The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  I know this because I saw it. I lived it. I breathed it, felt it, loved it. I am it. My all-American childhood is a testimony to what goodness can emerge when black folks in this country achieve what nearly all of us had been denied since we were stolen from Africa: the ordinary comforts of home.

  And that private triumph, Mr. Tureaud, along with the public battles you won in the courtroom, produced for our people a double victory.

  FOUR

  THE FAMILY RESERVE

  They say it takes a village to raise a child. For me, Pontchartrain Park was that village. The child it brought up was the father to the man that I am today.

  I was born on December 8, 1963—the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, as my deeply Catholic mother would tell you—at Sara Mayo, a Garden District hospital on Jackson Avenue, two and a half blocks from the Mississippi River. Tee and Daddy brought me, their third son, home to the little brick rancher on Debore Drive.

  That’s the thing about Pontchartrain Park. Its utterly ordinary, 1950s-style, cookie-cutter Americana appearance veiled what was in fact an extraordinary accomplishment for black Americans: middle-class normalcy. The grandeur of the Garden District, the glorious townhomes of the Vieux Carré wearing wrought-iron balconies like garlands, the charming Creole cottages of the French faubourgs—we have none of that in Pontchartrain Park. No tourists will make the long drive out to see our neighborhood, because they have seen ones just like it a thousand times before, all over America. Strangely enough, tourists did come in the 1950s, on coaches where tour guides would show off the exotic Negro housewives, hanging out their laundry like any other American women. Mercifully, the novelty of that faded with time.

  You can make the drive around the curving streets of Pontchartrain Park in just a few minutes. The entire neighborhood is only one square mile. The park and golf course are at its geographic heart; otherwise, it’s one plain brick ranch house after another. The real value of Pontchartrain Park, though, is not what can be seen from the street, but what the neighborhood built inside all of us who had the good fortune to grow up there.

  Here’s the key to understanding Pontchartrain Park, the secret of its success: It was a place in which nearly everybody owned their house, and each house had in it both a mother and a father. Our dads never had to talk about the responsibilities fathers had to kids; they demonstrated them by example. Our moms did not have to carry the burden of raising children by themselves. They did it with their husbands. That was the norm in Pontchartrain Park: single-family homes, each family headed by a mom and a dad, and everybody’s mom and dad obliged to support the other in their common mission of raising up the next generation.

  My brothers and I were loved, and because we were loved, we were disciplined—not just by our parents, but by the whole community we lived in. I felt protected, with all those mothers and fathers around. I knew that if anything happened, there was an adult who would help me. Every grown-up in our neighborhood spoke with the authority of our own mother and father. We knew they loved us and had our best interests at heart.

  When I was a kid, all of Pontchartrain Park was like my own backyard. This is not “Leave It to Black Beaver” nostalgia. It was real.

  Debore Drive runs down a narrow strip of land between the park and the massive levee standing between our neighborhood and the Industrial Canal to the east. The canal had to contain storm surges during hurricanes. Because our neighborhood sat in some of the lowest land in the entire city, that big-shouldered wall of earth, over two stories tall, protected us from Armageddon.

  If you had asked my older brothers, Stacey and Ron, and me, we would have said that the big shoulders that kept the danger far away belonged to our burly, barrel-chested Daddy. He worked as a stockroom clerk and deliveryman at Kirschman’s, a furniture store right up the road from us. Every workday, Tee would grab her car keys and say, “I’m going to get your father.” For a long five minutes, we Pierce boys would revel in the anticipation of Daddy’s arrival so we could share our day with him.

  Suddenly, the door would open and through the portal the conquering hero would return to tell his boys tales of adventure. This was what my dad didn’t have growing up, and he was determined to give it to us.

  Every afternoon, we had our family ritual. He would sit down in his chair and tell one of us kids to get him a cold Budweiser. I would climb up onto him just to be close. I could smell his own musk clinging to his Dickey’s workshirt, an aroma that said, I have worked hard all day to provide for my family—what a great comfort that was to me as a child. It was enveloping, and it planted a powerful sense memory. It conveyed a sense of safety, of protection, of strength—and all these things in an atmosphere suffused with love.

  The Pierce family also had a Sunday-night ritual that brought every week to a close. Tee would lay out a cheese-and-cracker platter on the coffee table and bring in beer—a Bud for Daddy, a Miller pony for herself—and we would settle in to watch 60 Minutes on CBS. When Mike Wallace and Morley Safer signed off, that was when our school week began. My mother would begin her lesson plan for the week, and we boys started our weekend homework.

  Evenings like that—the family at home, at peace, learning about the world together—were golden. But Amos and Tee’s boys didn’t always make it easy for them. I was the mischievous one, always doing something to get into trouble. Some days Daddy would come home from work bone-tired, flop down in that chair, and tell me to go get the belt (on the short drive home, Tee would have briefed him on my misbehavior that day). I would hand him the belt, he would say, “Stand right there,” to the side of his chair, at perfect arm’s length, then whap! he would deliver a lick across my backside. And I would be thinking, Damn, Daddy, you couldn’t even stand up to whip my ass?

