For her Zócalo Sketchbook, You offers us a psychedelic aquarium of fish that expand and reveal themselves to symbolize her name. “In Chinese, Zhi means wildflower, Yu means fish. So I combined and expanded these two symbols to create this series,” she tells Zócalo.

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The bordello scenes in the video recall famous photographs from Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, which flourished from 1898 to 1917. And while the song is clearly about Beyoncé, the persona she embodies in it resonates with an earlier iconic black female: Lulu White, the self-styled “Diamond Queen” of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century demimonde. Knowing Lulu White’s story helps us see Beyoncé’s artistic creation within a complex historical framework, for in it are woven together threads of American history: stories of sexual slavery and prostitution; revolution and exile; and, not least, capitalism and the American Dream.

Lulu White was the most notorious madam in Storyville. She earned fame and fortune as the “handsomest octoroon” in the South, and her bordello, Mahogany Hall, featured “octoroon” prostitutes for the pleasure of wealthy white men during one of America’s most virulently—and violently—racist periods. It was also the dawn of consumer culture and the beginning of modern advertising. Thus, Lulu White crafted a persona for herself through stories that had long circulated in New Orleans; she repackaged those stories to create what today we would recognize as her brand.

The first story in White’s compendium was that of the “tragic octoroon.” The word “octoroon” describes a person who is seven parts white, and one part black. By the 1890s, the female octoroon was already a stock character in literature, having entered public discourse as part of antislavery efforts to highlight the moral and sexual depravity of the South. The label “octoroon” actually told a story about the women it described: in it their fathers were always white, and the “black” (enslaved) mothers always got successively lighter, finally producing a white-looking “octoroon.” Even in spite of paternal wishes, their daughters remained in slavery, where their light skin added to their value in the sexual slave market. The octoroon often takes her own life rather than submit—hence the “tragedy.”

The most famous abolitionist novel featured the “tragic octoroon” trope. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Eliza as the picture of feminine perfection, with her “rich, full dark eye,” “long lashes,” and “ripples of long silky black hair.” The reader encounters Eliza through the eyes of a visiting slave trader. “The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.” The trader offers to sell Eliza in the New Orleans slave market. In spite of the “brown of her complexion,” she was fair enough to pass. “You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” remarks one of the characters.

Even as stories of tragic octoroons protested slavery, they reinscribed “race.” Neither “octoroon” nor other terms, like “mulatta” or “quadroon,” were meant to be precise; the point was “one drop” of “black blood” producing something hidden deep under white skin. This played into a prevailing 19th-century stereotype of upper-class white ladies as sexually pure, pious, and submissive; black women, free or enslaved, were imagined as the opposite—sexually passionate and depraved. The very word octoroon evokes white male racial and sexual domination over several generations, with a prurient twist. The octoroon’s dormant black blood held the promise of intense, and forbidden, sex. She may have looked “white,” but, to quote Beyoncé, she had “hot sauce in her bag.” By incorporating the story of the octoroon into her brand, Lulu White reoriented her tragic fate into a modern sexual fantasy, and promised its fulfillment at Mahogany Hall, also known as the “Octoroon Club.”

The second story White wove into her brand was that of the Caribbean diaspora in New Orleans, which she used to confound her own racial status. White was born in Alabama, but she often claimed to be from the West Indies. After a racetrack refused her entry, a newspaper reported White’s complaint that “some people take her to be colored, but she says there is not a drop of Negro blood in her veins. She says that she is a West Indian, and she was born in the West Indies.” White thus asserted control over her narrative by playing on the illegibility of race in New Orleans.

What did “West Indian” mean there? Several things. New Orleans had a large Caribbean-descended population, stemming from the migrations during the French Revolution, through what became the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and then exile from Cuba several years later. All tiers of Caribbean society entered New Orleans—free whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color—adding to a diverse population that already had a substantial percentage of free people of color. New Orleans, unlike the South as a whole, was a three-caste society, where one’s “race” did not always accord with “free” or “enslaved” status or, later, heritage. There are instances on record of Creole women suing for libel after being labeled “colored.” White’s assertion of West Indian provenance left her “race” ambiguous.

