Shibboleths of City Siddity

The last waftings of New Orleans are drifting off my psyche leaving stranges traces: I visited somewhere entirely unfamiliar and, through that, my own past.

I was anxious about visiting-- felt I was a stranger entering a strange land, attending a huge conference in a big and culturally unfamiliar city.  The first night there I went for a walk to remember my big city ways.  I moved to my current semi-rural home from the middle, and I do mean the middle, of Indianapolis, so I once had city-wise ways.  

Each city has it's own flavor and NOLA has perhaps been both romanticized and demystified in uniquely striking ways.  That is a different topic. I had fears. Uniquely bad things can happen swiftly and sometimes invisibly in cities. When I lived in Indy, there were gangs on the hoof not far from my house and skirting clumps of young men could be a skill and a gamble. Crowded, tourist-laden streets are important to local economies that operate both on the surface and, more ominously, beneath it. And a woman alone is always aware of a special vulnerability.  Suffice it to say that there must be something intriguing there because I left with a sense of its livability, even though everything in me wanted to say "no! never!"

But was my fear somehow born from a place of privilege, an lens of outsider assumption? African American's have a word for this attitude of false superiority--siddity. One of the layers of meaning in that term, is that siddity folk come from the same place but act like they don't.  I was once a city gal, walking down borderland streets and yet here,  I was literally on the border of the French Quarter and did not venture into it until my 2nd day there. When a colleague posted pictures of his forays on Facebook,  I noted that I hadn't even visited and he offered to walk me into that world.  It was lovely.  The world of the Quarter itself (in festival mode) was, yes,  full of--as a cabbie put it later--the 3 P's (pourings, piss, puke)--all of which were disgustingly aromatic and ubiquitous, but the waft of music was masterful and the art--everywhere.  My guide and I wandered through, getting acquainted, keeping time to blues, admiring architectural tableaus.  We found an Edward Hopperian diner serving plain ol' breakfast and savored cool air, hot coffee, new friendship.

That small stroll gave me the gumption to wade through the festival and then across a quieter swath of old neighborhoods to attend a crawfish boil the next evening.  Again, as a solo woman, I set a certain pace, wove through the crowd with assurance and then strolled with a purposeful step through the quiet back streets.  My walk of two miles across the French Quarter left me with a nostalgia for the architecture of past centuries, surprising me with its ghosts--like muted lullaby strains crooned by a lost grandmother.

I re-experienced how the middle of city can have surprising corners of serenity.  It's the hidden places--the back streets, the alleys and the "empty" lots that are populated with  welcome sunlight, needed shade, shelter from the traffic of vehicle and human.  Strangely sacred spaces emerge in the midst of the most industrial of spots.  Indeed, the spare haiku of empty railroad track, the twilight warehouse stoop, the drowsy rusted scaffold-- feel like chapels in the city's storm.  And Sunday mornings can have an unworldly peace in the middle of an urban center.

When I lived in Indy, I did a backward commute--I drove over 40 miles to an outlying town in a bedroom community and, somewhat ironically, did social work there.  In the course of my work, I sometimes rode with the sheriff's department to accomplish a visit.  One time a deputy exclaimed, upon hearing where I lived, "Do you sleep with a gun under your pillow?!"  I found that comment (and the mindset it revealed) both amusing and insulting. 

Thinking we're better is usually siddity.  And me thinking that the dangers of New Orleans are any worse than the dangers of rural Western Monroe county is just plain siddity once I acclimatize.  A stranger in a strange land is always in danger.  But there are usually more friends than enemies wherever we wander...if we don't get too siddity about it.  The guy selling me pralines in the little shop took the time to commiserate about obnoxious motorcycle sounds and confided his dismay at how they overrode sublime live cello music the day before.  He even shared the name of the cellist when I revealed my love for cello sounds.  We shared a connection about things that matter--traffic, rudeness, cello music.

As my last captain's log entry pointed out, trauma happens in any neighborhood.  Indeed, my job in that pricey outlying suburb was Child Welfare and--contrary to the ridiculous occasional exclamation from the ignorant--YES, the rich and privileged do abuse and neglect their children (They just have better lawyers).  So murder and suicide happen in the lovely rural hills and they happen in crowded city neighborhoods and it's usually all about love and despair in the small world of family and friends.  Despite the hauntings of the drive-by shooting--the worst fear of a lawman anywhere is the "domestic dispute."

I lived in the middle of Indianapolis in a neighborhood bordered by a schizophrenic pathwork of gentrificition and gangs. One night the kids from next door--all six of them--showed up bundled in their winter coats to troupe up our stairs and sit in a silent row on our couch to wait out a particularly violent fight between their mom and her boyfriend. She and I had chattted now and again beacuse her lone boy-child, Jonathon, tended to play with my son. She told me of her struggle to find work, the blessing of her church people, and the wonders of imbibing aloe juice (I suspect she was hoping I'd participate in her fledgling business selling said product).

That mundane pause in our usual passing by perhaps allowed enough human trust for her to send the kids to me for safety in a bad moment. As they sat there, utterly still, politely refusing to take off their coats, I checked with the kids about whether they had been in danger (no), if they ever had been (no) and if they thought I should call the police (no). I didn't.

The police derisively referred to my neighborhood as "the swamp" and tended to treat most of us, even when victimized, as if we were swamp creatures that would be better off devouring each other. Factor in that this family was African American and I just couldn't bring myself to seek such dubious "assistance." One time all the tools, my husband's lifeblood and the source of our income, were stolen from his locked truck. The neighbors behind us said they knew who stole them but were too afraid to say. The police didn't even blink.  That's just the way it was.

So I wonder about Jonathon just as I worry about the children of the suicide couple down the road.  Jonathon is an African American male in a large city in the midwest;  his prospects are not good.  He grew up poor, but churched, loved but a little isolated, handsome, but--to the police--just another black kid running loose on the downtown sidewalks.  I don't even remember his last name or what kind of music he liked.  I do know that, when we went to the movies, he was fearless in the face of Jurrasic Park's Tyrannosaurus Rex.  My son and I had to move to the back of the theater and hide our heads in each other's arms.  Johnathon just sat there, stoic, amused, in the very first row as a monster roared out, in huge 2-D splendor.  3-D adult survival is proving difficult for my 23 year old son, how much less or more so for his old friend?  

The thin line between alienation and privacy wavers indistinct and maddening no matter our environment.  The answer is not evident to me on how to find it, cross it with timely kindness, respect it with dignity. How do I keep the siddity part of me settled down and the down home part of me open to insight and real human connection?  Are there ways for me to listen to the praline guy, to connect with Jonathon, to reach Susie when we nod in passing that will grow my soul, that will allow their souls to grow, too, in that moment of connection?