The Wind in the Reeds Page 4

  Anything could be said at the table, but the sanctity of the family circle was inviolate.

  “You better not breathe a word of it when you left the house,” Tee said. “We never did.”

  Like many country people of that era, both black and white, the Edwardses had no running water indoors. They had to haul water from Bayou Lafourche for washing, and bathe in large, twelve-inch-deep buckets called “foot tubs.” Uncle L.C., the baby of the family, remembers that when his oldest sister, Inez, would come visit from New Orleans, she would make it her business to bathe him. She would sit him in a no. 3 washtub full of water and scrub him hard all over with a bar of Octagon soap. It was a miserable experience, but Inez was diligent about cleanliness.

  There were no indoor toilets either. If Mamo or Papo needed the bathroom at night, they had a slop jar in their room. The kids had to make do with a five-gallon can.

  The Edwards children would be up early in the morning to work the land and the garden before going to school, and get out early to make it home to help with chores before sundown. They grew corn, beans, cabbage, mustard greens, and more, and raised hogs and fowl. Nothing went to waste in their house. If the kids didn’t like what they were served, Papo would say, “Eat it, and if it kills you, you won’t have to eat it again.”

  “Our garden was out by the levee,” Uncle L.C. recalls. “You stayed there and worked all day. After working, you would go back down the road, take a bath in a foot tub, and go to sleep. That was it. That was a joyous time.”

  It was an era of simple pleasures. “You enjoyed the company of the College Point people,” L.C. continues. “You enjoyed the sound of the rain on the tin roof. The sound of that rain falling, and everyone coming out of the field.

  “Nine months later, you saw an increase in everybody’s family,” he chuckled.

  The cane harvest generally happened around October, which meant schoolchildren in Assumption Parish had the entire month off to help. Everyone in the black community had each other’s backs, watching each other’s kids, helping on each other’s farms. They were poor black country folks in the Deep South, and knew that the only people in the world they had looking out for them was each other.

  A boucherie—butchering a hog—was a big event in the life of the community. When I was a kid, we would go to these things in Assumption Parish, and aside from the scary thrill that came when Papo demanded all us boys touch the dying hog and hold the bucket into which blood from its punctured heart poured, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Later, I came to understand that every member of the community took home a piece of that hog and had something to eat, no matter how poor they were. In that sense, Papo’s instruction to lay our hands on the animal as it struggled against death, and to collect the life pouring out of the hog’s breast, was a ritual with deep meaning. As boys who would one day be men of the community, we had to lose our fear of doing something traumatic, because it was essential to the continuation of communal life. The hog was giving its life to sustain the community; the role of men was to take the life of that animal for the sake of all, even the least among us. We were not to fear the sacrifice.

  As much as he loved his sons and grandsons, Papo was unusually progressive for his generation when it came to his daughters. Papo took a lot of criticism from his friends for educating all his daughters, especially during the Depression. Back then, it didn’t make a lot of sense to country people to send girls for higher education. But Papo came from the Southalls, for whom reverence for education was a defining value. It took a great deal of courage and vision for Papo and Mamo to educate their daughters in the face of not only poverty and racism, but also the skepticism of their community.

  Their tenacity emerged in part from their profound hope. Papo and Mamo really raised their children to believe that things were going to get better for black folk, but they also taught the kids that they had a part to play in making that happen for themselves. For Papo, having an education was important for the same reason keeping a dollar in your pocket was important: You never knew when opportunity was going to open up, so you had better be ready to take advantage of it.

  Papo had only a third-grade education, while Mamo had been through seventh grade. But their wisdom and devotion to the transformative power of schooling could not be measured by academic transcripts. In fact, Mamo went back to school when she was sixty-five years old to earn her high school diploma, which she did in three years. To this day, it hangs on the wall at Uncle L.C.’s house, in a place of honor.

  WHEN MY MOTHER would become indignant at racial injustice, she knew that education would be the greatest weapon she would have with which to fight it. Her education would give her the tools to define her own destiny—and as a professional teacher, she knew it was the best hope her black students had for delivering themselves.

  Yet she never forgot where she came from, or how she got where she was. After graduating from Southern University with a degree in education and home economics, Tee returned to the bayou to teach. Back then, the only middle-class professions open to African Americans were teacher, preacher, and undertaker. If you were one of those, you held elite status in the black community.

  Though she was working at the black school in Paincourtville, Tee, a tomboy in her youth, helped out on the farm by driving the tractor as Papo, Tee Gladys, and the others gathered hay. One of the kinfolks chastised her for lowering herself in that way.

  “You finished college,” the relative chided. “You have a sheepskin. You’re not supposed to be on this tractor.”

  “If I hadn’t been on this tractor, I wouldn’t have a sheepskin,” Tee shot back. In her family, there was nothing undignified about hard work.

  When my older aunts were children, there was no advanced education available to black children in Assumption Parish, nor any other kind of training for the trades. During World War II, Aunt Inez, the oldest daughter, moved to New Orleans to live with one of our cousins. She learned a trade and became a seamstress in the Tulane Shirt Factory, making shirts on U.S. government contract. All the Edwards girls—Evelyn Mae, Yvonne, Gladys, and my mother, Althea—went to New Orleans in their turn to complete their high school education. They lived with and helped each other.

