With a series of lyrical vignettes Eileen M. Julien traces her life as an African American woman growing up in middle-class New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s. Julien's narratives focus on her relationship with her mother, family, community, and the city itself, while touching upon life after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Haunted by a colonial past associated with African presence, racial mixing, and suspect rituals, New Orleans has served the national imagination as a place of exoticism where objectionable people and unsavory practices can be found. The destruction of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath revealed New Orleans' deep poverty and marginalized population, and brought a media storm that perpetuated the city's stigma. Travels with Mae lovingly restores the wonder of this great city, capturing both its beauty and its pain through the eyes of an insider.
Eileen M. Julien is Professor of Comparative Literature, African American and African Diaspora Studies, and French and Italian at Indiana University Bloomington. She is Chairperson of the Department of Comparative Literature and author of African Novels and the Question of Orality (IUP, 1992).
Contents<\> Contents Acknowledgments What I Keep in My Freezer; or You Are What You Eat Routines Oatmeal Collage A Streetcar Story A Glimmer of Gender Going to Algiers "Buttons, anyone?" A Pacific Street Story Room at the Top Connie The Jug's Ball "The Country" Facts of Life Money Troubles Fudge and Jelly Donuts The Shadow of Death A Woman's Place Brother Boyfriends The House They Didn't Buy Family Affairs She Would Have Typed All Night Small Victories Daddy's Public Voice Hurricane Betsy Groovin' Christmas '66 My Mother, My Hair Getting Over It Eunice, Mae, and Me Questions of Power Losing Mae Arriving Late Daddy's Gumbo Conversation Reflections Revisiting Birthday Surprise Dakar Hair The Carnival Spirit Katrina The Wake of the Storm The Keys
1950s New Orleans and beyond
"This is a book to love, to savor like one of the Julien family gumbos... A wonderful portrait of middle-class blacks in a city usually portrayed by the poverty of its black population and the decadence of its whites. This is real life in New Orleans, in both its unique qualities and the universality of people in their common experiences, as well as a moving depiction of a loving relationship between a mother and a daughter." NChristine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld "Julien recalls a culture and space threatened by erasure, that will for the most part be 'memory' or 'memoried,' recollected by those who knew it before and knew it as home." NAngeletta Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes
