Arts & Style

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There were 11 girls and 5 boys. They were all individual births. No twins. There was a span of close to 40 years between the oldest and youngest sibling. Closest to me is my sister who is three years older. Everyone else was about two years apart. My mother was 47 when she had me.

My sister is going to be 90 next month. My oldest sister was the superintendent in the Baton Rouge schools and a principal. She died a few years ago at 99. My sister Elyse is in a retirement home now. She was a doctor. She went to Howard University Medical School when she was 18. Carol is now deceased. She taught music. My sister Jocelyn retired from the school system in New Orleans. Pretty much everybody works or worked in New Orleans.

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My father delivered mail in the Garden District, in the area where they had all these rich, rich, rich people. We grew up, even in a segregated society, being exposed to white people. Some people at Tulane University did a study on my dad and concluded this man is a genius, just born before his time. He was very extensively well read. I knew how to read before I went to school, and my dad taught me to read out of the Bible. If you can read out of the Bible, you can read anything.

He taught us about history, about Gandhi. We read poetry.

We had dinner at 6 o’clock. Everybody, no matter what you had to do, you were at the dinner table at 6 o’clock. After dinner, each one of the kids had to go to the front of the table and say one new word you learned that day, spell it, tell what it meant, use it in a sentence. Instead of watching television, we read, we played music, we had conversations.