On Love

Out of everything we read, Ernest J. Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying impacted me the most. A Lesson Before Dying is set during the 1940s South and tells the story of Jefferson, an innocent black man accused of aiding in the murder of a white man and sentenced to be electrocuted. Jefferson’s defense refers to him as a “hog” and Jefferson internalizes this belief that he is not human and even cynically mimics the actions of a hog: “He grunted deep in his throat and grinned at me”. Throughout the course of the novel Grant, a school teacher, regularly visits Jefferson in an attempt to get Jefferson to understand that he is a man and not the hog whites consider him to be.

“They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time. ”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Visiting the jail that Jefferson was locked up in was both profound and overwhelming—it brought the setting of the story literally to life, making Jefferson’s experience in jail tangible and real to me. We walked inside the black-out cells where prisoners were put in as punishment for out-of-line behavior. We walked in a room where people were hanged from the ceiling. My intention in taking the photographs below was not in any way to glorify or to create a spectacle out of death and suffering but rather I took these photos out of remembrance for what went on here and reverence for the innocent people who were locked up here like animals and suffered immensely. I hope my photographs capture the chilling and cruel nature of the jail.

We also got to visit the plantation church where Dr. Gaines grew up going to school and in the novel where Grant teaches, kindergarten through sixth grade in a shortened school year compared to the white children. Visiting Ernest and Dianne Gaines at their home was a surreal experience and perhaps my favorite part of our bookpacking trip. Cheylon, an archivist at the Ernest J. Gaines Center, showed us inside the plantation church and gave us a brief history of the church and the property. Dr. Gaines lives on property that was once a plantation his ancestors worked as slaves on.

The novel is heartbreaking and moving. I can’t remember the last time I cried while reading but I cried several times while reading this book, especially reading Jefferson’s diary. During our morning seminar on the novel before we visited the Gaines’ home, Andrew talked about the idea of believing that we are loved and how it is easier to give love than to receive love; how it is hard to believe that we are worthy of love. By the end of the novel Jefferson finally realizes that he is worthy of being loved and accepting love:

• “sometime mr wigin i just feel like tellin you i like you but i dont kno how to say this cause i aint never say it to nobody before an nobody aint never say it to me”
• “is that love mr wigin when you want to see somebody bad bad”
• “my litle cosin estel even com up an kiss me on the jaw an i coudn hol it back no mo”
• “when they brot me in the room an i seen nanan at the table i seen how ole she look an how tied she look an i tol her i love her”
• “[you girlfren] thats the firs lady that pretty ever tech me an nobody that pretty never kiss me”
• “reson i cry cause you been so good to me mr wigin an nobody aint never been that good to me an make me think im somebody”

I cried reading these lines in Jefferson’s diary. As Andrew pointed out, this feeling of not being worthy of love is not unique to people in Jefferson’s situation but is a universal condition all humans struggle with to some extent. Finishing our bookpacking experience with a novel with universal themes on love and the human condition was perfect; I will forever look back on this trip and remember A Lesson Before Dying and the beautiful relationships we formed with each other through all of our adventures in Grand Isle, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Breaux Bridge.

Growing Roots

“We pledged allegiance to the flag. The flag hung limp from a ten-foot bamboo pole in the corner of the white picket fence that surrounded the church ”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Here we are in the old Pointe Coupee Parish courthouse prison cells: 12 college students and one professor, exploring a place that is far from our home. It is nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside and there’s no air conditioning to cool the hot floor of the building; it seems unimaginable to have to be on this floor for more than a single hour, let alone stuffed into one of the tiny prison cells. 

There they were, some 75 years ago or so, in a courthouse in the fictitious town of Bayonne that bears striking resemblance to Pointe Coupee today: 12 white members of the jury and one white judge held the fate of black man in their hands at the Bayonne courthouse in Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, A Lesson Before Dying. Jefferson, a black man, is wrongfully accused of a crime he did not commit and is sentenced to be executed by electric chair, a grave injustice. Jefferson is dehumanized by the segregated criminal justice system and is forced to live out the rest of his life until the day he dies in a hot, stuffy and tiny prison cell. 

Today, boxes of unorganized papers and old books fill the cells in the Pointe Coupee Parish courthouse prison cells which once barred inmates until as early as the late 1980s. The cells-turned-storage rooms still hold on to the memories of humans found guilty of crimes; they are rooted in the agony and despair of their former inhabitants. The highest floor of this building paints the story of life in a cell that Gaines writes about in his novel for us to see with our own eyes. Rundown toilets are relics of the days when men and women lived day after day in these cells. Gaines describes the prison cell that Jefferson is placed into in A Lesson Before Dying:

“The cell was roughly six by ten, with a metal bunk covered by a thin mattress and a woolen army blanket; a toilet without seat or toilet paper… ”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

In the months leading up to his execution, Jefferson is visited by his Aunt Lou and local school teacher Grant Wiggins who is charged with the task of teaching Jefferson how to become a man before his death sentence. In his godmother’s eyes, Jefferson must be rooted in his manhood before he can meet his maker, so Grant Wiggins is Miss Emma's choice for the man who will teach her godson how to become a man. 

At first, Grant Wiggins is hesitant to visit Jefferson in prison, but after visiting Jefferson multiple times, Grant begins to become closer to Jefferson in the days leading up to the execution. As Dr. Gaines puts it himself, while Grant is teaching Jefferson how to die, Jefferson is teaching Grant how to live. Grant left Bayonne for California to go to college before coming back to teach in Bayonne, something in his past, his roots, made it impossible for him to stay away, as Grant comments: 

“My mother and father also told me that if I was not happy in Louisiana, I should come to California. After visiting them the summer following my junior year at the university, I came back, which please my aunt. But I had been running in place ever since, unable to accept what used to be my life, unable to leave it ”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

When Grant Wiggins comes back to where his roots are, he must grow them as he spends time with Jefferson in prison or teaches the local schoolchildren about their place in the world. Although he is unable to comprehend why he cannot leave his childhood home, maybe it is because when he goes back to it he finds the same community in the same despair. 

Local church/school from Dr. Gaines' childhood that now sits on his residential property. 

Yet the black community of Bayonne comes together, especially in the months leading up to Jefferson’s execution; they are rooted in belief and camaraderie, the sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of former enslaved people, coming together to lift each other up. Members of the community help Grant gather enough money so that he can buy a radio for Jefferson. Grant Wiggins gathers the school-aged children in the local church and teaches them about reading and arithmetic as well as providing them with life lessons, disciplining them when necessary, and reminding them that the justice system rooted in the United States of America is flawed and unfair:   

“Do you all know what is going on in Bayonne?... Do you all know what is going to happen to someone just like you who sat right where you’re sitting only a few years ago? All right, I’ll tell you. They’re going to kill him in Bayonne. They’re going to sit him in a chair, they’re going to tie him down with straps, they’re going to connect wires to his head, to his wrists, to his legs, and they’re going to shoot electricity through the wires into his body until he’s dead.”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

I interned at the courthouse where The State of Colorado v. James Holmes was on trial when I was a senior in high school. The District Attorneys tried hard to convince the jury that James Holmes, who walked into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado during the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises, the white man who brutally killed 12 victims and injured 70 more, was guilty of his crimes. I sat and spoke with one of the victims’ mother, unable to imagine the pain that she felt losing her own child. I listened to witness testimonies recounting the tragic night. I watched as James Holmes who had dyed his hair bright orange, spun around in his seat as the DA was presenting evidence against the murderer to the jury. 

The 12-person jury was all white except for one Hispanic woman. James Holmes, a white man and a mass murderer, was found not guilty of his heinous crimes due to insanity. He was sentenced to life in prison even though he had taken the lives of 12 innocent people. The justice system still puzzles and fascinates me to this day. 

***

Our class walks around the prison cells; we have a type of freedom that the inmates who once were confined to these cells never had. We walk through the prison cells in solemnness, dwelling on the plight of the numerous inmates who were once confined to these claustrophobic and stuffy cells. In one cell, our guide, Tammy, points out a rectangle in the ground where the floor has been welded back together. She then looks to the ceiling and tells us that she believes the round circle is where unfortunate souls would be hung from, their bodies dropping down through the area where the floor was welded back together. 

Throughout our time taking a tour of the prison cells I wondered about justice and the meaning of such a concept. Perhaps, like Jefferson, many men and women were wrongfully accused of crimes they did not commit and were sentenced merely for the color of their skin: an injustice. For those who were rightfully accused, what was their punishment? Was it just? Was it execution by electric chair like it was for Jefferson? How could the United States of America, a country that prides itself in its roots of freedom and opportunity, be responsible for a quarter of the world’s prison population? Is that justice? Is that freedom? Is that really how this country treats its citizens? 

We were not even in those prison cells for one hour, let alone a day, let alone a week, a month, a year, multiple years, but I was hot, claustrophobic and felt like I was carrying the weight of the world. I could never imagine being confined in these cells. The place feels so haunted and so horrifying. I was relieved when we hastily went down the stairs to the air conditioned first floor, fresh air never smelled so wonderful. 

Our class got to meet with the current sheriff of Pointe Coupee, Sheriff Beauregard “Bud” Torres III, who not only is approachable but can also hold a tune; he leads a double life as the "Singing Sheriff" and has recorded his originals songs in New York and Nashville. The singing sheriff plays his original songs for us: he is proud of his work in the same way that he is proud of his heritage. Sheriff Torres graciously sat down with us to talk about Louisiana in general and to tell us about his own family history. 

Sheriff Torres can trace his roots back to the original French and Spanish who first came to Louisiana, including famous and integral ancestors who helped shaped this region of the United States. Similarly, I can trace my maternal grandmother’s lineage back as far back as before Christ and am the direct descendant of some integral people to world history including the notorious Christopher Columbus, who, in a way, helped to establish this country. I wouldn't say my roots are perfect, but I would like to think Columbus' descendants have come a long way and have learned from the past in order to try and make the world a better place to live in. 

The room that we’re all in right now is the courthouse’s press room. Sheriff Torres tells us that, while he’s usually stressed in this room, sharing his songs and family history with us is extremely refreshing. We smile back at him from our spots on plush, comfortable spinning chairs, clouds compared to the hard beds the inmates would have had to sit on in the cells above us. The experience is humbling—all of us in that room are grateful that we only had to walk through the cells, places where distraught inmates once lived, rather than exist in those tiny spaces day after day. 

*** 

The day before we went to the Point Coupee Parish, we were at the state capitol building in Baton Rouge. Within two days we walked through the Louisiana state capitol building one day—through the meeting places of the House of Representatives and the Senate and even saw the area where former and notorious Louisiana state governor Huey Long was shot in, only to walk through prison cells in Pointe Coupee the next day. We were able to walk around the building where matters pertaining to Louisiana are discussed and debated and saw the place one could be sentenced to should they break those laws within those two days. Both buildings have state legislative roots in their own ways and serve as reminders of some version of the making and repercussion of our country's justice system, which is clearly not perfect or fair, nor has it been for so many years before.

Ernest Gaines explores justice and the meaning of justice through Grant Wiggins' realization that the legal system is imperfect:

“...Don’t tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers. Who among his peers judged him? Was I there? Was the minister there? Was Harry Williams there? Was Farrell Jarreau? Was my aunt? Was Vivian? No, his peers did not judge him...”

— Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Everything is rooted in something, anchored down in success in the same way it could be anchored down in sin. Roots are important, where you come from is important, but where you’re going, how you treat people and what you do to better the world, is far more valuable. 

