Creole home thrived without slaves

The modest house in the Lucy community on St. John the Baptist Parish's sparsely populated west bank has a story that is far different than the slave-and-master tales that some of its grander and often-visited neighbors offer.

St. John's first judge, Terence LeBlanc, built the French Creole home in 1820. LeBlanc's daughter, Adorea, a free woman of color, married Adolphe Sorapuru, a New Orleanian of French Basque descent. The couple moved into the house.

Until about five years ago, the Sorapurus' descendants lived there and worked on the surrounding 60 acres growing sugar cane, corn and vegetables.

The story of people such as the Sorapurus - free, middle-class people of color who owned land - is one that's often overlooked, descendant Jude Sorapuru said.

"You have your plantation owners, which we were not, and you have your slaves, which we were not," Sorapuru said. "We were kind of the in-between."Sorapuru, Adolphe's great-great grandson, and his family are trying to preserve the home he now co-owns with more than a dozen relatives. The house has been vacant about five years. It is in pretty good shape: It was repainted last year, and aside from some minor repairs, the Sorapuru clan doesn't plan any major renovations.

Last summer, the Sorapuru House was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Last month, the Sorapuru clan and its offshoots - about 300 strong - held a large family reunion and plaque-posting party on the home's grounds.

"I wanted to bring all the kids here to show them what life was like," Sorapuru said. "Unless you pass these things along firsthand, they'll get lost or trivialized."  Sorapuru, a retired educator and a history buff, was already interested in his family's past when a River Road Commission representative spotted the house and approached him about preserving it. Not long afterward, Sorapuru applied to have the home listed on the national register.

According to the state Division of Historic Preservation architectural historian Pat Duncan, who prepared the application, the Sorapuru House is one of less than a dozen surviving French Creole buildings in St. John Parish.

Among its distinguishing characteristics are 8-inch-thick "bousillage" walls, filled with mud and horsehair, and a hall-less floor plan, with large living rooms in the middle flanked by bedrooms on either side.

The simple, sturdy house also has some aesthetic extras, stylings that mark it as the home of a moderately prosperous family. For instance, inside the house are six sets of 10-pane French doors with glass so old it has started to slide downward. Four mantels are built in the Federal style, with layered shelves and paneled sides.

For now, Sorapuru wants to see that the house is preserved. He would like to see it opened someday for tours.

Most of Sorapuru's memories of growing up in the home are fond.

The yard is full of fruit and nut trees. The family grew all the vegetables it could eat, and would take the rest to the French Market in New Orleans on weekends to sell. Nothing went to waste.

Although Sorapuru looks back on those days somewhat wistfully, things weren't easy back in the days after the Depression.

The family's only source of cash was its regular vegetable- selling trips to the French Market. The family bartered food for almost everything the children needed - shoes, books, clothes.

The family was broke enough that when Sorapuru walks by the stove in the kitchen, he gets a twinge of pain, remembering the time the $2 in spending money his mother had given him slipped out of his pocket and into the fire.

Sorapuru earned his doctorate and became an educator, working in the New Orleans public school system and later becoming chairman of the Division of Education at Dillard University. Most of his siblings also became professionals, and the Sorapuru farmland was eventually leased to a neighbor.

Though he decided the farming life in Lucy wasn't for him, Sorapuru wants to preserve its memory for his descendants. He's seen firsthand what can happen when history is ignored.

On a recent trip to France, for instance, Sorapuru managed to get by with the French he picked up from listening to his parents, who spoke the language almost exclusively.

But for the most part, he and his siblings tuned out his parents' language.

"We wanted to be modern, so we spoke English," Sorapuru said. Now, he said, French is "a lost part of our culture. The sad thing is when you get older, and you find out you had a culture, and you can't find it anymore. I don't want that to happen to my kids."