Silhouettes in the Garden

By T. O. Stallings

They call New Orleans the Big Easy. The moniker comes, in part, from the French saying laissez les bons temps rouler. Let the good times roll. The name is a misnomer. There is nothing easy about living and growing up in New Orleanss Eighth Ward.
My mother told me God created the world as a garden. A peek and a promise of what is to be seen in heaven. She also taught me that God allowed the devil access to the garden. Access and permission to tempt earths mortals. My mother told me we should all try to hide from the devil. To do so she believed we should pass through life as much a shadow, a silhouette to the devils eye, as possible. That is a difficult task for the pious. It is even more difficult in New Orleans, a city made famous by its history and traditions. Traditions and history that include temptations, vices, corruption, Mardi Gras, and voodoo.
My name is Jehan Henri. This is the story of my silhouette in the garden we call earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503565838

T. O. Stallings

T. O. Stallings is retired from the United States Army where he attained the rank of First Sergeant. He is a veteran of the Vietnam War and throughout his career served at various posts around the globe. A resident of Vicksburg, Mississippi, Mr. Stallings divides his time between volunteer work, writing, and travelling.

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Copyright © 2015 by T. O. Stallings.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/28/2015

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Contents

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Epilogue

For Sheri

PROLOGUE

The word invisible is an adjective. It means imperceptible to the eye, not in sight, not perceptible to the mind.

I am invisible.

Not literally. At six foot three inches, I am easily seen if you would only care to look. I have flesh, bone, blood. I am invisible in the figurative sense of the word. Obscure. Unknown. A nobody. Irrelevant. Inconsequential.

I am like most of the people in the world.

I am not rich, famous, or politically powerful. By God’s grace, I am not one of the destitute. I am not infamous. Nor am I criminally or mentally dangerous. If you do not exist in my circle of acquaintances, there is little probability you have ever heard my name.

My mother told me God created the world as a garden. A peek and a promise of what is to be seen in heaven. As a boy I never understood how she could believe that to be true. A small woman, barely literate, she seldom left our house. Doctor visits and church attendance. Those were her exceptions. Yet she had an uncanny ability to quote the scriptures verbatim. The world is full of places of stunning beauty, she told me often. Reluctantly, afraid of my father’s reprisal if I didn’t, I agreed with what she said. As a boy I never saw much beauty in my surroundings. As an adult I have been blessed to have seen much of the beauty of which she so passionately spoke.

She also taught me that God allowed the devil access to the earthly garden. Access with restrictions forbidden by God to stay in one place, the devil was forced to constant rambling. While wandering, he is, however, permitted to amuse himself by tempting earth’s mere mortals. Her reasoning for believing as she did seemed simplistic. The devil’s temptations are nothing more than God’s tests of faith. Fail the test and be barred from eternal life. Unpretentious logic. I never appreciated any of it while young. Although the neighborhood where I grew up was harsh, I never thought of it as evil. I thought of it as normal. Only as an adult did I witness the evil she implied. Too often the evil outweighed the beauty.

As a child, I held no perceptions of death. As an adult, I learned life on earth is short. God alone determines how long we are permitted to walk the paths of this earthly garden. Compared to eternity, our length of time here is diminutive. Miniscule. And in the end, we will be judged as much for what we did not do as we will be judged for what we did do. Everyone should hide from the devil. To do so, my mother told me I should pass through this life as much a shadow, a silhouette as possible. Only the good and pious can succeed. If successful, she assured me, I would elude his temptations and pass into the kingdom of heaven.

As a child, I thought her sayings nothing more than fanciful myths. As I aged, I grew more inclined to agree with her. I can only pray my attempts have been fruitful.

My name is Jehan Henri. This is the story of my silhouette in the garden we call earth.

ONE

I arrived in this world in the predawn hours of a Sunday morning. My birth, however, was not attended by a doctor in the sanitary conditions of a hospital delivery room. My parents couldn’t afford that luxury. Instead, I came into the world amid the dust and clutter of my parent’s home. There, on the living room sofa, aided by a toothless, aging Creole midwife, I slipped from my mother’s womb and breathed the first breaths of life. My mother, covered in the perspiration of her labor, managed a weak smile as the midwife laid me across her breasts. My father, who had been standing in the kitchen doorway, crossed the room and peered at his son. From his pants pocket, he pulled a folded ten-dollar bill and handed it to the midwife.

