1
Why She Won’t Leave
My mother’s sitting in her ruined backyard, the one haunted by the ghosts of children and swing sets, sand boxes, plastic pools and Slip-n-Slides. Almost everything that wasn’t knocked down, split in two or uprooted by Katrina was drowned or damaged by the water that covered the yard for no one knows how many days. Skeletons of shade-giving pecan and avocado trees, hibiscus, bay leaf, holly, and the snaky vines of wisteria remind her of how vibrant this yard used to be. Once, there was even an addition to the house back here, a small room with large screened windows and a ceiling fan where she and my father would play card games late at night with friends, a room where he drank scotch and she drank wine and where they still talked about the future.
My mother is sitting on a porch swing that is set on a cracked and roofless cement floor, all that’s left of that room she and my father added onto the house and that was destroyed by another hurricane years ago. Her neighbor’s house is empty, the tree that stabbed the heart of it still there, upside down, the treetop buried in the house, the roots reaching out to sky. If she looks at it in just the right light, it looks alive, like some kind of woody Medusa, the roots curling around like dreadlocks.
My mother is drinking a glass of wine and listening to music, a mix of New Orleans jazz and blues. She’s not listening to anything intellectual or edgy, no Coltrane or Charlie Parker, not anything like what her daughter who doesn’t live here anymore might listen to. No, she’s listening to music she’s always listened to, music that reminds her of people she loved who are gone, and her youth, which is gone, and her city, which also feels gone, and she’s listening to music that deepens the sadness she already feels, and somehow the music’s sadness combined with her own grief makes her feel incredibly present in what has become her life in this city, and that’s somehow weirdly better than actually feeling better. The music resonates with something ancient and animal inside her body, and she feels like the vibrating string of that resonance.
The music is coming from the back window of the living room, which she’s left open so as to be able to hear it, and she’s it turned up loud because the cars on Williams Blvd make lots of noise, and now that the airport, just a couple miles away, is back in business, the sound of planes often seems to speak for the sky, and the sound of planes is not music, will never be music, and even after almost fifty years of living in this house, the sound of planes still makes her feel helpless.
I don’t know exactly what she’s listening to since she’s alone and I’m not there, but if I had to guess I’d say she’s listening to something with piano in it, since she loves piano: she’s the one who insisted all five of her kids take lessons and who negotiated those free lessons from a neighbor. She was the one who scraped and saved to pay for a piano over many years though she never touched it except to dust or move it. She might be listening to Professor Longhair, or Dr. John or Fats Domino or James Booker. She loves the way those New Orleans guys punch the piano, how they mix up blues and boogie-woogie and the parade rhythms of carnival, all sloppy and sexy-like. The piano also reminds her of her mother, who played by ear. New Awleans, Dr. John croons, city of a million dreams, you never know how nice it seems when you way down south in New Awleans. My mother sips her wine, thinks of her life as a child growing up in the Quarter, yeah it’s true I got those Basin Street blues. She thinks of the French Quarter Festival and seeing James Booker there a few years ago; she and her friends will go again this year even though her legs hurt more and more as she gets older and it gets more and more painful for her to walk. She doesn’t want to think about that much, but she knows she probably only has a few more years where she’ll be able to walk unaided.
James Booker. Only he sounds like this, that heartbroken, raw piano, only someone who spent time in Angola, she thinks, could play like that, I went down to St. James Infirmary, I heard my baby cry, he sings, I was so brokenhearted, she was gone somewhere, in the bye and bye.
