Transcript
Speaker: Honestly, the picture is so important and what it represents is so incredibly important.
Speaker: It is like the physical manifestation of what has happened with these narratives concerning the people of Africans in this country.
Speaker: They were there.
Speaker: They contributed.
Speaker: They did extraordinary things.
Speaker: And for whatever, well, for many reasons, that was suppressed and literally covered over in this instance.
Speaker: And then there's people today who wouldn't have had the opportunity to do what I'm doing 50 years ago, but are able to do it now.
Speaker: And we're telling these stories and uncovering them literally.
Speaker: You know, and so this is extraordinarily important.
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: We have some extraordinary stories to share with you over the coming episodes.
Speaker: They're about paintings and furniture, but more than that, they're about remembering.
Speaker: Remembering not just what happened, but to whom and why.
Speaker: And they're also about forgetting.
Speaker: And not just what we've forgotten, but what we've tried to forget.
Speaker: We're going to travel from the French Quarter of New Orleans to the forests of New Hampshire, to the shores of Tahiti, looking not just for answers, but for memories, and memories of memories.
Speaker: We'll encounter the people who made these things, the people who cared for them, and those who manipulated them.
Speaker: We'll answer some questions and find others to be unanswerable.
Speaker: And along each journey will be guided by the piece itself, the craft, the work of art, the curious object.
Speaker: For the Magazine Antiques, this is Ben Miller.
Speaker: I hadn't seen anything else like it, and it kind of just shimmered.
Speaker: There was like a moment where it's like, I need to figure out more about that.
Speaker: That's Jeremy Simeon.
Speaker: You might have heard him on this podcast before if you've been listening for a while.
Speaker: He's the reason I know about this painting.
Speaker: He's the reason a lot of people know about this painting.
Speaker: You'll be hearing a lot from him.
Speaker: This is the first of three episodes about an extraordinary painting from Antebellum, Louisiana.
Speaker: If you ask Jeremy, or for that matter, me, it's one of the most important stories about the history and legacy of American art.
Speaker: And until just recently, almost no one had ever heard of it.
Speaker: But something remarkable was happening in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1837.
Speaker: Something that you've never read in the history books, and if you're like me, you never even imagined was possible.
Speaker: It was so remarkable and so uncomfortable that
Speaker: that for generations people tried to conceal the evidence that it had ever happened at all.
Speaker: Because in 1837, a 15-year-old child was painted by one of the most acclaimed portrait artists in Louisiana.
Speaker: But this child was not the heir to an aristocrat or a planter's fortune.
Speaker: He wasn't the child of a diplomat or a governor.
Speaker: No, this 15-year-old boy was named Belazare, and he was an enslaved child of African descent.
Speaker: When we talk about history being erased, we typically mean it as a metaphor.
Speaker: People trying to ignore or overlook or forget about uncomfortable truths.
Speaker: But today, we're going to take a look at a time when history was erased in the most literal way.
Speaker: This is the story of Belazare.
Speaker: How he was painted out of history.
Speaker: and how now, in the year of his 200th birthday, his memory has been reborn.
Speaker: It's also the story of the people around Belisere, including the three white children appearing beside him in this painting, the people who shaped who he was, and the story of the people who came after him and defined his legacy, the people who forgot about him and tried to forget about him
Speaker: and the people who have worked so hard to remember.
Speaker: And it's a story about how we remember our past, and how we shape that past, honestly and dishonestly, intentionally and unintentionally, and what we can do to get back to the heart of what really happened.
Speaker: We don't know who erased Belazere.
Speaker: For a long time the story went that the child had done something to anger his master, who then had him painted over as some kind of punishment or retribution.
Speaker: But one thing we do know is that story isn't true.
Speaker: Well, this is purely speculative.
Speaker: And this is definitely, you know, we have no proof of this, but what I glean from this painting and its narrative was that Belizeh was probably painted out in the early part of the 20th century.
Speaker: That's Bradley Sumrall, chief curator at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans.
Speaker: That's where the painting is on display right now, where the world saw Belizeh revealed for the first time.
Speaker: And at that time, America had really brought its problems or its view of race to New Orleans.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: This is a time...
Speaker: in America when a lot of Confederate monuments were going up very quickly throughout the South.
Speaker: And we're talking well after the civil war was over and done.
