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The Story of Bélizaire, Pt. 1: Biography
100 Plays3 years ago
Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, the Black child at the rear of this 1837 family portrait was painted out. Why? Benjamin Miller sits down with the painting’s owner—and its primary advocate—Jeremy Simien, as well as scholars, collectors, and other experts in the field involved with the painting’s journey from museum castoff to much-fêted cipher for the Antebellum South, and attempts to nail down why its eponymous figure was forgotten for so long.
Part 1 of a 3-part series on the painting "Bélizaire and the Frey Children." Feat. 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
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Transcript
Symbolism of a Historical Picture
00:00:00
Speaker
Honestly, the picture is so important and what it represents is so incredibly important.
00:00:06
Speaker
It is like the physical manifestation of what has happened with these narratives concerning the people of Africans in this country.
00:00:17
Speaker
They were there.
00:00:19
Speaker
They contributed.
00:00:19
Speaker
They did extraordinary things.
00:00:22
Speaker
And for whatever, well, for many reasons, that was suppressed and literally covered over in this instance.
00:00:29
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.
00:00:38
Speaker
And we're telling these stories and uncovering them literally.
00:00:42
Speaker
You know, and so this is extraordinarily important.
Introduction to 'Curious Objects' Podcast
00:00:46
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:50
Speaker
We have some extraordinary stories to share with you over the coming episodes.
00:00:54
Speaker
They're about paintings and furniture, but more than that, they're about remembering.
00:01:02
Speaker
Remembering not just what happened, but to whom and why.
00:01:07
Speaker
And they're also about forgetting.
00:01:10
Speaker
And not just what we've forgotten, but what we've tried to forget.
00:01:17
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.
00:01:30
Speaker
We'll encounter the people who made these things, the people who cared for them, and those who manipulated them.
The Extraordinary Painting from Antebellum Louisiana
00:01:38
Speaker
We'll answer some questions and find others to be unanswerable.
00:01:44
Speaker
And along each journey will be guided by the piece itself, the craft, the work of art, the curious object.
00:01:55
Speaker
For the Magazine Antiques, this is Ben Miller.
00:02:04
Speaker
I hadn't seen anything else like it, and it kind of just shimmered.
00:02:07
Speaker
There was like a moment where it's like, I need to figure out more about that.
00:02:12
Speaker
That's Jeremy Simeon.
00:02:13
Speaker
You might have heard him on this podcast before if you've been listening for a while.
00:02:17
Speaker
He's the reason I know about this painting.
00:02:20
Speaker
He's the reason a lot of people know about this painting.
00:02:22
Speaker
You'll be hearing a lot from him.
00:02:26
Speaker
This is the first of three episodes about an extraordinary painting from Antebellum, Louisiana.
00:02:32
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.
Uncovering Belazare's Story
00:02:41
Speaker
And until just recently, almost no one had ever heard of it.
00:02:47
Speaker
But something remarkable was happening in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1837.
00:02:55
Speaker
Something that you've never read in the history books, and if you're like me, you never even imagined was possible.
00:03:04
Speaker
It was so remarkable and so uncomfortable that
00:03:09
Speaker
that for generations people tried to conceal the evidence that it had ever happened at all.
00:03:17
Speaker
Because in 1837, a 15-year-old child was painted by one of the most acclaimed portrait artists in Louisiana.
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Speaker
But this child was not the heir to an aristocrat or a planter's fortune.
00:03:34
Speaker
He wasn't the child of a diplomat or a governor.
00:03:36
Speaker
No, this 15-year-old boy was named Belazare, and he was an enslaved child of African descent.
00:03:50
Speaker
When we talk about history being erased, we typically mean it as a metaphor.
00:03:55
Speaker
People trying to ignore or overlook or forget about uncomfortable truths.
00:04:01
Speaker
But today, we're going to take a look at a time when history was erased in the most literal way.
00:04:11
Speaker
This is the story of Belazare.
00:04:14
Speaker
How he was painted out of history.
00:04:17
Speaker
and how now, in the year of his 200th birthday, his memory has been reborn.
