Chapter 11. St. Joseph's Day Altar

Ralph had invited Amy to meet his mother.

No, that wasn’t exactly what he had said.  He actually had invited her to celebrate St. Joseph’s Day at his mother’s home. 

Well, “home” wasn’t exactly correct either, since she was living in the FEMA trailer parked in the driveway of her still-soaked home.

In any event,  she was going to Ralph’s mother’s home, and the day of that meeting was St. Joseph’s Day.

Amy had never been to a St. Joseph’s altar, having been raised in the French and Spanish traditions that included banana-leaf-wrapped tamales on Christmas Eve.  The St. Joseph’s altar  was brought to New Orleans in the 1880’s by the Sicilians who came over in boatloads to the Crescent City.  No longer celebrated in Italy, New Orleanians still hung on to this feast, yet another excuse to party and eat with the Pope’s permission.  Every March 19, Italian families and catholic churches all over the greater New Orleans area set up altars to St. Joseph. Legend has it that a sever draught in Sicily had threatened that year’s crop, so the Italians promised St. Joseph that if he intervened and brought rain, they would honor him each year in perpetuity.  I’m guessing that St. Joseph was tired of being upstaged by Mary and this he saw this as his chance to do something that might overshadow even a  virgin birth.   So he sent the rain.  And now New Orleans has its St. Joseph’s Altars.

Somehow St. Lucy got mixed into the equation.  She was the Patron Saint of Eyes, or the blind.  So on St. Joseph’s Day Italians remember St. Joseph for rain and St. Lucy for eyes.

Not that anyone was wishing to see more rain in New Orleans.

Seven months after Katrina and New Orleans still smelled like a dirty, wet, mildewed rag.

Amy was looking forward to participating in her first St. Joseph’s altar.  She tried not to think about meeting the Mother.  Or what it might mean for Ralph that she was meeting his mother.  She remembered watching the movie Three Coins in a Fountain with her grandmother. An odd movie.  Three women who could thought of marriage as the only path to true happiness and true self-worth.  There didn’t appear to be any other viable options.  Amy marveled that here  they were, secretaries in Italy, living in what looked like a villa with servants.  And that was not enough.  One of these three women pursued one of the bachelors she had met, pretending to like what he liked, when she actually didn’t like any of those things, like opera or osso bucco.  She was intent on trapping him.  It worked because he invited her to meet his mother, something, she was told by one of the other secretaries, was the first step toward marriage in Italy.

Amy was praying that Ralph hadn’t seen this movie or held the same cultural assumptions of the Italian’s of the late 1950’s.

She really and truly was not ready.  She had an identity that needed some attention first, an identity shattered since Katrina and, like New Orleans, it needed shoring up and a comprehensive renewal and development plan.

They headed towards Mid City where Ralph’s mother lived.  Amy was still not used to the sight of the battered city. Usually by mid March, the azaleas are in full bloom everywhere,  the wild irises are popping up along the ponds and stream in City Park and Bayou St. John. But this March, all Amy saw was mud with some tufts of odd looking weeds pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk. The storm had even wiped out the ubiquitous and resilient St. Augustine grass. The azaleas and St. Augustine grass had all died, no longer shaded by the trees because the trees were no longer there. Dead as well, killed by the water.

By the time they drove up to Ralph’s family home, the front yard was filled with about 100 people spilling into the streets and neighboring yards. From what she could tell, Mrs. Adamo and one other person had a FEMA trailer on this block.  The rest of the homes appeared to still be uninhabited.

Amy looked over at Ralph whose eyes were glued to the street (he was probably saying a silent prayer to St. Lucy), a street that looked more like a bombed road in Iraq.  If the potholes didn’t blow out a tire, the jagged edges of uprooted concrete would.   Ralph was 100% Italian. Dark, think wavy hair, a perennial stubble of beard, green eyes and a classic Roman nose.  He had dark circles under his eyes no matter how much sleep he had.  He always wore a pen clipped to the collar of his shirt, the every-ready author and journalist.

She could tell as soon as they got out the car that the guests at the St. Joseph’s Day altar were beginning to have breakdowns. 

Before Katrina, New Orleanians were inclined to have breakdowns usually at parties.  Not subtle, hide-in-the-power-room type breakdowns, but large, theatrical, operatic, streetcar-named-desire breakdowns.  Since Katrina, these became even more histrionic, if that were even possible.  Since Katrina breakdowns could take place anywhere, like a drive-by shootings.

One the porch of the boarded up home was an elegant but older woman who was having a breakdown. Amy assessed she was having a Blanche-style breakdown.  The elegant but older lady was dressed in a soft beige linen dress, standing on the porch in the shade, shielding her eyes with her pale, fragile freckled hand that was holding up a chunk of diamond which, if the afternoon sun hit it just right, might have blinded one of the many boisterous children, all having their own pre-adult breakdowns, blinded them in spite of St. Lucy and her lucky beans on the altar.  It was as if Blanche were having a breakdown because the sun did not  have a the proper shade placed over it to soften its unforgiving brightness on her fragile white hand.

