The City of New Orleans

The City of New Orleans

As I spend my time reflecting on my time here in New Orleans, I have come to some revelations. It's hard, really, to write more — I think I've covered a lot surrounding my sentiments of the city covering different topics and backgrounds. So I think I'll just take some time to appreciate the city for what it is. I guess I could talk a bit about the difference between Louis and Lestat, or I could talk about Binx. But ultimately, I think what I want to say is something those books already know, and that I've also caught up to.

There is a reason writers come here. Not just to set their stories here, but to actually be here, to sit in the humidity and let the humidity work through them. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire in the French Quarter. Truman Capote grew up in these streets. Anne Rice built an entire mythology out of the specific moral architecture of this place, the way licentiousness and grief share a face here – as shown through Lestat and Louis, which is something you feel the moment you walk outside at night and find the city fully, unapologetically alive in a way that makes you feel like the rest of America has been doing something wrong.

What strikes me is how extraordinary the city manages to be. How it takes such a mundane things and turns it into something interesting. Take this picture of Mallards waddling through Audubon Park for example. I could have sworn they were gossiping about us walking their space. Shotgun houses painted lime green and lavender in the Marigny, sitting shoulder to shoulder, hanging baskets of flowers over red doors, the whole block looking like someone chose joy very deliberately whilst being in a place where much of the time there’s none. Aesthetic restaurants — warm candlelit rooms with brass pitchers on white brick shelves. Greek food in a place where Greekness isn’t a first thought. I loved walking on the rail tracks cutting through flat afternoon heat with the city spreading in every direction, but just for a second, let me be a kid. Chinese-inspired red lanterns glowing from dark ceilings in the club. And of course the swamp light at the edge of still water where the reflection of thought through some hanging sunglasses and the sky's reflection become the same thing, especially in such a heavy place as the Whitney Plantation. None of these images feel separate from each other here. They accumulate into something that is harder to name than beauty, closer to truth, but imbued with immense horror in the same breath.

““America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.””

— Tennessee Williams

Underneath all of it, I will continue to remember the hands that built New Orleans. What I want to keep returning to though, is the immense peace I’ve felt while being here. Of course, nothing here is resolved, but the peace of a city that has survived this much and still insists on the table being set, the food being extraordinary, the music going while rain comes and goes contains an enormous positive weight. There is a sovereignty in the way people move through New Orleans, like they have learned something about the relationship between pleasure and survival that the rest of the world is unaware of. I felt it eating in that house on Lake Shore, I felt it standing in Preservation Hall with the sound moving through the room like water, I felt it in the small, quiet moments, listening to the waves and the cries of Edna on Grand Isle, and watching the bridge light up at night on the levee. I have felt that peace in every moment I’ve been here and I will cherish that feeling until the day I die.

I came here with books, for the books. But now, I leave here having walked through them. And with a profound understanding for why the books were written here in the first place. New Orleans is a city that’s been imposed upon those humans that were forced to make meaning out of the absolute circumstance of limitations. And sure, maybe I am reaping the benefits of those limitations. But having absorbed the history I am happy that I am finally able to understand what makes this city an amazing city. And the truth is, it really just is itself. The city of New Orleans.

A Court of Throne's and Color

A Court of Throne's and Color

I'm not going to pretend to understand Mardi Gras, but I really enjoy the colors of it.

Maybe that's the most honest thing I can say walking through New Orleans. The colors don't ask for comprehension. Purple: Justice, Green: Faith, Gold: Power — they simply land on you like a verdict.

There's something about watching a parade move through a street that certifies those colors. Before the floats, before the brass and the beads catching light mid-air, a street is just a street. Although, I’d also argue that one should consider knowing the history of said street if it was built in New Orleans. It could be anywhere. Yet, it’s here. Then the parade passes through and the whole block becomes Somewhere. The street becomes Somewhere. The colors did that. The spectacle did that. The history of the colors did that. And after standing inside of it, I can’t unfeel it.

What does it mean that a city like New Orleans needs color? Why does it need Mardi Gras? I think my original qualm with my misunderstanding of it was that it didn’t make sense to have abstract colors and beads and float and music and food just for the sake of celebrating. It didn’t make sense to me. It didn’t make sense that it scheduled its excess into a liturgical calendar, crammed all its desire into one Tuesday, then (most likely) woke up the next morning and let someone draw a cross of ash on its forehead? So I did some research: The word Carnival translates from the Latin carnelevamen ~ farewell to flesh ~ a last indulgence before forty days of fasting and penance. French and Spanish Catholics carried that tradition across the Atlantic, planted it in Louisiana's particular mud, and watched it grow into something the Church probably didn't anticipate. Kings and queens. Royal courts. Hierarchies celebrated in public, decorated in sequins, legitimate and absurd at once. 

