One of the Bayou Street favorites was the ebullient Melanie Marx, a remarkable creature of endless energy, enthusiasm, and sheer good humor. A prankster, a punster, a puncturer of pomposity. I remember, when I was very small, the first time I saw her. She had a handful of Lilliputian zinnias, a form new at the time. “Did you
ever
see such colors?” she cried, rushing up the front steps. I was under the swing, making something out of matchboxes. “Just
look
!”
I hope that’s the phrase engraved on her tombstone, blessed lady. “Just
look
!”
Miss Minnie J. Cox was another character. She always wore black, black. Black hat and a walking stick. And she always had some tale of woe. She’d come by saying, “Well, say a little prayer for Miss Minnie J. Cox.” She’d tell her tale of woe, and then she’d leave to go tell the neighbors on the other side. She’d say, “Well, say a little prayer for Miss Minnie J. Cox,” as she’d leave.
There was the most effective telegraphy system from porch to porch. Two Model Ts could bump in Bienville Square, and in ten minutes that news would have reached Spring Hill. Who had crashed into who in Bienville Square.
“Oooo, Miss Annie, did you hear?”
“What’s that?”
“Bienville Square! Judge So-and-so ran into the back of that lawyer’s new Model T, right there in Bienville Square!”
She’s on her way with some fresh eggs to the lady next door, who’s in bed with fever, and over the back fence she says, “Tell Miss So-and-so that Judge So-and-so busted into So-and-so’s new Model T right there in Bienville Square.”
Downtown to Spring Hill in ten minutes. And that’s how they did hurricane news, too.
*
For me, every morning on the front porch was Carnival. There was a passing parade of street vendors and peddlers of all kinds pushing their wagons and carts down Conti Street. Their cries would fill the air. You have to remember, there were no sounds of radio. No sounds of television. There simply was no racket. Between passing cars, a silence fell that would only be broken by certain wonderful sounds, like the cries of the street vendors.
“Got the good sweet melonnnnnnnnnnnnnnns!”
“Corn! Corn! Too sweet to eat!”
“Snap beans that snap themselves. Soft and tender!” “Waterme-e-e-e-e-e-lonnnnnns! Ripe just right! Ripe just right!”
The oysterman came down the street with his pushcart full of ice and oysters covered by a great burlap flap that smelled part wet dog and part rowboat, an umbrella on a pole quaking over all. His cry was the best of all.
“Oy-oy-oy-oy-ster-man, manny-man, manny-man, manny-man! Get your fresh oy-oy-oy-oy-oy-sters man, manny-man, manny-man, manny-man!” You’d hear all these cries from every direction. Gershwin did a little bit of it in
Porgy and Bess.
It was just heaven. We used to rush down to the curb just to hear it.
If you wanted to serve crawfish, you called some of the little po’ boys in the neighborhood. Ma-Ma would call and she’d say, “Now day after tomorrow I want four dozen crawfish.” Broad Street had a ditch down the middle then for the crawfish. And those po’ boys would deliver them. See, everything was mixed together. I mean, people who were wealthy, people who were modestly endowed, people who were working hard, people who didn’t have anything, and blacks, who were servants. They were all sort of mixed up in downtown Mobile. Miss Minnie J. Cox had a huge house on Broad Street. Sitting in this avenue of oaks, you know. Facing the ditch. And then next to her was a ship captain who wasn’t anywhere as well-off as she was. Then a block away on the other side of Spring Hill Avenue were all tiny little houses of black servants, who only walked a couple of blocks to work. So it was all social classes and colors together. And if you wanted crawfish, you just called the little po’ boys.
The lightwood man who sold pine knots for the stove and fireplace sang out, “Liiiiiid-ud! Get yo’ liiiiiid-ud!” These were oily pine knots for starting fires in stoves and fireplaces because all you do is put a match to them and they blaze. We had to have them year-round because of that wood-burning iron stove. Then came the iceman. He had a huge wooden truck lined with zinc and filled with huge blocks of ice, pulled by a white horse. He had this bell and you’d hear him from miles away down Conti Street, this tinkle-tonkle, tinkle-tonkle, tinkle-tonkle. It was hanging on a little loop of iron, and he’d pull this little rope. The icebox was on the back porch, and it was this huge oak chest with another oak chest inside lined with zinc. There was a colored disc one could leave in a window which showed how many pounds of ice were needed that day. The horse-drawn ice wagon would stop at the back gate, and the iceman would saw off the blocks and carry them with his great big iron tongs to the wooden chest on the back porch. Always a drama. Every child for blocks followed the iceman to catch the “snow” which rained down when he sawed the ice. Some ate it right there, others ran home, hands cupped, to put either vanilla or lemon extract on it, or grenadine or molasses.
