witness
From 6.16.06, North Country, upstate NY:
I’m wondering always
how to be of service, but I can’t live with no boundaries because then
I realize you come to place with yourself where you’ve been erased down
to a tiny nub & you can’t recognize or remember how you got there
in the 1st place. & then how it’s a process of re-acquaintance
& renewal & re-discovery. But also one of culling through old
memories & recasting them in a new gaze, to try to summarize when
people ask you about it, so you are always playing with a twist &
turn of the phrase, of adding on & changing the answer of your
experience. Of change, even if you stayed, deadlocks & roadblocks
& blockages would have lifted, or maybe that would be you. But the
experience of struggle & battle has changed you forever &
changed your communion with the city, that community & the place
where you locate yourself. & it’s also about re-growing up, so that
I have come of age there & have contributed my dues & can go
somewhere else without wondering what if?
From New Orleans today:
Waiting
for the bus at Magazine and Jackson yesterday on the way to the clinic,
I noticed a little green walkway – lush grass, big yellow petals amidst
of overflowing trash can, cigarette butts, discarded Coke containers.
And then a mound of bricks with a beautiful woman’s picture. Underneath
the text read:
Vera Briones Smith, 1939-2005
Died here August 30, 2005
"Vera
was apparently the hit-and-run driver the day after Hurricane Katrina
struck New Orleans. Authorities left her body by the side of the street
for 5 days and threatened to arrest anyone who attempted to touch her
remains and bury her with dignity. Her friends and neighbors finally
buried her on this spot on the 5th day. A few days later, the Coroner’s
office removed her remains. This shrine, composed of the bricks from
her 1st grave, consecrates this place in memory of all those whom
government officials subjected to indignities in life and death during
the storm."
Today, drawn to that spot again for a moment of
reflection. I took out my journal and started writing down those words
when I saw a man crossing the street, waving to me, asking me if I knew
Ms. Vera.
I didn’t, but Eddie Parker – friend and community
member — wanted to take me to see someone who had loved and cherished
her. A few moments and streets later, Max – Vera’s husband – rolled
over to us in wheelchair and let us into the small space where he and
his late wife had called home since 1979.
“Everyone went crazy
after the storm, people stealing cars, even police stealing cars.” Max
had no friendly words for the local city cops who put a gun to his head
and told him not to touch his dead wife’s body. “Worst day of my life.
I had to go down and cover it up. Then, the damn cops pulled up and
said if you mess with this body, you’re gonna get shot.”
Max
hands me a well-worn September 5, 2005 Times-Picayune where the photo
of Vera’s make-shift grave made the front page. The caption says,
“Agents with the U.S. Marshal’s service examine a make-shift grave
Sunday at Jackson Ave. & Magazine.”
He cries when he talks
about that day when his wife went to the store while he was trying to
fix up the awning that Katrina had torn down, blocking their front
door. “I should have been with her.” It was the day before her birthday.
Over
one year later, Max has been in and out of the hospital 18 times. He’s
busted every bone in his shoulder, arm, pelvis, knee, ankle. “If she
were here, none of this would have ever happened.” Vera would have
taken care of him, like she took care of the landlady, Leona, who Max
describes as the Jewish daughter who was in a POW camp for 15 days in
Poland and who saw her mother murdered by the Nazis.
Max’s
post-Katrina days have been difficult. Federal marshals forced him to
evacuate; he had to leave with his doors and windows wide open. $20,000
worth of tools walked off, and the rain got the rest. He describes a
ghost town when he returned a few weeks later – no lights, no gas,
nothing. For three months, he lived off of MRIs, dinners from the
National Guard. Half of the people in the neighborhood haven’t
returned, and he thinks many of them may not come back.
He’s not
the only one with this story. A tree fell on a six year old girl down
on Jackson Street, and her family wasn’t allowed to remove her body.
But
he wants me to know that they had good times while they lasted. The
Vera I write about and wish I got a chance to meet was a woman who left
a trail of costume jewelry, who loved going thrift shopping, who
couldn’t keep her mouth shut – both in laughter and in saying things
like she saw them, like nicknaming her neighbor “Pumpkin seed” – and
who dreamed of being an opera singer. Spoke Spanish, French and English
and loved to dance around her house while frying chicken or making
potato salad. A happy-go-lucky woman who made a good time out of
anything she did, who didn’t worry about the bad, and was only
interested in the good.
“After 40 years together, it’s not easy,” he says. “But we had some good times in this shack here.”
