When writer Terry O’Neal went looking for her ancestors on a genealogy website, she found a treasure trove. She unearthed over 35 DNA matches with the LeBleu family, among the earliest settlers of the “Neutral Strip” that once encompassed the Lake Charles area.
Among the ancestors she found in her genealogical research was James Alphonse, her third great-grandfather and the last surviving person formerly enslaved by Major J.C. LeBleu, a Calcasieu Parish police juror and Confederate veteran, according to Alphonse’s 1943 obituary.
According to that obituary, Alphonse was buried at a “negro cemetery in Chloe.” O’Neal’s search for that cemetery would lead her deep into the Calcasieu Parish woods — to her own roots and those of many others.
O’Neal has spent over two decades researching her genealogy. Her mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles were rooted in the Chloe community, and she knew long before coming across Alphonse of the racial split that separated her storied family.
The French pioneer Martin LeBleu is believed to have been the first to have settled along the English Bayou in the late 18th century, after his wife “took a fancy to the drooping cypresses and the majestic moss-hung oaks.”
LeBleu’s daughter, Catherine, married Charles Sallier, who built the first home in Lake Charles.
But O’Neal, who identifies as Creole, learned early on: “There was a divide between the Creole LeBleus and the white LeBleus.” Growing up, she says she always heard that the white side of the family “didn’t want anything to do with the colored side.”
Even in death, that separation remained.
Before new roads were built in the area, the white LeBleu cemetery sat straight across from the now-abandoned Chloe cemetery, where people of color — Black, Creole and Native American — were buried.
While the white cemetery was maintained, the Chloe cemetery all but vanished into the woods.
“The Chloe African-American Cemetery Preservation Association was birthed from my mission to restore, preserve and document those buried at Chloe,” says O’Neal, who founded the association earlier this year. “Not just for documentation purposes, but also for the descendants of those who are buried there.”
On her hunt for records, O’Neal found conveyance paperwork showing that Eulalie St. Mary, a landowner and herself a descendent of the area’s earliest settlers, dedicated a parcel of land “to the inhabitants of the Chloe neighborhood, to be used as a neighborhood cemetery” in 1904. The land became known as St. Mary Cemetery or, as some obituaries have shown, Chloe Cemetery.
O’Neal filed for stewardship of the cemetery with the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court in February, not long after she learned about it and, the following month, established her nonprofit to make it an official cemetery preservation organization, and to help with funding, she says.
She estimates it will cost at least $130,000 to get the cemetery, which sits about six miles outside of Lake Charles, right on English Bayou, up to standard.
“There’s a lot of unmarked graves here. A whole lot of them,” says Jed Duhon, who has been helping O’Neal clear the cemetery. Duhon is the Principal Chief of the Atakapa Eagle Band of the Four Winds Tribe Louisiana Cherokee Confederation, and says Black, Creole and Native people have lived (and been laid to rest) on this land “probably since the beginning of time.”
O’Neal is passionate about unearthing their stories. “I want their voices to be heard,” she says. “Because right now, they’re silenced.
Getting the almost impenetrable woods under control will be a careful process, as heavy machinery could damage unseen gravesites, Duhon says. “Some kind of way, we’re going to have to peel this first layer back slow.”
Gravesites like that of Debbie Randle, one of the last people believed to have been buried at the cemetery in 1990.
Her younger sister Margaret Miller Bryant remembers Ms. Randle as fiercely protective and a gifted seamstress, who was buried in a black dress that she sewed for herself.
“She could make anything,” Bryant tells The Current.
Although she never married or had children of her own, Randle deeply loved Bryant’s kids and would often take them to work with her at the Calcasieu Marine Bank in Downtown Lake Charles.
Even when Ms. Randle was buried in the 90s, the cemetery was already overgrown. Her family had to clear out a patch of tall grass to prepare her burial site, Bryant recalls, which used to be accessed via a dirt and shell road.
“No one ever kept it up over the years, it just got worse and worse. When I was a little girl, you could see a lot more of the graveyard closer to the road area,” Bryant says. “But now it’s [near] somebody’s driveway.”
Buried there are Bryant’s grandparents and possibly great-grandparents, but because the older graves had wooden markers, Bryant says, many of their exact burial locations have been lost to time.
Randle’s niece, Danielle Guillory, was six when she died and remembers her as a doting, loving “Nanny” who smiled with her whole face. Guillory says it was sad and hurtful to see what the cemetery was like when she went back to find Randle’s grave as an adult.
“I don’t even know the words to [explain] when you go there and you see the shape that it’s in. I just wanted to know where she was,” Guillory says. “Sobering, that’s the word. It really is hard to believe. It’s a lot for me to take in.”
Bryant, Guillory’s mother, returned to the cemetery in May for a community cleanup effort hosted by O’Neal. She hopes the cemetery can be fully restored so she can show future generations where their ancestors, including her older sister, are laid to rest.
“She was a person,” Bryant says. “She existed. She mattered to us.”
The next volunteer cleanup will happen Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 17 and 18, from 7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The cemetery is located at the intersection of Shane Rd. and E. Opelousas St. near the English Bayou.
“I can use a chainsaw and I’m going to help,” Duhon says. “We’re going to get this cleaned up, come hell or high water.”
