By Gerri Graves
I stepped off the bus wearing the same dress I’d worn for the past four days. The weather was hotter than I had expected and the kind of muggy that never lets the surface of your skin dry.
I’d come to New Orleans for the week of Halloween, with a suitcase full of clothes meant for the fall. It was not my first visit to the Big Easy and I reprimanded myself for not researching the current weather conditions before my flight.
Being that I had always traveled on a microscopic budget, there was no wiggle room for the extra clothing expenditure. I settled for canceling one night at The Dungeon and one night at Pat O’Brien’s and bought myself a dress I would live in for the next 6 days. Washing it by hand at the end of the day and hanging it in the shower to dry overnight.
The one thing I wouldn’t give up was my trip to see the plantations. If it meant washing that dress every night, I would do it. No way was I missing those massive white oaks along the narrow pathway that led to the entrance of Oak Alley.
Anne Rice fan, remember? A portion of ‘Interview with the Vampire’ was filmed there. At least, that’s why I originally visited this plantation…..now it was more nostalgic. I’ve been visiting these grounds since my 20s.
Wrapping my arms around those trees and sitting amongst its buckling and twisted roots, made me feel like I was being hugged right back. Smelling the scent of the Mississippi flowing just across old River Road coupled with the perfume of the greenery within the expansive grounds, made my tummy do flip-flops.
It’s history I could touch and feel. My overly abundant, whimsical imagination would envision the people and scenarios that might have played out over the centuries. I’m getting butterflies just writing this.
No way was I going to trade that experience for a second or third set of summer clothes, so I sought out those little tour booths located here and there, within the French Quarter.
I had my favorite plantations…and I looked for a tour that encompassed all of them: San Francisco? Check. Destrehan? Check. Oak Alley? Check. Nottoway? Check……Oh, wait. There was a new one I hadn’t seen before. Hadn’t heard of it before.
I asked the attendant about this new plantation added to the tours…..The Whitney. She explained this plantation was dedicated to the slaves’ perspective and their daily life working on an active sugar plantation. It was an overall peek into their wretched existence, laced with personal stories of the men, women and children who worked on this plantation. This was something I must see.
I booked my tour for two days in the future, paid the attendant, grabbed my tour brochure and tickets, and made my way to the Cafe Du Monde for a little afternoon caffeine and sugar fix. Still, the best deal in the French quarter.
Two days and two more trips to the Cafe Du Monde, I found myself stepping out of that bus and following the guide to the entrance of the Whitney. Already fatigued from labored breathing that felt like sucking liquid air through a straw, I welcomed the air-conditioned gift shop while we waited for the property tour guide to begin our tour.
When she arrived we exited the comfy AC and strolled out, once again, into the hellscape that was Southern Louisiana weather. Whilst walking out to the plantation proper, she began to tell us stories of the people who worked this plantation and the horrors they experienced. Some so horrific, they are not fit to be included within this publication.
What struck me then and still sticks with me today is viewing the luxurious plantation first, with all its upscale amenities that point in time allowed, complete with extravagant furnishings and accouterments their station in society demanded, and then walking to where the slaves were kept.
Barely a shack, they were generally a one-room accommodation with a porch meant to sleep entire families. That is……the children they were allowed to keep. Most were snatched from their mothers and auctioned off like cattle.
I fell back on the tour and stayed to look through every building. These buildings where children were made and born and where, unfortunately, many of them died.
The lumber of the construction was most likely cypress which grew in the swamps surrounding New Orleans proper and could be harvested for next to nothing, but slave labor. Ironically, it is the durability of this wood which is resistant to rot, water, mold, and insect infestation, that allows these buildings to stand to this very day. Defiant in its age, it allows us a glimpse into the horrific history that America has yet to reconcile…..or fully embrace, for that matter. They are a monumental testament to the crimes committed against our fellow human beings. Our brothers and sisters.
As my brain told stories and imaginings of what these walls witnessed, I asked myself…..”Did they consider this home? Was there laughter, love, and familial humility? What did they cook? Was it fare that was directed by the plantation owners, or did they have the freedom to subsidize their meals with what could be got within the Mississippi? Were these bare wood walls their escape when the day was done….or was it an extension of the horror, done under the cloak of night?”
My wandering thoughts abruptly ceased when I realized how far behind I was from the group I was with and I hurriedly walked to catch up.
Later that night, within the quarter, as I was meandering my way back to my B&B……it began to rain. I absolutely loved the rain and walked within it until the downpour became too heavy. I sat myself under a canopy just across from the Monteleone on Royal St. to wait it out and as luck would have it….a lone Saxophone player was playing to an audience of two just a few canopies down. The couple danced, in the rain, to the lazy, stylized drawl of the sax. Slowed to a love song, so the two could cozy up to a romantic slow dance.
I watched for a time until the witnessing of the event brought about a pang of jealousy. I leaned back on the old building and listened to the rain, the sax and the quiet whisperings that the lovers exchanged.
I lived in that time, in that moment. Something our phone-crazed world has forgotten how to do. I can still feel how all these odd scenarios found me in that place, in that moment. How all the happy accidents worked their magic and placed me there. The rain. The long walk within the quarter, with no destination. My resting place found out of necessity, placed me in front of one of the most beautiful buildings and on one of the most aesthetically prized streets our nation has to offer. The saxophone and the lovers were just the cherry on top.
I closed my eyes, listened to the music accompanied by the incessant beating of the rain slapping against the pavement…..and thought about home. My home, and the home that wasn’t a home for many men, women and children that lived so long ago.
The recent anti-camping legislation caused a remembrance of this slice of my life.
