History Lessons Read online

  Mom was lucky. Most people with the grade of aneurysm she suffered die within days or even hours. Her recovery was uncomplicated, though prolonged by decades of abusing her body with booze and cigarettes and by a lifetime of poverty and unhappiness, barely softened by the recent arrival of Social Security checks. But she came through and, remarkably, stopped getting drunk, at least on a very regular basis.

  Only one year before Katrina hit, Mom moved to Florida, and she hates it. She detests its dizzying yet monotonous spread of subdivisions and shopping malls, and the way everyone depends on cars. There’s no culture, no personality, she complains, unlike New Orleans, where she walked to fetch her groceries or rode the Magazine Street bus downtown past jewel-toned Victorian houses, as festooned as king cakes, and telephone wires draped with last year’s Mardi Gras beads.

  She moved extremely reluctantly, after her landlord died and his daughter decided to renovate the shotgun. The house was a wreck. The roof leaked tea-colored water; there was no air-conditioning except for one window unit, covered in dust and mildew and about to tip into the alley; and the entire place was filled with roaches and fleas and with rodents held more or less in check by a couple of alley cats. My mother couldn’t find a new place with a rent cheaper than one hundred dollars a month, and that, combined with fears about crime, convinced her to move east.

  Mom has two dutiful daughters who live near her. Kinta teaches English in a rough inner-city high school and coaches sports she doesn’t know how to play. She’s the kind of person who will help out no matter what—steady and sometimes so self-effacing you don’t know who she is anymore. Her students are amazed, and the boys utterly thrilled, when she tells them she was once a Playboy Bunny. Kinta’s been lying to her husband so she can visit Mom three or more times a week, keeping her company and tending to things like the grocery shopping. Marie, seven years older than Kinta, is a nurse married to a real estate agent, counting the days until she can retire after decades of saving everyone but herself, Mom included. She has proclaimed for so many years that Mom is just about to die that it has turned into a family joke.

  It’s July 2006, and I have gathered my mother and three sisters at Marie’s house in Jacksonville, Florida, to dig through their memories for my own use. I have turned a family vacation into a research trip. The kids are playing in the pool. My wife is inside reading a magazine. Tall oaks surround Marie’s house, so we are in the shade, but just a few feet away columned light has found its way through the trees. The crab grass is beechen green, though some of it has turned brown, burnt by the sun. It’s blistering hot and very still, as if the heat has slowed everything down. My sister Sabrina has just arrived in her beat-up car from New Orleans, a couple of days late, with a jumble of clothes in a suitcase and a few joints to smoke during evening walks along the beach. Sabrina laughs away her lateness and all her other eccentricities as the peculiarities of being a New Orleanian, as if they are a species of human that operates by an entirely different conception of time.

  I’ve been traveling around the South for five years now, conducting research and interviews, collecting material, dealing with bureaucracies and their records, ruminating on what I’ve found and what’s not there. This is what most historians do. We spend a lot of time looking for stuff so that we can somehow sketch a picture of people and their world. Historians collect evidence—facts—which they assemble into a story that is also an argument: this is how things happened, for these reasons; this is what this person did and why, and these are the consequences. Historians are more judges than lawyers, constantly contending with conflicting material and theories about the past, hoping that somehow meaning will emerge and, with it, a sense of how things might have really been.

  I know I want something more. I am hoping evidence might awaken the past, or at least that knowledge might fill in the spaces where there is now only nothingness. My mother looks nervous, scared even. I am scared too, afraid she will tell me something I actually don’t want to know. I try to remain calm and use the steady, dispassionate language my training as a historian has taught me. I’ll be a social scientist pursuing factual evidence, determinedly objective, though at the back of my mind I realize I have no idea where this journey into memory and history will lead me. I’ve packed a briefcase with too many pens and pencils, pads of paper, a few gadgets, hoping the paraphernalia might somehow protect me. Our conversation is stored on a digital recorder smaller than my wallet.

