The Lost Violin

This chapter focuses on the evidence that suggests that Edmond Dede struggled to get by in the last years of his life. By 1897, when his son Eugene's daughter was born, three generations of Dedes were living together at 48 rue Liancourt. The arrangement lasted a few years, until late 1900 when Dede entered the Hospital Necker for Sick Children, the hospital nearest to their home. There, at the age of seventy-three, he died. This happened on January 5, 1901. His death certificate lists him as the son of “Bazile Dede and of Jeanne Marie Louise Dupre, deceased spouses,” a last elision of identity. No announcement of his death appeared in the Paris papers or in the Bordeaux newspapers most likely to have carried it. He had been forgotten by the bordelaise public long before.

City of Dust

This chapter argues that in neither of the profiles appearing in the Bordeaux does Dede claim to have matriculated at the Conservatory of Paris, but he does identify his teachers. The musicians he named lend weight to the possibility that his talent caught the attention of the faculty. To the author of an article, which appeared in L'Artiste de Bordeaux, Dede named three faculty members with whom he studied in Paris in the late 1850s. He began with the composer Adolphe Adam, who died the same year, but not before recommending Dede to the composer Jacques-Fromental Halévy. Meanwhile, in 1855, a year before Dede began studying with him, Eugene Delacroix wondered how the man got any work done.

A Family Long Free

This chapter argues that no family embodies the anomalous history of New Orleans better than the Dede family. Of all the towns and cities in North America with populations of free African Americans, the chapter goes on to argue, New Orleans was the city most likely to have produced a black man like Edmond Dede—possessed of enough talent, ambition, and training to launch himself up to a high level of accomplishment. Only in New Orleans could African American families trace their family's history back beyond 1864, the year the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. Contrary to later reports that Edmond Dede was the son of West Indian refugees, he in fact belonged instead to a long-established family with roots in North America.

City of Song

This chapter illustrates how Dede was unlikely to have made common cause with the poor migrants who were black or mixed race passing through or settled in Bordeaux. By the time he moved to the Folies-Bordelaises, mixed-race people perhaps did not associate him with a spirit of adventure. But whatever prejudice Dede confronted in France paled in comparison to what he would have experienced back in New Orleans. He had steady employment as an orchestra leader throughout the 1860s–1880s, perhaps not in the professional milieu he would have preferred, but he competed against French musicians for jobs and won them. Popular music has always been popular chiefly among the young; growing older, then, cannot have been easy for him, as styles changed and the imperative of keeping up with the public's taste required a young person's energy.

City of Sound

This chapter chronicles a time when Dede worked as a cigar roller in the day time while he dedicated himself to his avocation at night. In this period between his return to New Orleans in late 1851 and his departure for Europe, he published a song, “Mon pauvre coeur” (“My poor heart”). It was a melodie, a form of art song most closely associated with Hector Berlioz and Charles Gounod and similar to the German lieder of Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. The printed song makes it among the oldest, if not the oldest, published music by an African American. We can conclude from the song that Dede was composing stately melodies for a white and black audience at a time when most music lovers were responding to more lively, foot-tapping kinds of songs.

Lost

This chapter discusses how the free people of color in New Orleans pointed to Edmond Dede as an example of what African Americans could achieve if given opportunities like the ones he found in France. To his death, Creoles of color thought Dede was so unusually accomplished for an American black man that they elevated what little they knew about his life in France to the level of drama. Problems for the historian start with the realization that although the reports about his life were certainly exaggerated by his friends and admirers, some of the enhancements came from Dede himself. For those who seek to understand his opportunities and choices within their historical context, the process of separating fact from wishful thinking awakens a sympathy for the man who risked all and mustered the resources to act on his dreams.

City of Exile

This chapter details how other immigrants, like Edmond Dede, became seemingly out of place in Bordeaux. In late January 1864, Dede was putting the dancers through their paces in the Grand Theatre. The chapter describes how Madame Isaac Louverture at the same time was sitting in her room two blocks away. Over toward the river, at that time, Clarendon Davisson was finishing his letters. Closer to the Grand Theatre, Camille Thierry was sitting in a cafe with friends. Although it is hard to believe that any one of them would have called Bordeaux, much less France, home, the evidence of their actions and the choices they made suggest that the meaning of “home” had shifted since they had been in their native lands.

Found

This chapter explains how the contradictory forces of invisibility and conspicuousness that worked incessantly upon dark-skinned black men and women living in societies dominated by European cultural values shaped Edmond Dede's interactions with the people he encountered. They defined people's expectations of him and provoked him to adopt strategies to evade those forces. He may not have prospered to the extent or in the way that he would have preferred to, but in the end the people who used him as an index of their hopes were right to do so. Conspicuousness was a permanent quality of his life in an overwhelmingly white society. Likewise, because his skin color consistently drew the attention of white, black, and mixed-race observers away from his work, the creative self would be always behind the mask.