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Welcome to my archived blog about The Black Russian

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Why "archived"?  Because I started it in 2012, a year before the book was published, in part to save some of the material I had to leave on the "cutting room floor" as I trimmed the 750-page manuscript to produce the final version, which was less than half that length.  I decided to archive the posts on my website because I think they contain useful (and I hope!) interesting information.

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When I was researching the book, I tried to find out about, and to describe in detail, all kinds of things related to Frederick Bruce Thomas's life and times. ("FT" became my shorthand reference to him after a while, especially for the benefit of my wife, son, and daughter--who patiently listened to my stories over the course of several years.)  Because I could not keep a lot of this really interesting material in the book, I am pleased to be able to share it here.  Much of my information about Coahoma County in Mississippi, where Frederick was born and lived in his youth, comes from two valuable books:  James C. Cobb's The Most Southern Place on Earth:  The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (Oxford, 1992); and Linton Weeks's Clarksdale and Coahoma County (Clarksdale, MS, 1982).

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1. Geography Can Be Fate

Slavery and its legacy inevitably loomed over Frederick Thomas’s origins. 

But there was another factor that was implicated—geography. 

FT was born in 1872 near Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi, in the northwestern corner of the state known as the Delta.  Despite the region’s name, it’s not the Mississippi river’s mouth, but its inland floodplain, and lies some three hundred miles upstream from the Gulf of Mexico.  Nonetheless, the Mississippi made the Delta what it was and affected everything that happened there, including how slavery developed. 

Together with its tributaries, the Mississippi, which is the fourth longest river in the world, drains much of the eastern two-thirds of the United States, from northern Minnesota to New Orleans.  For millions of years, as the winter snows melted upstream in the Mississippi’s vast watershed, the river regularly overflowed its banks.  These floods carried huge quantities of silt that was washed down from the areas drained by the river system, and as the floodwaters receded, the silt, together with abundant organic matter, was deposited over the floodplain.  (Or at least it used to be, before engineers started to build massive earthen levees along the river’s great length to try to keep it in its channel—a process that began before the Civil War.  As we know all too well, these levees fail at times and devastating floods still spread over hundreds of square miles on either side.)  This regular replenishing of the soil is what made the Mississippi’s floodplain one of the most fertile regions on earth, and why it has been called the “Nile” of North America. 

The weather in the Delta is the final ingredient in the area’s unique geographic mix.  Relatively mild winters, short springs and autumns, and long, hot summers allowed a rich variety of vegetable and animal life to flourish.  Cotton grew twice as tall in the Delta as in other areas of the South.  By the beginning of the Civil War, cotton constituted over half of total American exports and Mississippi alone produced one quarter of it.  English fabric mills got most of their cotton from the American South (a factor that would play into English support for the South during the Civil War—about which, more later).  By 1860, Coahoma and several other river counties nearby had become among the wealthiest in the entire United States. 

But the topography and climate of the area also made the land extraordinarily difficult to work. And all of the labor was carried out by enslaved black people.

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2. Geography and Human Settlement in the Delta, or How Human beings Can Reshape the Land

The Mississippi floodplain’s geography also determined how humans could settle in the Delta.  When, at the end of the spring floods, the river retreated into its channel, the water did not simply drop its load of nutrient-rich soil and disappear.  It lingered in countless interconnected swamps, lakes, and slow-moving streams—called “bayous” in the Delta--that segmented the generally low-lying region into patches of dry land interlaced with bodies of water. 

If one drives through Coahoma County today, it's hard to imagine what it looked like even a century ago, to say nothing of the years right after the Civil War.  All one sees outside the towns are vast expanses of nearly flat, cultivated fields that are interrupted occasionally by small growths of trees, by streams, and the rare, carefully circumscribed, lake or swamp.  However, in the 1860s and until the beginning of the twentieth century, Coahoma County was densely forested, with many trees soaring a hundred feet or more.  (As a result, locally harvested lumber would become the primary building material in the area as well as a major supplement to income from farming.) Amidst the trees were jungle-like growths of underbrush and cane, which made passage extremely difficult.  The swamps, lakes, and bayous further impeded travel by land, as a result of which water became the primary means of transportation throughout the nineteenth century.  Roads appeared slowly in the region, and the few that were built were often impassible because of flooding.  As late as 1908, a black postman traveling across Coahoma County had to ride through thick woods most of the way.  A trip of twenty miles could take as long as three days if the weather was bad and the road muddy.  He would sometimes have to cut a path for himself through fields and brush, and the effort could be so exhausting that he would need a fresh horse for the return trip.

