Ernest’s Lessons

The medieval Pointe Coupée Parish Courthouse

The Louisiana State Capitol and the Pointe Coupée Parish Courthouse, the governing bodies of Louisiana of both local and federal scale, were some of the most memorable locations from the past month. Not because of its politics or its exciting legislation, but because of the people who I connected with and the Southern hospitality. Often, Southern hospitality is commonly linked with food service and social situations, but in reality, it’s a way of life that permeates every facet of Southern life, even in its politics.

Sheriff René Thibodeaux and USC bookpacker Simone Jackson

It’s the kind of Southern hospitality and the sheen of kindness and generosity that makes you almost forget about its atrocities and pained history, it’s the kind of authenticity that makes you question how so many contradictions can coexist before you remember human nature and human beings are inherently complex. When reading A Lesson Before Dying, it’s almost instinctual to categorize the protagonists and antagonists by racial group. And in the days leading up to our visit to New Roads, specifically the parish courthouse, it seemed natural to prepare oneself, especially a person of color, against small-town mindsets and possible ignorance which I, wrongly but nonetheless, personified into a rural Southern courthouse. But what’s also essential to the small-town mindset is the kind of generosity and authenticity that treats every stranger as family, that creates home for anyone looking for acceptance.

Sheriff Guidry in A Lesson Before Dying represents part of the Southern population that believes it’s within their pride and identity to uplift values like the Lost Cause and visions of Southern grace and beauty, all of which relied on the cruelty of slavery. And because the injustices faced by Grant and Jefferson at the hands of Guidry feel so tangible and thoroughly distressing, it’s difficult to the extent that it feels immoral to separate fiction and literature from reality, especially when that literature is based in reality. But more importantly, it is that much more difficult to avoid generalization and the stereotyping of individuals of the same position simply because of their identity. And the epitome of these epiphanies is the sheriff of Pointe Coupée Parish Courthouse himself, Sheriff René Thibodeaux.

From the first meeting to the last goodbye, through repeated acts of unforeseen generosity and incomparable warmth and kindness, through open invitation of difficult conversations and difficult criticisms, through the offering of Morganza cake, through his welcome invitation of a childhood tree and a transformative boat ride, I was thoroughly embarrassed – so much so, that the defensive I had subconsciously built and prepared in the days leading up to New Roads, felt incredibly ridiculous and even ignorant on my part.

Southern hospitality, however, like Thibodeaux’s — deeply touching and affecting — they make it easy to forget and subconsciously avoid the conversations that require accountability and introspection, the kind of conversations that glaringly highlight the interpersonal differences and disagreements in belief and value systems that make the differences between physically different groups that much more unjustifiable. It’s this fear of confrontation, fear of dispute that results in regressive legislation, in the oppression of minority groups and in the guarantee that the internal – secret prejudice, generalizing, stereotyping – will flourish, remaining unchallenged.

The entrance to the Senate Chamber at the Louisiana State Capitol

The hot topics of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the opposing Blue Lives Matter Movement, of reparations and critical race theory seem unnecessary, especially for small towns and tight-knit communities where “color doesn’t matter.” But people of color experience and know that color only doesn’t matter in interpersonal relationships, in situations where there are no stakes but kindness and is based on the guise that equality has been achieved – both of which are created and used to convenience and absolve white guilt. Personified in the Louisiana State Capitol, on the ground floor where Senate committees gathered in the hearing rooms that accompanied each side of the gray carpet floor. Sitting down at a senate committee hearing discussing House Bill 321, I had the plan to only sit for 10 minutes until I spent the next half hour popping into every room, getting bite-sized samples of Louisiana politics. As the screen started to blur and it increasingly started to feel like I was in Sunday church and hearing the pastor continually drone on with his sermon in the background, I wanted to know which team to root for – partially to wake myself up but also out of sheer confusion and curiosity as to the bill’s proposition.

