A single docent was the only visible worker in the Alexandre Mouton Museum this Tuesday afternoon. My husband and I and our two daughters, their elementary school closed for spring break, were the only visitors, real tourists having opted for more appealing Lafayette sites. Ask if we have questions, the docent said but didn’t appear any more interested in us than we were in her until I mentioned my grandmother’s maiden name.
“You should look for her,” she urged. “We have so many Moutons in the book,” she said with great enthusiasm, as if taking personal credit for that collection of names.
Why should I expect to see my mom-mom in this woman’s book? We weren’t a family descended from famous stock. Of that, I was certain. Ten of us had squeezed into my grandmother’s house, two bedrooms until an expansion added a much needed third and a second bath. But the docent kept insisting. She wasn’t a Mouton herself, she confessed, disappointed, and wasn’t in the book but my grandmother might be.
I mumbled something I hoped passed for sympathy, although not having Mouton genes was hardly cause for regret. Still, I followed her to the book she kept. Refusing might paint my branch of the Moutons as less gracious than the one she aspired to join.
“Alexandre,” she said proudly, a finger pointing at the house’s namesake on the cover. “First elected governor of Louisiana. Took office in 1843. A lawyer…” She trailed off. We’d be here until closing time if she recited all she knew about him. How often had she pointed at that name, progenitor of people she knew intimately, their possessions catalogued and maintained, their ancestors and descendants traced and recorded? “Your grandmother’s first name?”
“Martha.”
“Of course.” The very name my face suggested?
My family went in search of more entertaining displays, leaving me to this woman and her book.
She turned pages swiftly, making her way down tangled family lines. “There.” Index finger to the page. Marthe, born 1898, died 1981. Marthe, married to Ivy Breaux. Marthe, mother of four, only three surviving to adulthood. Marthe in that book, though the name I knew ended with “a.”
Why French Marthe in the book, English Martha everywhere else? Was that letter change accidental or intentional? Had a careless parish priest, charged with maintaining sacramental registers, made a mistake, “e” becoming “a”? Had a determined teacher, devotee of English, altered the spelling to conform to standards no Mouton of Mom-Mom’s generation understood? Or had Mom-Mom herself grown tired of that modest “e” and decided an “a” with its prominent position at the head of the alphabet suited her better? That would’ve been just like my grandmother, a woman more comfortable leading than following. Whatever the explanation, it wasn’t a subject I wanted to explore with this oddly eager woman.
“See?” she said. “I knew she’d be here.” Without a single misstep, the docent had found my grandmother. Did her devotion to Alexandre and kin spring from how manageable they were compared to her own relations? A daughter always borrowing money? Another with asthma? A brother with a drinking problem? Whatever guise their complications took, they were bound to be messier than the people neatly arranged in this book. She must’ve been relieved to spend her days with page after page of passive Moutons, robbed of the ability to protect what they didn’t want discovered. Their lives, publicly documented or pieced together, might still contain elements of disguise, but their masks could no longer be finessed into more desirable facades. Not so those squirmy folks at tonight’s supper table.
I meandered through rooms, the docent now content to lie in wait for the next visitor reporting Mouton ancestry. I studied somber portraits. Several mouths reminded me of my grandmother, but maybe I imagined what the artists hadn’t intended. So easy to see what you expect, nothing more or less.
Did Mom-Mom know she was related to someone famous enough to have his house preserved as a museum? He died 13 years before she was born, so she could not have known him personally, yet 13 years isn’t very long in a family’s history. Had she heard tales of Alexandre’s exploits? If so, why not hand those down to her children, grandchildren? Was she too removed from her own past for Alexandre to mean any more to her than he had to me?
Why should I have thought to ask Mom-Mom if we were related to the man staring out from my eighth grade history textbook? Why should I have thought to ask my mother whether the father whose name I carried was the father whose genes I inherited? No one can find the right questions until she has emerged from ignorance, at least partially. By then, it can be too late. Witnesses dead. Memories blurred. Truth stubbornly evasive.
What I knew about Alexandre divided into fact, information confirmed here or elsewhere, and speculation, informed by history but not fully dictated by it.
Fact: He was born on November 19, 1804, sharing a birthday with my firstborn. Speculation: Though nearly two centuries separated them, Alexandre, like my daughter, might have displayed Scorpio’s best qualities. Observant and resourceful. Loyal and passionate. His mother, like me, might have appreciated giving birth before winter set in.
