Mined from the notebooks Saturday night, July 4, 2020. Posted Friday afternoon, August 7.
An aerial view of New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in 2008, three years after Katrina. That's the Bayou Bienvenue Wetlands Triangle across the water, which is still, in 2020, waiting for restoration. Photo by Andrew Leaf, via the Research Project.
From the Department of In Search of Lost Time: Saturday night, July 4, 2020.
When I was at the Iowa Writers Workshop a hundred years ago, the fad was to write short stories like Raymond Carver’s. That’s to say, the fad was to get published by writing the kind of stories the New Yorker and the prestigious literary journals seemed most interested in publishing at the moment---short short stories told in short “spare” sentences, with their few characters---often single characters whose only connection with other people is in memory or at second-hand through phone calls or letters the story’s readers are privy to only in snatches or summaries---isolated in time and place, brooding on their sad, broken lives. Those stories ended with epiphanic images of cups of coffee going cold, cigarettes burning in ashtrays or between fingers, doorknobs grasped but not turned, or cars seen through the window curtains driving away to uncertain destinations: images that were meant to sum up the vague emotional malaise that had haunted the protagonist throughout the story---hearts emptying of feeling, pleasures no longer satisfying, decisions unmade, dreams left unrealized and being let go. Emotional loss through failure of nerve or character was always the theme and the plot, as much as there was a plot. Self-pity the pervasive tone. You can tell I didn’t write those kinds of stories and didn’t much care to read them. And I didn't get published.
Creative non-fiction wasn't yet a thing. Boy, did I miss out there.
The fad passed, a long time ago, but I still get an unhealthy dose of satisfaction whenever I read something, in a work of fiction or nonfiction, in which time, history, and place matter, and taken together they tell us something significant about the characters, and in which the characters taken as themselves tell us something significant about the history and the place from which they sprang and in which they are living their lives. Stories in which things stand for themselves, and while they may be symbolic, they’re not symbols. Stories in which actions are direct; they signify by what they act upon or act in response to, and not what they may imply about the actors’ inner turmoil. Stories in which characters say what they mean.
Tonight, I started reading Sarah M. Broom’s memoir “The Yellow House”. You can imagine my delight as I read the opening paragraphs…
From high up, fifteen thousand feet above, where the aerial photographs are taken, 4121 Wilson Avenue, the address I know best, is a minuscule point, a swab of green. In satellite images from higher still, my former street dissolves into the toe of Louisiana's boot. From this vantage point, our address, now mite size, would appear to sit in the Gulf of Mexico. Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret. From these great heights, my brother Carl would not be seen.
Carl, who is also my brother Rabbit, sits his days and nights away at 4121 Wilson Avenue at least five times a week after working his maintenance job at NASA or when he is not fishing or near the water where he loves to be. Four thousand fifteen days past the Water, beyond all news cycles known to man, still sits a skinny man in shorts, white socks pulled up to his kneecaps, one gold picture frame around his front tooth.
Sometimes you can find Carl alone on our lot, poised on an ice chest searching the view as if for a sign, as if for a wonder, or else, seated at a pecan-colored dining table, with intricately carved legs, holding court. The table where Carl sometimes sits is on the spot where our living used to be but where instead of floor there is green grass trying to grow.
See Carl gesturing with a long arm, if he feels like it, wearing dark shades even if it is night. See Rabbit with his long legs crossed at the ankle, a long-legged man knotted up.
I can see him there now, in my mind’s eye, silent and holding a beer, babysitting ruins. But that is not his language; he would never betray the Yellow House like that.
Carl often finds company on Wilson Avenue where he keeps his watch. Friends will arrive and pop their trunks, revealing coolers containing spirits on ice. “Help yourself, baby,” they will say. If someone has to pee, they will do it in what used to be our den, or they use the bright-blue porta potty sitting at the back of the yard, where the shed once was. No, this plastic, vertical bathroom is the only structure on the lot. Written on the front, in white block letters on black background: CITY OF NEW ORLEANS.
That’s how Broom introduces both her story and one of her main characters. “The Yellow House” is Broom’s story of growing up the youngest of twelve children in New Orleans East, far removed from the French Quarter, out of earshot of the the Blue Nile and Preservation Hall, out of sight of the tourist-beckoning Garden District, a world away from the mostly white and Republican, economically and politically privileged Jefferson Parish, in a mostly black down at the heels working class and poor neighborhood that would eventually be blown down and drowned by Hurricane Katrina---and that still hasn’t been reclaimed and rebuilt. The Water, as opposed to the water Carl loves to be near, is the local nickname for Katrina and its aftermath of environmental devastation, economic disaster, and political failure, neglect, and corruption at the city, state, and federal level. She fits Carl into all that history, the family’s and the city’s, while presenting him as a distinct and autonomous individual and actor, taking charge of his own life if not his entire fate---he's waiting, busying himself, as he searches for a sign, or a wonder that he seemingly expects to come, if they come, from outside his property, delivered by someones other than himself. Bloom is not a Zolaesque naturalist, just as she’s obviously not a Carveresque minimalist. Her people aren't pure products of their environment and heredity. Their lives don't take place entirely in their heads. But she is realistic. Geography, family, and psychology tie together to create a sense of place and to tell the full story.
She fits herself in there too, introduces herself right from the start, right in the first sentence, establishing her voice as a storyteller, and giving us her point of view---the aerial view of the neighborhood is one of her characteristic views of many places since she left the Yellow 4121 Wilson Avenue for Texas for college and then on to California for grad school, where she got her bachelor and master’s degrees respectively and started her peripatetic career as a journalist, writer, and academic.
But notice how she refers to 4121 Wilson Ave as our lot, possessively, as shared, with Carl and by extension the rest of the family, in the present---now. This is going to be a book about loss, but also about holding on, to the past, and in the present. I’m going to stay up all night reading.
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