fiction: Lara Stapleton
New
I wondered if it was the light that muted our colors. The sun doesn’t shine as brightly onto our streets, and so I can’t get the same satisfaction in New York, my home. In New Orleans, I had found myself experiencing little highs all day. I wandered around in that damn heat, looking at little houses flanked with bushes and trees breaking open with flowers. I felt lifted when my eyes landed upon something especially bright or unique, some new combination of two or three colors, main color trimmed with a balance of secondaries of which I had not previously conceived.
I was overwhelmed in moments or often just slightly elevated. I didn’t know good feelings could be so simple. These are colors only designers know, or art school graduates or people who are quite good with such aesthetics because they love it and have made a hobby of decorating; I have not, so I will make my best guesses: teal, aqua blue, gray with a breath of violet, deep violet, midnight blue, soft green, powder blue, hot pink, orangish red, purplish red, deep red, indigo, shrill, pure yellow. I am from a very gray place, rusty Michigan, and in addition to the factories and strip malls of our childhood landscape, there are the overcast skies that make up the majority of the year. These bursts of color pulled at my heart. The sun radiated into me. I wanted to keep it.
One day, I stood in front of a little yellow shotgun with lavender doors. Magenta flowers burst from bushes on either side. I just stood there in the narrow street, wishing someone I love had been there to share it. Maybe that was it– the perfect amount of longing– that felt so good, that love with a twinge of sadness that something cannot be, no one else is there, or it cannot last forever. Too much longing is a terrible thing, but a touch of it is lovely. While I was standing there, with my mouth slightly open, I assume, a short, thin, very tan white man of about thirty came out of his house, and seeing my expression, smiled. “Do you want to see the court yard?” he asked. And I stood in that small space full of wandering jews and bougainvillea. My head fell into my hands for a moment. What would you call that purple? I asked him. I guess that’s like a maroon, he said, more brown than purple, brown with red. Yellow streaks wound through the dewy maroon and green leaves. And he asked me where I was from. And sometimes I say Michigan, and sometimes I say New York, where I’ve been twenty years, and this time I said New York, and he said, oh, I’m from New Jersey, and he said he had come down on a rescue mission after Katrina and decided to stay. It’s so beautiful, I said. Thank you, I said. Thanks for showing me.
And I very much love New York, my home, and I returned with what I believed to be a new skill, the ability to move myself, just a little with color, like a minor version of experiencing a great poem or spectacular view or a scene in a novel or a film you want to share with someone you love. I returned believing I could bring joy to my life by noting the existence of beautiful colors. I’d read about this in the famous Color Purple, of course, many years ago: God wants you to recognize purple. After everything, there is still a beautiful color, and a character in Beloved too, an older woman who had been a slave just wanted to look at pretty colors until she died. I remembered these passages, but I didn’t get it, really, until my month in New Orleans.
I knew I would seldom find it in a building in New York, just an occasional wayward restaurant or bodega, a random Queens hardware store, but I thought I could recreate it by looking at the lovely blouses of young women on the subway, their fabulous jackets, but so far I only have the same feelings for feet, ha! For our glorious sandals, a longing for a beautiful object that I wish I could freeze in time (ha! and now I sound a bit silly and shallow, if I have not already). What is it that is so beautiful about the curving heel with sparkles and bright feminine toes? The feet of New York’s women are lavish in the summer, sparkly and arching, or flat and delicate with bold shining toenails against their whole-gamut range of flesh: yellow and blue black and pink and olive, cinnamon, and deep brown, rich and poor alike, sparkly Payless and sparkly Manolos. The girls, the ladies, the serious matriarchs of commerce, of academia, of city affairs, the secretaries and the nurses and the silly teenagers sit on the subway, on their way to work, to the clubs, to dinners with boyfriends and girlfriends and spouses, home to their children, with their bright and lovely toes dangling off their lovely feet.
But I wanted more. I wanted the ability to see those colors all day, and feel simply lifted, and feel simple longing. And I sat down in an empanada shop in Lower Manhattan, painted blue and yellow. The trim was a bold baby blue, which did it for me, but the main color was a mustard yellow, and I thought it was dull, and I wondered if it were New York itself, the grayness of this city, or the muted sun, that would make a business owner choose the brownish mustard, over a high pure yellow. Perhaps it’s just the bold southern sun that gives you that feeling all day long, that makes every color look brighter.
