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The Boys in the Bands |
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utmost seriousness. "A Creole is a mixture of Spanish and white and must talk French. Now they are folks will say they Creole, but they ain't. You take in the Seventh and Eighth Wards, we are Creoles, mostly, from way back, but you go on across Elysian Fields into the Ninth Ward and the people over there call themselves Creoles, but they're black and they got bad hair. They're from the country.
"Of course, they speak the language—speak French, but what does that prove? If you learn Italian, it don't make no Italian out of you. You catch my point? They're different from us. They don't have no education; maybe only been to school two or three years and fust barely know their ABC's. And you don't see none of them fair like my niece. She's a real lady— so fair you wouldn't know—isn't that right?"
I thought of the girl, her creamy face heavy with scorn for her somewhat darker little uncle. She had barely turned from the television set in the plushy living room where Paul had dragged me to prove his policy-making brother's prosperity.
"And she's got a good education, too," added Paul, very humbly. "You see, we Downtown people, we try to be intelligent. Everybody leam a trade, like my daddy was a cigarmaker and so was I. All us people try to get an easy job that our education qualifies us for. We try to bar jail. . . . Uptown, cross Canal yonder, they used to jail," he chuckled with real malice.
"There's a vast difference here in this town. Uptown folk all ruffians, cut up in the face and Jive on the river. All they know is—get out on the levee and truck cotton—be longshoremen, screwmen. And me, I ain't never been on the river a day in my lifer
Paul's heart was in this. Canal Street had been the dividing line between two worlds in Negro New Orleans. As long as you stayed on the Downtown side, you were "not just another Negro," but if you crossed Canal you "carried brickbats and all forms of ammunition." The line was felt to divide. |
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