Butterfly in the Typewriter Read Free

also related to the famed corsair Jean Lafitte.
    In addition to his French ancestor, Toole’s grandmother on his father’s side, Mary Orfila, was the daughter of a Spanish commission merchant, who came to New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century. And thus Toole had the two primary pillars of New Orleans European heritage: the French, who founded the city in 1718, and the Spanish, who governed it over forty years. Their descendants were dignified by the classification of “Creole” and traditionally honored as “pure” New Orleanians.
    But Toole’s privileged ancestry was tempered by the earthy influx of the Irish. Both his mother and his father had ancestors from Ireland that had come to New Orleans during the potato famine of the mid-nineteenth century. Initially seen as a source of cheap labor, many Irish immigrants ended up digging canals waist deep in the swamps behind the city, a job determined too hazardous for valuable slaves. The Irish settled south of the old city, along the Mississippi River in an area that became known as the Irish Channel. Surviving great hardships, they eventually thrived, and they made a lasting impact on the unique downtown accent called Yat, which is resonant of dialects heard in the boroughs of New York City.
    Toole’s mixed lineage tells part of the story of New Orleans—how it grew by waves of immigration and how ethnicities established their own neighborhoods in which they kept their traditions alive. In this way New Orleans mirrors some of the great port cities of Baltimore, New York, and Boston. But eventually, as families merged and moved, ethnic
lines blurred. While his mother’s side proudly carried the Creole heritage of the French name Ducoing and his father’s side carried the Irish name Toole, in the late 1800s the Ducoings and the Tooles ended up neighbors in an area of the city called the Faubourg Marigny, just outside the old city. The fact that a Creole and the son of an Irish immigrant were neighbors, signifies, on one hand, the decline of the Creole stature in the economy of New Orleans, but on the other hand speaks to the ability of the working class to carve a respectable place for themselves in the city, despite the old social order. And each of these families had a child born to them near the turn of the century: the Toole boy and the Ducoing girl grew up one block away from each other on Elysian Fields Avenue, the same “raffish” street that Tennessee Williams set his ill-fated romance A Streetcar Named Desire .
    Toole’s mother, Thelma Agnes Ducoing, was born in 1901. From her earliest days she aspired to theatrical stardom through acting, dancing, and singing. Later in life, she proudly boasted her early entrance into performance art. “I began my stage training at the age of three,” she would say, rolling her R’s with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor. A proud Creole, her father instilled in her an appreciation of the arts and “culture,” which she passed on to her son. Unfortunately, her father also had a proclivity for other women. As an unremitting adulterer throughout Thelma’s childhood, he came and went as he pleased. Only later in life did it strike Thelma as odd that he would openly take another woman on a leisure trip to Cuba, leaving his wife and family behind. He was the first of many men that disappointed Thelma. But such pain caused by her father likely fueled her fiery spirit. In 1920 she graduated from The Normal School of New Orleans with a certificate to teach kindergarten. And in that same year she earned a degree from the Southern College of Music. For a time she entertained dreams of going to New York City, but she could never abandon the place for which her ancestor, Jean François, fought to protect. She decided to stay in her hometown and teach music and theater at the public schools.
    As she began her career as a teacher, she started her courtship