Moth Read Free

seemingly deserted hall and went down them (they smelled of stale cigarettes and urine) into the kind of cool, gentle rain we rarely see back in New Orleans. There, when it comes, it comes hard and fast, making sidewalks steam, beating down banana trees and shucking leaves off magnolias, pouring over the edges of roofs and out of gutters that can’t handle the sudden deluge.
    I turned up the collar of my old tan sportcoat as I stepped out of the hospital doorway just in time to get splashed by a pickup that swerved toward the puddle when it saw me. I heard cackling laughter from inside.
    Earlier I had noticed a small café on the corner a few blocks over. Nick’s, Rick’s, something like that, the whole front of it plate glass, with handwritten ads for specials taped to the glass and an old-style diner’s counter. I decided to give it a try and headed that way. Moving through the streets of the rural South I’d fled a long time ago. Bessie Smith had died not too far from here, over around Clarksdale, when the white hospital wouldn’t treat her following a car accident and she bled to death on the way to the colored one.
    At age sixteen, I had fled. Fled my father’s docility and sudden rages, fled old black men saying “mister” to ten-year-old white kids, fled the fields and the tire factory pouring thick black smoke out onto the whole town like a syrup, fled all those faces gouged out and baked hard and dry like the land itself. I had gone to the city, to New Orleans, and made a life of my own, not a life I was especially proud of, but mine nonetheless, and I’d always avoided going back. I’d avoided a lot of things. And now they were all waiting for me.

Chapter Two
    A FEW WEEKS BEFORE THAT, AT NINE in the morning, I’d just finished putting a friend’s son on the bus to send him home. He’d kind of got himself lost in New Orleans, and I’d kind of found him, and I think finally we were all kind of glad, parent, child and myself, that I could still do the work. It was a beautiful morning, unseasonably cool, and I decided to walk home. So I left the Greyhound Terminal and started up Simon Bolivar, with downtown New Orleans (what they’re now calling the CBD, for Central Business District) looming at my back like so many cliffs.
    I never have figured out just how a street in this part of the city got named for a South American liberator, but that’s New Orleans. Some of the streets down here actually have double signs, a regular-size one and a smaller one riding piggyback, with different names. Further up, where it becomes La Salle, Simon Bolivar has one of those.
    I walked past the projects. Newer ones of slab and plastic looking like cheap college dorms from the fifties, older brick-and-cement ones like World War II institutional housing, most of them with sagging porches, window frames and entryways, air conditioners propped on long boards, spray-painted lovers’ names or exhortations to Try Jesus on the walls. Then, crossing Martin Luther King, I passed the old Leidenheimer Bakery and a lengthy stretch of weathered Creole cottages and doubles, storefront churches, windowless corner foodstores. Every couple of blocks there were clusters of chairs and crates beneath trees on the neutral ground where the community’s social life is carried on. Lots of boarded-up buildings with signs on them. Do Not Enter, No Admittance, Property Pelican Management. There were even signs on the Dumpsters outside the projects: Prop. of HANO. Signs on everything. The ones we read, and the ones we just know are there. We learn.
    I went on up to Louisiana, turned left, looked in the window at Brown Sugar Records and across at the Sandpiper’s sign over the door, a two-foot-high martini glass complete with stirrer and olive and a rainbow arcing into the glass. It’s supposed to be lit up, of course, probably all greens and blues, but the lights haven’t worked in twenty years at least. These great old signs still turn up all