Читать книгу Strangers in the House - Candace Savage - Страница 8

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TANGLED ROOTS

Car les racines, c’est aussi les morts.

For our roots are also the dead.

ANTONINE MAILLET, Pélagie-la-Charrette, 1979

WHEN I WAS a kid growing up in Alberta, a camping trip to the Rockies was always the most thrilling part of the summer holidays. There we’d be, packed into the family sedan, spooling across the seemingly endless expanse of nothing-much-to-see until, in a few breathtaking moments, a majestic wall of rock and forest and snow-capped peaks would rise before our eyes. Each time I experienced this transformation, my mind would flash to a lesson we’d been taught (and retaught) in school—how, in the 1700s, a French fur trader with the swashbuckling name of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye had ridden across this same country on horseback, not knowing what lay ahead, and become the first European to see what, in his awe, he called the Shining Mountains. I was awash with wonder.

So it was disappointing to learn, many years later, that the story was not true. Historians are now convinced that neither Pierre nor his sons and successors ever saw the Rockies, either in Canada or farther south, having reached the limit of their travels in the Bighorn Mountains of present-day Wyoming. And if what I thought I knew about the La Vérendryes was not to be trusted, what did that leave me with? What did I really know about the French presence in the Canadian West? A few other oddments of dubious information were kicking around in my mind. Wasn’t there something about a rascally team called Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard des Groseilliers, better known to the wits in elementary school (of which I admit I was one) as Radishes and Gooseberries? But that was almost the beginning and the end of my knowledge. I would be starting my research with an empty cupboard.

The obvious place to begin was with that enticing name, Napoleon S. Blondin. A little poking around on the internet immediately began to turn up clues. My Napoleon S. Blondin might have been a Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “First & Middle Name(s),” the search page on the Ancestry website prompted. “Napoléon Sureau dit,” I ventured. Is that how it should go?

“Last Name.” That was easy: “Blondin.”

I clicked the red button at the bottom of the page, and bingo, there he was. It appeared that my guy had been born around 1880, which sounded reasonable, and was the son of either a Martha E. (birth name unknown) or a Georgina Trottier, and a man named Cleophas Sureau dit Surcan Blondin or perhaps C. S. Hut Blondin. In a world where English reigns as the default language, other tongues merge into an unintelligible parley-voo, even in a nominally bilingual country like Canada. This orthographic whimsy—Sureau or Surcan, dit versus Hut—added an extra degree of bewilderment. I could see that I was in for a challenge.

And so day after day, I posed as a Sureau dit Blondin descendant, searching for my roots. “Place where your ancestor might have lived,” the website queried. Day after day, I pretended. It did not occur to me to worry that the fathers and grandfathers, the mothers and stepmothers, the aunties and uncles and cousins—the legions of cousins—whose births and deaths I was tracing were not of my own flesh and blood. The walls around me were filled with their descendants; it was tempting to imagine them listening as I worked. The more I learned about their story, the stronger the connection grew, and the more honored I felt to be in their presence.

RESEARCHING FAMILY HISTORY on Ancestry is like poking around an abandoned house, filled with cobwebs of wishful thinking and littered with errors. Anyone can post whatever he or she likes, with or without proof, and the contributions do not always meet the loftiest standards of historical scholarship. By contrast, clicking onto Le programme de recherche en démographie historique (the PRDH, or Research Program in Historical Demography) at the Université de Montréal is the digital equivalent of entering a clean and well-lighted room. Inspired by the upwelling of national pride that swept Québec in the late 1960s, the PRDH was established with the modest aim of creating a registry of all the original European families of French Canada, including every person who arrived or was born there in the 1600s and 1700s. Anyone whose ancestors are included in this database is definitively Québécois de souche, an expression that means something like “Quebecer from the ground up.” In English, it might be “old stock” or “100 percent” or “dyed in the wool.” In Québec’s darkest moments, people who lack these deep roots are sometimes dismissed as outsiders, part of the “ethnic vote” on which indépendantiste Jacques Parizeau blamed his 1995 referendum defeat.

And sure enough, here in the PRDH is la famille Sureau dit Blondin, bedecked with fleurs-de-lys. Though really, I discover, that should read la famille Sureau. The rest of the family’s elegant handle turns out to be a kind of nickname that was all the rage in New France. “Dit Blondin” simply means “called Blondin.” (Ah, so it should have been First & Middle Name(s): “Napoléon.” Last Name: “Sureau dit Blondin.”) Just to keep things interesting, the “dit Blondin” tag was also attached to several other lineages, including people carrying the surnames Avon, Berneche, Lapierre, and Leclerc, among others. Thus, there are several lines of Blondins, all early settlers in New France but otherwise unrelated.

