Writing Home

I don't much care for literary projects intended to pay posthumous tribute. "Give me my roses while I'm living," my grandfather is quoted as having habitually told his daughters. And I quite agree. Much as he prided himself in both the care and devotion of his four girls, evidently he did not count on it. For one of the things for which Grandpapa Lùc is best remembered is having grown his own garden of rather exquisite roses.

Recently though, I read an interview with a friend in an online literary journal. The friend has been dead some years now and the interview, published posthumously, was part of an issue dedicated to him. In it, he spoke, as he often did, about how difficult it was to become a writer coming from a background where literary pursuit was deemed a waste of time and energy. It was all about how, hating his friends and family and hometown for their ignorance and lack of progressive politics, he'd had to go clear to New York to find a group of like-minded people with whom he could identify and try to learn to write about things that mattered.

I was thoroughly primed to discount the piece altogether, only to end by liking it far better than I could have expected. It is a curious piece. Curious in the way that museum shows are curious. In the way that my Great-aunt Katherine's bric-a-brac and what-not cases were curious to me as a child. Objects from a past barely hinted at in contemporary lived experience.

I guess it's just the fact that I came along in an altogether different era, or perhaps with a different personality and set of attitudes about work shaped by an altogether different upbringing. For instance, I don't ever recall needing a sense of belonging to a group of like-minded people doing like-minded work. Nor do I recall ever having been made to feel that writing was in any way odd. On the contrary, the very first time I declared publicly that writing was what I wanted to do I got immediate support and advice and recommendations of things to read and to do.

It was an assigned essay for Ms. Larré's seventh grade English class. And in addition to the carefully penned words of encouragement she wrote at the end of my paper, Ms. Larré came and spoke with me at the beginning of the next class and offered me a special pass to go and use the library at any time, which I gladly accepted and immediately put to use. More important, however, was the fact that at home, creative output was considered perfectly normal. It was expected.

My brother Lawrence, who had and still has a great love of ancient world history, drew and sketched and had a deep interest in maps. As a pre-teenaged boy he spent hours poring over old texts, studying and copying maps and following the development of kingdoms and empires over their multiple wars, rises and falls. Except for the usual hanging out and roughhousing with neighborhood friends, he had little patience for athletics of any kind. He spent the better part of his time in libraries and haunting the secondhand bookshops along Magazine Street. By the time he was twelve, he knew every old and rare books dealer in the city by name as well as by special and general collection. By thirteen or fourteen, he was already collecting, trading and selling books the way other boys traded baseball cards. If our Mother needed for some reason to punish him, she had only to take away his library card. I recall that our Grandmother Alberta would sometimes sneak the card to him along with extra carfare if he promised to hide carefully whatever books he did bring home.

His favorite hiding place was under the house, near the very front, way up under the front porch section. In those days, New Orleans houses were built up on piers because of the routine flooding expected not only with hurricanes...