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New York Times
29-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Confronting History, Family and Race on a Road Trip to New Orleans
His hard stare meets me every morning, but now I return his gaze. The old pirate doesn't make me flinch anymore, the way he did when I was a boy, because I finally know who he is. I learned this by testing the truth of the family stories that I'd grown up with about Jacinto Lobrano, my great-great-grandfather and the pirate Jean Laffite's right-hand man, during a six-day trip along the Gulf Coast. In my father's family, this unsigned oil painting is passed down to the firstborn son, and now hangs on the wall of my house in a village outside of Uzès in France. Jacinto, who was born on the island of Procida in the Bay of Naples sometime during the 1790s, is depicted as a stern but handsome man in his late 40s, with wavy chestnut hair and a small gold earring in one ear. He presents as a prosperous and possibly respectable family man. But he was still a pirate, a fact I clung to growing up in a Connecticut suburb that pasteurized difference in defense of propriety. Though my ancestry is 95 percent British Isles, being even a tiny bit descended from a pirate made me different, maybe a little glamorous and potentially wild. As I learned the first time I read Jacinto's obituary when I was a freshman in college, he also profited from enslaving people. This shocked me, so I called my grandmother to learn more. She was vague, suggesting he'd just dabbled in the slave trade. Her temporizing didn't soothe my revulsion, so I did what millions of other white Americans have done when they discovered this evil in their family's past. I dropped this knowledge like a stone into a well of denial. Then, eight years ago, I got an Instagram message from a high school student in Mississippi named Dakota Lobrano Wallace. She'd come across me on Google and thought we might be related, and wondered if I could help fill out her family tree. It seemed likely that we had ancestors in common, since the pirate had five sons and two daughters, but I didn't know how. And it didn't entirely surprise me when I saw Dakota was African American. In New Orleans, where Jacinto Lobrano and his sons had lived, sexual relations between the races were common, often initiated by white men who forced themselves on enslaved women. I told Dakota I'd be happy to share what I knew, but warned that it would obviously be ugly. 'I'm OK with that,' she replied. I sent her everything I had, including the Nov. 12, 1880, obituary of our forebear from the New Orleans Picayune. We became friendly via occasional messages about her high school graduation, subsequent nursing school studies and my work, our immediate families and politics, and we eventually began addressing each other as 'Cuz.' According to his obituary, Jacinto and his father had left Italy because they'd been involved in a plot against the government. Eventually, they'd ended up in the Gulf of Mexico, where Jacinto fell in with the French pirate, Laffite. Jacinto was instrumental in persuading Laffite to side with the Americans during the War of 1812. Jacinto then fought so bravely during the Battle of New Orleans that Gen. Andrew Jackson presented him with a silver sword. The story passed down in my family was that when Union troops occupied New Orleans in 1862, the old pirate sent a note to the invading Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler threatening to use his most prized possession to remove his Yankee ears if anyone attempted to confiscate it. Jacinto lived in a large house at the corner of Laurel and Fourth Street and engaged in a variety of different businesses, including buying and selling enslaved people. I wrote to Dakota to see if we could meet if I came to Mississippi. When she agreed, I planned a trip along the Gulf Coast, starting in Sarasota, Fla., where I owned an apartment, with stops in Pensacola, Fla.; Ocean Springs, Miss.; and one to see Dakota in Hattiesburg, Miss., where she was working on a graduate degree in health care; and then continuing to New Orleans where I would visit another cousin. A Date in Hattiesburg So often we travel to find out who we really are and to make ourselves better with this knowing. I traveled to the American South to meet my lovely cousin in Mississippi. In ways that I could not have known, my