A Banks Street Story

Two-month-old Bobby did not hear the knock at the front door on that fateful, Holy Saturday afternoon in New Orleans, March 26, 1932. He did not see the two policemen with their shiny NOPD badges standing in the doorway assigned to deliver the dreaded news. He did not witness his three sisters, ages six to twelve, holding on to one another, or hear his older brother, who was only eleven, cry out “What are we going to do?” He was unaware that the knock on the front door would change the lives of the Donnelly family on Banks Street forever.

In the South, people have visible and audible roots in their place of birth and early years, finding expression in often remembered and retold stories. William Faulkner’s fiction emerges from his “postage stamp of native soil” in Lafayette County, Mississippi. In New Orleans, neighborhoods and high schools themselves often define their inhabitants and alumni. Bob Donnelly had his feet planted on Banks Street in New Orleans, literally and metaphorically. Southern and New Orleans writers have often anchored their work in houses, like Faulkner’s Compson House in The Sound and the Fury and Shirley Ann Grau’s The House on Coliseum Street. When Mary Queen Donnelly, Bob’s widow, begins the stories of Bob’s life as he remembered them and told them so often to his family, she focuses on the house, the family home, at 2927 Banks Street in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans.

– Thomas Bonner Jr., Professor Emeritus, Xavier University of Louisiana