civil-rights legislation or social program had ever touched or was likely to.
I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.
Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.
I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday—almost thirty years later—as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.
So much time has gone by. So little has changed.
Chapter Ten
A S I LAY THERE, VARIOUS FACES —Frankie DeNoux, LaVerne, Hosie Straughter, anonymous doctors and nurses—hovered in the sky above me.
Howya feelin’, Lewis?
Anything at all, you let me know, you hear?
Look like you gone home to Arkansas and ol’ Faubus done got hold of you.
Contusions.
Multiple lacerations.
Mild concussion.
May be cervical damage.
Those last four items (I was pretty sure) from the same source, and oddly chantlike, as though someone far off were singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the …” and so on. With that little hiccough just before the new bone gets mentioned.
Afterward, asleep, awake and at a hundred bus stops somewhere in between, I listened to the words, the chants, go on rolling and unrolling in my head.
Contusions. Multiple lacerations. Mild concussion. May be cervical damage.
Conlacerations, mild latusions, maybe cause multiple dams, vehicle damn age.
I remember trying to talk to those faces hovering up there above me. Maybe I did talk to them, I don’t know, don’t know what I might have said if I did. I don’t even know if they were really there. I was afloat on a chemical raft. Faces, towns, states, shores, years went by.
Someone stood over me saying there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was important that we talked. But then a wind came up, or a current, and I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. It was great.
A few more faces and months went by.
Actually, the whole thing lasted only five or six hours—as I discovered when the drugs started easing off to make way for the pain. They made a lot of room, I want to tell you. And unlike most other New Orleans real estate, it didn’t go vacant long.
Someone was saying: “Jesus, you look worse than I do. I’d have bet good money that wasn’t possible.”
I asked what time it was. A clock hung on the wall across from me, but wayward and unfocusing as my eyes were, it could as well have been a fish tank.
Some time after six, he said. Sure enough: scratchy dawn at the window. My cruise down life, time, and the river hadn’t been such a long one after all.
He leaned close.
“Remember me?”
I nodded. “You okay?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t of been if you hadn’t happened along. Bullet went through. Lots of blood, hurt like a sunuvabitch, but no real damage.”
I looked at the heavy bandage strapped around his thigh. To make room for it, they’d cut the pant leg off, so he’s wearing a sportcoat, shirt and tie, black socks and shoes, and his bare hairy leg’s hanging out there in the wind.
“You look ridiculous.”
“Guess it depends on your perspective. Like most things. Compared to what I was expecting to look like for a while there, this is great, believe me.”
He held out his hand. It was wide, pink, and grimy. Traces of blood still around the nails and under them.
Unaccustomed to shaking hands with whites, I hesitated, then took it.
“Don Walsh.”
“I’m—”
“I know. Robert Lewis Griffin, but you don’t use the first name. And
I watched the Sacramento confrontation on TV within hours of its happening, in a bar on Magazine, five or six Scotches into what became a long evening.
Years before, during the course of the events I’m putting down here, I’d gone with Hosie Straughter to hear a black American novelist living in Paris give a talk at Dillard on a rare U.S. visit. Reading passages from his books, he said that slavery, discrimination and racial hatred, even poverty, were only the first steps toward the destruction of a people: the final one was the terrible, irrevocable damage his people were now doing to one another.
I thought of Sacramento and of that novelist again just yesterday—almost thirty years later—as I sat in the Downtown Joy on Canal watching Boyz N the Hood.
So much time has gone by. So little has changed.
Chapter Ten
A S I LAY THERE, VARIOUS FACES —Frankie DeNoux, LaVerne, Hosie Straughter, anonymous doctors and nurses—hovered in the sky above me.
Howya feelin’, Lewis?
Anything at all, you let me know, you hear?
Look like you gone home to Arkansas and ol’ Faubus done got hold of you.
Contusions.
Multiple lacerations.
Mild concussion.
May be cervical damage.
Those last four items (I was pretty sure) from the same source, and oddly chantlike, as though someone far off were singing “the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the …” and so on. With that little hiccough just before the new bone gets mentioned.
Afterward, asleep, awake and at a hundred bus stops somewhere in between, I listened to the words, the chants, go on rolling and unrolling in my head.
Contusions. Multiple lacerations. Mild concussion. May be cervical damage.
Conlacerations, mild latusions, maybe cause multiple dams, vehicle damn age.
I remember trying to talk to those faces hovering up there above me. Maybe I did talk to them, I don’t know, don’t know what I might have said if I did. I don’t even know if they were really there. I was afloat on a chemical raft. Faces, towns, states, shores, years went by.
Someone stood over me saying there was someone he wanted me to meet. It was important that we talked. But then a wind came up, or a current, and I wasn’t there anymore. I wasn’t anywhere. It was great.
A few more faces and months went by.
Actually, the whole thing lasted only five or six hours—as I discovered when the drugs started easing off to make way for the pain. They made a lot of room, I want to tell you. And unlike most other New Orleans real estate, it didn’t go vacant long.
Someone was saying: “Jesus, you look worse than I do. I’d have bet good money that wasn’t possible.”
I asked what time it was. A clock hung on the wall across from me, but wayward and unfocusing as my eyes were, it could as well have been a fish tank.
Some time after six, he said. Sure enough: scratchy dawn at the window. My cruise down life, time, and the river hadn’t been such a long one after all.
He leaned close.
“Remember me?”
I nodded. “You okay?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t of been if you hadn’t happened along. Bullet went through. Lots of blood, hurt like a sunuvabitch, but no real damage.”
I looked at the heavy bandage strapped around his thigh. To make room for it, they’d cut the pant leg off, so he’s wearing a sportcoat, shirt and tie, black socks and shoes, and his bare hairy leg’s hanging out there in the wind.
“You look ridiculous.”
“Guess it depends on your perspective. Like most things. Compared to what I was expecting to look like for a while there, this is great, believe me.”
He held out his hand. It was wide, pink, and grimy. Traces of blood still around the nails and under them.
Unaccustomed to shaking hands with whites, I hesitated, then took it.
“Don Walsh.”
“I’m—”
“I know. Robert Lewis Griffin, but you don’t use the first name. And
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