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The Story of Bélizaire, Pt. 3: The End; or, A New Beginning
112 Plays3 years ago
In 1837 a family group that flew in the face of convention was committed to canvas, presumably by portraitist Jacques Guillame Lucien Amans. It showed four children. Three were white, dressed in their Sunday best and gazing placidly at the viewer. The fourth, standing behind them in a Brooks Brothers livery coat, was a Black teenager. This is Bélizaire, and at some point around the turn of the twentieth century—for reasons unknown—his portrait was covered up.
In this final installment of the trilogy we consider Bélizaire’s legacy and that of his portrait. Does the debonair boy of 1837 have an afterlife ahead of him? Will Bélizaire and the Frey Children prove to be, as Taylor Thistlethwaite puts it, “one of the more significant paintings that has been rediscovered in American history”?
Feat. collector @jeremy.k.simien, Ogden Museum of Art curator of the collection Bradley Sumrall, historian and genetic genealogist Ja’el Gordon, Washington and Lee University assistant professor of art history Wendy Castenell.Hosted by Benjamin Miller @objectiveinterest.
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Transcript
Introduction to Belisere
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:12
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.
Broader Implications of the Painting
00:00:32
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.
00:00:46
Speaker
Today, I want to take a step back and reflect on what this painting really means.
00:00:54
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?
00:01:11
Speaker
What does he have to tell us?
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Speaker
And what is he asking of us?
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Speaker
And what happens next?
Upcoming Series Preview
00:01:36
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.
00:01:46
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.
00:01:52
Speaker
why they all but disappeared, and why despite that, we're all still kind of obsessed with them.
00:02:02
Speaker
And before we get to today's story, I want to make a personal appeal.
Audience Engagement Request
00:02:08
Speaker
Curious Objects is a labor of love.
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Speaker
And for me, every episode is genuinely a privilege to work on.
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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.
00:02:26
Speaker
You email me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com.
00:02:32
Speaker
You find me on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:02:34
Speaker
You write reviews on Apple Podcasts.
00:02:37
Speaker
I see it all, and it helps give me the fuel to keep going.
00:02:44
Speaker
And the truth is, I need your help on this one.
00:02:48
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.
00:03:03
Speaker
And the best way I know of to make that happen relies on you.
00:03:08
Speaker
So, if you're enjoying what you're hearing, and you'd like this project to continue,
00:03:15
Speaker
I'm not asking for financial support, but I really am asking for your help to tell someone about it.
00:03:23
Speaker
Maybe shoot your friend a text or an email or post something about it on social media.
00:03:29
Speaker
Tell your family about it.
00:03:32
Speaker
I love doing curious objects and I really want to be able to keep doing this work.
00:03:37
Speaker
And right now, that depends on you.
00:03:40
Speaker
So please just take a moment now while you're thinking about it.
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Speaker
and share the word with someone.
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Speaker
Or shoot me a message.
00:03:48
Speaker
I'd be thrilled to hear from you.
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Speaker
And if you've done that already, thank you.
00:03:52
Speaker
It means the world to me, and I'll keep doing everything I can to bring you the best stories I can find.
00:04:05
Speaker
Now, with all that said, let's get back to Belizear.
Public Reaction at Ogden Museum
00:04:09
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.
00:04:20
Speaker
Here's Bradley Sumrall, their chief curator.
00:04:23
Speaker
It's been a real honor to have this piece at the museum.
00:04:28
Speaker
The public has reacted very strongly to it as expected.
00:04:31
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.
00:04:41
Speaker
And when it comes to Black representation, that's fairly easy in the 20th century.
00:04:51
Speaker
in 21st century, but it becomes harder to find representation, especially positive representation of black faces in the 19th century.
00:05:01
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.
00:05:16
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So that's where
00:05:19
Speaker
our conversation began.
00:05:21
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.
00:05:35
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And I was very excited to hear it.
00:05:36
Speaker
And once I saw the painting, I was even more excited because it is such a beautiful depiction of this enslaved boy
00:05:45
Speaker
We're very honored to be able to show this painting.
00:05:48
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.
Historical Journey of the Painting
00:06:15
Speaker
The Ogden Museum isn't necessarily the end of Belisere's journey, but it does feel like a resting place.
00:06:24
Speaker
This painting spent 185 years accumulating the dust and grime of racism and shame and fear and secrecy and misunderstanding.
00:06:38
Speaker
It's carried that ever-increasing weight decade by decade.
00:06:42
Speaker
And now, at long last, it's been cleaned and transformed, remembered and rediscovered.
00:06:51
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.
00:07:00
Speaker
I swear it feels like five years.
00:07:03
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.
00:07:20
Speaker
And, you know, it was fulfilling.
00:07:24
Speaker
But there's also a level of sadness with this painting every time I see it.
00:07:30
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.
00:07:45
Speaker
These children, none of them lived to adulthood.
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Speaker
That's terrible.
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Speaker
And then the one person who lived as an adult was sold away.
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Speaker
I mean, it's just, it must've been very lonely.