Hierarchy

In my last blog I talked about how New Orleans has a very distinct character.  When we left the city, we left all that behind, but as we traveled further north in Louisiana, it felt like we were actually going further South - into the Deep South. 

Our hotel was in Downtown Baton Rouge.  It felt like the Finance District of Los Angeles with everyone coming in to work at nine and leaving the city to go home at five.

Empty.

While our base was in Baton Rouge, in actuality we spent most of our days exploring New Roads, a small one street town just a 40-minute car ride away from Baton Rouge.  New Roads is the setting for the book we are reading, A Lesson Before Dying.  Driving up to the town you pass beautiful estates, sitting on the False River.  The estates all have a big house near the side of the road, and then land that just stretches out as far as the eye can see - sometimes filled with sugar cane crops, other times just grass.  Driving past the estates I could imagine the big house overlooking the river, the rows and rows of sugar cane swaying in the breeze, and the slave quarters a ways off - their own small community. Once slavery was abolished, many slaves (now free blacks) still stayed on the plantation lands, now earning a small wage and having to pay rent – strapped to the same land and working for the same family as before the Civil War.  Many of the estates in New Roads remained working farms up until the 1970s.  The free blacks stayed in the same little houses and lived the same little lives. The slave quarters were now just “the quarter” and it was where Jefferson and Grant, the two main characters of the novel, were raised.

New Roads

Once you pass all the estates and actually get into town, there are a few restaurants and stores, but it is mostly silent. The heat is oppressive and persuades most people to stay indoors.

When I was in New Roads, it felt like I was experiencing two sides of the same coin. There was so much kindness - true "Southern Hospitality" - that I had not experienced in New Orleans.  A pharmacist took us on his boat for a ride down the river, and the sheriff of Pointe Coupee Parish (where New Roads resides) took time out of his busy day to show us country songs that he made in Nashville. Everyone was so gracious - such a Southern virtue. But grace is being benevolent to someone who has less power than you, who is lower than you, and it presupposes a hierarchy. That hierarchy, in which there is white, and there is not white, is the other side of the coin.

Three hundred years ago there was slavery. Two hundred years ago there were black codes and sharecropping.  Then came Jim Crow, segregation, and the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.  Redlining and the War on Drugs followed, and now the prison system is used as a legal framework to maintain that same hierarchy.

“The 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution makes it unconstitutional for anyone to be held as a slave. There are exceptions, including criminals.”

— 13th, Netflix Documentary

When black men make up an 40.2% of the U.S. prison population, but only account for an estimated 6.5% of the U.S. population, we must ask ourselves a question. If 1 in 3 Black males are expected to go to prison in their lifetime while only 1 in 17 white males are expected to go to prison in their lifetime, we must ask ourselves: is this deliberate?

---

“The prison industrial complex relies historically on the inheritances of slavery.”

— Angela Davis

When we were in New Roads, we visited the courthouse and jail because it is central to A Lesson Before Dying.  The novel is about Jefferson, a black man - though he is only 21 and is more boy than man.  He is caught in the wrong place at the wrong time and found guilty of a murder he did not commit. He is sentenced to death by electric chair. 

The courthouse was on the first floor of the building.  The jail, not a functioning jail anymore, was just used for storage and took up the second floor.  We took an elevator to go up to see the cells. “This elevator is the original elevator and even has a little compartment for the prisoners,” Tammy, the deputy giving us a tour explained.

Once we had all gone up the elevator, in groups of 4-5, we started walking around looking at the cells.  “This jail had been used as recently as 1989, with no AC in the Southern summer heat,” Tammy pointed out. The cells were tiny, only about two paces by three paces, barely enough room for a bed and a toilet.  They had three solid walls, and one wall of bars – no privacy.

View Into Jail Cell

Our guide showed us where the inmates had their recreation time. It was on the roof.  There was no shade. It was a 15 by 40-foot strip of roofing that gave in slightly with each step.  The roof was different shades of grey only broken up with black and silver vents randomly protruding through the roofing. We quickly went back inside to get a break from the heat.

Jail Roof (Former Recreation Space)

As we walked around the jail Tammy took us into a small room. “This room,” she pointed out, “was the only cell for women back in the day.  But seeing as there were hardly any women prisoners, it was also the room used for executions.  See that circle with the hole up there,” Tammy pointed at the ceiling. “That’s where they would put the rope for the hangings.  And look at the floor,” she gestured to the ground, “you can see they’ve welded it shut, but it used to be a pit so the bodies could drop.” I was standing right on the welding, and quickly shuffled back.

Everyone was silent, each of us wrapped up in our own thoughts. I wondered about how many people had been hanged here, each with their own lives, their own stories. I thought about Jefferson and how he had faced a similar end.

I thought about this specific quote from the novel:

“Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person.  Justice? […] They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened.  Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us white folks all, have decided it's time for you to die, because this is the convenient date and time.”

But then I thought about how, even from the beginning, Jefferson didn’t stand a chance.  How he had started picking cotton in the fields at age 6, and went to a black school in a church that started one month after the white schools and ended two months before the white schools ended – separate but equal?

I thought about the despair Grant, a black school teacher, had when his classes were filled with boys like Jefferson.

“I have always done what they wanted me to do, teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.  Nothing else – nothing about dignity, nothing about identity, nothing about loving and caring.  They never thought we were capable of learning these things. ‘Teach those niggers how to print their names and how to figure on their fingers.’”

— A Lesson Before Dying

I thought about the podcast I had listened to on the car ride to New Roads.  It was the episode of The Daily by the New York Times that was aired May 30, 2018 titled “Was Kevin Cooper Framed for Murder?” Kevin Cooper is an African America death row inmate currently held in California's San Quentin Prison. Cooper was accused of four murders that occurred in the Chino Hills area of California in 1983.  The sole survivor of the attack said that the intruders were three white men, and a woman called the police and said that her boyfriend, a white convicted murderer, was probably involved.  She gave the police his bloody coveralls. The police threw away the coveralls and instead arrested Cooper.

Cooper was found guilty of four counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder with the intentional infliction of great bodily injury.

“This is the story of a broken justice system. It appears that an innocent man was framed by sheriff’s deputies and is on death row in part because of dishonest cops, sensational media coverage and flawed political leaders — including Democrats like Brown and Kamala Harris, the state attorney general before becoming a U.S. senator, who refused to allow newly available DNA testing for a black man convicted of hacking to death a beautiful white family and young neighbor. This was a failure at every level, and it should prompt reflection not just about one man on death row but also about profound inequities in our entire system of justice.”

— New York Times, Nicholas Kristof

All this happened in California, one of the bluest states in the nation. It serves to remind us that this issue isn’t a Southern issue, and it isn’t a Republican or conservative issue.  It is a national issue.

I thought about Jefferson. I thought about Cooper.

“This place is legit haunted,” Lauryn, another bookpacker, said as we slowly walked out of the cell.

Inmaet Writing Found In A Cell

Blue Carnival

I’m in Baton Rouge now, and the distance from New Orleans is just enough space to do some thinking uninterrupted by the wailing of a saxophone. Is it disrespectful to say wailing?

Don’t get me wrong, the wailing is beautiful. I heard some of the most musically wondrous moments of my life in New Orleans. The city’s historical and cultural hodgepodge is very inspiring (apartments with French latticing and hole-in-the-wall po-boy restaurants on the same avenue? What? Is this Vegas’ dream ego? If Vegas were actually real and more well-read?), and my eclectic soul is wowed by just about everything. But I was there long enough to see the same buskers days in a row. The crowds followed the same songs, stopping to reflect on a stranger’s sonic heartache or fleeting harmonica happiness on pretty streets four or five times a day.

Who needs the south of France when you have France in the South?

This was why I found New Orleans a bit overwhelming at first. There were so many expressions of emotions being evoked, conjured, aroused—and so often. After a while, though, through the carnival-esque noise, I could sense something missing. Some unmet wishes, or yearning for elsewhere, some tough crowds, unfilled tip buckets on the sidewalk. Some returning the next day, and the next, to the same corners on Royal Street, same signs as last time.

I guess I started to realize that even inspiring momentary splendor for others in the form of a cornet, or masked and beaded dancing, or precious local trinkets at the nightly art market, is a profession. It’s someone’s practice of seeking fulfillment. People do this because this is what they can do to make strangers happy, or part of themselves happy, or at least a living. These are the city’s pretty offerings to its visitors—songs as sweet as powdered sugar—but sweet things so often can make you tired and restless.

So that’s how a city so happy can wail. Like the rest of us, the city is looking for the best time all the time. The incessant searching—on Frenchman St, on Bourbon St, in every lounge and bar in the evening—has made a festive and fun tradition of the art of finding meaningful delight. Second lines and krewe parades on the weekends are expressions of pride and sweet sugar—New Orleans has been through a lot, but it still knows how to try and be joyful by referencing the past. The medieval influences in the Mardi Gras and parade culture, tied with Catholic antiquity, tied with African spirituality, tied with the graciousness of an old American South all sing and dance together in the humidity. This is what history looks like finding happy hobbies today: their arts confess love, relive histories, and sustain livelihoods. That’s just the way of life in New Orleans. A daily carnival, a medieval fair, seeking the holy grail of elsewhere, somewhere in its history.

We went to the second line parade of The Divine Ladies, a Social and Pleasure Club in Mid City. It was so much fun. Also, they played Drake’s Nice For What and I wasn’t able to get it out of my head for a week and a half. On Melissa’s blog there’s a fun video of the festivities.

Even its future-seeking comes from the past. I knew I had to visit at least one psychic in New Orleans. Fortunetellers, who typically use tarot cards that borrow from medieval tropes, line Jackson Square and have offices in every plaza. Though scary or silly for some, psychic readings are fun conversations about intuition, trying to read what we know. Just for fun, here’s a generic reading of my next six months. We talked through the possibilities the cards presented, and my personal reflection and meditation has enjoyed the information. I got a specific love reading and career reading too, but I can’t give all my secrets away on the internet.

Drawn from memory. My psychic told me my spread was very positive—a nice confidence boost!

From tarot to voodoo, the sheer abundance of fortunetellers in New Orleans is a symptom of restlessness. Knowing—or trying hard to know—what’s next and what’s sweet and how to fill the tip buckets every day seems never-ending. The books we’ve read recently entertain the idea of ennui while seeking meaning in the past, present, and future: from Ignatius’ medieval fetish to his job hunt, John Kennedy Toole paints a perfect picture of a strange man with impossible ideals, settling in Confederacy of Dunces. Ignatius, like Binx in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, turns to movies to indulge in some form of temporary fulfillment: only during movies can Ignatius feel superior to life and ridicule its manifestation as film. Binx is quite unlikeable and quite bored, but his internal torment and yearning for elsewhere is contented when he’s in a “neighborhood theater out there in the sticks without a car.”

“When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.”

— Ignatius, Confederacy of Dunces

So that’s how a city so seemingly happy can wail—because in reality, it’s quite blue. On the surface, New Orleans’ eclectic curiosities might seem fleeting. But really, the city knows how to do two things very well: dwell, and distract itself.

Not that that’s a bad thing at all. Maybe that is just what we’re supposed to do. And though I’m in Baton Rouge now, I still smell like its quirky, nostalgic glamour. I think I will see beads in trees for a long time.

A Lesson on Living

“When, in disgrace with the fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, WIth what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate. For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”

— William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

I couldn’t lift my eyes from the table. Each word had been impaled within my bones. Each sentence had been left to resonate until the space between my two ears was flooded. I couldn’t feel my body; I did not have control at that moment. 

