The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  The enfeebled Archbishop Rummel finally ordered the complete desegregation of New Orleans Catholic schools to begin in 1962. The outrage from white Catholics was so intense that several prominent lay Catholics tried to get the Louisiana legislature to pass a law forbidding Rummel’s act. The archbishop excommunicated three of the militant segregationists, including the notorious Judge Leander Perez.

  This is the Church that formed my mother. And yet, despite it all, she was unwaveringly faithful till the very end of her life. Tee always taught us the secret to staying strong in the faith despite the sins of the priests. She stressed that we have to separate the man-made from the divine, and that man is fallible. In our family, we never had that docile sense many Catholics cultivated toward clerics. You could always challenge a priest—and if you saw one behaving unjustly, you had better.

  Years later, I visited Stacey one weekend when he was at Howard University. After Sunday mass, my brother asked the priest why, during the prayers of the people, he prayed for the peace of Jews and Christians in the Middle East, but not for Muslims. The priest looked at my brother strangely, as if being challenged by a parishioner was a bizarre new thing.

  That was the Tee in him coming out.

  Once, as an adult, I went to mass at St. Mary’s, the church attached to the Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter. Inside the church, they display all the flags that have flown over New Orleans since its founding. One of them is a Confederate flag. After mass, I asked the priest if anyone had ever registered a complaint about that emblem as offensive to worshippers.

  “Listen,” the priest said to me, “you just need to relax.”

  “Whoa, hold it, Father!” I said. “Yes, I’m offended by it, but I asked if anybody else was. I know this is a tradition, but I would just like to add my name to all the other folks who have prayed here and who have a problem with the Confederate flag flying in the middle of church.”

  We got into it a little bit. That, too, was Tee.

  This is all part of the experience of loving a Church or a nation that oppresses you, and does things that are offensive to you. Just as Daddy stayed faithful to America, though it had given him reason to break faith, so too did Tee stay faithful to the Church. Do not let your righteous anger, however justified it may be, cause you to break faith. Things are going to get better, but do not forget that the dark side of human nature will never go away. Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on.

  AS AN ACTOR who has traveled the world practicing my craft, I can see now that everything my mother, my father, and our village of Pontchartrain Park did for me was, to paraphrase Papo, putting a dollar in my pocket anticipating the day that the world would go on sale. They were preparing me and all us children of Pontchartrain Park for the open road that we African Americans were finally going to have the right to take.

  Daddy loved the open road. On the last day of school every year, he would sit down with us kids and say, “Where do you guys want to go this summer?” We took a family vacation every year, no question. This was what my dad didn’t have growing up, and he was going to give it to us.

  This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a scary time for many Americans. It was an era of war, protest, rage, drugs, radicalism, and violence. For Daddy, this was beside the point. The whole wide world, which had been tightly circumscribed for black folks, was now his to explore. He was going to make the most of it, and show his sons that this land was their land too.

  On those road trips, we would stop at a roadside Stuckey’s, one of those big cafeteria-style places. We would buy our food and sit down, and another black family would come in. The place might be empty, and that family could sit anywhere they wanted, but they would come and sit with us. My mother hated that. She’d say, “We don’t have to be segregated anymore, but they’re so goddamn scared!”

  Amos and Althea Pierce weren’t scared. They had come too far to give up now. This was what they had fought for all their lives: the freedom to leave their little brick house in their tranquil suburban neighborhood and get on the road to explore this land of dreams, like any American family. My mother, who once saw a neighbor’s car incinerated by Klansmen as a lesson to black folk to stay put, lived long enough to drive across America with her own children in their family car, leaving their village and roaming as far as their desires would take them.

  Daddy had a cheerful saying: “You can’t get lost in America. Anywhere you go, it’s still America.” It is the land of the free and the home of the brave—and I never knew any two Americans freer or braver than my mother and father.

  FIVE

  MY TRUE NORTH

  For part of my childhood, my school class would go three times a year to the New Orleans Symphony (which later became the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra). Sergey Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was an annual treat. I always looked forward to it and felt that I knew that world. The only way into the forest and into that magical realm was through the music and its performance. It was then that I began to intuit the power of art.

  When I think about my journey to life as an artist, I think of Peter, I think of the Wolf, and I think of the gift my mother and father gave me by sending me to those performances. What if they had never done that? What if they had never opened their young son up to the life-changing possibilities in live performance? How would my life have been different, and poorer?

  And I think about the time as a small child, riding with my parents out to the country and listening to a radio broadcast of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee reading poetry. They created a world with words and performance that I found mesmerizing. While Daddy and Tee drove me to College Point, Ossie and Ruby transported me to a place I had never been.

  There was a time when I was older and the actor Roscoe Lee Browne came to New Orleans to narrate some orchestral pieces at the Mahalia Jackson Theater with the Louisiana Philharmonic. When I saw and heard him read poetry between the passages of music, I was deeply moved by the beauty of his performance. I knew that I wanted to be able to handle words and language that way. He revealed to me the power of poetry and performance to take you outside yourself and your mundane world.

