Night Raid
1963
AFTER MY GREAT UNCLE died, Daddy bought the biggest house in Jean Ville, Louisiana from his widow and moved us up South Jefferson Street from our small ranch style house. I was eleven, going on twelve, and my bedroom, which faced the road, had floor-to-ceiling French windows that opened onto a deep front porch that spanned the entire front of our antebellum home.
We had only been in the Big House a year, when I was reading in bed and smelled smoke through the opened window. It seemed to hang in the air, mixed with a distinct barnyard smell and the stench of burning rubber. A loud roar, like thunder, rose from the ground and my bed shook. I crawled out of the high four-poster, pulled my long hair into a ponytail and tiptoed to the divan between the two front windows. Kneeling on the rough tapestry, I pulled the thick, blue drapes back a few inches and peered through the blinds.
Engines revved and horns blared while horses galloped over the sidewalk and through our front yard. I watched as if in a dream while three pickup trucks, their beds loaded with people in white sheets, dunce hats and white fabric over their faces with two holes for eyes, pulled into the driveway and drove across the wide, front lawn.
It was summer, almost five months since Mardis Gras. What was the occasion for this parade, or was it a celebration? White-costumed people in pickups and on more than a dozen galloping horses waved torches in our front yard.
Two of the men—now I knew they were men because I could see their boots and jeans under the sheets that flapped open in the fronts—jumped out of a truck bed and ran towards the front of our house. Their boots thumped up the thirteen steps onto the porch. They were so close I could have touched them. I cowered behind the heavy curtains, still peeking through the opening but instinctively backing a few inches away from the window, stretching the drapes out in front of me. One of the men held a can of paint while the other dipped a brush into it several times and wiped it across the white wood. He saw me peeping through the open window.
“Get away from here, girl. Go back to bed,” he said. “You don’t need to be involved.”
I backed away, moved to the other window.
Three other ghost-clad people carried what, from the back, looked like a huge crucifix, into the middle of the yard. When they stood it up, it was twice as tall as the tallest of the men. Two more men ran up behind them with shovels, dug a hole and within seconds, planted the body-less cross.
Then they packed the dirt around the bottom with their boots and lit the cross on fire. The men on the porch joined the ones in the yard to form a circle around the cross and chanted something I couldn’t understand. All the while horns blew, men yelled, trucks revved, and horses galloped in circles around the ring of men, tearing up our yard and making so much noise I saw the lights go on in Dr. David’s Switzer’s house across the street.
I was so enthralled I didn’t hear Daddy come into my room.
“Get back to bed, Susie!” he said, pulling the drapes fully opened and lifting the blinds in one whisk. I backed up and stood behind him. He put one of his big hands on either side of the window and leaned forward as if to make his head go through the screen. When he saw the action he stormed out of my room, through the hall and onto the porch, just as the men jumped into the beds of the pickups, and the caravan of trucks and horses with men carrying lighted torches, paraded down South Jefferson Street towards the Quarters, where Tootsie and Catfish lived.
“Hey, you renegades,” Daddy yelled. “Get off my property before I call the sheriff.”
But it was too late. They’d already left and no one moved to stop them.
Daddy called the sheriff and spoke to a man who said he was the only deputy on duty and couldn’t leave the jail—he’d give the message to the sheriff in the morning. Someone would come by to check out the scene. Daddy mumbled something about the sheriff being, “In on this,” and hung up.
The cross in our yard burned brightly for hours. I was scared and the bright light of the fire kept me awake so I crawled in bed with Mama and Daddy and laid my head in the crook of Daddy’s arm and cried. He stroked my hair and whispered to me until my eyelids got heavy and I stopped sobbing. He explained that those people called themselves the Ku Klux Klan and harbored hate in their hearts. He said they wanted to keep blacks and whites separated and used fear tactics to make sure that happened, but would never go so far as to hurt a little girl.
I asked him why they came to our house.
“It’s a warning,” he said. “They think I should stop being friends with Ray Thibault.”
Daddy said that colored people were the same as whites. He grew up on a farm in Backwoods, Louisiana, population 400, about twenty miles from Jean Ville, the parish seat of Toussaint Parish, where we lived.
“I was friends with Moses’s son, Rufus,” Daddy said. “We played and ate supper together and hunted and fished, like brothers. We talked a lot. He had feelings and dreams and aspirations just like I did. God doesn’t see differences because someone’s skin is darker than another’s.
“Jesus had dark skin, you know,” he told me that night. I didn’t know that. The Jesus at Assumption Catholic Elementary School I attended with my brothers was white—the one hanging on the cross, the picture with the big heart, the statue in the grotto—they were all white men.