Hurriedly google-ing “house bill 321 louisiana state,” the first search result contained even more convoluted language and it became I started to weigh whether more thorough research and reading was worth it when after all of it, it would simply be about another routine zoning law that didn’t even pertain to the states that I lived in. But luckily, in the next article, I learned that House Bill 321 signified deeply flawed targeting and prejudice against juvenile offenders, children, in the criminal justice system. Because of child protection laws, the criminal records and accusations of juvenile offenders are sealed and only made available to the district attorney and the plaintiff. But with the potential passing of Bill 321, juvenile records would be made public, uploaded on an online database for any future employer or institution to access and weaponize against. Although it wouldn’t be sweeping legislation for the state, it isn’t surprising that the program will be piloted in five parishes, Orleans, Caddo, Bossier, Lafayette and East Baton Rouge, that have majority Black populations. And with Black adolescents facing a higher probability of conviction than white youths–due to a number of reasons such as over policing and the school-to-prison pipeline–this bill enforces the prison industrial complex, obstructing the hope for rehabilitation and maintaining a hierarchical system that targets a historically oppressed group.

The late Ernest James Gaines (Source: 64 Parishes)

The various themes of oppression that both Jefferson and Grant face in A Lesson Before Dying during the Jim Crow South remain relevant, even at the forefront of American politics, 80 years later. The dehumanization Grant faces when the sheriff searches his body when visiting the courthouse and when Pichot makes him wait in his kitchen for hours, the dehumanization Jefferson faces when his defense debases him to a hog and when the townspeople complain of his own execution, still persists–subtly–but still persists in the proposed legislation that disguises its discrimination as concern for public safety. And being written and created in the same capitol building built by the governor who swore to nail every kind of corruption in American politics for every person of every race and creed is legislation actively hunting and damning Black youths for life.

Despite seeing the Henri Pichot’s and Sheriff Guidry’s who believed in maintaining an older, traditional hierarchy, on the other side, we also saw the Grants, Miss Emmas and Tante Lous fighting for the dignity and rights of people who have had it stripped away for most of history. Those fighting against the bill in front of the Senate like Ashley Hill Hamilton of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights embodied Tante Lou and Miss Emma, those who doggedly fought for their community with the refusal of taking anything but “yes” as an answer. Those like criminal defense attorney Sarah Omojola embodied Grant who spoke about the fight with a realistic cynicism and tiredness that entailed years of being entrenched in a system that made little progress and easily regressed, being entrenched in a cycle that often felt hopeless. In the same fight a century later, remnants of Ernest Gaines’ characters are reenvisioned in our modern activists and scholars.

Daddy Went to Get Milk

Trombonist Ronell Johnson pictured here at a performance at Preservation Hall.

(Title Context: The phrase “Dad went to get milk” comes from an internet meme popular in the early 2010s in which its punchline is based on the common trope of unfaithful fathers claiming to get groceries like milk or cigarettes and never coming back home.)

At times, the notes seemed to punch through the walls but the other notes that carried and softened those blows simply lilted and bounced in the air. Every note was played with rhythm and every rhythm played with purpose. Sometimes, Powell sang with the Preservation All-Stars, like Armstrong, warm and gravelly, and let his voice accompany the music, letting the notes carry.

Preservation Hall in the French Quarter

The hall’s dimmed lights blurring everything into obscurity spotlight light up the performers and just enough of the peeling, exposed walls of mismatched materials and colors to transport you back to Preservation Hall in the 1960s and 70s, to a time where jazz was purely unfiltered and the plaster of the fabric of New Orleans. Dimming all of my senses except sound as the hall dimmed its lights, closing my eyes from all of the superfluous elements of the music posters and the wistful architecture, the music came alive, flowing directly to my ears. The music felt almost tangible, surrounding me, visualizing itself in bright, colorful swirls in my head. As the spotlight moved from the bassist to the trombonist to the cornetist, the decades-long rich history of New Orleans jazz, of the founding fathers of a generational tradition like Buddy Bolden, came alive in the dark room. Each song embodied jazz and all of the eccentricities of Bolden. Like Bolden and like the essence of New Orleans jazz, the Preservation All-Stars were unrestrained by technicality, unrestricted by formality, freeing and liberating everyone who plays and listens.

