Chapter 3 A large mahogany bookcase, a small plastic suitcase and a medium cardboard box

Amy stared at the black and white photograph.   In the photo, her mother and her uncle,  both preschoolers, are sitting at the dining room table in their home not far from the Canal Street Cemeteries in New Orleans.  Their mother Mignon sits with them, but not their father Carlos.  Carlos was rarely in any of the family photographs. He was always the one behind the camera.  In the background, behind the dining room table, stands the seven foot tall mahogany bookcase with its two glass doors and two small drawers at the bottom.

She sighed, her breath a griever’s prayer.

She remembered that bookcase fondly.    She could see herself even now sitting on the brown and gold floral carpet that covered the floor in her grandparent’s living room.  She was sitting at the foot of this same bookcase, with its lovely fluted columns running up each side, the carved leaves punctuating each end of the  columns, and the round carved trim framing  the top and bottom of the door frames.  Over the years, various collectible items filled the shelves, but it always contained her great-grandfather’s books.  Her grandfather told her that he had bought that bookcase after the war, and had stripped and refinished it.  Amy made him promise that he’d teach her how to strip and refinish furniture when she was old enough.  Of course, he told her in his whisper of a voice.  I will teach you whatever I can.  He never let her down on that promise.

Ever since she was a child, Amy would sit at the base of the bookcase for hours at a time, the two small drawers opened, photographs spilling over the sides and onto the floor.  She enjoyed going through the randomly stored pictures that her grandmother put there before Amy was born.    The photographs were in no particular order. She might find a photograph of her great grandmother from 1920 on some Guatemalan veranda lying next to a photograph of her grandmother on a Biloxi Beach in 1945.  Her grandmother would often remark, each time as if it were the first, your mother also sat there for hours looking at those photographs.    

Interspersed among the photographs were equally random pieces of paper. Some were letters written by her great-grandfather in a form of Spanish rarely spoken today and in an exquisite penmanship  that she had come to find out was called Willigha, a font based on the copperplate formal handwriting popular at that time, equally extinct in her digital world.   There were also painfully thin onion-skin papers with now blurry type-written poems written by her grandfather as well.  Amy admired the handwritten letters as if they were photographs, representations of another time and of people who were no longer with us.   It was however difficult for her to reconcile the ornate, lyrical handwriting of her great-grandfather when placed next to the stern, austere face in his photographs.

After she turned 18, she began to sit with these letters and poems more often, trying to decipher the words with her high school Spanish.  She recognized a love poem here, a tribute to some political leader there,  even  letters from  former Guatemalan presidents.   Because her grandfather never spoke about his father  (and when he did, he referred to him as Mr. Rubio and never as my father)  she sensed that she was not allowed to ask questions about him.

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Family stories take many forms.  In some families, they are shouted out proudly at family Christmas dinners, at Passover feasts, at Thanksgiving dinner tables, meant for everyone to hear, again and again and yet again, until the stories become family legend, larger than life.  In some families, the stories are contained within the “begats”  written on the blank pages at the beginning and end of Bibles.  Some family stories become public domain, the subject of cautionary tales or of inspirational self-help. Amy would come to discover her family’s story among the photographs and writings in the bottom two drawers of this bookcase.  Later, after discovering the small plastic suitcase and the cardboard box in the attic, she would have to rewrite that story.  Even so, the stories she would come to tell were like a book with whole chapters missing, lost to sea, dust to the wind.

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Amy put away the photograph of her grandmother, mother and uncle in front of the bookcase.  Two years ago, she had packed up the photographs and papers from the bottom two drawers of the bookcase, a decision that had come to feel to her like an act of supreme providence and grace, as less than a year later Hurricane Katrina would flood and destroy her family home.  She had convinced her grandfather that she would keep the photos safe and preserved.  And that she did.  She took the contents to the bald, yellow-toothed, gnome-like British archivist at Tulane University who oversaw the precious rare manuscripts.  He gave her acid-free special containers  and even  preserved some of the more fragile papers in a clear special material without her requesting him to do so.  The archivist clearly loved to preserve precious texts, even those of a family he didn’t know.  But she had kept them safe and preserved in a way she never thought she would have to.