Blondin, from the Dictionnaire universel français et latin, 1743

Qui a les cheveux blonds, ou une perruque blonde; & figurément les gens qui font les beaux. Les coquettes aiment fort les blondins; ce sont de vrais séducteurs de femme.

Someone with blond hair or a blond wig; & figuratively people who strut their stuff. Flirtatious women really love blondins; they are real seducers of women.

From this it is tempting to conclude that the first member of the Sureau tribe to attract the “blondin” nickname may have been a charmer, perhaps even a bit of a ladies’ man. His name was Hilaire Sureau, and we know that he was born in the 1650s, near Poitiers, in west-central France, the fifth child and second son of a vintner. We also know that in 1683 he journeyed across the dark waters of the north Atlantic to live and work on the Island of Montréal, in the employ of a Roman Catholic missionary society called La Compagnie des Prêtres de Saint-Sulpice, or the Sulpicians.

The Compagnie had established itself in the Saint Lawrence Valley for the sole purpose of evangelizing the Indigenous people of the region and leading them from error and sin. The arrogance of this intrusion, which was territorial, spiritual, and economic, did not sit well with the people of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the conflict that ensued between the French and the Five Nations was protracted and bloody. It didn’t help that each side allied itself with the other’s worst enemy: the French with the Hurons and the Iroquois with the English. In 1687, not long after Hilaire’s arrival, the French military descended on a number of Iroquois villages, leaving ruin in their wake. Two years later, the Iroquois set fire to the French settlement of Lachine.

Hilaire was no stranger to lethal risk. Although he had grown up in a time of relative tranquility, France had been ravaged for decades by a grotesque civil war, and the region around Poitiers had been a flash point for violence. Christians had taken up arms against Christians. On one side, in fierce defense of the status quo, stood the Roman Catholics; on the other, in armed resistance, were the Huguenots, Protestant followers of the fiery French theologian Jehan Cauvin, better known to many of us as John Calvin. Among the Huguenots burned at the stake as heretics was a woman named Radegonde Sureau (a relative perhaps), one of the millions who lost their lives in the uproar. An uneasy peace was finally achieved early in the seventeenth century when the king’s army crushed the Protestant rebels, and their inevitable English allies, in the Siege of La Rochelle.

Although the overt warfare had ended, the soft violence of repression continued for decades afterward through les dragonnades, a policy that forced Huguenots to billet government soldiers in their homes. That directive came into effect in 1681, and it was just two years later when our Hilaire stepped aboard a sailing ship heading for the Saint Lawrence. No sooner had he settled in than, in 1685, King Louis XIV issued the Code Noir, which, in addition to regulating slavery in French colonies and ordering the expulsion of Jews, outlawed the observance of any dissenting Christian practices. Thus, although we cannot know what beliefs Hilaire Sureau held in his heart, we know what he would have said. There was no legal option except Catholicism.

THESE WERE NOT the kind of stories I’d expected my house to tell. And yet I wasn’t entirely surprised by what I was learning, because the terror of the European Wars of Religion had caused convulsions for my own ancestors. In 1711, my paternal great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Ulrich and Barbara Schürch were packed onto a ship and deported from their home in Canton Bern for the crime of being Mennonites, too radical for the leaders of the Swiss Reformed Church. Eventually, they found refuge in Pennsylvania and established themselves on a large plot of land (acquired through the displacement of the Lenape, or Delaware, people) near a village they named Schoeneck, in memory of the homeland they had been forced to leave.

That was my grandpa Sherk’s side of the story. Although he and my grandma had met and married in northern Alberta, it turns out that she had Pennsylvania roots as well. Her foundational North American ancestors, William and Nancy Jack, are said to have been born in Ireland and to have arrived in Mercer County, Pennsylvania, around 1800. According to an annotation in an old family Bible, William hailed from County Cork. But there are unsubstantiated rumors, kept alive in the Google-sphere, that his people were originally French and had been among the tens of thousands of Huguenots who were harried into exile.

Scholars tell us that, yes, it is true that some French Calvinists found their way to County Cork and, yes, the surname “Jack,” from Jacques, does appear in their midst. But then the record goes blank. Did one of these Huguenot descendants emigrate to Mercer County? The ocean looms between A and B, and there is no way to know for sure.

