I’m one of those New Yorkers who live in Nashville, but maybe you’ll forgive me, because my family has deep roots in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana.
Incredibly, my connection to New York began in Louisiana.
In the 1930s, my great-grandmother Lola Perot married Irish New Yorker John Donnelly in her Louisiana hometown. They moved back to his hometown in New York after they got married. The adjustment from south to north must have been huge for Lola – not only did she leave behind her family and her culture – but I later learned that she also left behind her name and her race.
My mother and her mother Marion (Lola’s daughter) were raised French and Irish by Lola (in New York she was called “Louise”). My grandmother was very proud of her French heritage. One day, after going through some boxes of old family photos, I saw a picture of my mother’s grandmother on her wedding day, next to my Irish great-grandfather John Donnelly. It was perfectly clear that Lola was not white.
20 years later I still struggle with the meaning of that photo and everything it represented about who my family was and still is. Over the course of my great-grandmother’s life, she and her family were censored as black, mulatto, Mexican (Latino), and eventually white. It shook me to the very bottom of my perhaps not so French core.
Who was Lola Perot? And who was I?
In all honesty, I was frustrated with Gram for hiding our heritage. The amount of work required to keep it simple discover who I was piled up around me.
Determined to solve the mystery, I spent the past year interviewing relatives in New York and meeting new relatives in Louisiana. I was exhausted and not sure how to continue this journey, not only to find my roots, but also to explain them.
A woman named Naomi Drake changes my perspective.
From the same time as Lola, Drake headed the Bureau of Vital Statistics in New Orleans from 1949-1965, where her personal mission was to “out” all people whose birth certificates were white, but who she thought were they had African or colored ancestry. In her view, this racial hypo-ancestry classification was necessary, and she would often delve into a person’s family tree, intent on finding an ancestor who had been labeled “colored,” or search through obituaries of relatives to see if a relative was a service in a traditional “black” funeral home. If anyone rejected Drake’s racial determination, she would withhold the birth certificate entirely.
Trying to survive in the Jim Crow era was incredibly difficult for non-white people.
In Louisiana, the one drop rule wasn’t reversed until 1983 – a year after Lola passed away and just three years before I was born. Under that rule, one only had to be 1/32 African American to be considered colored. I was raised white, but if I had been just a few years older, Louisiana would have said otherwise.
I used to think Lola was ashamed of where she came from, but now I know better.
What seemed like self-destruction to me was her attempt to protect her family and her children from the most dangerous enemy: their own heritage. Her decision for our family was both courageous and heartbreaking. We were both the privileged and the discriminated against. We were both white and colored. We were both Yankee and Southern. Our family history seemed to be a little bit of everything – and maybe it’s okay to be a little bit of both.
Danielle Romero loves to reveal secrets and tell long forgotten stories. Watch the “Finding Lola” docu-series on YouTube.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Personal Essay: How Discovering My New Orleans Roots Shaped My Identity
