History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  Grandmother raised her children on stories of the great house and how life had been when there was money and good fortune. One could live by stories, if they were told often enough. Stories sparked into fantasies of family walks down the Esplanade past homes with cut-crystal doors that led into large square rooms filled with mahogany antiques, a rainbow’s light dancing across the floors. Servants stood in thick, pressed cotton uniforms serving meals on tables of burnished wood covered in white damask. At winter’s end gowns of red taffeta twirled at the Proteus Ball, and flames danced from the Bananas Foster at Galatoire’s.

  Wealth would one day be hers—of this Cecile was certain. She would be a proper woman of means. While everyone else drank café au lait, Cecile sipped tea from the finest china she could find. It was a small but important way of reminding herself of the English blood murmuring through her veins, from distinguished and rich descendants on her father’s side.

  Cecile spent her teenage years and early adulthood in the Great Depression. She thought of becoming a nun. For a short time she entered a convent but found it all too depressing and returned home, where she spent long hours bent over the radio and going to the Ashton Cinema whenever there was enough spare change for a ticket.

  Cecile graduated from high school during the height of the Depression. She took various jobs—governess, saleslady, beautician, seamstress—until 1937, when she quit and married a Cajun man from Lafayette. Old Man Louis—that’s what my siblings and I called him—enjoyed weekend evenings picking through big succulent boiled crabs piled on top of a Times-Picayune spread across a Formica table. In the decades after World War II, when many whites fled the inner city, Louis made a good enough life building homes out in Gentilly and in the other New Orleans suburbs, barking orders in a barely intelligible accent with a wet, chewed-up cigar hanging from his mouth.

  A child arrived soon after their marriage, then a year later another, both sons. Cecile had five children in all; the last, Jeanette, was born in 1952.The couple rented a nondescript shotgun on Cambronne Street, a few blocks from the levee and not too far from her mother. In the 1930s and 1940s this area housed what elites impolitely called the city’s white trash, people who worked by the sweat of their brow or moved from one job to another within the city’s expansive informal economy. Today the house has been lovingly renovated as part of the post–Hurricane Katrina return to Uptown by middle-class whites looking for areas that won’t flood in the next great storm.

  The couple argued. She deserved better: a large house in a posh neighborhood where she could bring good company, hold elaborate dinner parties, drink Ceylon tea from bone china. Descended from American aristocracy and the Creole elite, Cecile felt entitled to more than being married to a Cajun contractor. She knew the history of her mother’s family: Joseph the wealthy cotton broker, the great house on Esplanade. Her great-grandfather’s last name was Adams. “We’re related to one of America’s founding fathers, and before that to someone who had come to this country on the Mayflower,” Zeno had told his daughter. Somewhere in America there were the “right relatives.”

  For months, Cecile picked up the phone and began dialing anonymous people across the country, trying to discover her rich relatives living in stately homes and settled in their economic fortunes. Louis had the phone removed.

  There are so many silences within the written archive, particularly when the records deal with the most intimate aspects of people’s lives: love and jealousy, sex, a woman’s dreams, madness. It is difficult to discover what really happened, how and why my aunt went crazy. Some facts are easy to come by. In 1943, just six years into her marriage, the police arrested Cecile for creating a ruckus at her parents’ house. She also suspected that Louis was a philanderer. Cecile started following her husband around, yelling at the women Louis was working for to “leave my husband alone.”

  She neglected the children. Their names begin appearing in the police records between 1948 and 1952: an eleven-year-old daughter reported missing, notations by officers of arriving at the house because Cecile was disturbing the peace. The police took Cecile to the hospital. The children went to the precinct headquarters.

  By October 1951, Cecile was spending hours and hours in her room before the mirror, brushing her hair and laughing, as if she were preening herself for a lavish party. Cecile would go downtown and buy the best clothes at the most expensive shops, then go home and within a few days give them away.

