In the Shadow of Statues

by Mitch Landrieu

  We didn’t get off easy, though. If we got out of line, we caught the belt. My dad would sometimes get upset at us for fighting over petty things, grabbing your sister’s or brother’s seat at the table, taking something that didn’t belong to you, arguing over who sat where watching TV, particularly on Sunday nights when we watched Walt Disney and Bonanza—silly stuff that flared into wails and squabbles. He would say, “If you want me to work this out, none of y’all are gonna like it,” and in the pluralism of our sprawling household, those words carried weight. It was a really bad situation when Dad said, “Meet me in my room.” You really did not want to hear that. Today he claims he doesn’t remember ever spanking any of us; but he did, though not badly. My father was anything but harsh. He and my mother have always been there when I needed them, and they both still are today.

  In the fullness of time, I have come to realize what extraordinary hearts my parents have, how much they gave us, and others, without making a show of it, how genuinely they respected and enjoyed each other, their children, and other people, whatever they looked like or believed. One time, my oldest sister, Mary, was walking on Broad Street by St. Matthias and saw an African American boy, seemingly cast off. She brought him home. She was fourteen, I was nine. I remember my mother gave him a couch to sleep on and a place at our table until he could be reunited with his family. In a house with nine kids, it was an extraordinary gesture. But that was what we came to expect from our parents, and they expected the same from us.

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  In 1965, when I enrolled in kindergarten at St. Matthias, the school was all white. On the way to school we walked past Wilson Elementary, the recently desegregated public school, which was nearly all black. New Orleans has historically had a healthy population of African American Catholics. Over the next few years, the first black students arrived at St. Matthias. This was, indirectly, of some consequence to me. On my first day in second grade, a girl I really liked in first grade was gone. When I asked where she was, I learned that her large family had moved to Holy Name of Jesus Parish a couple of miles away, near Audubon Park. Her father didn’t want his children going to an integrated school. Holy Name was in an affluent white neighborhood. My heart was broken. I was mad and didn’t understand. Our school was great, the kids were great. Her family had lived right around the corner from us. Her father had played on the same high school baseball team as my dad. They had known each other for most of their lives. Her dad stopped talking to my father for some time because my parents kept us at St. Matthias.

  As more African American kids came to St. Matthias, more white kids left. The same thing was happening in our neighborhood: white families moving out, black families moving in. “Why aren’t we going to Holy Name?” I asked my father. “Because this is where we live,” he replied. “This is our neighborhood, and if we leave, the neighborhood’s going to be the worse for it. And so would we. We’re staying.” And so they have, to this day. It is not quite an empty nest; three grandchildren are living with them today.

  In 1970, after my father’s inauguration as mayor, more people started coming over, to talk, to eat—black people, white people. I met multitudes of people. I was ten years old and I remember leaping into his car on Sunday mornings as he set out to visit churches. One of the most magical moments of my life came at St. Francis de Sales, a Catholic parish on Second Street in Central City, another neighborhood. It was the first time I had heard an African American choir; the sounds were glorious—“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Amazing Grace,” “Just a Closer Walk with Thee”—the choral lines swelling up and bouncing off the rafters. I was transported by the way they prayed and praised God in those rolling songs. I remember thinking that their relationship with God was so much more joyous than in the churches where we went to Mass and the people sat in the pews looking bored and couldn’t wait to leave after Communion.

  I would sometimes hear acquaintances of my parents, or some of our white neighbors, complain about black people as weak, stupid, lazy, criminal, unfaithful, or unpatriotic, often using the N-word, plural. The words rang false to me; they never matched the smart, strong, kind, empathetic, faithful, patriotic, and soulful African Americans I kept meeting. And because certain white friends of the family knew how we felt, they began to look at us in a different way, as if we were weird, or worse. This was when I realized that some grown-ups were flat wrong. I wasn’t comfortable challenging them—my parents raised us to be polite, and though my father’s politics were on the leading edge of social change, he did not confront or browbeat people in social settings. But if someone gave it to Moon Landrieu, he stood his ground and gave it right back.

  The guys I hung with in high school knew where I stood on race; few of them pressed me on it. Our minds were on other things, like the discovery of girls. After I was out of college, though, a friend from Jesuit told me that in high school he was afraid to come to my house because we lived in a black neighborhood. That was strange to me. We lived in a mixed neighborhood, I thought. To some, just like with Homer Plessy, if it was just a little black, a little makes you all black. But I did wonder why white people were afraid of my black friends.

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  One evening, my father came home from City Hall in a bad mood. Sometimes he came home with a big bag of Lee’s Hamburgers (with cooked onions you could smell a block away) and a big smile. But when he got mad, his left eye would twitch, and this night that twitch was in overdrive. It was baseball tryouts. He told us that he had gotten a call from the recreation park supervisor who was in charge of the Carrollton Boosters playground. Each one of us siblings played baseball and volleyball at Carrollton Boosters, a local booster club that sponsored kids’ sports. The supervisor had called and told him that some black family was trying to sign up to play ball and the father said he knew us. “Who is the man?” my father asked.

  “Some guy named Norman Francis.”

