The New Orleans Recreation Department used to provide separate and unequal playgrounds for the city's children. Before they were desegregated in 1963 as a result of a lawsuit, there were over 100 playgrounds for whites and only 19 for blacks. My family did not live near any of the black playgrounds, and we were not allowed to set foot in Bunny Friend Park, the white playground on Desire Street, in walking distance from our house.
Holy Redeemer Church, our black Catholic Parish (a distance of five white Catholic Churches away from our neighborhood), was across the street from Washington Square, another white-only playground. It was a well-kept park with lots of trees, swings, a wading pool, cement paths and benches.

When I was about 10 years old, Mama and I left church one Tuesday night after Novena and circumnavigated Washington Square to get to the Desire bus stop at the corner of Dauphine Street and Elysian Fields Avenue. The buses were slow at night. We knew we were in for a wait. 

We'd been standing at the bus stop for only a few minutes when my mother suggested I break the law. There was no one around. It was dark. The large, spreading live oaks in and around the park blocked out much of the streetlight. We were standing just a few feet away from the park entrance.  

"Go swing on the swings until the bus comes," Mama said.

I was the happiest criminal in New Orleans that night. I tested every swing, looking for the best fit, and thought about the little white behinds that would sit in them the next day, behinds that would never suspect that their swings had been violated during the night. I pushed off with the stealth of a cat burglar, pointed my toes at the treetops, and swang with the intensity of an Olympic athlete. I ignored the building fear of what might happen to Mama and me if we were caught. She stood watch at the bus stop, my mother, occasionally glancing nonchalantly in my direction, but looking natural, as if she were just another colored lady waiting for a bus on a dark corner.

This was my first criminal act in life. And Mama was my co-conspirator. What happens to a child whose mother suggests, sanctions, and acts as lookout for her own daughter's crime? I became a repeat offender. A habitual swing thief. I swang on the white-only swings every Tuesday night for the nine weeks we attended Novena that year. I was never apprehended, and I am reported to be still at large, hiding out somewhere in New Orleans.