Aline St. Julien interview recording, 1994 July 01
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| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I was just—Well, maybe I'll just start with that. | 0:01 |
| Michele Mitchell | Actually, let me make sure, because you just said a couple of things and I want to make sure I got your voice level right. This thing has been acting kind of funny. | 0:05 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Okay, well I see the—Yeah, it's moving now. | 0:42 |
| Michele Mitchell | Whenever you're ready. | 0:46 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My name is Aline St. Julien. Capital A-L-I-N-E. Capital S-T. Capital J-U-L-I-E-N. I've written a book called Colored Creoles. It's a therapeutic book for me, it's a biographical piece, something that I wanted to do to provoke thought, to get people to talk about these things. This was an unwritten law, the Creole culture, and this understanding that we were to keep ourselves alienated from the darker people of our race. As I was growing up, I was always taught that I was Creole, and my mother would never say she was Negro, never considered herself from Africa. And I'd say, "But mama, we all come from Africa." I didn't know that I was really saying a true statement until this last—Not long ago they found this woman, Lucy, and they said, that really, everybody comes from her. | 0:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And I was just so tickled because originally we all Africans, all the people, all human beings. So I just laughed to myself. But she liked to say, she would like to say that my father was from Santa Dominguez. His people. So we were not slaves. So I said, "But mama, they brought slaves to all the islands, all these islands. And some of them won their freedom and came here to New Orleans, in the United States as free men of color. But originally we were African." "No, we are not Africans." So it was a crisis all through my life, an identity crisis to who am I? I had to answer that question over and over. When I tell my high school teacher that I was Creole. She'd say, "Sit down, you are Negro." | 2:06 |
| Michele Mitchell | Your high school teacher did this? | 2:58 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My high school teacher told me that. She said, "You are a Negro, A Creole is a person of French and Spanish heritage who's born here in the United States." She said, "You are not a Creole." That was the technical definition for Creole in those days. | 2:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was she White, the teacher? | 3:21 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She was Black. She was Black, Yes. Okay. Well, you see where you from? You might have White teachers. We didn't have White teachers. We went to completely segregated schools. And now that I look at the integration and what it's doing to our public school system, you get any kind of White teachers in the schools, as long as it's the job they're really after. And they might not have the interest in our children that we would like them to have. And our best Black teachers go to the integrated schools because they have to be up to par, make sure that they know what they're doing. | 3:21 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But we can get just anybody, see? So integration has hurt us. Integration has helped the White man also, if we had emphasized the economic integration, if we had gone after jobs and stability, that would've been wonderful. But what we did, we wanted the right to be treated like everybody else. And of course they benefited by it because they have all these businesses that opened up to us. And now the businesses that we held before, the Blacks are going to integrate. They think, well, that's just wonderful. But it's only those that have money that can really integrate. | 3:58 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And it's only those that have been trained in such a way, I call them Negroes that can get into positions that Whites will feel comfortable and secure with these kind of people in it. So it has been a burden to us. When we were living in segregated times, we had drug stores. We had Donna Shay, [indistinct 00:05:06], later on LaBranche's Drug Store, Bellfield's Drugstore. We had insurance companies, funeral parlors, even a funeral parlors. Now Blacks are going to the White funeral parlors that— | 4:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | Even now? Really? | 5:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Even now—What I'm saying is even the Black funeral parlors are suffering because of integration that Blacks are finally going to the White funeral parlors. And then we had a culture during integration that I will never forget, not only as a child, but more so when I was bringing up my children. It was Mardi Gras. It was really the Black Mardi Gras and a White Mardi Gras. | 5:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Could you explain that? | 6:00 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I could explain that by saying the locale made the difference. We celebrated Mardi Gras on North Claiborne from St. Bernard Avenue, all the way to Lafitte, the train tracks, St. Louis and Lafitte around that area. Mama would not let us go to Canal Street because when we went to the parades, we were treated badly. On the floats, they'd throw things, but they were always aiming for other people, not you. | 6:00 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The policemans, if they were pushing you back, they always pushed you harder if you were—Pushed you harder, or if the horses, they were on horses. The horses would always run into a group of—To push you back, a group of Black people. And there was always arrest. There was sirens, the police cars going all the time, always picking up drunks. Black people were the only drunken people then. The Vieux Carré. They could do all they want in the Vieux Carré and still they can do all they want in the Vieux Carré. But the other places, they always—Around the Black neighborhoods arresting for drunkenness or something. | 6:38 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mardi Gras, that's what you expect. So they had big oak trees all along Claiborne Street, and we made it like a day long picnic. The families would come together and they'd set up a table or whatever, and they had their foods. Some people would sell food, and they had the Indians mostly in our neighborhoods. The Zulu parade would come down Arlene Street, go to [indistinct 00:07:50] restaurant. And it was just wonderful. So when I start having my children, we did the very same thing. We brought families would come together, relatives, you know, could walk the span and you'd meet somebody else, friends that you knew. So it was just wonderful, that span. That was the Black area. That was the Saturday night fun time where you could go in different bars. We were not allowed to go in different bars because we were nice people. | 7:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We were Creoles and we had to imitate the Whites who were nice people. We couldn't act like these "niggers" or always we were felt we had to feel better than somebody else. And so we were not allowed to go into bars. We did have our Mardi Gras on Claiborne Street along with a lot of other people. What was nice about the drugstores and that area, most of the businesses, the drugstores were there. The doctor's offices were there. We had one Black attorney [indistinct 00:09:09], and that was A.P. Tureaud. One Black attorney. He was Dutch Morial's mentor. Dutch Morial start working with him. They called A.P. Tureaud, Mr. NAACP, because he was affiliated with the NAACP, and really had a top position there. And as my kids grew up, I realized I would not bring them up the way I was brought up. I could not bring anybody dark home. | 8:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | Now when you refer to growing up, what years are we talking about? | 9:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Specifically, I had an incident that I never forgot in my high school days. I was going to Xavier Prep. I was educated in the public school system and I was at Wicker High School when I decided I wanted to quit school. And in order to keep me in school, my mother who couldn't afford it, said she would send me to Xavier Prep, which was a private Catholic school where nice people went. And whenever you heard nice people, most of those nice people were Creole people. The nice people went to the Prep and the nice people went to St. Mary's. A student from St. Mary met me in New York when I was on the board of the National Office of Black Catholics. And she took me on a side and she told me that she just unloaded on me what the prejudice she suffered when she was a student at St. Mary's Academy. | 9:50 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | How the light-skinned girls sat on one side of the room with light-skinned and long hair and a dark-skinned girl sat on the other side of the room and she was a light-skinned, really hurt. She was really hurt by that. And that's the way I feel too. I feel that we were terrible to imitate the society at large to do the very same thing that was done to us. Just as coming up, I just couldn't believe that we could do something like that. The very same thing. So she just unloaded on me talking about holy family, how prejudiced and they were, it was the long haired children that got the privileges and the light and everything. Well now these schools, the Prep and St. Mary's Academy and St. [indistinct 00:11:56], which was an all boys school, I would say as far as our races concerned, is fully integrated. Because I believe we need integration among ourselves. Definitely. | 11:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And that we don't need to be rushing to integrate with other people when we can't even integrate with each other. So this incident in high school, I was at the prep and I had met what I thought was a nice girl. And when you told growing up as a child, go with your own kind, you don't know what that means. And when they say nice people, you don't know. You think that's nice people or good people and you don't know that it's color. I didn't know it had anything to do with color. So I befriended a nice girl who was living with the Catholic family, but they didn't want to influence her into the Catholic religion. But I was—Because they wanted her to be on her own, which I thought was very, very nice because we didn't have a choice in being Catholic. I was born Catholic. They didn't ask me whether I wanted to be Catholic or not. It's only now that I changed my mind. | 12:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I have gotten out of the Roman Catholic Church and I'm into Imani Temple, the African-American Catholic Congregation is the name of our—We are still Catholics, but we are Catholics with self-determination making policies for ourselves because every other group came here and they could be Spanish, Spanish people. They let them act like Spanish people or they could be Korean or Vietnamese. They let them act—But us, we had to assimilate. We had to imitate. We had to celebrate St. Patrick. We had to be everything but African queens or kings or everything, in public school and all the way through. | 13:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I was just sick of that. But anyway, this young woman that I befriended, she wanted to be—I influenced her. Well, I don't know what it was, but she just liked me. And I took her to mass with me and I start teaching her the catechism and trying to convert her. So I was her godmother. I was to be her godmother. So the first time I took her home, I didn't know any better, but after she left, mama said, "Don't ever bring her back." That I couldn't. | 13:58 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But I said, "Well, why?" "Well, she's not like us." You see, they never would come out specifically and tell you she's not like us. And I say—So the only thing that I could figure out was the color, because she was a dark-skinned girl. But it was all right for me to christen her. Now mama wasn't, wasn't Catholic enough to let her come in the house, but it was all right—She was Catholic enough for me to christen her and be her godmother. So that just stayed with me all through life, that kind of stuff. Other things happen as growing up when we went shopping, seeing Black families and Creole families, there's all colors. You don't know when that real White one's going to come up from the slave master or you don't know where that real Black one's going to come up from our African heritage. You see? So you had all colors. | 14:36 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Well, I had a sister and a brother who was light skinned, more like my mother's type. And the rest of us would on my order more like my daddy. Now, when I'd go out with my sister shopping, well if we'd separate and we'd be looking different place, they'd be taking her to the dressing room to try on a dress. And when I'd walk up or I'd go—I couldn't go in. So my sister would say, "But that's my sister." "Well then y'all can't try on dresses." See, I had another terrible incident. I had gone to try on a bathing suit after my second child was born, I think. I was so proud that my body had gotten into shape and I was going to go get a bathing suit and go swimming and everything at Maison Blanche. And he wouldn't let me try on a bathing suit because, "Well, why?" Because, well then I may not be clean. I'd say, "Well, I took a bath before." Black people don't wear drawers. I wore drawers. I took a bath before I came and I just wouldn't have it. | 15:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I would not accept the fact that I couldn't try on a—Well, it's against board of health rules. I said, "But look at all these women." White women would be gone with all bathing suits on their arms to try on a bathing suit. So I said I wanted to see the manager. So she went and talked to [indistinct 00:17:02] and I could see him just doing that, doing that. "No, I couldn't." So I said, "I want to see the manager." So they brought me in the office and the manager was on vacation. So the assistant manager came out and that was the first time I cried like a baby. I cried—The first time segregation made me cry. All those years you grew up knowing you were segregated, knowing every day you knew you couldn't go to the White school, you couldn't go to the White church. You knew that. | 16:44 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We lived one block from Saint Anne, Saint Anne's church and had to pass up that church to go to St. Peter Claver's Church, which was about two blocks further. Now what they do with the public schools and the churches here, and maybe they do at other places, is that when they bill a new church for Whites, they give the old ones to Blacks. If they build a new school for Whites, they give the old schools to Blacks. It wasn't customary to build a brand new school for Blacks. You got the books that were left over used, you got all those things. Well, it was the same with the church. If we went to Saint Anne's church, we had to sit in the back pew or upstairs in a choir loft. When we went to communion to receive communion, the priest would pass us up. If we went to the rail to kneel down, he would pass us up and give communion to everybody before he gave it to us. | 17:41 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I knew all of that. I knew when we got on a street car—We had a street car line right on Esplanade. I lived on North Johnson, 1230 North Johnson, between Barracks and Governor Nicholas. We walked one block or two low short blocks to Esplanade to catch the street car. And we had to sit behind the screen for Colored only, behind the screen. I know what you mean. It's the truth. So we grew up like that. That's why I tell you, our mayor, Mayor Dutch Morial, Mark's father, never forgot that. They said when his time was over and he moved out of his office, he was picking up his sign. He had a "not for Colored sign" on his desk. | 18:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | He did? | 19:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That's right. He sat behind a "not for Colored sign" on his desk. So that's what antagonized those Whites. They called him arrogant. They call him everything. They talk about can't handle himself. Sid could never handle him like Dutch Morial did. And that's what his son's going to do because he's a chip off the old block. That's how he was trained by his father. So you can see how segregation hurts people. You see, he sat that on his desk, a Black male sitting in the back, honey, they told us, sit in the back of that screen. Well honey, he was showing them. The head of the city sitting in the back of that screen. You hear me? I was proud of him. So anyway, I had gone through all of that. I knew every day that I woke up in my life that I wasn't as good as the little White girl living at that time in our neighborhood. | 19:43 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | You had mixed neighborhoods. The White child maybe could come in your house, play with you, and Black people were always so proud to be playing with White, but you couldn't go in their house. Same way mama wouldn't let that girl come in my house. You couldn't go in their house. Their history was repeating itself. We were doing the same thing they were doing us. See. So when they wouldn't let me try on that bathing suit, I cried. But I wasn't crying just for that bathing suit. I was crying for all those years that I had suffered. And it had come to a head. Do you know the woman whose clothes line broke? She went inside and shot herself. It wasn't that clothes line, it was all the things that had mounted through the years. And that's what happened to me. It just came down on me and I sat in front that man and cried like a baby. | 20:37 |