  I look at my mother and can tell she once was a beautiful woman. Her eyes, though, seem worn, pained. They are dark and foreboding, and I feel as if in an instant I might tumble into them. I realize I have always lived with the terrifying eyes of my mother.

  She looks insane. I want to flee.

  Children splash each other in the pool, run around and jump onto rafts.

  “Christine. Sweetpea. Please don’t run. You’ll slip.” My daughter looks at me and smiles as she slides into the water.

  I want to ask: “What do you remember of our earliest relationship, you know, how we were as mother and young child?” I want to know about one of my few abiding memories, from age four-and-a-half, when my mother tried to commit suicide. It was November, only a few weeks after neighborhood children dressed as ghosts and demons had clamored up our stairs looking for trick-or-treats. The weather had turned cool, finally, and the camellias had begun their winter bloom. She locked herself in the bathroom, laid a towel and pillow carefully across the black-and-white basket-weave tiles, and turned on the gas to the ceramic heater.

  The bathroom was opposite the place where I slept. It was more of a closet than a room, with roaches that came out in the night and left welts around my ankles, their fecal matter and the apartment’s accumulated debris contributing to a history of childhood bronchitis. My brother Gus, a short, reed-thin boy of fifteen, banged on the door until he broke the lock and it crashed open. And there was my mother lying on the floor.

  I don’t tell my mother that I have returned to that room. Property deeds disclosed an owner. A letter followed, then a phone call, finally a knock on the door, and an agreement that I would not take any photographs, or use the current owner’s name in print.

  “My wife thinks you might be some kind of weirdo,” Mr. G., the new owner, told me matter-of-factly. “You might, like, come back to rob us or something. We’ve got a kid, a boy. He’s just started school.”

  My business card with my university and professional title stamped across its front held little persuasive power. But then New Orleans is a rough town filled with scam artists. The city is notoriously violent, with one of the country’s worst murder rates. Most everyone cloaks their selves in some sort of protection: alarms, burglar bars, guns, Rottweilers, private security companies, FOB decals on their cars. A curtain of iron seven feet high guards the house. Two “Stanley Security Solutions” signs stand sentry, but Mr. G. worries nonetheless.

  A drug dealer owned the house before it went into foreclosure. Mr. G. bought it cheap. Now he’s fixing up the house, cleansing the place of its checkered past. The neighborhood is on the upswing. Katrina made Uptown attractive again. Many middle-class whites had abandoned the city for the outlying suburbs, complaining about all sorts of urban menaces: declining schools, political corruption, violence, the disappearance of an urban civility that had once governed the city’s chiaroscuro neighborhoods, or at least as so many whites like to believe since civility was enforced by white supremacy. Many moved to the most vulnerable areas, like Lakeview. When the levees failed during Katrina, the waters reached nine or more feet. Entire suburbs disappeared. Now everyone’s looking for high ground, and the city is once again a draw.

  I walked through the rooms, all smaller than I had imagined. Mr. G. opened the door to my bedroom, which has returned to being a closet and storeroom. My hands reached from one wall to the other. I turned around and there was the bathroom. I stood just as I had nearly half a century ago. Almost nothing has changed. The tile floor is still there with
its labored weave of black and white. The shelves opposite the door are still there, which once held hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome, and assorted makeup. So also the sink, then the toilet, finally the three-quarter shower and bath against the wall. What I saw and what I remembered were seemingly in perfect accord. It felt as if there was no then or now, or as if the experience had become so burned into my mind that it had refused any forces of erosion or dissolution.

  I didn’t tell Mr. G. what unfolded that autumn day, about all the sadness that could not be contained within that room, or about how the blinding light of memory refuses time’s passing.

  I pointed to the wall opposite the sink.

  “Wasn’t there a ceramic heater, about there?”

  “Yeah, we removed it. They’re too dangerous. Anyway, we got central air now.”

  “So, Mom, I want to know more about your life. And 5225 Chestnut Street.” What I want to say is, “I want to know what happened between us, you and me. And I want to understand what I couldn’t then.”

