“Nooooo!”
If the light flickered, that was our signal to run for our lives.
Right off the third fairway is a lagoon. In the middle of it sits a nub of land we boys dubbed “Nanny Goat Island.” It might as well have been the Lost Island of Atlantis. We thought often about what happened on Nanny Goat Island, and how great it would be to cross the water and plant our flag on its shores. But there were no Columbuses in our gang. Could we build a raft? No, no; the lagoon was an uncrossable barrier. The mysteries of Nanny Goat Island would forever be out of our reach.
In 2013, when I went to play the golf course for the first time, I eyeballed Nanny Goat Island and realized the water in the lagoon was probably only thigh-high. We could have easily waded over. I’m glad we never tried. It was tantalizing to have a land at the heart of our neighborhood that we could never reach. It was a spur to our childhood imaginations.
One of the highlights of any Pontchartrain Park kid’s year was the annual spring weekend fair at the Bethany United Methodist Church. I lived for it. It was like Christmas in springtime. It’s astonishing to reflect on how something as simple as a church fair was all that it took to fill a child’s heart back then.
My mother would give me ten dollars for the weekend and send me off to the fair. For fifty cents a round, I would toss rings on bottles and throw sandbags on checkerboard squares, all on a quest for a prize. There were all kinds of games to play with your friends, and when you got tired, you would go get a “church plate”—that is, a plate of food prepared by church ladies. You’d get stuffed peppers or stuffed crab, maybe some green beans and potato salad, served to you with a square of waxed paper on top. Somehow, the waxed paper made the food taste better, or so it seemed to me. You would pay for your cold drink, then have the privilege of sticking your hand deep into the ice in the cooler to fetch a can. It felt so cold, and so good. After the lunch break, it was right back to the games.
One year, dusk was falling late on a Sunday afternoon, and the fair was winding down. By then, my friend Carlton Watson and I were broke, but we had to squeeze just a few minutes more out of the fair weekend.
Though Tee had sternly instructed me not to borrow money from anybody, I devised a way around it. “Carlton,” I said, “doesn’t your sister have some money?” He asked her for five dollars, and she gave it to him. We spent every last cent of it.
The next day when I got home from school, my mother was on fire.
“Boy, what did I tell you yesterday?” Tee said. “Didn’t I tell you not to beg anybody for money? I teach that Watson girl, and she told me today that you took all her money at the fair.”
Now, here’s where it gets interesting, and you see the particular way children of my time and place received discipline.
“Boy, you’re out there embarrassing me,” Tee fumed. We all heard that from our mothers and fathers back then. Parents drummed it into their children’s heads that when they were out in the public square, they were representing the family. Southerners tend to judge the quality of one’s parenting by the behavior of one’s children. They raise their children to think of themselves as representatives of the family, and to behave accordingly.
My mother lived in the community where she taught. To everyone there, I was Mrs. Pierce’s son. I had a responsibility to carry that name with pride, with purpose, and with honor and dignity. I didn’t find this oppressive; in fact, I was proud to be Mrs. Pierce’s son. It carried such weight.
I’ll never forget that when I first went away to school in New York City, the local newspaper reported that Mrs. Pierce’s son was headed to Juilliard. I came home on one break and saw Fat Albert (yes, we really had a Fat Albert in Pontchartrain Park). He had taken the wrong path. Fat Albert had not gone on to college and was still at home, hanging around, doing nothing with his life.
Fat Albert told me, “Man, you lucky.”
“How’s that?”
“You have Mrs. Pierce as your mother,” he said. “She kept you on the straight and narrow, and look at you now, you doing good.”
I felt pride, but I also felt such guilt. Albert didn’t have what I had. I went home and told that to my mom, and thanked Tee for all she had done for me.
“If I didn’t have you, I would have been like Albert,” I said.
“Boy, don’t listen to him,” Tee said. “His mama is a principal. His mama did all the same things. Albert’s been that way since he was a little boy. His mother’s a good woman, and she did all the same things I did. He just didn’t want to listen. You should feel sorry for his mother.”
Next time I saw Albert out, I told him, “You ought to think about how you treat your mother.”
Good parents provide all they can to prepare their children to succeed, but the children have to feel a reciprocal bond of obligation toward the parents. In turn, both parents and children feel a responsibility to the broader community to do their part to maintain the common good.
Everybody’s parents looked out for everybody else’s kids. I never knew the name of the man I passed by every day on the walk home from school. He would almost always be in his front yard, and when I passed, he would call out to me, saying things like, “Hey, Little Amos, you on your way home, huh?” A block later I would walk in our front door, and they were expecting me. The sentry of Mendez Street had phoned to say I would be there shortly.
There was one kid in the neighborhood, Brian, who had been pulling off some petty burglaries and putting the stolen loot under his bed. The way he got caught demonstrates the moral system of Pontchartrain Park. Brian’s mother was cleaning his room and found the stolen property under his bed. Instead of making him give back what he had taken and apologize, she turned him in to the police. She had raised him better than that, and she wasn’t going to have the family name smeared by his lawbreaking. There would be no excuses.
