New Orleans

Some kind of way, I found myself in New Orleans. I was still such a long way from Los Angeles (do you hear how that word sounds on your lips? Say it again. Slowly. Lossssss Annnngeles. The allure is almost biblical). I was so far because I was stuck in the Southern air thick with heat, sweat, and hatred, too tired to take to the road again, and too restless to sleep quite so soon. And so I wandered, willfully lost in the mess of New Orleans streets.

I thought that here, there might be a possibility of fitting in. Here people came in every shade: pale white, burnt white, yellowed white, reddish brown, black as earth, and even creamy coffee brown. Here there is a blend of America and Africa and France and the Caribbean. You’d think, in this confusion, hatred based on the color of one’s skin would be a difficult endeavor. But I guess we’ve found a way.

I drift into a jazz club where there are three black musicians on piano, guitar, and bass. Their notes vibrate and hang in the air long after they were played. I sit and try to digest. In the booth next to me is a white woman with short hair, speaking English with a thick French accent to a man with a thick head of dark curls.

“It’s beautiful,” she murmurs to him, eyes fixed on the black performers. “It’s so real. It’s what I’ve been looking for.” She takes another sip of her whiskey, and gestures at the lone black couple dancing on the side of the room, “Americans have so much freedom, but so few of them know what to do with it. Jazz is so free.”

I think of my father toiling under the Alabama sun, bound to his land by his tenant status just like a slave. I think of my grandfather, and the plantation on which he was used, led about like chattel, and brutally beaten. I think of the blacks I saw leaning against the side of the street here, also stuck in New Orleans, because there was simply not enough standing room in the back of the bus.

I twist my body to turn to face the French woman and say, “I think jazz is sad. I think jazz might be the saddest thing on this Earth.” She looked at me with a sort of delight and wonder, as if I were a prop that had unexpectedly started to speak. I took that in, and then I left the bar.