  But I don’t. It seems too confrontational, too needy and judgmental, as if I am demanding that she offer a detailed accounting of her life. We turn from each other’s eyes, and she takes a sip from a tall glass filled with ice and cola. A bead of water, in which a fragment of light has taken a fragile residence, falls to her lap.

  “Son, I can’t remember.”

  I know not to press too hard, afraid she will get angry and walk away. But I also know that part of me wants to run from these questions, from our past. I steer the conversation in a different direction, hoping she will reminisce.

  I begin by telling what little I know from the research I have gathered so far about the woman who sits opposite me.

  “Mom, you grew up during the Depression …”

  And that’s all it takes to get her talking. Despite her protestations, my mother has a remarkable command of her past and can go on for hours until she tires. Perhaps the deficits she complains of relate to short-term memory, to things like what she ate for dinner yesterday, a conversation with a daughter, stories from the books left open and abandoned by her bed. The unbounded ordinariness of everyday life runs away from her, leaving behind a more distant past that seems nearby, as if the 1920s were yesterday and the nineteenth-century history of her family just last week. Childhood experiences rise before her, including radiant stories she had been told by her mother. A history from long before her birth begins surfacing.

  I can almost see Mom’s grandfather Joseph, the cotton broker, forming before her glistening eyes, walking from his office on the Mississippi River in the Vieux Carré to a fabled house on the palm-lined Esplanade. The wealthy Creole elite lived here, in homes with porches on each floor and seventeen-foot-ceilinged rooms that let the cool air curl around one’s feet. There were long dinners beneath gilded chandeliers: oysters from Plaquemines, turtle soup with sherry, a roasted haunch of venison. The adults would drink café au lait in one of the double parlors, adorned with elaborate plaster work, that lay at the foot of sweeping staircases fashioned from mahogany and rosewood imported from Central American jungles.

  Just as quickly her mind takes me from the vanished resplendence of Esplanade to an impoverished childhood in a rented shotgun during the Great Depression. Mom lived in Hollygrove, next to the Mississippi River in East New Orleans. It was a poor, predominantly black neighborhood, though the fact that she lived in an African American community is entirely absent in her recollection. From the photographs and records I have examined, Hollygrove was a crisscross of oyster shell roads and ditches, into which a few cars dipped uneasily, so low and underserved by the municipal government that it regularly suffered some of the worst flooding in the city. The summer storms left the houses sitting on their stilts like little islands in a suburban lake.

  Mom was eight years old, the youngest of six children, when the stock market collapsed in 1929. At first New Orleanians thought themselves immune from the crash’s effects. They’d ride it out like a hurricane or like any other nuisance that rolled into town—celebrate in the face of impending disaster, maybe even conjure up a new cocktail, dish, or ditty to mark the occasion. Wall Street seemed a continent away, financial turmoil a distinctly northern malady. Furthermore, they had more important things to fret over. The city ran on alcohol, sex, and corruption, and Prohibition had made these even more profitable. Federal agents stepped up their patrols along the coast’s Rum Row. Suddenly it became more difficult to smuggle thousands of cases of Cuban booze from the boats sashaying at anchor off the Balise. City authorities also began yet another effort to rid the city of its great “devilment”: gambling, prostitution, and burlesque dancing. Some feared the city’s citizens would eventually go blind from epidemics of syphilis and the clap. Amidst the endless political shenanigans and charges of corruption, on two things everyone could agree: the “Green Wave,” Tulane’s football team, was having a great season, and Mardi Gras would continue as ever.

  The bottom fell out in the middle of 1930, just in time for Mom’s ninth birthday. Jobs disappeared. The municipal government didn’t know how to respond, spending more time squabbling with the state and federal authorities than helping its citizens. Unemployed workers rioted. Violence swept the city. Ineptitude and indifference continued. Corrupt officials worked hard to ensure the money from bribes kept flowing. New Orleans would become the largest municipality in the country that did not provide money for the relief of indigent families. The best Mayor Walmsley could do was to hand out oranges for the needy to hawk on street corners. Before long the city was awash in citrus.

