Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: This is the third and final episode in our series on the remarkable story of Belisere, the enslaved 15-year-old boy who appears, against all odds, alongside three white children in a masterpiece of Louisiana portraiture dating to 1837.
Speaker: Over the last two episodes, we've traced the story of Belazare, how he came to be included in this picture, and the improbable path the painting has followed up to the present day.
Speaker: Today, I want to take a step back and reflect on what this painting really means.
Speaker: Beyond the fascinating and troubling and revealing stories we've explored over the past two episodes, I want to ask, what is or what should be or what can be Belazere's legacy?
Speaker: What does he have to tell us?
Speaker: And what is he asking of us?
Speaker: And what happens next?
Speaker: After this episode, we'll be taking a break for Thanksgiving, but we'll be back afterwards with a different curious object, with its own powerful story.
Speaker: In this case, about perhaps the most radical religious community in the history of America, the most radical religious community in the history of America.
Speaker: why they all but disappeared, and why despite that, we're all still kind of obsessed with them.
Speaker: And before we get to today's story, I want to make a personal appeal.
Speaker: Curious Objects is a labor of love.
Speaker: And for me, every episode is genuinely a privilege to work on.
Speaker: There's nothing that makes me happier than hearing from one of you who listened to an episode and got something out of it.
Speaker: You email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: You find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: You write reviews on Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: I see it all, and it helps give me the fuel to keep going.
Speaker: And the truth is, I need your help on this one.
Speaker: Especially as we've started to take on these complex and rich and challenging stories, the only way this work is going to be sustainable is if we're able to reach a wider audience.
Speaker: And the best way I know of to make that happen relies on you.
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Speaker: Maybe shoot your friend a text or an email or post something about it on social media.
Speaker: Tell your family about it.
Speaker: I love doing curious objects and I really want to be able to keep doing this work.
Speaker: And right now, that depends on you.
Speaker: So please just take a moment now while you're thinking about it.
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Speaker: I'd be thrilled to hear from you.
Speaker: And if you've done that already, thank you.
Speaker: It means the world to me, and I'll keep doing everything I can to bring you the best stories I can find.
Speaker: Now, with all that said, let's get back to Belizear.
Speaker: Last episode, we traced the history and whereabouts of the painting all the way to its current owner, Jeremy Simeon, who has loaned it to the Ogden Museum in New Orleans to be exhibited there.
Speaker: Here's Bradley Sumrall, their chief curator.
Speaker: It's been a real honor to have this piece at the museum.
Speaker: The public has reacted very strongly to it as expected.
Speaker: And one of the goals that I have here at the museum is to have every person that comes into the museum feel represented through the collection and exhibitions.
Speaker: And when it comes to Black representation, that's fairly easy in the 20th century.
Speaker: in 21st century, but it becomes harder to find representation, especially positive representation of black faces in the 19th century.
Speaker: And Jeremy has that in his collection through a rather extensive collection of cartes de visites and cabinet cards and daguerreotypes and tintypes of black figures from the 19th century.
Speaker: So that's where
Speaker: our conversation began.
Speaker: And then through those conversations, mostly over Zoom during the pandemic, I became aware of his purchase of Belizear and he shared that with me.
Speaker: And I was very excited to hear it.
Speaker: And once I saw the painting, I was even more excited because it is such a beautiful depiction of this enslaved boy
Speaker: We're very honored to be able to show this painting.
Speaker: And I think, you know, seeing the children react to it has been very rewarding to see their, you know, kind of conversations around erasure and slavery, and especially seeing, you know, children of color seeing such a positive, empathetic, beautiful treatment of a Black figure from the 19th century.
Speaker: The Ogden Museum isn't necessarily the end of Belisere's journey, but it does feel like a resting place.
Speaker: This painting spent 185 years accumulating the dust and grime of racism and shame and fear and secrecy and misunderstanding.
Speaker: It's carried that ever-increasing weight decade by decade.
Speaker: And now, at long last, it's been cleaned and transformed, remembered and rediscovered.
Speaker: You know, it's been a kind of a long road, I'd say, even though it's been only a year, a little over a year.
Speaker: I swear it feels like five years.
Speaker: And when I first saw the painting on the walls of Ogden, there was a chill and there was a sense of just kind of a sense of pride in sharing this story.
Speaker: And, you know, it was fulfilling.
Speaker: But there's also a level of sadness with this painting every time I see it.
Speaker: For many reasons, some of them personal, but most of them just because I know the story of these, not just Belisere's difficulty, but also this family's difficulty.
Speaker: These children, none of them lived to adulthood.
Speaker: That's terrible.
Speaker: And then the one person who lived as an adult was sold away.
Speaker: I mean, it's just, it must've been very lonely.
Speaker: It must've been very just tragic for him to have grown up with these children and see them all disappear.
Speaker: That's how I feel.
Speaker: I have conflicted feelings about the whole thing.
Speaker: I think it's an extraordinarily important piece.
Speaker: I'm proud of the work, but for me personally, you know, it's a lot.
Speaker: That, of course, is Jeremy Simeon.