For “Jack” is also a British name, and the family might just as likely have numbered among the thousands of Scottish Protestants who were transplanted to Ireland by the English government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in an attempt to outnumber and overrule the Irish Catholic majority. (The devices of power, it seems, are endless.) But whether French Huguenot or Scots Irish, there is no doubt which side the Jacks were on. That foundational ancestor, William Jack, was named for the Protestant standard-bearer King William of Orange, who famously defeated the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne.

THERE’S A CURIOUS sideline to this story of Jacks and Jacques. It involves a nineteenth-century con man who gloried in the Frenchified handle of Gustav or Gustave Anjou. (His birth name had been tarnished by certain unfortunate convictions for fraud in his native Sweden.) After immigrating to New York in the 1890s, he established himself as genealogist to the rich and famous and to anyone else who could afford his fees. Suitably fortified with greenbacks, Monsieur Anjou provided the Jacks of Pennsylvania with a line of descent that went back, with nary a question mark, through an unbroken chain of twenty-two generations. Since Huguenots had earned a reputation for skilled craftsmanship and stubborn integrity, they were considered an ornament to any pedigree. And so, ever eager to please his clients, Anjou fabricated a paper trail that wound through the “archives” of seventeenth-century Eure-et-Loir (a département of France that wouldn’t actually be created for another hundred years) and endowed the family with a bevy of bogus French Protestant ancestors. His inventions continue to haunt dusty, ill-lit corners of the internet, giving hope to Jack descendants who yearn for a touch of l’élégance française.

FROM WHAT I’VE said so far, you may have formed the impression that Protestants were the only people to suffer during Europe’s religious wars. But when an entire continent was tearing itself apart over doctrinal differences, no one escaped untouched. Winners oppressed losers, and the virtues of Christian charity were forgotten. In England, for example, King Henry VIII was so outraged by the Pope’s refusal to annul his first marriage so he could wed again (and again) that he had himself appointed as head of the Church of England. Soon, Roman Catholicism was outlawed as a species of treason, an affront to the Crown. Monasteries were ransacked and looted; priests were tortured and killed. Ordinary adherents who declared their faith were sometimes imprisoned and, always, stripped of their liberties, leaving them unable to own land, receive bequests, graduate from university, or qualify for professions. In 1673, a new law required anyone who applied for governmental or military office to take an oath denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the belief that the Eucharistic bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. Not, one would think, an obvious prerequisite for public service.

The next year, a man named Peter Curricoe stepped aboard an English vessel bound for Maryland, a colony created by Catholics for Catholics and dedicated to religious freedom. He arrived as an indentured servant (essentially a slave), put in the required seven years of work, and received title to fifty acres of land, acquired through the displacement of the Piscataway and Yaocomaco people, as his reward.

Five generations later, when my mother’s mother, Mary Catherine Carrico, was born, she remained as fiercely and irreducibly Catholic as her forebears. By choosing my grandfather Humphrey, she became the first member of her lineage to marry outside the faith, and together, they fed the flames of religious discord around their kitchen table on the Alberta plains.

BUT BACK TO Hilaire Sureau. When we left him, he was a young man of about thirty, engaged by the Sulpicians as a laborer in Montréal. It can’t be mere coincidence that his employers were just then embarking on a major construction project, the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice, now one of the oldest surviving heritage buildings in the city. Built between 1684 and 1687, it stands as a tribute to the men, likely including Hilaire, who carted the stone and burned the lime and mixed the mortar. With his three-year contract completed, he could have returned to France but instead decided to leave Montréal and take his chances downriver, in the town of Québec. Less vulnerable than Montréal to attack by the Iroquois, Québec had nonetheless recently been forced to repel an attempted invasion by les maudits Anglais, launched from the English Protestant stronghold on Massachusetts Bay. There was no escaping the toxic winds of religion and politics.

Hilaire, meanwhile, had other pressing concerns. Marriageable women were in short supply—most girls wed in their teens—and here he was, rapidly scrolling through his thirties. So it must have been with considerable relief that, in June of 1691, he married a thirty-year-old named Louise Paradis, a mother of four, who had been widowed earlier that same month. Through this fortunate liaison, he connected his lineage even more deeply with the history of New France, since Louise’s line went back to the very beginnings of French settlement. The couple never became wealthy—for a time, Hilaire worked as a carter for the municipal government—and they likely resided in a modest house. The experts tell us that the average home in Québec at the time had a footprint of around 750 square feet, with a large room on the second floor shaped by the pitch of the roof, not unlike the one in Saskatoon where his great-great-great-great-great-grandson would one day live. Into these narrow confines, Hilaire and Louise would welcome four more children, two daughters and two sons, all of whom would survive to raise families of their own.

