America Divine: Travels in the Hidden South
Dallas Angguish
Copyright 2010 by Dallas Angguish
Smashwords Edition
Published by Phosphor Books
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ISBN 13: 978-1-4657-5498-1
About the Author
Dallas Angguish was born in a small town in Australia in 1968. His short stories and prose have appeared in the journals Lodestar Quarterly, TEXT and Polari Journal as well as in anthologies such as Dumped (2000), Bend, But Don’t Shatter (2004) and When You’re a Boy (2011).
Dedicated to Martin
Part One: Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez
Vieux Carré Awesome Voodoo and Mutual Pleasure Society
Part Two: You Can't Show Your Bosom Before Nine P.M.
This book is a collection of travel tales. I use the word ‘tales’ deliberately, as it indicates that the stories are about more than mere facts. I like the way that the word tale is used—as in fairy tale and tall tale—to indicate both the telling of something beyond the mundane and the telling of something from a perspective that is out of the ordinary, perhaps even strange.
The landscape of these tales is the American South, a place that I have visited a number of times over a decade or so. Although I am certainly writing about my experience of the South during those visits, I am doing a bit more than that. I am writing about a landscape that exists beyond the physical boundaries of the Southern states. I am writing about a South of the mind, a metaphorical South.
My first encounters with the American Deep South were as a child, through old black and white films that were being replayed on television. I was a reclusive boy, constantly skipping school, and I spent many of my mornings watching these old movies.
The first one was Jezebel, starring Bette Davis and set in New Orleans. That was enough to get me hooked. Then I saw Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte, Gone With The Wind, The Yearling, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Streetcar Named Desire and a number of others. Of course, these films are partly about the real South, the historical and factual South, but they are more about the metaphorical South, the South of the mind and of the imagination. I got to know this South very intimately as I avoided the drudgery of my all-boys Catholic school.
I’m not sure why the local TV station in Toowoomba, Queensland, played these old films, but I’m glad that they did. It led to a life-long fascination. Soon after this time, I discovered and fell in love with Southern literature, principally Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and the plays of Tennessee Williams.
There are many reasons why I admire Southern cinema and literature. The main one is that they reflect personal, racial, gender and sexual struggles for fair treatment and equal rights in ways that Australian cinema and literature, bar a few rare exceptions, are still yet to do.
The tall tales in America Divine document my journey to discover more of the real South as much as they document my continuing love of the cinema and literature, and the myth, of America’s Southern states.
Because I am writing about a number of different visits to the South, the stories jump about in time. I think that’s part of the fun. It also reflects that the South, if anywhere, is a place in which time tends to collapse. The past, present and future comingle and blur together. Almost all of the pieces were written before Hurricane Katrina (2005) and have a distinctly different feel to the few that were written after (such as Shallow Water, Oh Mamma).
Furthermore, because I am often writing about a South of the mind, a metaphorical South, the tales have that taste of the South that I encountered in those films and books. This is often the taste of the actual South, but sometimes differs from reality in subtle ways that are difficult to express in words.
While travelling in the South, I find it impossible to relate to the place and people without those films and books feeding into my perception. Every street corner is haunted by those films, every building filled with celluloid ghosts. The landscapes and the people are ‘written over’ by the literature and by the myths.
I’m not sure if I should be concerned about that. Perhaps I should, but the metaphorical South so completely overlaps the landscape and features of the actual South that, for an outsider anyway, it is practically impossible to see one without the other.
Southerners themselves often talk about their home with reference to those very same films and books and so visitors are encouraged to experience the actual South while reflecting on the metaphorical South. It’s almost as if Southerners don’t really want us to see the real thing. Perhaps, in order to protect their much loved privacy, they prefer to hide behind a cinematic and literary veneer.
That veneer is very nostalgic and tends to gloss over that which is dark about the South – the racial inequality, the conservative (often closed) mindset, the environmental degradation, the lack of focus on heritage and cultural preservation, the political hypocrisy. But, every place has its good and bad. Every place has beauty and ugliness. Every region has its saints and its villains. The South is no different.