Preservation Hall throughout history

But as the cornet and trombone quiet, and the drums and bass soften to a low but firm guide of the music, laying down the blueprint for an emerging star, the pianist plays louder. Playing more intricate riffs and rhythms, the pianist unleashes the potential he quieted throughout the show to share the power of expression. But now that it’s his turn, he captures every space in the room, every attention, and tells a magnificently unforgettable story. For the next few minutes, a barrage of notes and chords, at times harmonious and at other times, discordant, the pianist with hair as dark as my father’s and his skin just as bronzed, starts to morph into the image of the man who had raised me and left without a word. Closing my eyes, I was brought back 10 years into the past to days of simplicity and scarcity as well as potential and unfettered hope for the future. I was brought back to memories of a house filled with incessant belting of arias and gospels, to mornings and nights of endless piano scales repeated to joyous madness. His slow, inevitable descent into mental illness, as his depression deepened and his temper worsened over lost dreams and failed potential, all remembrance of him had left as if the pain of his abandonment, the pain of a distance I’d never thought to be possible, had erased the entirety of his existence in my life. But, the memories of everything that I considered noise pricked the back of my throat and warmed my skin as I heard that noisy madness once again and as he revisited me in my thoughts.

Being graced with music that had been passed down for generations, with music that had enraptured every individual in the hall, as the image of my father was so intensely conjured, I also saw Buddy Bolden and his descent to both insanity and jazz. To have had the story of a man whose constant was music, whose natural expression was through music, personified through a personal parental figure during adolescence led to a naturally deeper understanding of Bolden and of my own father as well. To have not understood the necessity, why my father had to play everyday, why he had to sing everyday, and then to come to his understanding through the tragedy and success that is Buddy Bolden, I realized I had misunderstood him, couldn’t recognize him as more than a father.

Eun Joo and Jong Rack at Mary’s graduation

As a musician who played and sang for the love of music, despite so many similarities, I couldn’t see my father in Buddy until Preservation Hall. I mourned the father I first knew and my existence for sacrificing his dreams. I mourned the death of the potential of his talents, his unrewarded sacrifice for fame and acclaim. And what I saw everyday was the death of his lifelong passions for a daily cycle of wage labor and mere survival. But for Bolden, who left an unrecognized legacy, whose music and talents can never be truly actualized, recognized, heard or performed, simply his life, his present moments of performing was simply enough. Consciously or not, he found no value in the future’s worries, in permanence or in self-establishment. Recognizing the beauty of Bolden’s decision to remain present, it altered the perspective of my dad’s own story, changing the attitudes that defined a lack of fame as failed artistry. Learning Bolden’s story and seeing it represented at Preservation Hall, served as the empowerment and license to redefine what was conventionally viewed as failed potential for my dad, to give him the dignity and recognition he deserved for being brave enough to freely chase his passions – a success that goes beyond the traditional, conventional standards and markers of success. And for all of the musicians and artists who performed for their unadulterated love and passion for their art, for their music, for all of the artists who were OK with the invisibility and the lack of recognition, who did things for the joy of them, the Preservation All-Stars seemed to be playing for and in honor of them – the only difference was one happened to be on a stage.

The Complexity of Home

A house eerily in destruction at the intersection of Royal and Dumaine.

Coming back home for Louis wasn’t a reunion, it wasn’t a joyful meeting or nostalgic reminiscence. New Orleans for Louis was painful and tortured, layered with nostalgia and familiarity. Esplanade raised him in his life as a vampire, like how a mother raises her daughter yet leaves generational pain, intrinsically bonding the two until death. And like many flawed maternal relationships, Louis and his city harbors immense rejection, hurt and a lack of acceptance within familiarity.