00:04:26
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
00:04:48
Speaker
and the people who have worked so hard to remember.
The Mystery of Belazare's Erasure
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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.
00:05:20
Speaker
We don't know who erased Belazere.
00:05:23
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.
00:05:35
Speaker
But one thing we do know is that story isn't true.
00:05:40
Speaker
Well, this is purely speculative.
00:05:44
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.
00:06:03
Speaker
That's Bradley Sumrall, chief curator at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans.
00:06:07
Speaker
That's where the painting is on display right now, where the world saw Belizeh revealed for the first time.
00:06:14
Speaker
And at that time, America had really brought its problems or its view of race to New Orleans.
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:06:26
Speaker
This is a time...
00:06:29
Speaker
in America when a lot of Confederate monuments were going up very quickly throughout the South.
00:06:36
Speaker
And we're talking well after the civil war was over and done.
00:06:40
Speaker
But there was, there was this conversation, America was becoming more racist in the twenties and the teens and twenties.
00:06:48
Speaker
And that, that conversation
Interpreting the Painting's Composition
00:06:50
Speaker
seemed to be coming to a head.
00:06:51
Speaker
So I think possibly he was painted out, you know,
00:06:56
Speaker
as a result of racism, trying to erase this figure from the history of this family.
00:07:03
Speaker
Because it would have been uncomfortable to see a black child in the same picture with white children?
00:07:10
Speaker
Purely speculative, but yes, I would think that would be the reason.
00:07:14
Speaker
There's a lot more to say about that.
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Speaker
And don't worry, we're going to get into it.
00:07:18
Speaker
But first, I want to back up for a moment.
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Speaker
Belisere isn't the only person in this painting.
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Speaker
There are three others, three other children, all of them white.
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Speaker
They're standing and leaning and sitting in front of Belisere.
00:07:34
Speaker
The oldest one is nine, that's Elizabeth.
00:07:37
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.
00:07:53
Speaker
Elizabeth, Leontine, and Frederick are looking right out of the painting at us.
00:07:59
Speaker
All three of them with easy smiles and fine billowing garments.
00:08:07
Speaker
The year this painting was done was the year Elizabeth and Leontine died.
00:08:13
Speaker
Frederick died a few years later.
00:08:15
Speaker
The only person from this painting to live to adulthood was Belazare.
00:08:21
Speaker
Probably, you know, same reasons, yellow fever, scarlet fever, malaria, one of the mosquito-borne illnesses.
00:08:30
Speaker
But yeah, that Belazer survived is a big part of that story as well.
00:08:37
Speaker
In the picture, Belazer's eyes are cast to the side and downward.
00:08:41
Speaker
His arms are crossed.
00:08:43
Speaker
So I think my interpretation of his expression has kind of changed the more familiar that I've become with the painting.
00:08:52
Speaker
Of course, conservation also kind of articulated a little bit more of that expression or brought out more of that expression.
00:09:03
Speaker
But I think he's a bit bored.
00:09:08
Speaker
I think he would rather be doing something else.
00:09:10
Speaker
I think people have kind of projected that he's, you know, giving them side eye or attitude or annoyed.
00:09:20
Speaker
But one, if that were the case and he was doing that in the artist's studio, it wouldn't have happened.
00:09:27
Speaker
been captured, I don't believe.
00:09:30
Speaker
But it is a fitting look in light of everything we know about what would have happened.
00:09:35
Speaker
And so it's interesting because of that, you know, what we know, but I don't think that's the case.
00:09:41
Speaker
I think he's just slightly kind of bored.
00:09:44
Speaker
And I heard someone say that he has this kind of air of an older sibling, kind of like, come on.
00:09:50
Speaker
Let's get this gun, guys.
00:09:51
Speaker
Come on, y'all.
00:09:53
Speaker
And I kind of see that because I don't see discomfort.
00:09:59
Speaker
I see a little bit of closed off with his arms crossed.
00:10:03
Speaker
But if you look at 19th century paintings of the time kind of leaning away and the arms closed, that's in...
00:10:12
Speaker
the scope of how people were depicted.