Daddy said the KKK hated Jews, too, but they didn’t bother the Switzers because they provided medical care for the Klan members and their families.
Dr. David and Dr. Joseph Switzer, brothers and two of only a handful of physicians in Jean Ville, were Daddy’s friends. The older brother, Dr. David, lived directly across South Jefferson Street from our house and had delivered all five of us kids. He made house calls when I was sick and reminded me of the Santa Claus I had believed in when I was little—what with his jolly, loving manner, and all.
Daddy said God was colorblind.
But while he talked, I thought about the different things Mama had taught us. Mama was what you might call, prejudice—I mean, she thought differently.
“I’m from North Louisiana” she said. “Where Negroes are Negroes. They know their place, and there aren’t many of them. We ran the uppity ones off early on.” She told me and my brothers to stay away from, “those people,” except for our help, Tootsie. But even with Tootsie, there were lines we shouldn’t cross, like going to visit her in the Quarters or kissing her brown cheek.
Mama rolled her eyes behind Daddy’s back when he talked about coloreds being people and God loving us all the same. We’d laugh to each other because we knew she’d tell us the opposite once Daddy was gone. When he wasn’t around she told us colored people had tiny brains and were the “inferior,” race. And she treated Tootsie something terrible, didn’t pay her much money, and made poor Tootsie do all the dirty work like scrubbing toilets and sifting through garbage if we lost something. I always wondered why Tootsie stayed. She could have worked for any white family in Jean Ville but she worked for Mama until I went off to college, years later.
The Klan visit only made Daddy more determined not to change his stance on colored people. One day I heard him tell Mama that he had coffee with Mr. Ray Thibault at Charlie’s Diner downtown every morning before heading to the Toussaint Bank where he was vice president at the time.
“I love to watch the looks on the faces of the sheriff and his cronies when they come in the front door, look around, and spot me at the corner table with Ray,” he said. “They’ll have to do more than burn a cross in my yard and paint words on my house to make me change who I am as a man.”
“I don’t know why you have to be friends with that Negro,” Mama said. “There are lots of white men in this town who admire you and want to be your friend. Why do you waste your time?”
“Ray and I have a lot in common,” he told her. Then he proceeded to explain all the reasons why it didn’t matter what color Ray Thibault’s skin was. Mama listened and rolled her eyes behind his back.
I thought about the only two colored people I knew, Tootsie and Catfish. Tootsie had been with us since I was an infant and I never thought of her as any color. She was more of a mother to me than my own, and I loved her almost as much as I loved God.
Catfish was a dark man who walked in front of our house every afternoon on his way home from work. I first met him when I was little, about six or seven.
*
A deep ravine separated the front yard of our old house from South Jefferson Street and was where we caught crawfish, tadpoles, turtles and, sometimes, after a hard rain, even minnows in its muddy waters. I held a bucket in my small hands. The weight of the hard-shelled snapper in my daddy’s galvanized pail made me bend over as I carried the load down the driveway and onto the road. I was bringing it to Catfish, a tall man who my brothers and I saw almost every day. I walked slowly with the bucket, afraid for so many reasons.
I was not allowed to talk to people who lived on the other side of Gravier Road in the “Quarters.” It was only about a block away, but it could have been miles, it was that much of a mystery. Our mother told us, “Those people eat white children,” which, of course, only made my brothers and me more curious about them.
I was seven and I knew about Vampires. I read Nancy Drew mysteries and even some of the Hardy Boys. If this tall man smiled I wondered whether I would see fangs.
But the bigger mystery that day had to do with a rumor about Catfish, who often stopped to whistle a tune or play his harmonica and dance for us, right there in the street. We’d overheard our mother and her friends talk about him during their Wednesday afternoon bridge game.
“They say he eats turtles,” Mrs. Rousseau said, fanning her cards in her left hand and rearranging them with her right. “I’ll bid two hearts.”
“You don’t say!” Miss June looked across the table at Mama who was her bridge partner and said, “I’ll bid two spades.”
“Turtles? Well, what do you expect from those ignorant Negroes,” Mrs. Ruth said. She looked at her cards and peered over them at her partner, Mrs. Rousseau. “I’ll bid two no-trump.”
“Catfish is nothing but a dumb clown. He dances in the streets to entertain the kids sometimes. That’s about all those people are good for,” our mother said and all the women laughed. “I’ll say, four spades.”
“Four spades? Anne must have a strong hand.” Miss June began to lay her cards on the table while Mama smiled and said, “We’ve got this, June.” And they did, win the hand, that is. Mama always won at bridge, she was something of a phenom at cards.