The house, on a back street of New Orleans’s Eighth Ward, filled with my cries. At that moment, both of my parents relished the sound. My cries were testament that their unbroken chain of ancestry, dating back to 1721, would continue. Going into the bedroom, my father pulled a large Bible from the top drawer of a chest and carried it back to the living room. Standing over my mother and me, he opened the book to the handwritten pages of the family tree. With the forefinger of his right hand, he repeatedly traced over the name Miette Barrineau. She was our beginning. The first. Each generation that followed owed her their existence. My father knew the story well. He had been raised on its importance, and like the dutiful child he was, he learned the story better than he knew anything else. Slowly, in his small soft voice, he repeated the tale to mother and son.

Miette Barrineau, along with eighty-seven other women, had been sent from France to help populate Nouvelle-Orleans. But she was not one of the much celebrated filles à la cassette. The casket girls, as they would be known later, came years afterward. No, Miette and her companions had been given no chests filled with proper attire for their voyage. Neither, after their arrival in the new world, had they been schooled in wifely duties or educated in the skills necessary to sustain a household. She, and the others with her, did not receive guidance from the Ursuline nuns. The nuns had not yet been sent to the colony. Nor did they receive nightly protection from soldiers to protect their innocence. Those amenities and niceties were reserved for the casket girls with their middle-class backgrounds and their small chests shaped like miniature coffins.

Louisiana history often mentions the arrival of the casket girls. Seldom, if ever, does it mention Miette Barrineau or her companions. When it does, they are nothing but a footnote. An anecdote reduced to one or two lines. Always, within the span of those few words, they are christened with infamy and labelled the correction girls.

Unlike the casket girls, the eighty-eight chosen females were not living a life of moderate comfort. They were not the respectable daughters of semiwealthy families. No one could, or would, vouch for their chastity. Most were recent inmates of La Salpêtrière, a notoriously cruel jail in Paris. The others were vagabonds. Pickpockets and prostitutes shanghaied from Paris’s underworld. Many still wore the chains of their imprisonment as they boarded the ship. All were classified as persons of bad moral character. Not that it mattered to anyone, but their selection violated a royal edict, an edict which clearly prohibited the transportation of persons of bad moral character to Louisiana.

Despite the diktat, they sailed. Three nuns of the Grey Sisters accompanied the women. They would be the chaperones. A midwife, expecting to be busy once the women were married off, sailed with them. Together, confined below deck, they endured disease, storms, hunger, and the rigors of an ocean crossing. When they arrived, they looked emaciated, pale, and alarmingly unattractive. Ten of them succumbed to illness. When the first one died, the others watched in horror as the wooden coffin was drilled with holes and lowered into a muddy crypt rapidly filling with water. To ensure it remained buried three large slaves stood on the box, weighting it down. Finally, when it filled with enough swamp water to keep it resting firmly on the bottom of the grave, the three slaves scrambled out and filled the hole with mud. The ghastly scene was repeated with each new death.

By March of that year, only nineteen of the women were married. The other fifty-nine remained single. That worried the leaders of Nouvelle-Orleans. The nuns proved incompetent in their attempts to change the propensity of the girls from lawlessness to respectfulness, from prostitution to chastity. But inevitably, in a territory lacking in eligible white women of childbearing age, all of the correction girls found husbands.

The casket girls, after being married, proved amazingly fertile and bore enormous numbers of children. In turn, those children were just as fertile, and their offspring as fertile as themselves. Proof of their fertility is that nearly every native family of Louisiana can easily trace their history to one of the casket girls. Yet, by some physiological mischance, the correction girls proved exceptionally barren. Perhaps their sterility was punishment by a vengeful God for past transgressions. No one knows. But none ever bore a child. None, that is, except Miette Barrineau. There could be no doubt the birth of her child was a miracle.

When finished with the tale, my father looked down at me with tears in his eyes and sighed with happiness. Miette Barrineau died more than two hundred years before I was born. To my father, she died the day before. He would ensure that I knew her story well. And, as he told me often, with any fortune, I would one day pass it on to my own children.

