Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Caledonia
Or
Hurricanes Rock
Okay, where were we five years ago in the first days of September? Where were we when the sun went down? Where was Moses when the lights went out? In the dark.
After the first effects of the hurricane had passed, the electricity was cut off; we still don’t know why, but, the city became… powerless. That meant no lights, no fans, no air conditioning and no radios. The storm had knocked out cell phone usage as well. And then, our water supply was cut; again, we didn’t see the why or wherefore. We were left… in the dark… dry. Anyone left here by choice or circumstance was left, literally, in the dry dark… without the ability to bathe.
Us veterans of past storms didn’t sweat it much; a couple of days without amenities and we’d be back on the grid, eh? “Let’s go get some coffee and a newspaper and find out how bad it had been”.
Too bad nothing was open and the only thing I found outside was the quiet and the heat, that plus a tree that had crashed onto the front of the building that I was living in.
We did have gas, so one would assume that we would have heat and hot water; but with the temperatures being hotter than hell outside and the water supplies at nil we could only use the gas to cook whatever was left unspoiled in our powerless refrigerators or of a dry ingredient unused until that time. It was like camping in hell. The toilets are useless if you can’t flush, eh? Minute by minute it became increasingly clear that we were not prepared.
Before the storm hit, and just before the storm hit, the mayor checked with his lawyers to see if he’d get into much doo-doo ordering a mandatory evacuation, so no one thought it was going to be very bad; I mean, if there is no mandatory evacuation order… Besides, the storms always turn at the last minute and miss us, right?
Wannabe writer that I am and with not a small amount of ego, I started keeping a journal of our days and nights stranded from America. It wasn’t until I looked down and saw that I had written the words “I am very scared” did I accept the fact that us, I, we just might not make it through this one; that this was an adventure that was spiraling out of control; that it was just dangerous enough to take my life and the lives of my loved ones and those that I had become responsible for.
Added to that, the biggest damn explosion that I ever heard was in the early (still dark) hours of Thursday morning; it turned out to be a facility that housed propane tanks. The sky was on fire and Boom! after BOOM!!! had me assured that we were being bombed and that we were all but doomed.
We now know that that did not happen. I did not know that then; at the occurrence of that epiphany I went into a different gear, a survival gear. We began to go into the ‘we have got to get out of here’ gear and without the prospect of hope of any kind we began packing, consolidating, planning.
When Kevin (Debbie’s neighbor) said those words (“they left me the car and they know that I can’t drive”) I was already ready.
The car was a Toyota Corolla, 2005, white and it was parked on the fifth level of the Hotel’s garage. To get to it we had to walk the block past Canal St. which was ankle deep in water to the garage where the street was calf deep in water. We did not know if it was even there or in what condition we would find it in if it was.
We had been advised earlier, by one of the uniformed guys that had started to occupy the Canal St. zone, that the water that we were standing in was becoming “noxious” due to human, animal, chemical and petroleum waste matter. He intimated that rotting carcasses and bodies did nothing nice to standing water. The water was waist high on Rampart St. and we could see black people wading away from the projects with bundles balanced on their heads, water chest high.
We had seven animals in our care by then and as a lark I had painted and nailed to what was left of the tree in our front yard a sign that announced us as ‘DOGPATCH’. In some kind of moment I must have thought it cute or catchy or something, I don’t know.
Thursday of that week that sign had attracted a young woman to us that wanted us to take in another puppy or two, which of course we couldn’t. She then asked if we could come release a dog that had been left by its owners who had split after the storm leaving the dog stranded in water chained by the neck. She had already taken into her care a female and pups. I, fool that I am, took up a hammer and screwdriver and told her to lead me to the unfortunate canine; it was almost time for cocktails and the bar that we had found still in operation had a curfew just like the rest of us.
Debbie had insisted on being part of the escapade because as she well knows, just her presence will keep us safe; we started off. The woman turned the corner up Saint Philip St. toward Rampart St. and I asked what our destination was: she replied “Treme”. A little further up the street and I asked what breed of dog we were going to rescue and she replied “Pit Bull”. She spoke in a matter of fact voice as if we were going to the bakery for a King Cake. I, on the other hand, saw my life flash before my eyes; Treme was where there was a lot of trouble of a violent type even in the best of times and releasing a chained Pit Bull was quickly becoming the very last chore that I wanted on my plate. I thought of that nice cozy tavern, Molly’s At The Market, and the warm beer that awaited me among friends and fellow strandees and began to regret my mission.
By the time that we reached our destination the water was knee high and we were deep into the Treme neighborhood, an area that I wouldn’t have dared enter in any earlier juncture of my life approaching a task that I would have surely thought more than once about volunteering for had I been in my right mind.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Katrina fifth anniversary part 2
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
The Crowning Miss Adventure
Or
Are We There Yet?
Well… last month, by request, I wrote a fifth year anniversary article on Katrina. Aaaaand…. a thousand words was just not enough, so I ended with ‘to be continued’. Our Katrina experience was BEING IN the French Quarter for six days into it which coincided, oddly enough, with the first sign of responders to make it into our neck of the woods (I know some folks on Esplanade that say that they are still waiting); bringing us well into September, which is more of an anniversary for me than August. Go figure.
As you know, my lead time for publication is six weeks, so my first question is: “Are we still here?” Did the mud and the sludge and the grunge and oil; a hurricane, a tornado, hail as big as tombstones, acts of god or man do us in again or are we all still just waiting to inhale? Did we make it back up off the mat or were we sucker punched by unseen powers…again? Has it rained BP oil on our parades? Are cruise ships braving the slick to dock in our port again?
If we’ve taken it blindside again, then this, like the September article five years ago, might never get any further than my blog; so here I come: five years later and you have to pay a buck to put air in your tires; how’s that for blowing goat? Five years in and prices are up and wages are down and baby needs a pair of shoes.
Five years in and a plan to issue all children life jackets so that “they get used to them” is the best we can do.
Remember that closing scene in the movie “San Francisco’ where Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy are coming back into town, comrades in arms. Singing? Well, that’s us guys! Except that we’re covered in oil and for every three steps forward we take two steps back. I’ll tell you what, Cap, we all deserve a frigging medal for our mettle, a tall one for our tenacity and a second line for our sincerity, just for the fact that we have chosen to still live here, and that’s just for starters.
For us, September is when the situation that we’ve come to know as the ‘Katrina incident’ really hit home; it was September when we awoke to a stream of refugees washed from their homes by flooding conditions not of their making or consent. The citizens passing us with their meager possessions were going to what they were told was ‘the refuge of last resort’. What they did not know that it was was a situation better described as ‘the end of humanity as you’ve ever known it’. It was the Super Dome and later the Convention Center that became our face of misery, neglect and abandonment and once there there was no way back to nourishment, kindness or sanity.
People’s pets that were brought to shelter were not welcome; they were turned loose in the street, abandoned and separated from their humans. In some of the lower parishes, on the rationale of the possibility of the animals forming packs, they were shot on sight. Having a pet did not necessarily exempt a person from being forced to evacuate either; authorities had the authority to shoot your pet as incentive to get you to leave, in fact authorities had the authority to do anything they damn well pleased including shooting innocent citizens, looters or criminals of and by their own determination.
Not all uniformed personnel in charge of keeping the peace and maintaining order were Gestapo-like. Only a portion abandoned their posts or went rogue; but it’s important to note that girlfriend and I had three things going for us: our age, our skin color and our ability to converse intelligently. Those attributes gave us an even break and playing field.
We stayed for six days mainly because we were not prepared to evacuate in the first place, we had no vehicle, we had no money, we had three cats and three dogs and we had no plan. We holed up at a second story apartment on Dauphine St. that had minimal damage: two chimneys collapsed, roofing, siding and gutters ripped off and a sizable cypress tree fallen upon the front of the building; but, as I tell people, we were the lucky ones.
It was real real quiet in our neck of the woods, most had evacuated early to spend days on the road not getting anywhere; of the ones who had stayed, most left by mid-week. We had taken into our care another dog whose owners were opting for the Convention Center, we were running low on supplies and had only an AM radio for information. The only thing we know for sure was that there were a couple of taverns still open to commiserate with those of us left and that with no electricity or water things were getting worse.
We had been in touch with the owner (Gallivan Burwell) of one of the canines in our care via the telephone land line of a neighbor’s and had a safe house set up for us in Shreveport should we be able to escape. People hoping to get out by walking across a bridge to the other side of the Mississippi River were turned away at gunpoint by police, there were bodies in the street, there was lootings, gunfire and disorder. There was no cold beer.
Gallivan had left us the keys to his apartment on Saint Philip St. where he alerted us to a stash of cash that he had kept for emergencies, like fugitives we sewed the money into our clothes and gathered and consolidated our supplies to be ready for a break to come to us. It was flood conditions all around the French Quarter but pretty dry for the most part within its boundaries.
Six days in and we’re over at girlfriend’s apartment to check for anything else helpful in an escape. Eight in the morning and her downstairs neighbor (with warm beer and cigarette) explaining how his womenfolk had been evacuated leaving him and his three dogs and the keys to a new car, fully gassed and “they know that I don’t know how to drive!” he happens to say to me (!!!!!).
Thus ends another thousand words but there is more
By
Phil LaMancusa
The Crowning Miss Adventure
Or
Are We There Yet?
Well… last month, by request, I wrote a fifth year anniversary article on Katrina. Aaaaand…. a thousand words was just not enough, so I ended with ‘to be continued’. Our Katrina experience was BEING IN the French Quarter for six days into it which coincided, oddly enough, with the first sign of responders to make it into our neck of the woods (I know some folks on Esplanade that say that they are still waiting); bringing us well into September, which is more of an anniversary for me than August. Go figure.
As you know, my lead time for publication is six weeks, so my first question is: “Are we still here?” Did the mud and the sludge and the grunge and oil; a hurricane, a tornado, hail as big as tombstones, acts of god or man do us in again or are we all still just waiting to inhale? Did we make it back up off the mat or were we sucker punched by unseen powers…again? Has it rained BP oil on our parades? Are cruise ships braving the slick to dock in our port again?
If we’ve taken it blindside again, then this, like the September article five years ago, might never get any further than my blog; so here I come: five years later and you have to pay a buck to put air in your tires; how’s that for blowing goat? Five years in and prices are up and wages are down and baby needs a pair of shoes.
Five years in and a plan to issue all children life jackets so that “they get used to them” is the best we can do.
Remember that closing scene in the movie “San Francisco’ where Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald and Spencer Tracy are coming back into town, comrades in arms. Singing? Well, that’s us guys! Except that we’re covered in oil and for every three steps forward we take two steps back. I’ll tell you what, Cap, we all deserve a frigging medal for our mettle, a tall one for our tenacity and a second line for our sincerity, just for the fact that we have chosen to still live here, and that’s just for starters.
