Highway 231, I think

There’s an RV heading south at 3 in the morning, and I’m in it.  In fact, I’m driving.  A student of mine is in the passenger’s seat and her designated job is to keep me awake as we careen from Montgomery to Pensacola on this two-lane rural road.
The blackness is a blackness I know: clear-cut groves of pine trees, soybean fields.  Matchbox houses at awkward angels to this snaking tongue of a highway.  Our last stop was a strip-mall parking lot, four states away, where we made dinner, played with trinkets we’d collected, and discussed famous stories of the road.  The other teacher and seven other students are now asleep and my driving cradles whatever expectations they have of morning. What road I can see seems lit from within.
To stay awake, I tell Jenny about my hometown.  Sand dunes hide missiles pointed toward Cuba.  Whole houses, remnants of back-to-back hurricanes, remain washed into the Gulf.  I recall fighter pilots whose faces I can see as they buzz the beach on crowded July days.  I tell her about the children on Sundays who, wearing long sleeves on street corners, hold signs foretelling eternal  damnation.  I tell her about the fiancé from high school who proposed to me in a mall, a story we will later laugh about on a playground in Louisiana.
Now, I know, we are nowhere.  I know enough about the road to know it is nothing in itself but a story and I caution myself against the thoughts in my head.  What if I fall asleep and crash this RV?  What if we careen off the road into a ditch?  What if a semi comes barreling across the yellow line into the nose of this cab?  I haven’t learned yet the kindness of the road because we are weeks away from the Mojave where, at 11 PM, we’ll discover a blown-out tire at a gas station  minutes before a mechanic pulls up and offers to replace it for free.

This too is true: One of us will dream of suicide, one of us will teach in Germany, one of us will drop out of high school, one of us will marry a lawyer.

For now, I convince myself that the phantom headlights suddenly turning from the ditch into the side of our cab is another runaway fantasy. And years later, at a desk or stopped in traffic, I’ll wonder what’s become of those travelers, I’ll wonder where the last pin on the map stuck and whether they ever made it out of that deep night, that long road.

Lessons I’ve Learned from the Road / vol. 1

May 7, 2008
Lessons from the road

The plan was hatched in San Antonio before we headed west on highway 90. We were in the RV parked outside one of our student’s homes. The eight kids we’d been traveling with for seven days were inside, finally enjoying some TV and life outside a 29’ mobile home. My colleague looked at me desperate. He’d had enough of our ambling ways, our random stops along back roads. He wanted a destination. He wanted to be sure something would happen. He wanted to be able to plan.

What he wanted was contrary to the whole point of the trip. The class was called Destination: America. We were traveling back roads with no direction other than the intention to go west or south from our starting point: Dayton, Ohio. We eschewed fast food. We stopped whenever even one person wanted to stop. We limited long stretches of solitude (usually provided by CD players and head phones). We didn’t allow ourselves the luxury of backtracking. Our goal was to cast off our notions of America and find a new America through the out-of-the-way places.

And, I would be naïve not admit that we hoped to do the same with notions of ourselves.

By the time we had reached San Antonio, we had had $2 a person lunches at a tiny diner in Indiana. We had ambled through a small town along the Ohio river, we had seen porpoises swimming along a sand bar in Florida, we had picnicked at night alongside the USS Alabama, some of us had tasted pigs feet, we had danced until midnight in the French Quarter, and we had lazed on the Gulf Shore in Gallatin, Texas. It seemed as though the trip was proving Kafka’s maxim that “The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

And yet, my colleague was restless. He needed a tangible goal. We plotted a point, timed the hours of driving, and estimated the time it would take to get us there. He asked me to tell the kids that, as the drivers, we needed a break from the road. I did, and the next morning we were off.

About Epiphanies

January 29, 2008

In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges of toxic idioms of merchandising. Wanting to convey an inward sensation of the sacred, we find ourselves skidding toward the usages of sales and marketing. With the idiom already compromised, the experience of revelation begins to grow ever more unsteady: Its effects can be like seasickness, but without the sea. In our age it tends to tremble and vibrate, like any visitation. It breaks boundaries and jeopardizes a feeling for scale.
Chalres Baxter
“Against Epiphanies”
Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction

By the fourth night, students were tired of the daily debrief. Coming together after a long day of gutting houses, or tramping door-to-door in the stench and the hot sun, was taxing. It was easier to hang out on the cots and eat cookies or hang out by the stoop a few doors down and smoke. Sitting in a circle and listening to 50+ people give a one-minute synopsis of their day only required more concentration and 50+ more reminders of the devastation we were steeped in.

After the first work brigade returned in April, those of us who hadn’t gone with them were buoyed by their tales of community. These pioneers had seen the destruction first, and their recollection assured us we would never believe the sights, the stories. Their pictures, video footage confirmed what the newspapers conveyed: People had lost jobs, had lost their families. People knew people who had committed suicide because relief just hadn’t come—wouldn’t come. The obvious difference between the levee in the ninth ward and the system of levees in the French Quarter confirmed the most cynical suspicions. But, because this group had experienced these things together they had a powerful, unspeakable bond. Many of us wanted to know what it would be like to have that feeling.