00:10:15
Speaker
And it's not meant to express some sort of contempt or annoyance.
00:10:21
Speaker
It's a good painting.
00:10:22
Speaker
In fact, it's a very good painting.
00:10:25
Speaker
It's a masterwork.
00:10:28
Speaker
Images don't do it justice.
00:10:30
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.
00:10:40
Speaker
I mean,
00:10:42
Speaker
Often depictions of black figures, they're just not so finely rendered.
00:10:50
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.
00:11:07
Speaker
comes close, but it really is a masterful work for New Orleans, for the South, but really even for American art.
Rediscovery of Belazare's Image
00:11:15
Speaker
So that's an idea of what the painting looks like today.
00:11:19
Speaker
But for most of the last century, Belisere was missing.
00:11:32
Speaker
When the painting was given to the New Orleans Museum of Art, Belisere wasn't there.
00:11:38
Speaker
When it was sold at Christie's, Belisere wasn't there.
00:11:42
Speaker
He wasn't there during the rise of the KKK.
00:11:45
Speaker
He wasn't there for the Jim Crow era.
00:11:48
Speaker
During the 1960s struggle for civil rights that so racked the state of Louisiana, he wasn't there.
00:11:56
Speaker
It wasn't until sometime after 2010 that he finally reemerged.
00:12:04
Speaker
Why it took so long, and how his memory was finally rediscovered, is one part of the story we're going to tell.
00:12:16
Speaker
But that is for the next episode.
00:12:19
Speaker
The other part of the story, and the place where we're going to start, is the story of Belazare himself.
00:12:26
Speaker
Who was this person?
00:12:27
Speaker
Who were his family?
00:12:29
Speaker
What kind of life did he lead?
00:12:31
Speaker
How did he, as a 15-year-old, come to be part of this remarkable painting?
00:12:37
Speaker
Where did he go from there?
00:12:39
Speaker
We found out who his mother was.
00:12:41
Speaker
We found out that he had siblings.
00:12:43
Speaker
And then we began to see all of these familiar names.
00:12:46
Speaker
Oh, well, he was born in the household of Joseph Trevino.
00:12:51
Speaker
I said, oh, Joseph Trevino, sure.
00:12:54
Speaker
His great-great-grandson was an editor of this and this and this.
00:12:58
Speaker
So it was just strange.
00:12:59
Speaker
We began to kind of reconstruct this world.
00:13:01
Speaker
And the world, it feels like it began to reach out to us, dropping more and more clues.
00:13:08
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.
Belazare's Family and Identity
00:13:18
Speaker
It still shocks me today.
00:13:21
Speaker
You know, I think this person wanted to be known.
00:13:25
Speaker
My name is Yael Gordon.
00:13:28
Speaker
I am a historian and a genetic genealogist.
00:13:32
Speaker
And so I am based here in Louisiana.
00:13:34
Speaker
So I am a Louisiana Creole and Cajun.
00:13:38
Speaker
I'll start with his mother.
00:13:39
Speaker
This young man, his mother's name was Sally.
00:13:43
Speaker
There's not much information that has been really uncovered about her essays to say where she was born.
00:13:49
Speaker
located or originated from.
00:13:52
Speaker
But we do know that she had a few children.
00:13:55
Speaker
And so after Marie Edmond and Marie Rose, then she would go on to have Belizear.
00:14:02
Speaker
And from the listings, from the information that is documented on him, he appears to have been a mixed race.
00:14:13
Speaker
But his mother and his siblings, they were listed as negress or negro.
00:14:21
Speaker
And so that doesn't necessarily mean that they were not of mixed race themselves.
00:14:25
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.
00:14:39
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.
00:14:55
Speaker
Just six years later, he was sold yet again.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yes, he is about six years old at that particular time.
00:15:02
Speaker
And so that can be very...
00:15:06
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.
00:15:24
Speaker
So the whole, the whole foundation of, of slavery is based off of instability.
00:15:31
Speaker
And so that's what Belize would have experienced from birth.
00:15:35
Speaker
and throughout the rest of his life up until the time that he just disappears.