Paralyzed. 

Only a single tear was permitted to run the track of dewy skin along my rounded jawline. Palm lifted to erase all evidence of weakness before raising my heavy head and hazy face in order to face the world. I was greeted with adverted eyes and silence. Slow, deep exhales filled the space around me. 

Speechless. 

I wasn’t alone. Though no waves carrying the laughs from the previous night were poured onto the dark mahogany, I was conscious of everyone’s presence. They were with me.

Everyone. 

For so long, I have had the illusion of being empty, in an empty world. Who was I? What did I have to offer to my society and those around me? 

Nothing. I thought.

I bared nothing that would make me more desirable than the next. I was easily disposable and readily replaced.

Melissa Carpenter. That name doesn’t seem to ring a bell.

So, instead of defining myself, I have attempted to stir up adjectives I could use as a mask to present to the strange faces that become inquisitive.

Because I have nothing to offer.

I have cried over the loneliness that evades me persistently, but find comfort in knowing I am safe that way. Because it’s not me, it’s the labels which I have shielded myself with that resulted in abandonment. It was never actually me. 

Confident, strong, boisterous. Harsh sarcasm, obnoxious jokes and dogmatic behavior lie on display for judgment. 

Bold. 

It’s not inauthentic. Rather, it’s cheating - orienting myself at a strategic angle so that I only exhibit those fragments of me strong enough to withstand the harsh blows of objective opinion. But inside, I am so soft. I am.

Vulnerable.

I have wished for better friends, studied harder for better grades and prayed to be accepted.

Loved. 

I just want to be loved.

But is there anyone in this world who does not so deeply desire the security of knowing they are truly loved and worthy of such?

No. 

We need each other.

Yet we live in a place that makes it hard to believe one’s self is loveable. The invisible, supposedly deconstructed, barriers of race, socioeconomic class, and education continue to divide – limiting the interactions between persons who each have so much to offer. When we continue to divide and divide, those of us who fail to associate with the majority in several aspects are left standing alone. In silence. Where does an Americanized half Korean girl from a working middle-class family, who studies biochemistry, belong? Who is there to associate with? It is easy to amplify certain identifiers to fit in with one group over another, but how impossible it proves to find one person who gets it. Who gets you and your dreams. Your hardships and aspirations. Why is this our world? Why can’t conversations be open without fear of rejection? Why can’t we just love every part of every person? 

Instead, we find ourselves in a fruitless race of giving and giving with nothing being reciprocated. Eventually, one comes to realize that the pot can only be poured so slowly before nothing is left but a dry, empty, dark hole. That one can only break off so many pieces of a heart before there is nothing left and no more love to offer. 

Isolation.

To love and be loved; it’s a balancing act. 

“You’ve never had any possessions to give up, Jefferson. But there is something greater than possessions - and that is love.”

— Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

Much like Jefferson, from Gaines’s “A Lesson Before Dying,” I have felt that I don’t have much to offer. I have felt trapped in my own world as Jefferson had been trapped in his, behind bars. As Jefferson is able to distinguish himself from his teacher, Grant Wiggins, I can identify the barriers that separate me from the whole. After touring the courthouse and prison cells in Baton Rouge, I was left speechless. Weighted down with the sorrow and despair which the prisoners had experienced in the very place I was standing. The must and humidity sunk deep into my pores. This was not life. As the rusty metal doors squealed shut I felt my heart drop to my stomach as I noticed fellow bookpacker, Claire, had been locked into one of the cells. She was no longer a part of my world. She was confined to the 15ft wide concrete cell and did not have control of her destiny. At that moment, she had become a slave.

“Because I know what it means to be a slave. I am a slave.”

— Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

In a way, we are all a slave to someone. Someone who is older, has more experience, more money, more power. Can one who is seen as a slave ever be loved, though? How does one live like this?

With dignity.

It is impossible to escape the judgment of society. To remain dignified though, as a man or woman, one must practice selfless love. Not living with anticipation of such love being returned but willing to embrace and cherish what falls into one’s lap. Trusting that they are capable and deserving and worthy of every bit of love offered. Love is not a scam. It is pure and endless. Standing in his cell, Jefferson marched to his grave with dignity. At that moment, he knew he was not a hog, but a human, a man. Jefferson had the capacity to love as much as any other person, free or enslaved. Just as the prisoners wrote on the inside of the cell at the prison, in our roots, we are equal. We are all equal.

Juxtapose

For seminar one morning, Andrew asked us to create a list of characteristics that we felt defined New Orleans.

“Exhibited”

“Contained”

“Reconstructed”

“Historic”

The list continued on till we had arrived at approximately fifty adjectives-most of which contradicted each other. Is it possible for a city to not only be self aware but to also be chaotic? Could New Orleans be celebrated and displaced? For me, these contradictions became overwhelming and apparent during my time in Baton Rouge. We would spend the morning touring a holding cell for prisoners but by the afternoon, we were comfortably sitting in a conference room, listening country songs from the singing sheriff’s Spotify. We would spend seminar discussing what defines humanity and contemplating questions about how we receive love before lounging on a boat and looking at the riverfront houses that lined either side. We toured the capitol and learned about Huey Long’s murder before speculating whether or not a pencil had actually gotten stuck in the Senate ceiling.

In A Lesson Before Dying, the driving plot of the book is a school teacher Grant, who is asked to teach Jefferson how to be a man before he is executed for being falsely accused for robbery and murder. Grant’s aunt is insistent that Jefferson must be a man when he is executed, rather than the ‘hog’ that society has made him out to be. However, there is a complex irony in trying to teach a man how to live like a man when he is about to face his death. This book has vivid moments of love and happiness that are followed by stark descriptions of Jefferson’s jail cell and Grant’s inability to grapple with his own experiences in the south. This mimics Southern Louisiana’s ability to have a history that has immense tragedy alongside a celebration of life and happiness. For me, having both emotionally moving and emotionally freeing experiences existing in the same place, one shortly after the other, emphasizes the truth behind what it means to be human. We live in a world where we are laughing at memes while also reading headlines about wars around the world.

Additionally, I think seeing the prison cells helped me to put into perspective Jefferson’s experiences in A Lesson Before Dying. Several impactful scenes in the book do take place within the small prison cell, where Dr. Gaines describes the cramped quarters and the sound of the Jefferson’s chains. The cells that we were able to see in Pointe Coupee Parish are no longer in use. They are upstairs in the sheriffs’ office and are strictly used for storage purposes. Each one of the cells was filled with boxes and boxes of old files and cases that no longer had a home downstairs. Even with the files, I could still imagine what the prison could have been like. There was an eerie feeling within each cell that was enhanced by the peeling paint, the small notes written on the walls inside and the sound of all four cell doors closing. Despite no longer being in use, the prison felt lived in. It was not impossible to imagine the people who would have had to stay in lock down or who would have glanced up at the large brick clock that stood just above their recreational space.

Once leaving the prison, we went downstairs to see the court house and had a chance meeting with the sheriff. He had come in from work to find all of us observing the old pictures and documents that were placed on the walls of the Sheriff’s conference room. Tammy, delighted to give us the best tour she possibly could, sat him at the head of the table to talk to all of us. Within the novel, the sheriff is cold, abuses his power and is unsympathetic to Aunt Emma’s cause. He often expects for Jefferson to adhere to the racist hierarchies that have been set in place for hundreds of years. He is the anti-hero. However, Sheriff Torres comes across as being Sheriff Guidry opposite. He is a charming southern man who can trace his ancestry all the way back to their first voyage to Louisiana. His family has stayed here, planted roots here and grown up here. He smiles often, attends to us as though we are the only people on his mind and cracks jokes in the middle of his stories. To add to the Southern charm, he enjoys singing country music and has been recording songs in Nashville-some of which he plays for us. They are wholesome country songs about love, women and the South. He brings a smile to all of our faces but it is a rushed change in emotion after experiencing the prison. It reminds me of an exhibit that we saw on Hurricane Katrina back in New Orleans-within the exhibit, there was a section that addressed the reactions of the community following the storm. Despite pulling up to garage doors that had been notes spray painted on by search and rescue teams or seeing the damage inflicted on their homes on TV before they were even able to see it themselves, the town still had a fashion show that re-purposed blue tarp to create clothing and they still held comedic signs that allowed people to laugh in the face of tragedy. This city has a powerful resilience that I believe is specific to their own community. They are able to grapple with happiness and tragedy in a truly admirable way that allows both emotions to exist side by side. There is not an expectation that tragedy must end before happiness can begin, instead, happiness exists alongside tragedy.

Old Prints and Stale Popcorn

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives”

— Walker Percy

I grew up sitting in black fabric seats with my feet swinging just above a soda and candy covered floor. I grew up wearing oversized sweaters, looking up at masterpieces and contemplating why anyone would mix green and purple. I didn’t grow up playing soccer-I tried baseball but spent the entire game drawing in the dirt in the outfield. I’ve seen thousands of movies and have gone to at least fifty art museums in my lifetime, however, the experience of seeing art at New Orleans Museum of Art and watching King Creole in the Prytania was truly unique because it was defined by the books that we’ve read while touring such a celebrated city.

“Ignatius ate his current popcorn and stared raptly at the previews of coming attractions. One of the films looked bad enough, he thought, to bring him back to the Prytania in a few days. Then the screen glowed in bright, wide Technicolor, the lion roared, and the title of the excess flashed on the screen before his miraculous blue and yellow eyes. His face froze and his popcorn bag began to shake”

— John Kennedy Toole

The Prytania is exactly as Ignatius describes it in The Confederacy of Dunces-it is a small quaint theater that you could easily drive past if you are not paying attention to it. There is only one screen (at least from what I saw) and only about four or five people working the theater. The popcorn was already made, packaged and ready to go. We purchased the tickets and were freely able to choose our seats when we talked in. There is a glamorous chandelier hanging in front of the concessions stand and smaller ones lining either side of the theater. The movie did not start on time. The seats are low enough that the head of the person in front of me was typically in the way. A little old man welcomes the theater through a video that must have been filmed twenty or so years ago. The movie itself is in black and white and stops abruptly at the end without showing the credits. It is ten o’clock in the morning. I’m snacking lightly on stale popcorn and I am aware at how pleased I am to be a part of the movie going experience. The treasured moments that Binx refers to in The Moviegoer, as being experienced by other people, for me, is the joy of watching a film with an audience. It is about discussing Elvis’ choices after the film-or even better taking after Ignatius in Confederacy of Dunces and talking during the film. While watching King Creole, I understood why Ignatius felt so inclined to scream at the movie screen in exasperation. The whole film seemed to be aware of how problematic it was and had the freedom to ironically comment on itself. For example, after the owner of the bar asks a young girl on a date, he turns to her and asks “Now what is a forty year old man supposed to say to a twenty year old woman”. She wittily responds by saying, “He’s supposed to say he’s thirty-eight”. These upbeat interaction kept the movie light while still addressing the actuality of life in the fifties. It dealt with political correctness in a way that our films no longer do. However, this film also moved slower than movies today. Movies today are fast paced and action packed so that it maintains the audience’s attention for the full two hours. King Creole felt like it gave the audience an opportunity to relax and contemplate the events happening on screen but often, during these pauses I wanted to turn to my neighbors and ask what they thought or express my own exasperation with Elvis’ poor romantic choices.