She was shouting, “Bruno, come here dammit. I need you” punctuating each syllable with the empty martini glass in her left hand.  Bruno, wherever he was, was not answering. In fact, no one was. In spite of the din of the boisterous children and the chatter of the adults, no one was answering.

Just at that moment, in the distance, as if walking right out of the sun’s center, five Mardi Gras Indians appeared from behind the funeral home.  Amy squinted behind her sun glasses and blinked a few times. All the debris and decay dissolved into her peripheral vision.

“Come meet ma mama, “ said Ralph.  Amy’s eyes flapped open like a sprung window shade.

“Bruno come here goddammit.”

Amy could hear Blanche’s voice like a refrain to the beating drums of the approaching Mardi Gras Indians.  Their red and yellow and green brilliance from their feathered dress was blinding.

Ralph grabbed Amy’s hand.  It got lost in his large grip.  He guided her towards the FEMA trailer and up the hastily constructed wooden steps, constructed helter-skelter, the railings just slightly too long and stairs just slightly too narrow. Standing on the stairs with her back to Ralph and Amy was a small woman with dark curly hair. The grey roots were just beginning to show. She had on a loose pair of neatly pressed jeans and a white linen top.  As they approached, the small dark woman leaned forward and said, “Bruno, go take care of your wife. She’s having one of her spells again.”

If you aren’t having a breakdown in New Orleans, you are probably having a spell. A spell is the first step before the breakdown, kind of like meeting your boyfriend’s mother is a first step before marriage.

The man, Bruno, turned around.  He was a graceful man. Tall, 60-ish, silver white hair and tan, leathery skin.  He wore a pair of khaki pants and a pink golfing shirt.

Men in New Orleans wear pink with abandon.  It’s an endearing quality that flies in the face of their otherwise machismo attitudes.  Machismo probably isn’t the right word. New Orleans men were a blend of the Old World and New World, but mostly of the old World.  These men still whistle at women on the streets, even in the 21^st century.  More than once, Amy had heard a man on the street almost sing these words to her  as he approached and passed her, “Hey, sugar, looking good today!”. If she dared to meet the admirer’s eyes, he’d inevitably wink and smile in a way that made it impossible for her to be indignant.

Bruno  was holding a half full martini glass in his hand.  As he turned toward the short dark woman, he squinted into the sun, put his hand over his eyes, took a sip of his drink sighed and then handed her the glass in what seemed like a dance he had done many times before.

I’ve got a Big Chief, Big Chief, Big Chief of the Nation

Wild, wild creation

He won’t bow down, down on the ground

Oh how I love to hear him call Indian Red

When I throw my net in the river

I will take only what I need

Just enough for me and my lover

.

“Bruno, come here, goddammit!”

Amy’s ears filled with the music of the Mardi Gras Indians and Blanche’s song from the porch.

Blanche was actually already well beyond the spell and well into the breakdown.

Bruno would have known this had he walked around the FEMA trailor and onto the porch where Blanche stood.

She was  holding onto the crumbly porch railing as if she were on a board tossed about on the open sea.  She closed her eyes.  The music of the Indians began to soak into her sea-sick thoughts and become one with her heartbeat.  She felt the moving earth under her feat begin to still.  Suddenly she was sitting in a familiar, run down and battered room, filled with bleachers which were filled with people.  They were all watching a group of musicians as beat up and battered as the room itself.  At the piano Blanche saw Sweet Emma. On the piano sat her ubiquitous red purse and on her head perched her ubiquitous blue hat.  She was singing:

I’m alone because I love you

I love you with all my heart.

She was sitting in her wheelchair, playing with her one good hand.

The clarinets and trombones began to weave their notes inside and outside and on top each other.

All the sunshine has toined to rain.

Blanche opened her eyes hoping it wasn’t raining.  

The Mardi Gras Indians were now in front the house where the St. Joseph’s Altar party was in full swing.  While Amy had been watching Blanche sway back and forth as if in a voodoo trance, Ralph was introducing his mother to her, the short dark haired woman on the FEMA stairs.   At some point, between Blanche’s reverie and breakdown, and the Amy’s introduction to Mrs. Adamo, a bedraggled group appeared from one of the houses that seemed to be abandoned, armed with clarinets, horns and trombones.  They walked behind the Indians.

The drummer beat out three, slow beats.

The horns began to play, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.”

Everyone at the St. Joseph’s Altar grew still. Men with caps removed them. Women made the sign of the cross. Children found their parents’ hand.  Blanche stopped swaying.  Bruno stood next to Blanche and put his arm around her.  At the moment Amy heard a mockingbird. It was the first bird song she had heard in seven months.

Chapter 10: The Flower Ball

It was at the Flower Ball that Dulcia met Helen.


