Chocolate City In White Beignet Powder

After 1200 miles and 11 states, you have no idea what a beignet can actually mean.

Crossing Lake Ponchartrain was a highlight of the trek. Something inherently redemptive about a first sojourn to New Orleans since the deluge. But I'm off my soapbox for the time being so I will leave all obsequious tributes for other sentimentalists...just you watch how long I make it.

East of New Orleans as Jake described is some of where shit still looks really knocked around. Of course he means it in the most respectful way possible, having essentially taken the charge of almost singlehandedly resurrecting the educational system in the city, he's earned a resignation in his laymanship. I pass through it and I dwell in different phases of mourning and curiosity.

I take a walk and then we drive around and go for po boys and Jake tells me that 60% has come back and that mansions are cheap and I am seduced by that temporary symbolic attachment (err...escapist) syndrome that asks me to stay in new places forever. This would make sense because I'd been a spit down I-10 from Houston and still somewhere. Enough.

In the morning, I meet my sister at Cafe Du Monde, you know, cloyingly tourist epicenter of beignets and coffee outside the French Quarter. It's full of the usual suspects taking pictures and not understanding that someone will eventually acknowledge you if you just wait for it. We are passing each other on the road, I am going to Texas via New Orleans and she is going to D.C. via New Orleans. We're going to live on the same coast for the first time in almost eight years and get our MFAs and go into debt.

My big sister just needs a posse of JAPs and she'll be ready for a night at TenJune.

It's 10:45 A.M. and 95 degrees and we're outside sweating, eating beignets and coffee and being siblings. After the meal I buy coffee beans with chickory for mom and we sit on a bench with the mighty Mississippi looming over the side of a small hill. A New Orleans jazzman is working the morning shift, playing a trumpet and singing different songs about God, full of crescendoes.

During one such quixotic crooning, Amy scratches her boyfriend's back and his hand engulfs hers. It's a strange time to find a piece of life romantic, road-bitten and moving, sweating in early morning Louisiana sun but that's what people in love do and while I'm profundly jealous of it, half-anxious like tourists in the cafe waiting to be acknowledged.

I tell her about the trip, about the drive through the Lower 9th Ward. She asks how it was there and I tell her how we had to get out of the area before it got dark because there still isn't electricity and it's not safe to be there after dark. I tell her it was pretty messed up. I don't tell her about the clusters of empty houses that are just rotting, about the Xs that the National Guard put on the sides of the houses and the numbers beside them that designate how many dead people or animals are inside. There is still graffiti on the houses where residents indicated that unattended bodies were there. As a further embarrassment, the National Guard placed a date on the walls to designate when it finally made it to each house. The discrepancy built as high as ten days from the houses we passed.

I asked Jake how many people died and he said somewhere between three and five thousand and I can't fathom it because it's not a number anyone actually knows and certainly not one that anyone touts like the September 11 tally. Jake begins an explanation of the obscene number of people who were shot dead by our own National Guard whose job it was to shoot looters who were trying to get supplies from flooded supermarkets. I don't tell my sister about it either. I ask Jake how could he not be angry and he says that he deals with it by trying to get the kids educated and out of New Orleans to college, but few ever seem to make it because the quality of their education is always so far behind the pace. I always take the education I received for granted and now more than ever, I really feel guilty for the times I lagged.

We finish our coffee and I finish the last five hours of the trip, passing by the alligator farms for tourists and the crawfish businesses run out of the back of trucks on the roadsides of I-10. I cross over into Texas, which lets you know you're in Texas every few feet. The ultimate arrogance of the transition is when you see a sign posted about five miles into the state explaining that the Beaumont is 10 miles away and that El Paso (the end of Texas) is 897 miles away. I've miss the arrogance and then I'm home.