It also increased her value, because when it came to women, “West Indian” signified sublime, ineffable beauty, seemingly created by the mixture of races and the environment. The New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn described the type as “certainly” among “the most beautiful women of the human race,” having “inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions.” Antebellum travelers to New Orleans rhapsodized at great length about the beauty of New Orleans “quadroons.” Some of these women participated in a kind of institutionalized concubinage, whereby they entered contracts with white men. The terms of the contract, Frederick Law Olmsted remarked, varied “with the value of the lady in the market.” The female creoles of color were thus imagined as quasi-free “tragic octoroons.” Instead of being fated to sexual slavery, these women were thought to “pass their life in a prostitution,” in the words of another visitor to the antebellum city.

Lulu White’s claim to be at once West Indian, not “Negro,” and “octoroon,” blurred the matter deliberately. In a sense, she claimed both the heritage of white male creoles and of their female creole of color mistresses. This blurring was integral to White’s brand, a selling point for her business. Perhaps Beyoncé is drawing on some of this history, too: “My Daddy Alabama; Momma Louisiana; you mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas Bama.” Lulu White turned the history of Caribbean “creoles” in New Orleans to her own use at Mahogany Hall, where light-skinned black women were literally prostitutes. White was the proprietress there; she determined the value of the lady in the market.

This brings us to the third story White’s brand comprised: the self-made man. The story of the self-made man is among the oldest in American culture, beginning at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s fabled yeoman farmer, and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. The turn-of-the-century version still reassured Americans that by hard work, honesty, and a bit of luck, anyone could rise from humble circumstances to achieve greatness—or at least a comfortable living. Northern businessmen had long come to New Orleans to make their fortunes. The New South desire to develop the region along the lines of Northern industry created new opportunities for strivers. Lulu White’s self-promotional brand encompassed the men she sought for customers. She could make their (American) dreams come true at Mahogany Hall—as she had her own.

Postcard depicting Basin Street, once a hub of high-end prostitution. Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

White’s narrative of self-made success presented a distorted, winking reflection. She was a woman of color; her business was selling sex. Yet, it scarcely mattered that “legitimate” New Orleans did not believe White’s self-creation myth. Her customers were unlikely to have believed it themselves. A promotional pamphlet touting the success of “this famous West Indian octoroon,” described Mahogany Hall as having cost $40,000 to erect, and called it “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country.”

White operated in a netherworld of transgressive pleasure that flouted the morality of respectable society. Lulu White, the brand, was not diminished by newspaper reports deriding her and calling her “negress”; the notoriety amplified her appeal. And men seeking sex with lovely “octoroons” knew just where to go. As the historian Roland Marchand explains about the dawn of the consumer age, “popular convention permitted advertisers to exaggerate, as if all their statements were placed within qualifying ‘quotation marks.’” Lulu White’s keen marketing sensibility predicted the transformations in American mass culture ahead of their time.

Long before Beyoncé sang, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it,” Lulu White built a similar narrative of self-made ascendancy, and even a brand that allowed her to profit from the interweaving of historical narratives. And Beyoncé continues to play with these ideas, so that while her success is premised in part on her sexuality, no one imagines that she’s literally a prostitute, or that she’s really treating her lover to dinner at Red Lobster. Rather, Beyoncé embodies a fantasy, crafted from multiple stories, tinged with the hard realities of racial, sexual, and economic subordination, but, in the end, triumphant.

To be sure, the similarities between White and Beyoncé can be overstated. Lulu White was a real madam who trafficked in young women and girls for the purposes of prostitution; Beyoncé reimagines that role to inhabit all at once the prostitute, the madam, and even the pimp, while embodying a brand that is at once autobiographical and relatable to her millions of fans. If White pioneered this kind of self-packaging, Beyoncé, also known as “Queen,” perfected it.