 Dulcia had been looking forward to the ball for months. It was one of the few events in her city that she enjoyed. The Festival of Minerva, which had become the most popular event in the Qezaltenango, left her wanting for Truth and Beauty and Authenticity, rather than this newly-concocted co-option of all things Greek. She thought it was absolutely ridiculous that anyone would think that this country, thousands of miles from Athens, was at all similar to the Greece that existed at the time of Plato. Not to mention that this Spanish outpost, itself thousands of miles from its mother country Spain, was itself struggling to maintain its Spanish roots, an enclave, if one were to be truly honest and speaking with eyes wide open, situated in the midst of such primitive people as these Mayans. They were everywhere, and hidden from sight at the same time. Admittedly, some of the Quiche families had gained enough money to buy homes inside the city, assimilating Spanish customers and dress. Dulcia couldn't help but think that the Quicke women dressed in Spanish mantillas were no less ridiculous than her own country women dressing up in Greek togas and wearing headdresses of laurel leaves for the Festival of Minerva.

She dared not express her opinions about his pseudo-festival to her husband Cassimiro who was good friends with the President whose idea it was to build these obscene Temples to Minerva all over Guatemala. Cassimiro explained (patiently, but condescendingly, as if Dulcia were a little girl) that these Temples celebrated the president's commitment to progress, his personal commitment to classical education. Dulcia struggled to believe in all that. She could not and would not express what was growing to be disdain for all things the president represented, not just because she knew her husband would judge her harshly; no, more than that, she remained silent because the president, not ignorant of the ire he was capable of creating with his decrees, had created a spy network all over the country like a plague.

The Flower Ball was another story. Every February as far back as she could remember when the Dragon's Mouth orchid burst into bloom, and the bromeliads exploded like fireworks from the trees, she remembered the Flower Ball. Her mother would be her most beautiful on the night of the ball. Her father never seemed more handsome that night, as he accompanied her mother, holding out his arm for her as she stepped into the carriage.   When Dulcia was 16, she went to her first Flower Ball, like all girls of her status at that age. It was a night that changed her life in ways she had not imagined. It was there that she met Cassimiro for the first time. It was there that her parents and Cassimiro agreed to his proposal of marriage.

Cassimiro had not known he would meet his bride that night. In fact, his attention had been focused for months to the French consulate's daughter Madelein Pellet. In fact, he thought that at this particular Flower Ball of 1900, he would approach Madeleine's father and ask to call on her, but nothing more than that--just the call. Cassimiro was an ambitious man. He had to be very careful about the woman he would choose for his wife. If he were to have any future in government service, marrying well was critical to that future. But when he saw Dulcia enter La Casa de la Cultura, all those focused plans disappeared. As a man drugged by the heavy fragrances of a room filled with breath-taking flora, he could see only Dulcia whose dress was the color of Poinsettias. In her hair were yellow Peacock blossoms, the ephemeral flowers that lasted only one short day. Her skin was translucent, her eyes dark as onyx. She appeared as if from the Garden of Eden.

They married eleven months later. Dulcia missed the next two balls, pregnant with her sons Enrique and then Jorge. Tonight was her first ball in two years. She was nineteen, but she felt like that child watching her mother dress for the ball, hoping she would be, one day, just as elegant and beautiful.

As she entered the hall, she could see that the Flower Ball of 1903 was as beautiful as she remembered. The room was filled with the glorious orchids of Guatemala's highlands. She moved further into La Case de la Cultura, into the room where the marimba was playing and the women and men were dancing. Her heart sank. Behind the marimba stood tall Greek colums, draped with laurels. The Minervan fever had infested her flower ball. She said nothing, knowing better, knowing the consequences of speaking against anything Mr. President ordered. The one time she had spoken up, Cassimiro raised his hand as if to strike her. He didn't, of course. That was not who he was, not his way at all. But it was at that moment that the young bride realized that the president's influence extended into the privacy of a matrimonial couple's bedroom, that his reach extended even into a a couple's conjugal intimacies.

Dulcia left the main room with his obscene Greek pillars and found the room where the refreshments were served.  She sat at a small table, draped with white linen cloth and covered with bright yellow and orange rose petals. A large crowd was gathered around a tall silver vessel that held a new beverage, called coffee. She smiled remembering how her family had plucked up from its roots the wild coffee plants that invaded their hillside garden on Lake Attitlan. Now it seemed that coffee was becoming fashionable. She even heard Cassimiro talk to some of his work colleagues at a dinner party about a coffee economy as the future of Guatemala and a propitious sign of progress for the country. But they were always saying such things like that: Science is Progress, Progress is Happiness, The Rational Mind is the Supreme Mind. These things Dulcia heard, even understood, although she didn't agree with these sentiments. They were things that Cassimiro espoused, with a type of ignorance that comes from the belief that you have indisputable power by virtue of being born male.

Dulcia took one of the cups of coffee offered to her and sat down at a table alone. She took a small sip and immediately wished she had asked for the milky chocolate drink she preferred. She noticed a woman, obviously not Guatemalan, sitting at the table next to hers, in a chair inches from her own. The woman seemed to be older than Dulcia, although it was hard to tell. She was tall and thin, almost bony. Her hair was the shade of Guatemalan soil in the winter, after months of no rain. It was curly, gathered in one large unruly mass, on the crown of her head. She wore a dark green dress, not at all festive, in fact, rather dour, more suitable for  church on Good Friday.