Fact: He owned Ile Copal Plantation, a gift from his father, where he raised cotton and sugar cane with slave labor, presided over Louisiana’s secession convention in 1861, and contributed significant amounts to the Confederacy. Speculation: He grew resentful of those expenditures, wished he’d preserved his wealth for himself and his heirs. More speculation: His eventual retreat into isolation was attributable to guilt from the death of a son in the war he’d helped fund. Still more speculation: Payment had been exacted for the slave labor he’d exploited. One life sacrificed for many lives. Was Alexandre’s debt fully paid? Did his heirs owe more?
Martha or Marthe? French was her first and most fluent language. Several older siblings never learned English, but she could make her way through English unless provoked. Then chastising words, often aimed at rascally grandchildren, tumbled out, her tongue quickly reverting to her native language. Quelle merde. So, Marthe.
As with our mutual ancestor, my knowledge of Mom-Mom divided into speculation and fact, much of that coming from stories she told. Wasn’t a person entitled to rely on family stories as much as on historical records? Weren’t the two, personal memory and written history, woven into a single tapestry? Yet memory can be unreliable, the storyteller misremembering, the listener misinterpreting. Documents can be secreted away or manipulated. Truth can elude the most persistent investigator.
Mom-Mom is a champion card shuffler. The best. She could work a Vegas casino. I watch as she shuffles in the manner I can replicate. Now comes the trick, cards streaming from the hand she holds above to the one waiting several inches below. In an instant, the cards disappear from one hand, reappear in the other.
“Show me,” I beg. How I want the cards to flow into each other for me as they do for her.
“Attendez.” She cuts the deck again. “Comme ca,” she says and a river of cards, bewitched, hovers in the air for an impossible moment before falling back into her hand.
I force my eyes wide open, determined not to miss a single flick of her wrist. The cards. Her hands. The cards. No matter my refusal to blink, no matter how hard I concentrate, I can’t see where to begin and she can’t explain how she does the trick she learned ages ago. She repeats the demonstration until her itch to play grows too strong and she shuffles a final time before dealing the full deck. Bataille begins. She slaps a card on the table and I do the same. When she wins a hand, she swoops the cards from play to the back of the stack she holds, her movements so swift and sure, she must’ve been a gambler before she was a grandmother.
Checkers is her other favorite pastime and we play on Sunday evenings after she returns from visiting one of her many relatives. The pleasure of this game lies in maneuvering a piece to the opposite end of the board where an ordinary checker transforms into royalty. “Crown me,” one of us calls out gleefully when that happens. Win or lose? Who cares? The possibility of metamorphosis from peasant to king is what commands our devotion.
The red and black checkers didn’t hold the same attraction for her as the deck of 52. Even as a child I recognized the difference between the cards, which delighted her, and the checkerboard, a temporary diversion and nothing more.
I never knew her to play bourré or poker or visit bingo parlors, but oh how she shuffled those cards, how her fingers snatched a winning hand. Priests might’ve lectured on the evils of gambling, warned about punishments awaiting the wicked who flirted with the Jack of Spades. My mom-mom either didn’t listen or didn’t care.
Once, she was a girl eyeing opponents across a gaming table and hedging her bets depending on what she uncovered. Why did she abandon the games of chance? Why substitute slow-paced checkers for the thrill of a royal flush? When we were playing our games, I didn’t see the need to ask. Then again, can a child ever guess what she will want to know as an adult?
Saturday afternoons Mom-Mom tunes our TV to the Lafayette Playboys led by Aldus Roger and his Cajun accordion. Couples flit across the screen, some of them frequenting the studio on a nearly weekly basis. “Her, she be dancing with a new one today,” she says matter-of-factly when her favorite lady is paired with a different gentleman. Sometimes events force a dancer off the floor. Accept the disappearance and turn your eye to the replacement. That’s Mom-Mom’s philosophy.
“She’s got a new beau.” I snort at the idea of old women with boyfriends.
“Peut-etre son mari est malade.” Mom-Mom offers a husband’s sickness as a more acceptable alternative to the coquettish dallying I proposed.
“If he’s sick, why isn’t she home taking care of him?”