  Amos ran a tight ship. When I was sixteen, I went on my first car date and drove to the fair at St. Mary’s High School. My brother Ron was at his girlfriend’s house nearby. He wanted to borrow the car while I was at the fair with my date, so I let him.

  When the fair closed down for the night, Ron was nowhere to be found. I had to call my girlfriend’s dad to pick her up. It was humiliating. Finally, Ron comes barreling around the corner in the family car. I was furious with him for screwing up my date. When we got home, I told my parents, who said, “Ron, you shouldn’t have done that.”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “That’s it?” I said. “That’s all he gets?”

  My folks and I had a huge argument that ended with me storming out, going over to my friend Cedric’s house. I complained that my parents weren’t paying attention to me, and I resolved that I was going to show them: I wasn’t going to go home.

  Cedric’s mom wouldn’t let me stay the night there—that Pontchartrain Park parental solidarity again—so when I went back to our house, I slept in the backyard, in the cold. The next morning, when I was tiptoeing around the backyard, trying to figure out how I was going to manage my entrance, the sliding glass door opened. Tee stuck her head out. She was not as happy to see me as I had hoped.

  “Come in here,” she said sharply. “Boy, your father’s so angry, you’d better get in here right now. You think you can just hang around here? You’re not going to school?”

  I said no, I know the rules. In our house, the understanding Daddy and Tee had with their sons is that we were welcome to live at home as long as we were in school. But if we were not in school, we had to support ourselves.

  “I have a job Uptown,” I lied. “I’m going to get an apartment, and as a matter of fact, I’m going to stay in school, too.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Now that we know, you’d better get your ass on out of here. You can’t stay.”

  “Fine,” I told her. “I’m going to my place now. I’m going to come get my stuff later.”

  Lacking any other plan, I went to school. When I came home that evening, it was already dark—it must have be
en winter, because the sun had gone down early—and I noticed that something was blocking the light that usually came through the living room window. I crept into the house with trepidation, not knowing what to expect.

  “Wendell’s here,” said Daddy. He turned to me. “We’re going to have dinner, and after dinner, you and me are gonna talk.”

  I walked straight to the table and sat down with the rest. As soon as my plate was clean, Daddy leveled his gaze at me and said, “You finished? Okay, let’s talk.”

  I ducked into my room to put my books down and couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Everything was gone! The closet was empty, all the books were gone from the shelves, the dresser drawers were open, and empty, all my football trophies had disappeared, as had the mattress. The only thing that remained was the box spring from my bed.

  “I’m waiting on you in the living room,” my father said.

  When I stepped in, everything I owned was there in the living room, piled high against the window. It took my breath away.

  “Sit down,” Daddy said.

  I sat down.

  “So, you gonna run away from here, have us worried last night?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You guys weren’t fair to me. You didn’t tell Ron that—”

  “Okay, so here’s the deal,” Daddy said. “You got a choice. You either live in my house, and live by my rules and do what I say, or you take all of that shit that I bought for you—I’m going to give to you—and take it to that so-called apartment of yours tonight, and get the hell out of my house.”

  He was on a roll.

  “I am not putting up with this shit,” Daddy continued. “You don’t so-called run away from home and don’t call home, and have me and your mother all worried about you. Don’t you ever do that, ever. So you have a choice: Live here by my rules or take your shit and get out. Now, Wendell, what’s it going to be?”

  “I guess I’ll stay here and live by your rules,” I muttered.

  “Good,” he said. “Now take all that shit back to your room.”

  I spent the whole night putting my room back together. As humiliating as that incident was, it was one of the best things my father ever did for me. It was all about a strong father showing discipline.

  As fierce as Daddy was in maintaining moral order and respect in his own home, he was, if anything, more fierce in defending his sons against outside threats. He might blister our backsides if we acted up too much at home, but we never once doubted that on the other side of that threshold, Amos Pierce had our backs.

  My brother Stacey was nine years older than I, and he endured traumas that I was too young to understand at the time. When I was just a toddler, Stacey, who was still just a child, was on the civil rights front lines. He was part of the Ruby Bridges generation, the first to integrate New Orleans public schools.

  Bridges was one of the first children to integrate New Orleans schools after U.S. District Judge J. Skelly Wright ordered the city, after six years of delay, to obey the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. On the morning of November 14, 1960, federal marshals escorted the black first-grader into William Frantz Elementary, five blocks from the Bridges home in the Upper Ninth Ward. A white mob stood outside, waving signs and Confederate flags, and screaming racist epithets at the six-year-old girl. Bridges would later say that she at first thought the frenzied crowds and the police barricades must mean it was Carnival time.

  Newsreel footage from later that day shows white mothers hustling their little children out the front door of Frantz as if rescuing them from a plague carrier. The next day, Judge Leander Perez, the cigar-chomping militant segregationist political don of St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes, led a massive rally at which he urged white parents to withdraw their kids from the integrated schools.

