The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  That was it. “You touch me one more time,” my father roared, “and I’m going to kick you in your fucking teeth.”

  The radical wiseass turned around and minded his own business. That was a demonstration of black power that the brother hadn’t expected.

  Like my father, my uncle L. H. Edwards fought for the American flag—his war was Vietnam—and came home to face discrimination as well. Uncle L.H. was a far angrier and a politically more extreme man than my father, but no matter how mad he was at what America had done to him and his people, his faith in America’s ideals and his loyalty to that flag did not waver. Like his son Louis says, “My father might have put on a dashiki, but he was going to wear it while he waved that flag.”

  “You have to understand, my father was an officer,” Louis says. “He was so proud of that. He believed that there was no military in this world greater than the U.S. military, and you had better speak to him with respect because of it. He might have sung the black national anthem, but he wasn’t going to fly the flag of any African country, or any other nation but our own.”

  Those brave black soldiers, Amos Pierce and L. H. Edwards, taught me about true patriotism. This land was their land, too. It was made for them, same as everybody else. They never forgot it, and they weren’t going to let their fellow Americans forget it. Their patriotism said, “America is a great country, but we’re going to keep fighting to make it greater.”

  In 2009, I did my small part in this long struggle to make our country a more perfect union when I contacted WWL-TV reporter Bill Capo in New Orleans and asked him to help me get Daddy his medals. I couldn’t let that injustice stand, not after all Amos Pierce had done for me and for his country. I explained what had happened and Bill started looking into it. He contacted U.S. senator Mary Landrieu, a fellow New Orleanian, who put her staff to work researching the issue.

  What they found was that Corporal Pierce had not been awarded two medals, as he believed, but rather six of them. There was a Bronze Service Star, an Asiatic Pacific Campaign medal, a World War II Victory medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Meritorious Unit Commendation, and a Good Conduct medal, along with an honorable service lapel pin.

  Working with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, we arranged a special ceremony on Armed Forces Day, 2009, to present my father, then eighty-four, with his country’s thanks and honors. True, they were half a century late, but it’s never too late to do the right thing.

  Major General Hunt Downer of the Louisiana National Guard spoke warmly of my father, telling the audience that we must never forget the debt of gratitude we owe to the Greatest Generation. Museum board president Gordon “Nick” Mueller added, “We would not have won World War Two without the African Americans, the Native Americans, the Hispanics, the Japanese Americans.”

  My brother Ron rose to speak, fighting back tears. He told the audience that our father “truly believed in the American dream, and he bought into it. And when he would tell us that we could do anything, he wasn’t just spouting words, he meant it.” (Ron said later that the event was surreal for him. “Here I was in the presence of a real-life American war hero, and it was my father—and I had no idea about it.”)

  When my turn came to speak, I was as emotional as Ron was. My heart was bursting with love and pride in Daddy and all his comrades-in-arms. “It’s a great honor to stand here today,” I said. “But it’s not just for us. It is for all the men and women who couldn’t live to see this honor, and receive the honors they received, but still had love and faith for this great nation.”

  Tee stood with us, at Daddy’s side. I hoped that my oldest brother, Stacey, who had died of heart disease a decade earlier, could in some way share that moment of triumph with our family.

  Then it was time to give Daddy his medals. His face beaming, Daddy made his way with his walker to the stage. I stood at his side, holding the six medals in my hand, while Ron pinned them on the left breast of Daddy’s pin-striped suit. Tee looked on, cradling the box the medals came in.

  Later on, his chest laden with colorful ribbons and bronze medals, Daddy told WWL-TV that he felt like General MacArthur. For us, it was enough that he was U.S. Army Corporal Amos Pierce, Jr., war hero. His family had always known it, but now the whole world did. America had finally lived up to the promises it made to a young black man who crossed the ocean and walked through fire and thunder for her. America had finally kept faith with an old black man who, despite everything, had taught his sons to believe in this great nation.

  Whenever I hear people say, “So many people died for our freedom,” I say yes, you’re right—but I’m not thinking of battlefields alone. I’m also thinking of bayous and creeks and rivers where so many African Americans died, or endured the murders of their beloved husbands, sons, and fathers, at the hands of their fellow Americans who would never answer for their crimes in a court of law. And I’m thinking of the busy city streets and the lonesome country roads where so many black folk risked their lives—and in some cases, gave their lives—for the cause of liberty and justice for all Americans. There is blood on the ballot box, and it is the blood of black soldiers who fought for America—whether or not they ever wore the uniform.

  They loved the country that persecuted them and treated them like the enemy. To me, that is a vision of supreme patriotism. It’s like my father always said to my brothers and me, every time we would see a triumph of American ideals: “See, that’s why I fought for that flag!”

  Amos Pierce never stopped fighting for that flag, and never stopped loving it, either. On the day he finally received his medals, he said nothing at the formal ceremony, but at the gala afterward, he decided that he wanted to offer a few words to the crowd.

  He hobbled over to the microphone and, despite his hearing loss, spoke with ringing clarity.