I intend to go back to the South again. They say that anyone who has been there once cannot help but return. Perhaps you know that already but, if you’ve never been, I hope that you can make the trip soon.
In the meantime, I offer you a visit to the metaphorical South in the form of America Divine. I hope y’all enjoy your stay.
Part One: Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez
Orleans Parish Prison, New Orleans, 2010
Rain poured down outside, not that Brooke Hutton could tell in the windowless interview room of the OPP, the Orleans Parish Prison. The fortress-like walls of New Orleans’ infamous city jail were blocking out all but the slightest sense of the downpour.
She wasn’t used to these sudden storms that arrived late on summer afternoons, their dark clouds rolling in like a heavy blanket being drawn up over the city. They didn’t get storms like that in Camden, Maine, her hometown. Just one more reason why New Orleans seemed to her like a whole other world.
Brooke still hadn’t got around to keeping an umbrella in the car, so she was soaked through as a result of her dash from the parking lot to the prison entrance. Even her bra and panties were damp.
The concrete interior of the OPP lacked ventilation and the interview room was beginning to feel a bit like a sauna. The surface of the old metal-topped desk in front of her fogged up whenever she touched it. Her royal blue skirt suit—so perfect for the mild summers of New England but a woolen torment in the Louisiana heat—was letting off its own steam.
She didn’t think she’d ever get used to this humidity. It sapped her of energy and drew all the moisture out of her body so that it pooled on her skin. Sometimes, she couldn’t shake the thought that the fluid of her innards was slowly leaking away; the juice of her liver pooling in her armpits, the water of her spleen soaking into her pantyhose.
At other times, she felt as if she was no more than sawdust inside and that, if her skin lost any more of its suppleness, she could very well split right open and her viscera would scatter on the wind. She often thought such things; kind of crazy things.
She was holding out hope for an early autumn. If she didn’t get it, if it didn’t cool down soon, she might find herself on the other side of that desk; being assessed by one of her colleagues for admittance to the OPP’s mental health ‘ward’.
She’d only been in New Orleans a month. But what a month! She’d seen nearly a dozen clients a day since she arrived. Most of them were suicide attempts, but nearly as many had been Katrina survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder. There’d also been a handful of out and out psychotics. One was a murderer who’d killed three people. But this was why she’d come – New Orleans was in the middle of a mental health crisis and she wanted to help.
Almost as soon as she’d graduated from Harvard, she’d started feeling dissatisfied with the direction her life was taking. With her psychology degree in hand, she’d gone straight back to Camden and joined a respected private practice. A year later and she hadn’t dealt with anything more challenging than a rich lawyer’s wife with a minor drinking problem. That’s if you didn’t count the cluster of teen kleptomaniacs—all private school girls with wealthy daddies—that she’d counseled just before getting the offer to come to New Orleans.
It was an offer that she couldn’t refuse, especially if she wanted to salvage any sense that she might be able to make a real difference. What was the point of all those years of study if she was just going to help housewives reduce their drinking and assist spoilt teenagers to feel better about their pathetic pleas for attention?
She hadn’t been in New Orleans more than a day before the reality of the situation made her think that perhaps she’d made a mistake in coming. New Orleans, long self-described as ‘the city that care forgot’, was becoming the city that couldn’t forget, no matter how hard it tried. The inhabitants were drowning under an up-swell of trauma and despair carried into the city on the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.
Katrina survivors were haunted by terrible images and memories; images of the dead floating on the city’s flooded streets and of whole neighborhoods decimated. Memories of days and days left on rooftops unaided with no water or food. Memories of communities and families torn apart as the city’s inhabitants were sent into exile in far-flung states like Georgia, Kansas and Texas. These images and memories were their constant companions. They were also breaking down New Orleanians’ historic nonchalance and resolve in the face of crisis and disaster so that, post-Katrina, the suicide rate had tripled.