For us, September is when the situation that we’ve come to know as the ‘Katrina incident’ really hit home; it was September when we awoke to a stream of refugees washed from their homes by flooding conditions not of their making or consent. The citizens passing us with their meager possessions were going to what they were told was ‘the refuge of last resort’. What they did not know that it was was a situation better described as ‘the end of humanity as you’ve ever known it’. It was the Super Dome and later the Convention Center that became our face of misery, neglect and abandonment and once there there was no way back to nourishment, kindness or sanity.
People’s pets that were brought to shelter were not welcome; they were turned loose in the street, abandoned and separated from their humans. In some of the lower parishes, on the rationale of the possibility of the animals forming packs, they were shot on sight. Having a pet did not necessarily exempt a person from being forced to evacuate either; authorities had the authority to shoot your pet as incentive to get you to leave, in fact authorities had the authority to do anything they damn well pleased including shooting innocent citizens, looters or criminals of and by their own determination.
Not all uniformed personnel in charge of keeping the peace and maintaining order were Gestapo-like. Only a portion abandoned their posts or went rogue; but it’s important to note that girlfriend and I had three things going for us: our age, our skin color and our ability to converse intelligently. Those attributes gave us an even break and playing field.
We stayed for six days mainly because we were not prepared to evacuate in the first place, we had no vehicle, we had no money, we had three cats and three dogs and we had no plan. We holed up at a second story apartment on Dauphine St. that had minimal damage: two chimneys collapsed, roofing, siding and gutters ripped off and a sizable cypress tree fallen upon the front of the building; but, as I tell people, we were the lucky ones.
It was real real quiet in our neck of the woods, most had evacuated early to spend days on the road not getting anywhere; of the ones who had stayed, most left by mid-week. We had taken into our care another dog whose owners were opting for the Convention Center, we were running low on supplies and had only an AM radio for information. The only thing we know for sure was that there were a couple of taverns still open to commiserate with those of us left and that with no electricity or water things were getting worse.
We had been in touch with the owner (Gallivan Burwell) of one of the canines in our care via the telephone land line of a neighbor’s and had a safe house set up for us in Shreveport should we be able to escape. People hoping to get out by walking across a bridge to the other side of the Mississippi River were turned away at gunpoint by police, there were bodies in the street, there was lootings, gunfire and disorder. There was no cold beer.
Gallivan had left us the keys to his apartment on Saint Philip St. where he alerted us to a stash of cash that he had kept for emergencies, like fugitives we sewed the money into our clothes and gathered and consolidated our supplies to be ready for a break to come to us. It was flood conditions all around the French Quarter but pretty dry for the most part within its boundaries.
Six days in and we’re over at girlfriend’s apartment to check for anything else helpful in an escape. Eight in the morning and her downstairs neighbor (with warm beer and cigarette) explaining how his womenfolk had been evacuated leaving him and his three dogs and the keys to a new car, fully gassed and “they know that I don’t know how to drive!” he happens to say to me (!!!!!).
Thus ends another thousand words but there is more
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Oil Spill in the Gulf
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Gulf Oil Spill
Or
And Not A Drop To Drink
Okay, here we are on day fifty four, day fifty four and the earth is still hemorrhaging vital fluid of a poisonous nature into waters that supported life… once. I find myself in a Costnerish moment, but I believe not even Kevin in all his psycho-environmental weirdness could have imagined this ass kicking. An epic adventure of a monumental catastrophe without a hero, plot or frontal nudity scene. This one is rated WFN (We’re Fucked Now) and is not suitable for impressionable minds. Watch nonstop, via video-cam, the world turning to pitch and washing up on a shore near you.
Fifty-four days in and it’s like a Grateful Dead set, we’re caught in a ‘no way forward and no way back’ conundrum. Fifty-four days in and there is no relief in sight; the oil is spewing, gushing and vomiting from a depth of over four miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and not all the kings horses nor all the kings men can slow or stop the calamity.
Does it seem like I am using many words of the doom and gloom nature? You bet your sweet ass I am. In a few short days our oysters will be a thing of the past; the great Louisiana oyster, a hybrid of indigenous stock and Croatian implants cross-cultured and bred over a century to produce the gustatory sweet soul sensation that we here were so proud of. The banning of our bivalves across the country met with sneers here, whoever these people were that shunned our supplies just because of potential health hazards could just go without, period. The call to process the oyster by some kind of sterilization almost caused riots; how dare someone tamper with perfection. We do not eat our oysters for any other reason than they taste wonderful and they are ours. If you have health issues, we say, don’t eat ‘em. Simple.
But, there goes the oysters, there go local shrimp, there go any wild caught seafood; the abomination that pollutes the Gulf, insidiously is creeping up the coast, into Mobile Bay, up onto Florida’s beaches and rounding the bend and heading into the Atlantic coast, how’s that for tragedy? This one is not getting swept under the rug, my friend, and we’ve got the seabird, turtle and dolphin carcasses to prove it.
What is being done? Not much; we’re promised, for sure, that the completion of the drilling of the relief well will solve everything IN AUGUST!!!!
Word around here is that if they pour enough concrete into the sucker it will stop, but then the valve that has become a piece of evidence will be sealed and no-one will ever know what happened. Another thought around here is that if they did stop the flow it would cut off the access to a lot of income; most of us don’t give a shit, we want the disastrous leak sealed. And the prevailing opinion is that it has taken too long and gone on too far and we are really screwed this time.
“Well, what about hurricane season?” you may ask. And well you may ask; this season is supposed to be a rip-roarer and there is no way to prepare for that except to keep your perishables at low inventory and your vehicle tuned and gassed. “What if a storm picks up the oil slick and dumps it on you, is that a possibility?” Who knows, the gulf waters are now in the eighties, El Nino is coming in and it’s hot as hell here; the levees are not up to the pre-Katrina levels and WFN!
Now it’s day fifty-five and headlines of local newspaper articles include “Thousands of people, vessels already in Gulf to combat oil”
“Dredging to create sand berms in Gulf may start this weekend.”
“Rig owners waiting for next step.”
“6- month moratorium called too short.”
“Vessel carrying oil from the leak arrives in Mobile today.”
“Grand Isle mayor plans to deploy barges in two passes.”
“Petition seeking shorter drilling moratorium gathers steam in Louisiana.”
“Some say hurricane would flatten berms.”
“Animals go into labeled containers, frozen.”
Yeah, about those animals. We now have an ‘Animal Collection Report’ in the paper.
Birds: collected 1,183 alive 504---dead 679
Sea Turtles: collected 351 alive 55---dead 296
Mammals includes dolphins: collected 39 alive 2
Other quotes in today’s paper are:
“IT’S LIKE A CLOUD OF WORRY” which means that we’re in a world of hurt down here. “Seafood supplies are dwindling”, “The Coast Guard tells BP: too little, too slow” and “Cleanup crews appear to be one step behind the spill.”
Meanwhile our President is making up to the Prime Minister of England while our mayor is spatting with his counterpart in London. Oh boy, I know you’re saying, why is God so mad at them poor crackers and coloreds in Louisiana? Well, to tell you the truth we really don’t know; it’s as if we are under siege by the sirens leading us to our demise. We are flummoxed by our fates as the cosmic whipping boys and who, just who do you complain to? It’s another case of the Department of Happy Endings being closed to those that are the most in need.
Oh, and by the way, we can smell oil in the air here when a good breeze blows in. There are people down here that are getting chest pains, shortness of breath and headaches. Oil? Airborne ‘dispersants’? Our imagination? For the record, I don’t feel so good myself. More later.
I’m posting this, unfinished, to get your reactions, I’ll be adding to it later today, tomorrow and on and frigging on……..stay tuned
By
Phil LaMancusa
Gulf Oil Spill
Or
And Not A Drop To Drink
Okay, here we are on day fifty four, day fifty four and the earth is still hemorrhaging vital fluid of a poisonous nature into waters that supported life… once. I find myself in a Costnerish moment, but I believe not even Kevin in all his psycho-environmental weirdness could have imagined this ass kicking. An epic adventure of a monumental catastrophe without a hero, plot or frontal nudity scene. This one is rated WFN (We’re Fucked Now) and is not suitable for impressionable minds. Watch nonstop, via video-cam, the world turning to pitch and washing up on a shore near you.
Fifty-four days in and it’s like a Grateful Dead set, we’re caught in a ‘no way forward and no way back’ conundrum. Fifty-four days in and there is no relief in sight; the oil is spewing, gushing and vomiting from a depth of over four miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and not all the kings horses nor all the kings men can slow or stop the calamity.
Does it seem like I am using many words of the doom and gloom nature? You bet your sweet ass I am. In a few short days our oysters will be a thing of the past; the great Louisiana oyster, a hybrid of indigenous stock and Croatian implants cross-cultured and bred over a century to produce the gustatory sweet soul sensation that we here were so proud of. The banning of our bivalves across the country met with sneers here, whoever these people were that shunned our supplies just because of potential health hazards could just go without, period. The call to process the oyster by some kind of sterilization almost caused riots; how dare someone tamper with perfection. We do not eat our oysters for any other reason than they taste wonderful and they are ours. If you have health issues, we say, don’t eat ‘em. Simple.
But, there goes the oysters, there go local shrimp, there go any wild caught seafood; the abomination that pollutes the Gulf, insidiously is creeping up the coast, into Mobile Bay, up onto Florida’s beaches and rounding the bend and heading into the Atlantic coast, how’s that for tragedy? This one is not getting swept under the rug, my friend, and we’ve got the seabird, turtle and dolphin carcasses to prove it.
What is being done? Not much; we’re promised, for sure, that the completion of the drilling of the relief well will solve everything IN AUGUST!!!!
Word around here is that if they pour enough concrete into the sucker it will stop, but then the valve that has become a piece of evidence will be sealed and no-one will ever know what happened. Another thought around here is that if they did stop the flow it would cut off the access to a lot of income; most of us don’t give a shit, we want the disastrous leak sealed. And the prevailing opinion is that it has taken too long and gone on too far and we are really screwed this time.
“Well, what about hurricane season?” you may ask. And well you may ask; this season is supposed to be a rip-roarer and there is no way to prepare for that except to keep your perishables at low inventory and your vehicle tuned and gassed. “What if a storm picks up the oil slick and dumps it on you, is that a possibility?” Who knows, the gulf waters are now in the eighties, El Nino is coming in and it’s hot as hell here; the levees are not up to the pre-Katrina levels and WFN!
Now it’s day fifty-five and headlines of local newspaper articles include “Thousands of people, vessels already in Gulf to combat oil”
“Dredging to create sand berms in Gulf may start this weekend.”
“Rig owners waiting for next step.”
“6- month moratorium called too short.”
“Vessel carrying oil from the leak arrives in Mobile today.”
“Grand Isle mayor plans to deploy barges in two passes.”