Lulu White died in obscure poverty in 1931. But her brand has been revived over the years as an emblem of a mythic, romanticized Storyville. The older stories persist, too. At the end of the “Formation” video, Beyoncé lies atop a police car floating in the Mississippi River. She sings as the car sinks into the deep, an homage, perhaps, to the tragic octoroon.

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I certainly have stories of my family’s past, shaped by witches, warfare, and the Wild West. But with every generation, an ancestral tradition has been shed, a cultural touchstone tweaked, through choice or force, until I arrived at the no man’s land where I live today.

What I do know comes from stories, or pieces of stories—fragments, gathered over time—but they were never quite full. Some were overheard at weekly family dinners at my grandma’s house in midtown Tucson. I saw others in a Facebook group for “The Windes Family of Arizona,” set up to share family history. But none of these fragments cohered in a way that felt meaningful to the way I live my life, and the way I identify myself as a person.

One of my earliest realizations about my ancestry was learning that my mother’s father was an Indian. I didn’t know much about what that meant, and I would later find out that neither did my mother, who grew up thinking her father was Cherokee, only to find out later in life—through a slip of the tongue—that he was a Sioux.

The profound cultural differences between Cherokee and Sioux weren’t something I knew growing up. But upon reflection, it isn’t so simple. Some of my ancestral amnesia may derive from the fact that my grandfather grew up as a Native American orphan in the 1920s.

Another family myth that stuck with me through the years is that I am a descendant of the first witch burned in the United States—a story that I heard from some relatives on my mother’s side, but later found out was a bit exaggerated—or maybe I just misremembered it.

My ancestor, Mary Dyer, was a Quaker who was hanged after Bostonians discovered that she had given birth to a malformed child and then disposed of it secretly (a crime her strictly Puritan neighbors blamed on her Quaker beliefs). Hiding the corpse of the child, who was born with microcephaly, was the last in a long line of “offenses” that had Dyer banished from the Puritan colony multiple times before her eventual demise. Some say her death was the catalyst that led to the Rhode Island Charter, one of the earliest declarations of religious freedom in America.

But as a child growing up in a suburb of Tucson I told this story to anyone on the playground who would listen—relishing the effect it had—and embellishing some of the grisly details, including the addition of green-tinged skin and a pointy hat. Later, in high school, I wrote essays about my mysterious kinswoman, but I never identified with Mary. Not any more than I did with the Sioux or Cherokee Indians. They were characters in a history textbook that I knew as the past—not my past, just the past.

Dyer was not the only one of my ancestors with a strong religious connection. In 1879, Romulus Adolphus Windes became the first Windes relative to roll into Arizona, with his wife and two children, pulled by his two donkeys, Tom and Jerry. He was the first Baptist minister in the state, and he went on to found the first Baptist church in Prescott, and moved on to found churches in Globe, Cottonwood, and Jerome, and 10 Sunday schools in the Verde Valley, south of Sedona.

I learned the story of Adolphus from a speech given to the Tempe historical society by my great-grandfather, and more from a thesis written by a graduate student at the University of Arizona.

All these stories became part of the background noise that I tuned out. My ancestors’ religion, like their ethnicity, didn’t factor in my family’s sense of itself. I was raised as an atheist, viewing religion as the antithesis of science and education, which were revered in my household.

And so the old stories and my lack of religion blurred together. My family is not attached to the past or bound to the fear or calling of an afterlife. Instead, we try to make ourselves fully present through education, hard work, and intention.

Growing up, I viewed myself as a part of many communities at the same time, without ascribing to any single one. My best friend in second grade was a Romanian. Later, I met Anthony, a Mexican American whose family had many traditions and a heritage that I didn’t view as strange or foreign. His grandmother made tamales, and his family held get-togethers that included me—and that I loved. It was also through his family that I first came to appreciate the one, new American holiday that I celebrate: Super Bowl Sunday.

