Parsley

There are some things that a cook adds to a recipe in order to express something about themselves and the dish....
For my mom, I think parsley did this.
Does anyone know how long dried parsley lasts? Is there a point where it adds nothing to the dish because it has been around too long?
My father, Eugene, returned from a salvage auction in Philly with a chest which I still have in my study.
Eugene searched long and hard to find a "deal", a quick buck, something for nothing, a time and a place where he could find something that would change his downward slide....
It didn't happen, but he did arrive home with some interesting stuff....like the huge can of parsley that we found in the locked trunk... after we broke it open.
Who would have thought that anyone would lock parsley in a trunk anyway?
But there it was, a surplus of WWII, in an olive green can....a huge olive green can with U.S. government all over it.
From what I remember, Mom was still using that government issue parsley for ten to fifteen years after Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge.
It seemed to me that everything about WWII was done on a big scale: the invasions, the weapons, the number of soldiers ....even cooking ingredients!
And I thought it was cool that even army chefs would use olive drab containers.
It's funny to me that of all the other things that came out of that trunk, the only thing I remember is the
parsley.
This parsley was not an everyday ingredient in our house. I always got the vibe that mom used it when she wanted to announce that the dish being prepared was special. So, the parsley stash was whipped out at Thanksgiving or Christmas....times when flamboyant ingredients were called for, and everything available that might add to the turkey's bread stuffing was poured in without conscience.
My mom offered up sage in the same reckless way officers threw their men into the heat of a battle.
The can of parsley outlasted Eugene's presence in our house. The last Christmas it was used, Eugene had probably already died from pneumonia he caught in a rat trap apartment somewhere around Lafayette Square.
Even now, whenever I use parsley in a chicken and sausage gumbo or a soup, I think about Eugene, and the trunk, and its precious contents...and in this sense it has lasted a very long time.
I must also confess that I too search long and hard to find a "deal". Realizing that there is no quick buck, no something for nothing, and no time or place where I can find some material thing that will change my downward slide.... These are lessons that I still struggle with.
I think we all have spices that we use with attitude in every part of our lives.
But for a time, it was parsley in our family...probably more attitude than taste. The Irish Channel was like that.

Pat Boone and Joyce

Music...
It was about the only thing I could come up with.
Who would ever pay attention to a short, chubby boy with glasses, thick glasses...with absolutely no athletic ability...and very little brain.
I wasn't stupid, but nobody knew that...not even me.
What I was, at the time, was amazingly awkward and unconditionally sloppy, and I wanted someone to think that there was more. I wanted that badly.
Music seemed to offer hope.
In the musicals I watched and loved, there was a moment when everything would suddenly fall into place for a musician or singer....a person who had formerly been a hopeless nobody....and then all of a sudden......
BANG! Life would be suddenly good for a gifted nobody....
Hold on to something....ok? I wanted to be Pat Boone...."Love Letters in the Sand"..."April Love"....
Pat Boone!
The man was everything I wanted to be....cool, neat, suave, witty.... And it seemed that he had to fight the girls off with a stick.... The nice T-Bird he drove in one of his movies certainly didn't hurt.
In my pre-teen years there was a lot of distance between what I was and Pat Boone.
But to get the ball rolling, I began to practice his songs....over and over again. I even practiced whistling the bridge just like he did on "Love Letters in the Sand".
I was also drawn to Little Richard and Buddy Holly.... But Pat Boone was my main focus.
At the time, upper elementary, I stalked Joyce Stein.... Joyce was perfect....
I would watch her come into class on cold mornings...watch as she took off her coat...
It was like seeing a Christmas present opening itself up....the ribbons in her long, red hair....the wool scarf....and amazing dresses and jumpers....
On warmer days, she would wear a sweater over her shoulders, and it never slipped off. It magically stayed perfectly placed all day.
How did that happen? Did girls like Joyce take lessons in being perfect?
Somebody, probably her mother, put a lot of time into Joyce. There was a grace and elegance about this kid that I was not ready to deal with.
And she was smart! Joyce and my friend, Bubba, were always in competition with one another over grades.
I wasn't.... I was lucky if Mrs. Keith even handled my messy work.
At home, I would perform for my mother, and anyone else who would listen....seriously perform. And I would get my feelings hurt if I even got a hint that they were holding back a laugh. I wanted them to be as serious as I was about this thing.
Something big could come of this....like I might get on the Amateur Hour...or Lawrence Welk...
Who knew? Joyce Stein might notice me...smile at me...give some sign that she knew I was alive.
After school, I would walk down Boudreaux Street....casually following Joyce....singing....
"April love is for the very young. Every star's a wishing star that shines for you....".
Or...
"On a day like today, we passed the time away, writing love letters in the sand....".
Up to Magazine Street, doing my best Pat Boone....and she never turned around....not once....
I found out that she attended the Valance Street Baptist Church on Magazine, and I tried to imagine what she looked like on Sunday morning....
I did get to hold her hand once in fifth grade... They brought us down to the basement of the school to do square dancing.
Boys and girls alike made faces and gruesome sounds signaling how this was a fate worse than death.
Actually, I think we were very excited....
I remember Mrs. Keith trying to get us calmed down and civilized...and I remember Joyce in a wonderful green plaid dress.
As we began to dance,it shocked me how cold Joyce's hands were.
Joyce Stein was supposed to have warm hands...and she was supposed to smile warmly....and that didn't happen either....and her blue eyes were cold....
This would have never happened to Pat Boone.
The music never left me, but I think I realized that my music would never warm Joyce up.
And all I wanted was a smile....but that, I guess, was a lot to ask from a preteen girl who officially hated boys....especially boys who were a hopeless mess like me.
There was other music that would enter my life....but it came later and harder.
Perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.....

Detectives in Togas

The very first book I "owned" was DETECTIVES IN TOGAS.
Fourth grade had been a very hard time for me. My parents were in the middle of one of their on-again, off-again things, and that meant changes of address and schools.
It was also a time when I was coming to terms with how I felt about Eugene, my father.
From TV, I had put together a vision of what I wanted my life to look like....ponies, big fluffy dogs, and long-term, secure everything.
It was a vision that I didn't want to let go of...but it was all on a slippery slope.
Eugene kept increasing the angle of descent on the downhill run, and I began to realize that there weren't going to be any ponies.
I got my hands on DETECTIVES IN TOGAS at Thomas Jefferson Elementary. I had already been to two schools that year, and here I was in Mrs. Keith's combined class of fourth and fifth graders.
Mrs. Keith was a short, very thin woman, and her brown hair was as short as she was.
That teacher was one tough woman!. She may have been the toughest woman I had ever run across.... She had to be strict to teach two different classes at once and not have the whole thing be a zoo....
She pushed us hard.
I loved that woman...a lot, and I was sure she loved me. She loved all of us....I'm sure of that.
Our class was like one big extended family, and Mrs. Keith, her husband, and her older son were all part of it. Many of us needed that, and we needed her stories about her son and her husband....and what they did together.
What was Mrs. Keith's was ours for the taking...a life that we could be a part of.
Well, it was springtime and the school library was unloading a lot of books, and Mrs. Keith brought us to this storage room full of boxes. Everyone was allowed to take something that looked good.
Mine was DETECTIVES IN TOGAS, and I have absolutely no idea what drew me to it.
Rich kids in ancient Rome who attended a private school and were taught by a Greek slave...nothing like anything I had run across in the Irish Channel, for sure. Maybe the only thing I could identify with was this pack of boys ratted the streets of Rome the same as I ratted the streets in the Channel.
These little Romans were smart, curious, and brave...even solved a murder.
When school ended that year, I prayed that I would be back with Mrs. Keith for fifth grade. Over the summer I read DETECTIVES IN TOGAS over and over again....through my parent's screaming fights.... through the New Orleans heat....though a drawing back from Eugene....through a growing hate.
Over and over again... It was my connection to Mrs. Keith and the rest of my school family.
Miracles of miracles, my mother and I managed to stay near enough to Thomas Jefferson Elementary for me to be there with Mrs. Keith....again.
There were Bubba, Joyce, Johnny, Alice, Wayne, Peanut, Bruce, Alvin.... Long-term and secure.....
Mrs. Keith had taken a trip around the world with her son that summer, and on the first day of school, there were small presents for each of us....with our names on them.
One of the things I got was one of those Japanese ceramic spoons.
And there were stories and pictures of all that they had seen. (Seeing Mrs. Keith on a camel was a trip!) We were there, in each place, with her.
She was planning on us being back with her! She knew because we were her children....