00:15:40
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.
00:15:55
Speaker
And so he will be sold yet again.
00:15:59
Speaker
years and years later.
00:16:01
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?
00:16:16
Speaker
What was the reason?
00:16:17
Speaker
Was it to pay off debts?
00:16:20
Speaker
Was, were they family friends?
00:16:22
Speaker
Were they, um, intermarried?
00:16:24
Speaker
Were they actually related?
00:16:26
Speaker
Now,
00:16:27
Speaker
From then on, then we go down and more and more in depth into Belizear's life.
00:16:34
Speaker
And his mother is still alive by
00:16:39
Speaker
1840.
00:16:39
Speaker
And so by 1839, actually, a year before that, the Fry household is they have to start selling off some of their property.
00:16:47
Speaker
And so 1840 shows they show Bella's still in that household.
00:16:52
Speaker
But it also shows what appears to be his mother, Sally.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so at that time, Bella's air was listed as a household servant.
00:17:04
Speaker
So he was a domestique.
00:17:07
Speaker
And so someone who was working inside of the home.
00:17:11
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
Life and Relationships in Slavery
00:17:20
Speaker
mother.
00:17:20
Speaker
But a lot of times that's more so I see that scene that more so with young ladies.
00:17:24
Speaker
So for him, I don't like to use the term favor, but he had a little bit more
00:17:34
Speaker
a little bit of hierarchy or a little bit of status as opposed to being put out into, say, the field.
00:17:43
Speaker
But in, say, in the Orleans area, that's not really, say, a lot of land to cultivate anyway.
00:17:48
Speaker
So a lot of these individuals would have been house servants and would have been house servants.
00:17:54
Speaker
Status, hierarchy, favor.
00:17:57
Speaker
These are tough words to think about in the context of chattel slavery.
00:18:05
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.
00:18:22
Speaker
And how easily that kind of language slips into, you know, they were really better off as slaves.
00:18:31
Speaker
It's part of what we call lost cause ideology.
00:18:36
Speaker
And it works very hard to forget that claiming ownership of a human being is inherently a catastrophic violation of human rights.
00:18:47
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.
00:19:01
Speaker
And Belisere certainly experienced that variation.
00:19:06
Speaker
But for now, he's still a teenage boy living with his mother in the Frey household in the French Quarter.
00:19:13
Speaker
I wanted to know more about what that life might have looked like.
00:19:16
Speaker
One detail that gives some insight into that is his clothing.
00:19:20
Speaker
Here's Bradley Sumrall once more.
00:19:22
Speaker
I mean, for me, there's got to be a complex relationship that happens in a situation like that.
00:19:26
Speaker
That was a very intimate, these homes are not
00:19:30
Speaker
the mega mansions that we think of today in the French Quarter.
00:19:33
Speaker
They were, it was, you know, a small French Quarter mansion.
00:19:38
Speaker
And this 15 year old boy was living in tight quarters with this family.
00:19:44
Speaker
So it's a complex relationship, I believe.
00:19:47
Speaker
You know, it's a form of intimacy combined with the psychological trauma of enslavement.
00:19:58
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.
00:20:12
Speaker
Although Belizear's outfit, although it seems very fancy to us today, that would have been a livery coat.
00:20:17
Speaker
That would have been, you know, the uniform of a house servant.
00:20:22
Speaker
possibly made by Brooks brothers.
00:20:25
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?
00:20:34
Speaker
Uh, tan overcoat, uh, you know, wide collar, uh, um,
00:20:41
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
00:20:58
Speaker
something of that.
00:21:00
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.
00:21:10
Speaker
From contemporary eyes, we look at it and we think, oh, well, he's so finely dressed.
00:21:15
Speaker
He must have been well cared for.
00:21:16
Speaker
But I think that's asking a lot from this painting.
00:21:20
Speaker
I don't think that he's
00:21:23
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
00:21:34
Speaker
Or they were depicted like you would, they were used as a prop.
00:21:38
Speaker
This was from a slave owner's perspective.