Some of the stories of my family’s past are not fantastic adventures. Rumors of infidelity, divorce, family drama, and money troubles plague my family tree. These blights on my ancestry blend in with the rest. There are multiple stories—or at least rumors—of male ancestors of mine who abandoned their families and changed their names. I sometimes feel ashamed of these people, and feel a small sense of curiosity—but no burning desire to investigate.

Some stories were purposely redacted from the pages of my family’s collective history. When I was in my 20s and asked around a bit, relatives told me about “skeletons in the closet” that the Windes were not proud of. Affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, the Confederacy, and slavery were just a few examples, but I never heard a whisper of these skeletons growing up.

Much of my ignorance growing up was due to a lack of due diligence, and a short attention span. A second cousin on my dad’s side, and many relatives on my mother’s side, know a lot about my ancestry. But I was taught by my parents that this didn’t affect who we were, or who I am, because we are who we make ourselves out to be.

The most tangible connection I have to my distant ancestors is that they walked in the same halls where I now go to school. In memoirs written by some of the Windes family, stories of running the halls of the Tempe Normal School, now Arizona State University, give me a tinge of excitement—of connection—that where they stood, I now stand. Where they taught and learned, I now learn. I am making myself where they made themselves, long ago. I guess that means I’m an Arizonan-American.

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In San Pedro, a blue-collar coastal neighborhood defined by the Port of Los Angeles and its large population of Italians and Croatians, I never thought about my cultural identity. Japanese-Americans were once a large presence on Terminal Island, but when the government rounded up the Japanese fishermen and their families in the early hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, most never returned.

So the ties that bound me to the Japanese-American community were modest at best. Even then, I knew how valuable The Rafu Shimpo was. How much it meant.

The first time I appeared in The Rafu, it was during my full ’90s-era glory: giant hair, off-the-shoulder black jersey dress, and a faraway expression.

I had been selected as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA and I was acutely aware that The Rafu profiled the new inductees in their annual graduation issue. As incredible as it was to receive the honor from UCLA, I think what meant the most at the time was that I would be featured in the pages of The Rafu Shimpo.

For Japanese-Americans, getting into the The Rafu meant you made it, you were somebody, at least among the vast interconnected community of friends, family, and relations. Friends of your parents who got The Rafu would send clippings. Even for me that community validation was important.

That’s a small slice of what this newspaper has meant to generations of Japanese-Americans. A look at the whole pie reveals that The Rafu Shimpo is the last of its kind: a bilingual Japanese-American daily with two separate news staffs covering politics, civil rights, crime, healthcare, sports.

The Rafu Shimpo’s editorial staff in the 1930s

 
The Japanese edition started first in L.A.’s Little Tokyo in 1903, but its English companion has been running since 1926, when Louise Suski was hired to get it going. The Rafu has spent over a century covering one of the earliest Asian-American communities in the U.S. Six generations now have lived and grown up here, with The Rafu documenting all of it, with the exception of that dark period during World War II when Japanese-Americans were forcibly evacuated from the West Coast and incarcerated in internment camps. Remarkably, The Rafu returned to publication in 1946, less than one year after Japanese-Americans resettled in Little Tokyo. I was conscious of this legacy when I became the English-language editor of the paper in 2002, after working at other Japanese-American outlets and a newspaper in Japan.

When Publisher Michael Komai announced in March that the paper was in a financial crisis and could close in December, I was devastated. And then came the meetings, phone calls, emails, and texts. Many Japanese-Americans and others have come to rely on the paper and cherish it as a link through 113 years of Japanese-American culture and history. They voiced their concerns over the state of the paper and asked how they can ensure The Rafu continues on.

If The Rafu closes, the community itself will develop a sort of collective amnesia.