The country butter lady came in an old Chevrolet with a rumble seat filled with straw baskets full of ice and pats of pale sweet butter wrapped in green leaves. Miz Mimms made a proper entry with much ado and was always invited to sit and rest a moment, have a glass of iced tea, and share those details gleaned from other households. She was a master of gossip and never forgot that “gossip is no good if it doesn’t start from fact,” as Ma-Ma always said.
“I do feel sorry for her living alone,” Miz Mimms would say. “But who owns those men’s socks she hangs on her back porch?”
Tells everything.
Miz Mimms was a real character. She wore a cabbage leaf on her head to protect her from sunstroke. She said it was the only thing that would keep you cool. The sun won’t go through a cabbage leaf. Never boil your brains if you wear a cabbage leaf.
Old black men with sugarcane stalks over their shoulder would come passing by. Children selling cut flowers, stolen from that morning’s funeral wreaths at Magnolia Cemetery. The scissors grinder with his fascinating emery wheel-on-wheels. The pot mender with his bits of lead and solder and strange tools and a spirit lamp. The postman always stopped for a word. Conversations went on, corn was husked, beans hulled or snapped, rice picked over, coffee ground, beads restrung, paper wicks folded for next winter’s fireplaces—somehow a whole world was encompassed, seized, dealt with before noon.
*
A lot of sloppy household stuff was done on the back porch. The back porch had the huge icebox and a series of Xs that held brooms and mops and a dustpan and an ash scoop, and all kinds of household tools. And there was this huge meter box that the meter reader came to read once a month.
And he was a strange character, wearing a cap with a big green celluloid visor. He never said anything. If you said, “Hey, Mr. Meter Man!” he wouldn’t look to left or right. He would just march up onto the back porch and read that meter.
If you had green peas or the first butter beans, you often shelled them on the front porch. But peeling shrimp, or cutting the tips off okra, or husking corn for corn pudding was messy. That was done on the back porch. And then some days my grandmother would just stay in her wrapper till time to dress for lunch. She didn’t want to sit on the front porch. Hot August. She’d have her hair all pulled straight back with eighteen thousand hairpins so not one hair was touching her neck. She had this loose garment of dotted blue swiss that she’d just float around in during really hot weather. With her slop-slop slippers.
One of the moments I can recollect so clearly is reading
Little Nemo,
the comic strip, out of the Sunday
Register
to my grandmother and Rebecca as they sat in these rocking chairs on the back porch, shelling the peas or snapping the beans or husking the corn. I had to describe the action of each frame as well as do the dialogue.
So now Little Nemo is on the deck and he says to Captain Flip, “Well, Cap’n, how long is it going to take to cross this channel?” And Captain says, “Why don’t you climb the riggin’s and see?” Then Little Nemo climbs to the top of the riggings with his telescope and carefully eases back down, and Captain Flip says, “Can you see land?” And Little Nemo says, “I can see land.”
Whenever I read, they used to roar with laughter, and I was always rewarded. That was considered a job.
Then suddenly there might be a silent presence on the back porch. The boboshillies. These were old Indian women from the backwoods. They never knocked. They never cried out. Always dressed in white. They had their hair under a white turban, almost like a nurse or a nun. And sometimes a colored apron with these big pockets that they carried all kinds of things in, like gumbo filé powder, bay laurel leaves, sassafras root. They had all kinds of strange things from the swamps, like powdered this and powdered that. They sold medical, medicinal herbs to black people, things for childbirth, fever, and all that, but I don’t think they sold those to white people. And I was scared of one very old lady who was a boboshilly. I don’t think I ever heard her utter a sound, and she moved like a shadow, completely silent and seemingly weightless. For me, silence was everything frightening. I couldn’t care less about darkness, but silence… My grandmother was fascinated by them. I think she bought gumbo filé, ground sassafras leaves to put in the gumbo. But the boboshillies would never sit and never stay.
