from “Sleep Them Close: A Story of New Orleans” by Melissa Dickey

Image by Chloe West / instagram.com/chloe.m.west

Smell of sweet olive. Picking satsumas, kumquats, lemons, whatever overhung the sidewalk. Japanese plums from the tree in front of the house. The house down the street with the sign that said, We Don’t Call No 911.

Sun breaking through after a sudden storm, the blacktop of the streets steaming.

We lived on Vallette Street, behind my father’s, my grandmother’s elementary school. Off the porch, could see the church that held my grandfather’s funeral.

At the river’s bend. One end point of the crescent. Good breezes off the water’s width. Place where people porch-sit. Know each other. Never leave.

Hear the calliope’s song off the riverboat. Hear gunshots, maybe, sometimes. Sound carries on the wind. The children were scared of the steamboat’s whistle. I was scared, sometimes, of guys on the ferry I took to work and back. (Why. No one ever did anything but look at you.) I was white and they were black. I was female, they were male. There was a sizing up.

*

And I’d heard the stories: the woman who got jumped walking home from the ferry at night. The drug deals a few blocks away. Muggings, robberies. The block past which a middle-class white woman such as myself is advised not to walk.

*

So it happened that one day a young man killed another man in the street in front of our house. The young man was carjacking my neighbor’s car; she was out of the car, standing near, and the other man saw and came running to stop it. He jumped on the car and the young man shot. Through the windshield. My husband saw the dead man’s body, a few minutes later, lying in the yard next door. I was in bed. It was 7 a.m. January 25, 2012. And I was with my kids aged three and not yet one.

Then in the bathroom then at the back of the house, remembering my black students’ advice to not be a witness. In this way I did not help. I was, yes, hiding, and making breakfast for the kids who knew something was up because we could hear people yelling and crying on the front porch. The dead man’s wife, and kids.

Making the oatmeal. Eating the oatmeal. Calling the landlord. Emailing a student to say I’ll be late because my street is a crime scene I don’t want to enter.

My street is a scene I will soon leave for the suburbs.

*

But before that I become preoccupied with the thought of my three-year-old witnessing violence. Especially after that guy on the ferry pulls a knife on another guy during a fight while I watch. Is it really my or her safety at stake though? What kind of safety? The safety of her innocence? Of mine? I decide at this time that no one is really safe. This is comforting. Then I move to the suburbs.

True and not true. Who or what is safe? Who or what is not safe?

This is, of course, a story of my privilege.

*

Once when I was fifteen I took acid with some guy friends and we sat on the levee here watching the river and digging in the dirt. It was spring. A couple walked by with a pig on a leash.

Later, ten years later, I wonder: was it that woman who was shot in her home? I know from the paper she had a pet pig she walked on a leash. I know from the news she had a baby and she died.

*

It is thinking about my children that makes me think: I cannot die.

When I confess this to a child-free friend she replies, Yep. I don’t have any kids, and I could die anytime.

Which makes me take back my comment. I don’t want my friend to die, either.

Still there’s something about the children. That’s what makes us leave, really. Afraid. Flee. Worried. Or maybe, maybe, I was really just worried about myself, and kids are just those bits of yourself walking around that you can’t control. Protect. “That’s my heart out there, walking around”—a thing people say. A you that is physically separate. Another you not you.

*

“Why is the woman screaming? Why is she upset?” the three-year-old kept asking.

I go to teach my class. I take them to the art gallery to write. There’s one room I’m drawn to, with figures life-sized and masked.

Imagining, re-imagining what happened: how much I heard or did not hear. Inside the scene again as if inside a bell, the space closed, collapsing.

*

I want to say more about the young man. That he was found. In school. A week or so later. That he said he needed a way to get to school, hence the carjack. That he kept going to school while everyone looked for him. Even those guardian angel guys on bikes. His face on flyers all over.

There is more to it. That the killed man was white. That the young man was black. That the killed man was called by the media “the Good Samaritan,” a quote from a neighbor. That at this exact time the local media stopped their policy of publishing the arrest records of the murdered. The killed man had such a record.

New Orleans: 193 homicides in 2012. Ranked third deadliest city in the U.S. that year.