Not only that but, according to a Centre for Disease Control and Prevention report Brooke read on the flight down from Maine, up to fifty percent of adults in the crescent city had clinically significant psychological distress. Another report she’d seen, by Louisiana State University, said that twenty percent of the city’s residents were suffering serious mental illness. All of this was happening in the context of a mental health infrastructure severely undermined by the Katrina disaster. Much to Brooke’s surprise, the system was in such disarray that the Orleans Parish Prison now housed New Orleans’ largest psychiatric ward; with some 60 ‘beds’ out of a shockingly inadequate 130 across the city.
But, judging by the hefty file handed to her when she’d arrived at the jail, the client she was waiting to assess had problems that long predated Hurricane Katrina.
When she opened the file, she found a scrawled note on top:
I swim in the shallow water, oh mamma, and the King comes to me in his panther skin. I sing in the shallow water, oh mamma, and my skin shivers with his touch. Shallow water, oh mamma, that ghost is in me and I sing. Shallow water, oh mamma, that king is in me.
From what the police had told Brooke, these words had been graffitied all over the French Quarter by Shanice Coronet, the client Brooke was about to meet. The words had been written on a cluster of tombs in Saint Louis cemetery Number One, in chalk on the pavement all along Bourbon Street and on the front of more than a dozen houses. The day before, they’d even been written on the floor of the Café du Monde; in icing sugar that had fallen from the hundreds of beignets consumed over the course of a busy Sunday morning. That night, they’d been written in Shanice’s own blood on the steps of the cathedral on Jackson Square. That was when the police tracked Shanice down and brought her in.
Brooke knew that the words were a variation on a traditional New Orleans song, one that was sometimes played during a funeral march, but she didn’t know its significance. Before she had a chance to review the other contents of the file, Shanice was brought in by a guard. Brooke’s breath caught in her throat at the sight of her.
She was tall, easily six feet, and beautiful; literally breathtakingly beautiful. African-American with night-dark skin, her hair and eyes had a luminous quality to them. Her hair was below her shoulders and dead straight. Her lips were full, her skin perfectly smooth with a hint of blue in the black. She was dressed in tight blue jeans and a fitted t-shirt of a vibrant pink. Brooke felt stupid for it, but the first thing she thought was that Shanice could easily be a model.
The OPP guard man-handled Shanice into the chair opposite her and Brooke instantly hated him. He was a typical bully in uniform; white, balding and overweight. He left the room and locked them in, leaving Shanice shackled to the table which itself was bolted to the floor.
Brooke then felt a little uneasy. She’d never been in the presence of someone so overwhelmingly beautiful in her life. She now understood what it meant when someone was described as ‘stunning’. Shanice Coronet’s appearance was over-powering, distracting, awesome. Brooke felt like a stunned rabbit, a deer in the headlights of Shanice’s physical presence. A sack of sawdust whose seams had suddenly popped.
Pulling herself together, Brooke flipped through the police report detailing the events leading up to Shanice’s detainment: the graffiti, the strange words scrawled all over the quarter, the blood drawn from her own belly to write the words on the cathedral steps. Brooke inconspicuously glanced at Shanice’s stomach and could just make out the shape of a bandage under her shirt. She then quickly returned to the police report.
‘You haven’t introduced yourself,’ Shanice said. Her voice was a surprise. It was deep, and resonant. Unlike most of Brooke’s clients, she was very well spoken.
‘Oh, I’m sorry. My name is Brooke Hutton, I’m a psychologist.’
‘The guard told me what you were already.’
‘Did he tell you why you’ve been brought to talk to me?’
‘So you can assess whether or not I’m insane.’
‘Well, no. So that we can get support for you, if you need it, and keep you from harming yourself again.’
‘It was only a little bit of blood. I’ve got more than enough to go around. I could paint the whole quarter if I wanted to.’
