Feeling the Hand of God

My grammy is amazing.

"Our mother is so happy for having voted. She is proud to know that her vote went in and when the tallys are counted that hers is there. I talked with her today and she talked almost 30 minutes about how happy she was and she just thanked everybody that had any part in making it happen. Thank you for being serious enough to follow through. It is the only way that the elderly can vote and maintain some dignity about their life at that age. Mom is a blessed women at 88 to have seen all the major events of the 20th Century and then to vote for someone of color. She feels as though she has felt the Hand of God!"

When I saw this email that my mother sent to the family to thank them about being so vigilant in fighting to keep my grandmother's name from being purged after being displaced by Katrina, and getting her ballot shipped so that she could vote absentee, I cried. I've read the moving human interest pieces about elderly black people across America getting to the polls for this election, but this brings the story home for me.

My grandmother was born in New Orleans in 1920. She was so poor that she spent time in an orphanage even though her parents were alive, so poor that she wore two left shoes-- mens size 10, orange-- that her family bought at a rummage sale to school. Her story is the story of many, the story of a frontliner to the life I of privilege that I lead today. She didn't finish high school, but she's finishing first in life. After raising 12 kids, some of whom (like my mom) were PRE Brown vs. the Board of the Education grade school de-segregators, and some of whom (my mom's 4 older siblings) fled the Jim Crow South never to return.

What a life! I can't imagine it, and that was precisely her goal. That a granddaughter such as I would have a different life, one protected from such experiences, where such abject poverty and oppression would exist only in my imagination. As I place myself in her shoes -- her two left shoes -- I am moved by the long race she's run with such a handicap. I am moved to feel the full gale force of this revolution in a way that I never could without her example. After such a life as she has lived, the things that she has seen, the things that she has felt, this bone fide wise woman has cast her vote, and feels the very hand of God on it. Who am I to argue with that? Go grammy! I bless God for the gift of you.

Crazy: Failure to Launch

They say that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It's true. I can testify to the fact that the road to my personal hell(destination: Cr@zy!)is paved with my mother's good intentions and her efforts to realize them, each and every single little one, in its entirety, without delay. I am daily splayed upon The Grill -- her critical words, probing questions, fussy rants, and laser-beam stares. I roll around like a gas station frankfurter, trapped, writhing in agony and basting in the juice of knowing that she's never 100% wrong (most times far from it in fact) and therefore cannot be 100% ignored. Tepid small-talk conversation is a a dangerous spelunking adventure -- morphing instantaneously, starting out as an exploratory walk and fracturing into a black shrieking cacophony, like startling a cloud of sleeping bats. I emerge a wreck, barely alive, trembling, tussled, scratched....and smelling of guano. Hence my fear of cavernous conversations.

I live with my mother. There is no nearing escape date. Today, after ironically crowing to some woman after church about great it is to live here (based on how much worse it could be), this is Alcatraz, and I am inmate MXB001, a stranger to freedom.

Everyday, using a secret playbook of henpecking strategies, she is trying to whittle me into an image I cannot see inside myself, maybe her image. I sincerely hope not. Doesn't she realize that I'll inevitably become just like her, and sooner rather than later as I am well past adolescent angst and whinging? It's the law of the universe. I'm not even trying to fight it in the cosmic sense -- that's a losing battle with destiny. But all things should come in their due time, right? It's not my time. Just now it all feels like a reverse prism, like some cold faceted crystal smashing my spectrum into a sterile, bland beam of white.

Frankly, I used to be better at dodging these outrageous daily slings and arrows, but I'm getting tired and suffering them instead. With little endurance left, I am being eroded... slowly unmanned. What is the feminine counterpart for emasculation? I'd like to give this terrible phenomenon a name. It already has a face.

Post Theme: Crazy by Gnarls Barkley

Notes from Katrinaville

As Gustave stares us down, memories from Katrinaville are inevitable. Today is the third year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and here in the Coastal South, you can cut the tension with a knife. The real question is less what's going to happen than is it going to happen again, and so soon. Can we handle being wiped out again, or will we become an American Pompeii after these storms are through?

What a way of life! We sit at the end of nature's natural lane in the sea; we wait like striped pins for God's bowling balls. Every generation of people who has built a life here has had one storm story, but global warming has given us the dark gift of two or three this generation. Older people from New Orleans will tell you about Hurricane Betsy in 1965, Gulf Coast residents will tell you about Hurricane Camille in 1969, but now those same people have more than one catastrophic storm in their lifetime. How are we to adjust?

As New Orleanians our families are already scattered, our recovery in its infancy. There is no end to the depth of emotional and psychosocial damage we've sustained. We are a resilient and strong people, but there is arduous and unexplored territory ahead. It's like hacking your way through a new jungle with an old machete.

Yesterday the displaced portion of my family was interviewed by a local news station in Atlanta. They spoke on memories of Katrina and the oncoming storm, and possible onslaught of evacuee relatives, of which I am one. I couldn't speak as I was seized with emotion. How strange to see relatives you know and love once in awhile, or on television, living in another place, when just three short years ago, they were seen so often we took it for granted, daily even, living around the corner. That is Katrina's greatest, most merciless theft, and Katrinaville's most haunting legacy: ghosts of memories.

Post Theme: Black Rain by Ben Harper