After Trump was reelected, Mark and I talked about moving south to Mexico.

Instead, we went north.

North toward Mississippi.

An hour outside the City that Care Forgot, just across the state line, we found a small cottage nestled in the woods, built by a man from New Orleans in 1976. It was built the same year my father moved us to the rural Northshore. I did not plan that coincidence, but once I saw it, I knew it was home.

I thought of my father immediately—of those first deep breaths of pine—and understood, in a way I had not before, what it meant to return to his Amish roots of tending the land, something already quietly inside me too.
I find myself following in his footsteps, tending what resists tending. I walk with a machete through overgrown woods strangled by invasive vines, clearing paths that will close again by morning, and I think of his patience, his stubborn faith that land answers only to repeated labor. It is not something you control once and call finished, but something you cultivate and tend. Maybe that is where I find God now: in the land, in the labor, in the daily work of tending it.

Our six acres of feral land sit between a plot marked by a sign that reads, If you can read this, you’re in range, and a mechanic who revs his oversized truck, chrome testicles swinging beneath the bumper, as if noise itself were a kind of territorial claim. Along the road are Confederate and Trump flags, though today only one Trump flag remains in tatters. The twelve-mile stretch of low hills is punctuated by a few Dollar Generals and twice as many churches—the same architecture of belief, grievance, and survival I grew up with, only rearranged across a slightly different map.

Friends from the city ask how I can live here, though the question is less curiosity than confirmation, a way of asking how I can stand it, how I can choose such a place. My 101-year-old father-in-law, a WWII veteran from upstate New York and lifelong Republican until Trump, still laughs when he says he cannot believe his eldest son bought a place in Mississippi.

Everybody knows about Mississippi.

What they do not understand is that I have been standing in similar terrain my whole life.

Even though I had never spent time in our next-door state, Mississippi is not an abstraction to me, not shorthand for everything we condemn from a distance, but a place shaped by the people who claim it and the people who endure it, by histories that are neither past nor settled. The truth is that the whole country feels like Mississippi right now, and racism and intolerance do not begin or end at a state line or belong only to the Deep South, no matter how convenient that narrative is for everyone else.

As I try to understand Mississippi, I find myself returning again and again to Wright Thompson’s remarkable book The Barn, where he writes of Emmett Till’s murder as “the rise and rot of a tribe of people, of which I am one.”

That line struck me hard, not because I believe the South holds exclusive claim over racism or cruelty, but because I recognized the courage of refusing distance from an inheritance I had spent much of my life trying to outrun.

I live close to it now, not because I accept it, but because I refuse to pretend it exists somewhere else. So I stay close enough to see it clearly, close enough to speak about it honestly. I know too well what silence preserves.

Even now, especially now, the old machinery persists, and it announces itself through language before it ever draws a line on a map. The Supreme Court has now given states permission to pretend race is invisible while Black political power is carved apart in plain sight. Mississippi waits nearby with its own sharpened maps, fresh from declaring April Confederate Heritage Month, while Gov. Tate Reeves gloats that Rep. Bennie Thompson’s “reign of terror” was over.

In Louisiana, Gov. Jeff Landry told “60 Minutes” he wanted the state “finally unshackled from the decades of litigation,” as though the long struggle for Black representation were not a demand for democracy but a chain around the state’s neck.

That is the language of the old South pretending the problem is not exclusion, but the people who keep objecting to it.

Then a Black protester in Louisiana cut through all that polish with a sentence that went viral. Addressing white legislators during the redistricting fight, he called MAGA “the last breath of the Confederacy.” The line landed because it named what the official language kept trying to hide: the Lost Cause still gasping through new maps, new mandates, new court rulings, and new words for the same old theft. Not resurrection, but a death rattle.

Out in the woods, language becomes harder to disguise. A vine does not call itself heritage while it strangles a sapling. An invasive tung tree does not pretend to be tradition while it swallows the light and poisons the soil.
Pulling thorny greenbrier from young trees, I see what politics works so hard to conceal: what is strangling what, what is stealing light, what has bent itself toward survival. For so long, I could not see my own Southern inheritance that plainly.
Inside, at a table facing the century-old hickories, I write, and I think of my mother. For a long time, I tried to separate her from myself, as though I could cut away the cruelty and keep only what made her bearable. Even my education, the thing I once believed would save me from her, reached back through books and language and widened her world too.

But the silence she enforced, the fear she could summon, the way love and harm occupied the same space without warning—these shaped the way I learned to see, to anticipate, to read what was never said.

And still, that is not the whole image.

Photography taught me that light does not exist without shadow, that you do not eliminate darkness but expose for it, and that too much light can erase as surely as too much shadow can conceal. The truth of any image lives in what is revealed, what is obscured, and what cannot be resolved.
That is the only way I can see my mother honestly now: not by forgiving the darkness, not by denying the light, but by holding both in the same frame.

My mother had one life, and not enough time to become everything she might have become. I can see that now in the uneven arc of her, in the moments when she reached, however briefly, toward a different way of being, a different way of seeing and loving. Those moments did not last, and they did not redeem what came before or after, but they were there.

That does not absolve her. It complicates her. And complication is harder to live with than judgment. I suppose I could say the same about the South.

I think of Hamlet, Andre’s favorite play, and of Shakespeare’s instruction to hold “the mirror up to nature,” to reveal “the very age and body of the time.” For years, I believed that mirror was meant for the world outside me—for the systems I documented, the injustices I named, the stories I exposed. But Faulkner taught me that in the South, the mirror never reflects only the present. The past stands in the frame too. It keeps walking beside us, speaking through our mothers, our maps, our laws, our monuments, our silences. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he wrote. I understand that now.

My mother is in that reflection. The same woman who taught me fear, silence, and avoidance also taught me how to speak, how to look closely, and how to stay with what I would rather turn away from.

New Orleans raised me in the same contradiction: beauty beside brutality, intimacy beside inequality, music over decay, celebration over erasure. The city can second-line through grief while ignoring suffering one block away. The South can call cruelty heritage and exclusion tradition. Like my mother, they taught me to notice everything and to pretend not to see what was right in front of me.

And still, I love them both, but not innocently.

After a lifetime looking through a lens, sorting through memories and everything I was taught to ignore, I understand that loving a person or a place does not require absolution. It requires staying long enough to see clearly.

When we first arrived, few birds moved through these woods. The invasives had choked so much light from the understory that even the wild things seemed to pass through without stopping. I cut and pulled and cleared, freeing young trees, opening the low ground, making room for what might return.

Some mornings before sunrise, I wake to the sound of a barred owl in the distance. For more than a year, I heard it without ever seeing it, its voice moving through the trees before dawn. Then one morning, just as the light began to lift, I finally caught sight of it. It swept low across the creek I had recently cleared, silent and precise, gliding through the tupelos before settling on a white oak limb as if it had always belonged there and I was late for its arrival. I stood motionless in the damp Mississippi air, watching it blink awake with the morning.

There it was, a reminder that what has been crowded out can return, quietly, after the clearing.

After everything I have lived, photographed, survived, and finally learned to see, I know what this moment asks of me. I did not come to these woods to disappear. I came here to sharpen my eye and steady my hands. So I will stay and bear witness.

And as the old machinery of the South rises again, then I so will I—not for it, but against it—because I am a daughter of the South, and I am Andre’s daughter too. I know what silence protects. I know what darkness hides. Still reaching for light, I will carry my camera and my inheritance into whatever comes next.

Kiln, MS 2026

My grandparents had left rural Iberville Parish for New Orleans, settling in the Irish Channel, a working-class neighborhood of Irish immigrants, Germans, African Americans, dockworkers, petty thieves, and families trying to survive near the Mississippi River’s wharves. My grandfather worked as a tugboat pilot, while Andre and her siblings attended Catholic school at the corner of St. Mary and Religious Streets, a crossroads as symbolic as it was ironic for their turbulent upbringing.

Andre grew up in and around the St. Thomas Housing Development, completed in 1941 to replace the neighborhood’s mixed-race slums. To hear her tell it, St. Thomas was Mayberry until the Civil Rights Act desegregated the “whites-only” development, sparking white flight and disinvestment. That was the story she carried, anyway. A story of a lost world, of order ruined by change, of safety taken from her rather than denied to someone else.

But the Irish Channel of her childhood was never as innocent as she remembered it. Gangs clashed in the streets, poverty pressed in from every side, and Andre roamed that rough world with a sailor’s mouth and a survivor’s instincts, skipping school to help her mother care for her siblings while her father was away on the river. She never made it past 7th grade.

Her voice was raspy and almost manly, her cigarette always balanced between her fingers, her certainty about the world absolute. She carried herself like the statue of Robert E. Lee, who stood for 133 years above Lee Circle, facing north toward the local YMCA in permanent defiance, as the old New Orleans joke had it: “Yankees Might Come Again.” That was my mother’s posture toward the world — aggrieved and immovable.

To be her daughter was to be careful and watchful, measuring every word and every glance, never knowing when a sarcastic barb or sudden flare of anger might come down. My siblings and I framed our childhood as “walking on eggshells.”

As a photographer, I understand the power of a frame. Sometimes the crop clarifies. Sometimes it improves the image. And sometimes it is a downright lie.

I was reminded of that just a couple of months ago while photographing a school event, when a woman who worked there asked me to crop the trans girl out of the group photo. I refused. But before I answered, I recognized the request. She wanted the more acceptable image, the one that made certain people disappear without admitting they had been erased. I knew that kind of crop. I had practiced it in my own life.

For years, I tried to crop my mother into someone easier to love. I wanted the writer, the Shakespeare reader, the woman capable of humor and tenderness. The woman who listened to Bach and Pink Floyd. I wanted the mother who, late in life, wrote a novel while working the graveyard shift at a gas station. I wanted that mother in sharp focus, well-lit and composed. But my mother refused to stay inside the composition I made for her.