That blasé statement worried Brooke a lot. Such a relaxed attitude to the spilling of one’s own blood could indicate serious psychosis. Shanice must have picked up on Brooke’s concern because, right at that moment, she smiled; a big, uninhibited smile designed to disarm. Brooke turned away so as not to be dazed. She flipped past the police report to documents from an earlier run-in with the mental health system because of depression. Before she could read very much, Shanice interrupted again.
‘Those papers just tell lies. You won’t learn anything about me from them.’
‘Alright,’ Brooke said, pushing the folder aside so as to garner Shanice’s trust, ‘why don’t you tell me about yourself, in particular why you think you’re here.’
‘I’m here because of the king. The king is in me.’
‘Right, that’s what you’ve written here,’ Brooke said, indicating the hand-written note. ‘But what does that mean exactly?’
‘The king enters me and dazzles me. He comes into me and makes me moan. He’s set up house inside me. He’s made me his own possession.’ It was as though she was reciting poetry. But the words were disturbing.
‘Who is this king?’ Brooke asked.
‘The Panther Lord, the long-dead Indian King. He loves me. He is a ghost.’
‘A ghost?’
‘Yes,’ she answered flatly, challenging Brooke to doubt her.
‘And this ghost, he enters you?’
‘He enters me and makes me moan. He’s set up house inside me…’
‘He’s made you his own possession…. Yes, you said that before. So, can you tell me more about this Panther Lord?’
‘He is a long-dead sorcerer King of the Mississippi Indians. He has the power to call storms, to wield lightning like a whip, to take the form of a panther to hunt and devour his enemies. He enters me and unravels me from the inside out.’
‘By ‘enter’, do you mean he physically possesses you?’
‘Physically, spiritually, sexually. He throws me down on the ground and shakes me ‘till I scream. He owns me. I am his.’
‘I see,’ Brooke said, a cold shiver running down her spine. She’d never had a client who believed they were the victim of spiritual possession before. She wasn’t sure how to proceed. They certainly hadn’t covered that in her classes at Harvard.
‘But, why you Shanice? Why has this ghost chosen you?’
‘Look at me. Look at me real deep.... I’m special. I have my own hidden power. The King sees me for what I am. He says I’m blessed. He says, in his time, people like me were revered. We were the ones who spoke with the dead. We were the ones who walked in two worlds.’
Brooke turned to write a few notes before proceeding. She needed a moment to gather her thoughts. A deep sigh from Shanice stopped her mid word.
‘You don’t believe me,’ she said.
‘I believe that you believe that this is what is happening to you,’ Brooke reassured her.
‘That’s just psycho-babble,’ Shanice sneered. ‘Just condescending psycho-babble…. But I don’t care. I can tell by that awful ensemble you’re wearing that you’re both color-blind and very narrow in your worldview. You will never accept the unseen. The King will never show himself to you.’
Brooke felt stung. It was her favorite suit. She returned to the file. For years, Shanice had been in and out of therapy for depression. But so far Brooke could find nothing in the file that would indicate the kind of delusion she was currently displaying. Brooke knew that these kinds of things rarely just came out of nowhere. They were precipitated by something, usually something awful.
‘Can you tell me when you first started feeling that this ghost was possessing you? What was happening in your life then?’
‘It doesn’t matter when it started. That has nothing to do with it. The King enters me and dazzles me. That’s all that matters.’ Brooke recognized that for the diversion that it was.
‘O.k., so if it doesn’t matter when it started it won’t hurt for you to tell me. Was it during Katrina, or maybe after?’
‘That would be simple for you, wouldn’t it? Then you could explain what’s happening to me by blaming it on Katrina. Then you wouldn’t have to face all the things that exist that cannot be seen. Well, I don’t blame Katrina. I thank Katrina. What you don’t know is that Katrina wasn’t just any old storm. It was sent by the King. Sent to bring the King and me together. That storm blew on his bidding.’
‘I see. Can you tell me more about that?’ Brooke refrained from taking any more notes. She sensed it would prevent Shanice from opening up further.