“Petition seeking shorter drilling moratorium gathers steam in Louisiana.”
“Some say hurricane would flatten berms.”
“Animals go into labeled containers, frozen.”
Yeah, about those animals. We now have an ‘Animal Collection Report’ in the paper.
Birds: collected 1,183 alive 504---dead 679
Sea Turtles: collected 351 alive 55---dead 296
Mammals includes dolphins: collected 39 alive 2
Other quotes in today’s paper are:
“IT’S LIKE A CLOUD OF WORRY” which means that we’re in a world of hurt down here. “Seafood supplies are dwindling”, “The Coast Guard tells BP: too little, too slow” and “Cleanup crews appear to be one step behind the spill.”
Meanwhile our President is making up to the Prime Minister of England while our mayor is spatting with his counterpart in London. Oh boy, I know you’re saying, why is God so mad at them poor crackers and coloreds in Louisiana? Well, to tell you the truth we really don’t know; it’s as if we are under siege by the sirens leading us to our demise. We are flummoxed by our fates as the cosmic whipping boys and who, just who do you complain to? It’s another case of the Department of Happy Endings being closed to those that are the most in need.
Oh, and by the way, we can smell oil in the air here when a good breeze blows in. There are people down here that are getting chest pains, shortness of breath and headaches. Oil? Airborne ‘dispersants’? Our imagination? For the record, I don’t feel so good myself. More later.
I’m posting this, unfinished, to get your reactions, I’ll be adding to it later today, tomorrow and on and frigging on……..stay tuned
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Katrina fifth anniversary
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
All The Kings Horses
Or
Hey Jude
Hurricane Katrina: what can I say that hasn’t been said ad nauseam? What can I tell you that you haven’t already seen on ‘Treme’? That we were some of the last ones to leave and some of the first ones back (and that’s with putting in over five thousand miles on the road)? That when we left the city was broken, we thought beyond repair, and when we came back, it was to a battered but unbowed wreck, mugged by nature, left to drown when levees didn’t hold, occupied by the military and ravaged by civil disobedience? Yes.
Yes, we came back to take a sad song and make it better. What else could you do after a wash the size of 16 Manhattans bitch slapped the Gulf Coast? 50,000,000,000 gallons of water from broken levees in 80% of New Orleans alone and alone we found ourselves; 500,000 citizens displaced, blown to the four corners. “Crying won’t help you, prayer won’t do you no good; when the levee breaks, Mama you’ve got to move”.
The waters shredded all boundaries with its destruction: economic, social, political and racial. Patricians and plebeians alike perished and providence had no regard for the pureness or poorness of a person’s soul; we all took the hit. All at once, we all became very fragile and extremely… mortal.
For the first nine months back we swept our own streets until the mayor signed a company for five times the cost of pre Katrina times, recycling became a distant memory, light poles were out and eighty percent of the city was in darkness, coffin flies blackened the air and trash and rotting refrigerators lined the street. No mail delivery. Remember? Debris piled up stories high, our stories piled up like psychic debris, we came back not because we wanted to; we came back because we had to. In prescience how could we not have come back? Unthinkable. Would we abandon a wounded comrade? A dying relative? A beaten home team?
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work putting back together the city that care forgot; we were a city of motherless children coming back to care for our home--we are still orphans of the storm--it’s been three steps forward and two steps back for five frigging frustrating years. It’s as if greener pastures are not in our futures.
The mayor said that he wanted the recovery to be driven by the economy; ergo rents doubled. The mayor said that the city wanted everybody back; and so they closed and eventually tore down the projects and homelessness tripled.
We developed three different strains of Katrina coughs; predictably, we were told that there was no such thing. We knew about lootings, rapes, bodies and gun battles between police and citizens; blithely that was all swept under the rug and whitewashed.
The fuster cluck of the repairing of miles of sewer pipe and fresh water lines and gas pipes and streets, oh the streets. Get this, the administration said that, purposely, they, and this is five years in, only went around repairing twenty percent of the streets that accounted for eighty percent of the traffic; that traffic being commuters. I personally don’t know who these commuters are and I also don’t know how, in five years, we have only been able to fix a paltry twenty percent.
Five years in, we have cell phone towers in our streets that serve no function; we have electronic parking meters (even in less affluent sections of town) with increased rates, property is being taken away under the guise of imminent domain, still almost 60,000 residences on the blighted list, new hospitals in the works while storm affected ones remain shuttered and the majority of the so called ‘recovery effort’ being accomplished by volunteers and faith based groups. Five years in and we are still a city racially divided four ways from Sunday.
Do you want to talk about drugs and violence? Want to know the murder statistics and how we are still highest per capita in the country? Don’t get me started.
Five years in and we’re still the country’s step-child; should another storm or disaster occur we will still be crying ‘po mouf’ to our neighbors. We are still in no position to offer succor to others should they need us. The great American city.
Five years in and we wouldn’t live anywhere else in the whole damn hemisphere and although our optimism flags at times, we are here for the long haul; we are among others that feel the same. At our home we pay private recyclers; our neighbor composts. I work the voting polls and participate in the process in which we elect our officials, I reserve the right to bitch about our inequities. We have a new mayor and hopefully our city is on its way to a better future: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
There is a philosophy that tells you that only by your cognition does the universe actually exist and that when you close your eyes it no longer does; that when you put your head down for the final sleep it will be gone. Poof. In the meantime all that happens is illusion spurred ahead by greed; the grand scheme that goes on within you and without you is here for your temporary education, enlightenment and transcendence.
That existential crap only goes so far until you may realize that, even if true, you have this one life to live; that you still bleed when cut, that you still cry when hurt and that you still are inclined to live a full, happy, productive and honorable existence. Even though it appears, at times, that the cards are stacked against us; even though we take pistol whippings by the fates; even though when the going gets tough(er) we are inclined to get going. To experience New Orleans is to experience love; for me, to live here is to want to make it better.
“The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better”
“The minute you let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”
To be continued…
By
Phil LaMancusa
All The Kings Horses
Or
Hey Jude
Hurricane Katrina: what can I say that hasn’t been said ad nauseam? What can I tell you that you haven’t already seen on ‘Treme’? That we were some of the last ones to leave and some of the first ones back (and that’s with putting in over five thousand miles on the road)? That when we left the city was broken, we thought beyond repair, and when we came back, it was to a battered but unbowed wreck, mugged by nature, left to drown when levees didn’t hold, occupied by the military and ravaged by civil disobedience? Yes.
Yes, we came back to take a sad song and make it better. What else could you do after a wash the size of 16 Manhattans bitch slapped the Gulf Coast? 50,000,000,000 gallons of water from broken levees in 80% of New Orleans alone and alone we found ourselves; 500,000 citizens displaced, blown to the four corners. “Crying won’t help you, prayer won’t do you no good; when the levee breaks, Mama you’ve got to move”.
The waters shredded all boundaries with its destruction: economic, social, political and racial. Patricians and plebeians alike perished and providence had no regard for the pureness or poorness of a person’s soul; we all took the hit. All at once, we all became very fragile and extremely… mortal.
For the first nine months back we swept our own streets until the mayor signed a company for five times the cost of pre Katrina times, recycling became a distant memory, light poles were out and eighty percent of the city was in darkness, coffin flies blackened the air and trash and rotting refrigerators lined the street. No mail delivery. Remember? Debris piled up stories high, our stories piled up like psychic debris, we came back not because we wanted to; we came back because we had to. In prescience how could we not have come back? Unthinkable. Would we abandon a wounded comrade? A dying relative? A beaten home team?
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work putting back together the city that care forgot; we were a city of motherless children coming back to care for our home--we are still orphans of the storm--it’s been three steps forward and two steps back for five frigging frustrating years. It’s as if greener pastures are not in our futures.
The mayor said that he wanted the recovery to be driven by the economy; ergo rents doubled. The mayor said that the city wanted everybody back; and so they closed and eventually tore down the projects and homelessness tripled.
We developed three different strains of Katrina coughs; predictably, we were told that there was no such thing. We knew about lootings, rapes, bodies and gun battles between police and citizens; blithely that was all swept under the rug and whitewashed.
The fuster cluck of the repairing of miles of sewer pipe and fresh water lines and gas pipes and streets, oh the streets. Get this, the administration said that, purposely, they, and this is five years in, only went around repairing twenty percent of the streets that accounted for eighty percent of the traffic; that traffic being commuters. I personally don’t know who these commuters are and I also don’t know how, in five years, we have only been able to fix a paltry twenty percent.
Five years in, we have cell phone towers in our streets that serve no function; we have electronic parking meters (even in less affluent sections of town) with increased rates, property is being taken away under the guise of imminent domain, still almost 60,000 residences on the blighted list, new hospitals in the works while storm affected ones remain shuttered and the majority of the so called ‘recovery effort’ being accomplished by volunteers and faith based groups. Five years in and we are still a city racially divided four ways from Sunday.
Do you want to talk about drugs and violence? Want to know the murder statistics and how we are still highest per capita in the country? Don’t get me started.
Five years in and we’re still the country’s step-child; should another storm or disaster occur we will still be crying ‘po mouf’ to our neighbors. We are still in no position to offer succor to others should they need us. The great American city.
Five years in and we wouldn’t live anywhere else in the whole damn hemisphere and although our optimism flags at times, we are here for the long haul; we are among others that feel the same. At our home we pay private recyclers; our neighbor composts. I work the voting polls and participate in the process in which we elect our officials, I reserve the right to bitch about our inequities. We have a new mayor and hopefully our city is on its way to a better future: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually.
There is a philosophy that tells you that only by your cognition does the universe actually exist and that when you close your eyes it no longer does; that when you put your head down for the final sleep it will be gone. Poof. In the meantime all that happens is illusion spurred ahead by greed; the grand scheme that goes on within you and without you is here for your temporary education, enlightenment and transcendence.
That existential crap only goes so far until you may realize that, even if true, you have this one life to live; that you still bleed when cut, that you still cry when hurt and that you still are inclined to live a full, happy, productive and honorable existence. Even though it appears, at times, that the cards are stacked against us; even though we take pistol whippings by the fates; even though when the going gets tough(er) we are inclined to get going. To experience New Orleans is to experience love; for me, to live here is to want to make it better.
“The minute you let her under your skin, then you begin to make it better”
“The minute you let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better”
To be continued…
Friday, May 7, 2010
Big Easy Picks 2010
Big easy picks
Best Television Production Yet Starring New Orleans
HBO’s Treme, first of all, is NOT a documentary. It is a fictional story told about a real time; that time being three months after the Gulf Coast’s decimation by hurricane Katrina. It’s characters are based on real people and the real people are based on characters and they run a gamut: Rich man, Poor Man, Beggar man, Thief. Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief with a Chef and WWOZ DJ thrown in. Treme is a ‘you love it or you’re still sore from the last hurricane to enjoy’ program. I’m not sure that it will play in Peoria, where they’ll probably need subtitles but, check it out. Local Sundays at 9pm. Local musical performances and recognizable storyline.
