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.