A few years ago in New Orleans I was walking backward down Bourbon Street in the blazing sun during peak Mardi Gras. It was so packed you couldn’t see the cobblestones under your feet. You could barely see the sky. Standing on the wrought-iron balconies with beer cozies in hand, revelers rained brightly colored plastic beads down like joyful plastic hail. There wasn’t a sober soul in the parish.
It was no accident that I found myself in New Orleans, and it wasn’t just for the party. In one way or another, with varying degrees of directness, all roads lead back to that low-lying port city. New Orleans holds a unique place in American culture, a spiritual home baptized by suffering and joy, the birthplace of jazz, the graveyard of Katrina, as proof of my people’s indomitable spirit. Despite centuries of discrimination, the saints just keep marching. It’s almost impossible to write about New Orleans without lapsing into hyperbole, but that poetic magic is exactly why the city of 391,000—about the size of Wichita, Kansas—has always loomed tall in the American mind. And in my mind, especially.
My connection to the city runs through my grandmother, who grew up in Ville Platte in western Louisiana before joining the migration north in the 1960s. My mom always carried Louisiana with her, in her cooking, in her accent, in her outlook. She never left. And after raising me and my sister in New York, by 2007 my mother had had enough and moved back home. First she settled in Baton Rouge, where she worked as an executive chef at a hotel. By the time I was down there for Mardi Gras, she had settled in a small but tidy shotgun apartment in the Garden District in New Orleans, working as a private chef for some of the city’s wealthy families.
As I was walking, looking up and back but not forward, I stumbled hard into the body in front of me.
“Watch where you’re going!” I said angrily, spinning around with more than a tinge of Frozen Hurricane–fueled aggression.
“You fucking watch out!” said the other guy. That was all I needed to hear. I cocked my arm, ready to knock this guy out. But just as I was about to deck the asshole, I paused. The guy’s face—broad, pale, somewhat flushed now, with greenish-blue eyes—and mop of tawny hair was familiar. He didn’t look that different from any of the thousands of frat boys who arrive in New Orleans en masse, like popped-collar locusts, to rage, but somehow I knew this kid. He wasn’t just any frat boy.
“Holy shit,” I said, searching my memory to match a name and a face. “Michael?”
The kid’s scowl broke into a wide familiar grin “Kwame!” he shouted.
We hugged as drunk old friends do when meeting in an unlikely place after a very long time: tightly and with extreme affection.
Michael and I used to be like family. Not “like family,” but like literal family. The Gallaghers—Michael, his twin brother, Patrick, their mother Fran and their father Dennis—lived on Astor Street, not too far from where I grew up in the Bronx. I first met the twins when we were five years old, at the start of first grade. The summer before, I had scored high enough on the Gifted and Talented test that a parallel world of education opened up to me. I don’t remember much about the exam except that my mother was nervous, that I wasn’t, that I had to match patterns of circles and squares, and that I was excited I got a fresh pencil on testing day.
That I was there taking the test at all represented a small victory. My mom drove me, like a gas pedal caught in the down position. She, and by extension I, occupied the upper stratum of have-nots. We were poor but had just enough resources to be aware of and eager to take advantage of programs that gave me at least a fighting chance of moving on up. But I have to give him credit: it was my father who registered me for the Gifted and Talented test. The test cost nothing but it required the time and the skill to navigate the Department of Education’s bureaucracy. For some of the kids I met growing up, and for many I later met in the projects, it didn’t matter how talented and gifted they were, since their parents didn’t know the test existed.
That test determined my future in ways too vast and varied to chase down. Instead of attending the Dickensian, chronically underfunded and overcrowded school in my neighborhood, I took the bus every morning to P.S. 153 in faraway Baychester, a school nestled amid the brick buildings of Co-Op City.
Since kids tested into the program from around the city, our little classroom looked like an image from a fancy postracial preschool brochure. In my classroom there were Dominican kids, African kids, Indian kids, Japanese kids, Eastern European kids, Irish kids. It was a real rainbow, with Michael and Patrick as the white stripes.
