Xavier Review 42:1

XAVIERREVIEW

42.1, Spring 2022

Xavier Review, a journal of literature and culture, is published twice a year. © Xavier University of Louisiana.

Ralph Adamo Editor

Katheryn Laborde Managing Editor

Thomas Bonner, Jr. Editor Emeritus

Jason Todd Associate Editor

Thomas Bonner, Jr., Biljana Obradovic, James Shade, Oliver Hennessey

Robin Vander, Mark Whitaker, Nicole Pepinster Greene Contributing Editors

Bill Lavender Graphic Design

Editors, Xavier University Studies, 1961-1971

Rainulf A. Stelzman, Hamilton P. Avegno, Leon Baisier Editors, Xavier Review

Charles Fort, 1980-1982

Thomas Bonner, Jr., 1982-2002

Richard Collins, 2000-2007

Nicole Pepinster Greene, 2007-2011 Managing Editor

Robert Skinner, 1989-2010

Unsolicited manuscripts may be submitted in typescript or by email attachment with a brief letter of submission and a self-addressed envelope for reply to the Editors, Xavier Review, Box 89, Xavier University of Louisiana, New Orleans, LA 70125. Essays should conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers with parenthetical citations and a list of Works Cited. Manuscripts accepted for publication will be requested as electronic files. Subscriptions are $20 for individuals, $25 for institutions. Editorial inquiries may be addressed to Ralph Adamo at radamo@xula.edu. All other inquiries may be addressed to Katheryn Laborde at klaborde@xula.edu. Xavier Review is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse, as well as other indices.

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ISSN 0887-6681

Editor’s Note

With this issue we return to our usual practice of publishing two separate volumes of Xavier Review per year, while recent exigencies had made one double issue a more accessible goal.

We are pleased to be able to present chapters from three upcoming books by three veteran New Orleans writers. We have non-fiction work by James Nolan and Randy Fertel, and while their author biographies at the end of the issue summarize brilliant careers, I wanted to express our editorial excitement at being able to present excerpts from books that will create waves locally and beyond. Similarly, the excerpt from Jonathan Kline’s new ‘novel in tiny stories’ challenges preconceptions about the nature and reach of the contemporary novel; his book is guaranteed to produce heat as well as light.

In addition, as usual, we offer poems by exceptional poets, as well as personal and review essays, every page worth a long look.

Our cover photos and photo-essay in this issue are by local (by way of Arkansas) underground photographer, Charles Franklin.

When I began writing editor’s notes at the beginning of my time as this journal’s editor, I had intended to use the forum to comment not only on contents of the current journal but also on wider literary and social issues. At this point in time, however, words—at least words by me trying to make sense of our world—are difficult to produce. I only want to say to future generations: once you have put guns back in their proper place, and worked out ways to honor the lives and ambitions of everyone from every community, congratulations on improving the world we are handing you, and apologies for the distressed state in which we left things.

Xavier Review 42.1, Spring 2022

Editor’s Note — iv

James Nolan

Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans (excerpt) — 7

Floyd Collins

Teresa: Nights on the Delta — 37

Charles Franklin

City Park: A Portfolio of Photographs — 40

Randy Fertel

Cultural Tensions in American Popular Culture — 54

Malaika Favorite

A Review of Delta Tears, poems by Philip C. Kolin — 73

Juyanne James from Personal Essays on Fear — 79

Tim Skeen

Two Poems — 85

A. P. Walton

Two Poems — 87

Jonathan Bracker Morning Events — 90

Jonathan Travelstead

Cloud Fable — 91

Jonathan Kline from Standing at the Gate — 94

Contributor Notes — 104

James Nolan

Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans (excerpt)

Prologue: A Rough Draft of History

ike Socrates, Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys, Edgar Allan Poe, Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, William Burroughs, Tony Kushner, and other writers who have approached the subject of plagues, I’m an artist, not a scientist or politician. When dealing with a story of pestilence, either as an immediate threat or a metaphor for menace, I turn toward my imagination to shape it rather than to laboratories or public health policies. Those in power will write the definitive narrative of the coronavirus pandemic. And as a writer adrift during these saturnine years of 2020, 2021, and 2022, now staring out of my window at an alley in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans, I must emphasize the obvious: I’m not powerful. Nor am I in any position to speculate whether history, that final version of eventful times told by writers bestowed with authority, will match my personal story.

L

But I feel this is one worth telling.

Even as a Southern fiction writer, poet, and memoirist, one with a grotesque and satiric edge to his esthetic, I could never have made up the events of the past two years, beginning on the first day of lockdown in 2020, when my thriving life was abruptly cancelled. I could never have foreseen the confusing and often contradictory public health policies, the divisive politics of the epidemic, or the smoldering civil war about vaccines and facemasks. Nor could I have invented the ghostly Luling Mansion where I was living during much of this time, adjacent to the cemetery where four generations of my Creole family lie buried near Bayou St. John.

Or could I have imagined how, at that very moment, the crew of an Amazon vampire movie shoot would arrive to paint the second-story walls of that phantasmal palazzo in the plague color palette—purple and scarlet—then disappear under strict health mandates, only to return months later to construct a Potemkin graveyard of the undead across the street, even as the coronavirus was ravaging the world. I could never have foreseen my eviction, mid-pandemic, during which I was forced to translate my household into a pyramid of boxes to move into this townhouse apartment on—of all places—Bourbon Street. Nor could I have dreamed up the loneliest New Year’s Eve ever, or the Mardi Gras that wasn’t. Or my desperate search for a vaccine to keep this older man with a heart condition from dying.

I wish that I could have concocted such a plot for a thrilling new novel of the horror, dystopian, or speculative genres, but I didn’t.

Because I was the protagonist, the plot was real enough, and it was happening to me.

The infectious disease epidemiologist Philip Alcabes writes that as a professor, “For years, I have occasionally offered a college course on epidemic narratives. Earlier versions of the course featured accounts of outbreaks by journalists, memoirists, novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters—that is, epidemics as shaped by one sensibility.”

This is such a book.

As you’ll discover in these pages, I’m a veteran of disruptive times, both of the medical and political varieties. “What’s past is prologue,” as Shakespeare cautions us in The Tempest. This is the third epidemic I’ve survived: first polio as a boy in the fifties, then AIDS as a bisexual living in San Francisco and Barcelona during the eighties and nineties, and now the coronavirus, well into my seventies. In each of these eras, I’ve been a member of the target demographic of the pandemic. As of January 6 of this year, this is the second attempted coup d’état I’ve witnessed, and one of three socially restrictive regimes I’ve lived under, of both the totalitarian right and left: fascist Spain, a state of siege in Colombia, and just after

the Maoist Cultural Revolution in China.

So nothing should surprise me, either on the medical or political fronts. But these past two years have challenged my faith in human nature, in American democracy, and in the reliability of science to cure all of our ills, much less to sort out the truth. This week a friend wrote to me referring to the pandemic in the past tense: what it meant to her. This was even as the Omicron variant from South Africa was spiking a fifth surge in the United States, where the death toll already has topped nine hundred thousand, the most recorded mortalities of any country in the world. And many European, Asian, Latin American, and African countries were opening up their lockdowns only to slam them shut again in unpredictable patterns that make my head spin.

Although, now vaccinated, I’ve finally taken off my mask, but I’m still listening to the guitar of my imagination. I write these words in the past tense of memoir as well as in the present tense of journalism, what former Washington Post publisher Philip Graham called “the first rough draft of history.” For the moment, during this unsettling time between pre- and post-pandemic life, history seems to be broken, and the powerful have yet to rush in to fill the gap with their official interpretations of what has happened, why, and how it could have been avoided. Contrarian and exasperated as these observations often might seem, I hope that you’ll find my own narrative engaging, entertaining, and somehow meaningful to your own. This disruptive era happened to all of us, each in our own particular way, and the challenge now is to connect our stories, making sense of our suddenly altered lives.

The rest, as they say, is history. February

Part I: The Closing (Excerpt)

Between dying and not dying, I chose the guitar.

Pablo Neruda, “Autumn Testament”

F or the first time this month, I sit on my balcony watching wispy clouds stream across the midnight blue sky, and in spite of a late March wind, feel peace. Medical experts claim that because of my age and underlying heart condition I could die tomorrow of this new plague, gasping for breath between blue lips.

Yet a transcendent calm has claimed me.

Everything has stopped. On a dime. As Mose Allison sings, “Just as well the world ended / it wasn’t working anyway.” That geyser of unlimited possibilities fueled by a pumped up economy of gushing petroleum, traffic jams, tourist masses, soaring jets, mega churches, mega stars strutting across festival stages, five-star restaurant raves, and blockbuster hits, has come to a screeching halt. Of all places, Los Angeles now has the best air quality in the world, the gray cap of pollution over Beijing has lifted, and in Venice fish are swimming in the canals. No pedestrians venture out or headlights flash through this sepulchral evening in the Faubourg St. John neighborhood where I live in downtown New Orleans. Crows caw overhead, a cat screeches, and something quacks in the backyard patio three stories below. I never noticed before, but my neighbor must have gotten a duck.

The coronavirus has arrived. This last day of March, 2020, the United States is now the epicenter of the global pandemic, outpacing China, Italy, and Spain in diagnosed cases and deaths. Dense New York City has almost half of the cases in the country, and as of today 101 deaths have been recorded in insular New Orleans, with only 380,000 residents. This

three-hundred year old city, which has withstood numerous wars, fires, pestilences, and hurricanes under the flags of three different nations, is now a ghost town. National newscasters have taken to broadcasting stock footage of deserted Bourbon Street to drive home the eeriness of the current lockdown in American cities.

Everything has stopped and tonight, for the first time in two weeks, I appreciate it. My mind doesn’t whirl with plans about where to go or what to do next because I can’t go anywhere or do anything. Listening to Paco de Lucia’s flamenco guitar, I pour myself a glass of Rioja wine. The evening air is redolent with night-blooming jasmine, an early summer scent as haunting as the perfume of a long lost love. A brisk breeze billows the marquisette curtains as March goes out like a lamb, this same month that rushed in shrieking like a Greek harpy on steroids. The earth needed to pause for this breath of fresh air, and so did all of us living here. What is tragic is that a global pandemic had to provide this hiatus, at least for those of us fortunate enough to still be breathing without a respirator. Breathe in. Breathe out. It’s almost April Fool’s Day.

Yet this is no practical joke.

On Monday, March 16, 2020, in this Chinese Year of the Metallic Rat, my life was cancelled in one fell swoop. A curt email from a student informed me that the conference room where I teach Wednesday writing workshops in her Warehouse District condo building was closed to any social gatherings. Another email let me know that the public library where I was to give a paid talk that Saturday about point-of-view in fiction was shut down. My own point-of-view grew rancid as I waited an hour for a public bus to come rumbling by to take me to my downtown gym. I really needed a swim and a good sweat in the steam room to calm down. The driver told me that this bus, the “Walmart to Cemeteries” line, was now running on a reduced schedule. And once I finally arrived at the health club, it also was closed. I soon learned that all restaurants, bars,

coffee shops, theaters, museums, and other “non-essential businesses” in the city had been shut down. The only exceptions were grocery stores and pharmacies. On my way back from the closed gym, I stopped at the neighborhood grocery, only to find the shelves bare of most staples. People were starting to hoard, especially toilet paper, as if that alone could wipe away the reek of mortality.

When I’d left the house, movie set designers were scurrying around on the second floor of the building where I live. Known as the Luling Mansion, it’s a decadent Italian-style palazzo built by the wealthy German cotton merchant Florence Luling in 1865, designated as an historic landmark but one in sore need of preservation and repair. Now divided into ten shabby apartments, only four of which are occupied, it looms like a gothic granite phantom over the St. Louis Cemetery Number Three next door and nearby Bayou St. John. The set designers had been busy painting the walls of the two empty second-floor apartments purple and scarlet. This was in preparation for the upcoming shoot of an Amazon vampire film called “Black as Night,” to be filmed that week in three consecutive dusk-todawn sessions. We few tenants were to be relocated to hotels. My plan was to pocket the hotel reimbursement, stay, and put up with the klieg-lit vampires downstairs.

When I arrived home from the closed gym and the bare grocery shelves, the movie sets were empty and the row of white studio trucks parked out front gone. The “no parking” signs the film crew had tied to the iron fence spikes were removed. The shoot had been cancelled by the city health department.

I breathed an enormous sigh of relief. I wouldn’t be living on the set of a vampire movie during what I was soon to find out was a global plague, one that had just started to kill people in New Orleans. Exhausted, I plunked down my gym bag and the few groceries I’d been able to scrounge onto the dining table in my living room and sat there to stare out of the third-floor window. In the moonlight, faint white glimmers of the above-ground tombs were visible through a tangle of branches.

Although I couldn’t spot it through the grove of live oaks, my own tomb was in that cemetery, the one in which my mother is buried, along with four generations of our Creole family.

At seventy-two, I knew that one day in the not too distant future I would take my place among them in that little peaked house sealed with white plaster. When I go, just roll me off the balcony, I joked to friends, and into the Glaudot tomb. At the moment, I noted that I had no fever, dry cough, or shortness of breath, and wasn’t ready to be rolled off the balcony. Not yet. That was day one of the plague in New Orleans.

The next afternoon I phoned a friend in San Francisco, where I’d lived for several decades, only to learn that the City (as we called it) was also in lockdown. Then I called the airline to cancel the flight to San Francisco that I’d been planning for the following month, partly to hang in a place I once called home but primarily to escape the booming Jazz Fest that takes place every year in late April at the racetrack next door. My bedroom window faces the Acura stage, where this year The Who were scheduled to perform.

What do you do when a half-million drunken tourists show up at your house? My plan has always been to escape elsewhere to visit with friends. Now everyone in town agreed that the eight-day festival would be postponed. Along with the cancelled vampire movie, that was another huge relief. Regularly inundated as we are by masses of tourists, we locals have gotten picky about which festivals, parades, cultural shindigs, and raucous crowds we can tolerate. Is this for us, we ask ourselves, or exclusively for them? If I don’t spot somebody I know within the first fifteen minutes, it’s for them. As cities go, this is still an inbred town.

Two weeks previously, for the first time ever while in New Orleans, I woke up during Carnival with a dark premonition not to mask and dive into the swarming hordes in the French Quarter for Mardi Gras. Although I’d been reading reports in the New York Times about the Wuhan virus, I

was only dimly aware of the looming pandemic. Yet that weekend several people either had been crushed by parade floats, tumbled headfirst from their perches on floats, or plunged off toppling balconies. The corpses of two construction workers were still dangling inside the ruins of the collapsed Hard Rock Hotel on Canal Street. This year Carnival felt cursed, foreshadowed by death. The city had changed, I was adapting, so I didn’t go. That was when scientists now believe New Orleans was “seeded,” as they call it, with the coronavirus by the million Carnival revelers, many from New York, who arrived by way of infectious airports, planes, and cruise ships, those perfectly sealed incubators of the disease.

“Lockdown.” “Social distancing.” “Self-quarantining.” “Flattening the curve.” “An abundance of caution.” “Sanitizing.” “Super-spreader.”

On and on drone the politicians, public health officials, and broadcasters. The language around the plague is forming a thick crust of cant, a catechism of euphemisms that insulate us from their impact the more they’re repeated. The circuitous tone reminds me of George W. Bush’s term for torture, “enhanced interrogation,” or Trump press secretary Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” a clumsy tap dance around the word “lie.” As Doctor Rieux comments in Camus’s The Plague, “All our problems spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language.”

I immediately distrust the spin factor in any public phenomenon that changes names in midstream. We’re now rebranding the coronavirus as Covid-19, because, I suppose, a name attached to a number sounds scarier and more official, and can’t be confused with a brand of Mexican beer or a royal coronation. Although I understand the genus and species distinction between the two terms, with this shift in nomenclature a visceral connection to a memorable image—the corona or crown—is missing. As the old Baptist ladies during my childhood used to say, “She’ll get her crown in heaven.” Now we pray that she doesn’t get a crown of virus spikes in her lungs.

General Honoré’s gruff “stay at home” feels more compelling, especially now that we have no choice.

I’ve put together a plague reading list from my library. First is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” which I find in volume two of my grandfather’s musty 1903 edition of the collected works, a five volume set. It’s the perfect lockdown text, and rereading it sends a shiver down my spine. In Poe’s story, the ornate chambers where Prince Prospero’s masked guests hide from the plague are purple and scarlet, the same colors the set decorators had painted the empty second-story apartments where the vampire movie was to be filmed this month. Within Prince Prospero’s locked and sealed compound, “The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime, it was folly to grieve, or to think…. All those and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death.’”

On the landing of the staircase leading up to my third story apartment stands a mute ebony grandfather clock, one that hasn’t chimed for decades, if not a century. In Poe’s story there also “stood against the Western wall a clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang.” When this ominous clock chimes the hour, the revelers cloistered with Prince Prospero from the Red Death halt their dancing and “the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation…. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock.”

