CHERISHED MEMORIES takes a memorable journey back to New Orleans of the 1950s. Professor Beverly Jacques Anderson shares stories from her childhood and from her elementary school classmates, providing a fascinating look at the experience of growing up in the Creole culture of the Seventh Ward of New Orleans. This culture indelibly shaped the character, personality, and aspirations of Anderson and her elementary school classmates, many of whom became hard working, family-oriented, service-oriented, productive, self-assured citizens.
Creole culture in the Seventh Ward was rooted in close family ties, hard work, creativity, high expectations, independence, the Golden Rule, Catholicism, shared language/manner of speaking, and a shared sense of belonging to a unique community. Teachers, parents, and principals-all African Americans-valued education and set high standards for student achievement. According to interviews with twelve of the author's classmates, these beliefs, along with the unwavering support of parents and teachers, helped to produce competitive individuals in all walks of life. The Creole culture was also rooted in racial, ethnic, and religious segregation that affected individuals in surprising ways.
Anderson also examines the history of public and Catholic education for children of color in the Seventh Ward of New Orleans and addresses the impact of the school on the community and vice versa.
Explore this fascinating community and its educational history with Cherished Memories.
CHERISHED MEMORIES
Snapshots of Life and Lessons from a 1950s New Orleans Creole VillageBy BEVERLY JACQUES ANDERSONiUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 Beverly Jacques Anderson, PhD
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4620-0321-1Contents
Three Elementary School Classmates Meet...............................................1Civil Judge and Former Civil Lawyer...................................................4Chief Administrator for the City of New Orleans.......................................12Creoles of the Seventh Ward of New Orleans............................................23Our Beloved Valena C. Jones Elementary School.........................................53Most Frequently Attended High Schools of Classmates...................................71Rivers Frederick Junior High School...................................................71McDonogh 35 Senior High School........................................................77St. Augustine High School.............................................................81Ophthalmologist.......................................................................85Special Education Teacher.............................................................95Pediatrician and Former Health Officer for the State of Louisiana.....................110Retired Employee Development Specialist...............................................128Lawyer and Former Louisiana State Legislator..........................................138Special Education Paraprofessional....................................................146Carpenter Contractor..................................................................157Retired Elementary School Teacher.....................................................164Middle School Science Teacher.........................................................173Retired Elementary School Teacher.....................................................185A Part of Our History Is Preserved and Cherished......................................194Concluding Notes......................................................................197References............................................................................209Appendix A............................................................................212Appendix B............................................................................214Appendix C............................................................................218Appendix D............................................................................222Appendix E............................................................................225Appendix F............................................................................233
Chapter One
Three Elementary School Classmates Meet
It was noon as I stood at the dining room entrance of the Le Pavillon Hotel in New Orleans, my hometown, eagerly waiting to have lunch with two of my friends from elementary school. One of them started with me in kindergarten, and the other one joined our fourth-grade class. I could hardly wait to see them. It had been at least twenty-five years since the three of us were last together, and I was eager to laugh with them and reminisce about old times. Hurricane Katrina, with all its devastation, had left me with a greater need than ever to remember life as it once was. I started looking up old friends, particularly those from my fifth-grade class. I'd always thought there was something special about that group.
I looked around the dining room to see if either of my friends had arrived. My eyes immediately fell upon a distinguished black man in an expensive-looking suit. His thick gray hair was brushed back, and his heavy gray eyebrows complemented well-defined facial features, resembling those of an American Indian. In a room filled mostly with whites, my classmate stood out with his deep tan skin and his confident manner. Instantly, the image of this seemingly well-to-do, established man was juxtaposed in my mind with the picture of the elementary school classmate whom everyone knew as Herbert Cade. The young boy who is now a district judge for the city of New Orleans earned, by his indomitable way, the privilege of having his friends use his full name whenever they talked about him. Later, during the lunch, we would laugh about this manner of referring to him.