| Michele Mitchell | This is in the fifties or the sixties? | 21:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That was in—Let me see, 1950. 1950. My daughter was born August 1949 and that was 1950 because I thought the summer that came up after that was the fifties. So he gave me his handkerchief, honey. He gave me his handkerchief to wipe my eyes. He was so sympathetic, so compassionate. But he wouldn't let me try on that bathing suit. | 21:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | But he would give you his handkerchief? | 22:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | He gave me the handkerchief. I can't remember if I kept the handkerchief, if I gave it back. Because usually when Blacks went into a place they had no business going into, or somebody gave them a glass of water to drink, we'd always joke and said he must've broke the glass afterwards. Or he must've broken the handkerchief afterwards. Or he must've done this. So I can't remember if I gave it back to him. But when I think about it and I laugh about it, I say to myself, I don't know, I can't remember. But if he kept it, I guess he threw it away. But he said he wasn't the manager, so he couldn't make policy. Now if the manager's on vacation two weeks and the assistant manager's there, surely there's going to be things that's going to happen where he's going to have to make policy. | 22:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So he was telling me he would do it, but he couldn't do it because the other manager wasn't there. So I went home really upset. I called my husband on the phone and at work, something I never did because his job, you just didn't do those things with him, his job. But he knew that I was real upset and I wanted him to go to the bank and borrow money to close my account. I had had an account at Maison Blanche that was a hundred and some odd dollars. I can't remember the exact figure, but it was over a hundred dollars. We had an account there. | 23:06 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So he saw how serious I was and how strong I was, and he did that. And Monday morning, I was at Maison Blanche again on the fifth floor closing my account, telling them why I wanted to close my account. Well I never bought a thing at Maison Blanche again until the Civil Rights Act passed. And you could try on bathing suits and you could do this and you could do that. And I remember the first thing I bought was a bicycle for my child. And in the meantime, in between that, when they had lifted the segregation discrimination against Blacks at Maison Blanche, I went to eat before because—We had a mayor during that time, his name was de Lesseps Morrison. | 23:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | I was going to ask you about him. | 24:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes. And I blame him for the White flight. I blame him more than anybody for the White flight. And our church also. Because when they integrated City Park and a relative of ours, at least the Detiege—It was a Mandeville Detiege who won the case to desegregate City Park. And my mother's sister married a Detiege. | 24:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | How do you spell that? | 25:28 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | D-E-T-I-E-G-E. Mandeville Detiege. He's the one that won that suit against City Park. And probably it was A.P. Tureaud that was the attorney because a White man would've not. So anyway, de Lesseps Morrison said that we had nothing to worry about because Negroes won't go there. And if you ever remember the quote Carter G. Woodson said, that when you are segregated or when you are trained to be segregated, to be put in your place—I forget how the quote goes, but when you train to be put in your place, if you can't find your place, you'll cut a hole in a wall to make yourself a place. You'll make yourself that place. | 25:29 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Well honey, that's what de Lesseps Morrison said. We didn't have to worry that they wouldn't go there. So the same thing happened in the stores. Naturally, if you segregate me all these years, I'm not going to go running up there. It takes time. But I was one of these that was more aggressive and just hurt. I was just more hurt because I had sisters and brothers brought up the same way I was brought up. It didn't touch them like it touched me. They weren't as sensitive to it as I was. No. I used to wonder why? Why? They didn't go natural. They had didn't take the pomp out of their hair or they didn't do any of that. So anyway—Now where I was? | 26:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | You were talking about Mayor Morrison and White flight. | 27:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah. So de Lesseps Morrison said that, and then Maison Blanche had dropped the desegregation there. So I decide one day I'm going to Maison Blanche and I'm going to eat there. And I went there and I sat down there to eat. Not a Black person there. They looked at me and they looked at me and I sat there miserable. I saw my name on the front page of the paper mother with seven children arrested for sitting in Maison Blanche, sitting in the lounge at the restaurant. I was so frightened I didn't know what to do with myself, but I was determined to sit down there and eat dinner—Lunch, I guess it was. A White woman comes to the table, she says, "May I sit here?" I said, "Yes," I couldn't get over the fact the place had filled out and she needed a place to sit and she sat. Now I said to myself, couldn't be a New Orleans White woman that—It might have been a tourist. It might have been—But it just helped the situation for me. | 27:24 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But I was miserable. I ate that dinner. I remember I had meatloaf and something else. I ate that dinner, but it wouldn't go down. I was so frightened. So I accomplished what I wanted. I got up, I paid my money and I went home. And I was so relieved because I was—Nothing happened to me because usually that's why you don't, you're not going to enter. You think something happened to you. When I was a little girl, if I went to City Park and rode my bicycle just in that Esplanade, that center part, you just go a little bit, "Nigger, get out of here. What you doing in here?" Anybody could holler at you and put you out. And here I was in Maison Blanche testing it. So I come home and I wrote a letter. That's one of the gifts God gave me. And I pulled out my heart and I told them that I had gone to their restaurant and how I ate and enjoyed the dinner and everything. | 28:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Now you see, you would think this is a normal thing. You would think this is a normal occasion. Then I told them how abnormal it was for me and the things that I went through and they tell me—I never did see it, but there was work, there were workers there that told me Maison Blanche put my letter on the bulletin board. So you see there were places they were trying to do. The White dentist that Dr. Haydel, that's the father-in-law of Mayor Dutch Morial. My doctor was Dr. Haydel and he had recommended an eye doctor for me, Dr. Azar in the Maison Blanche building that was a little separate from the store, but attached to the store. And when I went up there again, you sat with everybody in the office and I said, oh, there's no segregation here. Now Azar, I don't know what's his heritage, what's his background or anything. | 29:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But he was—I don't know what race he could have been. I know he was considered White. Everybody who's not Black is White. The Spanish come here, Spanish come here. Don't take them long to know what side to go on. Some of them look like my relatives, but it don't take them long to know where to go. I don't blame them. If you're going to get treated better, I don't blame. But anyway, there was Azar in the Maison Blanche building and I'm sitting in the office and feeling good and everything and all of a sudden they called Aline St. Julien. I said, "They're calling me before these people that's been sitting here." I was wondering—Well, they put you in and in the office in the back, they had another sitting office in the back for the Aline St. Juliens. That's where they had the other office. | 30:55 |
| Michele Mitchell | And this is in the fifties too? | 31:43 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That was in the fifties too, you see? So it was all over. I had it all over every time. But that one time I broke was when I couldn't try on a bathing suit, that one time. I never cried after that. I never cried after that. I've been a fighter ever since. I will not accept it. So what I start doing is boycott, self boycott. If you couldn't get organization. So that's what I do. I would not buy it. [indistinct 00:32:18] store, they would not let you try on a hat because we put grease in our head. You see? It was always something. I don't know what all the reasons were, but it took me a long time, even after integration to go to these stores. It took me a long time till I finally went back and I am like that to this day. | 31:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I am going to put my money in the Black community as much as I can. You see? Now if our people could come together, and that's what hopefully this is for us to come together. We got one little monthly paper called the Tribune that really give us positive information about ourselves. The daily paper that we have is the Times Picayune. And they all as biased as can be, always was. The only thing printed about us was the crime. Whenever we committed a crime, it was in the papers. We were always in the back part of the paper till finally, as time went on, you'd see, I think Sidney Poitier made the front page for the Academy Award he won. So that was Valley of the Lily's. What did he win Academy Award? | 32:45 |
| Michele Mitchell | Lily of the Valleys? Something like that. | 33:52 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I think that's what he won it for. I mean, that was a first. It was just hard. Not long ago, we had a series of—They call it Black and Whites. In other words, it was an open forum where all Black and Whites could write in and tell their feelings about segregation or some experience they had. I had coordinated a panel for six years with people of different racial backgrounds, economic status, religious status. Across the board. We had the WASP, we had the Jew, we had the Spanish and the Black on there, and we went all around this city. College campuses, churches, just what have you, all different places telling our experience with discrimination. Well, of course mine was the bathing suit incident. | 33:57 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We had a professor from Loyola University who had not even known Blacks. And I think the first incident she had was with Blacks, she shared a coke. She was drinking a coke and another Black woman was drinking a coke. So her talk was something about that. That was the first time she realized she had actually had some little contact with Blacks. She was the one that would always brag about how she spent her childhood in City Park. And I would say, "Janet, didn't you miss me?" And she'd look at me, "What you mean, Aline?" I'd say, "I wasn't there. I certainly didn't spend my childhood in City Park. Did you see anybody like me?" | 35:08 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It just got to me how these Whites could not even see that there was an invisible man there. That we just were not there. They were not prejudiced against anybody. They don't know nothing. It just would aggravate me. Another girl we had on that panel from—She was from Mississippi and she said, "Negra" for Negro. And I say, "Mary, can't you say Negro baby? Say Negro." | 36:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She said, "Aline. That's how we always said it, Negra." I said, "But it sounds so close to nigger." I said, "You hurting people's feelings." Another panelist would say—So I felt I was giving them some education. They always saying, they don't know what the Blacks want. Well, you ain't going to know what the Blacks want unless you have some contact with them and let them tell you. Another one was, "Gal, listen gal. That gal, that gal." And I said, "Don't ever call a Black woman gal, you hear?" I said, "Don't ever call a Black woman gal." I said, "Because that was all through slavery and throughout segregation days that they call us gal." Gals. I was eight months pregnant with one of my babies when an old man in a market asked me a question about how you buy some something ham or something. He wanted to know. "Girl, girly, girly." | 36:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And I stood up there, I said, "Girly, girly." I was [indistinct 00:37:43]. And I just walked away from him. There I was like that and I was girly. Now he may have not meant any harm. I don't know. But honey, it was—And I had to be called Mrs. I had to be called Mrs. Everywhere I went because I had all my babies at Charity Hospital and I was called mama, mother or girl. Mama, mother. Because I was pregnant. I was going to be mama. So I was mama, mother or girl, depending on the doctor. It was never Mrs. St. Julien. When our people would get examined, it was just a [indistinct 00:38:25]. And you would hear the doctor say something like—If the woman would say, "Oh." "It didn't hurt going in." It was the disrespect. It was just—Yeah. I mean they treated you without dignity. Your dignity was always hurt. | 37:35 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So whenever I stepped in Charity Hospital, I would give my name loud and clear. My address, I would never mumble because they'll say, "Speak up, girl. Oh, I can't hear you." That kind of stuff. So I always made it a point to speak distinctly to let them know exactly whatever information and carry myself with some kind of authority that they don't put you and they would. So we went through all of that. Now I'm off again. | 38:44 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So these were the things you went along with. And this panel, we were able to—What this panel did, we felt it was part of the Community Relations Council of Greater New Orleans. Community Relations Council of Greater New Orleans. It was an integrated organization to try to make things better in the city as far as discrimination and segregation and integration, all that bit. They had people on there like Israel Augustine, which was our judge. They had the Whites. I remember Michael O' Keith. Ortique. Revius Ortique, which is the Supreme Court judge now. | 39:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | How do you spell that last name? | 40:24 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | O-R-T-I-Q-U-E. Among the Whites, Helen Mervis. She's the one who told me when she chose me as moderator of the panel, I said, "Oh no, I can't be my moderator." And she said, "I see a lot of ham in you." And that was the first time somebody had let me know that I knew—Even if some people would take it as an insult, I took it as a compliment that if somebody believed that I could lead, surely I could. | 40:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | What year was this? | 41:11 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | This was in the early sixties. This was the sixties. This was the sixties. I had this panel. Then I had two Jewish friends. I'll never forget that. Two Jewish panelists who were good friends. And when I would choose what talks I wanted on this—Blanche Francis. Norman Francis' wife, at Xavier University was a panelist and they had discriminated against her children. She had tried to integrate her children and one of the Catholic schools and they had treated those children badly. So that was her talk. So what I would do, it was I tried to fit the talk with the audience that we were— | 41:13 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | If it was a Black audience, I would have certain talks. If it was a White audience or a mixed audience, I'd have certain talks that I would choose. So these two good friends, one of them I called. I said, "Jane, I would like you to talk this time. We have an engagement." And I'd give her a time. She said, "Oh no, it's Flo's time." Her friend was Flo. "It's Flo's time." I said, "but I don't want Flo's talk. I want yours." "But she's going to feel bad. Oh, I'm going to hurt her feelings." I said, "Oh no, you're not. I am doing this." I say now, "If I had a friend that I had to walk eggshells, that I had to—" How do you say that? How do you say that? | 41:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | Walking around on eggshells. | 42:46 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, walk on eggshells for, I said, "That's not a real friend." And I left it at that. She spoke, but it was her friend. So I just didn't play that. So we had six years to change—We had gotten together to change these people's hearts, to let them know what discrimination, how discrimination and prejudice hurt a person. And we wanted their compassion, their sympathy, and all that kind of business. After you'd give them all your talk and everything, you'd walk out and you'd get some Whites that would tell you things like, "Where could I meet more Colored people like you." | 42:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The word was Colored. Now when they said Colored, they were being nice. When they said, "nigger", that was the other extreme. In the middle. Or if they were like business-like or institutional stuff, it was Negro. That kind of stuff you'd go on with. You went through the gamut. Or another thing, if you said you were Catholic, that was nice. They treat you better. If you were trained Catholic, most likely you were Negro, you know were going to act right and you were going to be nice. Anybody who stood up for their rights or could speak up or talk up, they were agitators. They were agitators. | 43:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Soon, but not quite yet. Okay, now it's going. | 0:01 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah. So you had to go through all these things and understand what was happening to you. So we spent six years trying to change people's hearts. We'd even go to little outlying parishes. We went to Luling, Louisiana, to different little places. Sometimes we'd go on outskirts, across the river. These White churches that never heard nice Colored people talking. So after six years, the panel dissolved, and I got tired of it. I wrote a letter to the organization before I left, and I told them how I felt. And some of the things I said was or what my feelings was, you go back to your people. All this integrated stuff. | 0:05 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | One doctor had told me, I remember Dr. Braden. I said, "Now, you see all this integration stuff, these meetings we having together, and all of that." I say, "I can do away with that." Some socials in Kappa Cop's house or on Broadway with two numbers. I wasn't used to the big rich houses and all of that. Here I'm sitting with all these people and everything, integrate myself to death to try to get them to understand what we all about. And then, they never would. You'd come out of a panel talking, where could they meet people at? Oh, you don't look Black. | 0:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | Who would say that to you? | 1:33 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes, you don't look Black. I wasn't talking about the look of Black. I was talking about the Black consciousness. I mean, we could be Black as could be. If we don't have it up here, the Black conscious, it don't do no good. So I wrote the letter, and I told them, I mean, I mentioned all the things that I thought some of those members were there for. I called some of them opportunists. Different ulterior motives. Some of them, it was a hobby. They didn't have anything to do. The various things I was thinking. I had gone in there real serious thinking I could change the world, but there was some up for political positions. When they make their record, if you noticed these Whites that got into office into certain, they always had a record of being with Black people. | 1:33 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | This organization, the NAACP, the Urban League, full of White people. They were making records for themselves, so they could step up. You see, because here it is the White flight. I mean, it's not our fault that we are predominantly Black in the city. It's the White flight. It's not our fault that the schools went down or the North program went down, everything. It's the White flight. Or the schools went down. It's the White flight. And then, after they then rape the city of everything, then they put our leaders up there, and they're going to criticize them for not leading. Broke down everything. Now, you got a Black leader. He's got to account for everything. He's got to do that. He don't do this. He don't do that. | 2:29 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It's not equal. It's really not the same, you see. So I got out of that organization. And I started pulling out of different organizations. When I was in that organization on the panel, I was on the Mayor's Human Relations Commission. We had Marguerite Bush, that's Black. We had McKenna, a professor. Warren McKenna, a professor at Xavier University. We had Robert, mm-hmm. What's Robert's last name? We had a few Blacks on there. The president of the council was Monsignor Screen. There was the Catholic Church again represented. And Picu was the director at that time. We'd come together monthly. We had an incident where a little rookie cop, White cop. We didn't have many Black cops yet. And if we had them, it was always that division and still is. | 3:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Little rookie White cop goes on Xavier's campus and roughed up Dr. Warren McKenna. Excuse me. One of the professors. He was in pharmacy. Rough him up. Pulled his shirt I don't know if he done tear his shirt, and everything. Now, this man is sitting on a human relations commission. He's what you call class, if you want to call educational, or Creole, or whatever. He's Creole, he's educated, he's everything, and they're roughing him up, just like Ralph Bunche's son. They discriminated against him. These Blacks that think because they get up there. They're different from those down there. They're going to get you too. Eventually, they're going to get you. Morial, I'm talking about Dutch Morial. He had an incident with a cop too. Pulling all over him. So anyway, we sat on a commission. We want to talk to the mayor. Now, this is the Mayor's Commission. Mayor Schiro was the mayor. | 4:32 |
