There's Another New Orleans

                                    By Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Where the roads crawl backwards

behind streets broken up in many places

and children stand in doorways,

staring. Their eyes look far away,

and a woman stands by the street corner

hollering for a dollar to take her to the shelter.

At the Chinese restaurant,

a blind man was having a meal after

a long day collecting coins that we

tourists threw into a plastic bowl

on Canal Street.

My girlfriends and I took a streetcar

from Bourbon down to the Gardens

where colonial mansions rush past you

with lost history. I didn’t know

you could ride a streetcar on a sidewalk

and watch houses disappear into history.

I wanted to feel the years.

I wanted to holler until I cried, or danced

through these colonial-mansion-streets

so the past would come flying out like

chicken feathers.

The colonial houses want to tell me

we have done away with the past?

But the streets behind our view crawl

backwards into history we came here

to remember or forget.

Someone should have kept the years for us.

Someone should have carved up the years

on pieces of metal for us.

At the restaurant door, I lose my step

in the dark. A five-year-old-boy

is playing the harmonica—nine o’clock

at night on Thursday. On Bourbon Street

nude girls are dancing in a bar,

and the five-year-old-boy outside,

on the sidewalk collects brown coins

into a plastic bowl. Will we ever know

what pennies can do?

Down the road, we forget the child,

the penny-collecting-harmonica-playing-child.

Just a few steps away, a saxophone

wails on a thin string. At Bourbon and Canal,

tourists come out in colonies, holding

on to the thin evening air.

What brings out the best of Canal Street

brings out the worst of Canal street.

The Saxophone player sweats and balloons

hard into the night air of footsteps coming

and going in search of food and drinks

and happiness. Lovers holding on to each

other as if afraid of unfamiliar ghosts.

There’s another New Orleans, I say,

where the blind man rises at dawn

below our passing feet.

You will not see him beneath the footsteps.

The tall buildings will lose him too,

in the French Quarters, where the smell

of Cajun spices and crawfish drowns us tourists.

The Gumbo tasted like home food to me,

and my God, they brought Jollof Rice

all the way here, and named it Jambalaya.

Our waitress placed me in the middle

of people eating fresh oysters and drinking

red wine. The wines and hot peppers will drown

only the moment. Outside the night air,

on our way back to where hotel rooms await us,

there, again is the five-year-old,

somebody’s son—the child who plays

the harmonica like no other person

March, 2002

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posted 9 November 2005