*

I should also mention this: how a major holding area for slaves was here, on this spot on the river’s curve, where people disembarked from boats and were kept until their sale at the markets.

When we lived here, I took my daughter to the spot where cotton was planted in memory of that time, and she and I picked some cotton, pulled and stretched it, picked out the sharp bits, kept it on the kitchen table for a while. Its strength impressed. A little cotton ball.

That sign, that cotton: recently bulldozed.

*

The flyers on telephone polls, the 3-D image of the young man’s face in black and white. Or wasn’t he a boy? The wanted signs posted everywhere. Much made of this one death. How many other deaths by guns were there in the city that week?

A makeshift shrine popped up in the next-door yard where his body fell. I put wildflowers next to the lit candles.

*

Of the man who died: I read that he felt like an outsider in the neighborhood. That he would have been surprised at the outpouring of support, the neighborhood-wide yard sale—all proceeds going to his children’s education fund. Did I sort of remember seeing him around, walking? I imagine, I believe, I did. His face, familiar. He wasn’t one of the well-to-do, his house not one of the large and well-kept. Maybe it was a rental, like ours. Maybe it had loud window units for heating and cooling, like ours. Maybe he struggled to afford it, as we did.

Man and boy: of the same class? I am guessing. I am making this up.

*

When I go to read more about the young man, almost a boy, I am feeling sympathetic. He didn’t set out to kill anyone that day. He acted, probably, out of fear, or what felt like self-defense. He made a mistake. He meant to steal a car, not murder someone.

And then I read of his behavior. His assault of prison guards. His sexual assault of a female guard. His insistence that he killed no one, despite all evidence.

The way people look in their mugshots. Don’t they always look angry and guilty.

*

The closest I’ve come to getting a mugshot taken—I was sixteen, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday. Pulled over for speeding, out past city curfew. Taken to the New Orleans juvenile detention center, right next to the parish prison, in the back of a cop car. In the waiting room as they called my parents, I cried and cried. Fool. I think I remember seeing the room where photos were taken of kids being detained. I was just waiting for my parents to come and get me, more afraid of my parents than of going to jail. An employee asked me with some irritation why I was crying so much. In the back of the cop car, I’d asked if I could smoke a cigarette. I’d noticed the doors had no handles. Or was it that the handles didn’t work.

My father whistling along, not speaking to me, the radio on low all the way home.

*

I admit that I loved, as a teen, in my twenties, the sense of brushing up against danger. The getting close but not too close. Admit it was a source of pride. City girl. What does this say about entitlement.

There’s still an allure—walking at night, along the river, the low sky dense and glowing orange from the refineries’ lights, walking toward the ferry that will take me downtown. My body alert, not trusting strangers in the dark. Who knows what could happen. The bars are all open. No hour’s last call.

*

The rapid fabric of growing up, how we stitch one thing to another.

My Hello Kitty wallet was stolen one day from the cafe on Verret St. I’d left my purse on a table outside while I went in to use the bathroom. Dumb seventeen-year-old. A white man with a white beard used to talk to me about poetry when I went there to do homework and write. Men were always talking to me then, interrupting my reading. I thought nothing of these interruptions, neither flattered, offended, nor afraid.

My mom asked about that man once when she picked me up. She never said what she was thinking. She showed me his obituary, though, a few months later. The obituary was kind, he was a kind man. What makes a kind man. What makes a threat.

*

Did I mind being cat-called while walking down the street? I did. I did not. I did. Did not. I remember, many times, being frightened, startled by the loud sound of a horn behind me as I walked down General Meyer, a car zooming by, perhaps a call out a lowered window. The way it makes you jump. The way you never expect it. Was I walking in a certain way? Is my skirt shorter than I thought? What do I look like, anyway, to them? Will they stop the car? Do I yell back? Keep silent? Keep walking? Not walk? Not walk?

*

At times it seems the whole gingerbread-porched neighborhood overlays unmarked histories, to distract. I wish for signs, markers, saying. Say all that has happened. Instead there’s the “Jazz Walk.” A bed-and-breakfast called The House of the Rising Sun.