“What you see in his pictures is her mind jumping that far back to when she would dare to imagine the future, parading with love or money on a beautiful anonymous cloth arm. Remember all that as she is photographed by the cripple who is hardly taller than his camera stand.”

— Michael Ondaatje

I’ve read Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje twice now: once during a creative writing class my freshman year and the second time during this trip. I’ve discussed the use of language, the presentation of mental health, how the book portrays the South and jazz and what it hopes to explain to its audience but despite all of that, it never really sank in that these characters did actually exist. I never thought about the fact that many of them could have gone on to get married, have families and kids or grandkids who are now working somewhere on this earth. It didn’t sink in till I was standing in the New Orleans Museum of Art, staring at the images that Bellocq, one of Buddy’s friends in the novel, had taken of prostitutes in early 20th century Louisiana. As described in the book, the black and white photographs had pictures of either half dressed or nude women with faces scratched out or covered. There were only a few but it was enough to gain a better understanding of Bellocq and provide even more context for such a powerful novel. It adds a weight to the story because I can better understand that this happened to someone. It also continues to add to the experience of being in New Orleans because I am exploring and living in the same spaces where these two historic figures once lived.  

The World Outside

“I no longer pretend to understand the world”

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

In my opinion, the best books to read are the ones where I feel as if I am in the world of the book itself, experiencing life with the characters themselves. Maybe my opinion relies too heavily on my pursuit of a Creative Writing major, but even when I was younger, I realized that the more I understood the characters in a book, the more I could feel with and for them, the more I enjoyed reading a particular book.

When I read Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer for the first time about a year ago, it was hard for me to relate to Binx Bolling, the main character, as he went about his quotidian life, searching for meaning of it, in New Orleans. I had never been to New Orleans when I read the book for the first and knew very little about the social and political dynamics as well as the history of the city, especially in the mid 20th Century, so I struggled when I tried to place myself in Binx’s world.

However, I finally felt as if I could understand the locations and settings in the book more when I read it the second time around after spending nearly two weeks in New Orleans. Although I still realized that I felt detached from Binx as a character because I found minimal connection with a white male, a fraternity brother of the Deltas, living in New Orleans in the middle of the 20th Century as a stock trader who goes through his secretaries one by one, I decided that at least my understanding of the place that the book brings to life was clearer this time.

I felt as if I could see the places in my head, mainly because I normally could visualize Binx's Aunt's house in the Garden District of the city or Galatoire's Restaurant that is referenced in the book. While the setting came to life, I still thought that Binx and I were completely dissimilar. 

The Moviegoer follows Binx Bollings as if the character himself had his own reality TV show-- Binx struggles to find love with any one of his secretaries but eventually marries his cousin, he is isolated from the world and oftentimes watches movies alone and he is the older half brother to a number of younger half siblings. Throughout the book, Binx grapples with situations that I have never even imagined. 

Me at my sorority's LSU chapter house.

But then, after I finished reading the book for the second time, I took a step back and re-evaluated my relation with the book and with its main character. Although I'm not a brother of a fraternity like Binx is, I am a part of a sorority (and I got to visit my sorority's house at LSU!). While I'm not living and working in a city like New Orleans, I still go to school in Los Angeles, an equally vivacious city like New Orleans in its own way. And, like Binx, at the end of the day I'm just trying to figure out how to live life each day. 

Kate, Binx's cousin and eventual wife, makes this comment about no longer pretending to understand the world. I suppose I would agree with Kate; it's too burdensome to try and understand the entire world, but it's worthwhile to try and understand parts of it. Living in New Orleans helped me to understand a city in a country of many across the globe. So, while I don't try to understand the entire world-- the psyche of every type of person, the cultures in every town, or the beliefs of every religion-- I certainly began to understand one tiny part of it. 

Our time spent in New Orleans taught me a lot about the little world around me and, more specifically, I learned much more about the dynamics and cultural history of a place that is still rebuilding every day after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, located in a region of the United States that was once incredibly segregated and has gone through multiple personalities under Spanish and French rule. I feel as if I am more connected to the city in a way that helps me understand the book more than I did the first time. I do not understand everything about New Orleans or Louisiana in general in the same way that I'm not trying to understand the entire world, but over these past weeks I have gotten a much better understanding of it.

It’s one thing to be in a room, like a classroom or a hotel conference room and learn about the world outside, but it is life-changing to get outside of a room and understand the world around you first-hand. As Binx puts it:

“…[W]hat takes place in my room is less important. What is important is what I shall find when I leave my room and wander in the neighborhood”

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

Binx makes this comment about wandering neighborhoods and getting outside into the real world with this sense that he could escape isolation in a room and be a part of something bigger than him, which has resonated with me throughout our time spent in Louisiana. I have thoroughly enjoyed walking around the city and learning more about who I am as a person, how I interact with the world around me and how these interactions can shape my future in the same way Binx goes through his life in The Moviegoer learning about who he is and where he is going. 

Clearly, I never got the sense that Binx was some heroic or remarkable main character, but he is very much a genuine and authentic person struggling to understand his identity from his interactions and love affairs with his secretaries to his relationship with his mother and half-siblings. And, not unlike a majority of modern people today, Binx relies on movies and film to help ground him in his exploration of self, which makes for an aptly named book title. Walker Percy writes about neighborhood, about place and about identity and its relation and almost reliance on cinema:

“Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.”

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

While I was reading this book, I had an such an intensified sense of place when I found that I could orient myself in the city much better. I wanted to get outside the book, or the room I was in, and experience what Binx could have experienced, and especially wanted to experience his love for moviegoing and idolization of classic Hollywood celebrities such as William Holden. So, I looked up old movie theaters and found The Prytania theatre, which had been referenced in another book that we have read for this class, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and was amazed that a classic movie was soon to be shown, and it was a very relevant classic movie to our class: “King Creole” starring the one and only Elvis Presley. We made arrangements to visit the theater and watch the 1958 movie which was so incredible, not only because I love classic film and anything related to pop culture in the 20th Century, but also because I could imagine Binx sitting in a similar one-screen movie theater watching a black and white film on the screen and my relation to The Moviegoer was much more palpable after we saw the classic film.

Watching scenes on the screen at the Prytania Theatre that were shot in the French Quarter was mesmerizing: I was able to visualize and see places in New Orleans that I have repeatedly visited, like the French Quarter, back in time, the middle of the past century. I even felt as if I had a good sense of direction and knew where I was just by watching the on-location scene play out on the screen. Had I not ventured out into New Orleans multiple and repeated times, I do not think I would be as receptive to Binx’s plight trying to learn more about himself in an oftentimes chaotic world of New Orleans as much as I did. Binx, and consequentially Walker Percy, also understands the power of repetition:  

“A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.”

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

You cannot truly understand any part of the world if you read about it once, or if you hear about it just once. Take a hint from Binx Bolling and venture outside of the place you're in to experience the world around you to learn more about it but also, to learn more about yourself. 

Oysters

Here are some foods that I tried for the first time in New Orleans: oysters, muffuletta and beignets.

Dancing in the Streets

It was hot and most definitely the wrong day to be wearing pants. I didn’t want to go outside to join Andrew on a corner somewhere in Central City watching some boring, old ladies march in sync to an obnoxiously loud marching band. I was just too tired. I wasn’t even going to go, but when I realized I had nothing better to do except wilt away in my hotel room that’s how I ended up there on a corner somewhere in Central City. I had never seen anything like The Divine Ladies.

Beautiful. Decadent. Vibrant. Jubilous. Never had I seen such unfiltered joy and expression. Why I was concerned about standing dormantly on the sidelines watching various old women parade themselves? I have no idea. That afternoon spent with the Divine Ladies was a party like no other. Floats and costumes and a full marching band playing “The Weekend” by SZA in the danceable arrangement I’ve ever heard surrounding me in every direction. I didn’t even stand on the sidelines at all. Not even two seconds into watching their divinity in awe, and I was engulfed in their court, dancing beside them and their extravagant garments. I didn’t want to dance because I knew I wouldn’t be as good as any of the champion residents that frequent the scene. I didn’t want to dance, but of course I did anyway. It was electric– nearly impossible not to. Never have I ever experienced anything like it.

Apparently, stuff like that is typical in New Orleans and that doesn’t make any sense to me. How does anyone get anything done around here with second lines marching out their windows on Sundays like clockwork? The spirit of the city is overwhelmingly generous and mystical, and everyday feels like I’m uncovering something completely brand new. Although it’s not very large in comparison to other major cities, I could truly get lost here everyday in something completely brand new. The experience of the second line was one of those things– one of those completely brand new out of this world kind of things. Brilliant and bright.

This was Buddy Bolden’s world. Okay maybe not his exact world, but Buddy Bolden (protagonist of Coming Through Slaughter) was a man of the town– a writer, a jazz connoisseur, a barber, and a family man. Everyone knew him, or at least of him because this was his town in every aspect. The only reason he ever left is because at some point this town– his town– became too much too bear, and I can see how. Like all cities, this one doesn’t stop for anyone. Just like life, it goes on and although a little slower, it keeps moving. There will always be jazz on the streets, psychics in the square, voodoo in the alleys, life everywhere… so much so that it can be hard to remember what you came here to do in the first place. What’s up, down? Left, right? In my short time here, I’ve already learned that it can be hard to orient oneself in a city that doesn’t have any orientation. Here, things have an organization to them but it’s all chaotic and hard to place. North and south don’t work here– it’s Riverside or Lakeside. And sure there are crosswalks and traffic lights, but if you can find someone who can tell me how they work, send them my way. This place is wired differently, yet it’s always pulsing and you can feel that heartbeat everywhere. I felt it especially on that Sunday afternoon while watching the Divine Ladies, and nothing made more sense. This. This is the heart of New Orleans, I thought to myself. This is exactly what Andrew wanted us to feel.

My Cup of Tea

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough 

to suit me.”

- C.S. Lewis

There’s something about coffee shops that intrigue me. Having your body be rejuvenated by a warm, aromatic drink. Coming out of the café with your clothes permeated with the smell of rich java. Feeling empowered to either completely get in the zone or to just unwind with a good book in hand. These are the memories of my favorite setting. Back at USC, the life of a typical student reflects much of the fast-paced style of the city of Los Angeles. Truly indulging in my favorite setting was never part of my “everydayness,” as Jack Binx would describe it.

Living in the 1950’s in New Orleans Gentilly neighborhood, Jack Binx Bolling seems like a plain man on the outside: he’s an upper class, Korean War veteran and a financial advisor, who enjoys going out with his secretaries and likes to watch movies. However, after reading 242 pages of a week of his life from his perspective, he’s a lot more complicated, funny, messed-up, lost, and honest than you’d think. The following excerpts show a small glimpse into his character:

“... people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they’re tranquilized in their despair”

— A cynical Binx pitying the perception that hobbies contribute to a successful life.

“...all the friendly and likeable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.”

— An angsty Binx describing why he reads controversial periodicals when he feels bad.

“I can talk to Nell as long as I don’t look at her. Looking into her eyes is an embarrassment.”

— A brutally honest Binx talking about his "plain horsy old girl" cousin, Nelly.

Sometimes I felt like Binx was with me at this café. As he reflected on that one week before Ash Wednesday, when he was about to turn thirty years old, I was listening, processing, and reflecting on all his analytical thoughts and remarks. I found myself spending hours with him—like he had just walked into my favorite setting and we were chatting over a cup of tea. Except he was doing all the talking of course.