Speaker: But there was, there was this conversation, America was becoming more racist in the twenties and the teens and twenties.
Speaker: And that, that conversation seemed to be coming to a head.
Speaker: So I think possibly he was painted out, you know,
Speaker: as a result of racism, trying to erase this figure from the history of this family.
Speaker: Because it would have been uncomfortable to see a black child in the same picture with white children?
Speaker: Purely speculative, but yes, I would think that would be the reason.
Speaker: There's a lot more to say about that.
Speaker: And don't worry, we're going to get into it.
Speaker: But first, I want to back up for a moment.
Speaker: Belisere isn't the only person in this painting.
Speaker: There are three others, three other children, all of them white.
Speaker: They're standing and leaning and sitting in front of Belisere.
Speaker: The oldest one is nine, that's Elizabeth.
Speaker: Her sister and brother are Leontine and Frederick Jr. Together, the four children are posed in a bucolic marshy forest with a rivulet at their feet and the wisp of a distant sailboat on the water behind them.
Speaker: Elizabeth, Leontine, and Frederick are looking right out of the painting at us.
Speaker: All three of them with easy smiles and fine billowing garments.
Speaker: The year this painting was done was the year Elizabeth and Leontine died.
Speaker: Frederick died a few years later.
Speaker: The only person from this painting to live to adulthood was Belazare.
Speaker: Probably, you know, same reasons, yellow fever, scarlet fever, malaria, one of the mosquito-borne illnesses.
Speaker: But yeah, that Belazer survived is a big part of that story as well.
Speaker: In the picture, Belazer's eyes are cast to the side and downward.
Speaker: His arms are crossed.
Speaker: So I think my interpretation of his expression has kind of changed the more familiar that I've become with the painting.
Speaker: Of course, conservation also kind of articulated a little bit more of that expression or brought out more of that expression.
Speaker: But I think he's a bit bored.
Speaker: I think he would rather be doing something else.
Speaker: I think people have kind of projected that he's, you know, giving them side eye or attitude or annoyed.
Speaker: But one, if that were the case and he was doing that in the artist's studio, it wouldn't have happened.
Speaker: been captured, I don't believe.
Speaker: But it is a fitting look in light of everything we know about what would have happened.
Speaker: And so it's interesting because of that, you know, what we know, but I don't think that's the case.
Speaker: I think he's just slightly kind of bored.
Speaker: And I heard someone say that he has this kind of air of an older sibling, kind of like, come on.
Speaker: Let's get this gun, guys.
Speaker: Come on, y'all.
Speaker: And I kind of see that because I don't see discomfort.
Speaker: I see a little bit of closed off with his arms crossed.
Speaker: But if you look at 19th century paintings of the time kind of leaning away and the arms closed, that's in...
Speaker: the scope of how people were depicted.
Speaker: And it's not meant to express some sort of contempt or annoyance.
Speaker: It's a good painting.
Speaker: In fact, it's a very good painting.
Speaker: It's a masterwork.
Speaker: Images don't do it justice.
Speaker: What you see on the website, or, you know, in an interview, just really don't do justice to standing in front of the painting and the luminosity of the painting, and especially the treatment of Belizeh.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: Often depictions of black figures, they're just not so finely rendered.
Speaker: Maybe something like John Singleton Copley's studio study for Watson and the Shark from the late 18th century comes close or Charles Wilson Peale's 1819 portrait of the elderly Yairam Mahmood.
Speaker: comes close, but it really is a masterful work for New Orleans, for the South, but really even for American art.
Speaker: So that's an idea of what the painting looks like today.
Speaker: But for most of the last century, Belisere was missing.
Speaker: When the painting was given to the New Orleans Museum of Art, Belisere wasn't there.
Speaker: When it was sold at Christie's, Belisere wasn't there.
Speaker: He wasn't there during the rise of the KKK.
Speaker: He wasn't there for the Jim Crow era.
Speaker: During the 1960s struggle for civil rights that so racked the state of Louisiana, he wasn't there.
Speaker: It wasn't until sometime after 2010 that he finally reemerged.
Speaker: Why it took so long, and how his memory was finally rediscovered, is one part of the story we're going to tell.
Speaker: But that is for the next episode.
Speaker: The other part of the story, and the place where we're going to start, is the story of Belazare himself.
Speaker: Who was this person?
Speaker: Who were his family?