“She take care of him all week, her. Today her day for the dancing.” Mom-Mom has no sympathy for the ill husband she invented. I try to spot a ring on the woman’s left hand, but camera angles don’t cooperate. My grandmother leans towards the dancers as they glide across our screen. “She has the best feet, her,” she says after several moments of close scrutiny.
I turn my attention to all those pairs of feet, some matching the musicians beat for beat, others racing ahead or lingering a half note behind. If the camera’s eye were aimed at me, ready to catch my every mistake, I’m not sure I’d find the rhythm, but Mom-Mom’s lady doesn’t care who watches.
“You went to the dances when you were a girl?”
A hand on her lap joins her tapping foot keeping time. “I went to the fais-do-dos, me.”
“With a boy?” I press a thumb against my lips to stifle another snort at the thought of my mom-mom with a boyfriend. She’ll ban me from the parlor if she smells that insult.
Her foot slows from the Cajun two-step to a waltz and her hand stills. “Your grandpa, he could dance. Mais oui, that Ivy, he danced.” Does she see herself, not the woman on our screen, waltzing across the studio floor? I try to picture a girl’s slim ankle, a pair of Sunday best black leather shoes. Instead, all I can make out are varicose-veined legs, wide feet slightly swollen and encased in pale blue mules.
The surface message was not complicated: Once, she was young, in love, and eager to dance. The rest? Here is what I came to believe Marthe was showing me. You will not always be a girl, amused by your elders’ memories. Sooner than you can imagine, you will be the elder piecing together a patchwork of information to understand who you are, who your ancestors were, and where you came from. That is when you will regret not listening more carefully or asking for more stories.
Other than the brief entries in the Alexandre catalog, no historian chronicled my grandmother’s life. Document scraps (birth and death records, photographs, a receipt for the down payment on a parcel of farmland) were not sufficient to reconstruct a life. Her stories, filtered through me and my siblings, offered the most detailed portrait of the life she’d lived.
Occasionally, when we feed the backyard chickens, Mom-Mom mentions Ivy’s cockfighting. The birds’ legs were equipped with stiletto blades making sure the damage they inflicted wasn’t limited to the stabs of their own, deadly enough, talons. The fights attracted large audiences, some serious bettors, others there for an afternoon’s entertainment.
“Did children go?” I ask.
“Pas des enfants.” She offers no explanation for the exclusion.
I don’t think I’d enjoy watching roosters go after each other until a loser collapses and a victor is declared. Even my backyard enemy, constantly scheming to peck my bare feet, deserves the soup pot more than what awaits him in that ring. But I dislike being barred from anywhere and scowl on principle.
“Mais you, you would come.”
Relatives of a bird owner are never excluded. My place is secure. Not close to the ring, she tells me, and I agree that’s best. I see us, Mom-Mom and me holding hands but standing back, away from the splatters of blood or the crush of a crowd pushing ever closer to the excitement, letting onlookers’ cries tell us how Ivy’s birds are performing.
The framed World War I soldier hung in the narrow hallway. Ivy’s shoulders were thrust back, his hat straight, his expression unflinching, a face you’d trust to do battle on your behalf. Where was the sweet boy who led a girl in the Cajun two-step?
I conjured different images. Marthe alongside Ivy. This new beau of hers not yet in uniform. Herself, a girl still. Life’s hardships, a distant and unspied future. For now, a mischievous grin on her face and an arm linked through that handsome boy’s crooked elbow. A prized rooster in his free arm? Likely as not. He took good care of his birds, this young man of hers. Did she think he’d treasure her as he did them? Even so, how could I reconcile the woman I knew with the one who chose a cockfighter as her husband? No more than I could reconcile the soldier he became with the dancer he’d been.
Perhaps Ivy proved to be the exact partner she needed, but his time with her was short. He died when his daughter, my mother Myrtle, was 3, his sons a few years older. If Alexandre hadn’t thrown money at that unholy cause, Marthe might’ve been spared her sharecropping years when she picked cotton, filling and refilling the sack draped across her chest and over one shoulder, her obligations to the landowner coming first, money to support her family second. A slave’s existence? Hardly. A plantation owner’s existence? Hardly that either.
In her quietest moments, did she ponder the fickle nature of her circumstances, born into this Mouton household instead of that, heir to so little while Alexandre and others feasted on so much? She worked those fields, saw to household chores, and raised three children. Relatives helped, but the responsibilities were hers alone. After years of frugality, she managed to buy several acres. I have held the proof of purchase, evidence of a single woman taking care of those she loved. No speculation here. Only facts.
