The White League by Thomas Zigal

Author:Thomas Zigal [Zigal, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612187549
Publisher: AmazonEncore
Published: 2011-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter twenty-three

We walked down St. Peter Street, passing underneath the shoddy, fern-choked balcony where Tennessee Williams had sweated through his shirtsleeves pecking out A Streetcar Named Desire on a manual typewriter. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if Louis Robb was following us. Half a block away, Jackson Square appeared gray and nearly deserted in the waning afternoon light. The sketch artists and tarot readers in front of the Pontalba building had already packed up their wares and were moving on. Four street musicians playing brass, black teenagers from the projects or Tremé, struggled to attract an audience near the wrought-iron fence surrounding the central garden. The horn players’ chief rivals were the reckless street-sweepers who had suddenly materialized in small motorized vehicles, a prankish crew spinning wildly over the cobblestones like bumper cars at a carnival, whirling at each other and cutting figure eights while blowing dirt futilely around the square. There was something quintessentially New Orleans about them, showy and daring and ludicrously incompetent. A busload of German tourists had disembarked to applaud the sweepers and take their photographs.

“Such a happy, carefree people,” my brother said, observing the young black municipal workers posing vainly atop their vehicles. “Literacy and a living wage will only confuse them.”

“The White League would love you if they could only get to know you, Perry,” I said.

He squeezed the nape of my neck, a rough schoolyard move from our Holy Name days long ago. “Come along,” he said, leading me toward the arched colonnade of the stately old museum. “It’s time for your history lesson, mon petit.”

The Cabildo had been built at the end of the eighteenth century to house the Spanish magistrates during their brief colonial rule in Louisiana. A solid block of stone with a mansard roof and graceful upper gallery overlooking the square, the building matched the ecclesiastical Presbytere on the other side of St. Louis Cathedral, the architectural embodiment of Church and State in early New Orleans. For nearly two centuries the Cabildo had served weighty purpose, most notably as the chamber where the Louisiana Purchase was signed in 1803, transferring Louisiana from France to the United States. Until Father Joe told me the story, I hadn’t realized that the building had stationed the Metropolitan Police Force during Reconstruction. The White League had chased them back here after the Battle of Canal Street, forcing them to surrender their headquarters overnight. Three years later, during the election controversy between the Southern Democrats and Republicans, the League had returned with three thousand armed men to again overtake the police station and judicial courtrooms and declare their own winner. I would have bet stacks of U.S. currency that it wasn’t the last time white men with weapons had stolen an election in Louisiana.

As soon as we entered the Cabildo lobby, we were quickly surrounded by little old lady volunteers eager to give us brochures, answer our inquiries, accept donations. A pesky blue-haired retiree kept thrusting a pen at our chests, demanding that we sign the registry.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.