Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Travels with Mae is a series of vignettes at once tender and full of doubt. Eileen Julien tells the story of her girlhood, young womanhood, and cultural and political awakening against the backdrop of New Orleans in the 1950's and 60's. Not only the story of the author's coming of age, this is a loving portrait of family life. Julien gives an insider's perspective on New Orleans culture. With her we attend Carnival balls and parades, family picnics and swimming parties, and survive hurricanes Betsy and Katrina. Along the way, we meet countless aunts, uncles and cousins, and are privy to family spats, her mother's upstairs closet, and kitchens stretched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., rural Louisiana to New York, Paris to Bordeaux and Dakar.
Equally impressive are the accompanying visuals. Chockfull of family photographs and reproductions of the brilliant paintings of Kalidou Sy, Julien serves up an interplay of words and images that makes Travels with Mae a compelling keepsake." --Brenda Marie Osbey, author of All Saints: New and Selected Poems and Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2005-07
Review
"To travel with Mae is to be well-traveled indeed; Julien honors her mother's spirit, her family's strength, with this affectionate, graceful portrait." --The Times-Picayune Indiana University Press
Review
"Deeply moving, beautifully written stories about her family by an Afro-Louisiana Creole scholar. Although most of the people in her stories are no longer with us, they will now live on forever just as their indomitable culture lives on everywhere, not just in Louisiana." --Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author of Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in Louisiana
Review
"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." --Christine Wiltz, author of The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld Indiana University Press
Review
"Julien recalls a culture and space... recollected by those who knew it before and knew it as home." --Angeletta Gourdine, author of The Difference Place Makes Indiana University Press
About the Author
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).
Table of Contents
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