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Me and my boyfriend "Kunte Kente" spent a few of my birthdays in New Orleans, and I could tell by the way I had a feel for the city that I'd been there before, in another lifetime: the food, the music, the way I was greeted at the airport....this Acadian girl was home. Of course, I'm the original northern branch of a family tree that's stretched itself wide across this country we live in, though often not of our own choosing. The harsh heat and humidity endured by the Cajuns and Creoles who had settled in the bayou told me everything I needed to know about our history, because we're made for adversity.
Still, the American South can be so very different from New York because of its deeply segregated past. When I took a road trip to Graceland in college, I'd never seen black folk order food from a diner just to eat it in a car parked in the parking lot outside of a restaurant. It was scary and strange to me. So, too, did New Orleans have that dividing line back in the late 90s, before the flood. I'd never seen poverty that sharply split between the fat white tourists in town, and the children who performed for them in the streets, with bottle caps on the bottoms of their shoes instead of taps.
Kent warned me that we'd be crossing more divides like the French Quarter's, if we wanted to see some of the prominent tourist attractions of New Orleans, and Congo Square was on our list of "must see" places. He and I met in a recording studio, and Kent worked as a professional musician before we met, sometimes during our relationship, too. I'd also studied the history of jazz and blues in school. Most of my music is heavy on the R&B and hip-hop, as well as the classics. We simply had to go see where it took root and spread out from the epicenter of the square to the rest of the world.
Instead of a dusty dirt square packed with drummers, we found a bunch of tidy bricks neatly arranged in a circle, and we were the only people visiting that day. The weather had turned a little rainy, though nothing frightening to us, so we spent some time walking the circles of stones in the pattern they're laid out in, like the beginning of "The Wiz" musical from Broadway. But, that wasn't the biggest part of our trip over there: it was first stopping at a dive bar to talk with a white-haired hipster about directions before we crossed a serious four-lane highway to the ghetto, before we walked past openly burning garbage cans in broad daylight and burned-out car wrecks abandoned by the side of the road, like New York City during the 70s and 80s. The dividing line between us and our destination was that clear, and that real.
Back in the heyday of "Online Dating", freedom reigned alongside the brave and the slightly (to very) insane, and I was right there with it on my desktop. Like any other amusement or entertainment, it can become addictive really quick, sort of like shoe shopping but with much more partner-swapping involved. Don't like a guy's email or photo? Oh, well. On to the next one! And there was always another one out there.
In order to truly test the waters—I'd been publicly against it in the past, based on the principles of human attraction and hard science—I dived in deeply, surfing in-between jobs posted to the printer at the office, or at home on the weekends. For the first time in my life, I was single for a prolonged period of time. I was accustomed to having a man around, especially with his 150-lb. dog that he left behind quickly, as New York City totally kicked the shit out of yet another recent arrival.
For years, men had formed a crucial part of my economy. Because of their sometimes higher-earning potential and/or easier availability for work, I could at least count on my man to have a job that would pay his bills while I paid mine. It was the only type of equality we knew in our working class homes. You do your thing, I do mine. No man = harder times. We became reliant on them for holding down money on their end, while we struggled to hold onto jobs we were significantly underpaid for, in workplaces still permeated with the attitude that women could just leave an office to get married.
Women could make it to leadership, but saddled with an entire family? Yeesh...not on our salaries. I was used to paying for my home, my car, all of my own insurance, plus food and clothes, but with absolutely no extras. I went for years without taking a day off, or a day at the beach using the subway, because who would take care of my big dog? Oh, yeah: if I wanted to go on a date after work, I arranged for it during the day while working, took the train back to Brooklyn, walked my dog (or hired a dog walker if I had money), and returned home after the date (paying pricey cab-fares) so I could be there when my very large dog woke up earlier than anyone else in our household, in case the neighbors complained again (even the ones with noisy kids and dogs), because I'm "me" and they're from out-of-town.
Easy, right? I did it as smartly as I could. I used blurry or out-of-date photos to obscure my beauty so I could have a conversation over email that lasted more than a few rounds, but it didn't work. Word got out, and New York is my native market, nowwhatimsayin? Within months, I dated: an international explorer to the Antarctic who recently video-chatted with cute schoolkids through his website, two video producers, a physicist-turned-oil-derivative day-trader with extremely deep pockets and a beautiful apartment, a celebrity chef from a popular t.v. show (I had no idea who he was, just back from Germany and all), a not-so-famous actor, a very handsome Transylvanian audio engineer/house cleaner, an opera singer still working a day job, two writers (a broke poet and a dull journalist), a French businessman with a trés chic West Village pad, and a motorcycling lighting designer in his 50s with the requisite country house in upstate New York...you get the idea. And all of them were wrong for me.
It was either that their looks weren't on par with mine (and I am notoriously forgiving in that department, ladies, just ask around), or their temperament/attitude about life sucked, or they were culturally out-of-depth in my New York home, or their ethnicity wasn't "down home" enough for this area (meaning my entire family would hate them at first sight), or religiously they didn't fit into my life, or their work was boring, or their addictive disorder raged out-of-control...the list went on and on. I wasn't especially picky, either. I was just open to "putting myself out there", like the cliché says. I'd never been able to do that before, because there'd always been a man waiting in the wings to date me, like I was their salami ticket on the deli line that finally came up. It was all about them and what they thought they wanted from me, but never me really, because I could do what I wanted to, with hard work and some time.
With that in mind (plus a million paranoid rants in my head told to me in my mutha's accent about the seediness of "singles ads" from years past), I came up with a fake email name loosely based on New Orleans culture called "Madame Leveaux", for an extra layer of protection and security. It worked remarkably well. It was French-sounding (like my name), but vague enough not to attract undo notice from those men looking to date and score rather quickly, which was fine by me. If I didn't like them, then it was easy enough not to answer an email again, and if I did, well...have you heard about women in their 30s? It's not hype, gents. That's our raging hormonal time, like a young man in his late teens and 20s.
I wasn't a "cougar", but I was old enough to know the "who/what/when/how/and why" I wanted exactly what I wanted (after years of solid relationships that fell short for me, through no fault of my own), and to the chronically-inept, very casual web surfer—in contrast to my rather professional posture as a desktop publisher—it was excruciating to entertain my emails AND my presence. I was either better than any photo could capture as a real live person, or wayyy smarter than some simple emails could hope to suggest to my male audience, which has always been my problem. I am "too too", you know? Too much for you.
And so, when I did a little web surfing of my own just the other day, as part of some historical research to go along with an old souvenir poster that I'd bought on a trip to New Orleans before the flood, I wasn't surprised to learn that the real Madame Laveau was far more than some local voodoo priestess. No, amis. She was way more than a tourist attraction cooked up for the white folk comin' to town, looking for the exotic to go along with their "purple drank" down on Bourbon Street. The real Madame was a lot like me: an herbalist, healer, and apothecary by trade. That's right, friends. An educated, working woman doin' her own thing excellently well, in a town and time that was vehemently opposed to it at first, I'm sure. But, that didn't keep them from comin' back to they mama, just like y'all do. Welcome back.