The Garden District’s Gothic Briggs-Staub House

The complex relationship Louis has with his home reflects the relationship between humans and location, and how environment acts as a parental force that develops a child’s feelings and thoughts, and how the viewpoint in which they see and interact with the world with. Something as objective as a clapboard suburban house or a brick school building or humidity in the weather becomes deeply subjective, personal and unique to each individual that experiences it. Walking alongside the narrow streets, with the sunlight reaching through the shining oak leaves overhead, lighting up the columns, porches and swirling designs of the wrought-iron fences running across each house, the seemingly impossible and complex co-existence of beauty and pain was personified as we walked into sunset.

What makes Louis’ pain so deeply-rooted and internal is the rejection of who he is. As a vampire, there is no source or place of acceptance because of his identity. And rejection of this caliber that deeply cuts and wounds humans – living beings that are intrinsically and deeply in search of love and acceptance – is at times, unrecoverable and in the least, perpetual. Being the object of such hatred, being told that you simply are not and can not be enough is both the external hatred of someone that becomes internalized. Although Louis didn’t inherit his vampire identity by birth, this identity was yet forced upon him, cursing the rest of his eternity to a life he did not choose. Similarly, those born into any minority, those born with anything societally undesirable do not choose to be unwanted and unloved. They are instead an adaptation, a survivor of everything that has made them as a person a rejection.

Like many New Orleans and Louisiana natives, there is no other city comparable to New York and a seemingly objective location becomes part of the larger collective identity: being a New Yorker. Like the people whose ancestors settled in New Orleans generations ago or those who decide to establish their own families in the city, every person who succumbs to New York City and her bewitching charm become her undying ambassador. But, within her beauty, her whimsy, her candor, her vastness has the ability to harbor immense pain.

Bridge leading into Central Park’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Resesrvoir

At the Central Park carousel, where the vibrantly blooming elm trees tell us spring has arrived, the memories of summer are stained in every color of the racehorses and in each brick of the gazebo. Other than it lying directly across Sheep Meadow and it being the heart of Ella Enchanted’s glorified scenery of the New York City playground, the carousel was also too expensive for my parents to afford. And recognizing the $3.00 burden, a 6-year-old girl took a slice of its weight for herself through her act of disinterest and avoidance of the colorfully racing horses and cheery music. On Main Street, at the crossroads of the flavors and stories of migration and sacrifice character of Flushing, Queens, there were the neglected studio apartments above the restaurants out of their budget where a young mom in a foreign country quietly stayed awake to fight off the cockroaches and ticks every night as a newborn slept beside her. Right in the middle of 91st Street, only a 5-minute walk from Central Park and the notorious park-view apartments of Central Park West, among the green ash and silver maple leaves that sprinkle shade and sunlight along the sidewalk, among the smooth sandstone and weathered brick of the brownstones lining the street, a 13-year-old struggled to don the armor she needed to pass through the glass doors that led to incessant mocking and ostracization for the lack of wealth she was to inherit. In a city that was, to her, tainted with pain but inherently beautiful, in a city of complexities she was incapable of comprehending, to escape seemed to be the only answer for someone who believed that forgetting was the only road to healing.

Garden District mansion at Chestnut St and Jackson Ave

But after 2,000 miles and two years of distance, after self-transformation and changes in style and appearance, whatever acceptance she yearned for couldn’t be found until returning home. Experiencing confusion as sharp as the pain from a thousand paper cuts, returning to the streets and the trees that nurtured her, it was also the hurt that raised her. Standing in the glowing dusk were the enchanting landscape and collage of shamrock greens and tawny browns that were stained with the tears, guilt and pressure of fulfilling a minority myth and a false dream.