Down in New Orleans, I had spent time with a guy just a bit older than me, the boyfriend of one of my Ft. Greene friends. She, Annette, had come down to visit, and Richard, her boyfriend and she and I all went to the Second Line together, and don’t get me started on the Second Line. A hundred and ten degrees in the shade, and every last damn man plays an instrument, and a couple of women too, and there are two hundred people dancing in the street, on rooftops. And everyone knows the songs, and the teens don’t seem to think it’s corny. And what is this they dance? Something very old, nothing you’ve seen on the street anywhere else or in clubs or videos or even old rock and roll movies, something much older. Like Brazilians, they dance and walk at once. And people are selling hot sausages off the back of their trucks, and beer out of grocery carts. And I’m happy just to be there and be there with friends.
And later, at the burger joint, Richard, who just moved down to New Orleans, tells us what it was like in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn, where I live, ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, that Spike Lee used to throw loft parties and Saul Williams would stop and chat with you on the street. Brooklyn Moon had open mics and the young people who hung there went on to make films and win Off-Broadway theater awards, star in HBO series, direct avant-garde legends and write novels that rip your heart out, books of poetry that young journal-keepers read here and there about the country. And it’s over, he said. Ft. Greene is not what it used to be. And the black bohemians who once peopled that neighborhood, have largely moved to Bed-Stuy, and Bed-Stuy has not yet cohered into a center of culture and cafe hangs. And Ft. Greene has not only gentrified into a predominantly white neighborhood, these are not artists or culture heads, these are corporate lawyers, and former bankers weeping over their soup on unemployment.
Richard painted a picture for me of this nineties Ft. Greene in which everyone was so young and beautiful, so promising, on the cusp of greatness, much better than the actual fulfillment, the break through to notoriety. It was over, dead, he said and I was a bit sullen that night feeling like New Orleans was not mine and I had no place to go back to.
But I am happier here, in New York. How do I explain that? I had little highs all day during my travels, but I often got lonely and felt uncentered. I missed my people. I came back a little bit friendlier, greeted with more enthusiasm, my twenty-years worth of friends and acquaintances and I found it to be a wonderful summer full of parties and gatherings and nights in the neighborhood sitting at the sidewalk cafes. On the 4th of July, a Madiba regular, a guy from that the South African place in Ft. Greene, threw a rooftop party in Bed-Stuy. He had a huge roof, with a DJ and a raw bar: lobster and shrimp and oysters and two kinds of spicy steak and burgers and sausage and fancy side dishes like grilled beets and cassava. We didn’t know Samuel, the wickedly charming Botswanan bartender could cook like that, like a chef, and there was liquor for miles, “I feel like somebody loves us,” I said. Damn, I said, and Richard was saying Ft. Greene was dead. Fuck Richard, he’s the dead one. And there was a funky, funky DJ, our friend DJ Whether, and I danced with people I had not danced with before, Juan C from Costa Rica and that young man who won Nigerian Big Brother, and everyone texted their friends and the party doubled then tripled before the vibe changed to something just a little bit out of control, and Victor, the Madiba regular who threw the party, started hanging in his own condo.
“Somebody should give Victor some,” we were joking all night, and some of the dudes even said they’d do it, and at the end Samuel told us, later, as we talked about it for a week after, he saw a woman pretending to fall asleep on his couch. A few of us at Madiba had fun imitating the act of arranging oneself on the couch in an attempt at seduction, Marilyn Monroe with your arm flung over your head and your hip arched out. It went on for weeks, that feeling of community, that feeling that somebody loved us. The little stories about new couples and how people dance with this ridiculous elbow swing, or how many ladies Chinedu (Big Brother Nigeria) rapped to and in what manner, and what the steak tasted like, with an exquisite equilibrium of various peppers and how much the whole thing actually must have cost and how Victor was a new man after that, how beloved and beaming with new choices of women. Victor had been coming around on the weekends at Madiba, when we drank our coffees after brunch or our Heinekens or Obama Mamas at night. I confided in the one particular friend I trust to tolerate my excessive nosiness: wonder if Victor is looking for a wife. And then I confided in that same friend who also tolerates my sappiness, that I felt like someone had given us each other for the summer. We’d gone somewhere special and come back a community.