| Michele Mitchell | S-K? | 5:40 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah. S-C-H-I-R O. | 5:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 5:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Schiro. And we wanted to talk to Giarrusso, the police chief at that time. Joseph Giarrusso, who just left the counsel. He sat on the city counsel for many years. He was a hard-nosed bigot. And Mayor Schiro said we couldn't talk to his police chief. We were the Human Relations Commission, and we couldn't talk. Or the Human Relations Committee, whichever one. I was on the Archbishop's Human Relations Committee. At that time, all of them was having a human relations committee, human relations commission. They were going to make changes. And you were on there. It was nothing but a big show. The only thing I could say that came out of it, it was an education. The panel, I didn't lose anything because it educated me. It even made me strong in my feelings toward my people, that my people didn't have a problem. It's those people that have the problem, not us. | 5:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So we couldn't even talk to the police chief to complain. We had gone to Xavier University, and sat down around the table, and talked about what we were going to do. We were going to file suit. And he did file suit. I don't know how long it took, but he dropped his suit. I don't know if there was pressure put on him. I don't know if it was fear. I don't know what it was, but the suit was dropped. In the Catholic Human Relations Commission or Committee. One of them was commission. I think the Catholic one was commission. And I think the mayor's was committee. We had an incident. We all sitting there. McKenna was on that commission too. We sitting around there. Roy Guste, that's the Kennedy family of New Orleans, The Gustes. | 7:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | G-U-S-T-E? | 8:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | G-U-S-T-E. | 8:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 8:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Roy Guste, the attorney general, his brother, that family. Oh, they were well respected. They were all on the Catholic Human Relations Committee. They had an incident at St. Raphael where when they integrated the schools, the Catholic schools—Well, after the public schools last, should have been before. We had been trying to get them. Should have been before, but they waited until the public schools integrated. | 8:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | By the late '60s or so. | 8:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes. | 8:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 8:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That's right. And oh, it took about 10 years, I think, over 10 years before integration really happened. So they had an incident. What they would do is if they had Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts they had there, they moved the meetings that were originally on school ground. They'd move it to houses, to private homes, you see. And that's where our kids would be discriminated against because, well, they couldn't go. So it was one incident where this little girl couldn't go to the meeting because she was Black, you see. And McCall, I'll never forget him. I don't know his first name. He was a lawyer. Later on, King of Rex, big Catholic, everything. Put prejudices all, get out. I know it now, but I didn't know it then. So we talking about what we going to do about this. It was Monsignor Allman that was at St. Raphael at that time. So we tried to resolve that problem. Couldn't do a thing. Couldn't do a thing about it. | 8:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The Monsignor, if we told him something and he'd agree, don't mention his name. We'd have little meetings. Even in my home, McCall came one time, and somebody else, and we'd talked about the situation. Nothing but talk, talk, talk. So what I was getting out of it. Then, the National Office of Black Catholics was established at that same time. And I was a member of the board. So I was traveling to Washington for board meetings. Now, I had seven children. Good thing I had a good husband because, I mean, that man would help me and would help with the children. And I was going to board meetings because we were going to set policy in the Catholic Church. Imagine. And I believe that stuff. So we were having meetings there. We had the Black Sisters' Caucus. All that was part of the National Office of Black Catholic, the Black Priest Caucus, the Lay Caucus. | 10:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I was part of the Lay Caucus and a board member, which meant meetings, meetings, meetings. That's why today, I don't want to go to no meetings. So anyway, we'd go to these meetings. So what I was getting, and then you'd hear a Catholic priest when I'd be very concerned about something, "We should change or something." He'd say, "Ms. St. Julien, you think I'm going to get ulcers?" I had had an ulcers. I was beginning to get ulcers over this thing. So I'd be sick most of the time. Sometimes in Washington, I'd stay at the seminary. My son was a seminarian at that time. That's why they'd let me stay at the Josephite Seminary when I'd go over there for those National Office of Black Catholic meetings. And sometimes I was sick at night with these ulcers, just mucus just coming out like water out of your mouth. | 11:08 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I got to a point when I went to a doctor, he said, "You're going to have to give up some of these things." He said, "You're going to have to rest." So I finally just gave it up. But this priest told me, he said, "Ms. St. Julien, this is nothing but a political thing." That priest is a bishop today. And that's all it is. It's about making your moves, trying to get to the top. It's politics in the church, and it's politics in the city, and it's politics, just trying to get different positions. That's all it is. So I got frustrated, and I pulled out of that. So I said, "I'll be quiet for a while." And I wrote an article about "Holy Mother the Church is an Unfit Mother." They published it in the National Office of Black Catholics magazine. They had a national magazine called Free in the Spirit, and Gertrude Morris was editor at that time. | 11:57 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And she calls me from Washington to write about the church. They were having a special woman's magazine that Free in the Spirit was going to put out, what different women of the church thought about the church. I said, "Do you really want me to say what I feel?" She said, "Yes." And I wrote the article, "Holy Mother the Church is an Unfit Mother." | 13:07 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I don't know if they could take it like that, so they changed it just slightly. They moved the "is" from the definite position to a question mark, "Is Holy Mother the Church an Unfit Mother?" That's not what I said. I said, "Holy Mother the Church is an Unfit Mother." And if I was a bad person, if I could say that word like other people would say it, I'd say, "Holy Mother the Church is an Unfit Mother—" fill in the blank. You know what people usually use. | 13:33 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 14:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And I don't do that. That's how angry I was at the way our church was un-Christian. There's so much more, but anyway. So I wrote that article. Well, honey, I lost so many of my friends. My husband used to tease me. He said, "There's a church in this house." We had the same pictures all over the house until I decided Jesus is not White. Nobody have to tell me that. My common sense tells me that. I don't have to prove it or anything. Jesus is not White. And here we are with all of images of the White, blonde Jesus. I wanted them off my wall. And my mother gave me for a wedding present the Blessed Mother who is blonde and blue-eyed and Jesus. So what I did, I didn't tell her anything. | 14:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But what I did, I got a nice Black Blessed Mother. All over Europe, the statues are Black. But they had a picture of Mother Perpetual Help in the Ebony Book one year. And I cut it out, and I put it in where the White Blessed Mother was. And then, I told my brother-in-law, who was an artist, I say, "Just paint yourself. I say, "And I'll have the Black Jesus." He had a beard, and bush, and that kind of stuff. And I say, "And I'll have a Black Jesus." He never did. But I did get my Black Jesus. I can show you. I have a Black Jesus and I have my Black. No more of that stuff. I said, "We unconsciously made our children love everybody but ourselves." I said, "That first little baby doll we gave them with that blonde head to love White people." | 15:16 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And that's all they want is our love. After they've discriminated against us, beat us, lynch us, and everything, they want us to really love them. And we just go on and perpetuate all this stuff. And that's why we love—You go in people's house, you get the little classic Blue Boy. You get the Blue Boy, the classic little ballerina. We don't need all of that. We have things all around here. We have things that can show that we are a Black people. My children established a school. When they married, they decided that the public school system was not adequate. And they were not sending. They were out of the church. My poor husband and I used to die. | 16:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We'd be pillars of the church. We'd be in a parish, a counsel. We'd be on a parish level, the archdiocese level. We'd be family life bureau and all these different organizations. Guinea pig, that's what we were, Guinea pigs. They wanted nice Black couples. So they picked Norman Francis and Blanche Carol, my husband and me, and Gaston Moore and his wife. A few of us, they handpicked. And I used to ask the sisters, "When y'all came to give us the faith of the religion, did y'all handpick us?" I said, "Because when I was in church, I didn't see many Black people." And I'll go to Corpus Christi's Parish. That was Creole land. | 16:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | Okay. | 17:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I came up in St. Peter Claver Parish, and they were a few Black people. So sometimes I thought what they did was pick the ones they could that were not proud of themselves. The ones they could do what they wanted with. The ones that didn't know who they were. That's the ones they could do. | 17:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And another thing too, they took the women. They took the women and the children, and they forgot about our men. The priests were acting like fathers for some of the men. My husband came from a big family, eight children. His father was an alcoholic. Oh, they gave his mother a job in the convent, gave those children free tuition, took them on picnics, and everything. So Father act like the father. And that father was an alcoholic. | 18:08 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then, they'd give the woman advice. "You don't have to sleep with him. After all those eight children and everything, you don't have to sleep with him." I mean, got into your private business and everything. I was on the rhythm method. I could use only for two years. "May I use it Father?" Why? Then, I began to resent calling people that were strangers to me, Father. Why Father? | 18:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then, there's just so much that you just can't imagine what a human being can go through with this segregation, with this discrimination, with all these things. So the ones of us that got along well is if you imitated them and act like them. Well, you were nice. | 19:07 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So now, I'm lost again. I've gone off the track again. So there's just so much to tell. After I wrote this article, I lost a lot of my friends. Priests would come in here. I mean, it'd be traveling and it'd stop in here. Sometimes nuns would sleep overnight. They'd be with my children and everything. Well, after I wrote that article, my name was mud, you see. But it did good. Some people would write, and they'd say, "It wasn't only the Catholic Church like that," they'd tell me. Some of them could relate to it. Some of the things that I was saying, they could relate to. Then, this same woman editor, Gertude Morris. We were having a conversation, and I said something about pannéed meat. | 19:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | What's that? | 20:32 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Just like you, she said, "What's that?" That's the Creole word for breaded meat. You know when you have breaded meat, you call it breaded meat? | 20:34 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 20:43 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We call it pannéed meat. It's French words that come out of me. I'm the youngest of five children. And my mother and my grandfather spoke French. I never picked it up, the broken Creole. I never picked it up. They were from Lockport. There's a lot of people from the different low country towns that migrated to the city for work, because it had gotten kind of hard on farmland. | 20:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | In the early '30s, late '20s. | 21:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh, I guess before the '20s. Around the '20s, like that. So they came from Bayou Lafourche, they called it the Bayou Lafourche area, where there's—What is it? Is it a river? Bayou Lafourche. Or lake? Whatever it is. Bayou Lafourche, they call it. I don't know how to spell Bayou Lafourche, so don't ask me. All I know it's Lockport, and it's near Bayou Lafourche. So that's where they came from. They migrated over here. | 21:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And before they migrated, my mother who was light-skinned, she would come spend a few weeks or maybe the summer months with her father's aunts who lived in Vieux Carre [French language 00:22:05]. So just like [French language 00:22:06] is a French word. Pannéed meat is a French word. And what else? The other day, what did I say? Yeah, I said my sister-in-law has a friend. Like my mother, I said, "Oh, she has a cavalier." That was one of the old saying. So every once in a while, what will fall out of me is one of these Creole words or broken Creole. | 21:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Ricard, Ulysses Ricard was beautiful. He'd write poems, Creole poems. He just knew the language. He was a linguist. And he knew the language. He had traveled different places, learning the different languages. When my sister took French in school, my mother really couldn't help her. It was like two different languages. She took French because she thought mama was going to help her. But mama spoke broken French, you see. So when they would speak, my grandfather and my mother would speak. It was usually that we don't understand what they're saying, see. But my oldest sister picked it up, and she understood what they were saying, the older ones. But by the time it got to me, I knew nothing. So when I went to Paris, I went and visit my nephew who was in a diplomatic service in Paris. I got the opportunity to go. | 22:35 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And a Frenchman resent you. And I ask a Frenchman, could he direct me? Was I going in the right direction for the Arch of Triumph? He say, "You Americans assume everybody speak your language. Don't you know any French?" I said, "Oh, I'm sorry." I said, "But I must commend you because you bilingual." I say, "I can speak nothing but English." I say, "I admire that." I say, "And I'm from a French background." I say, "I'm supposed to—I only know chapeau." And I was trying to think. Hat is chapeau. And I was trying to think. He said, "Well, will you promise me?" So I said, "Yes." And I beg his pardon. But I came away from that. I say, "That's the first time somebody called me an American." They didn't see my color first. | 23:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | When you went to Paris? | 24:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When I went to Paris. | 24:25 |