The women leaned towards Dulcia with a knowing and kind smile on her face, and in remarkably good Spanish with only the slightest accent, she said,

"How do you like the coffee?"

Dulcia debated about how honest she should be, wondered if this woman wasn't one of the president's spies. She decided to lie:

"It's good."

The women broke into an even larger smile that made Dulcia forget about the drab dress and the mop of hair.

"I'm glad you like it. Have you tried it with sugar and milk? It looks like you are drinking it black." And the woman reached over to picked up Dulcia's coffee cup, saying, "May I?"

Dulcia nodded. For some reason, she couldn't seem to speak.

The women in green poured mild and then added a teaspoon of sugar into the coffee, and then stirred the mixture. She returned the cup to Dulcia.

"Try it now."

Dulcia took a small, tentative sip, and then a large, more assertive sip. It was delicious.

"It is very delicious!" She had found her voice again, and smiled.

"I'm Helen. Helen Sanborn from America."

"Dulcia Rubio de Aragon. I'm very pleased to meet you."

Dulcia bowed her head slightly as she shook hands with Helen, a gesture she had picked up from Cassimiro.

Chapter 9: FEMA Friday

Lots of Amy’s friends talked about their mothers.  Mother-daughter issues. Mother-daughter hate-love relationships. The unbelievable things a mother could say to a daughter.   Amy’s three friends since grammar school—Kay, Ann and Denise—loved to tell their latest mother story whenever they got together.  It’s always about mother, Kay would say, and Denise would giggle behind her napkin and Ann would smile through her eyes while chewing on another boiled shrimp dipped in remoulade sauce.  The last time they had gathered at their favorite restaurant at the West-End edge of Bucktown, the one where the brown-and-white Mt Carmel pennant held the most prominent position over the bar’s 20 foot-long mirror above the top shelf of liquor, they ended up laughing so hard at Kay’s newest mother story that even the wise guys at the bar shook their heads and stuck their fingers in their ears.

Amy joined in the laughing but not in the storytelling.  Her girlfriends all knew that Amy's mother had died when she was still a baby.  They also knew she enjoyed and welcomed their stories.   They all knew that Kay was right—it is always about mother, even when you’ve never known yours.

Amy was never prone to self-pity.   She was born without self-pity or even jealousy. She truly never envied anyone.   She listened to her girlfriend’s stories grateful to be part of strong friendships that had sustained and fed her in her short life.

It had been over a year since Katrina, and almost two years since that last meal at the Bucktown restaurant with the Mt. Carmel pennant.   Amy sat alone at the Point with an oyster po-boy from the New Orleans Hamburger and Seafood Company. The red-roofed white lighthouse on the Point had collapse from its foundation and sat deflated like a clown with its hat pinned to the side of its head.  She was completely alone there. Not a single car travelled along the sea wall just across the inlet.    More than half the city’s residents had not yet returned.  Amy’s grandparents had died post-Katrina, one of many so-called Katrina Deaths that were becoming a commonplace but not formal cause of death.  Kay and Ann had not yet returned, and Denise was busy at Catholic Charities managing the volumes of volunteers that had descended on New Orleans like pennies from heaven.

It was another stunning sunset.  Amy believed that in New Orleans God lived inside the sky.

And that’s how she was.   In the midst of the sadness and loss, she sees the sunset and thanks all the powers that be for the joy of this oyster po-boy and the blood orange and jeweled turquoise sky.

She remembered that it was FEMA Friday and that she and Ralph had made plans to go to these newly-created, post-deluge excuses to party.  It would be something different. Something they had never done pre-Katrina, but seemed to be something to do post-Katrina.  Big Freedia, a New Orleans street party staple since the 90’s, was back in town. It was time to let loose and do some sissy bounce.  Amy seemed to be doing a lot of things she had never done before.  She was inside out and she didn’t fight it.  She simply let the seams show on her clothing and in her heart. No sense in getting even more bent out of shape.

Ralph had never been to a sissy bounce either.  He had spent most of his time behind a book reading or in front of a classroom teaching or at his desk writing.  The latter is what he wanted to do all the time in his small one room apartment near Tulane where he taught mostly privileged kids for whom literature was a necessary evil to be suffered on the way to the MBA or law degree.   Thirty years ago, Ralph was fond to say, Tulane once had the best theater school in the country. John Kennedy Toole studied there and then wrote his masterpiece while teaching at Dominican College (another defunct college).   Even the university bars were the home to a score of bards around whom a poetic renaissance flowered, where words, worshipped, were washed down with whiskey.  

Ralph’s uncle had been the unofficial poet laureate of the Maple Street Bar on Oak Street.   Now, he’d mutter, we’re surrounded by a generation of investment bankers and computer geeks for whom the word is merely another commodity or at best a nuance best reduced to the smallest number of letters to make texting easier.

Those bars had not opened either since Katrina.  So it was off to the Casino on Canal Street to see Big Freedia  and a bunch of women who would take over the dance floor in a declaration of feminine power and independence. 

Of course the casino found a way to open quickly. That’s just the way it is.