The Sureau dit Blondin line was now firmly established among the pioneers of New France. From those roots came a stream of begats that spanned the centuries, as Hilaire’s son Charles (1695) fathered Pierre Simon (1727), who fathered Pierre Simon fils (1752), who fathered Simon (1799), who fathered Augustin (1821), who fathered Cléophas (1844), who fathered Napoléon (1879), who ended up on the northernmost edge of the Great Plains. Generation after generation, these men allied themselves with good canadienne women named Marie Anne, Marie Élisabeth, Marie Amable, or Rose Marie, each of whom bore ten or a dozen children, sometimes even more, and took them to the parish church for baptism or burial. The family was so exuberantly French Catholic that, in the course of time, it would even produce a saint, Esther Sureau dit Blondin, canonized in 2001 as the Blessed Mother Marie-Anne, a not-so-distant cousin of Napoléon. “Plus un arbre enfonce profondément ses racines dans le sol,” she once wrote, “plus il a de chances de grandir et de porter de fruit.”¹ The more deeply a tree sinks its roots into the soil, the greater are its chances of growing and bearing fruit. You could never accuse the Sureau dit Blondins of having shallow roots.

IN SASKATOON, THERE’S an unwritten rule that any house more than eighty years old ought to be torn down. I think of this dictum every time I sweep the floor in our crumbling basement or watch frost crystals sprout from the electrical plug-ins beside the kitchen sink. Over the years, Keith and I have done what we could—replaced most of the rattly old windows, added insulation to attic and walls—but there’s no getting around it. The place is old, approaching its tenth decade, and it embodies standards of efficiency and comfort that belong to another age. It’s easy to understand why so many of our neighbors have opted for the newer, infill houses that punctuate our block, some of them tastefully harmonious with the street’s period aesthetic, others frankly not. Recently we have lost two more “heritage” houses on our side of the street, a block distant in each direction. Every time a house is demolished it represents a kind of forgetting.

Knowing what I now know, I walk from room to room in my house and seem to see portraits of all those Sureau dit Blondin ancestors hanging on the walls. The images are painted with broad strokes, black and white with vague faces, posed singly or in couples or clustered in tight family groups. And in one of the frames—something suitably ornate and gilded, I’m thinking—there is a map of Canada, with Saskatchewan and Québec highlighted in full relief.

Despite what it says on my passport, I have never felt fully Canadian, not in the a mari usque ad mare sense of the word. When I was a child, my world was bounded by my limited experience, first of the Norwegian-speaking community in northern Alberta into which I was born (though we were in no way Norwegian), then of the succession of small, multiethnic, English-speaking prairie towns to which we subsequently moved. When I became an adult, my map stretched northward to include Yellowknife—still, by some definitions, within the geographical province of the North American plains—and then homeward, to Saskatoon. With each move, my identity became more firmly rooted in the ragged gestalt of the Canadian prairies, “east of the Rockies and west of the rest,” to borrow from a Corb Lund song. Although I had ancestors and presumably even relatives in Ontario, they belonged to another world. As for Québec, my stilted, schoolgirl French marked me indelibly as an outsider.

But now this unassuming little house had opened its doors to a story that transcended petty barriers and boundaries. Small as it was, it encompassed solitudes and centuries.

GENEALOGICAL RESEARCH IS addictive: every discovery, no matter how insignificant, induces a pleasure rush. Look here—this maternal great-great-grandmother was a genuine Fille du Roi, one of the women (orphans and adventurers) sent out from France in the seventeenth century as wives for the colonists. And this fellow, he was a soldier in the famous Carignan-Salières Regiment, French army regulars deployed to New France in the 1680s to impose an uneasy peace on the Iroquois. As long as the sugar hits of satisfaction kept coming, it was tempting to go on and on.

