A new shoot, a new blog

I just returned from New Orleans and St. Bernard, my first trip since last August. Almost a full year. And I haven't recovered. Yeah, there was the insufferable heat. ( I'll never forget what that felt like, heat index in the three digits, every day, the minute the sun the hoisted itself into the sky until well after nightfall) Mama Sue is not well at all, and what tore me up was that she seemed not to care. Sue, whose irreverent, Southern humor has warmed and astonished, shocked and delighted me for the past five years, is succumbing to something very dark, where conversing is beside the point. Where tending a garden is irrelevant.

Sue is a large part of my film, whose title, Mama Sue's Garden, alludes to her changing, fantasy garden. It was never all "real," but intermingled silk flowers, glass stems, cherubs and shards recovered from Katrina with palms and climbing vines. It was a curiosity shop-garden and a world.

I've long ago crossed the line that some friends say I should never have crossed. I've stepped from behind the camera to hold hands and join forces with the people I"ve been shooting. I"d love to start a conversation among other doc filmmakers about this. Are most documentarians full of " scruples" about this? Anyway, I'm all about blurred boundaries. I can hold a camera one minute and talk about revitalizing the soil with buckwheat and sunflowers (can you imagine that shot if that happens?!) the next. So I've crossed over into a garden rally-er. They've got the land. (For more details, scroll back through this blog) They've got a name -- Garden of H.O.P.E. Sue suggested the name, attached for a while to a scrappy group of volunteers, which she says stands for Helping Other People with Everything.

But this blog has become too -- um, all over the place. My few readers must be exhausted. St. Bernard, filmmaking, Mama Sue's Garden, Nicaragua, the flu, Prospect Park, Spanish lessons and Alan, my brother who has autism and some other disabilities. So I decided, why not make some partitions and start another blog, one devoted just to Alan, and his just started music sessions while this one will chronicle the progress towards completing a documentary where the end is really still an unknown.

Alan, who doesn't speak, who seems to inhabit another reality, has, at 60, started music *therapy.* I put it in asterisks, as I don't like the oxymoron-ish feel of that. How can music be anything BUT therapy? Alan drums like a jazzer, his music therapist said. What a wonderful thing to be -- a jazzer. Anyway, he does sound like a seasoned jazz drummer, taking the baton and crashing it down on the cymbal like an almost in-control madman. Does it four or five times and then stops, a wistful, far away look coming over him. So, the blog will be called Jazzrman.blogspot.com/

an unusual birthday present

Sometimes I think about giving an assignment to a roomful of compliant, eager and creative writing students. Funny thing is, I don't teach writing, and never did. And though I write, and am even dabbling in fiction now (for children -- and boy is that hard) I'm not a writer. But these thoughts of providing an assignment, and oh, 'you have two weeks in which to complete it' have been arising. Go figure.

This week's assignment? The best birthday present you ever received.

My birthday rolled around (fortunately) this past Thursday. I share a bday with Julia Roberts and the Statue of Liberty, and my cousin Eric, and I'm sure a few million other people.

This one, though, the thing I was delighted to receive was an unlimited supply of horse manure. Horse shit you ask? You wanted horse shit? Well, not specifically. Other things -- like a free day of plowing, or a perimeter fence for an acre -- would have been equally satisfying. I speak, as you may know, if you've read back a few posts, about the garden I'm assisting, or more accurately, fretting constantly about, down in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana. Myself, along with three others, who are natives (I am not, which is a bit of a problem. I'm in in NYC, which is very far indeed from Southern Louisiana in more ways than one) started it, back now two years ago. Mr. Lynn Dean, a wealthy and very big-hearted man, leased us the land at no cost, for ten renewable years. August, our master gardener, called excitedly. The owner of a small group of race horses (race horses? In St. B? I've learned to love St. Bernard, but more for its generous, gregarious, gentle, well, not always gentle, people who are NOT the race-horse set, I assure you) wants to help the garden, and is willing to truck over as much manure as we need. His voice over the phone was urgent, excited, delighted. But the horse farm owner was a bit concerned about dropping off a truckload of manure right next to the Cornerstone Church, a former trade school in a tin shed, which sits on the corner of this acre. She wanted the Pastor's phone number so she could give him a heads up right before delivery.

