Ins and outs (Part 2): My history in Mandeville

April and Joanna with her mother and grandfather on the Mandeville Lakefront.

If you get off the Causeway on the north side and take the Monroe Street exit to the left, you will find a neighborhood where old folks move to retire. It is a bird sanctuary with a bayou behind it.

I grew up with my mom, my grandpa, and my sister at my grandfather’s house at 154 Sandra Lee Drive in Old Golden Shores in the neighborhood in front of Lewisburg. It was named after the Lake Pontchartrain shores that are in the back of the neighborhood, just a bike ride away from our family’s house. My grandpa taught me how to ride a bike on Sandra Lee Drive, which took me crashing into a mailbox and scraping my knee, but at least Grandpa was there to put a band aid on it.

My mom’s dad, George Anthony Williams, Jr., was born on May 30, 1925 to his parents George A. Williams, Sr. and Isabell Bowes Williams. His parents were from England and Ireland. During his life, he graduated Jesuit High School in New Orleans in 1942 and the U.S. Merchant Marines Academy at King’s Point in 1945, followed by his service to his country in WWII. He always told us the story about how lucky he was. He was summoned off of the ship he was on and it ended up sinking with all his friends on it. He also told us that when he would drink beers with his buddies in the war, they would call each beer that they had finished drinking “one more dead soldier.” He laughed as he told the story. After the war, he used to work as an ambassador for an old rubber company on Banks Street in New Orleans.

My grandparents raised my mom in River Ridge, which is one of the white inner ring suburbs in New Orleans. Along the river, it is located on the high grounds located towards the airport. She grew up in a home with her seven other brothers and sisters where they had a very nice black woman who was their nanny named Gertie. She took care of them while both of their parents worked. She said that their family was so big that they couldn’t even go out to eat at restaurants because they didn’t have a big enough table for them. My mom was a missionary in her youth, so she travelled the world and tried new things.

Before Hurricane Katrina, life on Sandra Lee Drive was very quiet. After the storm, most of the trees between our house and the Causeway Approach fell down and you could hear the growing traffic more and more. My grandpa’s home had to be rebuilt from all the trees that fell on it. I can still remember walking outside our front door onto the porch and being able to smell the Chinese food that was coming from Trey Yuen, the restaurant just behind the trees. In the past few years, all of the trees have been cut down and they are now building more houses across the street from grandpa’s old house.

When I was four, my aunt asked my mother to come help take care of Grandpa, so we moved to Mandeville from Texas, and my mom graduated from Delta College shortly after we moved to Mandeville as a licensed massage therapist and an acupuncture specialist. She has the personality of a healer so these were the perfect jobs for her. She used to head the Alternative Center at Touro before Hurricane Katrina, and she has been teaching Massage Therapy at Charity School of Nursing under Allied Health with Delgado Community College.

As a single parent, she worked a lot to support us, and wasn’t home all the time. My grandpa was like a father figure to me–someone who was home after school while mom worked. My sister and I grew up making him home-cooked meals and pies. In his later years, he would sneak in the kitchen and eat a whole container of ice cream or an entire pie if you left it out. As he got older, my aunt said my grandfather was becoming too senile and sold the house, and we had to move into an apartment building away from him. Instead of coming home to my grandfather, I started looking up to my sister instead.

Part 3: Chill spots

Editor’s Note: This story is one of a series reprinted from the book A Guide to South Louisiana: Stories of Uncommon Culture. Each author was a student in Rachel Breunlin’s “Storytelling and Culture” course for the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 2017. The Neighborhood Story Project sponsored the project as part of its mission to publish collaborative ethnography in high quality books in which the authors receive royalties for their creative labor.