Louis’ reconciliation with his own rejection and his consequent agony starts in his escape from New Orleans and becomes his epiphany in his return. The beauty of New Orleans found in some parts of the Garden District, in its quietly content streets and patches of garden at every turn, is bewitching in the same way New York, San Francisco, Chicago, all of America’s biggest cities are to its lovers and admirers. It’s the acknowledgement of the deep-seated pain that has created its history and all of its admirable, commodified beauty. Out of and in disguise of the foundational role of slavery in the South, of a deeply racial and colorist caste system, of colonialism, New Orleans and the Garden District achieves, through its constant wrestling with hideousness, a reputation of beauty.

At the microscopic, Louis discovers this dichotomy through his own life in relation to New Orleans. It isn’t until his return, until his confrontation with the harsh realities and truths of his vampiric identity that Louis is given the power to fully love and admire the grotesque beauty of what he had always had, of his home.

Main Character Syndrome

“Main Character Syndrome: When someone thinks they are the main character of their life. Usually comes with a side of individuality complex, quirky style and a self-centered point of view” (Urban Dictionary, 2023).

Edna was a respectable Catholic housewife and mother, a Creole woman in high society in late-1800s New Orleans, and she was in love with and had secret desires for a man who wasn't her husband. She also wasn't crazy about her children. But she kept it all a secret, away from judging eyes. Her tortured journey of confusion and repression of her sexuality and her true feelings to awakening is one that almost every female reader can identify with, but it's also one that was historically denied to women, denied to Edna. It's an epiphany that awakens her desire and her right as a woman to be the main character of her own story, and it's a powerful epiphany, that Kate Chopin encaptures, that is a rite of passage for the oppressed.

Identifying as Korean American, it should be relatively easy to find your identity, to find “yourself” and the boxes you fit into. Especially when considering the friends I’d made and the people I’d met in Southern California, especially when considering my sophomore year suitemate Kara who had a white dad and a Chinese mom, especially considering the middle ground she balanced, not knowing whether she was white or Asian, considering all of that I should have had it relatively easy with two Asian parents. Despite coming from Hawaii, a state where everyone was or at least knew someone who was Asian, where everyone had an intimate understanding of the vast diaspora that constituted “Asia,” Kara often didn’t know where or how she fit into the two opposing genes she was born with. Considering my friends who, like Kara, didn’t know what they belonged to, I was born with only one possibility, with one straightforward path to follow.

Lane Kim from the television show Gilmore Girls being a good Asian girl to being the baddest of them all

And for a while, while growing up in mainly majority-white schools, in majority white neighborhoods, in majority white social circles, I believed and, almost as if naturally, took upon the role of the activist and was looked upon as the spokesperson of the entire Asian American community to efficiently package an entire population’s struggles and desires for the convenience of a certain class of people who couldn’t be bothered and moreover, weren’t incentivized to listen.

Obviously, being the minority in any sense, not belonging to the conventional, intrinsically places you on the sidelines and makes you second choice. Rejected by potential friends, rejected by potential mentors who would rather guide students who look like them, rejected by the boys you bravely give your heart to, it’s not only being told that you’re not the “main character,” but also being told that you can never be, forever cursed to the sidelines, to serve, to provide fluff, to move the plot – all because you were born with the wrong features, the wrong body type, the wrong hair, the wrong color.

Today, it’s not that dramatic. The above description is more of an in-depth version that seems more damning, self-pitying and foreboding than today’s reality, or at least, than my own reality. But the sharp prick of realization that comes with each racially-motivated rejection isn’t any less painful, because each realization comes with the force of having to come face to face with the accusation of simply not being enough. And growing up, being seen and defined as an undesired minority almost inevitably leads to a sorrowful and painful resentment of your own enriching background, of all the things that make someone uniquely special. No matter how many coming-of-age films or throwback 2000s movies or romantic comedies try to convey the message that weirdness is attractive, desirable, hot and manic pixie, it is still delivered in the medium of a conventionally attractive, white woman.