I worry about the pastor, and the neighbors. Will they be as excited as August and me about this gift? Anyway, like Scarlet O'Hara, decided to worry about it later. I caught the fever. Horse manure! An unlimited supply. Free! It didn't come right on my birthday, but the conversation occurred a few days before and you know -- birthdays are really a cloud around the date. Al jokes plaintively that my birthdays go on for about a month, though this isn't so.

A load of horse manure is one of the things we need to get going on this little patch of green, what is destined to be an organic semi-urban farm down there, nestled between St. Bernard and Plaqueminnes Parish, just South of the Lower 9th and New Orleans. It's hard by the Mississippi, and when you look up -- I imagine this scene -- from weeding a patch of beans, you'll see the turrets of big cargo ships slowly gliding down or up river.

The skies down there are quite beautiful. So you'll also see the billowing clouds in a field of pale blue. Above the turrets. The earth is dark and dense (Mississippi mud pie wasn't named idly) and nutritionally very poor. So once we spread the manure, we need to plow it under and turn over the soil, and crumble it a little, integrating the fertilizer. August has told me all this. I confess, I am a farming neophyte. I've grown a patch of beans, cukes, tomatoes, like everyone else, but really in the most unprofessional way. I marvel at cumcumbers' agressiveness, how they leap their boundaires and march towards the carrots. But how to control bugs, thwart voles, irrigate in the dry dry months of this past summer -- I really don't know.

Back to St. Bernard. We received a gift of organic seeds from our friend, Lorna, who moved from Tennesse to help a variety of neighborhoods begin to farm, or garden, on top of straw bales. Post BP oil spill, post Katrina, she figured, people would be needing good cheap food. Anyway, they, the straw bales never arrived, as they were supposed to, from the Midwest. The promise of donated shipping never materialized. But Lorna left us dozens of packets of seeds. Everything we'll need for at least a year. I guess that's another wonderful present. Thanks, Lorna!

So, that's the assignment for this week. What has been your best BDay present?

p.s. My resolve to post here every week, with pictures, interesting musings, has been broken as you can see. I'm deep into editing Mama Sue's Garden and anyone who has edited anything will know that it doesn't leave much head space for much else. Kathryn and I are plowing ahead - pun unintended! - step by step through a recent moment in the history of three individuals, one of them August, and the others, Mama Sue and Lettie Lee. These two projects are intertwined though. I fervently hope that the film gets an audience. It has been at least three years of my life so far. But then, that its fortunes will fertilize the garden.

Lettie during an interview

marching in a Second Line

I haven't written much about Lettie Lee, yet as you can see from the photo on the left, Lettie is one of those people who gets involved.

Or to put another way, Lettie Lee is fully engaged, but unlike many engagists, she does it in an utterly unassuming cheerful way, knowing to the minute what's going on in her Parish, St. Bernard, where she was born and has lived her entire 70+ years. Engaged in working for councilmembers, the sheriff candidate she supports, staffing the election tables.

Whenever I go down for a visit, she gives me a large paper bag to take home, full of unexpected things -- newspaper clippings, beads, travel brochures, tee shirts. She'll give you anything of hers too, if you admire it for longer than a second.

I met Lettie while I was living down in "da Parish" as it's known, where I was drumming up business for a documentary film class I was offering, thinking I'd offer people a way to give voice to their lives, firsthand. Thought it wasn't my job to make a film as an outsider looking in, though that in the end is what I've wound up doing.

