Glee Guy
Van san sou! Lots of glee guy, only van san sou, Maw-maw called out, whipping up the excitement in the room with her voice, trying to really sell it, advertising her wares like a man selling flowers on the street in New Orleans. She pulled colorful plastic toys and musty smelling clothes from a plastic grocery sack, holding them up one by one before tossing them at me. They piled high on my lanky teenage body. You like this glee guy? She asked, shoving a colorful plastic McDonalds toy from the latest Disney movie in my face. Yeah Maw-maw, thank you, I lied, and was rewarded with a quick smile and a t-shirt to the face.
*
Don’t pretend you never lied as a child to please an adult. Nothing would be gained by telling Maw-maw the toy was common, ugly, stained by Sharpie marker, and that I was at least five years too old to enjoy it. Instead, I reassured her and gained her smile. Wasn’t that a better choice?
*
Emelda Orgeron Lefort — my Maw-maw — loved garage sales. She frequented them as often as she could. My siblings and I overflowed with surprised gratitude when the shirt happened to still hold a vestige of style, or when the toy was fun, like an Etch-a-Sketch or Spirograph. It was very hit or miss. What was definite, unchanging, was her desire to please us. Nearly every Wednesday morning — garage sale day on Bayou Lafourche — she tried to reward our love with her treasures. The attraction came, I think, from being able to snatch items up, filling her arms for only a few coins. It was beautiful extravagance for a woman who’d grown up in such hard times. She’d quit school when she was eleven-years-old, in fifth grade. She worked in a shrimp factory to help her family pay bills.
*
Have you heard those words together before? Shrimp and factory. Shrimp aren’t manufactured but born — the marriage of nature and machinery in the term is an odd one to me. But I didn’t have to get a job until after I’d finished high school, so I speak from privilege. I was born in the same place as Emelda but decades later, when schoolgirls no longer had to support the families they were born into.
*
There was no real choice — there were ten children counting Emelda. On the South Louisiana bayou it was normal — women and girls in simple cotton dresses worked with seafood instead of sewing machines, as they might have in other states. Emelda shelled shrimp for hours with her leather skinned fingers, was paid pennies by the pound, and never quite got the raw fishy smell off before showing up for her next shift. Maybe her mother cried when Emelda had to leave school. Maybe she didn’t. Her parents — my great-grandparents — were both completely illiterate. Did they see Emelda as already educated enough because she could read and write a little? It was already so much more than they would ever be able to do.
*
I don’t know much about her early life. I didn’t think about that, busy with myself, and now she’s gone. The things do know have layers of dust and a child’s point of view covering them up. Maw-maw told me that she didn’t know how to read until God helped her learn to read the Bible as an adult. She used cassette tapes of the Scriptures, fingers tracing the letters as she listened to the verses droned out. I asked my mom how Emelda got to fifth grade if she couldn’t read. My own fourth grade daughter reads Harry Potter and Roald Dahl. My mom doesn’t know.
*
Maybe Emelda could read enough to struggle along in school until the fifth grade. Maybe the strong gulf vapors in the factory scrubbed letters and sounds from her mind, or the overworked teachers on the bayou knew they had to move the kids along before their parents pulled them out to join the labor force. No time to waste when more siblings were being born, more open hands grasping and gaping mouths needing. No allowances, financial or moral, were made for birth control on the Roman Catholic bayou. A cycle of life: a baby is born, her older sister removed from school. Augusta Trosclair Orgeron, Emelda’s mother, wore a cotton maternity dress for her own job in the baby factory.
*
Maw-maw wore roomy, bright, cotton muu-muus. She was always the most comfortable in the room. She danced with her broom when sweeping the kitchen, to make us laugh. She sang songs in Cajun French as she swung the broom around the room, Venez avec moi a la maison de mon père — come and go with me to my Father’s house. She called her happiness the joy of the Lord . Her face was stamped with it, as clearly as a birthmark.
*
“Van san sou” was vingt-cinq sous — twenty-five cents. “Glee guy” was drigaille — trash. I didn’t know this until I began college French, back to school in my thirties, Emelda in the ground for more than a decade. I received a shock when my class learned French numbers and I picked out the sounds in my memory to equal actual French words. My siblings and I hadn’t known what she was saying as she tossed plastic and cloth at us. She was marveling at how cheaply she had gotten these things — what a bargain — and also acknowledging that she got them cheaply because they were drigaille and had been discarded. One woman’s drigaille is another woman’s trésor, I guess, although not always her granddaughter’s. Emelda flung her prizes with the exuberance of a Mardi Gras queen riding her float, and remembering her throwing glee guy in my face, her musty shirts piling in my lap, fills me with joy. So maybe I wasn’t lying when I said, I like that glee guy, Maw-maw. Thank you.
