this, but I know now that I never thought of myself as a child. I will pick up this theme later.
Before I move on in time, let me deal with school.
Chapter Four
I started the first grade in St. Alphonsus School on St. Andrew Street and Constance in the neighborhood called the Irish Channel. This was a world away from our home on St. Charles Avenue and Philip Street, but only because the five blocks between us took one through the beautiful mansions of the Garden District, from the noise of St. Charles Avenue, to the treeless sun-baked streets of the working-class neighborhood where some of my ancestors had been born. The Irish Channel was at that time still a blue-collar-class neighborhood and the Catholic schools that educated the children were large parish schools.
There were two separate grade schools, as one originally had been for the children of German immigrants and the other was for the children of the Irish, but by my time, immigrant distinctions were largely submerged and how parents made the choice of schools and religious orders I didn't know.
I only knew that I was going to St. Alphonsus, staffed by the Sisters of Mercy, and that my two aunts were both Sisters of Mercy, and that this was our school. My mother had gone there, in the very same building, many years before.
The uniforms were simple: any kind of white cotton blouse, and any kind of navy blue skirt. Everyone wore brown string shoes. The children of the parish were entirely too poor to have any fancier uniform than this. Prim little girls had navy blue sweaters and pleated skirts. Poorer children wore what they had. Everybody was supposed to have a blue beanie. If you didn't have a beanie on your head, you weren't supposed to go into church. No woman with an uncovered head ever went into church. And no man went in without taking off his hat.
The boys had nothing to do with our world. They were in their own schools, staffed, it seemed to me, by much harsher and rougher sisters who slapped them often in an endless struggle to make them behave. We caught glimpses of them and their fearsome teachers when we assembled for church.
At a distance, they seemed loud and noisy and disruptive, and infinitely more rambunctious than girls.
We were a classroom of forty little girls with a young teacher, Sister Mary Hyacinth, and the first thing I did when I was introduced to this sister, was tell this sister that my name was Anne.
Up until that time I'd been called Howard Allen, which was in fact my name. I had been named after my father, Howard, and after my mother, as her maiden name was Allen, and each of her daughters carried that name as well.
My parents had insisted on this startlingly unusual name for me even when the baptizing priest objected that there was no St. Howard, and insisted that the name Frances be added, as there was a St. Frances indeed. But I never knew as a little girl that I had the name of Frances, any more than I knew that I'd been born on the Feast Day of St. Francis of Assisi, a saint I came to love more than any other saint.
What I did know was that my parents thought the male name of Howard was going to be a great asset to me, and they also believed that I was going to do great things.
I hated it. Children on my block had always objected vigorously to this name. "That's a boy's name." I didn't like the sound of it. If it had been Mark Antonio, or Celestino, I might have loved it. Sidney, Valentino, Louis Philippe, any name of that sort, I might have tolerated. But Howard Allen was the ugliest, most confusing, jarring and burdensome name imaginable, and I parked it at the door. I walked away from it into the name of Anne.
My mother went along with it. If she wants to be called Anne, she said, then call her Anne. Sister Hyacinth was amused. And later on at recess, when I told my sister Alice, who was always called Suzie, that I wanted to be Anne, she started calling me Anne. This was a highly influential moment. If my sister had made war on this name, the war might have been won. But she accepted it with a near eerie wisdom and thenceforth called me Anne until she died.
Every now