It was only after her death that I realized I had been cropping myself, too. I wanted to cut away her cruelty, her racism, her rage, and the damage she left behind. But I also wanted to cut away the parts of me that had inherited more than I cared to admit. For as long as I can remember, I smiled my Great Gatsby smile, trying to pass for polished, charming, untouched. I hid the dysfunction of my family. I arranged myself to look picture-perfect. But no picture is perfect.

Perhaps that is why I began writing: to confront the edges I could not keep cutting away, and to admit that the whole picture included not only what my mother had done to me, but what I had carried forward from her. Nothing exposed that inheritance more clearly than the people I chose to love.

She had begrudgingly endured my relationships with a Mexican man, then a Black man. But the man I eventually married came along, and it was a bridge too far.

Mark was a liberal, jazz-trombone-playing Northerner whose education and politics collided with everything she had been taught to defend.

I watched, often silently, as they argued, her cigarette smoke curling in the air like a battle flag, each puff a declaration of resistance, each word a stand against what she believed he represented. He thought he was reasoning with her, but she felt judged by him, looked down on, measured against a world that had already decided she was ignorant, backward, and wrong.

Mark carried a different inheritance: two uncles who had fought for the Union and stood at Appomattox when the war officially ended. To my mother, he might as well have arrived in blue wool with surrender papers in his hand. Their arguments had the shape of Archie Bunker and Meathead with a Southern histrionic flair.

In one argument about God knows what, the Civil War did not feel like history. It felt as if Appomattox were playing out in my backyard.

“You’re just a Cranky Yankee,” she yelled. And from that moment, that’s what she called him. Even after they made peace months later, but she used it more as a term of endearment.

I had always framed her through contradiction: South against North, ignorance against education, racism against progress, past against future. But after a lifetime of looking through a lens, I know better than to trust the frame too easily. No photograph is innocent. Every frame says as much about what has been left out as what remains inside it.

Late in life, Andre threw her whole being into writing, as if language had become the only tool she had left for understanding the life she had lived and the damage she had done. In her poems and pages, I could see moments of recognition. She began to question the racism she had absorbed and passed on. She began, however briefly, to imagine another way of being. Those moments did not always last, and they did not redeem what came before or after, but they existed.

The truth is that my mother wounded me. But she also shaped me. She refused to be silent, even as she demanded it. She refused to be invisible, even as she made me disappear. That contradiction does not absolve her. It makes the picture harder to look at.

Photography taught me that too much shadow conceals, but too much light can erase. The truth of an image often lives in the tension between the two: in what is visible and what is hidden.

My mother lived in that tension. So does the South. So do I.

Had she lived longer, had she been educated, had she not borne five children inside the pressures of poverty, religion, and survival, who knows what she might have made beyond the poems and pages she left behind. To deny that possibility would be another kind of reframing.

That is the part I resist most now. I do not want to crop out her cruelty and call it love, but I also do not want to crop out her struggle and call that justice. The harder work is holding the whole image long enough to see it clearly: the racist mother, the wounded mother, the funny mother, the terrifying mother, the writing mother, the mother who harmed me, and the mother who gave me, in some twisted inheritance, the voice I now use to speak when I see harm.

That is why redistricting feels so familiar to me. I know how clean it can look when the “obstacles” have been cut from the frame. The Supreme Court of White Supremacy knows it too. So do the mapmakers who slice through Black communities and call the result lawful, neutral, constitutional. They know the trick: cut carefully enough, and the picture fits the story they want to tell. Cut often enough, and people begin to believe the cropped version was always the truth.

That is what America keeps trying to do to itself. It crops the picture to sanitize the narrative, then demands gratitude for the edited version. The South already knows this. It knows how to crop a plantation until it looks pastoral, how to crop out slavery and keep the columns, how to crop out lynching and leave the oak tree standing as scenery. It knows how to crop out Reconstruction and keep the myth of noble defeat, how to crop out Jim Crow and keep the flag, how to crop out voter suppression and call the map fair. It knows how to crop out Black power, brown power, poor people’s power, women’s power, and then call the remaining image democracy.

America wants the beauty without the brutality, the Constitution without the exclusions, and the map without the people it was drawn to diminish.

My mother was flawed, and she was still beautiful. But whatever beauty she had could only be understood in the full picture, not in the softened version, not in the edited version, not in the version that made her easier to love. America is no different. If there is beauty here, it will not be found in sanitized history, banned books, rigged districts, or the polite language of courts and legislatures pretending that power has no race and maps have no memory.

It will only be found by looking at the whole thing.

And right now, the whole thing is damning.

A country this determined to crop out the truth is not defending history. It is defending a Lost Cause.

Because what gets cropped out has not disappeared. The people America keeps cutting from the picture are still there, just beyond the border, organizing for yet another fight, refusing to vanish. And if that past is any indicator of the future, what America pushed out of view will become impossible to ignore.

And I will be there to photograph the whole big, beautiful, brutal picture.

Protesters at the removal of the Confederate Jefferson Davis statue, 2017

“Did you send me the dead bird?” said the gravelly voice on the line.
“Yes, it was me, and I’m so sorry I didn’t call first,’’ I said nervously. There was a long pause followed by a deep breath.

“I like the dead bird,” he said, his voice eerily like my mother’s—Andre’s—thick port accent. I didn’t know him, but I knew the call was from The New York Times. The number flashed as a string of ones—an anonymous caller ID meant to shield their lines. The first time it appeared on my phone, I thought I’d hit the jackpot, or that I had a direct line to Jesus, the way Andre used to say.

I had just sent an unsolicited photo of an oil-soaked bird from a barrier island 50 miles south of New Orleans.

On to Grand Isle for the first time in more than a decade, I was struck by the number of dead trees surrounded by open water and disappearing marsh. The coast as I knew it as a kid was disappearing fast, around a football field an hour, as the local adage goes. Seeing it up close, I realized the place I remembered was not only disappearing but dying.

That was one thing. The bird was another.

It wasn’t the first bird I had seen killed at the hands of man. Or woman, I should say.

When we first moved to the then-rural Northshore from the city, I was afraid of so many things. But my heart surged with excitement the first time I saw an owl. I had fallen asleep so many nights to its echoing hoots, imagining the mysterious creature that made them, and now it was right in front of me.

I wished I had a better camera than my Brownie, but Andre had other ideas. She handed some cash to our teenage neighbor, always armed, even after his little brother had lost an eye to a stray BB—and without warning, he pointed at the owl perched in the pine tree.

I watched, frozen, as he took aim. The rifle cracked, and the owl fell in a blur of feathers, hitting the ground with a disturbing thud.

“Why did you kill it?” I cried, as Andre handed James ten dollars. “Surely we’re not going to eat it!”

“I’m gonna get it stuffed and hang it on the wall,” she said matter-of-factly, as if a photograph wouldn’t do. “Like an angel.”

She scooped up the blood-stained, downy carcass and placed it on the back seat next to us. I cringed away from the “angel,’’ shot down in a murder-for-hire scheme by a woman in pink rollers.

One moment the bird had been perched—alive, alert, part of something larger—and the next, it was an object to hang on the wall.

When we got home, adrenaline still running through her, she stuffed the bird into a black garbage bag and shoved it into the freezer until she could find a taxidermist—a word I had to look up in the dictionary, in the phone book.

When she showed up at the local animal stuffer with her prize, she was in for a rude awakening. “Ma’am, you should just turn around right now and walk away, and I’ll pretend we never had this conversation,” he said.

Apparently, shooting an owl—any wild bird—was illegal. So, the bird stayed hidden, our family secret, frozen in the freezer, keeping Andre out of jail.

I don’t remember exactly when or how it disappeared, only that one day it was gone. By then, the image had already fixed itself in my mind.

Standing on the beach at Grand Isle, looking at that oil-soaked body, I felt it again—the same rupture between what I believed and what I was seeing.

The Deepwater Horizon rig had exploded on April 20, 2010, killing eleven workers. In the days that followed, officials insisted no oil was leaking from the well nearly a mile below the Gulf. I was sent to photograph the first press briefing, a routine assignment that felt anything but.

They repeated that the situation was under control, but the truth was written in the faces of the officers lining the edges of the room—tense, watchful, already carrying the weight of what hadn’t yet been admitted. It was my first job for a new editor, and I found myself turning away from the podium, chasing something more revealing: the quiet panic etched in the faces of the Coast Guard officers.

I guess I did a good job because the next day, I was assigned to cover Jazz Fest, a rare stretch of seven days of work I didn’t question. I was blissfully photographing Glen David Andrews in the Gospel Tent when the calls started—major outlets like Getty, New York Times and Reuters scrambling, the spill no longer contained. I declined them all, bound by the assignment I’d been given. Within hours, the festival job was canceled, resources redirected to the oil spill. I waited to be reassigned to the spill.

The call never came. I was left with nothing—no festival, no spill, no recourse. Someone else was sent.

I packed my gear and drove south, following the bayou past towns already slipping into water, toward a coastline that was about to change in ways no press conference could contain.

When I reached the coast, I spotted a cluster of press boarding a large boat. I pulled on a life jacket, fell in line, and climbed aboard without a credential. No one stopped me.

We pushed twenty miles into the Gulf before six-foot swells drove us back inside the cabin, the boat pitching hard enough that the trip ended before it really began. We turned around without seeing anything.

I figured I’d burned a day and a tank of gas.

But on the boat, I met a writer who asked to buy a few of my photos, then offered me a week’s work—twice what the lost gig paid—documenting the spill from the air and on the water.

From above, the sheen stretched for miles. But after a few days without finding oil near the shore, they let me go, with an open invitation to return when it finally came inland.

I kept driving.

I wandered the shore remembering how as kids we dropped nets down through the hole in the floor of our rented camp on stilts to catch blue crabs, then hoisted them up to boil for dinner. I remembered the smell of the salty sea air, which now smelled like petrochemicals. I remembered the soaring brown pelicans sweeping the coast and how we imagined they were pterodactyls.

They moved with a kind of certainty, folding themselves out of the sky and plunging into the water with precision. We watched them the way other kids watched fireworks, waiting for the moment of impact. They were ours—the state bird, something we claimed with pride. They felt prehistoric, unchanged, and immune to whatever else shifted around them. They weren’t.

