The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  Art tells us who we are, and it tells us who we must become. Art doesn’t give us life’s answers as much as it empowers us to live life’s questions. Art, like religion, is how the eternal and the ideal enters time and becomes real. In turn, it is how we mortals experience, if only for a moment, immortality. Art is how we humans, individually and collectively, impress our seal on the wax; it’s how we charge ordinary matter—wood, paint, stone, a word, a voice, a note, a gesture—with life and spirit and harmony.

  Art is the most serious thing we can do, because when making it, we humans, forged in the image of God, are most like our Creator. We tend to forget that. This production of Godot, in that weary time and in that storm-battered place, helped me remember. And I was far from the only one.

  Early in the play’s first act, Vladimir hears a noise and thinks it might signal Godot’s approach. “Pah!” snorts Estragon, dismissively. “The wind in the reeds.” We would be wrong to dismiss that sound.

  Man is only a reed, said the French philosopher Blaise Pascal, but he is a thinking reed. When the winds of adversity blow hard against him, the sound they make as they pass over his contours may be mere noise—or they may be something like the music a teenage Sidney Bechet, grandson of a slave, made when he blew across his clarinet’s reed and, standing on the back of a New Orleans furniture truck next to a horn-playing juvenile delinquent named Louis Armstrong, helped create jazz.

  I learned from the late Albert Murray, the great Harlem connoisseur of black music, that art is the way individuals and cultures react aesthetically to their experiences in life. Jazz and the blues, the most American of all musical forms, is the sound made by history’s savage gales blowing hard on African people in the Diaspora. The storm-tossed reeds may be humble, but the reeds are thinking, the reeds are feeling—and the reeds are resilient.

  The reeds sing a song of triumph. The harder the wind blows, the stronger our spirit, the purer our art, and the greater our victory.

  TWO

  DOWN THE BAYOU AT THE SOURCE

  We know who we are by the stories we tell about ourselves and the world. We know who we are through the family and community of whose stories we are a part.

  We make our stories. And our stories make us.

  I am not sure the stories of my family are art, exactly. After all, they came down to me not as objects to be admired for their beauty. Then again, they contain so much truth and goodness that they cannot help being beautiful as well. Their trials, their triumphs, the virtues that gave them the strength to overcome—all of these things live in the stories my family shares as an inheritance that grows as we invest in it each successive generation.

  I draw creative strength from my roots buried deep in south Louisiana. Until the storm, I did not appreciate how much those roots were the veins connecting my heart to the body of historical experience that gave birth to the man I am today, and the man—and the artist—I am becoming every day.

  Here are some of the stories that made me.

  SOMETIME IN THE 1850S, nobody can say exactly when, on the banks of a Kentucky river, a boy named Aristile rested in the basket of his slave mother’s arms as she said good-bye to their family and sailed away. One white man had sold mother and child to another white man, as the child’s father, brothers, and sisters stood on the water’s edge in tears. Five hundred miles downriver, the passage of the mother and her child ended on a sugarcane plantation near Bertrandville, in Assumption Parish, a moist and fertile patch of land between the Mississippi River and Bayou Lafourche. The master forced his name on the mother and child: Harris. That is how my family came to south Louisiana.

  Years later, after emancipation in 1865, Aristile would tell his children that his earliest memories are of his mother teaching him to say his prayers at night, and telling him when freedom comes, as it surely would, to go on a quest. “You are not a Harris. You are a Christophe,” she would say. “If you ever get free, go back to Kentucky and look for your family. The Christophes.”

  He never did.

  The story of Aristile’s descendants is a story of a parade through American history—sometimes a mournful dirge, sometimes a raucous stomp—from being symbolically owned by the bayou to owning a piece of it. That is, from being treated as no more important than the land they worked for the white man as enslaved exiles, to becoming masters of themselves and that land, which would become, in the fullest sense of the word, home.