Best Guilty Summer Pleasures
That too but…the Casino at City Park for a butter pecan cone under the oaks on a hot Summer afternoon is almost as good as good can be and …. a trip to Angelo Brocato’s at 214 N. Carrollton Av is simply a giddying experience and the iced creams and confections are nothing if not bordering on sensual; however, after reading Sara Roahen’s hunger inspiring Gumbo Tales I became a Hansen’s Sno-Blitz Sweet Shop (4801 Tchoupitoulas St) disciple and have joined the ranks of knowing New Orleanians that wait each Spring to watch for the updated sign outside updating the years that they’ve been in business that signals the beginning of their business year (now having been open 71 years). In Hansen’s you may wait in line because there are ‘no shortcuts to quality’ and the original snow making machine still operates at it’s own pace and the syrups are house made and new flavors are always surfacing to our amazement and enjoyment. Open 1 til 7 every day but Monday
The Very Best Local Cookbook
Books about our local foods have been written for over a century and a half and there is not a runt in the litter. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana kitchen is where Creole/Cajun became cool for the rest of the world. Written in 1984, it’s in it’ 91st printing, it took two years to write because at the time he was not measuring any ingredients. Paulette Rittenberg stood next to him and cooked and wrote and tested, bless her heart and patience, consequently all of his spice mixtures (for every dish) are broken down by ingredient. The Remoulade Sauce is the blueprint for every one you’ll have today in New Orleans, color photos on how to make a roux and how to blacken a fish. Every basic recipe and I mean every basic recipe. Check out the Sweet Potato Pecan Pie and the BBQ Shrimp. $28.99 new but working copies can be had for less.
Best Unadvertised Restaurant
Café Maspero 601 Decatur St. at Toulouse not to be confused with Pierre Maspero which pales, has been open since 1974 and run by the same family from inception. The philosophy is simple; large portions, small prices, no frills.
The very best Muffelatta in the city; served hot, individual size and there is more filling than bread. Seafood platters as big as your head, $1.00 daiquiris and house wine; tap Abita in frozen mugs and a great onion soup among other offerings. No credit cards, no reservations, no dessert, no blaring televisions and no waitress in a uniform explaining the daily specials and telling you their name and that they’ll be your ‘server’. Cost conscious, brisk, casual with the occasional celebrity or walk in party of thirty. Open 11:00 am-10:00 weekdays 11:00 pm weekends. Closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.
French Quarter Computer Café in operation
Oxymoron? Pretty much. With the closing of the Bastille and other private ones that couldn’t hold on after hell and high water hit (not to mention escalating rents and naive management) The French Quarter Postal Emporium at 1000 Bourbon St. has been the only place to send anyone in need of computer time, fax services and mailing services. Into this breach comes That Internet Café On Toulouse, 717 Toulouse (off Royal toward Bourbon) to be exact next to Glass Magick. 522-2020. Summer hours are 7am until 2:30. They’ll be offering access, sales repairs, fax and tutoring. Again another locally owned and operated and in need of support in these trying times.
Best Television Production Yet Starring New Orleans
HBO’s Treme, first of all, is NOT a documentary. It is a fictional story told about a real time; that time being three months after the Gulf Coast’s decimation by hurricane Katrina. It’s characters are based on real people and the real people are based on characters and they run a gamut: Rich man, Poor Man, Beggar man, Thief. Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief with a Chef and WWOZ DJ thrown in. Treme is a ‘you love it or you’re still sore from the last hurricane to enjoy’ program. I’m not sure that it will play in Peoria, where they’ll probably need subtitles but, check it out. Local Sundays at 9pm. Local musical performances and recognizable storyline.
Best Guilty Summer Pleasures
That too but…the Casino at City Park for a butter pecan cone under the oaks on a hot Summer afternoon is almost as good as good can be and …. a trip to Angelo Brocato’s at 214 N. Carrollton Av is simply a giddying experience and the iced creams and confections are nothing if not bordering on sensual; however, after reading Sara Roahen’s hunger inspiring Gumbo Tales I became a Hansen’s Sno-Blitz Sweet Shop (4801 Tchoupitoulas St) disciple and have joined the ranks of knowing New Orleanians that wait each Spring to watch for the updated sign outside updating the years that they’ve been in business that signals the beginning of their business year (now having been open 71 years). In Hansen’s you may wait in line because there are ‘no shortcuts to quality’ and the original snow making machine still operates at it’s own pace and the syrups are house made and new flavors are always surfacing to our amazement and enjoyment. Open 1 til 7 every day but Monday
The Very Best Local Cookbook
Books about our local foods have been written for over a century and a half and there is not a runt in the litter. Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana kitchen is where Creole/Cajun became cool for the rest of the world. Written in 1984, it’s in it’ 91st printing, it took two years to write because at the time he was not measuring any ingredients. Paulette Rittenberg stood next to him and cooked and wrote and tested, bless her heart and patience, consequently all of his spice mixtures (for every dish) are broken down by ingredient. The Remoulade Sauce is the blueprint for every one you’ll have today in New Orleans, color photos on how to make a roux and how to blacken a fish. Every basic recipe and I mean every basic recipe. Check out the Sweet Potato Pecan Pie and the BBQ Shrimp. $28.99 new but working copies can be had for less.
Best Unadvertised Restaurant
Café Maspero 601 Decatur St. at Toulouse not to be confused with Pierre Maspero which pales, has been open since 1974 and run by the same family from inception. The philosophy is simple; large portions, small prices, no frills.
The very best Muffelatta in the city; served hot, individual size and there is more filling than bread. Seafood platters as big as your head, $1.00 daiquiris and house wine; tap Abita in frozen mugs and a great onion soup among other offerings. No credit cards, no reservations, no dessert, no blaring televisions and no waitress in a uniform explaining the daily specials and telling you their name and that they’ll be your ‘server’. Cost conscious, brisk, casual with the occasional celebrity or walk in party of thirty. Open 11:00 am-10:00 weekdays 11:00 pm weekends. Closed Christmas and Thanksgiving.
French Quarter Computer Café in operation
Oxymoron? Pretty much. With the closing of the Bastille and other private ones that couldn’t hold on after hell and high water hit (not to mention escalating rents and naive management) The French Quarter Postal Emporium at 1000 Bourbon St. has been the only place to send anyone in need of computer time, fax services and mailing services. Into this breach comes That Internet Café On Toulouse, 717 Toulouse (off Royal toward Bourbon) to be exact next to Glass Magick. 522-2020. Summer hours are 7am until 2:30. They’ll be offering access, sales repairs, fax and tutoring. Again another locally owned and operated and in need of support in these trying times.
Friday, April 30, 2010
July in New Orleans
Po Boy Views
By
Phil LaMancusa
Jewel Eye
Or
Isle Of Views
Well, here we are in another July with another set of a thousand words to amaze, entrance, mystify and amuse you………or not. And as we sit, looking for any breeze at all, watching the weather channel and hopefully sipping on a cool one, our thoughts harmonically converge on ways to pay our bills, preferably without breaking a sweat.
How about we write the Great American Novel? That’s great! That’s novel and that’s American, huh? Well, hold on Pilgrim; it’s not as easy as all that. Pretty much in these economic times, getting a first book published is called fat chance. Getting any other books published is possible if you have already published or if you are somebody; add to the blah blah blah that you cannot become somebody until you’ve been published and you’ve got your predicament and mine: you’re not a recognized author until you’ve been published and you, in this economy, cannot get published until you are a recognized author or have shagged a celebrity out of wedlock (fat chance).
Or, unless you have a plan; I’ve got a plan. We, hit the lottery, steal a couple of horses, jump a twenty foot fence and make it to Mexico, riding hard, by morning. Noooo, that’s my escape plan. My ‘getting a book published’ plan is simply this: start small.
By starting small I mean, write a short story, enter it in a contest, win the contest and BAM! publishers will be breaking down your door to get you to accept a book deal and give you a bazillion dollars just because that’s what publishers do. Are you up to running off eighteen pages double spaced in the font of times new roman?
We think that we are ready (using second person here); besides that, we’re ready to set four circumstances, antagonists, protagonists or pains in the asses into motion if that’s what it takes to get a story moving. Advice that they have been receiving (slick switch to third person) had them being aware that more than a four cornered (for example: the Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover) manuscript was daunting to all those readers other than the wise guys that can fathom Shakespeare, Virginia Wolff or the first chapter of Genesis; no wonder our lives seem so complicated. If we only had to concern ourselves with three challenges (persons, places, things) at a time…
Speaking of which, writing should be relatively easy for them/you/us because all it really takes is for the suspension of reality as we/me/y’all know it. Simply do not believe what is happening in everyday life and it friggin flows. i.e. “I don’t believe I left my driver’s side window down in that rain storm, got a ticket, there’s a Tomahawk Missile in my back seat, I can’t find my cat, a cop car just pulled up, I gained ten pounds just standing here in my pajamas and boy, do I gotta pee.” translates to the writer’s mind as: ‘Well, what wouldja believe?’
1. It’s not really your car; your car is still at the nightclub and you were too drunk to drive last night.
2. Somebody laced your morning coffee with LSD and you’re hallucinating everything except your bursting bladder.
3. You’re being set up by aliens from a fraternity on a distant planet who think that it’s one big funny flummoxing inferior bipeds.
4. It’s your cat’s fault for leaving the window open when she put the missile in the car and you’re really still asleep in your bed and about to wet it.
Orrrrr: “It was a dark and stormy night, somewhere in the distance a dog barked; three men sat around a camp fire. One of the men, the good looking one, asked the returning veteran to tell the blind one about his tone deaf daughter with the wooden leg playing for tips at the smokehouse with her little dog who was worrying towels with vowel usage and syntax.
Sudden storm warnings appeared on the horizon; they were in a category all of their own, fighting a burning oil spill while the governments of four states formed committees to study the subject of the missing cat, who had stolen heavy artillery in her attempt to fight fire with fire only to blow out the window of the sleeping crime fighter’s car window. Very little was revealed except that a note was left on the windshield disguised as a Christmas card of a pleasing and very attractive design, especially appealing to officials who mistook them for dinner invitations or sliced luncheon meat, “dressed or undressed?” I asked.
The sun came up, the phone rang, the waters rose and Dondi was packing his batteries in a carry on bag that he hoped to store in the overhead compartment without an additional charge; the Goodyear blimp glided over depositing weight everywhere and discouraging forecasters who only predicted rain from open windows of squad cars equipped with radar detection. “Sorry” said the elephant in my nightclothes, “I don’t do windows; you’ll have to ask the midget posing as a little wolf in sleep’s clothing.”