At that age, friendship is mostly fermentation. You just need the right conditions—physical proximity, natural warmth, and a little time—and affection takes root. The Gallagher twins were goofy, friendly, and open kids, just like me, and that was enough for a friendship to form. They had identical sandy brown hair, fair skin, freckles, and cockeyed smiles. Michael was outgoing, adventurous, and a little obnoxious. Patrick was quieter and introverted but funny as hell when you got to know him, and doggedly loyal.
We quickly established our dynamic. Michael and I would stir the pot. Patrick, whose angelic demeanor endeared him with authority figures, covered for us. He had such an air of responsibility, and innocent saucer-like eyes, the teachers took his word over clearly observable facts. Michael and I would have stolen ketchup packets—destined for the edge of a toilet seat—spilling out of our pockets, but wide-eyed Patrick would swear up and down that “No, ma’am, Kwame and Michael certainly never sneaked out to the cafeteria.” He’s a math teacher now, back in the Bronx, but he’d have done great testifying before Congress.
Because we couldn’t drive or otherwise make plans on our own, we were dependent on our parents to keep the friendship alive outside of school. Luckily their mother, Fran O’Leary—which is a cliché of an Irish moniker but really her name—and my mother became fast friends. My mother was a boisterous peeled-almond-skinned Creole woman who had left behind the corporate world to scrape by as a caterer and chef. Mrs. Fran was a lily-white hard-nosed prosecutor for the New York City criminal court. But when she wasn’t at work, she was just as fun-loving and outgoing as my mom. Even if I hadn’t gotten along well with the boys—which, thankfully, I did—the two liked each other so much I still would have been at the Gallaghers’ house every day or they’d have been at mine.
I preferred to go there. Unlike our cramped quarters, the Gallaghers’ home was a spacious three-story brick house around the corner from the Bronx Zoo. It was much more suburban and quiet than my neighborhood. Kids scampered around the blocks like extras in the The Sandlot, all Chuck Taylors and wholesomeness. They left bikes outside. Unlocked. And when they came back, the bikes were still there. It was crazy.
The Gallagher house was a jumble of stuff, a mess of life. No space on the wall was bare, no inch of carpet uncovered. There were stacks of newspapers and magazines, shelves full of mugs and framed photographs and knickknacks. Books, ranging from thick novels with leather binding to Danielle Steel thrillers, were everywhere, next to cups full of pens. So many pens. The place was lived-in, and the clutter—clean but not tidy—gave it a friendly vibe, as if everyone and everything in it was so comfortable they could let their guard down.
After surviving the boredom of the school day, the twins and I usually just took it easy. We watched television, played Pokémon, or Legos, or K’NEX. And dominoes. The Gallagher boys were proud owners of the most epic set of dominoes I had ever seen: 2,000 black-and-white tiles they kept in a huge tin box in their bedroom. As soon as we arrived at their house, we’d dump them all out and start building. With Patrick acting as supervisor and master planner, Michael and I would arrange the tiles to form great lines that snaked down the hallway, through doorways, down stairs, over boxes and piles of magazines. We weren’t simple single-snakers, either. Our dominoes had more bypasses and detours, jug handles and forks than a New Jersey road. The tumbling of one tile set off the clack-clack of two branches, and these, like a river rushing around a rock, would surround table legs and G.I. Joe figurines before joining up again. Even though we couldn’t sit still during the school day, Michael and I were focused, precise, and disciplined in our pursuit of domino domination.
For children, especially like me, who have so little power in the world, the predictability of dominoes is more than a game. It’s proof that you can plan; proof that you can choose your path; proof that sometimes things work out. But that wasn’t the only thing that was comforting about life at the Gallaghers’: I came for the dominoes but stayed for the dinners.
Usually we’d play until six, when Mrs. Fran came home from work. The garage door would grumble open and, like a dog spotting a squirrel, we’d stop what we were doing and scamper to the kitchen to meet her. The kitchen was the undeniable heart of the Gallagher house, seemingly untouched since it was built in the 1970s. The cabinets and counters were an eye-piercing bright yellow that never existed before that decade and ceased to exist after. Upon putting down her briefcase, Mrs. Fran would give us all a hug and start cooking dinner immediately. She didn’t even change out of her work clothes, skirts over tights with sneakers. Unlike my mother, Mrs. Fran was not an adventurous cook nor, with a full-time office job, was she able to spend time experimenting and perfecting recipes the way my mom could. She fed her family a simple rotation of dinners: London broil, meatloaf, boiled chicken, and, when she was feeling adventurous, pierogies. Fish never made an appearance, nor did any of the staples of my childhood kitchen: no goat, no rice, no curries, no stews, nothing spicy or even flavorful.
