Creative Words: People Watching in Jackson Square, New Orleans (6/9)

I’m ridiculously behind on my blogging (I know and I’m sorry), but with reason–pretty words have been floating around in my head for the last few weeks. I’ve been drafting most of them, but by far, the most successful writing I’ve done lately is to just get snippets out of my head and onto a screen. More of these will come at some point. Please read into what I’ve written, dig into it, shuffle it around, and pick it apart. I love feedback.

This particular piece was inspired by my recent trip to New Orleans. The short of it: I noticed two different walks of life sharing the same immediate area.

“Juxtaposition”

I have found an intersection of humanity—the literal and visual divide between opposing walks of life. From this side of Decatur Street, I see people that reflect who I have been. Young women in wide-brimmed hats and designer sunglasses cluster around a sugar-covered table of beignets, extend their phones high above their heads, and take selfies of a rather mundane event: being at the Café du Monde. A tall, thin man with heat-rashed cheeks drapes an arm around a Korean woman who is in a uniform that is unflattering to both her body and her ancestral culture. He hands his Nikon camera to his son and stands proudly beside this living, breathing monument of Louisiana tourism. A statue of some New Orleans great looks on from the background in disapproval, forever damned to observe the newcomers that will never know the city—his city—the way he did. Tourists.

The powerful Mississippi River is beyond the wall. I know it although I can’t see it. Although it is invisible to me from my place on this corner, I don’t doubt that the river continues to flow. An uninterrupted, underestimated threat that has caused catastrophic damage in its past, but for now, is peaceful. I haven’t forgotten it.

Life is different on this side of Decatur. Economically far from a world of people that can afford to vacation, yet just a few actual yards away from that life, is a world that is populated with street performers. The Silver Man who plays, lip syncs, and dances on a milk crate to James Brown hits day in and day out. The painter who forces a passerby to consider the real message behind her erotic depictions of women. The woman with the pockmarked face that offers to read your palm or tarot cards for a donation. People who have never needed Google Maps to tell them how to get to Point B. The hustlers. People that entertain the other half of the street in hopes of getting some sort of compensation. Oftentimes, but not always money.

Rain is an equalizer. It forces all to seek shelter beneath the balconies and galleries of this resilient city that is historically impervious to water damage. I’ve heard it on the forecast, but more certainly, I feel it in my bones: the rain will come soon. Large, bulbous deliverances of water will come from almost nowhere and cleanse the city of this afternoon. It will be quick, but it will flood the streets, catching the toes of the espadrille wedges of the elite and the torn, dirty Converse of the Other.

Juxtaposition: “the fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.”