  Why am I telling you this? Because I would not be the man I am if my ancestors had not been the men and women that they were. In southern culture, family and land are everything—especially to African Americans, whose families were broken by slavery and, in liberty, left with little or nothing.

  In my clan, the ancestors live on through the stories we tell ourselves and our children, and in the family farm on Bayou Lafourche. My cousin Nicole, the family historian, reminds us older folks that we have a responsibility to tell these family stories to the younger generation. Family can easily fall apart. You can’t take it for granted. My mother and father showed me the value of family and why it’s worth fighting for. Whenever I wonder why I’m hanging on to these people who are becoming strangers to me, I take a step back and think about our shared history.

  If we forget our stories, we will forget who we are, and we will forget who we must be to one another. The family is our strength. My personal triumphs are not mine alone; they represent the victory of all my forebears. You can trace a line from the Hollywood soundstages where I work to the sugarcane fields of Louisiana’s River Parishes. These stories, stories of ancestors I never knew, are my story too, not only because they formed the moral imaginations of those who formed me, but also because these tales from my family’s oral tradition tell me who I am.

  In the days before the Civil War, Louisiana plantations produced nearly one-quarter of the world’s exportable sugar. To support the booming industry, New Orleans became North America’s largest slave market, and Louisiana’s sugar plantations were notorious for their unsurpassed cruelty to slaves. At the start of the Civil War, more than 330,000 slaves worked the fields in Louisiana. But according to family legend, my great-grandfather wasn’t yet one of them. The boy was not yet a field slave, but enslaved nonetheless, his master grinding as much work out of the child Aristile as he could.

  When Aristile was a young teenager, not quite old enough to be sent into the fields—this would have been in 1862 or 1863—he stood wearing nothing but a big shirt and watched Union soldiers riding along the banks of the bayou. Freedom came after the North’s victory, but Aristile did not return to Kentucky to look for his kin, and no one in my family ever has. For better or for worse, our home was now in Louisiana.

  Freedom from bondage did not mean freedom, though. After the Civil War, most former slaves expected to get some share of the land they had worked. The idea was that each freed slave was entitled to “40 acres and a mule” as compensation, and as a foundation on which to build a new life. It never happened.

  Aristile’s former master moved him to what was known as the Williams plantation as part of a plan to undermine land redistribution to freed slaves, or so the story came down through my family. The planter took Aristile to three brothers, former slaves who had been given the name Williams, and told them they were to consider Aristile their brother. They were older than Aristile and ordered the teenager around. When the Williams brothers received a little piece of property, they gave Aristile a quarter-acre lot off the main road. It was nothing, really.

  But that’s where Aristile founded his family. My grandmother Frances Harris and her nine brothers and sisters grew up on that tiny spit of ground in Assumption Parish. My uncle L.C., the last survivor of my mother’s generation, heard from Frances that Aristile “was a lover who didn’t do nothin’ but make moonshine and sell it. That was his forte.” Aristile told his children that he had seen and done enough fieldwork as a slave, and he was f
inished with that.

  Frances, Aristile’s daughter, grew up to marry Herbert Edwards, who came from the Southall family, from the other side of the bayou, in the early years of the twentieth century. The Southall clan descends from Collins and Causey Southall, who were born into slavery and had twelve children. The Southalls were all about education, believing that it was the key to overcoming racism, making material progress, and generally improving the family’s position in the world. They lived in a black settlement on the flat green fields of south Louisiana’s Cajun plantation country, an hour west of New Orleans. To be precise, they were on the banks of Bayou Lafourche, between Plattenville and Paincourtville, on College Point Lane—so called because the African American families who lived there became known for sending their children to college. Education has always been a sacred value passed down in my family—and we can trace it back to the first generation out of slavery.

