“In the 1970s, when busing began in the schools, the teachers were tasked with categorizing the students in their classrooms,” said Wendy Gaudin, 54, referring to the effort in some cities to desegregate public schools. Her Creole grandparents left New Orleans for California. As an adult, Ms. Gaudin returned and now teaches in New Orleans at Xavier University, the only Catholic school among the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. “I was categorized as a Native American, and my sister Roslyn was categorized as Caucasian, and my sister Leslie was categorized as a Pacific Islander.”
Professor Gaudin, who has written a book about identity in the Creole diaspora, described how this racial ambiguity could help Creoles when they confronted obstacles in a place that was not quite the promised land that they had hoped. When her grandparents found property in Los Angeles to build a home, they discovered that the neighborhood had a racial covenant excluding Black people. Her grandmother, who was “very, very fair skinned,” she said, went to the bank, paid the deposit and signed the papers. Then her grandfather, who was darker-skinned, built a house and they moved in.
“And nothing could be said, because the land was already theirs,” she said.
There were some who chose to live in their new hometowns as white people, or who simply lived that way because no one ever asked. This did not always involve explicitly creating a new identity; often, it involved simply moving away and keeping quiet.
One of those whose Louisiana Creole roots were unknown, at least to most around them, was George Herriman, who created the famed comic strip “Krazy Kat,” and who was assumed to be Greek by some of his associates. The Louisiana Creole heritage of Anatole Broyard, the influential New York writer and literary critic who wrote book reviews for The Times, was not publicly known until years after his death.
In 1946, Mr. Roudané’s grandmother filed to have the family surname officially changed — likely dropping the ‘z’ because it might tip the authorities off to his Creole heritage — and shortly after, her son was admitted to Tulane University, which at the time was all white. A few years after graduating, he moved to the Midwest and lived the rest of his life as a white man.