I remember the first time I had London broil at the Gallaghers’. It was about a year into our friendship, on the night of my first sleepover. When done right, London broil can be tender and juicy. The meat is marinated for hours and then simply and quickly broiled. But if you overcook it—or undermarinate it—it becomes extremely tough, which was the best way to describe Mrs. Fran’s: tough as leather.
When she handed me a plate with a few slices of grayish meat, a couple of marble potatoes, and a mound of Stovetop Stuffing I peered at it with apprehension and muttered, “Thank you, Mrs. Fran.” As soon as I put the steak into my mouth and chewed it, I thought, Man, this is tough. But stranger than the texture was the flavor, or lack of it. It was completely flavorless, not good, not bad, just…nothing. I asked incredulously, “What’s wrong with this? It doesn’t taste like…anything.” Mrs. Fran was not pleased. Patrick and Michael stared at their plates, embarrassed. But I honestly didn’t know what was going on with the food in front of me.
Until that point I had really only eaten my mother’s cooking, a combination of her family’s Creole and Caribbean recipes as well as the Nigerian dishes my father’s cousin had taught her. At school I never went near the lunch lines. The smell of industrial cleaning supplies, prefrozen burgers, and cardboard milk containers kept me away. Often I’d wait to eat until I got home, welcomed by the familiar scents of garlic and thyme. My palate was used to the supersaturated flavors of mojos and curries and jerk. But this meat, this meat was like nothing I had tasted before.
“If you don’t like it, Kwame,” said Mrs. Fran sharply, “you don’t have to eat it. But that’s what is for dinner.”
I blushed, ashamed. I didn’t say anything but began dutifully sawing through a slice of the meat.
Like every child I was learning about the world by trespassing on it. Etiquette, like not criticizing someone’s cooking, was a tripwire I had just stumbled over. I’m sure Mrs. Fran doesn’t remember that night, but to me both the realization that sparked the question and the shame of asking it return with undiminished intensity every time I look back.
The kitchen, as I said, was the heart of this home but clearly not because of the food. It was the family spirit that gave the room its magnetic power. Much of this warmth came from Mrs. Fran. But the person who struck me as most responsible for the hominess of the Gallagher house was Patrick and Michael’s dad. Mr. Gallagher couldn’t have been more different from my own father. First of all, he was a cop. In fact, if you close your eyes and picture “Irish cop,” you probably wouldn’t be too far off. He was a big guy with a beer belly and a mustache that sat heavily on his upper lip like hay on an overloaded wagon. It was a total cop ’stache. By the time he turned in his badge in the early aughts, he was captain of New York City’s organized crime task force. When I was hanging around, though, Mr. Gallagher was a detective. This was in the nineties, at the tail end of the Gambino family rule, so it’s safe to say he had seen a lot of dark and ugly things. But when he opened the kitchen door, he seemed to leave all that stress and darkness outside. You could tell that he could be scary as hell if he got mad, but I never saw that happen. Not once.
Every night I was there, Mr. Gallagher came home just as we were sitting down for dinner. It seemed like a magical coincidence. Sweeping in, he’d take off and drape his NYPD coat over the back of a chair in one fluid motion. Then he’d work his way around the table, with a hair tousle for me and a kiss or hug for Michael and Patrick before ending up in front of Mrs. Fran, who turned to greet him, her face upturned and ready for a kiss. To Michael and Patrick this was normal everyday stuff. To me it was remarkable. Mr. Gallagher and Mrs. Fran seemed to fit each other like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
The easy way in which the twins received his affection and unselfconsciously reciprocated filled me with the sadness of a window-shopper. I could see it, feel it, come close to it, but their family life would never be mine.