  Frances and Herbert Edwards were known to us all as “Mamo” and “Papo.” They raised their seven children during the Great Depression, eking out a living on their portion of the forty-four-acre Assumption Parish farm that Papo shared with his brothers Johnny (“Parrain Johnny”) and Ashley (“Nonc Ash”). Nonc Ash eventually left the farm and, like their brother George, became an educator, but Papo and Parrain Johnny stayed in Assumption Parish and worked the land.

  Of the two Edwards men who stayed behind, Papo was the stolid, no-nonsense farmer, but Parrain Johnny (parrain is Creole French for “godfather”) was a rascal. With his ever-present short stogie in his mouth, he chased women up and down the bayou.

  One family story has it that Parrain Johnny was once working for a white man who was having an affair with a black woman and hid it from his wife. Whenever he needed to send his mistress something, he would use Parrain Johnny as a go-between. But in the middle of being a go-between, Parrain Johnny became an in-between. When the white boss found out Parrain Johnny was loving on his mistress, he and his friends beat Johnny to a pulp and threw him on a trash pile to die.

  Another version of the story has it that Parrain Johnny was having an affair with a white woman in Paincourtville whose family nearly lynched him when they discovered their forbidden love. Whatever the truth, Johnny nearly died in a beating. Somebody found him and got him to the doctor. He recovered, though he suffered from epilepsy for the rest of his life.

  Parrain Johnny died when I was five or six. They said he fell into his fireplace and burned up, but the family never believed it was an accident. Who falls into their fireplace and doesn’t try to get out? He was supposedly running around with another man’s wife, and the jealous husband, we think, pushed him into the flames. My cousin Louis says that Parrain Johnny’s death was such a shock for the same reason you’re surprised when a stray dog gets run over by a car. It’s been so good at dodging traffic all these years that you can’t quite believe it finally got popped.

  From the 1920s through the 1940s, Papo was just about the only black farmer in Assumption Parish who owned his property and brought his own sugarcane to the mill. He put his entire family to work there. During the fall grinding season—that is to say, the harvest—the whole family helped bring in the crop, even Mamo and Papo’s daughters.

  AND DID THEY EVER HAVE DAUGHTERS! There was Inez, Evelyn, Yvonne, Gladys, and my mother, Althea, whom I grew up calling “Tee.” Two boys—Louis Herbert (L.H.) and Lloyd Carroll (L.C.)—filled out the family. (An eighth child, a daughter, was stillborn; the old midwife named her Matilda, and Papo put her into a little coffin and buried her in the backyard, past the pecan trees from which hung the children’s rope swing.)

  Theirs was a religious household. Papo was a lifelong Methodist; Mamo, a Catholic. All the Edwards children were baptized into the Catholic faith, and Papo saw their upbringing as loyal sons and daughters of Rome as a sacred obligation. If one of the children didn’t want to go to Sunday mass, Papo wouldn’t let them play outside that afternoon. Every night, Papo would get on his knees and pray aloud, presenting all his family’s needs to the Lord, while the children kneeled quietly beside him. He read the Bible to the children and explained it to them as best he could.

  The way my mother and my aunts and uncles told it, everybody in College Point was as good as family, and you respected them as such. It takes a village to raise a child? That’s how it was in College Point. Any adult could scold any kid for doing wrong. They knew how your mama and daddy would want you to behave, and they also knew that your mama and daddy would appreciate the reinforcement of the community’s standards. In the Edwards family, as in most other black families in College Point, life’s purpose was to serve God and get an education. If you did these things, and held tight to the family, you were going to make it.

  Papo refused to accept from his children anything short of excellence. When one of his kids would say, “Daddy, I can’t do it,” Papo would respond, “Can’t died three days before the creation of the world!” He believed in you, and he expected you to rise to the challenge. Education was one of the most precious gifts a man or a woman could have, Papo believed. “If you get an education,” he told his children, “they can take away your job, they can take away your house, they can take away everything you have, but once you get something in your head, they can’t take it away from you.”