*

Wanting the same for your kids as you had—some people (which kind of people?) say this. As if we can only imagine our own version of childhood. Did I want the same for my kids? I did not. I did. Did not.

*

I haven’t said anything about Frank yet. Our next-door neighbor on Vallette. Foil on the windows, yes. Friendly. The landlord called him a “neighborhood watchdog.” After the shooting I asked, where was Frank? As if it was his responsibility, being a black man, to sit out on the porch every morning and night, to protect us all from black men.

*

The time Frank, obviously high, came over to our porch, told us he loved us, invited us over to his house to “see how I live.” My husband went, and Frank pointed out all his nice furniture, introduced his wife.

And the guy down the street who decorated his house with upright basses. On each window, iron burglar bars in the shape of an upright bass, in ironwork. One day my daughter and I saw him outside, an older white guy. I stopped to compliment his upright bass windows. He invited us in; we went in. The whole house full of upright basses. Three or more in each room she ran through.

*

Now that they so seldom hear thunder, see lightning only a few times a year, my kids fear it. There, we welcomed the storms.

And when I go to read Nola.com, it is killing after killing after killing. What does it mean to get used to this.

*

On the day of the shooting I wrote this:

His children. His children were there and they came running up, they saw. That those children saw their father killed for trying to stop a carjacking. That it could have been my children, my husband dead, my family. That he was bringing his kids to a bus stop. That it was my next-door neighbor’s car, a car in front of our house. Where we walk every day. Where we play and feel safe in our home. That it was seven in the morning, a time when we could have been leaving the house. That it all could have happened to us. My husband would’ve done the same. Or would he. That the children saw.

And thinking of the sweet mandolin player in the cafe on the weekends, who might be dead now for all I know. Today I feel that anyone could be dead—how are we all here and walking around in our bodies? And to grow a garden across from where he died. What are the steps to cleansing a space of a violent crime. Just keep thinking how it could have been, it could have been, and why. And the children were there, his children.

My own house my street that’s become a crime scene and how can we continue to live there. We could move, but would we even feel safer anywhere else, is it wrong to feel like this could happen on any block and it will fade. How to go about then in the world and pretend it’s good.

*

At the public high school for this neighborhood, in 1992, there was no air conditioning. School began in August, here in the subtropics. In sixth grade, for a civics project, I clipped a story about it from the newspaper and wrote an outraged summary and response. Then I went about my air-conditioned Catholic school life.

*

The word “wigger.” As in “white nigger.” As in a white or sometimes Asian person who “thinks they’re black.” Who wears baggy pants? Boys with large stud crystal earrings? I can’t recall now exactly what a “wigger” looked like, or even if there was an exact description—probably there was not. You did not want to be perceived as a wigger. This was made clear by fourth grade.

*

Once, in high school, the D.A. came to give a talk on drugs, as our (high-achieving, public, magnet) school was beginning to implement stronger drug control tactics, searching classrooms with drug-sniffing dogs, testing students’ hair. One student told the D.A. that if some of her classmates were using drugs on the weekends, it didn’t affect her ability to do well academically. He responded something like, Would you say it affected you if girls in your classes were being raped? She left the auditorium in tears.

This same D.A., in a private conversation with my dad and some chamber of commerce members who were working on a city councilwoman’s election, told them, about the city’s high homicide rate: But this isn’t happening in places you’d go, this isn’t happening in your community, so what does it matter. If those people want to kill each other, that’s not affecting you.

*

I ask my son, age three, what color skin the imaginary bad guy has. I know what he will say; I hope he won’t say it. “Dark skin,” he says. And when I ask why, he says, “Because I’m making it up.”

To have the bad guy be other than oneself—that seems clear enough. What else though. Something else.

*

One morning waiting for the ferry: two men, a fight, a knife drawn, put away.

When the knife came out again, we had all boarded the boat. A woman tried to intervene, but a young man called her back: “That’s how the man around the corner got killed. Just gotta let ’em do what they’re gonna do. Don’t interfere ma’am.”

Where are you supposed to go?” I asked the woman next to me, with a baby in a stroller. The man next to her said, “That guy’s gonna get his head cut off. Gonna see a lot of blood.”

