Memories of a New Orleans Boyhood

Peter Tonguette

Sitting on my desk is a photograph I took sometime in the mid-1990s. 

I was perhaps 14 when, on what looks to have been a pleasant spring day, I prodded my parents to drive into New Orleans. We lived in Slidell, a suburb north of Lake Pontchartrain (and thus north of New Orleans). Going into the city was always a treat. I sometimes accompanied my father on business meetings in New Orleans, and on one occasion, my elementary-school class took a field trip to what was then the Times-Picayune’s newsroom on Howard Avenue. A journalism career was born.

The city had plenty of cultural and commercial attractions for an intelligent, bookish youngster such as myself, including an aquarium, the exceptional Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts, and an awe-inspiring three-story Brooks Brothers on Canal Street. In my recollection, the suits at this Brooks Brothers were on the second floor—the entire second floor. Even as an adolescent, I was a clotheshorse. 

On the day I took the photograph, however, I had planned for us to make an excursion to the French Quarter, the historic district whose notable features, as far as I was concerned, included St. Louis Cathedral, the Café du Monde, which achieved renown on account of its powder sugar–encrusted beignets, and my actual destination: Faulkner House Books. 

I had been to this bookstore a number of times before, so I remember walking there with confidence that glorious day. My parents and younger brother trailed behind me. As I approached St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square, I angled to the left. I entered a small alleyway beside the cathedral, Pirates Alley—or, as a street sign helpfully translated, “l’ Alleé des Pirates.” (New Orleans remains a marvelously Francophone city.) Several more paces took me to the door front of Faulkner House Books, whose then-proprietors, Joe DeSalvo and his wife, Rosemary James, had purchased the multi-story residence where, in 1925, Mississippian William Faulkner scribbled away on his debut novel, Soldiers’ Pay. The first floor was a small but bursting rare bookstore—my favorite bookstore. 

Although I planned to walk out of Faulkner House Books with a fresh stack of first editions, I was, evidently, carrying my camera that day. I make no claims for my compositional skills, but when I look at the photo I took, I am pleased. 

Outside of the bookstore, I turned my lens towards the direction from which I had entered Pirates Alley. Standing in the center of the alley, I managed to capture a symmetrical angle. The wet pavement reflected the sunlight that broke through the narrow sliver between the cathedral to my left and the row of buildings, including Faulkner House Books, on my right. Although New Orleans always seemed to be full of people—artists, musicians, tourists, genuine weirdos—on that day, at that moment, I count only three silhouetted pedestrians in Pirates Alley. My parents must have either been standing behind me or still inside the bookstore, where my father would have been talking with one of the owners and my mother picking up something to her taste—say, Jane Austen.

To me, the picture looks idyllic: a fine day, a fascinating place, a noble avocation (buying books).

Although I lived in suburbs north of New Orleans from the ages of 2 ½ through 15, I never fully considered it home. I was born in Columbus, Ohio. Even so, I loved New Orleans and its inhabitants. I encountered Southern manners (every child was taught to affix an honorific to an adult’s first name—Mr. Bill, Miss Katharine) and Southern opulence (a friend of my parents had so many hats in her collection that they had their own shelves in her closet). By the time I was old enough to be charmed, I was charmed. I was certainly conversant in the city’s literary heritage: Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, John Kennedy Toole, and all the rest. Once, I attended a talk by Shelby Foote given at, of all places, a Barnes & Noble in a suburb of New Orleans. I hated the hot weather, but I grew to love the Louisiana winters—those 60-degree Christmas Days can grow on you if you’re not careful. 

Yet my parents always had a hankering to go home, which was, to them, Ohio. My father had taken us to Louisiana to run a company, and for the 13 years we lived there, he never stopped referring to Ohio as “God’s country.” One day we would return to God’s country, and in time, we did. I understand his thinking. We were Midwesterners by birth; New Orleans deserved its reputation as a den of iniquity—the “city that care forgot,” the locals called it, proudly.

In all of the years since coming back to Ohio, I have become accustomed to my ancestral home and I have never once gone back to New Orleans, though I did, for about 12 months in the early 2010s, freelance for the Times-Picayune—a comical arrangement whereby I wrote stories about my former city from the glacial remove of the Midwest. 

When I look again at that photo I took in Pirates Alley, though, I think my parents had it wrong. We were, then and there, living in God’s country—a fallen country, perhaps, but what country isn’t?