History Lessons

by Clifton Crais

  Even so, I can still scarcely tell a personal story from those two years following my return from Mississippi. The few memories I have seem more like frames cut from various parts of a motion picture, the remnants of some editorial process. There is no order to them until I bring them alongside the memories and stories of others, and the evidence I have collected that marks a time and a place. I try finding my life in the archive I have created. Sometimes meaning begins to emerge by the association of one fragment of information with another. A photograph with the date on its back suddenly becomes important. “Okay, so I was there” around so and so date, I tell myself. I develop questionnaires, asking relatives for dates, precise chronologies, whatever memories they have. I then triangulate the evidence, theirs and mine, and whatever else I’ve dug up. Kinta’s job at Maison Blanche gave her an income and discounts. She could buy Christmas presents. I vaguely recollect her giving me a box of Hot Wheels, laying the plastic track along the floor beside a frosted Christmas tree. It must have been December 1969. Working backward, I can determine I was in New Orleans for 1968 and 1969 and part of 1967, in Mississippi from the summer of 1966 through the middle of 1967, then in New Orleans from 1965 to 1966. So this is my history, I tell myself.

  From these swirling images it is hard to know what picture is my own. I had hoped that memory would somehow emerge in the gathered stories of siblings, by driving around places where I must have walked, or from the relics I have recovered, for example a savings book from the Hancock Bank, account 83-042-2, recording an initial deposit of $7.50 on June 24, 1966, and a final deposit in February of the following year, ten days before my birthday, leaving a now unrecoverable balance of $19.

  With information acquired from others, I thought I might begin remembering. My archive would invite memory. Soon I would string memories like beads along a thread, everything properly placed in time. But the memories I have stolen from others only add to the confusion and nausea of simultaneity, in which the past is both gone and hauntingly present in the gloaming of my conscious awareness. Time turns upon itself in ever tighter circles until I am left in a non-world of indeterminate tense, and the future, any future, runs away like a spring tide to an ever-vanishing horizon.

  FOUR

  BOBBY

  THE SCHOOL IS STILL THERE, A RECTANGULAR CITADEL of brick on Jefferson Avenue. The children have gone home by the time I arrive. I walk empty corridors of polished yellow pine, glancing into classrooms festooned with learning; it’s easy to imagine them filled with children fidgeting in their seats and teachers trying to follow their lesson plans amidst the boisterousness. At the end of a hallway a janitor sweeps away the memories of another day. An administrator describes to me the changes in the school since Katrina, how the school is now mostly African American and no longer named after John McDonogh, the eccentric and workaholic nineteenth-century slave owner whose estate decreed the creation of a public school system for the “education of all castes and races.” When I ask about the records she tells me they are kept off-site. I’ll need to go elsewhere to find traces of my earlier self.

  It’s not difficult reconstructing life at McDonogh No. 14 during the 1960s. There exist enough records to reconfigure a school day. I can insinuate myself into the evidence: oak desks for the pupils, and on the playground swings, monkey bars, merry-go-rounds, and zinc slides silvered smooth by children’s backsides. There was the Morning Prayer to say, then the Pledge of Allegiance, and at some point in the school year lessons on the city’s past: about when it had been founded long ago in the Spanish times, by men like Governor Francisco Luis Héctor, the thin-faced Baron de Carondelet, and of course about Lafayette’s contribution to the American Revolution. There were the usual primers of American public school education, the Dick and Jane readers and math workbooks onto which children scrawled their answers. I would have walked past shotgun houses lined up along bare streets and solid middle-class homes cooled by the shade of magnolia trees and up the stairs to my classroom. Summer’s spectral haze turned to winter’s lucent skies beneath which Mardi Gras revelers danced in the streets. A few blocks away the Krewe of Thoth marched from Tchoupitoulas up Henry Clay and along Magazine Street and its tatterdemalion stores. Majorettes in sequined outfits and gold tassels tossed silver batons high into a cotton-candy sky. High school bands played songs like “Louie, Louie.” A group of classmates celebrated the Apollo mission to the moon, dressing up as “Luna-tics.” Between the bands and the horses there were the floats, and the men and women behind their masks and costumes, and beads of red and blue and silver, and gold doubloons tumbling through the winter light.