time with Dakota would give me a deeper understanding of my heritage and of the foundations of America. Before my husband, Bruno, and I left Sarasota, I texted Dakota to make sure our Saturday lunch date in Hattiesburg was still good. She replied with a thumbs-up emoji. Driving north on Interstate 75, Bruno suggested we leave the bland highway for a back road, Route 27. The first 30 miles were dotted with live oak trees tasseled with ghostly Spanish moss and the white split-rail fences of Florida horse country. Then came towns whose names I learned from rust-streaked water towers. The towns offered a doleful refrain of billboards: Gun Shop, Bail Bond, Waffle House, Pawn Shop, Dollar General and Fried Chicken. I'd gone beyond my usual American contexts — New England, New York City, college towns. After hours on Panhandle roads lined by malls, we were pleasantly surprised by Pensacola, a city of 56,000, which had a palpable sense of history and a handsome old-fashioned walkable downtown. Though St. Augustine, Fla., founded in 1565, claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in America, Pensacola predates it. A hurricane pulverized the first settlement, but in subsequent iterations, Pensacola was a place where different cultures lived together, and the architecture in its 40-block historic district recalls New Orleans, with meticulously restored Creole-style houses lit by gas lamps on streets with French and Spanish names. The next day, I received a text from Dakota. Her grandmother had just gone into hospice care, and she was studying for final exams. 'I have a lot going on right now,' she said. I wondered if she was going to cancel. Bruno and I reached the flat shoreline of Mississippi, where the charm of arty Ocean Springs came from its Victorian wooden cottages with fretwork eaves, shade trees, jazz bars like the Julep Room and excellent restaurants. I found myself glancing at my phone so often I turned it off for a while. Late that night my phone buzzed, and I jumped. Dakota texted me to choose the restaurant for lunch and let her know what time. I did some internet scrolling and chose a well-rated Thai place called Jutamas. The Day Arrives Rural Mississippi looked red and raw in the rain under a low pewter sky as we drove north to Hattiesburg the next day. When we got to Jutamas, we sat at a table with elaborately folded black napkins and an orchid spray in a bud vase, and I nervously watched the vivid fish whose world had been reduced from an ocean to an aquarium. Through the restaurant's front window, I saw Dakota park, check her makeup in the rearview mirror and straighten out her gold hoop earrings before she came inside with a big soft smile. I saw her before she saw me, and I was awed by her poise and the bravery it took to come meet a middle-aged white man and his French husband, on her own. (I had suggested she bring her sister, mother or a friend, if it would make her more comfortable, but she said she'd come on her own.) I stood up and gave her a hug and a kiss on both cheeks. Then we sat down and just looked at each other and laughed. We shared an ancestor but were basically strangers. Once a fumble of pleasantries had passed, and we'd ordered lunch, I delicately — I hoped — began to probe our family connection. Dakota pulled out her phone and began scrolling through generations of photos of her family. She was descended from Philip Lobrano, one of Jacinto's five sons. I'm descended from another of the sons, Dominick, and I didn't know anything about the lineages of his other offspring. As she scrolled, I was confused, because I could not tell whether the people in the older photos were Black or white. But, Dakota told me, her great-grandfather, Philip Posey Lobrano, had 11 children with a woman named Ana Floyd, who was one-eighth Black, making her what was classified as an 'octoroon.' In the next generation there was a photo of Dakota's grandmother, Bertha Otkins Lobrano, an African-American woman. She had married Peter Lobrano, a son of Philip Posey Lobrano and Ana Floyd. 'Even though Peter Lobrano looked white, he had to take a Black bride because of his octoroon mother,' Dakota explained. 'In a small town like Centreville, Mississippi, everyone knew who had Black blood,' she went on. 'The way the color line worked is that if you had any Black blood at all, you married someone else who was Black, because most white people didn't mess with the color line.' I began to apologize for my oversight, but Dakota waved it away. 