  “I want you all to remember those who didn’t come back, I want to dedicate this night to them,” he said. “So many who fought didn’t even have a chance to live their lives. I was given that chance, as difficult as my life has been.”

  Daddy thanked the audience for the honor, saying he was not bitter for having been denied the medals for so long. He was simply grateful to have them now.

  “We’ve come so far as a country,” he continued. “I’ve realized now a lot of what we were fighting for.”

  And then he paused. It took all of his strength to stand as erect as possible at the podium. He saluted crisply, and said, “God bless America.”

  That’s when I lost it. For someone not to be debilitated by pain and anger and embarrassment after all he had been through; who fought for this country when this country didn’t love him and wouldn’t fight for him; to come back from war and still have to fight for the right to vote and the right to go into any establishment he wanted to—that made me think of the vow he made to me as a child: “No matter what, son, I will never abandon you.”

  I have never known a greater man than that old soldier on the night he received his due.

  WHEN HE RETURNED FROM THE WAR, Daddy went back to high school, though his long semester in the South Pacific made him older than his classmates. He had been drafted before graduation, and now he wanted to earn his diploma. After that, he used the G.I. Bill to enter Southern University in Baton Rouge, the historically black college founded after Reconstruction.

  One night, at a campus dance, Daddy saw “this little red girl,” as he would always say, who caught his eye. That was Althea Lee Edwards, my mother. Daddy remembers that she was “just a little red thing”—he referred to the bright hue of her skin. After they became sweethearts, his pet name for her was “Black.” He would say, affectionately, “You little red-skinned thing, you don’t want to be black.” That’s where the name came from.

  As a college man, Daddy always held his little Dobbs fedora on his forearm, which was the style at the time. There he was, drunk, trying to chat up the woman wh
o would become my mother, and he kept dropping his Dobbs. Tee was not impressed with the fast-talking drunk boy from New Orleans who couldn’t keep his hands on his hat.

  But he was persistent, and he kept courting her. Finally, Tee invited him down the bayou to meet her parents. Daddy caught the bus to Assumption Parish for the weekend. All the old folks in my family loved to joke about how all it took was for Amos to get one taste of Mamo’s good country cooking, and he was hooked. Seemed like he came down every weekend after that.

  They were still an item when Daddy left for photography school in New York City. He moved in with Tee Mae in Brooklyn. At some point after Daddy’s arrival, he began to date a woman from Baltimore. When Tee Mae found out about it, she blistered him good. “Oh hell no!” she said. “You’re not going to live in my house and run around on my sister.”

  She called Tee back home in Louisiana to break the news. By then Tee had graduated from Southern and was living in New Orleans with her sisters and working. My mother asked Tee Mae to put Amos on the line. When she had his ear, Tee spat, “We’re through. Stay up there with your little Baltimore girl.”

  “Oh no, no, no!” wailed my father. He wept inconsolably. Days later, he withdrew from photography school, packed his bags, caught the next train for New Orleans, and when he rolled into town, found my mother and asked her to marry him. She said yes. Daddy worked for a while as a studio portrait photographer, but when he left New York, he said good-bye to serious artistic ambitions.

  Many years later, when I was studying at Juilliard, I finally learned why my father had been so adamant that I think hard before committing myself to an acting career. My brother Ron, who was more observant than I, said, “Did you ever see Daddy’s photographs in his study?”

  I had not. He had brought a sheaf of beautiful, artistically composed photographs home with him, which he kept in the bottom of a desk drawer. These images, photographs of New York and its people mostly, were aesthetically sophisticated. I was floored. There was one in particular, a self-portrait, that involved a double-exposure technique of startling technical accomplishment for a photography student.

  “Daddy, you never told me you were an artistic photographer, not just a studio photographer,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I thought you knew that.”

  Daddy might have made it as an artist, but he chose to return home to marry the love of his life. He never expressed regret, but when my brother Ron showed me those images, I knew instantly that had our father stayed in New York and pursued his artistic dream, he had the talent to have become a first-rate photographer. Daddy understood what it felt like to put one’s dream of becoming an artist away forever. He resisted my early acting ambitions because he had wanted to protect his boy from that pain.

  All along I thought Daddy didn’t respect my talent and my passion for acting—that his skepticism was a failure of paternal love. Once I knew what the real story was—that his gruff pushback came from an excess of paternal love—a tremendous burden lifted.

  Daddy and Tee married in 1952 and moved into a rented house on Deslonde Street in the Lower Ninth Ward. Half a century later, the world would know the Lower Ninth Ward as the epicenter of Katrina’s wrath. In the 1950s, though, it was a neighborhood where poor and working-class folks, mostly African American, lived and raised their families. Fronting the river only four miles east of the heart of the French Quarter, the swampy Lower Ninth has always been one of the poorest and most isolated parts of New Orleans. In the 1920s, dredging the Industrial Canal connecting the Mississippi with Lake Pontchartrain due north further separated the Lower Ninth, both geographically and psychologically. Historically, African Americans had to live in the lowest-lying, most mosquito-infested and flood-prone parts of the city. The Lower Ninth was the boondocks of the Crescent City, but black New Orleanians didn’t have much choice.

