After his father died, Mark Charles Roudané, a retired Minnesota schoolteacher, began going through his dad’s papers. There were scores of binders, the records of a life as a prosperous, white, Presbyterian businessman in the Midwest.
All of the files were labeled — except one. When Mr. Roudané, 55 years old at the time, opened the unmarked folder, he found an old photograph of a Black man named Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez.
Dr. Roudanez, a wealthy physician in New Orleans who co-founded two of the earliest Black-owned newspapers in the United States, was Mr. Roudané’s great-great-grandfather.
“In an instant, my identity shifted.”
The news that Robert Francis Prevost, the Chicago-born cardinal who became Pope Leo XIV, had family roots among New Orleans Creoles has enthralled few people as intensely as those who share his heritage. While members of the pope’s immediate family identified as white, various records from New Orleans from just a generation earlier describe his maternal grandparents as “mulatto” or Black. Such a story is a curiosity for many who are unfamiliar with Creole culture. But for those with Creole roots, there is something immediately familiar about it.
“Anyone who looks at me outside of New Orleans sees my street race, which is white,” said Mr. Roudané, now 73, using “street race” to describe the perception of a person’s heritage that people draw from a quick glance. “Anyone who looks at me in New Orleans looks at me and goes, ‘OK, I see where you’re coming from.’”
“Creole” and its more specific variant, “Louisiana Creole,” is a complicated term. It was historically used to describe any child born in the New World colonies to European parents, and at times, to anyone of mixed race. In modern-day Louisiana, it’s most commonly used to describe people of mixed European, African and Native heritage, and the culture they share. Louisiana Creoles are usually Catholic, often but not always with French or Spanish last names. And many are light-skinned; some are fair enough to be perceived as “only” white.
The roots of Creole New Orleans run into the 18th and 19th centuries, when the city was a French and Spanish colony, then a French Catholic-suffused city within the United States. It was populated by Europeans, early Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and Africans, people enslaved and free, forming a distinct society that, while hardly racially equitable, was decidedly more tolerant of racial mixing than the British colonies or the young republic.
Anglo-America, which historically tended to see race as a simple binary fact — there were Black people and white people — did not entirely know what to make of Creole culture in New Orleans, said Faustina DuCros, a professor at San Jose State University who studies the Creole experience. The city’s complex racial identities presented a logistical problem for the aims of Jim Crow, which in the early and middle decades of the 20th century sought to ensure that races were strictly defined and kept separate. Despite scrupulous efforts by white authorities to police the boundaries of color, some people of Creole background in New Orleans had access to opportunities that were meant to be reserved exclusively for white people.
Fatima Shaik, 72, who lives in New York City and grew up in the Seventh Ward, the heart of Creole New Orleans, recalled stories that her father would tell about a fair-skinned cousin who went to work at a bank during the day, a job that was supposed to be off limits to Black people, and then return home to her Black family in the evening.
“Nobody at the bank would even think to ask her,” she said. “Or there might have been some nice white people who were playing the same game we were.”
Still, said Ms. Shaik, who has written about the city’s hidden racial histories, some who chose to lead white lives decided they had to write off their Black connections altogether, for their own protection.
“The strict ones, the ones that really wanted to be white, did not then write home to their grandmother or their father, or they dropped their sisters and brothers like a hot potato,” she said.
As the vise of Jim Crow tightened and the industrial economy promised jobs elsewhere, many Creoles in New Orleans joined millions of other Black people in leaving the South in the Great Migration. People from New Orleans moved north to Chicago, or west to Los Angeles, where Louisiana transplants built up a vibrant neighborhood of Creole restaurants and Creole-majority Catholic churches.
The people they met in these places often had little familiarity with the prism that shaped Creole identity — and defied the ways in which most Americans had been taught to think about race over the country’s first two centuries. Newcomers in California or Illinois were in many cases thrust into the existing categories. Some identified as Black, finding a place in that broad spectrum of complexions. Out West, some were assumed to be Latino, particularly those with Spanish Creole names. But adopting the available identities could be a challenge.
“They would try, many of them, to say, ‘I’m Black,’” said Andrew Jolivétte, 49, a sociology professor at the University of California, San Diego, whose family moved to Northern California from Louisiana in 1960. “And they were like, ‘No, you’re not. I don’t know what you are, but you’re more white than you are Black.’ When they would hear that, they didn’t know what they were.”
Some discovered that various members of their own family were deemed by those around them to have all come from different backgrounds.
“In the 1970s, when busing began in the schools, the teachers were tasked with categorizing the students in their classrooms,” said Wendy Gaudin, 54, referring to the effort in some cities to desegregate public schools. Her Creole grandparents left New Orleans for California. As an adult, Ms. Gaudin returned and now teaches in New Orleans at Xavier University, the only Catholic school among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. “I was categorized as a Native American, and my sister Roslyn was categorized as Caucasian, and my sister Leslie was categorized as a Pacific Islander.”
Professor Gaudin, who has written a book about identity in the Creole diaspora, described how this racial ambiguity could help Creoles when they confronted obstacles in a place that was not quite the promised land that they had hoped. When her grandparents found property in Los Angeles to build a home, they discovered that the neighborhood had a racial covenant excluding Black people. Her grandmother, who was “very, very fair skinned,” she said, went to the bank, paid the deposit and signed the papers. Then her grandfather, who was darker-skinned, built a house and they moved in.
“And nothing could be said, because the land was already theirs,” she said.
There were some who chose to live in their new hometowns as white people, or who simply lived that way because no one ever asked. This did not always involve explicitly creating a new identity; often, it involved simply moving away and keeping quiet.
One of those whose Louisiana Creole roots were unknown, at least to most around them, was George Herriman, who created the famed comic strip “Krazy Kat,” and who was assumed to be Greek by some of his associates. The Louisiana Creole heritage of Anatole Broyard, the influential New York writer and literary critic who wrote book reviews for The Times, was not publicly known until years after his death.
In 1946, Mr. Roudané’s grandmother filed to have the family surname officially changed — likely dropping the ‘z’ because it might tip the authorities off to his Creole heritage — and shortly after, her son was admitted to Tulane University, which at the time was all white. A few years after graduating, he moved to the Midwest and lived the rest of his life as a white man.
When Mr. Roudané told people about his discovery, many did not know what to make of it.
“People were so confused,” he said “‘Well, are you Black? Are you white?’”
But when he would travel to New Orleans, having become an avid student of the city’s Creole history, he said, he met people who understood instantly. He has seen that same split in the conversations around the new pope: puzzlement for many, but among his friends in the Creole community, a joyful recognition.
“All I can say is, New Orleans is a whole different take, a whole different universe when it comes to understanding what race is about,” he said.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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