  My father was livid. He called and eventually fired the supervisor then enrolled his best friend’s kids. Michael, David, Timmy, Cathy, Patrick, and Christina Francis were superb athletes who won many an MVP award. But Norman reminded my dad of a sobering truth: “Moon, this cannot just be about my kids.”

  Under my father’s administration, the New Orleans Recreation Department playgrounds welcomed African American kids and dismantled the color barriers for sports teams. The best-selling author Michael Lewis and future NFL star quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning all played at Carrollton Boosters.

  My wife, Cheryl, grew up in a quiet neighborhood in Metairie, the largely white suburb across the city line in Jefferson Parish. When we met in law school at Loyola in the mideighties, she didn’t know Carrollton Boosters existed. After we got married I moved this sweet girl from the suburbs into a mixed New Orleans neighborhood, and I’d brag about Carrollton Boosters. And then literally for the next twenty years, we kept bumping into people who’d tell me, “I remember playing with you at Carrollton Boosters!” Or, “I played with your sister Mary (or your brother Mark) at Carrollton Boosters!” Finally Cheryl said, “Do you know anybody who didn’t play at Carrollton Boosters?” So when our children were growing up, Cheryl was all in when they started to play at Carrollton Boosters. I coached them all in soccer, baseball, and basketball, getting to relive my childhood. It was a blast.

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  In my seventh grade and final year at St. Matthias, New Orleans was hit by a wrenching tragedy. On Sunday, January 7, 1973, my father was having a retreat for his top staff at a monastery across Lake Pontchartrain outside the town of Covington. Reports came over the wire that there was a sniper on top of a building in the Central Business District. My father rushed back to the house, and by then TV had reports of a shooter ensconced on top of the Howard Johnson’s hotel, just across Loyola Avenue from City Hall. “I’ve got to go downtown,” said Dad. He had a driver by then. I dove in the backseat. I
was excited and wanted to be close to the action. My father didn’t know I was there until we got to City Hall; he took me immediately to the back of the mayor’s office and ordered me not to leave, but I watched it all from his office window. And though I didn’t know it then, it was a foreshadowing of some of the domestic terrorism and violence we are seeing today from Fort Hood to Dallas to Baton Rouge.

  The shooter, later identified as Mark Essex, was a twenty-three-year-old Black Panther sympathizer who had been dismissed from the navy for “character and behavior disorders.” He was on the hotel rooftop, firing at police officers. As the Times-Picayune would report, Essex had been on the run since killing a police cadet and wounding a veteran officer a week earlier in Gert Town, an inner-city neighborhood. In the hotel, in front of room 1829, he shot and killed a Dr. Robert Steagall and his wife, Betty, who were guests.

  He soaked telephone books with lighter fluid and set them ablaze under the curtains of the Steagalls’ room. On the 11th floor, Essex shot his way into rooms and set more fires. He killed Frank Schneider, the hotel’s assistant manager, and shot Walter Collins, the hotel’s general manager.

  As dusk approached, Essex was trapped in a block house on the hotel roof. The U.S. Marines volunteered a helicopter to get to him. During passes over the roof, officers poured gunfire at the block house while Essex popped out sporadically to fire back.

  For hours after they killed him, police searched vainly for a second sniper who they erroneously believed was on the loose. In the days before SWAT squads, the police response was chaotic.

  During that tumultuous day, my father had Joe Noto, a big burly police officer with an M16, take me home. When I reached the house, I was struck by the NOPD presence outside. We went downstairs into the basement apartment, where my grandmother was watching TV. She kept asking Mr. Joe how her son was and he kept saying, “He’s doing fine, ma’am.” The stations were running live news coverage, and just then showed my father running across Loyola Avenue, jumping a barricade, and going into the Howard Johnson’s. The lobby had become a command center. In later years he told me it was about the worst day of his two terms as mayor.

  Before it was over, Essex killed seven and wounded another eight. Three were police officers. Two other officers had been killed earlier, including one of the great leaders of the police department, Louis Sirgo. To this day, an award in Sirgo’s honor is given to the most valuable cadet in the NOPD graduating class. Guns—and therefore mass killings—were a lot less common in 1973, but the troubling thing is that, just like so often with mass shootings and politically motivated violence today, there were warnings. Essex had written a threat letter targeting police that arrived the day before the rampage.

  My parents didn’t talk much about the death threats that came to the house, but every couple of months police would visit because of threatening calls or a letter. My mother would make sandwiches that I sometimes delivered to the officers, thanking them for watching over us. In 1971, after a police shootout with Black Panthers in the Desire Housing Project, African American protesters had gathered in the street in front of our house on Thanksgiving Day. We had no police protection then. I remember sitting outside at the top of the front steps with several of my siblings, while Dad had talked to some of the protesters down below. It hadn’t exactly been friendly, but he hadn’t called in a security force. I later read in a thesis on my dad that he’d called the violent wing of the Black Panther Party “a small group of self-styled revolutionaries.” The author, Frank L. Straughan, Jr., said my dad was in a bind. “They were not interested in promises of upward mobility in a capitalist society and rejected compromise, distrusted all authority, and demanded immediate resolution to longstanding problems. Worse yet, they were willing to die for their objective.”

