History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  My mother had no medical insurance. She suffered from depression and alcoholism. Her poverty meant that she was unable to seek care outside the state. Uneducated and poor, like so many other women of her generation my mother depended on men. She had lived through the Great Depression in desperate poverty, had hoped to marry a man who would be a provider. She would be a homemaker, a wife and a mother. With divorce she became an anachronism. She could not go back to get her high school degree, had no skills that promised a career, or even a modest income to support a family. My parents had always lived on the lower edge of middle class. Divorce pushed my mother over a precipice.

  Mom knew about Mandeville from her sister. My aunt Cecile had spent nearly three years there before being transferred in 1957 to the State Insane Asylum, just east of Jackson, Louisiana, one of the most notorious hospitals in America. Even today, Ms. Washington tells me, everyone knows to avoid Jackson. Mom knew what might happen to her. Mandeville had a specially designated room for performing trans-orbital lobotomies. Another room was for “shock” therapies, including one in which terrified patients were brought near to death with insulin then saved by the doctors and nurses, six days a week for up to ten straight weeks. Another option: twenty or more sessions of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), one every other day. The hospital widely prescribed psychoactive medicines such as the powerful antipsychotic chlorpromazine, which made my mother feel dumb and reduced her to the classic “Thorazine shuffle.” The 1950s and early 1960s saw an explosion of medicines for the mind, though doctors and scientists still knew relatively little about the mechanisms of brain chemistry.

  Between her attempt on my life and the failed suicide, my mother’s world finally unraveled. I understand now that when she looked at me, her young son, she saw failure and hatred and everything that had gone wrong in her life. In the New Orleans Civil Court I discover dates that help put the pieces into some sort of alignment. She attempted to drown me around the time my father finally left, on January 5, 1963. Two years later, exactly three weeks after leaving Mandeville, at 5:20 p.m. on a Thursday evening, a court employee walked up the stairs, knocked on the door, and served my mother with divorce papers.

  Dad offered to provide $200 in child support. Mom hired a lawyer, who asked the court for an extension, which the judge denied. On the eighth of March, the lawyer petitioned that my mother receive $75 in alimony, and $300 in child support, arguing that my father had kept the family “in a constant state of instability and turmoil by making repeated unnecessary changes in the family domicile.” Mom returned to this very issue during our interview, her voice growing angry as she recounted all the times Dad moved the family from one rented house to another, always promising that better times lay in the next job.

  The final judgment decreed a divorce and granted custody of the minor children to my mother. The judge ordered my father to pay $46 per week in child support, less than he had originally offered. This sum—$184 per month, $2,208 a year—was far below the federal government’s 1965 poverty threshold. Rent and utilities left us with less than $75 a month for five people, not including my grandmother: $15 a person per month, fifty cents a day.

  Nearly a year later, the court served new papers. Dad was now asking for permanent custody. My mother, wrote the attorney on Dad’s behalf:

  is not the proper person to have the care, custody and control of these children for the reason that she is unable to provide for them a proper environment for their rearing and upbringing, that she neglects them, that as a result of her actions, they are subjected to influences which should not occur in the life of my minor children.

  The judge did not grant my father’s wishes, though he recognized my mother’s neglect. Instead, the judge “granted the permanent care, custody, and control of the minor children” to my sister Marie, by this time twenty-one years old and with two children of her own. In fact we never moved in with my sister. One child after the other headed to Mississippi to be with my father. I stayed behind in New Orleans with my mother and grandmother, entering first grade at McDonogh No. 14 in the fall of 1966. Mom began drinking soon after she got out of bed in the morning. The apartment was a disaster, fetid and crawling with roaches and mice. My mother brought men home. One man, a decade younger than she was, an alcoholic and the brother of Kinta’s best friend, sometimes beat her up. A pregnancy followed, then a botched back-street abortion.

  Despite all my research, I cannot see those early years much more clearly than before. I once hoped that with enough effort I would be able to open some shutter that had kept the past closed to me. I was trained in the belief that once I knew context I could attach meaning to people’s actions. This is what historians do. But the past is more complicated and inscrutable than that. Context is of our own imagination, and yet it’s as much a part of the histories we tell of our selves, and others, as the events we highlight. I want to be able to say that by circumstance and illness my mother was unable to care for us, unable to love. This all seems true, and at the same time not quite true enough. Something gets lost in explanation.

  And yet, somehow, the simple bits of information become important. Time’s stubborn specificity reminds me that while some things are gone forever, the past lives on beneath the surface of our lives, silent and powerful. There are dates, even a chronology: November 1964 to January 1965. I know now why during the holiday season the world seems drained, turns a bit more fitfully. Amid the merriment and presents and food and trees and tangles of lights I am still four years old, and my mother is in Mandeville. I am waiting for her in an Uptown house on the other side of the lake.