On the street car ride to Canal Street, Amy and Ralph sat in  a comfortable silence.  They had had lots of practice with silence sitting in the coffee shop late into the night and sometimes into the early morning.  The city could feel so lonely.  New Orleans had never been a city where one could feel lonely before. People are too talkative, too inquisitive to leave you alone for a minute. But that had changed, too. Most of those folks had not come back.  That silence was not comfortable.  The city had a silence that had never existed before.   As if one’s mother had left, leaving behind chaos, disorder.  Who would clean up after us?  What would make sure we were safe?  Who would see to locking the doors up at night, that a door was even there to protect us? 

Amy sat in the wooden street car seat hanging on to every oak tree that survived the waters, marking each street lamp’s light pushing through the fog that had begun to fall.   And in that instant she knew her mother was there, in this city.  The only constant in her life had been New Orleans.  Its beauty had nurtured her.  Its music and food and people filled her with joy and hope.  Its corruption and seediness tested her faith and dared her to care.  She had come to count on the consistency  of the March azaleas, the February rains and the summer scents of jasmine.  She’d almost lost this mother of hers.  There was no doubt her mother was suffering.  

Amy whispered, “I am here, it’s fine.”

“I know,” said Ralph.

Chapter 8: Night People

Night people hanging out, looking at each other
Waiting for something to happen
Night people hanging out, looking at each other
Waiting for something to happen

While the day world is sleeping
Night people are creeping, hanging out, looking at each other
When the day world stops moving,
Night people start grooving, hanging out, looking at each other.

If everybody went to sleep at the same time
Every night, the world would die, die, die.

--Alan Toussaint

Amy’s sleep problems began, well, as far back as she could remember.    The cool pillow that brought her comfort when she first lay her head down at night seemed to turn to stone after she had twisted to the one side and then the other, over and over again, trying to find that magical spot where her dreams could begin.  The antique clock that sat in her grandparents' living room  atop the dark mahogany knickknack shelf marked the passing of the long night.  Every fifteen minutes she was reminded  that she was still awake. One strike for quarter past.  Two strikes for half past.  Three strikes for three-quarters passed.  Four strikes for the hour, followed by number of strikes for that hour.   If only she could quiet that clock, but she dared not ask her grandparents.  Finally, when the  light began to change in her room, she would creep through the hallway and fall asleep in the doorway to her grandparents’ bedroom.  In the morning Mere would find her sleeping there and swallow a cry in the back of her throat where lived the memory of Anna’s small sleeping form in that same threshold.

Amy slipped out of her bed.  It was three a.m.  Since her grandparents had died, she had stopped fighting the sleepless nights and instead made friends with her insomnia.  In New Orleans, she could always find someone to keep her company while awake, at any hour.  Lonely she would never be, if she took to the streets.  The coffee shop a few blocks away never closed. Inside she would always find a few heavy smoking, caffeine addicts, doodling in their books or looking absently at the empty streets from the large windows. Over time, she had befriended a few of these nocturnal spirits.  If she wanted more company, she hopped on her bike and headed to the French Quarter and Café Du Mond where the other night people came for a sugar rush or chicory boost.   In the early days after Katrina,  the large military tanks along Canal Street and on the neutral ground on Rampart Street with National Guardsmen aiming their very large weapons in all directions would startle Amy, over and over again.  Almost two years later, New Orleans still felt like a war zone.  It seemed nobody was sleeping any more.

She pulled on her green Tulane sweatshirt and jeans. Tonight she’d stay close to home.  She grabbed her small notebook stuffed with a few folded, yellow papers.  She headed to the nearby coffee shop on Magazine.  Maybe Clayton would be there.  He was always good for a story or two about a French Quarter Grand Dame, in truth a New York City post-Katrina transplant,  who would have ordered another piece of custom furniture from him out of pity for his loss of clientele after Katrina and who felt it her duty to single-handedly save what was left of  the New Orleans “culcha”.  Ralph was her other night-time companion.  He was a poet, teacher and journalist belonging to the dying fourth estate.  She hoped that he would be there. She was growing fond of Ralph.

She liked New Orleans’ local coffee shops.  Not because she believed in the green-movement of shopping local. Like most natives, she abhorred whatever was in fashion.  She avoided the chains, choosing the local venues that didn’t try to be too clean, too smart.  A little dirt was desirable.  Mismatched chairs preferable to the boredom of redundancy.  Old wooden tables that needed a match book to hold them steady better than the cute bistro tables that populated the mall coffee shops attached to large bookstores.  Inside Amy beat the  heart shared by all New Orleanians, a heart that was armored with the  suspicion of the chic and a thirst for the passé and defunct.

