Walking With Saints, Talking With Fools

I am in New Orleans, where the buzz is about a possible break in the stifling heat, and the welcome warmth is from those memories of downing local muffaletta sandwiches with ice-cold Dixie beer. Where the football Saints remain hopeful despite a woeful history. Where musical saints march and mourners dance in funeral corteges. And where Blessed Diversity is thy name.

It is late Friday afternoon, and I am sitting here as a guest speaker at a national journalism educators convention, glancing at my fellow panelists and at the audience who will join us to speak about diversity, about the value of differences in the classroom, varied voices in the newsroom, more inclusion in all other rooms. But we are in a largely empty room now at the Sheraton Crowne Plaza Hotel, and we are deciding whether to wait just a little longer to allow more people to arrive.

There are five people on the panel. There are six people to hear us. But we may as well be waiting for the Saints to reach the Super Bowl because, after vamping for a while, no one else shows. And so we start. And we talk. And we debate. And we discuss. And we remind one another how important it is that we have diversity in America. All five people at the front table. And all six people in the audience.

I am in New Orleans. It is late Friday night, the dismal memory of the panel fiasco fading in my heart. I am walking the French Quarter near my hotel and mingling with the crowd. I have found my diversity: They are the young and the old, families and singles, men and women, the drunk and almost drunk, the delirious and the weary wafting through the narrow streets. They walk amid the roar of conversation and spikes of laughter and those musically cool triple notes slipping outside the nightclub doors, through the humid air and into hungry ears.

Then I see the little boy in frayed overalls and no shirt. He looks to be no older than 8. Next to him is an even smaller boy in similar attire, a pocket version of his brother. I say brothers because a woman who appears to be their mother sits on a crate behind them on the sidewalk. Touting them. Directing them. Collecting for them. The boys have close-cropped hair and shimmering black skin as if they have been sweating even more than the rest of us on this sticky night. Sweating for good reason, I see. Sweating because they are dancing, tap dancing, around the crate, around their mother, around the flow of tourists and other pedestrians. People part as they approach. Some show only a flicker of curiosity. Most give the brothers a wide berth. Few give them the money they seek.

I am torn about what to do. Reward them for their dancing? Refuse to reward a mother who exploits children for a midnight job? Should I play tourist? Should I play along? Should I be so torn? All I feel is this immense sadness, sadness you are not supposed to feel in New Orleans. In the French Quarter. On a Friday night.

*

I AM LEAVING NEW ORLEANS. IT IS SATURDAY MORNING, AND there is no escaping the prickly heat.

The airport shuttle arrives and the driver greets me. A friendly sort, talkative. I am his only passenger, and he focuses his attention on me. How about this heat? Have a nice stay in our city? Have you been enjoying yourself?

Yes, I answer, how about that heat?

A short distance away, we stop for another passenger. She is a fair-skinned, suntanned--no, sunburned--woman who moves with a flourish. She sports a broad-brimmed hat and oversized sunglasses and flops to her seat in dramatic fashion. When the driver sits and closes the door, she is nonstop conversation. About her long night out. About her hangover. Sun worshiping. Growing up in Georgia. The new home in Texas. The annual weeklong jaunts to the French Quarter to collect those hangovers and bask in Louisiana sunshine.

The next passenger is another woman who sits next to Sunglass Woman. She seems older, with milky skin set off by a colorful outfit. She is a resident of the French Quarter and sits directly behind me, playing tour guide. Yes, she confirms, Delta Burke does live on this block. And, yes, Delta and her husband are very nice people who come here a lot when they are not in Hollywood. And so on, as the shuttle moves down the cobblestone street. The pair of women at my back become a blur of conversation that passes over me.

Until the carriage driver appears.