The Rex Organization formally codified the colors in 1892: purple for justice, gold for power, green for faith. Justice and power named by the same organizations that, at that time, barred Black people, women, Jews, and Italians from membership entirely. The irony doesn't require commentary. It just sits there, in the color. 

I keep thinking about the pointed mask and where that silhouette has been in this country. The Catholic capirote dates to the Spanish Inquisition, the pointed cone becoming the preferred form because the tip was thought to direct the penitent's prayers upward — shame reaching skyward, someone who had sinned coming publicly to account for it. Then the shape travels. Gets absorbed into The Birth of a Nation. Gets mass-produced and worn by men who used it not to seek mercy but to terrorize people in these very streets. Commentators link the Klan's visual identity directly to the folk traditions of carnival, circus, and minstrelsy. The same cultural lineage. The same instinct toward costume and procession and the anonymity of the crowd, turned into something unforgivable. This is why as I walked through the Mardi Gras museum I had a strange sense of unease. Seeing the people of rural Louisiana celebrate on tractors with beer, colorful masks and pointy hats – though I doubt even they understood what they were celebrating. Because if they did, they would know, none of the colors were welcome or prompted to be shared with those who actually were.

Another example of this is the Mystick Krewe of Comus which remained closely tied to Confederate ideals after the Civil War, including ex-Confederates in their parades, and the second krewe was founded by a club working toward the same goals as the KKK. The royal court, in turn, was not a metaphor in their eyes. It was an actual power structure with a throne and a very specific list of people not invited. There was a Robert E. Lee statue here for decades, presiding over a traffic circle like he owned it. It's gone now (thank God), but just the ideologies that these “courts” were built on a semblance of misplaced pride makes me shiver.

I should specify though that what I’ve been feeling walking through the streets of New Orleans isn't anger exactly. It's the sensation of the layers, the mixation of cultures, and of course all of the colors my eyes have been inputting that didn’t seem to exist until I got here. The feeling standing on ground that has been everything at once, and seeing the ignorance peel through the city that still holds so much beauty.

The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was founded in 1909 precisely because the carnival parades were segregated (crazy I know). And Black New Orleans didn't wait to be included, despite the historical relevance of Mardi Gras being rooted in racist, albeit English ideals. It built its own court, its own royalty, its own spectacle within a tradition designed to shut it out. It reminds me of the founding of HBCU’s in the South and other Black organizations that have built and designed specifically because one group didn’t want to be inclusive. I’ve actually had the unfortunate encounter of someone telling that they HBCU’s should “no longer exist” because things are integrated now, and it “served it purpose.” This is why I am glad that The Mardi Gras Indians sew suits by hand that take an entire year to make, and that they built a culture that is entrenched in preservation of culture — and even acknowledging the help a separate group grave to Black people by paying homage to Indigenous Americans who sheltered and aided runaway enslaved Africans. Now we are walking through the colorful streets that once legally excluded them, purple, green, and gold beads and all. And the preservation of this tradition, including showcasing it in The Backstreet Museum makes it all the more colorful.

I imagine arriving back into the city just as the street cleaners were sweeping up after the last parade passed (Moviegoer, pg.218). All that color from the celebration placed on a curb. The city, exhaling. I can see someone stepping out of an Ash Wednesday service with a gray smear on their forehead, sitting in their car for a minute before driving anywhere having indulged and splurged in celebrations the day before. I can imagine them not really thinking about all the color they experienced. Not really looking out the window to consider that what they’d just celebrated may have simultaneously been ostracizing. But nonetheless, they still celebrated — and went to church the next day, still dizzy from the stimulation of yesterday's juicy colors. And weeks from now, they’ll go to work — forgetting about the parade — yet still embellishing and appreciating the colors, regardless of history, of New Orleans. The Robert E. Lee statue is gone. But the systemic inequalities are not. The parade continues. Purple for justice, gold for power, green for faith. What that means now, who it belongs to now, is not settled. But I find, with the colors and richness of New Orleans, I'm not in a rush for it to be.