What happened to Brian would have happened to any of us had we done the same. The integrity and stability of the community that we all depended on required respect for the code, respect for the family, and respect for yourself. Community requires covenant. Growing up in that Pontchartrain Park cocoon helped us kids develop our inner strengths in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support. With the exception of the time white kids in a Volkswagen Beetle drove through our neighborhood taking potshots with a gun at kids (I don’t know if it was a small rifle or a BB gun), the only time we had to confront racism on our turf was when we would cross The Ditch—a drainage ditch between Pontchartrain Park and Gentilly Woods that marked the no-man’s-land between the black boys and the white boys. Every now and then, we would stage raids on the other side of The Ditch, for the sheer thrill of it. To see it now, it’s just a puny groove in the soggy ground, but to us kids, it might as well have been the DMZ.
THE DITCH, and what it stood for, served to remind us that as good as we had it in Pontchartrain Park, there was a world beyond its borders in which we were seen as the enemy. But in our own little piece of paradise, we were free to let our guard down and just be kids.
Our father taught us the skills of combat with a world filled with people who did not have our best interests at heart, and our mother instructed us in the inner disciplines that would help us conquer that world. She had learned well from Papo and Mamo how to use her wits and her tenacity of character to overcome anything the world threw at her.
And it wasn’t just her boys to whom she taught these things. She made sure her students at Coghill Elementary, the neighborhood black school where she taught, learned the same lessons her parents had taught her.
When the kids didn’t have their homework and came to her with various excuses, she wouldn’t accept them.
“You don’t think I was poor?” she would say. “You don’t think I had problems at home when I was your age? Two plus two still equals four, and you still have to know that.”
“Yes, Mrs. Pierce, but my mama
, she couldn’t—”
“Okay, but what is two plus two? Isn’t it four? Why didn’t you write that down?”
“Well, I didn’t get around to doing my homework.”
Then she would let them have it. Tee’s point was that the world is not going to cut you any slack, especially if you’re black, and even more so if you’re black and poor or working-class. You had better learn that lesson early, child, and commit yourself to working hard, getting an education, and never, ever giving up or giving in. There is no other way.
This was how she responded to the outrage of racism. The white-hot anger we had inside of us over the way we were treated is nothing to be ashamed of. The art is mastering it, so that it doesn’t master us. Papo and Mamo trained their children never to give racists the satisfaction of victory. “Don’t ever be the kind of person they think you are,” they would say.
My mother never liked to show emotion, but she had a long memory. She never forgot the night riders burning the car on College Point Lane. She never forgot her father, a hardworking farmer, being taken advantage of by the white man at the plantation store. But she channeled all that indignation into a passion for education as the only path to victory over our oppressors.
Injustice was going to come, Tee taught, but turn that anger to your advantage, let it fuel your fire and inflame your knowledge. And always watch out for folks who are going to pretend that they have your best interest at heart, but who really might not want you to get ahead in life.
The temptation to leave the straight path could take many forms. It might even come from a well-meaning teacher who will tell you, “Don’t worry, you’re going through a lot right now, so you might not be able to understand these concepts.” Tee always hated teachers like that, willing to demand less from students because the kids were hard-luck cases. She knew from her own life experience that those were precisely the kids who needed to be challenged so they could develop the strengths they needed to get out of the hole into which they were born.
When teachers would try to coddle me in that way, Tee wouldn’t have it. “You don’t have to patronize my son,” she would say. “How much homework does he have? If he’s supposed to do it, he’s going to do it.”
Tee stayed on my back about reading. Books opened up my young mind to worlds beyond Pontchartrain Park. In seventh grade, 1975–1976, I had a great teacher, a white South African woman named Mrs. Wagner. She introduced us to novels like Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, about the spirit of revolution in West Africa, and Alan Paton’s antiapartheid novel Cry, the Beloved Country. Mrs. Wagner opened my eyes to a lot of change going on in the world.
The way I was raised, reading was the norm. It got to the point in middle school where we would ask each other in the halls, “Man, what are you reading?” Our community drummed into our heads the imperative of education. And they all pulled together to help us succeed. When I was having trouble with trigonometry, I went to see Mr. Tanner, who lived on the other side of the park. That was the thing in our neighborhood: You’re having trouble with math, go see Mr. Tanner, he’ll help you. It was just part of life. First, I’ll play a little basketball, then I’ll run over to Mr. Tanner’s to get help with my math. He helped me understand trig by showing me how to approach a problem with the same sense of creativity I brought to my high school acting classes. There was only one right answer, but there were often several ways to arrive at it.
My mother rode me hard on my lessons. If I was supposed to have two hours of homework at night and I finished it in one hour, she wouldn’t let up: “Go on to the next chapter, then.” That was because she knew education was key. She came from a time and a place where education really changed lives for the better. Tee’s parents, undereducated country people who lived hard lives under oppression that black children of my generation could scarcely imagine, had taught her well how much education meant. She and her siblings were living proof that Papo and Mamo were right. They were living examples of what any child, no matter how poor and disadvantaged, can accomplish if he or she really believes that “can’t died three days before the creation of the world.”