Without Ivy’s premature death, Marthe might’ve been the doting grandmother of fairy tales. Instead, she ruled our household with a strict hand, never requiring an election like a certain more famous Mouton to legitimize her reign. She demanded a clean house, a well-tended yard, and religious devotion—Saturday confession, Sunday communion, nightly prayers. Did she worry over what might result if she loosened her grip? Weren’t past losses prelude to future ones? Once, she’d consented to her daughter leaving home, and I was proof of what happened if you turned away for an instant.
She did not regret my life. I was, as my sister frequently reminded, her favorite. Yet, she gave no inkling of my origins. Not that I recalled. Then again, maybe she tried, but the hints were too obtuse or I was too oblivious to understand. What was certain was the silence she kept came at my mother’s insistence. Why was Marthe content, this once, to follow rather than lead? Did she worry over the consequences of disclosure? If your family wasn’t fully yours, was only part of who you were, and if someone said that out loud, what then? Where would the revelation leave you, leave them? Easier and less risky to stay true to the charted course, even if charted by someone else.
I was past 50 before I needed a passport and to get it had to provide a birth certificate. Mine was dated three years after my birth. No cause for suspicion given I was born at home in rural Louisiana. Unacceptable, said the bureaucrats. Who was I really? What sinister motives stood behind my attempt to obtain a passport with such flimsy evidence? Still, the bureaucrats weren’t completely unreasonable. A baptismal record would suffice. I’d never seen mine. Why bother searching for a piece of paper that would only show what I already knew?
An early January morning. My mother and I facing each other in the kitchen, once Marthe’s, now hers. Here, Mom-Mom and I had played endless Bataille and crowned each other with our checkers, enjoying our royal status until the game ended. Now, another game was ending.
Myrtle handed me the long-concealed baptismal certificate showing my last name as her maiden name. The space where a father belonged? Blank.
I was taken aback but not shocked. I’d always been aware of the myriad differences between me and my six siblings. Our body types were different. They had laughs closely resembling each other while mine was an altogether different creature. They were mechanically gifted and I certainly wasn’t. They were drawn to outdoor play while I spent hours indoors. Genes explained a lot.
“You must’ve been adopted,” my next-door neighbor, cousin and frequent playmate, had often joked.
“Must’ve been,” I’d answered, also joking.
Had we both suspected the truth? Not consciously but on a deeper level. How could we not? Body types. Laughter. Aptitudes and interests. Individually not adding up to much but altogether enough to raise questions for even the least mindful.
I never doubted the love of my adoptive father, dead over a decade, but now looked back and recognized its quality as more distant, less fierce than the love he manifested for my sister and brothers. I was never the target of his rages. My good fortune, I’d thought at the time, but perhaps only a sign he didn’t expect as much from me as he did from them. When I defied or disappointed him, those weren’t his genes on display. Nothing I did branded him a failure.
That morning, my mother was more upset than me. Witnesses, my two siblings in whom she’d confided days earlier, had anticipated the opposite. Me, upset and in need of consolation. Our mother, tender and comforting. Instead, Myrtle was the one crying and wringing her hands, a gesture I’d thought used only by comedic actors or performers too inept to manufacture genuine symbols of distress. But clichés achieve their status for good reason. She’d protected her secret all these years and now was being forced into confession, those hands announcing how much she’d dreaded this day, how she’d done everything possible to avoid it.
I asked for details about my biological father. She answered but guardedly, a woman trying to find her footing, searching for the story that would hold up for the rest of her life. My father was a good dancer from Mississippi. Weren’t we Mouton women pushovers for good dancers? Did I believe her? Not quite? How about this version instead? She twisted and turned her tale until my father became an oilfield worker from Texas, a decent hoofer but no match for Mississippi Man.
When she settled on this final account, she was as convincing as she’d been when she told me of my father’s presence at my birth. For the most part, men didn’t attend children’s births in the fifties. Even knowing that, I willingly wrapped myself in the appealing family tableau my mother shaped. She was persuasive and I was eager to be persuaded. Back when she’d created the inauthentic birth story, had she spied doubt on my face, skepticism she was determined to erase? One more good story and I’d be permanently secured to the family. Did I need to hear that falsehood as much as she needed to tell it?