But there was a purpose to this research, two questions I had set out to resolve. First, taking them in reverse order of appearance, was the mystery of the two Napoléons. Was there, or was there not, a connection between the Blondins of Saskatoon and their Métis namesakes in the Qu’Appelle? Such a linkage is entirely plausible since, in the early days of New France, marriages between Indigenous women and French men were encouraged. “Our young men will marry your daughters,” Champlain told a gathering of Hurons in 1633, “and we will be one people.”² A few years later, Marie de l’In-carnation and her Ursuline nuns established a school for girls in the town of Québec, and their graduates, many of whom were Indigenous, frequently went on to marry settlers. Intermarriage was also integral to the fur trade, especially as voyageurs began to venture farther into the country around the Great Lakes, le pays d’en haut. These men often learned Indigenous languages, married into Indigenous families, and adopted their wives’ customs.

Although Hilaire does not seem to have been involved in the fur trade, several of his descendants certainly were, including his eldest son, Charles. We know this thanks to a database of voyageur contracts co-curated by a historian at the University of Saskatchewan. (Where else would this arcane knowledge reside but ten minutes’ walk from this house?) But no matter where or how hard I looked, I could not find any Indigenous women in the Sureau dit Blondin line.

So what about coming at the problem from the other direction? What if I started with the Blondins in the Qu’Appelle Valley and searched for their canadien forefathers? At first, the hits came thick and fast. There were Métis Blondins written all over Western Canadian history—a Paul in the Edmonton district, a Julia at Cumberland House, an Édouard Pierre at Saint-Boniface, all in the nineteenth century—and each of them held the promise of linking back to ancestors in French Canada. But the documentation turned out to be spotty, pocked with disappointing gaps, and all too quickly, the trail petered out, leaving me stranded on the shores of Lesser Slave Lake in the 1790s with a Pierre Blondin, parentage unknown.

Fortunately, I did find an answer to my second question: How had the Sureau dit Blondins ended up on the prairies? It turned out to be quite easy to map the family’s serial displacements. Perhaps succeeding generations had taken their cue from founding father Hilaire, who, having moved from Poitiers to Montréal to Québec, returned to Montréal. Whatever the reason, the entire line of Sureau dit Blondins had remarkably itchy feet. If you’ve ever read Louis Hémon’s classic novel Maria Chapdelaine, you will remember the closing scene, in which the long-suffering heroine hears “la voix du pays de Québec” echoing through her thoughts like the tolling of a bell. This is a nation, the voice informs her, where “rien ne doit mourir et rien ne doit changer”—where nothing must die and nothing must change. “Alors je vais rester ici . . . de même,” Maria concludes, choosing to stay where she is, “patient and without bitterness,” certain that this is the Québécois way.³

The Sureau dit Blondins clearly weren’t buying it. As new agricultural frontiers opened up—and despite their passing involvement in the fur trade, the family were farmers first—Napoléon’s forebears had opted for change and a chance at getting ahead. At first, they’d migrated from parish to parish in the vicinity of Montréal: Pointe-Claire, Pierrefonds, Laval. That’s where they were in the autumn of 1759, when the French army fell to the English on the Plains of Abraham, and, a year later, when the entire colony of New France surrendered to the British. Then, in the 1800s, Hilaire Sureau’s descendants made two surprising leaps: first, to the extreme west of the former French province (now known by its British overlords as Lower Canada) and, second, in a shocking breach, across the border into the laps of the English. It was from this toehold on Georgian Bay in Lake Huron that Napoléon and other members of his family would set out for Saskatchewan in 1904, to establish themselves in the wide-open spaces west of Saskatoon.

Some twenty-five years later, Napoléon, by now accompanied by his wife, Clarissa Marie née Parent, and four young children, would finally touch down in this house. Around them spread a grid of streets, laid out by the Temperance Colonization Society fifty years before, that paid tribute to the glories of the British Empire, with streets named Albert, Victoria, Lorne. How had the family coped with being planted in this “foreign” soil? What kind of a welcome had they found in the Last Best West of the Canadian prairies?

As I was wondering how to clothe the bones of fact with flesh and feeling, a promise of help materialized out of thin air. An email message appeared in my inbox offering to put me in touch with an actual, living descendant of Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “Howdy,” it began invitingly, “I just turned up your query for information about my wife’s grandfather via a Google search.” Imagine: a granddaughter. Apparently, by poking around on the internet, I’d left a trail of digital footprints that led directly to my inbox. And it seemed that Napoléon’s granddaughter—her name was Lorena—had also been working on her family tree and was willing to share what she had learned. But would we get to the heart of things? Would she be willing to share family secrets with an inquisitive stranger?