We know what they are listening for: the appointed hour of their own mortality. After the masked Red Death has snuck into the fortress and followed Prince Prospero into the final chamber, where he and his guests succumb to the plague, “the life of the ebony clock went out.”

Now, every time I leave the building, I shudder as I pass the silent ebony clock on the staircase landing to walk through the abandoned purple and scarlet film set on the second floor.

In one of these apartments downstairs, rows of plaster death masks are mounted above the crown moldings of the eighteen-foot ceilings. The walls remain painted those alarming colors because the film crew plans

to return here “when all this is over,” although I suspect that Amazon will simply cut its losses and finish shooting “Black as Night” in a sound studio. Before the crew left, I insisted they return the foyer to its original ivory color. They had painted it a depressing shade of enamel gun-metal gray, which made entering the building feel as claustrophobic as walking into a submarine.

Next on my reading list is a 1960 Signet Classic edition of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a sixty-cent paperback I’ve been lugging around since college. It still has my dorm room number scrawled next to my name on the inside cover. The cover image, bordered in purple, is of a hooded woman in a scarlet facemask. That seems to be the plague color palette: purple and scarlet.

“Social distancing” reminds me of Defoe’s portrait of the1665 bubonic plague in London, during which everyone hid inside their houses, the streets were emptied, pubs were closed, public “feasting” banned, and nobody tolerated any outside personal contact. Unfortunately, as we now know, the yersinia pestis that infected the lymph nodes of its victims until they swelled into blackened buboes was spread by bites from the fleas infesting black rats, not by person-to-person contagion. So holing up inside rat-infested houses was the worst prevention possible. To escape the city, many moved to boats on the Thames, where the holds were filled with rats. “Nobody would suffer a stranger to come near them,” Defoe writes. “The strange temper of the people of London at that time contributed extremely to their own destruction.”

To add to the misery, the authorities ordered the killing of all cats and dogs, which, of course, had kept the rat population at bay. Pages and pages of the novel are dedicated to quoting the numerous other municipal health edicts issued to prevent a collapse of the destabilized government, rules as confusing as the ones we receive now about wearing facemasks or not, singing the “Happy Birthday” song twice while scrubbing our hands, bumping elbows instead of handshakes, or wiping down groceries.

An earlier European outbreak of the Black Death is described in

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a fourteenth-century Italian epic in which what we’d now call a “socially distanced pod” of ten young people sequester themselves inside a villa in Fiesole, a town near Florence. There they take turns spinning a hundred tales to avoid the ravages of the bubonic plague that in 1348 killed a hundred thousand people within the strictly quarantined Tuscan capital. In the narrative frame to the stories, Boccaccio writes that “touching the clothes of the sick or anything touched or used by them seemed to communicate this very disease to the person involved.” To avoid this lethal contamination, people like these young fabulists “gathered in small groups and lived entirely apart from everyone else. They shut themselves up in those houses where there were no sick people,” only, as we now suspect, rats crawling with fleas infected with yersinia pestis. On the other hand, in an aside that mirrors today’s blithe lockdown resisters, Boccaccio notes that “others thought the opposite: they believed that drinking excessively, enjoying life, going about singing and celebrating … making light of everything that happened was the best medicine for the disease.”

We Americans shouldn’t feel so singular about our polarized pandemic politics: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Next on my plague reading list is a brittle paperback of the Kenneth Burke translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice , a novella that inspired my pilgrimage to Venice in the early seventies. There I sat on the Lido beach in front of the Grand Hôtel des Bains scanning the horizon for an apparition of the angelic adolescent boy Tadzio, imagining the haughty, middle-aged German writer Gustav von Aschenbach dying of the cholera epidemic as he takes a last lingering glance at the lost beauty of youth. Every time I hear the swelling Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, I picture black hair dye dribbling down Dirk Bogarte’s feverish face as his eyelids fold shut in the final beach scene of Visconti’s film version.

Yet in this reading what captures my attention isn’t the morbidly decadent eroticism that once attracted me to the book, but the first-hand account of a cholera outbreak that Mann witnessed during his journey

through Italy in 1911. In a 1930 diary, he wrote that “nothing is invented in Death in Venice.” With by now familiar verisimilitude, as true today as it was then, he captures the hypocrisy of the city authorities in dissimulating the sudden appearance of a so-called “Asiatic” cholera. It’s significant that Boccaccio also describes the Florentine plague as originating “some years earlier in the east,” as if Asia were the menacing source of all infections, like Trump’s Kung Flu. In contaminated Venice, nobody will tell Auschenbach the truth. At the time, nobody knew that the disease was spread by water contaminated with human waste, and symptoms of the epidemic were blamed on the sirocco winds and rotten shellfish, even as wealthy tourists fled amid the abrasive stench of germicide. Although last February the Carnival in Venice was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic in neighboring Lombardy, at the same time the Carnival that brought the virus to New Orleans proceeded here full speed ahead because, as in Mann’s novel, “The authorities were more actuated by fear of being out of pocket… or by the apprehension of the large loses the hotels and shops that catered to foreigners would suffer in case of panic and blockade. And the fears of the people supported the persistent official policy of silence and denial.”

An English travel clerk finally explains to Aschenbach in excruciating detail the mortal dangers of the cholera epidemic descending upon the city, where the quarantined buildings and orphanages are filled with the dying. “Recoveries were rare. Eighty out of every hundred died, and horribly, for the onslaught was of the extremest violence, and not infrequently of the ‘dry’ type, the most malignant form of contagion.” He warns the German that “You would do well … to leave today instead of tomorrow. The blockade cannot be more than a few days off.” After which, in besotted denial, the failing writer marches out of the travel agency to visit a barber, where he has his hair dyed and lips rouged to further pursue the elusive young Tadzio. Just as most of us here, following the news of the burgeoning pandemic in New York, continued to design our Mardi Gras costumes. Even though I didn’t participate in the ill-fated festivities this year, I heard

that on Fat Tuesday more than a few papier-mâche headdresses shaped like the spiked globes of the coronavirus went parading through the streets.

Whether in fin de siècle Venice or twenty-first century New Orleans, those who live by tourism die by tourism.

Although in the plague-ridden history of this port city, once known as “the Necropolis of the South,” commercial indifference to public health hasn’t always been the cause of our ongoing malaise. The authorities in New Orleans really didn’t understand the origins of our most deadly contagion, the yellow fever epidemic of the nineteenth century, long believed to be spread by “miasmas” in the city’s marshy terrain. Soldiers shot cannons to dispel the hot, humid swamp gas emanating from what one commentator in 1850 called “this boiling fountain of death … belching up its poison and malaria.” Residents were advised to sleep on balconies and in courtyards to avoid contagion indoors, even though those were the perfect places to be bitten by female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. It wasn’t until 1900 that their bites were finally proven to transmit the virus, a theory that had been proposed but widely scorned twenty years earlier.

The fear, confusion, and superstition surrounding yellow fever are well portrayed in the little known Toucoutou, a novel published by Edward Larocque Tinkler in 1928. This “tragic mulatto” story describes the effect of the epidemic on the life of a Creole of color able to passe en blanc, much as my great-grandmother Landry and her family did. Toucoutou’s childhood French Quarter home is permeated with the “cardavric stench peculiar to yellow fever,” in which Bujac, her infected French-born father, often spews “black vomit—like coffee grounds.” A doctor treats the disease with the then cutting-edge techniques of leeches, mercurial purges, lit turpentine rags applied to bleed germs from scarified flesh, and “a freshly sliced onion by his bedside—they say it absorbs the sickness.” He cautions Toucoutou’s octoroon mother “be sure to change the slices often and burn them afterwards or otherwise you will spread the disease. It is lucky for Bujac that he has it today when he can have the attention of an enlightened physician…. Rest assured that the latest discoveries

of medical science are helping,” meaning this scientist’s trusty leeches and sliced onions. Although unaware that mosquitoes are spreading the infection, he at least understands the futility of burning tar and firing artillery to stop the epidemic. In an early plea for public health, the doctor insists that “if only they would clean up the stinking swamps that empest the city; if they would see to it that the filth from the cesspools is not washed into the houses on every flood, they might accomplish something.” And that alone, of course, would have helped to control the swarms of mosquitoes spreading the illness.

During the late nineteen hundreds, fifteen per cent of the city’s population fell to yellow fever, including four of my great-grandmother Landry’s six siblings, who died in their home on Bourbon Street between June 29, 1882, and July 18, 1884. Their deaths occurred during what was known as the “sickly season,” those summer months when mosquitoes breed. These family remains are buried deep inside our tomb next door, the one I can almost spot through the grove of live oaks. On the marble mantle next to the Landry clock, I keep a faded oval daguerreotype of grande Mémère’s brother Sylvère who died in that epidemic, as seductive at fifteen as Tadzio was to Aschenbach, although with more exotic mulatto features. Understandably, my great-grandmother was a fanatic about keeping screen doors tightly closed. “Come back and close that screen door,” she’d shout as this restless five-year old scampered outside to play. “You’ll let the mosquitoes in.” Never for a moment did she let any standing water collect outside in which mosquito larvae could hatch.

“Ne touche pas,” my grandmother Mémère would scold during our walks through the neighborhood. “Tu touches tout, et c’est sale ça.” As a boy, I felt compelled to reach out and touch every oak tree, iron fence post, and abandoned tricycle along our path, to form a tactile relationship with the world. But for a woman of her historical era, Mémère was right. Behavior learned during a plague seems to follow people for a lifetime. In September of 1918, when a surge of the Spanish influenza epidemic tore through New Orleans for a terrifying three weeks, my grandmother

would have been a recently married twenty-five year-old, the target age demographic for infection. And she obviously had been told that every surface was contaminated with deadly influenza germs, as many believe today about the coronavirus, insisting as we do on squirting sanitizer on fingers and repeated hand washings. When I lived with Mémère as a high school student during the sixties, the Spanish flu epidemic seemed as ancient to me as the texts about Cesar’s Gallic wars I was reading in Latin class, and I couldn’t understand why she was such a maniac about disinfecting everything. Once a day she even swabbed the telephone mouthpiece with alcohol.

Although I never saw this austere Creole lady wear a mask, either a bejeweled Mardi Gras one or any other kind, facemasks were in wide use during the epidemic of the so-called “sneeze malady,” which caused 3,362 deaths in New Orleans between the fall and spring of 1918-19, and 675,000 deaths nation wide. The global mortality toll of this pandemic is estimated at fifty million. Since the contagion arrived in the city onboard a navy ship returning from South America, only military bases and navy stations were quarantined, but schools, movie theaters, and dance halls were closed. Yet the massive war relief rallies and parades, during which people flocked to support the troops and buy Liberty Bonds, caused a wildfire spread of the virus. Mémère never spoke of the epidemic, but did demand that both my grandfather and I wash our hands with soap and water before sitting down at her table. “I’ll wash my hands,” was my grandfather’s sassy retort, “but I won’t use soap.” Both this budding teenage beatnik and his whimsical eighty-seven year old grandfather thought that Mémère’s dictatorial sanitation regime, an obsessive behavior ingrained in her during the flu epidemic, was a real drag. After all, as far as I was concerned, the times they were a’changing.

As the times always change, but once traumatized, people seldom do. We can recover from diseases, but a visceral terror, once awakened, will seize us forever. What I learned from these older family members, as well as from both Defoe’s and Camus’s novels, is that like war and natural

disasters, if plagues don’t kill you, they can cause lifelong personality disorders. I wonder if I’ll spend the remainder of my days surrounded by skittish people scarred by self-isolation and distrust, socially distanced for life like those lone figures staring out through window panes in Edward Hopper paintings.

In my readings of purple and scarlet plague literature, I’ve discovered that each epidemic leaves the lingering imprint of an esthetic pathology, a profile of the individual attacked from within, in the same way that war literature leaves a unique image of how societies react when besieged from without. Just as those isolated figures in Hopper’s paintings staring vacantly through windows seem emblematic of the coronavirus, the ethereal pallor of Mimi in Puccini’s La bohème captures the haunting tragedy of the young dying from tuberculosis. The stench of decay that Mann conjures in Death in Venice calls to mind the very fetor of cholera, in which the contaminated backwaters of the toothless poor invade the garden parties of the wealthy. Yellow fever is a swamp miasma, buzzing with insidious insects, in the simmering stupor of a tropical summer. And the ancient curses of the Black Death and smallpox represent the crippling disfigurement of the once perfect human form, Adam and Eve covering with fig leaves their bubonic buboes and pustules of pox as they stumble exiled from the Garden of Eden.

In the same way that war tends to unite people, epidemics separate them. If an enemy sniper shoots off my arm or a foreign plane bombs my city, I know whom to accuse, and can identify my allies and foes. But when my own body betrays me, invaded from within by some communicable pathogen, and the contagion comes from those closest to me, whom do I blame? The intrusive virus, or my neighbor and friend?

Albert Camus’s The Plague begins with hundreds of bleeding dead rats. The real rats, as we later find out, are the narrator’s fellow citizens, not unlike the shoppers today at my neighborhood grocery, who scurry away from each other with beady rodent eyes staring out above flimsy cotton facemasks.

First it was iron lungs.

Then the purple blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma.

And now respirators.

This is the third epidemic I’ve lived through, and my own demographic at the time of each infection has been the targeted one.

I was entering kindergarten in the fall of 1952 during the height of the polio epidemic. That year there were 58,000 new cases of that form of infantile paralysis among kids my age, and 3,000 deaths. My parents had been cautious about letting my sister and me play outside during the summer, and I wasn’t sure why. Swimming pools were closed, along with most children’s playgrounds in parks. What I remember most vividly are the black-and-white photos from Life magazine they showed us of little boys and girls in iron lungs, those metallic coffin-like tubes from which only the child’s head emerged. How do they hold an ice cream cone, I wondered, or pick their noses? Before I scampered off to grammar school, I was issued a list of stern do’s and don’ts, most of which I can’t remember because, dreamy boy that I was, I paid no attention to the do’s and did all of the don’ts. I was warned to avoid other children who walked funny, because they might have polio.

“If you get too close to them you might wind up in an iron lung like those pictures in the magazine,” my mother said. “And you wouldn’t want that, would you?”

From what I remember, my best friend in second grade was a Dutch boy named Derrick who had a lazy foot that dragged behind him. This was the year before we were vaccinated in 1955 with Dr. Jonas Salk’s magic pink sugar cubes. Derrick and I walked around the schoolyard with our arms around each other’s necks, making up nonsense songs while I ignored his distinct limp. He told me about the windmills and fields of red tulips in Holland, where he’d been sick but recovered. He also said that his family had escaped from the Nazi bad guys, which was why they

came to the United States. I can still see his tawny face scrunched up in a broad smile, his complexion more Mediterranean than Nordic. Actually, now that I think of it, he looked Jewish, although then wouldn’t have known what that meant. We had many adventures together, went all over the city on our own, and I felt a real bond with him, closer than to any other kid my age.

The first batch of Dr. Salk’s vaccines in 1954 didn’t work, and 200,000 children were injected with the defective doses. Thousands of new polio cases developed among those unwitting guinea pigs. To show the skeptical world that the initial vaccine worked, Dr. Alton Ochsner, founder of Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, had been among the first to have his daughter vaccinated in 1954. She soon died of polio.

Decades later my mother, a hypochondriac obsessed with the medical world, would become the secretary to the poor girl’s brother, Dr. John Ochsner, who by then was the director of his father’s ever expanding clinic. At some point after I moved home to New Orleans in 1996, my mother asked me with an amused smile if I remembered my imaginary friend from grammar school. After my thirty years on the road, she and I were getting to know each other again.

“I had an imaginary friend?” I didn’t recall that at all.

“You don’t remember? You went on and on about him, dreamed up stories about you two gallivanting all over town. You probably made him up because you felt so lonely at first going off to school. His name was Derrick and you said he was Dutch. Holland was always your favorite part of ‘Bozo the Clown Goes Around the World,’ that record that came with the pretty picture book, remember? We played that part about the windmills and tulips over and over. You said Derrick promised to take you there.”

This was news to me: had I made up Derrick? “Did I mention he’d had polio?”

“Oh come on! You made up an imaginary friend with polio?” My mother shot me an alarmed look.

“And the more I think about it, his parents were Jews who had survived

Nazi concentration camps.”

Born in 1947, I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. During the war, my father liberated the concentration camp at Leipzig, and I’d come across a shoebox of horrifying photos of the mounds of skeletal remains that the soldiers immediately had to bury. Thousands of these photographs were distributed to the troops because they suspected nobody would believe what they’d witnessed. My father seldom spoke of it, but his war experience was a dark cloud hovering over the house.