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 3. A Thought About Independence Day and Black People During the American Revolution 

The New York Times ran an article on its front page yesterday (July 3, 2012) about the Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic organization that used to be notoriously racist, but that now accepts African-American women as members.  The article mentions that some 5,000 blacks fought on the colonists’ side during the Revolution, out of 400,000 whites.  Not all blacks did so willingly, although some did; and not all those who fought to win their freedom from slavery actually received it.  Nevertheless, today’s descendants of these men are justifiably proud of their ancestors.  But the article does not mention that far more black people chose the British side during the Revolution.  Why would they have done so?  Simon Schama in his Rough Crossings:  Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (2006) describes how tens of thousands of black people voted “with their feet for Britain and King George” during the Revolution because the last royal governor of Virginia had announced that any slave owned by a rebellious colonist who escaped and served the king would be freed.  Tens of thousands did so, fleeing to Nova Scotia, and unleashing one of the great exoduses in American history.  However, in the end, many were betrayed by the British and had to flee farther, to Sierra Leone on the coast of West Africa.

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4. Critters and People in Coahoma County, or What Life was Like in Frederick’s Childhood Home

Coahoma was one of several new counties formed in the state of Mississippi in 1836 from what had been Indian lands (the county name means "red panther" in Choctaw), but despite a rapid increase in settlers, its population was still sparse on the eve of the Civil War--a little over 6,000 people, of whom more than three-quarters were slaves.

Even in the later part of the nineteenth century, the Delta still looked like a wilderness and teemed with wildlife to an extent that is now difficult to conceive.  This made hunting and fishing the simplest way to provide meat for the table, for white and black people alike.  Colonel Robert Eager Bobo, a planter near Clarksdale, the Coahoma County seat, who claimed the distinction of being the first white to actually be born in the County, became nationally famous for his exploits as a bear hunter.  In 1869, the year Frederick’s parents started out as farmers in Coahoma County, he killed 304 bears, including one that weighed 711 pounds after being gutted.

However, not all forms of the abundant life in the Delta were prey for humans—the opposite was true as well.  The large areas of standing water and the hot climate created perfect breeding conditions for clouds of mosquitoes that appeared every spring, making whites who could afford it eager to leave the region for higher and cooler ground.  One planter’s wife complained that during the warmest months her baby son “rolls on the floor, scratches and screams every evening as if he would go crazy—he is as badly marked as one just recovering from the small-pox.”  Mosquitoes also brought malaria and yellow fever; water borne illnesses ravaged the Delta’s inhabitants as well.  Epidemics killed thousands in the nineteenth century, and the black population suffered most of all.

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5. Frederick Thomas's Birth Date, or The Challenges of Genealogy (Part 1 of 2)

This longer post (split into two parts so as not try the reader's patience too much--as well as to keep her/him reading!) illustrates some of the issues I encountered in my genealogical/historical research.  Assembling the information and correlating it was a fascinating task.  However, the resulting analysis was much too long and intricate to include in the final version of the book.

Information about Frederick Thomas’s birth date and parents has to be assembled from a variety of sources.  An important document is an oral autobiographical statement by Frederick that was written down in 1924 by an American consular official in Constantinople.  In it Frederick gives his birthday as November 4, 1869, says that his father’s and mother’s names were Lewis and India, and claims that she died when he was four or five years old, or in the 1870s.  However, U. S. Census data suggest that he was mistaken about the year of his birth and that it was closer to 1872.  Moreover, a number of documents preserved in the Coahoma County Courthouse in Clarksdale, Mississippi, dating from 1879 to 1890, prove that India was very much alive and still married to Lewis during this period.  Additional documents filed after Lewis’s death in 1890 refer to India as his widow, and several of these name Frederick as her son.  How can these discrepancies be explained?  One possibility is that the consular official in Constantinople made mistakes in what he wrote down; another is that Frederick misremembered when he was recollecting events from fifty years earlier.  However, this is more likely with regard to his birth date than to his mother’s name.  A third possibility is that Frederick misrepresented his relations with India for psychological reasons, possibly due to a dreadful event that occurred in the family’s life in 1890 (about which, more later).