Joseph, My Grandfather

I flashed on my mother bringing meat home from the Winn Dixie where she worked.
Mr. Harry would allow Mom to slip out with some fine cuts of beef that "weren't quite right"....or "on the verge".
She would open the packages in the sink and smell the darkened meat...sometimes smelling it more than once...and then out would come the salt.
Mom would put the meat under the tap to wet it, rub salt into the steaks or chops...sometimes repeating the process several times until it seemed cleansed and fit to eat.
Then would come the explanations of why the meat was ok...how rich people paid out good money for aged beef...how the general public didn't realize that the meat that was dark and old looking was really the best....how lucky we were.
Mom was like that.
I wondered how much of this she actually believed...or was it all a collection of the lies that the poor tell themselves to make it all ok...all acceptable...and palatable.
I don't know.
But I still have a styrofoam plaque of John 3:16 that we got from Top Value trading stamps. Mr. Harry also gave Mom rolls of these stamps. How all that went down, I don't know, but at least they didn't need to be rubbed down with salt.
The taste of glue is what I remember from filling book after book with the gold stamps....and the catalogue that spurred me on, all filled with dreams that could bought with those stamps. We never managed to get the really big stuff...just a lamp here, a set of Lilly glasses there....a coffee maker, a toaster.
The Top Value Redemption Center was the only place I heard the word redemption used outside of church. "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so....?
I was busy pasting stamps in our project apartment when we got the news that my grandfather, Joseph had died from his run-in with a big white Cadillac right off of North Broad. They had him hooked up for days on all sorts of machinery at Charity Hospital....but now that was over.
Joseph had paid for years for a burial policy that entitled him to a grand throw - down at the House of Boltman on Napoleon and St. Charles...complete with huge limos...a silver metal casket...and a plot at the Garden of Memories on Airline Highway.
Quite a show!
When I saw him in the casket, I thought about meat. It wasn't Joseph with the wad of Brown Mule in his mouth...the Joseph with the penetrating black eyes and jet black hair he dyed...the Joseph who sang crazy songs and cursed bitterly at all he hated...the Joseph who drew moustaches on the only portrait that my grandmother ever had made because he loved to piss her off.
Joseph lived to piss people off....which is why he praised Hitler and Stalin loudly.
He paid for that funeral bash the same way we would lay aside trading stamps.
And I suppose they preserved him for much the same reasons that my mother would rub down the
partially spoiled meat with salt.... He wasn't completely bad, but a lot of people were convinced, from all appearances, that he was too rotten to save.
His wife, my grandmother, thought so. When she was in the last stages of a hideous battle with intestinal and stomach cancer, she made the family promise not to bury her near him.
Like the meat from Winn Dixie, Mom explained away Joseph's life.... even the parts that had destroyed her childhood and her first marriage. He was ok....
Emma knew better.

The "White Glove Treatment"

I was about eight, and my mother had sent me to live with Emma, my grandmother...Selma, my mother's sister...Eddie, her husband...and schizophrenic Sidney, my mother's brother.
I remember being shaken...softly shaken.... from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. Everything was dark.
I didn't surface out of sleep all at once. Selma drew me out of sleep like one would draw out a bucket from a well. She called my name softly....Bobby....Bobby. Awareness of details came to me slowly, but Selma was in no hurry....Bobby.
Selma held a flashlight...letting it dance around...to her face...to the knife she held...the same knife my grandmother used to cut up chickens.
Her eyes danced, wild...and her smile was mean, showing lots of teeth....mean. And she was wearing white gloves.
"Aunt Selma? What are you doing?"
"Bobby, they're all dead! I have killed them all...."
Selma then went on to tell me how she had murdered everyone in the house. Eddie, Sidney, Emma..... And now it was my turn.
As she went on, I cried, I begged.... Hope? Well, there seemed to be none. It was my turn to die. My terror brought her amusement. She wanted me to beg...to plead. And she laughed and preened in
the face of my fear.
Why?
Selma explained later that this madness was a punishment for my bed wetting, my poor conduct reports from school....just for everything....including the holes I tore in the knees in my pants when I fell playing outside...including the shirt that got torn during a fight at school...including breaking my glasses.
She put down the knife...the flashlight...rubbing her gloved hands together as if she were warming them for the task to come. Selma spoke of strangling me, and I would be dead like the rest.
This night was later referred to as the night Selma gave me the "white glove" treatment.
Selma joked about it! And she shamed me by describing the terror and fear I exhibited as she played out the scene.
Why?
Goodness came about through punishment and shame.
There were nights when she would have me drop my pants so that my knees would be bare.... then she would pour raw grits or rice on a sheet of newspaper and have me kneel on them.
I would beg to get up, just as I begged for my life that night.
And the stories of me on grits and rice were also told with the same lightness...and I felt the same shame.
Why?
It seems that my mother had spoiled me...and this called for drastic measures. Something had to be done....quick.
There was the night Selma was so outdone that she took the shade from a floor lamp...and then held my bare arm against the hot bulb.
All for my own good.
I learned many lessons about goodness and evil in the St. Thomas Housing Project....for my own good.
There was a German boy, Eric, that lived near our building. I loved his accent.
Eric and I had been friends for a few days when he invited me to come up to their apartment. He wanted to show me something funny.
He and I entered their home, and nobody was there except his grandmother....and she was totally deaf.
Eric told me, "Watch this!" Eric went behind his grandmother and began to call her all sorts of mean, profane things....and then he laughed.... I was stunned.
Why?
Eric's laugh...and Selma's laugh...to me they seemed the same.
And they were!
Sick.... I never played with Eric again. Sadly, I spent years trying to gain the approval and love of Selma. And sadly I tried to see the necessity and humor of the "white glove treatment", the raw grits and rice, and the searing light bulb.
It took years...long years....to see Selma and Eric as the same....to see that I had a lot in common with Eric's old, deaf grandmother. We were both unable to hear what they were saying....
The deaf woman and I? There was no blame....there was no excusable reply to "Why?"

The Streets

I felt safe...no matter where I went in the city.
The streets were mine, and they were lovely...little peeks of old cobblestone, patterned brick sidewalk here and there...and the roots of huge oak trees that tore up the cement... causing it to look like the badly broken bridgework of an old woman.
But I felt safe in these streets. They were mine.
I remember nights, walking home from places with my mother...The street lights pooling light every so often, punctuating the blackness..... I loved it.
And then my mother's voice, "Bobby, if anyone tries to hurt us, I want you to run...."
I never understood her fear...these streets loved me. Everything I knew about them shined, like the
obsolete streetcar tracks nobody bothered to remove....like the wet asphalt after a rain.
Their smell is connected to my grandmother Emma...somehow. I think about smothering myself into Emma's damp house dress and apron as she worked in the kitchen. Her sweat, the odor of security...and the streets.
"Mom, we're ok."
It's so easy to be brave when there is nothing to fear.
Home was another matter.
Home was an on-again, off-again brawl...with hidden scandal...unforgiven hurts...broken promises ...neglected responsibilities...shame...secrets...lies.
Fear...lots of fear....especially fear of exposure.
There was a truth about the streets that I never found at home. Honesty and openness seemed to thrive in the streets....they demanded it. My family demanded something very different.
There was Eddie...he was married to my mother's sister, Selma.
Right about the time I arrived in New Orleans in the mid-50's, my cousin Mary Ida told her mother, my Aunt Roberta, that Eddie had showed her "dirty" pictures....and had "touched" her.
My family never recovered from this.
There were huge profanities thrown back and forth in the courtyards of the St. Thomas Housing Project...vicious phone pranks day and night ...along with threats and counter threats....
It went on and on for years.....with brief periods of uneasy peace....sub-surface hostility.
Sisters at war.
And Mary Ida? Besides Mary...and Eddie, I may have been the only one in the family who knew the truth.
Eddie showed me the very same pictures and tried to molest me too....but who could I tell? Nobody believed Mary....so, who would believe me?
Eddie looked at me as I sat in his '52 Plymouth...."Bobby, don't tell anyone. You see how everybody thinks Mary lied....they won't believe you either."
I kept my mouth shut....but I knew....like Mary knew.
When I looked at Eddie I always thought I saw a slight, knowing look...maybe even a smile....daring me to say something.
I felt ashamed....soiled....
I was a coward.
How could I describe to my mother what Eddie had shown me? How could I tell her what he was and be sure there wouldn't be more war....or be sure that I wouldn't be called a liar.... like Mary?
The streets were safe.
Years later, childless, Eddie and Selma took in a young prostitute who was pregnant. They adopted her baby and named her April Lynn. Eddie abused and molested his daughter at will for years before she left home and became a prostitute like her mother.
The truth came out....but it came out in the streets, not at home.
April eventually gave birth to a baby that was born with no eyes, another that was profoundly retarded.
In her late teens, Mary married Alvin, a Pentecostal preacher, and traveled with him as he held tent revivals all through the South...proclaiming liberation and truth.
I spent my childhood in the streets escaping the horror at home.
It was in the streets that I found the wedding ring I gave my wife...found it while tripping out of my mind in the French Quarter.
It was in these streets that my wife and I sold our pottery
It was in these same streets that my wife and I brought our children to experience the musicians and clowns....the food and the funk....
Safe....

Seasons

Audubon Park was an amazing place for me. There was an open-air stage made to look like a Greek or Roman ruin, and that was close to the lagoon where they rented boats. A train ran all through the park and passed by the zoo.
The branches of live-oaks hung low to the ground...making it easy to slither up into the trees, and we boys played "king of the mountain" on a dirt mound called Monkey Hill.
The seals played in a huge pool and bellied up on a smooth rock island at its center. I wanted to be a seal and fought the urge to jump the fence to be with them...particularly during the summer.
And then there was a dreamy merry-go-round with lots of ponies all about...and mirrors reflecting the strung lights...and music, like syrup in the air.
Around and around....and with each round a chance to grab at a ring. I would stretch out far...had to have that ring....
I never slipped off my horse, but it was worth the gamble...the risk...
Each time around the urgency was there, but then the ponies would became still, the mirrors didn't catch as much light, and there was no more syrup in the air.....just children, some laughing....some crying as their parents took charge of them.
And when the carousel emptied, so did the desire I had for the rings I grabbed at.
Situations give things their value.
Many things I did as a child were associated with a particular season of the year...and they had a sweetness only then. When the season passed, so did the magic.
Mardi Gras is the ultimate example. Night after night...parade after parade, I would snatch and grab at the beads, trinkets and doubloons. It's a good thing my mother never found out the insane chances I took. But I filled my room with this treasure...sometimes grabbing handfuls of it...letting it run through my fingers. I was rich!
After Mardi Gras? Who knows what happened to it all? And it didn't matter, because the season was gone.
During the summer, it was marbles. I filled CDM coffee cans with the marbles I won shooting marbles with neighborhood kids.
In the spring, I collected baseball cards and flew kites.
The fall was the season for tops and a game called "spike".
War was muti-seasonal.
Kids would divide up into teams and gather up acorns, pine cones, chinaberries ....anything that could be thrown....and the war would begin.
I remember finding a whole mess of chinaberry trees...and filling bags with their fruit. But the berries rotted in the bag before I had a chance to use my stash. The season had passed.
Situations give things their value....but my mother didn't seem to understand this.
Once we got free tickets to the circus at the Municipal Auditorium. As we went in, the smell of popcorn was everywhere, and I threw some huge hints....more than once.
I can hear her, "Bobby, I can buy you enough popcorn to last you days and days for what it will cost for me to buy you one little bag here at the circus."
How could I tell her about the rings on the carousel...and Mardi Gras beads...and marbles and chinaberries.....?
How do kids explain to their parents about seasons?
Maybe seasons are something that parents have to remember about. They used to know about seasons when they were kids...but somehow, they forget.
I did.