00:07:58
Speaker
It must've been very just tragic for him to have grown up with these children and see them all disappear.
00:08:05
Speaker
That's how I feel.
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Speaker
I have conflicted feelings about the whole thing.
00:08:09
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I think it's an extraordinarily important piece.
00:08:12
Speaker
I'm proud of the work, but for me personally, you know, it's a lot.
00:08:18
Speaker
That, of course, is Jeremy
Hopes for Uncovering Belisere's Story
00:08:21
Speaker
Simeon.
00:08:21
Speaker
And he's still working on this painting.
00:08:24
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.
00:08:39
Speaker
I have this hope that when a story comes,
00:08:48
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.
00:09:08
Speaker
And his descendants are right actually over there.
00:09:11
Speaker
That would be magical.
00:09:12
Speaker
I don't, but I,
00:09:14
Speaker
I don't know if I can convince myself of that.
00:09:17
Speaker
So until it happens.
00:09:19
Speaker
Until that does happen.
00:09:20
Speaker
Until someone, maybe even someone listening to this right now, has that, I remember seeing that moment.
00:09:28
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.
Challenging Perceptions of Slavery
00:09:40
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.
00:09:55
Speaker
I mean, listen, in Louisiana, we have a lot of secrets.
00:09:59
Speaker
We have so many strange taboo subjects, especially relating to race.
00:10:07
Speaker
It's a complex story.
00:10:08
Speaker
This really shows the complexity of slavery.
00:10:13
Speaker
And it also shows that while somebody...
00:10:18
Speaker
the psychological trauma that enslaved people had to endure.
00:10:23
Speaker
Um, because one moment the family's doting on you, you're included in the portrait.
00:10:27
Speaker
You're, you're a domestic servant.
00:10:29
Speaker
So this would have been probably in an area, a public area of the home.
00:10:34
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.
00:10:47
Speaker
That's just so strange to me.
00:10:48
Speaker
It's so – I can't even imagine that, and I don't understand.
00:10:57
Speaker
I can't fully understand what Bellows' era would have thought about that.
00:11:01
Speaker
A lot of times we want to erase so much to separate ourselves from certain things and certain aspects.
00:11:07
Speaker
Oh, my ancestors never owned and slayed people.
00:11:09
Speaker
Oh, they would never do that.
00:11:10
Speaker
As though all of our ancestors are amazing, great people.
00:11:13
Speaker
We all have relatives and ancestors who we sometimes don't want to talk about or wish that they were not related.
00:11:22
Speaker
I wouldn't know anything about that.
00:11:24
Speaker
Right.
00:11:25
Speaker
You know, I wouldn't either.
00:11:26
Speaker
All of mine are just amazing people.
00:11:29
Speaker
But we cherry picked
00:11:31
Speaker
Who is great and who is good?
00:11:34
Speaker
And everyone is loved by someone.
00:11:37
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.
00:11:45
Speaker
And so there are some individuals sometimes that want to completely separate themselves from that aspect of saying that their family were
00:11:55
Speaker
involved in the slave trade.
00:11:56
Speaker
But this country was built off of that.
00:11:58
Speaker
We have to talk about that.
00:12:00
Speaker
I'm not saying that this current descendant who is alive now that they are responsible for this.
00:12:06
Speaker
I'm talking about what someone's ancestors were doing.
00:12:11
Speaker
That has nothing to do with this person saying, hey, no, you own them.
00:12:14
Speaker
No, that's not what it is.
00:12:16
Speaker
So don't, we can't try to erase that and hide that.
00:12:20
Speaker
And it can be a shame to some individuals.
00:12:27
Speaker
That's Yael Gordon, the genealogist we've heard from before.
00:12:30
Speaker
And here's art historian Wendy Castanel.
00:12:33
Speaker
I think that's an interesting thing about
00:12:36
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.
00:12:53
Speaker
So the laws were one thing, but the way people interacted within the space of the laws was completely different.
00:12:59
Speaker
And I think that that's what this portrait illustrates for us.
00:13:04
Speaker
I keep coming back to this idea that the more honest your story is about history, the more complex and challenging it becomes.
Truth in Historical Artifacts
00:13:21
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,
00:13:31
Speaker
is that they are fundamentally truthful.
00:13:36
Speaker
Not that they can't be deceptive.
00:13:38
Speaker
On the contrary, they can and often do create their own biased narratives.
00:13:43
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.
00:13:53
Speaker
It was really made by a very real person.
00:13:59
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.
00:14:29
Speaker
I think the most important thing to know is that this did happen.
00:14:33
Speaker
This is real.
00:14:35
Speaker
It's not just something we read about.
00:14:37
Speaker
An erasure is real.
00:14:43
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.
00:14:58
Speaker
And then, of course, with Belisir's case, where they disappear.
00:15:02
Speaker
Is he free now in this painting?
00:15:04
Speaker
Because we know his name, I feel like in a way he is.
00:15:08
Speaker
And so,
00:15:08
Speaker
What we have with this painting at the end of the day is Belazare.
00:15:15
Speaker
Not all of him, not even very much of him.
