The Bitter Northerner

In New Orleans, someone on Dauphine Street called me baby before I had been in the city for an hour. Not in the way that gets held at you like a small weapon in other cities, where the word falls out of the mouth of a construction crew and onto the sidewalk and women find ways to step around it. Here, in New Orleans, it welcomes you inside like a door held open. The people from here say it funny. “baaaaby”. Really draw it out. Really make you notice.

There is a version of this essay in the trash folder on my computer where I talk about the city as a metaphor. I decided that I am not interested in that version. I am, instead, most interested in the particular way my body moved through the French Quarter at midnight, how the humidity that pressed against my skin felt. How it felt like another body, how I could not tell where the sweat ended and the air began. I am interested in what it means to be Black and Queer in a city that has been making room for Black and Queer people since before this country had honest language for either. Which is really just a complicated way to think about how the streets of New Orleans has space for me and how it was always has. For me, and you too, there is a place at the table and it did not have to be built. It did not have to be argued for, theorized for, workshopped into existence.

In the best circumstances, I find it uneasy to talk about Queerness and Blackness and America and not talk about the dead. Here in New Orleans, I find it impossible. 

Yesterday morning I woke up early, and somehow found myself walking around a cemetery with an overpriced and slightly too sweet coffee. In New Orleans, the graves sit above the ground, bodies wrapped in stone, a reminder that the ground has no interest in keeping its promise for the buried. The water table is too high. The city sits too low. Burying someone in New Orleans means that the earth will inevitably push them back up.

The earth here refuses to hold the dead down. 

And somehow, I find this to be instructive. I find this to be about more than engineering. A city that will not let you disappear into the soil is a city that insists on making itself visible, on the way a body takes up space even after the breath has gone out of it. The tombs here are not modest. They are dressed in stone and iron and sometimes in fresh flowers and sometimes in lipstick marks from strangers who press their mouths to the stone and ask for something they cannot name. Money, maybe. Rest, maybe. Love, maybe. Forgiveness maybe, too. The cemeteries here are not places you go to forget. They are places where forgetting becomes impossible. The dead here, have addresses. The dead here, have architecture. The dead, in New Orleans, are dressed for the occasion.

New Orleans, is above all else, about visibility, I’ve noticed. About being seen. About spectacle. It is also about who gets to be seen, and what happens when the seeing is forced upon you.

There are plantation homes here. It is impossible to ignore these, too. Homes made of wood cut by hand, homes built before the tools were created to save time. Because of this, you can walk through the rooms where enslaved people slept, and the tour guide will tell you about what they ate, what they didn’t, how they were tortured, and what their names were if the names survived. You can stand in a room that was built by hands that were not free and your feet will feel the dents on a floor that someone’s knees wore smooth while their eyes were watching god. Shoutout Zora Neale Hurston. These plantations here are still standing, for the most part. You can see the fields that built this country, and you can feel the Louisiana sun on the back of your neck, too. Some of them serve lunch and sell gifts. Some of them host White people’s weddings in the fields. The violence does not leave a place just because we hang new curtains. The violence does not leave when replace the dead with living spectacle.

And not far from here, there are those cemeteries that highways run through. There are graves here that got paved over so that someone could get to work a little faster. The highways here cut through a cemetery, cut through neighborhoods, which are really just complicated ways to hide how these places are also an alter, also a history that has been beating for over a century. Underneath the overpass, you can almost feel the faint pulse of what was taken. The Black dead that built this place were not granted the theater of an aboveground tomb. They were covered, rerouted, turned back into dust and mixed into the concrete.

I tell you this because death in New Orleans is not just one thing. It is not uniform. It is not democratic. There is this culture of death that I can feel in my chest on these streets. Sometimes it means that death calls for a jazz funeral, a second line, a parade of strangers crying for someone they never met but whose leaving they can feel in the brass. 

And there is also the Other death that gets bulldozed for a highway. There is the death that gets a monument and the death that gets erased so completely that it’s only hope of returning is in the push from the earth. Here, erasing itself somehow becomes invisible, and I’ll be thinking about that for weeks. What I know for certain is that if you are Black, if you are Queer, then you already know which kind of death has been picked out for you, a death that is pressed and starched and laid across the bed like an outfit for a day you did not agree to attend. For many of us, we know death can only lay out our Sunday best.

I spent hours walking in the Louisiana sun today. I started early hoping to witness how a city can like this can rise. I walked through homes of former slaves and somehow didn’t feel a fantastic belonging. I stood in front of the statues of the dead, the Confederate ones, still standing in their poses of frozen certainty. I read the plaques. I didn’t feel the weight I was told I would. I let the heat of the South press its whole weight against me until my shirt went dark at the collar, until it stuck to my back. And then I walked back to my hotel. 

On the corner of my hotel, there’s this gay bar, and there’s this bartending drag queen who was standing outside smoking a cigarette; saw me walking by and said “baby, you look like you need some water”, and handed me a bottle before I could answer. I had not said anything. I had not asked. This 6’4 man with a beard and a dress and a wig just saw a body in the sun and decided it should not be thirsty like that.

I keep thinking about this. I keep thinking about the economy of care that operates in this city outside of any system, outside of any program or initiative or campaign. I think about how queerness has always been a radical technology. One of survival, a sophisticated way of reading rooms quickly and knowing who needs what before the need becomes a crisis. It is also a technology of resistance. The drag queen at the bar didn’t know me and didn’t need to. They had been taught, by whatever life had taught, to see a tired person and offer something cold.

But this is the city of the dead, after all. Everybody says so.

The tombs are here, the ghosts are here, too. The voodoo shops sell gris gris bags to tourists who want to believe that the invisible world is something that can be for sale. But voodoo, the real practice, the one removed from the mythology of dark magic, removed from the folklore, removed from the possibility that it can be sold, the one that lives in the hands of the people who do not need a tourists belief to continue, has always been about the maintenance of the living through communion with what came before. It is an insistence that the dead are not done with us. It is an insistence that the bones turned to dust do still speak. That they have opinions. That they are still, in ways that matter, in the room with us.

And I think Queerness operates on a similar frequency. I think Blackness does too. We carry our dead in ways that would look, to some people, like a haunting, like voodoo, like magic. We say their names at the table. We wear their clothes. We tell their jokes to people who have never heard them laugh. We build our lives on top of the graves and we do not pretend the graves are not there. We know they are there. We save a seat and set a plate for them. 

It’s Tuesday and I’m on Bourbon Street. The music comes from everywhere and nowhere at once and it is absolutely terrible, and it is perfect, and it is too much and it is never enough. 

Last night, a different drag queen on a balcony blew me a kiss and I caught it, actually reached out and caught it, closed my fist around the air where it would have been. There are places in this country where Black queer people catching a kiss from a drag queen on a balcony would be the beginning of a story that ends with a flood. The hope and the grief of this country is found in our willingness to close our fists around what would have been. To catch it in the air.

I’m here in New Orleans and it is just a Tuesday.

In New Orleans, everybody calls you baby.

Leaving the hotel, the woman behind the counter says to me “you coming back, baby?” I said yes before I meant to. Before I had time to decide. 

Until then, I’ll be closing my hand around the air of what could have been.

I am still thirsty. I am still coming back. A place for me will be set.

Today, I’m back in Chicago. Nobody here calls me baby.

bitterly yours,

chase owens

–baby