New Orleans 6.3.1994: Race Matters and Postmodern Play

Sunday morning, 9 A.M. on Kathleen and Abner’s stoop. Next door, three feet away, as New Orleans houses are built, a baby voices its presence to the soft sunshine. Its mama mocks it, repeating its up-reaching sounds with bass, down-going ones.

Two nights ago, the mama and her boyfriend fought so fiercely the police were called. We had seen them earlier in the day—she a tubby-gutted slattern with round face, dirty askew brown hair, tired, mean brown eyes, a twisted toothless mouth, cigarette hanging out; he a blond cherub spoiled, years her junior, fresh-faced with blue eyes, already going paunchy, sucking on his own cigarette. Real New Orleans. Jesus would have loved them. I have trouble doing so.

The fight was drunken and cacophonous. She screamed vituperations in gutter language, while he demanded she let in the pregnant cat. When the police came, he was outside (2 A.M.) on the stoop, told them he was the husband. Abner and Kathleen says this happens often.

It’s New Orleans, 1994, year of our Lord, Morial Jr., just elected mayor last night. Not much can be done about the decline of traditional neighborhoods here, though I hope Morial will give it a shot. This neighborhood, solidly lower middle-class when we lived here 20 years ago (but even then grudgingly accepting a first wave of displaced Cubans) is now virtually all black. The whites who remain are utterly déclassé, like Kathleen and Abner’s neighbors, remnants of the 1950s neighborhood trapped on this reef as history washes their children to Kenner, Chalmette, and the idyllic North Shore, as t.v. newscasters now urge us to call across the lake.

Rather than remain in these neighborhoods and rub shoulders with Cubans and people of color, white families have fled. And in doing so, have left the city deprived of an important tax base, full of social problems that they blame on race rather than on their own abandonment of the city.

Through it all, New Orleans is always so vital—the squirrel scratching its way up and down the twist of tree limbs across the street, pigeons hurling like suddenly alarmed dignitaries onto the spiky green leaves of the loquat, a mockingbird displaying its white stripes in delighted flight onto the grass of the vacant lot.

I love the mild air, the slowness with which light comes and goes each day, even the raucousness of it all. I don’t like the litter, the burnt-out faces of the trapped poor folks, the bitter hard ones of the Metairie grandparents we saw last night as we had supper on Veterans. Talk about postmodernism.

Steve’s definition of postmodernism: seeing Schindler’s List in a bookstore yesterday, he said, “Oh, they’ve made a book out of that movie.”

Lots of impressions, too many to do justice. LIM nice to me. M. Dumestre introduced me as a New Orleanian, serious scholar, gentle person. Oodles of my students there, all sweet, solicitous, eager to touch and hug in that New Orleans way: M. Wolf, P. Hennican (sporting a Peggy Wilson sticker: her sister-in-law), D. Thompson, B. Dwyer, D. Kouris, D. McCloskey.

The latter amusing with her chunky little body in black tights surmounted by a bright red t-shirt with a beaded Indian thing around her neck, punk-red hair, huge asymmetrical earrings. A statement, and an A for effort, if not fashion savvy. She was back from a trip to El Salvador, where she picked coffee with Salvadoran workers. Then home to New Orleans to a dinner where she dined with people from the Salvadoran embassy, who cooed soft Hispanic horror at her poor scratched white arms, and recoiled in astonishment when she told them how she had incurred the scars. The ambassador made a joke of it: “I knew our economy was bad; I didn’t know we were importing American labor, though.”

. . .

Abner just drove up. Neighbor on the other side lamenting the election—a bearded 40ish man with a Yankee accent, who said, “For the first time in New Orleans history, there’s not a white male government—only one white male elected.” To which Abner replied, “Well, they can’t do a worse job than the previous government. We’ll see what they’ll do.”

New Orleans, En Route 4.3.1994: Golden Expectations Become Hamburg Drizzle

En route to New Orleans, in the plane somewhere over western Carolina or eastern Georgia. I’m to give a lecture tonight, a workshop tomorrow, then a much-needed vacation with Steve, who’s on break next week.

Taking off, I think of the Bahamas, the clear light there last summer, the dishabille of the baseball diamond we walked each evening, with its spiky tufts of tenacious tropical grass. I think of the wind atop Fox Hill, the mysterious scent of the frangipani, the owl that stared us down from the monastery’s unfinished bell tower.

Then I think of rainy, gloomy Hamburg, the two awful Chinese meals Steve and I had there in restaurants that smelled of urine, where the waiters preferred to speak English. I think of the musty inn we stayed at in Dreis in the Eifel, with its frightful furnishings like something from a Fred Flintstone set, skins nailed to interior walls, clashing violently with those nubby polyester bedclothes the 1960s called modern.

Displacement. That curious excitement of displacement I feel whenever I travel. The golden expectations that soon become Hamburg drizzle or Dreis furnishings. I’m not sure what to make of it. As I read James Merrill’s memoir, A Different Person, how he sought displacement in Europe as a young gay man, I wonder if it’s inherent in being gay. Totus mundus exilium est: yes, it’s the displacement of oppression and the doors it closes to “normalcy” and privilege; and it’s the displacement of being denied family—in traditional senses of the word.