“PJ’s? Sorry, no coffee for you; it’s bound to stunt your growth” I replied with candor, alacrity and a Hubig’s humble pie.
“Well, cry me a river” said the person surveying the broken window on the driver’s side eyeing the Tomahawk Missile in the back seat as the cop car pulled up to examine the ticket on the windshield. The missing cat stuck her head out from under the vehicle, trading oil, with Olive the other reindeer, and replied: “I hope not The Yellow Stream by I. P. Freely!”
The End.
Now wasn’t that simple, minds? Was that such a dill, Emma? Just suspend your bee, Lief!
I do it all the time and look where it’s gotten me; a one way ticket to Palooka-ville, is where. I could’ve been a contender and still can. I’m writing a short story about a soldier that comes back from……… sorry……. they also told us at the class to never tell anyone what your writing because you cannot trust other writers not to steal. Shame shame. It’s on my blog but don’t tell anyone that I told you, okay? Me? I gotta pee.
By
Phil LaMancusa
Jewel Eye
Or
Isle Of Views
Well, here we are in another July with another set of a thousand words to amaze, entrance, mystify and amuse you………or not. And as we sit, looking for any breeze at all, watching the weather channel and hopefully sipping on a cool one, our thoughts harmonically converge on ways to pay our bills, preferably without breaking a sweat.
How about we write the Great American Novel? That’s great! That’s novel and that’s American, huh? Well, hold on Pilgrim; it’s not as easy as all that. Pretty much in these economic times, getting a first book published is called fat chance. Getting any other books published is possible if you have already published or if you are somebody; add to the blah blah blah that you cannot become somebody until you’ve been published and you’ve got your predicament and mine: you’re not a recognized author until you’ve been published and you, in this economy, cannot get published until you are a recognized author or have shagged a celebrity out of wedlock (fat chance).
Or, unless you have a plan; I’ve got a plan. We, hit the lottery, steal a couple of horses, jump a twenty foot fence and make it to Mexico, riding hard, by morning. Noooo, that’s my escape plan. My ‘getting a book published’ plan is simply this: start small.
By starting small I mean, write a short story, enter it in a contest, win the contest and BAM! publishers will be breaking down your door to get you to accept a book deal and give you a bazillion dollars just because that’s what publishers do. Are you up to running off eighteen pages double spaced in the font of times new roman?
We think that we are ready (using second person here); besides that, we’re ready to set four circumstances, antagonists, protagonists or pains in the asses into motion if that’s what it takes to get a story moving. Advice that they have been receiving (slick switch to third person) had them being aware that more than a four cornered (for example: the Cook, the Thief, the Wife and Her Lover) manuscript was daunting to all those readers other than the wise guys that can fathom Shakespeare, Virginia Wolff or the first chapter of Genesis; no wonder our lives seem so complicated. If we only had to concern ourselves with three challenges (persons, places, things) at a time…
Speaking of which, writing should be relatively easy for them/you/us because all it really takes is for the suspension of reality as we/me/y’all know it. Simply do not believe what is happening in everyday life and it friggin flows. i.e. “I don’t believe I left my driver’s side window down in that rain storm, got a ticket, there’s a Tomahawk Missile in my back seat, I can’t find my cat, a cop car just pulled up, I gained ten pounds just standing here in my pajamas and boy, do I gotta pee.” translates to the writer’s mind as: ‘Well, what wouldja believe?’
1. It’s not really your car; your car is still at the nightclub and you were too drunk to drive last night.
2. Somebody laced your morning coffee with LSD and you’re hallucinating everything except your bursting bladder.
3. You’re being set up by aliens from a fraternity on a distant planet who think that it’s one big funny flummoxing inferior bipeds.
4. It’s your cat’s fault for leaving the window open when she put the missile in the car and you’re really still asleep in your bed and about to wet it.
Orrrrr: “It was a dark and stormy night, somewhere in the distance a dog barked; three men sat around a camp fire. One of the men, the good looking one, asked the returning veteran to tell the blind one about his tone deaf daughter with the wooden leg playing for tips at the smokehouse with her little dog who was worrying towels with vowel usage and syntax.
Sudden storm warnings appeared on the horizon; they were in a category all of their own, fighting a burning oil spill while the governments of four states formed committees to study the subject of the missing cat, who had stolen heavy artillery in her attempt to fight fire with fire only to blow out the window of the sleeping crime fighter’s car window. Very little was revealed except that a note was left on the windshield disguised as a Christmas card of a pleasing and very attractive design, especially appealing to officials who mistook them for dinner invitations or sliced luncheon meat, “dressed or undressed?” I asked.
The sun came up, the phone rang, the waters rose and Dondi was packing his batteries in a carry on bag that he hoped to store in the overhead compartment without an additional charge; the Goodyear blimp glided over depositing weight everywhere and discouraging forecasters who only predicted rain from open windows of squad cars equipped with radar detection. “Sorry” said the elephant in my nightclothes, “I don’t do windows; you’ll have to ask the midget posing as a little wolf in sleep’s clothing.”
“PJ’s? Sorry, no coffee for you; it’s bound to stunt your growth” I replied with candor, alacrity and a Hubig’s humble pie.
“Well, cry me a river” said the person surveying the broken window on the driver’s side eyeing the Tomahawk Missile in the back seat as the cop car pulled up to examine the ticket on the windshield. The missing cat stuck her head out from under the vehicle, trading oil, with Olive the other reindeer, and replied: “I hope not The Yellow Stream by I. P. Freely!”
The End.
Now wasn’t that simple, minds? Was that such a dill, Emma? Just suspend your bee, Lief!
I do it all the time and look where it’s gotten me; a one way ticket to Palooka-ville, is where. I could’ve been a contender and still can. I’m writing a short story about a soldier that comes back from……… sorry……. they also told us at the class to never tell anyone what your writing because you cannot trust other writers not to steal. Shame shame. It’s on my blog but don’t tell anyone that I told you, okay? Me? I gotta pee.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Short story submitted to glimmertrain 7/18/10
Strawberry Nest
By
Philipe LaMancusa
For my grandfather, growing up in a small town in Northern Georgia, life was neither confusing, nor was it challenging; it just was. The rituals and dramas of youth were played out, as they had been for generations, with no surprises and few variations. A child’s year began each spring and culminated in the ocher skies that signaled the ending of summer’s independence. Fall and winter were restrictive, with reprieves of too few holidays and no conception of incremental time.
Universally, children are on wavelengths of their own; adults, young and old, are strange and alien to their ken and comprehension. As we all know (or eventually find out), adults, as well, have no clear understanding of themselves; awareness of the passage of time and its significance is their reward for maturity. Wisdom is a diaphanous veil of subjectivity.
And so it turns out that being grown up is what proves the most challenging and this is that kind of story, the kind of story about being grown up. This is the recounting of near a century ago, when life in the rural south was a system of orbits and auras, where grownups revolved around each other in degrees of intensity. This is the story of how one man’s attempt to understand, and make peace within himself, if nowhere else, had all the earmarks of a great catastrophe and all the prospects of a grand adventure.
Tom Callas came back a little later than other survivors of the Great Conflict overseas and without fanfare. He was a son of the sons of the pathfinders and trailblazers of the Chattanooga Southern Railroad that had come through the American south with oxen and wagon in the 1880’s, and had stayed to build a town and a life for themselves and the generations that would follow.
His arrival could have been viewed as surreptitious were it not for the lack of ceremony or grace that came as natural to him as falling off a log, or in this instance, falling out of a train. Tom took his leave of a slow moving freight train with the markings of the Tennessee Alabama Georgia Railroad, locally known as the TAG line, one fine April morning and hopped off at the Blanche water tower just south of the Pigeon Mountain tunnel. He was too excited to sit and wait another mile or minute and eager to put his feet on home soil. His time away hadn’t changed him much physically, but his heart was emaciated with longing for red clay dirt in his lungs. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, tripped and skinned his knees, bruised his chin, chafed his hands and, by divine providence, received a lung full of red clay dust. Ask and you shall receive.
Unselfconsciously he picked himself up, stretched tall and took a deep breath; he held his nose up like a coonhound ‘ownin’ the line’ and slapped the red clay dust from his clothing with a worn and shapeless slouch hat. He had made his exit from the train on the far side of the tower, and set off through the familiar woods, like a nefarious lover slipping through the back door; the scent of poplar, black walnut, fox grapes, and wild jasmine intoxicating his senses while the tall pines that held up the sky hushed the terrain like a cathedral. This was Lookout Mountain area and he was well acquainted with the Smokey Mountain countryside. Tom Callas was a healthy twenty-two year old man and he was glad to be alive and home.
Shortly he reached a country lane where he stopped at a little store run by coloreds and splashed his face in the yard pump, drinking from his hands cool well water, splashing his face and snorting like an old steam shovel; a few local ancients in rockers and some half pints playing with a wagon hoop watched his performance. Unfazed, Tom flashed a lopsided grin and waved with his neckerchief. He hitched up his britches, shouldered his rucksack and headed toward Burgess: a postage stamp of a town nestled between the soft rolling land and the hard steel of the railroad. The day was as perfect as warm pie on a kitchen windowsill.
Being alone for more time than is normal for a person sets him ‘talkin’ at hisself’ as hill folks would say and Tom had been alone a long time and was no exception; “I used to play here when I was just a little’n and the smell’s just the same,” he said to no-one in particular. His lean frame traveled easy and quick and he passed the four miles into the town with spring in his step, in his heart and in the woods of Walker County.
“Yonder lie Blue Pond, and yar Little River by the trestle, uppin’ to Cherokee and down to Gadsden” he recited like a schoolboy, nodding his head, eyes wide and jaw set proud.
“It’s the smells that really bring you back”, Tom Callas later told Mick Percy, the town’s sheriff, pharmacist and only practicing lawyer.
Mick had sat out the Great War on the advice of his Grandpappy, who had seen action at Chickamauga in sixty-three, where over ten thousand young men a day had lost their lives in a half a week of slaughter. Mick was nobody’s fool and didn’t relish becoming fodder in a conflict that had so little concern for, what he considered, the sanctity of human life. The boys who came back from this last one had witnessed horror and terror beyond belief and a good percentage of them had missing parts of their anatomy that he was sure was not only damn inconvenient, but added nothing to their employment opportunities, which in the early 1920s was slim to nothin’ thereabouts, if you couldn’t mine the coal or harvest timber.
Mick had allowed that he was hell-bound-lazy from birth and only aspired to live up to that potential; spending as much of his time and his Daddy’s money on schooling and finally settling down to a two story clap board house more or less in the center of a town where few crimes were committed, rare litigation was heard and only an occasional headache powder or horehound cough syrup was ever needed in this terminally healthy and sane little town.