The census enumerators who went through rural America to count heads in 1870 tried to be accurate but they made mistakes nevertheless.  In the case of Frederick Thomas’s family, the most striking error is that enumerators counted the family twice, on July 30 and September 5, and gave two different locations for their farm—Coahoma County and neighboring Tallahatchie County, both in northwestern Mississippi.  As multiple documents in the Coahoma County Courthouse prove, the Thomases in fact lived in the southeastern corner of Coahoma County.  However, because their farm was only half a mile or so from the border with Tallahatchie County, and because orienting oneself and traveling in that region was very difficult in 1870 and later (see my earlier posts about the heavily-forested, wet terrain, and the scarcity of roads), it appears that a census taker strayed over the county line in September and counted the family a second time.  Comparing the two 1870 records also shows how inaccurate the census process could be, as well as how casual people were about their ages at a time when paper records were scarce.  “Lewis” in the first record is spelled “Louis” in the second.  The parents’ ages differ by a few years—“Lewis” is “36” while “Louis” is “33,” his wife is “34” and “32.”  A child, nine-year old “Darby” in the first is “Yancy” in the second; John is “8 months” old on July 30 and “6 months” on September 5;  Kate is “5” years old in the first but does not appear at all in the second (in this instance it is also possible that she died between the two enumerators’ visits).  By contrast, “William” in Coahoma is likely “Wilmer” (the handwriting is unclear) in Tallahatchie, but is consistently “3” in both.  The Coahoma enumerator splits the family in two and gives them two houses, but the Tallahatchie enumerator does not.  These differences might also have been the consequence of the regulation in 1870 that allowed federal enumerators to ask anyone who was over twenty years old at a given property for information about everyone else who lived there.  This information could have come as readily from a hired hand as from a family member. 

However, the redundancy of the two 1870 records is also very useful because it makes possible the verification of two important bits of information.  The first is that neither of the 1870 records mentions Frederick, who claimed that he was born in 1869 and should therefore have been listed.  This is strong evidence for his actually having been born after September 1870.  Confirming this conclusion is the baby in the family.  If John was between 6 and 8 months around August of 1870, then he must have been born between December of 1869 and February of 1870.  This means that his mother could not have given birth to Frederick in November of 1869 as well.  Furthermore, Frederick was still referred to as a “minor” in a court document dated 4 June 1891, which means that he was younger than twenty-one on that date and therefore born after 4 June 1870.  The second important fact is that both 1870 records list a woman in the family named Hannah, not India. (to be continued)

6. Frederick Thomas's Birth Date, or The Challenges of Genealogy (Part 2 of 2)

The 1880 U. S. Census suggests a way to resolve the discrepancies involving the year Frederick was actually born and what his mother's name was (see previous post) . 

On June 5 of that year, an enumerator visited the Thomas farm in Coahoma County and noted that Lewis Thomas was the head of the household; but now he was married to a woman whose name reads either “Juda” or “Inda” (the census-taker’s handwriting is unclear).  They have three sons, one of whom is “Fredrick,” eight years old (thus indicating a birthday in 1872), while the others are “Yancy” and “John”; there is no “Kate” or “William.”  Given what Frederick said in 1924, “Juda/Inda” is clearly the census taker’s mistake for “India,” much like the other mistakes in names that appeared in the 1870 records.  Thus, a plausible conclusion is that Hannah was Lewis’s first wife and that after she died at some point between 1870 and 1880, he married India.  As I mentioned before, this region of Mississippi was in fact notorious for its recurring epidemics of yellow fever that killed tens of thousands of people throughout the nineteenth century (especially virulent ones swept through in 1873, 1878, and 1879), so it is hardly surprising to find major changes in families between the two censuses.  Frederick’s remarks in 1924 about his mother’s death were thus probably about Hannah.  This supposition is confirmed by additional census data, which indicates that Hannah was Frederick’s birth mother and India his stepmother.  This follows from the notation that Frederick’s mother was apparently born in Maryland (once again, the handwriting is unclear), which matches Hannah’s birth state as indicated in the 1870 census, but not India’s Alabama, as noted in the 1880 census.  In fact, the mother’s birthplace for all of the children in both censuses is given as Maryland.  (Lewis’s birthplace is consistently Virginia.)  If Frederick’s age was indeed “8” on June 5, 1880, then his mother, Hannah, must have died at some time after June of 1872, which puts a possible early limit on when Lewis might have married India.  However, because “8” was probably the enumerator’s, or little Frederick’s, or someone else’s best guess at his age rather than a precise determination, Hannah might have passed out of Lewis’s life closer to 1870 or a bit later than 1872.  None of this correlates with Frederick’s recollection in 1924 that his mother died when he was four or five, which would mean 1876 or 1877, if one accepts the census data.  However, he may simply have misremembered the timing of events that had occurred decades earlier.