*
When the cathedral bells rang eleven o’clock, there was a shuffle of feet, of chairs being pushed back. Everyone on all downtown front porches said in civic unison, “Gettin’ hot, time to go inside.” But during that morning hour, the front porch was the universal agora, the outdoor parlor, the message post, the echoing chamber for countless unofficial town criers, the first act of an opéra bouffe, endless source of gorgeous and useless information for a child.
Porch life turned neighborhoods into augmented families or familial groups. It was a formal relationship—you never intruded—but the important events of birth, death, illness, engagements, weddings, and birthdays were absolutely known. You knew them before being told, just from seeing what was happening on the other front porches. If you were outside on the front porch, you saw what was being delivered. Or not being delivered. You knew who got groceries and who didn’t get groceries. You saw the druggist’s boy come up on his bicycle bringing medicines, and you knew that Mrs. Allen was not so well over there or had had one of her attacks. If you saw the doctor come, and saw everybody wringing their hands, you knew someone was gravely ill. Everybody helped everybody else, and everybody shared. You couldn’t watch the life taking place on someone else’s front porch and not be a part of it. And if you needed this, that, or the other, all you had to do was ask two of your neighbors, and one of them would have it.
That is the good aspect of gossip. If you are in trouble, serious trouble, friends sort of happen to pass by often, happen to telephone, or put in a good word behind the scenes. In the South, gossip is a full-time occupation. That’s why our roads are in bad condition, the bridges that were due ten years ago aren’t built yet, the mail doesn’t work. People are too busy tracking down versions of the story. “I heard she went to New Orleans alone.” “Oh, no, her husband followed her.” “Oh, no.” “Oh, yes.” But there is a humane dimension to gossip. In New York, you know, you could drop dead and the next-door neighbor wouldn’t know it for ten years. Here, if the cat cries at the back door longer than two hours and it’s not let in, someone will check.
If there was a death, everybody stayed home to do whatever had to be done, because funerals were at home. The neighbors always gathered—even if you loathed some of your neighbors and had been battling and feuding for years—all neighbors got together. It was that old-fashioned thing. Someone would always get the widow or widower out of the house while the undertakers were clobbering the corpse in the bedroom, doing the embalming, cleaning up afterward. The ghastly smell of formaldehyde and whatever in the house.
Porch life made everybody cousins. You may not like all your cousins, but you helped out anyway, because they were family. And that is something we have almost totally lost, along with porch life itself.
*
Everybody came home for midday dinner in those days. Then there was always a fuss to see what my grandfather might bring home in the middle of the day. You never knew what might turn up from one of those boats. Once my grandfather brought home this bunch of plantains, and we found a baby spider monkey in it. The midday meal was a serious occasion, the dining table a sacred altar where everybody worshiped at noon. There was always a cold consommé or a cold cream soup to start. No ghastly globby dressings on raw salad to insult our innards at the beginning of the meal. My grandfather never allowed water on the table; there was always wine, which he made himself and stored under the house. There were always two meats or one meat and one seafood. Little lamb chops and then ham. Or broiled fish and then pork chops. Always at least two starches. Rice and potatoes and barley. There were always hot breads. My grandmother made wonderful crunchy-crust bread, or little muffins, or cornbread, or fresh biscuits. Then usually it was salad and cheese and fruit. Beautiful cheeses; I don’t know where my grandfather got some of those cheeses. He loved Limburger. We called that “dirty socks cheese.” Afterward some small sweet thing like a pickled peach, and there was always some splendid dessert. My grandmother made these wonderful aniseed cookies. They had to age for a week. I’d come home from running around the neighborhood and I could smell them in the house. She would have hidden them in a different place every day. The minute I came in I’d start that room-by-room search. I often found them. And I learned to take one and rearrange the others. Or there might be some glorious bit of chocolate from George’s Chocolate Shop. Or a sherbet made of Karo syrup and blackberries. All glorious foods. But you see, everybody was active. By the time I had climbed the pecan tree and gone under the house and skipped around the block and dug holes and gotten into Uncle Francis’s wood shop, I needed to eat. And my grandfather walked down to Water Street and then walked up and down the street, talking to the other produce people. He couldn’t have had a sandwich and a cup of tea after all that.