It’s always amazing to me how bits of my past coincide with the present day. Like whatever hand is guiding us just outside the periphery of our timeline, is revisiting a lesson you’ve learned long ago. Driving the point home. Reinforcing boundaries and solidifying ideals to set permanently within an individual’s moral compass. The experiences that make up the persona of an individual’s identifying trademarked personality. Different lives, differing participation, alternate takeaways from similar scenarios. Scenarios that mold us into individuality, yet…..still the same as the neighbor you greet each day while retrieving the afternoon mail.
Simply put, my idea of home may not be your idea of home.
It springs questions, like a trap we’re made to reside in…..until our minds plant firmly the tendrils of a foundational core of that which we were made to become. Some liken it to the doctrine of fate, or serendipity…..or coincidental internal instruction. Like finding the correlation of a plantation 2300 miles away from a homeless person who loves to wake up to the chirping of birds, the rushing of the river and the occasional mule deer that wanders through his makeshift encampment. It’s the only freedom he understands, apart from a world that doesn’t or will never, understand what that means to him.
Home to the individual is not a popular construct or construction. We visit buildings every day that are not our home. Nor are invisible property lines and the dwellings that lay within them. I’d venture to say, some might even consider them a sort of prison. If you’ve ever been in a bad marriage, you know precisely what I mean.
You work, play, shop, eat and visit buildings every day that are not your home.
Some spend years incarcerated in a building that would never be considered a home, no matter what your interpretation of home is.
It’s also speculated that home is wherever your parents and siblings reside. Or a single person you love so mightily, that any scenario without them in it would be likened to a purgatory. Wherever they are, is where your home is. And while my sentimental nature yearns for that to be true somewhere out there in the universe, that hasn’t been my experience. The person I loved mightily treated our long relationship more like the Waffle House, instead of ‘home’. A long stop, but not a permanent home.
So, while I love the idea of finding your home in a person, that unfortunately hasn’t been my experience.
I’ve pondered over all the buildings I’ve resided in over the course of my lifetime, and although I have fond memories in each one……not one of them has ever felt like home. There was no permanence to any of them. Nothing but a roof with four walls that kept me and mine out of the elements.
There were never handprints on the back patio, with splayed adolescent fingers, commemorating a date in time. No abandoned treehouse in the back half acre. No scratches of measurement on the door jamb. Never any kindergarten handmade Christmas ornaments tucked safely in the attic, alongside forgotten toys and dolls with inked in eyebrows and mustaches. Nor Fido buried in a neatly manicured backyard, with a tree-limbed cross you reconstruct year after year, planted firmly within the soil of where your remembrance of his head lay. Nestled, just there, behind the rose bushes and viney jasmine.
For some of us, the conventional idea of home is something we neither recognize or identify with.
It’s conceptual. It’s evolving. It’s an enigma. And for those who make up the rank and file of the homeless community…….it’s elusive. Whatever ground we gain in obtaining a home, whatever our idea of what that home is, it’s constantly under threat. Either conditional or revoked with the threat of tickets that can’t be paid or even incarceration.
All of this, for me, collided a few weeks ago. I was speaking on a panel that evening, but before I did….. I strolled amongst the words etched within the Anne Frank memorial and worked my brain to land sentences that would hopefully, make an impact. It was here I witnessed a black man….a veteran, openly weep at the phrases that moved him. He spoke of past and present treatment up to the week before when a total stranger called him that name that hurts my heart to hear.
This stranger was itching for a fight and spoke the word that he thought would allow him to beat on the subject of his disdain.
Instead of rising to his baiting, this man quietly walked on. Stoic and resigned to not leave his fate in the hands of a jerk our country is currently letting slide.
He was good enough to fight and die in our wars, but not good enough to walk the streets, in his own country, unmolested.
Was this ever his home? Will it ever be his home? I openly wept with him over a pain I could never truly comprehend or understand. I listened to him as the tears welled, while he described the significance of these words etched in stone, to him.
What is the true meaning of home? To those that slept in a one-room shack, on a sugar plantation 2300 miles away? To the homeless community? To this kind, soft-spoken man who exposed his vulnerability and trusted a person he barely knew, with that vulnerability?
I’ve thought of little else, these past few weeks. It’s hard to come to a conclusion, without the consideration of those who might feel differently. I can’t speak for them. I can’t answer definitively for those that once lived, and those that are counted amongst the living. All I can do is take in the experiences the universe has gifted me and draw my own conclusions.
‘Home’, I think, is freedom. Without dictation or forced opinions of what a construction, or lack thereof, symbolizes. Home….is the freedom to decide what home is to you. Freedom. Pure and simple. Home is wherever your mind and body reside, peacefully.
It may be amongst your kin or your special person. It may be that remote colonial in upstate New York. It may be a makeshift camp in the woods, by the river, where your alarm clock is the sound of geese arguing loudly when they think no one is watching. It may be a community where you feel welcome — regardless of your race, religion, sexuality, sex or fat bank account.
No one has the right to tell another what that home may be.
It’s not the first time people of privilege and power have designated for us what home should be and it won’t be the last.
I have no idea how to fix it. We seem to relish in having our fingers in other people’s lives. Telling them who to love, when to start a family, what they should believe in, what lives are important and remembered by name and those relegated to a number…..and what home is.
The best I can hope for is that somehow, someway……something I write resonates on a deeper level with a person I’ll never meet, in a ‘home’ I’ll never visit. A singular changed mind is enough for me. It’ll have to be, as our country becomes more calloused to the needs of its impoverished and sidelined citizens, every single day.
No, I’m not the architect of the ultimate solution. Not sure that person exists…..but if you need me, I’ll be right here at home. Wherever that may be.