The difference in children’s names between the 1870 and 1880 censuses also needs to be explained.  Assuming that the second enumerator in 1870, who visited the Thomas farm in September, did not simply omit Kate, it would appear that she died young.  William was three years old in 1870 and does not appear in 1880, which means that he also probably died.  John was eight months old in 1870 and is ten years old in 1880, which correlates well.  As for “Darby/Yancy” who was “9” in both 1870 records, he reappears as eighteen-year-old “Yancy” in 1880, which suggests that this was his actual name and is reasonably consistent in terms of age. 

Determining the actual date of Frederick Thomas’s birth is complicated by other documents.  In his eight applications for American passports between 1896 and 1921 when he was in Europe, Frederick (as he always spelled his first name when he wrote it himself) gave dates in the 1860s, albeit differing ones—15 November 1863, 4 November 1868, 15 November 1868, 4 November 1869 (some of these are likely transcription errors made by consular clerks when they copied details from an old passport to issue a new one, such as an “8” being misread as a “3” and leading to the eccentric birth year of “1863”).  I chose November 4th as Frederick’s birthday because it is the day and month he gives in what are probably the three most reliable documents extant:  his first application for a passport, which he made in Paris in 1896, when he was younger and presumably remembered his past more accurately;  his passport application in Constantinople in 1921, when it was crucial for him to receive American recognition;  and his autobiographical statement from 1924, on which his future livelihood, safety, and family’s well-being depended.  “1872” is dictated by the age given in the 1880 census and by John’s birth, which makes it impossible for Hannah to have given birth to Frederick in 1869.

This means that November 4, 2012, will be the 140th anniversary of Frederick Bruce Thomas's birth.  I should organize a party!

Unraveling details like this in his life is part of what made working on his biography absolutely fascinating and very addictive:  the more I learned, the more little strands of information I found and connected, the more I wanted to search.

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7. How Slaves Reacted to the Emancipation Proclamation

Throughout most of the Delta and the South, the institution of slavery started to collapse right after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 and while the Civil War was still being fought.  Despite the brutal efforts of whites to maintain control over their slaves, many blacks rebelled against overseers and masters, refused efforts to evacuate them, seized livestock and other property, and escaped to areas occupied by Union troops.  It is easy to imagine that when news of their emancipation reached Frederick Thomas’s parents, Lewis and Hannah, they, like most blacks, erupted with joy.  An observer in one Delta community recalled that the former slaves “got together and laughed and sang and danced all night rejoicing”; another wrote, “they jumped and hollered and carried on something terrible.  The boys in blue came by to excite them even more.”  One old black woman who had been punished by her white owner for refusing to work by being forced to sit on an ant-infested log jumped off and began to run around “shouting and hollering” when she learned that slaves had been freed.

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8. Revelations continue about racist mistreatment of black soldiers in WW II

The New York Times had yet another article yesterday, July 23, 2012, about the hideous racism to which black troops were subjected during the Second World War--this time while building the crucial highway from the lower 48 to Alaska.  This was a very rushed effort because of US fears of a Japanese invasion of Alaska following Pearl Harbor (which of course was paralleled by the wartime internment of Japanese Americans).

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9. Slaves Writing About Themselves

The Huffington Post published an article on August 2, 2012, about a cache of letters that the Kentucky Historical Society acquired that were written by slaves before the Civil War, as well as some letters written by former slaves after the war.  As I commented on The Huffington Post, this is an amazing discovery because, as is well known, writings of any kind by American slaves are very rare: whites systematically tried to keep slaves illiterate to make them easier to control.

I'd love to read these letters--perhaps they'll be transcribed and posted on the internet some day. That some of the letters written after the war apparently originated in southern Mississippi makes them even more interesting for me.  Frederick Thomas's parents became very prominent in Coahoma County, for multiple reasons, and even though this is in the northwestern corner of the state, who knows how far their fame spread.

