Transcript
Into America
Uncounted Millions: Things Fall Apart
Trymaine Lee: A quick warning, this episode contains descriptions of violence and self-harm.
When you look at the Coakley generations of Howard graduates and entertainers and nurses —
Adele Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: — and professors, then you look at that side —
Adele Flateau: Yeah
Lee: — do you see the difference?
Adele Flateau: Yes. You know, the Flateau family, it’s a very different story.
Lee: The story of Gabriel Coakley is nothing short of astounding. Before the fall of slavery in America, this free black man in Washington, D.C. becomes a successful businessman, buys his family’s freedom, and then achieves something that up until that point would have been any black person’s wildest dream. He secures reparations for his family’s enslavement.
In the decades after the war, the Coakleys would continue to exemplify black excellence and progress. Whereas Gabriel Coakley, the patriarch, broke freedom’s ground with a windfall, the generations to follow would seed that ground with opportunity and accomplishment. But their experience was the exception, not the rule.
Like their counterparts in the North, black people in the Deep South were doing what they could to piece together hopeful lives built on the fragile new freedoms won in the Civil War. But for them, what’s won could easily be lost.
The South, through the Civil War and well beyond, was a very violent place where black life was considered cheap. State violence, white supremacist violence, violence for being too ambitious, too smart, too free, were all commonplace.
There was violence baked into the maintenance of the Deep South’s racial and social order, and secondary, interracial violence that seeped into the everyday lived experiences of black people in black communities that were legally restricted from social, economic, and political maturation
Yet, despite all those competing forces, black people in places like Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the heart of the old Confederacy, pushed into nascent freedom starting from scratch. And from scratch, they fought to build lives of dignity. That experience was more typical, often perilous and plagued with uncertainty.
Adele Flateau: I don’t even know what happened to the land in that side of the family. I don’t know what happened to that land.
Lee: But they lost it.
Adele Flateau: Apparently.
Lee: This time and place is where we meet another black American family whose story both contradicts that of the Coakley’s and is bound to it with a bang and then bloodshed.
Adele Flateau: What the hell happened in this family to take out two young men in the same year?
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is “Into America.” On part three of “Uncounted Millions: The Power of Reparations,” we step away from the story of the Coakleys to meet the Flateau’s, as family rumors and lifelong questions pull us south to discover the other side of this family tree.
Act One: More questions than answers.
It’s a cool, rainy Tuesday in New Orleans, and I’m headed down I-10, headed to a little city called LaPlace, where I’m going to catch up with Adele Flateau and her son Desmond. We’re here in Louisiana to try to see what we can dig up about her paternal side of the family, the Flateau’s.
Lee: It’s clear how different this land is compared to the big cities of New York and D.C. where we’ve been so far. During slavery, Louisiana produced a large share of the nation’s cotton and almost all of its sugar. This was hard, dangerous work that would have been much different than the elite circles Gabriel Coakley was running in. Louisiana was home to hundreds of plantations, many of which were located on this very drive crisscrossing the banks of the Mississippi.
When emancipation finally came following the end of the Civil War, most of the over four million Black Americans still lived in the South, where agriculture and rural life was still dominant. And this stretch is where the other side of Adele’s family was rooted.
From Brooklyn to Louisiana to D.C., how you doing?
Adele Flateau: I know, right? I’m telling you, man. What is wrong with you?
Lee: Listen, it never stops. It just keeps going.
Adele Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: How you feeling?
Adele Flateau: It’s been going.
Lee: I meet up with Adele and Desmond in LaPlace, about 30 miles outside of New Orleans.
Good morning, buddy.
Desmond Flateau: Hey, good morning.
Lee: How you feeling, man?
Desmond Flateau: Good. Good to meet with you.
Lee: Likewise. Likewise.
We all hop in the car together. Desmond, Adele, my producer, Max.
So, Ms. Adele, what’s our mission today? What are we trying to find out? What are we after?
Adele Flateau: So today, we’re going to focus on the Flateau side of my family, which is a lot more mysterious. We have a lot less information.
Lee: There are details of Adele’s immediate family, things that shaped her upbringing that she’s been trying to find out for years.
Adele Flateau: Flipside I guess for me, it’s on a personal level, being able to understand more about my father because he had his ways. And I guess we really never had a full picture of what his life was like, you know, his childhood.
You know, he always made it clear like that things were not easy, but he never went into a lot of detail.
Lee: Sidney Flateau, Adele’s father, was born around 1915. When he was just eight, Sidney lost his dad. And later that same year, Sidney’s uncle also died. Adele doesn’t know how either of these men died. She just knows that at some point, Sidney was sent away from Louisiana to live with relatives in California.
Adele Flateau: He never explained or talked about stuff that, you know, happened in the family when he was young, but I’m guessing there were a lot of things that went on that we have — probably never know anything about.
Lee: Adele has also heard rumors that at some point the family might have had some money and then somehow it was gone. Through a combination of family stories and from pouring over Ancestry.com, Adele can trace her Flateau line back to Albert Flateau Sr., born in 1851, likely to a white immigrant father and a black Louisiana mother.
