Last Man Standing (ii)
from true-crime author Jack Olsen about Elmer Gerard Pratt of Morgan City
Eunice Petty Pratt made him, the last of 8 she bore and 7 she raised. I don’t know why she called him Elmer.
She gave him as well the saint’s name Gerard. Elmer’s birthday, September 13, 1947, was not the feast day of any of the saints Gerard.
I am thinking Gerard Majella, also a final child, patron of children, of mothers and mothers to be, and, what do you know, the falsely accused. Yes, a saint’s name.
A Connecticut Yankee, a Puritan and a Jew, I bear the names of a prophet in Babylon and 1 dozen kings of England. Louisiana is rather a Caribbean state named for a Roman Catholic monarch.
There Eunice gave those births at home on Death Alley, which she maintained was not named for a lynching, in Across the Tracks, the brown town of that day down by the levee in Morgan City.
She woke with her husband to the bells of the Sacred Heart church, still standing, still white. She and her children worshipped at Holy Eucharist, now inactive, with the Society of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, who still serve black Catholics.
So, his mother made him, gave him to Jesus, then Jack Pratt put Elmer Gerard to work with his 3 brothers for Jack Pratt & Sons scavenging the town and the fires of its dump, picking through hot ash for metal to haul to New Orleans. Mr. Jack would pause the truck for the boys to pick up road-kill to cook up at the junkyard in the big city.
He fed and launched 7 that way, 6 of them college men and women. The football team at Morgan City Colored High took Elmer G. for quarterback.
He graduated in 1965 with an eye toward playing for Southern or Grambling, schools to uplift the race. Instead the elders recruited him the day before graduation.
Looking back he spoke of the elders to his biographer Jack Olsen in terms of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and before them the African Legion of Marcus Garvey. That is as may be.
Maybe the elders of Across the Tracks did have funny hats. I do know that in general even the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia are not much organized.
The Josephites and their Ecclesia Catholica, the Catholic Church, are organized. The Teamsters and the Vietnamese Communist Party are organized.
Organization costs money. You have got to extract rents or tax. The rest of us are just affinity groups.
Whatever their hats, the older men, the pillars of the community, those who provided for the common defense, put Elmer on a bus to enlist in the United States Army, whose resources afford selection by aptitude and training in skills and leadership.
Black men had been fighting for a new nation conceived in liberty since Lexington and their own communities since running away after first arrival in the Caribbean. The old men sent Elmer Gerard Pratt away from his mother to learn to defend his Americans.