'I'm Black, and I live in the South, Alec,' she said. 'It's just baked into everything.' She also told us that Philip Posey Lobrano had three sisters who lived in Centreville, but their descendants were not in touch with Dakota's branch of the family. 'They just swept us under the carpet,' she said. 'We were an embarrassment to them.' Dakota knew most of the same stories about Jacinto that I did, which made them ring true. She also mentioned that when she misbehaved as a child, her maternal grandmother would say, 'That's just your Lobrano acting up,' and shake her head. By the time we took some selfies of ourselves in the parking lot, I was humbled. It was Dakota's kindness and graciousness that had made our meeting so happy, for me anyway. Dakota said she hoped she'd see us again and I promised she would. The squeaking of the windshield wipers in a thunderstorm woke me from a nap in the car while Bruno drove us back to our hotel. I sat in a silence swollen by the sweetness of having met Dakota. I also felt stung by my ignorance of her life as an African-American and the power of the color line in the American South. Following in Jacinto's footsteps On a Sunday morning, as we neared New Orleans, a stiff wind was whipping up white caps on the broad briny waters of Lake Pontchartrain. In the footsteps of Jacinto Lobrano, we wandered the candle-wax scented dimness of St. Louis Cathedral, where he'd married, and visited the Cabildo, which was built by the Spanish between 1795 and 1799 to house the government, to see the portrait of Jean Lafitte, the chief of Jacinto's band of pirates. We had dinner with my second cousin Ann and her husband, Gene, at Galatoire's in the French Quarter that night. When I showed Ann and Gene a picture of Dakota on my phone, they nodded but didn't engage. Sitting in a flat-bottom boat during a bayou tour 16 miles south of New Orleans in the Mississippi Delta the next morning, I listened to the fascinating recitation of our guide-navigator with his beguilingly soft Cajun accent. He pointed out sunning alligators and mentioned that these murky byways had once been the preserve of pirates. These were the steamy mosquito-ridden swamps where Jacinto had spent his youth. Until he'd given up piracy to run his sugar plantation and profit from human slavery, he'd been a thief, an outlaw and an outcast. It was astonishing to see how much storytelling, including his obituaries, and my family's myth-making had tempered Jacinto's ignominious biography into that of an eminent local grandee. That afternoon, we visited the Confederate Memorial Hall Museum in New Orleans, where the silver sword Jacinto had received as a gift from Andrew Jackson is part of the collection, viewable by appointment. Wearing a pair of flimsy white muslin gloves, I held the heavy blade with a beautiful gold-chased silver scabbard. Of all the stories I'd heard about my great-great grandfather, the one I'd most doubted was the one about the sword. Suddenly, I desperately wished Dakota were there with me to share the moment. We left New Orleans for the drive back to Florida, stopping at one point at a roadside picnic table. Unexpectedly, I welled up while unwrapping a turkey sandwich. My sudden gushing was fed by exhaustion, happiness, relief and shame, a very deep shame. I'd finally realized that the real reason for my trip was that I was seeking atonement. I'd failed, too, because there could be no atonement. Still, if meeting Dakota couldn't change the past, I still hoped we'd begun to repair an ugly rent in our family's history with the only thing that might mend it: the truth. When I later asked Dakota if she agreed, she hesitated. Then she said, 'You're family, Alec,' and I was very moved. 'But I don't know that we can ever really mend America, because racism was built into the foundations of this country.' I suggested we could try. 'I don't know, Alec. I think it's easier to be optimistic if you're white than it is if you're Black,' she said, adding, 'But sure, at least maybe we can fix our own broken brick.' Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2025.
Daily Mail
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Aisling Bea gasps 'that's hard to hear' as she confronts 'shameful' family history on BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?
