The name on the deed to the house on Prytania Street was Celestine Arceneaux, my wife, and Pops told it to me in the courtyard with a handkerchief in one hand and his trumpet in the other. In 1987, he said, old Arnaud Delacroix, the father of Preston, lay in that house for two years with a long illness, and the nurse who tended him day and night, without pay beyond a bowl of red beans, was a woman from the Seventh Ward who sang in the choir at St. Augustine. Celestine. Arnaud, in his last month, asked a lawyer to put the house in her name, and she never knew.
“She never knew because Arnaud asked the lawyer not to tell her until she needed it,” Pops said. “And the lawyer passed in 1991, and the paper sat in a drawer in the clerk office until a young woman named Camille went looking for something else last year.” He tapped the staircase with the bell of his horn. “I played at her engagement party, Lionel. She went pale. She hired a lawyer. Her father paid the lawyer double to say nothing.” The Delacroix family had been living for thirty eight years in a house that belonged to my wife, and then to me. Preston knew. That is why he had put his hand on my chest.
I stood by the fountain with my ginger ale and understood why a man would push another man off a staircase. It was not that I was poor. It was that I might be the owner. I thought of Celestine at the stove, stirring red beans for the whole street. She would have laughed. She would also have said, “Lionel, do not make a scene at a wedding.” So I handed Pops my ginger ale, straightened my gray suit, touched the rosary in my breast pocket and told him I was going to walk up to that staircase and have my picture taken.
A deed in a drawer gave one father of the bride the length of a wedding photograph to bring his in law back to the truth in New Orleans.
I gave my terms to Preston Delacroix on the grand staircase itself, in the middle of the photograph, in front of the bride, the groom, forty guests and a photographer with a flash. I said it quietly, with a smile. I said I would take my place at the top of the stairs beside my grandson, and that after the reception, he and I would visit a lawyer on Poydras Street. I said the house on Prytania would stay in the family, meaning Jalen and Camille, and that Preston and his wife would be welcome to stay on the second floor for as long as they liked, at no rent.
Preston dropped his hand from my chest. His face went the color of old plaster. He said he found out about the deed when Camille was twelve, from a letter in the desk of his father, and that he decided to put it back in the drawer and live in the house, as if the paper might forget itself. He said he was ashamed of me because I was a reminder. “Lionel, every time I saw you I saw the name on that deed,” he said. “I thought if I made you small, the paper would be small.” I said, “That is the saddest thing a man ever told me on a staircase.”
Preston, who was not a man to stay sad for long, turned and snatched the folded copy of the deed from the breast pocket of the groomsman beside him, meaning to run through the courtyard and out the front gate and into the night, and he bolted across the courtyard in his rented shoes. The photographer kept taking pictures. The groom said, “Is this part of the program?” Camille said, “Daddy, no.” Pops lifted his trumpet to his lips and began, very softly, to play a few bars of a slow jazz dirge, for the dramatic effect.
Standing in the archway that led to the gate was a Mardi Gras Indian chief, one of the guests of the groom, in a full suit of bright blue feathers and beads six feet wide and eight feet tall, built over eleven months by hand. He was not moving. He was not about to. Preston ran into the feathers and bounced off like a ball off a haystack. The chief looked down. In a voice that rolled through the courtyard, he said, “Young man, you are running in the wrong direction.” He pointed to the staircase, where the entire wedding party stood waiting.
Preston walked back across the courtyard on his own feet, handed the deed to Jalen and sat down on the bottom step of the staircase in his tuxedo. The photograph was taken after all, with the whole family on the stairs, including me, including Preston, who stood at the end, looking at nothing. The lawyer on Poydras recorded the deed on Monday. Preston and his wife stayed in the house on the second floor, paying nothing, as I had promised. Camille took the top floor and put a tiny red bean pot on the mantle. I have not once raised the matter of rent.
In the name of Celestine, who passed in 2020, I started the Celestine Arceneaux Red Beans Monday Fund. It pays for title searches, succession lawyers and recording fees for families who may own property they never knew about, in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Bernard parishes. In the first year we helped twenty six families find paper they did not know they had, and the first was a retired school bus driver from the Lower Ninth Ward, Mr. Duplessis, who found a deed to a double shotgun left to his mother in 1964. Pops plays at every signing, on his trumpet, in a little hat.
Every Monday now, I cook a pot of red beans in the big kitchen on Prytania Street, the way Celestine did, and the whole block comes. Preston sets the long table. Camille brings the rice. Jalen carries in the bread from the bakery on Dauphine, and little by little the old house is learning to be loud. Last Monday Preston sat down beside me, put a spoon in his bowl, and said, “Lionel, these are good beans.” I said, “They are hers.” We ate until the dishes were empty, and I took the rosary out of my pocket, kissed it and put it back.