It’s not clear if Albert Sr. was ever enslaved, but by the time slavery ended in the 1860s, he would have been a teenager coming of age during Reconstruction, when freedom was new, when black men were gaining the right to vote and hold office. Families could send their kids to school and black business people were able to thrive.
Albert sees this brief window of opportunity, gaining local prominence in Louisiana, likely through some kind of agricultural business.
But where do we get the idea that he owned businesses? Where did you first hear about that?
Adele Flateau: Oh, because there’s articles. There’s an article where he was bringing some steers into the central part of the city and they said he almost got kicked by the steer. It was just some local article, you know, and they had apparently a high regard for him, the white people, at least some of them.
Lee: The newspaper article from 1883 refers to him as our excellent colored friend, Albert Flateau, and goes on to detail a pretty funny story. It goes, Albert had a narrow escape from the wrath of an infuriated steer the other day and was compelled to take water in order to avoid taking a horn. And in the thick of Reconstruction’s political opportunities, Albert Sr., he got involved.
Adele Flateau: By 1880, he was an elections commissioner, so he would have been like around 30.
Lee: So through Reconstruction, he’s beginning to kind of flex his new citizenship, right?
Adele Flateau: Yes.
Lee: But the backlash to these free, empowered Black citizens was almost immediate. In the 12-year period of Reconstruction, there were over a thousand documented lynchings in the state of Louisiana. Groups like the Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia started to grow in prominence and power, and the promises and progress of Reconstruction were snatched away swiftly and violently.
It’s a history Adele hasn’t been able to hide from as she tries to figure out exactly what happened to this part of the family line. Could there have been a lynching or some sort of feud with the wrong white people?
Adele Flateau: It seems like we kept coming up against the Landry family. Are you familiar with them or heard about them?
Lee: I have heard of them, yeah.
Adele Flateau: Yeah, they were very wealthy, well-known, certainly by those standards of the day. But my great-grandfather was one of three election commissioners in the parish. And my great-grandfather and another commissioner, they had tossed out some ballots because they weren’t properly signed.
Lee: Mm-hmm.
Adele Flateau: And then the third commissioner was named Landry, and he challenged them because, you know, he didn’t want the ballots tossed out.
Lee: The Landry’s were a rich and powerful clan who records show were among the largest landowners in this part of the state, whose dealings and reputation loomed large. So while the Flateau’s would have been on their come up economically and politically, they would have been jockeying for position with the likes of the Landry’s and others.
Given these details about the livestock and local elections, it seems this family had some level of prominence, and that likely would have meant land. But Adele hasn’t found anything to prove it yet.
Adele Flateau: We don’t know exactly what he accumulated. That’s the thing. And —
Lee: We know he was making money, he’s bringing the steer in. He was making moves.
Adele Flateau: Right. And that’s why we think he had something because how did he, you know, he had some kind of business.
Lee: Albert Sr. married Sarah Bengear (ph), and together they would have 10 kids. The youngest child was Albert Jr., Adele’s grandfather, the one she’d never get to meet, a man who died mysteriously at 32 years old, the same year as his older brother, Wilbert, who was 44. Adele has heard some rumors about Wilbert.
Adele Flateau: His son was in charge of some water rights operation in this parish because he got sued, so this lawsuit had to do with our family via my uncle administering water to the surrounding plantations.
Lee: First, a scuffle over ballot signatures, then over water rights. Was any of this at the heart of the Flateau family mystery? In order to find out what happened, we have to go to the source. We were on our way to a public records room in Donaldsonville, a small town in Ascension Parish, about halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
It’s not a place you would find yourself unless you were looking for something very specific
Historic Donaldsonville.
Adele Flateau: Historic Donaldsonville. Shacks (ph).
Lee: Look at that grocery store. That grocery store been there for 100 years.
We pull into the parking lot. It’s an old brick building with Spanish moss hanging from the trees.
I don’t know, it’s kind of giving the To Kill a Mockingbird a little bit, I don’t know. It’s giving the To Kill a Mockingbird vibes.
Adele Flateau: Good sense. Which part of the movie —
Lee: Oh, I don’t know. Where do we start?
As we’re walking in, we notice a wall with framed photos of all the past county clerks.
Adele Flateau: Oh, let’s see if we recognize any names up here.
Lee: Oh, wow.
Adele Flateau: Whose name?
Desmond Flateau: Landry.
Adele Flateau: Landry? Holy crap.
Lee: There’s a black and white photo of a man with an oil baron mustache and a caption that says Frederick Landry, clerk, December 31st, 1894 to April 16th, 1909. Huh, interesting. We keep going.
Clerk: What type of record are y’all looking for?
Adele Flateau: Well, okay. Well, my great grandfather was born here in 1851.
Clerk: Okay.
Lee: We learned early on that with this kind of research, you never really know what you’ll find in these archives, what they’ll have or what they’ll have part of. It’s a tangled nest of half records and receipts.