New York is my home; I’ve been here nearly twenty years and I have my friends, close friends and party friends and run-into-twice-a-year on the street friends. I have friends from my restaurant days, my bartending at the Nuyorican days, my quasi-academic life in the community colleges, my neighborhood, and because I am a mixed Filipino-Irish-American, I have the Filipino writers and intellectuals I gradually accumulated over the years. This is of great satisfaction to me. You can imagine my family was a bit isolated in Michigan, and here were these people who accepted me, and were even extremely cool about the fact that I am mixed and a very racially ambiguous person. And believe me, I have had many arguments about my ethnicity. People get upset about things they’re not accustomed to. They resent the blurred boundaries, the threat to order.
People told me I wouldn’t want to leave New Orleans, and they were right, but only in a sense. I know my home is New York, but I do think I had a number of truly very happy days down there. There was the day on the river drinking the most obscenely sweet hurricanes with Anthony, who was thirteen years younger than me. The hurricanes were beautiful like everything else, like the breeze off the water, and what would you say this color is? Flamingo pink, he said. Ahhh, yeah, that’s it, flamingo pink. He was a poet, a young man with a journal, and he read books I know and quoted them and to have his attention for a moment made me feel like I was hovering at some pinnacle, like a piece of fruit that is about to turn, that must be had now. And amazingly, he knew a thing or two about scenes I had been a part of fifteen years before, the work of poets nearly a generation older than him, people about whom I knew stories of romance and personal squabbles and it was pretty amazing to have someone care about things I had been a part of. Anthony grew up in Ft. Greene where those writers of color I know lived in the mid-90s, then moved to New Orleans at the age of thirteen, and so here we were with private understandings of each other, drinking flamingo pink drinks on the river. I told him I thought strippers in New Orleans were, um, not so attractive, pudgy with bad teeth. Some of them got bullet wounds, he added, and by nightfall we were drunk enough to go test our hypothesis on Bourbon Street in one strip club after another. We ended up in a spot called, Little Darlings, and the girl with the best body, tall and thin-yet-stacked introduced herself to us as Supermodel. And we laughed and in moments of intimacy, we quoted writers we both literally and figuratively knew.
When I got back to New York, people asked me about Katrina. The truth is, I only saw a bit of the scarred remains, the houses with the dates painted to the left of the door, the water lines at neck level, small buildings with the entire back ripped off, furniture and scrap metal long ago removed. Although there was little evidence of daily life remaining, the room divisions, the walls down the middle left an impression of vulnerability, nakedness, roof blown off a life. Of course these images were nothing compared to the footage we saw on CNN during and for months after the hurricane. There were no longer cars upside down on houses, grandmothers laying in kiddy pools and pulled by the young and strong. No more young men on rooftops, fading in the heat, stumbling sideways on the shingles in their dehydration, obese women hunched over in crippling pain, pushed forward by healthier relatives, sitting on anything that could float, plastic bins, two tied-together tires. The morbidly dying at the side of the road, babies howling outside the Convention Center, even Anderson Cooper growing enraged as the days and the heat go on and the bodies bloat outside the Superdome, at the edge of the highway. No daily legends of terror, gang rapists and vigilantes. No miles and miles and miles of trash, soft, useless wood, boxes of clothes and family albums and teenage journals full of melodrama and bank records and grandmother’s chair in front of what-used-to-be houses, and the filthy water, the infamous stench, the swimming in sewage, our own shit, a woman’s, a man’s face in her, his own shit, in everyone else’s in human filth that daily humiliation modern life allows us to deny. Humiliation. Yes, these 2009 remnants of the flood were such tiny shadows of those contemporaneous images, that to be frank, Katrina wasn’t much on my mind.
And so it was a couple of hours later when I felt like a fool: an older man at the bus stop had said he had good days and he had great days and that he had decided four years ago that was how it was going to be, and that most people were good people, and I didn’t do the math of the four years until I was on that same bus route back.
