Nine Lives Page 5

  “Sister Mary David has a little breakfast program on Dryades. She was hoping you’d ask Mr. Fountain to come visit, and maybe play a benefit. Can you do that?”

  Frank had known Pete for as long as he could remember; they used to push toy cars around in the sawdust at Bozo’s bar while Pete’s dad opened oysters for Frank’s. They’d done a lot of drinking together over the years, and Frank marched every year in Pete’s irreverent Half-Fast parade through the Quarter. Pete was a wild man. The thought of dragging him to meet some nun made Frank squirm. But this was a strange morning. “How about this?” he heard himself ask. “How about I come up myself and see if it’s right for Pete?”

  Ten minutes later, Frank was cruising slowly up Dryades Street, past the Jewish-owned groceries and tailor shops that catered to colored New Orleans. He trembled slightly, still shaky. He parked in front of Handelman’s department store, found the address, and pushed open a plain plywood door. In a vast barn of a room, colored women and children sat at long folding tables, spooning up breakfast out of white crockery bowls. The room smelled of coffee and steam-table oatmeal. Black men in combat fatigues and berets—looking like soldiers of Patrice Lumumba—carried trays of dishes to and fro. A mix of religious and revolutionary propaganda covered the walls: quotations from Matthew, mawkish renderings of Jesus on the cross, posters of Malcolm X, drawings of raised fists in stark reds, greens, and blacks.

  A short, fat white nun bustled toward him in a black habit and stiff white wimple. One eye was milky blind, the other stared bizarrely to the side. “Are you Dr. Minyard? I’m Sister Mary David.”

  “Who are they?” Frank said, gesturing at the young black men dressed for combat, hustling about with pots of coffee or mops or holding crying children on their laps.

  “Why, the Black Panthers,” she said, as though any fool would know. “They look scary, but this is what they do—feed breakfast to poor children all over the country. I’d been trying to start a breakfast program and having no success until they showed up. The archbishop gives me a little money, they provide eager hands, and we get by.” The women at the tables were of every age and shape, some in obvious castoffs, none too clean, others with stiff, straightened hair and skimpy dresses of exaggerated sexiness. A few looked as though they’d slept in the street. Most had babies or young children. They went about their breakfast with businesslike determination. “They’re prostitutes, mostly,” Sister Mary David said. “Look at their arms and thighs; you can see the bruising. Most of them are addicted to heroin—or alcoholic. This is the one square meal they’ll get all day. If Pete Fountain would play a benefit for us, it would mean the world.”

  FRANK SPENT the rest of the day examining one pampered uptown matron after another, smiling, bringing all his charm and professional calm to bear. But as the afternoon wore on, he felt the malevolent coldness gathering in his feet, rising up his legs. His breath grew short, and at three o’clock he had to buzz the receptionist and ask her to hold an appointment. He sat at his desk with his head in his hands, staring at the floor.

  He lifted the phone and dialed Pete Fountain’s club on Bourbon Street. “It’s Frank; let me speak to him,” he told the bartender. “It’s an emergency.”

  BILLY GRACE

  OCTAVIA STREET

  1969

  Billy Grace emerged slowly from the extravagant sleep of a teenager. Above his head, on the creamy plaster wall, hung a black-and-orange pennant—WOODBERRY FOREST—and another, in green and white, anticipating freshman year at Tulane. On the wall beside the bed hung a print of red-jacketed riders jumping a hedge and, dangling from a purple, green, and yellow ribbon, a medallion of the Rex Mardi Gras krewe. He could hear Lorena, the family cook, making breakfast downstairs. His open closet revealed a row of blue blazers, seersucker suits, a camel’s hair jacket, and crisp button-down shirts in white-and-blue pinstripe. On a chair lay a new pair of jeans and a folded blue work shirt.

  Billy’s father stood in the doorway. “Hey,” he said with a gruff laugh. “You’re not a Eustis or a McCall. Get up and go to work.”

  BILLY, TALL AND HUSKY, walked toward the St. Charles Avenue streetcar stop in his stiff work shirt and jeans, the boughs of grand oaks forming a ceiling that bathed Octavia Street in a cool green light. Nothing moved, save a middle-aged colored lady walking, eyes down, from the streetcar stop to her day job. Behind lush hedges of oleander, big wooden houses rose, stolid, to either side, as though watching him with their arms folded.

