Taking a Ride

Sandra Hayward-Jones
EVWP Summer 2009


We did not own a car until I was in the fourth grade. Actually, my mom didn’t learn to drive until then, which would have been around 1965, and she would have been about 36 years old. Although she taught school in the neighboring parish about 15 miles away, she and other co-workers who did not own cars took a bus to the intersection of Tulane and Carrollton, where another teacher picked up the carpoolers. In the 1960s, I don’t think the term “carpooling” had been coined, nor was it done with concerns for the local environment.

I’m not sure what finally convinced my mom to buy a car, but she finally got a 1965 or 1966 Mercury Comet. It was gray in shade, and believe it or not, air conditioning was considered an option! And my mother, on a budget obviously, chose to forego that option! In Louisiana humidity and heat, no less! But interestingly enough, I don’t recall the heat, just the fact that we now had transportation for the limited trips we took.

Limited, as in local. Neither my mom nor my grandmother ventured beyond the borders of the Greater New Orleans area. My mom at that time worked in Kenner, a stone’s throw from the airport. She often bragged about her driving prowess and declared her excuse for needing r&r: “I just bucked aside those diesel trucks on the highway!” As an adult 20-plus years later traversing Airline Highway, I could not figure out what the big deal was. The Airline is a two-lane on each side stretch of road with a neutral ground separating the road (I learned later from a USAToday article about an upcoming Super Bowl that Louisiana is the only place that refers to median strips as neutral grounds, but that’s another story for another day). It was hardly a drag strip nor did it come close to a California freeway. But my mom needed a valid reason for crashing once she got home from teaching third graders five days a week, teaching piano lessons on Saturday, and her off-and-on position as a church organist on Sundays.

My grandmother left the southwest Louisiana community of Franklin in 1925, never to return. I could not understand how anyone could leave their hometown and never go back. From time to time a cousin would come to New Orleans and visit us, but my grandmother, Tottie, as I always called her, had no desire to go back. Distance was not an issue: Franklin is probably 110 miles away to the west. Greyhound buses go past daily. But in my adult reflection, I suspect there were childhood memories and events that were best left alone.

When she did refer to her childhood, Tottie spoke of hard times, working in the fields, living with various aunts and cousins as her mother abandoned her and her two brothers, remarried and “had a good time”. I know that Tottie resented not having the opportunities of higher education. She bragged about the eighth grade education she had, that she felt was equivalent to much higher education in the 1960s. People she went to school with learned to cook and sew and you knew your time tables by a certain age.

Although Tottie had only an eighth grade education, she was hardly illiterate. I credit my passion for newspaper reading to her: we always had the daily paper delivered to us, and Tottie read it cover to cover. She could tell you not only about President Nixon and Watergate, for instance, but who had a baby, who bought a marriage license, who lost their homes, who’d recently mortgaged their homes. Tottie may have been a homebody, but she was neither isolated or lonely. When she was not doing her daily household chores, you would find her on the telephone giving legal advice to women ranging in ages from their 20s to those of her age. People sought advice from Tottie on protecting their property, or seeking assistance for their children when the parents were not married. She knew a lot about a lot of things, but was never quite comfortable in the presence of what she considered “educated people”.

She’d educated my mother on a paltry income. Somehow she managed to have long-standing jobs through the years that were unusual, given the social climate of the time. In the 1930s and 1940s, she worked for an Italian portrait artist whose studio was on Royal Street in the French Quarter. I’d just always heard she’d “worked” for him, and that he taught her to paint in oils. To this day her scenes of French Quarter courtyards grace the walls of my relatives coast to coast. But a conversation I had with her in the 1990s revealed to me she had been his cook/maid. She’d never called herself that, but just assumed I knew what her role had been.

When I was in the fourth grade, about the same time my mom bought her first car, Tottie decided to go back to work after being “retired” for about 10 years. At this time she was in her 60s, and she worked three days a week in the office of Dr. Stewart. She had no formal training as a dental assistant, but had worked previously in the 1950s for another dentist, who recommended her services to Dr. Stewart.