Then, by chance, there was a fire safety check on the ferry, and there we were, all locked onto the boat with the man with the set of chef’s knives, one of which he’d just brandished. I heard him call in sick to work.

Everyone shook their heads and looked askance. Read their papers, talked softly. A ferry attendant who’d seen the whole thing appeared unimpressed. Was I the one overreacting, pulse so quick? The guy was yelling and waving a knife.

*

Before we moved to New England, someone smashed our car window while my husband took the kids to the aquarium—bits of glass all over the three-year-old’s car seat, her yelling and screaming at the sight. My husband said he’d never go back to that neighborhood. His resolve lasted about a year.

*

When I check the Algiers Point Neighborhood Association website 1/6/17, an announcement appears about a recent sexual assault of a woman who was running on the levee.

Do I miss living with fear of violence? I do not.

*

In the place where we now live, on the campus of an elite New England boarding school, I don’t tell people much about our life in New Orleans. I suspect they might think I was foolish, or crazy, to like living there. That I belonged there. For the first nine months or so of our new life here, I experience a sort of culture shock. Nothing reminds me of home because there’s hardly a single likeness. As if different countries.

“Welcome home!” someone tells me, when I return from going home.

*

I’d walk you around. On River Road, that one wraparound ironwork balcony, with wooden boards painted blue. The crawfish boil smell from the back of the Old Point Bar. Where once I saw a garbage man dance each time he loaded a can onto the back of the truck. One motion: jump off, dance, load can, return can, jump on.

I don’t mean to make this symbolic. I am trying to describe.

*

Why is New Orleans so preoccupied with belonging, with staying where you came from, with authenticity, allegiance? I always had this sense that I belonged to Algiers, and I loved Algiers Point in part because I felt it loved me back. I could point to the parks my grandparents’ helped plant. The plaque outside the Lutheran church with my grandfather’s name on it. At the cafe, I run into my third cousins, my father’s friends.

But I know there’s something else going on.

*

No marker for the slave camp. No marker for the crimes. I’m reminded of an activist organization after Katrina that posted Crime Happened Here signs on crime sites, with a description of the activity and the date. How simple, how useful, that naming. And yet the practice did not last; perhaps it was not popular with city officials. Not good, I suppose, for tourism.

*

Where mosquito larvae live in puddles year round. Where men give me head nods in greeting, where men and women call me Baby and I am not offended. Where today, 6/15/15, they’re filming a movie with people dressed in Western wear: cowboy hats, vests, fringe, denim. “I hope they’re not making a movie about New Orleans,” a man says to me as we pass. “’Cause we don’t dress like that.”

Where there’s always controversy around representation.

*

I remember discussing with friends who also lived in shotgun houses—each room walked through to reach the next—where to put the children’s bedroom. The front room? No. We were afraid to sleep them so close to the street.

*

There’s another story I want to tell about this neighborhood. The one I’m reminded of when I read accounts of white fear throughout the city’s history. Of what is done in the name of protection. The one where the man says, “Anything darker than a paper bag’s gettin’ shot.” The one where the man says, grinning, “It was like pheasant season in South Dakota.” The one that ends with how many bodies lying on the streets and sidewalks. 8, 10, 12? There is actually no record, no count. 8/30/2005 – 9/2/2005. Are those even the right dates.

*

“We don’t want your kind around here!” one black resident was told after Katrina, by white men sitting on a porch, holding guns. The New York Times: “Then one of the men racked his pump-action shotgun, aimed it at Mr. Bell and dared him to be seen again on the streets of Algiers Point.”

*

When I watch the videos of those militiamen bragging, I imagine my cousins’ husbands. I imagine some of my uncles. I am seeing myself, my people, in them: there they are. I am. We are.

*

What do we do in light of no record? In light of, the cops were told and nothing happened. In light of, one man tried to reach the Coast Guard but turned back, shot in the throat.

 

 



Melissa Dickey is the author of two books of poetry, Dragons and The Lily Will, both from Rescue Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in jubilat, Puerto del Sol, Columbia Poetry Review, and Kenyon Review Online, among other publications. Born and raised in New Orleans, she now lives at a boarding school in Deerfield, MA, where she’s the primary caregiver of her four children.