Clerk: What’s the last name?
Adele Flateau: Flateau, F-L-A-T-E-A-U.
Lee: We started with the marriage records, but we strike out.
Looks like that may be it in this book.
Then it’s on to land records. And like our time in the D.C. archives, looking for clues on Coakley, it means going through these huge, dusty books, some over 100 years old, handwritten.
Adele Flateau: You can barely read these numbers, they’re handwritten.
Desmond Flateau: This 61, right?
Lee: This kind of digging is always exciting, but it’s also pretty arduous. My producer, Max, comes through first.
Max Jacobs: I thought maybe I saw something.
Adele Flateau: Maybe it’s after.
Jacobs: To be part of the story but yeah.
Adele Flateau: There it is, and there’s more, look. Okay, so now —
Lee: A. Wilbert or Wilbert A. Flateau?
Adele Flateau: Yeah, that’s my uncle.
Lee: So this is from 1920, there’s a —
Adele Flateau: Let me come over there and see.
Lee: Wilbert A. Flateau and his wife, Mrs. Wilbert A.
Again, Wilbert Flateau is one of the older children of Albert, Sr.
So the vendor, they purchased some property from Albert Flateau, successor Albert Flateau.
Adele Flateau: Yup.
Lee: 1919, did he sell his sister some land?
Adele Flateau: I don’t know. That’s why we’re here.
Lee: That’s the question.
Lee: What we found is a land sale involving Wilbert Flateau. It shows that Wilbert inherited the land from his father, Albert Flateau, Sr. So there was land and it got passed down. But the full record isn’t here.
The clerk tells us that the other county archive, which is about 30 miles away in Gonzales, likely have the rest. But this is an exciting first find.
Adele Flateau: Yes, so they must have had businesses and land because they were doing all these things in the parish. I couldn’t imagine that they were landless, you know. I never heard anything from my dad about them having land here. Maybe, you know, the ending may have not been very good. Maybe that’s why he never talked about it.
Lee: I guess we’ll see in Gonzales, I guess.
Adele Flateau: Putting a lot of faith in Gonzales.
Lee: Come on, Gonzales. Come on.
Adele Flateau: They better come through. They better have those records over there.
Lee: We hop back in the car. So how you all feeling about what we found?
Adele Flateau: I mean, it’s really good to be able to corroborate stuff that you kind of had a feeling about. They were trying to make it in this next iteration of freedom, you know, that they were — they were doing everything, taking possible — chance of every possible opportunity, you know, starting businesses, owning land. The question is what happened, you know. It’s all of that.
Lee: And managed to, I guess we’re about to find out, pass some of it along.
Adele Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: At least for that generation.
Adele Flateau: It never got to my father and he was only like two generations away.
Lee: This is us right here.
Lee: In the next archive, we’re more focused. We know the documents we want. The clerk, Brett Landry, yes, he’s also a Landry, takes our reference numbers from the other office and comes back with several documents.
Brett Landry: This is the first one. And the date on this is September 1919.
Adele Flateau: Yes.
Lee: OK great, let’s dive in.
Landry: And again, it’s telling you this is several Flateaus here.
Adele Flateau: Yeah.
Landry: And then they’re selling all — see that’s et al, of course it means and others.
Adele Flateau: Mm-hmm.
Landry: W.A. Flateau et al to Larry Davin and —
Lee: The W.A. Flateau is Wilbert Flateau.
Landry: Five miles, 60 acres — it was 60 acres at this time. So on the east side of the public road from Hopeville to Dutchtown, by which said road is bounded on the west. And then the track is containing 60 acres, more or less.
Lee: That sounds like Turn Left at the big old tree.
Landry: Yeah, then you do see some that are actually that vague.
Adele Flateau: Can you imagine how much land that was?
Landry: Sixty acres.
Adele Flateau: I had no idea 60 acres was involved.
Lee: Sixty acres of land sold by Wilbert Flateau in 1919. As we’d soon learn, these documents would tell the whole history of the land and how it was acquired.
Adele Flateau: Acquired by inheritance. Okay, but — so this was then passed on to the children, Wilbert Flateau, Albert Flateau, Sophia, Teresa. These are all the children.
Lee: They inherited that land.
It goes on to list Wilbert as the executor of the land and the state following the death of Albert, Sr. and his mother, Sarah, just a few years later.
Then we find the actual succession document. And it wasn’t just the 60 acres that Albert and Sarah had passed down.
Landry: It looks like he’s also getting —
Adele Flateau: Two head of hogs.
Landry: Seven head of cattle.
Adele Flateau: Cattle. Remember, I told you he almost got hurt by a cattle.
Lee: One mare, one mule.
Landry: One mare, one mule. Two colts, one buggy and farm wagon.
Lee: But until now, you haven’t seen any of these records, all this land moving around.
Adele Flateau: Oh, no.
Lee: This is all brand new stuff?
Adele Flateau: No, this is all brand new. And 60 acres of land, no way.