My mother is alone in her backyard because her parents are dead and her husband is dead and her two sons are dead and her sister and two brothers are dead and her two daughters do not live in this city that she will not leave. Her daughters live in nice northern cites that are safe, with less crime than New Orleans, cities that are far from hurricanes and floods, but they are not interesting cities in my mother’s opinion, and this is still the most damning thing she can say about another city, that it’s just not interesting. And besides, people talk different in those cities, and those cities are not this city, this citywhere she was born, this city where she had sex for the first and last time, this city where she married then birthed and raised five children, this city where her sons, her husband, her mother and father and grandmother and grandfather and great- grandmother and great-grandfather and great-great grandparents and great-great-great grandparents are buried. Two-hundred years of ancestors are buried in this muddy soil. She will not leave them, she will not desert them as her daughters have deserted her. Down the road, came junco partner, Booker sings,trilling the piano like her mother used to do, he was loaded as he could be. . . . knocked out, and loaded, and he was wobblin’ all over the street. Only here, she thinks, would we sing songs celebrating drunks, and she drinks a drink to my father, tilting her glass to the Medusa tree in her neighbor’s yard.
Those cities her daughters live in don’t have food like they have here, either, she thinks, no thick-rouxed gumbos and jambalayas and Creole sauces and crawfish and crabs and oysters and shrimp and red beans and rice, and roast beef po-boys, and they don’t have interestingly named streets like Desire or Tchoupitoulas or Melpomene or Humanity, she thinks, and what can you say, really, about the imagination of cities that give their streets names like Main or First or Second, and what about cities that don’t have King Cakes, or voodoo dolls or beads or Mardi Gras or crawfish festivals or rice festivals or oyster festivals, and those people in those other cities don’t have the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain and they don’t smell like this city, spicy and rank and full of color, and she’s certain they don’t even have a sense of humor, or interesting politicians, and she thinks that maybe people in those other cities might not even know how to dance, really, and they don’t have the Saints or Al Hirt or Pete Fountain and now that I think of it , maybe that’s what she’s listening to as she sits alone in her back yard, maybe she’s listening to Pete Fountain’s clarinet all high and sweet like a gladiola, and maybe she’s singing along when the saints go marchin in, oh lord I want to be in that number, and how could she leave New Orleans now, now when the Saints are doing so well? She remembers when all the fans wore paper bags on their heads and called themselves the Aints because they were so embarrassed at how bad the team was, but they went to games anyway, and she remembers when Archie Manning wasn’t yet just the father of Peyton, but the red-headed hero of the Saints, and now that they’re so good, it would be wrong to leave, all that time wasted on them when they were bad, and she drinks to that, and maybe it’s trumpet she’s listening to, maybe loungy Al Hirt, maybe he’s blowing Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans. She and my father used to go to his club on Bourbon, and she still likes to go now and visit his statue in the Quarter, touch his trumpet, and remember all that is gone.
My mother is sitting alone in the swing my brother gave her on mother’s day the year before he died, the year before Katrina, and even though it’s rusted already she thinks she will never not use it, she will never give it away, she will never move away from this swing. There’s just room enough for her to sit comfortably on it without someone else and now she’s swinging to the drip drop drip drop of Fats Domino, I’mwalkin to New Awlins, and she’s thinking about music and sorrow and music and forgetting and music and remembering and she ‘s thinking of how important music is to this city and how it’s not important in this way to any other city, and even though one of her daughters lives in a big city in the northeast where she says there’s lots of jazz, my mother knows in her bones it’s not like it is here, music here is the voice of the city, but in this other city where her daughter lives she’s certain the music is just some extra thing, some little curly-q, something nice, she’s sure it’s very nice, but it’s not necessary like it is here, and she’s certain this city would die if it couldn’t sing, and she drinks to that. Jackomo fe nan e', Jackomo fe nan e', you don't like what the big chief say you just Jackomo fe nan e'.
She pushes herself in the swing and all of a sudden she realizes almost all the songs she loves from this city are riffs and improvisations—a word her daughter likes to use—on loss— brother, brother, brother John is gone. When the levee breaks, ain’t no place to go.
How could she go to another city where music and food were not the breath and heart of it? She’s sure she’d feel like an alien, living somewhere else, somewhere not here, with all her records and cookbooks and history books and Mardi Gras beads and colorful old-lady clothes and costumes, people would just see her as an eccentric old woman. Here, she thinks as she swings, here I am someone, here the earth knows me, the water loves me. Here I’m a native. I’ve lived here so long, she thinks, the air smells like me, the trees and the bushes sometimes look like me, and when I die I’ll just switch one shape for another.
