The Wind in the Reeds Read online

  An enraged Mamo grabbed Papo’s shotgun, ran into the yard, and taking aim at her fleeing daughter, pulled the trigger. Tee Mae wasn’t hit, but when she heard the shot, she fell facedown in the dirt all the same. Before she got to her feet, she heard Mamo keening in the distance. “Oh, Lord, I’ve done shot my baby! I’ve done killed my baby!”

  Tee Mae knew that it was about time for Papo to come home from work, and she also knew that Papo had warned Mamo not to touch his guns. So she judged that the smartest thing for her to do was to lie there on the ground and wait for her father to arrive.

  Minutes later, a cousin walked up on Tee Mae, thinking she was dead. He poked her in her ribs with his pointy boots, trying to turn her body over to see her wounds. Tee Mae let out a laugh and sprang to her feet. Just then, Papo arrived home. Tee Mae knew she was safe. She got back to the yard in time to hear Papo lecture Mamo about her unorthodox disciplinary methods.

  “Oh, Mama, I done told you that’s not how to chastise those children,” he said. “Don’t be messing with my gun. Use a switch on them kids.”

  Mamo was vexed. “You see that black wench there?” she yelled to everyone present. “I’m going to get you for this! You did this on purpose!”

  But from that day on, Tee Mae never had any more trouble with her mother trying to discipline her with firearms. “That was the second time she’d shot at me!” Tee Mae said.

  Though Mamo had her angry moments, her children remembered her as strong-willed and extraordinarily capable. Despite her fits, they liked to say that she could get along with both the Devil in hell and the Lord in heaven. “She drove us to love ourselves and to make something of our lives,” says Uncle L.C. “She was another Mary McLeod Bethune.”

  The one thing Mamo did not know how to do was manage money. That was Papo’s job. Papo did not trust banks, and he kept some of his money in a chest in the house. The rest he stored in his barn, in a sack hidden in a barrel. He was a frugal man, but not a miserly one. One Christmas, his children received a vivid illustration of the value of their father’s prudence.

  Mamo worked as a cook and a maid in a white family’s house, and she spent the early part of Christmas Day there preparing their dinner. Back at the farm, Papo oversaw the preparation of the Edwards family’s holiday meal, which they would celebrate as the evening meal so Mamo could be with them. Christmas dinner was always rich with country food, including chicken, turkey, and goose from their farm, rice, green peas, and potato salad. For dessert, the family ate candy and cake Papo made himself. There wasn’t much money for Christmas gifts, but Papo and Mamo made sure their children feasted well on the Nativity.

  One Christmas evening after supper, the Edwardses went to call on their College Point neighbors, to wish them a happy holiday. The kids were startled to go into one house and to see that all that family had eaten for their Christmas meal was potatoes and grits. When they returned home, Papo told the children, “This is what I mean when I tell you it’s important to save for a rainy day. If you put your money aside now, you will have enough to eat well on Christmas.”

  Given the man Papo was, if the Edwardses had any food left, he probably took it to that poor family and didn’t tell his own children for the sake of preserving their neighbors’ dignity.

  His children remembered Papo as a slow talker but a deep thinker. He never made a quick decision, but acted only after prayer, deliberation, and sleeping on it. Whatever the answer was, he arrived at it through careful reason, not passion. Acting on impulse was the sure way to lose your money, in Papo’s view.

  Papo worked for a time in a sugar factory and received his weekly wages in a brown packet. He had a firm rule with himself: Wait twenty-four hours before spending a penny of it. Uncle L.C. said that as a young working man, he thought his father’s rule was silly. You have the money, he figured, so why not enjoy it?

  But when he got married and started a family of his own, he understood Papo’s good sense and followed the rule himself. Uncle L.C., who worked at the DuPont chemical plant, has done well through saving and investing over the years. To this day, he credits Papo for teaching him by word and example the importance of being careful with your money and not letting your passions guide your decisions.

