Anna Dexter-Louisiana Winter, 1923
February 22, 1923
It’s raining today, drizzly, straight down rain.
When my father moved us to New Orleans from Chicago we arrived on the train in the middle of the night. It rained that night like it’s raining now. I didn’t want to come here. He said the bank he works for told him to go, and he had to go. I suppose that’s so.
When we moved into this company-owned house on Saint Charles Avenue, I think I spent the whole first week sitting in the big bay window counting the times the trolley rumbled and jangled by on the track that ran down the street. Just a few weeks before we were celebrating Christmas on Michigan Avenue in Chicago, buying presents, listening to the carolers. Decorations draped the grand street. Snow drifted gently out of the sky. It was so beautiful.
But now I’m in the deep South of Louisiana, and it rains in February. This is no winter.
My mother bought a cat to keep me company. It stares at me like I’m a stray dog. Cassie, our cook, wanders passed, and I ask her if it ever snows in New Orleans. She says almost never. I watch the cat watching me.
February 24, 1923
I went outside this morning. I wandered out in the garden that meanders through the backyard. The cat was cleaning itself in an upstairs window. Mist drifted up off the cobblestone and mingled with the moss that hung from the trees. Horse hooves clopped in the distance. Dripping water rolled off the roof and plopped in muddy puddles. The cat watched me as I wandered out farther in the yard. And it was then, while I pondered the shape of a magnolia tree, I heard singing, faint singing that drew me farther back in the yard. There, back in the corner of the garden a boy was dancing around a brick fireplace, and he sang this gentle song:
in the spring and summer,
Daddy works all the time
workin’ hard
never have no fun
winter time,
it’s time to play
we go down by the river
It was an odd little lonely song that he repeated over and over as he skipped around the fireplace.
"Well it’s winter, are you going down by the river?" I said. The boy leapt. I startled him. I hadn’t intended to.
"No," he said, My daddy’s taking some bank man to a plantation in the country. He drives people for a living. Bank man from Chicago, how about that?" He was speaking about my father. "My Momma working in the kitchen. That’s why I’m playing here."
His name is Clarence. I told him that I’d go down to the river with him. He asked me what I knew about going down by the river. I had to admit, I knew nothing. But that day we played in the garden. Me and my new friend.
February 29, 1923
Clarence comes every day to bring groceries and supplies for Cassie. I like it when he stays awhile. We play hide-and-seek, or sing songs, or Cassie tells us a story. He knows different songs than I do. All the songs I know are happy. Sometimes his are slow and lonely, like hymns. When he leaves I ask him if he’s going down to the river, and if he would show me. But, like always, he says no. We have fun together. I don’t understand. I think we are friends.
I asked Cassie where Clarence goes when he leaves, and she said, "He just goes about his business. Don’t you worry about it." Then she invited me into the kitchen where she was preparing vegetables for a pot of soup that simmered on the stove. She peeled and chopped vegetables and I dropped them in the pot. The soup smelled of strange spices that I had never smelled. Bread baked in the oven and made the room rich and warm.
Around Cassie’s neck hung a feathered and beaded necklace strung together with a leather string. It looked like no jewelry I had ever seen. I asked her where she got it. She said it came from Haiti, where their family came from.
I had never heard of that place. I went to the library in my father's office and looked up Haiti and learned that it’s part of an island not too far out in the ocean from the United States. The island is shaped like a crawling insect. I had never heard of such a place, but I noticed something as I read: People in Haiti practice voodoo. I had heard of that. Clarence and Cassie, voodoo people?
I read more. I read about serpent worship, spells and incantations, charms, gris-gris and zombies--the walking dead. I felt chilled. Clarence and Cassie, doing these things? Then I thought, what does Clarence mean when he sings about going down by the river? Why wont he show me?