Aisling Bea gasps 'that's hard to hear' as she confronts her 'shameful' family history on Tuesday's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Today's (Tuesday 20 May) instalment of the BBC show, which sees celebrities explore their heritage, will see the actress look through some historical documents during a meet up in County Limerick with historian Dr Richard McMahon. Richard opens up to the comedian, from Kildare, Ireland, about her great-grandmother Martha Sheehy and her time during the great famine. However he could find records from the early 1850s which gave him a sense of position that she was in at the time. Aisling says: 'Before famine 40 acers in area of court, then her estate in Ballycannon she had 115 acres post famine...' Richard tells her: 'The family have a larger farm by the end of the famine then they had pre famine Ireland. Today's (Tuesday 20 May) instalment of the BBC show, which sees celebrities explore their heritage, will see the actress look through some historical documents during a meet up in County Limerick with historian Dr Richard McMahon 'So during this devastating period in Irish history, which would have such a long terrible legacy for all of us afterwards, how does someone come to have more land if owned than renting so soon after the famine?' Aisling asks him. Richard explains: 'During the famine landlords would have evicted 100,000s of people off the land and when they are moved of the land, the land is taken over by farmers like your great great great grandmother Martha.' Aisling tries to wrap her head around it and replies: 'So while she might not be evicting them, she maybe using it as an opportune moment.' 'Some people got larger farms on the back of people getting moved off the land,' Richard tells her. Aisling brutally says: 'That is hard to hear. I'll be honest. 'Having spent all our childhood learning about the Irish famine in our history classes, anyone who, any terrible situation profited... 'It does make me feel a little bit shameful to be honest.' The current series of Who Do You Think You Are? has been an emotional one. Richard opens up to the comedian, from Kildare, Ireland, about her great-grandmother Martha Sheehy and her time during the great famine Last week Layton Williams broke down in tears after learning the 'awful' truth about his enslaved ancestors. He grew up in Bury, Manchester, with his mum and three siblings, but his dad - who was born in Bury - also has Jamaican roots, and wanted to find out more. Speaking about what he found out at the end of the instalment, Layton said: 'I'm feeling a mixture of feelings, like a bag of feelings. 'When you're a person of colour, you always know that is probably the eventuality. But when you actually have it all spelt out to you that your family would have, you know, been enslaved, quite frankly... 'To actually think about it and to really know their names, and know that they were children growing up in it, there's so much black power in that. 'And I don't think I've been like, really, really proud of being, like, a person of colour. 'And really, like leaning into "I'm a beautiful black man and I'm proud to have come from people who went through that, but kind of came through the other side..." 'Now I'm going to cry.' The actor, 30 - who took part in Strictly Come Dancing in 2023 - appeared on the latest episode of the much-loved BBC show Fighting back the tears, Layton continued: 'It's really, it's really beautiful and it's important that we don't' forget because it's real and it happened, and it was sad. 'And I'm sure it was awful, but we made it here. And my family is like, actually, they're bonkers. 'But they're amazing. And there's so many of us. 'And I really, really hope that whatever they went through, like we were kind of worth it, you know?' 'So yeah, I will look back at this experience for sure and be really happy. 'I'm really proud of the family that came before me.' The week before Ross Kemp broke down as he unearthed a family secret that he spent his whole life questioning. The 22nd series of Who Do You Think You Are returned to our screens in April. The likes of Andrew Garfield, Diane Morgan, Mushal Husian, Ross Kemp, Aisling Bea, Will Young, Fred Siriex and Layton Williams explore their family history. Simon Young, BBC Head of History, said of the new series: 'The stellar line-up this year is a real treat for our audiences. 'But so is the history, from the shock of a royal ancestor to epic stories of survival. 'And that's why this series endures, because it hints at the amazing family micro-histories that make all of us who we are.' Colette Flight, Executive Producer for Wall to Wall Media, added: 'Spanning centuries and travelling the globe, Who Do You Think You Are? is back. 'With eight much-loved celebrities to entertain and captivate us as they delve into their family histories. 'As they discover their ancestors' adventures, triumphs, trials and tribulations, their rich family stories reveal incredible snapshots of history. 'Including one of the greatest villains of Medieval England, the evacuation at Dunkirk, rescuing art looted by the Nazis, and the birth of American Independence.'
New York Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Jewish Promised Land in … Texas? Rachel Cockerell Had to Know More.