  Cecile would also take the Carrollton trolley to City Park, and then a bus along Esplanade, until she found the old house. For hours she would sit on the front porch, content that she had returned home. “Get out! Get out!” Cecile screamed when the owners returned. “This is my house. You have no right.” The police came and drove her down to the Seventh Precinct, and then to the mental ward.

  For the next thirteen years my aunt was in and out of mental hospitals. Mostly in. During Cecile’s first hospitalization, doctors administered twelve ECTs, followed by a course of insulin shock therapy that involved thirty-six episodes and thirteen comas. She also received the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia from which she would never escape.

  Louis disavowed his wife. By 1954 they had divorced, their youngest still in diapers. For some time the children lived with my grandmother and Zeno at 7901 Cohn Street. It was a long walk from their home on Cambronne, but near enough to their father to help soften the fact that the family had broken apart.

  “My place is home caring for my family,” Cecile pleaded with the doctors. She had to “return at once to the city and assume my responsibility for the three younger children.”

  Each time Cecile returned to New Orleans the hallucinations returned as well, along with arguments with Louis and her parents. Jesus sat in some Uptown shotgun, held against his will. General MacArthur governed from the White House. Everyone plotted against her.

  Cecile spent time at DePaul and Charity Hospitals before making the trip across the lake to the mental institution in Mandeville. She received further courses of ECT and insulin shock therapy. Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, and the powerful tranquilizer Tolnate entered the arsenal of treatment. Cecile escaped more than once, each time trying to make it back to New Orleans and to her children.

  In 1957 the family agreed to have Cecile committed to the state hospital in Jackson. Built in 1848 during a great wave of American incarceration, the Louisiana Insane Asylum had among the worst conditions of any hospital in the country. Patients were left in their own excrement, wandered naked through the corridors, suffered terrible malnutrition and neglect. Doctors routinely administered electric shock and insulin shock therapies. Frontal lobotomies were widely performed on all sorts of patients, especially women, until the emergence during the 1950s of powerful tranquilizers and antipsychotics.

  Mrs. Gremillion, a Jackson hospital doctor records, brought with her “a disorganized letter which she sites [sic] as evidence of her concern with the welfare of her small children.” She also brought newspaper clippings of police and searchers standing next to the mutilated body of a six-year-old girl.

  “Why are you here?”

  “You tell me,” Cecile replied, explaining to the doctor that she was well known in polite society, descended from the very best stock of Boston and New Orleans.

  She had, as it were, “a superior air about her.”

  Cecile kept trying to escape, mostly unsuccessfully. She was discharged in 1958, but returned to Jackson in 1959 and moved to a locked ward. At one point she was on the highest doses of antipsychotics. It became difficult to wake her up in the morning. Lethargic, wasting away, she appeared to one doctor as a “zombie,” though she still insisted on her “family responsibilities.” Cecile began having difficulty walking, increasingly falling down. She accidently injured a finger in an electric fan. The doctors worked her up for another course of ECT in March of 1964: “She would need at least twenty if not more.” Through June, July, and into August they wheeled Cecile into the room, blasting her bra
in with electricity. Her condition deteriorated further. At the end of the year Cecile’s daughter filed court papers to declare her mother legally incompetent.

  A routine medical exam in 1963 had revealed something in Cecile’s left lung. The doctor suspected a minor infection, but her condition steadily declined. Late in the evening on August 22, 1965, soon after being transferred to Charity Hospital in New Orleans to determine why her health continued failing, Cecile died. Undiagnosed cervical cancer had spread to her lungs, brain, and adrenal glands. She was fifty years old. A few miles away the judge had just ruled on my parents’ divorce.

  Two weeks later, Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in one of the worst storms to ever hit the city. The tempest stretched nearly six hundred miles across and had a forty-mile eye and 120-mile-an-hour winds. Betsy hit the city at night, tearing off roofs, knocking down trees, breaching some of the levees. The flood waters consumed the crypt that housed Cecile’s remains.