By 1970, the brown pelican had been pushed to the brink, poisoned by chemicals that made their eggs too fragile to survive. In Louisiana, they had almost disappeared entirely. It took decades—bans, protections, deliberate intervention—to bring them back.

After so many years of rare sightings, I remember the day I was driving the Causeway when three pelicans rose beside my car, a sight for sore eyes.

By 2009 they were declared recovered—a rare success, proof that damage could be undone if people decided it mattered enough.

A year later, the oil came.

A month after the explosion, I was walking the beach when the oil finally came ashore, sliding up to the feet of a young family, children in swimsuits and a dog circling in the surf. I made a few frames, and within minutes the beach was shut down.

A colleague and I drove north to a wildlife refuge where the crude was said to be thicker. Law enforcement blocked the entrance, no exceptions, not even for press. So, we hid in the back of a state wildlife and fisheries truck, then let out once we were past the barricade. Inside, the shoreline was already lost: rust-colored oil coating sand, rock and everything it touched, the scale undeniable.

Men in rubber boots raked up the thick gooey mess into large clear plastic bags while workers on boats laid out yellow containment booms to collect the oil. Helicopters flew overhead, reminding me of Katrina days, while dump trucks moved sand to build berms to stop the oil for washing further inland.

We were photographing the scene—dead fish, an oil-covered crab—when we spotted the dead bird. I got down low and watched as the bird’s oil-soaked wings moved back and forth, as if it were still trying to fly.

I knew it was a strong image, so late that night I sent it—unsolicited—to The New York Times, something I’d never done and half expected to backfire.

It ran in print, online, then everywhere. It spread faster than I could track, reused without permission. One use placed it beside the president.

While anger at BP was justified, it was redirected toward President Barack Obama after he imposed a six-month moratorium on new drilling, a decision that only deepened his unpopularity in a state already wary of him. The outrage was loud and immediate, even as the live feed showed oil still gushing into the Gulf, even as volunteers worked around the clock to clean and save oil-soaked pelicans, even as the spill hollowed out the seafood industry and tourism in real time. It was easier to blame the pause than to reckon with the damage already done.

In the weeks ahead, I photographed bird and turtle rescues, sick dolphins struggling for dear life, disappearing pelican rookeries like Queen Bess Island and fisherman out of work. The devastation reached nearly every aspect of life in Louisiana. Even strippers’ income was down after big oil tycoons and fisherman stopped frequenting the Bourbon Street clubs where they doled out big tips for lap dances.

Anger hardened as the oil streamed live for 87 days, twenty-four hours a day. No one accepted blame. No one could stop it. And in the end, no one was held accountable.

On June 11, more than a month before the well was capped, I drove down to Fort Jackson’s Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, where hundreds of oil-soaked birds were being treated by volunteers working around the clock.

After photographing the obligatory handshakes and staged conversations outside, we were directed inside for a tour. A sign at the entrance split us in two: birds to the right, humans to the left. It split me, too.

Inside, dozens of pelicans filled the room, held in newly built plywood boxes, their feathers heavy with oil. Our state bird—only a year removed from the endangered list—now huddled together, stacked one against another, stunned and diminished. It didn’t register all at once, but when it did, I couldn’t unsee it.

I went home and made a small book—Love Pelicans—using photographs of the birds covered in oil and the volunteers working to clean them, hands moving carefully through feathers with dish soap and water. I sold it to raise money for the rehabilitation center.

I have seen what oil costs.

And now, when I think of Jazz Fest, I think of what was happening at the same time, just miles away. The oil. The birds that couldn’t fly.

It wasn’t one bird. It was everything we’d done.

And everything we keep doing.

The price we keep agreeing to pay.

Fort Jackson’s Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, June 11, 2010

It was 2019, and at first it was just a Saturday, long and unremarkable, the kind I’ve lived a thousand times—photographing socialites at a fundraiser, the rich and famous wining and dining to benefit people they will never meet -- until sometime after midnight, without ceremony or warning, it slipped into April 7th, and the night gave way.

All I wanted to do was sleep, my shoulders aching from hours of lugging two cameras around my neck, a bag strapped to my hips, the kind of exhaustion that settles into your bones. But Mark was out of town, and Miss Louise paced the hardwood floor, nails tapping, her whole body angled toward the door as if the night and nature were calling.

She had to go, so we went.

We turned onto the Esplanade neutral ground under a near-full moon, the live oaks stretching above us, their shadows falling like long arms reaching across the grass, the antebellum mansions set back in haunting elegance, jasmine drifting through the air. I had the distinct feeling I wasn’t alone out there—not just because of him, not yet, but because of what I had recently learned about that stretch of land, the new historical marker noting the slave pens that once stood there, a reminder that the ground keeps its own memory, and it doesn’t rest.

That’s when I saw him.

A shape at first, then a man curled into a sleeping bag. At first I thought he was one of the many gutter punks or urban campers I’d complained about for clogging the neutral ground with their tents and dogs.

As I got closer, I recognized him. I had seen him for years—walking, limping all over town, talking to himself while the rest of us passed by, pretending not to notice. I had even photographed him once outside One Shell Square, sitting cross-legged, looking down, his face inches from the concrete, deep in conversation with someone I couldn’t see, while people in pressed shirts stepped around him without breaking stride.

For years, I had been curious about him. But I never stopped because he always appeared untethered in a way that felt familiar yet too close to a life I already knew how to look past.

That night, though, something was different—maybe in him, maybe in me—because instead of pacing and muttering, he was still, writing in a yellow notebook, focused in a way that felt almost fragile, like whatever storm usually carried him had, for a moment, let him be.

So I walked up and asked, “Are you a writer?”

And his face lit up in a way that startled me, like I had found the exact right door and opened it.

“Yes, I’m a poet,” he said, and then, just as quickly, “Are you a writer?”

“No,” I said, as he suddenly looked disappointed. “But my mother was.”

He leaned forward immediately, energized by the idea.

“Where can I read her work?”

And without thinking—without even pausing long enough to recognize what I was doing—I gave the answer I had been giving for years.

“Oh, she was never published. It wasn’t very good. She only went to the seventh grade.”

I heard it as I said it, that familiar move, the softening, the qualifying, the way I translated her life into something easier for other people to accept or dismiss, a reflex I had worn for so long I didn’t even recognize it as armor anymore.

I had just finished a book—Cherchez la Femme: New Orleans Women—a project built entirely on honoring women as they were, complicated and imperfect and powerful in ways the world often overlooked, and I had spent years insisting on their worth without apology.

And yet there I was, under those live oaks, on that same haunted stretch of Esplanade, doing the exact opposite with my own mother to a mentally ill homeless man who hadn’t asked me to protect anyone.

He didn’t hesitate.

“Who cares if it’s good? She was a writer!” he said, almost incredulously. “Do you know how many Stanford professors would be interested in a novel by a woman who only went to the seventh grade?”

He said it like it was obvious. Like I was the one who didn’t understand.

I went home and couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t shake the question circling in my head: was this man on my path a sage or playing me? He had the look of someone the world had written off, and yet in the span of a few minutes he had casually mentioned Kierkegaard, Tolkien, Stanford—names that didn’t belong to the version of him I was looking at. He spoke with a kind of ease, a fluency that didn’t match the man in the sleeping bag, and I knew, without quite knowing how, that he was educated, that there was a life behind him that hadn’t simply disappeared.

So I did what I always do when I’m unsettled—I started writing, then searching, following the clues he had given me: poet laureate of Stanford in 1991, a mother who shared my name though spelled differently, a town in Michigan near a lake, the offhand remark that if I liked John Updike, I would like him. One thread led to another until dawn broke and I was still sitting there, pulled into a life I hadn’t expected to care about, and into my own in a way I never had before.

His name was common enough to be maddening. One dead end after the other. But I persisted—a PDF of a prestigious school newspaper featuring his name and a poetry award from 1991. Then another article from his hometown paper. Then, improbably, a photo of him and his college friends in an alumni magazine from 1995—an Olympian, a neuroscientist, a mathematician-turned-professional-poker-player, all of them on a cruise, in leisure suits, smiling into the camera. The then-him looked very different from the now-him. But I believed it was him. If he weren’t wearing those aviator sunglasses, I’d have known for sure—those piercing blue eyes.

I looked up the Olympian and found an article he’d written about a program he was producing, which in part would be paying homage to his lost friend, the poet laureate. I found him on Facebook and sent a message, careful not to say too much—not to mention that Kevin was homeless or living on the streets I walked every day. It didn’t feel like my story to tell, and yet I posted about it on Facebook, ending with ... But what if the poet doesn’t want to be found? What if he does? My head is spinning. I have to sleep.

I didn’t sleep. I sent out a message on Facebook.

Hi John, this is a longshot, but do you know Poet Kevin Bennett? I had a long talk with him. Seems like an interesting guy.

I stared at my phone for what seemed like an eternity.

Then it lit up.

Holy shit… we have been looking for him for years and years. OMG I can’t believe you found him! Where do you live? Kevin is my best friend and I haven’t seen him since just after Katrina. I would love to talk.

And so, we talked. The next day, the Olympian dropped everything and flew to New Orleans. No hesitations, no conditions.

What followed was a string of missteps and misses that at times made him feel almost imagined, until finally—improbably—two weeks later, it all converged: two men running toward each other in the middle of Esplanade, one a fit Olympian, upright and clean-shaven, the other limping, beard long and unkempt, clothes hanging off him like a life half-shed, stopping traffic not because anyone had to, but because everyone there could feel they were witnessing something like a miracle.

Weeks later, Kevin moved into an apartment, cared for, no longer on the street. The story spread—landing on the cover of Stanford Alumni Magazine, leading to a reunion in Las Vegas—and somewhere along the way people began calling me a saint, an angel.

But I was no angel.

At that lunch, after the wine had been poured and the pleasantries had settled, the man leaned across the table and asked me a question I hadn’t expected.

“Do you ever get afraid?” he said. “Approaching people like that—homeless people, mentally ill people? With your camera?”

I understood what he was really asking. He wanted to know how I walked up to a man who frightened other people, in the dark, alone, and simply said hello.

I didn’t answer right away.

Not because I didn’t have an answer. But because the true one wasn’t simple.

I would have had to tell them about my brother—about the calls I didn’t always answer because I thought I already knew what he would need, cigarettes, a light bill, something to steady the latest unraveling, and about the quiet calculations that came with it: whether I had the time to listen to his delusions, the money, the energy, the space to carry it all. How loving him could feel both endless and exhausting, and how I had learned, without ever saying it out loud, to keep that part of my life contained, tucked away from the one I was living now.

I would have had to tell them about letting the phone ring for days until I finally picked up and he told me he hadn’t left his trailer in two weeks— not since Parkland, not since seventeen people were killed and the language that followed began to settle in—monster, evil, mentally ill—words that didn’t stay on the television but seeped outward, into the way people looked at him, into the way he moved through the world.

And I would have had to tell them how, when I finally answered, he didn’t ask for money but simply asked if I could take him for a ride, which had always been our thing growing up—driving without a destination because motion meant freedom—and how, when I went to get him, later than I should have, he told me that people were looking at him differently now, that they seemed afraid.

We sat across from each other in a coffee shop after that drive, and what he said next, I have thought about nearly every day since.

He told me that when he was out in public with me—when I came to pick him up, when we went somewhere together—he could hold his chin up.

Just that. And it landed with a weight I still carry, because in that moment I understood how much of his life had been shaped by the absence of something so small, and how little it took, really, to give it back to him.

It was such a simple thing to say, and it landed with the full weight of everything it contained—all the years of sideways looks, of people shifting away, of moving through a world that had already decided what he was before he opened his mouth. And what it meant that one person beside him could change that. Not with my money. But with my presence and proximity. Just make it possible to hold his head up for an hour.

I thought about that shortly thereafter at a book signing at Barnes and Noble in Mandeville—my just-released Cherchez la Femme spread out on the table, Arnold beaming over my shoulder, so proud he could barely stand it. He hovered near me the way he sometimes did in public, that closeness helping him feel strong. A woman I had gone to high school with leaned across the table and whispered, “Would you like me to call security?”

And for the first time in my life, I introduced my brother to her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said, suddenly mortified but looked at him and smiled, and shook his hand.

That was the moment I stopped being afraid.

Arnold gave me the answer before I ever needed to give it.

So when I saw Kevin that night on Esplanade, curled into himself, writing in the moonlight, I didn’t calculate anything. I didn’t weigh the risk or consider what I looked like walking toward him. I thought about my brother, and what it had meant to him that I showed up—and I walked over.

So when that man asked me at lunch if I was ever afraid, the honest answer was: not of Kevin. Of something else. Of the distance I had spent years maintaining without fully understanding why—from my mother’s unpolished, unpublished, 600-page novel I had learned to apologize for before anyone could dismiss it. From my brother, whose life went largely unseen by anyone who didn’t love him. The shame I carried wasn’t about them. It was about me—about the part of me that had sometimes chosen the easier thing, the quieter thing, the thing that didn’t require explanation.

That is what I couldn’t say out loud at that lunch table.

That the empathy people celebrated in me was really just the long way around to something Arnold had been offering all along—freely, without condition, with his chin up.

On April 7th, 2020, exactly one year after finding Kevin, I lost my brother. My dear sweet baby brother.

And now I cannot think of April 7th without holding both truths at once.

The night one man was found. And exactly one year later, the day another was lost.

Two men, the same age, both moving through a world that did not know what to do with them—one pulled back into the light by people who refused to stop looking, the other slipping quietly beyond it.

He was never published or celebrated in the way a great poet is—no more than my mother had been. But I wrote about him the only way I knew how—on Facebook, in the language of family, of memory, of the small, ordinary miracles that never make headlines. Because while one story was shared and celebrated and called a miracle, the other was no less worthy of being seen. And if I couldn’t give my brother the world’s attention, I could at least give him mine—fully, finally, and without apology.

Our dear sweet, only brother Arnold Gerber, 51, passed away at home this morning surrounded by family after a brief illness, April 7, 2020. Arnold was born March 2, 1968 in New Orleans to Arnold and Andre (Truxillo Gerber).

He graduated from Covington High School where he played football for the mighty Lions, was a loving member of the Mandeville Christian Fellowship Church and spent most of his life in St. Tammany Parish. He worked a number of odd jobs including the Mandeville Shell and Chevron stations where he always greeted customers with a huge smile and loving word, and where he gave the best carwashes ever!

He was a friend to all who knew him and the best brother anyone could want. We will always remember Arnold for his unwavering faith and capacity to love, despite many difficulties during his short life.

Just a little more than a year ago, after turning 50 years old, Arnold lived his ultimate dream of getting married in a beautiful wedding thrown by his church. It was the happiest we’d ever seen him. And it was the first time we saw him dance like there was no tomorrow.

We’ll always remember Arnold for his love of his wheels – from his hot wheels where he spent hours on the hot sidewalk playing, his first banana-seat bike when he survived getting hit by a car because he was going too fast to stop, his skateboard that he could ride doing a handstand, his Honda motorcycle he let us ride when our cars broke down, to his beat-up car that he kept running against all odds and costs. He always cherished the freedom of “taking a ride.”

He will also be remembered as the hero on Thanksgiving Day, 2005 when he breathed life into and resuscitated our dear three-year-old nephew after drowning in a pond. Arnold was always the one to rescue us with a prayer and pep talk when we needed it or with an overwhelming joy when we had good news to share. He relished keeping our family close.

Arnold is survived …

He is preceded in death by his parents.

The past month has been difficult but our family is so grateful for being able to get him out of the hospital and into his home where he wanted to spend his last few days surrounded by family.

Due to the current, unprecedented guidelines limiting public gatherings because of the Covid-19 virus, there will be a private family memorial at a later date. We hope to “take a ride” and scatter his ashes at Sunset Point in Mandeville where he spent much of his time watching the sun go down on Lake Pontchartrain.

My sisters and I took that final ride to the lake and let him go, and somewhere in the quiet of it, I let go of the shame I had been carrying, too.

The Poet and the Olympian reunite, April 2019

We were supposed to meet at the Jazz Museum for their Noche de Muertos event so I could introduce Greg to a curator about possibly showing his work.

After decades documenting New Orleans music, his body of work would be the envy of any city or museum.

Greg had photographed nearly every musician of note in New Orleans—Walter “Wolfman” Washington stretched across an antique settee with his red guitar and that megawatt smile, Fats Domino flashing his sly grin and holding up an “OK” with his fingers, Gatemouth Brown in stark black and white with a pipe resting at the corner of his mouth.

Many of them are gone now. But in Greg’s photographs they are still here—still smiling, still holding their instruments, their stories revealed in that brief moment before the shutter closed.

That was Greg’s gift. He didn’t just photograph people; he preserved them with masterful artistry and a storyteller’s depth.

And not just the legends.

I’ll always cherish the photograph he took of me once, weighed down with cameras, looking like a pack mule in the middle of an assignment. The story of my life.

But when I arrived at the museum, it quickly became clear I had misunderstood the event. This was not the place, or the time, for introductions. So I stepped outside and called him.

“Don’t bother coming,” I said. “This isn’t what we thought it was. Let’s just grab coffee next week.”

Next week came and I canceled again. I had to work.

Then he was gone.

Photography has taught me many things over the years—how to read light and shadow, how to anticipate a moment before it unfolds, how to measure the world in fractions of a second.

Yet somehow, I convinced myself there would always be time for coffee next week.

You’d think I might have learned my lesson from Greg.

But it took another photographer to drive that lesson home.

For months we had been texting about getting together for coffee or going to his house for one of his famous red beans and rice nights. It had been nearly a year since I’d made it to one.

Photographers live strange schedules—late nights, early deadlines, long days chasing light wherever it shows up—so plans drift.

Soon, we say.

Next week.

Let’s make it happen.

Then one morning I got a way too early phone.

“Pableaux is gone,” he said.

Pableaux had collapsed during a second line, doing exactly what he loved most—walking through the city with a camera slung over his shoulder and a stack of small prints in his hand, photos of the very people dancing beside him. He handed them out like currency, little gifts of recognition, surrounded by brass bands and the rolling rhythm of the street, knowing those photographs would be tucked into drawers, taped to refrigerators, passed down through families—small pieces of memory carried forward like the stories we tell.

The city mourned him the way New Orleans mourns best: with brass bands, people filling the streets, and stories.

But what stayed with me was that red beans night we never had.

The strange thing about photographers is that we rarely see each other in normal life. Our friendships happen in fragments—passing at assignments, crossing paths at events, texting about a job or a deadline.

Yet over time those fragments become something like family.

A few of us jokingly call ourselves the “Photo Family”—the name of the group text we share after decades of helping each other out: passing assignments when someone’s double-booked, covering when things go sideways, saving each other’s reputations more times than we can count.

It had probably been two years since most of us had sat down together.

When Jeff sent a message asking when we might meet for lunch—and Tracie suggested inviting Rusty—I did something unusual for me.

I didn’t delay.

“How about tomorrow?” I wrote.

And just like that, there we were.

Jeff. Tracie. Frank. Rusty. And me.

Five people who have spent most of our adult lives chasing light and stories, so it’s never surprising we have plenty to talk about.

At first the conversation moved the way it always does with photographers—war stories from the field, strange editors, impossible deadlines, and the old days when we were so broke we were grateful just to have film in our cameras and gas in the car.

We swapped the kind of stories that only seem possible in Louisiana—those odd assignments that take you from the deep swamp to the middle of the suburbs, sometimes with bullets flying overhead, where the lines blur between the natural world and everyday life. I mentioned a time I found myself deep in the marsh with two men, two guns, and a cooler of beer while covering nutria bounty hunters, the state paying by the tail to slow the damage the swamp rats were doing to the wetlands. Rusty’s stories were even wilder. On one assignment with Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee, hunters fired along the edge of Lafreniere Park, the shots ricocheting off the stone wall of the concert lake, sending him ducking. Another night they were hunting nutria along the canals on Veterans Boulevard. Rusty described the whole absurd scene of rifles cracking, hunters lining the canal bank, unfolding beneath the glowing sign of a Toys “R” Us.

We erupted with laughter, the kind that leaves your stomach aching after a good meal. But there were tears mixed in too.

Because the last time I had coffee with Rusty was more than a year earlier, when we were judging a photography contest.

Two months later he was diagnosed with ALS.

Since then Rusty hasn’t wasted much time worrying about what he can’t do. He’s been busy doing what photographers do best—making pictures and making stories. He spends as much time as he can with family and friends, gathering people around him the way we did that afternoon, squeezing every bit of life out of the days in front of him.

He even has a new show opening in April featuring photographs he’s made from his wheelchair, highlighting his journey with the disease. Many of them are shot using rear-view mirrors—small reflections of the world behind him, fragments of the road already traveled even as he keeps moving forward.

But sitting there watching everyone laugh and tell stories, it meant something deeper than I could easily explain.

Driving home that afternoon, I kept thinking about how unexpectedly wonderful that lunch had been.

And I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

The next morning I was reading and came across a passage from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy that stopped me cold. She writes that the secret of great stories is that they have no secrets—they’re the stories you’ve heard before and still want to hear again, the ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t.

And suddenly I understood why that lunch had felt so good.

It wasn’t the food, or even the beautiful view of City Park—alligators sliding through the water and birds swooping overhead. It was the storytellers themselves, and the lives behind the stories they tell.

The same ones we’ve shared for years: wild assignments, close calls, strange characters, and those absurd moments when the world looked so ridiculous through a camera lens that all you could do was laugh.

Listening to everyone that afternoon, I thought about Greg again—and the coffee we never had.

A photograph captures a fraction of a second—a blink of light in the vast sweep of the universe. A human life isn’t much longer. In cosmic time, our years are just another flash. Yet like a photograph, a life can still hold an entire world.

Stories let us step back inside those moments—feel the swamp air again, hear the laughter, see the light exactly the way it fell that day.

Because photographs freeze a moment.
Stories bring us back inside it.

And if we’re lucky, both will outlive us all.

Maybe that’s what Day of the Dead is really about.

Trapper Everett Verret’s daughter Becky, 17, plays with her three-week-old nutria “Shaggy,’‘ that her father brought her for a pet. Nutria Control Program only buys tails that are at least seven inches long. PHOTO/CHERYL GERBER

When I was a kid, Mardi Gras was pure magic.

My mother, Andre, sewed matching costumes for my four siblings and me. She always had a theme, whether we liked it or not — like the year she made us Raggedy Anns and Andy and secured red mops to our heads with bobby pins that dug into our scalps. That was the year I learned how quickly magic could turn.

I loved the floats, the beads flying through the air, the thunder of marching bands beneath the oak trees. But it was the doubloons — flashing gold in the sun, clinking against pavement — that sent us scrambling.

When Rex rolled by that year, a masked man on horseback tossed a handful of coins toward us. I bent down and a Black boy my age stomped on my hand as he and his friends scooped up what they could. One grabbed beads from Raggedy Andy, making him cry.

I was outraged.

Those beads were clearly meant for us.

We lunged like NFL players fighting over a fumble, small hands clawing at concrete until Andre intervened and the boys vanished, laughing, pockets heavy.

“It isn’t fair,” I cried, and I carried that injustice with me for years, polishing it into a story about what had been taken from me.

It never occurred to me they were fighting for what had rarely been thrown their way. Years later, a Black friend told me masked white men on floats rarely threw beads to her when she was a child.

The following year, Andre dressed us as a deck of cards. I, the oldest, was Queen of Diamonds. My gambling father was not to be outdone. He decorated his work truck like a little casino float and parked it near our usual stretch off St. Charles Avenue.

That was the year he built a platform, so we stood above the crowd, no longer competing for throws. From up there, beads came easier. Doubloons landed right in our laps.

As a young adult, Mardi Gras became my rebellion — a way to break from my conservative upbringing and shed the good-girl silence I had learned at home.

Alcohol became its own kind of mask — loosening my tongue, softening my edges, giving me permission to take up space I wasn’t sure I deserved. Every throw felt personal, as if I was chosen.

Mardi Gras became a mirror of who thought I was. I thought I was stepping into myself when, in truth, I was still scrambling for something to be handed down from above.

Then the mirror cracked.

Around that time, I began assisting photographer Michael P. Smith. One night he led me into a Mardi Gras Indian practice at Handa Wanda’s Bar on Dryades Street. I had only ever seen the Indians in photographs — radiant in feathers and beadwork. That night, there were no suits. Just men — more Black men than I had ever stood among.

Tambourines rattled. Voices rose and fell in hypnotic rhythm, chants slipping in and out of a language I couldn’t decipher but could feel in my chest. Men sparred face to face, never crossing the invisible line between them, tension building with every beat.

Then one dancer stepped over the line.

The room snapped. A chair flew. Mike yanked me down as silence fell over us. Fear shot through me.

For a long moment, no one moved. Then a tambourine rattled. One voice rose, deep and steady.

“Mightaaay, Cootie Fiyo,” Big Chief sang.

“Tee-Nah Aeey, Tee-Nah Aeey,” the tribe answered.

“We are the Indians, Indians of the nation…”

What had hovered on the edge of chaos became something sacred — not spectacle, but affirmation. Defiance carried in song.

My nerves unwound, thread by thread. Fear gave way to awe.

They were masking but not waiting for a float to pass or a throw to arc their way. They were not scrambling for something handed down from above. They were claiming what had always been theirs.

When I lifted my camera, a man covered my lens with his palm. Not violently. Just firmly.

Not this, he said.

In that gesture was a boundary more powerful than any ordinance. They did not owe me their image. I told myself I was there to witness. But I was also hiding.

The camera became another mask.

That same year, I fell in love with a Black man.

Navigating an interracial relationship did more than draw lingering stares; it exposed the architecture beneath the pageantry. Julian noticed who received eye contact from the floats and who was overlooked. He saw hierarchy where I had seen magic.

It was also the year Councilmember Dorothy Mae Taylor pushed through an ordinance requiring krewes parading on public streets to open their ranks.

The backlash was immediate. Some old-line krewes chose to stop parading rather than integrate, clinging to exclusivity as if widening the street might shatter tradition.

Before Michael. Before Julian. Before that reckoning, I had been blissfully ignorant of Mardi Gras’ long history of exclusion.

One night, over drinks, a friend said Dorothy Mae had “ruined Mardi Gras.”

Julian didn’t blink. “Ruined it how?”

“She’s destroying tradition.”

“Tradition?” he shot back. “God forbid a Black man ride in Rex.”

The bar went quiet. I rushed to soften it, to insist she didn’t mean it that way. What began as a debate about parades turned into something more personal between Julian and me — about what I was willing to see and what I was still protecting.

I believed the ordinance was right. I told myself that meant I understood.

It didn’t.

Understanding is not something you catch like a doubloon tossed your way. It requires stepping off the platform and asking why you were standing there in the first place.

Weeks later, Julian and I walked into Treme before dawn on Mardi Gras morning. Fully masked, we were neither Black nor white — just two people moving anonymously through the crowd.

For once, the glances dissolved.

Mardi Gras became sanctuary.

We laughed hysterically as a Zulu rider held up a sign, “Yell… if you want me to ride in Rex next year.”

When Julian caught my first Zulu coconut, it felt less like something handed down from above and more like something shared at eye level.

Dorothy Mae hadn’t ruined Mardi Gras after all. She widened it.

The street made room.

And so did I.

This year, I didn’t do Mardi Gras.

A family obligation kept me away, something tender and necessary, and I told myself I would be fine missing it. Mardi Gras has lived in me long enough that I don’t need to stand on St. Charles or beneath the Claiborne overpass to feel it.

But of course, I looked.

I opened social media the way you crack a door, just to peek at what you’re missing. I scrolled through brass bands, coconuts, glittering children, Indians radiant in sunlight — and then I saw what I wish I hadn’t.

A Black doll hanging in a bead noose.
Riders targeting protest signs, turning mockery into sport.
Images of white men in orange prison suits dancing.

And something in me sank — not because Mardi Gras has never held ugliness; this city has always been a place of contradictions — but because the ugliness felt less hidden, less embarrassed, as if something in the air had given it permission to step beyond the mask and into the open.

As if they mistook their corner of the street for the whole city.

Because I have spent my life behind a camera, I know how light behaves. It finds the cracks. And there is not enough orange makeup, Botox, or spin to conceal what’s behind the mask.

We in New Orleans understand that every spell fades with the morning light, and that ashes are never far behind.

Sooner or later, the mask comes off. The crown slips. The cheering fades. The platform is dismantled board by board.

And the mirror does what mirrors do.

I stood back, mesmerized. The flames cracked and leapt, sending sparks into the dusk, something I’d never seen growing up in the city. Smoke billowed upward, embers licking the tops of the pines. I noticed the birds lifting suddenly from the trees, scattering into the sky.

When my eyes came back down to the fire, a quick movement caught my eye. I saw a wild rabbit.

It stood just beyond the fire, perfectly still, almost spellbound by the flames, just as I was. I stared at it, silently praying it would come my way.

Instead, it bolted — straight into the fire.

I froze in horror. I held my breath for what seemed an eternity.

Then the rabbit burst out the other side, its cottontail burning.

For a moment, everything was silent.

Then my father started shouting, running in circles, cursing as the rabbit ignited smaller fires in its wake. Sparks flew from its fur as it ran hard toward the woods, setting patches of land ablaze behind it. Everything felt out of control—the fire, the land, the moment slipping beyond anything we could contain.