Untitled

The block of time in which I grew up in New Orleans was a period of vast transition. There was so much hope and anticipation that the city would grow and sprawl as so many other cities across the South seemed to be doing. I remember constant comparisons between New Orleans and Houston, for example.
But for some reason, New Orleans never got the juice.
The grids for the planned growth were optimistically drawn out in the form of highways that let to nowhere much. The city fizzled.
Black New Orleans proudly advanced the cause of civil rights and the recognition of the importance of black culture in the city. But it was slow going...involving demonstrators being hosed down by firemen at city hall...demonstrations in front of businesses down town.
As I was growing up, most blacks had jobs as maids, doormen, custodians. restaurant help, sanitation workers...mostly subserviant roles. Even during Mardi Gras, the black flambeau carriers lit the way for parades they had no real part in....except for Zulu and the Mardi Gras Indians.
The machine of segregation was in full throttle...and this was a rather harsh reality to a white kid born in Phildelphia...a kid who stole his first kiss in kindergarten from a little black girl.
I rode the city transit system quite a bit...there were no school busses. Every morning the busses, trollies, and street cars carried white business men into the center city, the maids and yardmen out to homes in Lakeview, and kids like me to a variety of private and public schools all over the city.
For seven cents a person could travel the whole city. But for blacks, it wasn't the price of public transit, it was the indignity.
There were two holes on the back of every seat...there were also wooden signs that read "No Colored Beyond This Point". There were two pegs on the sign that made it possible for the sign to be mounted on the back of the bus seats.
When a white person entered a bus and there were no seats available except those occupied by black, he could move one of the signs in back of a seat...causing the black(s) occupying that seat to get up and stand so the white could sit.
If a white was already sitting in a seat, and there was still a seat available next to him, no black person could occupy that seat. This made for a very interesting "game" among white kids going or coming from school. When they got on the bus or trolly, each white kid would take a seat all to himself...meaning that the seats available to black passengers were very limited.
Although I didn't participate in this cruel game...some of my friends did. My attitude adjustment toward the whole rotten thing came one afternoon when a heavy, older black lady got on the bus with bags of groceries. No seats were open to her in spite of seats next to white kids.
The lady stood trying to manage her bags and keep her balance at the same time as the bus stopped and started. In short order, she fell with her purchases rolling all over the floow. I immediately thought of my grandmother, Emma. I saw Emma on the floow...I saw Emma's purhases rolling all over the bus.
What was happening here was wrong...very wrong.
I helped her pick up her stuff. This was not some noble gesture to somehow salvage race relations in the South...but shame. Biting, head-hanging shame. This was not some stranger...this was my grandmother...somebody's grandmother.
I was changing...more aware.
The separate water fountains, bathrooms, entrances to movie theaters...separate shcools, housing projects, waiting rooms at doctors' offices....
And our churches....?
When civil rights legislation got serious, lovely public swimming pools were filled with concrete to avoid integrating them.
I wonder if it's coinccidence that New Orleans fizzled when respect and tolerance fizzled? ...Did it all happen when the "city that care forgot" forgot to care?
The racial intolerance I observed was at least one of the things that disillusioned me with "Bible Belt" Chrisitanity...and into a life style that promised love and acceptance...and a mind-opening drug experience.

Rodney

There was a large Baptist Church out on the Airline Highway that sent its blue and white busses all over the city of New Orleans..."The Church of the Open Bible". It had a big open neon Bible on the roof and a sign..."God said it, I believe it, That settles it."
One of those busses passed through the Iberville Housing Project...my mother and I and a lot of people we knew rode that bus three times a week to services. Hunched Mr. Tweety, my jazz hero, was there, and Miss Margie, a big woman, who Mr. Tweety knew from the old days when the speakeasies heated up the city.
I loved that big church. It was, in many ways, my family. Sure there were a lot of rich members, but there were also a lot of folks exactly like me, my mom and the rest of our bus from the projects. And people cared about us...really cared.
That Baptist church was also my social life. There was a gym, a bowling alley, and a youth program with lots of activities...and we fit. People saw to it that we got there...and when we missed a service, there was always somebody that found out why.
But I probably liked the rides to and from church more than anything else. These were my people...
Tweety told me that Miss Margie was really something back then...quite a singer. But it was not easy to look at the older lady on that church bus and connect her with the hot music of the 20's. It was great when these two got started unearthing their part of the jazz age on the way to church...and I just sat quietly taking it all in.
Back in Philadelphia, I made the first spiritual decision I remember. My mother took me once to this huge church...my overall memory of the place takes in a gray stone exterior...with an interior of dark wood and dim light.
I don't remember what the sermon was about, but toward the end of it all, the preacher invited people to say "Yes" to Jesus. That pulled at me...the idea of saying yes to Jesus, and I told my mother so. "Mom, let's say yes!" And we did!
I had no idea what I was doing, but I think it was important.
Retarded is not a word we use much anymore. There are much more polite, kinder, politically correct ways to refer to people who are slow...but back then when people spoke of Miss Margie's son, they just threw it out there..."You know, Rodney...that retarded boy!"
I remember Rodney as very good looking and well dressed. He looked sharp...Miss Margie saw to that. But he had a lot of the mannerisms of his mother...a guy in his 20's or 30's acting like a woman in her 50's or 60's. Rodney got on the bus with a hanky in one had, dabbing his eyes and face, clutching a huge Bible in the other arm...holding the book close to his chest, like it was precious to him. And even though Rodney couldn't read, it was precious.
Rodney was merely imitating the only adult he was with most of the week.
Nobody made fun of Rodney much...who would want to make fun of this gentle soul?
In the way of a small child, Rodney loved everybody. But the thing that Rodney was most known for is that he said "yes" to Jesus at every service....every time there was an altar call.
When Bro. John-Paul would wrap up his sermon, he would step down from the pulpet and invite people to come, and Rodney was most often the first to go and take the pastor's hand...dabbing his eyes, looking broken and grieved...hungry for healing in his life...responding to the same sort of pull I felt as a small boy...
That's what Rodney did.
Who knows how many other people reached out to God during those sevices because of Rodney?
He went first.
As the congregation sang, "...Open wide Thy arms of love. Lord, I'm coming home." ...Rodney couldn't go home fast enough!
Rodney's gift was saying "Yes".

The Trunk

In the corner of my study is an old steamer trunk covered with wood-grained adhesive paper...and it's very precious to me because it goes back as far as I can remember...linking my infancy and early childhood in Philadelphia with my life in New Orleans..the city that crowds my sensory memory with its earthiness, its funk.
I arrived in New Orleans by plane when I was seven to stay with my grandmother Emma. Where my mother ever got the money for that ticket...and why she felt so motivated to get me out of Philidelphia, I will never know.
The trunk that had moved with us from apartment to apartment in Philly came to New Orleans a year later than me...along with my mother, Martha, and Eugene, my father. It arrived, along with everything we had ever owned, but I didn't see any of it for months and months.
With no employment waiting in New Orleans, no place to live, and no cash to speak of, Eugene had the trunk and everything else we owned shipped south. He and Mom rode the Grayhound.
We wound up in a tiny, furnished apartment on Magazine Street. All our stuff, including the trunk, went into storage. The shipping company wanted the freight charges before releasing anything...and the company also planned to charge us storage fees on everything that had been shipped. And we really didn't have room for the stuff anyway.
Rolling around in my kid's brain were visions of all the wonderful things that were waiting for me...toys I had left behind when I left Philadelphia...including my very first bicycle...clothes...stuff.... And the longer I waited, the more glorious the dream of being reunited with all of it became. I think this was true for my mother too.
I remember that apartment on Magazine very well...it's where I came down with the chicken pox...it's where I learned my states and capitals...and it's where I saw more roaches than at any other time in my life. The cans of roach spray my mother bought did very little good.
With a broom stick and a spring clothes pin, I made a rubber band gun...and with it, I had a lot of fun picking roaches off the walls.
My mother cried in anger and frustration at all of it...especially the roaches, I think.
My mother and father both managed to find jobs...Eugene even kept his for a while before my mother wound up supporting us all...again.
It took a very long time...maybe a year or so, but my parents made payments to the freight company...and finally we got another apartment near Louisiana Avenue...and we got our stuff, including the trunk.
My heart broke.
It all looked like junk. Many of my mother's things had been broken in shipping, I had outgrown the clothes..my bike was too small for me, and I was too old for most of the toys. Our dreams had been handled too roughly and they had been in storage too long.
Out of all it, the steamer trunk still survives...
Years later, my mother bought some contact paper with a wood grain and spent hours applying it to the trunk. But it wound up looking exactly like an old trunk covered with contact paper.
Of all the things from my childhood, this trunk is the only thing that has always been there. It's ugly and grungy...tacky as the contact paper that covers it...but it's tough...and it survived.
It's my link...

