Nine Lives Page 3

  Tell you what happened one time. There was a five-and-dime up in San Fernando and I’m in there one day looking at the Timex watches, thinking about getting one up under my jacket. White man who owned the place comes over and says, “What you doing there, boy?” I was so pissed I slammed that watch down on the counter and walked out. But I used reverse psychology on the motherfucker. I got my little sister’s friends to go in there with their little backpacks after school. Then I go in, making myself the shiftless nigger, and damned if that white man didn’t take the bait and follow two steps behind me everywhere I went. Meanwhile, the girls are stuffing everything they could get their hands on into their little backpacks, stealing that white man’s ass off. Teach him a lesson for stereotyping us. That’s the New Orleans way.

  RONALD LEWIS

  LAWLESS SCHOOL

  1965

  Lawless Junior High had never looked so good, its halls and classrooms freshly coated in pale green paint, the desks new since the flood. Ronald sat in the front row, chin on his fists, gazing at Miss Rosetta Marchand. Nobody in Ronald’s world spoke the way Miss Marchand spoke; she sounded like a white lady on TV, with none of the “ain’ts,” “gwines,” and “gonna’s” of Deslonde Street. She’d gone to Howard University, she’d told the class. She told them that often.

  “This is called ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers,’” she said. “You should know that Langston Hughes wrote this when he wasn’t much older than you.”

  Ronald closed his eyes.

  “I’ve known rivers,” Miss Marchand read. “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

  Ronald let Miss Marchand’s voice pour over him, thinking, I’ll talk like that one day. There won’t be anybody in the world I can’t talk to.

  “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,” Miss Marchand read. “I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset.”

  Ronald felt a shot of excitement. He’d seen the Mississippi just that way, all golden in the sunset. Abraham Lincoln, the pyramids, the motherland beside the Congo, and, right up with them, the Lower Ninth Ward. It was all one, a Negro life beside the rivers. And he was part of that.

  “I’ve known rivers,” Miss Marchand read, lowering her voice to a whisper. “Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” The bell jangled, and Ronald was carried outside by the crush of bodies, his mind following Miss Marchand’s ancient dusky rivers from the pyramids to Abraham Lincoln to Deslonde Street. I’ve known rivers, he thought. I’ve known rivers come and cover my house.

  He cut across the back of the school yard to Dorgenois Street and walked toward the canal. A din of hammers, table saws, and generators rose around him. Men were swarming over houses, stringing wires, tacking roof tiles, rolling paint. What a difference two months made. By the look of it, everybody was coming back. People had even found time to replant flowers. The sweet olive and four-o’clocks were fading, and the angel’s trumpets and moonflower were coming on strong. Their fragrance riffled Ronald’s nose, pages turning in a catalog. The neighborhood was feeling like home again, and it was good to be home.

  Only one street in the neighborhood was still largely deserted: Tennessee Street, where the white folks lived. Some had sold out to Negro physicians and lawyers when the schools started integrating in 1960, but most had stuck it out, because they couldn’t afford to live anyplace else. Since Betsy, though, few of the whites seemed willing to make the Herculean effort to rebuild here, when they could start over in St. Bernard or Jefferson Parish and not have to send their kids to school with Negroes. This street alone still carried whiffs of that malevolent post-Betsy rot that was gone from the rest of the Lower Nine. It made Ronald shiver, as when a cloud crosses in front of the sun.

  Miss Duckie, though, she’d come back quick as anybody. She was the damnedest white lady in the world. Tall, skinny, and grim, with brass-colored hair and glasses, she lived with her husband and son in the house on Tennessee Street whose backyard joined Ronald’s. Ronald’s mama did day work over there, though it seemed that every time Ronald went over, Mama and Miss Duckie would be drinking Dixie beer and talking together at the kitchen table, switching the radio between the spirituals Mom liked and the Fats Domino tunes Miss Duckie preferred. Miss Duckie ran the city park on Forstall Street, handing out the bats and balls, managing the lifeguards at the pool. Colored kids were supposed to use the park back of town by Florida Avenue, and every now and then the white boys would think to run Ronald and Pete out, but Miss Duckie had none of that. At the first sign of trouble, she’d put her hands on her hips and stare at those white boys until they got their minds right. She didn’t have to say a word; that park was hers. Sometimes she even let Ronald switch off the park lights at the end of the evening, throwing the big wall switch like sending a man to the electric chair.

