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DONL 2
Last year I wrote to some of you about an event at the Superdome known as the
SuperFair, which is a big carnival with rides inside the Dome. It is another
predominantly black attended event at the Superdome which some of my
co-workers think would be a great event to bomb, kill the coloreds.
What I wrote about last year was a drive-by shooting outside the Dome one of
the nights after the fair. Whoever did that shooting is still at large, but
the shooting that was done in retaliation has eight or nine people facing
charges. Four are facing first degree murder charges which carries a
possible death penalty.
The idea that night after the first shooting was to go into enemy
territory--presumably the neighborhood of the first shooter--and then "kill
anyone we see." That "anyone" turned out to be a kid named Tim, and he was
called Big Tim because he was big for his age, that age being
twelve-years-old. But he looked older to the multiple car loads of searching
18-20 year olds, and the fact that he was limping from a sprained ankle did
not enter into the equation for these teenagers with a vendetta. Up
Cambronne in Pigeontown Big Tim walked until he saw a group of boys with
obvious ill intent exit a vehicle, and then he started running, as best he
could. The boys ran after him, shooting as they went. Two car loads of
boys trailed after in the street. The boys in this trailing group copped
pleas, turned states evidence and will average five year sentences. The boys
chasing Tim eventually caught him because one of the bullets entered his
spine and caused him to fall down. And this is how it goes here: after Tim
fell down from an obvious bullet wound, these boys did not freak out and jump
in their cars to flee. These four boys stood over Tim's large dying
twelve-year-old body and fired more bullets into the flesh of his torso, and
into his head.
I don't know anything about this kid, Tim. Maybe he wasn't an innocent, but
twelve-year-old's should not end this way.
I have driven around this small town extensively during my searches for
property and I know the streets and neighborhoods pretty well. When a murder
happens here I can often picture almost exactly where it happened, and these
memories have become a plotted map inside my head. And there are days when
the math comes to bear down on me and everywhere I go I see bloodstains on
the sidewalks. My first two years here the city recorded a total of almost
eight hundred murders. For a per capita comparison to a city the size of NY
I multiply by twenty and get sixteen thousand.
And I have to some degree integrated myself into this predominately black New
Orleans community and I know many of the children and I know some of the
murderers, and as frustrating as it can get here with people constantly
dropping trash in the streets, and disrespecting each other, and cussing, and
killing, I still cannot arrive at a place where I can understand this all
encompassing hatred that is felt by so many of the area whites, or the
blinding fear and intolerance which rules so many of the little minds 'round
here.
I have become kind of numb to "n" word, and try not to let offenders get
under my skin. But the cumulative effect still wears me down in the end and
there are times when my white friends say "nigger" and I just smile the smile
of system shut down, tap my foot as eulogy to the boy(s) with no father(s),
the boy no one hugged, who received no compliments ever, and never a special
treatment, but did one day gain a notoriety, bleeding out, on a street corner.
DONL 1
I bought my school bus yellow 85 Dodge pickup with Cadillac spoke hubcaps and
a homemade plywoood bedcover from a trim carpenter named Timmy. Timmy is
having marital problems which somehow have become so out of hand that his
whole family has come to witness numerous fights between Timmy and wife, and
some of these fights have occurred in front of their two children. Timmy's
mom found this last bit so upsetting that she mailed him a letter which very
uncharacteristically had her espousing the rather base opinion that by
fighting like they do at so many family gatherings, and in front of their
children, "they are no better than niggers."
As insults go among the average white Louisianan, this was a doozy. For it
to come from a mother to a son is almost unthinkable. Timmy once said to me
that the annual college football game between Grambling and Southern would be
a good time to put a bomb in the Superdome because "you could kill so many
fuckin' niggers." That pretty much expresses a prevailing sentiment among
white people in Louisiana. No, not all white people feel that way here, but
more than you would like to believe. Many, many more than you would like to
believe. Or so I presume (what you would like to believe).
I used to explain to my likeable yet so completely casual rascist white
co-workers that white and black people in Louisiana to the casual observer
that I am, have more in common culturally than any white/black population I
have ever been around. "You eat the same foods, you are influenced by each
other's music, and the way whites around here talk sounds more black than
white much of time," I would antagonize. "You say 'ax' for 'ask', you say
'zink' for 'sink', you say 'I'm going to make groceries,' whereas the rest of
the white world is saying 'I'm going grocery shopping.'"
That the two races have been "mixing" around here for three hundred years is
a most beautifully obvious thing and yet vehemently denied on individual
basis's.
And coming home from an average summer work day to be met by a front porch
full of neighborhood youth, some gangsters, and maybe a parent or two, all
black skinned, playing dominoes, or card games like pity pat, or tonk, and
the only thing more frustrating than hearing them refer to each other as
"nigger" is the absolutely ridiculous refrain of "don't say that, Mr. Jim (or
Miss Amanda) don't like you using that word up here." I suspect I hear the
word "nigger" coming from black mouths more than white. I don't know what
that means, but I've heard it used as an excuse many times: "Shit, they call
themselves that, why can't we?"
At some point I just stopped answering, out loud.