When we
arrived, what had been Elysian Fields, New Orleans became Memorial Drive,
Atlanta.
Memorial Drive
-- haunted by memorialized confederates, ghost soldiers on the trails of slaves
railing against their captive plight into night. Memorial Drive: a dividing line in the “city too busy to
hate,” a city that separates at fault lines that trace to quakes like the 1906
riot of race when Atlanta reverberated with postbellum rage and chose the birth
of a nation in its postpartum fate.
In
the quiet since, a cold war is contained, insulated by economics. Discrete deals between the city’s grey elite
in backrooms where they trade neighborhoods for a tenth of influence, public
schools for public faces in places of power, a black bourgeoisie bold between columns
of white power structure… a privileged minority of the black majority precisely
placed to placate the masses, to avoid another rupture.
It is the
south, gorgeous Atlanta, where a universe of trees burst with hidden streams
that soothe heat like phoenix tears resurgent in the gleam of glass towers,
magnificent as antlers on a buck, where hilly, radiant seasons bloom as
flowers, and offer a rhythm that frees one from feeling stuck, that breeds in
one a sense luck, where change is always around a bend in time, where struggle
can turn to hustle and be the breath of a success that ends in rhyme.
We were
welcomed to Atlanta, the Elysian Fields of the South, an ornate gothic steeple
teetering atop the Southern Dream. Along
Memorial Drive, on one side you can see a tide of wealth rise through the hip
of Cabbagetown, up the funk of Little 5 to crest in the mansions of Inman Park and
up, up into the mirrored glitter of Midtown skies.
Along Memorial Drive, on the other side, it
looks like Katrina hit Normandy, a barren beachhead littered like a little
Vietnam with hollowed out, broken brick ranches, graffiti castles, and a haunted
high rise that litters the sky.
When we New Orleans
gypsy cousins flooded Atlanta in caravans, she extended a hand of Christian
charity, and then clutched her purse. It’s
taken a decade to begin to understand Atlanta’s curse and why her lips are pursed,
along Memorial Drive.