Susan Saulny

And so by the time Minerva was born, she grew up in a family that owned its land outright instead of having to be sharecropping or, you know, or worse.

So she had the benefit of some education and a solid foundation, some stability in life when she decided to move to New Orleans where she met Ned DeGrange.

A terrible turn of events for these children who had been a happy family in Treme at their mother's cottage on North Robertson Street, knowing their mother and their father.

Yeah, Minerva's death caused everything to spiral.

Ned was all of a sudden alone with four black children in a city with segregated housing.

And this is around 1912.

He turned to an order of Catholic nuns in the French Quarter who ran orphanages, and he proposed they take the children as boarders.

Now, I can't imagine the tears, the trauma, the screaming that must have been involved when these kids who had lived a happy family life with their mother and sometimes their father at a cottage in Treme were suddenly handed over to an orphanage.

And the youngest two were quite little, the youngest maybe just a little more than two.

So to be institutionalized at what was called an orphan asylum, just the cruelty of it, the awfulness of it.

Honestly, once I realized what the place was called, that it was the Lafon Orphan Asylum for Colored Boys, my stomach turned.

So not in these terms.

He told me that after his mother died, he went to live with the sisters.

And he put it in very gentle terms.

And being a kid, I thought, oh, with the sisters, like in The Sound of Music or something like that.

That couldn't have been farther from the truth, right?

The orphanage was pretty grim.

He didn't tell me the full story.

No one did.

And again, I think this was an effort on his part, if I can speculate for a moment, to not pass on his pain and trauma to a new generation.