The Trunk

In the corner of my study is an old steamer trunk covered with wood-grained adhesive paper...and it's very precious to me because it goes back as far as I can remember...linking my infancy and early childhood in Philadelphia with my life in New Orleans..the city that crowds my sensory memory with its earthiness, its funk.
I arrived in New Orleans by plane when I was seven to stay with my grandmother Emma. Where my mother ever got the money for that ticket...and why she felt so motivated to get me out of Philidelphia, I will never know.
The trunk that had moved with us from apartment to apartment in Philly came to New Orleans a year later than me...along with my mother, Martha, and Eugene, my father. It arrived, along with everything we had ever owned, but I didn't see any of it for months and months.
With no employment waiting in New Orleans, no place to live, and no cash to speak of, Eugene had the trunk and everything else we owned shipped south. He and Mom rode the Grayhound.
We wound up in a tiny, furnished apartment on Magazine Street. All our stuff, including the trunk, went into storage. The shipping company wanted the freight charges before releasing anything...and the company also planned to charge us storage fees on everything that had been shipped. And we really didn't have room for the stuff anyway.
Rolling around in my kid's brain were visions of all the wonderful things that were waiting for me...toys I had left behind when I left Philadelphia...including my very first bicycle...clothes...stuff.... And the longer I waited, the more glorious the dream of being reunited with all of it became. I think this was true for my mother too.
I remember that apartment on Magazine very well...it's where I came down with the chicken pox...it's where I learned my states and capitals...and it's where I saw more roaches than at any other time in my life. The cans of roach spray my mother bought did very little good.
With a broom stick and a spring clothes pin, I made a rubber band gun...and with it, I had a lot of fun picking roaches off the walls.
My mother cried in anger and frustration at all of it...especially the roaches, I think.
My mother and father both managed to find jobs...Eugene even kept his for a while before my mother wound up supporting us all...again.
It took a very long time...maybe a year or so, but my parents made payments to the freight company...and finally we got another apartment near Louisiana Avenue...and we got our stuff, including the trunk.
My heart broke.
It all looked like junk. Many of my mother's things had been broken in shipping, I had outgrown the clothes..my bike was too small for me, and I was too old for most of the toys. Our dreams had been handled too roughly and they had been in storage too long.
Out of all it, the steamer trunk still survives...
Years later, my mother bought some contact paper with a wood grain and spent hours applying it to the trunk. But it wound up looking exactly like an old trunk covered with contact paper.
Of all the things from my childhood, this trunk is the only thing that has always been there. It's ugly and grungy...tacky as the contact paper that covers it...but it's tough...and it survived.
It's my link...

Canal Street

I haunted Canal Street. There were so many places to go, so many things to see, but like most of my childhood I was alone when it seemed that everyone around me was in groups. And that's how I took it all in....alone. A kid in a bubble, floating along through downtown ...before the malls killed the central city.
There were so many places to go... At the International Trademart, I would go into the various travel agencies and come out with all sorts of posters and pamphlets of places far away. I would make up some kind of story about doing a project for school, and with that lie came tons of stuff.
The posters went up in my room, the pamphlets I would read...filling my in the blank places on my mental map.
And the Trademart was so conveniently close to the Algiers ferry...good for free rides to Algiers and back ...as long as I wanted to watch the barges and freighters push through the chocolate water.
There was Werlein's music store where I spent endless time talking to the instument repairmen on the third floor as they worked on all sorts of horns. These were friendly guys who put up with the endless questions of a curious kid with nothing to do but watch and ask.
One floor down from the repairs was a whole floor full of pianos. Kids would be walking in and out for their lessons...some were better than others. There would be families pricing instruments...huge grands that would never fit in our house.
At street level, the glass cases filled me with lust... There they were, brand new horns with no dents, no scratches, all sitting in plush cases of deep blues and reds.... Sexy before I knew what sex was.
And the sheet music for sale...with people I could tell were real musicians flipping through stack after stack...some carrying instrument cases, looking important.
When I got thirsty, drugstore soda fountains were good for a glass of water...Walgreen's, Waterbury's... Drugstores were different then...with lunch counters, small juke boxes every so often.
One time I saved up and bought my mother a bottle of Chanel #5 at Waterbury's.
If I was really broke, I would put a nickel in the paper machine, grab a big handful of the Times-Picayune
and become a newsboy.
I loved being downtown, playing some kind of role.... going to the Grayhound station and milling around being a passenger....going to the huge main branch of the library being a student...going to Charity Hospital's emergency room being a patient.... but the thing about the emergency room is that sometimes I saw and heard harsh things as people bled and moaned with pain.
Thom McAn Shoe Store was many times a stop because there was a machine that x-rayed your feet, showing you how your shoes fit. I don't know how many times I went in to see the bones in my feet.
And Woolworth's? Oh man, that store had EVERYTHING. Tropical fish, endless toys, a lunch counter... This store was a main stop. On Saturdays, all sorts of gadgets were demonstrated...things that sliced, diced, and were ready to change your life in significant ways.
Woolworth's on Canal was also the site of the first civil rights demonstration I ever saw. Black people serious about wanting to eat at the white counter were crowding the street carrying signs and singing.
It looked dangerous...like something bad could happen....like something fragile was about to get broken.
I watched.
The Roosevelt Hotel. I'm surprised I got in, but there were important things to do there. ....check out the rich people, walk on plush carpets, use a bathroom where there was a friendly black man to hand me a towel...a cloth towel. And the gift shop was a whole other world of china, sculptures, glassware, jewelry... And nothing was decorated for Christmas like the Roosevelt!
Kress', Maison Blanche, D. H. Holmes, Krauss'...all the workers in these huge stores knew me...and never lost patience with my aggressive enjoyment. I looked at everything, touched everything, and if at all possible, tried things out...electric putting machines, punching bags....
I could fill a whole day, moving from wonder to wonder...but alone. I would walk on the fringes of groups of strangers because I wanted so badly to be with somebody, anybody. I watched them enjoy my city, my street....talking, laughing, with the potential of carrying some of it home...the potential of making some of it part of their lives. But I was in my bubble with nothing comiing in and nothing comeing out.
My bubble... It was there even at home. I decided early on that nobody noticed me or gave me much thought. One morning, I got a red sticker, put it right in the middle of my forehead. ....just to see how long it would take someone to notice it. Nobody...not one person said anything about it all day.
That evening, I was in an evil mood... I was alone.
But the rhythm of Canal Street, noises like rumble of the street cars, my ritualistic stalking....As New Orleans gathered me up in her arms, rocked me, distracted me with her charms.... for a time I wasn't lonely...just alone.

Mr. Harry

Heat turns up often in New Orleans culture...in the climate, in the food, in the music, and in the way the people live their lives.
The summers were a blast from hell in the public housing projects. All the brick and cement, with very few trees, small patches of grass, and the humidity.... The heat made the asphalt soft. And we did battle with the sun using only window fans....this sun that stoked the inferno.
More than once I got fussed for opening the refrigerator, putting my head inside to feel the cool. Lots of people would crack open an icecube tray and rub the cubes on their arms and faces. Relief of a sort....
The afternoon rains helped some too. It's hard to forget the smell coming off the cement as the rain hit it. It sizzled like when you spit on a hot griddle.
The men who passed through the projects selling snow balls and ice cream from trucks were vicious in a way. Kids could hear the jingles bouncing off the boiling hot streets and buildings...and the tunes carried for blocks. There was a promise of some cold thing ringing out...for a price.
Children nickled and dimed their parents to death for change. And mammas, already short-tempered with the heat, grew to hate the ice cream man. "Mamma, it's just a time...!" But the dimes didn't come easy, and it made parents feel mean to push their kids away with a "No!"
Vicious, that's what they were. Stirring up the little ones like that!
People would seek out businesses where there was a penguin sticker on the front door or window. And just go in and chill a while. Play like you're shopping...or if it was a church say a very long prayer.
Mr. Harry was the manager of the meat department where my mother worked. Mom would come home sometimes and tell me stories of how Mr. Harry cheated customers...grinding up ice with the hamburger to make it weigh more, having the workers put a pair of shears on the scale as they weighed in hams, paying off government men with bags of steaks when they came to check the store's scales....
Mr. Harry won lots of awards for running a very efficient meat department. And I liked him because when I would visit the meat department in the summer, he wouldn't fuss me when he would find me standing in the meat locker enjoying the cold. He also let my mother carry home a lot of meat that would have been put on "quick sale". ( I'm smiling now thinking of the times I ate ground filet mignon on a hamburger bun.)
One summer, Mr. Harry invited my mom to babysit his children while he and his wife went on vacation...
me too! Mr. Harry stayed out near the lake in a beautuful brick house....like nothing I had ever seen before. His two children just had not wrapped their heads around what they had.
AIR CONDITIONING
He had an air conditioned house! And in addition to wall - to - wall refrigeration, he had a color TV! ...the first one I had ever seen. And Mr. Harry had an ice machine, a huge freezer full of ice cream, and ALL of the pop I wanted.
For days, I camped out in the living room...in a soft, cool, leather recliner watching color television ...holding a real glass (not plastic) full of one iced drink after another. My mother was so afraid that I would wet the bed.... I did, once.
Mr. Harry's children thought I was crazy. Some people just don't understand, just don't realize. I have all of these things now...and more. But there was a first time for it all, and Mr. Harry allowed me to experience it.
But the crash came whem Mom and I had to go back to our apartment in the Iberville Housing Project...to the heat...to my black and white world where there was no ice machine and no real glasses.
Mr. Harry was not vicious like the ice cream man. He certainly was not perfect, but the cool he shared with my mother and me was so much more complete and lasting...and open. His sharing was quiet with nothing to announce it....it didn't need a loud jingle.
In hot New Orleans, Mr. Harry was part of the city's coolness.