  Crisis set in by 1931. The river fell quiet. Even the city’s prostitutes reduced their fees. The first and hardest hit were men without skills, men like Mom’s father, Zeno, who took whatever work he could find. Mostly he dreamed. Mom’s mother, Cecile, made a little money teaching English to Italian immigrants. But the family was desperately poor, living by their wits and by gifts of food and clothing. Often they couldn’t make the five-dollar rent and took up odd jobs or borrowed from family to make ends meet. The children went hungry more often than not.

  Mom listened to her mother’s stories of their wealthy past and tended her father’s dreams. She scavenged Uptown for Coke and Barq’s Root Beer bottles, while in the backyard her father concocted “Zeno’s Magic Furniture Polish.” Mom spent hours swirling pebbles in the bottles to clean the dirt that clung to the inside. The family would then fill the empty bottles with the polish, which Zeno would take to the Garden District and the wealthier neighborhoods, where he’d sell his magic door to door. He felt more at home wandering through the mausoleums at Lafayette Cemetery, which looked like a fabled city—an ancient Rome or Athens in miniature—than knocking on the doors of stately homes, with their nineteen-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers, and empurpled plaster-work framing windows. But he had to go where the money was.

  “I’m gonna sell the formula to Johnson & Johnson,” he told his family, even as bottles of the polish piled up in the backyard. They would be rich. Mom would get her pair of patent leather shoes. The family wouldn’t have to scrape by. They would return to their rightful place among the city’s elite. They would own a house far from the railroad tracks, a solid house two or even three stories high near Saint Charles Avenue or maybe even in the Garden District. There would be Sunday dinners at Galatoire’s, weekend trips to the Gulf Coast. When the weather had turned and winter brought out the camellias in pinks, coral reds, and silken whites, they would attend one of the Carnival balls. They would throw beads and doubloons from dazzling floats, instead of scampering after them on Mardi Gras day.

  Mom lived by her father’s promises and her mother’s stories of their illustrious Creole past. Mom might have gone to sleep hungry, but she could at least sate herself with family history. “We lived down on,” a story would begin. By that simple pronoun—“we”—Mom could escape time into some eternal familial existence, a past that was right there to behold and always would be, a past that
would somehow wash clean the stain of poverty and despair. As long tales unwound of how things once were, she would nod yes, as if the stories might, at any moment, become real again. “It will come right. It will come right.” This prophecy at the end of a story softened the wounds that gnawed at her like a curse or a sickness in the soul. Mom would have those patent leather shoes. She would meet her prince.

  In the middle years of the Depression, Mom blossomed into a young woman with dark, flowing hair and an hourglass figure. Whenever she had a few coins in her purse, she would walk down the block to the Ashton Theatre on Apple Street—the “Ashcan” everyone called it—a hulking temple of a place where upward of seven hundred people at a time could watch newsreels and dream away the day. The large Reproduco pipe organ from Chicago sat silent. The “talkies” had arrived, and the great films of Ernst Lubitsch, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, and femme fatales like Dorothy Lamour, Greta Garbo, and Rita Hayworth—sophisticated women, beautiful, powerfully seductive.

  Mom’s stories and the material I have collected meld together, and in a confusion of tenses I feel myself tumbling into more distant histories. I look at her again. Time ripples across her weathered face as if an earlier self, formed of impossible longings, still lies just beneath the surface. Mom wanted a mink coat, a swimsuit that held tight to her bosom, a lover who would return her to what the family had irrevocably lost: wealth, stability, good taste, a house she would own, and adoring, successful children. Dreams were her only inheritance. She yearned for a man who would whisk her away. He would be a good man, a decent man, most of all a successful man, who would take her to Easter brunches at Commander’s Palace, where the gin fizzes smelled of spring blossoms and waiters served Oysters Rockefeller upon a plate of diamonds. In the summer he would take her away from the city’s swelter and its deadened talk of the weather. In the tender hour after a thunderstorm, he would come to her, and the cricket lullabies and fireflies sparkling in their nightly waltz would tell her that she was content, and secure, and in love.