Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood
9781465684882
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
“Children should be seen and not heard.” Children were neither seen nor heard in the days of which I write, the days of 1840. They led the simple life, going and coming in their own unobtrusive way, making no stir in fashionable circles, with laces and flounces and feathered hats. There were no ready made garments then for grown ups, much less for children. It was before California gold mines, before the Mexican war, before money was so abundant that we children could turn up our little noses at a picayune. I recall the time when Alfred Munroe descended from Boston upon the mercantile world of New Orleans, and opened on Camp Street a “one price” clothing store for men. Nobody had ever heard of one price, and no deviation, for anything, from a chicken to a plantation. The fun of hectoring over price, and feeling, no matter how the trade ended, you had a bargain after all, was denied the customers of Mr. Alfred Munroe. The innovation was startling, but Munroe retired with a fortune in course of time. Children’s clothes were home made. A little wool shawl for the shoulders did duty for common use. A pelisse made out of an old one of mother’s, or some remnant found in the house, was fine for Sunday wear. Pantalettes of linen, straight and narrow and untrimmed, fell over our modest little legs to our very shoetops. Our dresses were equally simple and equally “cut down and made over.” Pantalettes were white, but I recall, with a dismal smile, that when I was put into what might be called unmitigated mourning for a brother, my pantalettes matched my dresses, black bombazine or black alpaca. Our amusements were of the simplest. My father’s house on Canal Street had a flat roof, well protected by parapets, so it furnished a grand playground for the children of the neighborhood. Judge Story lived next door and Sid and Ben Story enjoyed to the full the advantages of that roof, where all could romp and jump rope to their heart’s content. The neutral ground, that is now a center for innumerable lines of street cars, was at that time an open, ungarnished, untrimmed, untended strip of waste land. An Italian banana and orange man cleared a space among the bushes and rank weeds and erected a rude fruit stall where later Clay’s statue stood. A quadroon woman had a coffee stand, in the early mornings, at the next corner, opposite my father’s house. It could not have been much beyond Claiborne Street that we children went crawfishing in the ditches that bounded each side of that neutral ground, for we walked, and it was not considered far. The Farmers’ and Traders’ Bank was on Canal Street, and the family of Mr. Bell, the cashier, lived over the bank. There were children there and a governess, who went fishing with us. We rarely caught anything and had no use for it when we did.
