It was 6pm and the sun had gone yellow and soft. We were standing on a street corner under a live oak tree in Uptown New Orleans. A second line band was playing, the bass drum beating the dum, dum, dum. I had only slept three hours in three days and I had a constant high whine in my ear from standing too close to the speakers. I felt like my whole fucking brain was made of glass, cracking imperceptibly. It would shatter if things lined up the right way, the way a whole bridge can fall apart under the ordinary stress of a thousand marching feet in step.

 

This whole fucking town talks in code, I was thinking. Big Chief Bud Boudreaux of the Black Seminoles, a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians, peeked out from under his heavy black-beaded mask and rasped out, "We callin' ‘em back. We callin' ‘em all back. From the hot and heavy in Texas, we calling the people back."
His hands reached out wide, his palms up, and he shimmied his shoulders. His voice got louder.

 

"From up yonder in Memphis we callin' ‘em back."

 

His fists closed, his arms reached forward, and then he pulled the air between me and him back towards his chest. His eyes glared out from the darkness of the mask. I felt them rest on me. I tried to return his fixed stare with one of my own, thinking for a second that I had spiritual clout, but he looked right through me. When he pulled the air between us, I could feel something in my gut moving. Whatever moved inside me was hooked to my testicles. The sweat on my skin went cold.

 

"From clear out to Hot Lanta, we callin," the Chief's muscles strained like he really was dragging a quarter-million souls from all over the map through the muddy tributaries of the Mississippi back to New Orleans. He was pulling me somewhere too.

 

His feet stamped out an old rhythm. My feet stamped with him and my beer spilled on my shoes. I was wearing cheap black leather sneakers but they had taken on a kind of iridescence from the layers of swill that had washed over them during two days of self-numbing at the Jazz Festival. I got lost in their colored sheen for a moment and when I looked up again the Chief and his helpers were marching away from me, Black Seminole spell-casters. I wanted to get in line with them and stamp that rhythm back to wherever they were going. Tell my family, friends, boss, to fuck the hell off. I'm a Black Seminole now and I belong somewhere.

 

Next to me Bobby and Clyde were talking to Clara. The Chief hadn't made an impression on them. No wonder. Bobby and Clyde were from New Orleans and they'd seen him before. Clara was so focused on cocaine and male attention that she could have cared less about the Chief's message. But he fucked me up. I think he was telling me to move to New Orleans, but I didn't know for sure. I mean I knew that on the literal level he was talking about all the black people from the 9th Ward and Mid-town, but I had had a recurring dream for just under five years about being a slave woman giving birth in shackles and maybe he was talking to her and she was me, you know?

 

"What the fuck are we doing?" I said, kind of irritated.
Bobby laughed and looked at Clyde.
"Shit Henry, what are you doin?" Clyde said, like he was teaching me some Cajun wisdom.

 

Clara tipped her head back and laughed hysterically and I felt the cracks in my glass brain widen. She gave me a fucking headache. Everyone wanted to fuck her because she was so thin and pale and pretty and she knew it. She and her husband had been in a car wreck six months earlier. He died. She didn't. She climbed out of the car and out of her little Memphis society box into young widowhood, a cool protective shadow. Now she was auditioning as a New Orleans party girl. I never saw her spend a fucking nickel the whole time we were together. I don't think she was sorry about the crash and she milked the shit out of it. I don't blame her I guess. If you're herded into a box when you're 20 by everyone in your life, then you should get the hell out of it however you can. Life's too short to live somebody else's.