He is a large black man with graying hair and an arm that he holds tightly pressed to his body in such a way that I wonder if he is maimed. With the other hand he is taking money from the couple who have apparently just disembarked from his horse-drawn carriage, and they are settling accounts in a conversational way. But the driver’s vehicle is blocking the narrow street, forcing us to stop. The sidewalk barterers continue, oblivious to the growing irritation clouding our van. The shuttle driver leans on the horn, and the woman behind me wonders aloud why the carriage driver doesn’t simply move his vehicle closer to the sidewalk and let us squeeze through.

Then Sunglass Woman speaks up. “What do you expect from a nigger?” she says casually.

Her words are like a percussion grenade exploding in our cloistered van. I whip around in disbelief at the speaker, who is now pressing back against her seat.

“Now, now,” chides the driver with a nervous laugh. “Let’s not have any of that.”

The gentle admonition exasperates me. I am furious and astonished at what I hear, but I seem helpless to speak. I have trouble forming the words for my outrage. My glower is met with indifference.

“Well, what can I say?” Sunglass Woman goes on bemusedly, as if she were in a restaurant explaining to fellow diners how she absent-mindedly placed the wrong order. “I was born in Georgia.”

As the shuttle lurches forward, I turn and can see that the carriage driver is gone. The woman behind me resumes her conversation with our newfound racist. The driver appears content having spoken his piece. I am the only person tongue-tied, locked in verbal paralysis while listening to the conversation swirling around me and searching for a speck of remorse, waiting in vain as I did for the crowds to join my panel discussion.

A few minutes later, we stop at the Sheraton to pick up our final batch of passengers, and as the driver swings out of his seat to greet his new customers, I slowly turn and zero in on Sunglass Woman.

“Before the other passengers get on board, I want to say something,” I begin. “We all heard what you said back there, and I cannot let it go without telling you that I found your comment totally offensive, racist and uncalled for.”

I can feel the prickly heat surging up my face as I wave off an attempt to defend herself. “I don’t care if you were born and raised in Georgia. Or here in New Orleans or wherever. That was a racist, deeply offensive remark, and there’s no excuse for it.”

I can sense that the words have hit their mark, but my target does not waver. “Well, that’s your opinion,” she says defiantly with a toss of her hand. When I begin to renew my attack, she interrupts and pierces me from behind her sunglasses. “Well, I may find you offensive,” she says.

I start to counter her statement by acknowledging that I’m not at all surprised she would feel that way about another person of color when the second woman suddenly places her hand on my shoulder in a conciliatory gesture.

“I agree with you that the remark was totally inappropriate,” she says soothingly, a peacemaker glancing at her sunglassed companion. “But I just want to say that when you return to your own country, I hope that you do not think that all Americans feel this way.”

For the second time my mind is reeling. I cannot believe what I have just heard. And now my fury is aimed at the peacemaker in all her well-meaning innocence.

“I am in my own country,” I say in the most coldly furious tone I can muster. “I know all Americans do not feel this way, because I am an American and I do not feel this way.”

As I say this, the woman shrinks back into her seat in a puddle of apologies. But I hear no apology from Sunglass Woman. And as the driver steps back into the shuttle and we inch out the hotel drive, I turn around. I stare out the window as we pick up speed on the boulevard and head to the airport. Am I the Invisible Man whose presence is so overlooked that someone feels she can make a racist statement with immunity? Am I the Exotic Man whose face and skin color suggest only foreignness to another American? Am I the Ineffectual Man whose voice and outrage make no difference?

Behind me, life is back to normal. There is the chatter of conversation, and as the words drift toward me, I realize that the other passengers have no idea of the outburst they had missed and the angst that followed. I can hear Sunglass Woman and the Peacemaker talking about movies and celebrities and places they visit and restaurants they like and hobbies they share. I hear them ponder the thinner Delta Burke--does she look positively super or merely different?

Beside me, the shuttle driver is humming as he makes up for lost time and speeds his human cargo to catch their flights.

I just stare at the road ahead, at the highway that is taking me out of New Orleans. I am a man who travels to speak about diversity. Who talks of change. Sells hope. Now ambushed by reality.