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Perry Hall St. Bernard Parish blackberries. Ripe in April!

http://viningsnaturalhealthcentre.co.uk/tag/haywards-heath/page/4/?profile=blue I wasn’t eaten that night by an alligator, as it turns out; I woke up entire, and immediately hopped on my bike to do a little morning tour of the park. There were all kinds of wading birds everywhere; they flew off as soon as I was within a hundred feet or so.  I found ripe blackberries and ate a great deal of them, and then found ripe wild strawberries as well. These last were larger than, and equally insipid as, any wild ones I had seen. I have heard it said that this species of strawberry, which invades lawns, is a European introduction, though I do not know that. As delicacies they are worthless, but I imagine that like most wild foods they do have some kind of nutritional value.

When the sun got over the treetops, I spread out my goods, which had taken on some dew in the night, and then read and mulled while they dried. I checked my maps, and by the time I had packed up it was after ten.

Coming into town was a shock, after a night in the swamp with the wild animals. St. Bernard State Park is eighteen miles from the French Quarter, and the gates of the park mark the beginning of the conurbation known as New Orleans. My maps told me I was in Poydras; the people told me I was in Violet; it made no difference, really. I would be surrounded by people and buildings for the next five days, from one end of New Orleans to the other.

Wild strawberries.

The inhabitants of this East End of New Orleans are known to be loud and brash; those from Chalmette are called “Chalmatians,” those from Violet, by analogy, “Violations.” All told the area is known as “the Parish.” All counties in Louisiana are called parishes; but this one is special, the way Long Island, in a city full of islands, is the island. My first experience confirmed the stereotype. A car in front of me veered suddenly to the right, blocking my path; as there was traffic, I stopped. The driver, a beautiful but somewhat used-up woman – half the women I saw looked like they either had done drugs or dated someone who had – leaned over the six-year-old girl in her passenger seat to speak with someone walking by. “WHY DIDN’T YOU ASK ME I WAS RIGHT THERE!” she yelled at him. “NO I LIVE DOWN THE BLOCK WITH JOHNNY NOW! YEAH! COME OVER ANYTIME YOU NEED SOMETHING! FOR REAL!” Then she veered back into traffic. Young people looked too skinny, too tattooed, too tanned and leathery or too pale; everything seemed off and weird. Black men with weird red and yellow eyes walked each one alone down the road. The shoulder of the road seemed to have been paved with broken glass and garbage.  Nothing in particular was photogenic.

I wanted to check my email to get the phone number of my host for the night – a friend of a friend – and I stopped off at a bakery. They had internet and I got a donut and took a seat. I barely got anything done, of course, because the woman who worked there – a woman in her sixties wearing much makeup – kept coming right over to my table to speak to me.

“Wheah you from honey? New Yawk! I was in New Yawk once. Oh God, like forty yeeuhs ago. I hated it. Too much. Too many people. I mean – I loved the Broadway shows, I want to take my dawtuh-in-law to the Broadway shows. But othuhwise, no.” Then off she went, going out of the shop, into the shop, doing various things. Not long after she came back to my table. “You know the one thing about New Yawk I liked – this one thing kind of saved it for me. On every block, you’ve got those guys selling like icees in a little papuh cup! Every block! I think I lived on those things. Now that was pretty coo, I thought.” I didn’t want to tell her I hadn’t seen anyone selling Italian ices like that in twenty years.

She came back to show me a picture of her as Queen of the Mardi Gras Parade in Violet. “Oh yeah, that was me, honey.” I would not have recognized her, to be honest. She had been, indeed, quite beautiful. “I was a pretty hot bitch! I had some good times. I made that costume, it took me like five weeks and it cost, I mean today it would be thousands of dollars.” It looked like a Vegas showgirl outfit – very large, with a lot of feathers and sequins. “That was 1982. I had been working for yeeuhs around heah and so I was something of a community figyuh, let’s say. I had that outfit in my closet, lost it in the stome. We had fifteen feet of watuh heah. Lost all that stuff – all my furnicha, all my pickchas, my close, all the memories. So sad. So sad what that stome did.”

She went off and spoke with a neighbor who came in. Apparently Jodi had just gotten a restraining order against her boyfriend. “Relationships should be about babies,” she declared to her neighbor. “Am I right? That’s what it’s about. So make sure it’s someone who would be a good fathuh. Because nowadays you just don’t know about people othuhwise. But you can tell if someone will be a good fathuh. That’s instinct.”

She went off to the back room, then back to my table. She put her fingers on the table as she looked down at my seated self. “And you want something to tell people in New Yawk about honey, how bout this. Aftuh the stome Habitat for Humanity – you know, Jimmy Cahtuh, all that bullshit – they came around heah and they offered to build people houses for fawty thousand. So people were like, ‘Okay, great!’ So they paid them to build houses. But they would staht and then run out of money – I mean, you can’t build a house for fawty thousand dollahs honey. I’m not tawkin about a FEMA trailuh, I mean a house. So people said, ‘You said you weh buildin us houses, now you want mo money?’ But if they didn’t pay up the Parish would come around and take theah propuhty away, because it was an eyesore. I tell you, it was all one big scam, Habitat for Humanity, look it up. Nobody tawks about this stuff.” [I can find nothing to confirm any of this.]

Later she was back. “You people from New Yawk always love to heah about alligatuhs. I just had one, it was sad, I had to call the cops, he was in my back yahd all the time. I love them, but not in my back yahd, you know?”

“So the cops come and kill them?”

“Right, if it’s a nuisance. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff around heah. My son, he said even if he wuddn’t bawn and raised heah, he’d still wanna live heah. Because of the coachuh. Heah you can sing and dance down the street. Anyplace else they lock you up.”