Gamy Anthropology

GUMBO YA-YA--Lyle Saxon, Edward Dreyer, Roberf Tallant -- Houghton Mifflin ($5).

This book is a somewhat violent, some what gamy anthropology of New Orleans below the belt. Most of the material for it was jotted down in hundreds of conversa tions with Negroes and white people. It begins with the cacophonous Mardi Gras saturnalia of "Kings, Baby Dolls. Zulus and Queens'' (Baby Dolls are Negro trulls, Zulus are their men friends who elect a Negro King of the Mardi Gras). It ends with "Superstitions," "Colloquialisms" and "Customs." In between, the book's 581 pages are acrawl with underworld or otherworld manifestations.

Gumbo Ya-Ya (which is Cajun for "Everybody talks at once") contains instructive chapters on crapshooting, how to play the lottery, the decaying Creoles, the decaying plantations, slaves and slave tortures, buried treasure, the New Orleans slums, the Mississippi River front, its roustabouts and their jargon, and New Orleans cemeteries to which, during rainy spells, coffins sometimes have to be brought in boats and forced under the muddy water with poles.

But, as befits this somewhat ghostly book (it was written from material collected by the defunct Louisiana WPA writers' project), its best stories for non-Orleanians are ghost stories.

The most gruesome: a domestic episode in which the unemployed father of 25 children unwittingly eats more than half his progeny in the form of roasts served him by his desperate wife.

One day he hears ghostly children's voices singing:

Our mother kills us,

Our father eats us

We have no coffins,

We are not in holy ground.

Under the steps, he finds a pile of little human bones. So he strangles his wife and has his children properly buried. "It is said that he was never able to eat meat again.''

Very different is the report of the ghost of a little old French lady in a faded green bonnet who tiptoes through the rooms of an old plantation at night. "Tirelessly, she journeys from bedchamber to bedchamber, raising mosquito baires and peering hopefully into the face of each sleeper." It is her doom never to find the face she seeks.

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