He was obsessed with this idea of “the search” and how we shouldn’t be stuck in our “everydayness.” In between that, he took out his journal to pose questions about romanticism and scientific objectivity. He then went on to talk about how we can experience “malaise,” but then by the end of the week, he couldn’t even figure out how to find satisfaction in his search. And all of a sudden, he’s married to his mentally unstable cousin and decides to attend medical school.

My weak summarization of his story obviously doesn’t do the novel justice, but it probably left you just as confused as I felt after finishing it because I wasn’t even sure where I wanted to begin comprehending this man’s complicated thoughts. After reading The Moviegoer, I found myself stuck in how I should feel about this guy. He is, at times, insightful, and obviously has some problems, yet, he is somewhat likeable through all of his messiness. Processing everything was even more difficult because the entire novel was in his perspective, which forced me to evaluate his worldview, opinion, and validity of people, places, and philosophy. Sometimes he’d be super cynical or full of angst, but other times his thoughts just made me laugh because he has no filter. Still, if given the choice, I'd feel unsure about chatting with this guy over a cup of tea. 

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life… to become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

— The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Walker Percy, the author of The Moviegoer, uses Binx (in all his splendid characteristics) to communicate much bigger and meaningful ideas to his readers. Sometimes I found myself liking Binx, but more often than not, I was annoyed by his inappropriate behavior and angsty thoughts. But it was through Binx's "search" that Percy challenged me to reevaluate my life’s purpose. Because of this deep and personal human connection, I had a sense of fulfillment and enjoyment when I reflected on the novel as a whole. And while “the search” may sound silly, it’s really just putting a label to a longing that everyone has at some point in their personal life: to find life’s purpose and satisfaction.

I appreciate Walker Percy and even (the somewhat tolerable) Binx because The Moviegoer forced me to slow down and consider Binx’s philosophical questions to be my own. 

“‘You will be thirty years old. Don’t you think a thirty year old man ought to know what he wants to do with his life?’ ”

— The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

I laughed when I first read how Binx’s sweet Aunt Emily just zapped him with such a burn. However, after taking out the part about being a thirty-year-old man and replacing it with “what will you do after college?,” the comical question resembles a fear that almost every student struggles with. It all ties back into this idea of “the search,” since ideally, education should lead to a career or passion that would ultimately lead to a sense of fulfillment and purpose in life. There feels like an enormous pressure to have everything together during this short and sweet time to find the major that works for you, achieve as much as possible, and grab all the opportunities you can. Even aside from passion and academics, Percy touches on another insecurity of any young adult: loneliness.

"I am frightened when I am alone and I am frightened when I am with people. The only time I’m not frightened is when I am with you."

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

Binx’s cousin, Kate, can be boiled down to a mentally unstable woman, but in reality, she reflects a deeper and common insecurity that many people face. So in addition to students being expected to have their passions and career plans figured out, there comes an expectation to suddenly have a great and easy transition to attaining an awesome social life. It was what was expected of Kate, just like any other woman in her class.

He even touches on the spiritual and philosophical when he discusses God and romanticism and scientific objectivity. And while some perceive Binx’s tone to be pretentious, since he talks about philosophy in such detail, I perceive and admired his tone to possess a quality of honesty. Even though Binx is annoying at times, I value his shameless thoughts above all other characteristics because it keeps me engaged and listening. Not having a filter in his thoughts makes Binx a much more relatable character, and it reminds me that, I too, am a very flawed human being who’s still trying to figure out everything as I continue to pursue “the search.” The Moviegoer was definitely my cup of tea: fiction literature that evokes meaningful conversations and thoughts.

The reflective mood, as well as the allotted time and space a reflective mood demands, has been a great shift of focus. It was super fun to witness the culture and the neighborhoods in which our novels’ characters lived in, but the nature of this type of traveling required a go, go, go type of attitude for a solid week. I have come to appreciate this period of time to unpack what I learned about from this experience has been, in itself— a time to appreciate the process of unpacking and evaluating, over a cup of coffee with a book that dared me to connect a fictional character’s struggles and ideas into my own reality.

There’s so much to unpack in this novel and I know that I will definitely reflect on and be challenged by it for a while. I believe it to be a book that will teach me something new every time I read it. And while I’ll probably hear from Binx in some other café again, nothing will ever be as cool as listening to Binx over a cup of tea, in his very own New Orleans.

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The Sound of Slavery

Who gets to have a voice?

Who has earned the right, the respect, and the power to speak first, to be heard and recognized and validated by peers and strangers alike?

What does it mean when a group of voices systematically goes unheard and ignored?

Today I reflect on those who were strangled into silence. The people who lived and died without speaking their minds, as I am free to now. Those enslaved men, women, and children who would have been beaten if found with a book in their hands.

Their voices, their lives, and their histories, became palpable at the Whitney Plantation.

Cabins where enslaved workers lived at the Whitney Plantation

Over a century after emancipation, the Whitney Plantation is an anomaly. Of the numerous plantations scattered throughout Louisiana, it is one of the few courageous enough to honestly describe this stain of slaughter on the South. Other plantations exclusively sell the story of “Gone with the Wind”: of a gloriously romantic antebellum era, with mansions overlooking vast fields of cash crops, of gallant Southern gentlemen courting beautiful heiresses, sipping sweet tea and daydreaming about nothing at all.

In this vision, the cries of enslaved men being brutally whipped, inches from death, are muted. The cruel realities of women raped by their masters, raising children they were forced to bring into this world of merciless servitude, are censored. The remote gets grabbed and the channel is changed, from a documentary that we don’t really want to see, to a lovely whitewashed version of Southern history.

Modern plantations that tiptoe around their history of slavery are almost as dangerous as a sugar plantation was in Louisiana. The painstaking process of refining sugarcane was so unsafe that an enslaved person had a life expectancy of seven years after setting foot on the property. For the ten year olds, this meant they would likely be robbed of the chance to become an adult. Is this really a fair price for a barrel of molasses?

Kettles used in the "Jamaica Train" process of refinement, which involved pouring the scorching sugar from one open cauldron to another

This toxic element of American history makes black voices like Michael Ondaatje’s incredibly necessary. In his novel, Coming Through Slaughter, he shares the fictionalized chronicles of legendary jazz musician Buddy Bolden. Although Bolden lived in the early 20th century, the language of the novel shows how saturated Southern culture was with slavery. When Buddy breaks a window with his fist, Ondaatje parallels this rage to the not-so-distant violence of the region.

“The window starred and crumpled slowly two floors down. His hand miraculously uncut. It had acted exactly like a whip violating the target and still free, retreating from the outline of a star.”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

Like the hand of Buddy Bolden striking a window pane, white Southern plantation owners were left relatively unscathed by their own cruelty. Yet formerly enslaved individuals continued to suffer, even after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Newly freed families had no choice but to become sharecroppers on the same plantations where they were previously disenfranchised. They fell perpetually indebted to their old masters, thanks to deliberately high living costs and low wages. These people were fettered first by men, and later by debt. Such desperate financial situations followed certain black communities into later centuries, pushing young people into whatever jobs they could find.

“And since the death of Mr Bass all [his] daughters had slipped successively into the red light district. Bolden in fact had slept with each of Nora’s sisters in his time.”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

A description of Countess Piazza's brothel in a Storyville blue book

(from knowlouisiana.org courtesy of The Historic New Orleans Collection)

Approximately 2,000 prostitutes worked the streets of the district of Storyville in New Orleans in the early 1900s. In the blue books that served as an index of the Storyville district's prostitutes, women of color were labeled with a "C" or described as an "octoroon". This allowed them to be marketed to men who fetishized them for being "exotic". These women were again commodified, like their mothers, fathers, and grandparents sold into slavery. Years had gone by, yet black people still could not define themselves, could not have a voice, could not exist without being objectified or devalued for their skin color.

The burden of living in a society that seriously limited opportunities for and discriminated against blacks is a lot to carry. Bolden dealt with it by enjoying copious amounts of alcohol, music, and women, in addition to a more unconventional method. In the novel, Buddy abandons his wife and children for two years, to live in near isolation with a woman Buddy loves and her husband, in an area where he was a complete stranger. Landscape suicide: wipe the slate clean, and you can be whoever you say you are.

“He could just as easily be wiping out his past again in a casual gesture, contemptuous. Landscape suicide.”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

How tempting it must have been for him to escape the world. To go somewhere far away from the people who think they know you, who saw you grow up and grow old and fall in and out of love with people, places, things that you’ve seen so often you can taste them in your dreams. Going somewhere, anywhere, where you alone get to decide what the world sees of you? No wonder Buddy was prone to committing landscape suicide. This was his way to have a voice. This was how he could speak; this was his way to tell others who he was, without being told first.

When we think of history, whose voices do we hear?

Which voices are accurately preserved over time?

Which voices are swallowed up by a self-righteous majority?

Slave songs are profound because they embody the emotions, intensity, and tenacity of the people who performed them. According to descriptions of Buddy Bolden's music (as he was never recorded), his performances shared this resonance. These melodies expressed everything about who Bolden and those enslaved were, without really saying anything at all. The language of music gave them a voice, if only for a few minutes, that their oppressors could not deny.

Ondaatje’s message in his title, “Coming Through Slaughter”, also speaks volumes. Coming through, processing, recovering, healing from the slaughter, the injustice, the murder of black people everywhere in the South. It isn’t a process that is easy nor efficient. Post-war, they were coming through slaughter. Post-Reconstruction: coming through slaughter. Post-Emmett Till, post-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., post-Michael Donald. Still, today, coming through slaughter.

Memorial for the hundreds of escaped insurgents killed in the 1811 German Coast Uprising

A Weekend in New Orleans

Saturday Night.

“What the hell is a virgin mint julep??” the bartender at the Voodoo Lounge drunkenly exclaimed in response to the order Claire, a fellow bookpacker, tried to place.

Non-alcoholic drinks apparently do not exist in the Crescent City.

New Orleans’ obsession with drinking culture and general debauchery is most clearly seen on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter through the eyes of Ignatius J. Reilly, the belching, overweight, "slob extraordinaire", protagonist of A Confederacy of Dunces.

The city has many masks.

Nocturnal. Licentious. A sweaty cocktail.

“A stinkhole of vice.”

— A Confederacy of Dunces

The cigar smoke in the air mutes the neon signs advertising 24-hour-bars and souvenir shops that are only broken up by drive through daiquiri joints and strip clubs.  It smells exactly how you would imagine.

Chaotic. Celebratory. Exhibitionist.

Beads are thrown into the air. Bachelor and bachelorette parties, their sashes dirtied, their t-shirts stained, stumble past people throwing up in gutters. Drag queens purse their lips, hands on hips, surveying the sweaty, swaying crowds. The deep bass of dance music blasts out of every storefront.

Heady. Spicy. Sensual.

There is a feeling of transgression, of stepping outside of your comfort zone, and of sexual and social deviance. On Bourbon Street one can buck the monotony of everyday life. People drink like there is no tomorrow and wildly chase after the next moment of excitement.  

“This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft.”

— A Confederacy of Dunces

Decadence. Indulgence. Gluttony.

There is extreme excess in an attempt to stay in the now. But this happiness is fleeting: the alcohol wears off, the glitter is washed away, and the colorful beads lay forgotten in the street as people stumble back to their houses and hotels.

Debris. Decay. Distress.

---

Sunday morning.  

Compartmentalized. Syncopated. A new day.

