Old Blood

I’ve always claimed Louisiana. On a recent trip, I wondered if it would claim me.

Imagine a white house with a wraparound porch and a second-floor balcony on a boulevard lined by live oak trees strung with Mardi Gras beads. There is a brick courtyard with wrought iron furniture and decorative ferns and a bar on the porch serving mint juleps all hours of the day and night. Inside, the lights are low and incense smoke curls towards you. You start up a large, winding staircase lined by peeling plaster walls. The steps veer sideways, worn away through centuries, and colored light filters through a skylight shining above. There is no working elevator, so you’re lugging your suitcase, and your arm muscles start to burn from the effort. On the top floor, you walk through the dim hallway to No.19 and open the door. You see me inside, standing over my suitcase, wearing a black dress with white polka dots and gathering my things for dinner. My spouse turns towards me.

“You’re always trying to prove you belong here,” he observes. He’s referring to the 30-minute drive from the airport, during which I wasted no time informing the Lyft driver that my Mom is from Metairie and my Dad is from Denham Springs.

Revealing these details had an immediate - and desired - effect; our driver shared that he went to Southern and took some classes at LSU. I said something like: “Oh, that makes sense since they’re close together.” He chuckled, “Southern is all the way on the other side of town!” I blushed - I had meant that they were located in the same city albeit different neighborhoods. I tried to recover. “Oh yeah, near the Krispy Kreme right? My Dad loves getting doughnuts there.” In the car, my spouse looked at me and raised an eyebrow. He’s never had a hot doughnut from the Krispy Kreme near Southern. For all he knows, I’m making it up.

Now, I slip on my sandals as we prepare to leave the room. “I wanted the Lyft driver to know that I love it here,” I said.

We take the streetcar to dinner, and it is populated by people with bags - locals with groceries and tourists with Aunt Sally’s pralines. We have neither, and I wonder how others perceive us. Do the tourists think we’re native New Orleanians? Do the locals think I’m a tourist?

Sitting in silence, I can’t share my resume of reasons I belong on this rickety wooden seat, speeding down St. Charles avenue. I can’t explain that though I don’t have an accent, I do know where to go to eat the most picturesque beignets in the city (Cafe du Monde in City Park). Or that, though I didn’t grow up in Louisiana, I’ve watched the LSU Tigers on Saturday nights in the Fall for as long as I can remember. Or that I don’t have Cajun ancestry, but red beans & rice is the food I’d always ask Mom to make when I came home from college.

My spouse and I don’t press the call button in time for our stop, and we miss it. As we exit into the misty night, one stop past where we were supposed to get off, checking our phones for walking directions to the muffuletta place, I wonder if that’s a dead giveaway.

The Columns Hotel, New Orleans, LA

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Now imagine walking through a rental car facility, suitcase swerving behind you on the linoleum. The second the sliding glass doors to the parking garage open, you’re hit with a sweltering heat, a blanket of humidity. The ceilings are low and gray, and even though it’s morning, it’s dim inside, with the only light coming from the glowing Enterprise kiosk. You see me and my spouse with blue roller suitcases approaching a woman wearing a black fanny pack. She opens her arms wide.

“Welcome, Welcome!” She cries with an enthusiasm rare for airport employees.

“Is it welcome to New Orleans or welcome home?” She asks.

“Welcome to New Orleans,” says my spouse.

“We’re so glad you’re here,” she says, beaming. I can’t help but smile back; I love how proud Louisianans are of their state in spite of its myriad issues. It matches the attitude of my family members, whom we’re visiting next in Baton Rouge.

After pulling up our reservation, the attendant walks us to the area to pick up our car. “Is it your first time here?” She continues.

“Oh no, my whole family is from Louisiana,” I said.

Without missing a beat, she says: “Well then, it’s in your blood. Welcome home.”

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Now imagine a road, old and grey, pockmarked with holes, heat mirages rising off of it. Just ahead, you see a decorative gate with the words “Amite City Cemetery” in wrought iron arcing across the top. You notice that the white paint is peeling as your car squeezes through, the wheels bumping on the gravel road. You drive straight back to a live oak tree and the spanish moss dripping off of it is stagnant in the muggy air. In the tree’s shadow, there’s a trash can, and when you peer inside, there are decorative flowers splayed across the bottom, bleached by the sun. You look up and see two headstones with PARKER etched across the back. Between them is a granite vase. On the other side of the headstones, you see my aunt, her hand cupping her chin. She bought the blooms at Hobby Lobby and secured them with wire. Now, she watches as I place the yellow, pink, red, orange, and purple flower arrangement inside the vase. The spray is massive, three feet wide by one and a half feet high, the flowers spilling over the tombstones.

My aunt points to the road to our right, “We want everyone to see the flowers from the road, so they know how much we love our family.” I follow her finger to the road, on the other side of which is a taxidermist. The placement of the shop would be funny to me, if we were anywhere else, if we weren’t standing at the graves of my grandparents.

Amite City Cemetery (Credit: Town of Amite City)

NeeNee and Poppa are inextricable from my memories in Louisiana, and it would feel wrong to travel here without paying homage to them. I usually make a side trip to Amite because sitting on the grass and seeing their names written out on the granite means they still exist, they’re not forgotten.

I know they would’ve liked that we were visiting their graves, bringing flowers and scraping off the weeds that have grown over Poppa’s footstone, even if as my aunt reminds me, they’re not here, they’re with the Lord. The first time my spouse visited Louisiana, we drove NeeNee to the cemetery and she listed all of the relatives interred inside the gates, pointing to tombstones. Today, my aunt follows this ritual as we stand in the heat. I used to be annoyed by the repetition, but now I think of it as an oral history. She’s keeping the story alive, so when I come here with my children, I will remember all my threads of connection to this place.

“It’s hard to get into the cemetery,” she says. “Anyone who wants a plot these days has to go to the new one on Mulberry Street, there just aren’t any left here unless you’re old blood.” She pauses and looks at the flowers, fluffing them to fall just-so over the tombstones. “We’re old blood.”

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