Speaker: And he's still working on this painting.
Speaker: One of the things he's hoping for is that by making the world aware of Belazere's story, maybe, just maybe, someone will turn up evidence of what happened to him after being sold to Evergreen Plantation in 1856.
Speaker: I have this hope that when a story comes,
Speaker: is shared on more than one platform and more people hear about it, somebody will say, oh, I've been having this piece of paper that I found, you know, I've had it for 10 years and it says right here, you know, that, you know, this gentleman went here and he lived a prosperous life, had 37 children or something that we would love to hear about.
Speaker: And his descendants are right actually over there.
Speaker: That would be magical.
Speaker: I don't, but I,
Speaker: I don't know if I can convince myself of that.
Speaker: So until it happens.
Speaker: Until that does happen.
Speaker: Until someone, maybe even someone listening to this right now, has that, I remember seeing that moment.
Speaker: What we do have is a painting that has been trying to speak to us for a long time to complicate our collective memory of the institution of slavery.
Speaker: to disrupt our moral intuitions about America's racial history, and to challenge our own personal histories and the way we situate ourselves and our forebears in one historical narrative or another.
Speaker: I mean, listen, in Louisiana, we have a lot of secrets.
Speaker: We have so many strange taboo subjects, especially relating to race.
Speaker: It's a complex story.
Speaker: This really shows the complexity of slavery.
Speaker: And it also shows that while somebody...
Speaker: the psychological trauma that enslaved people had to endure.
Speaker: Um, because one moment the family's doting on you, you're included in the portrait.
Speaker: You're, you're a domestic servant.
Speaker: So this would have been probably in an area, a public area of the home.
Speaker: You would have passed every day, whether you were bringing food, whether you're getting water, whether you were, whatever you were doing, you would have passed every day and seen your, your image with this family.
Speaker: That's just so strange to me.
Speaker: It's so – I can't even imagine that, and I don't understand.
Speaker: I can't fully understand what Bellows' era would have thought about that.
Speaker: A lot of times we want to erase so much to separate ourselves from certain things and certain aspects.
Speaker: Oh, my ancestors never owned and slayed people.
Speaker: Oh, they would never do that.
Speaker: As though all of our ancestors are amazing, great people.
Speaker: We all have relatives and ancestors who we sometimes don't want to talk about or wish that they were not related.
Speaker: I wouldn't know anything about that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, I wouldn't either.
Speaker: All of mine are just amazing people.
Speaker: But we cherry picked
Speaker: Who is great and who is good?
Speaker: And everyone is loved by someone.
Speaker: It's a good, they don't have to be loved by everybody, but you have to tell the truth about what your perspective is of that particular person.
Speaker: And so there are some individuals sometimes that want to completely separate themselves from that aspect of saying that their family were
Speaker: involved in the slave trade.
Speaker: But this country was built off of that.
Speaker: We have to talk about that.
Speaker: I'm not saying that this current descendant who is alive now that they are responsible for this.
Speaker: I'm talking about what someone's ancestors were doing.
Speaker: That has nothing to do with this person saying, hey, no, you own them.
Speaker: No, that's not what it is.
Speaker: So don't, we can't try to erase that and hide that.
Speaker: And it can be a shame to some individuals.
Speaker: That's Yael Gordon, the genealogist we've heard from before.
Speaker: And here's art historian Wendy Castanel.
Speaker: I think that's an interesting thing about
Speaker: the 19th century in general and race relations across the South in general, it was not as straightforward as it would at first seem on the surface because you're dealing with humans and individual personalities and things.
Speaker: So the laws were one thing, but the way people interacted within the space of the laws was completely different.
Speaker: And I think that that's what this portrait illustrates for us.
Speaker: I keep coming back to this idea that the more honest your story is about history, the more complex and challenging it becomes.
Speaker: And one of the opportunities that we have in looking at historical objects like this painting, one of the reasons I'm so interested in curious objects,
Speaker: is that they are fundamentally truthful.
Speaker: Not that they can't be deceptive.
Speaker: On the contrary, they can and often do create their own biased narratives.
Speaker: But whatever the object is, whatever it looks like, whatever story its maker or its patron want to tell, the fact remains that it was really there.
Speaker: It was really made by a very real person.
Speaker: In this painting of Belisere and the Frey Children, you're seeing a glimpse of a history not compiled and summarized and retold, not streamlined and condensed and abbreviated, but a glimpse, however small, of a true moment, a snapshot of reality.
Speaker: I think the most important thing to know is that this did happen.
Speaker: This is real.
Speaker: It's not just something we read about.
Speaker: An erasure is real.
Speaker: we have to, I think the sooner we all acknowledge, oh my goodness, this was terrible, so tragic, where enslaved people were brutalized, where they were torn from their families, and where they, I feel, betrayed.
Speaker: And then, of course, with Belisir's case, where they disappear.
Speaker: Is he free now in this painting?
Speaker: Because we know his name, I feel like in a way he is.
Speaker: And so,
Speaker: What we have with this painting at the end of the day is Belazare.