TWO

Our existence teetered somewhere between poverty and penniless. My father, Conrad, worked three menial jobs while my mother toiled at keeping house and tending to what she conceived to be my every need. Somehow we managed to survive from paycheck to paycheck. Even with our shortage of money, we never viewed ourselves as underprivileged. Self-pity, in Conrad Henri’s house, was forbidden. To him, money was not, and never had been, the measure of success. Even with the added responsibility of a son, money would never be Conrad’s goal. His only goal was to live his life in faithfulness to his family and moral decency in his community.

Hanging on the living room walls of our four-room shotgun-type house were my father’s favorite sayings. Printed in bold calligraphy and painstakingly framed with his own hands, the quotations provided the bases of his code of conduct. A code comprised of five-letter words that he repeated often to himself, his wife, and me. Right, wrong, truth, faith, honor, valor, trust, and Jesus. Other words were unnecessary. Starting when I was one, before anyone retired to bed each evening, my father would stand in front of the framed quotes and read them in a surprisingly strong solemn voice.

Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it (William Penn).

Honor is the reward of virtue (Marcus Tullius Cicero).

Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth (Mahatma Gandhi).

Half a truth is often a great lie (Benjamin Franklin).

These were my father’s maxims, but not his only ones.

He would often quote the Reverend Jonathan Mayhew, who died in 1766 (The essence of government, I mean good government, and this is the government the Apostles treats of, consists in making good laws and in the wise and just execution of them), James Madison (If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary), Thomas Paine (The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind), and George Washington (Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism).

And there were a hundred more he frequently recited. After each he would ask if I knew their meaning. Not waiting for a response, he embarked on imparting to me his interpretation of the words.

Any breach by those he loved resulted in severe chastisement and worse. Not one to spare the rod and spoil the child, he rarely hesitated to whip me into obedience. The whippings, to a certain degree, swayed me into conformity. To a greater degree, they made me headstrong and stubborn.

On a Saturday morning in my fifth year of life, I found running pell-mell through the house and out the front screen door to be exhilarating. At the fastest speed possible for a five year old, I would hit the screened door with my hands, sending it flying to the limit of its spring. Quickly I bounded out of the house onto the porch, turned, and watched the door slam shut with a thunderous bang. Laughing to the point of tears, I reentered the house and repeated my movements. After ten minutes of hearing the slamming of the screen door, my father, trying to sleep in on a rare day off, yelled from the bedroom.

Stop that, boy! You are going to hurt yourself!

I now do not know if I never heard my father or merely chose to ignore him. From the back of the house, I sprang forward, my small feet pummeling the wood floor as I made my way toward the front door. I held both hands in front of my body and they crashed into the door with a loud smack right below the door’s metal hook. At that instant I heard my father yelling from the bedroom and I slowed my forward motion. It was a mistake of enormous proportion.

The wind, or fate, lifted the door’s metal hook and held it out straight. As the door swung in closing, the hook, point first, caught me above the eye. My momentum carried me onto the porch. As I went forward, the hook ripped into skin. Silently piercing the flesh, the hook remained impaled above my eye until it had torn a wound four inches in length.

Pain flooded my head. Blood gushed, flowing steadily into my eye and down my cheek. I screamed. The screams brought my hastily dressing parents from their bedroom. Seeing me covered in blood, crying hysterically, caused my mother to shriek. Temporarily blinded by blood and tears, I did not see my father. I did, however, feel his arms around me, lifting me upward and carrying me from the porch. Through my sobbing, I heard the door to the family sedan open. In my shock, unable to see my surroundings and sensing I was about to fall, I screamed louder. Instinctively I thrust my arms from my body to break my fall. When my hands touched the cool cloth of the car’s backseat, my panic slowed. Closing my eyes, I relied on my other senses.

I heard the car door slam and the engine roar to life.

I felt the car lurch backward, stop for a second, and then pitch forward.

I heard my father’s voice coming from the front seat. The voice was calm, soothing. But underneath the words, I sensed disappointment and a seething anger.

I felt each turn, each increase in speed, and finally felt the car brake to a stop and heard the motor die. Only a few seconds passed before the rear door of car was opened. My father’s strong hands lifted me from the cushions of the seat and out of the car.

Cradling me in his arms, Conrad Henri carried me to the porch and, with his right foot, banged loudly on the door.

The same Creole midwife who had delivered me opened the door. Looking at my father and my bloody face, she held open the door and stepped to the side. Jerking her head toward the kitchen, she said, In there.

I have no money, my father