My Second Time in New Orleans

We pull up to a downtown hotel with a marble lobby. Like most downtowns, in major U.S. cities it’s dead, with echoes of a decadent past. My room faces a brick wall and is cleaning-supply heavy. I call downstairs for something lighter. 

Six floors up, I have a view overlooking a parking lot, which indeed has more light. I can look into empty office buildings and watch as not a single car enters or exits the freshly striped lot. 

Eventually I sleep, after spending hours mapping out my storytelling facilitation for the morning. It’s my first time guiding a specifically Black and Jewish cohort through a story workshop, a unique chance to reflect on the art I’ve been making and what, if anything, “Black Jewish Storytelling” is. 

I lead with “calling in the ancestors,” so they wake me, on time. And usher in the good vibes for the morning.

The facilitation is warm, and generative, and mostly about legacy: what is it that we’ve been given, and what we are leaving for generations behind us. As we share around the room, we begin to really see each other. 

Outside it’s wet and rainy, with occasional flashes of light. 

After the session, we eat lunch and pack into vans for the plantation we’re scheduled to see. My first (official) plantation: The Whitney. 

On the bus the cohort buzzes from the energy of the morning. I’m sleepy, but chat with a lovely Orthodox woman (Black like me, like all of us), who arrived later with her two kids.  I catch her up on the writing prompts and conversation, and see what she’s been working on. She’s traveling to Israel next week, with her littles and her husband. A trip which seems to have been a long time in the making and has been cancelled multiple times. For them, it will be an integration of religious culture and everyday life that they don’t fully get back home. 

I tap on the complexity I’m experiencing, and it unspools (gratefully for my nervous system), and we talk about one thing, not everything: the challenges of raising her son in mostly white Jewish spaces, the racism, the exhaustion of advocacy. And other challenges: being in more secular spaces that are unsupportive to orthodox practices like food, rituals, and education.

It feels like an unfair trade off to me, this splitting of self, this having to pick and choose. I of course encourage her writing, her stories. Her voice must be heard and integrated. Integration, such a big, wide word when applied correctly. 

Eventually, we feel held and happy enough to settle into the silence– her head leaning into the window, mine back into the seat. Our reflections kiss the freeways and overpasses as we rush past, until it all turns into a swath of green. It’s a longer and shorter drive than I imagined: some 40 minutes or so outside of the city. 

Then we arrive, pulling into a long driveway and onto a large parking lot of stony pebbles. We are met by the head of the plantation/historical site, and she introduces us to our guide: a young Black woman (maybe in her early 20’s), wearing a bright blue sweatshirt and blue scrunchies tied around two long braids on either side of her head. We learn she is a descendant of the plantation, and she walks us to the first stop on the tour: The Antioch Baptist Church.

Now. There was not a large, beautiful baptist church in the middle of a slave plantation originally. There was a storm (this is New Orleans), or maybe it was a fire? Either way, some damage was done, so eventually the church was relocated for preservation on the Whitney plantation land.

Our young guide tells us that the original name of the church was not “Antioch” but “Anti-Yoke” church. Yoke, as in the oppression breaking our backs, (yes, but no, and yes), as in the literal weight on their physical bodies. As in the forked wood with a sometimes 15 pound bar harnessing enslaved people to each other by their necks, originally used to bind oxen together.

And when white people came for the revolution in the church’s name, the congregation changed it to “Antioch,” (which is my new favorite pseudonym because it sounds like Anti-Yoke’s twin cousin). Because who could argue with the name of a town in the Bible?  I wonder aloud how many other “Antioch’s” share this same history. A revolution in plain sight. 

Big, white church. Wood moaning. Clay children inside. Sculptures an artist made, more haunting than can be described. Clothes and features all rendered to reality. No eyes. Because…

(a breath … )

The church had lots of windows. 

Outside a big, black slab of marble holding names and fragments of narratives: a memorial wall. We make our way to it and one of our crew (the only local New Orleanian in the group), finds his family name on the wall. He had known this part of his family’s history but he’d never seen it in front of him, written in stone. We wander around the marble etchings. I read small excerpts of first-hand narratives of someone my age’s maybe great-great grandparents. 

Black people being brutalized. Beaten. Tortured at the hands of white slave owners. So much darkness. 

Bottomless cruelty.  Bottomless cruelty to children. 

I also find fabric, ingredients, seasons, moments of pride described in the fragments of people’s stories. My image refracted in the black stone as I bend down to read. I take some pictures for later, and feel the weight of my phone increase. 

Next we tour the big house, full of holes—a literal hole for refrigeration still gaping up from the ground in the kitchen: a parched mouth. We walk up and down the grand entryway to the house, lined by a canopy of wide trees. Looking up at the sky; the land coming at us from all directions. I was not prepared for beauty, for the horror of it against a naturally perfect day. What, or who, had the tree held?

The rain had stopped and we’d stepped into a different month, “a different time,” (the thing that some people come here to escape to, not from), as our young guide reminded us. 

The horror. The sickness of forgetting, of erasing our collective past with positional, selective memory.  More blue sky, white clouds, bright greens. 

We saw some more structures, like the outdoor kitchen and the overseer’s shack (intentionally left in disrepair) and then some kind of prison. A barred, rusted, shipping container-like thing that our guide doesn’t go close to because she says it makes her feel sick to imagine the 10 or so bodies that were jammed into each “cell.” She sat at a distance as we looked in, waiting for us at the edge of a wooden house nearby. 

We met her there, at the porch of a house that enslaved Black people lived in all the way up to the indentured servitude poriton of the plantation’s history, in the mid fucking 70’s. 

It was blue. 

The house was painted blue. Little faded strokes of it now against the grey-haired wood. 

A surprising blue. 

“To ward off spirits,” our guide said. “They would paint it blue to blend in with the water. So the bad spirits wouldn’t see the house and it would be passed over.”  Those words pinging through this Blewish cohort especially at this time of year, with the Passover/Pesach holiday fast approaching in the spring air.

A moment of wholeness passing over all of us. And for some of us, that holiday always contains a tradition of naming oppressed people, those particularly in our awareness that year. The flexible arms of the exodus story, ever-expanding and connecting us. 

Your sweater matches the blue, I say to our guide. 

“Yes!” she says, blushing down. 

It must mean you’re protected. 

She bloomed back up, “you’re the second person to say something (spiritual) like that today.” Accepting the synchronicity as truth. Accepting her protection. 

I snapped a picture of the house, and another. Some wind…The plantation was closing. 

A Kaddish was spoken, before our guide walked us down quickly to one of her favored spots on the land, closer to the field (fenced off near the lip of the parking lot).  “I want you to see this”…

A memorial commemorating a most brilliant rebellion, and the horribly bloody aftermath.  

I left for them the stone in my hand.