  Later, as a drama student at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA, pronounced “NOAK-uh”), a performing-arts conservatory for high schoolers, I was thinking about whether acting was the life for me. At sixteen, I went on a school trip to England, and in Stratford-upon-Avon, I saw a production of As You Like It by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was the first time I really saw Shakespeare come to life.

  By then I was in my junior year at NOCCA and had already been living in a world where people felt as strongly as I did about the connection between art and a meaningful life. There were young people and teachers telling me it’s okay to think this way, and that there’s a whole world of people out there who believe art is important. I felt that I wasn’t alone. And to go from this to Stratford-upon-Avon to see the Royal Shakespeare Company, I thought, You can do this with acting? Oh my God!

  That’s when I knew what I was going to do with my life.

  This vision, this hunger, this talent, and this potential—all of it was latent within me, and had been since I was a tiny boy. It took a classroom visit by an acting teacher to awaken a sleeping teenager to his calling.

  ELLIOTT KEENER once told me that he knew from the first time he saw me that I was headed Uptown to study with him. But I had no idea. How could I have? I was just a ninth-grade boy then, a stranger to myself and to the world of possibility.

  I was a freshman at Benjamin Franklin, a magnet high school in New Orleans across town from Pontchartrain Park, and planning to play on its football team. One day, I sat in the back of my English class, disengaged, hoping that this period would pass quickly. The teacher told us we had a special guest today, a Mr. Elliott Keener, the founder of the drama program at NOCCA. It was still in its early years and had yet to build its formidable reputation as
an incubator of world-class talent.

  “I saw you there in the back of the class, sitting up straight as I talked, getting interested,” Elliott reminisced. “I knew that this wasn’t the last I would see of that kid.”

  What captured my attention was that this man from NOCCA was taking a serious approach to the arts. This was the first time someone explained to me that being an artist wasn’t just being an entertainer. Being an artist, he said, is about having a great impact on the world, and it’s not something you can approach casually. It’s something you achieve through study, through honing your technique and learning from those who have gone before you.

  Really? I had never thought of it that way. Elliott had captured my imagination. I had to know more.

  Then I went to an open house on the NOCCA campus, which was at the time located in a beautiful Italianate structure built in 1901 as a school. I had never been to this Uptown neighborhood. As I walked the leafy streets, amid its mansions and cottages, I first heard the birds, then the silence, and then out of that, music. Piano playing, solo trumpet or clarinet. Then I heard voices—hushed voices, then vivid voices—and they were speaking poetry.

  THAT WAS NOCCA: an oasis of art and creativity in this quiet Uptown neighborhood. As I explored the conservatory, I saw kids in different parts of the old school building working on a piece of visual art, playing their scales, or dancing in the corner. There were young writers sitting outside, pens in hand, bent over their notebooks, composing. This was the first time I ever experienced a commune of artistry, of people who knew they were in a sanctuary where they could do what they had only dreamed of doing.

  And they were my age.

  At the open house, you could sit in on any class, so I drifted from session to session. In the basement, I saw a kid in a soundproof booth tackling a piece of music on his horn. I stuck my head into an art class where the teacher was describing how to define your object on the paper, and how to express that object. There were all these kids with total focus on their drawing, just like the young writers I had seen in class outside, enveloped in an intentional silence that was almost monastic.

  A serious place, on serious earth, this was.

  Then I went upstairs to the theater department and met Elliott Keener, once again, and his colleagues Bob Cronin and Nelson Camp. Bob, Elliott, and Nelson defined everything about the theater department at NOCCA. Nelson was the movement teacher. Bob was the text instructor and the theater historian. Elliott handled voice. All of them taught acting.

  Elliott and I really clicked that day. He sparked in me a new and different appreciation for the lesson my folks had taught me from childhood: Anything I put my mind to, I could achieve. I knew that day I wanted to be at NOCCA. In the fall of 1978, I began my sophomore year of high school there.

  On the first day, in orientation, the principal, Dr. Thomas Tews, told us that if we wanted to be professional artists, we needed to accept right now that we were probably going to have to leave Louisiana. That was a shock, but the truth is, Dr. Tews knew that traditional Creole culture of New Orleans all too well. He knew that old-school New Orleanians, no matter what their social class, believe that you shouldn’t live farther than a hundred-mile radius of the city, if you should live outside the city at all.

  In preparing nascent artists, Dr. Tews had been battling parents who said, “Why can’t our baby just go on to Tulane? Why does she have to go to college so far from home?” After five years of this struggle as head of the new performing arts conservatory, he knew that he had better put it out there from the beginning.

  “There are training programs, and museums, and theaters, and dance companies, and all kinds of things outside this state that we are training you for,” he told us. “We don’t want you to deny yourself those opportunities.”

  He went on to tell us newbies that if we found that we didn’t like the long hours and intense training, and chose to withdraw from NOCCA, we shouldn’t see that as a defeat.