To give you one example: A white man in his 60s recently came into the office. He had befriended an elderly Japanese-American woman who had recently died and stopped by our office to pick up copies of her obituary. “I just wanted somebody here at the newspaper to know how much what you do meant to her,” he said, explaining that his friend, who was a member of the Nisei generation (American-born children of Japanese immigrants), read the paper everyday from cover to cover.

My aunt called to let me know she had contributed to the subscription effort, and others revealed that their parents worked at the newspaper and even fell in love here. (This is also what happened to me: I met my husband Eric when he worked in the advertising department.)

Rafu was not as central to my parents’ lives. They were among the post-World War II generation that moved their children away from Japanese neighborhoods to, in their case, a predominately white suburb. It was when I visited my Nana Asayo in Gardena, another L.A.-area Japanese-American hub about 30 minutes away from San Pedro, that I was exposed to The Rafu. Nana, who died in 2012 at 104 years old, subscribed almost the entirety of her life. My first attempts to read Japanese were by her side glancing at the newspaper’s front page.

An archival image of The Rafu Shimpo’s typesetters

 
She was proud of being Nisei, born and raised on the plantations of Hawaii. During World War II she took care of my mom and uncle in a tarpaper barrack at the arid Gila River internment camp in Arizona. The news that she would receive an apology from the U.S. government for this harsh, unjust treatment, came in the pages of The Rafu.

I first joined The Rafu staff in 2000. In the early years, I remember reporting on the fight to keep a jail from being built next to the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, the quest by Little Tokyo Service Center to find a home for the Budokan gymnasium, and Japanese-Americans finally receiving their college and high school diploma decades after they were uprooted from their schools and homes during the internment period.

Even then, we had crises. The paper was dealing with the rising cost of printing and mailing, plus a lack of vision about how to deal with these issues. Relations between staff and the publisher soured considerably after the abrupt dismissal of the printing staff in the late ’90s. An attempt to restructure the paper and turn around its declining fortunes resulted in the departure of our longtime associate editor and several other reporters. At the end of this process, I was asked to lead the English section in 2002. Since then, I have dealt with the departure of more key staff members, and reductions in the number of days we publish and the physical size of the paper.

In my time as editor, we’ve continued to cover issues the mainstream media hasn’t touched. For example, the sale of the nursing and retirement homes managed by the long-standing nonprofit Keiro Senior Healthcare, which has catered to the needs of aging Japanese and Japanese-Americans for 50 years, to Pacifica Companies, a private for-profit equity firm. Once The Rafu brought this issue forward, readers organized, held rallies, signed petitions, and garnered considerable support from politicians in Washington and Sacramento to prevent the sale. It is hard to imagine this kind of action without a publication like The Rafu Shimpo there to unify and amplify the voices of the community’s diverse factions.

While we’re proud of these moments, we’re struggling with how to preserve the past while embracing the present and future. Our mostly elderly readership is passing away. Their more-Americanized children don’t feel they need to get news from us to navigate their world. Many get their dose of Japanese and Japanese-American culture at blogs like Angry Asian Man and via Twitter. And the community has dispersed out from Little Tokyo and intermarried with groups of other backgrounds. Ask most Yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese-Americans) and their only connection to Japanese America is through basketball leagues.

A typical delivery bag for The Rafu Shimpo, used up through the 1980s

 
Are historically significant relics of the past like The Rafu still relevant amongst the Yonsei (fourth), Gosei (fifth), and Rokusei (sixth) generations? My answer is yes. First, for those based in Los Angeles, there are too many moneyed power players here in Little Tokyo, whether private developers or government entities such as the Metropolitan Transit Authority, that threaten to alter the neighborhood, one of the last three remaining Japantowns in California. In recent months, a number of historic businesses have closed or been forced to relocate, driven out by higher rents.