“An imaginary Dutch friend with polio? Whose Jewish family was in a concentration camp? As if he were Anne Frank’s brother?” My mother’s brow furrowed. “What in the world is wrong with you?”

She never could figure that out.

It appears that I dealt with the deep-seated fear we children felt at the time about getting polio by adopting an imaginary friend who had recovered from the disease. And as a Victory baby, my profound unease about the war and its “Nazi bad guys” had given his family a Holocaust background. I’d made peace with my worst nightmares by letting my overactive imagination turn holy terror into fraternal love. Thank you, Derrick, my first real friend, for getting me through the polio epidemic with your limp, as well as your windmills and tulips. *

During my second epidemic, I didn’t need to make up any diseased imaginary friends. During the eighties in San Francisco half of my real friends were dropping dead with AIDS, a virus that has now killed more than thirty million people worldwide.

After two years as a Fulbright professor at the University in Barcelona, I’d returned to live in the city in the fall of 1981, just as the first cases of a mysterious “gay plague” were being reported. At the moment none of my own friends had it, although I was starting to see skeletal pariahs with purple lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma on their faces, especially in the gay Castro neighborhood. I was shocked when some Chinese passengers

strapped on facemasks as they rode through the Castro Metro station, even though it had already been established that the disease was spread through intimate contact with either blood or semen.

My first friend to die of the “gay plague” was Hibiscus, founder of the gender-bending theater troupe the Cockettes in the early seventies, an era when I was introduced both to bisexuality and the wild tribal counterculture in San Francisco at the time. Hibiscus died in his native New York before much was known about a disease that so far had killed only 121 people globally. His grief-stricken parents sued the hospital where he died, calling for an investigation into the death of this formerly healthy thirty-four year-old theater icon. This was before the plague striking gay men, prisoners, junkies, and Haitians was finally named AIDS on July 27, 1982, and linked to sexual contact or intravenous drug use.

During the previous decade, I’d developed a hang-loose bisexuality that oscillated between women and men. I first moved to Barcelona with an American dancer girlfriend, with whom I’d broken up after becoming involved with a male writer from Mallorca, then left the country in the middle of a fling with a Spanish woman, who later joined me for a few months in San Francisco. Returning home, I was shocked that the joyous sexual liberation of the seventies had turned into a more predatory and promiscuous fetishism, one that included sadomasochism, bondage, allnight bathhouses, and sex clubs. Handcuffs rattling from his epaulettes, my downstairs neighbor Reuben would don his black leather gear every weekend to frequent The Cauldron, a sex club where patrons were locked inside from midnight until dawn to act out fantasies involving swings, ropes, bathtubs, zippered masks, clips, clamps, and whips.

Many of the women previously attracted to bisexual men now considered us Typhoid Marys. Some bisexuals went on what people now call “the down low,” secretly sleeping with both sexes, while others drifted into gay promiscuity. A weekend pickup in a gay bar, or on the bus for that matter, soon took the place of my serial romantic attachments. At the worst possible moment in the history of the epidemic, when little

was known about the disease or how to detect or prevent it, I became something of a disco whore.

During the years before the test, everyone in San Francisco was possessed by the same terror, distrust, and confusion we’re presently undergoing with the coronavirus pandemic. The clarifying moment arrived with Dr. Gallo’s discovery of the HIV virus and the eventual proliferation of a widely available test for the infection, first developed to screen blood products for hemophiliac patients. This allowed gay and bisexual men in San Francisco to take suitable action to deal with their status. If we tested positive for the virus, we learned what symptoms to watch for and how to care both for our own and our partners’ health. If negative, we studied safe sex practices to avoid becoming infected. In intimate relations, we were told to treat everyone as if he were positive, because negative guys could become infected from one week to the next. The street wisdom was that we were sleeping with everyone our partners had ever slept with, even last night.

The test results took two weeks, and receiving them was a life-altering event, a possible death sentence. On three consecutive days before learning my own status, I visited the St. Jude shrine at St. Dominic Church on Bush Street, lit candles, and obsessively repeated prayers to the saint of impossible cases.

A smiling doctor told me my test result: negative. I’ve been devoted to St. Jude ever since.

Rather than becoming a “sex negative” celibate, as many HIV negative men did, I decided to run away from this frightening scenario. I accepted a teaching position at a university in Beijing, where I moved with my dancer girlfriend, Maureen, in 1983. AIDS was unknown in China at the time, and I’d be able to experience Marxist ideology first-hand by living in a Communist country. Like many of my most naive misadventures, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

The next year, after returning politically chastened to the still raging epidemic in San Francisco, all I wanted to do was isolate myself and read

five hundred good books. So during the next three years I prowled the stacks of the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, where I received a Javits Fellowship to become a Ph.D. student in comparative literature. When not holed up in my apartment on Telegraph Hill with books about Pablo Neruda and Walt Whitman, I attended numerous memorial services for friends and former lovers who had died of AIDS.

In California people live in midair, which is where they die, making up rituals as they go along. I was disconcerted by the weepy balloon releases, the upbeat brie-and-white-wine “life celebrations,” and the home-made ceremonies to scatter ashes that took the place of the traditional wakes, funerals, burials, and repasts that I remembered from New Orleans. One thing I avoided were the suicide parties, during which friends gathered in the living room of a terminal AIDS patient while he disappeared into his bedroom to overdose on barbiturates. My grief built up collectively, unexpressed, swept under the carpet of a forever-young culture in which death is a dirty word and dying a faux pas.

Again I ran away. And it was in Barcelona during the pre-Olympic year of 1991 that I almost met my maker. Just before I left San Francisco, I’d sat up all night with my downstairs neighbor Reuben, patron of the black leather club The Cauldron, controlling his morphine drip while he lingered in a coma dying of AIDS. I’d never before ushered anyone into the beyond, so sitting across from the hospital gurney parked in his bedroom, I convinced myself that he could still smell and hear. I lit frankincense and read to him from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which guides dying souls through the bardos of the netherworld toward reincarnation. Just after I stepped out of his bedroom to make coffee, he took his last breath. The moment of dying, I’ve since been told, is as private as going to the bathroom.

Three days later I was on a plane to Madrid, my chest constricted with grief after Reuben’s death. I was returning to Spain, grateful to the Fulbright Commission for another round of teaching fellowships, and finally wound up settling in Barcelona for the next five years. Unlike in San Francisco,

where most people freely exchanged HIV statuses, in Spain the epidemic was just beginning to be acknowledged. There was little reliable testing, few self-identified AIDS patients, and the topic was still taboo.

For several months I was seeing a much younger Catalan, a handsome, would-be fashion model named Francesc, who treated his American professor boyfriend with a flattering puppy-eyed devotion. After New Year’s I staged a Reyes or petit Noel soiree for him at my rooftop flat in the seaside town of Sitges. I’d gotten a French king cake and bottles of Catalan champagne, and after we put on the two golden paper crowns that came with the cake and sat staring into each others eyes in the candlelit room overlooking the Mediterranean, my prince finally told me the truth. Several months before we met, he’d tested positive for HIV.

“How dare you not let me know!” I leapt across the table to choke him. “I’m going to murder you, hijo de puta, before your damn virus has the chance to kill me.”

“I thought you’d understand.” He was in tears. “I’ve been careful to practice only safe sex with you.”

I thought back: no condoms, but then again no anal penetrations. Little oral-genital contact, but lots of kissing. So far we’d received conflicting messages about whether the virus could be transmitted not just by semen but also by saliva. But once, I remembered, the young man had accidently ejaculated into my eye. It was messy, and at the moment seemed hilarious, but now it occurred to me that I was doomed.

That Reyes evening I didn’t kill Francesc, but read him the riot act about informing partners from the beginning about his HIV status, and that in ethical consideration positives usually sought other positive men for sexual contact, so as not to infect partners by accident, like coming in their eyes.

The next morning I walked with him to catch the train back to Barcelona, noticing how abnormally thin he was, studying every mark on his face for lesions, and wondering if his cough was a first symptom of Pneumocystis.

Much like during the current pandemic, we targeted groups were filled with paranoid delusions about how and why we were being attacked. At the time I felt so helpless and distrustful about the government’s response to the AIDS epidemic I subscribed to a prevalent conspiracy theory that HIV had escaped from the U.S. Army Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. One suspicion was that the virus first had been tested on prisoners, thus quickly spreading among homosexuals, Blacks, and intravenous drug users, groups that represented a significant intersection of jail populations and AIDS victims. Not that there were a lot of incarcerated gay men, but straight cellmate rape victims and prison bitches often reemerged in the gay scene as rough trade hustlers. Back in San Francisco, I’d kept a folder of clippings that supposedly proved this nefarious plot. So I wasn’t surprised when my friend Toni Morrison, a frequent guest lecturer at the University of Barcelona, agreed with me over dinner one evening as we whispered about the conspiratorial origins of AIDS, as widely believed in both the gay and Black communities.

Only years later did I learn that the Fort Detrick theory was a Cold War disinformation campaign generated by the K.G.B. and the East German Stasi. Known as Operation Denver, this interference or “active measure” by a foreign power achieved some degree of public credibility by making it as far as a Dan Rather report on the “CBS Evening News.”

Yet at the time, feeling persecuted, I decided to wait out the requisite six months of celibacy before taking another HIV test, and to do so at a state-of-the-art hospital in San Francisco. My mother’s acute hypochondria kicked in. I was convinced that a purple bruise under my fingernail was a Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion. I felt alternately fatigued and angry. I ate compulsively, so as not to waste away. After a visit from my friend, the poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I threw myself into a translation for City Lights Books of the selected poems of the great contemporary poet from Barcelona, Jaime Gil de Biedma, who had died from AIDS only two years earlier. How else in Spain could I make friends with the unmentionable disease that I might be harboring?

I also made friends with Jaime Gil de Biedma’s surviving partner, a Catalan actor named Pep Madern, to whom I confessed the agony that Francesc was putting me through.

“Why didn’t he tell me from the beginning that he was positive?” I ranted. “Murderer!”

Pep flinched, as if slapped across the face. This obviously was a subject close to his heart. The next spring he also died of AIDS, three years after his poet lover did, and it was anybody’s guess which one of the couple infected the other.

From January 6 of that disruptive year until June, when I escaped the galloping greed of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and spent the summer back in San Francisco, I underwent a chaste six months of pre-test jitters and self-recriminating meditations. How could I have been such a fool, thinking I could escape from the epidemic that had killed so many of my friends?

Although I’d never been militant about AIDS, I returned to San Francisco at a politically fraught moment, as ACT UP and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis continued their activist mobilizations to demand the approval of experimental antiretroviral drugs. The mood at the time is best dramatized in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, a play that premiered on Broadway in May of 1991, a year before I arrived in San Francisco for an HIV test. Swords drawn, Kushner’s stage was a perfect setting for my own ordeal. Pryor, an angry protagonist crippled with AIDS, asserts, “This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all … and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore.” The target of this gay militant wrath was none other than Dr. Anthony Fauci, the present coronavirus czar, then in charge of the indifferent federal response to AIDS. This was after AZT, the treatment approved by the F.D.A in 1987, had failed, killing more patients than it saved, such as the commie witch-hunt lawyer Roy Cohn, Donald Trump’s mentor and prototype. This dying old demagogue is portrayed in Kushner’s play as hoarding a locked stash of AZT in his AIDS hospital room, ranting that “Americans

have no use for sick,” much like the blustering Trump with his equally toxic hydroxycloroquine. This was before the first introduction of the life-saving cocktail of protease inhibitors was granted an early release in 1995. This miracle only occurred when the explosive Larry Kramer, head of ACT UP and author of Faggots, cornered the cowering Dr. Fauci in his Washington D.C. office and, unlikely as it may have seemed, the two became friends.

At the time, as an expatriate living in Spain, I was fairly oblivious to the politics of the epidemic in the United States. After making my HIV test appointment, I worked with Ferlinghetti on editing the Jaime Gil de Biedma manuscript, and made several pilgrimages to the St. Jude shrine at St. Dominic’s. I knew that my life was about to be changed drastically. And it was, at Presbyterian Hospital when I received the test result.

Once again: negative.

Dazed, I wandered from the hospital on Pacific Avenue toward Clement Street, mumbling prayers of thanks. I berated myself for not being more supportive of poor Francesc back in Barcelona, who had given this fortyfive year old the mortality shock of his life. I vowed to … well, I vowed many things that I can’t remember, and can’t answer now as to whether I’ve kept them.

Strolling down nearby Clement Street in search of someplace at which to have a celebratory lunch, I spotted two former lovers of mine huddled over a table inside the Burma Superstar restaurant. There sat Brinda, a woman from India with whom I’d been together for several years before the return to Barcelona, together with Ulysses from Louisiana, a man with whom I’d set out for San Francisco decades ago.

When I burst from the sidewalk into their lunch, they could tell by my beaming smile that my news was good. They’d been worried about me, they confessed, and had met to decide what to do if the results were otherwise. I wrapped them in a cherishing hug. This was how love was supposed to turn out.

The next year my translations of the Spanish poet who died of AIDS

came out with City Lights, and the name of Jaime Gil de Biedma, revered in Spain, was introduced to the English-speaking world. While working on the anthology that I titled Longing, I’d become intensely involved not only with Jaime’s lyric language but with the wry, rebellious persona of this leftwing dandy. We became poet buddies. I often spoke and argued with him in Spanish: why was he so damn indirect, requiring so much clarification on my part? Didn’t he understand how difficult it can be to convey the irony of his beloved British poets in the Spanish language? As with Derrick during the polio epidemic, I dealt with my fear of the disease by adopting an imaginary best friend who’d had it. Much like the two lovers in his poem “Anniversary Song,” we shifted “from betrayal to boredom, / boredom back to betrayal.” And by boredom, I mean wrestling with the tedious subtleties of linguistic parallels, and by betrayal, the inspired yet inevitable rewriting that one poet often succumbs to when translating another.

When I first met Pep, Jaime’s surviving partner, he’d greeted me with an amused grin. “Funny,” he said, “that you’re Jaime’s translator, because you’re exactly his type. He couldn’t have kept his eyes off you.”

It’s confirmed: a neighbor two stories below has been keeping a caged duck with clipped wings named Ruthie, after the famed French Quarter character Ruthie the Duck Girl. The neighbor, with whom I haven’t spoken before during the five years I’ve lived here, tells me that the duck is a wounded rescue animal she found in a City Park lagoon. For a while I was convinced that the quacking was the mating call of a menacing murder of crows I just noticed circling the sky at dusk every day.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

Other birds have returned—blue jays, mourning doves, and sparrows— and every evening, after the six o’clock Angelus chimes from the dome of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary church across the street, I sit on my balcony next to the three-hundred year-old oak tree to watch the birds,

squirrels, owls, and possums that scamper through its branches. Since the pandemic began, global carbon dioxide emissions have declined seventeen per cent. With less petroleum exhaust and artificial lighting, nature has come surging back.

I wonder if the recent pandemics—HIV, SARS, avian influenza, swine flu, Zika, Ebola, and now the coronavirus—are nature’s immunesystem responses sent out to attack the metastasizing cancer of human overdevelopment. Most of these viruses have their origins in animals, not that the monkeys, bats, chickens, pigs, and mosquitoes specifically are targeting us, but that nature as a self-contained biological organism has both a shared will and consciousness of its own, what the botanist Rupert Sheldrake calls “morphic resonance.” We might compare it to a worldwide mycelium of subterranean forest fungi, a collective internet of innerconnected organic life in constant communication and transformation. The virus of modern civilization threatens this self-regulating mycelium, and climate change caused by our pollution will soon have the natural world in its death throes. So why shouldn’t nature defend itself from the human virus in the same way that our own bodies protect themselves from destructive pathogens?

When we get the flu, for instance, our bodies go into high alert, each part pitching in to ensure our survival. Fever causes us to sweat out infectious toxins, fatigue sends us to bed for restorative sleep, and sneezing and coughing empty our lungs of mucous. The nastiest symptoms of the flu are ways that the body employs to rid itself of the nefarious bug that threatens its very survival.

So maybe nature, in an automatic immunological response, is trying to cough, sneeze, broil, freeze, blow, flood, quake, and burn our encroaching civilization away, one human at a time. Lately our infectious presence is so threatening that it seems as if we’re racing from one natural disaster to another.

In the scant seven-decade span of my own lifetime, the world population has almost tripled, now approaching eight billion people. In the

surreal satirist William Burroughs’s Cities of the Red Night, an uncannily prophetic novel published in 1981 about a pandemic ravaging the earth, a sinister Colonel Dimitri sums up the crisis to the global private eye, Sam Snide:

Jerry was a carrier of the illness. He did not die of it directly. Winkler, who was thirty years older, died in a few days. Well … there are those who think a selective pestilence is the most humane solution to overpopulation and the attendant impasses of pollution, inflation, and exhaustion of natural resources. A plague that kills the old and leaves the young, minus a reasonable percentage… one might be tempted to let such an epidemic run its course even if one had the power to stop it.

