The Dirty Brown

In remembrance of the 2 year anniversary of the hurricanes that hit the gulf coast, I'm re-posting this old blogpost about my return home to Louisiana's Cajun coast.

To view my photos from home, click here.
"Home. The streets lie, the sidewalks lie. you can try to read it but you're gonna get it wrong. The summer evenings burn and melt and the nights glitter, but they lie. Underneath the streets there's a river that moves like a snake. It moves with smooth, undulating, crippling muscle power. It chokes and drowns and trips and strangles and lures and says, "come here, stay with me," and it lies."
-Henry Rollins


I’m from the dirty brown. I say this as a means of self-identification. Blue, green, and red may abide in South Louisiana, but a native understands that dirty brown runs the place.

Dirty brown is a complicated color spread sloppy and thick on the coastal canvas where I was raised. It’s a swirled chaos of alluvial earth, plant memories, and darkness dwelling creatures in a chocolate soup, suffocating and shrouding everything under its aegis. It defies separation into requisite parts. It robs its world of transparency and reflection. It's too thick with history to expect anything less.

The rains come and the dry ground of the moment transforms to knee deep muck in the next, and when again dry your feet track with the brittle cracked mess it leaves behind. You never know how deep it is or what lies beneath it, and there’s always the fear that, like everyone else, you will find your way to the edge of a muddy bank and get lost in it by way of your own lazy southern dream or get pulled down into its mystery by whatever hungry thing that lays quietly just under the surface.

I wanted neither fate so I left the Dirty brown, an ignorant swamp rat, un-traveled and defined by poverty but determined to escape, and that’s what I did. That was almost 7 years ago. I've returned often but always to a wall of feeling invisible yet immovable that told me I don't belong and I'm not welcome. This wall held firm until two storms made it fall.

Two hateful bitches from the sea--Trina to the east, a month later, Rita to the west. They joined hands under the water and forced up dirty brown anger over levees, into the streets and through the front door of my momma's house. They took my family's homes one by one by one by one by one by one and when the dirty brown receeded it left behind a foot of mud to grease the pain and a host of secrets revealed. Poverty, racism, neglect, ignorance, and apathy were laid bare and the world was forced to bear witness to what I already knew.

Once my folks were out of the shelter and in a FEMA trailer I flew home and found that the sisters swept away more than my community. They took with them the pain that created my distance from it. Everything was immediate. There was no room for distance.

One at a time in a hundred different moments home came home to me:

I run new pipes through the floor of my parents trailer home while my uncles argue in French for long stretches over issues that should take 10 seconds to resolve. My cousin and I roll our eyes and laugh.

My uncle creates a garden. He works in the late afternoon to beat the heat, plunging his hands in to the silky rich topsoil, showing me how blessed it is. He tells me about the tomatoes we can expect. My older sister helps him, and when he calls her "Chocolat", a childhood nickname, her eyes crease and cheekbones redden and she becomes a giggling little girl.

The cayenne in my momma's chicken and sausage gumbo fills my nose, makes me sweat. I want water but I pretend I don't. It has a big scoop of potato salad dropped right in the middle of it, just how I like it.

Driving Highway 90, I see the biggest billboard in the history of marketing: "Cracklin & Boudin" next exit, and I know there's no other place in the world I will ever see a sign glorifying fried pig skin and spiced sausage stuffed in pig intestine.

The yard is filled with rusted scrap, mud, and assorted junk. It's typical of poor people, particularly poor old people. They keep everything because if they can't use it, someone else can. I want it clean, all of it, and I want to plant palm trees everywhere. The mess stresses me. A busted pidgeon coop, a broken hen's nest. Unpicked fruit. Rusted vehicles. An unused tractor. All artifacts with an immediate story but they might as well be buried under a foot of dirt. The saddest of these are two boats in the yard, neither with working motors. I'm disgusted. In a place where boats are like bicycles, they call to me and say that this is injustice, that I must not let this be. I think of one day repairing the aluminum hull of one boat and launching it in the canal behind my parent's place. I sit in the back of the boat, steering the motor, cutting through the dirty brown against the wind as it pulls up the bill of my cap. It's a pleasant daydream.

My parent's FEMA trailer is a glorified sardine can. Small, packed, sheets of flimsy metal. I look at it and think that I could peel back the roof and pluck my frail step-dad from it when I need to drive him to his chemotherapy treatment in New Iberia. We drive slowly and talk loud because his hearing is bad, and for the first time in my life this affable, proud, good natured man complains about something. He doesn't want to die. He doesn't say it directly but from his words I know he feels it coming and our conversation takes the tone of a desperate yet understated confessional, a discussion he can't have around mom. I tell him that he will beat it, but he thinks that we are lying to him. My mom didn't let him know for over a week when he was initially diagnosed because she was waiting for more test results, and now he assumes we're always hiding the truth. As we travel down narrow bayou roads, even in his weakened state, he manages to give his little wave to all the passing cars. They all wave back.

I sit under a 400 year-old oak in the middle of the day and listen to the oil field helicopters go back and forth to the gulf as they transport men working a 14 and 7 stretch. Maybe my brother-in-law or my nephew is on that one, I think.

I open the door at 10am; the humidity holds you down while the heat sucker punches you. Time slows. The slow hand on the wall clock doesn't even bother to move. There is no such thing as a type A personality in this environment. I find it invigorating.

I sit on the dock by the waters edge and watch the sun drop behind moss draped cypress trees while I smoke a joint with my buddies. The wind is blowing in off the water and we spend an hour in silence watching the birds take their dinner. They circle then nose dive into the dirty brown then shoot back up in to the sky, clean and nourished.

It's harvest time and the air is sweet because the cane fields are being burned to fertilize them for next year’s harvest. I think about being a child, walking through the fields sucking sugar from broken stalks. The plodding, mammoth transport trucks that own the roads at 5 miles per hour leave them festooned with excess bounty, like orphaned beads after a parade. I sit behind the wheel of my vehicle and wait calmly. As a teenager I would rage behind the wheel at being stuck behind the trucks, but now all I feel is patience and thanksgiving that something here still grows.

We eat. My God, we eat. On the way to one restaurant the radio plays a song about a man who is a "Suire from Grand Chenier" who "likes cocaine and Mary Jane". Children are singing the chorus. Another song by Hadley Castille comes on called "Everything on the Hog is Good", which is a rockin' tutorial about all the edible parts of a pig, which I find out is pretty much all of it. The only thing more out of the box than the music are the commercials, which even on radio provides imagery to the outside world that would call in to question the sanity of our entire ethnic group. In a moment of clarity I realize I'm not crazy for feeling out of place in DC. I just forgot where I came from for a while.

Going street to street, town to town, I read spray painted messages on the sides and windows of abandoned houses. "Rita you suck,” "Rita you left 5 people homeless,” or just a simple "why?,” yet in every face and every interaction I see nothing but beauty, resilience, laughter, hope, and fight, and it reminds me that among my people "joie de vivre" and "Laissez les bon tenps rouler" are not just slogans, it's who we are.

I don't know how to end this other than to say that D.C. has never felt like home, and I've never felt that Louisiana could hold me, yet for the first time when I left home I came home, because somewhere in the transition between two poles I became home. Peace of mind established, I carry both in equal proportion. Now, dirty brown doesnt' seem quite so complicated a color.