But is it also that displacement of being . . . genderless, betwixt and between, not one nor the other, at least, in societal myths about a gay orientation? Is that why W.E.B. DuBois’s idea of double consciousness appeals so? Like blacks, gay people live that strange phenomenon.

I know there’s lots of power there, in not quite belonging: Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Jesus and the reign of God, St. Francis and his father, any woman you can name, practically. But I don’t know how to access that power. I want to belong and not belong, to have security and be free to critique.

I wait for . . . what? To have some vague sense of who I am, I reckon. Speaking, as I will tonight, in this vague floating space that is my life and identity now—it’s very anxiety-provoking, to put it mildly. I don’t float well; I’m not a very spiritually mature person.

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Leave taking is always hard for me. Sugar’s reproachful eyes through the gate, the tick of the clock in the still house and rust stains in the sink. But today, the purple buds of the Japanese magnolia, big and fat against a not too well matched blue sky. They’ll open while we’re away, as they did last year. This is a poem, if I could write it . . . .

New Orleans 4.7.94: Still Bayous and Dark Coffee

Steve and I up early to walk along the bayou (St. John) and in City Park. I feel some spiritual depth calling to me here, these days. The bayou focuses that call, as it often did for me when we lived in New Orleans, and I wrote poems in my head as we walked on its banks. Followed by coffee at Café du Monde, in that still, cool time around dawn before it’s tourist-crowded.

But times away from home, like this teaching stint in New Orleans, draw out the worst between Steve and me—naked cor ad cor loquitur, and one cannot predict what will happen. The sameness of it all is so boring, so maddening—he says, I say, we say, like some rote chant. That book title, The Dance of Anger, is appropriate—it is a dance, a relentless two-step in which one can never improvise, or fling oneself into the cosmic polka with abandon.

Glad abandon: those old sucker words still get me, with all their self-deception. With Steve, what palls is precisely what drew me to him in the first place—the masculine control. But such sly control, that never really takes control . . . .

Of course, when people argue so hopelessly and for so long about such small things, the argument is really about something else. Control, I guess. If what we hate in others is our own shadow, then it’s I who am conflicted over control. I want to give myself (with glad abandon), but I’m afraid to do so. Afraid I’ll be summarily shaken and my slumber dissipated—as by my mother when I was an infant.

Do the deep traumas inside us ever heal?

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27.6.94

A thought re: my trip to Russia, why it was so painful:

Travelers in foreign lands experience a curious duality: their skin becomes simultaneously transparent and impermeable. To those in whose midst they walk, all their inner mechanisms are exposed, like clocks whose faces are removed. But for the tourist, there is the experience of extreme frustration, as one seeks to connect to foreigners, and finds one’s thoughts cannot pass thick membranes of language and custom, of one’s own skin.

Atlanta, Georgia: 25.5.1994: Rice Connections, Family Connections

A good day, a pleasant one. We researched again today, all day, at the Georgia Archives, and I found a lot of treasures, family documents . . . .

After working all day, we went to an Indian restaurant on Peachtree—Raja something or other. We had a vegetable plate of appetizers, papadums, lamb, banana, and coconut curry, a biryani of chicken, rice and peanuts (! yes, not almonds), paratha, and beer. Scrumptious. The biryani makes me think of all the cuisines that flavor rice with some sauce, and serve it with bits of meat and lots of vegetables. One gets a flavorful, filling, and balanced meal that way, and it’s not expensive. E.g., arroz con pollo, which is cooked by a technique similar to that of biryani, and pilaf, which must be the Persian antecedent of biryani, and which becomes purloo in the South, where the Indian dish marries with the Spanish and becomes Spanish rice.

(Not so strange, really, if one thinks of the Arabian roots of Spanish rice cuisine.) But the tomato’s, of course, New World. And surely jambalaya is a south Louisiana version of arroz con pollo or paella (and what’s the connection between those two?)—despite all those fanciful south Louisiana legends of Indian (i.e., native American) origin. And then all the Chinese rice dishes like fried rice, congee, the hot pot, etc.

Atlanta, Georgia 23.5.1994: Family Ghosts and Faded Tombstones

Walnut Fork church near Braselton, Georgia: I did a rubbing of Jacob Braselton, Sr.’s, tombstone. Could not get one of Jacob, Jr., and wife Mary Bryson. Their stones are flat, the faux-crypt style, and badly worn—even more so than a few years ago when I was here. Mary’s appears not to have an inscription, as her will stipulates: she asks to be brought back to Walnut Fork church (she was then living in Lumpkin County) and buried beside her husband, with a monument similar to his, but no inscription. The plot of Jacob, Mary, and their infant granddaughter Margaret has a marker saying it was restored by Leita Green Braselton and her sister Nell.

Today is the anniversary of my grandmother’s death in 1968, which was Ascension Thursday that year. Requiescat in pace.

