A heartbreaking look at New Orleans, from the ground up

     Last week I wrote about a video on the CNN homepage that put a human face to the crisis in Syria.
     This week, I'll recommend to readers an incredibly moving article from CNN that looks at New Orleans through competing lights: popular associations of drunken revelry, color, music, and perpetual festivity juxtaposed with the debilitating intersection of poverty and hopelessness that conspire to make the Big Easy the murder capital of the United States.
      Anyone who has read my manuscript - or spoken with me, for that matter - knows the degree to which New Orleans swept me away. The gas lights, the brightly colored walls and balconies of the French Quarter, the immediate proximity of the Mississippi River, the myriad genres of music that seemed to ooze out of every crevice . . . I can barely dwell on the city without feeling myself on the verge of tears. As such, I come dangerously close to falling into the same starry-eyed trap that grips the article's target audience - one that ignores what could rightly be called a domestic humanitarian emergency.
     It's a lengthy read but one well worth pursuing, providing a heart-breaking chronicling not only of the victims and survivors but also the tireless efforts of those who seek to bring the epidemic to an end. We meet Curissa "Cee Cee" Davis, who at the time of her 18th birthday had lost 20 friends to homicide, including Katie, her best friend since 14, killed by a shotgun blast to the back by an abusive boyfriend.     Later accounts detail an 11 year old killed by a stray bullet in a street-fight and a 2-year old who died when a man sprayed with an assault rifle the courtyard in which she played.
    The article then focuses also on the efforts of Darryl Durham, who heads Arts for Kids, providing youth with a means to express their frustrations constructively, and Father Bill Terry of St. Anna's Episcopal Church, who set up a "murder wall" in 2007, and has since recorded the names of every murder victim as a means of bringing awareness.
     Critically, the article provides insight into the factors that make the violence so pervasive. Chief among them, unsurprisingly, is race. In addition to the usual discrimination in hiring and housing, which demoralizes blacks and places them in situations of economic distress, New Orleans' residents of color are also confronted by what until recently was a wildly racist and corrupt police force, not to mention Katrina herself, which wreaked her greatest damage on traditionally black neighborhoods. Indeed, it was only after Katrina that the city first claimed the infamous murder capital designation.
    Race frames the way the violence is perceived, also. The article details three men who were murdered in the act of protecting others. Two were black, one was white. The media all but canonized the third, and a colossal reward was offered for the arrest of his murderers, while the deaths of the first two men went largely unnoticed.
     I say I was "dangerously close" to falling into the trap of sugar-coating the Crescent City, but I made certain that my second visit to New Orleans included a self-guided tour of neighborhoods like Tremé, that in 2010 still seemed a warzone in the aftermath of the storm. Such ventures only strengthened my love of the city, as its perseverance, its spirit of survival in spite of overwhelming hardship, was as beautiful to me as any of the French Quarter's alluring attractions. In celebrating the individuals who fight to rescue the city from crisis, and the successes they've already brought about, the article pays tribute to this very character.
    A slideshow lends one more dimension to the piece, detailing the residents of the city and the surroundings in which they lead their lives.

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 17

       A stream-of-consciousness passage where Dig meditates on the work of Delta Blues musician Son House:  

       Opening track “Death Letter,” the steel-bodied national busting in with its soul-soaked twang, the chords so filled with Mississippi mud it seemed a wonder the deck could keep running.
I got a letter this morning . . . said your love is dead . . . 
Half-waltz, half-roll.  The skin of a dead monarchal gator animated with riverboat grease dancing on the surface of an ocean of sweat and blood and runoff and atop it the man and his slide guitar, the high notes tear inducing and saliva coaxing in the same amorous breath.  High chords on Track 2 “Pearline” like a loving slap from the vengeful, interspersed with melody.  Blastchord-tune-blastchord-tune-blastchord-deltadawn wetness flooding runoff swamp dust cotton choke cotton choke.  The old blackman and his semi-blindness coaxed from retirement in 1963 to palliate the resurgent thirst of a generation hungry for the purported purity of all things traditional.  A studio and a river inside it.  Oh, Pearline.

Bearing witness to Syria

    In allowing my blog to fall into increasing bouts of radio silence, I've done a disservice to my continued support for the Arab Spring, a term I refuse to retire, even in light of the bloody, soul-crushing mess unfolding in Syria.
    Whatever happens going forward, irrespective of what now seems a likely outbreak of widespread civil war, it remains vitally important to recognize the incredible duration of time over which the protests were peaceful in nature, and even more important to celebrate those factions of the uprising that continue to plead for passive resistance to this day.
     As a testament both to the non-violent protests and to those individuals who've felt themselves driven to take up arms, I strongly recommend to anyone with with the requisite emotional fortitude this stunning footage from the CNN homepage. It was compiled in Homs over the course of the last three weeks, since the start of the siege, by an as-yet anonymous French journalist. In addition to capturing with singular immediacy the atrocities that transpire as we speak, it's an incredible testament to a man's commitment to reportage. He charges into firefights, machine guns blasting within arm's reach of his lens . . . crosses an open street through sniper fire to interview people who've gathered in a makeshift hospital . . .  interviews children who've been slammed with shellfire.
    To anyone who watches the video - 10 minutes in length, but a 10 minutes that left me with the impression that I'd watched a feature-length documentary - I can only hope it will excite the commitment I feel, at least in the barest sense, of keeping the troubled nation in mind.
     In supporting Syria, and by extension the global community, I'll be one more voice calling on Assad to get the hell out of Dodge.