Townsfolk up and about their business on that fine Tuesday morning would have taken little notice of a young man tramping through town, if not for his familiar hill-folk gate and the shock of red hair escaping from under his hat; even then they were only reminded of someone once familiar. Tom walked the dirt streets until he got to the small ‘business district’ and then took to the wooden sidewalk.
Of course, Mick Percy was bench lounging in the shaded area in front of his office/residence and of course, Mick Percy recognized him.
“Hey, Red.”
“Hey, Mick” Tom replied. Tom stopped and went to stand in the shadow of Mick’s overhang, adapting a friendly posture but not sitting unless he was invited as was country custom. Mick did not ask him.
“Jest gettin’ back?”
“Yep.” Tom replied.
“How was it?”
“I’ve had better times.”
“Got plans, Red?” Mick asked.
“Live as long as I can without fuss, I guess,” Tom said.
“Sounds fair,” said the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer and Tom Callas wandered on, marveling at the fact that he was here and it was now. As if by homing instinct, he found himself headed down to the place in town that had always held sway in his mind, that place in Burgess known to its townsfolk as, Four Corners.
It seemed in those days that every small town across America had an intersection that divided it into quadrants: economic, social, political and geographical; that junction was usually known as Four Corners. Burgess was no exception. In the case of Burgess, the four intersecting roadways pointed one by one to the coalfields and lumber mills, the affluent and white sections and the ‘dark side’ or negro section of town. The fourth roadway led you out and away from Burgess and all it’s functions and foibles; this was the road that Tom had taken six years ago, when he went to seek his fortune and found a world at war. He could not but stare.
Miss Emily Early was nothing, if not that. All of her life, all twenty-six years of it, she had been prompt, dependable and sturdy. She was the first one in her family to get highly educated and she was proud of her teaching skills. Since the colored children’s schoolhouse had burned last year, she had found work and lodgings at Miss Minette’s where she instructed, directed and motivated a staff of maids, waiters, porters and pot washers with kindness, intimidation and maternal sternness worthy of the Mary Sharp College from which she was a graduate. She dealt fairly with tradespersons and supervised the rotation of the plantings and pickings of the truck garden out back; it was her inclination to keep and stay busy and productive. With honor and pride she had ‘indentured’ herself to Miss Minette for two years time with the payment, by Miss Minette’s solemn word, being the rebuilding of the school. Emily Early was going to do proud by Miss Minette, if it took every bit of patience, humility and hard work she could possibly muster. Her motto was, “All we have in life is our time;” she couldn’t quite put a meaning to it, but she had read it someplace and believed that it was as good a motto as any for her life. She was known to dispense these words freely and often to slack employees, and when she did, she felt good about it. To the less than motivated staff of Miss Minette’s, it was taken to heart like water off a duck’s back.
Tom found a room in the back of the newspaper office for a dollar a week and looked for a job with no success. He bought a second-hand bicycle and got around easily. Uncomfortable with his own people, he took to riding out at night down to the negro section of town with his hat pulled close and bundled up; the nights that spring were just cool enough for the outfit and the foolishness. He would envy the ease in which evenings seemed to pass there. Here were simple folks, he thought, poorer than dirt and yet they seemed to weave through each other’s lives, as if from a common thread. “Goldurnit” Tom thought, “life around these colored folks is so damn near…” he searched for the word “predictable!
I reckon it’s white folks unpredictability that screws up theys lives like it do”. And all of a sudden he felt…enlightened.
One day he hit upon a novel thought, an idea to find work in the less reputable section of town and found himself knocking at the back door of the Royal Palms Hotel. The door was opened by a tallish, light skinned colored woman, not noticeably unattractive, in a grey, calf-length, house uniform dress; he caught the scent of gardenias and ladies notion store powder.
“Sorry, Mister, we don’t open until nightfall; Sheriff’s orders.”
“I’m looking for work,” Tom said
“Doin’ exactly what?” asked Emily with a hint of suspicion and sarcasm.
“Anything really,” Tom said. “Mostly, I can cook”
“Cook? That’s for women and coloreds, and if’n I can beg your pardon, Suh, you aint one of those.”
“All the same,” Tom said, “I do have experience.” Equally, he thought to himself, he had the scars to prove it.
Minette Crawford owned, had built and named the Royal Palms Hotel in Burgess, although there was not a palm tree within four hundred miles and no royalty to speak of within a thousand. The Royal Palms wasn’t exactly a hotel either, for one thing it was only open at night and for another, none of the male guests who frequented the Royal Palms ever did much sleeping there. Right now Minette Crawford was anything but happy. “I swear, for every pound of cook I get in here I get ten pounds of trouble.” You can assume by that statement that the trouble was of the domestic help kind, and it was; another of her key kitchen staff had come down sick, not shown up or simply walked out. She adjusted her ample frame behind her parlor desk and reminded herself that this time next year, she would be comfortably retired in Paris… Paris, France that is. She had busted her butt for enough years and was really, really ready for a long stretch of stress-free living. One more year in Georgia, she mused, if only she could keep the girls in line and the kitchen running smoothly. “Damn that nigra bitch” she muttered, taking off her thick eyeglasses and slamming down her book of French verbs.
Emily was not in the best of moods either; when Minette wasn’t happy, t’weren’t nobody happy and she had put Emily through paces that day enough to try the patience of a saint. That and that damn fool white boy had shown up again at the back door looking for work, this time with some kind of coloring on that evidently he thought could almost pass him for a negro, although Emily, for the life of her, couldn’t reason why anyone would want to do that. She was feeling just testy enough to turn to Miss Minette and say coolly: “there’s a colored boy by the back door, says he’s a cook, says his name’s Cal Thomas.”
Miss Minette closed her eyes and folded her hands across her ample girth. Emily stood quietly at the door, minutes ticked by like flies on a dung heap.
“God Almighty’s scrotum!” cursed Minette at last, “tell him to cook me something and I’ll see, but make no promises, hear?”
“Cook you what?”
“Hell, if he’s a cook, he’ll find something to cook; that’s what cooks do, isn’t it? Cook?”
Three nights later, Mick heard a commotion out behind the newspaper office and went out to find the night porter holding a pistol on a black boy; at their feet was a bicycle.
Mick addressed the porter by name.
“What’s going on, Earl?”
“I caught this boy trying to steal Tom’s contraption.”
“It’s alright, Tom sold it to him, I witnessed it” Mick said
Where’s Tom? Earl asked suspiciously.
“Moved on, and I appreciate your citizen’s concern, but you’ll have to let this one pass; the boy aint done nuthin’ wrong… at least not tonite. I’ll keep an eye out, rest assured and I’ll take it from here.” Earl wandered off slowly, shooting hard looks back at the colored.
“Red, that was a close one.”
“I thank you, Mick.”
“Well, Red, seein’s I sold you the pigment, I couldn’t have them bury no appaloosa in town. Someone would be sure to pass remarks. Besides, I knew your folks and I couldn’t very well let your insanity go un-abetted. Just keep your hair covered with that black bandana and you just might make it back to Minnie’s.”
The day of his acceptance into Miss Minette’s employ, Tom/Cal had surveyed the kitchen, starting with the larder and vegetable area before shooting his head out the back door to see what could be incorporated into his meal from the garden; the meal would make or break his employment opportunity and he wanted to show his stuff without, he mused, showing his all. “Don’t play all your cards at once,” was his philosophy. He turned to Emily and asked politely “Could you get one of them boys,” here he eyed some of the staff loafing by the back door, “to kill me a nice tender young chicken fo Miz Crawford’s lunch? And fetch me some special china?” He turned his attention to setting the wood right in the big stove and never looked to see how she was going to accomplish his request; “please” he added, with a tone of genuine respect. At that point, they both became in charge of the household.
He worked quickly and quietly and the kitchen staff made believe that they were working at something or other, but what they were doing was watching the man, a stranger to them, build a masterpiece of food, while moving with the grace and motion of a dervish dancer.
When the food was ready for service, Cal/Tom plated it nicely, stretched up from his hunched position and said, “Behold Miss Emily; that which was not, is.” Thus speaking, he retrieved a pipe from his pocket and went outside to smoke, wiping his face with the neckerchief that he had pulled from his back pocket.
A while later, Emily fetched him from the shade of an outside oak. “I don’t know what you cooked for the Missy, boy, but you got yourself a job and she wants to talk at you.”
Miss Minette was studying her French book when Cal was shown in; she looked him over myopically and took a deep breath before beginning. “Well, your cooking is passable and I’m willing to put you on, trial basis, of course. Make no mistake--the hours are long, the pay is low and the kitchen is hot. You’ll be on call most days, so you bunk in the back; Emily’ll get you settled and you start work…now.”
“I need to tell you that I have high class clientele here, coming in from as far as Memphis, going as far as Atlanta and what they want is to relax, have a good meal and some genteel company.” Here Miss Minette took another deep breath into her deep lungs and continued. This was the longest conversation, albeit one sided, that she had had in months.
“The dinners will be for two at a time mostly and then there’s breakfast in the morning. You’re off from work after breakfast Sunday morning and all day Monday; that suit you?” she asked.
“Yes’m and I thank you kindly,” said Tom/Cal.
And so began Tom Callas’ tenure at the Royal Palms Hotel as Cal Thomas, and from the beginning he was under scrutiny. Emily spent a good deal of time each day darting in and out of the kitchen, like a gadfly, for the first few weeks, until she was satisfied that the new cook not only was a good fit, but performed to her standards as well. Cal treated her with the respect of her station and was content to exceed expectations with his cooking.
And so he cooked. Roasts and chops, as tender as a mother’s love; wild greens with the taste of the woods and fence lines from where they were gathered; butterbeans and Crowder peas from the gardens; creamed potatoes, lighter than butterfly wings; cakes and ice creams and cobblers and crisps, so satisfying that it would bring water to your mouth just recalling their taste. Smells, cooking odors and gaseous miasmas emanating from that locomotive of a wood burning stove and ovens, attracted layabouts who passed time outside the hotel in idle states of olfactory contemplation and meditation.
A turn in the young couple’s relationship came on a late May morning; breakfast was over and the staff had trundled off to do whatever they did before the night’s occupation. Cal was about to step outside for a sit and a pipe and found Emily at the door, arms akimbo, facing an itinerate salesman selling notions from the back of a dilapidated wagon.
“Ahm tellin’ you, Suh, we don’t need nuthin,” Emily was saying.
“I aint talkin’ to you girl. I wants to see the ‘Lady’ of the house” said the salesman. “I’ve got some real quality stuff that I know she’ll be wantin.”
“Miss Minette’s not to be disturbed after eight a.m., period.”
“Now you listen here, nigger…” the salesman said, taking a threatening step toward Emily; looking up saw Cal standing behind her, his arms crossed and holding a cleaver the size of a scimitar.
The salesman whirled, eyes wide and gaped at some street loungers who were snickering, a good funny at the salesman’s expense.