Second, even younger generations have an interest in connecting with their Japanese-American heritage. We have been reaching out to young writers and Asian-American Studies professors, who can in turn reach out to their college-aged students. This summer, one of our brightest interns will be spearheading an effort to have student union clubs from all over the Nikkei diaspora (all generations of Japanese immigrants), contribute their work to The Rafu. We are looking into the viability of a Rafu app—to reach our new readers where they read—while we clean up our website and engage with and increase our social media presence.

Our goal right now is to get 10,000 new subscribers (equivalent to raising $500,000 in new income), so the newspaper will survive. These new subscribers would bring The Rafu the capital infusion it needs to update old equipment, pay staff better, and restructure the publication.

Ten thousand is a daunting number. But it’s something many Japanese people won’t flinch at: There’s the Japanese term manpo kei. It involves walking 10,000 steps a day for a long, healthy life.

The post A Cultural Touchstone Fends off the End of an Era appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I had arrived in Iran the night before and was staying with a family friend. The Afghan housekeeper, Ata, invited me to play indoor soccer with him and his friends at the local sports hall. I was in goal. The whole team consisted of refugees from the war in Afghanistan, a million strong in Iran. They spoke to each other in Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian, and I struggled to understand what they were saying. Afterwards Ata invited me to have tea, and although we didn’t have much to say I was happy to sit there in silence, cross-legged on the carpet, taking it all in. I was finally back in my father’s country.

I had been trying to come to Iran for several years. The memories of my childhood visits were fading and I wanted to refresh my understanding of a complex country. Above all, I wanted to find out how Iranian I really am. Military service, compulsory for all Iranian men, had so far prevented me from making the trip as an adult. But a recently passed law affecting the diaspora meant I was eligible for a temporary exemption, and I came as soon as I could. For nearly two months, I traveled across Iran taking photos, and I found a very different place from the menacing geopolitical actor you read about in Western newspapers.

I spent another night in Meygoon, and then went to stay at my aunt’s house in Tehran. You would never know, unless you visited, how marvelously self-made the city is. Or how the freeways, the smog, and the mountains will remind people of Los Angeles, where I went to high school. Even the socio-economic topography is the same—the rich drive Maseratis in the northern foothills and the poor fill the southern plains. No wonder Tehranis love L.A. In it they must see an ethereal mirror image of home.

Like everyone else in Tehran, my friend Kasra drove like a lunatic. It was the kind of driving that made you press down on an imaginary brake in the passenger seat. Eventually one of his stunts left too little room to stop, and he hit the old white car in front. Not hard, but enough to leave a few scratches on the bumper. But a moment later, when the lights turned green, both parties drove off as if nothing had happened. I asked, “Aren’t we going to stop?” Kasra laughed at me. “For that? No, we don’t stop for such small things in Iran. I was just saying hello.”

After a few weeks fattening up on my aunt’s perfect rice, it was time to move on. Besides, she had a crazy white parrot who said khodahafez—the word for goodbye in Persian—every time I walked past its cage. The bird seemed to have something sinister planned for me, so it felt like a good time to go.

I took a 17-hour train to Tabriz, my father’s hometown, famous for its summer wind. There, in the bazaar, the old men sold polished pears and the boys pulled pistachio carts through the crowds. I went off in search of a backgammon set to buy, but I got lost in the endless gold quarter. The merchants stood catatonic behind their stalls of riches. It seemed to me that men who handle treasure all their days can no longer see the value in that which does not shine.

I stayed in Tabriz for several weeks. Many of my days in the city were spent visiting distant relatives I pretended to remember.

“Do you recognize me?” they would say.
“Of course,” I lied.
“Do I look older? Am I fat? Tell the truth.”
“Not at all. In fact, you look younger.”

My dad’s childhood home had been turned into a beauty salon. At the top of the stairs, where my grandfather collapsed and died, women waited to have their hair cut. Nothing truly belongs to us, at least not for long. No space or place. The old rose garden, where my sister and I played badminton throughout the long summer of 2001, had become a parking lot.

