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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.
“3 years, 10 months, and 19 days...” That's what a woman buried on Mount Moor had lovingly carved into the tombstone for her child. "That's a mama who loved her baby", I said to my brother in passing. We read off their names, dates, and military service as we walked around the small grounds, hemmed in on every side by a new mall and its parking lots, in an area of Rockland County that was swampland when we were growing up here. There was actually nothing to see on the road from Nanuet to Nyack, but for this hidden little gem of a cemetery tucked into boggy marshland nobody else wanted, as fitting a historical tribute to segregation for ethnic minorities as ever.
Acadians, Cajuns, and Creoles shared the same fate, too. Bayou water is considered "bad" water, because mosquitoes give sickness to the people forced to live there. What the new laws couldn't wipe off the face of the earth, nature certainly could. It was an economical way to get rid of a despised people (often better than the European colonists around them who couldn't acclimate to this new place, similar as it is in climate to Europe, but that wasn't the real problem) through deliberate marginalization and severe economic poverty, except for one powerfully overlooked fact, and that was this: already-oppressed minorities often bond with similarly afflicted tribes, and so we did.
What was once a power play among the socio-economic elite, based on their weirdly outdated prejudices against "interbreeding", allowed our ancestors the relative freedom of marrying whoever they choose, which often meant mating with the much greater genetic stability present in the indigenous people who walked their way here, carrying their culture and robust good health with them. And so, it backfired against the minority elite horribly, which only angered the white man even more. We saw name after name of a people who lived over 80 years and more, way before modern medicine was available to them.
Unfortunately, their children didn't fare better. We saw a lot of markers and smaller headstones with one date etched simply into the stone, as places to memorialize their still-born babies before a naming ceremony could take place. I'd passed by the small cemetery many times, always rushing to make an errand on someone else's time, but this time, my brother went along with whatever I wanted. I priced out a few items in the bloated mall that are completely overpriced for this land and its economy, and we both left empty-handed, to visit my grandparents at their resting place. It only seemed fitting.
We were baffled by the overly ornate constructions of chain restaurants that we know are no good, wondering aloud how any amount of business could sustain such an obvious waste of space. Most of the square footage was blown on bad plastic decorations serving one purpose: to attract the eye of someone who'd obviously never been to a mall before, which is totally out-of-date for the area. I can't imagine that this "new" mall will up stay for very long, and that's a comfort to me, too. Long after these stores (with their cheap shoddy merchandise) will be plowed underground, our ancestors will still reside in relative peace, nestled in a little hillside that overlooks the real Palisades of Rockland, with their beautifully rocky facades. Happy Earth Day, 2016.
