A sense of family
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Edouard Fontenot has always been aware of his roots. The 37-year-old psychologist grew up in Lafayette, La., where his surname is common. He knew his ancestor Louis Fontenot had emigrated from Poitiers, France, to Mobile, Ala., in 1720 and that the family spread to Louisiana. Fontenot, his brothers, and their late father had talked about visiting the city in west-central France, but had never made concrete plans.
Three years ago, after accompanying his partner, Christopher Bellonci, to Europe on a trip where Bellonci traced his Italian roots, Fontenot again thought about visiting Poitiers.
"We went to the house that had been in Christopher's family for 700 years. It was really quite incredible," said Fontenot, who lives with Bellonci in Jamaica Plain and is a senior warden at St. John's Episcopal Church there. "It was interesting because Christopher has not had a big sense of place. I on the other hand am from a culture that is very much aware. I saw that being reawakened in him and saw the power and joy of having a sense of where one comes from.
"I think, too, that it can be hard sometimes for gay people to find the same family structures as straight people because there aren't the same kind of connections," he said. Furthermore, leaving the South for Boston in 1989 had left him feeling dislocated.
Though one brother was unable to get away, Fontenot's other brother, Brit, 32, could make the trip -- he lives in Geneva, where he works for the United Nations.
"We started talking about it and getting really excited about it. There had been a large research project already in our family," Fontenot said. "But it's not enough to know intellectually. I wanted to feel what it's like to be in the place."
Last November, the brothers, Bellonci, and Brit's wife, Kristina Allison, met up in Paris.
A three-hour train ride brought them to Poitiers, a city of about 80,000 between Paris and Bordeaux. "The landscape is fairly unremarkable," Fontenot said. "It's a bit off the beaten path these days." Poitiers had once been an important trade and intellectual center, famous for being the birthplace of Diane de Poitiers and where Charles Martel stopped the Moorish invasion of Europe.
"We didn't stay long, only three days. But that's long in Poitiers," he said. "It's a really lived-in city and people kind of experienced us as an oddity. People would say, `You were in Paris and you came here for three days?' But for me it had something of a pilgrimage quality."
When Fontenot travels, usually he is "big on sitting in the center of town and staying there and reading and talking to people. But this time I was really compelled to see things." Bellonci, on the other hand, is generally the one off playing tourist. "But Christopher and my brother sat in the central square for an entire day. They played dominoes and sampled every flavor of kir the place had. By the time I got back from seeing my sights, the bartender loved them."
Because Fontenot's training and interest are in theology (he is in the process of being ordained), he wanted to spend time at the city's churches and was most interested in visiting churches where his family records had once been kept. "I wanted to be in the places they had been."
His family, who were cobblers, belonged to the Montierneuf parish, and he went to the church building, now an arts center, and was quite moved "knowing that generations of my ancestors were baptized, married, and buried" there.
"I just enjoyed sitting in it, and letting a whole variety of things knit over me," Fontenot said. "There was a sense of these people, my family, over time. I felt firmly rooted in something larger than me. I thought about my family and how it's changed over the years. And 100 years from now, will someone think about me? I really value all that."
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