The city is hungover and it is time to go to church.  Mass is held at St. Louis Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in North America, serving as an ever present reminder of the French Catholicism that the city was founded on, and the Southern medievalism that the city continually hints at.  From the Rex (King of the Carnival) krewe parade during Mardi Gras, to the echoes of the medieval code that surface in today’s version of chivalry, the past invades the present.

Historic. Preserved. Memorable.

The piety on Sunday is forever at odds with the loose morals of Bourbon Street. Mardi Gras before Lent, feast before fast. (Or if you’re Ignatius, feast before feast before feast before feast.)

“Mrs. Reilly looked at her son’s reddenin face and realized that he would very happily collapse at her feet just to prove his point. He had done it before. The last time that she had forced him to accompany her to mass on Sunday he had collapsed twice on the way to the church and had collapsed once again during the sermon about sloth.”

— A Confederacy of Dunces

Across the street from the Cathedral is Jackson Square, a beautiful, green park lined by the Pontalba Apartments, the oldest apartments in America.

Jackson Square

Charming. Familial. Quaint.

Restaurants, galleries, museums, and cafes line the Square, most famous of which is Cafe du Monde, selling golden brown beignets and sweet café au lait. Street performers sing and play instruments, while psychics offer advice and predict your future with tarot card and palm readings.

Colorful. Upbeat. Eccentric.

Around the Square you can hear the street musicians playing jazz.  Jazz was invented in New Orleans and in many ways the city resembles the music it gave birth to.

"The music was coarse and rough, immediate, dated in half an hour, was about bodies in the river, knives, lovepains, cockiness. Up there on stage he was showing all the possibilities in the middle of the story."

- Coming Through Slaughter

It is a city that is a melting pot of cultures and a synthesis of ideas and values. New Orleans has been owned by many different nations and entities, and through all the handshakes and deals it retains a piece of each one. However, it is also a city that reamins very separate and distinct. New Orleans fosters small subcultures in its many faubourgs (neighborhoods).  From the quaint houses in the Marigny, to the rundown shotgun houses in the Tremé, New Orleans displays the improvisational nature of jazz music.

Bohemian. Enchanting. Free.

A house in the Marigny

---

Monday morning.

Melancholy. Ennui. Decay.

It is time for the city to go back to work or school.  There is a searching, or maybe it is a remembering.  It is so abstract and yet everyone in New Orleans feel it - the writers, the drunks, the musicians, the students alike all feel the a sense of melancholy press down upon them.

Perhaps I feel it most acutely this morning because this Monday morning we are boarding the van and driving to Baton Rouge.  The New Orleans chapter of the Maymester is coming to a close, and there is a sense of sadness as we pull out of the city and onto the highway.  I’ll miss the cacophony of sounds and smells of the city, the $0.75 happy hour oysters, and the distinct character of New Orleans that you can't find anywhere else. I can only hope that the journey from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is not as ill-fated as Ignatius’ Greyhound bus ride story.

“Outside the city limits the heart of darkness, the true wasteland begins.”

— A Confederacy of Dunces

The Poeticism of New Orleans

There is a poetry to New Orleans. It’s a rhythm. It’s odd, and it doesn’t make sense, its wandering and complex and it lies but gives you moments of the purest truth. It’s a lost and mischievous 17-year-old, who doesn’t know who he is or who he wants to be. New Orleans acts like a “troubled” adolescent - violence, alcohol, sex, imagination, creativity, clashes of ideas, the testing of limits - they all run wild here. It is a city with stories of murderers shuffling down the alleys and pirates crowding the bars, has a distinctive pride in its unique red light district of Storyville, and is home to a music that transcends all rules, even ones that it made for itself. The city rests on soil that asks for sickness and sinking, always on the verge of an outbreak or flood. A world with voodoo - pushing past the Catholic force or African “wildness” and allowing a humming religion of dance, spells, and pleasure.

Divine Ladies Parade

Part 1: Rhyming Spirituality

The spirituality of New Orleans is lyrical, intertwined, expressive. It is not fastened, but rather like the West African and islander ceremonies brought to the Americas by people stolen from their homeland — it dances. An curiosity about the "magic" aspect of Catholicism was first sparked by the recent Met Gala's theme "Catholic Imagination," but New Orleans expanded my awareness and fascination. The French and Spanish descendants and dominant white class in Louisiana, Creoles, were Catholic. As slave masters and first class citizens, they tried to instill Catholicism into the Africans and islanders they enslaved. What happened, though, was some sort of spiritual, fascinating miracle - the Africans incorporated Catholicism into their animism and deities. When I first heard this, I struggled to understand how these two spiritual cultures could hold hands. I wondered how the black community would accept Catholic ideas into their culture while still maintaining their own so strongly, and why the Catholics did not entirely strip the slaves from their native religion like their Christian counterparts did in the rest of the country. That concept - it is part of the poetry of New Orleans, or that is the word I can find closest to it. 

New Orleans helped me understand how different religions and spiritualities intertwine. "Catholics live in an enchanted world, a world of statues and holy water, stained glass and votive candles, saints and religious medals, rosary beads and holy pictures," I read. From this idea I could draw a thread into the magical theme of voodoo. For an example, “Papa Legba” is combined with Saint Peter. Other Catholic saints were used to represent spirits of similar domains. The African and island people continued using many aspects of their spiritual customs, like the dancing, dolls, chanting, potions, types of good luck charms called "gris gris" bags, and offerings associated with Louisiana voodoo today. 

Part 2: Music Notes & Rhythm

Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter chronicles the life of a man who similarly lives for ecstasy. Buddy Bolden, the subject of Ondaatje’s book and a jazz legend, existed on a mental brink of the freedom of creativity and the flexibility of morals. It’s a “place” in the mind which invites the rush of adrenaline and eventual satisfaction. By day, he worked drunk with a razor at the neck of a sweating barbershop client and offered them spontaneous advice without merit. By night he seduced and overwhelmed music notes and women. He lives his life like a young man testing every limit he finds, just like New Orleans tests the limits on the definition of a city and its culture. Buddy Bolden’s mentality reflects the dualistic mentality of his hometown - the experience is weathered but its recklessness is youthful. He does not bend to the rules - rather, he skips over and under the rules, peeling back wallpaper to see what’s underneath, and skirting under the dresses of women who are not his. It is not only Buddy who commits such dramatic acts, but the people around him as well. His friend Bellocq sets himself on fire rather than reasons, his mother-in-law chooses the companion of a snake rather than a cat, and his wife and her sisters come from a past of prostitution. 

Ondaatje writes in a style that conveys this wildness, exoticism, youthful recklessness that characterizes New Orleans. His sentences break classic structure, thoughts flow with unregulated consciousness. I thought it interesting that some of my classmates felt frustrated with this writing structure. They found it confusing, disorienting, and overly “flowery.” But this is exactly what I loved about it. The poetic personality of the storytelling gave the scenes a genuineness that I don’t believe can be captured when forced into the confines of structure. We don’t think, imagine, or reflect in clear or regulated manners. The purity of Ondaatje’s representation of memory and experience is palpably strong, and matches perfectly with the experience I’ve had in New Orleans. It doesn’t make total sense and you’re never sure what is genuine and ingenuine, you may even consider what your definition of “genuine” may be. Could “genuine” just be our attempt to steer real experience into the stereotypes we have collected and stored? Ondaatje uses Bolden’s relationship with music to further allude, purposefully or by happenstance, to New Orleans. 

“We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot - see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.” Like Bolden’s music playing, New Orleans, and one’s experience in New Orleans, can feel “formless.” It is formed by the French, West Africans, Spain, colonial Americans, the Vietnamese, among other cultures. Therefore, its identity is impossible to pinpoint its cultural “form.” It “tears apart the plot” of a city’s history, particularly of an American city set specifically in the South. It approached typical racial hierarchies in alternative ways, decorated its neighborhoods with distinctly different architectures and lifestyles, and promoted a sense of chaos over the usual order of American cities. The “music” that sits on top of Buddy’s life is his jazz. New Orleans generated a new form of music, one that experiments with structure, instruments, cultural backgrounds, and emotion. The concept of this music echoes through the city - accidents are ecstasy and a sip of adrenaline. 

Part 3: Poems on the Street

To turn an intangible feeling tangible, my feeling this city was some sort of poem, as Jenny and I wandered down Frenchman Street on a Saturday night we found a line of young men with battered typewriters. 

Here is what I wrote, in a style inspired by Ondaatje, Sunday morning.

Just past midnight - a few men sitting in front of beat up typewriters, smelling of beer and a long day, shirts unbuttoned for their hairy chests and hanging necklace charms. What do you want it to be about, he asks, rolling his tongue inside to wash across the sip he took. His mind swims in alcohol but his eyes are deeply invested in mine, peering through any stupor. A flick of the corner of his mouth to offer a smile when I say “youth.” 

New Orleans was the city where my grasp of poetry blossomed. I found it in Coming Through Slaughter, the lyrics and rhythm of a city known for its music, I observed it in its dynamic and stylized culture. What better place could there be to ask for a poem about youth, while I am in my youth - I hope I can capture its essence of fearlessness and imagination and magic as I write out my own life. 

Vampire Hunting in New Orleans

I grew up in a devout Christian household that strongly opposed anything and everything relating to the supernatural. While my friends read Harry Potter I read the Bible… okay that is a bit of an exaggeration but my parents really never let us touch the series or anything similar for fear that witchcraft and the Devil would corrupt our mortal souls. It wasn’t till the sixth grade when I began reading The Twilight Saga, much to my parents dismay, that I became obsessed with vampirism and vampire fiction. It was entertaining and I adored it, so much so that I had a poster of Robert Pattinson, who played the main heartthrob in the movie adaptation, hidden in my closet. I know my parents only intended to protect me from evil, but my interest in the supernatural was purely for entertainment purposes and I was not at risk of being possessed by the devil just for reading a little vampire fiction. It did however raise questions of Heaven and Hell, and of goodness and evil and why:

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil... Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

But why is that? Why is it so much harder to have goodness instead of evil? Near the top of the list of the evil and morally damned seems to rest the Vampire. Traditional Vampire depictions promise cold, pale creatures that turn into bats and haunt the streets at night with their fangs bared. They retreat to their coffin resting place before even a hint of sunlight can reach their soul-less exterior, cursed with eternal life and of course, an unquenchable thirst for the blood that pulses through human veins. Vampires have been rumored to lurk the streets of the French Quarter of New Orleans since its beginnings, and New Orleans has always been notorious for murders and missing persons which has earned the title of America's Most Haunted. Interview with the Vampire begins with the story of one of the Louisiana indigo plantations not far from the city, characterized by humid swamp lands and gnarled oaks dripping with Spanish moss which I imagine resembles the Whitney Plantation that stands just an hour outside of New Orleans. The story quickly transitions to the old city, the French Quarter, still largely preserved — and its streets of Creole cottages and colonial villas, with their battered shutters and secluded courtyards. The city is historically charged with voodoo magic thanks to the slave trade and heavily influenced by Catholic mysticism from generations of European immigrants; the combination suggesting all too obviously blood-spilling of a vampiric nature. New York Times best selling author Anne Rice begins weaving her tale in a city long identified with sexual permissiveness that is a plausible home and haven for dashing, irresistible and romanticized blood suckers. 

Whitney Plantation 

Creole Cottage in The French Quarter 

“In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home. It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard. I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume.”