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10. Visiting the Delta and the Blues

Nice article in The Root today (August 3, 2012) entitled "Rolling Down the Blues Highway: Enjoy Mississippi's musical history by visiting spots like the Delta Blues Museum and Po' Monkey's juke joint."  As I commented in a post following the article, there's another well-known place in the area to hear blues now--the Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the seat of Coahoma County, which is in the middle of the Delta blues country. It's next door to the Delta Blues Museum, has scheduled performances, and even has rooms to stay above it. One of the owners is the famous actor Morgan Freeman (he was also part owner of a very good, upscale restaurant in Clarksdale called Madidi, which unfortunately closed recently). The musical traditions of Coahoma County of course predate the appearance of the blues. And one of Coahoma's most famous sons was my subject, the remarkable Frederick Bruce Thomas, who was born near Clarksdale in 1872, and who went on to run variety shows with lots of music in Moscow, and was the first to import jazz to Constantinople.  There is evidence that his commitment to different kinds of music began during his childhood in the Delta.

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11. The Civil War is Not Entirely Over in Mississippi

AP published a good article today (August 17, 2012) about the troubled legacy of the Civil War in Mississippi.  A visible sign of this legacy is the Mississippi state flag, which incorporates the Confederate battle flag, and which voters in a referendum a decade ago decided to keep.  Even the preferred Southern designation--"War Between the States"--is an echo of the divide that persists in how that war is viewed, especially in terms of why it was fought.  The well-known historian David Blight has written about this and the kinds of revisions to which the events of 1861-1865 were subjected in the later part of the 19th century, which generally elided the issue of slavery and ennobled the image of the South.  We live with the consequences of the Civil War to this day, and these do not seem to be fading; on the contrary.

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12. Incredible Efforts by Owners to Preserve Slavery During and After the Civil War

We do not know exactly what Frederick Thomas's parents and family experienced during the Civil War, which brought great destruction to Coahoma County.  However, as Cobb (reference in first post below) and other historians have described, Union armies blew up levees, which allowed the Mississippi to flood some areas that had been farmland; burned and looted plantation mansions and slave cabins alike; drove away horses and other livestock; and confiscated cotton and other crops.  When some slave owners heard that Union troops were approaching, they tried to preserve their property as best they could by forcing their slaves into the forests and swamps and hiding them.  Even when the war ended, some planters were still so wedded to slavery that they tried to conceal from the blacks on their estates that they had been freed.  One ex-slave from a Coahoma County plantation who was interviewed in the 1930s recalled that he and his fellow slaves did not know that they had been freed for four years after the end of the war.  Another from neighboring Bolivar County said it took three years for ex-slaves to discover that they were free.  In all these cases, the ex-slaves had been forced to work by their former masters as if emancipation had not been proclaimed and the South had not been defeated.

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13. The Slaves' Backbreaking Labor in the Delta, or What Frederick's Parents Did Before 1869 (Part 1)

Hardly anything is known about the lives of Frederick Thomas’s parents, Lewis and Hannah, before 1869, except for what they had in common with other enslaved blacks in the Delta.  The life of a slave in this region was harder than in many other places in the South.  The amount of labor the land required to prepare it for planting, the longer annual agricultural cycle in the warm climate, the great financial investment that many planters made in land and slaves in the remote location, and the eagerness of the planters for quick profits from spectacular crops—all caused them to drive their slaves especially hard.  On new plantations in the Delta on the eve of the Civil War, slaves spent the winters splitting rails for fences, building cabins, clearing new ground and digging ditches.  Bad weather did not stop them.  When spring came, slaves first had to plow the land and then plant the cotton and corn, notwithstanding any delays caused by floods.  If there was spare time from this labor or from hoeing the rows, they spent it continuing to cut cane and clear the land.  Cotton picking would begin in summer and could continue as late as January, thus completing a yearly cycle of backbreaking work.  Summer heat would bring attacks of fevers that could strike down many field hands, but those who could stand would have to fill in to gather the harvest.  Field work was done by both sexes and all ages, except for the very youngest and the oldest and most decrepit.  Additional chores would include slaves working on their masters’ and their own food supplies, such as preparing salt pork.  On one occasion, slaves of a prominent planter were recorded as slaughtering thirty-seven hogs by eight in the morning, and finishing butchering and salting all the meat by midday.  If slaves displeased the white overseers, they could be whipped.