  Billy had never known anything other than the uptown life, but his father never let him forget they were relatively recent arrivals. Bill Grace Sr. had been raised on Esplanade Avenue by a mother who took in boarders. No Tulane for him; he’d gone straight to work after high school as a teller for Whitney Bank, which unexpectedly turned out to be the portal to uptown society. Whitney was more than uptown’s bank; it was almost a cult—clubby, intimate, and discreet to the point of secretive. From his lowly perch, young Bill Grace quickly figured out why. A surprising number of the elegantly mannered clients who appeared on the other side of his teller’s cage had little or no money, and Whitney existed largely to help them maintain appearances. Their grand mansions had been in the family for a century or more, long enough for generations of sluggards and playboys to whittle away the filial wealth. Some of the oldest names in New Orleans clocked in at law firms or brokerages owned by their fathers’ friends, yet spent most of their time at their lunch clubs, at the racetrack, or sashaying about the Quarter. Others simply couldn’t bring themselves actually to work; they managed by slowly and quietly selling off the family antiques. And when the going got too tough—when the blushing daughter of a fine old family was selected, say, queen of Comus, and tradition required the family to host a ten-thousand-dollar luncheon—the young teller watched the white-haired men of Whitney step in with a quiet loan. These may not have been the most advisable loans for a bank to make, especially in the late 1930s, but those who might have objected—the bank’s depositors and shareholders, say—were themselves uptown New Orleanians, none of whom would be served by an embarrassment in the community. Theirs was a village with little in the way of achievement to recommend it, but possessed of charm and taste that it prized above all things. Against the seamless maintenance of appearances and pleasantry, what were a few percentage points here or there? It didn’t take Bill Grace long to realize that, poor as he was, he had all he needed to be someone in uptown New Orleans.

  Handsome, witty, blessed with a gift for remembering names, he moved quickly from behind the teller’s cage to the more delicate task of repossessing automobiles. He therefore knew who among Whitney’s august clientele could and could not afford their Packard. Uptown New Orleans knew he knew, and uptown New Orleans could see that he was a young man who could keep his mouth shut. What’s more, Bill Grace was an awful lot of good fun—big, jovial, never said “when” and never got drunk, excellent at the small talk that keeps parties going. People liked having him around, which, ultimately, is all that really mattered. He was in high demand as a walker—escorting unattached ladies at parties—especially during the war, when he was 4-F and all the other young men were away. A hand shaken here, a back slapped there, and by the end of the war Bill had talked himself firmly under the wing of Leon Irwin, who had a massive contract to represent the John Hancock insurance company all across the South. Selling insurance came naturally to Bill; all a man had to do was make himself liked. By the time Billy—the third child and first son—was in kindergarten, Bill was Mr. Irwin’s full partner, and the family was ensconced here on Octavia Street between Prytania and St. Charles—about as good an address as they come.

  But Dad never let Billy mistake himself for a member of the leisure class. The summer Billy turned twelve, Dad had secretly paid a nearby gas station twenty-five dollars a week to hire Billy—for twenty-five dollars a week. No son of Bill Grace was going to while away his summer at the Audubon Park swimming pool. Dad was willing to pay Billy’s tuition at T
ulane, but Billy had to earn his own spending money.

