“I had no home. Mine had fallen all the way down. I understood, then, that the place I never wanted to claim had, in fact, been containing me. We own what belongs to us whether we claim it or not. When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”
I very much enjoyed this book as a standout in the genre of ‘one family’s story tells society’s story.’ I have never been to New Orleans, and I’m glad to have read this book ahead of time to increase my understanding of its literal geography and history. I did not know that the main draw for the French Quarter was that, until very recently, Black folks were welcome only as “supporting players, the labor, the oil that fired the furnace, the engine that made the wheel turn, the key that opened the door.” It’s an interesting American slight of hand to forget (deny, obscure) that what is touted as an area’s charm and allure comes at the literal exclusion of others.
Any American story must grapple with racism and disinvestment, and the history of New Orleans East is a case study. I enjoyed very much the author’s continued questioning of what it means to be from somewhere, especially when that somewhere seems to not care for you, your house, or your people.
“I always huffed at the insinuation that I was from somewhere else. It is the return not the going away that matters, I always wanted to say. That painful snapping back into place.”
Snapping back into place is heavy in the author’s life. She moves – to Texas, to New York City, to Burundi – and travels – to Turkey, to Berlin, to Cairo – but in the end this book admits that “this is the place to which I belong.” But belonging doesn’t mean lying, mythologizing, or hiding from the truth. Sarah goes on to explain “much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness.”
I found this story powerful, especially as we see an increase in climate-driven devastating catastrophes. Who has the right to return? Whose snapping back into place is easy, and whose is painful?
Lani.Tech 