Speaker: What kind of life did he lead?
Speaker: How did he, as a 15-year-old, come to be part of this remarkable painting?
Speaker: Where did he go from there?
Speaker: We found out who his mother was.
Speaker: We found out that he had siblings.
Speaker: And then we began to see all of these familiar names.
Speaker: Oh, well, he was born in the household of Joseph Trevino.
Speaker: I said, oh, Joseph Trevino, sure.
Speaker: His great-great-grandson was an editor of this and this and this.
Speaker: So it was just strange.
Speaker: We began to kind of reconstruct this world.
Speaker: And the world, it feels like it began to reach out to us, dropping more and more clues.
Speaker: And I know this sounds, you know, it sounds fantastical, but it really, it really is so strange how this all came to be.
Speaker: It still shocks me today.
Speaker: You know, I think this person wanted to be known.
Speaker: My name is Yael Gordon.
Speaker: I am a historian and a genetic genealogist.
Speaker: And so I am based here in Louisiana.
Speaker: So I am a Louisiana Creole and Cajun.
Speaker: I'll start with his mother.
Speaker: This young man, his mother's name was Sally.
Speaker: There's not much information that has been really uncovered about her essays to say where she was born.
Speaker: located or originated from.
Speaker: But we do know that she had a few children.
Speaker: And so after Marie Edmond and Marie Rose, then she would go on to have Belizear.
Speaker: And from the listings, from the information that is documented on him, he appears to have been a mixed race.
Speaker: But his mother and his siblings, they were listed as negress or negro.
Speaker: And so that doesn't necessarily mean that they were not of mixed race themselves.
Speaker: That just means that the individual who documented them could have thought that he may have had a lighter skin tone or a fairer complexion and listed him, say, as a griff or a mulat.
Speaker: Belisere was born in January of 1822, and before his first birthday, he was sold, along with his mother Sally and his sister Marie Rose, to a woman named Jeanette Levine.
Speaker: Just six years later, he was sold yet again.
Speaker: Yes, he is about six years old at that particular time.
Speaker: And so that can be very...
Speaker: unnerving in any of these circumstances because they are being sold from individual to individual and dealing with different personalities, different treatment and learn, having to learn how the next person is going to maneuver and operate and having to learn everything over again.
Speaker: So the whole, the whole foundation of, of slavery is based off of instability.
Speaker: And so that's what Belize would have experienced from birth.
Speaker: and throughout the rest of his life up until the time that he just disappears.
Speaker: And so after being sold again to the Fry family, Fry family eventually kind of comes into their own hardships a little bit later on.
Speaker: And so he will be sold yet again.
Speaker: years and years later.
Speaker: And so there, and so one of my parts of my research that I've been conducting is trying to, again, trying to piece together exactly what was going on and how did these, these owners know each other?
Speaker: What was the reason?
Speaker: Was it to pay off debts?
Speaker: Was, were they family friends?
Speaker: Were they, um, intermarried?
Speaker: Were they actually related?
Speaker: Now,
Speaker: From then on, then we go down and more and more in depth into Belizear's life.
Speaker: And his mother is still alive by
Speaker: 1840.
Speaker: And so by 1839, actually, a year before that, the Fry household is they have to start selling off some of their property.
Speaker: And so 1840 shows they show Bella's still in that household.
Speaker: But it also shows what appears to be his mother, Sally.
Speaker: And so at that time, Bella's air was listed as a household servant.
Speaker: So he was a domestique.
Speaker: And so someone who was working inside of the home.
Speaker: Again, we don't know why he was working inside the home, but usually the work pattern of a child followed that of the mother.
Speaker: But a lot of times that's more so I see that scene that more so with young ladies.
Speaker: So for him, I don't like to use the term favor, but he had a little bit more
Speaker: a little bit of hierarchy or a little bit of status as opposed to being put out into, say, the field.
Speaker: But in, say, in the Orleans area, that's not really, say, a lot of land to cultivate anyway.
Speaker: So a lot of these individuals would have been house servants and would have been house servants.
Speaker: Status, hierarchy, favor.
Speaker: These are tough words to think about in the context of chattel slavery.
Speaker: When I was a kid growing up in rural Tennessee, I was made all too familiar with this perverse and racist idea that, well, a lot of slaves were actually treated pretty well, that their masters took good care of them.