Speaker: Not all of him, not even very much of him.
Speaker: We only have bits and pieces, but in this painting, we do have a part of him, a small but honest part.
Speaker: This painting makes me feel very, it's a couple of things.
Speaker: So it makes me feel very,
Speaker: sad for Belizear because he's been hidden for however long he's been hidden.
Speaker: And he's just been trying to come out, trying to come out, trying to tell his story without being able to tell his story.
Speaker: And so he was almost forgotten to the time.
Speaker: But that was the purpose.
Speaker: The purpose wasn't to give these individuals necessarily an identity.
Speaker: So his identity, who he was, there was an attempt to erase his identity.
Speaker: and make like so many millions of others names and faceless.
Speaker: But he had he had he was his he was there.
Speaker: And so that was tried.
Speaker: That was that was stripped from him.
Speaker: The fact that his mother and his siblings were that, you know, we don't know what they look like.
Speaker: That makes me very sad for him.
Speaker: because while we have what he looks like, you know, they deserve to be recognized and known just as well.
Speaker: And so it also makes me very proud of him because I believe that that painting speaks volumes and him being there and his stance, it just, to me, it just, it was not one of, say he was being
Speaker: submissive, so to speak.
Speaker: And so it showed to me that he, you know, he was kind of, it kind of reminded me of a tough guy that, you know, he knew who he was, and despite his circumstance, he was still existing.
Speaker: And so it was almost an act of defiance, in my opinion.
Speaker: It was an act of defiance to where as he
Speaker: knew he wasn't supposed to be in this picture for whatever reason, but he was really supposed to be there.
Speaker: And he's going to stand up straight.
Speaker: He's going to stand alongside these children who otherwise he wasn't supposed to be alongside.
Speaker: And to see the folding of the arms, that can also be taken as an act of defiance.
Speaker: But then you look at his image and think, but he's looking a little bit sullen, but he's still
Speaker: standing.
Speaker: He wasn't at their feet.
Speaker: He was still standing, even if it was standing away.
Speaker: And when someone crosses their arms, that even in today, even nowadays, you think about these scientists and criminologists and people who study individuals' body language and they
Speaker: is that can be taken as okay well i am cutting the world off i've now i've stopped paying attention to you or i'm in a defense mode but it can also um you know me i'm protecting myself i'm protecting myself from every element that is around me and so i think he did just that he protected himself and so i'm very proud of this youth this young man for literally standing up
Speaker: So what comes next for Belazare?
Speaker: Jeremy owns the painting today, but if you ask him, that's not a permanent arrangement.
Speaker: I don't know exactly the next chapter in the life of the painting, other than it has to end up somewhere where it will be seen and appreciated and somewhere it's safe.
Speaker: Because that's what started this whole thing.
Speaker: That
Speaker: this painting needed to find a home.
Speaker: My home cannot be this for this painting.
Speaker: I have my own family and I have my own thing that I have to,
Speaker: I can't, I can't, you know, I can't live with this painting like that.
Speaker: It's such a heavy painting and it would be very selfish of me as a person, as a collector to just keep this in a wall or to keep it in storage.
Speaker: So it has to go somewhere.
Speaker: It's bigger than me.
Speaker: It's more important than me and my, my collection and vanities and whatever else.
Speaker: So the next thing,
Speaker: the chapter of the story would be to make sure it's where it can be seen, loved, and where it's safe.
Speaker: One thing is for sure.
Speaker: Belizeir is stepping up now to take his place.
Speaker: Go down, Moses.
Speaker: Way down in Egypt, lad.
Speaker: After a life of enslavement and a legacy of erasure, 200 years after his birth, and 185 years after that cool spring day with the French artist, after the other three children died, a century after that cross-armed teenage boy was painted over, after the people who were both his enslavers and, in some perverse sense, his family, or their descendants,
Speaker: had tried to forget his very existence after decades during which a museum kept that memory hidden.
Speaker: Here he still is.
Speaker: And the world is starting to see him and to understand what he has to tell us.
Speaker: I believe that this is a national treasure.
Speaker: I believe what happened to the painting is as important as the story of the boy in the painting.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: So I believe that that's something that resonates or should resonate with people all over the United States and maybe the world to some degree.
Speaker: regardless of what you look like, whether you're Black or of African descent, I think the story is bigger than that.
Speaker: I think we can learn from this.
Speaker: For Belazare's memory to survive through all those years and finally today shine through into our consciousness, I don't think I would call it a triumph.
Speaker: It's hard to call it a happy ending when we still don't know how Belazare's life ended at all.
Speaker: And really, it's not an ending anyway.
Speaker: There's still work to be done.
Speaker: There's still stories to be told.
Speaker: But it is maybe a respite.
Speaker: A moment of honesty.
Speaker: Or at least an attempt at it.
Speaker: And whatever comes next, we will be working not to forget Belzer, but to remember him.
Speaker: Pharaoh To let my people go
Speaker: This has been Curious Objects from the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: This episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Social media and web support comes from Sarah Galata.
Speaker: Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
Speaker: Our theme song is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