00:21:40
Speaker
This wasn't to elevate the figure of the enslaved person, but to elevate the status and wealth of the slaveholders family.
00:21:52
Speaker
What's a little different about this painting is,
00:21:55
Speaker
from other, especially European, depictions of enslaved people at the time, for me is the treatment of the face.
00:22:03
Speaker
It seems to me that the painter had empathy with this boy, and he really is the star of the painting.
00:22:09
Speaker
Looking at Belisere in this painting, wearing this overcoat, crossing his arms, pensive, it has quite an effect.
00:22:18
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.
00:22:29
Speaker
And for oppressed people, that problem is even more acute.
00:22:33
Speaker
Belizear as an enslaved person wasn't even understood to be fully human by the slave-owning society around him.
00:22:41
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.
00:22:52
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,
00:23:12
Speaker
may have had it a lot worse than those who worked inside of the home.
00:23:17
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.
00:23:29
Speaker
That doesn't absolutely does not mean that he did not or would not have received
00:23:35
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.
00:24:00
Speaker
It's easier for them to get punished for various amounts of things at a very, very quicker rate.
00:24:06
Speaker
There's no hierarchy in slavery at all.
Implications of Belazare's Inclusion in the Painting
00:24:10
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.
00:24:27
Speaker
One thing art is very good at is bringing stories to life.
00:24:32
Speaker
I wonder, if there had been video cameras in the 1830s, how would American history be different?
00:24:41
Speaker
Would some of the myths about the conditions of slavery have been easier to dispel?
00:24:47
Speaker
Would lost cause ideology have flourished if, alongside the jingoistic statues of Confederate war heroes and
00:24:55
Speaker
revisionist stories of happy days on the plantation, there had been documentary footage of slave ships and tobacco fields.
00:25:06
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
00:25:20
Speaker
of an enslaved black child standing next to white children, so offensive, so threatening, that they had Belazaire painted over.
00:25:31
Speaker
How fragile must your historical narrative be if something as simple as a painting can shake its foundations?
00:25:42
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.
00:25:52
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.
00:26:05
Speaker
I would say that it's not really unusual to find a portrait depicting African-Americans and whites together in the same image.
00:26:16
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.
00:26:34
Speaker
That's Wendy Castanel, assistant professor of art history at Washington and Lee University.
00:26:40
Speaker
She's also a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
00:26:45
Speaker
A common trope that you often find in photography, for example, or African-American nurses with their white hair.
00:26:57
Speaker
children as charges.
00:26:59
Speaker
And so that you see many photographs like that.
00:27:03
Speaker
And even in painted portraits, you often find African-American sitters alongside white families.
00:27:11
Speaker
And this is a longstanding tradition in American portraiture, not just from Louisiana, but across the U.S., especially the South.
00:27:20
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
00:27:38
Speaker
maybe a little rougher.
00:27:39
Speaker
But other than that, he does not appear to be a servant or an enslaved person.
00:27:47
Speaker
It's not obvious in the arrangement of the sitters.
00:27:51
Speaker
And that's what makes this particular image so unusual and wonderfully fascinating.
00:27:59
Speaker
Also, he probably took care of those
00:28:03
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
00:28:29
Speaker
And the whole time they're learning how to tend to those owners' children, but they're play toys.
00:28:36
Speaker
They're not necessarily playmates.
00:28:38
Speaker
They are play toys because they can do anything they want to those children and still get away with it.
00:28:43
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.
00:28:53
Speaker
just to show that they did have these servants, and look how great their servants
Speculations on Belazare's Paternity
00:28:59
Speaker
dressed.
00:28:59
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.
00:29:11
Speaker
So there are a lot of reasons that Frederick Frey might have decided to include Belisere in this portrait of his children.
00:29:21
Speaker
Maybe it was because Belisere spent so much time with Elizabeth, Leontine, and Frederick.
00:29:27
Speaker
Maybe Belisere had impressed him in some significant way.
00:29:32
Speaker
Maybe he was simply using Belisere as an ornament, a symbol of the Frey family's prosperity.
00:29:39
Speaker
But there is another theory.