| Michele Mitchell | How old were you when you went to Paris? | 24:25 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I was, let me see, 57 or 58. I'm 68 now. So I said, "Hi." And it felt good to be called an American, just plain American. Loved me with all of them. When you think about it, when our boys went over to Paris. Those White soldiers told the French people that our men had tails like monkeys, and all of that that went down. They were schooling these people. It was after World War II and all of that. And here, this Frenchman was calling me an American. Something that they never called me here in America. It was always either Colored whatever, whatever they called you, Black. And Black was a dirty word when I was coming up. You didn't call anybody Black. | 24:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | Even they have really fair skin? | 25:24 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Even if their skin was real dark, that was brown skin. You were brown-skinned. You would hear real dark people, all of that, baby, is self-hate. All of that was self-hate that was put in us. We loved everything, but our self-hate. We were kings and queens. When I went to Egypt, I was proud. They said we had no history. It's written all over the temple wall. Our history, kings and queens. All of those people were Black. It's Cecil B. Demille, Cleopatra, and all of that White. That's not Black. And I had assumed that before. I said, "Uh-huh." Coming from that region and everything. | 25:26 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then, I never read the Bible. We were discouraged growing up reading the Bible. The priest interpreted the Bible for us. We didn't know anything. I knew turn the other cheek. I knew that one. It'd repeat that one over and over again. And unless ye become little children. I remember that one repeated over and over. So that was subjugation again. That was to keep you controlled again. The Catholic religion was a controlled religion to keep you in your place. So it was nice to hear that I was an American in Paris. And when I went to Egypt, and I saw all of that, and you could see where they tried to break the noses on the Sphinx. They didn't want— | 26:05 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, break it off. | 26:54 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | —the Negro features. And you see these pyramids. I went in the hidden graves way down. These people believe in reincarnation. And you see where they've prepared for their life after death. And oh, it was just a wonder. Valley of the Kings, Valley of the Queens, the Aswan Dam. I went to Aswan, and the Nubian people, dark people. And they wear all this White. The men wear long clothes. And they're skipping over puddles, and everything. They don't have this problem with, am I man or am I not a man? They don't have none of that problem. Sometime you can see clean through them, see the drawers, whether they wearing briefs or other thing. | 26:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | Or not. | 27:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | They didn't have all these hangups we had. So I went there, and they say, "My Nubian sister, come back." I said, "Isn't that nice? My Nubian sister." So that was just nice. So it was a nice experience to go there too. So that's what I'm saying. I think what we need to be proud of ourselves. Like I say, all of this is self-hate. Anytime you real dark and you can't be called Black, you got to be called brown. Or that you have kinky, kinky hair, and you got to color it blonde. | 27:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | And do all sorts of things with it. | 28:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, and you Black and you blonde, and all of that. So I didn't do this. This natural did not come by when it was in style, a vogue. One day I was going on a trip with my children. How do they call that? Some program we had at our church, Corpus Christi. CYO. The CYO kids were going on a trip to Eight Flags or Six Flags, whatever. | 28:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, whatever it is. | 28:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah. And they were going over there, and I wanted to go swimming. And I didn't want to have to be bothered with my hair. And I never did like the setting, making those old curls, and all that kind of stuff, or the hot comb blowing in my head. Because when we were kids, we had to do it in private. We couldn't go to hairdressers, because we had to tell people that that was our natural hair. The little school children, so anyway. | 28:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | So when you went swimming, what year was this? | 29:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When I went swimming, what year that was. Now, my children were in school. So that had to be the '50s. | 29:18 |
| Michele Mitchell | In the '50s? | 29:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes, that had to be the '50s. The end of the '50s. Yes. | 29:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | Can you lift your hair? Just go ahead. | 29:28 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I left my hair. Before I remember it was, I don't know how many years afterwards that Ebony came out with a new style. And that's the first time I saw it. And when I decided for convenience that I wanted my hair natural, I went swimming. And after that, I never put a hot comb or permanent in my hair since. And I got so much slack for it. My mama wanted to die, my friends. There was a woman walked up to me, she said, "And you were so pretty." | 29:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Word. | 30:06 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I walk away from that saying to myself, "Well, then, if she looked at beauty from the neck on up, well, that's her." Because the total person, she's not looking. And I was all, that don't bother me no more. I got as many compliments— | 30:06 |
| Michele Mitchell | You look gorgeous. | 30:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | As many compliments with natural hair as I did when I had permanents. And I didn't only have permanents, I had the blue in it. The blue too. I say to myself, "So you develop, you grow. It's gradual." If you are brought up in a segregated society with so much self-hate, so much of this, the progression is gradual. You don't get up overnight and just say, "This didn't just happen to me gradually." It keeps happening. It happens. Just lately, I've been noticing. Not too long ago I wrote a letter, because what I'm seeing is those people that have run from the city comes back to the city for any benefits they can get, and then go back home. | 30:21 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So that's why I say I blame Delisette Morrison, because he was the one who started with these interstates. In other words, paving the way, so to speak, for them to get out the city. You see. He started with all this, in a metropolitan area. We're going to take in all the parishes, and you start hearing that. Then, you knew what that meant, you see. I didn't know then, but I see it now, you see. So those people, the latest thing was a spelling bee we had here at Xavier University, a Black institution. | 31:13 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yes. | 31:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | A Black organization, the Links Club sponsored it. They were co-sponsors and the Times Picayune. Now, the two prizes, I don't know if the three went to Whites. But I know two of the prizes. The first prize was a White child. The two of them were from Metri, outlying parish. And the one that was here was from a Catholic school. I don't know if a public school child got it. So you know when you say public school, you mean Black. And you know when you say private school or Catholic school, you mean White. If you have Black schools, they all Black. There's not a White in there, you see. If the school integrates, it gradually turns all Black or predominantly Black. Some Whites will hold on I guess for economic reasons. | 31:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So these children are coming now with their bigot parents that ran from the city because they integrated public schools. They're bringing their children back to get an organization. So when I wrote that bullet of links, explained it saying that they had to include the metropolitan area, all the parishes. And that one of the reason that the Times Picayune is sponsor, because one of the rules, you have to have a daily paper. What we don't understand is as Black people is that they make rules to restrict you, to limit your activity. We don't have a Black daily. Do you know of many Black daily papers? | 32:52 |
| Michele Mitchell | [indistinct 00:33:35] Chicago. | 33:36 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Now, that's the rule. A Black daily paper, you have to. So that excludes that. So now, you know who's going to have to say so. In other words, the rules, the games, the rules are written by those people who's in charge of the game. And if you play the game, you go by the rules. And if you Black, you go a lot by the rules. They hold you to the rules. Now, if you White, you may bend the rule. You may bend and may be flexible. But when you Black, you have to just like all these Black politicians, they're trying to get them one by one. History's repeating itself. Reconstruction days. Taking all those Black positions back little at a time. | 33:37 |
| Michele Mitchell | You're right. | 34:16 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Discrediting those Black men. So that's what I say, "The problem's not us. The problem's them." What we have to do, the way I feel is if we just would love each other enough, and have enough common sense, and pool that money together to make ourselves strong. We could have things like a daily paper. We have the Louisiana Weekly. We have a weekly paper. We have the monthly paper, The Tribune. There's many Blacks that don't even subscribe to that. I had an argument with a barber one time. I would bring him The Louisiana Weekly. I subscribed for The Tribune for him. And then, I went to his shop one time, and he asked, "What's going on, Eileen?" I say, "You should know." I say, "Don't you have The Louisiana Weekly and The Tribune?" | 34:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | He said, "Well, I didn't renew my subscription," he say. I tore into him. I say, "Why don't you put your money where your mouth is?" I say, "You always talking about this Black stuff." I say, "Here you are. You made your money." I say, "You are what you are today on Black people." I say, "All your customers are Black people." I say, "How much of your money is going back into your community?" See, he didn't know what to say. How much of your money? And that's what we should all ask ourselves. When we have a case, when we have some legal things too. Stop looking for your relatives who are lawyers that's going to do it for you, free for nothing. It's like that old time saying, coming out of me. You look for somebody to do it for tata in a Black race, to give you a break. | 35:00 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But when you go to the White man, you pay through the nose. If you want a good lawyer, you're going to go to the White man. If you want a good doctor, you're going to go to the White man. Niggers don't know nothing. Those niggers don't know nothing. Eileen, you got to admit, their institutions are better than ours where we get educated. It's not up to par and everything. I say, "Well, look at it like this. If I set a beautiful dinner table, and some partake of the food, and some don't." I said, "The ones who partake of it are the ones that's smartest, huh?" I said, "Well, these Black people in these schools are eating up that stuff, trying to get as much education as they can, just like we did from the very beginning." They wouldn't teach us anything. I say, "We learned how to speak from sound." | 35:56 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We heard river. We heard a river. We learned how to say it by sound. We had our own language. And we still have our own language. Standard English is fine. I understand we have to have standard English if you innovate. But we have a dialect. Just like you have the Southern dialect, we have our dialect, and we have our own language. There's some parts of the South that they have, I mean, Gullah. Gullah, they have their own language. So we have that. They tried to take all that away from us. So we're doing that today. Today, we can have the standard English. And Mahara, fine doctors come out of Mahara, because they onus. They onus. We have to be super, super niggers. So if we get at that table, we going to eat it all up. We going to try to get everything on that table, because we know we got to be super. | 36:51 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The other people? They don't have to do that. They White. They can get away with it. There's a candidate that could pay somebody to take his tests. There's a quail that didn't make even high grades in—You know what I mean? They can get away with that. You have to be super. You can bet your life that Dr. Ferdinand, who's the top cardiologist in this city, a Black man, knows what he's doing, you hear? Have to be super. So when you are recognized, you are a super nigger. You here? Just like OJ and all of them. I don't want to get on OJ, but anyway. Just like all of them, they've been super. They had to be super good, where the other people, they can get by. So yes, we eat it all up when we get it. | 37:54 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And we had a hunger for education. Some of us even lost our lives for an education during slavery time, for an education. Just found reading, you can lose your life. And we did it. So we are a great people. We are a great people. It's just that we don't know it. We're the only ones that don't know it. Look at the influence we have on people. They imitating us all over. They got our handshake now. They want to walk like us. They want to dance like us. They want to do everything like us. And we still can't believe that we great? They want to do everything like us. They're inflating their lips now. The tan, even they may get cancer from sitting in that sun. They want to imitate us. They put the plants. They're put in everything you're doing. | 38:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | No, we are a great people. We just don't know it. We have so much to be proud of. So from my experience, and I think it has helped, when the children start changing their names, my children, and they blame everything on me. They say, "That Eileen." I influence them to get the natural. People in my family start getting the natural. My daughter come back from [indistinct 00:40:06] with a natural. The nephews, the nieces, they all, "Eileen started that. Eileen started that." Some of the young people, it's style. They get out of it, and they back to it, they go full circle. My children began to leave the church. It was an embarrassing thing for me and their father. I'd go to the council meetings, and tell them that we're losing our children. Where are our children? | 39:38 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We are pillars of the church, and our children don't want any of it. That we're going to have to have dialogue mass. We're going to have to hear them out, hear what they have to say, what they think. No, they wouldn't stand. It was during a time when Pope John the 23rd had the ecumenical council, and opened the doors at the church. And we were supposed to have this ecumenism going on whereby you befriend other religions. We began to visit each other's church, the Baptist and the Catholic. And oh, we're just going to be wonderful. It went all by the wayside. People were supposed to have the vernacular masses came in. They lost some people who didn't want to leave the Latin mass. They were trying to encourage dialogue masses. | 40:31 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But Corpus Christi still, and I had written to Corpus Christi. I had written to the seminary when my two boys was in the seminary, and told them that I felt that I was living on a plantation, that Corpus Christi was a plantation. And that the priest was our slave masters, and that we wanted a Black priest. They had had no Black priests in the Catholic parishes. None of us had a Black priest. And the first Black priest, they sent him to St. Peter Claver's. And I had written a letter. But I know that they did it because of me, you see. So I pushed it, you see. They'd send out Black priest. Sometimes they'd start sending them to St. Noel. But the Whites, I mean, how could you be anything? I mean, you're going to teach them. That's why I'm so afraid of New York. | 41:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I don't know too much about New York. But from what I understand about New York, those White teachers got that public school system tied up, huh? Lock, stock, and barrel. I mean, they got these White people teaching our children who really don't care about them, which is a frightening experience. And they did with this—What's his name? Lenks? What's the union leader? Oh, honey, he's a Jewish man, and he is strong. He's got a strong grip on that. Can't remember his name. But anyway, those are the things we have to do. Just become aware. Just start studying. So that's what my children did. They form an organization. The women had a Black woman's group. They would have retreats for Black women and make leaders. They were forming leaders. Women that would come in there shy and everything. Today, they're leaders in the community. They're either in drama or they're leaders. | 42:07 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | They had a support system. My daughter had a brain surgery. And I'm telling you, they had a schedule around the clock to take care of her. I had to say, "Well, y'all put me in there." It was like if they had almost forgotten about me. But they babysat for each other. When one had to go away or they'd start speaking different places, the other would babysit. They'd babysit. They formed a co-op, an Ahidiana Work Study Center. They'd study on Sundays, and they'd formed a co-op. And they'd go to the French market, and buy food in bulk, and then come and divide the expense and the food. My daughter had gone to Ghana for eight weeks when she was at Xavier in the Operations Crossroads. That was that program. | 43:04 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And she had gone over there, and she learned how to do the wrapping the baby on your back. And the clothes came back, and wore all of the African garb in the street. All of them, I'm telling you, the whole group was wearing African garb. They taught in Ahidiana. They established a school for preschool kids with their babies. Every time they had a baby, the baby was teaching with the mama on the back. The baby was wrapped like the African woman on her back. And the ABCs instead of A is for apple, A is for Africa. Other alphabets, they'd make it strong meanings, not no umbrella for U. Unity for U. Strong, positive words for these alphabets. So they had their own African alphabets. So they really believe in a Pan-African ideology. | 43:57 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I am proud that they made it. It hurt their daddy that they changed their names, and me too. Because when I would get pregnant for my babies, honey, I'd be naming my baby before the baby come. I just knew what my baby. But what did I name my baby? I did name Cecily after a cousin who became a nun. And I did name Jeffrey even though his name is not like his grandfather. His grandfather was Jefferson. When we were proud of our presidents, he was Jefferson. So I couldn't say Jefferson. I was never that proud and patriotic, so I called him Jeffrey. But we called him Jeff, and that's what they used to call my grandfather. Other than that, the others were names that I liked. Lisa was a singer that I liked. And Michael was the archangel. Before I even had a boyfriend, I wanted a Michael, called after the archangel. Well, Michael today is Mtamishi. | 44:52 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes, today is the first. | 0:01 |