Lake Pontchartrain

I spent many summer days at Lake Pontchartrain. Days surrounded by families taking in the beach, swimming in the huge pools, doing the midway where they would share rides and silly games of chance. In the evening, families gathered to watch the free circus acts and fireworks.
I went solo. No family, no friends...alone. But I watched.
I saw what mothers and fathers were like at play with their children. It was magical to watch children being held, valued, and enjoyed. They weren't burdens, they were the stars of the day.
My mother thought it was healthy for me to be at the beach....to swim, to be out in the sun, to be among other children. And I suppose that while she worked at processing meat at Winn Dixie, it gave her comfort to think of me frolicking in the sun.
It wasn't quite like that.
For 10 cents, I caught the Elysian Fields bus to the lake on Canal Street....another quarter got me into the bathhouse and pool. And with the change from the dollar mom gave me for the day, I caught a burger and maybe a drink.
Sure, I liked to go because there were beautiful homes to see on the bus ride to the beach, and I looked at them in awe...wondering how people managed to live like that.
And once I got to the lake, there was the hope that something really wonderful would happen....some family would see me on the fringe of their fun and include me. That never happened.
Many times I was lonely, sensing that there was some invisible film...some barrier that I couldn't break through....something that prevented me from breaking into this other world....this world of family groupings.
Couldn't they see that I burned, consumed with a need to play and horse around and laugh with them?
I needed someone to be a kid with. But families do not open themselves to sharing their magic....do they?
My favorite part was the evening. When mom got off work, she would sometimes ride out to the beach and meet me. It was so good to see her! And if she and my father were between bust ups, he would be there too.
While watching the tight-rope walkers or trapeze artists perform, while watching the firework with them, I was finally part of something I ached for all day long. And then sometimes we would walk the sea wall
together....taking in the light show provided by the heat lightening, the waves breaking against the sea wall steps and the smell of ozone in the air.
The amusement park at Lake Pontchartrain died in the 60's with the civil rights movement. Like many other places in the South, the lovely swimming pools were cemented in to prevent integrated bathing.
Cement is a very clear way of defining a group's readiness to share and be open. It lays out hard truth in a way even a child can understand.

Sidney

Of all my family members, my mother's brother, Sidney,was one of the most gentle.
There is no telling how much he saw or how much he has endured over the years.
I have been told of the severe beatings he endured from his father.
I remember his severe case of acne, the reason he always had his hands on his face.
I remember hearing of the cruel names they called him as a teenager. Hamburger Face....
I remember tales of the many fights he got into as a youth, defending the honor of his sisters or retaliating to the cruelness of other school children.
My mother told me of the many times he received incredible blows to the head...sometimes from a fist
...sometimes from a piece of wood....many times from hitting his head on a sidewalk curb.
Sidney was a fighter. It seems that his clothes were so ill-fitting as a child that he would hold up his pants with one hand and fight with the other.
At some point in his late teens or early twenties, something really snapped.
Sidney began spending time in a mental hospital. In and out of Jackson State Mental Hospital near Baton Rouge and in and out of the stupor caused by shock treatments and experimental drugs.
The doctors wanted to give him a lobotomy, and that's where my grandmother, Emma, drew the line.
Sidney heard voices...lots of them. It's when he would begin sharing these voices with family members that things went bad for him.
And then there were times he would go to bars and begin preaching the message God had given him. I suppose not many people want to be evangalized while bellying up to the bar. And when the police were called in to put down the disturbance, Sidney would be locked away.
Once he told one of my aunts that the voices were telling him to cut up people and put them into a pot.
One of my cousins had spit in his face that day which likely set him off.
That was another stay at Jackson. How many times they fried his brain, no one knows.
We would just pile in a car and visit him some weekends.
We always brought fruit, sandwiches, cold drinks, egg salad, Ritz crackers, and lots ot cigarettes.
Most of the time I couldn't eat any of the food because Sidney was hard to watch. He would cram his mouth with food...again and again. And go off to throw up, and then return to eat more.
We tried not to notice, but I can still hear Emma suggesting that he slow down.
"Sidney, all this food is for you. So, slow down and enjoy it."
"Honey, don't make yourself sick."
Sidney was hungry for something and the food wasn't doing the job. Neither were the cigarettes that he violently smoked...lighting one from another....again and again.
His hands were yellowed and burned because he would forget he was holding a lit Camel.
When he was deep into the drugs or shock treatments , he was on another planet. And the verbal communication from this far off place boiled down to a very spacey "yes" or "no". It was like the positive or negative he comminicated was only given to shut the questioner up.
Questions were not a good thing for Sidney.
Sidney seemed so full of fear...especially fearful about what had happened to him at the hospital. He would beg not to be sent back because of the rubber hoses used on patients in the showers.
My uncle once shared with me the reason for using rubber hoses....no marks.
As we would leave the hospital, he would beg us to take him with us, and he would stand at the gate dressed in kakais waving to us.
It would break Emma's heart, and she would cry.
I loved Sidney, his smile, his insane little laugh.
He would play games with me taking special delight in beating me. The checker games he and I shared are good memories, and the puzzles we put together, the card games....all of it.
Sidney loved to help me study my spelling and took special pride when I brought home a good grade on something he had drilled me on.
The Sidney I remember was soft-spoken, kind, full of fun....and always ready to smile.
I see him with his curly, sandy hair, playful, like a puppy.
He made not secret that he despised his father, Joseph, who would never come by our apartment when Sidney was there.

What Sidney wanted was peace, and he has never gotten it that I know of.
Today he's in his late 70's and lives in a supervised home outside of New Orleans. He recognizes no one, just sitting in a rocker....smoking...off somewhere I have never been.

Uncle Joe, my grandfather...

My grandfather, Joseph, died at Charity Hospital when I was about 11 or12. He was hit by a white Cadillac on North Robertson, right off of Broad.
Memories?
The smell of tobacco all over the man, and the drool of it on the corner of his mouth.
The hard black eyes, cold.
The bitter laugh that followed cruel humor.
The stories he carried of me, of everyone, were always the worst.
It's strange the details that my mind wraps around and grips.
Joseph Wallace, my mother's father, had moved south from Philadelphia long before I was born and transformed himself from a Wakeley to a Wallace.
There were stories that his first wife died in an isolated farm house in New Jersey.
I shiver when I think about the descriptions of her trying to give birth on a kitchen table...a breached birth. And Joseph trying to help her.
I shiver at the thought of him hacking with a kitchen knife, trying to do some good. And then watching as she bled out.
The Joseph I knew was a hard man....a man with hard memories.
He called me "Bloodhound" as long as I knew him, my mother was "Mutt". It would be many years before I got the full story behind these names...and why he insisted that I not call him "grandpa".
"I'm not your grandfather! Calll me Uncle Joe!"
You name it, Joseph was bitter and angry and disappointed about it.
He trusted no one, always looking for a motive.
That may be why he would push me away when I would try to crawl into his lap.
It also may be why, as a pre-schooler, I hit him in the head with my toy fire truck while he was knapping.
So much of his life was broken, even down to the bottle of vitamins he carried in his pocket when the car hit him. If he had not gone to the drugstore to buy some Carter's Liver Pills, a plug Brown Mule, and the vitamins, he may have lived long past his 81 years.
Joseph's wake at the House of Boultman on St. Charles Avenue was magnificent. He had been paying on that burial policy with this funeral home for years.
The old man went out big.
I can remember riding in one of those huge black limos to the Garden of Memories on Airline. There are also memories of my grandmother, Emma, making everyone promise, even swear, that they would never bury her body near him. The plot next to him is still empty.
I had never seem my grandmother like this. I was in awe. This was a lady with a head of steam that I didn't recognize.
Emma had many of the Spirit's gifts. Whatever prompted her do this on the day of Joseph's funeral? Maybe more of the same that caused her to live apart from him for so many years.

The Depression

The people in my family who survived the Great Depression have always struggled to throw anything away.
There seems to be a fear that some insignificant piece of something that has been tossed on the heap will be exactly the thing that is needed. But it will be gone.
The sadness, the guilt, the blame, the anger, the sense of loss? They are all that will remain.
But the need? It will still be there. Always.
My mother, my aunts, my uncles, all those survivors of the pre-war years....
They hesitated to let anything go.
Who wanted the responsibility to throw something away that may one day be needed?
Who could bear that weight?
It was a materialism of the broke and broken.
It manifested itself in the hoarding of chipped china, out-dated, out-worn, out-grown clothing, and things harvested from the curbs of the big houses in the Garden District.
My mother's father, Joseph, had his "route"....his regular rounds up and down St. Charles Avenue which he would haunt at night. Joseph carried around a strong sense of disapproval of the rich fools who gave his route an energy and purpose.
Memories of crying sick or hungry children who couldn't be treated or pacified.
Memories of those same children walking along the tracks picking up coal dropped from railroad cars.
Memories of chamber pots filled with urine-ice in freezing bedrooms.
Memories of children naked in their beds waiting for their only change of clothes to be washed.
And the rich? They were the fools whose trash was gold.