Rhythm & Ruse

Rythym and Ruse

The rain falls — 8am then 2pm then 5pm. Unpredictable increments. Unpredictable screams. It’s similar to how Bolden felt in Coming Through Slaughter when the veil of emotions led him, unstrung through life. “There was no control except the mood of his power … he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot — see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.” (pg.37). When he played, Ondaatje describes his music as having no control beyond the mood of his own power. Notes passed before he even approached them, chasing something he could never quite name. Jazz, for Bolden, was not a release from the weight of living in the South; it was that weight, made audible. The music didn't save him; it mirrored him so perfectly that when the mirror shattered, he shattered with it.

What’s so interesting about Jazz is that the music chords rely heavily on four-note, 7th chords rather than standard triads. They use rich extensions (like 9ths, 11ths, and 13ths) for color and tension, and are typically organized into smooth, predictable progressions (like the \(ii-V-I\)). That is why it often feels ‘unresovled’ or ‘open,’ or might I say, soulful. When I stand in the rain in the French Market of New Orleans, I can somewhat understand Bolden’s mind. The whiplash of just sloshing through life and then having to become serious once the rain dries out is stressful. I can empathize with Bolden, and I love Ondaatje’s mesh style of prose and poetry that really allows us to swim through Bolden’s mind.

Nora’s Song

“Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his bone over town.

Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his

bone over town. Dragging his bone

over and over dragging his bone over town.

Then and then and then and then

dragging his bone over town

and then

dragging his bone home.”

I’ll admit, I don’t know what it’s like to be a musician. I don’t know what sweat and brow goes into going home with a nickel from a silver hat from the 1960’s. But regardless, as I listened to the band in Preservation Hall – I could feel the rain. I could feel the soul.

New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century was the only city in the world where jazz could have been born. It was a place where African rhythms, French Creole culture, the Protestant hymn, and the Catholic street parade all crashed into each other on the same block. Storyville — the legal red-light district that pulses through the novel like a second nervous system, pumped capital and money into music the way the Mississippi pumps silt into the Gulf. Bolden emerged from that pressure the way a note emerges from a horn, forced out by something larger than itself. As I walk down Iberville Street, near Canal St. where Bolden's final parade ended in blood and collapse, it reminds me of Ondaatje's description of him spinning at the Liberty-Iberville intersection, playing until the notes were “more often now, every five seconds,” (pg.129) until something in his body finally gave — “can't stop the air the red force coming up” (pg.131). It makes me feel like the city itself is a kind of instrument, tuned just slightly past what any one person can bear. Just like Preservation Hall, 45 minutes of “blues and the hymn sadder than the blues and then the blues sadder than the hymn.” (pg.81) just so I can forget slightly that the veil life holds is uncovered. And like Bolden, the music reminds a person of the rain outside, so much so that you might want to sink your head underneath some water.

“In the heat heart of the Brewitts’ bathtub his body exploded. The armor of dirt fell apart and the nerves and muscles loosened. He sank his head under the water for almost a minute bursting up showering water all over the room. Under the surface were the magnified sounds of his body against the enamel, drip, noise of the pipe. He came up and lay there not washing just letting the dirt and the sweat melt into the heat. Stood up and felt everything drain off him. “ (pg.58)

And of course, behind all the music is Nora. Bolden's wife — a woman who worked for three years as a prostitute before marrying Buddy, and who somehow survived him without bitterness. When Webb comes to her door asking about the disappearance, she gives him nothing he hasn't earned. And when Buddy finally returns two years later, after acting like a child to Webb, he gently but in a way that frightens her more than his rages ever did, meets him with devastating honesty: “Still love you Buddy … not like it was before because I don't know you anymore but I care about you, love you as if you weren't my husband” (pg.122). It seems to be part of the city for those who are artists to accept this way of living just as is.

“You may perhaps but it is not real. When I
played parades we would be going down Canal Street and at each
intersection people would hear just the fragment I happened to be
playing and it would fade as I went farther down Canal.”

— Coming Through Slaughter, pg.93-pg.94

Another example of this is what happens on page 92 when Bolden is hiding from his life, staying with pianist Jaelin Brewitt and his wife Robin. He is in love with Robin. She is in love with him. And Jaelin — more sensitive, more loving, more patient than Buddy by almost any measure — simply walks downstairs and sits at his piano while they do the Devil’s Tango. His music travels up through the floor to the bedroom where Buddy and Robin lie together. “His practice reached us upstairs,” Bolden reflects, “each note a finger on our flesh … The music was his dance in the auditorium of enemies. But I loved him downstairs as much as she loved the man downstairs.” (pg.92). And as I walk through the Marigny on a Tuesday night, music bleeding out of every doorway, it reminds me of that passage, the idea that jazz has always held grief and desire in the same hand. It makes me feel that sound, in this city, is never just sound. It is everything that cannot be said out loud.