  Two years later, as the Mark Essex tragedy played out, the police detail was a larger sign to me of how much times had changed.

  Those episodes, etched into my memory, informed for better or for worse some of my views on the police versus community violence of this century. We have to confront the issues of police behavior, racial profiling, and bias head-on. But despite the injustice, there is no place for violence against law enforcement.

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  In the spring of 1973 we had to take the entrance test for high school. You were supposed to take it in the school where you wanted to go. I wanted to go to De La Salle, a Catholic high school run by the Christian Brothers, because my older brother, Mark, had gone there. One weekday, my mother attended Mass at St. Matthias. I had this paper to fill out for the high school test. As Mass ended, I told her I needed three dollars. “What do you need it for?” she said.

  “This is for my high school thing.”

  “Let me see that. Mmm. Where you going?”

  “I’m gonna go to De La Salle.”

  “I’ll give you three dollars, but put Jesuit down there.”

  “But I don’t want to go to Jesuit.”

  “Just take the test at Jesuit. And if you get in, you don’t have to go.”

  I took the test at Jesuit, and several weeks later received the letter of admission. “Well,” I told my mother, “I’m going to De La Salle.”

  “No, young man, you are going to Jesuit.”

  I argued; she would have none of it. Finally, I said, “Mom, you lied to me! And we were in church.” After a long pause, she said: “Yes. I lied. God’s going to forgive me, but you’re going to Jesuit.” At least she admitted that she lied. She knew the Jesuit teachings would suit my personality and passions.

  When I began high school my father’s staff was complaining that he had become too irritable, so to ease the pressure, he decided to take up tennis, which meant getting to the courts at City Park in the early morning before work. I went with him, we played together, and he dropped me at Jesuit before the bell. I got to be a pretty good tennis player, and since it had been suggested to me by certain coaches that my future did not lie in basketball, the tennis team seemed promising. But I had a competing interest by then, and it prevented me from taking up varsity tennis. Since the day I saw Oliver at a movie theater, I had been captivated by musicals and had a growing interest in acting. I joined the Jesuit Philelectic Society to perform in stage plays. My parents paid for voice and dance lessons, and by the time I was a senior, I had played Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Scapino in Scapino, and the title role in Jesus Christ Superstar. Once you’ve been Jesus, it’s all downhill.

  I also performed at the Beverly Dinner Playhouse in Jefferson Parish and got my Actors’ Equity card at age sixteen. I was a real professional and landed paid roles in Fiddler on the Roof and Guys and Dolls, among others. Okay, it might have been local dinner theater, but I had dreams of acting on Broadway, of getting into movies. I occasionally crossed paths with another high schooler, Wynton Marsalis, who was going to Benjamin Franklin, the magnet public high school with a sterling academic record, and taking music lessons in the afternoons at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, where his dad, the pianist and composer Ellis Marsalis, directed jazz studies. We met when he was in Shenandoah, at Le Petit Theatre in the French Quarter, one of the oldest community theaters in the country.

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  Toward the end of my junior year, I was summoned to the principal’s office. Father Harry Tompson and Father Paul Schott were waiting. “Qualifying is about to open for student council president,” said Father Tompson. “We think that you have the leadership skills and that you should lead the school. We want you to sign up.” I had my hands full doing plays, and not a lot of political aspirations, I told them.

  “But you have a responsibility to the school,” said Father Tompson.

  There was another problem, I explained. One of my closest friends wanted to run for president; his parents had just gotten divorced, and I knew it would help him if he won
. “We want you to run,” said Father Tompson. “You need to think about it.”

  “Okay.”

  Despite the weight of what a Jesuit meant by saying We—the priests were custodians of the legacy of a school renowned for its academic and athletic achievements, and its distinguished alumni—I went into a teenager’s denial mode, which is to say I ignored it. On the Friday afternoon when qualifying closed, I was rehearsing a play downstairs and the door swung open. Father Tompson came over, stuck his finger in my chest, and said, “It is your responsibility to do the thing that helps the most people in the shortest period of time. You have evaded your responsibility to the students of this school and you should be ashamed of yourself!” He walked out. I was humiliated. I thought, “God, I thought I was doing the right thing, trying to help my friend”—who, by the way, lost the election.

  To this day, in every major decision that I have to make, I remember Father Tompson saying You have a responsibility—even if you don’t want to do something, even if you didn’t create the problem. When you’re elected to office, responsibility is an ever-widening territory, often far beyond the political turf you thought was yours.

  Father Tompson congratulated me—no hint of a grudge—when I was accepted to Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., which had a renowned acting program. He left Jesuit to become the director of Manresa House of Retreats outside New Orleans, where I spoke with him many times, and at length, on the retreats I made. We became the closest of friends. In the last years of his life, he became pastor of a church downtown and began a ministry to the poor. Out of that came the Good Shepherd School, a tuition-free school for poor African American students, and, with others, Café Reconcile, which today is the city’s best developmental institute for troubled youth, teaching them skills and putting them on a productive path in life. His efforts were focused on the poorest of the poor; and in New Orleans, you can’t separate poverty from race.