  If L.C. was the patient, deliberate brother, L.H. was the family firebrand. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War, and fiercely proud of his military service. He was a stalwart patriot but also a black nationalist equally outraged at the oppression the country he loved and fought for laid on the backs of black men and women. When she was old and gray, and L.H. had long since passed, my mother told me that her brother’s volcanic temperament came from a place of great decency.

  “If L.H. could give you his heart and still live, he would do it for you,” Tee said. “The thing I liked most about L.H. is that he would tell you he did not mind dying if he was dying for what was right. L.H. loved justice, and he was not afraid of nobody, and he spoke his piece to anybody and everybody.”

  There was little doubt where the fighting spirit that animated L.H., Tee Mae, and my mother came from. Tee once told me about a time in the 1940s when, as the Edwards children were walking home from school, a troublemaking white boy threw rocks at them, hitting L.H. in the head. When the kids made it home and told their mother what had happened, Mamo rocketed out of the house, up College Point Lane, and walked all the way to Bertrandville to confront the white boy’s mother.

  When the white lady, a Mrs. Aucoin, answered the door, Mamo told her how it was going to be from here on out.

  “I pay taxes just like you pay taxes,” my grandmother said. “My child has a right to walk on this road like anybody else. I told all my children that if that one”—she pointed to the boy—“even looks at them, they all supposed to jump on him and beat him till he’s dead. And if they don’t kill him, I will.”

  “Did the white lady call the sheriff on Mamo?” I asked Tee. It was hard to imagine that, in a culture ruled by the ideology of white supremacy, a white woman would take that kind of dressing-down from a black woman.

  “No!” she said. “That lady was trembling. She knew that boy of hers was bad. She told Mama it would never happen again. And it didn’t.”

  L.H.’s rage against those who had done him wrong—racists and everybody else—sometimes worked to his disadvantage. Said my mother, “L.H.’s biggest enemy was himself.”

  L.H. had a good job working for the local sheriff, but rashly quit one day, out of pride; he thought the sheriff ought to take his advice more seriously.

  L.H. didn’t need the sheriff’s department job. He owned a nice store in Bertrandville. Trouble was, he had gotten way behind on his commercial taxes. Our cousin in parish government told Mamo to get L.H. to pay his back taxes or there were some white people who were going to use his delinquency to harm him.

  “But L.H. wouldn’t listen,” my uncle L.C. said. “He made a mistake. He left the sheriff’s department. Two days after that, they put a lien on his store for twenty thousand dollars in back taxes. That’s how he lost his business.”

  Papo had a saying: “Always keep a dollar in your pocket, because you never know when the world is going to be sold for a dollar.” He meant that a wise man always held money in reserve to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities, and that a wise man always keeps a close watch on his financial matters. As brilliant as he was, Uncle L.H. didn’t do as Papo taught, nor did he discipline his emotions to protect his exposed financial flank—and he suffered for it.

  But he never gave up. Even after he lost the store, and his son Louis later had a similar setback, he was full of encouragement. “You know what, Lou?” he’d say. “Colonel Sanders didn’t make it until he was in his seventies. So keep fighting.” He always did, until his last breath. As he lay dying of cancer in 1999, his sisters thought L.H., a believer though estranged from the Catholic Church for parts of his life, would be willing to speak to a pri
est. But when Uncle L.H. saw a priest walk into the room, he all but rose up out of his deathbed and delivered a hellacious cussing to the poor man—and to his own sisters for summoning him. “Get him out of here!” he yelled. “Goddamnit, you niggers worship a white man like he’s God! He don’t look like you!” L.H. left his earth without last rites, but as master of his soul.

  Here’s what you need to know about Uncle L.H. and his anticlericalism: He had endured the Catholic Church’s failing to stand up to racism on behalf of its black communicants, and he had seen a close family member drink himself to death, never able to recover from his childhood molestation by a Catholic priest. He never forgave it. In “Strong Men,” a scathing poem rebuking hypocrisy in white Christians and passivity in their black brothers, the African American poet Sterling A. Brown spoke for Uncle L.H., a strong man whose spirit was never tamed. To honor my uncle L.H., I read that poem at his funeral as his body lay in St. Benedict the Moor Church, where he was baptized as a child.