And I think that overall, what I’m trying to say in this blog is that Buddy Bolden is just like any of us if we didn’t have something that grounded us. And although Bolden virtually had music to ground him, the four-note, 7th chords and incremental rain made it so that the ground itself kept shifting, and every resolution dissolved into the next unresolved tension, every moment of stillness was swallowed by the next squall, until there was no difference between the music and the man playing it. And this truth could be said about New Orleans itself, a city where music and body were commodified on the same block, which is why the musician, and the jazz itself probably shared the same emotion — led to the same lifestyle. Thirty piano players pulling in thousands weekly, brothels and jazz halls sharing the same advertisement in the same Blue Book, and where, as musician Danny Barker put it plainly, “if you wanted to go anywhere [in New Orleans] at all, you had better learn to play something.”

Angels Watch Me Through the Night

Angels Watch Me Through the night

4121 Wilson Ave, New Orleans, LA 70126

“I can’t stand it anymore,” are words I wish could just plaster themselves to walls and to dirt and be cultivated into a fruit that won’t perish. Unfortunately, my shouts and cries are only that — shouts and cries. And whatever pain and anguish I feel from the burden of my history will only disintegrate if I lay down, and choose to “not” stand it anymore. I stood in Congo Square and moved through the Whitney Plantation. I read Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House and stood edge of the East, endured Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave in a city that contains both the beauty and the evidence of everything those books/movie contained. People have tried to forgo the evidence, but New Orleans doesn't let you ignore it. From fifteen thousand feet up, where the aerial photographs are taken, what remains of 4121 Wilson Avenue is, as Broom writes, "a minuscule point, a scab of green" (Prologue). An overgrown lot where a house full of people used to be, reduced from above to something that looks like nothing. From that height her brother Carl would not be seen, sitting five times a week on an ice chest where the living room floor used to be. The reduction. The animalization. The inability or unwillingness to stand on the ground and see what is actually there. Humans. Standing above the bodies that built New Orleans, you cannot be abstract and pretend the ground was washed over by white. The city will not allow it and the ground remembers too much.

I think there is something to be said about remembrance. About standing in the anguish of what my people experienced. Watching Patsey from 12 Years a Slave be struck over 100 times by the evil held in the hand that held the textured whip. My stomach churned at the sight — I wasn't disgusted, I was angered, and somehow overwhelmed with burden. It's almost as if my stomach and my lungs had become chained together and I was drowning in muddy water. And after the movie was over, this feeling held for an insurmountable number of days. Here’s the thing though, there’s only so much muddy water I can stomach before I realize there is no point in digesting it.

Of course Northup didn't want to endure the muddy water either as he said so plainly, "aloud and boldly," before the first blow ever landed from Burch when he first awoke a slave (Chapter III, pg. 44). "I prayed for mercy, but my prayer was only answered with imprecations and with stripes. I thought I must die beneath the lashes of the accursed brute. Even now the flesh crawls upon my bones, as I recall the scene" (Chapter III, pg. 45). When his tormentor's arm grew tired, he stopped and asked if Northup still insisted he was free. He did. The paddle broke. Then came the rope. And still Northup would not say he was a slave. "All his brutal blows could not force from my lips the foul lie that I was a slave" (Chapter III, pg. 45). And even in saying “I can’t stand it anymore, I am who I say I am.” his words still became white noise, a white lie. I guess what I’m trying to say is, it didn’t matter what was true — the truth of his skin’s existence was the only thing that mattered.

I almost feel apathetic. I didn't cry as much as the others when 12 Years a Slave finished because to do so, would be to not only relive the trauma, but in some ways, it felt like crying gave the white supremacists in the movie power. I must admit — given my history (my mother working in the justice system with falsely incarcerated people, racism that I've experienced in my lifetime not only from white people but from other groups who have the archetypal influence) it's extremely difficult to be any type of empathetic towards the ignorance of racism. I classify it as hate, point blank, and will not tolerate it.