Dimitri points out that a virus is literally a copy, as is our human DNA. “Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original.” A pandemic, in which infectious copies are invading genetic copies in a battle for survival, could be a sign that we have replicated our species into extinction. To nature, humans are the virus, and according to Dimitri, “they will multiply their assholes into the polluted seas.”

We read in the Old Testament of plagues, locust swarms, and floods sent by Jehovah to wipe out corrupt regimes and cruel leaders. Perhaps the prophets who wrote those pages intuited a God that acts much like the immunological system of nature. At the moment, even as the coronavirus spikes, the biblical locusts are swarming in Africa, devouring every crop in their path. What is nature trying to tell us? Although this evening the birds and other creatures in the live oak branches assure me that nature is in a constant state of bountiful renewal, the pandemic also indicates that it’s threatened, pissed off at us, and fighting back.

My only solace during these lockdown days, when I often feel like a fat, lazy housecat, is to drink a glass of wine at sunset on the balcony, seated at the round glass tabletop under the live oak tree towering above me, its twisted branches extending over four neighboring backyards. Now more than ever this enormous tree has become the totem spirit that

shields me from both the merciless Louisiana sun above and the pandemic outside. Trees think in longer terms than we do. Until the sixties, live oak limbs in this neighborhood where I grew up were draped with gray beards of Spanish moss, as they still are in nearby City Park. But decades ago unrelenting car pollution put an end to those hazy silhouettes of moss. Covered with a bark as gnarled as the resilient old man I’ve become, this overarching live oak contains my spirit in its expansive limbs. It keeps me alive. Reminds me of those I’ve loved and lost through the three epidemics I’ve survived, and I wonder how long I can sit here at a social distance like this tree, solitary and self-contained. The final lines of Walt Whitman’s “I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing” come to mind, the perfect words with which to close this lockdown before a new reopening is upon us, together with whatever that may bring:

… and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in wide flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.

Floyd Collins

Teresa: Nights on the Delta

A Side

Teresa, I can still summon up summer nights

On the Delta, when my antique Underwood’s Basket shift clicked like a fisherman’s bait box

Teeming with live crickets. I’d align a sheet

Of rice paper in the platen and roll it into place

Deftly as my mother putting her white pinafores Through a wringer before pinning a hamperful

To the clothesline. Emerald fireflies were rising And falling like rootless stars while I composed At the trestle board table, frosted mug beside me

Brimming golden Schiltz that I lovingly soothed Into the wee hours during July of my twentieth Year. You were my motive and cue for passion

Even then, Teresa; I’d lift cold iron doors of red And blue mailboxes bolted down curbside, posting A sheaf of poems meant to evoke the comeliness Of your speech and its liquid sonorities. A manila

Envelope returned one poem lighter from Steelhead, Edited by Louis Jenkins in Duluth, Minnesota, almost, It seemed, before the evening’s chill dews and damps

Had dried on my palm. Elated, I felt launched in Earnest, but now I brood over your ledger-stone

In the Murray City Cemetery where granite heaves

At its own glittering mass like the sea. The sexton

Wears on his belt a ring of keys like a woman’s handBones. To him, sadness is a watermelon’s heart

Salted down, good whisky poured over the grave

Of a beautiful stranger. Shouldering a spade, he Wipes sweat from his neck with a kerchief dyed Midnight blue. He pauses. At his ear, patient

As needlepoint, the gnat’s psalm.

II. B Side

October moon ripens colder than a honeydew melon

On the hill’s shoulder. Flocks begin to gather, Teresa, Grackles playing the raucous bones of autumn. When Oil tins banged in our storage room my father described

Depression-era migrants, how a hobo in tattered flannel

Would stoke a furnace till dark to buy a side of bacon, Then fry spattering pork on his blunt-edged shovel.

Meanwhile, my mother’s people dined on sumptuous

Steaks or roasts while a bottle of Grand Marnier

Waited on the teak sideboard to be poured over

Dollops of vanilla ice-cream for dessert. The distance

Between their manor house on Greenwood’s boulevard

And the shotgun shanty where Dad dwelled as a boy

Seemed wider than Keesler Bridge spanning the Yazoo

River meandering drunkenly south toward Vicksburg.

Now each dawn, Teresa, I part my beige burlap drapes

To sun so abundant it’s like slashing a sack of grain.

Genteel poverty has been the wage of lending amplitude

To the protein heat our bodies sowed on satin sheets

So many decades ago. Even now you are with me

In all seasons: when I watch a cedar waxwing chip

At iced rowanberries with its beak or perhaps pause

As a locust splits and crawls out of its larval blister

Into song. I dial up The Beatles’ “Long and Winding Road” on a radio crackling with static and conjure

Those dusk to dawn interludes sleeping side by side, Teresa, the spectral celestial choir McCartney deplored Bearing us to other shores, one banked in the temporal World, the other in eternity. For me, those vinyl-tracked Lyrics had more to do with a potter’s wheel –“Truth is Beauty, / beauty, truth”—than some forgotten dee-jay’s Turntable. Draw the curtain, Teresa.

Charles Franklin

City Park: A Portfolio of Photographs

Randy Fertel

Cultural Tensions in American Popular Culture

“No Sweat” versus “Watch Me Sweat”—Dancing with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly

To be human is to feel this dual tug toward artifice and freedom from artifice, toward mastery and being mastered. Mastering through craft and Reason or mastered by inspiration or the unconscious, we come to know this world or the transcendent, and to do the world’s or (maybe) the Transcendent’s will. In the middle of these two extreme states exists the missing third, where having mastered our instrument—perhaps ourselves— we can let go, certain that we will do the right thing. That middle state, from whichever source, is the state that improvisers both embody and ambivalently long for and that first century rhetorician Quintilian described: “The greatest fruit of our studies, the richest harvest of our long labor.”

That tension, and sometimes that resolution, lie behind much of the popular culture of the 20th century.

According to Life magazine, along with the Lindy Hop, tap is America’s “only native and original dance form.” It shares that uniqueness, too, with jazz which also sought to humanize modern, industrial life. Sally Sommer, a leading expert on dance in American popular culture, distinguishes between African-derived tap dancing and European-derived ballet aesthetics: “one expresses the self, the other perfection” (quoted in Dinerstein 226). Seeking perfection privileges those linear, step-by-step, structured human faculties that enable us to achieve mastery. Ballet’s endless hours of repetitive training and exercise at the barre come to mind. Learning tap is, of course, no less arduous, nor less demanding. But seeking to express the self privileges non-linear, unstructured human faculties by which the self can be known: intuition, instinct, the unconscious. Eleanor

Powell and Fred Astaire both said they often dreamed their dance routines. Ballet has a long tradition of innovation (think Balanchine), but its goal is to participate in and to confirm the European tradition of artifice. Ballet training is largely given to learning the traditional repertoire of steps. It’s hard to imagine anything less “natural” and more artificial than dancing en pointe. Not that tap dancing is innately natural or any less arduous, and yet, as Joel Dinerstein argues in his monumental study of dance in the machine age, tap emerged as a “rhythmic organization of industrial noise.” Dinerstein quotes the great modernist architect LeCorbusier who, visiting New York in 1935 found things he had not experienced in Europe: “New sounds … the grinding of the streetcars, the unchained madness of the subway, the pounding of machines in factories” and, LeCorbusier adds, “[f]rom this new uproar [African Americans] make music” (qtd Dinerstein 4). Tap humanized what otherwise dehumanized, made “natural” what was unnatural. Tap has its repertoire of steps, just as machines do. But where a machine is locked into its steps, in tap innovation is key. For the tap icon John W. Bubbles “creating new steps is the only worthwhile challenge and achievement in the art.” As that other icon of the modern age Ezra Pound, demanded, “make it new.

Tap predates the premiere of Igor Stravinky’s Rite of Spring (1913), but the ballet anticipates how American dance, tap and swing, would come to transform industrial noise. Commissioned by famous impresario Serge Diaghilev and danced by Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, Stravinsky’s dissonant Rite of Spring pushed the envelope of ballet so far that, like Rock and Roll in its day, its Paris premiere caused a riot. For Anglo-American poet

T. S. Eliot who was in the audience that night in May, 1913, Stravinsky’s music, a puzzling combination of the primitive and the modern, seemed to transform “the rhythm of the steppes into the scream of the motor horn, the rattle of machinery, the grind of wheels, the beating of iron and steel, the roar of the underground railway, and the other barbaric cries of modern life; and to transform these despairing noises into music.” Together, Eliot and Stravinsky anticipated the “rhythmic organization of industrial noise”

effected by modern dance: tap and swing.

Appropriating machine rhythms fulfills the first two criteria Toni Morrison sets for “Black art”: “it must have the ability to use found objects, the appearance of using found things.” When those accustomed to classical dance dismiss tap it is often because tap dancers make it look effortless— fulfilling Morrison’s third criterion. In the spirit of improvisation, effortlessness conveys a freedom from outmoded conventions, conventions to which ballet is dedicated. “Tap,” for dancer Chuck Green, “is all about freedom.” Those qualities, effortlessness, freedom and innovation, are improvisation’s signatures.

Often compared, the tap-dancers Fred Astaire (1899-1987) and Gene Kelly (1912-1996) provide almost textbook versions of the rhetorics of spontaneity and of craft. A study in contrasts, Astaire, lean and lanky, is effortless elegance. Kelly, more muscular and earth-bound, is brute force, Marlon Brando to Astaire’s Cary Grant, he once said. Kelly’s film narratives are often about life’s challenges overcome by hard work. Astaire’s characters, unassuming, taking life as it comes, embody Trickster’s characteristic bravado and nonchalance. For the great French dancer Leslie Caron, who partnered with both, Astaire, was just made for dancing. You could see him walk in the streets and it was almost like he was dancing. There was a swing to it and a rhythm to it…. And he heard the music; he played with it, he danced with it, he understood it so well…. Everything was easy for him… He also had fun ideas—I think he’s the dancer who made fun of himself the most. He would goof around and the result is lovely. You can see it on the screen.

By contrast, Caron adds, Kelly “was very demanding and very professional. He didn’t think dancing was fun. He really thought it was hard work.” For commentator Jennifer Walsh, tellingly, Kelly “inspires a person to think that if she just tries hard enough, she might be able to do what he does. Fred’s dancing says, ‘Pfft. Forget it. You’ll never be this good.’” Totally controlled and virtuosic, nonetheless Astaire’s dancing embraces

and privileges unstructured, embodied emotion. Equally controlled and virtuosic, Kelly is all about structure. Hey, you can do that. First, you…

For Kelly two plus two always make four; Astaire is charmed by, and means to charm us with, the notion that sometimes two plus two make five.

Astaire rehearsed endlessly to perfect his dance numbers but makes them seem the product of the moment. Athletic and physical, Kelly wants you to see him sweat. Their only duet together, “The Babbitt and the Bromide” from Ziegfeld Follies (1946), is aptly set up by a dialogue where Astaire disguises their hard work and Kelly calls attention to it:

Astaire: Say, why don’t we ad lib something together then.

Kelly: Whip it up right here on the spot? Like the one we’ve been rehearsing for 2 weeks?

Astaire was so determined to give the impression of being unrehearsed that he hired guards to keep his rehearsals private. Yet everyone testified to his obsessive rehearsing.

Many of the narrative lead-ins to Astaire’s dance routines work hard to give the impression of not working hard at all. In Royal Wedding (1951), he “improvises” the famous hat rack duet when his dancing partner (Jane Powell) doesn’t show up for their planned rehearsal—just to kill time, just to play. Astaire rehearsed with more than 30 commercially available hat racks before insisting the prop department build one he could work (or play) with.

The famous “Slap that Bass” number in Shall We Dance (1937) is another rich example. Astaire plays a ballet dancer billed as Petrov to secure his status in the ballet world where he is an established star. But, he’s happy to declare his all-American name, with a wink, almost tap dancing with his tongue: “Pete P. Peters from Philadelphia PA.” He’s fallen for a music hall dance star, the equally all-American Linda Keene (Ginger Rogers). From the point of view of Pete Peters’s ballet world, Keene’s tap dancing is déclassé. But Pete Peters, despite being a ballet marquee principal, is smitten both with her and with tap. Peters follows Keene from Paris to

New York to woo her. During the trans-Atlantic passage, his far tonier but bumbling Brtiish manager Jeffrey Baird (Edward Everett Horton) watches a ballet rehearsal on deck, surrounded by a bevy of scantily clad young women. Meanwhile, Peters is belowdecks in the engine room learning some new licks, listening to the engine room crew perform a song that promises to cure the world’s problems brought on by the Machine Age by using machine rhythms as Morrisonian “found objects.”

Busby Berkeley’s highly-stylized and -produced routines displayed batteries of identity-less young women dancing in geometric, kaleidoscopic lockstep. These too were a response to mechanization. But Berkeley identified, as it were, with the oppressor. Plenty of fun, nonetheless his response was just a reaffirmation of the machine age’s call. His routines only imitated and did not transcend the machine, did not leap into freedom.

In “Slap that Base,” having appropriated the Black band’s rhythms and aesthetic, Astaire proceeds in dance to challenge the machinery of the engine room—John Henry-fashion, another appropriation.

Tap here, as improvisation always does, points out the flaw in orderly systems. The machine repeats itself over and over with power and to great effect, building the modern world. But like most systems, it is rigid. It cannot veer off in new directions. Perfectly structured, it cannot leap into non-structure. To do so is just to throw a rod, break a cog, or run off the rails. Improv, with its elasticity (and irony) instead creates something new. Freedom. It is the signifying response—yes, and…—to mechanization’s call.

Astaire’s on-screen persona is pure Trickster. While his manager inhabits the elite spaces on this transatlantic ship, going below-deck, Astaire crosses boundaries. This norm-breaking and infringement of hierarchical space is characteristic of improvisation’s perennial persona: Trickster. Vanity Fair in 1928, discussing four iconic tap dancers (including Astaire), speaks of them as “clowns of extraordinary motion.” For critic Robert Sklar, for all his elegance, Astaire had “a touch of the gutter.”

Cagney once remarked, “you know, Freddie, you’ve got a touch of the

hoodlum in you.” In The Barkleys of Broadway (1949), dismissing a stuff shirt, Astaire announces, “Aw, that fellow brings out the gangster in me.” Especially in the early Ginger Roger vehicles Shall we Dance and Swing that Music, Astaire always plays the outsider, a Trickster who playfully challenges the received hierarchies. Like the Greek Trickster Hermes, Pete P. Peterson is a charming bounder, equally comfortable among stuff shirts in high places as among clowns and gangsters or in the gutter.

In Swing Time (1936), Lucky Garnett (Astaire), an inveterate gambler (trickster Hermes is the god of chance), scowls ironically at the dance studio’s slogan where he meets and begins to woo Penny Carroll (Rogers). It reads:

To Know How to Dance is To Know How to Control Yourself

Astaire, pausing at the threshold—Trickster is the lord of gateways and portals—looks over this chestnut and dismisses it with a knowing smirk. Like improvisation’s Trickster figure, Astaire is in no need of the constrictions that self-control demands. He devalues it.

Astaire’s persona, needing no character development—again like Trickster—seems to leap (like mētic goddess Athene in her armor) fullyformed onto the screen, tuxedo-clad. In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, just born, the infant Hermes leaps from his cradle ready to invent, trick, lie, and cajole. Charlie Chaplin had this experience when he first put together and donned his Tramp costume: “For me he was fixed, complete,” he wrote in his autobiography, “the moment I looked in the mirror and saw him for the first time, and yet even now I don’t know all the things that are to be known about him” (quoted in Impro, 145).

By contrast, in Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952), the narrative twice recounts (once in a flashback, once as a story within a story) how Don Lockwood (Kelly) claws his way to Hollywood step by step through various levels of touring vaudeville.

For Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, “‘Slap That Bass’ encodes a

classic primitivist framework. Astaire goes to the ‘lower’ classes—the lessevolved, folk primitive cultures—for the raw, instinctive passion lacking in ‘civilization’” (245). This primitivist framework is characteristic of improvisation, inscribed in the gesture of spontaneity: this is good because “natural,” innocent of hard work and sophistication. Hermes’ birthplace is Arcadia, traditional setting for pastoral, the genre where shepherds woo shepherdesses during apparently workfree endless summers. Aspiring to Olympus, Hermes is essentially a rube, but one who gives such hierarchical distinctions no mind. Hermes is just Hermes, class distinctions be damned. I won’t make too much of Astaire’s lifelong choreographic collaborator’s name: Hermes Pan. Pan, another Trickster god, was a shortened form of the choreographer’s impossibly long Greek name, Panagiotopoulos. Pan is Hermes’s offspring. Surely as a Greek he must have settled on lascivious “Pan” with a wink worthy of Astaire’s partner in crime.

