Louisiana's Way Home Quotes

Perhaps what matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down but who picks us up.

The world was beautiful. It surprised me, how beautiful it kept on insisting on being. In spite of all the lies, it was beautiful.

What matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down, but who picks us up.

He was the kind of person who, if you asked him for one of something, gave you two instead.

I don’t know, Louisiana. I can’t see into the future. I do think that, more often than not, love has a way of finding us.

Because that is what it means to be alive, on this infinitesimally spinning planet. It means you have cares. Doesn't it?

Here is something I have learned: you should never expect help from someone who perpetually has their hair in curlers.

He looked at me, and, my goodness, his eyes were bright, and it occurred to me that they were probably so bright because he had never had to ask himself who he was or where he belonged or who he wanted to be.

You people and your feelings always spilling out all over,” she said. “Yep, we’re real bastards that way. All loving and supportive and excited about shit all the time.

Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican party policy since May 2008. With gas prices soaring to unprecedented heights, that's when the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan 'Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less'—with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be—locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore—was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once. In the face of this triple win, caring about the environment was for sissies: as senator Mitch McConnell put it, 'in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas, they think oil rigs are pretty'. By the time the infamous 'Drill Baby Drill' Republican national convention rolled around, the party base was in such a frenzy for US-made fossil fuels, they would have bored under the convention floor if someone had brought a big enough drill.

You have a gift, Louisiana, and the more of yourself you put into the song, the more powerful—the more truthful—the song becomes.

What matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down but who picks up.

It seems like a good thing to know the star that can keep you from being lost in this world.

And perhaps what matters when all is said and done is not who puts us down but who picks us up.

That awkward moment when you realize you’ve lived your entire life inside of a picture.” ~Peregrine Storke~ It was raining when my mother pulled up to the simple two-level brick home. Drops of water pounded on the roof of her beat up red Toyota, the sound both ominous and comfortable, before tunneling down her windows in rivers and tiny tributaries. The damp infiltrated the interior, soaking my skin despite the vehicle surrounding us. Rain was never simple this time of year in Louisiana. It always came followed by lightning, thunder, and a myriad of warnings. Leaves blew against the windshield, still full and green from summer, and I watched as one of them stuck against the glass, the leaf’s veins prominent. I wanted to sketch the way it looked now, alone and surrounded by tears, but there was no time. “Don’t forget to call me when you get there,” Mom murmured. Her knuckles were white against the steering wheel, her lips pinched. She wouldn’t cry. Mom seldom cried, she

times had changed. The chief impetus for rethinking the value of colonies was the global Depression. It had triggered a desperate scramble among the world’s powers to prop up their flagging economies with protective tariffs. This was an individual solution with excruciating collective consequences. As those trade barriers rose, global trade collapsed, falling by two-thirds between 1929 and 1932. This was exactly the nightmare Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted back in the 1890s. As international trade doors slammed shut, large economies were forced to subsist largely on their own domestic produce. Domestic, in this context, included colonies, though, since one of empire’s chief benefits was the unrestricted economic access it brought to faraway lands. It mattered to major imperial powers—the Dutch, the French, the British—that they could still get tropical products such as rubber from their colonies in Asia. And it mattered to the industrial countries without large empires—Germany, Italy, Japan—that they couldn’t. The United States was in a peculiar position. It had colonies, but they weren’t its lifeline. Oil, cotton, iron, coal, and many of the important minerals that other industrial economies found hard to secure—the United States had these in abundance on its enormous mainland. Rubber and tin it could still purchase from Malaya via its ally Britain. It did take a few useful goods from its tropical colonies, such as coconut oil from the Philippines and Guam and “Manila hemp” from the Philippines (used to make rope and sturdy paper, hence “manila envelopes” and “manila folders”). Yet the United States didn’t depend on its colonies in the same way that other empires did. It was, an expert in the 1930s declared, “infinitely more self-contained” than its rivals. Most of what the United States got from its colonies was sugar, grown on plantations in Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Philippines. Yet even in sugar, the United States wasn’t dependent. Sugarcane grew in the subtropical South, in Louisiana and Florida. It could also be made from beets, and in the interwar years the United States bought more sugar from mainland beet farmers than it did from any of its territories. What the Depression drove home was that, three decades after the war with Spain, the United States still hadn’t done much with its empire. The colonies had their uses: as naval bases and zones of experimentation for men such as Daniel Burnham and Cornelius Rhoads. But colonial products weren’t integral to the U.S. economy. In fact, they were potentially a threat.

