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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
in the whole world.
March, 2002
posted 9 November 2005 |
