Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [57]
“Watch the windows at the school,” one of the cops says, and they all spin around, pointing their guns at a large three-story building we’re passing on our right.
“That’s Frederick Douglass,” one of the officers explains. “It’s been taken over.” He doesn’t say by whom, but he’s clearly nervous, unsure what kind of reception we might receive in this neighborhood.
Many of the windows in the school are broken, and the front doors are wide open. At the top of the building, carved into the façade it reads, FRANCIS T. NICHOLLS PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL. The name sounds familiar, though I can’t place it at first. Once we’re about a block away, I remember: My father graduated from high school in New Orleans. Francis T. Nicholls was his old school.
MY FATHER’S FAMILY moved to New Orleans in 1943. He was sixteen years old. His mother came because there were jobs in the city and because her two married daughters had already moved here with their husbands. My father lived with his mother and five of his seven siblings in a ground-floor apartment in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from Francis T. Nicholls High School.
My grandmother got a job at Higgens-Hughes, a plant that manufactured boats for the war effort. My grandfather didn’t like New Orleans, and had stayed in Mississippi, trying to keep the farm going. He couldn’t find workers, though, because so many men had left to fight or to labor in factories. When he finally decided he couldn’t keep the farm running, he leased the land and got a job as a fireman for the Mississippi railroad.
My father fell in love with New Orleans from the start. It seemed to him a foreign and mysterious city. He saw his first opera in New Orleans and his first ballet as well. Compared with Quitman, it was like living on another planet.
He graduated from Francis T. Nicholls in 1944. In his scrapbook, I found a clipping from a New Orleans paper describing the graduation ceremony.
Next to the article, my father had pasted a picture of his senior class. The school was segregated then. In the photo, the boys all wear ties and vests, the girls knee-length dresses. My father stands off to the side, a smile on his face. He drew an arrow above his head, and wrote ME on the side of the page.
It made me smile. When I was five I’d done the same thing. My parents threw a party for Charlie Chaplin when he returned for the first time to the United States after living in Switzerland for some twenty years. I was photographed shaking his hand, and the picture was printed in several New York papers. I cut it out and taped it into my photo album. Above my head I’d drawn an arrow and written in big, bold letters, ME.
I WAS NINE years old when my father brought me to New Orleans for the first time. I don’t remember where we stayed, but I know it was in the French Quarter. I loved Bourbon Street: the music, the lights, the sidewalk performers. It seemed so taboo, so adult, dangerous but just slightly so, like a dirty Disneyland.
We went to visit the places of his youth, though many of them had disappeared. The streetcar he used to take to the First Baptist Church was gone; so was the two-story apartment building where he’d lived.
He was surprised to see Francis T. Nicholls’s name still carved into the façade of his old school. Nicholls had been a governor of Louisiana in the late 1800s and was a well-known racist. In New Orleans, however, they never erase history.
I have pictures of us strolling the streets of the French Quarter, sitting on a stoop spooning gobs of cherry-colored ice into our mouths. We went to a cemetery to visit a famous witch’s grave. The old headstone was freshly marked with white-chalk crosses left by those who still believed in her spells.
Somewhere on Bourbon Street we posed for a picture dressed in period costumes—a sepia snapshot I