What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [119]
Throughout her journey, Betty never surrendered her uplifting smile, her keen intellect, or her hope that one day America would embrace its diversity. There was no way she was going to be late for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States.
Born Betty Charbonnet in New Orleans in 1921, her early life intersected with another seminal event in the racial history of the United States, one of the nation’s most devastating natural disasters, the great Mississippi flood of 1927. She had not thought about it much until 2005, when the images of Hurricane Katrina jarred loose long-buried memories. Among them, she remembered the water rising in her family’s house on Touro Street, not far from where Katrina first breached the levee. “I was in my bed, which was stacked on orange crates, and water was lapping around it. My father was building a boat. And my sister, who was four, and I went outside with cousins to bail water because my father hadn’t caulked it yet,” Betty recalled.
The 1927 deluge inundated a million acres of land, from Illinois to Louisiana. It killed one thousand people and displaced some nine hundred thousand Southerners. The odor of fetid river muck that coated everything was nothing compared to the stench of racism the flood released. As John M. Barry detailed in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, the flood “shattered the myth of a quasi-feudal bond between Delta blacks and southern aristocracy.” And it unleashed the great migration of African-Americans out of the South, setting in motion a demographic change that would alter American cities, politics, and culture forever.
It also destroyed Betty’s family’s property and prospects in New Orleans and “catapulted my mother and her three little girls on a train bound for California with all their possessions in a cardboard suitcase,” Betty said. “She had little more than the hope of survival in a strange place” where Betty’s grandfather had already settled. Her father would follow after the destruction was tallied.
It was a traumatic upheaval that wrenched the Charbonnets from a place where their ancestors, natives of Thiers, France, had settled before the United States made the Louisiana Purchase. Her line of people became a proud, accomplished, mixed-race Creole family. Her paternal grandfather, Louis Charbonnet Sr., an engineer and a millwright, and his sons designed and built several important buildings in New Orleans, including a convent for the first order of black nuns in the United States. At home, in the hallway of her condominium in Richmond, California, Betty still keeps a collection of her grandfather’s leather-bound engineering texts. Nearby, there is a gallery of historical family photographs, including a portrait of her debonair-looking father, Dorson Louis Charbonnet, wearing a three-piece suit and a pale Stetson. Blond and hazel-eyed as a child, her father was a tall, fair-skinned, and formal man who resembled the actor Paul Newman.
On Betty’s mother’s side, the Breauxes trace themselves to feudal France, near Loudun. By 1661, they had settled in Nova Scotia as fur-trading Acadians. They were chased out by the British and eventually invited by Spain to settle in Louisiana. They became planters in St. James Parish, next to the Mississippi River. One of Betty’s Cajun ancestors owned sixty-three slaves, and one of his heirs fell in love with a mulatto slave named Celestine. He married her one month after