My brothers stood on the hill above the ditch, and watched me carry the turtle down the driveway and onto the road. My little brother, Will who was six, was worried about what would happen to me. He cried and yelled, over and over.
“Don’t go, Susie. Please, don’t go!”
James, our older, wiser brother was ten, and he wanted the man to eat me so he screamed out.
“Go on, Susie. Go on!”
I wasn’t sure what to do but I had already yelled across the ditch and told Catfish that we had the turtle, and my brothers were too chicken to take it to him.
I was a nervous child, the nails on my short, plump hands bitten to the quick, almost non-existent. My palms felt damp as they gripped the bucket’s handle.
I reached the bottom of the driveway and turned right, onto the blacktop road. He stood about three or four yards away. It was hot and humid and the sweat in my palms matched the perspiration that ran down my back. I knew the sweat was not totally from the heat.
Before I got to him he called to me.
“Hey little girl.” His voice was smooth and sweet, almost creamy. He sounded a lot like Tootsie. “You don’t need to be scared of me.”
“Who, me?” I tried to act big and brave but I knew my voice trembled. “I’m not afraid.”
He laughed. It was a hearty laugh, from deep in his belly. In fact, he held his belly while he laughed. It made me want to smile, but I was too terrified.
“Come on little girl,” he said. “I won’t bite you.”
I stopped dead in my tracks. Bite? Maybe Mama was right! It felt like my feet were glued to the pavement. My arms started to tremble and the bucket began to swing.
He took a step towards me. I wanted to run, but my feet were stuck. I gripped the handle so tight my hands started to tingle, like pins pricking my palms. I craned my neck upward and stared into his eyes. I couldn’t look away. It was as if a magnetic force ran between my eyes and his.
It only took him two steps to reach me.
“You gonna hand me that bucket or you gonna hold on to it?” he asked. Creamy.
“I, uh, I, um, I’m going to give it to you,” I said. But when he reached down to take it, I couldn’t let go. My fingers were frozen around the handle.
His hand stopped in midair, as if he was afraid to touch my hands. We stood there, both cemented in time, staring at each other.
I noticed how long his hand was, and thin, not like my daddy’s whose hands were round and thick and hairy. Catfish’s nails were not bitten. They were smooth and pink, which contrasted with the color of his skin—dark, not black, not brown, but darker than any I’d ever seen, even darker than Tootsie’s.
“I promise I won’t hurt you, Missy,” he said. Again I noticed how kind his voice sounded. Is this a trick? “I’m much obliged for the turtle.”
I didn’t move.
“I’m going to make me some turtle stew.” He spoke slowly, his voice like syrup flowing off the sides of a stack of pancakes. “I’m gonna boil it till I know it’s dead, then I’m gonna break the shell, me. It’s the meat inside that’s good, yeah.”
I knew the boys were excited because we had solved the mystery, but here I was, stuck in the street with this man I wasn’t supposed to talk to, riveted by the sound of his voice, the depths of his eyes, the color of his skin, the length of his legs.
He looked directly into my eyes when he spoke. I’d never seen eyes so dark, like a never-ending dark hole, and I thought of how Mama said if we dug a hole deep enough we would reach China. I wondered whether the depths of his eyes reached somewhere across the ocean.
“After I gets the meat out the shell, I’m gonna cut her in little squares. Then I’m gonna dip them squares in corn meal and fry them in some boiling hot lard.”
I looked down and saw him slide his outstretched hand under the handle of the bucket. The pinkness glared up at me. My mouth opened in surprise. How could one side of his hand be so dark and the other so light?
I loosened my grip and the handle fell into his palm.
It was as if he had two hands on each arm, one so dark it could have been dipped in chocolate, the other, pinkish white, the same color as mine. I let my arms drop to my sides and I lifted my eyes to look at him.
“Is your name really Catfish?” I asked.
“Sure is.” He laughed.
“That’s not a real name,” I said.
“It’s my nickname. You got a nickname?”
“No. My name is Susie.”
“Is Susie short for Susanna?” he asked.
“How did you know that?”
“Well, if it is, then Susie’s a nickname,” he said.
I thought about that a moment.
“Well, then, is Catfish short for Cadillac?”
He set the bucket on the road, held his belly, and bent forward. He laughed and laughed and, finally, I started to laugh, too. I wasn’t aware of anyone else in the world. It was just me and Catfish.
Finally, when we got hold of ourselves, he picked up the bucket.
“Me and my family going to have us a good supper tonight, us,” he said. “We shore will!” Smooth, creamy, dripping in syrup.
