thank you in advance
near death, emergency brakes, the 8th anniversary of my first publication that almost wasn't
Last Saturday marked the eighth anniversary of my first exhibition review, “A Way Back Home: ‘The Spirit of Haitian Culture’ at McKenna Museum.” You can read it here, along with pretty much everything else I’ve written that’s been published online under the archives tab. Please keep in mind that I was 22 at the time and judge me accordingly. I’ll come back to this review, the personal and social context of New Orleans in that weird 18-month period between ExhibitBE and Katrina’s 10-year anniversary, when we were all so young and hopeful (before philanthropy, media, and neuroses took over), another time.
Few people know, but I almost died a couple months before my writing “career” officially began. I’d dropped someone, an acquaintance who was part of New Orleans’ strange black feminist circle of the mid-10’s, off at the airport in their car, and as I wound my way out of the airport, I found that the brakes weren’t working quite right. Neither was the accelerator. I thought perhaps it was a matter of pressure. The car was older than any other I’d driven up until that point (I’d only had a license for a year) and poorly maintained, as suggested by the rancid interior smell (vastly improved but still present after a mutual friend had the car detailed for the owner), one of my earliest experiences witnessing the sort of self-flagellating conditions in which those of social justice fame sometimes lived by choice (the other side of the coin from Patrise Cullors).
I experimented with different ways of pressing the pedals, harder, better, faster, stronger, sometimes with success but not sustainably so. It started raining, my phone was dead. It was between three and four pm, peak afterschool traffic time.
Somehow I managed to make it down to Hickory, over the Earhart Expressway to Carrolton onto which I turned, headed toward Mid-City without encountering a single red light (or any other traffic situation that would require the full-stop that I wasn’t sure I could provide). Until I reached the intersection at Tulane Avenue.
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