| Michele Mitchell | Today's July 1st, and this is a continuation of the interview with Ms. Aline St. Julien and just— | 0:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And we are going to try—I've been showing you pictures, and you seem interested in the very old ones. And I'll look for some that are even older than these. But these that I'm showing you are most of the early parts of my marriage, the children, my firstborn, my mother with the grandchildren. This is my mother with the grandchildren. And I'm telling you all the things that—how we didn't have anything and how I bought my house. How do you say that? Sheer luck, or just it was God's work, how they say, "God did this," and, "God did that." But we had no money, and my husband was one of these chosen Negroes, when at his work, they invite this nice Colored boy. The other Colored boys worked in a warehouse, but this Colored boy was special because he was polite and the way he carried himself. | 0:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And he started off just wrapping packages in the parts department, learned all the various parts. Then he would pick up on radios, start fixing radios, and then it was refrigerators and ranges and air conditions. And before you know it, the war had come on, and because my husband was rejected, a 4F, which nearly killed him, hurt his manhood. The real men were on a battlefield, and he took a lot of jokes. "How come you're not in there? Big healthy man like you, what's wrong with you?" But he was a benefit to all of us because all the females of the family, his sister and anybody around his sister's age that had to go to these events, like school events or anything, he was good enough to take the company truck, which was a van, and we'd all be in the back with our evening gowns, sweating back, and he'd take us to the various events we had to go to. | 1:16 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And I was interested in his brother. I thought his brother Jimmy was just wonderful, and I was crazy about him. And then he had another brother, a younger brother, Thomas, a little older than me, but he was crazy about me, and when he went in the service, he'd be writing me all these love letters. And I didn't pay much attention to the man that I was going to marry and didn't know it. He was just like daddy of the family because he had taken over. His father was an alcoholic, and he had to be sacrificed, the one in the family to leave school in ninth grade and take care of that family of eight children and his mother. His mother was pregnant a lot, had varicose veins girding her neck, so most of the time she was in the hospital for either an operation on her legs or on her neck or something. | 2:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So he played father. They didn't have automobiles, so he'd go and pick up his mother at the hospital, bring her home in a street car. Everything was street cars during those days. I lived on Johnson Street, 1230 North Johnson Street between Governor Nicholas and Barracks, and we had a streetcar line, the Esplanade. On Esplanade Street back and forth you can go. You can either go toward the lake, to City Park, or you can go toward the river, to Canal Street if you're going on Canal Street. They had another line near my house, City Park Line. You could catch that one on Ursulines Street. You could go to Canal Street or you could come back on one transfer, come back around back home on Dumaine Street, and then you'd walk those few blocks back home. On seven cents you'd get a transfer. | 3:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | Seven cents? | 4:29 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Seven cents, and you'd get a transfer. And you might not be able to come back on the same line, but then you can take the intersecting line and come back on seven cents. We had peddlers in the street. "I got okra, strawberries, watermelon, lady! Red to the rind!" all that kind of stuff. And if you got somebody that was really a showman or entertainer, he'd make little rhymes. | 4:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did he? | 5:01 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, he'd make all kind of little rhymes. "Come get your nice, fine, fat, this and that." And they'd sell shrimps. They'd sell everything on the wagons. And my mother, I'll never forget, my mother would want to find out if the watermelons were good, so she'd say "Mr. Brinks—" she wanted it plugged, so the man would plug the thing. My mama would pick up, and he'd stick the knife in a plug and then pull it out, and my mama would take a bite. Mama would take a bite of the plug, and she'd say, "Uh-uh, that watermelon's not sweet." She'd give it back to him, and I'd be so embarrassed. I was a little child and I knew that wasn't the right thing to do, but that's what she would do. "I'm not buying that watermelon. That watermelon—" "Miss, that watermelon's sweet.That watermelon's sweet." | 5:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So it was things like that. And my brothers were ambitious. At least I had one particular brother that was always making money. He would pound red brick. You could pound red brick and sell it a nickel a bag, and you'd scrub your front steps. People would keep their front steps yellow and really clean with pride with that red brick. | 5:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | How would they do it? | 6:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It was a powder. After you mash it, they'd spread it on the whatever soap or whatever water and soap they were using, and they'd throw it on a step, and then they'd scrub with a scrubbing brush. | 6:17 |
| Michele Mitchell | And that would clean them? | 6:29 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And it would clean it. Right. Some people didn't have linoleums on their floor, and my mother-in-law was one of those. And she would pride herself. Those boys would clean the floors, you see, and that's what they'd use, the red brick. So her floors, you could eat off her floors, and yet they didn't have any linoleums on them. It was wood floors. They cooked on a wood stove. She would cook the biggest meal, gumbo, bake a turkey, everything with a wood stove. And we'd be about 13 young people sitting around the table eating. And they hardly had any money. But what she did was she stretched curtains. You know how you bought stretches, and they had these little nails, and it was just a work of art to see how she would stretch so many curtains. Her fingers would be all pricked with these nails and everything, rough from stretching curtains. | 6:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She took ironing in. She did day's work. My mother, to survive, made hog head cheese, and I sold it. I sold it on my bicycle. I'd go with the basket on my bicycle and sell hog head cheese. And she sold [French language 00:07:45]. She'd make [French language 00:07:46]. I'd have these [French language 00:07:48]. | 7:27 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And my sister said calas. And that's—Calas is this some flour, some dough you take and maybe put bananas or some kind of fruit or some other kind of sweet, and you drop it in hot grease. Hot grease. And they call it calas. You see some of these things I may not be saying right, you going to have to bear with me because some of these first thing, we from New Orleans, and we don't pronounce everything correctly. Every now and then you hear, what did I say yesterday? I fell out laughing. Yeah, I said the gutter. I say, now that child could have fallen in the gutter, and you hardly hear gutter anymore. You hear the ditch. Did you know that's what I was talking about when I said the gutter? | 7:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 8:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | People don't know what we talking about sometimes here in New Orleans. So if you hear me say it's something like [French language 00:08:47], we were talking about pannéed meat the other day. Pannéed meat. Well, we got [French language 00:08:52]. So that's from this old broken French that we picked this up some of our heritage being French, some of our heritage being Spanish, and our heritage being African. So imagine all of those words just mix like the word gumbo, African word or okra or something. So you mix all in New Orleans, everything it's mixed. So sometimes you're going to hear me saying— | 8:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And something I said the other day, I said, my goodness. Yeah, I was telling you Bayou Lafourche, I was telling you my mother come from Lockport, and that's nearby Bayou Lafourche. I said, now I don't know what body of water that is, a lake or something. And I'm saying Bayou Lafourche. | 9:15 |
| Michele Mitchell | Bayou Lafourche! | 9:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It's a bayou, Bayou Lafourche. It's a bayou. So if you hear me saying some of these things, it's just the mixture we have of different heritages here in New Orleans. So you'll hear all kind of languages. Okay, so where was I? Yeah, I was talking about Maya. You see I said it, yeah. I didn't say yes, but that's that New Orleans flavor. I love it. I call it colorful, and I love it when people could just be themselves. So I'm going to be myself. | 9:32 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yes, I would love it. | 10:09 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So what I'm really trying to say is how poor we were, how segregated we were. And yet we had a rich, beautiful life. And in spite of discrimination and all those things, we had this extended family, this family togetherness, the support from each other. So it was not hard. Like I tell you, if they had a communion girl in a family, everybody, one wanted to give her veil, one wanted to give her pocketbook, one wanted to give her rosary that by the time you knew it, she was all dressed and ready. And then the tradition was that she goes around the neighbors and visit all in her dressed in her communion, and everybody gave her a nickel or a dime. In those days, that was plenty of money. If you got a nickerl or a dime and you'd have quite a little bit of money and you'd be so proud of yourself. Same thing with little boys and or mama would make the suits. Mama made so many communion dresses for the family members. And I had the most children that I'd get the communion dresses. | 10:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My children had church dresses. Most all of them were White because I had all the hand-me-downs from the other families. So they were so many White dresses I wound up with. And for our social life, we went to Waveland to picnics. Once a year, we went to picnics because segregation did not allow us to go to punch and train park, which was a fair, rides and swimming, you could swing. | 11:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | So they had rides out there too? | 12:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh yes. They had the Zeppelin, this big Zeppelin out there, and merry-go-round, all kinds of rides, bumping cars, everything out there. And you had to ride by and tell your children that was private and you couldn't go, you could go on the end of the lake where the boats would dock these little boats on the lake. That's where they would dock their boats. And you could go there where the water was low and you'd walk in the sand and everything, but you couldn't go on any part of the lake. | 12:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And you couldn't go in City Park. I mean, I just would ride to the entrance at Esplanade and somebody would holler "Nigger, get out of here." And Ottoman Park, you could walk Ottoman Park as long as you didn't sit down, you had to keep walking. So all these things, we just adjusted to all those things. And like I tell you, that's the bathing suit incident that we have on a previous tape that I won't go through again. But it hits you at different times how hard this discrimination is. | 12:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | What was Waveland like? | 13:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Waveland, believe it or not, is in Mississippi, and Mississippi was the worst as far as segregation was concerned. But they had this land that Baptist people bought out there on the Gulf. It was a Bishop Jones, I think his name was. And he'd rent this place out to us. I don't know how much it was. All I know is we rented a truck. I remember Mr. Osso would drive, this was Creoles, mostly Creoles. And then the families would go out there on this one day, we'd be praying, it was around June. Some part after school was over, some part in June where Groundhog Day. We used to say, oh, if the ground hall come out, then it was going to rain so many days. And we'd be worrying and it would rain when we'd go to Waveland. And we had a good time swimming all day. And I remember my husband's mother would bring all her children, and then her brother who was married to my mother's sister would bring their children. | 13:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That was seven. My mama had five. So there was three families closely related that would be out there together. And then with other friends, and maybe Creoles. I remember the [indistinct 00:14:44] family one time was among us. And it was just wonderful. They played cards, we played ball. They had these big oak trees that the big branches, we'd get in and sit in and take pictures. And it was just wonderful to be able to go out there and swim. Oh, not really swim. None of us really knew how to swim. You know? Didn't have swimming pool. Not until they began building they build Hardens Playground later on for young people. And they learned how to swim in the North program, which was really limited and had what they call at the playground on Lafe Street was the linen playground, I think. Lennon or Lemon, whatever it was. | 14:31 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We had a good time at Waveland, something to look forward to. Another thing we did, we played concerts. We'd sit on the front steps. We had very few lights to light up the city. We may have had a light every three or four blocks, or maybe none at all, especially in the Black neighborhoods. So the moon, full moon was light. And once your eyes got accustomed to the dark, and we'd sit out on front steps, never knew anything about air condition. Most of us didn't have radios when I was growing up. Radios, I remember when we got our first radio, it was just so wonderful. And we'd have my sister, I was the youngest, but my sister would have her friends on a Sunday, dancing by Wayne King. You had Wayne King and the Walz King they'd call him and some other thing. You'd be dancing. | 15:40 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | They'd have dances in a house. Most of the entertainment was in a house. And in these concerts, we'd give concerts in my backyard and throw a spread over the line, charge people a nickel to come in and we'd perform for them. Those of us that could sing, would sing and somebody else. So those were the things we did. Every Sunday was a walk. If you didn't have money to go to a movie, the movies were segregated. We had to sit upstairs in the balcony and the Whites would sit downstairs, and if somebody threw a paper or spit child, sometimes they'd come up there and chastise, you try to find out who did it so you better behave. But that was the most we did was just a little piece of paper that accidentally went down there. That was terrible. So my husband lived in a neighborhood where they had the arcade show. | 16:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My husband, my husband and his family, they lived all over the New Orleans. They lived everywhere. They lived in St. Katherines Parish. They lived in St. Peter Clavis Parish and they had to couple up, two families had to live together. That's how we survived in those days, families would have to live together because people didn't have much money, you see? So they were always on a moving wagon because they couldn't pay the rent, all that kind of stuff. And in my house, for us to survive, I remember growing up with uncles and aunts, living in a house with my mother being maybe the housekeeper. Mama, what I call, would have hollow hustle going. She'd be the housekeeper. Everybody had to give her certain percentage of the money for her to run the house. You see? And my daddy didn't work. My daddy was, I don't know if I said that on that other tape, but my daddy had had nervous breakdowns, so he didn't work, but he'd help mama with the washing. | 17:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We had my daddy all day long, and mama would be making this hog head cheese and all these things. And my uncles were on a WPA, I don't know if you heard this work program to create jobs for people because jobs were scarce then too. And two of my uncles used to be prize fighters. And then they'd sell vegetables. One of them sold vegetables and another one got into this massage in a Beverly Country Club, which was exclusively White. And why they kept my uncle out of nowhere, because he looked like a White guy himself. And usually Whites, when in that kind of circle, they want you to look Black so you can look and wear a uniform and all that kind of stuff. I remember when my mother went to help at Lee Lightner, my husband's job, my mother-in-law then was working over there. | 18:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And they would have these promotional programs for salesman to come in and look at their products. They'd sell all these different appliances and they'd have food. And my mother-in-law would be serving them food. You see it would all be prepared, but she would be serving them food and coffee. She worked in a coffee shop, she handled a coffee shop, and sometimes she needed more help, so she would get more help. And a few times, she got my mother. And when my mother went there, she looked like White. So they began, and when you asked mama her name, it was Mrs. Duminy, I don't care who you are. It was Mrs. Duminy. And they began calling mama Mrs. Duminy. Well, when they found out that she was [indistinct 00:20:35] mother-in-law, well then it was Marie, Marie. | 19:47 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So those were kind the kind of things that happened early on. And then in my early marriage, I kept up some of the same tradition, a lot of family life. My children were always having birthdays, and the little parties would be nothing but the cake and the ice cream. That was a party for my children. And house parties one day had his birthday. We even had a little band. The little boys around the corner used to have a little band, and they'd come in and maybe for $10 they'd play music and we couldn't get rid of them. They didn't want to leave. After we got tired of the music, we wanted them to leave. | 20:41 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then two clubs, the social clubs. No, I want to tell you this, I need to tell you this because when I was a child, what really stayed with me, my aunt used to take me on Claiborne Street and Claiborne from St. Bernard to [indistinct 00:21:46] was a string of businesses. And we had Black businesses there. We had three drug stores, Black drug stores on the corner of St. Philip and Clavon. We had Guichards drugstore, that was G-U-I-C-H-A-R-D, Guichards Drugstore. And down the block, I don't know how many, not too far from him, I don't know if it was on the other side of Esplanade or this side, but it was Lavichier. Now how do you spell Lavichier? I think it's L-A-V-I-C-H, now what would be the French—I guess