00:29:43
Speaker
Another reason that Belisere might have held a special place in Frederick Frey's heart.
00:29:49
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.
00:29:58
Speaker
Belose was born in 1822, and he was born in the household of Joseph Trevina.
00:30:06
Speaker
And that is where Sally was at the time, his mother.
00:30:12
Speaker
And Sally had a few other children.
00:30:14
Speaker
But urban slavery was quite different.
00:30:19
Speaker
Just because he was born in that household does not mean anything.
00:30:23
Speaker
that even Joseph Trevino was his father.
00:30:28
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.
00:30:43
Speaker
So there are ways that a woman would have possibly met another enslaved person, met a free person, had a relationship,
00:30:51
Speaker
And been able to have had a child.
00:30:55
Speaker
And that is not limited to the man who owned her.
00:31:00
Speaker
Now, Frederick Fry, from what I understand, was in the city at that point.
00:31:06
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.
00:31:18
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.
00:31:34
Speaker
And she is the one who sold Frederick Frye, Sally, and her mulatto son, Belazare, around six years old.
00:31:42
Speaker
Now, it is interesting and worth noting that Belazare is the only child of Sally who is listed as a mulatto.
00:31:49
Speaker
And this is a descriptor that normally indicates mixed race and one parent who is white or European.
00:32:00
Speaker
So, that is something interesting and is part of the mystery, but we're not 100% sure.
00:32:07
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.
00:32:16
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.
00:32:30
Speaker
The bottom line is we don't know who Belisere's father was.
00:32:34
Speaker
The reality of the time and place is that kinship ties involving enslaved people were often overlooked or ignored or even suppressed.
00:32:45
Speaker
We don't know whether Belisere was a blood relation of Frederick Frey.
00:32:51
Speaker
What we do know, based on his inclusion in the painting, is that his place in that household was anything but ordinary.
00:32:59
Speaker
But that story about Belisere upsetting his master and having his portrait painted over in retribution, it was first publicized in 1972.
00:33:10
Speaker
At the same time that the painting was donated to the New Orleans Museum of Art,
00:33:14
Speaker
by a woman named Audrey Grasser.
00:33:19
Speaker
The master who she claimed was upset with Belisere, Frederick Frey, that was Audrey Grasser's great-great-grandfather.
00:33:28
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.
00:33:36
Speaker
The only problem is,
00:33:38
Speaker
None of it was true.
00:33:40
Speaker
I don't give that story any credence.
00:33:43
Speaker
I do see how someone in 1972 would justify that.
00:33:47
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.
00:33:58
Speaker
And so he had him covered up because in 1972, that would have been OK to say.
00:34:04
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.
00:34:14
Speaker
All right, now come in here.
00:34:15
Speaker
This is a Duncan Fife.
00:34:16
Speaker
You know what they did.
00:34:18
Speaker
Look at the Prudent Millard egg on this bed.
00:34:21
Speaker
Isn't it beautiful?
00:34:22
Speaker
A little slave boy would have pulled on this punka and fanned off, you know.
00:34:28
Speaker
It was okay to kind of trivialize and kind of...
00:34:34
Speaker
Kind of skirt around the issue of slavery and recognizing these people as enslaved people, not just these objects.
00:34:44
Speaker
So I think the story in 1972 and the comment in 1972 is very indicative of the –
00:34:51
Speaker
the age and the zygus or whatever of the time.
00:34:57
Speaker
But the reality is, what we've found is that no, Belisere did not upset the master.
00:35:02
Speaker
The master was kind of a lousy businessman.
00:35:06
Speaker
It's interesting to me that obviously there was some kind of shame or uncomfort that led to his being erased from
Belazare's Life and Labor on Evergreen Plantation
00:35:14
Speaker
the image.
00:35:14
Speaker
But in the end, he rises as the star of this painting.
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:21
Speaker
and becomes the most interesting part of its story, you know?
00:35:24
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.
00:35:45
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.
00:35:54
Speaker
It's a couple of these families.
00:35:55
Speaker
That is very, very probable.