Improvisation reaches back to a time well before democracy as we know it found the soil to take root. But democracy is deeply inscribed in improv. Improvisation’s affirmation of vitality ultimately tends to level hierarchies, which makes improvisation throb with a democratic impulse.

Mixed-race Hermes’s effort to gain Olympus, Wordsworth’s celebration of the peasantry, Whitman’s celebration of, well, everything, both anticipate the leveling of hierarchies that followed World War 1, which aristocrats did so much tragically to muddle. Jazz, with its commitment to hearing what every voice has to say even if it’s a misplaced chord, Herbie Handcock’s “rotten fruit,” is the greatest democratic expression. Thumbing his nose at the normative, Astaire projects Bakhtin’s carnivalesque “realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.”

The Tinkering of Improvisation and Virtuosity—The Birth of Jazz

Struggling to define jazz, the Encyclopedia Britannica lands upon improvisation as its defining characteristic:

one important aspect of jazz clearly does distinguish it from other traditional musical areas, especially from classical music: the jazz performer is primarily or wholly a creative, improvising composer—his own composer, as it were—whereas in classical music the performer typically expresses and interprets someone else’s composition.

The encyclopedia then celebrates composers and arrangers like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn as exemplary. Improvisation played a role in Ellington’s exquisite orchestrations, but they were minimal and confined to the breaks or solos. What was tighter than an Ellington-Strayhorn orchestral arrangement? In first generation New Orleans jazz, improvisation had a role not only in solos but within all the collective, polyrhythmic lines of which the music is composed—in the moment of its presentation.

The New Yorker’s jazz critic Whitney Balliet called jazz “the sound of surprise.” That was truer of first-generation New Orleans jazz. Hot or raggedy music, as it was first called by its creators, offers momentary freedom from the straitjacket of Euro-centric decorum. Originally a dance music, hot jazz, deeply rooted in the polyrhythms of Congo Square, embodies the surprise of being mastered by rhythm. It invites us in dance to be mastered ourselves. (As New Orleans jazz great Danny Barker said “if you can’t dance to this music, there’s something wrong with you”). Jelly Roll Morton, big band swing, and later cool jazz employ improvisation but embody and project craftsmanship and mastery. However much they incorporate improvisational breaks and solos, such jazz presents itself first and last as carefully composed and arranged—like Ellington’s always well-tailored tuxedo—as something to be admired.

These generalizations about jazz types are inevitably riddled with exceptions. Nonetheless, these rhetorical effects are distinct and unmistakable. Seeking to avoid the “plantation character” they saw in Louis Armstrong’s desire to entertain and please a mostly white paying audience, cool, craftsmanly jazz embraced the mediation of intellect. Swing to the contrary notwithstanding, much of cool jazz is often music

you can’t dance to. Hot jazz aspires to that state of immediacy Wynton Marsalis, a post-bop but cool musician himself, describes when he says of Louis Armstrong, “As a musician, technically, he’s on the highest possible level, because there’s no barrier between the horn and his soul.”1 Dizzy and Miles retracted their rejection of Pops as entertainer. Gillespie, eventually, “began to recognize what I had considered Pops’ grinning in the face of racism as his absolute refusal to let anything, even anger about racism, steal the joy from his life.”

Marsalis’ neo-traditionalism by contrast is mediated by his deep knowledge of jazz history. His covers, for example Mr. Jelly Lord, are superbly and tightly crafted covers. When Wynton has composed, the accent has been upon tradition. He explores jazz’s Gospel roots in his Pulitzer Prize winning In This House, On This Morning and in Abyssinian: A Gospel Celebration. With Ghanaian drummer Yacub Addy he explores its African roots in Congo Square, a testament to the birthplace of jazz where slaves were allowed to play their traditional drums and pushed back against the culture embodied by New Orleans’s cartesian grid. Wynton premiered the album with Addy at Congo Square. A second line parade preceded their mounting the bandstand. We think of spontaneity as pegged to originality, but the nature of spontaneity’s value—as of originality—is contextual. Mediated by the jazz tradition, Marsalis creates great art. “Unmediated”—note the scare quotes—Louis Armstrong, arguably the greatest artist of the twentieth century, surpasses what mere art can achieve.

Armstrong was the catalyst for the union of heart and head that was essential to the emergence of jazz as we know it (and one reason the strict opposition of head and heart breaks down). New Orleans musicians in the 1890s were distinguished by those who could read music and those who could not. Readers—those who played by reading composed scores—were likely to be French Creoles, descendants of the free men of color (gens

1 Stephanie Bennett, producer, Let the Good Times Role: A Film about the Roots of American Music, DVD, Delilah Music Pictures in Association with Island Visual Arts, 1992; emphasis added.

de couleur libres ) who were offspring of plantation owners and their slaves or concubines and likely to be francophone or bilingual. They were schooled in European culture and religion, decorous, rule-bound Catholicism (though often syncretized with vestiges of African religion). They lived downtown across Canal Street in or near the French Quarter. Their neighbors (and often their paternal families, acknowledged or not) were likely to be the descendants of white plantation owners.

Across Canal, uptown, though just blocks away, was another world. There, unschooled non-readers like Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) played a ferocious and propulsive Afro-centric, spiritualist church-infused, polyrhythmic music. Bolden and his cohorts of the first generation were more likely to have descended from the enslaved people who came from plantations to New Orleans during Reconstruction. They sought to escape the brutality of White Councils—called the KKK elsewhere. Just blocks apart, these were separate cultures. MayAnn Albert Armstrong, mother to Louis, was born upriver on a plantation in Boutte and settled at Liberty and Perdido (freedom and lost) Streets upriver from Canal.

Many, like MayAnn’s legendary son, were influenced by the spiritualist churches deeply imbued with African spirituality and the rhythms which embodied it: polyrhythmic, call-and-response, syncopated, and improvised. Non-readers, they were paradoxically called “head” musicians because what they played came from their head not the page. These often-darker skinned musicians and their hot, wild music were at first disdained by the lighter skinned Creoles as “raggedy,” or worse. Jazz, originally “jass,” referred to sexual intercourse. King Oliver, Armstrong’s mentor and lodestar, is said never to have overcome the “shame” of his dark skin. Uptown Blacks called downtown Creoles “dicty,” pretentious.

Skin tone is a loaded issue in African American culture especially in New Orleans with its large population of light-skinned Creoles who in the Treme neighborhood established the first free-black community in America and enjoyed freedoms and status well above their darker, uptown neighbors. The Autocrat Club in Treme well into the 20th century

used a “paper bag test” to manage admittance: if you were darker than a paper bag, you were not welcome. Reconstruction which had overseen race relations in the south after the Civil War ended partly in response to the Battle of Liberty Place (1874) when 5000 members of the White League, a paramilitary organization made up of Confederate veterans and New Orleanian blue-bloods, and future leaders of the Mardi Gras Krewes attacked and took over the Federal Custom House on Canal Street. The Federal troops removed, the entitlements free people of color had enjoyed were soon lost. Suddenly they were treated no better than the formerly enslaved, subject to the same discrimination and harassment to suppress their voting.

Jazz emerged not long after. The civil rights action that led to the disastrous Jim Crow decision in the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)—which made “separate but equal” the law of the land— had not been an effort to regain rights for all African Americans but only for mixed-race Creoles. The action was organized by the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens)—their French name an index of their birth and Tremé neighborhood—to challenge Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890. Homer Plessy was so light skinned that he had to signal to the conductor of the train that he didn’t belong in the train car where he sat so the law could be challenged in the courts. Plessy v. Ferguson—separate but equal—was the disastrous result. It made Jim Crow the law of the land. Twenty years later only the virtuosity of the young, unschooled Louis Armstrong was able to begin to break down the barrier between Black and Creole. Jazz as we know it—improvised and virtuoso—is a result of the wedding of those forces from uptown and down: hot and cool, soulful and intellective.

“Why am I So Black and Blue,” one of Armstrong’s transgressive masterpieces, was created in the aftermath of that wedding. Composed by light-skinned Fats Waller with lyrics by aristocratic Andy Razaf (grand-nephew to the queen of Madagascar), the song was introduced in the Broadway musical Hot Chocolates. The narrative setting for the

song was a dark-skinned ingenue lamenting that she is not light-skinned (“yeller”) enough:

Out in the street, shufflin’ feet

Couples passin’ two by two

While here am I, left high and dry

Black, and ‘cause I’m black I’m blue

Browns and yellers, all have fellers

Gentlemen prefer them light

Wish I could fade, can’t make the grade

Nothing but dark days in sight

Armstrong lopped off her longing to be a mulatto (“Gentlemen prefer them light”). He made it a call for empathy for all non-whites, not just the “browns and yellers”:

Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead

Feels like ol’ Ned wished I was dead

What did I do to be so black and blue

Even the mouse ran from my house

They laugh at you and scorn you too

What did I do to be so black and blue

I’m white inside but that don’t help my case

‘Cause I can’t hide what is in my face

How would it end, ain’t got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue

How would it end, ain’t got a friend

My only sin is in my skin

What did I do to be so black and blue

Armstrong’s raspy, seemingly untutored voice is another gesture that situates his work in the culture of spontaneity. In his own telling it was

Tillie Karnovsky, the wife of the Orthodox Jewish rag and bone merchant on Rampart Street whose Russian lullabies taught him to sing from the heart. The Karnofskys had virtually adopted him. Their building, an empty shell despite its historical significance, collapsed in Hurricane Ida. The most extreme version of that heartfelt singing was scat, which if Armstrong didn’t invent, he at least popularized. Scat presents itself as vocalization mastered by , taken over by, rhythm and melody. If Pops didn’t invent scat when he dropped his sheet music while recording “Heebie Jeebies,” as the legend goes, it’s an interesting mythic meme connecting him to Trickster, lord of chance and accident, good or ill. Stumble over a tortoise as Hermes does in the Homeric Hymn and invent the lyre. Or drop your sheet music, and create the means of great art. Such is the irrational art of Trickster, making a way out of no way.

We can get at how improv works, its rhetoric of the careless and uncrafted, by lingering over scat another moment. Compare for a moment

Louis’ singing, inspired by Tillie’s Russian lullabies to sing from the heart, to Frank Sinatra’s singing. In general, Louis’s rasp,—“as smooth as a tired piece of sandpaper calling to its mate” (Paul Kael, 5001 Nights a the Movies, 654)—compares unfavorably to Frank’s voice. “The Voice,” as it was called, is clear as a bell, smooth as satin—choose your favorite cliché. Louis’s technique, which seems the wrong word to describe it, for it seems without technique, without craft, is so invisible that many imagined Louis “a primitive genius” or “endearing child of nature” (Collier, 3).

I love Sinatra’s singing and I’m not going to suggest that lonely Frank is not soulful, but where Louis is about heart, Sinatra is all about craft Craft—his dedication to the technical aspects of breathing and phrasing, timbre and diction—is what Sinatra is about (see Pete Hamill, Why Sinatra Matters). And Sinatra and scat? Google those words and what you get is “Stranger in the Night.” Period. “Scooby doobie doo”: a closing that calculatedly if belatedly, half-heartedly to my ear, rides the wave of scat’s popularity. And if you think “scoobie doobie doo” came from the heart rather than from sheet music, I have a bridge to Hoboken to sell you.

Whoever invented it, Louis’s scat was an inevitable articulation of the blues and spirituals that by bending and worrying pitch produce the jagged harmonies, dissonance, and blue notes that have no place in the rationality of Western harmony or solfège. Blue notes literally have no place on the do re mi scale. The nonsense, read, irrational, syllables of scat create something marginal, outside the mainstream and dominant culture, but nonetheless new and lasting—straight, unmediated, from the heart and soul.

Calculated Outrageousness—The Godfather of Soul and Brother Bach

The marriage of opposing rhetorics—spontaneity and craft—is embodied again in one distant relative of the jazz tradition, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. In bandleader Paul Shaffer’s words, Brown is “the most ferocious barbarian of all,” and yet his performances intertwine mastery and being mastered by soul.1 In a New Yorker profile, Philip Gourevitch describes how his performances were at once literally spontaneous and “orchestrated according to the most rigorous discipline”:

Although no two nights are the same, and much of what you see and hear when he’s onstage is truly spontaneous, the dazzle of these unpredictable moments is grounded in his ensemble’s dazzling tightness. He proceeds without song lists, conducting fiercely drilled sidemen and sidewomen through each split-second transition with an elaborate vocabulary of hand signals. “It’s like a quarterback—I call the songs as we go,” he says. (Gourevitch, “Mr. Brown,” in New Yorker, July 29, 2002, p. 51)

“Even in his earliest, wildest days,” Gourevitch continues, his outrageousness was carefully calculated to convey that, while he cannot be contained, he is always in control. In contrast to the effortlessness that so many performers strive for in their quest to

1 Paul Shaffer, We’ll Be Here For The Rest of Our Lives (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp. 80-84.

exhibit mastery, James Brown makes the display of effort one of the most striking features of his art[…]. He is the image of abandon, yet his precision remains absolute, his equilibrium is never shaken, there is no abandon. (54.)

Like Gene Kelly’s, James Brown’s performances insist on his effortful spontaneity, effortful effortlessness, as it were. In this he is not unlike J.S. Bach who conveys the magisterial effort of his improvising during a royal visit

The King admired the learned manner in which his subject was thus executed extempore; and, probably to see how far an art could be carried, expressed a wish to hear a Fugue with six Obligato parts. But as it was not every subject that is fit for such full harmony, Bach chose one himself, and immediately executed it to the astonishment of all present in the same magnificent and learned manner as he had done that of the King. (Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 7)

Improvising “a Fugue with six Obbligato parts,” as Douglas Hofstadter remarks, is like “playing … sixty simultaneous blindfold games of chess, and winning them all,” or we might now add, like doing flying splits from the theatre balcony. Though both were prodigies and child performers, surely it’s surprising that Bach and James Brown might share anything. Were artists so heterogeneous ever yoked? Yet, what Gourevitch says about Brown’s “outrageousness” applies to both, that it was “carefully calculated to convey that, while he cannot be contained, he is always totally in control.” (Gourevitch, “Mr. Brown,” p. 51).

Why? What motivates this insistence either on effortful effortlessness or effortless effort? Clearly with Bach it is a way to display his extraordinary genius, his total mastery. Regarding his improvising, there seems to be no recourse to divine inspiration to explain his prowess, except perhaps that he had a generalized divine gift. Brown shares Bach’s well-earned grandiosity. In discussing the recording and remixing process he explains that his improvised performances are sacrosanct: “when it comes from me, it’s the real thing[…]. It’s God.” Compare Kerouac, who complained

to Robert Giroux, who wanted to cut up the scroll to revise On the Road, “This manuscript has been dictated by the Holy Ghost.” (qtd Cunnell, 52). Kerouac doesn’t mention which member of the Trinity helped him edit for six years to get it to press.

Like Kerouac, Brown’s motivation seems to be at least in part political, an expression of his personal version of Black pride. As Gourevitch writes, “This was the man whose ultimate civil-rights-era message song was ‘I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get it Myself)’” (57-58). Brown projects an “image of abandon, yet his precision remains absolute, his equilibrium is never shaken, there is no abandon.”

Motown (founded 1959) is James Brown’s contemporary (“Please Please Please,” 1958). The Motown Sound’s perfection also marries the rhetorics of improv and virtuosity. But the latter, virtuosity and craft, is clearly in the driver’s seat. Motown’s backup band The Funk Brothers, drawn from Detroit’s robust jazz and blues scene, justly prided themselves on their improvisational skills and a groove that grabbed the listener’s pulse. New Orleans clarinetist and saxophonist Charlie Gabriel, now with Preservation Hall Jazz Band, played with the Funk Brothers on many of Motown’s greatest songs.2 Like The Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s first jazz recording, “Livery Stable Blues,” with its transgressive, novelty barnyard sounds, The Funk Brothers were known not only for their propulsive groove but also for their use of odd instrumentation. Pianist Earl Van Dyke played a toy piano on the introduction to the Temptations’ “It’s Growing.” For “Dancing in the Street” heavy chains were shaken in the echo chamber to suggest the street riots the song warned against and celebrated. Greil Marcus wonders: “when it released Martha and the

2 In an online interview, poet and spoken word artist John Sinclair, a Flint, MI native, said that the Motown Sound was “based on Cosimo’s studio” (where jazz players helped shape early rock and roll and R&B) and that other, now legendary New Orleans musicians came up to help shape the Funk Brothers’ sound: drummer Smoky Johnson, singer Johnny Adams, saxophonist Kidd Jordan, and pianist Earl King. NOLA Reconnect: A Virtual Visit to New Orleans. October 16, 2020.

Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ in 1964, did anyone at Hitsville USA on West Grand Boulevard know, as people would discover, sing, and trumpet in Watts a year later and in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue, two years after that, that the song was about a riot, a refusal, a willingness to tear a city down to make it right?” The Funk Brothers’ improvisational skills were so invisible that a full-length documentary was made ( Standing in the Shadows of Motown, 2002) to bring them to the attention of Temptations fans. The Funk Brothers carried Motown’s disruptive core, but its overt presentation to the world was virtuosity, perfection.

The Motown Sound was engineered by its founder Barry Gordy Jr. who, tired of his job on the Lincoln-Mercury assembly line, wondered if he could reproduce Henry Ford’s masterstroke in the music industry. The accent fell on engineered. Tight and disciplined like a Ford assembly line, Gordy’s Motown Sound was, adds Benjaminson, “Afro-American tradition updated by the incessant pounding of the punch press and buffed to a shiny gloss by contact with a prosperous urban society.” As fellow Detroiter Greil Marcus recounts, listening to the first Motown records, you’d be “stunned that anything could be this good, this perfect.”

That perfection was no accident. Motown performers, many of them teenagers with loads of talent, were put through what Gordy called “Quality Control.” Gordy described his “factory-type operation” as “Detroit’s other world-famous assembly line.” Gordy’s recording studio, Hitsville USA, included separate stations where aspiring performers learned how to walk on stage, how to dance expressively with high gloss and intricate coordination, how to dress, what to say between songs, what a nightclub act involved. The Motown group Gladys Knight & the Pips referred to a childhood nickname. But, having drunk Gordy’s Kool-Aid, Knight explained that it stood for “Perfection in Performance.”

Like James Brown informed by the civil rights movement, Gordy’s perfection had a purpose, the elevation of his race. The high gloss and intricate coordination of harmonies, dance steps, and costumes were meant not only to appeal to a crossover audience for commercial reasons,

but also to make the case for African American equality. Gordy sought to transgress and to change the status quo of Jim Crow America not by confrontation but by means of aesthetic appeal. Consider, from about the same moment in America’s racist history, transgressive comedian Lenny Bruce’s bit on racism. He asks you to imagine yourself The Imperial Wizard of the KKK, and you have a choice to make:

You have the choice of spending fifteen years married to a woman, a black woman or a white woman. Fifteen years kissing and hugging and sleeping real close on hot nights. With a black, black woman or a white, white woman. The white woman is Kate Smith. And the black woman is Lena Horne. So you’re not concerned with black or white anymore, are you? You are concerned with how cute or how pretty. Then let’s really get basic and persecute ugly people!

Bruce’s logic didn’t take hold but Gordy’s Motown, like the first generation of jazz and like the Godfather of Funk, helped to humanize African Americans for white audiences. James Brown used the shock of his funk to do so, Motown the allure of its virtuosity with funk playing a hidden if powerful role.

Motown, then, was created in a step by step, structured process underpropped by the Funk Brothers’ mostly invisible, but deeply felt driving groove. The Funk Brothers documentary makes no effort to explain or teach funk, just finally to give it voice and to bear witness. The film’s message: The Temps stood on the shoulders of invisible giants whose art was beyond the reach of art.

Jazz singer Kate Smith

Jazz singer Lena Horne

Bruce’s comedy was unscripted, tying together well-honed riffs like this one, with meandering monologues. Bruce improvised. But, then, his challenge to the normative system was more confrontational than Gordy’s and he paid for it with the police harassment that hounded him to an early grave.

Of Astaire’s superb appropriations we can say at best that he meant well. And that, unlike Gene Kelly, he wasn’t entirely white bread.

A Review of Delta Tears , poems by Philip C. Kolin

(ISBN: 978-1-59948-841-7, 100 pages, $15, Main Street Rag, 2020)

Delta Tears is Philip Kolin’s 11th poetry book. A prolific author, he has published more than 40 books, many of them reflecting his fascination with the Mississippi Delta. The published works include critical and biographical studies of Tennessee Williams, a collection of poems on Emmett Till, and a coedited anthology Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River.

The poems in Delta Tears underscore the paradoxical nature of this region of the South. As the prologue poem, “The Mississippi Delta,” points out, we always hear “the dark voice of that mud river,/ part corpse, part redemption.” Further emphasizing this dichotomy, Kolin reminds us in “The Mississippi River’s Proclamation” that the Mississippi is “a river of reveries” and “a slave’s ride south to hell.” Reflecting the river’s and the region’s diversity, Kolin offers a variety of poetic types and voices, including biting attacks on slavery and sharecropping, blues-inspired laments, lyrics about Delta landscapes, and surreal visions about the Delta. The poems are divided into six sections— The Old Mud River , Centuries of Tears, Jukes and the Blues, Delta Dogs and Other Critters, Seasons, and Places to Store Memories. The first two sections on the river and the impact of slavery are the heart and soul of Delta Tears. Kolin’s love affair with the river is evident in poems such as “The River’s Music” where “in the Delta moonlight the river turns into a flowing symphony.” But Kolin laments pollution in “The River Cries Muddy Tears” and “Elegy for the River” causing “suffocating air” and driving “the river to emptiness.” Two back-to-back poems—“The Great Flood of 1927” and

“Flooding, 2017”—focus on one of the greatest threats the river poses. In 1927, black men’s lives were lost on levees and barges protecting white property. Here in horrific detail is the recollection of one black man kept prisoner pushing the river back:

When a shotgun blew a hole in my uncle’s chest, we watched his body leak red dirt clots that did little to stop the snake-like currents.

In 2017, “Seawalls and levees melted like sugar in the chicory rain” as coffins, resurrected by the water, “raced down the street.” The poem ends with this haunting line—“The only thing that sparkled in the night were garfish eyes.” In “The Chicago Delta,” after the Great Migration black families rejoiced that their “dreams could not be extradited to Mississippi” or be “chain-ganged to nightmares.” They were relieved “to say goodbye/ to that dark river thirsting for their souls.”

The horrors of slavery and sharecropping pulsate through “Centuries of Tears.” The lead poem “Bodies in Bondage” is a tour de force about the genesis of the slave trade, the horrors of Middle Passage, and the fate of slaves ending up in the Delta.

“On the far side of smiles,” they “came across an ocean of bloody vomit, feces, chains, peeled bones, and limp eyes and then down… the river... [ran] up and down like a snake searching for prey… Flesh sucking fish waited in the still murk for a welcomed suicide.” When their bodies were “sold and resold,” “Song became the only salve for their tongues. Like oarsmen, words carried them into the forbidden territory of hope.”

Kolin’s graphic empathy seeps through each line. In other poems, slaves received the overseer’s “cotton kiss,” a whip; elsewhere slaves were “sold as corpses” in “blistering slave markets” during a Yellow Jack epidemic since slavers declared “Jack would not infect black skin.” The pleasures of uncaring white Southerners are contrasted with black suffering in “Delta Cotillions,” where bloodstained eyes were ordered to

remain downcast and their sentences chained to slave syllables.” In one of the best poems in Delta Tears “Who Owns What in Sharecropping” Mister Charlie emblazons his name on the roof of each worker’s cabin and owns punishments such as “lynchings” and the “Black Codes” while sharecroppers own “boll weevils, floods, rickets, rocks, tornadoes, drought, dust, the debt … nightmares and despair, worn out lives and smiles

...and pine boxes but not the land they will be lowered in … Mister Charlie owns that.”

Perhaps the most frightening poem is “Parchman Prison Farm” with its “20,000 acres of agony.” Contemporary “enslaved America” punishes inmates for breathing too much (echoes of Eric Garner), and makes them drink water that is “flavored/ with mud and maggots.” The air is in “constant lockdown . . biting like fire ants in your eyes.”

The opening poem in “Blues and Juke Joints,” “Juke Houses” is a litany of places, patrons, and scores satirizing “white-face prying police” who dare not enter the sanctum of black music. There patrons meet a “funk-loving Jesus” who scoffs at the sign that reads: “Negroes and dogs allowed,” ironically undercutting segregation’s barriers. In only three stanzas in “Hospice for the Blues,” Kolin isolates some quintessential elements of the blues—betrayed love, voluptuous bodies, a cruel nature:

What ever happened, a man asks, to that woman with a ramshackle smile

and those wide come-my-way swinging hips that promised me forever

but with just a wink brought more agony than a mule felled by fire ants.

In “Bluesmen at Dawn” tired musicians “gather outside the locked juke with their brown/sugar mash and tales about a woman / whose heart beats

like a snare drum” Their memory runs wild long after the juke closes but right before they return “to the plantations/ their stories ploughed under, or carried/in poke sacks that grow heavier with the years.” Kolin scores three original blues poems—“Deep Down Blues,” “Velvet Blues,” and “Three Ladies Blues,” paying tribute to several blues legends—Billy Holiday, Bessie Smith, and Victoria Spivey. Other poems pay tribute to pop singers (e.g. Sam Cooke) mightily influenced by the blues and B.B. King whose “Thrill will never be gone.” “The Blues Bus,” carries a “pilgrimage of voices” from suffering from the forlorn love but as “darkness swallows their voices,” the bus “has moved beyond memory, and words.”

In “Delta Dogs and Critters” and “Seasons” Kolin’s poems change tone and tenor. He playfully characterizes the Delta’s ubiquitous mosquitoes as “rebel angels from heaven’s cool alpine air” who “resemble shrunken minotaurs down here.” nesting in “quicksand and fire.” In “Ode to Catfish,” the Delta’s “totem animal” becomes the “whiskered reincarnation of fish gods,” their replicas found in “front of stores, restaurants, and gas stations.” Tongue in check, Kolin declares that “Belzoni has surpassed ancient Babylon” in honoring them. In “My Fair Ladybug,” Kolin lyrically personifies these tiny creatures as “April’s grandmother” who “preserve springtime greenery” with their “Seurat-symmetry.” An entire city of them can fit “inside a gallon lemonade jug.” But, as with the Mississippi, Kolin knows that there are sinister forces lurking in the Delta. In autumn’s “Raptor Winds,” a “silky Maltese weighing less than a pile of leaves” is carried off by a red wing hawk while nomad dogs in search of “swamp water and field rats roam the Delta nights.” Hauntingly, crows, the Delta’s “dark undertakers,” intone “one-word requiems” as they swoop down in this “country of corpses,” e.g., in trees where “victim nestlings” are in their “last faint of breath,” on highways where “pieces of flesh are left behind,” and in fields as they carry off the hunter’s spoils and “the wind goes silent.” A beautiful poem on the stages of a sparrow’s life from its “rookery” where it is fed by “a mouth with wings,” to feeling “plumed desire” in “sun showers,” and in “tales of lustered flight,” and unlike noisy

pelicans, “sparrow’s song is enough.” Crows and sparrows, hawks and ladybugs, the complex menagerie of Kolin’s Delta.

Lyricism and terror fold into each other in poems on the passing seasons. Bucolic splendor bursts out in poems on spring ponds and gardens, summer retreats, and autumnal skies of “silk and lavender clouds.” Proclaiming “the world needs gardens,” Kolin alludes to one of the Delta’s most romantic rituals: “In springtime comes hurrahs/ for the progeny of last year’s/ debutantes—lacecap, hydrangea/ blue sage, heather and impatiens.” In the “Blessings of Spring,” he personifies a Delta landscape where “trees rustle to touch each other/ as if limbs and leaves were searching/ for lost lovers.” Evocative of the Romantic poets, Kolin exquisitely describes a pond “during gentle noon light/layered rainbows crown/top water and patch channel gaps.” But Kolin never lets readers forget about the other side of beauty and tranquility in the Delta. In winter, “Creeks freeze/ and cash crops go bankrupt—/spurs, choke weeds, rotting rocks/ [become] a market for despair.” Winter weeds with their “fusillade of springs and sprigs” set out to unseed early spring’s “untried grass.”

“A Delta Hurricane,” “The Dirty Side of the Storm,” or “A Eulogy for a Tree” also jerk us back from an idyllic Delta. Once “a child’s dream house,” a “neighborhood aviary,” an “artist loft,” the Delta tree is beset by “beetle borers girdling its limbs and torso in black crepe;/it stood stiff as an obelisk” in winter. Like Kolin’s fanciful riff on mosquitoes, “Humidity in the Big Easy” flows with hilarity—“Your glasses go blind”; “You are sweating more than a Preakness horse”; “You hallucinate that you take a swamp tour/ and see Dante passing in a pirogue.”

The poems in Kolin’s last section range from “The Delta Queen’ personified as a Cleopatra-like siren running through “the dark world/ she depends on to keep her illusions bright” to the brothels of “Storyville” where “an urn of cemetery dirt is complementary in each room” to Williams’s “Moon Lake” to “Chinese Grocery Stores, Circa 1935” where the owners “spoke Delta to their customers” but “Chinese at home.”

Among Kolin’s best work are poems on “The Old Cotton Field Church”

an “ark sailing across Delta heat haze/ carrying 40 souls every Sunday” and “Soil,” “the Delta’s definition and its paradox.” The collection ends with a solemn poem on the shrine of Madonna of the Delta that offers a “retreat” from “wounding remarks.”

I highly recommend Delta Tears.

from Personal Essays on Fear

To Be Loved

I t’s a valuable thing to know that you are loved. I’ve seen married couples, for instance, who seem madly in love with one another. They seem to find comfort and ease in their love and do not have to spend time wondering, doubting their partner’s love. This frees their minds for higher or more necessary pursuits, surely, such as building a precious family or vigorously taking part in a community’s well-being and growth. Again, their every thought is not wasted, wondering, fearing that they are not loved.

It is said that children who grow up seeing their parents in a loving relationship learn how to be in those types of relationships themselves. They can see themselves one day being loved as well. I think back to my mother, and although she seemed capable of happiness—a smile often coated her facial expression—there must have been incredible doubt that my father loved her. He claimed that he did. He passionately swore that he did. He seemed to need to state that he did love my mother.

There were signs of this love: their hasty marriage on Valentine’s Day 1948; his complete love of her cooking and other qualities; his lifelong desire to marry her again—the second time, done the right way, in a church, with everyone watching. Perhaps signs like these became markers of hope for my mother and gave her a type of minor strength that got her through the dark moments. Perhaps these signs afforded her relief from the doubts, the constant wondering and worrying about being loved.

My father said he was at once smitten with my mother. He often described the double-dates with him and my mother, and his brother, my

Uncle Jake, and my mother’s sister, my Aunt Mary.

“I just wanted to be close to her,” he would say. “All of us crowded into Jake’s old truck, and she’d have to sit on my lap the whole time. Boy, I liked that!”

I think of it now that all of them are long dead and I am getting older myself. My father was almost thirty years old when he became “smitten” with my mother, who was only fourteen years at the time. Yes, she had birthed a child at thirteen; yes, she was tall and looked mature; and yes, in those mid-twentieth century years, marriage for a girl of my mother’s age was not frowned upon, even to a man who was twice her age. But when I think of it now, I recognize that he was a grown man fiddling around with a child.

One of my favorite pictures of my mother is of she and I sitting on her front porch. She had paid local friends of my brothers to build the porch one spring afternoon—using old wood, propping it up with old stones, a little spit and a lot of beer. They had been kind enough to screen the porch so that mosquitoes would not be a problem on late summer afternoons when my mother often sat out there, catching a breeze, and somehow finding peace.

The photo seems rare, like the moment. She is sitting in a large chair, and I am sitting on the arm of that chair, with one arm around her shoulder. We are both smiling, almost laughing. She brought that kind of joy into my world. I could count on it, like death and taxes, as they say. The afternoon shade of the trees lay silently on the floor and cools the moment, even now, in my memory. Absolutely no one else is in the photo—these are clearly happy moments that she and I shared. But when I look at the photo now, I ask myself how she did it—how did she take the hard times my father gave her and make a seemingly joyous life out of them?

When I was very young—so young I cannot imagine my age—I woke from a bad dream and went to my mother and father’s bed, as I usually

did when frightened. I did not find them there and went in search, of my mother in particular. When I opened the door to the living room (from the kitchen), I saw, in the darkness, two huddled forms, on the couch, making weird noises. I must have thought my mother was in trouble because I called out to her, “Momma!”

The noises stopped, so did the movement.

“Get outta here!” my father yelled.

My mother may have said something softer, like “Go back to bed,” but the shock of my father’s voice had already turned me around. The fact that I can still remember the incident suggests I was truly traumatized by it.

I’m also not sure what this means, or why it has become part of this sketch on “love.” Probably because I have asked myself, at least once or twice, over the years, whether my mother was enjoying herself, or was this one of the many late nights when my father came home drunk, ready to collect on his rights as a husband.

What do I think? I think my parents had a lot of children. And the times when my mother was not “barefoot and pregnant,” at least one of his other women was carrying his children, too.