In the end a dozen people signed up, maybe two thirds of whom actually came regularly -- all of them hesitant, having come out of curiosity or hope. I'd say without a doubt that they were all overwhelmed. James T, a truck driver came to the introductory session, brimming with religious fervor and but it turned out absolutely no interest in giving voice to anything but the Almighty and James didn't come back, though he lived across the street from me and gave me a huge smile and a wave whenever I walked past. A young woman who spoke in a voice that barely rose above a whisper hoped she'd find a way out of her depression. She never came back. A high school student showed up, who'd had an extra family move in with his into their FEMA trailer. Many came for a class or two, leave, maybe return for another class. About five hung with the full ten weeks. (I should give a huge thank you to the New Orleans Video Access Center, NOVAC, who loaned me four cameras for this workshop. www.novacvideo.org)

While I was wondering whether what I'd begun was really a good idea, Lettie Lee, who I don't think ever owned a camera, called and left a message on my voice mail. Carefully enunciating her words and in a loud voice she asked if she could register for my workshop. I knew this woman! She sounded just like the elderly Jewish women from the Borough Park section of Brooklyn where I used to work as a tenant organizer. As she spelled her name, and repeated her phone number, I could see her neat as a pin home, curtains and windows closed, smell her lingering smells of cooking...

Lettie Lee is not Jewish. She's a descendant of the Islenos, 18th century immigrants from the Canary Islands. The Islenos came to St. Bernard because it was warm, because they could, because it was surrounded by water and they knew how to fish. Proud Spaniards, they became Southern to the core, and they rooted themselves in the Parish, giving names like Nunez and Perez to the roads and schools. Lettie does not keep a neat home, she doesn't like to cook.

Like everyone down in this part of the world, it seems, Lettie has a very long name (Lettie Anne-Marie, something something Lee Henderson...) a few middle names, a name received at Communion, a maiden name, a married name. None are foresaken. But she calls herself Lettie Lee.

When I met her I immediately felt like Lettie was family, from the side that's rock solid. Reliable, emotionally stable. Lettie always looks and sounds as though she's had a good night's sleep. Of course I was wrong. One afternoon, her broad, sunny face relaxed and grew drawn, as she mumbled, barely in earshot -- 'Katrina ruined everything.'

She spoke these words as she was heading into her tin can of a FEMA trailer, where she lived alone. Lettie's husband died in the 60's from an electrical explosion on the job. Lettie makes ends meet now by working as a driver for Enterprise Rent-a-Car. Lettie's trailer was lined up with 150 others in a flat, featureless FEMA trailer park. Dreary, like in refugee camp dreary. How come there was not the smallest amenity? Like -- a bench? These homes were small. You needed a place outside to sit, and to find companionship. The place could use a planter I thought, with geraniums. 'Temporary' rang out from every detail, although the residents of this FEMA park had been there for over a year, so you'd think that temporary wasn't the right attitude on the part of the government who'd doled them out, painfully slowly, often years after the storm. I'm a complainer. Lettie does not often complain. It's a roof over my head she'd say. without a hint of despair as she moved her clothes over so she could get into bed at night (there was no other place to store her clothes, so they were arranged in no particular order on one half of the bed)

The first assignment, that chestnut beloved by documentary teachers -- the vox populi, voice of the people "man on the street" interview. Ask a half dozen people the exact same (single) question.

OK everybody. You're going to work in partners, one person holding the camera, the other handling the social aspect of the project -- deciding on a question, choosing the spot you'll stand to find your populi, the people, and then ingratiating yourself with these total strangers and convincing them to stop for a moment and talk to you. Then you'll switch roles.

I paired Lettie up with a man about the same age, whose name I no longer remember, though I remember his shiny bald head, his sad smile. Like Lettie, unfailingly polite. He called me in the afternoon to apologize. He couldn't accompany Lettie on her assignment that evening. He sounded tired. Because he'd had a heart attack that morning. He was very sorry.