And at the Whitney Plantation, I stood in front of the sculpture garden — dozens of cast iron heads mounted on steel poles, faces of the insurgents from the 1811 German Coast Uprising, arranged in rows in dark soil — the apathy remained. I knew that these faces were a memorial to something that actually happened: the heads of the executed severed and placed on poles atop the River Road levees for forty miles. Somehow though, I couldn’t bring myself to cry. Because what I kept thinking about was Broom’s grandmother being born on Ormond Plantation on that River Road, into a world where this had already happened and been quietly absorbed into the landscape — "the facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life," she writes, "my beginning precedes me. Absences allow us one power over them: they do not speak a word. We say of them what we want. Still, they hover, pointing fingers at our backs" (Movement I, Prologue). Standing in front of those faces on poles, I felt that hovering. And then separately, the shame of it — which Broom describes not as grief but as "a warring within, a revolt against oneself. It can bury you standing if you let it" (Movement II, Chapter I). I think that shame, or realization rather just made me feel that crying would just be accepting those pointing fingers. The worst part — what makes me most apathetic, is that one of the reasons why Broom was able to publish her book, and the only reason Northup was able to escape, was because the white man was there. A question we then must ask ourselves is: Why does this (white man asserts a leg up)structure still exist?

I stood in front of the stories nurtured by the Federal Writers’ Project, one of which read the prayer: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord, my soul to take. And this I ask for Jesus' sake. Amen.” To fathom that a prayer I said throughout my childhood most likely was passed down from my slave ancestors is incomprehensible. You say those words as a child without knowing they were first said in darkness, by people who genuinely could not be sure they would see morning. And funnily enough – it now makes sense why my grandmother changed the last two lines to, “Angels watch me through the night, until I wake in morning light.” Changing the context, changes the contemporary reality we so desperately want to exist.

Ultimately though, despite the pain, despite the anguish, after this week, I've gained a new sense of pride as a Black person. Not the kind that needs to be performed or explained. The kind that comes from understanding the full length of what I come from — the people who marched fifty armed toward New Orleans knowing they would probably die, who held their names in their mouths even while being beaten, who prayed the prayer I prayed as a child in the darkness of cabins in Louisiana soil, who sewed beads for a year for two appearances, who cut the grass, who took the paper menu. I come from people who have been making beauty and meaning and resistance out of conditions designed to produce none. To stand in New Orleans and finally see that clearly, from the ground, not from fifteen thousand feet up, not through the tourism brochure, not through the mythology — is something I will continue to remember. And there is evidence of this sentiment: being able to eat with Rich Black Caribbeans of Lake Shore in the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen, embracing a vision from Elvin Ross who is reimagining the tragedy of Jazzland which didn’t permit reconstruction for those (mostly Black people) living in the area. Seeing this, I know that the world is my oyster, and I’m taking advantage of it — heavily entitled, and with every reason to be. Unashamed, despite any odds that are pinned against me by the racism that still persists in America.

““Now I lay me, down to sleep, I pray the Lord my Soul to Keep. Angels watch me through the night, until I wake in morning light.””

— An Unknown Slave

The Awakening

The Awakening

Sometimes it feels like I've already died and now am just reliving my memories. Maybe this is how I could describe arriving at Grand Isle and peeling the coast line with the brown oiled water and the sand with black bits. As I arrived, it was with no expectations, and with many unrelated thoughts on my mind. Of course, the journey from the airport and New Orleans consisted of embellishing the natural greenery and the wheels soaked in swampy water. But; I was not prepared for the history – confederate flags, lack of people, color (except for the violently painted houses), and lack of vibrancy expelled in the Grand Isle that contradicted the pages of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. I wish I could say that “There were acres of yellow camomile reaching out on either hand. Further away still, vegetable gardens abounded, with frequent small plantations of orange or lemon trees intervening.” (pg.21) but there was not. I was simply attempting to put myself outside of the greenery I saw on my way to New Orleans.