I think part of it is that there are many kinds of love. Like love of self, of others. There is love of one’s creation, of those birthed into the world, no matter the strain or ease of those births. I see my mother’s thankfulness at being given so many children by God: she birthed ten children, and also raised the girl child of her sister Josephine, who died in a car accident. I see my mother’s unabated love and appreciation for God’s gift of children.

I think about animal mothers and their offspring. The things they do to protect their young: the nourishing, the sharing, the instruction. Most impressive is the all-out adoration of those children. I am often amazed when I visit the zoo, or when I watch the many HGTV shows about animals. I am amazed at the lengths they will go as mothers. Growing up on our farm, we had a sow that would try to kill you if you even looked

at her piglets. What about those species whose mothers kill the father to protect the young? And ah, mythology, and all those protective mothers.

Down to her last breath, my mother was probably thinking of her children. She had so many, and yet had lost three (Anna as a baby, Lionel a few years before she died, and Willie barely a year before my mother’s death). Perhaps she wanted to keep the rest of us close. Those early morning phone calls, to each of us, are what I miss the most.

That photo of us on the porch tells me that I brought some joy to her that day. I had probably driven from New Orleans just to hang out with her. The thing is, I loved sitting on that porch as much as she did. There is something about basking in the shade of a porch, especially on a warm day—looking out on the world, imagining only goodness. That’s where our smiles likely came from: she and I talking about good things in life. Us laughing about some oddity or happenstance. Us sharing our optimism—despite the horror that may have been lurking.

Sometimes, I think we are fated for one life only. We like to think we could have chosen the road not taken, as Frost says, but is that true?

I do not think my mother’s life was destined to be sunny-side-up, rosy, and without extreme hardships. She was born during depression era America. She worked in the fields, from sunup to sundown, and this did not change until she was well past middle age. She was not allowed to finish elementary school. She bore a child as a child. She was chosen for marriage—which must have seemed like things were finally looking up—by a man who would later show that same type of attention to the child she birthed out of wedlock.

She struggled alongside him all the rest of the days of her life, always trying to make ends meet, never quite sure of the next dollar. She literally fought him—fisticuffs style—on many occasions, either to keep him from hitting her, or to keep him away from her eldest child, who would grow to fight him, too. She turned her face from his philandering ways. She

learned how to grow up and become a strong woman, to make her own money—because he was stingy with his. Her children, namely me and my sister, Venesta, felt so badly about this that when we joined the military, we monthly sent home a third of our pay so that she could better take care of herself and the children still at home.

All of this and more, leads me to believe there was no other, less oppressed life for my mother. What does that mean to me, today? Am I secretly praying that her next life will be better, that her turn will come? Yes, I am.

Then I think, that woman could surely laugh. Joy was something she was most familiar with. She went about helping people like her life depended on her doing so. She could talk up a conversation with even the most sullen, least friendly. She knew how to work hard and didn’t mind doing so. She taught her children to work as hard. She could goof off just as easily. Her house wasn’t always clean, but there was always an opportunity for fun—a run to the local store for snacks and cold drinks, for example. There was always food on the table, at suppertime, breakfast, and lunch. She was a devoted church woman, singing in the choir, ushering, teaching. And she pushed us, her children, to learn everything we could. When I was the first to graduate from college, she was the happiest I had ever seen her. She literally told everyone she knew, as well as everyone she met on the street. Sure, she had very little “learning,” as she said, but she now had a daughter who was smart and capable, in ways she had only imagined. I was the living prize that she could share.

Later in their lives together, my father came to the VA in New Orleans to have cataract surgery. In those days, he and my mother were inseparable. He had slowed down, learned how to be more appreciative as a husband, and turned specifically to God. She therefore came to New Orleans with him and spent the night at my apartment. Gosh, I was proud, to have my mother all to myself.

Sometimes, I wish I remembered every last second of that night— perhaps had a hidden camera, immortalizing those rare moments. If only I’d known she would be dead in a matter of years—years that now seem like months, days. I know that, after we left my father at the hospital, she and I spent most of the evening talking. I know that I stepped all over myself trying to please her, making sure she was comfortable and that she wanted nothing. I can’t remember what we ate—probably one of my specialties, like porcupine balls,1 which were popular with me back then. My mother didn’t drink, so we did not have wine, even though I probably had a bottle in the fridge. I would have had sweet tea available. When we were finally tired enough to sleep, I had to convince my mother to take the bed and I would take the sofa. I was especially happy that my mother would have the chance to sleep in my large, king bed (she and my father shared a standard-sized bed their entire married lives). I imagined she would roll around in the large bed and frolic the night away, that she would have the best night of sleep she had ever had. I know, silly. But I gotta say, that was definitely the best night I ever slept on a sofa. We woke up, ate breakfast, and drove back to the hospital in my little sports car. She wasn’t all that familiar with the New Orleans streets, and she was a little scared as I sped through the city. I am sure I slowed down, at least a bit. When we arrived at my father’s room, he lay there easily, waiting for the eye surgery. He smiled a lot in those days; he found a way to joke about his chances. When my mother went over to his bed, I could see his face light up, as it often did in those days when she was near. I’m sure he had missed her that night. I am sure of it.

Most days, I understand that there are many, many kinds of love. And most days, I know my mother knew she was loved—by my father, by her children, by her friends, and by random people she met on the street. She was that kind of person—someone who deserved to be loved.

Two Poems Tonometry

Such a tiny puff, a slight annoyance, a moment of noncontact, this legerdemain— what hocus pocus, what misdirection, with your chin in a cradle, a red dot centering itself on a hot air balloon? Hold still. Do nothing. Watch the dot. What’s the problem? the doctor asks. You have seen sap boiling out of trees. Rocks crack and split. Gulls implode mid-flight. The inside of your eye is under water at a high tide. He’s not listening. He’s not the least bit interested in what you’re saying. He’s the specialist reading the numbers as if your retina were the flat, dead floor of the ocean.

Floaters

Amoebas inside your eyes. Lava lamps dim, turn black and white. Jellyfish rise and fall against lacquered skies. An octopus squirts away, leaving its inky shadow behind. The glasses on the nightstand lose their power. To see is to be separated from the subject. To drive becomes more risk than reward always asking, Where? There? How close? The eye chart reveals mysterious messages in the examination room. When the doctor asks you to read line 3, the answer comes forth as if spelled by an unfamiliar voice, a message from a séance, from a theosophical text, a Ouija board: I C A N N O T

A. P. Walton

Two Poems

The Candle Held for Mirth

Somewhere in the world there flutters a brief, nameless poem, perhaps an enjambed epigram or even a senryu.. of wishing to see, then being unable to erase from mind the sensed images—

the data at odds with order, like cacophonous chords. The poem is hardly droll. Like its fellow infantrymen, it aims at rectifying the horror. –The horror.

In droves the horrors persist. And we take on the injustice. There may come a time for mirth, but it isn’t now; the jubilee may unroll over epochs, who can say?

The now is full with iniquities. With abuses and malfeasances, swift massacres, celled enslavements.

The now summons poet-seers to sheathe the discord, like a jagged trail through brokenness. To find a form that accommodates the mess, wrote Beckett, that is the task of the artist now. Then and now. Like oceanic latitude against staccato, the tumult remains, is natively entropic. –A scattered cyclone. A snake coiled high and adance. A fire hose loose and useless, a bane. But poets seize the hose, drape the blanket. Some words.. poems.. are not meant to be beautiful, but rather, disrupt chaos—form a tourniquet, disrupting disruption. I can’t unsee atrocity, but poets would rather see it than overlook it.

Then constrict it—smother it out, conclusively.

The form and the chaos remain separate, as it were.

Line designers, arriving at function.

Arriving in time to find and fix the faults, to address and dress the wounds.

Arriving at functional forgiveness.

Erotic Glimpse of the Unloved Mind Fleeing the Body

Never touched. Never grasped. The lingerie model virgin lies solitary at night under her veneer of thin underwear and imagines what love is or might feel like. She adores and abhors just how her closetfuls of underthings and hosiery and heels and jewelry and bags and untold further accessories including her cosmetics and extensions and plethoric fragrances feel, invariably make her feel both elite and chic and deified yet cheap and unloved, like a whore. If artists are, en masse, inconsolably excessive, effectively addicts, singularly or in hordes, she is, too, addicted less to the shutter’s click like a needle’s prick than to the tracking lenses, uninterrupted behind corneas, anterior chambers, and pupils, robotic, unshuttered, receiving an image at once a crude representation.. instantaneously transposed via axonal tract to new data, to synaptic and orgasmic bliss. So, exoticized, she deals. Until her sapiosexual libido dives to an uncanonized death in an unwatered pool and is reborn into a life of the terrifyingly explosive mind. Untouched, soon embraced. Never loved, awaiting love and understanding, grasping them.

Jonathan Bracker

Morning Events

I have pushed the Venetian blinds up So Henry can see everything out or down From the corner of this desk. Now he Looks out eagerly — or what would be Eagerly if he were human — apparently Considering that young man across the street Stepping down six steps with bicycle hoisted.

Henry then looks back at me looking at him, His whiskers a seal’s but not wet with sea-spray, His head a-move, ears occasionally dipping and twitching.

He now lifts and bends a paw to wholeheartedly lick it. Having gazed briefly but steadily Through the light material of a still-rolled-down Other blind, Henry arranges artistically his body and tail Before lowering himself to nap an unknown while.

It is something, how he teaches about nothing.

Jonathan Travelstead

Cloud Fable

This could be a memorial for how the porcelain body lies in repose. But light floods table & even the tangible from this room.

Lacking definition shadow gives, the eye sockets, lit smooth, contain sky with obsidian space. Don’t dare try dissecting this. A scalpel couldn’t find a seam in the hairless brow of this geometry, the mercury meniscus of this sexless torso. Not a hum exists in a vaccuum. No signs of the quantum coin, carbon, sunk in this quicksilver chest. In this cadmium pastoral.

We’ve waited out history for this, standing for days in a queue of bodies to kiss they/them.

We’ve come from the Vatican. We come from Buncomb. From Carbondale, tousled with our bent stick & broken bindles of code, our abacus, Antikythera.

They’ve unlocked the doors.

One-by-one, our lips brush the porcelain cheek as we leave our bodies with each glow of carmine. Russet. Rose.

The little god sits up. Wet with moon, looks upon the froth of clouds. What I could do if only a little wind, If only a little water!

Lonely with human story, hears an alien voice: Take a bit of cumulous & fashion earth. Of cirrus make fire. Fingernail a leaf’s vein mold bone into a collection of ribs a scaffold on which to hang again a story of flesh. Cloud Fable

This could be a memorial for how the trademarked, porcelain body lies in repose. How light floods the surgical table & the tangible from the foundry room. Lacking definition shadow gives, the eye sockets, lit smooth, contain sky, space. You’ve been sanitized, dressed in a suit with its own atmosphere–Don’t dissect this. A scalpel couldn’t find a seam in the bare brow of geometry, this sexless torso. Not so much as a hum exists in vacuum.

No sign of the quantum coin sunk in the mercury of their quicksilver chest.

We’ve waited out history for this,

standing for days in a queue of bodies to kiss they/them.

They’ve unlocked the doors. One-by-one, our lips brush the porcelain cheek which glows carmine, russet, rose, as we leave our bodies.

Jonathan Kline

from Standing at the Gate

The late July midnight sat on New Orleans like a suffocating toad as the old poet stood on the street corner waiting. He reeled from side to side, belched the taste of red beans and gin, shook his head, and shivered. He was waiting for the angel, a mousy little man wearing a woman’s overcoat. He was waiting for prophecy; waiting to hear his words come back in the language of the dead. He could hear him singing from the cemetery and was trying to remember the name of the song. The voice was clear and sweet as it echoed off the cemetery walls. It was difficult to just be quiet and listen to the night. There was a sudden sound of cats fighting, then a low harmonic bellowing of ships’ horns echoing across the neighborhood. He heard a door slam some blocks away, angry voices passed without words. A glass broke, and the singing stopped as a car started and drove away.

Now it was silent. He listened to the buzzing of the streetlights and thought about what it meant to be a poet. “Why me with this curse?” he whispered. “Don’t others hear the ship horn symphony? The crickets and the humming lights? Hush —the angel is singing again.” As he puzzled over the name of the song and where he had heard it before, his thoughts drifted to his time in university. “Distinguished Lecturer,” He whispered... “Professor of Howling Debauchery, Lover of Co-eds, Raper of Grade Averages, Killer of Dreams. It’s not my fault. I knew people, I was Distinguished, better than the rest. My translations were published by Penguin, and my poems by New Directions. I chased after youth like I could bite its moving tires. I suckled their high pigeon tits and let them believe they were my muses. But that was you. I walked across the park every day thinking of you, standing on your toes, nude in your red-towelturban, our café on the coast of Portugal, watching you in your studio painting, the time the hummingbird drank from the flower in your hair.

Everything beautiful was what you brought to the table, and I could see the sounds as patterns and poetry flowed because writing was easy when I could read aloud to you. I was going to get old and settle in with you. I was going to love you just like I promised. Then you were cut like a line from my life. Somebody edited you. A red line on the sidewalk. An exclamation point in your heart, for thirty dollars and an emerald ring.

In that darkness, there were not enough stanzas to hold my grief so I looked for a bottle that could. And I got old anyway. And when I became too mean to suck up and too drunk to put out, they decided the time for grieving was over. The New Guard was at the gate, but I was ten years deep in grief, still searching for you between the ice cubes.”

He listened harder to the song. It was old, he had heard it many years before when she was alive. He could almost remember her singing it. There was a clicking. It was getting louder, but he couldn’t tell from which direction. Then it stopped. The old poet walked around the corner to see the sound. Halfway down the block, he could see a silhouette of a deer, the long neck, the antlers outlined in the yellow streetlights. When the buck caught sight of him, it ran at top speed toward the old poet who stood there astonished by the majesty of his hallucination. As the buck ran around him it stepped on a patch of broken glass and lost its footing. It hit the concrete with a thud and slid on its back along the sidewalk off the curb and into the street. Then, fast as that, he was on his feet and gone. The old poet laughed a bit and said a breathless, “Wow!” as he watched the buck disappear into the night.

The thief slid her hand through the crack in the tomb and gently fished around for the slender bone she could see from the outside. When she tried to pull her hand out, the crack became a monkey trap, her hand only fit through empty. She laughed at herself for a moment then threaded the bone up her wrist and out the crack retrieving it with her other hand. “Hello.” She said to the lonely ulna, “My name is Abbey.” She held it

a moment then slipped it back in the tomb and wiped her hands on her jeans with a shiver.

Kennis could hear her coming closer, so, he made himself small in the dark corner of the mausoleum praying silently and kissing his St Dymphna medal. The iron gate squeaked, and he watched in fear as the flashlight shone over his nest, his collection of things, then on to him. “I am so sorry.” She said, turned off the flashlight and backed out into the light. “I didn’t mean to walk into your home. I mean I kind of knew you live here. I am friends with the old poet the one who talks really loud late at night. I was kind of hoping to meet you… but honestly, I didn’t mean to walk right in your home.” Her voice was soft, her apology sincere even though Kennis knew “I didn’t mean to walk right in your home” meant –“I didn’t mean to walk in when you were home.” He lit a candle and said, “Best forget that.” Abbey walked in and sat down. “My name is Abbey.” She said trying not to sound like she was talking to a child or a pet. “I’m Kennis.” He replied looking at her in the candlelight.

Kennis saw people in terms of danger and safety. Women were safer than men but not all. Old men were safer than young men, young women were safer than old women.

“You have many beautiful things she said looking at his collection: a large black beetle, three small antique bottles each holding blue jay feathers, 7 bird skulls, pottery fragments, piles of string and rubber bands.

“You clepta? Take all them beaucoup-pretty crap them pitch like fat turds.” Abbey thought about the word clepta for a moment… clepta... kleptomaniac then replied, “That is right, I steal things nobody wants cause they are beaucoup-pretty.” she reached into her bag and produced a small box of rusted springs and shook out a few in his hand. Kennis looked at them like jewels. “Ooo, that’s crazy shit, alright.” he said and tried to give them back. “Oh no.” She said, “It is a gift.” and handed him the box. It was old and fragile with the words Dixie Mill printed on it. He accepted it as a thing of great value and importance carefully setting it down and placing a bird skull on top.

Father Pace had explained to Kennis that If he smelled too bad, they would put him back in the white room or the clean cage as Kennis called the hospital in Latin. So, Father Pace arranged for him to bathe at the YMCA on Tuesdays. The smell of the Mausoleum, however, was making Abby sick “It was lovely to meet you.” She said as she rose to leave.