One summer day 10 years ago, Rachel Cockerell gathered with dozens of family members for a cousin's 80th birthday party in the North London house where her father had grown up. Among the guests were relatives from Israel. Cockerell had always known that alongside her impeccably Anglo ancestors, she had descended from Russian Jews through her father's mother. But she never knew her Granny Fanny; she had never celebrated Jewish holidays. A perennial jar of borscht in the cupboard had been the extent of her Jewishness. 'It was so peripheral in my vision,' she said recently. Something about spending the afternoon with Hebrew-accented cousins in the overgrown backyard of 22 Mapesbury Road sparked her imagination. Cockerell, who is now 30, Googled this branch's paterfamilias, her great-grandfather David Jochelmann. Up came his New York Times obituary from 1941. It stated: 'His name was a household word in Jewish homes throughout Eastern Europe.' That one sentence turned out to determine how she would spend much of the next several years of her life. Prowling century-old newspaper articles and digitized memoirs, Cockerell put Jochelmann's story at the heart of what became her first book, 'Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land,' published last year in Britain and May 6 in the United States. 'This man, my great-grandfather, was never spoken about in my family, and if he was, he sounded deathly boring — a 'gray man,' as we say in London,' Cockerell, who grew up in Notting Hill, said over lunch in Brooklyn last week. But Jochelmann (spelled Jochelman in some sources) turned out to be the Zelig of early Zionism, which began as a political movement to address Jewish persecution roughly a half-century before Israel's founding in 1948. He worked closely with Israel Zangwill, the writer and activist who, in a 1908 play, coined 'the melting pot,' the trademark phrase of American assimilation. Jochelmann helped execute Zangwill's grandiose scheme that, beginning in 1907, relocated thousands of Russian Jews to Galveston, Texas, on the Gulf Coast. Decades later, in England, Jochelmann was personal assistant to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the Zionist right. His three children lived fascinating lives of their own in the United States, Britain and Israel. 'Melting Point'(Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is not sui generis so much as multigenre: partly an immersive history of major events (early Zionism and the schism within its ranks); partly a nonfiction novel of ideas; partly a caper among fast-living bohemians; partly a family saga; and ultimately Cockerell's reclamation of her birthright. 'When I have been at Passover or in synagogues or at Hanukkah in Israel and America, I've seen what my family could have had, but didn't,' she said. 'This rich, ancient heritage of ritual, this culture that had been passed down however many years, ended with my grandmother or my dad — it definitely was not something that I inherited.' In fact, much of Jochelmann's story was new even to Cockerell's father, Michael, a prominent British political journalist who grew up with a portrait of his grandfather staring from the wall of 22 Mapesbury. 'It feels very odd to have a book written about my family without me really recognizing much of what I knew,' Michael said in a phone interview. He was particularly struck by the book's documentation of the antisemitic attacks that helped spur both Zionism and efforts such as what came to be called the Galveston Movement. 'There is a lot of my own ancestry,' he said, 'I hadn't realized was as awful as that.' Rachel Cockerell is less a presence than she might have been because of her book's unusual style. After composing half a draft in the manner of a typical nonfiction volume, she cut all her own prose. 'Melting Point' has a short preface, a brief afterword and some reproductions of faded photographs and paintings. It otherwise consists entirely of quotations: from newspaper articles, from speeches, from writings of obscure figures, from interviews Cockerell conducted with family members. Separated into blocks, they last anywhere from one sentence to a few paragraphs and are adorned with minimalist sourcing in the margins: 'Chicago Tribune, 24 August 1903,' 'Weymouth Gazette,' 'Israel Zangwill,' 'Mimi.' Cockerell found that attempts at paraphrasing just didn't work for her. Inspired by the George Saunders novel 'Lincoln in the Bardo,' which is organized as a kind of oral history, she strove to make the book personal through authorial curation. 