Last night, dinner at a restaurant on Peachtree called Grand China. It was a charmed experience. The owner, a Mrs. Tse-Chih Chang, brought us to our table and stood talking for half an hour—about ghosts in her house (one is a monk), about how her grandfather became sick and needed blood, so her grandmother went into the kitchen and chopped off her finger and fed him three cups of her blood, and so forth.*

Then she ordered for us—chicken in black bean sauce, ginger shrimps, and sizzling rice soup. It was a real treat for Pentecost day.

I awoke today on this first vacation day thinking how important it is to tell my story, to write. If I’m to have any peace with the familial ghosts that entrance me, I must meet them daily in fantasy, and write about the encounter, no matter where it leads me—even to the “dread essence beyond logic,” as Nikos Kazantzakis calls that spiritual stream that rushes underneath our lives.

*And am I crazy, or has Amy Tan not written stories very much like these? Are they stories that run through a number of Chinese-American families, then?

Virginia and North Carolina 11.8.94: Old Diaries and Country Churches

After a drive through the mountains, we went to Richmond and cloistered ourselves two days in the state library, state history museum, and archives. Some fascinating stuff—most alluring to me, an account book kept by Caleb Lindsey of Gloucester-Essex County in the late 1600s. To hold it in my hands . . . . I photocopied from it a “recete” for beer, from early 1700s when the book had come into the hands of Caleb’s son James.

After Richmond, a day in Norfolk. Pretty weather, clear, not too hot. A ghastly seafood dinner for which we paid too much in the expectation we needed to “treat” ourselves. One of those all-you-can-eat buffet deals with people clustered like locusts around steam tables, picking at this and that. Why can’t I learn, I’m not an all-you-can-eat buffet type? The night before, we had had a wonderful Vietnamese meal in the Fan district of Richmond for half the price: cold spring rolls, cabbage, carrot, chicken, and peanut slaw, shrimp, crab, and noodle soup, and skewered charcoal-roasted pork on noodles with fish sauce, mint, coriander, bean sprouts. Just as Duong and Phuong prepare it . . . .

Then drove back yesterday, stopping briefly in Windsor to visit the little Episcopal church and talk to Harry Lewis T. re: Monk ancestry, then to Nash County, Spring Hope, to talk to people about the Batchelors. And home. . . . .

In the car on the way home, Steve driving, I took out letters Daddy wrote from World War II and surprised myself by crying as I read them. Don’t know why. I suppose it’s the sense of loss—of his loss, his not ever having achieved anything near his measure. In some ways, this felt like the first real mourning I’d ever done for him—perhaps precipitated by my own corner-turning experiences of late.

And now. As I walked this morning, thought of the Shannon Faulkner case. Janet Reno recently said, ostensibly, that men who broke the gender barrier to become nurses are not required to put on dresses.

The point, it seems to me, is that the hierarchical male power structure Faulkner threatens must humiliate her. If it cannot exclude, then it must demonstrate its ultimate control over her and others by setting up a ritual of humiliation/subordination.

The head-shaving ritual already has that symbolism, for male cadets. It’s to initiate the cadet into the power structure, at the entry level. The whole structure passes power down, top to bottom, and requires subordination. It won’t work if one questions this requirement, or the motives or character of those above oneself.

Thus, it requires a tutelage in being subordinated, not questioning authority, accepting command, as a preliminary to one’s movement up. It requires that one learn to be pummeled, so that one may learn to pummel. It functions this way in any male hierarchical structure, whether church, university, corporation, or military.

This system doesn’t care about what people in “feminized” occupations—e.g., nursing—do. Men who become nurses are perceived as stepping down. No need to humiliate them. For men who seek to step up, such humiliation is extremely important, as an initiation into power.

Doughton State Park, Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina 7.-8.8.1994: Lambent World, Plaited Hills

At Bluffs Lodge, Doughton State Park, where Steve and I spent time last fall. Just had to get away. A harrowing day, about which I won’t write, as it’s late in the evening.

Morning now, Doughton Park. Thinking of that passage in Thoreau I love so, as I watch the hills, mist silently capturing trees on their crests: how all the world flows, in creation, so that the lapsed world becomes lambent. The hills of the Blue Ridge, as they dwindle to dale and fold here at its northern North Carolina boundary, say this to me so powerfully, with their glad unfolding as they lie plaited over the earth.

This beauty. I respond to it. So do many others. That tells me there must be something in some landscapes that speaks insistently to the human heart, to some types of human hearts.

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Nature: it used to have such healing strength for me. Where has that strength gone? As I read Mary Oliver, I sense that at least part of the answer lies in the extent to which I’ve permitted myself to live only in the rational, professional, ultimately self-obsessed, brain. My sympathy for mute creatures diminishes as a result, in direct proportion to this extent.

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Freedom: have I bought what little freedom I have at too great cost? More and more, I feel like a character in an Edith Wharton novel, who has tried to kick over the traces, made a bit of freedom for herself, but doesn’t know what on earth to do with it now, such a strange creature she has become to all the world else. Or like what’s her name in Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street.

But I like that sense of being true to what most deeply impels me, compels me, inside. Fulminate as he will, the Pope can’t convince me that this is not conscience, this impulsion to truth, freedom, love. Perhaps my problem is that I’m too conscious . . . . .