  INEZ EVENTUALLY MARRIED, but she died in childbirth. After her passing, Papo took Tee Mae aside and told her she was now the head of all her sisters and brothers. This was a heavy burden for my aunt to assume, especially given that she was living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, far away from the bayou, and working as a nurse.

  But family was family, and Tee Mae was not about to let them down. She had a special relationship with her little sister Althea, the fifth Edwards child. Earlier, when Inez was still alive, Mamo was down with malaria and feared death was near. She had six children at that point (L.C. wasn’t yet born) and gathered the three older girls around her, assigning each of them one of the three younger siblings to care for when she passed. Mamo decreed that L.H. would go to Inez, Gladys would be Yvonne’s responsibility, and little Althea would belong to Tee Mae. Though Mamo recovered, Tee Mae always considered my mother to be like a daughter to her.

  In the 1940s, eighth grade was the end of the road for black students in Assumption Parish. When Tee—my mother—came of age, Papo and Mamo sent her to New Orleans to complete her studies at Booker T. Washington High School. Tee enrolled in 1944, staying in a Carondelet Street apartment with Tee Mae and Tee Gladys.

  “She was a mama figure for me,” Tee recalled. “I cried all the time in those days. I wanted to go home to my mama. Mama told my sister, ‘Just let her come, just let her come.’ But she wouldn’t do it. She told our mother that if she let me go home, I would never come back. That would be the end of my education, and education is the most important thing.”

  Tee Mae prevailed, as usual, and my mother, the granddaughter of a slave, went on to become the first in my immediate family to earn a college degree
.

  “She would say, ‘You will always be my child, because Mama gave you to me when she was on her deathbed,’” my mother told me. “She would send me clothes and things when I was in college. But she would give you pure hell if you didn’t do what she said to do. My sister was as good as gold, but Lord, she was a bearcat.”

  By the time my two uncles finished eighth grade, Assumption Parish black kids could complete a full high school education at a local public school, but they didn’t attend it. They had been going to a one-room schoolhouse at St. Benedict the Moor, the local black parish, where all students studied under the same teacher, from first through eighth grades. The older kids helped the younger ones with their lessons. Priests from the Josephites, a Catholic religious order founded during Reconstruction to serve black Catholics, taught religious education classes.

  The Catholic Church in America was a segregated institution back then. In Louisiana towns where African American Catholics did not have parishes of their own, blacks and whites shared the local church building. But Sunday mornings were a humiliation for black worshippers. Churches typically reserved the back two pews for African Americans; when the pews filled up, blacks had to stand, even if there were seats available in the white section. Mamo told us that when she was a child, the Church segregated catechism classes. All the kids in the parish would go into a church for their instruction. The white kids would go first, and the black kids after them. When the white boys were done, they would clamber up into the choir loft and pee on the black children below.

  “And the only thing the priest would do is say, ‘Stop that,’ and go on with the lesson,” Mamo said. That memory would fire my grandmother up—and I saw that same flame flash in my mother over the years. After all that time, Mamo was still mad at that priest. “All this talk about ‘love your neighbor,’” she said, “and he barely lifted a finger to stop those white boys.”

  Racism like this was why my uncle L.H. left the Catholic Church as a young man and cursed a priest his sisters had summoned to his deathbed. The other Edwards siblings held on to their faith by force of will, recognizing the hard truth that there is a difference between the Catholic faith and the fallen humans who serve the Church.

  And every so often, one of those fallen humans would shock your conscience by their courage and righteousness. Harry J. Maloney, a big, bluff New York Irishman sent in 1948 by the Archdiocese of New Orleans to care for the Negro missions along Bayou Lafourche, was just such a man. Nobody in Assumption Parish, white or black, had ever seen anybody like Father Maloney.

  “He was a great man,” Uncle L.C. said. “He opened the eyes of many people. Mamo and Papo always said there’s something better coming by, and that something was Father Harry J. Maloney.”

  As soon as he hit the ground, Father Maloney started building the St. Augustine parish church and a new school at St. Benedict the Moor for black children. L.H. and L.C. stayed in the Catholic school system because Father Maloney organized a school bus service up to Donaldsonville, fifteen miles to the north, taking older black children to St. Catherine High School, where nine nuns, all black, taught them. Tuition was twenty-five cents per week, which was hard for Mamo and Papo to pay.

  But they wouldn’t dream of depriving their sons of a Catholic education if they could possibly afford it. After all, can’t died three days before the creation of the world. Even some non-Catholic black parents sent their children to study with the black sisters, because they wanted their kids to benefit from a stricter disciplinary environment.

  “When those nuns and those priests finished with your ass, they always instilled in you that you had to have something in your head,” Uncle L.C. remembers affectionately. “When we had a class reunion, none of us had been in trouble in life, and all of us had done some good. What’s the reason? It was the sisters’ school. That’s what I call Catholic school. Ain’t no Catholic schools today. You got your lay teachers, and you call it Catholic school, but it ain’t nothing like those goddamn nuns and priests, the sisters and the brothers.”

