Called Out of Darkness Page 0,13

sitting on the side of the bed, my mother in particular, and trying to assure me that everything was fine, the house wouldn't burn, and my sisters were fine.

Gradually I came back to myself. I stopped shivering in fear.

I picked up a book about Raggedy Ann and Andy that was for children smaller than me. I looked at the pictures because it was pleasant, and I healed somehow looking at or reading that book. No words come back to me from it, only the pictures and a feeling of safety, of simplicity, of pleasant things.

My mother's drinking was a great shadow that slowly and steadily darkened our lives.

But our lives went on.

My sister and I went to the library together all the time.

My experience of picking at books was exhilarating, but I remember just as keenly what it felt like to be in the library, to be sitting at a long wooden table in a vast space filled with such tables, sunlight streaming in the tall windows, the air as always warm and rather motionless, and the whole peaceful and safe.

I also recall sitting in "The Stacks," on the green glass floor, and picking through books I couldn't possibly ever understand. I'd read maybe three or four words of some volume like The Children of Mu, for example, and despair of ever figuring out the context for what the book was seeking to say.

I never discovered books on art in this library. Maybe there were none. When I was grown up I discovered beautiful art books and went mad for looking at pictures of Rembrandt and Caravaggio and Giotto and Fra Angelico. At this point, I knew none of this by book.

I did know the Delgado Museum of Art in City Park, however. I'd discovered an art class there on Saturdays, and for years I went to this class, though I never produced anything worth saving by me or anyone else. We were provided with huge sheets of paper, and with plenty of pastels.

Children from all over the city came to this class, though I remember primarily girls. The teachers were gentle and mild mannered and devoted.

But the real experience for me was the museum itself.

There I saw large replicas of baroque sculptures, some of which were replicas of Roman and Greek sculptures, and all of which involved Greek gods and goddesses or classical themes, Laocoon and Sons and The Rape of Daphne by Apollo and other such wonderful works. The museum also had some fascinating paintings, largely from the Renaissance on, and I recall interesting lectures on these works.

During the time I went there, an Egyptian exhibit came with a small mummy. That was a landmark event.

City Park itself had a dreamy beauty to it, with meander-ing lagoons and oaks even bigger than those at Audubon Park uptown. I spent hours as a child, usually with a friend, roaming safely and happily through this park.

I had uncommon freedom as a child. I went just about anywhere that I wanted. And I saw a version of New Orleans that perhaps other children didn't see. I penetrated poor neighborhoods and walked with complete confidence through places where no one would dare to go walking today.

I didn't feel anything could touch me or hurt me. And actually nothing ever did.

The bus trip to the City Park museum took me through the French Quarter, so, though my family never went there, I experienced it from the bus window as well.

As always I was riveted by the different houses I saw, the iron-lace railings, the elements of Italianate or Greek Revival style, and I was enchanted by color, and New Orleans was and is a city of more colors than one can conceivably name.

Let me repeat: this is the world in which I learned all that I learned. Learning was visual and acoustic but it was not through books. I felt frustrated and shut out of books.

It's important to note that in this world, I did not feel I had any special identity as a child. I did not see my sister as a child, or my younger sisters as children. I moved through this world as a person. We were spoken to by our parents as adults, really, and we called our parents, as they wished it, by their first names.

People were perceived as having distinct personalities and our family was given to labels which could be disruptive and damaging, but essentially it was a world of persons. I wasn't terribly conscious of