  “We would rather you learn now, at your age, the kind of commitment you have to have to your craft, and the difficulty of the challenges you’ll face, if you choose this as your vocation,” he said. “If you aren’t ready for this kind of life, and prepared to make that commitment, then we will have taught you something important.”

  Later, we first-year drama students gathered in the classroom, wearing leotards, waiting for the first class of our NOCCA careers. Bob, Elliott, and Nelson walked in and said not a word. One of them wrote on the chalkboard: The world is not fair. Theater is not fair. Bob, Elliott, and Nelson are not fair.

  Then they walked out of the room, leaving us students alone to stare at that board for fifteen minutes. It made me angry. Not fair? That’s bullshit. I’m going to make you fair, I thought.

  Then the trio returned to the room and asked us how we felt about what they had written. They explained that we students had chosen to embrace a craft and a profession in which it is very difficult to succeed. You have to decide how important acting is to you. This is not a hobby. This is not a job. This is not something you do for fun. This is a vocation, a calling. Part of your mission at NOCCA is to discover if that is true for you, or not.

  We are going to work you hard, and ask more of you than you can imagine right now, they continued. No matter what happens, you are going to change your life. With the education you receive here, you will be equipped to do anything you want to do.

  THAT FIRST DAY at NOCCA confirmed everything my mother and father had taught me about the value of hard work, education, tenacity, and vision. I had no doubt that as a member of the NOCCA Class of ’81, I was standing exactly where I was supposed to be.

  I took my teachers at their word. In my sophomore year, a kid in the music program who was two years ahead of me got into The Juilliard School at Lincoln Center in New York. He was a trumpet player named Wynton Marsalis. Wow, somebody I know is going to Juilliard! I thought. Maybe I should start thinking about it. Juilliard’s acting school was one of the best in the nation, and one of the most difficult to get into. But why shouldn’t I try? NOCCA gave me the confidence to believe that I had what it took to play in the performing-arts big leagues.

  Then I had to confront what Dr. Tews had warned me about on my first day at NOCCA: the sense that, by leaving New Orleans, I would be turning my back on my family and friends.

  Unlike most of the kids in the city, I couldn’t wait to leave New Orleans. And I never had the sense that I would be far from my family in New York City. For one, my aunt Tee Mae, the matriarch of the Edwards clan, had been living in Brooklyn for four decades. For another, Stacey was already in grad school at Howard, so I wouldn’t be the first in my immediate family to head East for college.

  More important, I knew that if I was truly going to be a professional artist, I was going to have to seize opportunity in New York if it was offered. Even then, I could see how many artists I knew in New Orleans were restricted by the fear of testing themselves by leaving the safe confines of home. I didn’t want to be safe. My father’s mantra kept going through my head, strengthening my resolve: “You can’t get lost in America.” He was saying it from a navigational point of view, but there’s a philosophical dimension to it as well. Daddy understood that it’s fine to want to go to new places, explore new things. This is what it means to be an artist, and this is what it means to be an American.

  Daddy was saying this at the dawn of integration, when he was put off by the fear he observed in other African Americans. They didn’t want to jump into the pool of opportunity to which they had been given access. They just wanted to timidly stick their toes in the water. That wasn’t Daddy’s way. He wanted his sons to use the freedom that had been won for them to go, to explore, to create—and to do so in confidence, knowing that the door will always be open and the front porch light on at home. Our family’s emotional bonds were so strong that geographical distance was almost an illusion.r />
  It is impossible to explain how much that sensibility informed my work. When I was living in New York and going through culture shock, facing harsh challenges, or just feeling overwhelmed by the size of the place and the anonymity forced on me there, I drew courage from the assurance that back in New Orleans, my family loved me and would welcome me home. It was like being on the playground at Osborne squaring off against Chet and the white mob; I could feel my allies at my back, and could hear my father’s voice urging me to keep fighting, to kick the big guy’s ass even as he is kicking mine.

  It’s ironic that so many New Orleanians don’t trust the fact that we have all these cultural tools that will sustain us when we are living far from home. Whenever you meet New Orleans expats, you have an immediate connection. They want to help you, and you want to help them, because even if you are perfect strangers, through this network of shared love for the city and its culture, you know each other.

  If you have a shot to be an artist—if you have a chance to go to Juilliard—you’ve got to take it. If you wonder what you’ll be giving up by leaving New Orleans, you’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about what you’re going to lose; it’s about what you are going to gain. You are going to add all that you will learn, see, hear, and accomplish to the legacy that New Orleans has already given you.

  People who make young folks feel that it is wrong to leave what is safe, comfortable, and familiar in order to learn and to grow and to better themselves do not have the best interests of the youth at heart. When I was at Ben Franklin, I ran a student organization whose mission was to recruit more African Americans to the magnet school, one of the best in the country. My student colleagues and I ran into that mind-set all the time. Black students didn’t believe that Ben Franklin was for kids like them. Black parents said, “My child will go to Ben Franklin and lose who they are. They won’t have their identity anymore. They will start to act white.” This is the excuse they use to keep their child from getting the best education possible, and gaining the prize that generations of African Americans struggled for.