My father tried to stop the spread, stamping and cursing, while I cheered for the rabbit, silently begging it to outrun the fire.

I don’t know if it did.

But in my twelve-year-old mind, it escaped and lived happily ever after. Much like I would one day.

That image never left me: fire as danger, fire as renewal, fire as something that cannot be contained once it’s loose in the world.

Years later, I would recognize that feeling again—not as fear, but as motion. As leaving one world and discovering another.

Long before halftime shows or controversies, Puerto Rico found me when I was young, broke, and pretending I wasn’t lonely.

A girlfriend of mine—a flight attendant who looked an awful lot like Pamela Anderson—met a handsome man from California on one of her flights. He was living in Puerto Rico while attending medical school. She was nervous and asked me to tag along in case they didn’t hit it off. They’d only known each other for the duration of one flight, while she passed out peanuts.

I couldn’t have been more excited by the thought of Latin music and salsa dancing, even though I couldn’t afford the trip. She promised me a free airline ticket and assured me we’d stay with him at his place on the beach.

When I met him, it was immediately clear: he was the Ken to her Barbie—handsome, charming, sun-kissed.

He lived in a high-rise condo overlooking some of the most beautiful beaches in Puerto Rico. From the balcony, the view was flawless—turquoise water, white sand, palms arranged just so. But the longer I stood there, the more it reminded me of Cancún, right before paradise was fully monetized, the beach lined with identical glass towers. I could have been in California for all I knew.

He was kind and thoughtful—but I was disappointed that he didn’t speak Spanish and didn’t know much about Puerto Rico beyond the eleventh-floor view.

By nightfall, my friend and her tan surfer had settled into something private. The rest of the world fell away—and with it, me. Just like that, I became the third wheel.

The next morning, I started walking.

When I reached Old San Juan, I exhaled.

It felt instantly familiar. Like the Spanish-built French Quarter—only taller buildings, narrower streets. But it wasn’t just the architecture. It was the life spilling out: old men slapping dominoes on folding tables, music blaring from windows, people dancing without needing a reason, the smell of garlic and oil and sweetness in the air.

I felt at home. Except that I had no place to stay.

That’s when I stumbled into La Galería, The Gallery Inn.

It felt less like a hotel than a centuries old secret. Thick stone walls with winding corridors through Spanish arches. Courtyards layered with sculpture, plants, books, and time. Nothing matched, yet everything belonged.

The woman who owned it seemed fused to the place. She carried herself with an air of an artist, her silver hair pulled tightly into a severe bun in a bejeweled comb. When I told her I couldn’t afford a hotel born in the 1700s, she didn’t interrupt or flinch. Instead, she led me down to the cool, damp cellar, invited me to choose a bottle of red wine, and poured two glasses. We drank together as the sun slipped behind the Atlantic. By the time the glasses were empty, she offered me a “student’’ room at half price.

The room was small and spare. Cold plaster walls. A four-post bed filled most of the space. The toilet was in a small closet behind a curtain. There was no window nor television. I felt the history settle around me, and for the first time in days, I relaxed.

I was sitting on the bed, pouring my feelings into my diary, when I heard music drifting through the inn. Rachmaninoff?

It moved through the building like a scene from Hotel California — beautiful, faintly disorienting. I followed it through shadowed rooms and arches until I reached a library, where a young man sat at a Steinway grand piano.

When the door creaked, he stopped playing. I apologized and turned to leave.

“Vuelve,” he said. “Siéntate aquí.”

I sat beside him on the piano bench. When he finished, he told me he was a conservatory student, that the woman let students practice there. When he asked why I was alone, I told him.

He said I couldn’t leave Puerto Rico without having some fun. Then he asked if I liked to dance. I laughed, of course I did. I loved salsa, especially Marc Anthony, whose music carried the fire of the ’90s.

That night, we danced until dawn. Salsa spilled into the streets. Strangers pulled me into motion. Music ruled—loud, sweaty, irresistible—the way it had at Café Brasil in the ’90s, when Acoustic Swiftness, Más Mamones, and Fredy Omar con su banda filled the room with Latin beats and rhythms.

Puerto Rico opened itself to me as a place that knew how to hold joy and longing at the same time.

Again, so much like New Orleans.

I’ve always loved Latin America. It began when I was eighteen in Mexico City. Later, living in Honduras as a young teacher, I learned how language carries emotion before meaning, how music holds memory, how joy and grief often share the same rhythm. Latin American music and New Orleans brass band music still give me chills, still make me cry, because both understand something essential: celebration is often born from survival.

That understanding deepened during my decade working at La Prensa, the Hispanic newspaper of New Orleans before Katrina. The Puerto Rican stories and parties were some of the most memorable assignments. Always loud music, exuberant dancing, and unapologetic pride. Culture passed hand to hand.

Which is why the irony is not lost on me. After Katrina, many of us in New Orleans were treated like refugees and second-class citizens in our own country. Today, I hear echoes of that same dismissal aimed at Latin Americans, at Puerto Ricans in particular, as if they aren’t citizens, as if their voices don’t belong here. As if their culture is something foreign instead of foundational.

I watched New Orleans after Katrina, washed clean, then refilled with something shinier and quieter. Culture preserved in name but drained of the people who made it. Music still played, but sometimes it sounded like an echo.

Bad Bunny understands that feeling about his beloved Puerto Rico.

Which is one of the many reasons I love his music. That’s why it hurts to see so much anger aimed at this moment, at this artist, by people who think his presence is somehow inappropriate.

In Turista, he sings, “En mi vida fuiste turista—solo viste lo bonito de mí,” a reminder of how easy it is to enjoy the surface of a place without staying long enough to understand its cost. Puerto Rico knows that feeling. New Orleans does too.

And that’s when I think again about the fire.

About the rabbit.

About something small and alive running straight through danger and coming out the other side, sparks flying, impossible to stop.

As Bad Bunny steps onto that stage, I don’t think about spectacle. I think about heat and his voice lifting people up when others would rather erase them. Like Bruce Springsteen did after Katrina and recently in Minneapolis.

I don’t care much about football, but I’ll be cheering for Bad Bunny and for all the people his music touches.

Bad Bunny didn’t start the fire. But he’s the spark.

And once the fire is loose—once it’s moving through music and language and bodies across the world, there will be no undoing it.

Luisa and her son Hector Oyola show their Puerto Rican pride at Mensaje 2002. (Photo by Cheryl Gerber for La Prensa New Orleans.)

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But I saw his post—a photo of his new car and a message that read, Don’t give your money to corporate CEOs. My rides cost less and the money stays in the community. It felt like something I could stand behind, yet I scrolled by. Later, something nudged me to reach out.

It had been so long since I’d seen him that I told myself it might feel awkward, that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. Years—maybe decades—had passed since we’d really talked in person. I imagined polite small talk, the way people do when they’re trying to bridge a lifetime in a few careful sentences.

But when he pulled up in his Mazda, all of those years melted away. There was no catching up required, no explaining who we’d become because we already knew.

We hugged goodbye like it was yesterday.

And then he was gone.

Before there was a memorial, before there was grief, there had been Café Brasil.

It was the late ’80s and early ’90s, before Frenchmen became a destination, when it still belonged to musicians, service industry workers, misfits and night people and whoever needed somewhere to land after midnight. The room was dark, the floor was sticky, and the walls felt soaked with beer and sound.

It wasn’t a café so much as a portal. It was the first place in the city where I felt like I belonged.

I had come back to New Orleans after growing up in the country, insecure in ways I didn’t yet understand. I didn’t know where I fit or who I was supposed to be. I felt behind, unformed, carrying the quiet shame of not quite belonging anywhere yet. I may not have had a way to express those feelings back then, but I knew how to dance. At Café Brasil, the music and the movement gave form to what I couldn’t yet put into words.

There were drums—always drums—calling us in. Someone would start playing, someone else would answer, a spiritual call-and-response like I’d heard in church growing up, and suddenly the whole room was moving.

Dancing there wasn’t performative. It wasn’t about looking good. People danced barefoot, eyes closed, arms loose, sweat-soaked, joy and pain spilling out all over the expansive dance floor. You didn’t have to be cool or confident or even happy. You just had to move. When I was feeling down, and I often was, I would show up and dance my sorrows away.

And at the center of so many of those nights was Michael.

He was a percussionist, but more than that, he was the heartbeat. He didn’t dominate the room. His rhythm wasn’t about showing off it, it was about listening.

Michael was a listener. You could hear it in his playing—the pauses, the restraint, the way his rhythm held everything together. That’s how I knew him as a friend, too: present, attentive, never rushing in with answers.

I heard about a memorial the day after the news broke on social media of his untimely passing.

I almost didn’t go.

I told myself I might not belong there anymore, that maybe our lives had drifted too far apart to justify showing up. Time is very good at convincing us that distance erases meaning.

But then I remembered the ride.

It was nothing dramatic. No grand reunion. Just an ordinary moment that turned out to be anything but. A small gift, perhaps the answer to a prayer I didn’t know I was being given.

So I went.

Just as I suspected, I didn’t see anyone from those early days. I had never met his sisters or his wife. I hugged the new people in his life without knowing what to say. I had known Michael a lifetime ago, and they had loved him right up until yesterday.

I stepped back as a shaman burned incense, quietly blessing those of us gathered there, making room for the people who had walked closest beside him most recently.

Standing there, I realized how little that distance mattered. We had known each other when we were young, when we were still becoming. He was working at Cruz, and I was working at The Gumbo Shop. Yet we both had big dreams.

I remembered one night after one of his gigs, sitting on my couch in the French Quarter. His long hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, my clothes still damp with sweat from dancing. We talked about those dreams—his to live in Cuba and learn everything he could about rhythm, mine to see the world through a camera lens. We didn’t know then how long those paths would be, or that we’d still be walking them decades later, both of us still answering the same call.

As the shaman prayed for his spirit to take flight, I closed my eyes.

Then the drums began.