  I have returned to Jacksonville a number of times over the subsequent years, but never to interview Mom again. We often sit the two of us on the back porch, just as we did that summer day. I watch the pool’s reflection dance across the wooden fence and wonder at the children playing innocently in the water. We talk about the little things in our lives. Mom asks about my family, current events, who I will be voting for in the upcoming presidential election. She never asks me how the research is going. I never tell her either. I never tell her I went back to the house and my closet room and that bathroom with its tiled floor. I don’t describe my trip to Mandeville, or to the courthouse with its divorce records archiving the pain of others. I suppose I would tell her if she asked, but I am glad she doesn’t. I have the facts at my fingertips. What I do not have is the words to string them together.

  I want to say that I understand now, understand in ways that I could not have as a child, certainly, or even just a few years ago, before I began this journey into my family’s past with a simple interview, sitting on a Florida porch. Perhaps this is all the discipline of history can offer, the possibility of seeing things just a little bit differently, the unexpected angle of vision that begins emerging from our labors among the dead.

  I want to say that I’m sorry for what happened, sorry for us both. That day I sat there looking into her eyes I felt a certain terror, but also an ineffable connection to someone who by all accounts was a terrible mother—not exactly love, perhaps, nor even a longing for love, but the simple tugging pain of recognition. We share a past, if not always a history. She is my mother, and I am her son.

  TWO

  ESPLANADE

  THE WORLD WENT TERRIBLY WRONG FOR MY MOTHER around the moment of my birth. I was unwanted, even resented; a baby’s fussing a reminder of a failed marriage, even a failed life. Mom hated breastfeeding; she wanted to have as little physical contact as possible. As a child, I could not count on her comfort when I was hungry or stubbed a toe or simply felt alone and fragile. I could not count on her even being there. I lived with the haunting presence of death.

  I wonder how my mother’s crises, the seemingly endless injuries and the disavowals that lay within every bottle, the very breakdown of language itself, at times overwhelmed my developing brain’s capacities to make sense of things. A torrent of stress hormones consolidated Mom’s attempted suicide so that a fleeti
ng childhood moment remains forever present. In the firmament of electrical signals, transmitters, proteins, chemicals, and neurons branching and withering in bewilderingly complex tangles, my brain developed an ineffable difficulty in processing experience and forming memories that distinguish the past from the here and now. Perhaps as a child I fell into dissociative states as a primitive form of protection. Perhaps also I began honing a kind of perspective, a writer’s remove.

  The origin of forgetting resides not only in my cerebral folds. The making and remaking of collective memory came to an end. Mom stopped telling stories. The simple rituals of family life that are so important to developing a sense of our selves and others disappeared—the meals shared, the clicking Kodak Instamatic recording celebrations and holidays, the yarns tying lives together that allow children to tell their stories and, one day, their parents’ histories. An existential muteness occupied the space where once there had been the motions of family and the making of memory. Even the photographs that sat upon a table memorializing a past, evidence of a seventeen-year-old marriage, now stood alone in their frames unremarked upon, or were simply thrown out with the rubbish, a life annulled.

  Which is why I’ve been collecting materials, sifting through records, phoning receptionists asking for forms, wanting to know when I might expect this death certificate, that medical record. I’ve assembled a chronology of my childhood, though for the life of me I can’t commit the dates to memory, so I keep copies in my office and in my briefcase. One chronology leads to another, a mechanical attempt to find out what people did, to create some sort of conversation with the dead. There are photographs I’ve taken and collected, notes I’ve scribbled down, interviews recorded, a timeline I am trying to fill in. And a list of questions, many of inexplicable relevance: about the color of a rosary, the smell of Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder in the summer, the resolute presence of my grandmother, Mary Cecile Samuela Salvant.

  I walk around New Orleans in the months after Hurricane Katrina wondering, hoping, if I might turn history into memory. I stop before cement steps leading to a hummock of weeds three or four feet high, then before an open briefcase filled with records that have been misshapen by the great storm, rendered brittle and unreadable, a black mold creeping over the words. Large parts of the city seem like a ghost town, but then New Orleans has always been occupied by the living dead. Standing outside the apartment, images form as if they resided just past the screen door, indistinct but definite traces of some other time. I am left with the disquieting feeling that I will discover that behind everything lies something else that is both present and yet inaccessible, immensely powerful by its very absence. I record these phantasms, test them against my notes, expand the chronologies, try keeping an appointment I have with the past.

  I imagine my grandmother is still there by the window looking over me. In the swirling silences of childhood, Grandmother appears as clear as winter’s light, forever brushing her hair, whispering prayers in a nightgown of gossamer-thin cotton. A hand moves up and down arms weakened by time and history, then around the back of her neck and across her bosom as she tends to her sinewy remains.

  The talcum powder keeps the dampness away, she says, makes you feel cool and fresh. A brush descends through long hair, which she then braids and fastens with a red rubber band from the Times-Picayune. The ponytail goes straight down the vinyl back of the wheelchair. A crimson and gold rosary falls across her fingers. Beneath the sweet, slightly floral talcum powder, there is the sour-milk smell of the aged.

  Grandmother lost a leg from a small wound she had left unattended, believing that long hot baths with Epsom salts might exorcize the pus from her body and allow her to avoid paying for a doctor she could not afford. She finally went to the hospital, but it was too late. The surgeon took the leg off right at the knee, stretching a flap of skin over a wound that would come to be held together by three scars at neat right angles.