Jessica I first met the man I married at a hair salon. I was going out the door; Jep was going in--for a haircut. Seriously. Nowadays, most of the Robertson men don’t get haircuts, but Jep did back then. When our paths crossed that day, we said nothing more than “hi” to each other, just one word. Jep and I both grew up in West Monroe, Louisiana, and he is two years older than I am. We went to different high schools, but because we lived in a close community, we had heard about each other. He knew who I was, and I knew who he was--and I thought he had a cool name. I had heard good things about him, including, “He’s a dream.” When our paths crossed at the hair salon and we simply said hello, I had no way of knowing the hairdresser would tell Jep all about me as she cut his hair that day. Both of us had gone to her for years, so she knew us pretty well, and she said really nice things about me to Jep. In fact, she takes credit for getting us together! After we were married I found out that when he left the hair salon that day, he went home and told his best friend, “I just met the girl I’m going to marry.” “What’s her name?” his friend asked. “Jessica,” Jep responded. He only knew this because the hairdresser had told him. “Jessica who?” his friend asked. “What’s her last name?” “I don’t know,” Jep admitted. I love the fact that Jep knew he would marry me after only seeing me once. Maybe he did not know my last name, but the next time he saw me, he made sure to find out a little more about me.

have

OCTOBER 1977

The Union army's southward march-especially in the Mississippi Valley-stretched supply lines, brought thousands of defenseless ex-slaves under Union protection, and exposed large expanses of occupied territory to Confederate raiders, further multiplying the army's demand for soldiers. On the home front, these new demands sparked violent opposition to federal manpower policies. The Enrollment Act of March 1863 allowed wealthy conscripts to buy their way out of military service by either paying a $300 commutation fee or employing a substitute. Others received hardship exemptions as specified in the act, though political influence rather than genuine need too often determined an applicant's success. Those without money or political influence found the draft especially burdensome. In July, hundreds of New Yorkers, many of the Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors. The riot raised serious questions about the enrollment system and sent Northern politicians scurrying for an alternative to conscription. To even the most politically naive Northerners, the enlistment of black men provided a means to defuse draft resistance at a time when the federal army's need for soldiers was increasing. At the same time, well-publicized battle achievements by black regiments at Port Hudson and Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, and at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, eased popular fears that black men could not fight, mitigated white opposition within army ranks, and stoked the enthusiasm of both recruiters and black volunteers.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

From the glass-topped table in the dining room, I could see over a field and into the woods. It was late afternoon, and the light was fading. Sometimes, when the light starts to fade, I get a terrible feeling of loneliness, like maybe I am the only person in the world.

I once had a teacher called Mrs McGregor who said that the world was turning very slowly on its axis. "It is moving infinitesimally," said Mrs McGregor. Infinitesimally. [...] But here is the thing: it did not feel to me like the earth was moving infinitesimally. It felt like it was hurtling and jerking its way through a lonely darkness. To my way of thinking, you never knew when the earth was going to lurch and go somewhere entirely unexpected. There was nothing infinitesimal about it.

Something large and dark had entered Room 102 of the Good Night, Sleep Tight, and the large, dark thing was sitting right on top of my chest. I could not breathe.

The world was so dark! I don't know that I had ever before encountered such darkness.

I could see dust motes dancing around joyfully in the air. What do dust motes have to be so happy about?

I do think that, more often than not, love has a way of finding us.