She was 80 when the forced confession was pulled from her and seemed too fragile for further interrogations. The tears. The trembling hands. The face contorted in misery. Years passed and the fragility, understandably, increased. I feared pushing her for more details. The truth of my origins, said out loud, might prove catastrophic, fell her with a stroke or heart attack. But my mother, at her core, was as strong as Marthe. I should have known this and been equally strong, not allowed pity to compromise my search for the truth of who I was. Yet how I wanted to believe all she was now telling me, present day truth a balm for decades of lies.
Public records confirmed the man Myrtle fingered was three months married, still a honeymooner, when I was conceived. This certainly didn’t bar his being my biological father, but the union lasted until he died a half century later. Such a long marriage seemed unlikely for someone who took to philandering weeks after he pledged his oath.
We met about a year before he died. He’d resisted meeting and tried to turn me away at the door but eventually warmed. We sat across from each other at his dining room table as I searched for similarities between his face and mine. I found none. If there had once been a resemblance, his advanced age disguised it now.
He readily admitted to a relationship with my mother but adamantly denied fathering me. She had beautiful brown hair, he said. The generosity of that description surprised me. Before the gray set in, my hair was also brown, I told him. Maybe not as beautiful as my mother’s. He pointed at his nearly bald head and joked about the hair he once had, serviceable if not beautiful. A sense of humor similar to mine? Grasping at remote possibilities?
I requested he submit to DNA testing. He refused. Suspicious that. But regardless of how irrational, he seemed genuinely convinced the procedure would make its way into the public arena, friends and neighbors gossiping over his guilt regardless of results. My assurances to the contrary were to no avail. The man watched too much television.
My adopted father also spent hours in front of the set. I grew up on The Fugitive, The Price is Right, I Love Lucy. All three of us might’ve been watching episodes at the same time.
By the end of our visit, this putative father’s denials rang truer than my mother’s narrative. Then again, maybe I was listening with ears too damaged by years of deceit to distinguish truth from lie.
Perhaps the man I met only once was telling the truth. Perhaps he was lying. I could’ve contacted his children, grandchildren to request DNA samples. Some days, I think I might still do that. Other days, I feel as if I have uncovered as much truth as I need.
Part of Myrtle’s story did not change. I had no trouble believing Marthe, not my mother, insisted I remain in the family rather than be given up for adoption. Easy to see Myrtle, young and frightened and humiliated, handing me to a placement agency. Better for her. Better for me. That’s what she would’ve told herself.
Easier still to see my grandmother, uncompromising and stern, saying I belonged with that long string of Moutons and that’s where I was staying. Only on this aspect of my mother’s unwanted pregnancy was Marthe leading, not following. She was not perfect but abandoning a grandchild was not a charge she’d add to her roster of sins. I was loved and wanted before I was born. That single truth can sustain a person through a very long life.
Except for this and a few other details, the full story remained my mother’s, maybe would never be mine. Did she remember all I wanted to know and refuse to reveal it or did she erase her past so thoroughly, she no longer saw it? My fault for wanting to know too much? Her fault for wanting to tell too little?
From governor and plantation owner to a two-bedroom home, a widow and her children farming cotton. How does a beginning beget an end? Was Alexandre’s Confederacy support the first step to rapid financial decline? Was Marthe’s generation with its struggle between native French and infringing English the beginning of a broader tailspin? Was Ivy’s early death the marker for what was to befall his daughter?
What about my birth, a dual moral and monetary burden? Without me, might my mother have found the life she craved? More carefree years before the duties of wife and parent intervened? A household of her own instead of subservience in Marthe’s? Greater economic ease? What else had she envisioned before my unwelcomed appearance? Perhaps that was partial explanation for keeping the story of my conception secret, any mention of those times a painful reminder of the life she lost with my arrival.
Without effort, I see Marthe’s thin lips, the ones I inherited, downturned in annoyance. Place yourself in the world but don’t try to take full credit for that world. Arrogance is unbecoming queen or commoner. Taking credit or blame for all that happens is a fool’s burden.
Marthe, like the rest of us Moutons, learned to shed habits and history which no longer served her interests. If our pasts became too burdensome, we found the rising sun, planted our feet in more nurturing soil, and hoped we wouldn’t miss what we’d left behind.
