Taken from my journal entry for Friday 11/9/07
I met Perry and Lep through Warmshowers.com. They live in a beautiful home they built themselves out of salvaged materials in Houma, Louisiana. Avid recumbent cyclists, Perry and Lep often host passing cyclists at their house for a night or two (by Perry’s estimate, they’ve had between 40-50 cyclists stay with them over the years.)
Above: Lep, Perry, and their two dogs.
Lep, 62, is a stocky guy who looks far younger than he actually is. He has a smile that comes easy to him and looks comfortable in a T-shirt, baseball hat, and jeans. A few years ago, Lep started a pallet business by collecting and selling discarded pallets from food stores. Before the pallet work he was a mechanic, but he comes from a family of shrimp brokers. He’s incredibly handy and is able to see a simplicity in homebuilding that most people are blind to.
Perry is a carpenter and has short hair and glasses. She is nine years younger than Lep and, like Lep, has been married before. Perry speaks with an authoritative tone but is as warm and inquisitive as anyone else I have met so far on the trip. Confidence emanates from her like smoke from a bonfire.
The two dogs that the couple have are treated like members of the family. They have their own couch and both Perry and Lep speak to them as if they were human. In return, the dogs are extremely well-behaved and affectionate.
After a feast of pasta, salad, and French bread, we started talking about my trip. I told Perry and Lep about some of the projects I was working on with different schools. When I explained the project on race, their ears perked up. We began down the conversational path that has come to feel so familiar on this trip, the one that leads straight to honest questions and answers about the dynamic between blacks, whites, and immigrants (often referred to as Mexicans along my route so far) in the U.S.
“You know what’s strange?” Lep asked. “Huge amounts of people in Louisiana are on welfare, many of them black, and they don’t want to work. But at the same time, tons of Mexicans crossing the border do want to work, and they work hard. It seems odd to me that the people who want to work are the ones who have trouble staying here legally, but the ones who don’t want to work have no problem collecting welfare, generation after generation. Either way, the politicians love both groups.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because they both can be manipulated. You think a black person on welfare is going to speak out against the government? That’s slapping the hand that feeds you.”
The simple power of this statement caught me off guard and left me speechless. I had never thought of welfare being used in this way before. A nightmarish image flashed across my mind of a man opening up an envelope containing his welfare check and seeing that the check itself was no bigger than the paper inside a fortune cookie.
By Lep’s read on the situation, one check floats the recipient to the next island of desperation at a speed at which only survival, unthreatening survival, is all one can focus on. Over time, children are taught to live like their parents and the cycle keeps repeating itself.
****
“You ever heard the phrase ‘in your face’ before?” Lep asked later in the conversation.
“Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about.” I imagined a literal definition of the phrase, someone actually standing close to someone else’s face.
“In your face sums up the attitude blacks have toward whites around here. You ever see them driving around with loud music blaring from their cars? That’s in your face. The baggy pants that they have to hold up with one hand? That’s in your face. Them walking around in groups in the middle of the day and not working? In your face. It’s like they always try to challenge you. Like you owe them somethin but nobody knows exactly what.”
“Huh.” I didn’t know what to say.
****
Above: The beautiful house that Perry and Lep built
The next morning, Perry and I spoke about The Storm. She had a hypothesis about why people didn’t evacuate before The Storm and why chaos ensued in New Orleans after it passed.
“What you saw on TV, all that stealing and disrespect, that was the result of 100,000 people fiendin’, craving.”
“Craving what?” I asked, unsure of what she was getting at.
“Crack! Drugs! A huge percentage of the black population in New Orleans before The Storm were addicts. The Storm wiped out their supply and interrupted their routines. All that evil you saw in the city after The Storm was from addicts not getting their fixes.”
I had never heard this explanation before.
“And why do you think people didn’t evacuate before the storm?” She paused and waited for an answer.
“They couldn’t afford to evacuate?” I said, knowing I was about to hear something different, something not so widely accepted.
“No no. Can’t afford a $20 bus ticket? No, come on. They didn’t want to leave their dealers. You think an addict, a daily user, is going to get on a bus and leave the only thing that gets em up in the morning, keeps em going? No. They stayed because they had to.”
Above: Doorbell at Perry and Lep’s
Perry told me about how she managed a liquor/convenience store in the ghetto for six years. She saw mothers come in to buy beer with their hungry children. She greeted the line of customers that would be waiting for her to open shop each day so they could buy beer. At 5:00 a.m. She told me about one man who cleaned cars and used to buy his alcohol with sticky coins he pulled up from the cracks of car seats.
Despite some of the comments Perry and Lep made about black people, comments that, to me, seemed harsh in their ridigness and unfair in the way they made assumptions, they still had close black friends. I’ve met many people in the south who feel and act the same way. It’s as if they maintain sweeping generalizations about black people but make exceptions for the black people they become close with, people they meet and speak to. How many positive interactions must a person have with members of a different race before he/she starts thinking positively of the race as a whole? Should we as people even do that, even generalize in that way?
When I loaded up the bike and was about to pull away out of Perry’s driveway, she spotted three black men down the street.
“You see that? You see them walking in the middle of the street like that with the baggy pants? That’s in your face. Look at that,” she said.
“Yeah, I see them,” I said, stopping short of agreeing with her.
We said good-bye and I rode down the road. The three men walked into a house before we had a chance to say hello.
Above: Inside of Perry and Lep’s place. All the wood and brick you see has been salvaged from another house