One day, as I was walking toward the Mardi Gras Indian museum, in the Tremé, the oldest black neighborhood in the US, I came upon a group of construction workers sitting under an awning in the shade, in the afternoon heat, two Creole brothers in their fifties and one younger white man in his twenties who soon said his ancestors were from Cuba. I marveled at how brown white people can get in that radiating sun, skin saturated to all its potential, to leave us squinting at the continual racial ambiguity: and one of the reasons I love this city is I identify with those blurred boundaries, and people are more comfortable with it down here: it doesn’t piss them off, well not in the same way, anyway.
I told them I liked the house across the street, its cool, gray-blue, and I wanted to take a picture of it, and it turned out to belong to one of the two older brothers. Soon, the conversation came to Katrina, without any natural segue, in that telling way that lets you know a matter sits with great heaviness on someone’s mind, your friend’s obtuse connections to his ex-wife over dinner, the weight of the non-sequitur, most revealing thing in the world. He asked, Paul, if I had seen Spike Lee’s film about Katrina. I had, but the truth is, I don’t remember it well because I think I watched it when I was exhausted. He said he’d been in it. He said, “We got two thousand people out. Then they stopped us at gun point. Sent me to motherfuckin’ Nebraska.”
They turned people back at the highway with attack dogs. They left people to die for four days. We could have saved ourselves, but they stopped us. He was a thin man, his limbs floated out of his sleeves, his plaid shorts, furry with gold hair gleaming in the sun, all knees and elbows. He said he would never fly the American flag again. He pointed to where a small cloth skull and cross bones image hung off of his roof. “That’s my flag now. I ain’t no American.” He sounded like a veteran who’d once flown a flag: Vietnam.
I wanted to ask if Obama changed anything. I wondered if that had provided any solace to black New Orleanians, changed anyone’s view of this country. I had been wondering that since I arrived, but for some reason I found it a difficult question to ask, just as I found it difficult to explain that I was researching for a project about miscegenation, writing about Creoles of color, and how they got that way, the fucking and the love affairs, the astounding number of common-law-marriage and concubines, and the undeniable generations of rape.
I am clearly not from Louisiana once I open my mouth though I look like a lot of people down here. I’m an American, born here, citizenship from birth. I come from miscegenation. I am also from a country colonized twice, by Northern and Southern European cultures and I am writing something at the center of myself: the intersection of sex and power and color. I have my education; I am of the first world, to some degree, because the women in my family married white. And here is a city built of such tales; they exist throughout the Americas but this is the one in the U.S., where some of the truth is told. And New Orleans may well be the seat of our culture. If this is the city where cool was born, this may well be the seat of our aesthetic.
Feeling vulnerable, I did not tell them what I was doing. I am afraid to hear it’s not my place; that is always my fear, although no one in my whole trip had ever said anything like that. And I let my questions about Obama go unasked. Did these two brothers, born, I would guess, in the early ‘50s know anything of the French, the Spanish men, the African, the mixed-race women who created their lineage?
I had been getting lonely and vulnerable of late, too long without people I know well, feeling not so much myself, not ready to converse or debate, so I let it all alone, too important to me. Ha! I recoil because I care too much.
The guy told me he was making his own film. He told me his full name, to remember it and keep an eye out for it. He pointed me to the Backstreet Cultural Museum, the Mardi Gras Indian Museum. I thought it was a family home, though I found out later it was an old funeral parlor, which had been fixed up with grant money. The proprietor’s brother was sitting in an awning, across the street drinking water from a bottle. He walked with me to open up the place.
I had read a bit about the Mardi Gras Indian traditions long before I came down. They participate in long-standing rituals during the festival season, not in the parades, but as actions in black neighborhoods around the city. The costumes are incredible, made of the brightest softest feathers of which you can conceive, with sequence and large shining beads, like tropical fish in some long, unexplored ocean bottom crevice, some astounding miracle of evolution, of potentiality, imagination.
I had been enamored of colors by whole trip, but these costumes were a whole new level. They take a year to make, and members of gangs, or tribes, what they call the groups, get together pretty soon after Mardi Gras and start working on the next year’s gear. They have various roles, Big Chief, Spy, Flag boy, and they move about the neighborhoods and when they meet another gang, there are elaborate rituals that are performed, complete with some language only they understand. It used to be that there was actual brawling, but now a days, the people involved work very hard to keep it a positive, cultural inheritance. There are contests, arguments over who has the prettiest costumes and because the population has been ‘diaspora-ized,’ they are working hard to pass it on to the youngsters.
