Saturday afternoon, August 11
“Hi, my name is Cathy. But everyone around here calls me Granny, so that’s Granny to you.”
That was Catherine Kahn, A.K.A. Granny. My friend Jim from Lafayette had set up a meeting with his wife Katie’s grandmother. Today she turned 82, and while she might have looked like the definition of Granny, what with her permed white-gray hair and height that came to a solid foot below me, she was as sharp as a razor. Her voice was difficult to place. I was told by people in Lafayette that folks in New Orleans sound different, and that they often sound like they’re from New York. I think that is true, and Cathy is a perfect example. Her pronunciation is like a Manhattan Jew, but her cadence and tone was born, bred and taught which fork to use in New Orleans. It was a mix of two voices which belonged to two specific people in two specific places.
Cathy has gained, from what I understand, a great deal of notoriety in New Orleans. The Jewish Women’s Archive says she has served as the “archivist at the Touro Infirmary, the oldest private hospital in New Orleans.” She’s also the “President of the Southern Jewish Historical Society and on the boards of the Museum of the Southern Jewish Experience and Temple Sinai.” And as if she needed any more qualifications, she has also spent “many years in the manuscripts division of the Historical New Orleans Collection, where she held every position from registrar to curator.” (All info found in the link above or here).
To put it short, Granny is one of the last words on Jewish culture in New Orleans. She is also a poodle enthusiast. I say enthusiast, it probably would not be too bold (it may not be bold enough) to say that she is a poodle expert. She had pictures and art of poodles everywhere: from coasters and dish towels, to watercolors and a guidebooks. At my feet, a little black curly ball of fur she called a teacup poodle was very interested in my shoes. Jim had told her a little about my trip, and she definitely remembered about John Steinbeck, but she remembered Charley more. I’m sure that if she had wanted to, and if I had had a picture, she could have classified his exact breed.
Jim, Katie and I wandered out into the garden while Granny (and yes, I’ll call her Granny) tended to some things inside. She lived in a modest-sized house only a stone’s throw away from Tulane University. This area was a far-cry from where I had been only an hour earlier. Here were the older, more educated and liberal New Orleanians, and thereby the richer. Of course I don’t want to, in any way, insinuate that one part of town is better or worse than the other. I can only comment on what I saw and try to be as unbiased with myself as I can.
After we had done a little catching up and talking about New Orleans and my trip, we stepped back inside to meet with Granny. It was great to actually sit and talk to people, though I felt that I was tripping over my words. When driving and traveling, it’s very easy to fall into deep, deep thought, which is generally traded for basic brain function. So if you are to speak to people after existing in that frame of mind for an extended period of time, none of the words seem to come out right or sound like they usually do. And we wonder why some homeless people talk to themselves. Spend a week on the road, alone, and see what kind of conversations you have in your head.
But, with or without words, we sat. We sat in her hazelnut-crème living room under a wall of old, framed maps of the New Orleans coast, the Caribbean Islands and others. Civil War soldiers sat frozen in photos on the sidetable, and Granny took her seat across from me with an oblong cherry wood table between us. The words came from Granny, and being a good Southern boy, I listened.
She handed an iPad to Katie who sat on a couch with Jim beside her: “Look up Google while I tell him about the Frantz school. In fact, Norman Rockwell did a painting about that.”
We had already been discussing the integration during 1960 earlier, and Cathy Kahn knows how to cut right to the chase. Her voice.
“Yeah, that’s The Problem We All Live With, right?” I asked.
“Yes it is.”
“Cause her name was Ruby, right?”
“Ruby. Yes indeed, you’re right, you’re right on. At the same time that that was going on, Newman school was going out looking for bright, black kids to get them to come in. Of course they picked a fine basketball player, they’re not nuts.”
We laughed because she was probably right. She was referring to actor and writer, Harold Sylvester. Cathy said the Newman school was a private school with Jewish money that had started as a children’s home but had developed a reputation for giving a good education. The fact that Newman school was working on integrating at the same time as the Frantz school said something to Cathy about the demographics.