  Back in my aunts’ and uncles’ day, the black children of this part of the world had strong families, deep religion, and a burning desire to learn. All they lacked was opportunity—and that’s where Father Maloney came in. He used his privilege as a white man and a Catholic priest to break down barriers of racial prejudice and systematic injustice.

  He started a federal credit union to help black folk who couldn’t get loans from local banks. He began a bus service to take black workers on the seventy-mile trip to the Avondale Shipyard near New Orleans, so industrial jobs that paid good wages could be theirs.

  Through these measures and others, he dramatically undermined the control that landlords had over the black workers living and working on their plantations, home to two out of every three African Americans in the parish back then.

  In those days, black folk lived in what they called “the quarters” on the various plantations’ grounds. Plantation owners would lock the gates at five o’clock, and nobody was free to come or go. No vendors were allowed onto the plantation; tenants had to buy from the plantation store. Many of them were illiterate, so they had no idea what the store was charging them. All you knew was that every month you were going deeper into debt. If no vendors were allowed onto the property, the black folk living there would likely never learn what things were like on the outside, or what was available for them.

  So Father Maloney founded a food bank. He would go by the local stores and collect canned goods and other donations and put them in the church hall. If you needed food, you bypassed the plantation store and went to see Father. Most amazing of all, when Father Maloney saw that black people made up 42 percent of the parish’s population, but only three were allowed to vote (the undertaker and two Baptist preachers), he organized a voter registration drive for African Americans—this in the early 1950s, a decade or more before the civil rights movement undertook them all over the South.

  The white power structure in the parish did not like that at all. They went to New Orleans to see Archbishop Joseph Rummel several times to complain about the “nigger-loving” priest. Archbishop Rummel told them to leave Father Maloney alone, that he was doing the work of God.

  He was with the African American people of Assumption Parish for only four years, but Father Maloney made a huge impression on the black Catholics there, who were accustomed to a church that defended the racist status quo. He demonstrated that faith could give you not only the strength to endure hardship and injustice, but also the courage to fight for a better world.

  Father Maloney was rare among white people in the South in his day, but he was a harbinger of a better America to come. Mamo and Papo had faith that things were going to change, and they prepared their children to play their part in that change. They saw things many others could not, and because they taught their children to believe in God, in family, in education, and in themselves, they empowered the next generation to make their dreams real.

  Today, many of the descendants of Herbert and Frances Edwards have gone far from the farm at College Point. Every one of us knows how much we owe them. My great-grandfather Aristile was an orphan and a slave. His daughter Frances was a farm wife and mother. Her daughter Althea was a schoolteacher. And I, her son, became an actor. In every generation, we’ve built on what we’ve been given. The gifts Mamo and Papo gave to me, both directly and through my mother, have been like greenbacks in my pocket with the world on sale for a dollar.

  DURING MY CHILDHOOD, I would see my parents dealing with some difficult situations having to do with racism and protecting us kids, in particular teaching us how to navigate a hostile world. As hard as that was, I can barely imagine what it was like for Herbert and Frances, or for Aristile. I know you’re a slave, son, but if you ever get free, you have a father, and sisters and brothers. Go find them. How do you endure the loss, the injustice, the cruelty, and the indignity of daily lif
e without going crazy? How do you endure it at all? How did they maintain courage and dignity and pursuit of the humanity of their own existence, in the midst of the filthiest, cruelest, most degrading treatment anyone can endure, all because of the color of their skin? How did they do it every single day, knowing that one false move could cost them their lives? And to have faith that they would somehow pass on to their children a sense of security, of dignity, of vision and hope for a better life?

  They did it for love of each other. They did it because they had faith in God—a God of justice, and a God that suffered with them. They did it because they had faith in the future, a future that they believed would be better, and would be so in part because they had the power, through education, to make it better. They did it through the power of ancestral memory, of practicing gratitude and taking strength from the sacrifices of past generations. And they did it through the love of family and community, which bequeathed resilience. Standing alone, any of us would have been crushed. Standing together, we could not be defeated, at least not for long. Because we knew who we were, and what we had to do. Our stories—the hand-me-down art incarnating the virtues that made our family strong—told us so.

  I think about what those three generations carried through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, all the way to the day that a black man was elected President of the United States, and I know in that humbling, awe-inspiring moment, I don’t need to look outside my family for heroes.

  Papo dropped dead in his fields in 1969. Mamo passed in a Napoleonville hospital twenty years later, with three of her children at her side. Nearly all of their children are gone now; the baby, Uncle L.C., who remains vigorous in his eighties, is the last of the family reserve. We still have the original farm in the family, but none of Herbert and Frances’s descendants work it. The world of College Point has faded into history too, as the grandchildren and their children have scattered, carrying with them memories, and for the younger generation, memories of memories. They will never know the hardships that marked the lives and shaped the vision of Mamo and Papo, their children, and all the people of College Point. This is a blessing beyond all telling.