  Another of Papo’s sayings was: “There are those who do not have your best interests at heart.” That is, be careful whom you trust. People are not always what they seem. If you leave yourself too open, those who do not have your best interests at heart will seize the opportunity to defeat you. Don’t be afraid of them, but understand what you’re dealing with and use your wits.

  Papo was a firm man, and a fussy one—Uncle L.H. used to talk about how hard his daddy was—but we grandkids remember him as gentle. We used to go to his house in Assumption Parish and sprawl on the floor watching TV while Papo sat in his big green wingback chair, presiding over everything. One summer day, with a bunch of us grandkids there, I found that Mamo had a litter of kittens in a box. I thought it might be fun to climb up onto the roof of the carport and drop them off to see if it was true that cats would land on their feet. I dropped them from that height onto the grass, and thought it was amusing.

  When I observed that they had all survived the fall, being a young scientist, I decided to experiment with increasing the kittens’ velocity. Back into the box they went, and up onto the roof I clambered with the kittens. I took the little fuzzballs into my hand and threw them down toward the ground. They didn’t all make it. As they wobbled away, a few never came back. I got bored and wandered off, and that was that.

  Later that night, we were watching television together when Papo said, “I found one of them cats dead. Who was playing with the cats?” I didn’t say anything then, and I never did. I feel guilty to this day about holding out on Papo. The detail that stands out in my mind is that Papo probably knew it was me, but he wanted to give me the chance to admit what I had done and take responsibility. He must have understood the importance of letting my young conscience convict me, and letting the guilt I carried be my punishment.

  Papo was gentler with his grandchildren than he was with his own kids. When I hear tales of the harshness of Papo’s old-school discipline with my mother and her siblings, it sometimes sounds cruel. It’s hard for people today to understand it, but for black folk back then, a strong will like Mamo’s and Papo’s, joined to a rock-hard sense of discipline, was a tool of survival. One false move could mean ruin. My aunt Evelyn Mae—we called her “Tee Mae”—told a story one day about how Mamo had thrown her out of the house, thinking she was pregnant.

  “They had told us that they would give us every last thing they had, but the one thing we must not do was bring an illegitimate baby into the home,” Tee Mae said. “If we did, they were going to put us out.”

  After her first menstrual period, Tee Mae didn’t have another cycle for three months. When Mamo saw that she
had missed two in a row, she accused Tee Mae of having been with a boy and gotten pregnant. Tee Mae protested that it wasn’t true, but Mamo refused to believe her. She gave her teenage daughter a brown paper bag with her things in it and sent her on her way.

  Tee Mae ended up at the home of family friends, wailing. By the time it all got sorted, Tee Mae had been to a physician, who verified that she was not pregnant, and was still a virgin. She was welcomed back home then. To us, this sounds intolerably harsh, and it was. But in those days, contraception was practically nonexistent, and having a child outside of wedlock left a woman and her baby extremely vulnerable. This unforgiving code of honor was a bulwark holding back disaster.

  It worked, too. “We never strayed,” my mother told me. “We were too scared of Papo, and had too much respect for him, to do anything else.”

  For all his strictness, Papo used physical violence against his children only once. Several of the children had stayed out in a far field longer than their curfew. When they came straggling home, Papo was waiting for them with a switch and lashed them on the backs of their legs as they ran crying into the house. Papo felt so ashamed of his violence that the kids overheard him telling Mamo he would never lift his hands against the children again.

  That was Papo. Mamo was different, and then some.

  One autumn day, when Tee Mae was a teenager, Mamo went to a quilting bee, leaving baby L.C. in Tee Mae’s care. Tee Mae became absorbed in playing jacks and forgot all about the baby. He shat all over himself. When Tee Mae discovered her baby brother covered in his own feces, she scrambled to get him cleaned up before Mamo came home, but it was too late. When Mamo walked in and saw little L.C. smeared with his own filth, Tee Mae had already run out the back door and was headed across the field like a shot.