However, this still doesn’t stop me from thinking: Edna feeling her certain “anguish” while being in the Grand Isle is not why the Grand Isle island is dull now. After arriving at the Island, I sat on the porch of the AirBnB, the H20 Psycho house, and did my best to enjoy the leisure and space of being on an island whose history is not forgotten. I tried my best to enjoy the lengths I had to breathe in spite of that history. Kate Chopin made it clear what the island was meant for – so certainly, I would try. I think reading The Awakening while being on the island allowed me to appreciate Edna’s state of mind more than if I wasn’t. I perhaps might have hated her character if I had read the book outside of Grand Isle. But the sheer descriptive properties of not only the Island, but the transition from Grand Isle to New Orleans allowed me to step into a 1899 white woman’s shoes, eat up the wind and salt in the air, and imagine myself walking with my own Mrs.Ratignolle into a bath house on the beach and fanning myself off with a patterned pleated fan made of gauze with a “long, narrow ribbon.” (pg.23). I had to put the book down at some point though, and when I did — my mind returned to reality. The saturated beach sand turned into a plain, flaccid color, the wind was just the wind, the blue water, brown and oiled, and the ATV’s holding Trump flags behind the gushing sunset were tangible and in a such a birds-eye-view way that cracks on the wooden floor inside the AirBnB provided me with more visual stimulatory comfort than the natural view. This reality, mixed with the one where all of the white individuals in The Starfish moved out at the first sight of "foreigners" made it difficult to truly absorb the variegation of Grand Isle. That is, if there really was much of any there to begin with.

It’s a little unfortunate that I experienced Esplanade and surrounding streets after the book was read. However, when we all got back in the van and drove off from Grand Isle to New Orleans, many of my unrelated thoughts had dissipated and I could truly appreciate the topography that was Louisiana. It is true that I still feel as if I am reliving my memories of some distant past life, but now that I can see Edna’s house for what it is: built on the backs of slaves and uncompensated labour with a splash, no a deluge, of hate, I appreciate New Orleans 2026 a little bit more than however Kate Chopin described it in 1899.

Life is feeble. And I won’t give up another chance to “experience” the effusiveness of something given the history it provides through literature. So I am extremely grateful and happy to have experienced The Grand Isle the way that I did. I hope that maybe Kate Chopin wrestled in her lifetime with what she left out. Or that, if she was born today, maybe she would see the error in her methods with how she treated Black people and hierarchy of color in the novel.

I anyways empathize with Edna’s character in The Awakening. Maybe it’s just a placebo phantom, or the unrelated thoughts as I mentioned – but I could also feel “an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of [my] consciousness.” (pg.9) in the Grand Isle. I think it’s because I’m a woman. A Black woman at that. But also because I know that Edna was specifically a white woman in 1899 with the troubles that a white woman in 1899 would have. It could have been the blurred but bold line between the licentiousness of the Creole and the prudeness of the Kentucky Puritans and the fact of the existing “structures” existing in the first place that made Edna the way she was. That allowed her to describe the ocean as she did, “seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude,” (pg.20). In many ways it is the same way I feel about the cypress I witnessed along the Mississippi river as we rode in the van. Something I hadn’t experienced before, the mossy structures, the stilted architecture, yet — my relationary experiences made me wonder if I had. I therefore only feel apotheosis from the fact that I’ve experienced this “new” sensation in a different life – or otherwise, I’d peered into the future.

I say this, not to bash Grand Isle at all, but to appreciate that without The Awakening or the historical knowledge that I gained while being there, Grand Isle would’ve just been another spot in America with a most likely majority of racist people and a lot of American flags. It reminded me a lot of my mother’s hometown, Keyser West Virginia. Rural, a hometowny feel where I’m sure the hospitality amongst families is invaluable, and Christian to an extreme extent — but this time, with water and really green trees. As someone who is Black though, sometimes it feels as if, because “quadroon” nurses, and “black slaves” no longer exist (in the same context) in New Orleans, or specifically on the Grand Isle, the culture and substance that would exist today — has just completely dissipated (in the sense that the marginalized individuals are what brought vibrance to the island). And what’s left is just an empty shell of what once was. Palm trees, sand, wood, and tapered roofs.

Again, I highly appreciate the book for what it is, written for the time it was written. And while reading it, as I explained, I was completely engulfed in the emotions and colors that painted both The Grand Isle and New Orleans. I can point out a specific description of Edna’s house in the making — “Ellen brought him one of her dust-caps, and went into contortions of mirth, which she found it impossible to control, when she saw him put it on before the mirror as grotesquely as he could. Edna herself could not refrain from smiling when she fastened it at his request. So it was he who in turn mounted the ladder, unhooking pictures and curtains, and dislodging ornaments as Edna directed.” (pg.130). I can only imagine, now that I’ve seen what the Creole French & Spanish fusion infrastructure looks like, how her house would’ve looked. And I can envision the grunginess of the “work,” sweat, and grime that went to making it finished. That is, at least, how I felt from reading the book.

“An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul’s summer day. It was strange and unfamiliar; it was a mood...She was just having a good cry all to herself.”

— Ch.III, Pg.9