At the Gentilly A&P where old Black men came up to me and said, Where’s this? pointing at a list I knew they could not read and I would take them up and down the aisles until their cart was full. It was there I saw two men in well-slept, street-rough clothes with a handful of change standing in the wine aisle trying to decide. One said what about that Night Train? Oh that some bad shit don’t drink that and I bought them a jug of Carlo Rossi paisano and we each took a good belt before I sent them on their way. This was not Lake Vista where I was half raised by a house maid from the Iberville who sprinkled water from a Coke bottle ironing my daddy’s shirts while watching The Guiding Light. This was the city that embraced my nouveau fancy cracker ass and crushed me to it’s ample bosom and said, gimme some sugar, child, and swung low to carry me home.
At the Gentilly A&P
One response to “At the Gentilly A&P”
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Good”catch (in a tenth of the words it would have taken me) of some here and then Things good to catch,Things reccognized in memory echoes. And, excellent Gentilly A and P floor sommalier work!
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About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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