Lee: So they had hogs and cattle and mares and mules and colts and buggies, whatever harrow is, like a bird or something.
Adele Flateau: A black man in the 1880s.
Lee: Let me see. Do we have a — how much it was sold for?
Landry: Yeah, it should be in there, $3,800.
Lee: First of all, purchase for $750 and then sold for $3,800. That’s already —
Landry: Come up.
Lee: That’s wealth building and that’s inherited, but then sold. Two years after their father passes, they’re selling the land.
Lee: But there’s still more. Our new friend Brett is pulling everything. Wilbert, by then a businessman, had also bought out two of his sister’s shares of their parents’ estate, setting him and his wife up for a very comfortable life, like his wife’s purchase of a fancy Oldsmobile.
An Oldsmobile, 1910.
Adele Flateau: 1910.
Lee: $800.
Desmond Flateau: $800, that was more than some land.
Adele Flateau: That was a lot of money for back then.
Desmond Flateau: That’s more than some land.
Lee: Right.
Adele Flateau: That wasn’t even on our list. Oh, my gosh. That’s crazy. And, you know, the only picture I have of my grandfather, he’s standing by a car. This one right here.
Desmond Flateau: It looks like an Oldsmobile.
Adele Flateau: Look, look. That’s the only picture of my grandfather there, yeah.
Lee: That might be it.
Adele Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: That’s probably this car we’re looking at the sale for —
Adele Flateau: Yeah, I’m telling you —
Lee: — is that right there.
Adele Flateau: — this is like unbelievable
Lee: Suited up, got the fresh car.
Adele Flateau: Yes.
Lee: They paid $800 for it.
Desmond Flateau: He was on top of the world.
Adele Flateau: Can you believe it.
Lee: His family inherited from his father. But then in a generation, all of this apparently is gone.
Adele Flateau: This is what’s scary.
Lee: For Adele and Desmond, this was a lot.
Adele Flateau: This whole thing in the beginning, like what happened? I really had no idea 60 acres was involved. But what happened to all this land and resources?
Desmond Flateau: It’s a great question.
Adele Flateau: Oh, God. Anyway, it’s a lot to take in.
Lee: Adele keeps coming back to Wilbert, her father’s uncle, the one with the high rolling wife. Wilbert was clearly managing the land her great grandfather had passed down to his children. The family’s fate and their fortune was literally in his hands.
Adele Flateau: You know, I just have a sense something bad happened to him.
Desmond Flateau: I feel like for him to have this amount of prominence and almost just disappear —
Adele Flateau: Mm-hmm.
Desmond Flateau: — off the face of the earth with all that he was able to acquire and to not kind of know how he passed.
Adele Flateau: I wish I could answer that, honestly.
Lee: And what of Albert Jr., her grandfather, who died within just months of Wilbert?
Desmond Flateau: Did he — did Grandpa ever find out any stories about what happened to his father? Or is it more like what — like, did you ever get the sense that it was just something that he didn’t want to talk about or is it just he didn’t know?
Adele Flateau: I don’t know. But no, I don’t have any clearances about my grandfather. I just heard things. I never — I have not found any records yet or any, you know, anything saying how he died. I haven’t found an obituary for him. It’s just a mystery to me, big mystery.
Act Two: Uneasy Answers.
Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir: Land ownership between 1870s and 1890s for African-American people was a game changer for that family and also other families within the area because everyone benefited from that land ownership of that one Black person in that area.
Lee: Dr. Sharlene Sinegal-DeCuir is an associate professor of history at Xavier University in New Orleans. We asked her about what it meant for Black people in the Deep South to own land during Reconstruction and the bloody backlash of redemption.
Sinegal-DeCuir: And so land ownership is tied to everything at this time. It’s wealth, but it’s not just monetary wealth. It’s wealth in the community. It’s wealth in generations to come.
Lee: But getting it is one thing and keeping it is another.
Sinegal-DeCuir: Holding on to the wealth for African-American families during this time is very difficult. There’s a long history of African-American people after the Civil War achieving ownership of land and losing that land within 10 to 15 years of ownership.
Lee: We asked her about the Flateau family mystery.
Sinegal-DeCuir: To lose 60 acres at this time is devastating for anyone. But in that day and age, I just cannot stress how devastating that would be for a family. Remember the stock market crash of 1929, right, and how all these people were jumping out of the windows because they lost their fortunes.
Just think about that, but think about it in the terms of the early 1900s for African-American people and how devastating that would be, not only for the person losing it, whatever cause that might have been for them to lose it, but to lose that and to know that my generations later on, what they could have been because of this land and what they will be because of not having it. That’s a lot to handle.
Lee: By the time we’d make this trip south, we’d been in touch with the Flateau-Coakley family for months, Zoom calls, phone calls, sit downs in their living rooms. Most of that had been focused on the Coakley side of the family and learning about what this unexpected compensation, this loophole reparations meant for this family’s future.