  The streetcar came swaying and clanging up the grassy neutral ground of St. Charles Avenue, and Billy climbed aboard, taking a seat halfway back, noticing, as always, the brackets on the backs of the seats for the “screen”—the movable sign that once announced, FOR COLORED PATRONS ONLY. Streetcar segregation had ended by the time Billy was eight, but he remembered his maternal grandmother, taking him to lunch at the D. H. Holmes department store, sitting erect in her floral hat and white gloves, studiously ignoring the Negroes crowding behind the sign. And he remembered the half-page ad that Dad and his friends had run in the Times-Picayune around the time formal segregation was falling apart in New Orleans: a news photograph from Mississippi of Negroes being pinned against a building by the stream of water from a fire hose and another of a Negro in a porkpie hat cringing from a vicious-looking police dog. “Let’s not let this happen here,” the ad exhorted. “Let’s respect the laws of the United States.” Billy had been only ten or eleven then, but he recalled the phone ringing off the hook the night the ad ran, and Dad saying into the receiver again and again, “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Billy was away at school, at Woodberry Forest in Virginia, when Martin Luther King was murdered. They’d gathered all the boys into the chapel for eulogies praising the standard-bearer of Negro freedom, without so much as acknowledging the irony that Woodberry Forest was segregated. Billy was managing editor of the weekly Oracle, and he’d stayed up late that night, orange-and-black tie loosened, scowling at the typewriter, writing what he hoped would be a ringing call for integration. “There are many boys from the South, including myself, who have never had the opportunity to converse with an educated Negro,” he’d written. “When someone mentions Negroes to me, I immediately think of the maids, laborers, etc., at home.” He’d spilled three thousand words into that editorial, but when it had come time for the call to action, all he’d been able to muster was that Woodberry “does not necessarily have to accept the Negro, but it should let its admissions policy be open to all.” A year later and he was still embarrassed.

  The streetcar wound its way around Lee Circle and up Carondelet to Canal Street, where Billy jumped off. He crossed Canal and walked up to South Rampart to catch the number 84 bus downtown. As it crossed Esplanade Avenue, the downriver border of the French Quarter, Billy realized this was the first time he’d ever been this far downtown. Rampart bent slightly and became St. Claude Avenue. The businesses here were shabbier, their windows covered with burglar bars. When the bus bumped over the railroad tracks, Billy said to himself, the Ninth Ward. Now I can tell people I know the Ninth Ward.

  He changed buses at Louisa Street, heading toward the Desire housing project. By the time he pulled the stop cord at Humanity Street, he was the only white person on the bus. Electricity and telephone lines crisscrossed the sky, jury-rigged and jarringly naked, with no trees to hide them. He passed shabby bungalows, drooping in the muggy heat, their old paint flaking. It was hard to find a truly straight line on them. Negroes lounged on their stoops, talking, laughing, listening to music on transistor radios, watching kids bounce balls on uneven sidewalks. Some were drinking beer at nine in the morning. They shouted from porch to porch in torrents of argot, and when they laughed, gold flashed in their mouths. “Good morning!” Billy called as he strode along. Mostly the people on the porches stared in silence. Every now and then one of them called, “All right.” Ahhite.

  He arrived at a gravel lot full of giant steel Dumpsters. The job, arranged by a friend of his dad’s, was to wash, scrape, and repaint all of them. This won’t be so bad, Billy thought: the hose will keep me cool. He turned on the faucet, hoisted himself onto the lip of a Dumpster, and aimed the nozzle at the filth covering the bottom. Orange rinds, crawfish heads, and coffee grounds crawled around under the stream of water. Grimy droplets spattered his face. He lowered himself into the foul-smelling cavern and went to work on the floor with a wooden-handled wire brush.

  The sun crossed overhead and dropped toward the Garden District as he worked his way through the Dumpsters. He heard laughter, close at hand, and he stood to peer over the lip of a Dumpster. Four colored men were setting a huge aluminum pot atop a propane burner across the street. They wore straw hats with tiny brims, pushed back carelessly on their heads, and loud shirts with square bottoms that hung loose outside their pants. They walked to and from the house, shouting to one another, carrying metal folding chairs, a table, a cooler. Billy felt like an explorer in a pith helmet, spying through palm fronds at an exotic tribe. Something in their manner struck him as—what?—the words “insolent” and “disrespectful” flashed across his mind, but he knew that was wrong. He realized that he’d never been ignored by a Negro before. Usually, they were either focused on him—like Lorena, or the waiters at Galatoire’s—or studiously making themselves invisible, like the gardeners who came once a week to mow the lawn and trim the hedges. The poor things, he’d said to himself more than once, squirming under the forced cheerfulness of a porter’s greeting or noting the cringing, averted eyes of a busboy. Yet these four men, waiting for their pot to boil, were unembarrassed. Undiminished. “Broke in a new guy last night,” a man in a blue shirt was saying. “Little bitty fella. Light skinned. Man, he jumpin’ up and down in the hirin’ hall, wavin’ his Social Security card like it’s the first day of school and he know the answer.” The man laughed, a deep, rumbling smoker’s laugh. “He gets out on the dock and he’s grabbing sacks and wrestling them all by hisself. I watched him for a while until I been had enough of that. I said, ‘Whoa there. Stop. We gots to do this all night.’”