00:35:57
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
00:36:13
Speaker
Descendants saying, OK, well, our ancestors owned these individuals and now you have an image of what one of these individuals look like.
00:36:21
Speaker
It's one thing for descendants to recognize that, OK, my ancestor owned enslaved people.
00:36:31
Speaker
But it's another thing to say my ancestor owned enslaved people and here's an image of that person.
00:36:36
Speaker
So now that puts an identity.
00:36:39
Speaker
So you never want to face that.
00:36:41
Speaker
That is very, very, that can be difficult to deal with.
00:36:44
Speaker
So what happened to Belazare in the years after he was painted into this picture?
00:36:50
Speaker
He remained in the French Quarter under the ownership of the Frey family until 1856, but
00:36:56
Speaker
That family's fortunes quickly changed.
00:36:59
Speaker
So Frederick Fry was kind of like the antebellum Bernie Madoff.
00:37:03
Speaker
He made a lot of bad deals.
00:37:05
Speaker
He owed a bunch of people money in 1837.
00:37:08
Speaker
There was this financial crisis that occurred.
00:37:12
Speaker
It was a financial panic that hit the United States.
00:37:15
Speaker
So in 1841, Frederick Fry's creditors actually demanded payment and they had to liquidate his assets.
00:37:22
Speaker
And Belisere and his mother were one of those assets.
00:37:25
Speaker
Now, Corley Fry, Frederick's wife, actually acquired them from auction.
00:37:34
Speaker
And this would have been at the St.
00:37:35
Speaker
Louis Exchange Hotel, which is still in New Orleans.
00:37:40
Speaker
So, they were, so, Belisere and Sally were actually part of his assets and they were liquidated.
00:37:46
Speaker
And Corley Fry had to purchase them for $1,500 at auction.
00:37:51
Speaker
So, you weren't that upset in 1841, right?
00:37:55
Speaker
And she held on to Belisere until 1856.
00:37:59
Speaker
And in 1856, we see her virtually penniless.
00:38:02
Speaker
She sells Belisere for $1,200.
00:38:04
Speaker
$1,200?
00:38:04
Speaker
Sorry to interrupt, but that's a lot of money.
00:38:11
Speaker
It's a lot of money.
00:38:13
Speaker
It's a lot of money.
00:38:17
Speaker
I'm not sure exactly what the inflation is, but it's significant, these prices.
00:38:21
Speaker
So she sells Belizear to Lezenbach now, who's a sugar cane planter, for $1,200.
00:38:28
Speaker
Belizear is about 34 years old of age.
00:38:33
Speaker
At this point.
00:38:35
Speaker
And a few days later she buys a house with those proceeds.
00:38:38
Speaker
Or at least begins to start building a house.
00:38:40
Speaker
And it's a very, very, very small modest house.
00:38:43
Speaker
Nothing like the three story brick house that they had.
00:38:47
Speaker
With Spanish cedar for... I think they had...
00:38:51
Speaker
They had exotic woods.
00:38:53
Speaker
I mean, the house they had built was one of the finest in the city.
00:38:59
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.
00:39:11
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.
00:39:24
Speaker
And when she needed money, she sold him.
00:39:32
Speaker
And so on Christmas Eve of 1856, Belisere, about 34 years old, was sold.
00:39:40
Speaker
to Evergreen Plantation, a sugarcane plantation about 50 miles up the Mississippi River.
00:39:53
Speaker
It's still there, by the way.
00:39:55
Speaker
Here's Yael Gordon once more.
00:39:56
Speaker
Yael Gordon, Yes, very, very large scale operation.
00:39:59
Speaker
Their plantation right now still has 22 slave cabinets.
00:40:02
Speaker
So in the deep south of Louisiana, we grow a lot of sugarcane.
00:40:06
Speaker
Cotton doesn't do extremely well here in the deep south.
00:40:10
Speaker
Sugar cane, of course, is a Caribbean crop.
00:40:13
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.
00:40:25
Speaker
It thrives on that.
00:40:27
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.
00:40:36
Speaker
And it's again, it's nonstop.
00:40:38
Speaker
And so it is a factory production going on.