But we became just as obsessed with this other side, whose story was more common for Black Americans, but one that was no less important. What would it mean to acquire wealth in spite of the odds and then lose it all? So for the past week, we’ve been following Desmond and Adele all over the state, interviewing relatives, tracking some records. We’ve learned so much, but the big question of what really happened, we still didn’t know.
We had one more day in Louisiana, but Adele and Desmond had a bunch of places they hoped to visit. They settled on the archives in the basement of Baton Rouge City Hall, and graciously, once again, they invited us to tag along. But when we called City Hall that morning, they told us that we could under no circumstances record anything inside the building.
And so Max and I were on our own. So plan B, we’d been trying to pin down where to find historical death records since we still didn’t know how Adele’s grandfather, Albert Jr., or his older brother, Wilbert, had died. After a bunch of back and forth and some wild goose chases, we finally figured it out.
It wouldn’t be in Ascension Parish where we found out about the 60 acres or back in New Orleans where we were staying. They’d be in the Louisiana State Archives in Baton Rouge. A few clicks and bingo, they were there. But all we got was a reference number. The original records were on microfilm. So we hit the road 75 miles north to the capital city to get them in our hands.
Jacobs: Secretary of State, State Archives, I think that’s us.
Lee: All right. Louisiana State Archives, person receiving offices. Good morning.
Ashley Rivera: Good morning.
Lee: So we finally arrived. We found our way here. So we have a few death records we’d like to look up.
Rivera: Alright.
Lee: Where do we begin?
Rivera: So, it goes by like if it’s any other parish, it’s statewide.
Lee: Ashley Rivera, one of the clerks at the archives, is helping us out. She gives us some forms to fill out and then she’s off to check the back for the microfilm. It could have only been a handful of minutes, but it didn’t feel like it.
Oh, I’m getting a little butterflies. I don’t know.
Ashley comes back with the canisters of microfilm, they are little cardboard boxes browning at the corners.
All right, so I see little stacks of boxes here.
Rivera: Yeah. Normally, we let people have like four at a time, but we can bend the rules a little bit.
Lee: Can we start with Albert?
Rivera: Yeah, you want to with Albert?
Lee: Let’s start with the one that, yeah, let’s start with that one.
Rivera: Yeah. Okay, that would be this stack here.
Lee: All right. Great. All right. So we’re here at the computer and the microfilm is about to be fired up, right?
Ashley loads the first reel of film into the film reader, hits a button and we’re off.
We’re zipping through these records now. We’re at page number 3,081.
Rivera: We’re at 229, I went too far. So what’s the story with this family?
Lee: Well, this side of the family, the family came to some degree of wealth out of the 1860s, ‘70s.
Rivera: Uh-huh.
Lee: And within a couple of generations, they somehow lost all of it. And one of the descendants, Albert’s son, was sent to California to live with relatives because after he died, his mother couldn’t take care of him and his siblings.
Rivera: Okay.
Lee: So we have our photo. There we go.
Rivera: There you go. There he is. Okay.
Lee: His trade was a butcher. His father sold steer. So they kind of assumed he would be in the business. So it says he was a butcher.
Rivera: Oh, good.
Lee: And let’s get to the cause of death, let’s see.
Rivera: And can we just get to the cause of death, lets see.
Rivera: Cause of death pulmonary something, something to do with the heart.
Lee: Wow, pulmonary, looks like thrombosis. Something of the heart, maybe some sort of blood clot or something with the veins, right? The family was — had an eerie feeling maybe there was something, you know, something bad happened. This is bad enough, but it seems that it was a health condition. Wow.
Rivera: Some kind of infection?
Lee: TB infection that say?
Rivera: Maybe.
Lee: Some sort of infection.
Lee: To finally learn Albert Jr.’s cause of death was in some ways a relief. He was certainly too young to die, but he didn’t die by violence or at the hands of the state the way so many young black men in the first quarter of the century did or still do today. He died by a blood clot and disease.
But even in this, there was great injustice. In the early 1900s, diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia were two to three times deadlier for black people and for white people.
So place of burial.
Rivera: Let’s see.
Lee: For Albert. We’re always looking for where he was buried, so now we know how he died. And where is he buried?
Rivera: Whatever that says. Let’s print it.
Lee: The death certificate lists the burial place, but it’s handwritten and indecipherable.
We’ll do some investigation just about, you know, some uncertainty about where he lived. At least now we know how he died. One big question answered. One more to go.
What’s this, Albert, Wilbert Flateau would be great.
Rivera: All right.
Lee: Thank you.
Rivera: Wilbert next. Wilbert will be on this one.
Lee: There we go.
Rivera: Wilbert’s also going to be toward the end.
Lee: Yeah, Wilbert is the older brother of Albert. They died just months apart in 1924.
Rivera: Almost to the end. Let’s see, Wilbert. Keep it in.
Lee: At this point, it was all I could do not to grab the machine myself.
Rivera: 6681.
Lee: Wow. They said there was a concern about something bad happened. Pistol shot wound to the head. Wait, suicide.
Rivera: Well, allegedly.
Lee: Oh my goodness, allegedly.