She had taken the whole lot with her when she decided she needed to live in another town, 1500 miles away from New Orleans.  She had every intention of staying there long enough to walk a different geography, know a different culture, experience a different climate; but there were other plans for her.  When Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans nine months later, she packed up the few things she had actually unpacked , stored them at a local storage unit, and drove back South, first to Alabama and her uncle’s home where her grandparents had evacuated.  She stopped there to see how they were doing, before heading to New Orleans, as the Mayor was allowing people back into the city to see the condition of their homes for a few hours a day.   At her uncle’s house, she unpacked from her car some of the photographs she had decided to take at the last minute so that her grandparents would have something of their past to hold on to, including this one of the family around the table and in front of the family bookcase.    Amy handed her grandfather the photos, randomly picked and randomly stored in the small letter-sized brown envelope.  Carlos held the envelope on his lap.  It seemed as if  opening  the envelope was simply too herculean a task for him. He smiled at Amy, his eyes peering out from deep inside some dark space, his heart visibly beating through his thin shirt.

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When Amy entered her grandparent’s home, her home, nothing, not even the devastation she witnessed for the last three hours of her drive, could prepare her for what she saw. The wooden floors buckled like a roller coaster.  The stench of the moldy plaster and wood, of the rotten food in the freezer and refrigerator was so strong it clobbered its way through her black-mold protective mask.   She found the mahogany bookcase  in the hallway partially covering her bedroom door, still upright, but  clearly suffering heavily. She realized it had floated for days in the flood waters, until it came to rest in this odd spot.   She gently touched the right glass door that was partially open. It deteriorated at her touch, falling to the buckled floor, shattering the glass.     At that moment, she knew she didn’t want to remain any longer than she had to. She took the pad out of her pants pocket and made a list of what she felt needed to be done-what needed to be hauled out to the front of the house for—who? who would pick the stuff up? But she had seen in her long drive through the city that those who had returned were piling up the damage furniture and appliances in front of their homes.  No one seemed to be worried about who was going to pick it up.  Then she went to the attic stairs to see if anything up there was intact.

She pulled on the black-moldy rope that drew the attic stairs down.  The stairs were in pretty good shape, so she climbed them fairly confidently.  She found the box of Christmas ornaments her grandparents had put up the whole time she was growing up and the old wooden children’s xylophone from Guatemala.  After she removed these items, she saw hidden behind them  a small cheap plastic suitcase and a medium size cardboard box with the words “Anna’s Journals” written in her grandmother’s handwriting.  She had never noticed these before.  The urgency to get out of the house didn't allow her to reflect on the fact that she hadn’t known that her mother had kept journals, and that in fact she had nothing written of her mothers. Single-mindedly she quickly but carefully took each of these remains down the attic stairs and into her car out front. With these few rescued items now in her car, she rolled down  the windows to try to diffuse the suffocating odor they brought with them, musty smells that bore witness to the 10 feet of waters that resided in their home for an eternity of days.

Carlos and Mignon, the only two parents she had ever known, survived the initial onslaught of Katrina, but they did not survive the heartbreak it left in its wake.  Mignon died a few months later. She lay down one afternoon to take a nap, and never awoke.  Carlos, his home and his wife gone,  finally lost his battle to the congestive heart disease that he had held at bay for years, so he could take care of Mignon.  Katrina’s waters had been one drop of water too much for his enlarged heart.

The night before her grandfather died, Amy had a dream.   In her dream, Carlos and Mignon were young. They looked like they did in the black and white photographs in the book case drawers.  Mignon was dressed in a long white Victorian gown with a high lacey collar and elegant billowy sleeves.  Carlos was dressed in a white linen suit.  They were standing together on a tall cliff overlooking the sea.  Holding hands, they jumped into the water.

In my dream, I’m now seeing them under the water swimming, almost dancing enjoying the sense of weightlessness and the serenity of the silence.   Above them, the waves of white filigree frame the vision.  They swim to the surface only to find that they cannot break through, they cannot escape the water.  The ocean, the waves and my grandparents suddenly disappear.
In my dream, my grandfather’s face appears, smiling.

A golden light fills the dreamer’s eyes.