Even the rhymes that my grandfather taught me as a child were full of anger and bitterness...
"Tammy was a Welshman.
Tammy was a thief.
Tammy came to my house
And stole a leg of beef.
So I went to Tammy's house,
And he was laying in bed.
So I picked up the marrow bone,
And hit him over the head."

The Depression was a disease. Something my family had survived...but a cancer in remission that could rise up again and again. And the fear of it fed on my family and the way they lived.
I remember my people as loud, harsh, fierce and full of rage...and hungry.
They grabbed, they snatched, they wrestled. They survived.
And they held on to everything....especially the memories.

Aaron

I encounterd Aaron's laundry before I ever met the man who filled those huge undershirts and jockey briefs.
Roberta, my mother's oldest sister, did the wash on one of those old washing machines with the wringer on the top, and then filled the lines in the yard with all of the stained wash. Bleach didn't really do much for Aaron's underwear.
Aaron was massive, the whole family was.
Eating was an event that went down in huge quantities all around. Mibby, Aaron Jr. (Junie), Roberta, and Aaron were capable of knocking down two dozen pork chops. Six per person, along with everything else.
And then there was Aaron's RC Cola. Cases of it. He drank more soft drinks than any person I have ever met.
Aaron worked nights along the river as a security guard. But during the day, he slept, and his sleep was something that Aunt Bert guarded religiously.
Nobody would dare wake the sleeping giant.
And in the afternoons when he did emerge from his bedroom, he would wander the house in his briefs with an RC in his hand, directing the meal prep for the family's daily Olympic eating binge. And lthen line up the lunch that would carry him though the night.
Bert and Aaron never shared a bedroom during the time that I knew them. Aaron's room was quite a place. There was his bed, dresser, etc., and then there were cases and cases of the many things that
Aaron stole from the ships and warehouses each night.
Cases of expensive French perfume, watches, cartons of ballpoint and fountain pens, cases of liquor, prescription drugs...all sorts of stuff.
He was part of the corruption that blanketed and soiled the New Orleans' warehouse district...and probably still does.
Junie would brag and call his daddy a "liceman". But Aaron a a thief.
There was a lot of it that found it's way into the homes of Bert's family.
It was insane. The costly jewelry, the watchers, the perfume...all of it in the midst of shabby governemtn housing where there was so much real need that was never met.
And some of it Aaron sold or bribed people with.
Aaron never got caught, but there were close calls. Times when paranoia prompted him to move his stolen stash to the houses of family members.
Once Aaron came home with a mess of tokens for the toll bridge over the Mississippi. How it all went down was never clear to me. But I do remember how sure everyone was that Aaron had finally done it.
While Aaron was a work each night, Bert and the kids would go to various Pentecostal meetings and join in with Charismatic experiences that spoke to both their spiritual and emotional needs.
And increasingly, Bert would speak out Aaron's sinful ways and the influence it had on their kids. But that never stopped the flow of perfume, jewelry, and other trinkets he stole from finding their way to her dressing table.
And it never stopped her from inviting family members over to raid Aaron's stash while he was away at work. She said that there was so much that he'd never notice. And he never did.
I wonder about Aaron. Why was he so ridiculed as a pig and a thief by Roberta and the rest of the family? ....and yet we all gladly received what he stole.
The St. Thomas Housing Project, maybe the whole Irish Channel, was full of Aaron's, grabbing at something or anything that would fill their lives...even for a moment.
Maybe a lot like Mardi Gras. Those glass beads flying through the air seem a lot more significant only because of the many hands reachi grapple for them.
On closer examination, they're cheap...tacky...with no real purpose. But people have been crushed under floats, crippled.....
Aaron was always ready for someone to throw something his way.
"Throw me somethin', mista'!"

The Happy Hour

The Happy Hour Theater was on Magazine Street, about two blocks from Jackson Avenue.
It's amazing what five nickles would buy when I was a kid.
The Mummy, The Wolfman, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein....
Fifteen cents to get into a movie house crammed full of anxious eyes...and two nickle bags of popcorn.
Life was sweet...at least for a little while.
My cousin Mibby and I taking in the show...watching, daring one another not to hide our eyes.
Mibby would scream. Girls did that.
The boys would throw things at the screen...at the monsters and the bad guys.
And sometimes the ushers would come with their flashlights and threaten the really rowdy ones.
It was easy to be brave in a whole crowd of kids, but on the way home, we ran...
I was so afraid that something would grab at us from a dark alley, some doorway, in the midnght that stretched between each lamp post.
But there were other movies, movies where people burst into song.
Mibby was never the same after she saw Elvis sing "Love Me Tender" at the Happy Hour. She went to see that same movie over and over.... Her mother Roberta spent a lot of change on Mibby's Elvis phase.
She would get mad, and sometimes hit me when I made fun of Elvis....
"Elvis the Pelvis!" I came up with that, not even knowing what a pelvis was...
"Love me tender, love me sweet. Take off my shoes and kiss my feet..."
Pat Boone got my attention.
I wanted to transmorgrify into Pat Boone...like a werewolf under a full moon.
Pat Boone had it all.
He would sing "April Love" or "Love Letters in the Sand" and the softest, most dreamy girls would sigh.
I don't know what I would have done if one of those girls would have come close to me and sighed, but it looked like something important to achieve.
White buckskin shoes, that perfect hair and smile, and that Thunderbird.
Mibby never understood Pat Boone, but I did.
I would never have the perfect hair and smile. And even if I did, my glasses would ruin the whole effect.
The T-Bird was out of the question too.
But I learned his songs. They were a part of me. I owned them like I eventually, miraculously talked my mother into a pair of white buckskin shoes.
But the transmorgrification never took place, no matter what phase the moon was in.
In the mirror, I was still a chubby, little boy with thick glasses.
But on the weekends, I could go to the Happy Hour and be brave in the face of horror, defeat evil, and sometimes even be Pat Boone.
I would later move on to the Beatles, but for Mibby, it would always be Elvis.
Decades later, after Mibby died, I went back to Magazine Street to get another look at the Happy Hour.
It had been gutted by a fire, and I can't describe the sadness I felt.
Gone.
Gone like the Woolworth's across the street from it, gone like the po-boy stand down the block, gone
like Mibby and Elvis...
Gone like a lot of things that helped me get through...and become a man.

Bubba

William (Bubba), my mother referred to his family as "scrubby Dutch". When I asked her about this once, she said that German (Dutch) women in Philadelphia, where I was born, would scrub the stoops to their houses. Very clean and orderly was the point.. Not rich, just whole and solid.
I envied Bubba's life.
He lived directly across the street from Thomas Jefferson Elementary School...a real plus because of the playground.
He had an older sister, Marsha, a chubby little blonde, who blushed over anything and everything... even me.
And his homelife. That was the big thing I wanted...but would never have.
His dad was always there in the evening...day after day, week after week. Always doing something with Bubba...like building a crystal radio... letting Bubba help when he worked on the car. Stuff.
His mom stayed at home...all the time. She was forever across the street at the school...helping Mrs. Kieth, my 4th and 5th grade teacher, put on the Fall Festival...help in the library. Stuff.
I had none of that...and I wanted it really bad. Probably a lot of kids did. When I watched TV, I would see families like this and wonder what it would be like to break into the TV to be a part of it all. So many times.
I don't know who came up with the idea that we needed electric fans in our classrooms. ...a magical vision that brought so many of us together...together in ways that made this one of the best
periods of my childhood.
The need was obvious...kids in classrooms with their sweaty arms sticking to their writing tablets and textbooks, clothes and hair damp. Misery. But there was no money for electric fans in the Irish Channel.
That's where the vision came in.... A paper drive!
We were told that the rag man (a pioneer recycle!) would come around to the school each Wednesday morning. That meant scouring the neighborhood between Tchopitulous Street and Magazine for old newpapers, phone books, whatever...
What made the whole thing fly was competition...fierce competition.
Each class was given area along the fence that surrounded the school. On Wednesday mornings there were heaps....mountains of paper along that fence. And these were weighed and tallied. Reports were filed. Why, because the winning class would be given money to spend on something for their classroom.
Wednesday morning meant bringing in paper, sure...but guarding it was tricky. And then someone noticed that magazines weighed more than newspaper...hmmm...
It was magic. Kids in my class united.... John (Peanut), Hennessy.the cousins Gary and Wayne, Bruce,
me.... Bubba's yard became our headquarters, his dad's garage our storage....and everyday I got to see Marsha blush. Good times.
Everyday, we would go door to door....houses, businesses, anyplace. We told people about the fans...
They called it the Irish Channel, but there were Germans, Italians, French...and they all saved paper for
our fans. They understood New Orleans heat and humidity.
Peanut's daddy drove an old Cadillac hearse...and sometimes it rolled into Bubba's yard full of paper.
Like the hearse, we never knew where he got it all.
And after the collecting,there was some kind of ball involved in some kind of game until it got dark, and then I went home to something a lot different than Bubba's yard.
This was all with kids who just wanted a fan, bragging rights at school, and something special for their
classroom if.... And we did.
It took two years, but every class at Thomas Jefferson Elementary School got a fan. And the kids in our class won...in so many ways from this effort.
We voted to buy a microscope with the contest money. We looked at EVERYTHING under it. Hair, blood, insect wings....you name it.
It was magic. Bubba's parents were magic too. People in just the right place at just the right time to give some of us a vision of wholeness. Clean.

