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Eh, La
Bas, Cherie!
A Letter
from Mackie Blanton
A New Orleans Evacuee
In NE Covington, we have no electricity yet,
nor running water. Our cell phones do not work there ever, under
the tall pine trees. These days we are coming into downtown
Covington to a bar where we can get internet service and
smoothies. Alcohol has been banned until the parish (St. Tammany
Parish) gets all of its residents back on their feet. As yet, we
do not really know what state our residences (Jordan's and ours)
are in Orleans Parish. Or perhaps we just can't face facts yet.
The city government is predicting that residents won't be
allowed back in until shortly before or sometime after
Thanksgiving.
First, they need to evacuate the entire
parish, then drain it entirely, then clean and disinfect it.
Every now and then I imagine something that is most likely under
fifteen feet of water: Jordan's baby portrait on canvas,
Jordan's first drawings as a kindergartner,
Jordan's later art work, our carpets and rugs and artwork from
North Africa, a nice hand truck I bought once, a naddy tweed
jacket I recently got elbow patches on, all of the tapes of my
cable tv show, my video camera I bought for documentaries,
Linda's quilts, Linda's notebooks, books upon books upon books,
and clothes. There is no longer a distinction
between possessions and memorabilia. There's just memorabilia
now.
It's weird, but as we were leaving Heron St. for Fussell
Cemetery Road, I reached for my passport, passport pictures, my
laptop and zip disks, and a Faruk Turunz oud. Linda packed
important papers (as we've always done) and reached for some
memorabilia and jewelry. I still can't understand why we didn't
pause to notice what we were doing long enough to see that we
should have also packed up the jeep with clothes and other
items. We left the Jeep behind. All our clothes – and my
clothes and luggage for Turkey – we left behind.
Somewhere in our psyches, we thought, as New
Orleanians always think during hurricane season, "We'll be
back in a day or two. Surely, this one will veer east or west or
downgrade to a Category One hurricane and all we'll get is a lot
of wind and a few
wind-felled trees."
Katrina did veer east, but it didn't matter.
The eye of this Category Five hurricane was 30 miles wide and
its wind gusts were 150 miles an hour. And it traveled slowly,
very slowly, taking its time chewing up our worlds.
All in all, we three are quite well. We have our lives and a
house, though a house surrounded by wind-felled trees. I think
those tall pines might have saved this house on a pond. This
morning, I saw the bass weaving to and fro below the pond water.
We
can always fish! Last week, Jordan and I assisted one of our
neighbors, a nurseryman, to clear-cut the roads up to the
highway. Then she drove off to a wedding on one of the sea
islands off the coast of Georgia. She should be back sometime
today.
Did I say that I still plan to go to Iznir? I was supposed to
leave yesterday but I've postponed my departure to the 20th. I
need time to buy some clothes, but also to continue clearing the
land as much as I can. Linda and I think it makes a lot of sense
for me to proceed as usual just because for us, fortunately,
life will be somewhat as usual, even if
it will again become so slowly.
UNO is setting up offices and courses at LSU;
so she will be needed there. She will more than likely commute
to Baton Rouge from Covington, or from her Cousin Patty's home
in Houma, or from Patty's apartment in the French Quarter. There
is very little that we can do but sit and wait for insurance
agents. After they make their estimates, we can hire local crews
to clear away fallen trees in Covington and, if it comes to
that, to bulldoze our home in New Orleans. So life needs to go
on.
We all, however, of course, grieve for those
thousands upon thousands who have perished or may wish that they
had perished since they lost so much. This morning I had coffee
and conversation with two men who did not lose much but who were
in tears just remembering the human suffering we have heard
reported on the radio and tv.
The problem for us Louisianans is that the country's marine
biologists, meteorologists, geologists, environmentalists,
physicists, architects, etc. have reported for at least the last
forty years that disaster would one day be visited upon us if
the politicians did not rebuild the coastal wetlands, construct
more powerful city pumping stations, and create higher levees
and gates and locks against the lakes and rivers.
It happened finally this year because the
temperature of waters in the Atlantic and the Gulf were warmer
or hotter than in the past. When a tiny swirl of wind in the
Sahel of Africa, rises and makes its way across the deserts
toward the Atlantic, it becomes twisters across the sand and
when it reaches the shore, crossing into the Atlantic, it
becomes a tropical storm. A tropical storm will become a
hurricane if warmth from the waters fuels its core. Tropical
storms or hurricanes for us will, after the Atlantic, cross the
Caribbean waters and Gulf and engulf us fiercely of severely.
Eh, La Bas, Cherie! as we say here in
multicultural/intercultural Southeast Louisiana.--Mackie
posted 8 September 2005
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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The Persistence of the Color Line
Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency
By Randall Kennedy
Among the best things about
The Persistence of the Color Line
is watching Mr. Kennedy hash through the
positions about Mr. Obama staked out by
black commentators on the left and
right, from Stanley Crouch and Cornel
West to Juan Williams and Tavis Smiley.
He can be pointed. Noting the way Mr.
Smiley consistently “voiced skepticism
regarding whether blacks should back
Obama” . . .
The
finest chapter in
The Persistence of the Color Line
is so resonant, and so personal, it
could nearly be the basis for a book of
its own. That chapter is titled
“Reverend Wright and My Father:
Reflections on Blacks and Patriotism.”
Recalling some of the criticisms of
America’s past made by Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, Mr. Kennedy writes with
feeling about his own father, who put
each of his three of his children
through Princeton but who “never forgave
American society for its racist
mistreatment of him and those whom he
most loved.” His father distrusted
the police, who had frequently called
him “boy,” and rejected patriotism. Mr.
Kennedy’s father “relished Muhammad
Ali’s quip that the Vietcong had never
called him ‘nigger.’ ” The author places
his father, and Mr. Wright, in
sympathetic historical light. |
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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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If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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1965
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update 20 April 2010
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