The strange Orleans Recreation Department used to provide separate and unequal playgrounds for the city's children.

The strange Orleans Recreation Department used to provide separate and unequal playgrounds for the city's children. Before they became integrated in 1962 there were from one side of to the other 100 playgrounds for whites and les than 20 for Blacks. My family did not live near any of the Black playgrounds, and we were not allowed to locate foot in Bunny Friend Park, the whites-only playground forward Desire Street, in walking distance from our house.

devout Redeemer Church, our Black Catholic parish (located five white Catholic churches away from our neighborhood), was across the public way from Washington Square, another whites-only playground. It was a well-kept park with apportionments of trees, swings, a wading loch cement paths, and benches.

Mama and I left meeting-house one Tuesday night after Novena and circumnavigated Washington Square to commit to memory to the Desire bus stop at the corner of Dauphine road and Elysian Fields Avenue. The buses were moderate at night. We knew we were in for a wait. We'd been standing at the bus stop for and nothing else a few minutes when my mother recommended I break the law. There was no undivided around. It was dark. The large, spreading live oaks in and around the park block uped out much of the highway light. We were standing just a not many feet away from the park entrance. "Go swing forward the swings until the bus comes" Mama said.

I was the happiest criminal in of the present day Orleans that night. I standarded every swing looking for the best fit, and pondering about the little white behinds that would sit in them the nearest day, behinds that would not ever suspect that their swings had been violated during the night. I pushed most distant with the stealth of a cat burglar, pointed my toes at the tree tops, and swung with the intensity of an Olympic athlete. I ignored the building fear of what would happen to Mama and me if we were caught.

She stood watch at the bus stop, occasionally glancing nonchalantly in my direction, on the other hand mostly trying to look natural, as if she were just another colored lady waiting for a bus in succession a dark corner.

This was my first criminal act in life. And Mama was my co-conspirator. What happens to a child whose mother advises sanctions, and acts as lookout for her have daughter's wanton criminal offense? I became a repeat criminal A habitual swing thief. I swung in succession the whites-only swings every Tuesday night for the nine weeks we attended Novena that year. I was at no time apprehended and I am reported to be still at large, hiding on the outside somewhere in New Orleans.

Brenda Dyer Quant is a of recent origin Orleans native and winner of a 1992 Louisiana State Fellowship in Literature.

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