  Miss Duckie was full of funny ideas. The city was just starting to expand out into a big swamp northeast of town, by the lake, and she was always asking Ronald and Pete to give her their pennies so she could buy land out there in their names. Someday that swamp will be a neighborhood called New Orleans East, she’d tell them, and they’ll be glad they got in early. Pete and Ronald used to laugh, never quite sure if Miss Duckie was joking, because she never, ever smiled. They saved their little bit of money for potato chips and pig lips from Irene’s bar.

  One afternoon in the November after Betsy, a truck wheel lay on its side in Miss Duckie’s driveway, with a round wooden sign rising out of the middle: “Voting Poll, Ward 9, Pcnt 8A.” Ronald had always liked watching the white folks filing in and out of her garage on election days, signing their names, and then stepping behind that mysterious blue curtain. Every time, Miss Duckie would take Ronald by the hand and carefully show him the rows of gray levers, even when he had to stand on a cold-drink case to see. Her head bent low beside his and smelling of cigarettes, she always said the same thing: Pay attention, Ronald. Someday you’re going to have to know how to do this.

  He looked left and right before walking up her path, an old habit. Miss Duckie didn’t mind him using her front door and setting on her porch, but her neighbors had never liked it. When she didn’t answer, he walked around back and found her in the garage. She straightened and peered at him through her smoke. “You know what happened this summer, right?” she asked.

  Ronald stared at her. Betsy had washed the whole world away this summer. But that wasn’t what she meant at all. President Johnson, she said, had signed a law guaranteeing the Negro the right to vote. She was about to have Negro registrars in her garage for the first time. Once again, she waved him over to look at the levers on the voting machine, and they went through the whole drill again. He asked her once why she cared so much about colored folk.

  “Like I told you,” she said. “We’re Jews.”

  Jews? Ronald wasn’t sure what that meant. He knew that Miss Duckie and Mr. Louis went to St. Peter Lutheran Church across the canal—maybe it had something to do with that.

  The world seemed changed after Betsy, and not all in bad ways. Ronald felt an energy that was new to the sleepy Lower Nine. All the hammering and sawing seemed to vibrate in his veins. Mr. Payton replanting azaleas by his porch. Mr. Butler hanging new gutters. Mr. Williams banging siding into place. Dr. King and the civil rights marchers were a long way from the Lower Ninth Ward, but this was what they were talking about: the strength of the colored man. Self-reliance. Negroes waiting on nobody, taking command of their own lives. And now they would walk into Miss Duckie’s garage and vote.

  Ronald had an after-school job at the Superette on Claiborne, and, borne forward on a symphony of hammers and handsaws, he banged through the door one afternoon to find old Mr. Earl, jowly and white haired, leaning
on the counter as usual with the States-Item.

  “Hey, Pluto,” he grunted at Ronald. “Canned goods in. Start with that.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ronald panted, heading down a narrow aisle of Hubig’s Pies and red-and-white Zatarain’s boxes. Ronald loved the smell of the Superette, a combination of old wood floors, bacon, onions, and Mr. Earl’s cigarettes. His friend Michael stood in front of the walk-in cooler, tying on a white apron. He was handsome, more filled out than Ronald, and his hair stood out a good inch and a half off the skull, whereas Mom kept Ronald’s scraped down to the scalp.

  “Hey, man,” Michael said as Ronald reached for an apron. “Why you let him call you Pluto?”

  “He’s always called me Pluto, like I call Walter ‘Blook.’”

  “He oughtn’t to do that.”

  “Why not?” Ronald said, pulling the straps of his apron around front.

  “Don’t you know who Pluto is?” Michael bent to a case of Blue Runners and wrenched it open. “Pluto’s the damn dog on Mickey Mouse.”

