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Chapter Eleven: Eshu on The Bayou
- University Press of Mississippi
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155 C H A P T E R E L E V E N ESHU ON THE BAYOU BACK IN 1960, LONG BEFORE ANY IMPERIAL THOUGHTS, WHEN MOM first started working as a lab technician at Tulane University School of Medicine, she put the word out for a housekeeper. A young woman called for an interview, and a time was set for Sunday morning. The appointed hour came and went. Tired of waiting, Mom went fishing. I was home reading. Hours later, there came a knock at the door.When I opened it, I learned that the young African American woman was Earner Sylvain, who had “come for the job.” “Okay.” That was the interview. I was ten years old.Years later, when Earner told me the story of how I had hired her, she added with a cackle that she didn’t meet my mother for three weeks. Mom would leave money on the kitchen counter for the shopping. On the strength of that interview, Earner Sylvain landed a job that lasted forty-two years, the only job she ever had. In addition to becoming the best of my mother-surrogates (alongside Mom’s waitresses), Earner was also an important—though little-known and never recognized—factor in Mom’s growing empire. Like my mother, Earner came from the country—Edgard, Louisiana, in St. John the Baptist Parish, about the same distance upriver as Happy Jack is down. Edgard is just above Boutte, where Louis Armstrong’s parents ESHU ON THE BAYOU 156 were born. Her name is pronounced “Earn-ah,” but she was indeed the “earner”in her family. She lived with four generations of Sylvains under the roof that my mother later helped her purchase on Arts Street near Elysian Fields and not far from Desire. Earner started very early to produce children , each with a different man. But mens, she would say, who needs ’em? And Sylvain: she is well named, a hardworking nymph of the primal cypress forests. Though I don’t think nymphs cackle and guffaw quite like Earner, or prefer wigs to doing their hair, or sometimes forget to put in their false teeth. Earner was my mother’s girl Friday. She cleaned house, cooked dinner, and ran errands. For eight years, until I went to college, it was Earner who made tuna sandwiches, with egg (how I liked it) and with sweet relish (how she liked it) on doughy, white Sunbeam bread, which, back then, we all liked. I would urge the addition of bacon, a luxury she sometimes indulged. Earner would tease me about the empty plates I’d leave under the bed, too engrossed by my French and Russian novels to bus them to the kitchen. When Mom got tired of cooking the steaks on Monday,Vontel’s day off, Earner took her place.When someone on the line was out, Earner stepped in. When Mom got tired of paying for the restaurants’ linen service, she bought a double-roller mangle. Earner washed and ironed the tablecloths and napkins in the dark hallway on Seville Drive. When that operation couldn’t keep up with her growing empire—four restaurants in New Orleans alone—Mom built a complete laundry in her new house behind the restaurant and hired workers to run it. Earner graduated from ironing to toting the linens around town in the white Nissan station wagon Miz Ruth bought for her. With the restaurant now adjacent to the house she kept, Earner was always running next door. The restaurant’s walk-in coolers and storerooms became her larder and pantry where she would “make groceries,” as we say in New Orleans, translating the French faire les courses. Butter, milk and eggs, potatoes and broccoli—all within easy reach. The restaurant’s salad station was a cornucopia with a panoply of house-made dressings: fresh-made chunky blue cheese, garlicky remoulade, paprika-laden French, Italian, and Thousand Island with relish and lots of minced egg (the recipe, which makes five gallons, called for ten dozen). If I was dining with them, I was the designated salad maker, a role I delighted in. I would go next door with a big bowl and come back usually with a chef salad larded with artichoke hearts, chopped hard-boiled egg, Creole tomatoes, asparagus spears, [3.144.189.177] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 14:12 GMT) ESHU ON THE BAYOU 157 shrimp boiled in Zatarain’s Crab and Shrimp Boil,“fatigued...