“When you’re looking and seeing pictures of Frantz School you can see some of the white women had their hair rolled up in curlers,” Cathy said. “Does that tell you what kind of a background they come from?”
It did, and I had noticed that. If not in curlers, they had their hair tied back with a kerchief or pinned down tight. They all looked like mothers who had just run out of the house in time to protest. Only younger, teen protesters in the pictures I saw had something that resembled a style.
“Yeah, okay, and they’re screaming at these little girls, and we were so horrified… I can tell you that white uptowners were down there trying to stop it. And my cousin George Dreyfous got kicked in the stomach and had to go to the hospital.”
Dreyfous was also the president of the Louisiana Civil Liberties Union. While I couldn’t find evidence of assault, he was definitely heckled by protesters when he came to the school to make sure everything okay. More than that, when the Board of Education cut funding to the two integrated schools in a last-ditch effort to keep them segregated, Dreyfous and several other prominent individuals cut checks from their own private accounts in order to pay the teachers and keep the lights on.
“New Orleans is a foreign city, but it’s in a Southern state,” Cathy said.
Cathy said that the history and the way the cultures have blended have generally allowed for tolerance.
“New Orleans is overly tolerant of a lot of things,” she said. “Crooked politicians, lax police… Potholes. Hurricanes. We’re very tolerant and include in that: live and let live.”
“But it hasn’t always been that way,” I said, skeptical.
“Always,” she said. I had barely finished my sentence.
“Really? Except for the, like you said, the lower class whites. The ones who were less educated?”
“Yes. Even in the uptown public schools, it didn’t happen. It’s down with the uneducated, intolerant people who were resentful to begin with. Blacks getting their jobs, maybe. It never ends.”
“It’s a shame that Frantz school is the most memorable image of integration in New Orleans,” Cathy went on. “And it was that and down in Plaquemines Parrish with Leander Perez, and maybe up in the Bible Belt part of the state—the non-Creole, the non-French part of the state.”
“The Mississippi side?” I asked.
“The Mississippi, Arkansas, Texas side—I don’t know that there was much to-do in Cajun country. They’re pretty easy going.”
Katie mentioned that the Cajuns might have had an easier time with integration and harmonious living because of the way the education system imposed itself on their own culture and language. In the early 20th century, there were still many Cajuns in the Lafayette and New Iberia areas that spoke only French. The schools, from what Katie and Cathy said, were fairly brutal in breaking the Cajuns of their language.
“That was something I was going to ask,” I ventured, “just to correct the terminology… now, Creole—”
“I knew it.” Cathy said, and we all laughed. She had been waiting for this one.
“There are so many definitions of creole. Okay. There’s Creole Jamaica. There’s Creole cooking. But when you get to people, okay, there is Creole of Color, and around here it was hyphenated as Creole-of-Color. Because Creole in New Orleans meant “white of European ancestry.” French and Spanish. I don’t think any Germans could be called ‘Creole.’ Our earliest immigrants were the French and the Spanish. And those were the Creoles.”
“So when you say that somebody is Cajun, then?” I asked.
“That’s different. Entirely. That’s a whole different ball game. I’ll turn it over to you.” Cathy gestured to Katie.
“Cajun is specifically people who came from Acadie, who were French, who were residing in Canada, but then were kicked out when the British took over Canada. And then there’s a whole diaspora where they dropped off all along the coast. And a lot of them were dropped off in Louisiana—a very inhospitable place. And then the brunt of them—well, a lot of them anyway—kind of trickled down here.”
“So Cajun and Acadiana are the same thing?”
“Cajuns are in Acadiana, and–” She paused and looked to her grandmother. “I don’t know what the word is for the people who live in Acadie.”
“Nova Scotians!” Cathy said.
Silence. Oh. Right. Laughter.