So the man, a man in his fifties, muscular from labor, bald, dark-skinned, missing some teeth, shows me about a dozen costumes exhibited around a long thin room. They’re from 2002 until the present, missing 2005. He explained the various officers. And I stood there: True Orange. Emerald Greene. Pure Yellow. Rich Purple. The most perfect red, redder than any previous red I’d ever seen, red turned up. Like the shiniest costume jewelry, but soft, feathers with a belly, a headpiece of sequence and large plastic, light-reflecting beads. Grown, masculine, men loving the soft and fluffy, like girl children, in touch with the most basic emotions, emotions men are trained their whole lives to denigrate. There were what seemed like a dozen costumes, chiefs and sidemen from the new millennium.
To the left was another room with memorabilia, photographs of earlier Indians and the Zulu Kings, laminated explanations laid out in large, readable font, glass cases full of scepters and articles and the coconuts the Zulus toss out during the parade. I asked the man about the origins of the whole thing, and what he answered was what I had theorized, was what I seen reflected in the desire to create the softest prettiest object that can be worn. “The Indians around here, some of them used to take in runaway slaves,” he said.
He left me alone for a moment, and I stood there in the center of the room, in the center of a dozen of the prettiest things I’d ever seen in my life. I knew I’d be back. I decided when the inevitable tragedy came: the loss of family, a relationship, some disappointment I could barely stand. At some midpoint of recovery, six months, a year later, I would come back to this room and get my optimism back, say: I’m ready to live again. Some people feel moved by mountains and rolling valleys, the Grand Canyon, the ocean, but for me it’s this man-made imitation of glorious sunsets and ducklings, all pulled together here in warrior garb, some epic tale of love and hate, with love winning.
And I’m still, after all these years, half way through my life expectancy, not sure I believe in God, though I’m open to it now, as I wasn’t ten years ago, because life is harder now and I need to feel there is something that connects me. It just feels better to believe, and I believe that if there is a God, he is diametrically opposed to large, gray, bureaucracy, as cesspool from rainbow.
The Germans, soon after the Holocaust admitted what had happened, they had no choice. And the Germans I’ve known in New York, we meet everyone in New York, World City, are terribly embarrassed. I do not believe that a generation should feel ashamed for its forefathers’ evils. Instead, it’s the truth that is so important. A truth that says: this is obscenity. This is the converse of humanity. It is the truth that is necessary to really bring full citizenship to those (of us) who feel alienated because the denial is lingering insult. It happened here, as ugly as Nazis.
In this room, in this museum, in the Tremé in New Orleans, I felt like I had arrived at some truth I’d needed all along and it felt like home to me, my American self, the meeting place of three peoples bursting against each other in the cyclone of history, two continents (or four) and two of those three peoples perhaps known but certainly denied: the unsung, the stubborn, the radiant. Ships at a distance. Capacity for wonder. Apocalypse and Holocaust. Holocaust. Apocalypse. And I will not leave you with an image of the dispossessed, wandering up the roadway, the undead groping up the roadway after the dead, the disease, the rotting innards, the search for nourishment. Nor will I leave you with an image of the genius instruments of torture, its iron rods and orderly systems. Nor the terror, the wild eyes of the bewildering unknown. I will leave you with the image of beloved warriors on horseback, cherishing their families, protecting their neighbors, riding into the Next World, fierce like deities, gentle as poets, soft as hatchlings, as magnificent as every last dusk.
LARA STAPLETON was born and raised primarily in East Lansing, Michigan with some time in the Philippines. New York City is her home. She is the author of The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute 98) which was a PEN Open Book Committee Selection and an Independent Booksellers’ Selection, and co-editor of Juncture (Soft Skull 2003) and Thirdest World (Factory School 2007). A Lecturer for Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York, she is a writer of poetry, prose, and screenplays. Her work has been published widely in journals, and she counts among her awards, the Columbia Journal Award for Fiction (1998) , The Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant (1999), and a PSC-CUNY grant for research (2010). She has finished another collection, 10 Tales from around the World, and is at work on a screennplay set in antebellum New Orleans.