They carried me back to the nights at Café Brasil, when Michael’s rhythms lifted me up, and to the moments when I lifted my camera, trying to catch what couldn’t really be held.

When I opened my eyes, I saw a sea of faces. With each beat, the circle in front of his house grew, as if an invisible force were pulling us to him. I recognized one face from those early days. Then another, and another.

Faces I hadn’t seen in forever—musicians I once danced to, people I danced with and sweated next to, people who carried me through some of the most formative years of my life, whether they realized it or not.

For a moment, time collapsed.

The day before Michael’s passing, I had heard a talk by another friend—an Olympian turned speaker sometimes called the “Time Guy.” He said time isn’t always linear, that memories, not minutes, are the currency. Standing there, I understood exactly what he meant.

A few people spoke—mostly musicians he’d performed with, some from long ago, some from just yesterday. I wasn’t expected to say anything, and I hadn’t planned to.

Looking out at those faces again, I wanted all of them to know how much they mattered to me. Those years didn’t just pass. They formed me. We were a congregation, even if we never named it that. We raised each other into the lives we live now.

I found myself stepping forward.

I said that those days we shared back then were like church. That even if we don’t see each other for ten or twenty years, the thread between us is never broken.

I have spent my life believing that photography was the thing that freezes time, and I still believe that. But standing there, I realized something else: time isn’t only held in images. Sometimes it’s held in people, and in the love we carry for them, no matter when it was.

Even now, in my grief, I can still hear Michael beating out Celia Cruz’s La Vida Es Un Carnaval—my favorite song, the one that used to send me dancing across the entire floor, grief and joy tangled together.

No hay que llorar, que la vida es un carnaval.

Café Brasil and Michael are gone, but the beat continues in me. La vida es más bella viviendo cantando. Some churches never really close.

I was 37 when this photo was taken. It was Mardi Gras and I remember thinking I was a full-fledged adult, past my heavy partying days. What the photo doesn’t show is how much weight I was carryimg at that age. 37. When I first realized life was bigger than just me.

I had just found love, and we bought our first house, a fixer-upper in the Lower Garden District for $86,000, and nothing about it was romantic. Not the constant worries about money, not the sense that I had taken on more than I could manage, including the sudden reality of becoming a step-parent. I had finally broken into the work I’d been chasing for years, filing photographs and stories for the Associated Press and The New York Times, which brought validation but also pressure, responsibility, and the knowledge that this wasn’t play anymore, that I was being trusted with other people’s lives and stories.

Thirty-seven was not easy. It was tumultuous and full on, the age when decisions stop being abstract and start echoing forward, when you realize that the choices you make now are the ones you will live inside for decades. I didn’t know how hard life would be, but I also had no idea how much I would live after that moment, how many people I would love deeply and imperfectly, how much loss I would survive without disappearing, how much meaning would arrive slowly through work, through grief, through staying present when retreat would have been simpler. So many of the things I value most in my life came after 37, not before it, because 37 was the age when I first understood that the foundation laid years earlier might actually hold, even with its cracks, even under the weight of what was coming.

That is why I am watching the news through tears as two citizens, both 37, are killed in Minneapolis during an occupation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and why disbelief keeps turning into rage in my body.

Because I know exactly what is being stolen.

They will never experience the strange relief of realizing they survived something they once thought would break them. They will never watch a hard decision finally pay off years later, quietly and without fanfare. They will never turn youthful mistakes into something instructive rather than defining. They will never get to say to another person, “I’ve been there,” and mean it in the way only time allows. They will never love people long enough to know them in more than one chapter, never witness friendships deepen, relationships evolve, children grow, parents age, or their own understanding of the world widen.

They will never look back at a photograph of themselves at 37 and think, with exhaustion and pride, that was when everything started to matter.

Thirty-seven should not be the end of a life; it’s often where courage hardens and the work gets real. At 37, Martin Luther King Jr. was taking the movement north into Chicago, Nelson Mandela was helping lay the moral blueprint for dismantling apartheid, Cesar Chavez was organizing workers who would soon change the country, and Susan B. Anthony was putting her body and reputation on the line for women’s right to vote. That is what 37 holds, which is why I refuse to accept a world where a life at that age is reduced to a footnote instead of honored as a threshold. Renée Good, a 37-year-old mother and Minneapolis neighbor, was among those standing up in her community before she was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent. I don’t know the details of the man killed today, only that he was alive, and that life, any life, is holy. But I do know that if ICE agents had not been deployed to occupy Minnesota, they would both still be here.

I didn’t know her well. I knew her the way you know people who keep showing up -- loud, fearless, purposefully obnoxious and strangely comforting, like a recurring character who always steals the scene. Her recent death has stirred up memories I didn’t expect and lessons I once resisted.

In the early 2000s, Sandra made herself famous -- or infamous -- through a freewheeling public-access television show called The Hester Report, where she replayed her tirades against elected officials as if to say: if you missed it the first time, here it is again. She once held up an illustration portraying Orleans Parish School Board members as boils on her own ass. I laughed so hard I almost peed. Another time, I gasped out loud when she pointed to a poster of George W. Bush as Hitler—back then, before memes became wallpaper, an image like that still had the power to shock.

She wasn’t subtle. That was the point. She made them pay attention. She made them uncomfortable.
But my discomfort didn’t start with Sandra.

For years, I watched her with a mixture of admiration and secondhand embarrassment. I used to call her the “Black Andre,” which sounds flippant unless you’ve ever met my mother, though not a comparison of identity, but my private shorthand for a shared refusal to be silenced.

Andre had her own language for “pains in the ass.” Once, confronting my ex–best friend who cheated with my boyfriend, she said, “You ain’t even a patch on Cheryl’s ass.” It was crude, precise, and final.

Like Andre, Sandra had zero tolerance for authority figures who felt entitled. Unlike Sandra, Andre had only finished the seventh grade. But like her in every way that mattered, she didn’t defer. She didn’t soften. And she took a certain pleasure in making powerful people uncomfortable, even when she failed to examine her own contradictions and moral failings.

Watching Sandra at City Hall meetings always sent me back to the day my mother discovered municipal government.

I was fourteen, learning to drive, when I nearly took out a cow wandering down a country road, a sight my mother had never encountered before we moved from New Orleans to the then-rural Northshore for greener pastures.

“What’s the matter, Mrs. Gerber?” someone smirked. “You afraid a cow is going to kill one of your virgin daughters?”

Everyone laughed.

That mistake cost them years of brutal insults.

They laughed at Sandra too. But it didn’t stop her.

Before Katrina, I loved covering Orleans Parish School Board meetings. They were contentious, sometimes wild, and almost always entertaining. I often found myself hoping Sandra Wheeler Hester, better known as “18-Wheeler,” a nickname earned by her volume and refusal to yield. When she showed up, I knew I’d get a great photo and a good laugh.

She interrupted meetings so thoroughly the bylaws had to be rewritten just to contain her. It didn’t work. One night she arrived dressed in army fatigues, flanked by her two children in matching gear, as if the school board were hostile territory. She was escorted out by security, as usual, still talking.

But that didn’t stop her from running for a seat on the school board. She lost the race, but she never left the fight.

Then came Katrina, and the city scattered. The meetings ended. The rooms went quiet. Voices like Sandra’s fell silent.

After evacuating to Missouri, Sandra Hester told The Times-Picayune she would not return to New Orleans. She was tired of being vilified, arrested, and “called everything but a child of God.”
And yet she came back.
Against exhaustion, against insult, against a city that passed ordinances to quiet her, Sandra returned and went right back to City Hall, picking up the fight as if she had never left.

The last time I saw her was during a contentious meeting over the removal of Confederate monuments. “Take ’Em Down” chants collided with “All History Matters” signs. “Black Lives Matter” faced off against long speeches about heritage. Every few minutes, police escorted someone out.

I brought my teen nephew with me to witness history. While I photographed the City Council, I glanced back and saw him yawning. Then I laughed when I realized he was seated directly behind Sandra “18-Wheeler” Hester. I knew he wouldn’t be bored for long.

After hours of shouting between those demanding the removal of Robert E. Lee looming from the city’s highest pedestal and those insisting they were defending Southern culture, the room finally fell quiet as Sandra walked slowly to the podium.

As soon as she began to speak, a council member interrupted her.

“Please state your full name and address before addressing the body.”

A few people chuckled. As if we all didn’t know who she was.

Sandra stepped back. Then she re-approached the microphone, slow and indignant, and said very calmly, very deliberately:

“My name is Sandra. Wheeler. Hester.”

The room was still.

“I live at (1234) Robert. (pause) E. (pause) Lee Boulevard.”

The entire packed chamber erupted in laughter, for perhaps the only moment of agreement that afternoon.

I’d seen that sort of move before. Not the words, but the instinct. The pause. The refusal to rush. The understanding that power doesn’t only crack under anger, it buckles under ridicule.

I felt that instinct most sharply one afternoon at a red light in front of Beau Chene Country Club. The light turned green, and Andre didn’t move fast enough for the man behind us, a BeauChenite, her all-purpose term for rich people whether they lived there or not, idling in a shiny black Mercedes with a horn and a sense of entitlement. He made the unfortunate mistake of honking at the tiny purple Ford Fiesta driven by a madwoman.

Andre threw the car into park.

My stomach dropped. I knew what was coming before she even opened the door. She stepped into Highway 22 and began directing traffic herself, waving along cars exiting a function that had just let out, while the honker sat trapped through two full red-light cycles.

People stared. I slid lower in my seat, wishing the floorboard would open up and swallow me whole.

After sizing up the woman standing in the middle of the road, the man in the Mercedes dared not honk again.

After she let the last car out, she yelled at the Beauchenite.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

That phrase stayed with me, not so much the words as the posture behind them. I’d seen that look before on my mother’s face: the quiet satisfaction that comes when a single line lands clean and drops someone a notch without requiring a follow-up. The moment when the fight no longer needs volume, only presence.

That’s the posture I saw again in Sandra.