—————————————
Our conversation rambled and wandered from family to politics to history, and all with culture interwoven between. She told one family account that I thought was particularly interesting. As I’ve said previously, I didn’t want this trip to become a huge commentary on race relations in the South. I’m not qualified for such a responsibility, and what does that even mean anyway? “Race relations in the South.” Either way, since Steinbeck encountered the racism and hate that made him leave the South in New Orleans, it is fitting that race be a topic of importance.
“Sicily Island is up river on the Louisiana side, opposite Vicksburg,” Cathy began. “The Vicksburg side is nice and high, and the Louisiana side is a swamp. This whole group of Russian Jews came over here, and my ancestors and all my family friends’ ancestors decided they didn’t want those little Russian Jews running up and down Canal Street breaking up their Mardi Gras balls and things. So they set up the Sicily Island agricultural utopia, and I’ll quote from their wonderful annals: ‘In our garden of Eden, there were only the snakes.’
“They came back with malaria and yellow fever. And then they were quarantined here. Even the ones that weren’t sick were quarantined. Nobody can be as anti-Semitic as a classically reformed French or German Jew,” Cathy said. We laughed, but there was weight behind it.
“I’m kinda embarrassed that I have to say that my ancestor, Felix Dreyfous, is one of the ones who sent them down there,” Cathy admitted.
“Is Felix related to the guy that got kicked in the stomach?” I asked.
“Yes, that was his son. They were much more tolerant about—I can tell you this, absolutely—they were crusaders of black integration, but they would have nothing to do with Russian Jews.”
“That’s really interesting,” I said.
“That is interesting. In fact, I should write a paper about that some time,” she chuckled.
She went on to tell another story about her relatives in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In her family, the story had been passed down that her great-great-great-grandfather had been gravely wounded in the siege of Vicksburg but recovered and was considered, from my estimation, fairly heroic. At a dinner party one evening, Cathy’s father Leon asked his cousin, a historian, to tell the story of how his ancestor had been shot.
“Leon, are you sure?” Cathy impersonated her relative.
“Of course!” Her voice grew deep and cocky.
“Well,” she said, “He was shot by a Confederate farmer stealing chickens.”
Again, the conversation ranged from why they are all of French heritage but all have red hair and icy green-blue eyes, to the fact that one half of Granny’s family is as ugly as sin. We had been talking for well over an hour and our conversations had broken up when she stole a glance at her watch and addressed us all at once.
“The sun is over the yardarm, gentlemen and ladies — could I make you a drink?”
Pause. It was a little after 3:00. Pause.
“What… what kinda drinks are we talking?” Katie asked.
“What do you mean what kind of drinks are we talking? What kind of drink do you want?” We all laughed again as she listed off an arsenal of spirits and an off-the-cuff list of cocktails.
Gin and tonic for Katie. When she got to me, I froze for a moment. I didn’t want to be the jackass to order Jack and Coke, and I didn’t want to be boring and just order whiskey straight.
“Geez, I’m not sure. I’ll have the most New Orleanian thing you can make me.”
“Sazerac.” No hesitation. Jim has one as well, and even Granny treated herself. Happy Birthday to her.
My new favorite drink.
I wish I could put her recipe on here. She made it very clear that they don’t make Sazeracs like the one I had anywhere on Bourbon Street, and if I could even find a good place (on Bourbon Street or otherwise) I would have to pay for it. I believe it, too. It was delicious. Something about the way the absinthe blends with the rye made the drink dangerously easy to drink. And I don’t know if that sun was way past the yardarm or if it’s New Orleans custom, but Granny has a hell of a heavy hand.
We sat and sipped Sazeracs or gin, and finally Katie and her Granny had a chance to catch up. They discussed familial going-ons and a couple of Granny’s apparent suitors who she may or may not have been kicking to the curb.
We sipped until the blood flowed easy to our faces and the laughter flowed easier. The sun started to turn the crème walls gold, and I felt it was time for me to go. It was her birthday after all, and they had been gracious enough to let me stay this long. I said my goodbyes, thanked them profusely and went off to find my hotel.
Limb of the Nation 