As I said earlier, Tee instructed us kids not to let passion in the face of injustice overwhelm our reason, but she balanced that advice by exhorting us never, ever to forget our dignity as human beings or our right to be treated fairly. If we kids came back and complained about something we thought was an injustice, my mother’s reaction was, “What did you decide to do? Did you just cower? What are you going to do about it?”
She delivered this lesson powerfully one day when I was in high school and competed in a Saturday morning race around the golf course. I came in second in my age group. But when it came time to award the honors, the officials said that I came in third, and awarded me the bronze medal.
My mother wasn’t having it.
“Wait a minute,” she said to me. “You did come in second.”
“Yeah, but it’s just a little fun run,” I said. “Who cares?”
“Oh, no, you came in second, you go tell them.”
“Let it go, Tee.”
“No, don’t you dare let it go.”
She approached an official and made a big deal out of it. He admitted that there had been a mistake, but the medals had already been given out, so there was nothing he could do.
Tee stood her ground. “My son earned the silver, and you will give it to him.” And so they did. I was so embarrassed—and told her so as we walked home. She wouldn’t accept that from me, any more than she would accept the biased judgment from the officials.
“Don’t be embarrassed when you’re right,” she said.
The lesson? Don’t settle for injustice. You can’t just sit back and accept it. You may be the only one, but you have being right, and fairness, on your side. And once you know something is right, and fair, even when others don’t want to recognize it, you can take comfort in knowing that. You may be alone, you may be isolated, but it’s right and it’s fair, and once you’ve determined that, that’s your shield and source of strength for all the attacks you’ll face from standing alone. Even if you don’t ultimately triumph, your enemies will still know in their hearts that they have done wrong, and they will also know that they could not conquer what is within you.
“Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one,” said Henry David Thoreau, who had nothing on Althea Lee Pierce.
It was hard for Tee to live at peace with the fact that you never really knew what people stood for. You could be getting along fine with everybody and think you had everything figured out, and then something ugly would erupt out of racism, or ignorance, or something like that. That upset my mother more than anything. How can you see me one day and smile, try to hurt me the next day, then act like nothing happened?
This deeply affected her relationship with the Catholic Church. My mother was devoutly Catholic her entire life. She was the church lady people would call on to recite the rosary at funerals. Nobody came between Tee and the Lord. But she didn’t have a lot of use for the men who ran the Church—and she came by her distrust honestly.
St. Gabriel’s was my mother and father’s geographical parish when they moved to Pontchartrain Park. On their first visit, my mother sat down before mass. An usher approached and said to her that the Negro pews were in the back. She and Daddy rose, turned, and walked to the back of the church—and kept on going. They never returned. They started attending St. Paul’s, an all-black Josephite parish a few miles away.
Some years later, a priest from St. Gabriel’s came to the house while my mother was out. My father let him in and they sat together in the living room.
“We hear that you all are Catholics,” the priest said. “Why don’t we see you in the parish?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Father,” said Daddy. “When we first came here, we went to mass there, but we were told to go sit in the b
ack of the church. That upset my wife and me. How could you have segregation in the house of God?”
The priest got his back up. “If you get sick or somebody dies,” he huffed, “don’t be coming to me.”
My father rose and said, “Don’t worry about that. Thank you.” He showed the priest the door. When Tee got home, she wanted to blaze off to the rectory and blister that priest’s ears, but Daddy calmed her down.
I suppose that it’s the priests like Father Maloney in Assumption Parish who keep you in the Church, but priests like the one from St. Gabriel’s make it hard to stick around. The Archdiocese of New Orleans had been an inconstant friend of black Catholics. Archbishop Joseph Rummel, a German-born prelate who served as the city’s Catholic leader from 1935 until his death in 1964 at the age of eighty-eight, took stands against racism that were unusually strong for a white man in that era.
He was the first Catholic archbishop to break the color barrier at the city’s Notre Dame Seminary, ordering it to admit black seminarians in 1948. When City Park refused to allow an integrated holy procession, he canceled it. In 1953, the same year he ordained the first black diocesan priest in New Orleans, Rummel issued a pastoral letter that ordered the end to segregation in all Catholic institutions of the archdiocese.
“Let there be no further discrimination or segregation in the pews, at the Communion rail, at the confessional and in parish meetings, just as there will be no segregation in the kingdom of heaven,” he wrote, a year too late for Daddy and Tee at St. Gabriel’s.
Rummel wasn’t kidding. He closed one parish whose white members protested his assignment of a black priest to their community. But when time came to desegregate the city’s parochial schools in the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the elderly archbishop’s resolve faltered in the face of much stiffer white resistance than he faced in desegregating parishes.
The racial resentment of white New Orleans Catholics—including many priests—was so overwhelming that it defined them even more strongly than loyalty to Church authority and Catholic teaching.
The Wind in the Reeds Page 10