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For days now, my flist has been innundated with thoughts on Katrina and her aftermath. I haven't said anything because there is nothing to say that has not already been said more eloquently by others. It saddens me and sickens me and makes me want to slap those people who sit in their chairs and ask, "Why do people live there?"
Why? Speaking for myself, I can only say that I live here because here is all I know. It's my home, my bit of earth, and my roots go deep in this Southern earth. My grandfather is a third-generation Floridian, which makes me fifth-generation Florida redneck. The bugs and fire ant mounds and thunderstorms to make a Marine wet his pants are a pain in the ass, but they're my pains in the ass, and I'm not giving them up until the good Lord pries my fingers from the dirt and comes for to carry me home. My grandfather delivered mail here for thirty years, and for his penance, he sacrificed a pound of flesh on his right arm to malignant melanoma. My father was a plumber for twenty-five years here before he died on the toilet from a massive heart attack.
I was born here, raised here, never took my first steps here, and was educated here. I got my first job here when I was sixteen. I got my heart broken here at twenty-two, and later that same year, I foreswore the vulnerability that romance brings. I shop here and cry here and write my fic here, and in May of 2006, I will go down in the records of FSU as an alumna. When I die and they schlep my withered, frail corpse through the nursing home parking lot and into the hearse, it will be here, and if my last wishes are honored, my ashes will be scattered over FSU, the only place in this world I ever felt safe and valued and worth more than passing pity.
Yes, this is a place of hurricanes, but this is also the place where I took my first wobbling steps in my grandfather's arms at nine years old. It was three miserable, halting steps, and they burned so badly I thought my joints were dislocating, but they were enough to make my Grandpa cry. It's where I buried my father and my MeMaw and my Pepaw, and it's going to take me in someday.
Maybe it's different for people accustomed to moving across the country at the drop of a hat, but for a great many people in the South, "Home is where the heart is," is more than a pithy aphorism, it's the by-God gospel truth. Sometimes, you live your whole life having never set foot beyond the county or state line. You don't have to because you've learned how to get by, to do without and take care of your own, and in a pinch, you ask your family, your church, or neighbor for a helping hand. Your home-not the four walls and the roof, but the ground below it or the sky over it-is a source of pride. You breathe it with every breath you take.
So when I hear people say that maybe New Orleans won't, or shouldn't be rebuilt, I boggle, and then I shake my head and I laugh, because they just don't get it. It isn't up to them whether or not New Orleans is rebuilt. It's up to the people who live there, to the people who made their lives and their histories and their memories there. Whether the government likes it or not, whether Bush and his minions sanction it or not, New Orleans will live again. The people will build it, brick by brick and memory by memory.
It won't happen all at once, and I'm sure that not all who have been displaced will return, but there will be enough. They'll think of all they left behind and wish for it again, for the jazz and the bayous and the crawdad parties. They'll remember the time Aunt June played with them on the slat-board swingset in the hot swelter of Loiusiana summer, or the time they went fishing with Uncle Hattis in a battered, old airboat, and they'll long for the sweetness of home. They'll come back, and it doesn't matter if Bush cordons off the city with armored divisions. They'll pick up sticks and rocks and shovels and take it back one skull and one foot at a time. To sunder a man from his home is to kill him outright, and those Loiusiana souls have no intention of dying on foreign dirt.
It won't happen this year, but I'd wager my house that there will be a Mardi Gras again, and there will be zydeco and brass bands carrying the dead to their Maker on a jaunty swell of music. There will be a French Quarter and jambalaya and gumbo hot enough to melt your tongue. In five years or ten, she'll be thriving again, because you can legislate a lot of things, but the human spirit and the longing for home isn't one of them.
It may well be that a hurricane flattens Tallahassee in my lifetime, and if it does, I'll do my best to heed the warnings and get out if I can. But the second the storm passes, I will return, even if there is nothing but dirt where all the brick buildings and the sagging oak trees stood. I will return because even if I have nothing to my name, I will have my dirt and my memories.
My home.
Why? Speaking for myself, I can only say that I live here because here is all I know. It's my home, my bit of earth, and my roots go deep in this Southern earth. My grandfather is a third-generation Floridian, which makes me fifth-generation Florida redneck. The bugs and fire ant mounds and thunderstorms to make a Marine wet his pants are a pain in the ass, but they're my pains in the ass, and I'm not giving them up until the good Lord pries my fingers from the dirt and comes for to carry me home. My grandfather delivered mail here for thirty years, and for his penance, he sacrificed a pound of flesh on his right arm to malignant melanoma. My father was a plumber for twenty-five years here before he died on the toilet from a massive heart attack.
I was born here, raised here, never took my first steps here, and was educated here. I got my first job here when I was sixteen. I got my heart broken here at twenty-two, and later that same year, I foreswore the vulnerability that romance brings. I shop here and cry here and write my fic here, and in May of 2006, I will go down in the records of FSU as an alumna. When I die and they schlep my withered, frail corpse through the nursing home parking lot and into the hearse, it will be here, and if my last wishes are honored, my ashes will be scattered over FSU, the only place in this world I ever felt safe and valued and worth more than passing pity.
Yes, this is a place of hurricanes, but this is also the place where I took my first wobbling steps in my grandfather's arms at nine years old. It was three miserable, halting steps, and they burned so badly I thought my joints were dislocating, but they were enough to make my Grandpa cry. It's where I buried my father and my MeMaw and my Pepaw, and it's going to take me in someday.
Maybe it's different for people accustomed to moving across the country at the drop of a hat, but for a great many people in the South, "Home is where the heart is," is more than a pithy aphorism, it's the by-God gospel truth. Sometimes, you live your whole life having never set foot beyond the county or state line. You don't have to because you've learned how to get by, to do without and take care of your own, and in a pinch, you ask your family, your church, or neighbor for a helping hand. Your home-not the four walls and the roof, but the ground below it or the sky over it-is a source of pride. You breathe it with every breath you take.
So when I hear people say that maybe New Orleans won't, or shouldn't be rebuilt, I boggle, and then I shake my head and I laugh, because they just don't get it. It isn't up to them whether or not New Orleans is rebuilt. It's up to the people who live there, to the people who made their lives and their histories and their memories there. Whether the government likes it or not, whether Bush and his minions sanction it or not, New Orleans will live again. The people will build it, brick by brick and memory by memory.
It won't happen all at once, and I'm sure that not all who have been displaced will return, but there will be enough. They'll think of all they left behind and wish for it again, for the jazz and the bayous and the crawdad parties. They'll remember the time Aunt June played with them on the slat-board swingset in the hot swelter of Loiusiana summer, or the time they went fishing with Uncle Hattis in a battered, old airboat, and they'll long for the sweetness of home. They'll come back, and it doesn't matter if Bush cordons off the city with armored divisions. They'll pick up sticks and rocks and shovels and take it back one skull and one foot at a time. To sunder a man from his home is to kill him outright, and those Loiusiana souls have no intention of dying on foreign dirt.
It won't happen this year, but I'd wager my house that there will be a Mardi Gras again, and there will be zydeco and brass bands carrying the dead to their Maker on a jaunty swell of music. There will be a French Quarter and jambalaya and gumbo hot enough to melt your tongue. In five years or ten, she'll be thriving again, because you can legislate a lot of things, but the human spirit and the longing for home isn't one of them.
It may well be that a hurricane flattens Tallahassee in my lifetime, and if it does, I'll do my best to heed the warnings and get out if I can. But the second the storm passes, I will return, even if there is nothing but dirt where all the brick buildings and the sagging oak trees stood. I will return because even if I have nothing to my name, I will have my dirt and my memories.
My home.
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