Speaker: And how easily that kind of language slips into, you know, they were really better off as slaves.
Speaker: It's part of what we call lost cause ideology.
Speaker: And it works very hard to forget that claiming ownership of a human being is inherently a catastrophic violation of human rights.
Speaker: So, it's a delicate thing to consider that while every instance of slavery is horrific and dehumanizing, the material circumstances of enslaved people's lives could vary widely.
Speaker: And Belisere certainly experienced that variation.
Speaker: But for now, he's still a teenage boy living with his mother in the Frey household in the French Quarter.
Speaker: I wanted to know more about what that life might have looked like.
Speaker: One detail that gives some insight into that is his clothing.
Speaker: Here's Bradley Sumrall once more.
Speaker: I mean, for me, there's got to be a complex relationship that happens in a situation like that.
Speaker: That was a very intimate, these homes are not
Speaker: the mega mansions that we think of today in the French Quarter.
Speaker: They were, it was, you know, a small French Quarter mansion.
Speaker: And this 15 year old boy was living in tight quarters with this family.
Speaker: So it's a complex relationship, I believe.
Speaker: You know, it's a form of intimacy combined with the psychological trauma of enslavement.
Speaker: And I think the painting and depictions of enslaved Africans at the time often, you know, show them in finery, in fancy dress, it seems almost.
Speaker: Although Belizear's outfit, although it seems very fancy to us today, that would have been a livery coat.
Speaker: That would have been, you know, the uniform of a house servant.
Speaker: possibly made by Brooks brothers.
Speaker: So this, you just, for people who don't have the painting in front of them, could you just describe, uh, what that garment looks like?
Speaker: Uh, tan overcoat, uh, you know, wide collar, uh, um,
Speaker: Although the buttons are not depicted in the painting, the extant example of a Brooks Brothers version of this coat would have had brass buttons, possibly, you know, handmade for the household, maybe with their crest or with their initials or
Speaker: something of that.
Speaker: So it would have been a uniform that they would have bought for Belazare to wear while he was working as a domestic in their home.
Speaker: From contemporary eyes, we look at it and we think, oh, well, he's so finely dressed.
Speaker: He must have been well cared for.
Speaker: But I think that's asking a lot from this painting.
Speaker: I don't think that he's
Speaker: when they're depicted in, when enslaved folks were depicted in 19th century portraiture in very fancy dress or very fine clothing, it was either a uniform
Speaker: Or they were depicted like you would, they were used as a prop.
Speaker: This was from a slave owner's perspective.
Speaker: This wasn't to elevate the figure of the enslaved person, but to elevate the status and wealth of the slaveholders family.
Speaker: What's a little different about this painting is,
Speaker: from other, especially European, depictions of enslaved people at the time, for me is the treatment of the face.
Speaker: It seems to me that the painter had empathy with this boy, and he really is the star of the painting.
Speaker: Looking at Belisere in this painting, wearing this overcoat, crossing his arms, pensive, it has quite an effect.
Speaker: Often, people from the distant past can seem like abstractions, reducible to a few lines in a history book or a few chapters in a biography.
Speaker: And for oppressed people, that problem is even more acute.
Speaker: Belizear as an enslaved person wasn't even understood to be fully human by the slave-owning society around him.
Speaker: But when you look at him in this painting, it invites your imagination to consider him as a real living and breathing flesh and blood person.
Speaker: Okay, so for someone who was an actual house servant, I know sometimes that there is a thought process that say persons who worked out in fields, whether it's sugar cane, cotton rice, coffee, or whatever,
Speaker: may have had it a lot worse than those who worked inside of the home.
Speaker: And just because he was someone in the home, which made it makes it appear as though he has a little bit more status than some of those who were not working inside of the home.
Speaker: That doesn't absolutely does not mean that he did not or would not have received
Speaker: more emotional issues or even possible abusive issues because the persons who work inside of the house, not only just Belizear, but anyone who works inside of a house or was a cook or was not out laboring in the field would have dealt with a lot more on the spot type of issues with abuse and brutality because it's easier to access them.
Speaker: It's easier for them to get punished for various amounts of things at a very, very quicker rate.
Speaker: There's no hierarchy in slavery at all.
Speaker: So just because one may have it seem as though they have more status or privilege over another, there is no hierarchy in the brutality of being owned by another human being that doesn't even look at them as a human being themselves.