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 15

     On the road through Alabama, Dig reflects on the New York left behind:

     He remembered lying in a cellar in Bushwick, in Brooklyn, down where the aroma of rotten planks and crossbeams bred a paradoxical atmosphere of fertility.  He had a wrench in his hand and pliers in his belt.  A wad of intersecting pipe hovered nine inches above his face.
     He’d been down there an hour, fiddling around with everything that budged.  Every once in a while the voice of someone in the building – most often a child – rose to a level sufficient to penetrate the floorboards above him.  Otherwise, the place bore a stillness so inclusive that even the pipes above him were silent, bereft both of trickle and hum. 
    He’d been in Rio two weeks earlier.  
    There’d been a gunfight in a playground, just six meager blocks from the home of the MeetUp family that hosted him.  
   A nanny died in the cross-fire, blown down at the feet of an unsuspecting child.  
He’d read about it in one of the Anglophone papers hoisted from the sidewalk, the words coming at him bloodless, an impotent chant, the conjured-up sorrow of a substance far inferior to the devastation he felt the day he came back to New York.
    Woman robbed at knife-point in Bed-Stuy.
    Page 6 of the Village Voice.
    Not even injured.  Just robbed.
    And knowing no cause for his heightened revulsion other than the fact that it was Brooklyn this time.  New York this time.  Just another texture to the bloodbath of Home.  
    And there in the cellar of the nameless complex, with Bed-Stuy and the place of the mugging twelve blocks east, and closer still the warehouses and alleys of Bushwick, surrounding the cellar, and yet muted by the cellar, and shut out by the cellar, he found himself spontaneously struck by the feeling that he could stay there forever.  Put down the wrench and close his eyes and enter a silence so deep that even the shouting of the child wouldn’t rouse him.
     Instead he finished the job, hopped the train to Manhattan, and walked through Central Park.  The crickets were already starting to sing, and the Latinos walked by in their sweat-stained A-shirts and their hacked-off shorts, followed by the women from 73rd St with their strollers and their heat-marred makeup, and the sweat of the city clung to the pavement, and the sound of the traffic and the metropolitan chaos purred through the trees, four octaves south of the crickets, and as always he could smell the baseball field long before he saw it – the kicked-up dust and the mass of leather gloves and palmed out bats – and he sat on the bleachers and watched them play, and every crack of the bat seemed to break open the air and leave in its wake a space to be filled, and the coach yelled and echoed in yelling, and within an hour of watching the fireflies had started to appear, and the contrast in heat between cellar and park had stoned him silly and played with his pores, and he remembered from afar, the park and the baseball, and he missed New York for the first time since leaving.

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 14

Yes, my friends, I can rap in your streets
I can pierce my ears with the grit of your ghettos


Born to the wars of the tongue-tied tenants
Tigris Euphrates inheritance of breath
by blood the nation my cradle and foes
watching it now from a far-flung shore
watching now your discount war


fought by word, of a part
in my name
send tanks for the honor of tearing my veil


not here in this city a field less worthy
nor here in the city a soil less rich
Birmingham City I’d take you to the trenches
not for the sheiks to tell me my rights
nor Bush to remind me
the knowledge misplaced 


Here in the city I plant down my feet
you can write no map on the flesh of my body
nor flags on my skin
hadith on my womb


like home like breath my Birmingham child
let no man cite
for Crusade, my name


for God Almighty
knows the length of my hair

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 13

      The road ran straight as a latitude line.  The trailers clustered on either side, each partitioned from the other by its own stand of trees.  Its own curtain of vines.  Its own little heap of aging Works in Progress.
     “Are you sure it’s not just because you know you’re in Alabama?” he said.
     She looked out the window, waited a moment, and then pointed.
    “Look,” she said.  “That house right there.  That’s plantation-era, right?”
    “Yeah.  I think so, anyway.”
     She watched as it slid past them on their right.
     She told him it felt like how Rome must feel, or Egypt, or Angkor Watt in Cambodia, all the sad and mighty antebellum monoliths hearkening back to a culture that was regal, almost imperial, and yet juxtaposed in the unscrupulous light of day with trailers and shacks and houses,  “And that’s not all,” she said.  “These mansions . . . they kind of contrast with themselves.”
     She gestured toward a looming, multi-colored, partially marble structure on the edge of a pasture.  The windows were broken and the painted portions of the surface had peeled, and for all appearances the place was abandoned, save for a pair of black kids playing jacks on the steps.  A woman kept watch from a trailer nearby.
    “There!” she said.  “That’s what’s different about Alabama.”
    Dig smiled.
    “Abida,” he said, “are you turning into Faulkner on me?”
     “I don’t know,” she said.  “I’m still reading Twain.”

Excerpt from Companions of the Garden, Chapter 5

     A small town in central Virginia:


     . . . .they left the restaurant and took off down Main Street in the direction opposite the place where they’d parked the truck.  Dig allowed himself to fall a pace-and-a-half behind her, watching her move, her clothes so dark against the concrete that with the help of a slug or two of Jack Daniels he might have confused her with her shadow.  
    She walked slower than he’d ever seen her walk before.  
    A step.  Three-quarters of a breath.  A step.  
    Making eye contact with every person they passed, even the people who struggled to avoid it.  
    Greeting the ones who smiled at her.  Smiling at the ones who didn’t.
    Five blocks from the restaurant a gray-haired lady stepped out of a pastry shop and asked them to come inside.  The air in the shop was odorless, and Dig blamed the AC; its ferocious campaign to keep all the chocolate from melting.
    The gray-haired lady handed Abida a chocolate cherry chunky.  She held it in both hands, as if dropping the pastry would incur something awful.  Abida took it from her, and also used both hands.  She chewed and swallowed, and she told the lady thank you, and they walked out to the street again, Abida smiling even wider than she had before, her hands rolled into fists, and they walked down to the end of Main Street, where an interpretive sign directed their attention to a building on the opposite corner, a landmark of the Civil War, its walls still riddled with the pockmarks of bullets.