Somewhere around Old Metairie, there were rental farms, because Metairie is a French word derived from another French word meaning “rental farm”, on which sharecroppers eeked out an existence of sorts. But in 1924, the year I was born, the area bounded by Papworth that intersected with a railroad track near Frisco, was dense woods, snakes, thorns, mosquitoes, and technicolor spiders, as big as my hand, hanging between the trees.
As the first boy born in our family after three daughters,---- Carmel, Lorraine, and Leila---everyone doted on me like they've never seen a boy before. But it turns out my birth was an omen of the tribulation ahead because during the following five years three more boys came out of the chute like tommy gun shots:::bang, bang, bang, three dangerous characters named Donald, Bobby, and Tommy...So that's seven kids in ten years. Imagine our mother: she was hanging washboard-scrubbed diapers on the line rain or shine, seven days a week for twelve years...(She was Catholic, of course. And I've always contended Pope Pius XI should have come to Metairie to confer upon her the Catholic Legion of Honor. That he didn't was the second biggest dereliction of the Church since the Inquisition and arrest of Galileo.)
I guess I was eight or nine months old---it's hard to remember now (we're talking like 1925)---someone (probably one of my dozen aunts) took this picture of me in a baby swing that hung permanently from a chain on the front porch. And my mom and grandmother are in the picture cooing this baby-talk like I'm two years old when, in fact, I'm nine months or so and bored to tears, which I shed often in those days in protest, because even then I was yearning to be free.
About every five minutes from the swing I watched a model A or T full of revelers chugging past on their way to the new wonderland on the seashore, leaving us on the porch behind in their dust. Few events have the memory-impact of that porch-swing snapshot. Otherwise, as evolution goes, life on all fours was a brief era, a montage featuring a chipped chalk horse, pots and pans,dead dragon flies that we smashed with the usual wooden rattles we linoleum rats banged around in the mid Twenties...and oh yes, blissful hours doing push-ups on the foot pedal of a hand- me-down Singer sewing machine...
But memories really spring alive when my sisters introduced me to Louisiana snakes...king snakes, garden snakes, moccasins, bushmasters, anacondas. Lorraine, or maybe Carmel, would tote me under her arm like a sack of flour, inching my nose (as close as my parents would permit) toward a cobra balanced by Leila on sticks. I am not exaggerating. Each near-death experience was legitimized as part of my education in biology. Naturally, I was too young to fear snakes and always reach happily for their pretty fanged heads. I'm alive today only because my guardian angel hovered over me always, praying on her rosary...
But of all the memories of Metairie that I still see in dreams none are as vivid as the blackberry hunts in the woods. My sisters and I would sneak out gingerly through the barbed-wire fence. I earned a scar or two from that fence at age four---my red badges of courage---but the blackberries were worth the cost: Only the brave deserve the fair, as the Greek poet said. The blackberry bushes were abundant; the further into the woods we ventured the more we found, and the more incriminating evidence stained our faces, hands and clothes. Of course, I'd rather not dwell upon the other price we had to pay when we returned home.
Our blackberry hunts ended abruptly from the day that Carmel, age 7, and Lorraine, barely 6, ventured too far and became lost in the woods. As dusk approached the neighbors became alerted and a search began. Neighbors fanned out through the darkening trees and along the train tracks where the girls were found walking hand in hand, wisely staying out of the forest without a clue in what direction to move. They had apparently wandered further and further into the wider wedge of the angle-shaped woods bounded by the train tracks and Papworth.
Our parents had a car then, a Studebaker convertible, the color of which I vaguely recall as yellow, but not likely; most cars in the mid-Twenties were still black. The one event of note, I'm told, is that Lorraine fell out of the car and was not missed for several blocks before Dad turned around to retrieve her.
Other scenes in the montage include our next door neighbor holding up a snake, an eel as tall as himself that he'd killed with a shotgun in his backyard pond...And myself, I've been told, on the very day we packed up to move from Papworth, refusing to go, and walking away from the movers until I was missed and my uncles had to drive up the road to find me.
But mostly I remember the Metairie sky when the moon was down and the country nights were black as pitch, except for the millions of stars. Laying in my Dads arms secure in the talk and laughter, I marveled at the stars beyond stars layered by more stars beyond stars diminishing into infinity; a free God-given spectacle I was privileged to see only during my brief time alive before the blessing of incandescent city lights dimmed the stars forever after.
