I don’t like genealogy.
Or rather, I don’t like it the way some people do.
In 2009, I began to dabble in it and uncovered an assortment of curiosities: a Swedish immigrant in the eighteenth century whose temper landed him repeatedly in court; a half-brother of my maternal grandfather whose rap sheet read like a discarded plot-line from Grand Theft Auto. Genealogy, at first, felt like voyeurism with footnotes.
Then, in 2013, I opened a private message on Ancestry.com from Sheldon Roy, the founder of the website “Early Colonial Families of Louisiana.” Sheldon was what you might call a professional genealogist—unpaid, but professional in the only way that matters: years of patience, rigor, and devotion to the evidence of existence. He had also been a friend of my late father. That was the real reason he reached out. And suddenly, I found myself pulled into channels I hadn’t imagined entering.
I began working in public libraries in 2015, and from 2021 to 2024 I served as an assistant in a genealogy collection. There were things I liked about the work—the uncovering of obscurity, the quiet pleasure of solving small mysteries, and the occasional realization visitors had that the past was not better than the present. Often it was harder. Sometimes it was cruel in exactly the same ways.
But there are limits to my liking of genealogy. I met people who do not stop digging. They cling to dates the way alchemists once clung to formulas, as if marriage records and death certificates might finally unlock the philosopher’s stone. Some do it for lineage societies; others for reasons harder to articulate. Everyone needs to belong somewhere. I became, almost by accident, the family genealogist myself—self-appointed, incurably narrative-minded, careless with dates, more interested in stories than proofs. The book I eventually compiled reflects that bias.
These days, I think less about branches and more about threads—those common and uncommon tensions that compose a life and give it shape.
Take Léandre François Roy.
My great-grandfather, three times over.
When the Civil War broke out, Léandre joined the 18th Louisiana Infantry as a private. He was captured and paroled in Alexandria in 1863, then rejoined another company of the same regiment. He remained in service until the Confederacy surrendered in 1865. The record shows a man who could not stay away.
Léandre was Acadian—descended from people expelled from British settlements in Canada for being too French, too Catholic, and for refusing to swear loyalty to the British Crown. He inherited a collective memory in which disloyalty meant removal. With his French name, his comfort in the French language, and probably a strong and strange accent, he already occupied a position of quiet suspicion in a moment when American loyalty was being policed aggressively. In such climates, there are only a few tolerable postures. One can leave. Or one can prove belonging.
Léandre proved it.
At the end of his life, the town of Mansura elected him mayor. He held the office briefly. Yellow fever took him within months. Among his children were two sons—Louis Pierre and Victor—who would inherit the same pressures of loyalty and coercion, and respond to them in entirely different ways.
Louis Pierre and Victor
If Léandre François Roy represents a man who could not safely refuse, his sons inherited something new: not freedom, exactly, but options.
Louis Pierre Roy responded to coercion by building insulation. Born in 1864, at the end of the war that had consumed his father, he devoted his life not to protest or retreat but to legitimacy. He became wealthy, entered politics, helped found banks, and established civic standing so solid it could not easily be challenged. He was a founding Grand Knight of the Knights of Columbus in Marksville. He served as a state representative. His name appears again and again in records that signal trust.
This was not ambition for its own sake. It was architecture.
Louis Pierre understood something his father could not have afforded to learn: that belonging could be constructed in advance. That if you built enough walls—religious, financial, institutional—you might never again be asked to prove loyalty under threat. Even the quiet Anglicizing of names in business records reflects this instinct. It was not denial of origin so much as translation. Frenchness could survive at home, in food and faith and memory, but respectability needed to speak the language of power fluently.
Louis Pierre did not refuse institutions.
He mastered them.
Victor Roy took a different inheritance from the same father.
Victor rose not through commerce or politics, but through education. He became president of the Louisiana State Normal School in Natchitoches—an institution charged with forming teachers, shaping citizens, and stabilizing civic life. Under his tenure, the Normal School grew into Northwestern State College. It was a role rooted in trust rather than visibility, stewardship rather than influence.
When Governor Huey Long attempted to coerce Victor into assisting with vote manipulation, the pressure was unmistakable. This was not abstract politics; it was command. Victor refused. There was no dramatic standoff, no public reckoning. Huey called in a favor. Victor was removed from his position.
This is where the family story breaks its own pattern.