  It took incredible inner strength to survive Jim Crow, much less to thrive under it. Mamo and Papo raised their children in a time and place when whites held all the power and were not afraid to use it. No black man or woman could afford to make a false move. Black people were supposed to know their place, and God help them if they challenged the racist social order. To guard your heart by learning how to endure daily humiliations without fighting back was the only way to survive.

  Papo was well respected within both the white and black communities, because everyone knew he was a righteous man. “He thought he was the equal of everybody,” my aunt Tee Gladys told me once. “He never backed down.” Except once, which was one of my aunt’s most painful memories.

  When my aunt Gladys returned home to the bayou from California after her first marriage broke up, she was dismayed to see that Papo was still selling his cane crops to a particular sugar-buying firm that paid Papo in credit at its grocery store. At the end of every growing season, the company would tell Papo that his cane crop was just enough to cover his family’s grocery bill.

  Tee Gladys told Papo that he was being ripped off by those people and he should quit buying groceries there. Mamo backed her up on this; she was tired of having to depend on that company and its store for the family’s food needs when there were other stores in the area that offered better prices. Papo was afraid no brokers would buy his cane if he moved his grocery trade to a competitor.

  “Daddy, it’s like having your hand in the lion’s mouth,” Tee Gladys told him. But he wouldn’t budge.

  “The first and only time in my life I saw my daddy cry was after a bad year in the cane field,” Tee Gladys said to me a few years before she died. “Cane didn’t produce well. Me and my daddy, I’ll never forget, it was a cold, rainy day in January. We went to that company store, shopping for all our groceries, and came to the cashier to check us out.

  “One of the owners knew we were in the store, and he had not had the courtesy to send a letter to my father to tell him we didn’t have any more credit there,” she continued. “When we got up to the cashier, the man came and took Daddy to the office, and told him he couldn’t have those groceries. They humiliated him.”

  When Papo and his daughter made it back home, he had to break the news to Mamo.

  “He was crying, tears running down his face,” Tee Gladys remembered. “But let me tell you, the white man didn’t do him wrong. He set him free. He wasn’t scared after that to shop other places. It hurt my father, but it got his hand out of the lion’s mouth. In the end, he was victorious.”

  Mamo and Papo were well respected in the entire community. Most of the time, however, whites in Assumption Parish felt entitled to treat their black neighbors with utter disrespect. There was no grocery store in College Point when my mother was a child, so she and her siblings would have to walk to nearby Plattenville to buy food for the family. As they passed the houses of whites, children their own age would be playing in the yards and would call out to their own mothers inside, saying, “Hey, Mama, a little nigger is going to the store. You want anything?” If the white woman said yes, her child would call out, “Hey, little nigger, stop.”

  If you were a black child, you had no choice but to do as that white child told you. This is how it was.

  My grandfather was a steadfast, quiet man, a poor country farmer of great dignity. That’s why the rare occasions when that dignity slipped were so shocking to his children. Tee saw him lose his cool only once. It was during the Depression, when a white hobo came to their door, begging for food. Papo exploded with anger.

  “Who are you to come here?!” he yelled, driving the beggar away.

  Why would Papo treat someone like that? Tee wondered. She saw him as the soul of justice and compassion. Then Papo said, indignantly, “He’s a white man in America, and he’s coming begging from me?!”

  Papo saw the hungry hobo as privileged because of the color of his skin. Was that fair? No. Nor was it kind. But you have to understand his intemperate reaction in the context of the pervasive and overwhelming power the white man had over the black man, and how gratuitously cruel was its exercise.

  WHEN TEE WAS A CHILD, a black family in College Point somehow scraped the money together to buy a new car. They were so proud of that automobile and showed it off to all their neighbors. It was like a gift to the community, because they could give people who walked everywhere a ride.