Emma

When I was seven or eight, my mother dressed my up in my very best outfit, bought me a one-way ticket from Philadelphia, Pa. to New Orleans, where I went to stay with my grandmother in the St. Thomas Housing Project.
A kitchen, a small living room, one bedroom, and a bath.
In this small apartment were five of us: My grandmother Emma; Sidney, my schizophrenic uncle; my mother's sister Selma; and her husband, Eddie Senyetter.
Quite a crowd.
I know that Emma was born in 1898 in rural New York, lost her parents early on, and was shipped off to some finishing school in Mississippi. And not much more.
How her husband Joseph Wakely Wallace entered her life is a mystery...and so is the reason that Joseph changed his name from Wakeley to Wallace. Last names in my family have always been a confusion.
Some things never change. Emma's life certainly never did in the years I knew her.
She had very little, and that little was volutarily shared with needy family members like me...or it was stolen from her by Selma. Emma's life was like that.
My grandmother may have lived in government housing, but her mind was still in upstate New York where there were table linens, full table service, and a piano, a grand piano.
Her living conditions and her mental landscape never really jived. And that may have been her salvation.
Sidney was "poor Sidney", Selma was "poor Selma", but she never saw herself as "poor Emma"....
The Emma who fathfully visited Sidney during his many stays at the mental hospital in Jackson, La...
The Emma who had her Social Security checks regularly stolen by Selma...
The Emma who took me in when my mother just couldn't deal with an abusive, dead-beat, common-law husband, her job, and me...
Emma was finished with finishing school a long time ago when I met her.
She was as neat as a pin...all 58 chubby inches of her. Always with a starched house dress, always with stockings, and never without a hat in public.
My grandmother was quiet in a family where loud, creative profanity was common. And they mocked her quietness, her reserve.
I can remember her cleaning the kitchen, quietly singing to herself...if she felt really rushed, she'd whistle some manic little tune. And I learned not to get in her way when she whistled.
I loved my grandmother, dearly. She would talk to me...
Telling me the same stories over and over again like they were fresh and new.
She took pride in her knowledge of German, French and Latin....bragged that one of her relatives had been the first Methodist bishop in the United States...that she had come from an "important" family.
And Emma read her Bible. Daily. She liked the devotionals in The Upper Room.
It was Emma who saw to it that I went to church and Sunday School every Sunday.
She was a rock, a steadiness when everything else in my life seemed to be sliding.
Emma never really fit into the vibe, the rhythm, the motion that I came to know as New Orleans. She was just there to feel the heartache as New Orleans and its funk tore apart her family and its fibre.

I must add that Emma spent an entire Social Security check to buy me a suit when I graduated from high school. None of her children or her grandchildren had ever done that before.

Miracle on Magazine Street

A Miracle on Magazine Street.
Coliseum Place Baptist Church, directly across the street from Andrew Jackson Elementary.
A church with spiral wooden stairway that kids stormed up and down on, a ground floor that was said to have been used to hide Confederate horses and men, and a pipe organ.
An old, red brick church with history and a tall steeple that was eventurally blown down in a hurricane.
It's no more. First went the steeple. Then the whole place burned down.
My grandmother, Emma, went to Coliseum for years, sang in the choir, and probably dreamed of being the church organist. But that job went to Mrs. Waller, and that's probably a good thing.
There was an electric pump for the organ in modern times. But wouldn't it be great to have been the boy who pumped the bellows before technology stepped in to ruin the coolness?
Our apartment on Magazine Street was directly across from the school, a block from the church.
Andrew Jackson was where I got chicken pox and got evaluated (for something) by Mr. Thorne. He met with me once a week for a while, asking me a lot of questions about my family. How I felt about things.
About the future. His visits were nice. He listened.
How could I tell Mr.Thorne the real stuff? About picking roaches off the wall of our bathroom with a rubber band gun. About the on again, off again parent fights. About needing new glasses. About any of my reality?
The family rule: Never let outsiders know what really happens in your family. They will never understand. They might take you away.
My mother especially stressed this when there were belt marks and bruises on my legs.
"Bobby, you show people those marks, and they may put you in a home."
Mr. Thorn got the "Leave It to Beaver" version of my life, I lied about fishing trips my father and I never took. A thick and meaty lie. It was all fabrication. And I wondered if he really believed it all.
I did good. According to mom, Thorne estimated my I.Q. at about 135, and the teachers backed off a little.
Somehow the punish work never eased up much.
Report cards from the period read: Conduct - Unsatisfactory. Robert does not work well with others.
Robert makes poor use of time and materials.
The bottom line: Me writing endless copies of the mutiplication tables.
One weekend, I had put off doing the punish work to Sunday afternoon. When my mother got wind of it, she told me that I would stay home from the Sunday night service at Coliseum and write and write...
Off she went to church, and there I was. Alone, and no church, and no watching Mrs. Waller play the pipe organ.
She would slip off her shoes to play those deep notes on the pedals with only stockings on.. I'd watch it all, never realizing how erotic the whole thing was to me.
Something had to happen.
I've always used reason to my advantage.
I began to think how pleased God would be for me to go to church. Faith, that's what I needed!
Faith! God would do my multiplication tables!
I prayed. God listened.
I would trust Him to deal with my multilication tables, laying out lots of paper, sharpening a couple of pencils with a kitchen knife.
Off I went to church.
Things went well until my mother saw me making my way to sit by Mrs. Waller.
"What are you doing here?" "What did I tell you?"
Mom then got the story of God doing my work for me, the sharpened pencils and everything.
I was trusting God. How could she find flaw in that. A miracle on Magazine Street.
"Bobby, do you really believe that?" I knodded.
"We'll see."
Mrs. Waller was in fine form. And then there was the walk home. It was quiet....real quiet.
We were in the kitchen. The pencils, the paper....blank. It was all there. No miracle.
Mom didn't say a whole lot. But she made a cup of coffee, and then she sat down by me and began to write.

1 X 1 = 1
1 X 2 = 2 .....

It didn't hit me right then, but Mom was part of God's miracle that night. Faith, it works.

Eugene

"I'll play it, and I'll tell you what it is later." This is what Miles said while they were in the studio recording "If I Were a Bell" for the album, Relaxin' with the Miles Davis Quintet.
While I was growing up, we did a lot of that in our family...go about our lives, laying it all down like an improvisation...never quite sure what it was until it was out there. It was all about the moment...all about now, and we'd give it a name later.
Sure, it was exciting, but excitement could be packaged up wirh changes charged with pain, anger, and freefall....like the falling in a dream where it's all about wondering when you'll hit the cement....
Falstaff Brewery was on Tulane Avenue, not far from the New Orleans Parish Prison.
On top of the brewery was a tower of letters that spelled out "Falstaff"...and on top of that a globe.
At night this whole thing would light up, giving people for blocks around a weather forecast. The red letters spelling out Falstaff would go from the top downwards...or from the botton up. The direction of the next day's temperature was all there. And the big lit globe on top let everyone know if the next day would be rain (red), or clear (green).
And it was faily accurate....one of the most useful advertisements ever. There were times when it would have been nice to have something like this for me, just a tiny, quick peek at where the whole jam was going.
That's maybe what a good drummer or bass player does for a band....bar by bar, phrase by phrase, things are rock solid.
I remember the last time I saw my father, Eugene. I was taking the Tulane trolly to meet my mother at the Winn Dixie when she got off of work, and it was just getting dark.
The plan was for the two of us to put in a grocery order together... As I passed, I looked at the Falstaff brewery, at its advertisement...but it told me nothing about what was about to go down.
I usually took forever to pick out a box of cereal because I was always checking out what came inside the box...what toy...what little gadget. It drove my mother crazy....
Finally, we were at the car stop, each carrying a bag of food. It was dark, Carrolton Avenue full of traffic and noise. And then out of nowhere, my father.
The three of us hadn't lived togerher for months....it went like that.
A fight where people got hit and things got broken and all sorts of things were said....bad things. And then my father would't be around...just mom and I. And then we would be back together again for a while.
Changes, like key changes in a song....but these changes were never smooth.
Well, here he was tonight, drunk...smashed...and smelly.
First he was trying to apologize for the last time around...how it would be good for the boy (me), but mom just kept asking him to leave... And then the apologies ended, and out came the anger and rage....
Alone...the traffic just kept going by... and I kept praying that the trolly would hurry.
I didn't know what to do except plead with him to stop...
He got mad....reached out, tore at the bags we were holding...groceries all over the street....there was my cereal. Then he started hitting my mother....
When I tried to pull at him, my mother begged me to stay out of his way....and Eugene pushed me off.
He got enough of it and stormed away. And my mother and I got down on the ground trying to salvage what we could of our grocery order....the bags were gone.
That was all of Eugene...never saw him again.
Two years later, my Uncle Cliff told me my father had died at Charity Hospital. He had been staying around Lafayette Square when they brought him in...pneumonia, I think.

"I'll play it, and I'll tell you what it is later."

I stilll don't know.

