My friend Sara Beth Williams wrote this.
September 2 2005 Home. It is where I am now, and it is where I have in some ways, never left. Whether you’ve spent only days or years, away from this river valley, you know what I mean. You know it when you cross the little bridge over some other creek bed in deepest, hottest July and the coolness rises up like an Alabama blessing. You know it wherever you are along the eastern migration route on a late fall day, when you look up to see the Canadian geese in their old formation against the cumulus clouds. You even know it when you’re in Florence (Italy) sighing over Michaelangelo’s David and the person next to you sighs too, and then says in an accent that turns out to be directly out of Florence (Alabama) “That’s so pretty I believe I’m fixin’ to cry.” You know it also when, in a dream, you come into a landscape that is green, and rolling, and so lush with shadow and promise that you first believe it must be a sort of paradise, but then you recognize it as the place beyond the No Trespassing sign where you once escaped with your giggling co-criminals, tearing your bellbottoms on the barbwire fence, carrying a few contraband beers and a pack of Salems, to share. You know that it actually exists, or did, somewhere out near a dirt road on Burningtree Mountain.” It actually exists!” you say to yourself. And you are amazed with this lovely dream that is really real. I suppose the right thing might be to use this space to apologize to whatever landowner I compromised back in 1973 when my friends and I broke the law on his land, but it is such a sweet recollection I can’t bring myself to say I’m sorry with a straight face. I will thank him here, though, thirty years late. I’ll tell him a lot of us trespassed, that we named his place Octopus Gardens, after the Beatles’ song, and that it was lovely, and that it did me a lot of good to sit in his meadows, under his trees, in the quiet and the warmth and the solitude. I don’t say it was right. I say it has stayed with me. Real beauty has a way of remaining. A lot of other things do not, and need not stay with you. How I know that today. I graduated from Decatur High School in 1974 and knew that late May night, in the deep way all of us experience that kind of certainty- not in our minds, but in our very marrow, that my adult future would not unfold in this valley. I spent my last season here that summer, in a little yellow house on 7th Street, impatient, bored, and convinced that life begins only after you leave your parent’s house for good. I was ready. I had a blue trunk filled with my college wardrobe: cutoff overalls and patched blue jeans, a yellow robe my mother sewed for me out of sale fabric from Brown’s, and several gauzy, embroidered peasant blouses bought that June from a hippie who sold them on the sidewalk in Panama City. I packed them away for school and didn’t wear them all that summer. When I opened the trunk, they still smelled of Coppertone, the sea, and Alabama sunshine. The last two months I lived in Decatur, I watched too much tv, talked all night with friends I’ve barely seen since, and mulled over what sort of college student I would be. I decided to be a deep-thinking, incense-burning, tea-drinking sort of serious and artsy college student. I gave up trespassing, and read the sort of literature I thought would ensure my success at the state university, beginning with Moby Dick, and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Soon enough I took up Erica Jong, and finally (and most deliciously), purloined copies of Cosmopolitan magazine. With all of these wise words, I figured to be on my way to becoming an accomplished young woman of the world, someone who had her destiny, her whole life, in hand. Destiny, or life, prodded me into a lot of homes, and way past peasant fashions and trashy magazines since then. I moved to mid-city New Orleans in 1988, several months before I was to be married to a native New Orleanian. Like most city neighborhoods, the one I lived in for those months was wildly mixed both racially and socio-economically. I met my first friend and neighbor after a few daysÑa ten-year-old who caught me sketching with colored pencils on my balcony. “Whatcha doing?” she asked. I showed her. Her eyes widened when she came closer. Anyone who remembers me from my school days here can assure you it wasn’t my artistic ability that so mesmerized her. The child did not know pencils came in colors other than graphite grey. Later on, when I went to her house to fetch her for an impromptu run to the sno-ball stand, she told me she could not go because she had just washed her socks for school the next day and they were wet. She owned one pair, and dutifully washed them out each night in the kitchen sink so she could go to school in clean clothes. Her name is Kiera. She has a middle name, but it is a secret and I promised not to tell. I had to hold her hand at the zoo because the elephants scared her. When I used my turn signals, she was fascinated — she’d never been in a car and thought blinkers were the best part of the ride. By now Kiera is a young woman, maybe one you saw on television today. Maybe one with a baby, or two, on her hip. Though I gradually lost touch with her after I married, moved uptown, and had my own baby, I can assure you Kiera has probably still never left New Orleans. Not for a day, not for an hour. She has never bought peasant blouses on a sunny morning at the beach, and she has never read world history or philosophy or British literature at a university. She probably never owned another set of colored pencils after the ones I left with her were lost, used up, or stolen from her. Instead, Kiera almost certainly continued to live a life of grinding, unmitigated poverty and suffered the spiritual, and intellectual barrenness that breeds in that environment. Statistics show she probably did not make it through high school, and in case you wonder why, I can cite a dozen obstacles, each one bigger than she, any one of them probably bigger than any of you. The Times-Picayune, our daily newspaper, in one of its regular efforts to report on the appalling conditions in the city’s public schools, a few years ago told the story of one typical elementary school: there were great holes in the walls and offensive graffiti on the spaces that weren’t crumbling. No libraries. No air conditioning. Broken-out windows. Toilets that had not functioned in years–the children were escorted across a busy city intersection to use the facilities at a gas station. Who would stay in such conditions? Who would learn anything but disdain, disrespect, hopelessness, and yes, crime? It is of course redundant by now to point out that these conditions eerily foreshadowed the conditions my fellow New Orleanians