Speaker: One thing art is very good at is bringing stories to life.
Speaker: I wonder, if there had been video cameras in the 1830s, how would American history be different?
Speaker: Would some of the myths about the conditions of slavery have been easier to dispel?
Speaker: Would lost cause ideology have flourished if, alongside the jingoistic statues of Confederate war heroes and
Speaker: revisionist stories of happy days on the plantation, there had been documentary footage of slave ships and tobacco fields.
Speaker: Maybe it wouldn't have made any difference, but I think it says a lot that sometime, most likely around the turn of the 20th century, a full generation after the end of legal slavery, someone still found the very image of
Speaker: of an enslaved black child standing next to white children, so offensive, so threatening, that they had Belazaire painted over.
Speaker: How fragile must your historical narrative be if something as simple as a painting can shake its foundations?
Speaker: But what's maybe even more surprising than Belazaire being removed from this painting is the fact that he was included in the first place.
Speaker: It probably goes without saying that in New Orleans in 1837, depicting an enslaved person alongside your white children in your very expensive family portrait was not normal.
Speaker: I would say that it's not really unusual to find a portrait depicting African-Americans and whites together in the same image.
Speaker: The difference is with this particular portrait is that the Belizear is depicted amongst the white children and there's no real distinction of caste or status in that portrait.
Speaker: That's Wendy Castanel, assistant professor of art history at Washington and Lee University.
Speaker: She's also a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Speaker: A common trope that you often find in photography, for example, or African-American nurses with their white hair.
Speaker: children as charges.
Speaker: And so that you see many photographs like that.
Speaker: And even in painted portraits, you often find African-American sitters alongside white families.
Speaker: And this is a longstanding tradition in American portraiture, not just from Louisiana, but across the U.S., especially the South.
Speaker: But usually they're marked as enslaved and marked as in service of the white family, whereas there's not really much of an indication that Belazer is much different than the rest of the group of white children, except his clothes are
Speaker: maybe a little rougher.
Speaker: But other than that, he does not appear to be a servant or an enslaved person.
Speaker: It's not obvious in the arrangement of the sitters.
Speaker: And that's what makes this particular image so unusual and wonderfully fascinating.
Speaker: Also, he probably took care of those
Speaker: other children that was probably one of his household duties to be the house servant or the play toy of these children so they grew up together that would also be very um common you have these women who were house who are who may have been a house servant and she would have she could have a child and that child will grow up right alongside that the owner's children
Speaker: And the whole time they're learning how to tend to those owners' children, but they're play toys.
Speaker: They're not necessarily playmates.
Speaker: They are play toys because they can do anything they want to those children and still get away with it.
Speaker: But I will say that for him to be in that painting, it also, another reason could be just to show the wealth of the family.
Speaker: just to show that they did have these servants, and look how great their servants dressed.
Speaker: Because of course the persons who worked inside of homes, as opposed to outlaboring in the field, are going to have better attire than those who were working outside.
Speaker: So there are a lot of reasons that Frederick Frey might have decided to include Belisere in this portrait of his children.
Speaker: Maybe it was because Belisere spent so much time with Elizabeth, Leontine, and Frederick.
Speaker: Maybe Belisere had impressed him in some significant way.
Speaker: Maybe he was simply using Belisere as an ornament, a symbol of the Frey family's prosperity.
Speaker: But there is another theory.
Speaker: Another reason that Belisere might have held a special place in Frederick Frey's heart.
Speaker: One of the things I have to bring up is there's a lot of speculation that Belisere is the son of Frederick Frey.
Speaker: Belose was born in 1822, and he was born in the household of Joseph Trevina.
Speaker: And that is where Sally was at the time, his mother.
Speaker: And Sally had a few other children.
Speaker: But urban slavery was quite different.
Speaker: Just because he was born in that household does not mean anything.
Speaker: that even Joseph Trevino was his father.
Speaker: I hate to use the word freedom, but these enslaved people were able to kind of go to a degree, walk around the city if they needed to run errands, if they needed to go places.
Speaker: So there are ways that a woman would have possibly met another enslaved person, met a free person, had a relationship,
Speaker: And been able to have had a child.
Speaker: And that is not limited to the man who owned her.
Speaker: Now, Frederick Fry, from what I understand, was in the city at that point.
Speaker: We did find some records of that, but he was not established, and we see no relationship between him and Joseph Trevino, where Sally, who was Sally's master.
Speaker: And in fact, between the Trevino house, there was another household that Sally and Belisere were in because they were purchased by a lady named Jeannette Levine.
Speaker: And she is the one who sold Frederick Frye, Sally, and her mulatto son, Belazare, around six years old.
Speaker: Now, it is interesting and worth noting that Belazare is the only child of Sally who is listed as a mulatto.
Speaker: And this is a descriptor that normally indicates mixed race and one parent who is white or European.
Speaker: So, that is something interesting and is part of the mystery, but we're not 100% sure.
Speaker: I'm not even convinced at all that Frederick Fry was his father, and I'm not convinced that Bella's era was blood-related.
Speaker: to this family, but for some reason, and it may have just been Belisere being an exceptional person, and they noticed that they took a shine to him and they liked him and they decided to put him in the painting.
Speaker: The bottom line is we don't know who Belisere's father was.
Speaker: The reality of the time and place is that kinship ties involving enslaved people were often overlooked or ignored or even suppressed.
Speaker: We don't know whether Belisere was a blood relation of Frederick Frey.
Speaker: What we do know, based on his inclusion in the painting, is that his place in that household was anything but ordinary.
Speaker: But that story about Belisere upsetting his master and having his portrait painted over in retribution, it was first publicized in 1972.
Speaker: At the same time that the painting was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art,
Speaker: by a woman named Audrey Grasser.
Speaker: The master who she claimed was upset with Belisere, Frederick Frey, that was Audrey Grasser's great-great-grandfather.
Speaker: Grasser told that story in an interview with the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and I'm sure she'd been told the same story by her parents.
Speaker: The only problem is,
Speaker: None of it was true.
Speaker: I don't give that story any credence.
Speaker: I do see how someone in 1972 would justify that.
Speaker: And I understand why someone in 1972 would feel comfortable saying that, oh, well, you know, that that old slave made a great great grandpa mad.
Speaker: And so he had him covered up because in 1972, that would have been OK to say.
Speaker: You know, just like in 1992 and maybe in 2002 at a plantation museum, it would have been okay to say, well, you know, the slaves, you know, they were treated pretty well.
Speaker: All right, now come in here.
Speaker: This is a Duncan Fife.
Speaker: You know what they did.
Speaker: Look at the Prudent Millard egg on this bed.
Speaker: Isn't it beautiful?
Speaker: A little slave boy would have pulled on this punka and fanned off, you know.
Speaker: It was okay to kind of trivialize and kind of...
Speaker: Kind of skirt around the issue of slavery and recognizing these people as enslaved people, not just these objects.
Speaker: So I think the story in 1972 and the comment in 1972 is very indicative of the –
Speaker: the age and the zygus or whatever of the time.
Speaker: But the reality is, what we've found is that no, Belisere did not upset the master.
Speaker: The master was kind of a lousy businessman.
Speaker: It's interesting to me that obviously there was some kind of shame or uncomfort that led to his being erased from the image.
Speaker: But in the end, he rises as the star of this painting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: and becomes the most interesting part of its story, you know?
Speaker: So it's definitely, although it's a very, very difficult painting of a very difficult subject and a life of enslavement, it eventually becomes a story of triumph because he re-emerges from that painting to become the central figure, the most interesting figure in the painting's history.
Speaker: again, kind of going back to what was the connection between all of these individuals, he very well could have been related to the family.
Speaker: It's a couple of these families.
Speaker: That is very, very probable.
Speaker: But also probable that he's not related and he didn't and they wanted to get rid of, erase his image in the actual painting to try to cover the stain of
Speaker: Descendants saying, OK, well, our ancestors owned these individuals and now you have an image of what one of these individuals look like.
Speaker: It's one thing for descendants to recognize that, OK, my ancestor owned enslaved people.
Speaker: But it's another thing to say my ancestor owned enslaved people and here's an image of that person.
Speaker: So now that puts an identity.
Speaker: So you never want to face that.
Speaker: That is very, very, that can be difficult to deal with.
Speaker: So what happened to Belazare in the years after he was painted into this picture?
Speaker: He remained in the French Quarter under the ownership of the Frey family until 1856, but
Speaker: That family's fortunes quickly changed.