The time I spent with my father was marked by pain and fear. Even when he was in one of his playful moods, I was never sure when the switch would flip and he’d go off on me. At my mother’s house the situation was becoming more complicated. It was no surprise that a woman as talented and beautiful as my mom would find someone else, and in retrospect, I’m glad she did. But at the time she met Westley, I wasn’t as magnanimous. All of a sudden there was a new man in the house, not quite my father but also not not a father figure.
Westley was a big guy, muscular, with a trim goatee and watchful eyes. Looking back on it now, all things being equal, he was probably the best thing I had going for me father-wise. He had been a well-known streetball player in Harlem when he was younger. By the time he met my mother, he was working for the City Parks Department as a venue manager for SummerStage, a series of concerts held in Central Park. He and my mom met there at a Roy Ayers concert. Piku, the social butterfly who had first introduced my mom and my dad, introduced them too.
As my mom tells it, she was hanging out with her friends at the concert. They were all passing around a Poland Spring bottle filled with vodka, too savvy to pay $15 for a watery beer or a tiny plastic cup of wine. My mom, being maybe a little naïve, had no idea and, to cool herself off, dumped the bottle’s contents over her face. She yelped in pain and surprise. “My eyes are burning!” she cried. Piku, who knows everyone, acted fast. She led my mom to Westley, who was on duty that night, and he shepherded my mother to a bathroom backstage where she could rinse herself off. When she could finally see again, she noticed his gentle eyes and the confident way he loped along and the care with which he took her back to her friends. They immediately dug each other.
West already had a son and a stepdaughter from an earlier marriage, and he knew how to be a father when he moved in with us a few months later. He even had a damn good idea of how to be a stepfather. A stepdad is like a substitute teacher. The position holds power but the person who holds it lacks credibility. West knew he wasn’t my father and didn’t try to act like he was. Certainly he didn’t try to act like my real father.
One night, after I’d returned from the Gallaghers’, he found me crying hysterically in my room. He came in and sat down on the bed next to me.
“What’s going on, Kwame?” he asked gently.
Through gulps of breath I said, “Why doesn’t my dad treat me the way Michael and Patrick’s dad does?”
I don’t remember whether West had an answer for that. I’m not even sure there is one. But what I remember is feeling that finally I had a father figure not too far from Mr. Gallagher, someone who would listen and put his arm around me and give me a hug.
As Michael, Patrick, and I grew up, the distance between their world and my own became more pronounced. Michael and I were always goofing off at school, but in second grade my trouble took on a different character and the consequences became more severe. Though the Gifted and Talented program was racially a rainbow, bias was not absent. As has been shown over and over again, black kids are more likely to get into trouble for the same behaviors white kids engage in, and I certainly could feel the story that I was a problem taking shape around me.
If Michael was caught throwing a spitball at another kid, he’d get a stern warning from the teacher. But if I was, I was immediately sent to the principal’s office. If we were both caught roughhousing at recess, the aide might say to him, “Michael, we don’t want to see you getting in trouble anymore” but he would turn to me and say, “Kwame, you’re becoming a troublemaker.”
But I also can’t lay it all on the school. Life at home was like a noose getting tighter, and so I did act out during school hours. Despite the positive influence of Westley in my mother’s house, my relationship with my father continued to be a source of suffering. Some of the trouble I got in, like the time I banged chalkboard erasers together and produced a cloud of dust that almost killed the asthmatic student in our class, seem like bad luck. Other instances, like the time I threw a boy off a jungle gym so hard he fractured his wrist, weren’t that innocent. Like a lot of other kids, I talked back to teachers. What headstrong second grader doesn’t try to prove he’s right? But none of the other kids shouted, “You’re a worthless piece of shit!” the way I did. None erupted in torrents of abuse, screaming, “You’re a stupid idiot!” or “What’s wrong with you?” Naturally my teachers were alarmed, so they sent me to the principal and eventually to the school therapist, a nice lady in a beige room. “Kwame,” she asked, “who taught you those words?” I told her I didn’t know, but of course I did. It was my father. It was his voice coming out in my higher register. The same things he shouted at me, I was shouting back at the world.
