Moving to da’ East (Part 5): Denise, ‘Just do right’

My mother, Denise Fletcher, is a beautiful and hardworking black woman. She’s currently a paralegal, which has always been her first love. However, for about 20 years she wasn’t in that profession. She used to help my dad run a computer company, Nu Technology Inc., which they started together. She handled the accounting, meetings, and more. She missed being a paralegal, though. When my parents decided to retire their business, she jumped back into being a paralegal.

Some people say that I’m a lot like my mother. She’s a private person, with a few close friends, and extremely neat.

Kayla’s mom, Denise, as a young woman. Photograph courtesy of the Fletcher family.

Denise: I’m from the Sixth Ward in New Orleans, from the Lafitte Projects. My mom, Vivian, grew up in the St. Bernard Projects, which was close to the Lafitte [Projects]. She worked in barrooms, serving drinks. She did whatever job it was that she could get. My dad, Warren Tervalon, grew up in the Seventh ward. He was in the Navy.”

Kayla: What was it like growing up in the Lafitte Projects?”

Denise: Well, growing up in the projects… I don’t know if you can imagine what that was like, but it was a lot of colorism, of course, just in the neighborhood I lived in. Not at the school I went to. The school I went to was fine because they had a mixture of light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks. But in my neighborhood, it was like me and my sister were the light skin ones. I’m pretty light, but my sister was even lighter where she was what they call passé blanc, where she can pass for white. She still can today. People sometimes mistake her for a white lady.

Just imagine living in this neighborhood with all these dark skin black girls that didn’t even know you, didn’t give you a chance, didn’t try to get to know you. When we first moved around there, they just assumed whatever they assumed about us because of the color of our skin. They just wanted to fight all the time. Just pick on you, wanna fight all the time… knock on the door, and say things like, ‘Tell the white girls come outside so we can fight ‘em.’” They would wanna pull your hair, mess up your face… they would hit you in your face to mess it up. You know, I wasn’t fighting nobody. My sister did.

Kayla: Tee Tee fought?”

Denise: Yeah, she had a fight with this little girl who lived across the way from us. She was dark, and she kept picking on my sister. My sister got tired of it. When the little girl picked on her this one time, my sister jumped off the porch and had a fight with her till somebody broke them up. After that, she left my sister alone. But me, on the other hand, I wasn’t getting out there fighting anybody. I wasn’t letting nobody mess up my face, pull on my hair. That just wasn’t in me to be out there fighting anybody. So, I just didn’t do it. I just ignored them, and went on with my life. I did very well for myself, and these girls that picked on me all the time and wanted to fight me ended up pregnant, in jail, on drugs, or dead… murdered. So, that’s the type of people I grew up with. Not all. Most because I had some really good friends that were like family.

I first met Pam, and she always stood up for me. She always had my back. If somebody picked on me, Pam knew I wasn’t fighting nobody, so Pam would always stick up for me and make them back off. And then little bitty Arthur, no taller than me, and I’m 5’1. But he’s like a brother, and he always had my back when it came to any boys that would pick on me because boys picked on me too, for whatever reason. I don’t know. All I had to do was tell Arthur, and Arthur would go fight them with his little bitty self. So, that’s like my two friends that were like family.

Kayla’s aunt and mother in the Lafitte Public Housing Development. Photograph courtesy of the Fletcher family.

There was also drugs and shootings going on in my neighborhood. Sometime we’d all be outside sitting on the porch, and all of the sudden you’d hear gunshots. Everybody would just run inside my house because we were all sitting in front of my house. You know, my friends. Just running from gunshots. It was just crazy. I’m just glad I didn’t have my children growing up like that.

But the reason why we grew up like that is because my mamma and daddy stayed together for a short time, and my mom couldn’t afford nothing else, so that’s where she had us living. She just wasn’t ready to be a parent herself. She went out and partied all the time, and she came home drunk a lot. I was the oldest, and I had to look out for my sister and brother. I’m three years older than my sister, and eight years older than my brother. Basically, we raised ourselves. We were home alone a lot. 

Out of the three of us, my brother ended up getting hooked on drugs. It started out with my mamma coming home with her little drink of Scotch and water. She would come home drunk with her leftover Scotch and water, and my brother would start sipping on it as a little kid. I didn’t know that at the time. Eventually he started cutting school, and dropped out in eighth grade. He’s very smart, but he dropped out because he didn’t have any proper guidance. My mamma just… wasn’t there.

My brother went to rehab lots of times because he was on crack, robbing people. My brother told me these things recently, as adults, some of the things that he had done. Back then, if somebody would’ve told me that, I would’ve been like, ‘No, not my brother. He would never do that.’ He was in and out of rehab several times. He would get better and fall back into that same cycle.

I remember this one time my brother was in Orleans Parish Prison. I was the only one with a car, so I would bring my mom to go visit him. I remember just being so happy to see him when he would come to the glass, and we had to talk on the phone. It would be a joy just to see him, even though it was painful to see him locked up like that.

I’m the only one that looked at living in the project and knew that that wasn’t something I wanted for myself. I made sure I went to school, got educated. Got married first, had children after. Just tried to do right and become successful.

Denise posing on Orleans Avenue near the Lafitte during a Carnival parade. Photograph courtesy of the Fletcher family.

Part 6: Picking the East

Editor’s Note: This story is one of a series reprinted from the book A Guide to South Louisiana: Stories of Uncommon Culture. Each author was a student in Rachel Breunlin’s “Storytelling and Culture” course for the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 2017. The Neighborhood Story Project sponsored the project as part of its mission to publish collaborative ethnography in high quality books in which the authors receive royalties for their creative labor.