Speaker: So Frederick Fry was kind of like the antebellum Bernie Madoff.
Speaker: He made a lot of bad deals.
Speaker: He owed a bunch of people money in 1837.
Speaker: There was this financial crisis that occurred.
Speaker: It was a financial panic that hit the United States.
Speaker: So in 1841, Frederick Fry's creditors actually demanded payment and they had to liquidate his assets.
Speaker: And Belisere and his mother were one of those assets.
Speaker: Now, Corley Fry, Frederick's wife, actually acquired them from auction.
Speaker: And this would have been at the St.
Speaker: Louis Exchange Hotel, which is still in New Orleans.
Speaker: So, they were, so, Belisere and Sally were actually part of his assets and they were liquidated.
Speaker: And Corley Fry had to purchase them for $1,500 at auction.
Speaker: So, you weren't that upset in 1841, right?
Speaker: And she held on to Belisere until 1856.
Speaker: And in 1856, we see her virtually penniless.
Speaker: She sells Belisere for $1,200.
Speaker: $1,200?
Speaker: Sorry to interrupt, but that's a lot of money.
Speaker: It's a lot of money.
Speaker: It's a lot of money.
Speaker: I'm not sure exactly what the inflation is, but it's significant, these prices.
Speaker: So she sells Belizear to Lezenbach now, who's a sugar cane planter, for $1,200.
Speaker: Belizear is about 34 years old of age.
Speaker: At this point.
Speaker: And a few days later she buys a house with those proceeds.
Speaker: Or at least begins to start building a house.
Speaker: And it's a very, very, very small modest house.
Speaker: Nothing like the three story brick house that they had.
Speaker: With Spanish cedar for... I think they had...
Speaker: They had exotic woods.
Speaker: I mean, the house they had built was one of the finest in the city.
Speaker: And so I don't believe, I think Bella's era was sold because she could no longer afford to live in that lifestyle, to live that lifestyle.
Speaker: And she just, you know, she, he was expendable at the end of the day, no matter how much they doted on him and loved him at some point, if they ever did or whatever you want to call it, or he was expendable.
Speaker: And when she needed money, she sold him.
Speaker: And so on Christmas Eve of 1856, Belisere, about 34 years old, was sold.
Speaker: to Evergreen Plantation, a sugarcane plantation about 50 miles up the Mississippi River.
Speaker: It's still there, by the way.
Speaker: Here's Yael Gordon once more.
Speaker: Yael Gordon, Yes, very, very large scale operation.
Speaker: Their plantation right now still has 22 slave cabinets.
Speaker: So in the deep south of Louisiana, we grow a lot of sugarcane.
Speaker: Cotton doesn't do extremely well here in the deep south.
Speaker: Sugar cane, of course, is a Caribbean crop.
Speaker: And so it flourishes in this type of climate, this humidity, the moisture that's in the air, the heat, and even the moisture that's in the ground.
Speaker: It thrives on that.
Speaker: And so it grows, but it also makes it probably, in my opinion, the most harsh plantations for someone to actually work on because the work is very, very grueling.
Speaker: And it's again, it's nonstop.
Speaker: And so it is a factory production going on.
Speaker: every single day so throughout the year even if when even when they were harvesting you know the cane there will still be other jobs to do um you know helping cut some of the um the the the road plays back or building the roads building the levees um digging ditches and things of that sort men and women would be doing both you know these these jobs how do you think things would have changed for him after uh after being sold to evergreen plantation
Speaker: Oh, wow.
Speaker: I think if he had not traveled ever before, or if he was not the kind of house servant that actually traveled with his owners, then coming to a sugar cane plantation would have been a lot different for him.
Speaker: it was completely different.
Speaker: Slavery in New Orleans was just completely different from other places anyway, in my opinion.
Speaker: And so for him to now have to go to a sugar cane plantation, first I'll say this, the day, so for Christmas Eve, there would not necessarily be a
Speaker: Christmas for these, because that is the grinding season for sugarcane.
Speaker: So work is going to be, is going to be being done constantly all day, all night to make sure the sugarcane is cut properly, sent to the mill, not frozen so it can be processed.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So going to something like that, if he had never seen that, I would imagine that would have been a devastating shock to him and very scary because now he has to wonder.
