Some of My Best Friends Are Black (43 page)

Before the Separate Car Act had passed, the Archdiocese of New Orleans
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had no desire to expunge people of color from its existing integrated churches. Local priests were particularly opposed to the idea. They knew well what was true then and is true now: blacks put more in the collection plate than whites. Louisiana’s people of color were dedicated and valuable parishioners—unlike white Europeans who, as one priest put it, “are as stingy here as they are in their own country.” And at the time, the Archdiocese needed all the Sunday offerings it could get; a string of bad property investments in the 1870s had left it teetering on bankruptcy. The church’s position was clear. “Separate and distinct parishes are not advisable,” it said in a statement in 1888.

Then, in 1889, Francis Jaansens, a Dutchman, was named archbishop of New Orleans. Jaansens brought with him a sharp mind for fiscal
matters, and he very capably pulled the church back from financial collapse. On the emerging question of Jim Crow, however, he proved far less adept. Unlike most of his contemporaries, who looked upon blacks in a condescending, paternalistic way, Jaansens was a genuine advocate for racial equality in the church; he openly lobbied for more colored priests to join the seminary, for example, and was instrumental in seeing several ordained. In this, his motivations were genuine. Also, since emancipation, black Catholics had been pushing to participate more fully in the liturgy and the community life of their parishes, and Jaansens was eager to oblige them—if blacks could not fully join in the Catholic faith, they would go across the street and join the Protestants, and there would be no getting them back.

Despite his good intentions, Jaansens was also a foreigner, unschooled in the racial politics of the South, and his concern for blacks was being overtaken by fear of his fellow whites. As the 1890s progressed, Jim Crow laws had a disturbing effect on the national mood. Whites began to accept, and then to insist, that separation from blacks in all public areas was natural and right. White Catholics began to ask, “If we don’t share restaurants and railcars, why should we go to church together?” (Even though they had always gone to church together.) In rural areas, away from the church’s authority, white parishioners began making violent threats against their own pastors for holding integrated masses. One priest in southwest Louisiana was so scared of his own congregation that he took to saying mass with a loaded pistol under his vestments. So how was the diocese to give blacks a greater role in the Catholic faith at a time when more and more whites simply wanted them out? Jaansens thought he had the answer.

The basic unit of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy is the territorial parish. As its name suggests, a territorial parish is defined by its geographical boundaries; it is designed to be the anchor of the community that surrounds it. “As a general rule, a parish should be territorial, i.e., it should embrace all the Christian faithful within a certain territory.” So says the church’s law books. The exceptions to this rule are called “nonterritorial” or “national” parishes, and they take a different approach to “forming a community.” They’re defined not by geography but by language or ethnicity.
If, for example, thousands of Vietnamese Catholic refugees emigrated to Minneapolis tomorrow, the local diocese might establish a “National Vietnamese Parish,” giving mass in the Vietnamese language and offering social services tailored to that group’s specific needs. For the German, Polish, and Italian immigrants who flooded into America during the nineteenth century, national parishes had often served as necessary way stations on the road to assimilation. After the Civil War, the church’s official position was that, in light of America’s “peculiar situation,” local bishops had the discretion to decide whether an integrated territorial parish was even feasible, or if an ethnic or national parish would be better suited “for the profit and salvation of the Negroes.”

Jaansens began to entertain the idea of a “National Negro Parish,” a place where a colored congregation alone could enjoy fuller autonomy without troubling the waters of the diocese. Except that blacks in southern Louisiana weren’t immigrants. They were not a separate nationality. They were very much Americans. They spoke the language, had lived here for centuries, and already belonged to established churches in the territorial parishes where they resided. For them, a National Negro Parish would not be a step toward assimilation, but a step back.

The archbishop went back and forth on the plan. He wrote his fellow clergy for counsel, and they wrote back with advice along the lines of “What a terrible idea” and “Don’t do it.” Similar protests were voiced by the Comité des Citoyens. Having failed to halt the institution of separate railcars, the group now put all its chips on stopping Jaansens’s Negro parish. The Comité publicly challenged the diocese, saying the plan would put God’s stamp of approval on the injustice of segregation. “If men are divided by, or in, the Church,” they wrote in a newspaper editorial, “where can they be united in the bonds of faith and love of truth and justice?” The archbishop had his own reservations, too, readily admitting that “a church for colored people alone may deepen ill feeling and separate still more the two races.…” Still, after mulling it over, Jaansens made his decision.

On May 19, 1895, with great fanfare, the Archdiocese of New Orleans opened the doors of St. Katherine’s, New Orleans’s first Negro parish. The church itself was a hand-me-down, the old home of a majority-white
parish that had moved to fancier digs up the street. At St. Katherine’s inaugural mass, Jaansens spent the whole of his sermon justifying the church’s creation, denying that it was in any way a step down, or back. The church was optional, he stressed, repeatedly. It was a place for blacks to come only “if they prefer” or “if they want” or “if they desire.”

But the Comité des Citoyens called it for what it was: a Jim Crow church. Defiant, they called on all people of color to boycott St. Katherine’s. Most did. The new parish was not a huge success. It drew enough congregants to remain open, but baptismal records of the time show that the majority of blacks stayed in their territorial parishes. Plans for a second Negro church in New Orleans were scuttled following a great deal of protest from both blacks and the local clergy. When Jaansens died in 1897, the drive for Negro parishes died with him; no more would be seen for a decade.

