I didn’t know when he was born or when he died. I would stay as long as it took to find my grandfather Azemar Frederic of New Orleans, my mystery man.īut I had little to go on. Family research required a journey, was a physical as well as an emotional quest. This was 1995, before the Internet, before. It was an aching absence that I needed to fill. This need for a physical image of him was primal. Without a photograph of him, I had nothing physical to connect him to me. I had time on my hands and an insatiable longing to find Azemar who over the years had become more and more unreal to me as if he never existed, was a figment of my mother’s imagination. So I resigned myself to seeking positions in the Chicago area where the competition was especially rigorous and my chances for success slim. My husband would need to obtain a Tennessee dental license to practice dentistry, and we would have to pay out-of-state tuition at the University of Illinois for our daughter Lauren.
Uprooting my life at the age of forty-nine for a position that paid in the low five figures seemed foolhardy. The year before, I’d been offered a position in creative writing at a liberal arts college in Tennessee. I was between adjunct college teaching jobs, applying for tenure track teaching positions in creative writing, and working part-time as an assistant editor for a medical journal. I’d come to the family history center in search of my grandfather Azemar Frederic. She appeared as nondescript and gray as the walls.
With robotic precision, she meted out instructions on how to use the machines, where the microfilms were located and how to order original documents. At the room’s entrance sat a gray-haired woman, birdlike and benign. The windowless basement of the Buffalo Grove Family History Center had the feel of an underground bunker-fluorescent lights, cinder block walls, the musty scent of dampness.
Available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and IndieBound. Excerpted with permission from " White Like Her: My Family's Story of Race and Racial Passing" by Gail Lukasik.