‘The Indian King has been trapped down in his tomb, down under the levees, for thousands of years. The anthropologists and archaeologists and sociologists don’t know anything about him. They’re like you. They are closed to the unseen…. He has been down in that hole all alone for so long. He spent year after year, century after century, pacing in his grave. Just pacing from wall to wall because he couldn’t go anywhere else. There was a curse put on him by an enemy sorcerer to trap his spirit in the tomb.’
Brooke had to give Shanice credit. It was a creative delusion. But why it had developed she still couldn’t determine.
‘But the Panther King desired to be free,’ Shanice continued, ‘and nothing would stop him from finding a way. So he spent his time in the hole developing his magical powers. Then, he worked up the magic that made that storm blow and the waters to swell. And then the levees broke and that tomb was bust open and the curse lifted and the King… the King he came to me on the water….’
Shanice’s face was alight with a strange emotion that Brooke had trouble identifying. Was it love? Desire? Mania? Or was it terror? Perhaps a mixture of all four. Brooke turned back to the file. There was a blue envelope in the back she hadn’t opened yet. It was stamped with the name of a clinic in Uptown. She’d never heard of it. As she took the envelope out of the file, Shanice began to sing.
‘Shallow water, oh mamma. I swim in the shallow water, oh mamma, and the King comes to me in his panther skin. I sing in the shallow water, oh mamma, and my skin shivers with his touch.’ Her voice was as beautiful as her form; a deep, spine-tingling, bluesy contralto with a heart-breaking cadence.
‘You have a beautiful voice,’ Brooke said without thinking.
‘Thank you,’ Shanice smiled. I did choir when I was little, at school.’ Then she resumed singing. ‘Shallow water, oh mamma, that ghost is in me and I sing. Shallow water, oh mamma, that king is in me. Shallow water, oh mamma, shallow water, oh mamma….’
Brooke grabbed hold of the metal table-top to steady herself as her head spun. The sound of that voice, echoing in the steamy windowless room, made her feel strange. As though she were about to faint.
Shanice stopped singing abruptly.
‘What’s the matter…?’ she demanded. Her eyes narrowed to pins as she stared at Brooke intently. ‘What’s the matter?’ she repeated, a hint of fear coloring her voice. ‘You feel like you’re going to swoon? You feel all hot and like you could just float up out of your body?’
‘What?’ Brooke asked, as she steadied herself and took a deep breath. ‘No… I’m just feeling a little dizzy… from the heat….’
‘He touched you! I know he did!’ Shanice accused, losing her cool demeanor for the first time. ‘The King touched you, didn’t he! You felt him!’ Shanice sounded terrified, jealous and, worst of all, like she wanted nothing more than to hurt Brooke as badly as she could. For the first time since she’d arrived in New Orleans, Brooke was glad for the manacles that kept her clients in their seat.
‘Calm down Shanice. I’m just feeling a little faint. It’s passing now… see, I’m feeling better already.’ It was a lie. She felt terrible. But she couldn’t let Shanice know. Her light-headedness clearly fed into Shanice’s delusion somehow. She needed to get through this interview and get out of that stuffy room.
While she opened the blue envelope from the file, she distracted Shanice with a question that she hoped would lead to a calmer conversation.
‘You said you did choir at school? What school was that?’ There was a long pause before Shanice answered, in which she eyed Brooke with what seemed a newfound curiosity.
‘Saint Aug, in the Seventh Ward,’ she finally said.
‘Saint Aug? Is that Saint Augustine’s?’
‘That’s right,’ she said, a mischievous glint to her eyes, ‘Saint Augustine’s.’
Brooke thought that she’d heard about Saint Augustine’s before. If it was the school she thought it was, it was spoken of very highly in New Orleans. People said that it produced some of the best students of any high-school in the South. If she remembered correctly, it had been an all-black school during segregation but now accepted students from any background, though it was still largely an African-American school. There was a Saint Augustine’s marching band that was nationally renowned. But she could have sworn that it was a high school only for boys. Maybe she had that part wrong.