March 3, 1923
Mother arranged to have me play with a girl down the street. She's a sour little girl that loves her doll collection and is selfish with it, besides. I miss my friends in Chicago. Nobody talks funny there. No funny words Like grits or y’all. I wanted to go outside and play, but the little girl said it was too cold. It was 72 degrees today! They have a cook too, just like us, but the girl talks badly to her.
The gardener came in the back door with a dead snake hanging from a rake. He had found it in the yard and killed it. He said it was a water moccasin. He said a water moccasin bite was lethal. Its skin glistened. Its belly was white. It dangled limply from the rake
"Where did it come from?" I asked.
"They come up from the river," he said. "Snakes live in the river.," he said. The gardener took the snake home with him. The book at the library said they use snakes in voodoo.
March 5, 1923
My family was getting ready to go to church. Cassie ironed my dress in the kitchen. Clarence rocked on a wooden chair in a corner. "Do you and Clarence go to church?" I asked her.
"And Clarence’s daddy too," she said. Just not where you go." She laughed. "We go over in Treme. That’s where a lot of us folks live." Us folks, she said.
I asked her what they did in their church. She said they did the same kind of things you do in any church. Clarence balanced on his chair and smiled. She gave me my dress. It was warm from the ironing. I stepped behind the pantry door and slipped it on. "You look real nice now," Cassie said.
"Could I go to church where you go, in Treme?" I said.
Cassie said that was no place for a little girl like me to be going and not to worry my head about things like that. Why was it no place for a girl like me if they did the same kinds of things that we do? It sounded mysterious.
March 10, 1923
I decided to follow Clarence. If he was catching snakes for their voodoo church over in Treme, I wanted to know about it. One day Clarence came and dropped off the groceries for Cassie. I asked where he was going, and he said he was going over to the river. That was my opportunity.
Clarence left through the back gate and moved nimbly through the yards. He headed south, toward where the banks of the river lay. I couldn’t keep up as he ran through hedgerows and over fences. I lost him.
I didn’t want to give up. My curiosity was too strong. This was too strange. I had gone from North Shore Chicago normalness to a place where they play with snakes and commune with the walking dead.
I stumbled through the swamps and sloughs that clung to the river edge. And then I heard singing. I heard Clearance’s song:
in the spring and summer,
Daddy works all day
workin’ hard
never have no fun
winter time,
it’s time to play
we go down by the river
He was just ahead in some thick brush. I could catch him in his snake worship if I just stayed quiet. I crept, and crept, and then leapt through the bushes.
"Where are the voodoo snakes?" I yelled.
Clarence screamed and threw down the object in his hands and just about fell in the river himself. "There goes my fishing pole," he said. "You sure like to sneak up on people, don't you?"
He was fishing. No mystery. No snakes. Just fishing. I didn’t understand why he didn’t ever want me to go with him outside the garden if he was just fishing. I asked him why.
And he said to me. "It’s on account of your white, and I aint. People wouldn’t like it.
"What people?"
"Lots of people on both sides. Momma and Daddy can’t risk no trouble when jobs is scarce like nowadays." I suppose I understood. But I didn’t like it. Then he asked why I went and scared him with the voodoo snake talk. I lied and said I thought it would be funny.
March 15, 1923
I was in the kitchen today, watching Cassie make a lunch of cold roast beef, butter-bread and canned peaches. Clarence was balancing on a chair the way he likes to do. "Clarence said you gave him quite a scare the other day," Cassie said. "Talkin’ snakes and such." I told her I was sorry.
She said maybe she and my mother could have a talk and see if Clarence and I could go outside the garden together. I was glad.
I told her again I was sorry for thinking she and Clarence would have anything to do with snake rituals and voodoo.
Then she said, "Well, nobody exactly said that. Now you two go out in the garden while I get your lunch ready. That tree out there is really starting to flower real nice."
I wondered just what exactly she meant, but right then it didn’t really seem to matter. Clarence and I walked outside. I looked about at the new buds on the flowers that bordered the walkway and then up into a brilliant white shower of magnolia blossoms.
