(couldn't upload yesterday - no internet connection)
1. InvisibleIn the book “Seedfolks” a woman describes her frustration in trying to get the city to clean up the trash in a vacant lot next to her. She makes countless phone calls to the city, eventually she is told this is a problem the county has to deal with, not the city. When she calls the county, she is told that the city is the authority she needs to contact. Meanwhile, as people pass by they throw their own trash into the pile, and the vacant lot becomes an informal sort of town dump.
She eventually gets so fed up with it that she fills up a bag with some of the trash from the lot, gets on a city bus, and rides to city hall. The secretary tells her to have a seat, and the official she wants to meet with will eventually see her. So she sits down in the waiting room, with her bag of trash, and first the fellow people in the waiting room, and then the secretary, begin to notice that her bag of garbage smells. It smells a lot. They bump her to the top of the list, and she is able to meet with the official to complain. She brings her smelly bag of garbage right into his office and allows the stench to surround them both while she is discussing the problem. The next day, trucks come, and the garbage is taken care of.
In the poorer neighborhoods that we visited, there were piles of trash lined up at the edge of the road, in the designated spots residents were told to put it so FEMA could get it trucked away. But the trucks never came. The problem is invisible to those officials who won’t travel to those neighborhoods. I’m thinking it might be time to load up some trash bags and hop on a bus.
(Trash in the Vietnamese neighborhood where we camped)
Claire was talking today about invisible people. When she went to Chicago last year over Easter break, she and her friend saw a man on the street corner trying to ask for directions. He was old, and disheveled, and looked, she said, like he might be homeless. He was asking for bus information, so he could go across town, and person after person walked past him without making eye contact. He began prefacing his request with a statement that he wasn’t asking for money. He held out his hand with money in it to show he already had money, he wasn’t begging, he just needed to know how to get across town.
Claire and her friend stopped and asked where he was trying to go. They didn’t know their way around Chicago, but they at least had a bus map with them. They unfolded the map, and were trying to figure it out. The minute these two respectable looking young women unfolded a map, help materialized out of thin air. They didn’t even need to ask for the help. A well-dressed woman spontaneously joined them, asked where they were trying to go (automatically assuming they were the ones that needed help), and when she didn’t know the bus route, she whipped out her cell phone, dialed a friend, who called the bus station, and got the schedule for them. During the entire conversation, she never addressed the man directly, even after being told the directions were for him. The man wasn’t able to make it to the bus stop, because his hips were bad and he couldn’t walk more than a few steps at a time, but he was trying to see his brother in the hospital, and was afraid his brother would die before he could manage to get there. They ended up hailing a cab for him, but she was sorry now, she said, that they hadn’t gotten in the cab with him and made sure he got to the hospital safely.
I found out today at the rally that somewhere in Biloxi, Caroline had picked up a homeless guy in her car. He had spent the last 6 months just trying to avoid being arrested by the Biloxi police for the crime of being homeless. He joined our march and came with us to New Orleans. I asked her to point him out to me, she just vaguely smiled, nodded towards the crowd, and said he’s the most respectable looking person here.
My grandfather was a vaudeville magician; I grew up with quarters popping out of my ears, and scarves changing colors at will. My sister and I could toss knots into a rope before we hit the age of five. All of my grandpa’s tricks combined couldn’t rival the magic of poverty, though. It can make people entirely disappear, until you look at them directly, and then it’s the circumstances that disappear, not the person.
2. Left BehindToday we are leaving behind the people we’ve been marching with since Mobile, and those folks that joined us along the way in one town or another, sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneously. We’re leaving behind the Chalmette National Military Cemetery we visited this morning with tombstone after tombstone marked simply US Soldier as well as those labeled as Colored Troops; and leaving behind house after house marked with the number of bodies found inside - no names for the invisible people. Dum tacit, clamat.
(Charlie, in the Chalmette cemetary, where over 14,000 soldiers are buried, almost 7,000 of them unknown.)
We’re leaving behind the people of Common Ground, who met us in the 9th Ward and swelled our ranks as we headed to the rally site. As we entered into the final leg of our walk, people were lining the streets to greet us, city workers were stopping as we passed by to flash us a peace sign, people who happened to be filling their cars with gas as we came down the street started dancing around, pumping their fists, shouting “Yes! Yes!” Our column of walkers which had left Mobile originally with roughly 80 people in a column 2 or 3 wide became a mass that filled the road, with people beating on improvised drums, dancing, calling cadence, singing. The final rally alternated between the stories from vets that chew at your soul, stories of hope (how common ground was started by one man with $20 in his pocket, and his friend who had $30), and great music.
(Common Ground and bystanders join us on the final leg)
(Nancy Griffith takes the stage)
We are leaving the good people of SOS, who were on the scene in so many neighborhoods along the coast. We found out on Tuesday that they were going to have to let their employees go and shut down their warehouse in Mobile, where we stayed on our first night, because they couldn’t make the $6,000 payment for the lease next month. A hat was passed around the camp at dinner, and I overheard a bit of the counting – I think we had collected about $5,000 on the spot at that point, I’m not sure what the total was.
And we are leaving behind a few members of the Iraq Veterans Against the War, who have vowed not to leave the coast until our host on the second night – one of the hurricane survivors who marched with us to New Orleans - has a roof on her house.
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