thank you, Katrina

Sometimes it’s hard moving between worlds.  It was good for me to come back from NOLA and go straight back into the classroom; I was able to stay in that “zone” for a little while, but today I’m back to my own reality.  I think it might be time to head back into the academy; this kidlit thing isn’t really working out and it’s starting to get me down.  I’m not going to stop writing, but I think I need to try a new approach—maybe try operating from within the academy instead of the blogosphere.  But this post is about my visit to New Orleans.  I don’t think I have a whole lot more to say, but I feel like I need to admit something.  Yesterday in East Harlem one child asked me how I felt when I found out Bird was going to be published.  And I told him how Hurricane Katrina motivated me to start sending my stories out again; Katrina hit in August 2005, and I had been living in Baton Rouge for only about 3 weeks…I’d just started a new job at LSU and I already knew I wouldn’t be staying long.  Then the hurricane threw everything into disarray, and I was filled with so much rage and I had to do *something* to take my power back.  So I went through all my manuscripts and sent out everything that was ready–picture book stories, academic essays, plays.  And a few months later, I found out I’d won the New Voices Honor Award; after that I got into an MFA program, I got accepted to a summer artists’ residency, I got a job offer in the northeast, and my first play was named as a finalist at a Chicago theater.  It was Hurricane Katrina that lit that fire inside of me—the rage she inspired drove me to look for a way out, and that’s exactly what I found.  When I think about my time in Louisiana, I still get mad.  It’s an irrational kind of rage—aimless, really, because I’m just mad at everything and everyone.  I hear the phrase “way of life” and have to bite my tongue.  So I didn’t go to New Orleans out of any sense of nostalgia; there’s nothing romantic about the city for me, and I didn’t expect to do any touristy things during my time off.  I don’t eat seafood, and I don’t drink; I do like jazz, but I never connected the particular songs or artists I love with New Orleans.  When I lived in Baton Rouge back in 2005, I remember a prominent black poet telling me that New Orleans was “the only truly great American city”—the only one to produce anything of value (she meant jazz).  And I thought to myself, “What about New York?  What about hip hop?”  But then I thought, hip hop doesn’t need NYC any more than jazz still needs New Orleans.  I didn’t say that, of course, because she was homeless due to the flooding and I was an outsider—not a Yankee, maybe, but a northerner nonetheless.  I’m always wary of exceptionalism, whether it’s New Orleans, or Haiti, or the USA.  Anyway, all this is to say that I didn’t expect to “have fun” while I was in New Orleans.  But I did—my host, Karen Ott, took me to the House of Blues one night and to Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse the next; Bob French and the Original Tuxedo Jazz Band blew me away and their vocalist, Yolanda Windsay, put Beyonce to shame with her rendition of Etta James’ “At Last.”  I ate a lot of good food, including the BEST school lunch EVER—white beans and rice!  But I don’t wake up thinking about the food or the jazz.  I wake up seeing the faces of the kids in the 7th grade—and the boy in the 6th grade who said he saw a mirror when he looked at the first page of Bird: “Because I’m a black boy and I like to draw, too.”  I see the girl in the front row who didn’t want to read her poem aloud, but asked me to read it privately.  And it was clear that she got teased a lot, no doubt by the pretty blue-eyed girl in the row behind her who was acting like a typical mean girl.  Yet she herself had written a touching tribute to her beloved teacher the day before.  All you can do in two days is listen and learn, observe and try to inspire.  I read my favorite chapter from Wish, and when I put the book down, a boy in the back row said, “Keep reading!”  So we read another chapter together.  The boy who’d been pushing my buttons all afternoon wrote one of the most powerful poems I’ve heard in a while.  Who’s your addressee?  Some kids spoke to bullies, some spoke to those outside their community.  All had their own ambition, plans for the future, their own sense of themselves.  And they were not willing to let something like Hurricane Katrina define them.  Foremost in their minds was the one-year anniversary of the loss of one of their teachers.  Most of them met President Obama when he visited their school, and they’ve got signed books from JK Rowling.  I’m no celebrity, but I hope I made an impact.  And I hope I now think of those kids when I think about New Orleans.  It’s time to let that anger go.