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14. The Slaves' Backbreaking Labor in the Delta, or What Frederick's Parents Did Before 1869 (Part 2)

Frederick was raised by his stepmother, India, who may have been a domestic slave because she was literate.  (She was also a remarkably determined and independent woman, as her later life showed.) But domestic slaves did not necessarily have it any easier than field hands.  As Cobb mentions in his book (reference below in first post) a rich planter’s wife recorded in her diary the daily schedule that her slave Mary had to follow.  Before her own breakfast Mary had to milk fourteen cows, prepare breakfast for the masters and some of the other servants, clean the house, make the beds, wash the dishes, and nurse her own infant.  Then she had to clean the kitchen, prepare a big midday meal for the household, wash up, clean the dining room, launder and hang a large pile of clothes, tend to her child, and clean the kitchen, after which she was finally able to go to bed.

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15. The Detective, or How I Researched The Black Russian (Part 1)

When I first came across a reference to a “Russian” black man named “Tomas” [“Томас” in Cyrillic] who owned a nightclub in Constantinople (about which more later), this was such a surprise and seemed so unlikely that I immediately wanted to know more.  Like anyone who needs a quick answer to a new question, I started by Googling.  But what little popped up mostly repeated what my original source had said.  Then, a keyword search of library collections turned up Allison Blakely’s pioneering book, Russia and the Negro, which had two paragraphs on “Thomas,” as I discovered his surname was spelled in English, and cited several other sources that eventually, after various twists and turns, proved invaluable.  From these I learned that Thomas may actually have been an American, and that his first name was “George” (which was incorrect, as I discovered only later).  But by this point, I was hooked; I had become obsessed with discovering the truth about a man long dead and largely forgotten. 

No detail was too small to pursue because I never knew where a particular strand might lead.  This is how I found one of Frederick Thomas’s grandchildren in Paris.  I never expected anything like this, and my discovery showed me that without chance and luck even the most diligent researcher could fail to get very far.  When I look back on the chain of unlikely coincidences that led to my meeting Frederick’s grandson, I still feel surprised and incredulous. (To be continued, of course!)

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16. The Detective (continued), or How I Researched The Black Russian (Part 2)

One of Blakely’s sources (see The Detective, Part 1, above) was an article in a Russian émigré newspaper published in New York in the 1960s that contained some vivid reminiscences about Thomas by two Russians who had worked for him in Constantinople more than forty years earlier.  Both also mentioned that Thomas had a son, “Mikhail,” who had been born in Moscow, and who was “now” living and singing “Negro folk songs” and Russian gypsy romances in nightclubs in Paris.  In the article, “now” meant 1965, whereas I read this in 2006, and it was unlikely that Mikhail would still be alive forty years later.  I searched published sources and the internet, but failed to find anything about him.  I then tried running an ad in a Russian émigré newspaper that is still published in Paris in which I asked anyone who might have known Mikhail or anything about him to contact me.  Nothing came of this either.  I had run out of ideas and was about to give up when I decided to email an acquaintance in Paris, "L.," an American who has lived there for years and knows a lot about movies and, as it also happens, about the Russian émigrés who lived in the city between the World Wars.  L. replied that he had never heard of Mikhail Thomas or his father, and I decided that I had reached the end of this particular thread.  Then, a couple of days later, I got another email from L.  By “the sheerest chance,” as he put it, “I have found a lead in your Fyodor Tomas mystery.”  A Russian friend of L.’s had just given him a book by a man named Konstantin Kazansky entitled Cabaret russe (“Russian Cabaret”) and “my” Thomas, as I had begun to think of him, “figures prominently” in it.

The book had been published in Paris in 1978 and was out of print, but the internet made it easy to order a used copy from a French book dealer.  Cabaret russe did indeed contain a series of revealing and intriguing references to Thomas, although the author did not know either Thomas’ real first name or his actual origins.  I was especially excited to discover that at the end of his book, Kazansky thanked “Michel (Mike) Thomass,” as he spelled the name.  This meant that Kazansky had known Frederick’s son personally and gotten information directly from him.  The book also revealed that Kazansky was a Bulgarian musician who had arrived in Paris in 1971, when he was a young man.  He could certainly still be alive thirty-five years later and I resolved to try to find him.  An online telephone and address directory for Paris gave not one but two listings for him. (To be continued, of course!)

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17. The Detective (continued), or How I Researched The Black Russian (Part 3)

In my last “Detective” post--in which I began to describe the unlikely chain of coincidences that led to my finding Frederick Thomas’s grandson--I ended with my decision to contact Konstantin Kazansky in Paris, a man who had known Frederick’s son, Mikhail, and who had written about Frederick in a book about Russian cabarets.