Amy stepped out onto the vacant street.  It was dark, but she knew the street so well by now, she could walk it with her eyes closed and still see  vividly each of the shops, what was in the windows and the person who worked there.  A few street lights here and there, mostly there, were working.  Most of the street signs were down and not yet replaced.  Large potholes ruled the streets.  In more than a few windows above the shops,  lights shone, betraying yet another night person keeping watch.  A small mist greeted her affectionately, dampening her hair that would curl wildly in a kind of ecstatic response.  On her walk to the coffee shop a few blocks down from her apartment, Amy thought about history and family. Except for her great-aunt in New Orleans and her uncle in Alabama, everyone in her family had passed.  She didn’t know if her mother’s sister was still alive, having only a few months earlier found out that her mother even had a sister.  She hadn’t asked her uncle about that, not yet at least.   She had spent the last few months reading her mother’s journals and the letters and documents that belonged to her grandfather and great-grandfather.    When she wasn’t working at the hotel, she was in the Tulane Library in the Latin American collection.    With the help of Sean, the collection’s archivist, she was learning about the history of her ancestor’s country Guatemala and the questionable role her grandfather played in it.

Someone, she can’t remember who,  said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But what if you don’t even know that history?  What if you find out all you know about even your own personal history is a lie, or incomplete?  Whose history is told and whose is untold?  Who tells it?  She was confused.  Unsure whether to continue in her digging up the past.  She was beginning to feel that her entire family’s history was a myth and that there was a large secret story hidden in the pages she carried with her.  She was beginning to wonder who she was and how much she would change by uncovering  the secrets of her family's  past. 

When Amy arrived at the coffee shop, Ralph was there, reading aloud to a small group of street kids of all colors and all ages, along with a few newly-arrived Mexicans, El Salvadorans,  and Guatemalans who also  couldn’t  sleep that night or more likely had no place to lay their heads:

From the air it’s all puddles:
a blue-green frog town
 on lily pads. More canals
than Amsterdam. You don’t
land—you sink. When
we met, you, the Native, shook
your head. Sweat dropped
on the bar … I’m in it up to my eyebrows,
stalled like a streetcar.
My life is under the bed
with the beer bottles.
I’ll never write another line
for anything but love
in this city where steam
rises off the street after
a rain like bosoms heaving.


Ralph loved to read Everette Maddox to everyone whether they wanted to listen or not.  And every time, Ralph won them over with the poems.  He felt that it was his mission to educate the young folks still left in the city about one of its great poetic legends and his constant source of inspiration and the provider of all reasons to keep on living.   He even dressed like Everette dressed—long sleeve white shirt (not matter how hot), small thin black tie (no matter what the occasion), and dark slacks (no matter the season).   Amy at that moment knew she loved him. Hi, she whispered across the room,  and Ralph waved her over, inviting her to join the group.  She waved back but decided that, given what she just found out about herself, she wasn’t up to sharing Ralph. She pointed to another table by the window and smiled.   Ralph shook his head and continued on reading aloud to his disciples, who seemed grateful for the words that washed over them like a cool shower.  But silence is what Amy wanted. And Ralph. She ordered a café au lait and a shoe sole.  She chose a table where she could watch the sun come up over the antique mall building across the way.  She loved how the light would tease the leaves of the oaks and dapple the damp streets… a blue-green frog town/  on lily pads…

The irony, maybe even futility, of digging up one’s past and reconstructing it in a post-disaster city did not escape Amy.  Along with every person  she encountered everyday at work or in her neighborhood, she was recreating her life.  Like her great-aunt, she was trying to rebuild.  But unlike the failure of the levees that destroyed a city, the destruction of the life she knew came from a box of journals and suitcase of papers that had been hidden from her by her own family.   She wanted to tell Ralph about her mother’s journals and her suspicions about how her mother actually died, but she was afraid he’d think she was crazy.  She wanted this relationship more than anything else.  Who was she to offer herself to someone when she was in this place of rebuilding?   The desire she felt for Ralph coupled with her fear of her own history scared her into an all-too-familiar silence. 

Chapter 7: The Dream

It is in the cold black darkness of an early winter’s night when she discovers a deep secret about herself.  Believing it only a dream, she discovers that the secret is, in fact, all about darkness, about unlit corners, shadowy doorways, windowless rooms, about all those places the eyes can no longer see anything, not even one’s own hand inches from the eyes.  The secret that she can see clearly in the dark.

She awakes.  First in a half dreamy state as the images continue to wash over her mind’s eye like tears, images repeating, images reconfigured, images redrawn according to the whim of an unfettered imagination held captive in the world of dreams.   She watches herself move through the darkness confidently, knowing without seeing whatever is filling up the dark space.  She knows it is there. 

She wakes fully.  She is no longer moving through a dark space, seeing without seeing.  She is in her bed, she is certain, certain as the clock’s light on the nightstand revealing 3:03 on his red face, which she can see with her eyes.  That she lies on her bed , which she can see with her eyes; under her yellow and green quilt, which she can see with her eyes; in her small home far North and thousands of miles from her mother.  She knows all this in spite of what she is now hearing.  In spite of hearing her mother’s voice calling out to her, loud and clear that she should come downstairs. She knows she is in her home, awake.

Her mother’s voice persists, insists that she should come downstairs. She begins to wonder about...when other voices in her mind join in, the thoughts in her mind racing each other, one toppling over the other, words stumbling over the other , sentences piggybacking in an endless loop of syntax-less meaninglessness, all this a sure sign she is in trouble, will of course never get back to sleep and lately she is of the opinion that these noisy intrusive voices in her head are, dare she think much less speak aloud, the Devil himself taunting her, working insidiously to possess her through chaotic thoughts, ensnare her in the mind’s confused web of words: the devil of distraction.  She is beginning to believe she had be enlisted into her own private battle with Evil.

