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.