Kennis took out a tin can that had been decorated by a child with crayon, glitter, and cotton balls, and handed her a small pink matchbox printed Petunia’s Restaurant, New Orleans. Inside was a tiny perfect gecko skeleton. “You want to bring home the dead. Him small... but him dead.” ###

The summer before Mrs. Capaci got sick was dubbed the Ice-cream Summer. Her youngest daughter Genevieve was almost eleven and had learned her 5th grade Latin lessons well, she earned ribbons for reading out loud, grammar and vocabulary. She taught her best friend Cecile and it became their secret language. They would talk in the garden and whisper in the pews. On Sundays, the girls were allowed to walk the 5 blocks to Angelo Brocato’s Gelato by themselves, and Genevieve was given enough money to get ice cream for her sister Juliana and her mushy boyfriend Vittorio, that’s what she called Victor in her journal. “Et osculare eum?”

Genevieve said with a giggle “I told you, I seen em in the garden just kissing away, they was touching tongue and everything.” Cecile replied. She felt sophisticated when she could listen in one language and respond in another.

“Volo eam ad ubera effundet super eam.” Cecile didn’t quite catch that, something about spilling her boobs, so she laughed. “Girl, you dirty.” The Ice-cream Summer passed with the girls spending every night camping in the courtyard or in Cecile’s room in the old slave quarter building behind the big house. Cecile’s mother, Astrid, told her that it wasn’t proper for her to sleep in Miss Genevieve’s bed, but really, she didn’t want her sleeping anywhere near The Devil.

After the last storm of summer passed Genevieve could hear her father

shouting at Victor and Victor shouting back. Her sister was crying in her room and her mother could not get out of bed. Astrid brought her to the kitchen and ladled out a bowl of gumbo “Now don’t you worry about grown folks stuff, I know your mamma is sick and you all tied up about that, but you gonna be alright. Me and Mr. Otis is right here we ain’t goin nowhere. Now you have some gumbo I made that special for you.”

“Is my mother going to die?” Genevieve asked, reaching for the butter.

“We all gonna die, child, that’s just the way it is.”

“Soon, is she going to die soon?”

“Only the Good Lord knows that now.”

The next year Genevieve Capaci turned twelve. She made new friends. She earned more ribbons.

Victor joined the army and Juliana cried for a year. When the word came that Victor was not coming home, she stopped talking, slept in her mother’s bed, and did not look up from her journal for the nine months it took to become a novitiate of The Poor Clares cloister.

Genevieve listened to her mother’s short, labored breaths gurgling through the wall as her father lifted the sheet and the devil climbed into her bed.

Episode 20

Boss Tully killed her every day. He was sitting under the umbrella talking to the young detective as the smell of boiled seafood, roasting coffee, and mule piss blended with his five-dollar cigar. The young detective talked about his progress finding the Knucklehead Derrick Grainger as Tully arranged three beignets in a line like vertebrae, secretly dreaming of her pigeon-toed death. The voice droned on as images of hands and necks paraded behind his eyes. Eleanor Frith died before she could scream, Tully thought, remembering the egret snatching the green lizard in his dream. The killer’s precision was a thing of beauty, flawless and painless in its execution. The hard part was getting her down that hallway.

Was she seduced? Did he convince her there was a lost puppy? A sick mother? Why would she leave the safety of the sidewalk? He chatted her up a thousand times. He became her lover, her pastor, a stranger, but he couldn’t get her to leave the sidewalk at 7:00 a.m. It didn’t make sense. The scenarios played out behind every thought and every interaction. They went on continuously… holding her at gunpoint, seducing, tricking, cajoling, coercing, drugging, but they all ended in a how could? Or a why would? Tully wanted to just let her die.

Murder always seemed so simple to him, someone wants something or wants something to stop. Someone is mad about something or has something to hide. He thought about the Knucklehead and how maybe he took that time in prison to fester a murderous rage. No, that pantywaist isn’t gonna do much besides disappear into a bottle. It has to be either completely random or somebody else with a mighty big beef. That’s the kind of rage you build up to, the kind where there is no more rage at all, just that cold knife in the back and move on. Then why the arrangement? Why the parted hair, the open blouse, the head cocked just so? Tully imagined a rage so deep and so personal it grew as hard and fast as a thrusting bird beak, no hot need for explanation, no quixotic fire of revenge, just a quiet empty gesture of the inevitable.

The young detective was going on about his trip to St. John the Baptist: how the girl in the flower-print dress told him where to find the Knucklehead and the road up to the syrup mill, and how “there was an alligator in the little pond right there with the crushing machine and the huge kettle of syrup, cane fields for miles in all directions and there’s a damned alligator in the pond. Boss the damned thing was five feet long. It wasn’t the biggest that ever was, but just the same. I mean how do the fish get in there? Anyway, so the Knucklehead knows his rights, but the Sheriff in La Place wanted a warrant, and the judge wanted some evidence and…”

Tully caught a snip of the monologue and interrupted saying, “The Knucklehead didn’t do it. I mean yeah, go find him and all, but he didn’t do it. He ain’t got the balls. What about the deacon’s wife? You said she

hated him alright, then it goes to follow that she hated the kid too. I mean she didn’t do it herself, but that church has got some secrets. Ya heard me?”

“You mean like maybe the Knucklehead ain’t Eleanor’s daddy?” The young detective replied. Boss Tully wanted to slap him for being stupid but instead cocked his head, opened his eyes wide, and said: “Damn. You are a detective.”

Tully looked at the three beignets arranged on the napkin in a line to the cup, like a spine to a skull, and picked the one in the middle.

###

The car wreck that left bone fragments in Brian’s brain changed a 22-year-old electrician’s apprentice with a rock band and a pretty wife, into an unassuming simpleton, disheveled and smelly with a withered hand and a limp. He walked up to Eddy wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a black Rush 1981 concert tour t-shirt. His words came slow and deliberate; just like his speech therapist taught him. “Can I help you, Mr. Eddy?”

“Sure, chief. So, Brian, how long you been married?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ve been married five years now.”

“Does she come to see you?”

“I got the keys, remember?”

“What?”

“I go home and see her.”

“My mom brought me a radio.”

“Cool. What do you listen to?”

“News.”

“News?”

“Yeah, I like to keep up on current events.”

“Yeah? So, what’s happening in the world today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you listen to your radio today?”

“Yeah, I listen every morning.”

“So, what’s happening in the world today?”

Brian looked at him with a sly smile and said, “I don’t know... You got da keys, brah.”

John Tory was a small man with a thin dishwater blonde ponytail hanging from the back of his balding head who wore wire-rim glasses and shaved his wispy beard into a soul patch beneath his lip. He lit a joint and passed it to Sam. “So read us a poem.” The old poet said. “What is it called again? The form you do.” “Jueju.” He replied. “What is that?” Sam asked, holding his toke. “It’s from the Tang Dynasty it is basically a Chinese quatrain… four lines of five syllables.” “Read the fucking poem.” The old poet said.

Then We Burned The Village

A meditation of ragged mud-men the living the dead the last black lily

John Tory looked at the old poet and said, “I’m going to find my friend, you coming?” “No, I gotta stay here but my boy Sam wants to go on an adventure. Don’t ya Sam?” “Sure,” Sam said with a laugh I never miss an adventure. Where are we goin’?” “We’re going to find my friend.” John Tory replied with a sly smile. Sam had been warned. The storm was coming, and he could feel the pressure starting to drop.

The two men walked in what seemed to Sam to be a completely random direction turning onto smaller and smaller streets until they reached a neighborhood completely covered in vines. The old two-story townhouses were overwhelmed by a thick cascade of yellow blossoms. A pair of junksick zombies were walking in toward them but knew better than to ask.

John Tory walked up to a house and kicked in the door. Sam followed him in. The front room had turned columns and peeling wallpaper. The ceiling had caved in leaving a pile of rubble and a view all the way to daylight through the vine-covered roof. John Torry opened the dust cover on the upright piano rotting against the parlor wall. He played a soft improvisation, melodic in its awareness of the piano’s lack of tune. His playing built to a hammering howling state of ecstasy as Sam wondered What is wrong with me? Why am I so uptight?

John Tory stopped playing. “He’s not here. Come on, let’s go.” As they walked Sam listened to the stories of burning villages and the pacifist medic killing one man to save another. He talked of how they were in Cambodia in ‘67 three years before Nixon announced the invasion. The fact that what he had done was illegal made him feel less like a soldier and more like a murderer. “I’ve seen villages burn, no shit, I’ve seen fucking villages burn.” Sam could feel the world start to spin but he couldn’t puss-out on the adventure, so he walked along and listened.

The next stop was a neighborhood bar called Peppermint Lounge. “I don’t think we’re welcome in there,” Sam said.

“Don’t worry I come here all the time. Just don’t act stupid. Ya heard me?”

The bartender looked at them sidelong but took their money. John

Torry put two quarters in the pool table and racked the balls as Sam tried not to look at the huge black man staring at them and whispering to his friends. As he watched him walk across the room Sam could feel what Miss Odette had called the hurricane coming for him. Here it comes he thought as the big man walked up to them. “What the fuck are you doin’ in here?” he said, making sure everyone could hear him. The gesture was so fast and so automatic no one saw it. Suddenly the little man had the 45’s muzzle right up the big man’s nose looking him straight in the eyes and saying softly, “I’m looking for my friend.” “I hope you find him.” the big man replied.

“Good. So, I am going to finish my drink and we’re gonna go look someplace else. Alright?”

“Alright.”

John Tory holstered the pistol and drank down his beer as the big man walked back to his friends.

“What the fuck was that shit, Dewayne?

“Fuck if I know. The man said he was looking for his friend and I said, “I hope you find him.”

Everyone in the bar laughed as Sam and John Tory walked out to the street.

Contributor Notes

Poems by Jonathan Bracker have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, and other periodicals, and in eight collections, the latest of which, from Seven Kitchens Press, is Attending Junior High. Bracker is the editor of Bright Cages: Selected Poems of Christopher Morley (University of Pennsylvania Press: 1965; reissued 2018); co-author with Mark I. Wallach of Christopher Morley (Twayne: 1976); and editor of A Little Patch of Shepherd’s Thyme: Prose Passages Of Thomas Hardy Arranged As Verse (Moving Finger Press: 2013). He has lived in San Francisco since 1973.

Floyd Collins has both an MFA and PhD from the University of Arkansas. His PhD dissertation was published by Delaware UP, and he has published five books of poetry, most recently What Harvest: Poems on the Siege and Battle of the Alamo. His collection of critical essays titled The Living Artifact was published by Stephen F Austin University Press in fall 2021, and his poetry and essays appear regularly in The Arkansas Review, The Georgia Review, and Kenyon Review.

Malaika Favorite is a visual artist and writer. Poetry publications: ASCENSION , Broadside Lotus Press 2016, Dreaming at the Manor (Finishing Line Press 2014) and Illuminated Manuscript, (New Orleans Poetry Journal Press, 1991). Her poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including: you say. say and Hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Pen International, Hurricane Blues, Drumvoices review, Uncommon Place, Xavier Review, The Maple Leaf Rag, Visions International, Louisiana Literature, Louisiana English Journal, Big Muddy, and Art Papers.

Passionate about great stories and good causes, Randy Fertel has taught the literature of war since 1981 at Tulane and the New School for Social Research. His award-winning 2011 memoir, The Gorilla Man and the

Empress of Steak , unspools untold tales as he tries to makes sense of his parents—and himself—in a colorful, food-obsessed New Orleans. Novelist Tim O’Brien calls his award-winning new book, A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation, “a stunner of a book—smart, jarring, innovative, witty, provocative, wise, and beautifully written.” He founded the Ridenhour Prizes for Courageous Truth-telling in memory of his friend, whistleblower and investigative reporter Ron Ridenhour. He is Trustee Emeritus at The Kenyon Review. His new book Winging It: The Secret Power of Spontaneity is forthcoming.

Charles Franklin was born in El Dorado, Arkansas, moved to Fayetteville and then to New Orleans in the 1970s. He is a musician and former filmshoot technician as well as a lifelong photographer, now living in mid-city.

Juyanne James is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Holy Cross. She is the author of The Persimmon Trail and Other Stories (Chin Music Press, 2015), her debut collection of 17 stories in which she interprets the African American experience in Louisiana, as well as Table Scraps and Other Essays (Resource Publishers, 2019), a memoir about growing up in a troubled home. Her stories and essays have been published in journals, such as The Louisville Review, Mythium, Bayou Magazine, Eleven Eleven, Thrice, and Ponder Review, and included in the anthologies New Stories from the South: 2009 (Algonquin) and Something in the Water: 20 Louisiana Stories (Portals Press, 2011). Her essay “Table Scraps” was a notable essay in The Best American Essays 2014.

Since receiving his MFA in storytelling from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago Jonathan Kline has performed in NYC, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Dublin and Cork Ireland. His performance monologues include Conceptual Cowboy Yodeling,

Stories My Mother Told Me Never to Tell

When I was 20, and The Terminal Hotel. He has been a visiting artist at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, Tulane University, and New Orleans Center for Creative Art. In 2011 he was awarded a residency by the Santa

Fe Art Institute. His stories have been published in The Xavier Review, The Maple Leaf Rag and Indigent Press. His poems have been published in Tribes Magazine, Big Bridge, Yawp, Cocktail, The Maple St. Rag, and The Journal of American Poetry. The Wisdom of Ashes a short sort of novel was released in 2013 by Lavender Ink and the sequel Standing at The Cloister’s Gate is going to be released by Lavender Ink in October 2022

James Nolan’s James Nolan’s thirteenth book, Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar: The Pandemic Years in New Orleans, will be published next year by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, and a new version of the City Lights anthology of his translations of the Spanish poet Gil de Biedma is forthcoming from Fonograf Editions. Flight Risk: Memoirs of a New Orleans Bad Boy (University Press of Mississippi) won the 2018 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Memoir. His fiction includes You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories (winner of the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction), the novel Higher Ground (awarded a Faulkner/Wisdom Gold Medal), and Perpetual Care: Stories. The collections of his poetry are Nasty Water: Collected New Orleans Poems, Why I Live in the Forest, What Moves Is Not the Wind, and Drunk on Salt, as well as a volume of Neruda translations, Stones of the Sky. He has received an N.E.A. grant as well as a Javits and two Fulbright fellowships, and taught at universities in San Francisco, Barcelona, Madrid, Beijing, and Florida, as well as at Tulane and Loyola in his native New Orleans, where he now lives.

Tim Skeen is the author of three books of poetry: Kentucky Swami, winner of the 2001 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry; Risk, winner of the 2013 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; and Reward, published by Finishing Line Press. He teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.

Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter. Since finishing his MFA in Poetry at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he spends his spare

time apprenticing as a gold- and silver-smith. His first collection How We Bury Our Dead by Cobalt Press was released in March, 2015, and Conflict Tours (Cobalt Press) was released in 2017.

A. P. Walton is a poet, writer, and critical researcher whose works include Diorama Appalachia (2011) and a study, Toward Innumerable Futures: Frank Stanford & Origins (2015). He has been on the move since infancy and lives, writes, and conducts critical research in northern New England.

XAVIERREVIEW

Freedom Knows My Name

by Kelly Harris-DeBerry

978-1-883275-297 • 2020 • $19.00

Freedom Knows My Name is electric. Kelly mixes brilliant poetics with the political. Read this book and don’t stop there. Scan the book and be transported to audio versions of some poems that truly capture the poet’s literary and oral magic. Experience this book.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow

Kelly Harris pulls no punches in her superb debut collection. Her writing is brutally honest, and her poems dance with the spiritual ethos of the holy profane.

The Langston Hughes Review

Liebestraum: Prose and Poems from a Fortunate Life

by Randy Bates

978-1-883275-30-3 • 2021 • $20.00

Liebestraum is a new and chosen hybrid collection of nonfiction, poetry, and fiction spanning five decades and set largely in the American South. Its primary elements are human and family relations that, even when fraught or laughable, are personal renderings of love.

XAVIERREVIEW

Available from Go Home and Cry for Yourselves

by Tim Fitts

978-1-883275-27-3 • 2017 • $13.00

Quirky, surprising and darkly humorous, Tim Fitts’ characters will get under your skin. These memorable stories unsettle, as strong fiction should.

—Claire Messud, author of The Burning Girl

Powerful in its portrayal of Americans living on the margin between “just getting-by” and catastrophe—financially, morally, existentially—this is a riveting collection of short fiction that captures the voices, attitudes, and crippled/crippling days of its masterfully drawn characters.

—Gordon Macalpine, author of Woman with a Blue Pencil

XAVIERREVIEW

The Shy Mirror

by Gordon Robert Sabatier

978-1-883275-26-6 • 2016 • $15.00

There is no singular delight in coming into the world of Gordon Robert Sabatier who is both a natural poet and a learned one too…. Here is a poet who does what all art asks us to do: to blur the lines between what is human and not human, the lines between pain and ecstasy, between being fully immersed in the physical and the spiritual in the moment of the poem. Here is a poet who uses formalisms we use to harness the fierce and wild.

Darrell Bourque, author of Megan’s Guitar and Other Poems from Acadie