Oh, I thought. He has a family. Does he have children, grandchildren? I wondered how his touch might feel to a child, like me. Was it tender and loving like Tootsie’s or was it harsh and rough like Daddy’s? For some reason, I had to know the answer. I reached my hand up in a gesture that meant I wanted to shake his. I think he was shocked. He looked from side to side, as if to see if someone might be watching. He shifted the bucket from his right hand to his left and reached forward to fold my tiny hand into his. I looked at the long, dark hand folded around the end of my arm. It felt soft and gentle and kind. I didn’t want him to let go. I wondered, when he washed his hands, whether they got lighter on the tops, or whether they stayed dark no matter how hard he scrubbed.
To a seven-year-old white girl in 1958 a decade before integration, in a small town in the Deep South, Catfish was an oddity. His eyes were as deep as the ocean, his voice, soothing as molasses; his touch like a gentle breeze; and his laugh, as hearty as gumbo. If that wasn’t enough, his hands! Chocolate on one side, cotton candy on the other.
I watched Catfish march down South Jefferson Street towards the Quarters, legs lifted high, knees bent as he sang, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He swung his arms, the heavy bucket in one hand as light to his touch as if it was filled with air. I stood in the street until long after he crossed Gravier Road and disappeared into the unknown.
My brothers were speechless as they stood in our front yard on the other side of the deep ditch and I was planted to the pavement watching Catfish march off.
*
Tootsie didn’t come to work on Tuesday, the day after the Klan visit. When she got to work Wednesday, I told her what happened at our house. That’s when I found out the Klan went to the Quarters, too.
“We spent all day yesterday scrubbing the black paint off the front of our house,” I told Tootsie. “It said, ‘N____r Lovers.’” Tootsie didn’t react, she seemed not to hear me, like her mind was far, far away.
Our lawn was still torn up—tire tracks and hoof prints rutted the ground and most of the St. Augustine grass was gone. The atmosphere was overcast with a smoky residue that seemed to sit in the air, unmoving. No birds or butterflies, not even a bumble bee, flitted through my mother’s prized camellia bushes and rose garden in front of the high front porch.
But Tootsie said it was nothing like the mess in the Quarters where the outhouse and one of the cabins was burned to the ground and her sister, Jesse’s house was scorched with holes in the roof and all along one side. She said that her daughter, Marianne, was home from school with stitches across her pretty face, black eyes and a broken nose.
“And those white men, well they did things to her she most likely never forget,” Tootsie whispered to me. “I wish it could have been me, instead.”
Mama was stomping mad that day and cursed Daddy under her breath. Tootsie just listened, as usual.
“I told him not to be friends with that Negro who owns the Esso station,” Mama said. “Bob says that colored man is a savvy business person. I can’t believe we let those people own businesses. Why, do you know Bob even has a charge account with that man and told me to go there for gas and charge it?”
Mama didn’t expect an answer. She spouted off like that from time-to-time knowing Tootsie wouldn’t dare repeat what she said. In fact, Tootsie knew Mama didn’t want or expect a comment—she was a non-person, like a statue Mama could shout at and take her frustrations against. All the white ladies in Jean Ville did that, talked to their help about their problems and let their anger out on them. They had to have someone. Tootsie washed dishes while Mama paced behind her, shouting and complaining.
“I won’t do it. If he wants my car filled up there, he’ll have to take it himself.”
When Tootsie arrived at work that morning she asked Mama for an advance on her pay, only the two dollars for the two days she’d worked so far that week.
“No,” Mama yelled. “I will not loan you money. As soon as I start to loan you money and you don’t pay it back, we’ll have problems.”
“But, Miss Anne,” Tootsie said. There were tears in her eyes. “It’s my baby’s 13th birthday. I got nothing to give her, and she been through so much.”
“You should have thought of that ahead of time and saved up. I said, ‘No!’ Now don’t ask again.”
When I got home from school that afternoon Tootsie was still upset. I knew she would try to pull my dad aside when he got back from work and ask him for money, but all hell would break loose, because Mama was bound to overhear or find out some way.
Tootsie was doing the ironing. She took the wet sheets from the washer after the spin cycle and, one at a time, slowly lowered them into the vat of starch and warm water on the back porch. She rung them out with her strong, brown hands and hung them over the line she stretched across the opening under the low roof. She set a dirty sheet under the line to catch the drippings that seeped down, no matter how hard she squeezed and pressed her hands to get all the moisture out. The ironing board was on the porch and it was hot outside as she pushed the electric iron over the damp sheets. The warm breeze did not dry the beads of perspiration that gathered on Tootsie’s forehead before they could drain into her eyes.