00:15:18
Speaker
We only have bits and pieces, but in this painting, we do have a part of him, a small but honest part.
00:15:28
Speaker
This painting makes me feel very, it's a couple of things.
00:15:33
Speaker
So it makes me feel very,
00:15:35
Speaker
sad for Belizear because he's been hidden for however long he's been hidden.
00:15:42
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.
00:15:48
Speaker
And so he was almost forgotten to the time.
00:15:51
Speaker
But that was the purpose.
00:15:53
Speaker
The purpose wasn't to give these individuals necessarily an identity.
00:15:57
Speaker
So his identity, who he was, there was an attempt to erase his identity.
00:16:05
Speaker
and make like so many millions of others names and faceless.
00:16:11
Speaker
But he had he had he was his he was there.
00:16:15
Speaker
And so that was tried.
00:16:17
Speaker
That was that was stripped from him.
00:16:19
Speaker
The fact that his mother and his siblings were that, you know, we don't know what they look like.
00:16:27
Speaker
That makes me very sad for him.
00:16:30
Speaker
because while we have what he looks like, you know, they deserve to be recognized and known just as well.
00:16:38
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
00:16:59
Speaker
submissive, so to speak.
00:17:02
Speaker
And so it showed to me that he, you know, he was kind of, it kind of reminded me of a tough guy
Belisere's Act of Defiance
00:17:10
Speaker
that, you know, he knew who he was, and despite his circumstance, he was still existing.
00:17:18
Speaker
And so it was almost an act of defiance, in my opinion.
00:17:23
Speaker
It was an act of defiance to where as he
00:17:27
Speaker
knew he wasn't supposed to be in this picture for whatever reason, but he was really supposed to be there.
00:17:32
Speaker
And he's going to stand up straight.
00:17:34
Speaker
He's going to stand alongside these children who otherwise he wasn't supposed to be alongside.
00:17:45
Speaker
And to see the folding of the arms, that can also be taken as an act of defiance.
00:17:51
Speaker
But then you look at his image and think, but he's looking a little bit sullen, but he's still
00:17:57
Speaker
standing.
00:17:58
Speaker
He wasn't at their feet.
00:17:59
Speaker
He was still standing, even if it was standing away.
00:18:03
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
00:18:18
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
00:18:46
Speaker
So what comes next for Belazare?
00:18:50
Speaker
Jeremy owns the painting today, but if you ask him, that's not a permanent arrangement.
Finding a Permanent Home for the Painting
00:18:57
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.
00:19:11
Speaker
Because that's what started this whole thing.
00:19:14
Speaker
That
00:19:16
Speaker
this painting needed to find a home.
00:19:19
Speaker
My home cannot be this for this painting.
00:19:21
Speaker
I have my own family and I have my own thing that I have to,
00:19:25
Speaker
I can't, I can't, you know, I can't live with this painting like that.
00:19:30
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.
00:19:39
Speaker
So it has to go somewhere.
00:19:40
Speaker
It's bigger than me.
00:19:41
Speaker
It's more important than me and my, my collection and vanities and whatever else.
00:19:47
Speaker
So the next thing,
00:19:49
Speaker
the chapter of the story would be to make sure it's where it can be seen, loved, and where it's safe.
00:19:57
Speaker
One thing is for sure.
00:20:00
Speaker
Belizeir is stepping up now to take his place.
00:20:04
Speaker
Go down, Moses.
00:20:10
Speaker
Way down in Egypt, lad.
00:20:20
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,
00:20:49
Speaker
had tried to forget his very existence after decades during which a museum kept that memory hidden.
00:20:59
Speaker
Here he still is.
National Treasure Beyond Race
00:21:01
Speaker
And the world is starting to see him and to understand what he has to tell us.
00:21:08
Speaker
I believe that this is a national treasure.
00:21:11
Speaker
I believe what happened to the painting is as important as the story of the boy in the painting.
00:21:22
Speaker
It really is.
00:21:25
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.
00:21:35
Speaker
regardless of what you look like, whether you're Black or of African descent, I think the story is bigger than that.
00:21:43
Speaker
I think we can learn from this.
00:21:45
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.
00:21:57
Speaker
It's hard to call it a happy ending when we still don't know how Belazare's life ended at all.
00:22:04
Speaker
And really, it's not an ending anyway.
Commitment to Belisere's Legacy
00:22:07
Speaker
There's still work to be done.
00:22:08
Speaker
There's still stories to be told.
00:22:11
Speaker
But it is maybe a respite.
00:22:15
Speaker
A moment of honesty.
00:22:18
Speaker
Or at least an attempt at it.
00:22:21
Speaker
And whatever comes next, we will be working not to forget Belzer, but to remember him.
00:22:44
Speaker
Pharaoh To let my people go
00:23:10
Speaker
This has been Curious Objects from the magazine Antiques.
00:23:16
Speaker
This episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:23:20
Speaker
Social media and web support comes from Sarah Galata.
00:23:24
Speaker
Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
00:23:28
Speaker
Our theme song is by Trap Rabbit.
00:23:30
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And I'm Ben Miller.