It was a gorgeous and chilly fall evening on Saturday, and Halloween night at our house passed happily. I really enjoy Halloween these days, even if that hasn't always been the case.
The numerous fairy princesses and vampires who visited us Saturday night were as precious and cute as they could be as they shyly whispered "twickotweet" and held out their plastic pumpkins.
If you were a small child and you came to our house on Saturday, you were overserved and are probably just now coming down from your sugar high. We loaded up on the good stuff (Snickers and M&Ms mostly, but bubble gum and lollipops were also on offer) and we let the kids take as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted from the big fully-loaded basket I held out to them. Even though I told the children to take whatever they wanted and even encouraged them to take more, they restrained themselves and each politely took only two, or at the most three, pieces of candy from the basket.
Almost all of the little ghouls and goblins were accompanied by one or both of their parents who hung back while their little ones bravely climbed the steps to our front door. More often than not, when I opened the door, I was briefly blinded as the proud dad or mom took a candid shot of their costumed little ones foraging for sugar.
I knew Darth Vader when he showed up, but I failed to recognize most of the other action figures, since my knowledge of the current pantheon of superheros is woefully incomplete.
I recognized most of the kids and knew some of them by name. They were all from the neighborhood. I knew almost all of the parents, at least by sight, and, after the kids received their goodies and fled the porch, the moms and dads typically approached to exchange pleasantries for a moment or two. I received quite a few words of condolence on the loss of Callie from people in the neighborhood who I see occasionally as we go about our lives but who I speak to only rarely.
Our Suburbingham neighborhood is firmly middle class, but the residents are typically a wee bit on the higher end of the income range. It's a happy hive of worker bees. I love our neighborhood. The brick homes are attractively scattered on the rolling wooded hills. People here take great pride in their homes and care obsessively for lawns best described as "manicured". The last time there was a crime here was never.
It's also a multi-ethnic neighborhood with every race and a number of ethnicities represented in the three hundred or so homes in our development. If any of you out there still harbor images of Alabama as a place that embraces old-style segregation, you are a few decades behind in your thinking. George Wallace, Rosa Parks and Selma are remembered here, but they are mostly remembered as cautionary tales from our history. These days we're still segregated, but our neighborhoods and schools are now segregated in the same way that neighborhoods are in the rest of the country--by income.
My favorite costume of the night was worn by the child of one of our Mexican-American neighbors. The little guy, maybe four or five years old, was a glowing skeleton looking like something straight out of an El Dia de los Muertos celebration, and he really was kind of spooky.
One father, a good guy who lives on the next street over, came by with his two little ones. His adorable five year old daughter was a precious bride and his chubby three year old boy was a wobbly groom. I oohed and aahed over the kids, and the dad and I chatted for a moment. Just another enjoyable Halloween moment in Suburbingham. I went back to my easy chair and the football game on my television to wait for the next kids to come along. Then it hit me as my thoughts drifted back to other Halloweens. It occured to me just how out-of-place, even inconceivable, that last moment would have been in my not-too-distant past.
To fully grasp the story that follows, you must remember that the parent escorting the wee bride and groom was the dad. You also need to know that this particular dad happens to be African-American, something I hadn't mentioned until now but is relevant to the story.
For the first few years of early marriage, Teri and I lived in the Garden District of New Orleans. This was in the early 90s and the Garden District was all white and very wealthy in a city that was mostly black and very poor. I can't remember a single black resident of the Garden District back then. There were plenty of African-American servants, but no black residents. Mostly this was because the homes in this historic district were large stately mansions, and many of these were handed down through the generations. But I'm sure that old-fashioned racism was at play there too.
When we were first married, Teri and I lived in one of the few buildings in the Garden District that wasn't a home for the upper crust. It was an ancient two story stucco box that had originally been built as an apartment--a very rare shotgun triple. Even though we lived there for something like five years and were great neighbors, the residents of the mansions surrounding our building always treated us as outsiders or tourists who were too far beneath their station to even notice, much less acknowledge. For the entire time we lived there, the lords and ladies of the Garden District never spoke to us--not a smile, not a wave, not even a nod of acknowledgement, and certainly never a friendly word or a casual chat.
In those years on 7th Street, we did get to know the other shunned "outsiders" who passed through our building as tenants in the two other apartments. In fact, we knew them too well, even intimately, as we shared paper-thin walls and floors. There were the wild and crazy Irish nurses upstairs; the huge 'Yat family desperate to move back to Metairie; then there was Mario and Marta, the hard working Honduran immigrants whose family and house painting business grew rapidly during their time there. And then there were the witches. The family of witches really admired our black cat, and, while they lived there, we hid Maggie away from them as Halloween approached.
Halloween night in the Garden District was always a sad one for me. As darkness approached, huge packs of mostly unsupervised kids would flood the neighborhood. Every year we had literally hundreds at our door. The children were virtually all African-American and they came from the poorest and toughest parts of the city to the upper crust Garden District because that's where the candy was. They knew there wasn't a chance of getting any candy in their own poverty-stricken neighborhoods.
Their costumes were very modest, not fancy store bought costumes. And many of the poorest kids wore no costumes at all, just the tattered clothes they had put on that morning. Quite a few of these children were well beyond the age of "normal" trick-or-treaters, and every year more than one would be a mother in her early teens carrying an infant in one arm and a paper bag in the other. Still a child herself, these young mothers were still trick-or-treating for themselves as they went from house to house with their girlfriends who weren't yet moms.
It was heartbreaking.
It was rare to see a real adult accompanying these children and fathers were completely absent. I don't remember ever seeing a dad with these children in our years in the Garden District. One mother, older than the typical teenage mom, pleaded for candy for herself after I had distributed some to all the kids at the door. "She's a crackhead," explained one of the children, perhaps her own daughter, and all of the other children laughed. The woman blushed in embarrassment, but she still wanted the candy.
Just heartbreaking.
Usually they came to the door in small packs, and the kids were extremely aggressive in their hunger for a few lumps of flavored sugar. I quickly learned that you had to be very careful to guard your candy bowl lest one of the older kids try to knock it out of your hands and scatter it on the ground so the pack could quickly scoop it all up and run.
It was getting late in the evening on our first Halloween in New Orleans--an eye-opening night for me. I was completely unprepared and overwhelmed by the number of children who came that night. After running out of what I thought was plenty of candy, I gave each kid who came a handful of pennies from a huge penny jar. This seemed to make them happy. Eventually the knocks at the door became fewer and finally ended altogether.
So when there was another knock at the door, more than an hour after the last trick-or- treater had come by, I resignedly reached for the penny jar and headed for the door more than a little irritated at the further interruption.
I opened the door to four of the cutest transvestites you've ever seen. They "trick-or-treated" me, and we gave them some homemade cookies Teri had just baked. Then Teri snapped the picture you see above. Like me, the picture is pre-digital and has faded a bit over the years, but there I am, the really skinny, dark haired, half-marathoner on the left circa October 1992.
Only in New Orleans.