From Tabriz, my cousin and I, accompanied by his friends, drove to Esfahan, the great city of medieval Persia. We stayed with a relative who had four beds for the five of us. In Iran, it’s compulsory to offer things to others, even things we don’t want to give. Each man insisted and swore that he wanted to sleep on the hard, uncomfortable floor. “It’s good for my back,” one said. “I don’t even like beds,” said another. Eventually I was the first to accept a bed, which showed I’m not a real Persian. In the morning I woke to find three empty beds and four men sleeping on the floor, shoulder to shoulder.

In the square outside the great mosque in Esfahan, families picnicked in the dying grass, and from the minarets the muezzin sang to the faithful. Shiite Islam is a religion of mourning, and it suits the Iranian character. Sometimes I think this country is the most melancholy I’ve ever seen, and perhaps the most beautiful. An elegiac land peopled by poets and heavy with history, made generous by its sorrow. On the drive back north, as I neared the end of my journey, I found myself already thinking back to what I had seen, wistful for something barely past. For all the ways I had proven myself to be a foreigner, I had long ago inherited the country’s collective nostalgia. In that sense I am Iranian indeed.

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I didn’t know what home meant. I did not recognize my
Mother’s mother: she was the color of pitch and whether
she was pleased to see her daughter and me, she kept it to

herself, a mystery. “Tonight”, Mother said, “we’ll sleep
under cotton netting to keep the mosquitoes from eating
us up” and like the man who delivered his catch from

early sea light, her voice echoed. Later, as grannie’s house
went dark, a bauble of moon glistening off the fretwork,
Mother found me atop a chest of drawers—(I had known

how to save myself, opened each drawer, more, then more,
scaled every one stuffed with the scent of lies and Hazell
history)—shivering in the nocturnal damp. When she asked,

I said I was hiding from the mosquitoes. Then I saw my first
on a screen. “How do they `eat you up’”? I probed. Nothing’s
as you imagine it, Mother said, and she wasn’t speaking to me.

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An aunt, uncle, and cousins were all flooded out from the city after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 10 years ago. My parents were affected, too, though they had retired to Mississippi from the New Orleans area in the mid-1990s. Katrina followed them like some dog on a scent. They were among the hundreds of thousands of people across the Gulf Coast forced to leave their homes and seek refuge in other parts of the state and the country.

My parents’ home survived even though it was directly in path of the storm. “God sat on my house,” my mother told us later. But all my other family members still in the city lost everything. I hadn’t been to the city where I was born in years since I had no family left there. I fled the city decades ago for other reasons, so I was a refugee, too—and curious about what was the same, what had changed.

I grew up in Metairie, a large suburb in a neighboring parish. I couldn’t wait to leave when I was a kid. Growing up gay in the Deep South, even in the “Laissez les bon temps rouler” and carnival-loving city that care forgot, was no parade. I was bullied in the ’70s and early ’80s. I was constantly called demeaning gay slurs; I heard that some teachers in high school even called me the “class queer.” To be sure, some teachers were extraordinarily kind to me, reading my adolescent poems and encouraging my writing. But children can be brutal to one another—constant verbal assaults, rough shoulders in the hallways, the contempt of exclusion. One kid tried to take a small razor blade to me, saying he wanted to carve one of those slurs on my skin. I couldn’t always find protection from my peers, and as soon as I finished my education, I left, under cover of a marriage with a young woman I loved; we were fortunate to love each other enough to divorce a couple of years later, knowing we’d helped each other escape an abusive place.

So my relationship to the city was complicated, and maybe it was the complications that both kept me away and now, post-Katrina, drew me back. I knew that I was from a unique—even exotic—place, but homophobia had driven me from it. I wanted to know how, and even if I could, reclaim my former home.