Sitting to his left was a professional-looking woman with short curly brown hair, bubbly cheeks, warm and engaging eyes, a smiling face, and nearly white skin. My best friend and classmate from kindergarten through twelfth grade (except for the eighth grade), quick-witted Brenda Garibaldi had become Brenda Garibaldi Hatfield, the chief administrative officer of the city of New Orleans, with a slightly heavier build than the slim frame she had carried most of her adult life, and still vivacious with the same demeanor. As I was dazed matching the pictures in my mind with my friends of today, they noticed me, and I found their loving eyes. All I could do was smile and rush to the table. I sat, and we sheepishly looked at each other, not wanting the other persons to know that we were checking them out to see if the years had been good to them. We concluded that the years had been fairly descent to all three of us aging senior citizens.
We were ecstatic to see each other, but we tried to be cool. Herbert Cade (henceforth Herbert) knew exactly what to say to two women who thought they looked pretty good "back in the day"; he reminded us that he was a year younger. Of course, we let him know how much we appreciated that information. We also admitted to him that his age was probably the reason that we didn't date him. "You know, we didn't want to rob the cradle" was my automatic response to him. That teasing response made me feel as though we picked up where we had left off many years ago: Brenda or I always had a comeback to Herbert. I had not seen Herbert in more than twenty-five years. I last saw Brenda a few months earlier when she attended a meeting in Washington, DC. We spent a couple of hours together at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC, catching up on each other's lives. I also talked with her briefly at my mother's funeral in December 2005. I vividly remembered being happy to see her at Mother's funeral. But today was different. I wanted to re-establish my friendship with Herbert, and I also wanted to be nostalgic and focus on our unique fifth-grade class at Valena C. Jones School, and Mrs. Owinda Taplette, our fifth-grade teacher.
After selecting our meal at Le Pavillon's luncheon buffet, we began to talk freely about our spouses, children, grandchildren, and impending grandchildren. We talked about the not so positive experiences in our lives, and we talked about classmates and my incessant desire to get the complete roster of our fifth-grade class. We had the exciting occasion to laugh about so many of life's experiences that we could not have even discussed with each other twenty years earlier. Perhaps, we now believed that inhibitions of our earlier years had dissipated or vanished in our senior citizen status. My classmates and I appeared to be free!
Herbert remembered another name for the roster, and at that point, I announced that we had accumulated forty names for the roster. Brenda seemed to think there were a least forty-two students in our class. The conversation then shifted to the class members who had died—we mentioned Germaine Viltz, Arthur Robinson, Tyrone Clements, Brinton Watts, Augusta Woods, Bernadine Payne, George Robichaux, Adrian Arnaud, and Gerald Mitchell. A few days after the luncheon, I realized that some of the individuals we mentioned had been in our seventh-grade class and not in our elementary school class. Gerald, a member of our seventh-grade class, was the first to die, and his death occurred when we were in the seventh grade at Rivers Frederick School. I remember feeling his hair and chest as he lay in his casket and thought his hair felt like a steel soap pad and his chest was hard. He did not look much like himself, as he looked puny and had a light yellow overtone to his skin. I later learned that he had meningitis. Gerald's face stayed with me for several months.
Two years later, my friends and I faced one of the most devastating experiences of our early lives. Our close friend, Bernadine Payne—Bunny, as we called her—died after being sick for about a year. This death was difficult for me because I talked with Bernadine every day after school when I was in the ninth grade. She would vicariously go through the ninth grade with me. She hardly ever talked about her illness, so I didn't either. From time to time, I would ask her if she knew when she'd be able to return to school, and she'd always give me a time, but she never returned to school. My sister Marianne and I visited her initially, but after a while, our parents would not allow us to visit because no one knew what was wrong with Bernadine. One day, she told me that she didn't want to die and that she was too young to die. I remember telling her that she was not going to die. I couldn't imagine Bernadine dying. Well, Bernadine died on July 13, 1958. Although I realized then that God was in charge and that I should not question His decisions, I could not resolve her death for a long period of time because I knew that she didn't want to die. Her words in her soft voice stayed with me. Bunny was one of the nicest and sweetest persons I have ever known.
The other classmates, Germaine, Tyrone, George, Augusta, Brinton, and Adrian, died after 1990. Many emotions emerged during that lunch as we nostalgically talked and thought about all our classmates who had died. George Robichaux, another member of our seventh-grade class and not a member of our elementary school classes, was the first person to introduce me and perhaps some of the other classmates to the sounds of Ray Charles, which I have enjoyed ever since. Whenever the teachers left the room, the student in charge of the class (as class president, I was often selected) would let George sing "Lonely Avenue." I had memorized the words and would silently sing them as George went into his brief concert for the class. This was especially funny to me because my dad did not allow us to listen to the soulful WYLD radio station where Ray Charles's songs were played. Instead, my sisters and I could only listen to the top twenty on the pop station. Well, at that time, I really didn't listen to WYLD, but I learned the songs from my classmate, and I really enjoyed the sounds and the words. By my eighth-grade year, my older sisters would turn on WYLD, but when one of us reported that my dad's truck had arrived home, we would quickly turn the station to the top twenty and sing with Teresa Brewer, Kay Storm, and others.
Brenda, Herbert, and I then began a more intense and focused conversation on a myriad of topics as Herbert and Brenda addressed specifics about their careers and what they remembered about our fifth-grade class, Mrs. Owinda Taplette, Valena C. Jones, our parents, and other topics they felt were related to our grammar school experience. We all seemed to thoroughly digest all of the words coming from each other. Everything uttered appeared to be deeply meaningful and took us back to the glory days of our youth and innocence. I began to feverishly take notes on what my two classmates recalled and expressed that afternoon. Some of their answers were in response to a few of the interview questions I had prepared (appendix A). Brenda and Herbert were the only two classmates that I initially interviewed together. After that afternoon session, we continued their interviews in separate meetings.
Civil Judge and Former Civil Lawyer
Herbert Cade, a district judge for the state of Louisiana, is elected every six years. He began his second term, which he won, unopposed, in September 2008. Before being elected to his first term, which began in January of 2003, he was in private practice law for twenty-seven years in New Orleans and served the Crescent City as a judge in the court of appeals for seven months beginning in June 1987. He won his first judgeship on October 5, 2002, after being encouraged to fill a judgeship held by a judge who did not seek re-election. Being a judge seemed so right and natural for Herbert because he would surely have the last word, and it would probably be profound and memorable. In Orleans Parish, judges are elected. However, they may be appointed to fill vacancies between elections for a relatively brief period of time, usually less than a year.
Herbert received his baccalaureate degree in 1973 at Louisiana State University at New Orleans (LSUNO) with a major in political science eight years after Brenda Garibaldi and I finished college. The following year, LSUNO was renamed the University of New Orleans (UNO). Although Herbert initially enrolled in LSUNO in 1961, the year our class graduated from high school, two years after his matriculation, he "stopped out" of college to work so that he could take care of his new family—a wife and impending baby. His marriage was not planned, but Herbert felt that it was his responsibility to get married and to take care of his new and growing family. During his hiatus from college, 1963–69, he worked as a bookkeeper at Al Hirt's Jazz Club and at the US Post Office in New Orleans—first as a letter carrier and subsequently as a special delivery messenger.
During his last year at the post office, he was a part-time student at LSUNO and had planned to continue to work at the post office there and attend school on a part-time basis. Upon reporting to work one day in 1970, he learned that he was being transferred to the Harahan Post Office as a letter carrier. He was surprised and dismayed that a decision could be made without warning that could seriously affect his life. He was not at all familiar with the working conditions in this suburban town of New Orleans, and he may have also been concerned about possible safety issues in what he perceived to be a predominately white area in Louisiana at that time. Herbert quit this well-paying job and sought another job. He would pass the screening instrument for several jobs, but for some reason, he would not be offered the jobs following the interviews. He was convinced that once the interviewers saw a black male, they would not hire him. This experience coupled with his knowledge of how supervisors could make somewhat arbitrary decisions impacting his life strengthened his resolve to acquire the necessary education and training to ensure that he would be his own boss. He was motivated to complete the requirements for the baccalaureate degree with dispatch. His wife worked as an executive secretary at Michoud Plant in New Orleans to support the family during that period.
Upon graduation from LSUNO, he was accepted into the law school at Tulane University but declined the offer because he could not afford the school. Instead, he decided to attend the law school at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He completed the program in three years, commuting from New Orleans to Baton Rouge every day (driving about 180 miles) for the first two years and graduated second in his law school class. Herbert resumed his responsibilities of caring for his family in 1973. At that point, his son, Melvin, was nine years old. Herbert's law practice flourished, and he became a popular and respected civil lawyer. However, his marriage was not as successful and ended in divorce in 1988. Melvin became a lawyer and practiced with his father for several years.
Receiving his baccalaureate and law degrees was a special honor to his mother, whose formal education did not extend beyond the eighth grade. However, the lack of extended formal education did not hinder the success of Herbert's mother, as she was the successful owner and manager of a dry cleaning business in New Orleans and had acquired several pieces of property near the Seventh Ward boundary line, which she rented out. One of these homes, located on Mandeville Street, was where Herbert lived when he was at Jones School. Ultimately, Herbert's mom received her GED. His three sisters, Pat, Penny, and Pam, loved and respected by their older brother, also became very productive citizens. Two of them completed college, and one of them, Penny, was a summa cum laude graduate of Prairie View University.
Herbert is the oldest child and the only male in a family of four children. His mother appeared to be younger than most of the other mothers of classmates. She was lively and very engaging. She appeared to approve of Herbert's friends and liked that we challenged him. I liked her outgoing personality and her pleasant manner with us. She was comfortable with Herbert's friends, and we were comfortable with her. When Herbert entered our class, he had one younger sister, Pat. His mother remarried several years later and two more sisters were added to the family. Herbert speaks of his stepfather as a great man and now realizes that he was truly a father to him. The older sister of this union is fourteen years younger than Herbert. He speaks of all of his sisters and mother with pride for their accomplishments and about them as individuals. On a trip to New Orleans in 2009, I visited his mother and stepfather at their Mandeville home, and we had a great conversation. I was eager to see them and hoped that I was not intruding on their privacy. I told them about my book and that I had interviewed Herbert for it. Consistent with what I remembered, they were kind and gracious. We spent a few minutes talking about the family photograph hanging on the wall in the living room, which was taken at the wedding of one of Herbert's sisters. I saw four generations in that picture and thought for a moment about the time capsule beginning with my fifth-grade year. Several of the young men in the photograph had a remarkable resemblance to the Herbert I knew many years ago.
As Herbert talked about his childhood, it became abundantly clear to me that he felt secure as a child, wrapped in the love of his mother, father, and paternal grandparents. He continued to feel love and respect from other members of the family, including his sisters and stepfather. He remembered that when he was a child, his paternal grandfather would sometimes pick him up from school and take him to the elder Cade's beautiful home in uptown New Orleans. He remembered with delight the pond and sidewalk on the front of the house and noted that his grandparents had done well in life and had acquired many material possessions. But most of all, they loved him, and that love along with the love and nurturing of his mother, following the death of his father, may have been critical in providing a solid base from which he created a successful pathway ultimately leading to his present position in life. Of course, there were challenges, but he was able to meet those challenges and overcome what could have been insurmountable obstacles.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CHERISHED MEMORIESby BEVERLY JACQUES ANDERSON Copyright © 2011 by Beverly Jacques Anderson, PhD. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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