  She moved into the apartment in July 1965, age eighty-three, six months after my mother returned from Mandeville and just a month after the divorce judgment, taking the front room, my parents’ room, though I have no memory of them together nor of the time when I was three and my mother slept there alone.

  Against one wall Grandmother created a small altar with hollow porcelain statues of Jesus and Mary. Father Canon arrived from Saint Stephen’s on Sunday afternoons when Grandmother turned her room into a chapel. My sisters remember meeting Father Canon with candles and guiding him into Grandmother’s room. From the corner of my eye I can see her bending down on one knee to receive the Communion. I was five years old, soon to begin kindergarten. The monthly Social Security check helped pay the rent and groceries. Grandmother taught me French and “the three R’s.” She soon had me memorizing multiplication and division tables, one through twelve, repeating them as one would practice musical scales.

  Grandmother kept a list of important dates: births, marriages, deaths, and announcements, carefully excised from the newspaper and taped into a notebook, the “Family Record.” The past offered some solidity, some staunchness in a life of poverty and insecurity and dissolution. She was the family archive, for decades offering stories about a distant past (though I cannot recall any of them), as if recounting good fortune presaged its return as surely as one caressed a magic lantern. Once the family had been rich from the cotton business, wealthy enough to have a slave serve dinner in their house on Esplanade, which was one of the city’s great avenues, where the Creole elite lived at the height of New Orleans’s prosperity. It was a grand house filled with polished European furniture and a door of cut crystal. Through the man-high windows, one could hear the great steam paddle boats trumpeting their turn round the river bend.

  “Dontcha remember when Michelle stayed with us,” Sabrina asks me, “our cousin?”

  “No, I just remember Michelle from your wedding.”

  “Seriously? I remember Michelle screaming ‘They killed her! They killed my mother!’”

  “No, I don’t remember anything about this at all. Nothin’. Really, Sabrina, I think I remember Louis or Teddy [Michelle’s older brothers] carrying Grandmother down the stairs once. And I know we lived off her Social Security check. But I don’t remember anything about Michelle living with us. I only just found out that Cecile had died that summer.” That was 1965, just months after our mother’s attempt on her life. “The only thing I remember is Hurricane Betsy and how the streets flooded and the chinaberry tree fell right across the road. I don’t remember Michelle living with us at all. Are you sure?”

  Sabrina seems perplexed that she has so clear a memory drawn against my blankness.

  “Well, Michelle was convinced the hospital had killed her … Like they had done something to her brain. I remember her saying, ‘They killed her! They killed my mother!’ She stayed for a while, like a month or so.”

  I explain that I am trying to find out what happened to Cecile, my mother’s sister. I want to know as much as I can of our mother’s life, her family, what happened. Many records have been destroyed. There are confidentiality issues too. Mom said she would help. She’s the closest living relative. Maybe I’ll find out something. Then I describe what I do know about Louisiana’s mental health system in the 1950s and 1960s—why women were treated so differently, the kinds of procedures doctors performed on patients, the sorts of medications they administered: insulin therapy, ECT, frontal lobotomies, Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, etc., until Sabrina stares at me and I half-expect her to ask “Why do you want to know all this?” I am not always sure myself.

  Certain facts come easily, as in most historical research. It is not difficult to track down a birth or death, the events dutiful clerks register in the state’s ledgers. The Internet has revolutionized genealogical research. There are multiple databases—some free, others for a fee—that make it extremely easy to create family trees. I simply type in a first and last name and out pours a wealth of genealogical information. Federal census data also h
as been digitized, making it simple to identify residences and household composition. Many newspapers are available online, allowing one to whizz through them by using keyword searches. Today, everyone with a computer can become their family’s genealogist.

  It’s all the in-between things that are difficult to discern—the innumerable motions of lives that so often turn into time’s infinite ashes. Historians delight in discovering materials that were not meant for public view; by these sources we believe we can begin listening in on people’s interior worlds, in short, on their consciousness. I have no diaries or letters to work from, no treasure trove by which I can begin understanding my family’s history. I have to cobble together an archive from so many bits and pieces: a police record, a divorce decree, and in Cecile’s case a thick medical file recording her insanity. I have been trained as a social historian, so I am used to working with fragments. It’s labor-intensive research. You have to be willing to scour every kind of source, and you have to be patient. A week of research might yield just a few notecards of information. You take what you can find and move on, though it’s also important to reflect on what historical forces have produced the evidentiary record.

  Cecile was born in Texarkana in early 1915, during the Great War. Zeno kept the family just out of destitution by traveling though the Ozarks and northern Texas and Louisiana, hawking texts for the Children’s Educational Books Company. He stayed away weeks at a time, always returning home slightly forlorn and never with enough money to settle down for long. They returned to Louisiana—first Baton Rouge, then back to New Orleans. Cecile grew up in various shotgun houses Uptown, mostly in working-class areas of Carrollton, never very far from the sound of trains atop the levee and ships plying the great river. Grandmother thought of her as an easy child with an “even” temperament. Teachers complimented her good work, fine memory, and most of all her yearning.