Here I paused.  I did not want to risk calling Kazansky without warning because I had no idea what kind of person he was or how he would respond to my inquiry.  And since I had failed to find an email address for him, I decided to write to him in the old-fashioned way, on paper.  To be safe, I sent letters to both addresses that I found in an online French telephone directory and wrote them in Russian because I assumed that since he had described Russian émigré milieus in his book, he could at least read the language; it was also easier for me to write in Russian than in French.  I explained who I was and asked if he had any additional information about Mikhail, Michel, or Mike Thomas (he used all these forms of his name), or about his father, Frederick, beyond what he had mentioned in his informative book.  I also said that I was going to be in Paris in another month and a half and would be very grateful if he would agree to meet with me.

Several weeks passed without reply.  I was getting increasingly apprehensive about losing the only lead to Mikhail that I had found, so I decided to call Kazansky.  Cold calling a stranger in the United States can be unpleasant enough; doing so long distance to France is even more unnerving.  I was running through what I was going to say when on the third ring a cultivated woman’s voice answered in French; I gave my name and asked if I might speak with Monsieur Kazansky.  When he came to the phone, I began to explain that I had written to him several weeks ago and that I hoped that he did not mind my calling.  To my relief, he proved to be a friendly and easy-going man who apologized and explained that he had not yet had a chance to reply but was happy to speak with me even though he had little to say about the Thomases beyond what he had written about them.  At that point, we switched to Russian, which he spoke fluently (my French is functional but not fluent).  We agreed that I would call him when I got to Paris so that we could arrange a meeting. 

And then he mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that Mikhail Thomas, who had died in the 1980s, had a son in Paris who had been married to the famous French lingerie designer Chantal Thomass. 

This casual remark was the link to all that followed.   (To be continued!)

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18. The Detective, or How I Researched The Black Russian (Part 4)

In my last post, I described how in 2006 I found a lead to Frederick Thomas's descendants, who appeared to be living in France.  The key detail I had learned from my informant in Paris was that Frederick had a grandson who had been married to a woman named Chantal Thomass, a designer of women's clothing. 

I again began to scour the internet.  Chantal Thomass proved to be very prominent, and famous especially for her pricey line of playful women’s lingerie--a kind of upscale Victoria’s Secret.  She has a flagship store on Rue Saint-Honoré, one of the most famous shopping streets in Paris, as well as boutiques in many other fashionable locations and cities around the world.  The signature look for which she is famous is called “dessous dessus” in French, which is the reverse of the usual expression for “upside down” and means something like “what is beneath is on top.”  It refers to wearing what might look like undergarments as (provocative) outer clothing. 

There were several biographical sketches of Madame Thomass on the internet from which I learned that after her divorce she kept the surname of her ex-husband, Bruce.  This, I realized, must have been the man my Paris informant had in mind:  I had actually found Frederick Thomas's grandson!  I also realized that Bruce spelled his surname with two letters “s” because of French pronunciation rules:  with only one “s” the name would be pronounced “Thoma.”  The Thomas family surname had thus made an elaborate journey from the American Deep South, to Russia, and then to Turkey before finally settling in France.  I imagined that this would have pleased Frederick himself very much. 

At this point, my own confusion over dealing with foreign online sources almost ruined the rest of my search.  I misunderstood the address I found for a Bruce Thomass in the Paris directory because I thought that it was for a drugstore, which seemed a very improbable occupation for the man I was trying to find (it proved to be for a minor business sideline of his).  I concluded that I found the wrong man and so again reverted to paper and the mails.  I wrote in French to Mme Thomass at the two addresses that I had found for her—one was her business office in Paris and the other the flagship store—as well as to a grown daughter, who lived in the French countryside and whom I also found in the online directory.  By this point, my trip to Paris was only two weeks away and I asked both women, if they would be so kind, to pass on my request for a meeting to Bruce, assuming that he was the right man and that they were in touch with him.