“You saw him! You saw that buck threaten me! He wanted to kill me! You all are my witnesses! He fairly screamed as he fled back to his wagon and made a beeline towards the office of the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer.
Emily turned and saw Cal leaning against the wall, tamping golden flakes of tobacco into his pipe. “What did you do?” she asked, raising that eyebrow like she was famous for.
“Who me? Nuthin.” Cal said, “I was just gonna have me a smoke ‘fore I clean up the morning mess; that white man must be seein’ spooks.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?” Emily said sternly, with just the slightest trace of a grin.
“You look right handsome when you smile, Miss Emily; you should try it more often.”
It wasn’t a day later, at a reasonable hour, that the Sheriff came calling on Miss Minette and asked to see Emily and ‘Cal’ as well.
“Well, Minnie ” Mick started with a deep sigh, “it seems we got a complaint about some darkie threatening to kill a white man, salesman by trade, and he was meaning to press charges.” Here Mick stared at Cal with a knowing look.
“Well yourself, Mick,” said Miss Minette. “What’s that got to do with these two?”
“Third, ‘well’ and it’s a deep subject, Minnie. It seems that before he could make a formal complaint, he received a visit from someone who scared him off with the threat of bodily harm, to wit, a gelding performed with alacrity for the purpose of intimidation.”
“Get on with it, Mick, and stop using those ten cent words; do you think that these two had anything to do with that?”
“Hell, Minnie,” said Mick, “ it couldn’t have been one of them; feller said some white boy was the perpetrator, with hair like a nest of wild strawberries, his words not mine; I just wanted to know if your staff had any ideas on the subject, seemed like the alleged ruckus started on your property.“
Here both Miss Minette and Mick Percy turned on the couple that looked up honestly and shook their heads.
“No Suh and No M’am, we don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout no white man; things pretty peaceful ‘roun heah, these days, aint that right Miz Emily?” said Cal Thomas, in his best servant’s voice. Emily nodded in agreement.
“Oh get outa here, you two; anything else Mick?” said Miss Minette.
“Naw.” Mick half smiled, “I guess that’s all. Hey Cal, what’s for dinner tonight?”
Tom had planned Celery Victor, Chicken Villeroi with sauce allemande, pommes soufflé, followed by watercress salad and a light sabayon.” Cal grinned and replied, “Why sheriff, Suh, I thought it perfect weather for some chicken with creamed gravy and field peas.”
`The two young people closed the sitting room door quietly behind them, looked into each other’s eyes and exhaled a deep and holding breath.
“Cal, you sure can grovel when you have to,” said Emily.
“Part of my larger education,” said Cal.
“Didn’t Mr. Booker T. Washington write something with a title like that?”
“I believe that he did, Miss Emily”
“Let’s get back to work” she said, and as they walked together toward the back of the Royal Palms Hotel, towards the kitchen and the rest of their lives, the backs of their hands brushed one another and without a thought otherwise, there came the linking of their little fingers.
Emily smiled, “Strawberry nest, indeed”.
END
By
Philipe LaMancusa
For my grandfather, growing up in a small town in Northern Georgia, life was neither confusing, nor was it challenging; it just was. The rituals and dramas of youth were played out, as they had been for generations, with no surprises and few variations. A child’s year began each spring and culminated in the ocher skies that signaled the ending of summer’s independence. Fall and winter were restrictive, with reprieves of too few holidays and no conception of incremental time.
Universally, children are on wavelengths of their own; adults, young and old, are strange and alien to their ken and comprehension. As we all know (or eventually find out), adults, as well, have no clear understanding of themselves; awareness of the passage of time and its significance is their reward for maturity. Wisdom is a diaphanous veil of subjectivity.
And so it turns out that being grown up is what proves the most challenging and this is that kind of story, the kind of story about being grown up. This is the recounting of near a century ago, when life in the rural south was a system of orbits and auras, where grownups revolved around each other in degrees of intensity. This is the story of how one man’s attempt to understand, and make peace within himself, if nowhere else, had all the earmarks of a great catastrophe and all the prospects of a grand adventure.
Tom Callas came back a little later than other survivors of the Great Conflict overseas and without fanfare. He was a son of the sons of the pathfinders and trailblazers of the Chattanooga Southern Railroad that had come through the American south with oxen and wagon in the 1880’s, and had stayed to build a town and a life for themselves and the generations that would follow.
His arrival could have been viewed as surreptitious were it not for the lack of ceremony or grace that came as natural to him as falling off a log, or in this instance, falling out of a train. Tom took his leave of a slow moving freight train with the markings of the Tennessee Alabama Georgia Railroad, locally known as the TAG line, one fine April morning and hopped off at the Blanche water tower just south of the Pigeon Mountain tunnel. He was too excited to sit and wait another mile or minute and eager to put his feet on home soil. His time away hadn’t changed him much physically, but his heart was emaciated with longing for red clay dirt in his lungs. He landed lightly on the balls of his feet, tripped and skinned his knees, bruised his chin, chafed his hands and, by divine providence, received a lung full of red clay dust. Ask and you shall receive.
Unselfconsciously he picked himself up, stretched tall and took a deep breath; he held his nose up like a coonhound ‘ownin’ the line’ and slapped the red clay dust from his clothing with a worn and shapeless slouch hat. He had made his exit from the train on the far side of the tower, and set off through the familiar woods, like a nefarious lover slipping through the back door; the scent of poplar, black walnut, fox grapes, and wild jasmine intoxicating his senses while the tall pines that held up the sky hushed the terrain like a cathedral. This was Lookout Mountain area and he was well acquainted with the Smokey Mountain countryside. Tom Callas was a healthy twenty-two year old man and he was glad to be alive and home.
Shortly he reached a country lane where he stopped at a little store run by coloreds and splashed his face in the yard pump, drinking from his hands cool well water, splashing his face and snorting like an old steam shovel; a few local ancients in rockers and some half pints playing with a wagon hoop watched his performance. Unfazed, Tom flashed a lopsided grin and waved with his neckerchief. He hitched up his britches, shouldered his rucksack and headed toward Burgess: a postage stamp of a town nestled between the soft rolling land and the hard steel of the railroad. The day was as perfect as warm pie on a kitchen windowsill.
Being alone for more time than is normal for a person sets him ‘talkin’ at hisself’ as hill folks would say and Tom had been alone a long time and was no exception; “I used to play here when I was just a little’n and the smell’s just the same,” he said to no-one in particular. His lean frame traveled easy and quick and he passed the four miles into the town with spring in his step, in his heart and in the woods of Walker County.
“Yonder lie Blue Pond, and yar Little River by the trestle, uppin’ to Cherokee and down to Gadsden” he recited like a schoolboy, nodding his head, eyes wide and jaw set proud.
“It’s the smells that really bring you back”, Tom Callas later told Mick Percy, the town’s sheriff, pharmacist and only practicing lawyer.
Mick had sat out the Great War on the advice of his Grandpappy, who had seen action at Chickamauga in sixty-three, where over ten thousand young men a day had lost their lives in a half a week of slaughter. Mick was nobody’s fool and didn’t relish becoming fodder in a conflict that had so little concern for, what he considered, the sanctity of human life. The boys who came back from this last one had witnessed horror and terror beyond belief and a good percentage of them had missing parts of their anatomy that he was sure was not only damn inconvenient, but added nothing to their employment opportunities, which in the early 1920s was slim to nothin’ thereabouts, if you couldn’t mine the coal or harvest timber.
Mick had allowed that he was hell-bound-lazy from birth and only aspired to live up to that potential; spending as much of his time and his Daddy’s money on schooling and finally settling down to a two story clap board house more or less in the center of a town where few crimes were committed, rare litigation was heard and only an occasional headache powder or horehound cough syrup was ever needed in this terminally healthy and sane little town.
Townsfolk up and about their business on that fine Tuesday morning would have taken little notice of a young man tramping through town, if not for his familiar hill-folk gate and the shock of red hair escaping from under his hat; even then they were only reminded of someone once familiar. Tom walked the dirt streets until he got to the small ‘business district’ and then took to the wooden sidewalk.
Of course, Mick Percy was bench lounging in the shaded area in front of his office/residence and of course, Mick Percy recognized him.
“Hey, Red.”
“Hey, Mick” Tom replied. Tom stopped and went to stand in the shadow of Mick’s overhang, adapting a friendly posture but not sitting unless he was invited as was country custom. Mick did not ask him.
“Jest gettin’ back?”
“Yep.” Tom replied.
“How was it?”
“I’ve had better times.”
“Got plans, Red?” Mick asked.
“Live as long as I can without fuss, I guess,” Tom said.
“Sounds fair,” said the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer and Tom Callas wandered on, marveling at the fact that he was here and it was now. As if by homing instinct, he found himself headed down to the place in town that had always held sway in his mind, that place in Burgess known to its townsfolk as, Four Corners.
It seemed in those days that every small town across America had an intersection that divided it into quadrants: economic, social, political and geographical; that junction was usually known as Four Corners. Burgess was no exception. In the case of Burgess, the four intersecting roadways pointed one by one to the coalfields and lumber mills, the affluent and white sections and the ‘dark side’ or negro section of town. The fourth roadway led you out and away from Burgess and all it’s functions and foibles; this was the road that Tom had taken six years ago, when he went to seek his fortune and found a world at war. He could not but stare.
Miss Emily Early was nothing, if not that. All of her life, all twenty-six years of it, she had been prompt, dependable and sturdy. She was the first one in her family to get highly educated and she was proud of her teaching skills. Since the colored children’s schoolhouse had burned last year, she had found work and lodgings at Miss Minette’s where she instructed, directed and motivated a staff of maids, waiters, porters and pot washers with kindness, intimidation and maternal sternness worthy of the Mary Sharp College from which she was a graduate. She dealt fairly with tradespersons and supervised the rotation of the plantings and pickings of the truck garden out back; it was her inclination to keep and stay busy and productive. With honor and pride she had ‘indentured’ herself to Miss Minette for two years time with the payment, by Miss Minette’s solemn word, being the rebuilding of the school. Emily Early was going to do proud by Miss Minette, if it took every bit of patience, humility and hard work she could possibly muster. Her motto was, “All we have in life is our time;” she couldn’t quite put a meaning to it, but she had read it someplace and believed that it was as good a motto as any for her life. She was known to dispense these words freely and often to slack employees, and when she did, she felt good about it. To the less than motivated staff of Miss Minette’s, it was taken to heart like water off a duck’s back.
Tom found a room in the back of the newspaper office for a dollar a week and looked for a job with no success. He bought a second-hand bicycle and got around easily. Uncomfortable with his own people, he took to riding out at night down to the negro section of town with his hat pulled close and bundled up; the nights that spring were just cool enough for the outfit and the foolishness. He would envy the ease in which evenings seemed to pass there. Here were simple folks, he thought, poorer than dirt and yet they seemed to weave through each other’s lives, as if from a common thread. “Goldurnit” Tom thought, “life around these colored folks is so damn near…” he searched for the word “predictable!