  Ronald froze, a chill spreading over him as though he’d stepped into the walk-in. A dog’s name. He saw himself with the broom, the mop, the Windex. He saw Mr. Earl chuckling like a friend one minute, barking orders the next. A bubble rose in his chest, full of Langston Hughes, Miss Duckie, President Johnson, and old Mr. Butler bringing his house back after Betsy. I got to do the work for Mr. Earl, but I don’t have to give him no song and dance. I am a man and I live by the river. Ronald hung his apron carefully on its nail and walked to the front of the store. He took a position square in front of Mr. Earl, who glanced up and sat back, laying down the paper.

  “Mr. Earl, I don’t want you to call me Pluto no more,” Ronald said. “My mama named me Ronald, not Pluto, and you can call me Ronald.”

  Mr. Earl didn’t say anything. He cocked his head to one side, and a flush spread from his open collar up his fleshy neck, like a thermometer rising. He snatched off his glasses and glowered.

  “Hell, Ronald,” Mr. Earl said finally. “You don’t have to be so goddamn sarcastic.”

  Ronald opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out. Sarcastic? What did that mean? He closed his mouth and marched back to the cooler. He sat on the wooden floor and folded his hands over his skull. Never again, he said to himself, am I ever going to let anybody say anything to me that I don’t know what it means.

  JOYCE MONTANA

  VILLERE STREET

  1966

  Joyce Montana opened the front door of her apartment and stepped onto the balcony in the chilly dawn. The crowd, gathered among the potholes of Villere Street, let out an expectant gasp.

  “It’s only me,” she called, wishing her voice didn’t squeak so, laughing and patting her unruly hair into place. She’d been up all night with Tootie, putting the finishing touches on the suit, and hadn’t had a moment even to change out of the old smock she wore while sewing. But what did it matter among friends? She climbed down the long wooden staircase, past the sign for the auto body and fender shop that occupied the space below, waving to Jerome Smith, Bertrand Butler, cousin Sylvester Francis, and young Maurice Martinez.

  Maurice met her at the bottom of the stairs, his camera dangling around his neck like a tourist off a cruise ship. Tootie had let Maurice hang around taking pictures on the condition he revealed to nobody the color of the suit. They could trust Maurice. It was true he’d left the Seventh Ward—left all of New Orleans—to work as a college professor in New York City. But he was a Seventh Ward Creole from way back; his grandmother had started the first kindergarten for colored children in Louisiana, on Roman Street between Annette and Allen, and many of Joyce’s friends had gone there. Maurice had returned from New York with the crazy idea that the Mardi Gras Indians were worth studying. Only a handful of people in New Orleans masked, most of them neighborhood colored folk without any money or position. Why would anyone in New York City care? Joyce wondered.

  “Ohhhh!” The crowd exhaled, and Joyce turned. Tootie stood at the top of the stairs holding out his arms, radiant in turquoise feathers. Sequins flashed from the cuffs of his shirt. Hillocks of intricate beadwork protruded from the apron covering his chest and belly. Joyce had concentrated hard all year, helping to bead those pieces. To see Tootie finally wearing it, out in the early sunshine, made her heart full.

  Tootie stepped slowly down the stairs, a royal peacock descending to his flock. Ricky Gettridge and Paul Honoré, young acolytes who’d spent hours helping build the suit, backed out the door above him, holding the crown. “Ohhhh!” the crowd gasped again. Taller than a man and at least as wide, of the same turquoise feathers as the suit, the crown was Tootie’s biggest yet.

  Tootie stationed himself below the balcony, a black wig of Indian braids framing his angular face. Paul and Ricky lowered the crown onto his head. Tootie had used the guts of an old football helmet—built it right into the crown so the giant headpiece would stay centered. The crowd cheered, and Tootie, twice as big as life, stepped forward, blazing turquoise. “Kuwaa!” he shouted. “Kuwaa!” He pirouetted, every bead and sequin twinkling.

  “Big Chief!” the crowd yelled. “Biiig Chief!”

  Eleven-year-old Darryl—Mutt-Mutt—ran down the stairs in a lumpy suit of white feathers. Poor little fellow had saved his allowance, washed cars in the body and fender shop, bought his own beads and feathers, and taught himself to sew simply by watching Tootie. That was Tootie’s rule; Mutt-Mutt could learn by watching, but Tootie wouldn’t teach him, because Tootie’s own daddy had taught him anyé—nothing. An Indian makes his own suit.