So I went with Lettie that evening, taking the job of cameraperson. The place she wanted to start was her FEMA trailer park. Under a bright street light (I forgot. There was one amenity. Blazing lights which went on at dusk, and flooded the park with light till dawn) Lettie found a security guard. Would he talk to us? I was sure I knew the answer, but Lettie would never assume. She asked would he talk to us. No. He wouldn't answer any questions, especially (as I'd asked) not the name of his employer, whether it was the same outfit -- Blackwater -- that was earning notoriety in Iraq. (It was.)

But we weren't there to investigate. Lettie was there for what she's best at -- coaxing conversation through gentle and genuine interest and a touch of hilarity. We left the park in search of a subject, and we found one after another outside the Walgreens, at the busy intersection of Judge Perez and Paris Road. Who would have guessed that Lettie -- my little old Jewish lady student -- would be so magnificently suited to this kind of activity.

"Do you have a junk drawer?"

I don't think there will ever be a better vox populi question. Not ever.

A couple stopped and happily responded to this apparently innocent query.

Man: 'Yes, it's where I keep keys, socks, photos of old girlfriends ... and many many slides.'

After I go, my hope is that my wife [whose standing right next to him] will go through them.

Wife: I plan on getting remarried.

Lettie: How will you find the time to find someone if you're going through all those slides?

Second interview subject: My FEMA trailer is a junk drawer. Entergy promises to turn on the electricity soon. Hey Herman (calling over to a grizzled toothless man standing by their car, a dozen yards from us) You gotta junk drawer?

Yes ma'am.

Whaddya got in it?

Junk. [grin]

A heavyset man who calls himself Slim pulls a pair of crab forks out of his pocket. I forget why he did this but you can tell he adores his crab forks. Lettie talked to Slim and his eerily cheerful wife, Elsie, until she found out they couldn't return to their home because of some bureaucratic detail -- like no deed for the trailer they'd lived in for their entired married life. I heard of a woman who drowned in the attempt to return home to retrieve her documents.

And so Lettie, as she would unfailingly do every time she encountered a stranger who was overwhelmed by the problems of returning home, offered to help. If I find something out, she tells Slim and Elsie, I'll come find you. Tell me where do you live? She smiles, laughs, Slim and Elsie laugh, roar even.

I promise to post a piece of the interview -- which we edited down to a 15 minute film that won 2nd place in the shorts category at that year's Nunez College - sponsored Pelican D'Or Film Fesitval.

Lettie, of course, gave me the statue of a pelican she received.

August, aka World

Two days later...the blizzard ended, of course. The clouds blew over, revealing blue skies.

I stirred from a dream this morning, in which two of the subjects of my film were talking quietly to one another. This would not happen in reality. August is a 63 yr old African American man living in a rundown section of Violet, which is a community in St. Bernard Parish, La and Mama Sue is a chatty, voluble woman, 55, with too many problems. She really has them all, I'm afraid. Just one I feel at liberty to share -- her daughter is due to be married New Year's eve in a bright red dress, and Mama Sue can't afford to get herself there -- Phoenix, Az from NOLA (new orleans) is a hefty ticket next week. So April will, what, walk herself down the aisle?

But that's not the least of it! The woman carries just a ton of burdens. Sue wants to talk to a receptive ear -- who doesn't -- but it aint gonna be August's ear.

Mama Sue is white and I can see how race plays a large role in the direction of friendship. Sue unburdening herself to August?! Literally -- in my dreams.

August -- aka World. Down in Violet, the black men of a certain age have street names, known only to each other. "World" must have an ironic tinge, because August hadn't ever left the state of Louisiana until Katrina demanded it. He and his partner, Georgiana, spent the better part of the three months after K travelling to Belmont TX and then settling in Lafayette, La. for three months.

I met August one evening when I was walking Violet -- my dog -- down Guerra Drive, one run down, down home long street that stretches from the 40 orbit canal to the Mississippi. It's about a mile long. I was living at the corner of Guerra Dr. and East Judge Perez. (You'll want to find out who Judge Perez was. Later. It's another irony that the black community of St. Bernard Parish straddles E. Judge Perez Boulevard.)