Rivera: Yeah, allegedly.
Lee: What. What does it say right above? Here — okay it says pistol shot wound of head.
Jacobs: So it’s in suicidal?
Lee: Yeah, that’s what it says, suicidal.
Jacobs: Holy shit.
Lee: Right.
Jacobs: Pardon my language.
Lee: Family was concerned that something bad happened and something bad did indeed happen. But to Wilbert —
Rivera: Hmm.
Lee: — not Albert.
We were trying to use our library voices. But this, this was a shock, a self-inflicted gunshot to the head.
And I’m still pretty shaken up about Wilbert.
Jacobs: Yeah, I mean, it’s —
Lee: I mean, whether, I mean, to die violently either way, it’s your own hand or someone else’s.
Jacobs: It’s just a reminder, they talked so much about rumors in the family.
Lee: Right.
Jacobs: And how many of them end up being true.
Lee: It was starting to get late in the afternoon and the archive was closing soon. We’ve been trying to decipher all the scribbles on these century old death certificates when another clerk, an older man named John Fowler, who’d been listening in, started sniffing around for us.
So you just brought this back over and you think we identify what that says? What is that? What is the place of burial for Albert Jr.? What does that say?
John Fowler: Sweet Olive. Sweet Olive.
Lee: What is Sweet Olive?
Fowler: It’s the cemetery. It’s this African-American cemetery in Baton Rouge.
Lee: Thank you very much.
Fowler: Thank you.
Lee: Okay.
Jacobs: Okay. Okay.
Lee: Okay, let me just look this up. It’s about 15 minutes from here. Not far from the river. Wait, and apparently it’s Baton Rouge’s oldest black cemetery.
Jacobs: Mm-hmm.
Lee: We dug up some pretty troubling information for Adele and Desmond, but at least we had something important to share, something meaningful that might put some of the puzzle pieces back in place. We figured we were done for the day. We found exactly what we were looking for so we started to pack up. When John stopped us. There was one more thing, a new story about Wilbert.
Fowler: Yeah, here it is.
Lee: Oh, wow.
Fowler: It says, father-in-law, Negro shoots father-in-law, then suicides.
Lee: Wow.
Fowler: After shooting Theophilus Heidel, his father-in-law to death, W-A F-L-A-T-E-A-U-X calmly walked into the front of the store and in front of the people, shot himself.
Lee: Oh my goodness.
Fowler: Through his straw hat.
Lee: My goodness.
A suicide is one thing. A murder suicide is something else. This would have not only destroyed his life, but would have thrown every life connected to his into chaos. The land, the wealth, none of it would ever be passed down to the Flateau’s. Instead the Heidel’s, Wilberts in-laws, would inherit the Flateau birthright.
Wow.
Jacobs: They don’t know this history?
Lee: They don’t know this history. But they were always, their concern was how did these two brothers die in the same year? There’s all this good stuff happening, how? There’s something, she literally said yesterday, I have an eerie feeling something bad happened, but she doesn’t know just how bad.
Lee: We’ll be right back.
Act Three: Sweet Olive.
(PHONE RINGING)
Adele Flateau: Hello?
Lee: Hey Adele, how’s it going?
Adele Flateau: Okay.
Lee: Yeah. Where are you guys at?
Adele Flateau: We’re still in the basement of the city hall —
Desmond Flateau: Baton Rouge City Hall.
Adele Flateau: — city hall building with the old marriage and land records.
Lee: We asked Desmond if he could take out his phone and record the other end. You’ll hear us go back and forth.
Okay. So, we just left the state archives and we pulled over because we just had to call you because we found a lot of information that confirmed some of what you were thinking, okay.
Adele Flateau: Oh no.
Lee: Yeah. So —
Adele Flateau: Okay.
Lee: Yeah, you know, that feeling you had, I’m just gonna tell you about this, okay. We’re gonna start with Wilbert, okay. So we found —
Adele Flateau: Okay.
Lee: — a bunch of information. I just want to start with Wilbert.
Adele Flateau: Okay.
Lee: Okay, because this is kind of the most shocking. This is kind of the most shocking. So he died the same year as his, his younger brother Albert, right?
Adele Flateau: Right.
Lee: And so his cause of death is a pistol shot wound to the head.
Adele Flateau: What did I tell you?
Lee: Okay.
Adele Flateau: I knew it.
Lee: But it —
Adele Flateau: I knew there was something bad.
Lee: It gets worse from there, okay. So, it was suicide. He walked into his father-in-law’s store in front of customers and his wife and shot his father-in-law, Mr. Heidel twice.
Desmond Flateau: Wow.
Lee: He then walks to the front of the store and puts two bullets in his own head. There is an article that was written —
Adele Flateau: So it’s a newspaper article?
Lee: There’s a newspaper article that says, Negro shoots father-in-law, then suicides. Family troubles given as cause of trouble on Fanny Street. And Fanny Street is where his father-in-law had a store. So I’m going to read this to you.