  This much I know. In the afternoons Grandmother taught me French and math and Catholic prayers. She believed in rote, which is probably why it is her education I remember: multiplication tables, French nouns and verbs—avoir, être, prendre, oublier—and prayers, “Our Father who art in Heaven …” I recited my twos and fours and nines and elevens and repeated words that seemed to rise from her aged fingers moving across the rosary. I realize Grandmother was trying to keep an eight-year-old safe in the apartment, and that education offered a kind of stability. I could own what I could learn.

  It’s now possible to bring into some kind of association the few scattered recollections of boyhood with the bits and pieces of information I have gathered and tried ordering. Historical research confounds, however. The archive disciplines and provokes. A record tells you something but also shapes, in some senses seems to dictate by some magical force, the questions one brings to the past. A bit of data attains the exalted status of a document, insisting on its importance as if its author was right there beside you. It is an odd feeling of intimacy that releases me to endless wandering. I fantasize and long. Tenses intermingle as the time I believe separates what belongs to me, to me alone, and what I have gathered becomes indistinct. History places its own burdens on memory. The differences between what began inside my head, and what is out there in books and buildings, and the stories that fall from others’ lips becomes less clear, less stable or assured. I begin questioning what exactly comprises my self, whether or not I am becoming a plagiarism.

  I suspect that for most of the children, the school established the outer limit of their exploration, the boundary beyond which their parents conjured all sorts of urban danger. I roamed. Around 1968 I began taking the Magazine bus downtown to visit my mother during her lunch break. I stood on the corner waiting, watching men with their Times-Picayunes neatly folded under their arms or rolled up in a hand and women in knitted skirts in pastel shades of yellow, blue, and peach and sleeveless tops worn over heavy “I dreamed of” Maidenform bras. I imagine I liked sitting on the front row of four seats, where I could observe the bus driver’s fingers click change away or hand the passengers gray, pink, and green transfer tickets. But I don’t actually remember.

  Mom worked in the cosmetics department at D. H. Holmes. Department stores offered women like my mother—women with few skills and little education, who at middle age had fallen on difficult times—steady if poorly paid employment. I can summon an image of her, an attractive woman in a long black twill pencil skirt and a white blouse, hair pulled back into a tight bun revealing a preternaturally high forehead, gold-encircled faux pearls pressed against her ears, lips painted red. She stands still and islanded in my mind’s eye, illumined in the department store lights amid cosmetic mirrors and the twinkle of gold cylinders of lipstick and amber perfumes resting upon mirrored trays. We would often walk a few blocks to Acme or Felix’s, have an oyster loaf or a plate of spaghetti and meatballs. She would drink beer, light a Salem, and unfold a slice of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum from the open pack she kept in her purse.

  After I had lunch with my mother I would usually stroll about the French Quarter, walking the length of Bourbon Street down to Esplanade and back again. I still wake to dreams of these ramblings, traces of the past riven by sexual fantasy. In those days, jazz and rock ’n’ roll spilled into the street—drums and tr
umpets, electric guitars and saxophones, music that became intelligible then turned confusing and cacophonous as the sounds from one bar blended into another. Large signs advertised Al Hirt and Pete Fountain with his goatee, clarinet at his lips. I floated along with the crowds of men and women with plastic cups in their hands, stopping at show-bar entrances, where barkers announced the beginning of a new striptease or sex act. An ether, cool and wet, suffused with beer and smoke, escaped into the street. Inside the men seemed like automatons and the women too, with their alabaster skin, loose breasts, and dark nipples, and their pink slits when they lay on their backs and spread their legs.

  In December 1968 or March 1969, Christmas or birthday, I got a bike, a Stingray with a banana seat and chrome fenders. Other kids pulled wheelies or threw their bikes into neat skids, leaving an arc of black tire across the pavement. Now I had my own. I learned how to stand on the pedals and race down the block, though I never managed to ride a wheelie more than a couple of feet.

