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Deliverance from
Marksville
How many is too many black people?
By Melinda Barton
Marksville, Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana.
It has been nearly 3 weeks since I said
goodbye to this little town nestled deep in the heart of Cajun
country (or should I say Klan country?). I don't honestly know
if I've ever been so relieved to leave a place in my entire
life, a period spanning nearly thirty years now. I encountered
there an anachronism that belonged more to my parents' youth
than to mine: virulent racism of the Deliverance kind.
It was Sunday, September 25, 2005. (Keep that
year in mind.) Rita had just done her worse. Having been
confined to the evacuee shelter for days due to the storm, often
without electricity, we were aching for a little recreation. In
a town as small as Marksville, that meant a night playing pool
at a small daiquiri shop on the main drag, Louisiana Highway 1.
Although it's usually completely classless to mention this
information, it's necessary here: "We" meant a group
of African-Americans and myself.
My friend Deborah and I arrived early in the
evening, desperate for a little stick action.
We spent much of the evening teaching the
local gentlemen what it means to get your ass kicked by a couple
of crazy broads. No problems there. As time passed, more of our
friends showed up and we had our own evacuee pool tournament
going. People were drinking, playing pool and poker machines,
and rockin' the juke box. All was well. A normal fun night out
with the crowd.
That was until "too many black
people" showed up. The bartender, a white woman, apparently
became afraid at the appearance of so many black faces and
called the owner. Within hearing distance of my friend Deborah,
she informed him that there were "too many black
people" in the establishment, she was afraid they were
going to rob her, and she was calling the police. (Keep in mind
that not a single hostile word or act precipitated this call.)
The owner showed up moments before midnight
and announced that the shop was closing in two minutes and we
had to leave, despite the fact that the bartender had told me on
the phone that they closed at 2 a.m. It took us only a few
moments to settle our business and leave. By the time we made it
to the door, there were three police cruisers in the parking
lot. These would soon be joined by half a dozen more.
Fortunately, no one was arrested and no
violence ensued. Although one African-American police officer
told my friend that "You black people from New Orleans make
me sick, coming all the way out here to bother people." And
that's precisely what happened, you know. We were all sitting
around NOLA one day, when we decided that it'd be a real kick to
go live in a shelter in Klan country and aggravate the local
hicks. A great plan, that.
If we'd only known that we were bringing
"too many black people," we could have avoided all
this trouble. I really must know: how many black people
constitute "too many"? Precisely when did we reach the
black person quota? Are six black people okay?
How about ten? At what precise point do some
black people become "too many black people"? Perhaps
this is one of those timeless philosophical questions that has
no real answer.
If only it had ended there. But there was oh
so much more. It's easiest to just write a list; so here it is:
The Avoyelles Parish Ignorance Top Five
List:
5. The local casino refused to serve
alcohol to evacuees, although they were free to spend their
money gambling.
4. They brought in the National Guard
to protect Wal-Mart because there were "too many"
evacuees in town. Read: too many black people.
3. A police officer working at the
shelter was so virulently racist and so prone to barking at
evacuees as if they were prisoners that the two highest-ranking
female officers quit the post in protest. Despite attempts by
these two officers and the captain of the shift to have him
removed, his "family connections" kept him there.
2. A young woman and her child were
invited to stay with a local woman, until said local woman's
neighbors began calling her with racist threats. Although this
local woman refused to tell the young woman the precise nature
of the threats, she explained: "Let's just say it's hunting
season, so if they shoot you, they can say it was an
accident."
1. A town just a short distance away
from Marksville was scheduled for a FEMA trailer park.
(Marksville had already refused to house one there.) The big
topic of the town meeting: "Can we segregate it?"
And all this leads to the moment when the Red
Cross announces the next Sunday that the shelter is closing the
next day despite plans to keep it open until October 15. So,
everyone had less than 24 hours to pack their things and make
arrangements either to go with the Red Cross to a shelter in
Alexandria, LA or to find another place to go. Some shelter
residents had already gone through more than half a dozen of
such moves. Personally, I was done with living in the past, so I
moved to my mother's now habitable apartment in Picayune, MS
until my move to DC (set for this coming Monday).
In the end, other than the friendships I made,
there are two things that will stick with me from my time in
Marksville: 1.) A deep and abiding shame for the color of my
skin, a feeling that will not pass easily. 2.) The eternal
question: Just how many are "too many black people?"
Source:
http://www.rawstory.com/exclusive/barton/too_many_110205.htm
posted 3 December 2005
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
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