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Return to Pontchartrain Park
By Gwendolyn Thompkins
Saturday, December 3, 2005 -- Six plates,
seven water glasses, four cups and saucers, a platter and a
tureen with a broken handle: These were the only possessions
that Weekend Edition Saturday senior editor Gwendolyn Thompkins
could salvage from her house in New Orleans. She sent back these
impressions.
In the 1950s, Pontchartrain Park made news as
"one of the biggest, most luxurious Negro developments ever
undertaken in the South."
It was the 1950s and we were proud Negroes,
breaking new ground near the lake. When residents Audrey and
Meldon Woods moved to Pontchartrain Park in 1958, it was so
quiet and tucked away that her father gave them a shotgun, just
in case. The Woodses were among the first to settle an elegantly
named street in Pontchartrain Park called Providence Place.
While New Orleans has always been an
integrated city, Pontchartrain Park was simultaneously a step
forward and a step back. It was a product of segregationist
thinking. But The Park, as we call it, also gave black New
Orleanians all the benefits of suburbia within city limits.
There is a vast and stately park in the
neighborhood with amenities such as a handsome golf course and a
Little League stadium. Across the street is Southern University
in New Orleans, the state school established for black college
kids in town. Surrounding the park are more than 1,000 modest
homes.
Somebody told the Times-Picayune
recently that growing up in Pontchartrain Park was like growing
up in Leave It to Beaver Land. I remember complaining as a
teenager in the 1980s that nothing ever happened here.
But there was a lot going on that I didn't
see at the time. More than 90 percent of the people here owned
their own homes. Nearly every kid I knew went to college -- the
worst student in my class ended up playing with Lionel Hampton.
One resident, Ernest Morial, went on to become the first black
mayor of New Orleans.
Pontchartrain Park today is a thousand
variations on a theme of catastrophe —
from my block, clear to the other side of the neighborhood.
Outside my house, at the top of what used to be my sister's
window, I found a dead fish stuck to the blind.
Many Pontchartrain Park residents are people
in their 70s. Some are holding out for some good news from the
insurance companies, hoping to be able to rebuild. Others aren't
sure they'll return home.
What has kept New Orleans together for nearly 300
years is neighbors doing the best they can. People like to say
that good fences make good neighbors. But if you ask the folks
of Pontchartrain Park, Gerttown and Back o' Town, of New Orleans
East, Gentilly and Lakeview, they'd say something different. In
New Orleans, good levees make good neighbors. Always have.
Always will.
Gwendolyn
Thompkins: "My house on the corner of Mithra Street and
Press Drive never had a drop of water in it that wasn't mixed
with Pine Sol or Mr. Clean." That changed in the— days
following Hurricane Katrina.
Source:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5036200
posted 14 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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American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding
of the Republic
By Joseph J. Ellis
This subtle,
brilliant examination of the period
between the War of Independence and the
Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner
Ellis (Founding
Brothers)
among the finest of America's narrative
historians. Six stories, each centering
on a significant creative achievement or
failure, combine to portray often flawed
men and their efforts to lay the
republic's foundation. Set against the
extraordinary establishment of the most
liberal nation-state in the history of
Western Civilization... in the most
extensive and richly endowed plot of
ground on the planet are the terrible
costs of victory, including the
perpetuation of slavery and the cruel
oppression of Native Americans. Ellis
blames the founders' failures on their
decision to opt for an evolutionary
revolution, not a risky severance with
tradition (as would happen, murderously,
in France, which necessitated
compromises, like retaining slavery).
Despite the injustices and brutalities
that resulted, Ellis argues, this
deferral strategy was a profound insight
rooted in a realistic appraisal of how
enduring social change best happens.
Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic
prose will make this a holiday season
hit.—
Publishers Weekly /
American Creation (Joseph Ellis
interview) |
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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
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
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2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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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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