I reckon it’s white folks unpredictability that screws up theys lives like it do”. And all of a sudden he felt…enlightened.
One day he hit upon a novel thought, an idea to find work in the less reputable section of town and found himself knocking at the back door of the Royal Palms Hotel. The door was opened by a tallish, light skinned colored woman, not noticeably unattractive, in a grey, calf-length, house uniform dress; he caught the scent of gardenias and ladies notion store powder.
“Sorry, Mister, we don’t open until nightfall; Sheriff’s orders.”
“I’m looking for work,” Tom said
“Doin’ exactly what?” asked Emily with a hint of suspicion and sarcasm.
“Anything really,” Tom said. “Mostly, I can cook”
“Cook? That’s for women and coloreds, and if’n I can beg your pardon, Suh, you aint one of those.”
“All the same,” Tom said, “I do have experience.” Equally, he thought to himself, he had the scars to prove it.
Minette Crawford owned, had built and named the Royal Palms Hotel in Burgess, although there was not a palm tree within four hundred miles and no royalty to speak of within a thousand. The Royal Palms wasn’t exactly a hotel either, for one thing it was only open at night and for another, none of the male guests who frequented the Royal Palms ever did much sleeping there. Right now Minette Crawford was anything but happy. “I swear, for every pound of cook I get in here I get ten pounds of trouble.” You can assume by that statement that the trouble was of the domestic help kind, and it was; another of her key kitchen staff had come down sick, not shown up or simply walked out. She adjusted her ample frame behind her parlor desk and reminded herself that this time next year, she would be comfortably retired in Paris… Paris, France that is. She had busted her butt for enough years and was really, really ready for a long stretch of stress-free living. One more year in Georgia, she mused, if only she could keep the girls in line and the kitchen running smoothly. “Damn that nigra bitch” she muttered, taking off her thick eyeglasses and slamming down her book of French verbs.
Emily was not in the best of moods either; when Minette wasn’t happy, t’weren’t nobody happy and she had put Emily through paces that day enough to try the patience of a saint. That and that damn fool white boy had shown up again at the back door looking for work, this time with some kind of coloring on that evidently he thought could almost pass him for a negro, although Emily, for the life of her, couldn’t reason why anyone would want to do that. She was feeling just testy enough to turn to Miss Minette and say coolly: “there’s a colored boy by the back door, says he’s a cook, says his name’s Cal Thomas.”
Miss Minette closed her eyes and folded her hands across her ample girth. Emily stood quietly at the door, minutes ticked by like flies on a dung heap.
“God Almighty’s scrotum!” cursed Minette at last, “tell him to cook me something and I’ll see, but make no promises, hear?”
“Cook you what?”
“Hell, if he’s a cook, he’ll find something to cook; that’s what cooks do, isn’t it? Cook?”
Three nights later, Mick heard a commotion out behind the newspaper office and went out to find the night porter holding a pistol on a black boy; at their feet was a bicycle.
Mick addressed the porter by name.
“What’s going on, Earl?”
“I caught this boy trying to steal Tom’s contraption.”
“It’s alright, Tom sold it to him, I witnessed it” Mick said
Where’s Tom? Earl asked suspiciously.
“Moved on, and I appreciate your citizen’s concern, but you’ll have to let this one pass; the boy aint done nuthin’ wrong… at least not tonite. I’ll keep an eye out, rest assured and I’ll take it from here.” Earl wandered off slowly, shooting hard looks back at the colored.
“Red, that was a close one.”
“I thank you, Mick.”
“Well, Red, seein’s I sold you the pigment, I couldn’t have them bury no appaloosa in town. Someone would be sure to pass remarks. Besides, I knew your folks and I couldn’t very well let your insanity go un-abetted. Just keep your hair covered with that black bandana and you just might make it back to Minnie’s.”
The day of his acceptance into Miss Minette’s employ, Tom/Cal had surveyed the kitchen, starting with the larder and vegetable area before shooting his head out the back door to see what could be incorporated into his meal from the garden; the meal would make or break his employment opportunity and he wanted to show his stuff without, he mused, showing his all. “Don’t play all your cards at once,” was his philosophy. He turned to Emily and asked politely “Could you get one of them boys,” here he eyed some of the staff loafing by the back door, “to kill me a nice tender young chicken fo Miz Crawford’s lunch? And fetch me some special china?” He turned his attention to setting the wood right in the big stove and never looked to see how she was going to accomplish his request; “please” he added, with a tone of genuine respect. At that point, they both became in charge of the household.
He worked quickly and quietly and the kitchen staff made believe that they were working at something or other, but what they were doing was watching the man, a stranger to them, build a masterpiece of food, while moving with the grace and motion of a dervish dancer.
When the food was ready for service, Cal/Tom plated it nicely, stretched up from his hunched position and said, “Behold Miss Emily; that which was not, is.” Thus speaking, he retrieved a pipe from his pocket and went outside to smoke, wiping his face with the neckerchief that he had pulled from his back pocket.
A while later, Emily fetched him from the shade of an outside oak. “I don’t know what you cooked for the Missy, boy, but you got yourself a job and she wants to talk at you.”
Miss Minette was studying her French book when Cal was shown in; she looked him over myopically and took a deep breath before beginning. “Well, your cooking is passable and I’m willing to put you on, trial basis, of course. Make no mistake--the hours are long, the pay is low and the kitchen is hot. You’ll be on call most days, so you bunk in the back; Emily’ll get you settled and you start work…now.”
“I need to tell you that I have high class clientele here, coming in from as far as Memphis, going as far as Atlanta and what they want is to relax, have a good meal and some genteel company.” Here Miss Minette took another deep breath into her deep lungs and continued. This was the longest conversation, albeit one sided, that she had had in months.
“The dinners will be for two at a time mostly and then there’s breakfast in the morning. You’re off from work after breakfast Sunday morning and all day Monday; that suit you?” she asked.
“Yes’m and I thank you kindly,” said Tom/Cal.
And so began Tom Callas’ tenure at the Royal Palms Hotel as Cal Thomas, and from the beginning he was under scrutiny. Emily spent a good deal of time each day darting in and out of the kitchen, like a gadfly, for the first few weeks, until she was satisfied that the new cook not only was a good fit, but performed to her standards as well. Cal treated her with the respect of her station and was content to exceed expectations with his cooking.
And so he cooked. Roasts and chops, as tender as a mother’s love; wild greens with the taste of the woods and fence lines from where they were gathered; butterbeans and Crowder peas from the gardens; creamed potatoes, lighter than butterfly wings; cakes and ice creams and cobblers and crisps, so satisfying that it would bring water to your mouth just recalling their taste. Smells, cooking odors and gaseous miasmas emanating from that locomotive of a wood burning stove and ovens, attracted layabouts who passed time outside the hotel in idle states of olfactory contemplation and meditation.
A turn in the young couple’s relationship came on a late May morning; breakfast was over and the staff had trundled off to do whatever they did before the night’s occupation. Cal was about to step outside for a sit and a pipe and found Emily at the door, arms akimbo, facing an itinerate salesman selling notions from the back of a dilapidated wagon.
“Ahm tellin’ you, Suh, we don’t need nuthin,” Emily was saying.
“I aint talkin’ to you girl. I wants to see the ‘Lady’ of the house” said the salesman. “I’ve got some real quality stuff that I know she’ll be wantin.”
“Miss Minette’s not to be disturbed after eight a.m., period.”
“Now you listen here, nigger…” the salesman said, taking a threatening step toward Emily; looking up saw Cal standing behind her, his arms crossed and holding a cleaver the size of a scimitar.
The salesman whirled, eyes wide and gaped at some street loungers who were snickering, a good funny at the salesman’s expense.
“You saw him! You saw that buck threaten me! He wanted to kill me! You all are my witnesses! He fairly screamed as he fled back to his wagon and made a beeline towards the office of the Sheriff, Pharmacist and the town’s only practicing lawyer.
Emily turned and saw Cal leaning against the wall, tamping golden flakes of tobacco into his pipe. “What did you do?” she asked, raising that eyebrow like she was famous for.
“Who me? Nuthin.” Cal said, “I was just gonna have me a smoke ‘fore I clean up the morning mess; that white man must be seein’ spooks.”
“Now, why don’t I believe you?” Emily said sternly, with just the slightest trace of a grin.
“You look right handsome when you smile, Miss Emily; you should try it more often.”
It wasn’t a day later, at a reasonable hour, that the Sheriff came calling on Miss Minette and asked to see Emily and ‘Cal’ as well.
“Well, Minnie ” Mick started with a deep sigh, “it seems we got a complaint about some darkie threatening to kill a white man, salesman by trade, and he was meaning to press charges.” Here Mick stared at Cal with a knowing look.
“Well yourself, Mick,” said Miss Minette. “What’s that got to do with these two?”
“Third, ‘well’ and it’s a deep subject, Minnie. It seems that before he could make a formal complaint, he received a visit from someone who scared him off with the threat of bodily harm, to wit, a gelding performed with alacrity for the purpose of intimidation.”
“Get on with it, Mick, and stop using those ten cent words; do you think that these two had anything to do with that?”
“Hell, Minnie,” said Mick, “ it couldn’t have been one of them; feller said some white boy was the perpetrator, with hair like a nest of wild strawberries, his words not mine; I just wanted to know if your staff had any ideas on the subject, seemed like the alleged ruckus started on your property.“
Here both Miss Minette and Mick Percy turned on the couple that looked up honestly and shook their heads.
“No Suh and No M’am, we don’ know nuthin’ ‘bout no white man; things pretty peaceful ‘roun heah, these days, aint that right Miz Emily?” said Cal Thomas, in his best servant’s voice. Emily nodded in agreement.
“Oh get outa here, you two; anything else Mick?” said Miss Minette.
“Naw.” Mick half smiled, “I guess that’s all. Hey Cal, what’s for dinner tonight?”
Tom had planned Celery Victor, Chicken Villeroi with sauce allemande, pommes soufflé, followed by watercress salad and a light sabayon.” Cal grinned and replied, “Why sheriff, Suh, I thought it perfect weather for some chicken with creamed gravy and field peas.”
`The two young people closed the sitting room door quietly behind them, looked into each other’s eyes and exhaled a deep and holding breath.
“Cal, you sure can grovel when you have to,” said Emily.
“Part of my larger education,” said Cal.
“Didn’t Mr. Booker T. Washington write something with a title like that?”
“I believe that he did, Miss Emily”
“Let’s get back to work” she said, and as they walked together toward the back of the Royal Palms Hotel, towards the kitchen and the rest of their lives, the backs of their hands brushed one another and without a thought otherwise, there came the linking of their little fingers.
Emily smiled, “Strawberry nest, indeed”.
END
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