Victor did not attempt to reclaim power. He did not seek vindication. He did not transfer his loyalty elsewhere in the political sphere. Instead, he settled quietly in Natchitoches and converted to the Baptist church. He became deeply devout, devoted to a new calling: to teach the Word. Victor withdrew from the arena where coercion had authority and placed himself inside a moral structure that did not answer to the state.
If Louis Pierre built the door, Victor measured the threshold—and stopped.
Edgar and the Cost of Visibility
Edgar Coco, my great-grandfather, belongs to the generation that inherited legitimacy already earned. He was a son-in-law of Louis Pierre Roy, having married Roy’s youngest daughter, Doris. By the time Edgar entered public life, the door Louis Pierre Roy built was open. Edgar did not need to translate himself into acceptability. He was welcomed as he was—Catholic, Cajun, charming, publicly joyful. He served as mayor of Marksville, befriended Earl Kemp Long, and was invited onto Long’s final gubernatorial ticket in 1959, the year my father was born. On the campaign trail, Edgar was applauded for his humor and his harmonica. He was photographed. He was liked.
This is not a small thing. Visibility is a form of permission.
And yet Edgar served only one term. He returned to the insurance business his father had established. What he carried privately never found a public language. He suffered from severe depression, treated it with alcohol, and died from cirrhosis of the liver. I do not know his politics. I do not know why he did not stay. What I know is that visibility—even when earned—extracts a toll. Edgar shows us that belonging, once granted, does not necessarily shelter the self. Sometimes it only exposes it.
Victor refused power and relocated his moral life.
Edgar accepted visibility and paid for it inwardly.
Both responses are understandable. Neither is reducible.
Fiction sometimes reaches what history cannot.
Burke and the Warning
Resonance in Fiction, Part I (The Neon Rain)
James Lee Burke begins The Neon Rain at Angola, with a man on death row waiting for the state to finish its work. Burke opens where refusal is no longer possible. Angola is not merely a prison; it is the terminal point of coercion, a place built on land once worked by the enslaved, where the state’s authority extends even over death.
Burke’s protagonist, Dave Robicheaux, stands perpetually near this edge. He is a man who refuses corruption again and again, but never leaves the arena in which it operates. He stays close to violence, to law, to punishment. His refusal is righteous, but it is also binding. Robicheaux knows the cost of saying no—and pays it repeatedly, in sobriety, solitude, and moral injury.
Burke offers no room of one’s own.
His warning is unrelenting: when refusal does not arrive in time, the state keeps the last word.
Robicheaux measures the threshold and remains standing in it.
Blackthorn: The True Outsider
Resonance in Fiction, Part II (The Signal Between Us)
Jeremy Blackthorn is the figure Burke does not allow himself to write.
Blackthorn is expelled from the New Orleans Police Department for refusing to ignore a case that would embarrass a powerful patron of the city. He is injured. He walks with a limp. He is not vindicated. Like Victor Roy, he does not appeal. He does not seek reinstatement. He accepts exile as a condition rather than an insult.
Unlike Robicheaux, Blackthorn does not remain in the building.
He becomes a private investigator not to fix the city, but to tell the truth about what it hides. He works the cases institutions avoid, not to restore order, but to preserve moral memory. His solitude is not theatrical. It is chosen. His outsider status is not a pose. It is jurisdictional.
Blackthorn occupies the space beyond the threshold—where refusal no longer needs permission, and truth no longer asks to be heard.
Closing Turn
Across these lives—historical and fictional—the pattern becomes clear. Léandre François Roy could not refuse. Louis Pierre Roy built insulation against coercion. Victor Roy withdrew entirely. Edgar Coco lived briefly in the open and suffered for it. Robicheaux warns us what happens when refusal comes too late. Blackthorn shows us what becomes possible when it arrives in time.
The measure was never how loudly they resisted, but where they stopped.
That was the measure of the threshold.
References
The disagreement between Huey Long and Victor Roy is noted in T. Harry Williams’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography Huey Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969) and discussed further in Richard D. White’s Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (Random House, 2006).
Edgar Coco’s relationship with Earl Kemp Long is treated in Kurtz and Peoples, Earl K. Long: The Saga of Uncle Earl and Louisiana Politics (LSU Press, 1990).
Dave Robicheaux appears in James Lee Burke’s The Neon Rain (Simon & Schuster, 1987).
Jeremy Blackthorn appears in The Signal Between Us: A Father/Daughter Discovery Story by Ashley Rovira and Griffin Wells (Heavy Crown Press, 2025).