The steady light cast by the whole Murphy family, in their old-fashioned Catholic perfection, has illuminated my life up to the present time. In a real way, they deserve their own book, the Murphy family. Seven of the eight children are living, and they and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are an endangered species indeed.
Back to the first-grade classroom:
What we learned in this school immediately was to write in a perfect Palmer-style hand. We learned this from books of Palmer script, making pages of a's and then b's and moving on through the alphabet. We never learned to print.
We learned to read from an insipid reader filled with fantastical pictures of Dick and Jane and Father and Mother who lived in a fantastical house with a monkey. We knew these were supposed to be ordinary people. But they looked to us like millionaires in a world of luxury that had nothing to do with our own.
They weren't related to the kinds of houses in which we lived, and they had nothing to do with the great mansions of the Garden District. I had some vague sense that they were
"American" and "normal." It was a bore. "See Dick run." I learned it but I didn't learn how to sink into a book or embrace it. And these readers probably had nothing to do with the failure either way.
We also learned the catechism, which was far more interesting to read, and this was my first formal instruction in religion that had to do with printed words.
My difficulties with reading prevented me from ever absorbing it as written material. I remember it as a series of rhythmic recitations:
Who made us? God made us.
Why did God make us? God made us to show forth His goodness and to share with us His everlasting happiness in Heaven.
Who is God? God is the Supreme Being.
We learned to recite this out loud, and though we did eventually learn to copy the questions and answers in pencil or ink, it was the rhythm that lodged in my mind.
Now compare the above to "See Dick run." Which is more interesting? Religion as the catechism taught it was infinitely more interesting. Think about the lovely sound of the word "everlasting." Reading lines like "See Dick run" was a bit like playing scales, I suppose. Whatever the case, the readers meant nothing until they started to have real stories in them in the fifth grade. The catechism shaped the learning that sparked my attention and my imagination, and began to fill up my head.
Our classrooms were large with huge windows that were open to the breezes that kept us cool even in periods of sti-fling heat which people in our air-conditioned world would not have borne. There were pictures of the saints in these classrooms, and there were statues, but I don't remember any of them. I think every room had a crucifix. I think every room might have had a picture of Pope Pius XII. It saddens me that I can't remember these details, and that the building, destroyed by Hurricane Betsy, in the sixties, is long gone.
The students in the school were white. These were the days of segregation and I did not ever hear of a school in our neighborhood for "colored" Catholics, and as far as I know there was none. Where these children were educated, I have no idea.
There were in fact many educated black people in New Orleans, and they did have schools, but they were not part of our world. I learned about them much later, when I began to roam the city, and even then the sight of them, these solid middle-class black people, was a bit of a shock.
The people of this time were vigorously racist. Though my parents were not, they accepted segregation as something that had to exist. They actively taught us not to be racist. But they were not social activists. I was not acutely aware of these issues at six years of age. But I lived in a white world of women and little girls. My father, a beloved uncle, and the priests were the only men.
Soon after I entered first grade, we began to prepare for our First Confession and our First Communion, and I think, though I'm not sure, that we went to daily Mass in the nearby church of St. Alphonsus, which was, and is, one of the most engulfingly beautiful places I've ever been.
At this point in my life, this was surely the largest structure