As I begin this post, midway through my annual 12-day pilgrimage to the NOLA Jazz Festival, I find it important to say: I love our little Cape Cod in the little town of Kent, Ohio, where I live now, where I spend the best days of my life with the best family I know. I love Ohio, and the intense changing of the seasons that is so much more apparent north of the Mason-Dixon line. I love my Kent community of diverse, amazing supportive and loving friends and my various therapists. (Think hairdresser as therapist; house-painter as therapist; carpenter as therapist; and my real I-can't-believe-this-woman-loves-me psychologist as therapist.)
I know all this. I believe all this. I want all this -- even as I also feel my heart beating in rhythm with the city of New Orleans, where my smart mama moved us from my native South Carolina via North Carolina when I was 17.
Ironically, I hated the city at first. A 1960s-educated, fear-based Catholic, I was spooked by the above-ground mausoleums and the sticky heat that lay over them. When we first moved, I'd spend hours in my bedroom listening to John Denver and staring up at our white apartment ceiling in the suburbs. I'd take three showers a day, trying to wash the humidity off. Then, somewhere along the way, I got past the mosquitoes as big as macaws and the heat that makes you feel like a streetcar is sitting on your chest. I discovered Jazz Fest and a broomstraw-thin Bonnie Raitt playing slide guitar like hot butter. I discovered Mardi Gras, and intensity tempered with penance: There’s nothing like being in the French Quarter at five minutes til midnight on Mardi Gras, then watching as the trash trucks roll onto the street like Army tanks when the clock strikes 12, pushing everybody home simply because it's Ash Wednesday. I discovered the creativity and verve of this city's diverse people, young women in lace dresses maneuvering bicycles along Toulouse Street, my own mother in her 40s in a tank top, second-lining in the street alongside a Jazz Funeral.
Like young people do, I left home for parts unknown in my 20s, returning only sporadically to New Orleans, usually with my growing family. I spent a Christmas or two there, and spring breaks on occasion.
And then Katrina came, totaling the home of my mother, who my three sisters and I were already grieving as she died four months before in a fire.
Katrina marked sorrow for me, just as it did for anybody who ever so much as visited this magic, tragic city.
Katrina also marked the deepening of my love affair and a vow to return to the City That Care Forgot every year, come fire or flood.
Every year I make good on this vow. I return at least once, some years twice, always for the International Jazz and Heritage Festival, an eclectic festival of food and music and culture, which BTW, should be renamed the Gospel-Reggae-Soul-World Music-Funk-Rhythm and Blues-Blues Festival.
I come, not to stare up at the ceiling, but to infuse my soul with the happy accordion of coonass Terrence Simien. I come to sashay to the the tight, jump-street music of my brother-in-law and his legendary brother, Deacon John, and the haunting, promising horn of 24-year-old Trombone Shorty, who grew up in the immortalized Treme neighborhood. I come to suck crawfish heads and eat collard greens and smothered chicken and mango ice. I come, as much as anything, to ride the city streets with my sister, she behind the wheel of her Buick with the duct-taped window, me behind the lens of my camera, recreating images of street scenes, colorful houses and live oaks, their arms draped with Spanish moss lofting on the breeze of New Orleans spring.
Ohio is the place where I will live happily ever after with the family I have created. It is my home now. But New Orleans is the place where I breathe most free. It may be the City That Care Forgot. It is the City of My Heart.