My mom and I would drive to Dr. Stewart’s office in the afternoons to pick Tottie up. We’d go a little early and parked in front the office. The office was located on St. Claude Avenue, about five blocks from the Industrial Canal, the body of water that links the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. It also separates the Ninth Ward; we were on the opposite end of the Lower Ninth Ward so much heard about after Hurricane Katrina. As I reflect back on the neighborhood of the 1960s, obviously not too much, if any, changes from the civil rights movement had occurred. The nearby high school, Francis T. Nicholls, was named for a Confederate hero. Twenty-some years later the Orleans Parish School Board renamed all schools named after Confederate heroes and replaced them with names of black heroes. Nicholls is now Frederick Douglass High School. But circa 1965, Nicholls High School stood a few blocks away. I recall us driving past businesses, in particular a laundromat on St. Claude Avenue, with a “whites only” sign in the window.

It was not this outward sign of segregation that perturbed me, but the covert ones, recognizable to me in spite of my young age of nine or ten. Dr. Stewart, highly regarded in local societal circles, who lived in the tony Garden District section of the city (think Windsor Farms in Richmond), was king of a local Carnival parade organization (only the elite wealthy are afforded this distinction), owner of a Bonanza Steakhouse franchise, hired my grandmother as his dental assistant, a black woman, but on general principle did not accept black people as patients. I recognized this as highly irregular, to say the least, but I understood even then that one could not easily change the status quo. As Tottie made dental appointments, one of her duties was to ascertain if the caller was black or white. I’m not sure exactly what she said to the caller if she thought they were black. I’m not even sure what happened if a black person showed up at the office for an appointment. But Dr. Stewart, bless his heart, worked on my mom’s and my teeth once as a courtesy. Now as I think about it, maybe it was his day off or something, because I don’t think there were any patients in the office that particular day.

That Mercury Comet drove my family around intact only as long as Tottie worked. Otherwise, we could not get Tottie into the car. As feisty a person as she was, she never learned to drive, but traversed the streets by bus, either to go shopping downtown on Canal Street or to Gentilly to a supermarket aptly named the Economical.

My mom and I, on the other hand, spent time together in the Comet, replaced later by a 1970-something forest green Ford Granada. Every Saturday was spent at church for Youth Choir rehearsal, which my mom directed. We may have stopped for lunch at the newly built Burger King, Church’s or Popeye’s (and my mom later would go into any McDonald’s and proceed to order a Whopper). On Sundays she and I would take a ride, which meant cruising along the lakefront and on to New Orleans East, where we admired new construction homes and oohed and aahed. These homes were a stark contrast to our five-room shotgun house.

Fast forward to 1995. I was summoned to New Orleans. You have to do something. My mom had suffered a stroke in 1981, which affected her short-term memory but not her ability to play classical piano, and Tottie was her caretaker. Tottie, now in her 80s, was beginning to show signs of senility. I went to New Orleans with my nephew to help me so I could literally kidnap them and bring them to Richmond. My mom was not the problem; she’d go along with anything. But how to distract Tottie, the homebody, so I could make arrangements for their absence, pack up their clothes, and bring them to Virginia?

Somehow I was able to take Tottie and my mom in my rental car to my aunt’s house for a visit. That was easy; the day of the flight was not as simple. I finally used Shoney’s as the carrot to get them out the house, insisting we needed to go somewhere together for breakfast. However, Tottie did rant and rave before we left, threatening to call the police and her lawyer. We eventually, with my nephew’s calm demeanor and ability to pick up a less than 5 feet tall, 90 pound lady and put her in the car, got to Shoney’s, and later to the airport.

My mom and grandma sat in the waiting area, discussing what bus they needed to take to get back home. They thought they were simply seeing me off. When our flight was called, I said, Come on. My mom was like, I’m going with you? Yes! She was excited. I held my breath, hoping Tottie would not embarrass me by cussing everybody out.

So that’s how I got them to Virginia. There were adjustments to be made on all fronts. I had to arrange for them to live in an assisted-living facility. My children loved having their grandmother and great-grandmother here. My mom drove me crazy with noting only fast-food restaurants as we drove down the street (“McDonald’s…Hardees…Wendy’s”), which prompted Tottie to shout “Shut up Audrey, all you think about is eating”. Tottie’s reaction whenever we drove through the modern, suburban neighborhood I lived in, was to ask, “Colored people live here?” which she always asked in disbelief. Tottie resented no longer being in charge (“I was the boss, now here you are the boss”), to which I replied “Trust me, I would not be the boss if I had the choice”.

Riding alone now as I drive through Richmond, I can’t help but remember life with the VIPs (my nickname for them). Tottie lived to the ripe age of 95, passing away the week before 9/11. My mom suffered a mini-stroke that December of 2001, from which she never recovered, and she was laid to rest the next April. Both were returned to their beloved New Orleans.