I-E-R, C-H-I-E-R. | 21:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Lavichier. I think that would be Lavichier. And of course, we had [indistinct 00:22:43] on a corner of [indistinct 00:22:43] and Clavon. So that was three Black drugstores, one White drugstore, Donachier, Donachier. Now that was D-O-N-A-C-H, I guess I-E-R, I guess Donachier now, that was White. And then they had this White doctor. They had Dr. Ferris. Now Black people used to go there, but then they had Black doctors. Dr. Sheffield, big, tall, distinguished man. I remember him because he was such a big man. And then we had CC Highdale, and we had the Standard Insurance Company. | 22:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | As a Black? | 23:21 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Black insurance companies we had, Frank's was an Italian, but it was a chicken place. And my husband's first cousin worked there for years. Charlie [indistinct 00:23:41]. And you'd buy your chickens alive and they'd kill them almost in front of you and pluck them and clean them and however you wanted them. Sometimes you'd have them cut up. And that's just how they do in Paris even today, when I went to Paris, they had all that. My grandfather had this meat stand and it's the same thing in Paris now. They had the meat staying outside and the pigs in the meat. | 23:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And on Carnival day, this Claiborne from St. Bernard to Orleans would just, you'd say light up, so to speak, with the life and activity. Families would come with their food and drinks and get their little stake, their territory and stay the whole day under those big oak trees. | 24:12 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | We had big oak trees there. The Zulu Parade would pass around there and would go further down to Dooky's. We had Latiste Notion Store, Latiste. How would you spell Latiste? Latiste. L-A-T-I-S-T-E. Latiste. I think that's how you spell it. Latiste. And it was at old maid at that time. Anybody that wasn't married, they call them old maids. And I think her name was Aline too. And she had that store with her sister. I don't know what her sister's name was. Then they had a coffee place. You could buy coffee and have it ground, you can buy it with the—Do you want the caffeine or not? | 24:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I used to go along by the hand with my aunt every Saturday you'd go shop there. They had a store, man that made mattresses and sew mattresses and used furniture. They had the Jewish people I think that had a cap shop. It was just wonderful to be around then to smell the aroma of Claiborne Street on a Saturday night and carnival day it was like two carnivals. We'd be there for almost the whole day. | 25:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And when the Baby Dolls—that was a tradition too, there was a club of Baby Dolls. The Baby Dolls were fat women that on Carnival day would come out in these scantily dressed costumes. They would have these short little satin skirts. And [indistinct 00:26:28] I forget what they had on. They might have a little crown on their head or they might have big ribbons in their head, and some of them might have socks and little shoes on. They call them Baby Dolls. And they'd shake down. They'd shake through the streets. That was nice. And we had the skeletons and we had the Indians, and we just had fun. It was a lot of fun. | 26:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did you ever go down, you said that you had two [indistinct 00:26:55] that were in the Vieux Carre? | 26:53 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes. | 26:56 |
| Michele Mitchell | Did you go down there? | 26:56 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | No, I never, never went there. And in fact, until today, I don't like to go in to Vieux Carre because it was so long we were not allowed to go there. They had the St. Louis Cathedral that was in the Vieux Carre. That's with a lot of passe Blancs that used to go there. They'd have their big weddings there, St. Louis Cathedral, right opposite Jackson Square. Jackson Square is right in the front of it. That's one of our oldest churches and a tourist attraction. | 26:59 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And these passe Blancs would go to school there. They would marry there. And my two aunts lived there. I never knew them, but mama would tell me how she'd go and visit her two aunts and cry when she had to go back home because they lived in what they call in a country in Laport. And she being the oldest children, the oldest daughter had to care for the little ones. They were 10 children, you see? So she'd have to care for the little ones. And no identity, didn't want to be living. They wanted to live like the Whites in the [indistinct 00:28:25]. | 27:40 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | They were close to the neighbors, her mother and the neighbors, they would help each other in childbirth. The children went to catechism together. But then there was always a point where they let you know where your place was. Like my mother's sister was put back in a line because she was Colored and didn't know she was Colored and would come home and say, they call her Colored or it was just different things. When my uncles got to be young men and looking good, the White girls start paying attention. That's when they cut off the association, that kind of stuff. | 28:27 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So anyway, we carried on that same tradition. When my children was growing up, I went on Claiborne Street with my children. Yes, I have pictures of being on Claiborne Street. And we were enjoying. What took that culture and that tradition away was the freeway. The freeway come through and they cut down all these oak trees, which was the usual. Usually when they're going to build something, either highways or whatever it is, they displaced the poor people, whatever poor section of the Black people, they'll displace these people for progress. So we make most of the sacrifices for progress. | 29:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | There was a funeral parlor right near Claiborne, around the corner on St. Philip near Claiborne, [indistinct 00:30:06], it was Labatt's funeral service first. But then Mr. Labatt died and his son-in-law took it over. So it was Labatt [indistinct 00:30:18] and Mr. [indistinct 00:30:19] and Louis [indistinct 00:30:20], he fought and tried to organize the neighborhood to stop them from cutting those trees down and bringing that interstate through there, but to no avail. Then he had another funeral parlor, right near Claiborne on domain, right near Claiborne. That was another funeral parlor. We had [indistinct 00:30:44]. That was on St. Claude. So we had Black businesses out of necessity because they wouldn't bury you. They couldn't go in their graveyards. We had a certain graveyards we couldn't go into. | 29:56 |
| Michele Mitchell | Which ones? | 31:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Well, I'll tell you which ones we could go into. St. Louis, the famous tourists, St. Louis, a lot of our people was there. And later on the bishop, I never did understand that thing. They said it was, how did they say that, a health hazard or the tombs were falling and they had to move so many bodies. And I never did believe all that stuff or never understood what that was. But from what I understand, the place is renovated. Most the tourists to go into— Marie Laveux's body is there. So that was the graveyard that we were allowed to go in. And of course there was the city graveyard called Hope Cemetery. Yeah, I think it's Hope. I don't know if it's Hope, H-O-P-E or if it's H-O-L-T. I don't know. | 31:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Now that's where my baby is buried. That was another incident that I'll never forget. My eighth child was born without a cranium, which was hard. He had this soft membrane instead of a hard cranium. And I couldn't push him out. And they were thinking about giving me a cesarean. And I finally brought that baby here, and he lived nine hours. And my doctor was Dr. Boute, a woman doctor, a Black doctor. We had our own doctors, although we always was able to go to some White doctors to practice on us. They'd be in these little drug stores for a while until they moved out. Or if you went to Charity Hospital, well, you had all White doctors. They didn't even allow Blacks to be interns or anything over there. | 31:58 |
| Michele Mitchell | The Charity Hospital they didn't? | 32:56 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Charity Hospital, it was the White side and the Black side, the Charity Hospital. They'd separate. And sometimes you'd go there, light skinned Blacks, they would assume that they were Whites and put them on the wrong side. Sometimes they'd be elated. They'd think it was a compliment. Other times they didn't want to be among Whites, so they wanted them to put them on the right side among their own people. So it was according to the type person you were, if you went in the service and you were light skinned and they'd assume you were Black, you'd be all tickled. Maybe that was a compliment. Then if something happened to the person and insurance, they went to collect insurance, you couldn't collect your relatives, even if it was your son, because he was on paper as White and you Black. See? So then how do they say that, the chickens come home to roost? | 32:56 |
| Michele Mitchell | Mm-hmm. | 33:50 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So all by the same token, they had a couple in my block who wanted to marry. They had been living and in a civil marriage, a common law, whatever you call it, but I don't know how long. And they wanted to marry properly. And one of them on the birth certificate was White and the other one was Colored so they wouldn't marry them. And they were both— | 33:50 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was this during the '40s? | 34:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | This was during the '40s, '40s, '50s and things like that. If you had one drop, let me see, I don't know what it was. If it was 139th Black blood, you were Black. That's how they determined. I said, "Wow, we sure got some good, strong blood, huh?" One drop. He had the whole person. I said, "Ain't that something?" So that kind of stuff was happening. Had another woman whose daddy went on the White side and he made a name for himself in Washington DC and had a lot of money. And when he died, she contested the will. She was able to contest the will and get the money from her daddy to prove that he was her dad, she had to prove that he was her daddy. You see, he had gone on the White side. So it's those kind of things that used to happen to you during that time. | 34:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So I brought up my children almost the same way and with the same values that I was brought up. Only that I decided they would not be brought up like Creoles. They would not be brought up to believe they better than somebody else, or they would not be brought up not knowing who they were, because I was struggling all my life to answer that question, who am I? | 35:21 |
| Michele Mitchell | Now you went to which schools again? | 35:54 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I went to Joseph A Craig's Elementary school, and I was very proud to learn of my Negro history in Joseph A Craig. We had some powerful teachers. We had Ms. Adley who would, when she talked about being Black, it was just wonderful. We had to have book reports of Black people, Phyllis Wheatley and, oh, I don't know, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Frederick Douglas, different ones. There was one particular teacher in her room I read three volumes of Harriet Tubman. She was just—Excuse me. | 35:57 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then we had music appreciation. We had The Song of the Volga Boatmen. And what was this? Oh, there was just something about the king and the halls, the kings and oh, it was just beautiful that we were able to get that. We had a band. My cousin was the drum major of that band. We had concerts. We had a principal, Ms. Kigel, who was a nervian. She was a nervous wreck. We'd be at the assembly and she'd pitch the bell in the assembly in a group of children. | 36:44 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And at that time, parents were mostly passive. The teacher, at least my mother brought us up like that. If you got a bad report from school, then you got punished home too. If you got punished in school, you got punished home too. Or they'd make an example of you. Your mother would come there and embarrass you and tell a teacher she had to freedom to hit you, to do whatever she wanted. And then when you get home your parents were going to do the same thing, beat you up again. I could remember my mother telling my brothers, "You get in trouble and get in jail. You stay there. I'm not coming and get you, you stay there." | 37:33 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Another thing, I remember my mother telling my brothers, "Don't smile at a White woman. Don't even smile at her." In those days if you smile, you know were coming on to a White woman. Or if you befriended or you did have an affair with a White woman, they could find your body floating in the water. So most Black mothers were worried about their sons because if a White girl wanted to holler rape anytime, that's what my mother would say a White girl can holler rape anytime and you could be lynched, you see? | 38:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So that was the biggest worry for mothers with their sons. My mother used to tell my brothers, "Don't run. Don't run anyway. Don't run." Because during those days they see you running, they think you did something. You see, "Don't run. If a policeman stop you, you stop and you talk or you just don't run." And they handled you so roughly all kinds of things they did. Another thing mommy used to say, "If a girl don't respect herself, respect her anyway, respect her anyway." Those were the kind of things we brought up. The way we were brought up, you see? | 38:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Your mother's name was Marie? | 39:27 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Marie Ella Duminy, Marie Ella Vagas Duminy. | 39:28 |
| Michele Mitchell | V-E? | 39:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | V-A-G-A-S, Vagas Duminy, D-U-M-I-N-Y. | 39:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | So Vagas was her maiden name? | 39:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Maiden name. | 39:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | V-A-G— | 39:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | A-S. | 39:49 |
| Michele Mitchell | And where was she born? | 39:51 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She was born in Lockport. | 39:53 |
| Michele Mitchell | She was born in Lockport, okay. I mean, you're talking about the values that your mother gave you. Could you say— | 39:54 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Strong values. Mama gave us the value of honesty, she would tell us stories about how people lied. She told me a story about a man who was good friends with a couple, he and his friend, even before marriage were close. And then after marriage he kept friendly with the couple. And one day they go out hunting and he kills the man. He was having feelings for the man's wife, you see? So he kills the man on a hunting trip. And there was nobody there. He took him way in the woods. And the only thing was the bright moon, they had a full moon, bright moon. And he goes back and he tells the woman some story, some lie about how her husband dies. And everybody believed him and he marries the woman. And they lived together further. | 40:06 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And one day he's sitting on the porch and the moon is shining, the bright moon is shining. And he starts laughing. He gets hysterical and he starts laughing and he tells her that nobody was there but the moon. And she starts questioning him why he was laughing. Well anyway, to make the long story—The truth comes out. And that's what she said. "The truth will always come out. And if you lie, you'll steal. And if you steal, you'll kill." That's what she used to tell us. The truth will always come. Or she'll tell us things like, "I have eyes in the back of my head, I'll see you and if I don't see you, somebody else will see you and it'll come back to me. So there's nothing you can do that I won't know of." Honey, you don't know how strong—We knew that that mama was going to know what we were doing or if we did anything wrong. | 41:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And it was good for me but I was so scrupulous that I was not only going to confession telling my sins, which I thought was sins. They weren't even sins. Everything was a sin in those days, girl. I was confessing things like stealing a piece of meat out my mama's red beans. If Mama cooked beans with country smoke in it, and I'd be in a pot stealing, go to confession and tell the priest, I stole a meat in there, and they'd be, "yes," you know, "yes." I guess they were tired hearing us, you know. | 42:26 |
| Michele Mitchell | (laughs) | 42:51 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Or I'd go tell him what my aunt did, "my aunt did this, or my aunt did that." And he tell me nothing. He just wanted to know what I did and don't tell him that. And Lord, if you did a little sin of impurity, if I say we'd be looking at each other's breasts, or a paste—one time I was in the bathroom pasting lemon peel on my little nipples, you know—I'd have to go in—(laughs) | 42:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | (laughs) | 43:11 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I'd have to go tell him everything. So until they'd say, yeah, yeah. But anyway, it had gotten to a point where I think maybe I was too scrupulous, but it did all the good in the world because I was always strong on truth. And I taught my children that too, to always be honest. And another thing mama would say, "When you tell one lie, you got to tell another one. You never can get away with one lie." Then she another thing she used to tell us that when you gossip or when you tell something, she told us something about a pillar. You get a pillar and shake all the feathers out. You cannot pull them back. You cannot pick them back up. And that was when you tell something, you have no business telling that you never can take it back. | 43:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So it's those kind of things. And they brought you up with so many quotes, birds of a feather flock together, which I didn't understand. I thought it meant as far as morals and that was concerned. But in mama's view, that was—And don't file a bad company, she'd say, don't file a bad company. And then she'd tell her stories about the bank robber that all a guy did he was just there. He didn't even go in and rob the bank. But when they put them in jail, they put them all in jail. When they electrocuted him, how did they say electrocute them? They all were electrocuted, meaning that there was no such thing as well. I didn't do it. I was just with the group. In other words, she impressed strongly, don't file a no crowd. I never did belong to a group I never did belong to— | 44:15 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | There was some children that had to belong to the group, not me. I always was an independent person. People would flock to me. She'd say be a leader, not a follower. Anybody could follow, she'd say, and I brought the same thing to my children. I told my children, and that's what happened to them also. They didn't have to follow a group or get in with the group or to be liked. And another thing happened, I had had a priest friend, and SVD, his name was Father Williams and William Adams was his name. And he was so much of a friend that when I was having problems with the family, I would write to him and he would write back to me. And one thing he wrote to me, two things he wrote to me that stayed with me, that changed me a whole lot because I was always an honest, frank person. | 45:09 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Honest to the point where I might even hurt you. If you say how you like my hair, I tell you if I like it and I tell you, if I didn't, which I could tell you from what I understand, what other— | 46:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | One of my aunts would say, "Aline, how you like my hat?" I'd say, "Oh, I don't like that hat, that looks terrible." "Oh, you little woman, you, you little woman," and then I'd get sacked out because I told the truth. I really thought you were supposed to tell the truth, so I had to try to learn how to—I started not saying something. Or they'd say, "I don't like you," or, "That Aline, that Aline," or if I was—And too, I would ask any question, and she's a little woman, she know this. I didn't know nothing, that's why I was asking questions. I wanted to know why they was— | 0:03 |