St.. Alphonsus

St. Alphonsus Catholic Chruch was on Constance Street, right off of Magazine, not far from Jackson Avenue...still is.
Perhaps the thing I most remember about this church was that it was always open. That made an impression on me. That church trusted people, even me.
Houses and apartments in the Irish Channel were not air conditioned. In fact, not many places were.
Air conditioning was such a big deal that businesses advertised it. There would be a penguin somewhere on the door or front window of a place to get the point across. St. Alphonsus didn't have a penguin, but word got out.
My cousin, Mary (Mibby), and I would be out playing in the streets during the summer, and when the heat got the best of us, we would go over to the church, pull open one of its big doors and.....oh, the cool!
It was Mibby who knew about the holy water in the bowl at the entrance. I would put my hand in it, lick it, wipe it on my cheek. Holy water felt good.
It was a beautiful place! I partucularly liked all of the prayer candles in the back. We were not Catholic, but we loved lighting up all those candles in little red glasses. I think we were supposed to pay something, but no one ever fussed us for doing it.
All those candles lit up was an amazing sight.
St. Alphonsus smelled good too. Later on, I would find out about incense. But at the time, the cool, the glow of candles, and the rich, heavy smell were very special.
Sometimes there would be ladies kneeling, praying silently. Some would go into the small rooms to the side of the church where is was said that priests waited to speak with them. There were times when I tried to get Mibby to go with me to see what the priests had to say. We never did.
We would get into a pew and sit or kneel....taking in the wonder of the place, it's art.
No other place I had ever been was like this...with it's quality of light, its richness. Some people might have thought it odd that this jewel of a place was in the middle of such poverty and need. But maybe we needed a jewel all of our own.
There were statues everywhere. Mary holding the baby Jesus, Jesus on the cross.... The statue that made me curious had Jesus reaching into His chest for His heart. What was He going to do with it?
It was so quiet and peaceful! Someone coughing, the knock of a kneeler being put back into place, the rustle of a woman's dress as she got up. Only sounds like these pupnctuated the silence and made the lack of noise even more obvious.
At some point, we knew we better go....it might be that we knew a case of the giggles was on its way.
That wouldn't be a good thing for the magic of the place and the people who had come seeking it out.
Opening the door as we left the church, it was all out there waiting for us....the glare of the sun, the heat, the noise....and in the distance the red brick of the St. Thomas Housing Project. There was something significant that we were leaving...leaving a place that made me feel cleaner, lighter.
But we knew that we could always go back whenever we wanted to. They trusted us.

Mary Ida (Mibby) died very young of breast cancer. It would be a good thing if she made it to some place like Saint Alphonsus.

Mr. Tweety

I loved Mr. Tweety....
Exactly when I started going over to the apartment that he shared with his mother, I don't remember.
But there were many hot summer afternoons that i spent there with the drone of an electric fan making the afternoons seem timeless.
At first we played checkers, his aged mother bringing in glasses of iced tea. And as we played we talked about anything and everything....it was easy. Later on, we progressed to chess, "the real game".
There were days that I'd walk in to find him listening to a ball game on the radio while putting together a jig saw puzzle at the kitchen table. Tweety loved the Yankees.
Mr. Tweety made it a point to read his Bible a certain number of times each year...he kept score. And he had plenty of time to read because he was disabled. But it wasn't the Bible that I really had in mind when I talked to him.
Most adult men I knew wanted to talk about their military exploits in WWII or Korea. It seemed like that's ALL they talked about....a lot like a burned out athlete who wants to relive the great games....sometimes for a drink at the corner bar.
Tweety had never been called to serve because of his deformed back. He was bent over and looked at people out of the corner of his eye....looked like he could see clear through you...
I was afraid not to tell him the truth.
And as a young man, Mr. Tweety had been injured in an accident in a print shop. It was hard not to look at what remained of his left hand: a piece of the thumb...all the fingers gone.
What I wanted for Tweety to share came from him with fire in his eye....his career as a jazz musician in the speakeasies of New Orleans. There was a lot of hot music being played back then. Someone older might have wanted some details concerneing some of the other entertainment going down in those clubs, but for a kid like me, the music was enough.
Jazz, that was what defined the man....not war. It was all about the music, the clubs, the people he knew....a life of cool riffs and excitement. I remember the day he passed along to me the idea of using a rubber toilet plunger for a wah wha mute. And you can believe the first thing I did when I got home was to run to the bathroom and get our plunger from under the sink and give it a go. Tweety said that Sharkey Bonano, a man sacred in New Orleans' jazz circles, was known to use a derby for the job.
Monk Hazel and his Bienville Roof Orchestra with Sharkey on trumpet!
The only time Mr. Tweety picked up his horn anymore was when he brought it to church, a large Baptist church on the Airline Highway that sent a bus into the housing project to pick us all up on Sunday morning. Tweety played in the church orchestra.
If I sat by him during the service, I got Life Savers...Tweety had an endless supply.
Right before the service, as the people were comeing in, talking and getting seated, the musicians would warm up a little. That's when I got little bits of what Tweety had been. He'd quiety knock out a quick little riff, and then turn to me with a wicked little gleam in his eye to see if I had caught it.
In time, he taught me some pretty useful stuff...like how to transpose music by sight...bumping it up a half step so that I could play with a piano.
What I came to realize is that New Orleans is full of Tweetys. Men and women who define their lives by the jazz they play...or the jazz that has touched them with its soul. But not all of them took on the task of drawing in rudely abrupt, quirky kids like me....kids with nothing but a hunger for a life.
Yes, and then there was the music.

JoAnn

JoAnn was wild. She was married to Wesley who was much older than she, and they had two young daughters. My aunts Burt and Selma would hold up in her apartment for hours smoking and drinking stong coffee....and talking. When my mother wasn't working at the supermarket wrapping meat, she would join them.
With JoAnn, everything was ok...nothing I did was ever wrong. She seemed to take joy in finding things for me to do that my mother would never allow...like throwing noodles on the wall to see if they were cooked. If they stuck, they were cooked, and you could see over the stove where she had done this many times.
JoAnn gave me a very big part of my life....music. For months I had been after my mother to buy me an accordian. Accordians were big, impressive, made a LOT of noise, and Billy, a crippled boy I played with, had one...with pearl buttons and lots of keys.
Well the accordian thing was just not going to happen. But one afternoon at JoAnn's, she and I talked about me getting into the elementary school band with Miss Tisdale. But I needed something to play.
JoAnn thought a minute, went into her bedroom and came out with a scuffed black case. She told me that when she was a girl in Mississippi she had played in the high school band. She opened the case...and there on purple velvet was a tarnished silver cornet.
It wasn't an accordian, but it drew me. She took it out of the case, put the mouthpiece in...and handed it to me. "I can play it?" She nodded, and just that quickly I put the thing to my lips and blew.
The sound was AMAZING.
Then I looked at the horn more closely. There were dents in the bell, some of the finish was wearing off....but on the bell it was engraved with all sorts of scroll work...and it had a name: "Olds".
An Olds cornet....B flat!
The case and the horn smelled old...old spit, old valve oil...just old.
I produced some terrible noises on the thing, and JoAnn just laughed. And then I went out on her second floor balcony. I gave everyone in that square of project houses a piece of my mind. It was nothing about technique and tone quality or coherent notes ....It was everything about letting loose with stuff....some deep feelings whipping out of that horn. I was wailin'!
I didn't know it then, but it was maybe some of the most pure, honest stuff I ever played. It was jazz!Oh yeah! And the people in those other buildings must have hated me for it....but not JoAnn.
JoAnn gave me that wild look of hers and laughed.... Then she showed me how to give a horn a bath and grease it up with Vasoline and get the valves seated right....stuff like that.
After promising to practice and take care of the thing, she let me walk out of that apartment with one of the few things she had that linked her to what she was before Wesley and the babies...and the housing projects.
So generous and free and.....wild!

Street Scene

12 years old, I would walk from the Iberville housing project, in back of the big department stores on Canal on weekends or during the summer....
There was a fountain pool on Rampart Street where people would throw pennies. If it looked promising, I would take off my sneakers, roll up my pants, and wade in to get a little spending money. Sometimes, I would hunt for soft drink and beer bottles and sell them at the grocery.
My walks would take me past parking garages, shoe repair and barbar shops as I eased into the Quarter.
I would walk down Bourbon Street during the day. Trucks would be loading up the clubs and restaurants with beer and seafood. There were pictures of dancers in outrageous costumes in the windows...Chris Owens, Linda Bridgette, they were famous. Al Hirt was a trumpet player like me....with his own club.
If I crossed over to Royal, there were antique shops, and the coolness of the lobby of the Montleone Hotel. I wondered what it would be like to stay there. The lobby full of marble.
The shop owners were very kind to me. I would ask questions about the paintings and the furniture....endless questions, like I was actually in the market for the stuff.
There were coin and stamp collections to look at in glass cases. And jewelry, and sculpture, and lamps.
So much to see. The world opened up.
My grandfather, Joseph, had shown me how to get bags full of bananas by picking them up under the conveyor belts unloading the boats into the warehouses by the river. It was a rush to come home with them and feel like I had done something important. Someone said there were poisonous spiders hiding in the bananas, but I never saw any.
My grandfather said that it was always good to carry a bag with you. You never knew.....
By the river were railroad tracks to walk, the smell of beer from the brewery, and big barges pushed by tugboats churning up chocolate...all foamy. Sometimes, I would catch the Algiers ferry just to stand by the railing and watch the water. I think that's where I first thought about the chocolate.
On Decatur Street there was a place that had alligator hides all salted down and furs the trappers brought in. I went for the smell of the place, and they let me go and rub my hands on the hides. I felt dangerous.
Central Grocery was on Decatur...still is. The cheeses and the spices..... There were sacks of beans sitting on the floor, dried fish, and coffee.
Except for a quarter or two, I had no money, and the whole time I walked, I felt like I was in a bubble, floating through all this...just looking and smelling and sometimes touching. But it wasn't really for me...and yet it was mine, and it still is.