  Tootie’s spy boy, dressed in a blazing-orange suit of his own, was already dancing up Villere Street toward St. Bernard Avenue, looking for a tribe for Tootie to challenge. The equally resplendent flag boy, carrying a big turquoise banner announcing the Yellow Pocahontas, nodded at Tootie and started off, and Tootie lumbered after him, followed by half a dozen men with drums and tambourines, filling the narrow street with the racketing and chant—“Two-way pocky way! Two-way pocky way!” Neighbors danced and cheered on their porches. Maurice, ever the professor, was lecturing a white photographer. “You hear that ‘two-way pocky way’? It’s from the French, the Creole. T’ouwais, bas q’ouwais. You are not to be believed. You are full of shit. They’re taunting the other tribe.”

  Mutt-Mutt ran after Tootie with an eager, panicked step that just about broke Joyce’s heart. Tootie might walk fifteen miles, and Mutt-Mutt would tag along, witnessing one wild encounter after another. But how far would he get? After all his work, would he end the day crushed and disappointed, Tootie’s disapproving growl ordering him home?

  JOYCE HAULED HERSELF back up the stairs, and the longest day of the year began. The apartment felt quiet after the rush to finish—pulling on the gauntlets, adjusting the moccasins—the big men shouldering around, getting the chanting going. After working on the suit night and day for a whole year, after living with it sprawled over the kitchen table and every other surface of the house, seeing it go out the door felt almost like a death in the family. In about six weeks, after one more appearance on St. Joseph’s Night, they’d be taking it apart, carefully returning each bead and sequin to its proper can, each feather to a labeled paper sack. The cycle of the suits was their whole life.

  Of all people to be so involved with the Indians, she often thought. Growing up at the corner of New Orleans and Allen streets in the heart of the Seventh Ward, she’d been as frightened of the Indians as everybody else. Everyone on Allen Street would run inside and watch through the blinds as the Indians came whooping and hollering up the street. They’d taunt each other until someone lay dead on the banquette—the hard sidewalks of New Orleans—with a knife or a bullet in his belly. If Joyce had met Tootie when he was in feathers, instead of in a respectful gray suit at a dance at the Monogram, she’d never have given him two seconds. What had worried her, that first night, was only how suddenly the slender, courtly Creole boy had taken his leave after they’d danced. I ha
ve to go home and sew, he’d said. Sew? What kind of excuse was that? She was sure he was brushing her off.

  One night early in their courtship, Tootie had shown up at the home Joyce shared with her toddler girls and baby boy—she’d divorced her no-count husband—carrying a mass of feathers and beaded cloth. Blood soaked through the shoulder of his jacket. It was his teenage son, he said, as she peeled the jacket off to reveal a long gash. They’d gotten into a humbug, his son had cut him, and his wife, drunk again, had gathered up the half-finished Indian suit, wadded it into a ball, and stuffed it through the window into the street. The way he talked, the woman might as well have discarded his immortal soul. Tootie had stayed the night with Joyce, and never left. He went to work every morning as a lath-and-plaster man and came home every evening. On Friday, he cashed his paycheck at the Circle Food Store and put the money up under the bedroom rug for her to take, as needed. He’d drink a can of Schlitz once in a while, but that was all. He didn’t run wild with his men friends, and he didn’t chase women. All he wanted to do was sit up late at the kitchen table with her, sewing. This piece here, like that, he’d say, drawing a row of blue against a row of black, a swirl of red inside a disk of orange. Sew that. I have the whole picture here, he’d say, touching his skull above those glittering brown eyes: you just worry about that little piece—you’ll see.

  She’d asked him early on how it came to be that black men dressed up as Indians on Mardi Gras day. She’d heard the standard explanations, of course—that it started as a way to honor the Indians who’d taken in escaped slaves during the bad days, that it started as a way for blacks to evade the prohibition against their participating in Mardi Gras. But she wanted to hear it from him; he’d really know. His answer made her love him all the more. I don’t know, he’d said simply. They were doing it before I got here. I only know I love it.