Tootsie liked to iron. It was the one time of day when she had relative peace. Mama would lie down for a nap with the baby and the rest of us older ones were either playing outside or still at school. She said when she ironed at her house she watched a black and white television set my Daddy had given her. I wasn’t supposed to know about the TV but I found out when I overheard her thanking Daddy for it.
At our house, she daydreamed when she ironed, or she just stood with her thoughts.
“I wants to make this day special for my girl,” she whispered to me when I climbed the steps onto the back porch, trying to escape the heat and humidity that had chased me all day. “She been through so much. She be thirteen today.”
I followed Tootsie to the linen closet where she stacked the fresh-ironed sheets and pillow cases and mumbled about how she wanted to have ice cream and a chocolate cake and lots of presents all wrapped up in shiny paper so Marianne’s special day could be long—long enough to unwrap every trinket she would buy at Mack’s Five and Dime after work, if only she had a few dollars. She knew Mama was right, she should have saved and shopped and baked before today, but the Klan had messed up everything.
I thought about my own birthdays. I couldn’t remember ever having a birthday party with friends and cake and lots of presents to unwrap. When my grandmother came to visit she brought a cake and everyone would sing happy birthday to me at the supper table and we’d have cake for dessert. Most years, when Grandy wasn’t visiting, I didn’t have a celebration because Mama said my October birthday was too close to Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas—I could celebrate on one of those holidays. Anyway, I never liked cake or ice cream and that became Mama’s excuse.
“How can I give you a party without cake and ice cream. It just doesn’t work, Susanna Christine.” She also said she had too many kids to remember everyone’s birthday. But the boys had parties and there had been a big bash on Sissy’s second birthday, the previous year. Mama’s friends came with their children for cake and games and little bags of trinkets and bubble gum to take home with them.
Mama was a gracious hostess. She had lots of friends who loved her and competed for her attention. I couldn’t count the number of weekend dinner parties she and Daddy gave where Tootsie was hired to serve and clean until the wee hours of the mornings. Mama loved to entertain the Jean Ville doctors, lawyers and businessmen and their wives. All the women wore mink coats in the winter, even though Louisiana didn’t have much cold weather.
Morehouse Samuels, the janitor at the bank where my daddy worked, would open the door and hang and fetch coats all evening, then he’d help Tootsie in the kitchen, because she couldn’t go home until everything was in order for the next day. I figured Morehouse was sweet on Tootsie and told her so, but Tootsie said she had no time for the likes of him.
When Tootsie worked a party, Daddy paid her five dollars and there were often arguments the next day, Mama yelling that he paid Tootsie too much.
“She’s going to expect that kind of pay every week,” Mama would scream. “I pay her a dollar a day, you can’t pay her five dollars for one night.”
“I earn the money. I’ll decide how to spend it,” Daddy would always say, which made Mama fiery mad. Then he’d leave, slamming the back door behind him. I tried to stay out of Mama’s way on those days.
Daddy was a CPA with aspirations of being mayor, then a senator. He struggled to build his practice until he ran for Louisiana Insurance Commissioner and got to know Governor Earl Long in the 1950’s and 60’s. Although Daddy was not on Long’s ticket, the governor took a liking to the smart, young, energetic investment banker and hired him as his personal accountant and investment counselor. That job, which took Daddy to Baton Rouge most weekdays, didn’t increase his income by much, but the connections he established catapulted his career. He became a lobbyist and a number of large oil companies and financial institutions began to invest with him and hired him to review their books and train their accounting departments. That’s when he started to accumulate wealth and was how we could afford to live in the biggest house in Jean Ville.
That was also when he became interested in politics. He constantly preached to us kids about how his reputation was important and that we should all be careful what we said and did. Any mistakes we made could reflect negatively on him and cause him to lose votes.
The afternoon of Tootsie’s daughter’s birthday I shut myself in my room and dug my piggy bank out of the bottom drawer of my dresser, from under my seldom worn sweaters. It wasn’t actually a pig, it looked like a treasure chest that didn’t open on top. It had a secret slot on the bottom that had to be opened with a tiny key that I kept in a sock in my underwear drawer.
I counted five dollars in Quarters, nickels and pennies but saved the silver dimes as they were good-luck. I found an old, blue fuzzy sock and put the coins in it, pulled the top up and tied it in a knot, then walked down the hall towards the back door. Without so much as a glance or a word, I dropped the sock filled with coins into the big pocket on the front of Tootsie’s apron. She didn’t look at me but a private understanding passed between us.
Tootsie would finger the weighty package and feel the wool sock and her plump fingers would massage what felt like dozens of coins of different sizes. I knew what she was thinking, now Marianne can have that birthday party.