My mother is sitting alone in her backyard because she’s sad, and it seems better to be alone when she’s sad. I’m old, she thinks, I am an old woman, and who wants to look at an old woman. She has girlfriends, and she knows they don’t care about how old she is. They have an informal club and they sometimes all wear purple like in that poem when I am an old woman I will wear purple. She could call one of her friends to come sit with her now, but most of her friends are sad too and she doesn’t want to make them even sadder. My grandma and your grandma, sittin’ by the fire, my grandma told your grandma, I'm gonna set your flag on fire, talking bout hey now, hey now Iko Iko an de'.
It’s getting dark now, the mosquitoes are out, and she slaps at her arms and thinks about going in. Later maybe one of her friends will call her up and they’ll go to a movie or out to listen to some music. They’ll still be sad, though, because this city they love and will not abandon is still so sick and broken and stinking. It’s like a child, or a parent you love very much who is addicted or alcoholic or has been in a horrible accident and is now a quadriplegic, she thinks. Sometimes it seems to my mother that everyone is depressed who still lives in this city, although they are all trying not to be. They’re sad because some of them are still living in trailers and some of them, like my mother, still have not had their houses repaired. The city is old, too, she thinks, a gone pecan. We’re all gone pecans she says to herself, looking at the thousands of rotting pecans on the floor of the backyard. She’s sad because it’s hard for her to believe the city will ever be the same, and she wants it, she needs it, to be the same.
Maybe she’s listening now to saxophone or clarinet, which she also loves. Maybe it’s Lester Young’s version of Summertime, which she used to sing to me when I was a child, or The Man I Love, a song that does not make her think of my father but rather of the boy she did not marry, the boy she didn’t have a chance to fall out of love with. Or Sidney Bechet’s Black and Blue or Louis Armstrong’s. What did I do to be so . . . .
They call it stormy monday, but tuesday’s just as bad. Wednesday’s even worse, thursday’s also sad. That’s what it’s like now, my mother thinks. Every day nothing’s being done to help us and maybe soon I won’t even remember what it used to be like, but she thinks if she keeps listening to the music maybe it will help her remember.
My mother is sitting alone in her backyard feeling sorry for herself and not wanting to feel sorry for herself. She knows depression is a selfish thing, like a little cloud she carries around with her that keeps her from doing much for anyone, especially herself. She’s sitting alone thinking of the last time she went out with one of her friends and they drove by the Lower Ninth and they saw again that the houses were still knifed into each other and they went by the marina and Lake Pontchartrain where she loves to sit and dangle her feet in the water like she did when she was a kid and the boats were still all scrambled up. I’m seventy-five years old, she thinks, and maybe you just get more alone when you get older and maybe nothing will ever be fixed, and she thinks about how she’s too old to fix anything, not even herself.
And I’m sitting here alone in my bedroom far away from my mother in some northeast city listening to music and imagining what she’s doing and what she’s thinking and what she’s listening to, and it occurs to me all of a sudden that I’m not writing about my mother at all, that I’m writing about myself, my own loneliness and despair and love of the music she taught me to love, the music I’mlistening to right now, the music of our city, the city and music she won’t leave, and I’m talking about here I am alone away from my mother in my bedroom listening to my own favorite songs I’m talking about see that guy all dressed in green, Iko! Iko! an de' and I’m talking about Summertime and the livin’ is easy and I’m talking about Brother John and I’m talking about I’m going back to Louisiana and I’m talking about Mama Roux! and I’m talking about way down yonder in New Orleans and I’m talking about I got my jambalya crawfish pieya and I’m talking about when the levee breaks and I’m talkingabout I got nowhere to go and I’m talking about I got my saints marchin in and I’m talking about going down to St. James Infirmary and I’m talking about I’m gonna be in that number and I’m talking about when junco partner comes down the road loaded like my father, knocked out, knocked out and loaded, and I’m talking about my gone brother, I’m talking about brother brother, brother Jay is gone and I’m talking about I know what it means to miss New Orleans.
--Sheryl St. Germain