I had not gotten a response from either of the women when I left for the airport, and was prepared for the worst.  I could easily imagine that my letters might have seemed too eccentric to warrant a response, especially from a prominent businesswoman who probably got lots of crank mail.  I also had no backup plan except to go to what I thought was the drugstore in Paris and that might have some sort of connection to the man I was looking for.  But luck intervened once again.  As soon as my plane landed and I was able to check my email and voicemails in the United States, I found several messages from Bruce Thomass himself expressing his eagerness to meet me.  All my letters had been passed on to him.  I imagine that he must have been as curious about me and my unlikely quest for information about his grandfather, as I was about him.

(To be continued!)

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19. The Detective, or How I Researched The Black Russian (Part 5)

In my last “Detective” post I described how I succeeded in contacting Frederick Thomas’s grandson in Paris, and how I received messages from him expressing his interest in meeting me.  He gave me his telephone number and I called him to set up a meeting.

Monsieur Thomass lives in one of the best districts of Paris, in an elegant, high-ceilinged apartment decorated with elaborate white molding.  When he opened the door, I saw a casually dressed, good-looking man with a charming manner who was about the same age as I am.  I would have found it difficult to say where he was from—Southern France, Italy, somewhere else on the Mediterranean?  He spoke only French.  Over the course of the next several hours and a lunch in a nearby restaurant, he told me the story of his grandfather, as it had been handed down orally in his family.  He kindly allowed me to use a voice recorder and generously gave me photocopies of several documents pertaining to his grandfather that happened to survive the great upheavals the family had endured during the past eighty years. 

And the story he told me was absolutely incredible:  he said that the man I was pursuing actually came from New Mexico; that he was a member of the native American “Tomac” tribe, and also had African-American and white ancestry; that he had gone to sea in Vera Cruz, Mexico; become a commercial seaman in Rotterdam, then a smuggler in the South China Sea; and that he got to Russia after he saved the life of a rich Russian in a bar in Shanghai! 

This is the story--and there were other episodes and details that were equally fantastic--that Bruce had heard repeatedly as a child from his father, Frederick’s son, Mikhail, when he was growing up in Paris.

It was a bright and unseasonably warm day in early November 2006 when I left Mr. Thomass’s apartment.  The low angle of the afternoon sun seemed to make the misty air glow above the Paris rooftops and softened the lines of distant vistas.  I had so much new information to digest that I felt rather dazed as I walked down the sidewalk, past a series of elegant shop windows with expensively garbed mannequins.  It had also been a strain to speak nothing but French for hours.  A café appeared before me and I took refuge in it so that I could savor what I had just learned.  “My” Thomas was beginning to take on flesh, and his life to emerge out of nonbeing. 

But about which Thomas had I heard?  At that time in Paris, I did not know what "my" Thomas's first and middle names actually were.  And the fascinating story that Mr. Thomass had told me about his grandfather’s early life pointed in entirely different directions from what I was beginning to discover and subsequently was able to confirm.

(To be continued!)

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20. The Detective, or How I Researched The Black Russian (Conclusion)

In my last post, I described how I met Frederick Thomas’s grandson in Paris, and how the family history he told me diverged from what I had begun to discover during the early stages of my research. 

Indeed, it emerged from what Bruce Thomass said that he did not know his grandfather’s real first name, or that his own first name had been his grandfather’s middle name, or that it was also the name of a half uncle whom he had never met and about whom he knew next to nothing. 

I would discover all this myself only months later, when I began to search for information about Frederick Thomas in the National Archives in Washington, D. C., and especially in the National Archives and Records Administration facility (NARA II) in College Park, Maryland.  The numerous documents that I eventually found in these and several other archives and libraries in the United States and abroad portray a man whose life differed markedly from that preserved in the Thomass family’s oral tradition, especially with regard to the first thirty years of Frederick’s life.  Nevertheless, because this family tradition did not emerge out of thin air, but reflects how someone in that family—most likely Mikhail, Frederick’s son—wanted its history to be remembered, the oral history remains important, telling, and psychologically revealing. 

By this early point in my research, I also began to realize that my yearning to learn as much as I could about Frederick Thomas reflected on me and who I was.  At first glance, there is little that I have in common with him.  But as a near-émigré living in the United States (I was three when I arrived on these shores) who feels a mixture of nostalgia for, and alienation from, the irretrievably lost and troubled past of my parents’ Russian homeland, I feel sympathy for Frederick—a black American in Russia looking over his shoulder across the years that separate him from his long lost and racially troubled birthplace.  Frederick Thomas felt at home in Russia, as I do in the United States.  But could he have felt that he fit completely?  Do I? 

What I would not give to be able to talk with him for just one hour.