Mother was skeptical, though. It’s dangerous, she said. There were more people that didn’t look like us, a marker of change for her. Houses looked different, many now built 8 to 10 feet in the air. Old familiar stores were gone. There was more traffic, even crime in suburban areas spared flooding, as people moved and rebuilt in other parts of the city. She couldn’t understand why I’d want to go back.

“You’re from there, but not in the blood,” she told me.

I’d heard this line before. The message was simple: You may have been born there, but you’re not like those people whose families go way back in the Crescent City—the Irish and Italian immigrants, the Creoles. We were from somewhere else, really, even if my sisters and I were born in the city.

But where?

Both of my parents were born in the country, my father in southern Mississippi, my mother in rural west Louisiana, Cajun country. My mother and her brother, Glen, had left the bayous of southwest Louisiana, to start their adult lives in the big city. She was something of a tomboy, a basketball player in high school. Glen was gay. Mother says their dad, an alcoholic, was unkind to him. New Orleans must have seemed like a city of lights on the bayou—a refuge, a safe haven, a port from which to launch their dreams. My father’s young adulthood is more of a mystery. He was 30 before he married, and I know little of his early life after he was discharged from the Korean War. He was, to me, a distant and even cold figure. He didn’t know how to be a father to me, though he was the first in my family to ask me if I was a homosexual.

As my mother tracked reports of the storm worsening in the waters of the Gulf, escalating to a category 5 hurricane, she packed my father into the car along with some clothes, and they went to stay with my mother’s sister, nieces, and nephew outside of Lake Charles, in far western Louisiana. They arrived to safety, after a grueling many-hour drive, just as Katrina hit land, its storm surge devastating the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

My father’s body suffered under the strain of the evacuation. He had been dealing with Parkinson’s disease a decade of his life, spending the last year with little control over his bodily functions, cursing my mother, running naked out doors in the middle of the night.

I caught a plane into Houston from Ohio, where I lived at the time, and then took a puddle-jumper to Lake Charles. I made it to the hospital eight hours before my father silently died at age 73, a few days after Katrina hit. His features softened. I snuck into the bathroom and sobbed. Mostly what I thought during his death, my arms wrapped around him, was this: although you didn’t know how to love me, I can still hold you and whisper in your ear encouragements while you pass through the bardo of death. In many ways, his death relieved us.

As we sat in my aunt’s trailer, my father just having passed, we listened with held breaths to news reports coming in about the catastrophic flooding engulfing the city, drowning its old charms, its histories, its complex cultural gumbo. The storm had already dissipated by this point, and a hazy sweltering heat had descended on everything.

While I never regretted leaving New Orleans, I began in those moments to feel a strange kind of protectiveness about the city. Here was a place deluged, not just with floodwaters, but with criminal inattention, with an unwillingness to improve a levee system that could’ve provided better safety for its people.

Maybe it had been cruel to me. Maybe I wasn’t from there in the blood, but the waters after Katrina spoke to me of relations thicker than blood, of the need to find and protect a sense of home in the world.

The city remained the epicenter, the ground zero of our family’s dramas, the focal point around which our lives have picked their paths.

And I was returning, again, on that February morning. I drove out on I-10, over the Pearl River into Louisiana, a sign welcoming me in French: Bienvenue en Louisiane. I imagined my mother and uncle on the same highway in another part of the state, driving toward the city, wanting a better life. I thought of the taunts and damage of my own childhood. We were all driven from our homes in one way or another.

I passed through East Orleans, so many homes still abandoned. I saw the new houses on stilts. I crested the bridge over the Industrial Canal, saw the downtown skyline, the curve of the Superdome, where so many people found insufficient shelter, and a city, state, and country that couldn’t protect them well enough. This hadn’t been my home in decades, but I felt my pulse quickening, a little throbbing in the temple, as I thought, with pity and anger, about the people who died here, about those who lost everything, about those who suffered.

The waters recede, and we rebuild, in the world, in our souls. The currents of blood and water swirl around us—and we have to take refuge with one another, and make homes as we can.

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