| Michele Mitchell | "She's a little woman." | 0:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When you call a child a woman, that was really an insult, that used to hurt me— | 0:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was it? | 0:48 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | —because a woman meant you went to bed with somebody, that you— | 0:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 0:52 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, that's what woman meant. | 0:52 |
| Michele Mitchell | That's what it meant? | 0:53 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Nowadays, woman, we don't want to be called girls, I don't want to be called a lady anymore, I want to be called a woman because— | 0:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | "She's a little woman." | 1:00 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes, she's a little woman. When they said, "She's a little woman," that meant you were sassy or you knew it all, you knew too much or something. That was not a nice word then, so I had to learn to shut up. | 1:01 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The correspondent, sometimes he would visit us and he was at Bay St. Louis, and my brother-in-law was a seminarian at that time, so that's why I met a lot of SVDs, Father LeDoux, Father Boucree, Father Olivier, Brother Peters, Brother Joseph. We'd go as a family on Sundays to see my brother-in-law and also, even after he left the seminary, we would continue because we had made friends. To tell you the truth, that was one of our outings. We never had many places to go, we would love to go there. And then they would feed us and that was so nice for us to be a family and they would give us dinner, so we felt like we were real. The children would just take—It was beautiful grounds, the grotto and the grounds, so it was really a nice outing. | 1:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Father Adams and I kept up corresponding after he left and went several places, he went to California, to Riverside and St. Malachy's parish. Through the years in bringing my children, when I was frustrated, I would write him and tell him what was going on, or I would tell him I had gotten in trouble with this one or that one didn't like me and this one didn't like me. One time, he wrote me and he said, "Aline, we were put on this earth to love, not to be loved," and that stayed with me. I said, "Well, I don't have a problem, because it wasn't a problem for me to love or to like people, so if they didn't like me, that was not my problem." It was a simple statement, but it did so much for me, till I stopped worrying about whether people liked me or not. | 2:05 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | And then later on in years, I came by a book, I read a book, "What You Think of Me Is None of My Business," so that just sort of confirmed this simple little statement for me. It was by Whittaker, I forget her first name. But it was so good, you have affirmations. The book was just marvelous. It made me a stronger woman. It made me a woman in my own rights, that I didn't have to worry about anybody. Even my children, my youngest child used to always try to get me, "You do this for Eli," or, "You like everybody but me and I hate you, I hate you," so I said, "That's your problem, baby." I said, "I love you," I said, "That's your problem. I don't have nothing to do with that. My responsibility is to love you. I love you, so I don't have no worries. You worry about that, you solve your problem." That was one thing that Father Adams told me. | 3:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Another thing was he said, "Aline," he said, "You are an oak," he said, "You have to be a willow, you're going to have to bend," and that's the first time, because you see, bringing up children is really a chore. It was a 24-hour a day thing for me. I'm not saying that 24 hours, I was into my children, because I was involved in the community. Once your children get to school, the first time you open your mouth and ask a question, you're an officer. They're going to make you secretarial or vice president or president or something like that when they see you can speak up or you're going to say something. From then on, I began to get involved with organizations in my school, on the parish level, on the diocesan level, on even the National Office of Black Catholics. | 4:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I was busy with raising a family and working in the community, in my church. I was in the NAACP, in the Urban League. We'd be soliciting for money for the Urban League, soliciting for money, for the The Catholic program we had to build Saint Paul. They gave us one school and they built, I don't know how many Whites, but we all had to pledge, so we'd be picking up pledges. Oh, what was that thing? I forget what, but the Catholics have a way of calling any fundraising thing by a name, but it's all the same thing. You're doing the same thing over and over, they just give it a new name. Anyway, I was doing all these kind of things and raising a family, and then I had strict rules for my children. | 5:25 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I had seven children, so I never asked anybody, "What you want to eat, honey?" I never asked them, "Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?" It had to be we were a unit. I looked at us as a unit. We ate, we had three meals a day, breakfast, and usually, it was a hot breakfast, it was grits or oatmeal. If I was having a baby or sick or something, my husband would fix their breakfast. You could see pictures of us with seven little plates across the thing, everybody with hot grits or hot oatmeal. Very seldom, we'd have a cold breakfast. When things got tight and we couldn't afford meats or I didn't have money for dinner or something, we had egg and rice. I could fix an egg and rice, and like I tell you that ground meat, I could fix you a hash, a stuffing-type thing with a lot of seasoning and bread and ground meat that you'd eat on French bread sandwich or you'd eat with rice or you could eat— | 6:24 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It was just wonderful, the things you could do with cheaply cut meats. We never bought the sirloin steaks. Well, I came up like that. If we had pannéed meat, it was neck chops or seven chops on Sunday. If we had other meat, it was meatloaf. Every Sunday, it was either meatball or the meatloaf. Sometime Mama would stick a few burrowed eggs in, there might be two or three burrowed eggs in it. It was just fun to cut a slice and see that nice burrowed egg, it made it pretty. Gumbo was cheap, so that's what we had. On Sundays, we had our gumbo and we had the pannéed meat and potato salad, usually, it was potato salad, and peas and maybe a lettuce salad. We made shortcuts, but my children had to eat. | 7:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Breakfast was in the morning when you woke up, it was lunch at 12:00, and it was supper at 5:00. Everybody knew that and everybody ate at the same time. Nobody straggled in, I didn't eat, I'm not hungry, I'm not this. If you ate all of your dinner, you could get seconds. You could get seconds, but not thirds. And the seconds, sometimes I couldn't afford seconds, but I'd spread the thing that the seconds would be—just a little tip just to let them know they're getting seconds. | 8:36 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | If they ate all of their dinner, they got five M&M's. They had to count them themselves how many, so I was teaching them a little arithmetic, too. You could cheat them, if I'd give them three, "Ah, Mother, ah!" I said, "Well, what is that?" And then, well, they'd count that, that's only three, okay, five, so you'd get five. At night, you'd get your graham crackers and milk for your snack before you go to bed, your graham crackers and milk. | 9:07 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | You got ice cream only on special days, on birthdays, communions, parties, or a Sunday, if it was a Sunday in the evening. You never got no treats, no sweets, if you didn't eat your dinner. If you didn't eat your dinner, you couldn't get the treats, so they always ate your dinner. I didn't have to worry about throwing food away. We never threw food away, I don't care what it was. They tried to eat that food just to get those five little M&M's. If I had Oreo cookies, it was two Oreo cookies, we had two graham crackers. It was a limited amount all the time. It was just a limited amount. | 9:40 |
| Michele Mitchell | But it was a treat. | 10:24 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, but it was a treat. If it was a cake or a pie, I could divide it into I don't know how many in that. They'd tease me, they'd said, "Get Aline, Aline can cut that cake into so many pieces," but that's what we did. During the summertime, I'd have a spelling bee for the neighborhood kids and my kids. In the yard, we'd have a spelling bee and we had it regularly, a certain day of the week. At the end of the summer, the person who had the highest score, they'd made highest score, I had these coupons that you'd go to the coupon store, they would get a prize. There was first prize, second prize, and third prize. The first prize, I got a little camera, then I'd maybe get a coloring book and colors, different little things for a spelling bee. | 10:25 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When Lent came around for my children, any extra work they did, they'd get a purple bean. I would buy black-eyed peas or white or the navy beans and I would put that, you know that thing you mop your throat with when you have a sore throat, that purple medicine? | 11:19 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, yeah. | 11:38 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I'd take that purple medicine and spray it over those beans so they had purple beans, and then I'd tell them, "Well, if you did extra," because everybody had their chores. They came in from school in the evening, put their books up, and they did their chores. One would have the dusting, one would have the passing the mop on the floor, the other might have the garbage, according to age. The older ones had different things. Somebody had the kitchen in the evenings, the bathroom, somebody had the bathroom, somebody had the pots. You never had the kitchen and the pots, it was always the dishes, you had the dishes, somebody had to clean around the kitchen. Somebody said, when I tell them that, they say, "Well Aline, what you do?" I'd say, "I'm on the foreman, honey," I say, "I'm on the foreman." | 11:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It worked was if you didn't do it right, you did it again. I don't care how many times. Oh, you finished your bathrooms, let me go see. I'd go see if it was done, if it wasn't done, I don't like that little piece, look right there. Same thing with the pots, my pots had to be on the outside the same as in the inside. They learned that and they thanked me today for all of that. When my son went in the seminary, he said, "Mother, you don't know how glad I am that you—" The boys and the girls, all of them the same thing, they'd rotate all— | 12:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | Your boys would be doing the same things? | 13:09 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The boys would do the same thing, they had the kitchen, they had everything. I said, "When you marry, your wife is not going to call me names." I said, "When you marry, she's going to be—" I'm telling you, I have a son that can cook on four burners, just like his daddy, you hear, make gumbo and everything. | 13:10 |
| Michele Mitchell | When your husband was serving as a surrogate father in his family, did he do all sorts of things? | 13:29 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh yes, oh yes. She taught those boys, my mother-in-law, and I wrote a poem thanking her for my husband, and he must have seen something of you in me, that's why he was attracted to me because I was a strong person, too. She was a strong woman. I used to tell her, "There ain't no grave going to hold your body down." She wasn't a complaining, yeah, yeah, woman. She did what she had to do and that was it, always. She taught those boys, they knew how to iron. My husband knew how to iron, how to clean up a house, everything. The only thing my husband would not do is fool with these little, bitty babies. When my babies were first born, my mama would stay about two weeks with us. My husband would do everything else, but my mama would take care of the baby and me. | 13:35 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Because my mother-in-law used to—she'd do the work and everything and then look for something to eat. My mama was one of these she'd get up and put a pot of beans on, get the food, know what she's going to eat at 12:00, then do her work and then eat the dinner that she had already prepared, you see, that's how I was brought up. Because you see, when you marry, you're bringing in the culture of two different people, you could say, so it's four cultures coming in, it's four ways of living coming in into a marriage, you see. Because my daddy's people were a certain way, Mama would tell us something about that, we weren't close to them. We were closer to my mama's people, so we knew all about her people in the way my mama did. | 14:26 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My husband, his mother brought him up the way she came up. And then there was the other side, the St. Julien side, that had another culture, another way of living, also. Even though they were similar, because we all were Creoles and basically Creoles come up about the same way, we had different ideas. My husband didn't know how to budget, Mama taught us how to budget. I could stretch a penny a mile away. I could make anything seem good. That's the way my mama would make something out of nothing and that's the way I was. | 15:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I could put some life into anything or even set the mood. My husband would get angry when I was sick or I was angry. He'd say, "You mess up everything, you mess—"I was, just like they say, the heart of the whole home. If I wasn't up, everybody was down, you see? So I had to keep the spirit up. That's what I would say, "Well who do I go to when I don't feel—Who do I go to when I'm sick and tired of it? | 16:00 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Those two things Father Adams taught me is I was an oak and I had to bend and I realized. I had a curfew for my children. I'd wake up at night and when my children were out in the street, I'd be peeping through the door and waking up their daddy saying, "Get up, you've got to go look for them." Aline, those children are getting big now, you can't be following those children all around, you can't do this, and you can't do that. But it would worry me a whole lot, you see? I knew very well how to bring up children, how to bring up little children, but I didn't know how to fool with the adults, that transition from child to adulthood when they were pulling away from me. | 16:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I really was naive in believing that if you set good example, your children were going to follow, and if you worked hard with the oldest children, that the youngest would naturally follow. Not so. Peer pressure is greater than anything. After you've worked and tried to mold your children's character and all those things, a peer pressure, a friend or anything, can come and just knock everything that you've done down, you see? But one thing I learned, it doesn't last. The fruit don't drop fall from the tree, they don't go too far. They didn't make mistakes too great that they couldn't benefit by their mistakes, you see? We were lucky in that and they thank us for lot of things that we did. But those were what we did. | 17:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I always wanted to keep my children busy during the summer months. They had a library card to go to the library, they'd read so many books, they'd get a certificate. If they brought in A's and B's in their class, we'd bring them to Dooky's. After the school was over, everybody who maintained an A/B average would go to Dooky's. If you didn't, you just didn't. We'd drop you somewhere by Mamie, or by Grandma, and the ones who made the As and B's would go to Dooky. It wasn't that we'd down you or anything, it was just that you had something to work for. Maybe next year, baby. It worked tough and then they worked for it. It wasn't a you poor thing and well then maybe it's not good to say this or that, and they worked for it. | 18:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | You said that you took them down Claiborne Street like your aunt took you. | 19:06 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh yeah. I didn't take them to shop because some of the places, when they cut those trees down, then the businesses start going and Claiborne Street is not like they—But when they were little, yes. Eli was here the other day saying, "Mother, I remember Claiborne Street," because he's one of the younger ones and I thought maybe he wouldn't remember, you see, but he did. I would like to remember the exact year that those trees were cut down, but when they were cut down, they cut some of our culture out, and that's beautiful. Culture is very, very precious. Hold onto your culture. I always had something for them to do. But then when they start in that teenage group, it was really a hard time for me. That's when Father Adams told me, "Aline, you are an oak, you've got to