After shooting, Theophilus Heidel, his father-in-law to death in a room to the rear of a store at 640 Fanny Street, W.A. Flateau walked calmly to the front of the store and in view of those passing on the street, pulled the trigger of his .38 caliber Colt automatic twice in rapid succession, resulting in his death with two bullets in his skull.
The bullets went through a straw hat that he was wearing. Flateau and Heidel were Creole Negroes from St. John Parish. Heidel, who was about 70 years old, dropped almost exactly where he was shot. Flateau, who was about 44 years old and who bore the reputation of a bad man in this country fell through a glass window in the front of the store.
Flateau, who is regarded as the most wealthy Negro in this section had been out of Baton Rouge since last Friday, where he had gone with his wife, we did not know. But she said there was nothing strange about that because it was her custom never to ask him. He came in about 1:00 Wednesday and accused the old man of meddling in his affairs and within a few minutes had fired the fatal shot.
Flateau walked through the store where Beatrice, his wife, was sitting and then, okay. It jumps to a different page. Those who saw the shooting say he appeared as though he was undecided just what to do and then turned and fired the two shots through his head. You were concerned about something bad happening and you were right.
Adele Flateau: Oh my God. Of course, we don’t know anything about this. This was never — never even heard any rumors or anything about this.
Lee: And you imagine that in the coming years after, um, Albert, Jr. dies, um, his son and his family find themselves without any money, but also this seems to maybe be a spark in some of this because by that point, Albert is already gone, um, that same year, just months earlier. And then this happens.
Adele Flateau: Well, it’s really, really shocking, but I — I’m just — I’m telling you for the last couple of years, I’ve been having a bad feeling about Wilbert. I can just say that. And I had no idea it would lead to anything like what you described, but, um, I’m just thinking, you know, I remember I was saying like all the men were just disappearing and, you know, dying young.
And it was just — I can imagine just that in itself, how much trauma that inflicted on the women in the family. And then, you know, uh, you know, the family structure, because when all the men are gone, it’s, you know, sort of a different dynamic going on.
Lee: Right. And then you have to also imagine he’s described as — as the wealthiest Negro in that part of the town. When he goes, all that money and all that wealth probably went with the Heidel’s.
Adele Flateau: Yes, because that’s right. The wife would have inherited whatever he had. You’re right.
Lee: Okay, so we got — we got some disturbing news about Wilbert that we found. And we did find some information about Albert Flateau, Jr. So we have his death certificate in our hands right now. And it appears he died from some — some sort of a pulmonary thrombosis.
So, natural causes. So, your grandfather died of natural causes. I know there was some concern about something bad having happened. It did to Wilbert, his older brother, but not to Albert Flateau, Jr.
Adele Flateau: Well, it was bad, but I get you, but it was not — it wasn’t from — yeah. And it says pulmonary thrombosis?
Lee: Yeah. Pulmonary some sort of — it looks like — it looks like thrombosis. So we — we’ve — we’ve had our hands full.
Adele Flateau: This is — this is more than I ever expected. I’m telling you, this is so tragic. I just felt like there was some kind of tragedy somewhere. Oh my God. I can imagine my dad, again, you know, you were asking me earlier or yesterday about how this may, you know, the whole family dynamic may have affected him. But imagine, you know, he might not have learned as a child, but I’m sure he found out, you know, what happened in the family because that’s a pretty big thing.
Lee: In the end, it wasn’t turmoil with a powerful white family like the Landry’s, but turmoil from within their own. It was an act of violence that would define generations to come. A brief moment that would undo everything this Black family had been able to build. Losing everything was just half the hell this family would face when their lives were shattered.
The other half would be in struggling to piece them back together again. This flash of violence sparked a debt that would be paid for most harshly by the women and children closest to these men.
Lee: For Black families, there has never been a safety net. Fate and fortune often hangs on a shoestring that’s fraying end to end. With their young patriarch dead and a fatherless widow deeply scorned, the Flateau’s would be forever split from their largesse, cast into the winds of poverty.
Sidney, who lost his dad earlier that year and without his rich uncle to be a father figure would likely suffer most. His mother would soon send him off for a life that she couldn’t provide him.
Lee: How are you — how are you — how are you feeling about everything you’ve learned?
Adele Flateau: I’m probably going to have nightmares. Oh boy. Oh my gosh. So all of this happened, I mean, for Mateo, this is like so dramatic.
Desmond Flateau: It’s heavy.
Adele Flateau: Very dramatic.
Lee: After these discoveries, we all needed a break. But before that, we had one more stop to make.
And well, guess what Adele, we found — I know something that was also very important to you. We found where your grandfather, Albert Flateau, Jr. is buried.
Adele Flateau: Wow. My goodness.
Lee: The cemetery is about 10 minutes from where you are right now. So should Max and I meet you over there?
Adele Flateau: Yeah, I think that’s a good idea. We’ll probably get there just before sundown or even it’s — can you text the address to us, Max?
Jacobs: Yeah, no problem.
Adele Flateau: For Sweet Olive, you said, right? Sweet Olive Cemetery.