Miss Saigon, his “lotus blossom”

It’s crucial to admit the certain privilege “awarded” to Asian Americans, especially East Asian Americans, not only because of our lighter skin but also because of our representation as the model minority – quiet, hardworking, obedient and consequently, easily controllable. But what most of our older Asian parents and relatives who revel in this “privilege” fail to realize is that in their pride is the acceptance of white supremacist views, the willingness to be blind to the injustices committed against us, to support and progress the oppression of fellow minorities, to fulfill that secondary character role that never initiates but follows. It is weaponized against us to place us in stagnation, to define us as the Lane Kim to Rory Gilmore, the Mr. Yunioshi to Holly Golightly and the Kim to the Engineer and nothing more.

Moving to Southern California, especially to Los Angeles, where over 10% of the population was Asian, South LA seemed to be a utopia where the people who looked like me made up the majority and the food and media I grew up consuming dominated social and academic conversations. It was a place where Asian families had settled for generations, where my peers were fourth and fifth-generation, from an established legacy that I didn’t know was possible for our community. They were children who had forgotten their mother tongue and children who had the audacity and confidence of the white people I grew up with, because now, they were the majority. They were what my parents would have considered completely “American.”

Rachel Chu and Nick Young, Crazy Rich Asians

In these newly, completely foreign settings, in the Korean cultural clubs and even in my different classes, in my various Asian social circles, where I was part of a desired majority, I had finally found the space where I felt confident and attractive, where I could fully explore what my interests and passions lied and what my desires and fears were, just simply as a teenage girl, completely unburdened by the weight of her racial and cultural identity. But even in these environments where, on paper, I should’ve felt entirely unrestrained in, I couldn’t help but notice the differences and discrepancies in the thought processes and emotional reactions I had compared to my Asian friends who were native to Los Angeles and San Francisco. These discrepancies are what I still continue to explore, wondering if they’re the result of the differences between a first-generation and fourth-generation Korean American, or if they’re diasporic differences, or if they’re simply regional differences. But along this exploration, is the discovery of myself as a person who wasn’t placed with the responsibility of an entire community, but instead, a person who had the right and the duty of being the main character of my own story.

But sitting on the sand of Grand Isle where Edna dared to love someone she couldn’t, where she went through all the tumultuous motions of a budding, forbidden and secret romance, through an experience that strips raw and bare mothers, wives and naive young girls alike, I had inhabited Edna, and even better yet, had felt as if I had become the main character. Walking along the path where the water broke the sand, against the wind that filled all of the senses, I was reminded of the times when I, like Edna, was overcome with an all-consuming love, with the emotions and desires she herself couldn’t identify. With a story, with a character that so deeply experienced feelings and thoughts that are both so universal yet deeply personal, I had felt the emotions I experienced every time I loved so deeply, so hopelessly, being represented through Edna, united through 100 years by the innately human and feminine capability to love. Edna represented, for me, all of the trials and tribulations of simply being a young woman, unbridled by the considerations of race and socioeconomics.

Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Although identity plays an undeniable role in someone’s story and in the development of someone’s personal thoughts and emotions, growing up carrying out the role of representing your identity, growing up where all the facets of your life are defined as simply “Asian,” I wanted less, I craved seeing my people simply happy. The portrayals of my identity in media have largely been heavy and serious, depriving the people who looked like me of all the visceral joys and fears of life, all the deeply visceral human emotions that are usually portrayed in the bodies of white actors and artists and subsequently, seem reserved for those bodies.

Not knowing, I was subconsciously tired of bodies and faces like mine being solely reserved to represent our plight of misrepresentation, to represent the burden of fighting for racial equality, obediently following the model minority myth, when I had been yearning to see my people, girls who looked like me full of the virality, silliness, depth of emotion and life like I knew my friends and mother to be, like I knew I was. I wanted the Ingrid Yun’s, the Lara Jean’s, the Kitty’s, the Rachel Chu’s and Nick Young’s. And reading atop of that wooden balcony, under the same beating sun, at that same magical period of dusk, swimming against the same waves, felt as though I were reaching Edna, as if the cameras and writers had turned their attention on me, validating my own story and feelings, in just the same way as Kate Chopin did for Edna.