That decade, however, was one of the worst in America’s already miserable racial history. Restrictive housing covenants made their debut. Lynching, a common practice since the end of the Civil War, reached epidemic levels, the highest the nation had ever seen. In 1909, Hubert Blenk was named the new archbishop of New Orleans, and by that time the racial climate in the city had become toxic. Blenk eyed a solution in Jaansens’s national parish experiment. But what Jaansens saw as optional, the new archbishop saw as essential, mandatory—the only measure that would keep peace between the races. Starting in 1911, he carved up the territorial parish boundaries in the city of New Orleans, erecting six more Negro churches in less than a decade, and adding several more in the small towns surrounding the city. Blacks were now strongly encouraged to attend them.

As bad as things were in New Orleans, it was in Lafayette that Jim Crow Catholicism took its most dramatic turn. In 1912, Monsignor William Teurlings was overseeing the construction of Lafayette’s new cathedral, St. John’s. Teurlings called a meeting with his black parishioners to inquire as to where they wanted their separate pews to be located in the new church—on the side or in the back. During the debate, an older woman abruptly spoke up and told Teurlings he didn’t need to worry
himself about the separate pews. Just give us our own church, she said. We want out.

Fifteen years earlier, Louisiana’s black Catholics had met the opening of a Negro parish with outrage. Now they demanded one. Teurlings consented. Upon hearing of the blacks’ desire for a separate church, the white Catholics of Lafayette gave a joyous prayer of thanks—so moved were they by the Holy Spirit that they even offered to pay for it. Blacks refused, insisting on raising the money themselves. This belonged to them. Lafayette’s first Negro parish, St. Paul’s, opened in 1912. The church was embraced and celebrated by its parishioners, for it gave them what they had never had before, a spiritual community of their own.

In the years that followed, the Diocese of Lafayette started incorporating Negro parishes throughout Acadiana. Most of the congregations were simply cleaved off from existing mixed-race ones, and this time there was nothing optional about it; baptismal records show a complete exodus of blacks from their original churches. Ultimately, thirty-five Negro churches would be established in Lafayette and in the surrounding towns of the diocese. The last opened its doors in 1962, eight years after
Brown v. Board
. Louisiana’s One True Church had split in two.

The “National Negro Parish” established at St. Katherine’s had been based on an exception to the rule. But across southern Louisiana, the exception became the rule, bending it to the point where it was essentially broken. Most of the little Cajun towns around here are so small that the black parish and the white parish overlap each other geographically, both covering what should be the same territorial parish, but splitting the resident community along racial lines, thus contradicting the very definition of what a parish ought to be. In fact, there is only one place on the entire surface of planet Earth where it has ever been the consistent, deliberate policy of the Catholic Church to physically break apart territorial parishes based on the color of a man’s skin, and that is the place where I grew up.

So back to my childhood home I’ve come. It’s the first Saturday in January—the worst of Louisiana’s drizzly, lukewarm winter—and I’m headed out through the back roads and bayous of Acadiana to see if Jim
Crow and Jesus Christ are still getting along. My first stop is the town of Breaux Bridge, and there they are, right as you drive up North Main Street at the center of town. First you pass St. Bernard’s (white), and just a half mile up the road is St. Francis (black). Next up is St. Martinville, with St. Martin de Tours (white) and Notre Dame (black). The town of Maurice has St. Alphonsus (white) and St. Joseph’s (black). In Carencro you’ll find St. Peter’s (white) and Our Lady of the Assumption (you get the idea). By late afternoon, I’ve driven through at least a dozen small towns, and they’re all the same. Sometimes these churches are across the tracks from one another. Sometimes they’re across the street. Sometimes they share a parking lot.

And how do you tell which is the white church and which is the black? Doesn’t take long to figure out. Some of the black churches are quite nice, but they’re always proportionally
less
nice than the neighboring white one. If the white church is gilded and ornate, the black church is boxy and plain. If the white church is boxy and plain, the black church is some prefab aluminum deal. And so on. To see them side by side, you can’t help but think of all those old pictures from the history books: the fancy white water fountain next to the dilapidated colored one. Only this isn’t history. It’s now.

As the sun fades, I wind my way down some back roads to the small town of Duson, right off Interstate 10. On the outskirts, I drive past St. Benedict the Moor (black, obviously), and head across the tracks to the nicer, newer St. Theresa’s, situated in the heart of Duson proper. I’d plotted my day’s itinerary to arrive here just in time for the Saturday vigil mass, attending both churches back to back, just to see. Duson had jumped out at me from the parish listings for one reason: St. Benedict’s and St. Theresa’s share the same pastor. Different buildings, opposite sides of town, but one priest? It seemed the height of absurdity.

It is. This weekend, the first after New Year’s, is the Feast of the Epiphany, and the Gospel reading from the book of Matthew tells the story of the three wise men—kings from exotic, foreign lands who brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the newborn Christ. After the Gospel reading, the priest delivers his homily. Like most homilies, this one
illustrates the message of the Gospel with a little story. The priest tells us about a sculpture he once saw in a museum. The artist had molded these gaunt stick figures and arranged them all walking around in different directions. “And when you look at these figures,” the priest says, “you realize their paths are going to cross but they’re never actually going to meet. This man’s art symbolizes our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of one another’s lives.” Then the priest goes on, telling the story of the Magi and the paths they traveled and how people of all races and cultures must come together and learn to love each other through Christ. He delivers this sermon at the white church. Then, half an hour later, he drives 0.7 miles across the tracks and delivers
the
exact same sermon
at the black church… thus symbolizing our inability to make contact with one another and to really be a part of one another’s lives.