Lee: All right. See you soon.
Adele Flateau: Alright guys.
Desmond Flateau: Alright, we’ll see y’all soon.
Lee: All right, so Sweet Olive Cemetery, circa 1850. We’re pulling in right now and — oh, this looks really old. Look at these tombs, look at some of these tombstones. Look at this. I mean, it’s — it honestly looks like it’s been almost abandoned, but also the nature of the way these plots are all jammed together. This looks like it’s the oldest black cemetery in the city. It really does. Let’s just pull over here and I don’t know how we would find.
Jacobs: It’s going to be a little tricky, I think, to find this.
Lee: Our guy at the archives was able to find us the exact row number where Albert, Jr. was buried. But once we’re here, there’s no obvious row numbers. There’s no obvious rows.
Jacobs: So it’s row eight, row eight, north plot 37.
Lee: It’s pretty messy, overgrown, uneven terrain. So it’s just us guys walking around, eyes scouring every yard of the place with Adele waiting on flatter ground.
I think the hard part is this cemetery has fallen in such disrepair that without knowing exactly where you’re going, it’s virtually impossible to find a grave. There are some that are literally caved in. There are some that are sinking into the ground. There are others that are knocked over and shattered. Some exposing literal coffins.
It’s starting to get dark and we realize that at least on this day, we’re not going to be able to find Albert, Jr.’s final resting place.
Desmond Flateau: I don’t know, there’s also a part of me that almost doesn’t want to find it. You know? Just not exactly know how I’m going to react in that very moment. But you know at the same time there’s also a part of me that’s like — that feels a need to definitively find it and, you know, just kind of continue to fill in those missing puzzle pieces.
Lee: We were in D.C. thinking about the Coakley’s.
Desmond Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: And this beginning of freedom and, wow, he bought this land and sold that and there’s the business and his fate was kind.
Desmond Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: The fate of the Flateau’s wasn’t as kind.
Desmond Flateau: Definitely not as kind. And, you know, these discoveries today definitely do help to, I think, further flesh out that picture that, you know, a lot of it was speculation. And it kind of comes with the territory when you, you know, you go through a lot of trauma. It’s not as readily shared as when there’s a lot of triumph.
Lee: It makes sense.
Desmond Flateau: It makes sense.
Lee: And also the newness of freedom and institution building and Black folks are accumulating things. They were doing that here, too, in Louisiana.
Desmond Flateau: Yeah.
Lee: The Confederacy, the former Confederacy, were building something. But then in a generation it snapped.
Desmond Flateau: Some of our family members.
Lee: Yeah.
Desmond Flateau: Yeah. To find out that, um, you know, Wilbert was one of the richest men in his part of town
Lee: They said the rich — they said the richest Negro.
Desmond Flateau: The richest, right. Yeah.
Lee: The wealthiest Negro.
Desmond Flateau: Far be it from me to understate, you know, what he was able to accomplish. But again, then it was almost like just like a blink of an eye almost, you know, in terms of time, like it was — where is it?
Lee: And how does a Black family at that time recoup? Right?
Desmond Flateau: Their margin of error is slim. Very slim. This is like the ongoing, um, just challenge that we face as people is how do you — how do you get a little bit of something and find a way to build upon that? Build that wealth and continue to carry it forward?
Lee: Building is one thing, holding it and maintaining it is a completely different thing.
Desmond Flateau: Completely.
Lee: We walk back over to Adele to capture the moment with a few photos and take a few more deep breaths.
Adele Flateau: Especially being here in this cemetery to know this is where my grandfather is, because I never knew where he was buried. And, uh, so that’s — it’s a — it’s a good feeling, you know, sort of — of completion or, you know, because he had such a short life. And to have him sort of like disappear from records and, you know, not really have much to document his life, one photo, you know. So this side was, you know, it was positive. Um, but finding out some of the other things was very, very heartbreaking.
Lee: It was a full circle moment separated by a century, if not for the tragedy and violence that happened here in Louisiana and one family’s crumbled fortune, this mother and son would not be. That little boy, Sidney, sent off with his mother’s greatest hopes and fears would become a man and find a future and reverse his family’s curse in a chance encounter with the great, great granddaughter of Gabriel Coakley.
Lee: And together, they would witness a new movement to take back what was stolen.
Rep. Ron Dellums: I would never forget the vision of fear in the eyes of Rollin, my friends, and the pain of leaving home. How do you compensate Rollin, six years of age who felt the fear that he was leaving his home, his community, his friend Ron. This meager $20,000 is also compensation for the pain and the agony. It is about how much pain was inflicted upon thousands of American people.
Lee: That’s next week on “Uncounted Millions.”
If you love the show and are excited for this series, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing “Into America” on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening right now. “Into America” is produced by Max Jacobs. Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez, Catherine Anderson and Bob Mallory are the sound engineers. Bryson Barnes is the head of audio production. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC audio and I’m Trymaine Lee. See you next Thursday for more of “Uncounted Millions.”