While we were there to do work, of course, we were also there to get our epiphany, our own story that would show we had been as close to the incident as possible. Usually it came when gutting houses. Families acquainted with loss had come back to get what they wanted, but left behind a framed Biblical passage. Or, belongings were piled in one unsalvageable heap. Small water-stained images of a family at a birthday party belied better times.

From these scraps, we hoarded our own epiphanies. Once, I even heard a student admit to it. In our debrief, she said she had been waiting for her story about New Orleans, her encounter with a survivor, or the evidence in a gutted house of its former living, breathing occupants. But as she told us of her moment, she said it wasn’t having the effect she had hoped for. She was still depressed.

After 9-11, I had a desire to be close to the incident then as well. It’s not that I wanted to skim the periphery of the smoking, gaping hole at the city’s heart. I wanted to be bussed in after curfew. I wanted to speak to people who had just come from the wreckage. And I did. I volunteered with Salvation Army to serve meals to rescue workers at one of the respite centers. For several eight hour shifts, I spooned baked salmon with capers to one exhausted worker after another.

Is the commercialization of private meanings so wide-spread that I wanted my piece of a more authentic pie? Or, does that commercialization evoke what my husband refers to as liberal tourism, this trend to commodify a cause so that well-meaning do-gooders can feel connected to it, and good about themselves by extension?

When I went to New Orleans I believed my intentions were genuine. I had visited the city a dozen times since I was 14. I had powerful memories of the place, and it was my favorite American city. Now, however, I wonder. Perhaps since these events are only beginning to be commodified, they are the only remnants of the sacred we feel we can trust anymore.

Kara Walker

13 October 2007

Yesterday, I went to the Kara Walker exhibit at the Whitney and was stunned. A friend was asking me what it was like to be someone from the South viewing this exhibit, and I’m still processing that question. The simple answer is I think my life in the South makes me hungry for this kind of work, for this kind of deconstruction of the South. But part of me wonders if this friend assumed I felt incriminated by these images. It’s interesting. Sometimes I wonder if, because I am not in the South, and because I have rejected some of the obvious racist beliefs I grew up in, if I have reason to feel perhaps more informed than those who grew up in a world where everyone went around clucking “Well, of course we’re all the same. And of course racism is wrong.”

What I mean to say is, perhaps it is a weird gift of understanding to see those silhouettes of the master with his head and arms full up under the skirt of the black woman and remember hearing my great great grandfather freed his slaves before going off to Virginia to fight in the Civil War. Perhaps my inclusion in those images is a gift. I don’t have to delude myself of my own gracious impartiality to all human beings, which of course is a stage of enlightenment few can truly claim. Yes, oddly, I feel proud to study those images and to feel old racist tracts branded for what they are, and then to remember moments when those scripts were abandoned– not because I had suddenly made black friends, or because someone told me that way of thinking was wrong– but because I realized those voices made no sense. Like the stark contrast between the black cut outs and the stark white wall, I saw Southern hypocrisy for what it was, a system of false duality that was unconscionable (like the moment when a math teacher giggled to my entire class that the only black girl in the entire grade had been cast as ‘Slightly Soiled’ in our production of ‘Peter Pan.’ ‘Because she is,’ the teacher remarked on a day the girl was absent ‘slightly soiled.)

I ended up getting in an argument with this friend when I began to suggest that Southerns would bristle at Kara Walker’s work because of its lack of “grayness.” Within the horrors of slavery, there were complexities of coexistence that do not excuse slavery or suggest maybe it wasn’t bad as we all think. But I think ignoring the grayness makes dialogue difficult today. To explain, I suggested that, perhaps, some slave/master family situations were not unlike, say, situations where wealthy Upper West Siders commission nannies from the West Indies, off the books, of course, to take care of their kids during the day. [So a woman has to leave her children in the care of someone else in order to go take care of a white couple's kids.] The work of a black woman, even if it is her choice to engage in this work, helps to secure the lineage of privilege and comfort of the white family.

I was barely finished with the analogy, when the friend became outraged. “How could someone coming here by choice be anywhere close to the same thing as being stolen from your land…” As if the exodus of West Indian women today isn’t linked to those old colonial trappings…

And then I ended up arguing something I don’t even believe. What I should have said to my friend was that he was proving my point. It’s much easier to validate your own enlightened racial consciousness by pointing to other perpetrators and saying “See how wrong they are? How misguided? How savage?” Southerners, perpetrators that they are, are that ideological scapegoat. Yet, Southerners and their close proximity to the scene of the crime, do not have the luxury of locating prejudice outside of themselves. Generations now have lived with and against the complexities of race, the troubling aftermath of slavery. This may not make them right and certainly does not make them innocent, but in some ways, whether Southerners can admit to the ghosts of the past or not, they live with them and are among them. In some ways this makes them more honest than I have found people up here are willing to be.