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

I took a deep breath searching for the sweet smell of jasmine that the Vampire Louis describes, but instead I am drawn into the aroma of the beignets nestled in warm powdered sugar in front of me. Beignets are essentially glorified doughnuts, nothing is particularly special about them except perhaps that they are native to New Orleans and a ‘must try’ at Cafe du Monde. I dust off the powdered sugar that inevitably lingers on your clothing after even one bite of the flaky French doughnut and begin to head down Decatur Street. There is a vibrant electricity that possesses the streets of this city at all hours: an undeniable charisma that seems to be followed by a cloud of foreboding darkness. The streets can be calm until you turn a corner and are inevitably enveloped in chaos, which makes it no wonder that this city is ideal for the supernatural. A few drops of rain fall from the sky and within moments the sidewalks are flooded and an unforgiving storm erupts in what feels like the blink of an eye.

“A summer rain had left the night clean and sparkling with drops of water. I leaned against the end pillar of the gallery, and I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.”

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Anyone who has ever been caught in a rain storm has experienced the adrenaline of running through the endless droplets searching for shelter, and the overwhelming relief once you find it. You don’t expect the sky to weep so intensely on a ninety degree day but it only reenforces the fact that anything is possible, and that balance must always be restored. Rain is a cooling and  calming force that counteracts the opposing sides of nature like sunshine to maintain an equilibrium or natural balance that sustains our Universe. Everything in the world has a counterpart; for day there is night, for good there is evil, for Satan there is God— contrary to the affirmation of Lestat in Interview with the Vampire where he laments that

“This evil, this concept, it comes from disappointment, from bitterness! Don’t you see? Children of Satan! Children of God! Is this the only question you bring to me, is this the only power that obsesses you, so that you must make us gods and devils yourself when the only power that exists is inside ourselves? How could you believe in these old fantastical lies, these myths, these emblems of the supernatural?”

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Rice’s novel offers probing psychological analyses and pursues philosophical questions such as, What is the nature of good and evil? Does life have intrinsic value, or is it an unfortunate series of accidents mercifully ended? Is immortality the greatest possible gift or the ultimate and inescapable burden? A new perspective is gained on human nature through the lens of nonhuman eyes as our protagonist grapples with these existential struggles. My theme song for my own explorations of life and the city is Step by Vampire Weekend. The song feels uncannily unstuck in time yet nostalgic for the past. The track's atmosphere adds an element of muted, drizzly grandeur to the sharply observed lyrics, which have such a varied vernacular texture that they sound like clipped phrases overheard on a stroll through the city. Near the end of the song, an unbearably poignant observation cuts through the chatter of the lyrics, that

“Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth”

— Vampire Weekend

which makes you realize that we spend most of our lives striving to be better, smarter, and wiser, yet once we reach a certain point, we are left longing for our youth, and the chance to do it all over again. Whatever answers you are searching for, whether it be truth, wisdom, religion, or even Vampires, savor every moment and strive to find contentment even in the midst of chaos. 

Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?

I learned how to play the piano when I was three years old. From that moment on, music was always in my life. I have played piano or other similar instruments like the keyboard or the organ for various music groups ranging from R&B ensembles to Latin/Afro-Cuban ensembles. The one genre I always wanted to play piano flawlessly for is one of the most difficult genres to perfect: jazz.

To supplement our class’s discovery of jazz we read Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, a rather poetic work that uses a surprisingly minimal knowledge of jazz pioneer and cornet player Charles “Buddy” Bolden and his frantic life before suffering from schizophrenia, being committed to an insane asylum and eventually dying at the young age of thirty-one. Coming Through Slaughter focuses on the Storyville district of New Orleans where gamblers and jazz musicians alike flocked and flourished at the beginning of the 20th Century. While the book itself focuses on the darkness of a man’s life in an oftentimes dangerous world, music, and in particular, jazz music, is the thread that weaves the work together.

“Buddy was on stage. Man A shot Man B with a gun, the pianist Ferdinand le Menthe between them leaning back just in time and disappearing before the first scream even bang. Bolden seeing what happened changed to a fast tempo to keep the audience diverted which was almost managed when the police arrived. Tiger Rag.”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

As a jazz aficionada I’ve seen my fair share of jazz concerts anywhere from my high school jazz band’s concert at a local jazz club to Herbie Hancock playing at Jazz at Lincoln Square in New York. So naturally I was excited to be able to sit close to the jazz band at Preservation Hall to listen to jazz music in the city that birthed the genre. My favorite song of the set that the band covered was “Tiger Rag”, that same song that Michael Ondaatje describes Buddy Bolden playing in order to calm the audience down a bit, especially since I have never heard this particular song played live. It was both a joy and somewhat haunting to have heard it live for the first time in the same city Buddy Bolden became a legendary jazz icon in. 

“He played till his body was frozen and all that was alive and warm were the few inches from where his stomach forced the air up through his chest and head into the instrument ”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

Music is a universal language and lies in the heart of New Orleans. In a city like New Orleans that has such a rich and vibrant cultural history, it’s no wonder that jazz music, based heavily on call and response and improvisation as well as cooperation from everyone in a jazz group to create serendipitous music, was born here. 

Christina and I were determined to have brunch at the famed Commander’s Palace, and we managed to get reservations for brunch one Sunday. Sunday Brunch at one of the greatest restaurants in New Orleans is called “Jazz Brunch” because a jazz band plays music as restaurant-goers dine. The three-piece jazz group, the guitarist, a bassist and a trumpet player/vocalist came to our table and when we failed to give them our request (in a moment of panic I couldn’t think of a single song) they elected to play the classic “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, a sweet song to accompany our brunch that day. 

Music is everywhere in New Orleans from the band at the wedding parade marching through the French Quarter to the laundromat that we went to do laundry at was once a recording studio in the early 1950s and had a jukebox in honor of the music that was once recorded there. It’s amazing to walk virtually anywhere in the city and realize that music is such a big part both the past and the present of New Orleans.  

“It was a music that had so little wisdom you wanted to clean nearly every note he passed, passed it seemed along the way as if traveling in a car, passed before he even approached it and saw it properly. There was no control except the mood of his power… and it is for this reason it is good you never heard him play on recordings. If you never heard him play some place where the weather for instance could change the next series of notes— then you should never have heard him at all. He was never recorded. He stayed away while others moved into wax history, electronic history, those who said later that Bolden broke the path. It was just as important to watch him stretch and wheel around on the last notes or to watch nerves jumping under the sweat of his head”

— Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

http://www.bojazz.com/ --- http://bjazz.unblog.fr/ (Do you know what it means to miss) New Orleans. Music by Louis Alter, lyrics by Eddie Delange. New Orleans (1947) by Arthur Lubin, with Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Zutty Singleton, Barney Bigard, Kid Ory, Bud Scott, Red Callender & Charlie Beal. Actors : Dorothy Patrick, Arturo de Córdova, Richard Hageman.

Trees

“Over the long, low row of pointed roofs were the massive shapes of oak trees in the dark, great swaying forms of myriad sounds under the lowhung stars.”

— Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire

Majestic live oaks canopy the streets of the Garden District. Our leader, Andrew, told us about how Walt Whitman once stayed in the Garden District and wrote a poem about a single live oak tree: “I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, / All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, / Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, …”

I have been fascinated by trees since I was a child. I can’t pinpoint why my subconscious draws me to trees. Maybe it’s the way trees’ branches twist into impossible shapes, diverging angrily into the vast open sky as if breaking free from shackles. Each branch sustained by the whole but possessing a will of its own. Allowing bits of fragmented sunlight to show through on a sunny day or on an overcast day breaking through a thick cloud of haze, demanding to be seen, noticed. Maybe it’s the unseen part of the tree that amazes me; the way the roots ground the tree, supporting it, forcing it to remain standing through adverse conditions.

Driving to high school in Sacramento—the “City of Trees”—I remember staring out the sunroof of the car as we passed under a canopy of dead trees. The trees weren’t dead—they were dormant. But they looked dead. In the spring they would awaken from their slumber, bursting with buds of promising new life. I see this as a metaphor for New Orleans’ resiliency following Hurricane Katrina: the strong will of the people of New Orleans being the roots which held the city up, allowing it to survive; the families and most vulnerable members of society the twisted branches ripped apart, damaged, obliterated in the storm; the rebuilding period the buds bursting with a hopeful vitality.

Visiting the Presbytère today, exploring the “Katrina and Beyond” exhibit, seriously affected me. I learned about how human meddling with nature (constraining the Mississippi River, draining land and digging canals) deteriorated the natural coastal buffer, leaving New Orleans more vulnerable to the natural force of Katrina. My fascination with the wild, free, untamable quality of tree branches I think reflects my fascination with the untamable and brutal power of nature to obliterate and destroy. I attempt to capture this with my photography.

My father is a farmer. Perhaps my affinity for trees has to do with growing up visiting our ranch, strolling through cherry and walnut orchards. In Interview with the Vampire, Louis recalls a very distinct memory of watching his last sunrise: “ ‘My last sunrise,’ said the vampire. ‘That morning, I was not yet a vampire. And I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely; yet I do not think I remember any other sunrise before it. I remember the light came first to the tops of the French windows, a paling behind the lace curtains, and then a gleam growing brighter and brighter in patches among the leaves of the trees. …’ ” Some of my fondest and most distinct memories growing up involve climbing trees, picking cherries, and going on ATV rides.

Exploring New Orleans and its multifaceted culture through the novels of writers that spent time here has led me to think about the places that influenced me growing up. The joy of this bookpacking trip is that I continue to learn about New Orleans while also learning more about myself. 

Syncopated City

If Paris is the City of Love, then New Orleans is the City of Careless Love.

It’s currently 1am on a Tuesday and I just got back from the Maple Leaf Bar, where I was caffeinated by live jazz. I’ve been in New Orleans for a week now and have walked a total of 110,397 steps in many different neighborhoods, which is just enough to offset (most of) the beignets and fried food. It’s still not enough to really understand where I am, though. There’s just so much going on in this city.

I walked around the French Quarter on my first morning in New Orleans. This was the first thing I saw on the ground.

Careless Love is a staple jazz song played by the famed Buddy Bolden Band of New Orleans. They don’t have a day-to-day fame, though, because when people on the trolley ask me what book I’m reading and I tell them it’s about the Buddy Bolden Band, they don’t recognize the name. Their fame is a secret veneration, kept alive by scattered jazz connoisseurs, those who know the history.

Honestly, I was expecting the culture here to be more… consistent. By that, I mean I naively expected almost everyone in New Orleans to love gumbo and appreciate jazz and have a fantastically costumed story ready to tell at the slightest mention of Mardi Gras. Obviously, no culture can be truly reduced to its stereotypes, but I’ve realized New Orleans seems to have the quirkiest conjunction of interests and pasts that make it an impossible postcard.

An artist I met told me that as the city branches out from the French Quarter into different neighborhoods, it becomes distinctly less Creole, less structured. New Orleans unfolds irregularly into fusions of tradition and eccentricity, from genteel Garden District to notorious Central City to artsy Marigny. The histories of the city are scattered along the Mississippi this way, and each of these river bank improvisations tell their part in New Orleans’ offbeat, multicultural biography. If Paris is the City of Light, then New Orleans is the City of Voodoo Candles, too.

The great thing about illustration is that I can capture people discreetly.

Its belief systems are as syncopated as its jazz. I listened curiously to Careless Love at Preservation Hall the other evening: like the city, it was funky to parse at first too. Uneven movement from bar to bar, each neighborhood is its own melodic venture, self-aware of both its echoes of the aristocracy and the escape of it. Buddy Bolden and his friends improvised new traditions. Less Creole, less structured, in every direction.