  Louis and his children filed a wrongful death suit in July 1966. They believed the doctors had killed Cecile, alleging that the mental hospital had failed to provide the most basic medical care that would have identified the cancer long before it had spread through her body. The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on the matter in the summer of 1972, affirming the lower court’s ruling and dismissing the case.

  I wanted to know more about Cecile’s life, because I thought that through my aunt I might better understand the women in my family—my beloved grandmother and especially my mother at the time during the early 1960s when her own world fell apart and she ended up in Mandeville. The research leads me in unexpected directions, and makes me feel as if I am compelled to follow some labyrinthine trail into the past. There are newspapers to read, obscure documents to collect, even Google Earth to look at. With two clicks of the mouse, I am staring at one of the shotguns my grandmother rented before she lost her leg and moved in with us on Chestnut Street.

  Historical research is often this way. We follow leads as we sniff around the past trying to make connections, triangulating bits of evidence to reveal possibilities that remain silent within a single document. Historians, particularly social historians, hope to tell stories of peoples otherwise condemned to silence, scouring the past to bring the dead out “from the enormous condescension of posterity,” in E. P. Thompson’s memorable words. We might bequeath to the future some sort of wisdom from the gritty details of those who struggled, suffered, and so often prematurely died. This seems important. And insufficient. I find myself not just wanting to know what happened. There is also a yearning to converse with the departed, to convene all these ghosts for some kind of colloquy, a communion of tenses.

  I dreamed of finding an empathic ghost, someone who cared and most of all listened, a kind of witness to the lives of others, who would be able to give me something knowable about my family’s interior lives. In one record a social worker expresses concern for the stress to Cecile’s children. I had hoped to find more like this, but in fact, throughout Cecile’s decade-long struggle with insanity, no one listened to her story. They asked questions, certainly, and Cecile answered, sometimes in detail and with enthusiasm, according to the doctors. She wanted someone to know her story, including all the demons, wild ideas, and concerns that swirled about her: the Uptown Jesus, MacArthur in the White House, Eddie Fisher’s betrayal of Debbie Reynolds. Her children were in danger. They needed their mother. Louis had been unfaithful. People owed her money. She had the good arches of a proper lady. Once there had been a house on Esplanade.

  The doctors would be wasting their time listening to a woman’s mad ravings. After World War II, schizophrenia became a quintessentially female malady, despite evidence to the contrary. Women were no longer hysterics. Now the problem was that their minds were broken, quite literally—schizo (“split”) and phrenic (“mind”). In an age when Freud was becoming a household name, the medical establishment believed that schizophrenics, unlike neurotics, had no need for talk therapy. It wouldn’t help, so there was no reason to listen. Madness and narrative were distant relatives, and not on speaking terms. It didn’t matter to the doctors, the lawyers, not even to the family, what Cecile had to say.

  Schizophrenia demanded the full battery of the psychiatric profession, from powerful sedatives and antipsychotics to frontal lobotomies. That first diagnosis of schizophrenia stuck. Each doctor’s summary and notes borrowed from the last in a long chain of records from the specialists who lobbed one medicine after another at her, to those who strapped her to a gurney and brought her to death and back, to those who zapped her with enough electricity to power a small town.

  I decided to listen to what my aunt tried to say through the paralyzing tonic of psychopharmacology, wondering if what I found might take me out of the hospital to other materials, different sources. It’s rare for the historian to rely on a single source, and it’s usually a bad idea. Records come with their own silences and mysteries. People often willfully suppress something important, producing within the document a powerful absence. Like memory itself, a diary or a police report or my aunt’s medical records exist by rules of selection and consolidation. Historians train themselves to identify what’s missing—and why—as much as they interpret what they’ve discovered.