Speaker: So he may have received the threat of being, say, sent off before, but now it gets real because that threat
Speaker: he doesn't necessarily, he's going to see that threat every day from looking from being inside of a home to maybe looking over the Gary and saying or the porch and saying he could very well be out there if something goes wrong at the drop of a dime be demoted to go and work out in that field and if that's something that he has never done in life it's going to be very life changing and it can end up in a
Speaker: in a tragic situation for him.
Speaker: I would guess that the quality of Belize's life with the phrase was much better than after he was sold to Evergreen Plantation.
Speaker: Again, Evergreen Plantation was more rural.
Speaker: It was a bigger plantation setting.
Speaker: He had less intimacy with that family.
Speaker: So he would have been counted just among the enslaved and not actually singled out.
Speaker: So I'm sure he was not as well treated comparatively as he was when he was with the Frey family.
Speaker: But again, that's simple speculation.
Speaker: And there's no way of really knowing except that
Speaker: He was included in this portrait of the frayed children, which kind of underscores the closeness that he had with that family, whereas he wouldn't have had time to develop as close a relationship with his enslavers at Evergreen Plantation.
Speaker: At the outbreak of the Civil War, Belazare was nearly 40 years old.
Speaker: Take a moment just to consider what was happening to him in this moment.
Speaker: He had been taken from the place where he had spent almost his entire life and was thrust into a hostile and unfamiliar environment.
Speaker: His family, his connections, any sense of stability was torn asunder on that Christmas Eve of 1856.
Speaker: Now, in one sense, nothing had changed at all.
Speaker: He was considered a slave on Christmas Eve, and he was still considered a slave on Christmas Day.
Speaker: But in another sense, things couldn't be any more different.
Speaker: That pensive, well-clad, enchanting boy of 16 who was so significant to the family that claimed ownership of him that they had his likeness included in a luxurious portrait of their own children,
Speaker: who had placed him in this picture in at least an illusion, however fleeting, of near equality.
Speaker: Twenty years later, he found himself in one of the cruelest environments in the entire American institution of slavery, the Louisiana sugarcane plantation.
Speaker: And just a few years after that, the entire world turned upside down by the bloodiest war in American history.
Speaker: And so after that, Belize really kind of disappears.
Speaker: And we know that that Orleans fell early to Union troops and a lot was going on with contraband camps and individuals fleeing to trying to get to Orleans to try to get some form of freedom or find Union refuge.
Speaker: But he just really
Speaker: disappears.
Speaker: And so if he by chance survived slavery, he would, I would, I would guess that knowing the, the life that he's already come from before Evergreen, he may have tried to go back to New Orleans.
Speaker: He very well could have passed away.
Speaker: I felt for a time that he got away.
Speaker: I felt for a time that, you know, he slipped away in the middle of the night because we did find a newspaper article after his last mention where it said that a group of maroons and runaways were very near this this Becknell plantation or habitation.
Speaker: And I want to believe that he disappeared.
Speaker: The other part of me is very, very
Speaker: realistic and says is and for me i believe he could have just died never realizing freedom and it's a great tragedy if you know one of the many tragedies but i don't know and i don't have
Speaker: any clear feelings one way or the other.
Speaker: And it's part of the reason that the painting is not upsetting, but very complicated to me because I need, I really want to, I really need to know.
Speaker: But, but I'm optimistic that we may find out still.
Speaker: This might be a good moment for me to correct myself.
Speaker: I've been saying that we're telling the story of Belisere, but really we're telling a story of Belisere.
Speaker: In this story, Belisere vanishes into the mists of time.
Speaker: In this story, we've forgotten what happened to him after Christmas Eve of 1856.
Speaker: There's another story with a different ending.
Speaker: And maybe it ends during the war, but then maybe it ends decades later in a peaceful home in New Orleans, or maybe somewhere else altogether.
Speaker: Jeremy and Yael and Wendy and so many others have worked so hard to remember.
Speaker: to draw memories out of paint and out of paper and ink.
Speaker: But there's so much more that we've forgotten.
Speaker: We tried for a century or more to forget that Belisere existed at all.
Speaker: Now it's time to remember.
Speaker: How did it come to this?
Speaker: Why was Belisere absent from all our stories for so long?
Speaker: That is a story for our next episode.
Speaker: For now, 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 Sara Blotta.
Speaker: Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
Speaker: Our theme music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