She calls out, stop the noise, be gone, demon of distraction.  She tries to pick up the conscious though of what she was wondering before Babel rose up, each voice fighting for hegemony.  Then she remembers,  yes, that’s it. She is wondering why she is hearing her mother’s voice if she is so fully awake and in her own bed.

She listens. It is dark in the room save for the clock’s obnoxiously lit-up face.  She can see all the furniture, every picture on the wall, every bottle on the vanity only because she has put them all there herself.  She can’t see each of these things with her eyes, but she knows they are there. She sees them in her mind’s eyes, in the place where memory of the familiar and safe reside.    She begins to drift away, the voices subsiding as she takes the mental inventory of her room.  The good, the commonplace and the everyday overcoming the evil of noisy distraction, sleep moves towards her like a welcoming ghost, and she curls up on her side, hugging her cool pillow.

Her mother’s voice calls out again, come downstairs please.

She throws off the covers, pulls on her blue woolen socks, wraps herself in her Mexican blanket and heads downstairs, fully prepared to find emptiness below.

Her mother is standing in the living room.  But it’s not her living room anymore.  Or is it?  Numerous tall windows fill the walls of a room larger then she remembers.  Her mother greets her with a tired, grateful smile and hugs her, something that feels out of character and yet familiar.  They sit down to chat and catch up, when her mother’s face suddenly changes as  shadows pass over it.  Her mother’s wrinkles grow more pronounced and her forehead maps out lines of concern, her eyes fix on something beyond. Her eyes follows her mother’s.  She sees the shadowy outlines of people standing in the windows.  Every window frames a dark, faceless figure.  She realizes the figures are growing larger, they begin to loom, hover, press against the window.   They are in every sense portentous.

She is afraid.   Her mother is afraid. They both know  that these figures are ominous, but they don’t know why; they are nameless, unvoiced, untold, silent ghosts.  Her mother turns to her and speaks with an authority that no one dare call into question.  Find a dark space, her mother tells her.  They can’t get you there.  And with your gift of seeing clearly in the dark, you'll escape their evil  and save the world.  And with those words, her mother points to the fireplace that suddenly appears in the room, and tells her to hide in the chimney.

She knows this is one of those times to listen to her mother.

Chapter 6: Anna's First Journal Entry

In the past I kept journals so that I would remember to listen to my children. As much as I love mom, she really doesn't listen to me. She never has. So I began to keep journals. Mostly I wrote about the trips I took or the boys I was in love with, or thought I was in love with.

Amy stopped reading.
Her grandmother had always listened to her.

All that changed last week--about the reasons why I kept a journal. I saw the documentary called Bitter Fruit. It was about the CIA and its role in overthrowing one of the presidents of Guatemala who as trying to create a more democratic country through land reform, democratic in the sense of wealth distribution. I realized that I know nothing Guatemala, about my father and his father and their life in Guatemala. I know we have my grandfather's books and some of his letters. But I've never looked at them except to look at my grandfather's penmanship.

Amy stopped reading.

She thinks about the mahogany bookcase.

Whenever dad talks about Guatemala he tells us about how he ate fresh fruit. How beautiful the weather was--that Guatemala is the land of eternal Spring. He talks about his education, and his favorite book The Three Musketeers. He likes to tell me about Lake Atitlan and the twelve Indian groups that lived around the lake each named after one of the apostles and each group wearing its own distinct dress. And he always said that the Indians were happy and that they didn't want to change.

Amy stopped reading.

She had heard these stories from her grandfather.

I knew my grandmother just barely. She didn't speak English, so mostly I remember sitting close to her and waiting to see what she pulled from her purse. She always seemed to have whatever was needed at that moment. My grandfather died before I was born. Dad never talks about him. When he does, he calls him Mr. Rubio. I know that my dad has nine siblings, two are half brothers.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her grandfather.

I'm writing what I know because what I don't know is beginning to feel very large.

I know that my grandfather worked for some Guatemalan presidents, that he wrote books (which we have) and that he was the Consul General to Guatemala for the Southeastern states when he died in 1944. I'm wondering what role he played in these repressive governments I'm just now learning about.

Amy stopped reading.

She knew this about her great-grandfather.

But she had never wondered about him in this way.

To tell the truth, I'm afraid of what I'll find out. But I couldn't sleep last night, so I'm pretty sure I need to find out.

Amy stopped reading.

She's not sure what to think.

I called dad last night and began to talk to him about the documentary. He says that the communists needed to be stopped, that the communists were the ones killing and shooting. That under Ubica Guatemala became safe again and roads were built and the killing stopped. He says that nothing else happened except that the communists were put down and Guatemala was saved from communism. But I could tell he was upset that I asked. I had never asked about Guatemala and its politicals. And dad had never offered that information.

Amy stopped reading.

She never saw her grandfather get upset.