  “I remember the night that the night riders came and burned that car,” Tee told me. “They said, ‘You niggers, don’t you think about getting no cars. Let this be a lesson to you.’”

  That infuriated my mother. What did that black family having a car have to do with those Klansmen? How did it hurt them? And the thing is, Tee told me, all the black folk knew exactly who the night riders were. The men may have worn white robes and hoods, but the people they terrorized knew them all. It didn’t matter. They were the law. They burned the black man’s car as a message to the entire black community: Don’t think you can ever have nice things or get ahead in this life. You are made to be poor and beneath us, and the sooner you get that straight, the better off you’ll be.

  Right there, as a little girl, Tee resolved never to let anyone deny her anything—not the right to go anywhere she wanted to go, learn anything she wanted to learn, or be anything she wanted to be. But she also learned that you had to be smart about it, and she passed that childhood lesson on to my brothers and me.

  “Know that those people who do not have your best interest at heart will always be there,” Tee said. “Accept it. Don’t be surprised when they show up. Know that you will have to face those folks and defeat them to achieve what you want to achieve. That’s just part of life.”

  This was not just a lesson in race relations. Racism was how it manifested for us in south Louisiana, Tee said, but don’t fool yourself: It will come in all forms, shapes, and sizes—and colors. It’s human nature. So in any dispute, small or large, don’t get mad when the bad guy lets his mask slip. Just know from that point on that he is the person who doesn’t have your best interests at heart and act accordingly.

  Was this a counsel of defeat? Not at all. It was, in fact, a canny strategy of winning a long-term victory against a more powerful enemy. You had to be willing to fight for justice, but you had to be smart enough to pick your battles carefully. Wiliness took all forms. In the 1940s, Mamo worked as a domestic servant in the house of the parish sheriff. Back then, when whites in the Cajun parishes didn’t want black folks to understand what they were saying, they would speak French. What the white power elite didn’t realize is that humble maid Frances Edwards secretly spoke French and would quietly report to her own people at College Point what the white men were planning. Her knowledge of French was the dollar in the pocket Mamo held to buy the black community advance warning to protect themselves from their enemies who held all the power in the parish and who did not hesitate to inflic
t terror on African Americans to keep them in line.

  For all that, it would be untrue to give the impression that life on the bayou was about nothing but blood, sweat, terror, and tears for black folk. When I was growing up, my mother and my aunts talked about the joys of those days more than anything else. They lived a classic childhood in the rural South, tied to the land and to the rhythms of agrarian life. Today, it can be difficult to believe that a life as materially poor as theirs could be bearable, much less a source of deep happiness, but that’s exactly what my mother and her siblings said.

  Tee Gladys and my mother were too poor to have store-bought dolls, so they would take sticks from the yard and call them their babies. Sometimes they would pick corn from the field and pretend that the silk was their dolls’ soft hair. They made dollhouses of pasteboard and dressed their humble dolls with dresses cut from the pages of a catalogue. “It was a beautiful life,” Gladys once said to me, her eyes twinkling.

  All the children of College Point gathered in the Edwards family’s yard to play. The reason? Nearly every day, Mamo made treats for them. Tea cakes, gingerbread, muffins, and the like, and on hot summer days, a big waterbucket full of lemonade. The neighborhood children would come to Mamo and Papo with their problems, seeking advice. They were afraid to be open with their own parents, but they knew they could find a sympathetic ear and good counsel at the Edwards place.

  In fact, Mamo and Papo were unusual in the respect they gave to youngsters, given the rigid hierarchy of age customary then. They involved their children in most decisions affecting the family and rarely hid anything from them. They talked everything out around the dinner table, which was a place of moral instruction. Mamo and Papo thought it important for their kids to know that family life meant sharing in both the blessings and the burdens of all its members. “They taught us that if one sister has two pieces of bread and the other has none, you must share,” said Tee Mae.