into white life in Chicago and one who stayed Black in New Orleans - and her own journey to put the two halves back together.
Susan, how do you hold the fact that these people that provided lives for you - and I'm thinking about you and your newfound cousins - they held so many secrets? They held so much back from you while also trying to provide a good life for all of you.
SAULNY: I try to not be judgmental about what they did in the past, right? Different time, different place, harsher - much harsher circumstances than I've ever faced. And what I appreciate that my grandfather did - he modeled a kind of composure and grace and dignity that we don't see enough of these days. He could have been bitter and angry. He could have taught us to hate. But he was just a very humble, working-class man. He came home tired and dirty with brick dust all over him. But I don't know if you saw the picture of him walking my mother down the aisle in the article...
MOSLEY: Yes.
SAULNY: ...In a tuxedo. He looked absolutely regal to me. So I think the lesson he tried to teach the family was it matters what society takes from you, but they cannot take away your dignity. He lost brothers and sisters, lost his parents, grandfather rejected him. They never took away his spirit, his ability to create a loving family or his dignity. And that's what I choose to focus on.
MOSLEY: Yeah. I mean, there's a way of seeing passing kind of not as betrayal. But, you know, if you could see a way out for someone you loved in the most brutal stretches of our history of this country, maybe why wouldn't you want that for them, too?
SAULNY: Right. I think the story struck a chord because it's about universal themes of longing for a better life, longing for a more prosperous future for your children, longing for home and identity. It hit all of those things. And you can see how each character, in whatever flawed way they may have attempted - they were forced by a society that was incredibly unfair to them to make some really hard choices to try to provide those things that we often take for granted today. So yeah. I'll say it again. I don't look back with judgmental eyes at all, and I wish that the world had been a better place for them.
MOSLEY: Now that the story has been out, what have you heard from people from both sides as far as how they're thinking about this and their own lineages?
SAULNY: It's been incredible to see people encouraged by this to ask their own hard questions and to look at their family trees, at the blank spots or the gaps, with critical eyes or more loving eyes. You know, I think our attempt to heal has shown the possibility of it. You know, I see through my cousins' eyes now and their white Midwestern eyes. And when I talk to them, I try to explain the way I look at things through my Black Southern eyes. And you know what? Everyone is seeing more clearly now. What we've done...
MOSLEY: Can you give me an example of that?
SAULNY: Yeah. We talked about something that's really hard. You know, we talked about white privilege one day and what it meant to have it, what it meant not to have it. And I think the first generation of kids from George and Edward, you can see the difference most clearly there. Let me explain this. Edward Jr. went to college and law school and became a partner in Chicago, a law partner. George Jr. dropped out of school at 13 to help his father lay bricks to support the family. So look at the different life trajectories between George, who was Black, and his son and Edward, who was passing for white, and his son.
By the third generation, we got together. And we look at each other, and we're like, well, you know, you're a professional person. I'm a professional person. It seems like we're living really comfortable lives. What made the difference? And I think my generation had the benefit of things like the Civil Rights Act, of the Voting Rights Act, of programs like affirmative action that were looking for potential and merit in places where they hadn't looked before. And if we gained any ground to be on somewhat equal footing now, I think it's because of a lot of the things that our parents' generation fought for - my parents' generation, Black people in the South.
And going into this, I didn't see how resonant this story would be with our times right now, today, in that we're seeing some of these things that made all the difference to my generation being picked apart, being diluted, being attacked. Most recently, the Voting Rights Act, which was the signature achievement of the Civil Rights Movement. You know, my grandfather was disenfranchised.
So there are so many things about the 2020s that look uncomfortably to me like the 1920s. But I get hope from the fact that we were able to heal this family and the responses I saw across the internet. There are other people who cheered it, applauded, said, we want more conversations like this. We want to do more of this kind of thing over here, where I am, over there, where you are. There was sort of, like - I got the feeling that people were ready for something like truth and reconciliation, you know, because that's really what we did. White DeGranges and Black DeGranges - we had a moment of truth and reconciliation. And that's something that America as a whole has never done about its racism problem.
MOSLEY: You know, the thing that really also struck me so much is just, from the outside, the white DeGranges, as you mentioned - they had a pretty privileged life. And by all accounts, it looks like the American dream. They're a nuclear family. 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.
SAULNY: 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, OK. 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 'cause 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 it 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.
MOSLEY: 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.
SAULNY: So I - 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, you know? 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 she - you know, her face just flushed, and she was like, I have a cousin? You know? 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, so he couldn't make that trip. But we decided, let's get them on the phone, FaceTime, and just let them have a conversation. So that was the moment - hello? Hello, Linda. Hello, Arthur. And just like little kids who were meeting for the first time, you know, they had just the cutest conversation. And I heard the tone of regret almost immediately from Arthur when he said something along the lines of, I'm sorry this is happening so late in life, and I wish we had done this a long time ago. And I know she felt the same way. But, you know, that catchphrase that was very popular in the family - guess that's what came to mind when she said, you know, I would have liked that, too, but c'est la vie
MOSLEY: Beautiful, but bittersweet.
SAULNY: Yes.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SAULNY: Yes.
MOSLEY: Susan Saulny, thank you so much for this remarkable story, and thank you for your time.
SAULNY: Ah, it was my pleasure. Thank you, Tonya.
MOSLEY: Susan Saulny's piece in The New York Times is called "A Family Secret No More." Coming up, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the new series from the team behind "Stranger Things." This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BRIAN ENO & JOHN CALE SONG, "SPINNING AWAY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
