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NOTES FROM NEW ORLEANS – Patience
Straight up, y’all – our nerves are bad.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve noticed a distinct decline in our collective mental state. The exchanges of ‘beeybie’ and ‘dahling’ during public discourse have all but disappeared. People are still cordial, mind you. But it’s like they’re someplace else when they talk to you. The smile and eyes meet for a split second – and often not at the same time even, then quickly fade away.
At traffic lights these days, I sit and wait behind drivers who’ve drifted off somewhere beyond the red light that’s now turned green. And I swear – I could make the block in the time it takes them to finish their long, slow drifts into right turns.
And there’s not the loud laughter and jonsing we used to hear up and down St. Claude and St. Charles.
We’ve lost, it seems, our sense of humor, our sense of moving forward, our sense of being in love with each other.
Between the still work-in-progress levees, housing shortage, money woes, and missing three-fourths of everyone we knew, we’re a collective study in post-traumatic depression. And it’s not helping that they’re still pulling bodies out of buildings around town - and not just exclusively in the Ninth Ward anymore. One was found across the street from Southern University just last week. He is believed to be a man who lived behind the school whose name was Freddie Burden.
Burden. If FEMA doesn’t kill us first, the irony here is sure to finish us off.
I wish I had good news to tell you folks. But the truth is, we’re going down…again.
It sorta feels like Las Vegas here. Real hot – hotter than humans are probably supposed to live in, hot enough to make you rationalize engaging in some illicit activity that, during saner times, you’d know better than to do. And just like in Vegas where there are no clocks in the casino, making time stand still, we too are standing still – still in the ruins of New Orleans. There’s always been a whimsical timeless quality here. Now, that whimsy has been replaced with lull not unlike yellow fever.
To be honest, there are a few improvements around town – none of which any governmental agencies can take credit for. Our landscape is showing signs of life, of growth. All of the trees and grass and flowers that sat underwater with our houses, without oxygen, for close to a month last year, are now blossoming again. I actually marveled as I took visiting friends and family members on the ‘Misery Tour’ last week through Lakeview, Gentilly, and the Ninth Ward at how much the better it all looks in green. The rains have washed the white saltwater ash off everything. And the coffee-colored water ring around the homes and businesses has faded some. “Wow, things look much better around here!,” I told my visiting folks. Only my mom – bless her Jewish Princess heart - was honest enough to say what my well-meaning friends wouldn’t: “Are you crazy? This city looks gawd awful!!”
Eventually life here becomes so overwhelming, you begin to wonder how we’ll ever get out of this mess. You drift around the city streets in your car, mulling over all the bad choices your city’s made from time immemorial: Why did we let ourselves become so dependent on tourism and now no one wants to visit us? Why do we say we will take this opportunity to change the things that were wrong here and then we re-elect the same dubious and racially divisive officials? Why did they let the federally paid for search teams go home when all our bodies hadn’t been collected yet? I mean, really - since when is it alright to have the corpses of townspeople lingering around under piles of debris for nine months now already?
And then the other night, I saw an inkling of what is perhaps the one thing that just might carry us over that far off, seemingly oasis of a finish line.
I was at the Tuesday night Rebirth Brass Band show. They were playing to a packed house, as usual. We were all crammed up towards the front, locals of all ages along with out-of-town volunteers who’d heard about the black magic music of New Orleans’ brass bands and they were really gonna hear it live for the first time in their young unexposed lives. You can tell them a mile away, these white, squeaky clean young idealists who believe, even if our faith has waned lately, that New Orleans will rise again – and doggone it, they’re gonna do their good Samaritan part to help get her there! God bless em.
So I’m standing right in front of the stage because I’ve got to get as close to this musical healing as I can before I start popping pills or engaging in some anti-social activity like slashing tires. Next to me is a pretty dark sister, who occasionally smiled at me as we subtlety competed for that perfect front row spot. Directly behind me was a tall, strong capable brother who looked un-messable with. And to his left, behind pretty sista-girl, was one of the squeaky clean young white volunteers who had suddenly morphed into a red-faced drunk who’d had just enough hooch to make him loose himself to his fullest capacity AND make him determined not to have his self-expression hampered by the mean-mugging people around him who he was elbowing.
The more he knocked sista girl and strong, capable brother in the back of the head, the more they look at him incredulously, which invoked his inner frat boy, unleashing even more aggressive flailing, bumping and knocking to drive home the point that DAMMIT! he’s here for the first time to hear this music and he’s feeling good and this is HIS night – in case you hadn’t heard!
With a mixture of dread and anticipation, I watched the turning point arrive when either or both strong capable brother and sista girl would have been full within their right to turn wild boy out onto the sidewalk. He’d certainly earned a huge serving of whoop-ass. But…an amazing thing – to me anyway – happened. Both sista girl and strong capable brother looked at each other as the red faced boy continued his dangerously up-close-and-personal flailing, smiled and said to each other, “I’m about peace.” “Yeah…me too.”
And just like that, sista girl and strong capable brother turned back to the stage and endured the wild jostle dancing until, ever so slowly, frat boy morphed back into selfless volunteer Samaritan, his maniacal dancing seemingly soothed by the choice those around him made to maintain their patience with him.
‘It’s a patience thing’, I thought. That’s what’s gonna get us through these days of waiting. Even when we’re tired, angry, stressed, drunk, depressed, and spacing out at stop signs, even while we brace ourselves with each newly discovered body, even as breaking news reports reveal at least weekly that our newly constructed levees are STILL riddled with problems – Even in our worst season of Job you never want to know, sitting and reading this in the comfort of your home in Elsewhere, USA, it is the New Orleanian spirit of slow cultivated patience that will drip our will like water on the mountains of our challenges, gently wearing them down, until the Gods turn back to favor us once again.
Hurricane season is here. Got to remember to smile, be patient, and say, “I’m about peace.” Seems to be at least one way to diffuse a hurricane.
Deborah Cotton is a freelance journalist and public speaker based in New Orleans, covering on-the-ground stories of the city’s recovery and chronicling the rebuilding efforts of the historic Ninth Ward. She can be reached at Deborah.cotton@gmail.com.
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