00:40:42
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
00:41:09
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:41:10
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.
00:41:27
Speaker
it was completely different.
00:41:29
Speaker
Slavery in New Orleans was just completely different from other places anyway, in my opinion.
00:41:34
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
00:41:47
Speaker
Christmas for these, because that is the grinding season for sugarcane.
00:41:53
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.
00:42:09
Speaker
Okay.
00:42:10
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.
00:42:23
Speaker
So he may have received the threat of being, say, sent off before, but now it gets real because that threat
00:42:31
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
00:43:02
Speaker
in a tragic situation for him.
00:43:05
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.
00:43:15
Speaker
Again, Evergreen Plantation was more rural.
00:43:19
Speaker
It was a bigger plantation setting.
00:43:21
Speaker
He had less intimacy with that family.
00:43:26
Speaker
So he would have been counted just among the enslaved and not actually singled out.
00:43:32
Speaker
So I'm sure he was not as well treated comparatively as he was when he was with the Frey family.
00:43:41
Speaker
But again, that's simple speculation.
00:43:43
Speaker
And there's no way of really knowing except that
00:43:48
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.
00:44:08
Speaker
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Belazare was nearly 40 years old.
00:44:13
Speaker
Take a moment just to consider what was happening to him in this moment.
Belazare's Unknown Fate Post-Civil War
00:44:22
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.
00:44:32
Speaker
His family, his connections, any sense of stability was torn asunder on that Christmas Eve of 1856.
00:44:42
Speaker
Now, in one sense, nothing had changed at all.
00:44:45
Speaker
He was considered a slave on Christmas Eve, and he was still considered a slave on Christmas Day.
00:44:51
Speaker
But in another sense, things couldn't be any more different.
00:44:56
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,
00:45:10
Speaker
who had placed him in this picture in at least an illusion, however fleeting, of near equality.
00:45:19
Speaker
Twenty years later, he found himself in one of the cruelest environments in the entire American institution of slavery, the Louisiana sugarcane plantation.
00:45:31
Speaker
And just a few years after that, the entire world turned upside down by the bloodiest war in American history.
00:45:38
Speaker
And so after that, Belize really kind of disappears.
00:45:44
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.
00:46:01
Speaker
But he just really
00:46:03
Speaker
disappears.
00:46:05
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.
00:46:22
Speaker
He very well could have passed away.
00:46:25
Speaker
I felt for a time that he got away.
00:46:28
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.
00:46:49
Speaker
And I want to believe that he disappeared.
Remembering Forgotten Histories
00:46:54
Speaker
The other part of me is very, very
00:46:58
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
00:47:15
Speaker
any clear feelings one way or the other.
00:47:18
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.
00:47:29
Speaker
But, but I'm optimistic that we may find out still.
00:47:33
Speaker
This might be a good moment for me to correct myself.
00:47:40
Speaker
I've been saying that we're telling the story of Belisere, but really we're telling a story of Belisere.
00:47:47
Speaker
In this story, Belisere vanishes into the mists of time.
00:47:53
Speaker
In this story, we've forgotten what happened to him after Christmas Eve of 1856.
00:48:02
Speaker
There's another story with a different ending.
00:48:06
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.
00:48:27
Speaker
Jeremy and Yael and Wendy and so many others have worked so hard to remember.
00:48:33
Speaker
to draw memories out of paint and out of paper and ink.
00:48:38
Speaker
But there's so much more that we've forgotten.
00:48:42
Speaker
We tried for a century or more to forget that Belisere existed at all.
Episode Conclusion and Credits
00:48:48
Speaker
Now it's time to remember.
00:48:52
Speaker
How did it come to this?
00:48:54
Speaker
Why was Belisere absent from all our stories for so long?
00:48:58
Speaker
That is a story for our next episode.
00:49:04
Speaker
For now, this has been Curious Objects from the magazine Antiques.
00:49:09
Speaker
This episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:49:12
Speaker
Social media and web support comes from Sara Blotta.
00:49:16
Speaker
Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
00:49:19
Speaker
Our theme music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:49:22
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.