bend," so I tried very hard and it was very, very hard for me. | 19:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Then the children start growing and start leaving. I had a problem with one of my daughters. I found out she was having a relationship with her husband, you know, before they were married. She was supposed to go on Operations Crossroads. She had been given money from churches and the students at Xavier University had raised funds for her. It cost $1,500 to go on that trip and she had to work for that money from donations and from the students working. When I found out she was having this relationship, which was something that was very foreign to me, I thought I didn't know how to make them as strong as I was spiritually, because you see, the church let me down. | 20:18 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When the children start falling away from the church and I began telling the priests, they did not have any answers. They didn't know how to solve the problem. When I was asking him for the vernacular, for dialogue—Not the vernacular, because that was Pope John the 23rd's ecumenical council, which brought in the vernacular at at mass and dialogue, and brought the churches together. You could visit Baptist churches, the Protestant churches. And they call that ecumenism, that all the religions were going to come together and accept one another, because we had been taught all our lives that we were the only true religion and all these other people were not saved, which was a whole lot of poppycock. | 21:34 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | But anyway, my children start falling away from the church and I needed help during those teenage years, you see? The church, I realized, was there only for those who came to them and for those who were already in the state of grace, so to speak, you had to be good, and I thought the church should be tending to the needs of people who really needed it. I had began to think about communion being for those who were the most hungry. They tell you that communion was for the nourishment of your soul. Just like food is for the nourishment of your body, communion was for the nourishment of your soul. | 22:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | When your body is hungry, it needs food, so when your soul is hungry, it needs food, too. There should not be any strings attached to it, because when God gave his sacrament, he didn't ask them, "Well, are you worthy? Are you worthy?" He even knew that Peter was going to deny him and that Judas was going to betray him, but he gave them a communion and all that. All of that, I was beginning to think for myself and I needed some help with the children and they weren't there for me. | 23:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My daughter, I challenged her and her boyfriend, who was [indistinct 00:24:09], and he said, "Well, is that what you want?" I said, "Oh yes. Y'all see each other," I said, "She has to go on his trip," I said, "Because she's indebted to too many people. If she doesn't go, she has to give everybody their money back, she will not keep this money." That was the understanding we had, so he said, "Okay." Oh, well, she could have killed me, you know. | 24:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So those were the things, but she is a fine woman today. She is the best teacher today. So they make their mistakes. She didn't want to even get married. She told the guy, so he said, "Tiara, we have to make a record for our children. Our children's got to have a record." She didn't even want to get married. And it wasn't because of pregnancy, it was because she wasn't pregnant. | 24:41 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | So it was things like that that just got to me and their daddy. And then the changing of the names, they got to be children, independent children thinking for themselves and changing their names, and their daddy wanted to die, you see? But I think they were right, in a sense, because it's name it and claim it. I may be repeating myself again and you tell me if I am. | 25:05 |
| Michele Mitchell | I don't know if this was on tape. | 25:28 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh, okay. It's name it and claim it, you see? You're named by your parents, then you're brought to church and the church gives you the name, your christening name, and then you get married and they give you another name and all of that. So it's just, you belong, a little piece of your belongs to everybody. Here, these children were saying, well, they wanted their own name, you see? They named their children all Swahili names. I don't know if I told you about that. | 25:31 |
| Michele Mitchell | I don't think that's on tape, to be perfectly honest. | 26:01 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | In other words, they thought about what they were doing, you see? I didn't, I just named my children names that just didn't make sense half of the time, it was just from sound. | 26:08 |
| Michele Mitchell | I've got that one of your daughter's names was Cecily and then Lisa. | 26:27 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mm-hmm. | 26:39 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yeah, that is on tape, but I actually don't have the names of your children. | 26:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | These are my grandchildren and this is the meanings of their names, which is just wonderful, so maybe you could write that down. | 26:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh. | 26:56 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | They took time to name these children, which I didn't. | 26:56 |
| Michele Mitchell | Your children's names, there are seven children? | 27:03 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Seven, uh-huh. | 27:09 |
| Michele Mitchell | What are their names? | 27:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mtumishi. You want to do that after the tape's over? | 27:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | I'm trying to figure out if I can take down their birth names and then take down their names now, the names that they chose for themselves? | 27:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I think I have a list of those, too. | 27:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, okay. Oh, great. | 27:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mtumishi's the first. | 27:51 |
| Michele Mitchell | What was the name before? | 27:53 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Michael. | 27:55 |
| Michele Mitchell | Michael. | 27:55 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Excuse me. | 28:02 |
| Michele Mitchell | He was born April 27th? | 28:05 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mm-hmm. | 28:06 |
| Michele Mitchell | And then? | 28:10 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Tayari. Tayari. | 28:12 |
| Michele Mitchell | And that was Cecily? | 28:14 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Cecily. | 28:16 |
| Michele Mitchell | Cecily. | 28:16 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | C-E-C-I-L-Y. | 28:17 |
| Michele Mitchell | And then Eric? | 28:23 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mm-hmm. | 28:25 |
| Michele Mitchell | And Nalima? | 28:26 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Nalima. Nalima was Lisa. | 28:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | 11/15 and then 12/23, oh goodness, almost Christmas. | 28:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I have two of my children born on their daddy's birthday. | 28:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | Which was 12/23? | 28:46 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Mm-hmm. | 28:48 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 28:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | He was born on the 23rd and I had a boy and a girl. I used to tell him, "Now, can a woman love you anymore than that, give you a boy and a girl on your birthday?" | 28:52 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, that's amazing. That's Eli who was born on the 23rd? | 29:05 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Eli is born on the 23rd, that's the boy. They're three years apart. This was my, what is that? The rhythm method. This was the longest rhythm method time, all these other ones are rhythm babies, twice, 14 months apart. | 29:14 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, rhythm babies, that's just—Now— | 29:38 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yuna. | 29:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | Yuna and Jude? | 29:45 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Jude. Jude is the baby that died. | 29:46 |
| Michele Mitchell | Goodness. Your husband's middle name was? | 29:49 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Joseph. | 30:06 |
| Michele Mitchell | Joseph. | 30:06 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh, my mother-in-law named all her boys, their middle name was Joseph and the middle name for the girls was either Marie or Mary, because that's a variation of Mary, Marie. It was either Mary or Marie, I think all her girls, well, she only had two girls, so it was Elaine Marie and Patricia Marie Joseph. | 30:11 |
| Michele Mitchell | Was he born here in the city? | 30:37 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes. My husband was born in the city. | 30:41 |
| Michele Mitchell | This is for the family tree? | 30:58 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | No, that's not the family tree. We have a nice family tree. My mother had a 90th birthday party and we really worked on a family tree, getting all her relatives, everybody. Let me see how far back we could go. Her great-grandmother, we went from her great-grandmother all the way down. Only on the maternal side, we couldn't go that far with my daddy's side, but it was really nice. Mtumishi, what he did was talk about what happened the year she was born, and she was born 1895. 1895, my mama was born. | 31:01 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 31:55 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | He did some research and start saying things that were happening during 1895, you see? Mama died at 90—What was mama? 96, I think. | 31:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | God, that's a long life. | 32:19 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah. | 32:20 |
| Michele Mitchell | How old is she in that picture? This picture? | 32:21 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | In this picture? I don't know in that picture, she looks so good. | 32:24 |
| Michele Mitchell | It's a wonderful picture. | 32:33 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She's in her 90s here, but I don't know. This must be '80s, because you could see she's going down here. She got a cancer on her nose, it was like a little [indistinct 00:32:50], and then it start getting bigger and bigger until it had to take her nose off, which was a traumatic—When I think of my mother, how traumatic that must be. We all have a bit of vanity, but even those of us that don't have any, some people like to say they're not vain, that's kind of hard for your face to be disfigured like that. | 32:35 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Of course, they put a, what do they call that, a false nose, prosthesis, however, and she got along fine with it and adjusted to it, but it was a traumatic thing for her, because she really did care about her looks and even to the end, fixing her hair. It's wonderful about all the Vagas sisters, they always took care of their looks. I think we were supposed to talk more about segregation and then I didn't, I don't know. | 33:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | It's all in there. It's all in there. You have a really nice way of weaving things into stories. | 34:15 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I hope it came out right, I don't know. | 34:27 |
| Michele Mitchell | You told me about Black business districts, which was such an important part, at least in terms of— | 34:36 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Oh yes. I wish we had that kind of togetherness or cohesiveness or unity of the race in that terrible period of Jim Crow and segregation, discrimination. Now that we're supposed to have arrived and we marched, I think sometimes we march for the wrong thing. We marched to integrate and that's not what we should have marched for. We should have marched for economic stability, for real equality, not equal to somebody to sit down and eat at the same place they eat, that probably would have come automatically, I think. But I just wish we had a better economic program. There is one thing about our race as a Black people that nobody else does, it seems, and that's we don't believe in each other, we don't love each other enough. | 34:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | The reason why we don't love each other enough is because we haven't learned to love ourselves and believe in ourselves, because once you love yourself and believe in yourself, you can love others easily. I'm thinking the way to learn to love yourself is to find out about your people and become aware of how great you are as a people and believe that your history began before Europe and that American history begins with Columbus, but our history goes way back, you see? If we just knew some of these things and if we could just praise and see the things that we're great for, the things that we do, like I said, we are creative people, if you see the things that our people can do. Like I tell anybody around here, I say, "Just make anything creative for me and I'll hang it up," and that's what I do. Now, my brother-in-law was an artist at Xavier University and that's his cups. I have different— | 36:05 |
| Michele Mitchell | Really? | 37:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yeah, that's his ceramics. You see, those two cups and then I have some dishes that I bought from him. And then, too, that's another thing, we have to encourage each other by buying things from each other, like I bought these things from him and just like my grandchildren, if you write a story for me, I'll pay you for it, you see? Kinini wrote a story, she's written her third story and she's good. Of course, she gets it from her daddy, but we are creative. | 37:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My daughter, too, she has learned this, teaching, it's like an innate gift. She didn't go to school, she taught for 13 years without a degree. Now, she's got her degree and she's teaching in public school, but they established a school and taught their own children and taught them well, gave them a good foundation. It's just praise. The children are doing wonderful things and when they do wonderful things, we ought to tell them, instead of just always telling them when they do things that's ugly, that's wrong. | 37:54 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, one thing I forgot to ask you about, what are your brother's and sister's names? I don't know what their names are. | 38:38 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes. My oldest brother is Walter Joseph Duminy. | 38:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | He was born— | 38:53 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | He was born—Now, wait a minute. Oh, I'm going to have to get that date. I can't remember, it's the 31st of, I think around Halloween. When he died, let me see, two years ago, he was 72. He died at 72. | 38:55 |
| Michele Mitchell | That makes 1920. | 39:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | It must be 1920. | 39:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Who came after your brother? | 39:42 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | My sister, Lucille, Lucille Teresa Duminy Baquet. B-A-Q-U-E-T. She married the brother of this famous Eddie's Restaurant, Eddie Baquet, that was her brother-in-law. | 39:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | And she was born— | 40:15 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | She was born February 28th 19—She was the same age as my husband. | 40:16 |
| Michele Mitchell | '22? About '22. | 40:26 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | '22, I think. | 40:30 |
| Michele Mitchell | After Lucille? | 40:30 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | After Lucille, my husband was '22, born in 1922. Well, I think she was—You see, one is born in December and the other one's born after, in February, so it would be my husband would be '21, because he's a little older than her, and she would be '22, you see, because it's December and February. | 40:36 |
| Michele Mitchell | Got you. | 41:02 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | See, so that's why it can't both be '22. The next one is Louise, my sister, Louise. She's born February 26th and she's 19—They're 11 months apart, so if Lucille's '22, let me see, if Lucille's '22, she's born the next February on the 26th, so that's '23, 1923. | 41:03 |
| Michele Mitchell | What is Louise's middle name? | 41:54 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Duminy and her marriage name is Sims. S-I-M-M-S. No, it's not two Ms, just one M. What would be her middle name? Louise—I don't know what's Louise's middle name, unless she's after her godmother, who was Bertha. | 41:57 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, that's okay. | 42:28 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I don't remember. The next after Louise is Manuel. | 42:29 |
| Michele Mitchell | Manuel? | 42:36 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Manuel, Emmanuel. | 42:38 |
| Michele Mitchell | Emmanuel. | 42:39 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Emmanuel. I wonder if he was Joseph, too. I don't remember Manuel's—Andrew, Emmanuel Andrew Duminy. Walter was not Joseph, Walter was—No, I'd better leave that alone. I can't remember. | 42:43 |
| Michele Mitchell | The first name's fine. | 43:19 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | I can't remember. And then I'm next, Aline Ann. | 43:25 |
| Michele Mitchell | I've got your birthdate. | 43:32 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | February gang, we're all in February. February 21st, 1926. Emmanuel is two years older than me, so he must have been—He's not two years older. Let me see how old we are. Louise is '23, so Emmanuel is 1924 in December the 5th, December the 5th, and then I was born the 26th, so that's, oh, I don't know how many months apart. | 43:35 |
| Michele Mitchell | Were you the youngest? | 44:17 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Yes, I'm the youngest. | 44:18 |
| Michele Mitchell | Oh, okay. | 44:20 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | That's five, isn't it? Did I forget anybody? | 44:20 |
| Michele Mitchell | No, you most certainly didn't. I've got your mother's name and I don't have his father's name, where do I find— | 44:22 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Paul, Paul Joseph Duminy. | 44:44 |
| Michele Mitchell | He was born in New Orleans or— | 44:59 |
| Aline Duminy St. Julien | Where was Daddy born? I don't know where Daddy was born. I don't know where Daddy was born. Let me find out. I have to— | 44:59 |
| Michele Mitchell | I can take this off. | 45:03 |
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