“But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn’t understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot—see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes… He would be describing something in 27 ways. There a was a pain and gentleness jammed into each number.”

New Orleans’ personalities live a short walk from each other, and contradictions are split by single streets. Secret venerations, connoisseurs, and careless, syncopated loves all rub shoulders. Jazz and blues, voodoo, Creole festivities, and southern grace all claim their own regimes, transgressing a unified tradition and expected rhythm. I don’t think I’ll ever understand—there’s so much going on to know every history.

Players at Preservation Hall, where photos weren’t allowed anyway.

I have absolutely concluded, however, that New Orleans is passionate. Every neighborhood is powerful and hot and artful. If Paris is for the airy, accordion love ballad, then this city is for the romance of sweaty jazz and deep bass. New Orleans loves, but unconventionally, magically. Pass any bar and hear trumpets celebrating improvised love, abridged love, quick love. Offbeat, off-brand love. This city belches its odes to love in vain, a beautiful self-destruction. In humid heat, New Orleans fantasizes about a better romance.

“The photograph moves and becomes a mirror. When I read he stood in front of mirrors and attacked himself, there was the shock of memory. For I had done that. Stood, and with a razor-blade cut into cheeks and forehead, shaved hair. Defiling people we did not wish to be.”

In some way, that is what artists do. The crux of Buddy Bolden’s legacy is decadence. The labor of creating something worthy of secret veneration is a self-aware, even inconsistent or impossible process. Uneven movement from bar to bar, New Orleans is the oddly fused and syncopated art form. New Orleans exists for the scattered, passionate connoisseurs, for those who want to understand just how deep its eccentric histories go. It is not a careful story, but it is about love.

On Saturday night, I asked a typewriter poet on Frenchman Street to write a poem about me:

So I’ll keep looking and listening. An uneven movement from bar to bar. Which means you might find me with a drink in hand in Tremé tomorrow night.

Interview with a Vampire (and a Fortune Teller)

“Dark and Evil aren’t the same thing.”

— Duchess the Fortune Teller

Not even a full 24 hours into our arrival in New Orleans, I found myself pacing back and forth in Jackson Square– examining and carefully selecting Duchess out of the line-up of makeshift psychic pop-up shops luring in customers one by one with the charm of their crystal balls and tarot cards. I, along with fellow Bookpackers Ryan and Melissa, ventured from our quaint abode on the dormant side of Canal St. during the witching hours into the wild… when the sun has been long gone for hours, yet the heat still clings to every square inch of your skin– energy and drunkards still oozing from every dark corner the French Quarter. What better way to formally introduce yourself and shake hands with the shadows of the city?

Here, there is talk of voodoo and hoodoo, of magic and curses, of the holy ghosts and the evil demons that lurk. Unlike any other city that I’ve traveled to within this country and without, never have I seen such a blatant and immediate embrace of the supernatural and all of its elements. While some weary visitors may scoff and call it “superstition”, here it is called and claimed as culture and in the land of the Southern Gothic, it’s best if you learn not to question it.

In juxtaposition to the potent Christian foundations of both this city and this country, talk of black magic and other worldly creatures that come back from the dead and hunt for blood can seem blasphemous– evil even. However, as Duchess the fortune teller explained to me when I asked her about the discovery of her craft, “Dark and Evil aren’t the same thing”. A simple phrase, yet an impactful one as many people tend to use “darkness” as a euphemism for what is truly evil.

Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire is the second book on our reading list, and the first to indulge the southern gothic style. In it, a vampire by the name of Louis recounts his life from the perspective of his undying eyes and immortal soul. It’s a story of American history–a very real subject– told through the vessel of the mythology of New Orleans– a subject of the supernatural.  With that being said, both subjects are equally as haunting in varying ways. As discussed in seminar, parallels can be drawn between the dark vampiric nature of Louis and the evil vampiric nature of the White America throughout the duration of slavery. Both parties rely on sucking the life out of their victims in order to sustain themselves and their legacies– a point in which is not emphasized enough throughout Rice’s novel.

I’ve always been afraid the dark and to this day, I prefer to sleep with a nightlight. There is something so uneasy about not knowing what creeps behind your eyelids as soon as you shut them. However, there is a beauty in darkness that this city is helping me uncover with every step down the decaying side streets, with every view of the overgrown ivy consuming and reclaiming its land. There is something eerie about this city’s willingness to believe in spirits we cannot see but that is what makes New Orleans a place like no other– an imaginative playground in which one can create and destroy life in their image. There is an infinite amount of stories to be told– stories to be written, to be photographed, or heard through the seductive sounds of the brass instruments casually played in the street. This is a place where darkness lives amongst the life, within the light, and all throughout the brilliant neon lights that resurrect this immortal city and continuously give it vibrant life.

The Whitney: A Photo Journal

Visiting the Whitney Plantation was enlightening and overwhelming. Never before had I learned about the brilliance of enslaved peoples but our tour guide at the Whitney pointed out how enslaved peoples were cherry-picked from Africa for their knowledge about specific trades and cultivating certain crops. The Whitney Plantation Museum works tirelessly and intentionally to tell the truth of the brutuality of slavery and what went on at this plantation. Below, through photographs I took, I want to highlight aspects of the tour that stuck out the most to me.

A condensed history of slavery relating to the Whitney Plantation

The names of children born on the plantation into slavery

The “Jamaica Train”, a series of open kettles in which sugar cane juice was heated

Slave cabins

Inside the quarters of enslaved peoples

The bars of a cage that enslaved peoples were held in during the auction process

Bricks on the floor of the Haydel home laid by slaves

Memorials of enslaved peoples—the only thing that is memorializing their deaths

The Field of Angels—a memorial for the enslaved children in Louisiana who died before their 3rd birthday—with our tour guide in the background

Mourning and Celebrating New Orleans

"There was no city in America like New Orleans."

Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

Every city has a distinct vibe. New Orleans is known to have a lively, joyous, and exciting vibe intertwined in its rich culture. During the first few days upon our arrival, it was fascinating to see the historical houses, unique architecture, and blend of cultures, especially in the French Square and Uptown.

While the houses were absolutely adorable and the streets and buildings were quirky, I hadn’t quite yet experienced the soul of New Orleans that I was hoping for. Where is it? Was I missing it? Did I not eat the right jambalaya? Maybe it’s cause I haven’t had a beignet yet. I appreciated what I saw, but wasn’t sure if I was appreciating the city or the fact that it’s a new and unfamiliar place. Perhaps my expectations didn’t match reality, and I had to come to terms with that.

Despite the slight doubt, I still anticipated the experiences I’d have in the rest of the city. I’m sure I would find “the soul of the city” at some point and be able to tell the folks back home that I had truly experienced New Orleans. But actually, I was just waiting to experience Preservation Hall.

Preservation Hall

I could only wish I have the ability to describe how fantastic and lively the music reverberated in the room.

Jazz never seemed to appeal to me—mostly because I’ve only thought of jazz to be mundane and uninteresting. However, Professor Chater seemed to look forward to it and deemed it worthy to wait in line for an hour for, so I made sure not to have a terribly bored attitude.

We had sat in the very front, on these very uncomfortable and random seat cushions, but a humble and homey seating arrangement nonetheless. The music was right up in my face. Literally, the man on the trombone almost hit me with the slide of his instrument. The beat of the snare was so powerful that I felt it ring throughout my body and unapologetically enhance the tune of the trumpet. By the time the show was over, I was practically deaf and shook because I was not ready to be that moved by jazz music. This was the New Orleans I had only heard about through words, but had now experienced through the living joy of music.

“On into the night and into blue mornings, growing louder the notes burning through and off everyone and forgotten in the body… their bursts of air were animals fighting in the room.”

— Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

5.19.18 // Preservation Hall

Preservation Hall was one of the most joyful experiences I’ve had in New Orleans. While New Orleans has a lot to celebrate and express joy over, it also is a city that flourished off of the mournful, disturbing, and evil practice of slavery.

Just as words couldn’t describe how joyful the jazz was, words cannot describe the disturbing history of slavery in New Orleans. During seminar, we mostly learned about the integral role of slavery for the prosperity of New Orleans; however, the testimonies of those who endured slavery weighed deeply on my heart at the Whitney Plantation.

How shameful is it to know that the city of New Orleans, along with the birth and prosperity of America, depended on and encouraged the practice of human exploitation. Vaguely learning about slavery in elementary school is not the appropriate extent of understanding Americans should have of its history. I know that’s around the extent of my understanding of slavery, and so visiting the plantation gave me the opportunity to envision the horrific truth of many people’s lives. Unfortunately, it is an ugly history. This human exploitation involved whipping until people’s backs were bare flesh, defining someone’s identity as your property, and forcing women to breed “good workers.” The physical, mental, and spiritual anguish placed upon people on this very land. It is absolutely something to mourn over.

This wealth, prosperity, and comfort...

...came from working men, women, and children to death.

Immediately after the tour, I felt a pang of shame to even call myself American. Even today, the consequences of human slavery manifest itself through racism, discrimination, and even persist in forms of labor and sex slavery. To be ashamed of my own country may seem dramatic, but it shouldn’t be a shocker because the atrocities of slavery are worse than anyone can imagine, can never be “made up for,” and should never be forgotten.

“Then there were not only the black slaves, yet unhomogenized and fantastical in their different tribal garb and manners, but the great growing class of the free people of color, those marvelous people of our mixed blood and that of the islands, who produced a magnificent and unique caste of craftsmen, artists, poets, and renowned feminine beauty.”

— Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice

A dangerous way to address slavery, however, is to seemingly normalize it. In our second novel, Interview With The Vampire, Anne Rice describes New Orleans and its people through the eyes of a vampire who lived during the early 1800’s. Unfortunately, her description ends up romanticizing the slaves and adds an element of exoticism to them.

While it’s important to understand that this is a fiction novel from the perspective of a character living during its time, having this dangerous romanticism and exoticism of people of color is just ultimately disrespectful. I address it, not because it’s something to pick out of the novel, but because it’s unfortunately a real perspective that some people still have of people of color. It’s another consequence that originates from the same individuals who encouraged slavery. However, it’s another reminder that advocacy for change in perspective requires respectful conversations about the subject. We ought to speak up about the things that we truly believe in, rather than letting uninformed perspectives or discriminatory comments slide past our ears.

5.18.18 // "The Tomb of the Unknown Slave" 

The figure in the photo above is titled “The Tomb of the Unknown Slave.” We came across it as we passed by the church of St. Augustine. And while no statue, monument, or dedication can ever justify the wrong done onto victims of slavery, I thought the plaque next on the wall described its purpose beautifully: “…the tomb of the unknown slave is a constant reminder that we are walking on holy ground. Thus, we cannot consecrate [(declare sacred)] this tomb, because it is already consecrated by many slaves’ inglorious deaths bereft [(deprived)] of any acknowledgment, dignity or respect, but ultimately glorious by their blood, sweat, tears, faith, prayers and deep worship of our Creator.”

5.20.18 // The Dancing Ladies Parade 

5.18.18 // The plaque next to "The Tomb of the Unknown Slave"

Reminders like these throughout the city don’t make up for its atrocities, but respectfully remind its citizens and visitors of its history and wrongdoing. It's a representation of resentment of the past and hope for the future. Looking forward, that’s why New Orleans can continue to celebrate in jazz, in jambalaya, and in people.

Kanye West once said, "I feel like I'm too busy writing history to read it." God bless Kanye, but don't be like him. May we always value and remember our past to better inform our future.

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