  “Don’t wait for your daughter to be raped by these Congolese,” he thundered. “Don’t wait until the burr-heads are forced into your schools. Do something about it now.”

  That kind of hatred doesn’t dissipate overnight. Five years after Ruby Bridges and a handful of black children first broke the wall of segregation, opening the door for more black children in New Orleans public schools, my brother Stacey learned what race hate meant in his first week at P. A. Capdau Junior High.

  He came home from seventh grade one day in tears. The next day, Daddy took him back and walked into the principal’s office with Stacey in tow.

  “Stacey, tell the principal what’s going on,” he said.

  “These kids are hitting me and calling me ‘nigger’ every time I come to school,” my brother said.

  The principal apologized and said he did not know it was happening. He promised Daddy to protect Stacey. Daddy told Stacey not to let it happen again, and if it did, to go to the principal and tell him.

  “Now you know what’s been going on, please take care of it,” Daddy said.

  “I will,” said the principal.

  “Because if you don’t,” Daddy said, “you’ll have to deal with me.”

  The principal was shocked. “You don’t have to get indignant, sir.”

  “Now, now, I’m not,” said Daddy. “I’m just telling you. If you don’t deal with this, if it happens again, you will have to deal with me.”

  When I found out years later how my father had handled it, I was astonished by his courage, daring to say something like that to a white man in authority during the early days of desegregation. You have to remember that the Selma-to-Montgomery marches were happening at the same time. On the television news at night, America saw images of black people being fire-hosed, tear-gassed, and savagely beaten for standing up to white authority. Black parents like Daddy and Tee had to teach their children how to navigate a world like that.

  There were no cameras to record deeds like what my father did that day at Capdau. It was a minor detail in the scope of civil rights history. But it took countless small but significant acts of courage and dignity like that one by mothers and fathers and children, walking through history with heads unbowed, to make a revolution. A new day was dawning in America, and Amos Pierce wanted to make sure that his boy and the white man who had authority over him knew it.

  Stacey was so smart. He was a scientist from boyhood. One Christmas, he got a chemistry set and a microscope. One day, he took a drop of water from our dog’s bowl, put it on a slide, and invited me to take a look. It was crawling with amoebas. That knocked me flat.

  “There’s a whole world inside that drop of water, Wendell,” Stacey said.

  That scientific mentality defined my oldest brother to me. But Stacey graduated from high school in 1972, just as the draft ended. He joined the Army ROTC at West Texas State University (today, West Texas A&M University), anticipating that the Vietnam War would be over by the time he graduated, and that he could enter the military as an officer. Military service was such a tradition in my family. My father was thrilled that his firstborn son was going to be an officer.

  He got homesick at West Texas and transferred to Southeastern Louisiana University, in Hammond, not far away. It was there that Stacey got into serious trouble—and my parents taught me a valuable lesson about what family means.

  In my family, my folks never talked down to their kids. They always shared information, often in family meetings. One night, they called Ron and me into the living room.

  “Stacey got arrested tonight,” Daddy said. He had been caught with marijuana.

  “Lesson number one: You’re not supposed to be dealing with drugs,” Tee said. “See what happens? He might be kicked out of school because he was messing with drugs. That’s why we tell you guys not to fool with drugs.

  “Second,” she continued, “whatever you do doesn’t just affect you; it affects the whole family. Your daddy has to go up to Hammond and get your brother out of jail, and then he’s got to go to work in the morning. He’s not going to
get any sleep. Everything you do affects the whole family.”

  She explained that they were going to have to take money out of my college fund to bail Stacey out and pay a lawyer to handle his case. Because I was younger than Ron, they would have more time to replace it, Tee said, and she promised that they would. But she wasn’t going to let the teaching power of this crisis moment be lost.

  “See how what you do affects your whole family?” she said, pounding home the lesson. “See how what you do ruins things for everybody?”

  Maybe Tee thought this might all be too much for Ron and me to deal with, given how young we were. She quickly reassured us.

  “Other families say you shouldn’t talk to the kids about these things. That’s not our way,” Tee said. “We share things with you kids, so you will always feel free to share things with us. We’re your family.”

  That taught me the strength of family, and the meaning of family. We all have each other’s back. We will help each other when one of us gets in trouble, and we will fight for each other. But we will also hold each other accountable.

  Stacey recovered and went on to finish his undergraduate work. Then he left for Howard University to get his Ph.D. in zoology. While he was there, Georgetown University across town in Washington, D.C., recruited him to attend its medical school. Though Stacey wanted to be a doctor, he couldn’t handle the pressure of that grueling first year, trying to complete both of these complex degrees. He had a nervous breakdown.

  He was renting a room in a woman’s home in the District. Stacey’s landlady phoned my parents one day to sound the alarm. “I’m really afraid your son is going to commit suicide,” she said. “I think he has a gun. I hear this clicking.”

  Tee and Daddy got on a plane at once, and Uncle L.C. joined them. It turned out that Stacey didn’t have a gun at all, that he had merely been clicking the light switch on and off. But it was clear that he was in serious mental trouble.