So walking Violet (my foster catahoula) down Guerra, stopping to say 'hi' and wave to my neighbors, everyone one of whom spent their evening outdoors, escaping the heat of their FEMA trailers, I met August and his friend Phil, aka Pipe (so named I guess because he's tall and very thin). Like everyone else, they were sitting on garden chairs, imbibing beer and chewin' the fat.

August and Pipe liked dogs, and I'd stop to let mine run with a neighbor's dog in front of his trailer. I'd hoped to interest the two men in joining my workshop -- making documentary films. But, August was quick to tell me that he wouldn't travel up to the Arabi, in the Community Center, where my workshop was held. A shake of his head, and large knowing smile. Nooo, I'm not goin up there. He didn't explain, but I understood.

Old habits die hard. Habit, though? Or old, historically-born, legitimate fear. Twenty years ago, or even less, a black person "knew his place" and Arabi, or Chalmette, just South of Arabi, or Meraux, further south, were *not* his place. A black man in his right mind wouldn't think twice...

But now, changes are in the wind. August has told my camera how much he'd like to be able to walk into white domains. Black and white shouldn't be in different parts of the City, different bars. Georgiana, his partner, disagreed firmly -- no the two races shouldn't party together -- then later said she regretted saying that.

We're -- all of us, Mama Sue, August and a couple more -- working hand in hand to develop a community garden down there. It's called Garden of H.O.P.E. which stands for Helping Other People With Everything. The name was borrowed from a now defunct group of volunteers, the most anarchic, disorganized, sometimes macho, free-spirited to the nth, and as warm-hearted a group as you'd hope to find. Anyway, they may reappear in my tale -- I hope so -- to come down for a long weekend, to help build the garden. The garden will be the second thread in this blog, along with the film, which soon, soon, I promise, I'll get to.

After returning from my walk in the Park today, I called August. We need to test the soil in the two lots we've been offered by Mr. Dean, the millionaire who owns land all over the Parish and who has one generous, eccentric heart. We can have one, and eventually more, of his one acre lots. One lot has a high level of zinc, but it's in a beautiful spot. It backs up against the Mississippi levee and the towers of freighters can be glimpsed travelling up and back down to the Gulf. You can't get a more romantic location I sigh, every time I see it. I try to will the zinc away. It's probably in a tiny, localized spot, I pronounce, hopefully. Mr. Dean, who owns the land, is almost incensed. How can his land be flawed? I want to see the report on that he tells me in his clipped, authoritative way.

August depends on me to make phone calls to "the man." If I were to give him the phone number of the Ag-extension contact in the next Parish over, Plaqueminnes, who'll handle the soil sample, he'd demur. There'd be a confusing, garbled excuse.

Plaqueminnes is maybe even worse in terms of its history than St. Bernard. Judge Leander Perez was based down in that Parish. If I were Afr. American, I can tell you, I'd steer clear of Plaquemmines. The things I heard on my first visit to Plaqueminnes. Unh uh. Unbridled, 50's -era racism. Or would I? I don't know. What is the extent of white racism against black? And the other way. I've heard stories about broken windows, and taunts from Mama Sue's daughter in law. August's friends tell him it's not safe for a black man to attempt what he's doing -- work an acre down there by the Belle Chasse Ferry, the crossing point into Plaqueminnes. August blows them off. It's left that I'll make the call to the the Ag-Extension and August will call when he's collected the samples.

So, ha!, August and Mama Sue were talking when I stirred this morning, readying myself to get to the park before off-leash hours ended. I miss New Orleans when I'm in Prospect Park. Joggers, cyclists and other dog walkers pass and we don't make eye contact, let alone exchange the hearty 'hi, how are yous?' I'd be graced with on my travels up and down Guerra Drive. True, no one walks a dog in Violet. They're free to wander the streets, but mostly, they're tied up. They're guard dogs. I must have been the "northern novelty," carrying plastic bags with me on my daily walks with Violet to the levee.

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