I ate all my ice cream. I scraped the bowl with my spoon, and then Grandfather Burke slid his bowl of ice cream over so that it was sitting right in front of me. I looked down at Grandfather Burke's bowl. The glass was twinkling in the light. It looked very pretty. It was dark outside, and there were lights on inside and the bowl was catching all the light, and everybody was around the table and the bowl was full of ice cream and chocolate sauce and peanuts, and I felt as if I was right on the verge of understanding something. And then Grandfather Burke said, "That's for you, doodlebug." I stared down at the beautiful bowl, and I started to cry.

I want you to know something, Louisiana. We all, at some point, have to decide who we want to be in this world. It is a decision we make for ourselves. You are being forced to make this decision at an early age, but that does not mean that you cannot do it well and wisely. I believe you can. I have great faith in you. You decide. You decide who you are, Louisiana. Do you understand?" I told him that I did understand. Even though I wasn't certain that I did. "And another thing," he said. "You will never understand why your parents left you in that alley. It is impossible to understand. But it may be necessary for you to forgive them, for your own sake, without ever truly understanding what they did. OK?" His face was so serious and sad that I said, "Yes, Reverend Obertask. I understand." But I didn't understand. How could I forgive people who had never shown me any kindness? How could I forgive people who had left me behind without loving me at all? And so it came to pass that I found myself sitting at the end of a long driveway in front of a pink house that smelled like cake, thinking about forgiveness and who I wanted to be in this world.

And now that we were home, we could look back with tolerant appreciation of such times as when a little boy in Texas, watching his first demonstration of scent discrimination, shook his head and muttered, "Golly, that lady sure must stink." Or the courtly sheriff in Louisiana who looked at us in amazement when he heard that we had no men folk with us, and in five minutes - with true Southern hospitality - had every man on the place busying setting up camp for us. And the inevitable Poodle question we were always being asked, "Lady, does their hair grow that way?

If you have not left your home in the middle of the night without even giving it a backward glance; if you have not left your cat and your friends and also a one-eyed dog named Buddy without getting to tell any of them good-bye; if you have not stood on the side of the road in Georgia, somewhere just past the irrevocable state line, and waited for someone to come along and give you a ride, well, then you cannot understand the desperation that was in my heart that day.

It is a long and tragic story full of dark alleys and twists and turns and many unexpected happenings,” I said. “And also curses. There are curses in the story.

Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves. Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.' As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.' The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.

Granny?

In my dream, you are standing in front of the vending machine from the Good Night, Sleep Tight, and you are smiling at me, using all of your teeth. You say, "Select anything you want', darling. Provisions have been made. Provisions have been made." I am so happy when you show up in my dream and say those words to me.

That is one of the things I have discovered in this world. It is pointless to make big plans because you never know when someone is going to wake you up in the middle of the night and say, “The day of reckoning has arrived.

I can listen to you, Louisiana Elefante," said Reverend Obertask. "That is the only magic I have. Do you want to tell me the rest of your story?

Should you be driving?" said the woman. "I should be driving," I told her. I gave her a very-serious grown-up-to-grown-up sort of look. "The situation is dire.

Who was I without the Flying Elefantes? Who was I without Granny? And who was I without a curse upon my head?

It is a wondrous thing to be at the top of a tree. When you have two Oh Henry! bars to eat. And a bag of peanuts.

Dang" said Burke when I was done. "That's a good song." At least I knew that about myself. At least I knew I was somebody who could sing. That was something Granny had given me. She had given me a lot. I suppose.

But Clarence probably had cares. Because that is what it means to be alive on this infinitesimally spinning planet. It means you have cares. Doesn't it?

The world was beautiful. It surprised me, how beautiful it kept on insisting on being. In spite of all the lies, it was beautiful.

In 1821 that was different. Mexico controlled land all the way up to northern California, which the USA could live with, but it also stretched out east, including what is now Texas which, then as now, borders Louisiana. Mexico’s population at the time was 6.2 million, the USA’s 9.6 million. The US army may have been able to see off the mighty British, but they had been fighting 3,000 miles from home with supply lines across an ocean. The Mexicans were next door.