  “Hear that,” an old man in a yellow shirt said.

  “It’s like a dance, little fella. It’s like a dance,” continued the blue-shirted man. He held his fists down by his hips, as though holding one end of a sack. He swayed. “Bup bup bup BAM!” He swung his arms and popped his hands open. “Easy like. No back in it.”

  “Man’s got to learn,” said the yellow-shirted man, cutting lemons with a pearl-handled knife, dropping wedges into the pot.

  “Man’s got to be taught,” said the blue-shirted man.

  Billy heaved himself out of the Dumpster.

  “Hey there, son,” called the old man in the yellow shirt, holding up a dripping bottle of beer. “Come have one. You working hard enough for all of us.”

  Billy smiled and crossed the street. Each man held out a hand to shake, but didn’t get up. The man in the blue pulled a milk crate close. “Sit,” he said.

  “How much they paying you to clean them Dumpsters?” the old man said.

  “Eighty a week.”

  “Eighty a week!”

  “I’m saving for a car.”

  “A car!” said the man in the blue shirt. “What kind of car you going to buy on eighty dollars a week?”

  “I got my eye on a Volkswagen Beetle. Eleven hundred dollars, brand-new.”

  “Shit,” the old man said. “That’s no kinda car.” They launched into a complex argument about the relative merits of the Lincoln Continental Mark IV and the Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.

  “Which do you drive?” Billy asked, and the old man laughed.

  “Number 80 bus is my car,” he said, and his friends rocked in their chairs with raspy laughter. “You married?”

  “No, sir. I’m only nineteen.”

  “That don’t mean nothing. I was married at nineteen. Still married, too.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Course I got something on the side. You know what I mean.”

  Billy blushed. “How does that work?”

  “Oh, I make it work.”

  Billy looked at the ground, embarrassed. The man leaned in close. “Son,” he said, “what’s your favorite thing to eat?”

  “Steak, mashed potatoes, and green peas.”

  The old man’s eyes were rimmed with red and he smelled of the day’s beers. “Now, young fella, how’d you like to eat that
three meals a day every day for the rest of your life?”

  Billy blushed again and took a long pull from his beer. Man, he thought. This city is a lot bigger than the Garden District and the French Quarter. He looked around at the ramshackle houses with a warm feeling of belonging. Ninth Ward. Eighth Ward. Seventh Ward. The East. Algiers. The Irish Channel. Christ, I love New Orleans.

  FRANK MINYARD

  ST. AUGUSTINE CHURCH, ST. CLAUDE AVENUE

  1969

  The unair-conditioned utility hall of St. Augustine Church smelled of old perspiration and cigarette smoke. A long table ran down one side, holding paper cups of Tang. A line of sad-looking Negro women shuffled beside it, some with babies in their arms or toddlers pulling at their hands, or both. Long-haired volunteers in jeans handed over the Tang, watched the women carefully as they drank, and made notes on clipboards. At the end of the table, a Negro man worked a big coffee urn. Another handed out doughnuts.

  Father Therriot, hulking and bearded like a mountain man, was a Josephite priest from Boston who had been dragged by the archbishop into running the methadone mission—and had come to love it as much as Frank did.

  Frank looked at the women filing along the table. “We’ve got to do something about the jail,” he said to Therriot. “That one over there? In the gold lamé? She was starting to get cleaned up when she got picked up for something. Shoplifting. I don’t know. She came out of the jail hooked all over again.”

  “The cell block is about the easiest place in the city to score heroin,” Therriot said. “They all say that.”

  Frank called Louis Heyd, the Orleans Parish criminal sheriff, who ran the jail. They’d been friends for years. Frank told him about his problem. “I can keep them off the hard stuff with methadone, but every time they go through your jail, they come out hooked again.” He asked if he could bring methadone into the jail itself.