'My favorite thing people have said to me after reading the book,' she said, 'is, 'It feels like it's written in your voice.'' The Guardian called the method 'deeply immersive and dramatic.' The New Yorker described how effectively sources were 'coaxed by Cockerell, who has a keen ear and fine sense of timing, into becoming some of recent literature's most compelling narrators.' Substantively as well, 'Melting Point' is not the book Cockerell set out to write after that birthday party in 2015. She was expecting to compose a Jewish family memoir along the lines of Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare With Amber Eyes.' But Cockerell, who studied art history as an undergraduate at the Courtauld Institute of Art and received a master's degree in journalism at City University, found her attention increasingly captured by the larger currents of Jewish history in which her great-grandfather played a first marginal, and then increasingly prominent, role. It would be necessary, she felt, to explore beyond the exclusive lens of her own family. And so the book's first half revolves around Zangwill and his notion of 'territorialism,' which diverged from Zionism's insistence on a Jewish territory in the Jews' ancient homeland. Prompted partly by an infamous 1903 pogrom in the Russian city of Kishinev, territorialists held as an intermediate goal a Jewish territory anywhere one could be gotten — 'Zionism without Zion,' as The Jewish Chronicle described it. Locales that were considered included East Africa ('Is it to be Jewganda?'), Australia, Mexico, Mesopotamia, Paraguay, Canada and Angola. A then-Ottoman part of modern-day Libya called Cyrenaica was ultimately rejected over a lack of water ('An Unpromising Land,' declared The Evening Standard). Galveston, a Gulf Coast port, was conceived not as a Jewish territory but as an entry point to the interior United States, as opposed to the East Coast cities — above all, New York — where Russian Jewish immigrants were already concentrated. Territorialism is a decidedly less-known aspect of Zionist history. In an interview, Adam L. Rovner, the director of the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Denver, called Zangwill an 'amazing, imaginative man,' whose vision fell out of favor. 'His pragmatism,' Rovner added, 'blinded him to the pursuit of the dream that has had undeniable success.' Though not Cockerell's relation, it is Zangwill who above all leaps off the pages of her book. He was 'the homeliest man I ever saw,' according to one source; 'negligent of his apparel,' according to another; and 'with a face that suggests nothing so much as one of those sculptured gargoyles in a medieval cathedral,' in the words of The New York Herald. (The descriptions could veer into antisemitism.) Yet he was tremendously charismatic. And also pragmatic, not only as a territorialist but as a mentor and a friend. In 1913, he urged Jochelmann to leave Kyiv, not for one of Zangwill's hoped-for Jewish territories, but for London. 'They are destined to become English,' Zangwill insisted of Fanny, Cockerell's grandmother, and her sister, Sonia. Following Zangwill's story, the book shifts to 1920s Greenwich Village, where David's son Emanuel Jochelmann ended up a playwright under the name Em Jo Basshe. Though he worked in an experimental collective with John Dos Passos, he achieved less renown: One review remarked of the unfortunate hero of a Basshe play, 'He suffered almost as much as his audience.' To capture this branch of the family, Cockerell spoke with Basshe's daughter, who is now 95 and lives in Canada, nearly every week for two years. The book goes on to explore the middle-class lives of Jochelmann's two daughters and their children in postwar London and Israel. Capital-H history is glimpsed in passing: a London protest against Hitler in 1933; the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel by a Jewish militia; an older woman's reminiscences of herself as a young girl spying telltale arm tattoos on Israeli bus passengers. A sub-current throughout 'Melting Point' speaks to present-day debates over what might be called the Palestinian question. 'The principal difficulty is that Palestine is already the homeland of another people,' one source observes; at the close of the 1940s another reports: 'The once all-Arab cities of Jaffa, Ramleh and Acre are now filling up with new Jewish immigrants.' The stories and quotations bump and jostle, leaving the reader to decide what might be the book's central tension: How does its first half — the history of Zionism and its failed alternative, territorialism — connect to the second half, which depicts a Jewish family's assimilation? As part of her reporting, Cockerell celebrated Passover and Hanukkah for the first time, in Israel. She ate fish tacos on the Galveston beach with a longtime local rabbi and his wife, a descendant of Jews who arrived there a century earlier as part of her great-grandfather's movement. 'My family has melted into the melting pot, and I can't be too sad about that,' Cockerell said. 'Because I am the textbook example of assimilation, I can't resent it.' Still, Cockerell seems glad that her family past includes moments of assimilation's opposite. 'I feel bad for the gentile side of my family,' she said. 'My uncles on my mom's side asking, 'When are you going to write about us?' It's like: Absolutely never. Sorry, guys.'