have endured at the Superdome, that they are strikingly similar, albeit much milder than the ones in that sewage-rich, overcrowded hotbox. I don’t apologize or make any excuses for the criminal behavior going on there–just exactly not at all. Most of the people there don’t excuse it either. It is horrific, and terrifying- despair fallen to it’s most base expression. But I want all of my new neighbors to understand that these people have been my neighbors too. I want you to know that mother giving up her child to a stranger on a bus, or the one shouting obscenities to the camera may well be the little girl whose hand I held tight at the Audubon zoo. I want you to know I’ve eaten po-boys with these neighbors at the fairgrounds, and that I have listened to their melodic tones on the chromatic harp late at night, the sound unbidden, and doubly sweet for that, and rich as chocolate, coming through my kitchen window. I want you to try to understand that the only options many of city’s most disenfranchised people have ever had involve either walking away from the system, or fighting it. The option to walk away is now gone. I ask you to recognize what generations of poverty do to a people, and I ask you, while you pray for your loved ones, and your friends along the gulf coast, to also pray for Kiera, and for her sisters, and brothers. Kiera did not have a handsome bungalow just off Delano Park to come to when the hurricane warning came. She didn’t have an old Subaru to drive up the interstate, she didn’t have a mother waiting with a chicken dinner and apple dumplings and fresh sheets on the beds. She had nothing, and now she has a lot less than nothing. I so appreciate your prayers and good wishes for me and for my family, and for my property. But I am well, and my family is well. Even the dog is here, and already annoying some of you with her barking as you walk down the alley with your own pets. Please do call her name (Stella), and tell her to hush. If you yell it out like Marlon Brando did in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, she’ll feel at home, too. Well, of course that’s why we named her Stella. Home. I also have a home, a modest house, on a corner lot in uptown New Orleans. There’s such a magnificent water oak in the front yard–it takes three people with arms outstretched to circle it. From my living room there I can see my neighbor’s house with the Christmas lights up all year. I can hear one neighbor, the violinist, practicing a concerto, and on the other side, my neighbor who has been a singer a Pat O’Brien’s for decades now, competing, with her scales. What wakes me in the morning is the mournful horn of the lonely river barges, and the clacking answer of the carefree streetcar. I can throw a handful of seeds out the backdoor and be over-run in a matter of weeks with exotic vines and stalks that drip with cascades of ginger blossoms, moon flowers, saucy passion flowers, and lurid bougainvillia . The Peruvian lilies rise up out of the compost pile overnight. Just a few blocks from my house, along one of the most majestic avenues in the world, I can duck into a little bar and hear delta bluesmen play songs that drench with sorrow and rescue with love in the same refrain. The music of the city settles easy, and deep. When there’s a block party, contrary to some popular opinion about the Godlessness in my chosen city, there are indeed prayers before the feast–Catholic, of course, but Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Baptist too. The Baptists bring congealed salads and fried chicken, the Indians bring samosas and naan, the Muslims bring hummus and good olives, the Catholics bring gumbo, doberge cake, bread pudding. The crawfish is boiled by folks you’d recognize as every inch, Good Old Boys. We share recipes, we swat mosquitoes, we agree and disagree, and go home happy, full, better people. New Orleans is a city of much tolerance, much contrast and contradiction, much richness and much poverty, and so much to bind us to the place, even with so much to deplore, so much that needs fixing. I live here now, but I live in New Orleans still too. I plan to return there someday, and expect fully that, like returning here, it won’t feel like a move, but a realization of having never really left. I don’t much worry over when it will be. It has taken me thirty years to again realize how much my home is here, has always been here, thanks to kind and generous friends in this city, and most especially to my mother, who has opened her heart and her space not just to my family, but to another refugee, and perhaps more to come. It is nothing more than, nor less than miraculous. It is friends, family, welcoming, caring. I can only hope my words here serve as some small antidote to the horrendous images we are seeing in the media. What comes to me this week is realizing it was in this quieter and more solid place that I learned much of what I needed to become a survivor in other places less quiet, less solid. I hope you won’t need to ask me why I intend to go back, why I believe I will return to New Orleans some day, or how I can be so calm in the face of losing every material possession I own to an improbable and vulnerable locale, to bad city planning, or to looters. The weather reminds me we humans aren’t in control. The looters remind me how much I have that I don’t need, and what’s really important. I think it’s all about what you learn to love early on, and it’s about loving the best things in the world: cool water in summer, landscapes so beautiful you dream of them your whole life, compassionate and loyal friends who come with you, stay with you, and greet you like they’ve been knowing you always, even when you’ve been gone for thirty years. Another valuable I took with me from here is an education, the one I received in the Decatur schools (where, like Kiera, I too qualified for a free lunch), but even more than the geometry I struggled with and the Shakespeare I loved, I took a grander lesson from a community that remembered to include everyone in it’s opportunities. I always had a place here. And I had fresh air, a majestic, wondrous space to explore, a river to swim in, and good climbing trees for a broader view of the world, even if I did sneak over a fence for some of it. I am so grateful for this valley, for the way it has stayed with me, all along the way, and for what it’s taught me this week: that a huge part of not being homeless is keeping your home in your heart. Sara Beth Williams
Decatur, Alabama
New Orleans, Louisiana
Copyright © 2005
On this day in 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash outside East Troy, Wisconsin, after sharing the festival stage with Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, Buddy Guy, and a host of others.
From the AP: