Well Bottom Blues

How to explain my childhood on Robert E. Lee Boulevard, too young to understand the images on the news of the mobs at the schools downtown being desegregated but old enough to understand that my grandfather would not let me drink from a public water fountain?

Sitting or lying on the floor watching the maid Sylvia ,who we shared with my aunt and grandparents, ironing my father’s shirts with the Coke bottle sprinkler attachment while she watched (cue organ intro) The Guiding Light. Sylvia attended my older sisters’ weddings but of course not the receptions.

My terrified awe at my father’s hired handy man Jo Jo, in spite of his Cheshire smile, a towering, muscular ebony man black as a Hindu demon, shirtless in overalls and seven league boots. I did not learn how to handle a hammer from my architect father, who stood aside and supervisory,  but from Jo Jo.

That was my entire personal experience of Black people before I was sent out into the world, to Catholic School at six after kindergarten at exclusive Uptown Ecole Classique. I didn’t understand that the city’s extensive Catholic school system functioned as segregation academies, racially and economically. The only Black kids at De La Salle High School in the early 70s were Morials.

I only knew that my maternal grandfather, vice president of the company and not just some foreman, refered to the employees as “his n*****s” as if they were still property, of the genteel way my grandmother said “nigra” as she  fed us very light cafe au lait and warned if we drank it too dark as children we would turn Black, of the racist childhood rhymes I learned from my peers.*

Things I only learned as an adult:

That Carnival was brought from Paris by the scions of weslthy Creole families,  free prople of color in a slave-based society, sons sent there to study.

That what came to be called Creole food was the product of enslaved black cooks attempting French recipes with local ingredients, some of which were originally from Africa.

That the white commercial jazz my parents listened to. Pete Fountain and Al Hirt, grew out of formerly enslaved people picking up the abandoned instruments of military bands.

That the rock and roll coming out of the transistor radio I got for my birthday in that pivotal musical year of 1963 grew out of a British fascination with African American blues music.

That everything I came to love about this city came from the minds and hearts and hands of the formerly enslaved. That everything I loathed about this city came from the machinations of the people I’ve come to call the godsons of cotton.

One Carnival morning in another century, on our way to spend the day with my worldly “maiden” great aunts who lived on Royal Street, my father stopped the car at the corner of Galvez and Canal to watch the Mardi Gras Indians.  I was entranced by this sudden eruption of uncontained and colorful joy, like creatures from a dream, from out of the common boulevard while my mother was frozen a ghastly white in some well-bred terror of stopping here, beside “those people.” And how can I be so certain where, when I was so young? I knew Canal Street from those slow rides on the green Canal streetcar with my grandmother down to shop still-segregated in the mid-1960s Canal Street.

That memory is sharp and clear because I recognize it now as the first level of my initiation into the mysteries of the city, my first step toward leaving Robert E. Lee Boulevard behind, entering a broader and deeper city I was sheltered from even on those crosstown shopping trips and by my Uptown education. I would learn to look not just at the great construct of those famous old growth live oak trees of tourists’ delight but also to study and understand the roots and the dark alluvial soil out of which those icons of the tourist city grew.

I would become a son not of the South but of New Orleans.

• Here is one in very small type if you wish to avoid it, based on the Hershey’s jingle of that era: D-I-L-L-A-R-D / Dillard University / Chocolate .