  The records that exist like a penumbra around my aunt’s life begin revealing darker secrets the family kept to themselves. A few weeks after Cecile first entered the hospital and the children ended up at the police precinct, Old Man Louis and Cecile’s brother, Henry Mullan, sat in a corner bar on Dante Street just around the block from the shotgun on Cambronne. They walked out of the bar mid-afternoon to Louis’s car. The two of them got in, closed the doors. Henry reached into his coat and pulled out a loaded .25-caliber Colt automatic pistol. They drove around for a while, the gun trained on Louis. They likely argued, perhaps about Cecile, until the car needed gas. While Louis stood at the pump, Henry got out and ran away. The police arrested him on Jefferson Highway, booking him for attempted murder and for concealing a loaded weapon.

  The psychiatric records tell me that Grandmother took in Cecile’s children, helped feed and clothe them with the little money she and Zeno had. When Cecile was discharged, or when she returned to New Orleans on a short leave or during one of her escapes, before the police car arrived and drove her back to the madhouse, she lived with her parents. Their relationship turned fractious. Mother and daughter had terrible, violent arguments.

  I cannot discern the content of their fights from the police and psychiatric records. Were they about Cecile’s children, her marriage, the character of my aunt’s relationship with her parents, or something else? What were the voices telling her? It is impossible to say. There exists but the faintest hint that Cecile had grown frustrated with her parents’ poverty. “My parents aren’t white,” Cecile once told a doctor. “They’re colored … My mother works like a slave.”

  Or was there some wound of neglect? When their daughter needed them most, my grandparents were not there. For seven months in 1954, neither of them bothered to inquire into their child’s condition. When my grandparents finally made the trip to Mandeville, the doctor was amazed they had not once looked into the plight of their daughter. They struck him as “obviously disturbed individuals.” My grandfather arrived “very unkempt and unshaven,” and “dressed in some sort of uniform.” Grandmother wore an eccentric outfit “suggesting the year 1910.” During Cecile’s years languishing in the squalor of Jackson, they never once visited their daughter.

  This discovery troubles me. I want to say that I could count on my grandmother, that she was the only sensible person around, that she worried about me and that she gave me an education, somehow instilling the importance of learning and hard work. I believe she saved my life. “Grandmother,” I want to say, “I can see you still, sitting in the wheelchair, the rosary beads slipping through your hands as you watch over me. You had been as constant as the morning.” My siblings tell me that our grandmother watched me f
rom her bedroom window while I played in the ditch near the house. But now I wonder if I haven’t taken their relic and turned it into a memory and a story of childhood, none of which may be true. I have conjured an image of my grandmother from the cultural archetype of the benevolent, wise elder shielding her young charge from the foolish and often dangerous world of adults.

  Other puzzles and fantasies begin emerging. Early in adulthood Cecile had seemed a bit different. The second decade of her marriage had been especially difficult, filled as it was with children and little money, jealousy, and fantasies that had begun ruling her life. She began losing her mind definitively around 1951, when she entered DePaul Hospital and the doctors filled her with drugs and shocked her brain. What is unnoted in any of the documents is the fact that a few months before she became a patient Cecile had become pregnant. She spent months alone in the hospital with a child growing inside her and with no one particularly interested in what she had to say.

  Following her release, her youngest child an infant, Cecile occasionally ventured into the city—not to Esplanade and the old house, but to a Woolworth’s store. There my aunt made a spectacle of herself, screaming and accusing the store manager of being the father of her baby.

  Cecile repeated this accusation until the medicines made it impossible for her to know who she even was. No one ever believed Cecile, or if they did they kept it to themselves. No doctor or nurse or lawyer believed Cecile either. Nor even her mother and father. It didn’t matter what she said. She was crazy, stark, raving mad, even though my aunt gave a precise name to the man she accused of being her child’s father: Arthur Mullan.

  “Have you ever heard of an Arthur Mullan?”

  Mom’s never heard of him. No one in my family seems to know anything about him. I start sifting through my records, coming across a genealogy Mom had begun many years ago, and there he is, my grandfather’s youngest brother. Arthur Mullan was Cecile’s, and Mom’s, uncle.