Soon I had cemented my reputation as a troublemaker, and I thought If the suit fits, wear it. On field trips to the American Museum of Natural History or to community theaters, I was the one preemptively told not to ruin it for the class. In the classroom my teachers stopped trying to engage me at all, and from my desk in the back of the room, I became louder and even more disruptive in response. Trips to the principal’s office became even more frequent, though over time their purpose became less rehabilitative. Eventually I just sat there, seen by the entire school as a nuisance.
I guess that’s one reason I grew to love the terrible London broil. The Gallaghers’ home became like a spit of solid ground where I could just be myself, a boy, a child, guard down and heart open, even as the world seemed to settle into its own conclusion about who I was. No matter what others thought, at the Gallagher house Mrs. Fran still served her flavorless food with a side of unconditional love, and Mr. Gallagher still swept in at dinnertime with a hug and a kiss and a pat on the back.
In fifth grade, Michael, Patrick, and I all transferred to a private Catholic school called Mount Saint Michael. That began our slow drift away from closeness. Since the school was much farther away than P.S. 153, you either had to take a school bus or the subway. The Gallaghers could afford the extra $300 a semester for a bus but my mom, who could barely cover the tuition, couldn’t. So every morning I took the 2 train to the 6 train, getting off at Nereid Avenue then catching the Bx16 fourteen blocks to the school. The commute was the real dividing line between the middle-class kids who went to Mount Saint Michael and the poor ones like me. It was also the first time I had been around other kids with my skin tone. I watched them on the train, fascinated as they brushed their hair into waves. I hadn’t known how to train my hair but I began to learn, first by watching and then, after buying my own brush, by doing. Eventually these guys became my friends. We’d meet up on the platform on Pelham Parkway and head to school together. Something, more than just that their skin was the same color as mine, resonated with me.
I began to wear do-rags, keeping them in my pocket until I left my house so as not to alarm West and my mom and earn the mockery of Tatiana. Then I’d meet up with the Mount crew, smoke a joint, and head to school. It felt good to belong, and even though my new friends didn’t seem like educators, they taught me about black culture in New York City.
I still remained friendly with Michael and Patrick but our friendship cooled. We went from hanging out outside of school, to eating lunch together in the cafeteria, to chatting in the hallways, to nodding to each other. Nothing unfriendly, just that I had found a coterie, a new identity. Our paths had diverged.
And then, twenty years later, I’m walking backward on Bourbon Street and bump into the past and he’s almost unrecognizable to me. Michael’s a lighting designer out in Las Vegas. Patrick is a teacher. And I’m a chef.
“We have to go see Jewel!” Michael shouted at me.
“Yeah!” I agreed. “She’ll freak out.”
The two of us happily made our way through the French Quarter, threading our way through the hordes to the Garden District apartment where my mother lived. She wasn’t back from work yet so we continued the party, raiding the freezer for ice cold bottles of Tito’s vodka that steamed in the heat. When my mother walked in a few hours later, she thought I’d just picked up some random drunk white dude. She gave me the quizzical “What are you up to, Kwame?” look I knew well. I liked that look. Unlike my dad’s, it was pretty open. My mom could come down hard, but she was also ready to throw down and party too.
Then Michael said, “You know me, Jewel.”
“I don’t know you,” said my mother, taken aback.
“Yes, you do,” said Michael, “Think.”
He got down on his knees and pulled his best little-kid face, gazing up at my mother with a faux wide-eyed innocence like Martin Lawrence used to do on his show. He looked ridiculous, of course—a grown man, drunk off his ass, on his knees—but then, after an instant her face began to crinkle and melt into a smile.
“Michael!” she cried and hugged him as hard as I’d seen her hug anybody in a long time. “You’re all grown up! It’s been so long; I didn’t recognize you!”
It was a moment full of emotion, for me and my mom and Michael too. I had no idea how he got to where he was, nor did he know of my own troubles and successes. You meet each other as friendly strangers, melt away the years with memory and the heat of nostalgia, and you’re a kid again, and friends again, and for a moment you’re back at the beginning. The three of us spent the rest of the night and well into the morning together, reminiscing about the Bronx, touching briefly on the vast blank space between then and now, but mostly letting it be. Maybe it was Mardi Gras, maybe it was the Tito’s, maybe it was just a trick of memory. But in that moment we were all younger again and lighter too, still untoppled.