Every summer during high school I worked for my dad's freight forwarding company on Camp Street. He arranges for goods to be shipped to Central American countries. My job was to go to places like the United Fruit company and to consulates to pick up the bills of lading or to get the documents stamped required for the shipments. I didn't know anything about the United Fruit Company and how it was part of the coup in Guatemala back in the mid 50's.

Amy stopped reading.

She didn't know this about her mother.

She didn't know what her mother was writing about.

I start this journal with the intention of finding out what I can about my family's past, about my father's past and his father's past. It's his father's past that's actually the mystery. That's what this journal will record--who my grandfather was. I'm writing this for myself, and maybe for my children.

I talked to my brother and sister, and told them about what I am doing. My brother as usual encouraged me to continue. My sister as usual became agitated at the thought of uncovering something unpleasant.

Amy stopped reading.
My mother had a sister?

Chapter 5: The Stages of Grief

Amy sat on the unstable antique chair that had come with the apartment on Magazine Street, looking at  the small plastic suitcase and the medium-sized cardboard box she had rescued from her parents flooded home.  The two flood survivors had been occupying a dark corner of the room since she moved back to New Orleans a little over a year ago.   It actually didn’t take her that long to get her things together.  But the move had taken up a lot of her psychic energy.  She needed to focus on the present.

  There weren't too many people who had returned yet, and the only livable area was the "sliva by the riva", the area of town that stretched from the French Quarter along the Mississippi River levee and that wound its way through the lower Garden District and Uptown to the River Bend, on the river side of St. Charles.  The lonely For Rent sign was a small one bedroom that was just a few inches and a slender wallboard beyond what would have been an efficiency apartment.  She found a job at a health club in a downtown hotel and was able to sell the Saturn, which made it possible for her to afford the high rent.  The out-of-desperation $1000 sign-on bonus the hotel offered and which was in fact offered everywhere in town from McDonalds to the Ritz,  covered her moving costs and security deposit.
 
The late evening February sun was scattering spots of light on the hardwood floor of the virtually bare room, barely warming the damp cold air finding its way through the old wavy glass window panes. She had had the suitcase and box since she had emptied her grandparent's attic, but had not yet explored their contents. Not even the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting on the wrinkled box were strong enough to pull her from her drowning  grief.

Amy thought she knew what it meant to grieve. What could be a greater loss than the loss of her own mother? Or of not knowing her own father? Her mother had died when she was barely two. Her father, she had never met. He was a brief sentence, an aside, something she overheard as she passed by the bedroom door of her grandparent’s room. “He wasn’t ready to be a father,” was the most common portrait her grandmother would paint of him. He seemed to exist inside parentheses, an afterthought. She had also heard some sketchy words “jerk,” “narcissus”, “self-centered”, words whispered when the adults didn’t see her behind Aunt Adele’s newly upholstered (for the fifth time in five years) chair or under Aunt Concha’s heavy black dining room table where Spanish diplomats sat eating inky black squid.

Of course, much more than a sentence or even a paragraph was spoken about her mother Anna. There were stories, short ones and long ones and ones with punch lines and some that seemed almost mythical. Her grandmother told funny stories about her mother, stories that made her laugh. Or she told her stories with a moral at the end, lessons Amy was to learn so that she would not repeat her mother's mistakes. She heard tales of her mother’s energy, her accomplishments, her rebelliousness from all things Southern and gentile, and her bad choices when it came to boyfriends. Her grandfather described Anna differently, like a poet might describe a person admired from a distance. He told Amy about Anna’s dreams, about what she had longed for in her life, about the books she read, the poets she read over and over again, and the music she’d dance to alone out on the patio. Amy knew about cummings and Eliot, about Mozart, about The Nancy Drew Mystery series—all the things Anna loved and cherished.

Amy realized, came to terms with actually, that what she thought had been grieving was as ephemeral as her mother was to her—a notion, a fiction, a reconstruction of fragments of photos and stories. The grief she felt about her mother's death was that of an unrequited lover’s.

The grief she felt when she saw her destroyed home and city, and the deaths of her grandparents a few months later was  different. It was concrete. Physical. A bulldozer that razed her entire being. She sat on the floor recalling a litany of events that had been occupying her thoughts for the past year: Katrina destroyed her home.  Two months later, Mignon died. Then a month later Carlos died, heartbroken and too frail to face the loss of his wife, his home, his city. The day her grandfather died, Amy felt all over again and with twice as much force what she felt the day she had returned to New Orleans after Katrina. She felt deafened by the silence, suffocated by the stench of death, hopeless in the scope of what was gone. She had loved her grandparents as deeply as she had known them. She had loved her city as deeply as she had known it. And she knew them all so very well.

This grief brought with it the hard truth that she had not really grieved her mother’s death. The hard truth that she had not known her mother at all. She knew the photos and the stories. She had lost only what she herself had created in her imagination. A fiction. A fragment. A photo.

And now Amy sat with the box of her mother’s journals, taped, sealed how long ago she doesn’t know. Next to it lay the small plastic suitcase. What she thought she knew, not only about her mother and father, but about her grandfather and his father as well, was about to change in a way as unfathomable as Katrina’s destruction.