  The bike liberated me from my grandmother’s supervision. In just ten minutes I could be in Audubon Park, or across Magazine Street and up on the levee, or past Tulane to the sno-ball stand on Plum Street, where I would sit on a bench eating tubs of spearmint-flavored shaved ice. I could look at the animals or sit among the great oaks, their boughs spread wide and low and welcoming, until a spring day’s silvered light turned to bronze and in the distance the trees stood as silhouettes. I could bike to the back of the park, not far from the Mississippi River, where the WPA had created the highest spot in all of New Orleans, Monkey Hill, and join the other boys to race our bikes down its side as fast as we could, until tears started forming at the edges of our eyes and it was time to go back up again, for just one last ride.

  I biked to the Prytania Theatre, where a classmate’s parents worked selling tickets, or to Napoleon just down the street from Saint Stephen’s, using money I had stolen from my mother’s purse to watch a movie. I remember, as if I am still sitting there in the darkened hall, watching They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the spring of 1969, just after I had turned nine. They are dancing for the $1,500 prize, and they are desperate and hungry and possessed like the people I had seen in the Quarter, groping each other, dancing round and round until the very end, when Jane Fonda passes the gun to her lover, who shoots her in the head.

  Dad visited that August 1969, on his way to the Gulf Coast a week after Hurricane Camille. I don’t know who he was going to help, Pat or Dorothy the Witch, but he came up the stairs and sat a while and brought me a brand new softball. I had not seen him for more than a year. I think I knew he had moved to California, though I had no idea where California was, just that it was distant and now he was here, sitting on a chair, and I was on the couch. He stayed no more than an hour, just to say hello and see how I was, and to give me the baseball, which felt smooth and dry in my hands. Then he put his fedora over his silvered hair and left.

  In September I changed schools, my third in as many years. Saint Francis Assisi, on State Street, must have seemed far away. I had to cross Magazine Street, and walk a mile and a half. In the 1960s before school desegregation, there were only a few reasons for going to a parochial school: religion, wealth, or because you were in trouble. I was definitely in the last category, though no one ever said as much. There was, I guess, the discipline that was supposed to emerge by the mere fact of wearing a uniform. And there were the sisters and the priest and the church itself, with its neat rows of pews and the murals of Christ’s tribulations I have since revisited, wondering what sense I made of them.

  I had to wear a uniform of dark pants and shoes, and a white shirt. I have a vague recollection of standing in the playground watching the other kids, less a memory than a feeling of shame. There is a ball being thrown around, a basketball court, and childhood conversations going off in a million directions. It is the clothes I remember. Everyone else seemed cleaner, properly put together, even as shirts starting loosening their way from pants and belts.

  Although I had been baptized and my grandmother and I did the rosary, I was less than an ideal Catholic. I hadn’t taken my Holy Communion. Divorce had effectively exiled my mother from the Roman Catholic Church, which might have offered her some solace. So the sisters insisted on my confession and communion. The latter was easy enough. You simply followed the others from the pew to the front of the church, kneeled, and repeated whatever the person next to you said, or simply mumbled something incoherently. Then you walked back, kneeled one last time while making the cross, and scooted your bottom along the pew.

  Confession was a wholly different matter, private and, I imagine, menacing. What went on in there, what could happen behind the pulled curtain? The sisters must have given me a booklet to read, instructions of exactly what to say, the whole spiel beginning with “Forgive me Father,” except that by the appointed day I hadn’t memorized a single word. I think I folded the booklet into my pants pocket, and once inside the booth immediately pulled it out, running through the words. I lied at my first confession, bullshitted the priest.