  Three years later, when Tee was home with their first child, my brother Stacey, Daddy came home from work with a surprise.

  “Hey, Black, I bought us a house today.”

  “You what?!”

  “Just ten dollars holds the contract.”

  Daddy packed his wife and baby son into their car and drove north toward Lake Pontchartrain, into the farthest edge of the Gentilly neighborhood, to show them where their new house would be. Coming to a bare two-hundred-acre tract of land hard up against the Industrial Canal, sandwiched between the lake and Chef Menteur Highway, was a new housing development called Pontchartrain Park. When complete, it would be the first subdivision built exclusively for the city’s rising African American middle class.

  From a twenty-first-century perspective, you might see Pontchartrain Park as a Negro Levittown, a square mile of separate-but-equal, cookie-cutter suburbia built on a drained swamp that was some of the worst, lowest-lying land in the city. In a nation trying to shake off the burdens of segregation, you might think it was an insulting attempt by the white power structure to buy off a black community that they were increasingly powerless to intimidate.

  You might see it that way. And you wouldn’t be all wrong. But that’s not how men and women like my father and mother saw it. For a generation of black New Orleanians, Pontchartrain Park was the closest they had ever been to the Promised Land of the opportunity to live like regular Americans. It was where the Moses generation in New Orleans planted its flag and laid claim to the middle-class American dream.

  It was where they took something Jim Crow ugly—a cynical attempt to divert the rising tide of hope and change coming out of postwar mobility into the stagnant swamp of segregation—and made it blossom into something beautiful.

  New Orleans neighborhoods were not always segregated. In fact, Tulane University geographer Richard Campanella calls New Orleans “America’s first multicultural city.” Founded in 1718 as the capital of the French territory of Louisiane, New Orleans spent four decades under Spanish colonial rule, until Napoleonic France briefly regained custody before selling it to the United States in 1803.

  By now it’s a cliché to call New Orleans a “gumbo,” but the metaphor didn’t come from nowhere. In all its local variations, the iconic southern Louisiana stew—which comes from European, African, and Native American influences—really does reflect the sociological and cultural reality of a city that’s unique in North America. True story: When the Cuban-American architect Andrés Duany came to post-Katrina New Orleans to help plan the rebuilding, he struggled with the characteristic inefficiencies of the city’s government. Then one day, as he walked in the Marigny neighborhood, a banana tree next to a brightly painted cottage made him think of his native Cuba. It hit him: New Orleans is not American, but Caribbean. By that cultural and geographical standard, New Orleans was a model of competent civic administration.

  “This insight was fundamental because from that moment I understood New Orleans and began to truly sympathize,” Duany wrote. “Like everyone, I found government in this city to be a bit random; but if New Orleans were to be governed as efficiently as, say, Minneapolis, it would be a different place—and not one that I could care for.” I don’t quite agree with him, but it’s a window into the psyche of the Crescent City.

  Because of its origin as a French colonial city in the subtropics, New Orleans always had the same raffish mestizo atmosphere characteristic of New World cities colonized by European Catholic powers. Alexis de Tocqueville was one of many travelers impressed by the diversity in the great port city. Visiting New Orleans in 1832 on his grand tour of the United States, Tocqueville wrote in his diary that in the Crescent City, he felt very far from America: “Faces with every shade of color,” he observed. “Language French, English, Spanish, Creole.”

  To be sure, this was not because New Orleans was uniquely enlightened among American cities on race. It was a matter of practicality. Tocqueville speculated that it was because the French and the Spanish colonists had largely been single men looking for wealth,
and forced slave women to be their sexual partners. The English-speaking colonists in the rest of America had mostly migrated in search of religious liberty, he said, and had come with their families.

  Until colonial rule ended with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Creoles—French-speaking Catholics of mixed European and African ancestry—lived amid whites. Many of them were what were called “free people of color” and had a distinct legal and social standing, sandwiched between white colonials and enslaved Africans. Black slaves, of course, also lived near their masters, either in slave quarters next to their masters’ houses, or in nearby back alley dwellings. These free people of color remained strictly segregated in social matters, though.

  After Protestant Americans took control of the city from the French, they brought with them American laws and more rigid attitudes toward race. Yet New Orleans remained one of the most racially diverse cities in the nation. The 1820 census found that the number of ethnic groups making up at least 5 percent of the population was seven—the greatest diversity of any American city at the time—and that about half the city’s population were either slaves or free persons of color.

  Black Creoles who were not enslaved settled heavily in the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood, to the east and north of the French Quarter. After the Civil War, freedmen leaving Louisiana plantations for opportunities and what they hoped would be a more tolerant New Orleans settled in the Back o’ Town districts. These were mosquito-infested slum areas on the undesirable swampy outskirts, far from any city services, where desperately poor black residents lived in ramshackle housing.

  The extensive drainage system the city installed between 1893 and 1915 was a game-changer. Before the massive pumps went into operation, the city’s boundaries were confined to the higher ground along the natural levees snaking east to west along the Mississippi River, and the parallel Metairie and Gentilly ridges to the north. Behind the Gentilly Ridge was swampland, running roughly three miles out to the lake.