  It is guilt that has helped me remember that image, just as it was a child’s feeling of disgrace for wearing tattered clothes that has settled a memory fragment within me. There is no way of confirming either recollection, except for the sensation I still feel when I drive up to the church and school. It is the feeling of slight unsettledness, knowing the past is never far behind, the unsteady stir of memory rising, like my recollection of the time my mother came to the Webelos scouts celebration. I am standing with the other boys, fidgeting before the auditorium lights, and there she is, near the front, and she is very drunk. A sister is there as well, unsure what to do in this public spectacle. Mom says something, loudly, belligerently, and I think she slips off the folding chair, though I can’t remember exactly what happened. There are really only two images bequeathed by that experience: standing there on the stage and seeing my mother slovenly drunk, and then afterward coaxing her into a taxi.

  There was a large fig tree in the backyard, with broad sticky green leaves and purpled fruit that I picked in summer for Grandmother. She peeled the fruit for morning breakfast, canning the rest so in the winter months she would have fig preserves with her toast and the coffee she brewed in the tin drip pot. I wonder if this simple ritual reminded her of a lifetime ago, when her sister Mae made preserves from the fruit trees in her backyard.

  The tree is gone. “Toppled right over on that fence there,” Mr. G. tells me. His arm points accusingly as if the tree slighted him, fell with the clear intention of costing him money. “Hurricane Andrew. Had to pay some guys to cut it all up and haul it to the curb.”

  I can imagine climbing through the tree, my limbs as thin as a gibbon’s. I am plucking ripened figs and spying on my neighbor Bobby. He is working the mower along a narrow rectangle of grass, the spinning reel of scimitar blades rasping like a pair of shears with each push down the yard. Afterward he sharpens the blades with a long file, oils the machine before returning it to the back shed. Or he is cleaning a birdbath next to a statue of the Virgin Mary in white and powder blue. Or he is in a lounge chair with a cup of smoky chicory coffee leafing through the Sunday Times-Picayune. What is constant is a desire. I hope he will be there, and that he will see me watching him.

  Through the summer months Bobby wore loose cotton shirts, often in plaids of blue and light green, or no shirt at all. He was in his twenties then, too old for the draft, a handsome enough man though already balding, with shoulders nearly as wide as he was tall and a smile to match. He had a predilection for very tight bathing suits, Speedos of varying colors, tight enough to reveal an arc of flesh.

  Bobby had the entire upstairs floor to himself, and a separate entrance. It was a long house reaching deep into the city block, as if someone had decided to build one shotgun on top of another, with a small porch in front that ran around one side and the standard kitchen at the very back. Bobby’s parents were Italian immigrants. They lived below with his siste
r Shirley, who was “not right in the head” and went in and out of mental institutions. Religious tapestries covered 1960s wood-paneled walls, chocolate browns and pelagic blues and brumous colors that sapped the light that had fought its way through the windows and heavy curtains–a Christ child with parents, scenes of crucifixion and judgment, the Last Supper with Christ’s open hands, a gaunt Jesus with dreamy downcast eyes—images that seemed more like apparitions when they undulated in the breeze from the window fan.

  I don’t remember when we first met, the first time I lowered myself over the fence and fell into his world. Research offers an approximate date: 1968, the year I returned from Mississippi. I was eight. Bobby gave me a few cents to buy candy from the corner store on Magazine Street: Red Hots, Bazooka bubble gum secure in waxy wrappers, Lemonheads in their neat little boxes. If I had enough money I might get a moon pie, tearing the cellophane wrapper with my teeth, or ask for a large dill pickle from the jar up on the counter. I might wander into Woolworth’s, where Bobby worked as a clerk, if I was downtown visiting my mother for lunch and tired of walking up and down Bourbon Street listening to jazz and looking at women. Bobby might buy me some candy or a model plane of gray plastic, an F-105 or an F-4, plus a small metal tube of glue.

  I like to think Bobby enjoyed walking the few blocks to the bus stop smoking from a pack of Lucky Strikes and returning home in the late afternoon or early evening; it is a kind of gesture of thanks projected backward. The Plasticine world and fluorescent lights of Woolworth’s suited him. The work was easy and the money adequate as long as he lived upstairs at home. He could walk along Canal Street window shopping, basking in America’s exuberance and its neon abandonments, and on the way back home with the bus window slid open he could dream of weekend parties and a hand running across a chest and down a leg.