One photograph of her stands out. Not of her raging, not at the microphone, but after the dust had settled. It was taken one year before Katrina, after the school board’s failed attempt to fire Superintendent Anthony Amato while he was out of town. At the last minute, a federal judge shut it down.

For Sandra, who had railed against the school board for years, it was a rare moment of vindication, proof that all that noise had, finally, mattered.

The room still buzzed with parents, board members, and activists wound tight with fury and relief. My attention and my camera were locked on Mama D (Dyan French Cole), still raising a firestorm, refusing to let the fight cool.

It took a moment before I noticed that Sandra was even there.

People were filing out, the argument spent. And when I finally raised my camera, I saw her. It was the same look I’d seen on my mother’s face years earlier. Not a smirk. Not defiance. Something closer to satisfaction. She didn’t need to say a word.

Sandra and Andre never met. They never shared a room or a microphone or a story. But they have finally met inside me.

For years, I learned how to watch, how to document, how to frame, how to stay just far enough back to avoid becoming the story myself. These women, in all their volume and defiance, taught me something I resisted for a long time: that silence is also a choice, and never a neutral one.

They weren’t trying to be liked.
They were trying to be heard.

God, I would give anything to hear their voices right now.

Andre’s deep raspy voice cutting through the room, Sandra’s mere presence making power squirm. And Mama D, who stood before Congress in 2005 and refused to stop when her time ran out, speaking until her community’s pain was laid bare.

But they’re all gone.

And what’s left is me.

What embarrassed me as a daughter has become my inheritance as a woman, and I’m done mistaking discomfort for a reason to stay quiet. So, in the spirit of Andre and Sandra, here’s my message to the current regime.

You are hemorrhoids on my ass -- painful, inflamed, and disgusting. I’m going to Preparation-H you and every pus-filled enabler until you’re gone. Then, when that day comes, I’m taking my healed ass to dance in the streets.

Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Out there, it was easy to feel connected to everything and no one at all.

In those long, quiet days, limiting my intake of the news, I read “The Overstory,” Richard Powers’s sweeping novel about tree activists and the fierce communities that form around the living world, and it moved me to tears. The title itself refers to what lives above our heads in the forest, while beneath it, hidden underground, roots are quietly communicating and holding one another up. The book reminded me that even the smallest acts of attention and care can become a kind of resistance in a world so determined to look away. And yet I, too, was looking away, trying to escape what was waiting for me back home.

Because back in New Orleans, Mardi Gras was gearing up, and for the first time in my life I wasn’t sure I could bear it. The feathers, the parades, the forced brightness all felt out of step with the grief I was carrying. I didn’t want to hear a trumpet or see a parade. I wanted the world to stay quiet so I wouldn’t have to feel anything. So I stayed in the woods, listening to owls instead of brass bands, pretending the world might pause if I didn’t look at it.

So while I was hiding from the noise and color of Mardi Gras, I wasn’t actually escaping the world, I was circling it in another way, through books that refused to let me forget what happens when people retreat into themselves.

I finally read “The Grapes of Wrath,” which had somehow eluded me all these years, and was astonished by how a book written generations ago feels as if it were written for now -- fear of the migrant forced to migrate, machines replacing hands, the greedy seizing resources and sovereignty. I kept reading Chapter 14 over and over, the way I watched the cardinals return to a feeder at dusk, because Steinbeck understood something I was forgetting: that once “we” becomes “I,” people become disposable, and whole families can be erased by those who already have more than they could ever need.

I love New Orleans with a ferocity I can’t quite explain or defend. But returning from the woods, the city felt so heavy. Homelessness presses in on every corner as tourists walk by with go-cups. National Guardsmen with guns flung across their chests walking on Bourbon Street, their boots grinding Mardi Gras beads into the pavement, on the same street where 14 died a year ago in a terrorist attack.

And I was carrying family grief too, that I won’t unpack here.

But then came the murder of Renee Good. All I wanted to do was run back to the woods and hide. Turn away. Into myself.

But then a miracle.

Yesterday, I stopped at a red light outside Dooky Chase Restaurant, I saw an old man dressed like he was going to church. But it was Saturday and I thought maybe he was just stepping out and it made me smile. But as I looked closer, his face was tilted toward the sidewalk, sorrow pulling his eyes down was as if in prayer.

As I studied him, another man, a couple decades younger, dressed just as elegantly, walked up from around the corner. He said a few words I couldn’t hear. He pulled out a fancy handkerchief and gently wiped the older man’s eyes. Then he wrapped him in a tight endless hug.

And I lost it.

Because there it was, in the middle of a street in front of the legacy built by Leah Chase, the queen of Creole cooking and the matriarch of New Orleans’s conscience. I could almost hear her warm and steady voice: “We helped change the world over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken.” I imagined her stirring love and nourishment into every pot, the way she once fed civil rights workers, the hungry, the hopeful, and anyone who walked through her door in need of more than just a meal.

Then the light changed and I drove on, never knowing why the old man was weeping.

Two men on a broken sidewalk, refusing to let sorrow sit alone.

I thought of Steinbeck’s two men squatting in a ditch, the passage I had been carrying with me all month.

“One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you who hate change and fear revolution. Keep these two squatting men apart; make them hate, fear, suspect each other. Here is the angle of the thing you fear. This is the zygote. For here “I lost my land” is changed; a cell is split and from its splitting grows the thing you hate “We lost our land.” The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first “we” there grows a still more dangerous thing: “I have a little food” plus “I have none.” If from this problem the sum is “We have a little food,” the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours. The two men squatting in a ditch, the little fire, the side-meat stewing in a single pot, the silent, stone-eyed women; behind, the children listening with their souls to words their minds do not understand. The night draws down. The baby has a cold. Here, take this blanket. It’s wool. It was my mother’s blanket take it for the baby. This is the thing to bomb. This is the beginning from “I” to “we.”

Gut punch.

What I realized was that Mardi Gras has always been New Orleans’s stubborn answer to despair. It isn’t denial. It’s defiance. It’s a city saying WE are still here -- still dancing, still feeding each other, still refusing to let grief have the last word. Feathers and floats and second lines aren’t a distraction from sorrow; they are a way of carrying it together.

And I’m seeing it now in Minneapolis, where ordinary people gather in the cold for Renee Good, holding each other when power tries to crush them.

Steinbeck knew that justice moves the way grapes are crushed, slow and relentless, until what has been hoarded is finally released under one big, beautiful moon.

So much sorrow in the world, yes. And still, Minneapolis -- two men on a broken sidewalk multiplied by thousands -- beginning the most dangerous thing there is: turning “I am hurting” into “we are.”

It was 1991, and I was teaching in Honduras.

After the first few challenging months, I couldn’t wait for Semana Santa, Easter week vacation. I traveled through Honduras, down from the mountains toward the coast. When I boarded in La Ceiba, I immediately felt out of place. The passengers were mostly Black, not mestizo like the people in the mountains. I was acutely aware of being the only American. And only one of a few women. My camera hung around my neck like a shield, though I wasn’t sure what I was protecting myself from.

This was my first venture into Garifuna culture. I was nervous as I scanned the crowded bus for a place to sit. Traveling alone had already taught me to be cautious.

I sat next to a young man who looked about my age, after he flashed me a warm smile.

“Buiti finafi,’’ he said.

I froze. That wasn’t Spanish.

“Good morning,’’ he repeated in English when he saw my confusion.

His name was Denis, and he spoke flawless and fluent English with a thick Caribbean lilt. Like most Black Caribs, he also spoke Spanish and Garifuna, an Arawakan language carried west when his ancestors fled St. Vincent in the eighteenth century to avoid enslavement.

Denis put me at ease as we rattled down the long, unpaved road. Outside the window, miles of lush African palms stretched in perfect rows, their dark green fronds swaying in the humid breeze. At the time, I saw only the beauty.

As Denis began explaining the history of the United Fruit Company, I felt a flush of embarrassment. He knew far more about it than I did. I was from New Orleans, the city where Samuel “Sam the Banana Man” Zemurray built his empire, and all I really knew was that his house later became the Tulane president’s residence on St. Charles Avenue. Listening to Denis, my perception of the landscape changed. I suddenly understood what banana republic meant, and how that history could still be pressing on his life, forcing someone like him to look for work beyond his own country.

He was still talking when he suddenly leapt from his seat.

“¡Pare!” he shouted.

The bus screeched to a halt, dust billowing as Denis vanished into a stand of palm trees. He returned moments later, hoisting an enormous iguana overhead.

A bidding war broke out. Iguana meat, prized as a cure-all for everything from colds to sexual woes, sold quickly. Denis pocketed 24 lempiras or about four dollars.

“That’s incredible,” I said, reaching for humor. “It reminds me of Night of the Iguana, when the church lady asks, ‘You mean they really eat those awful-looking creatures?’”

Denis didn’t laugh.

“Well, I guess you’d find it strange if you saw me suck the heads of a crawfish, like we do back in Louisiana,’’ I said, trying to lighten the sudden shift in his mood.

He forced a smile.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Denis sighed. “I’m nervous,” he admitted. “I’ve been working in Belize for a year,” he said. “When the fruit companies left, the land along the coast changed hands. Places my people had worked and lived on for generations were taken over. My wife and daughter don’t even know I’m coming home. They don’t have a phone. No postbox. Nothing.’’ He wondered if his three-year-old daughter would even remember him.

The weight of his reality pressed against me.

“Why don’t you get a job at a bilingual school like me?” I suggested. “I make $200 a month. You could stay in Honduras and be with your family.”

“But I’m not a teacher,” he said, shaking his head.

“Neither am I,” I admitted with a weak smile.

“They want teachers with an American accent.”

The air between us grew heavier.

For all my complaints about being underpaid, about feeling unfulfilled, I was sitting next to a man whose flawless English couldn’t secure him the same opportunities.

It was humbling. And it stung.

When we arrived at Trujillo, he walked me to the beach, where I said goodbye with a hug. I wished him the best of luck reuniting with his family. I never saw him again, but he traveled with me long after I left.

That summer, I traveled through Guatemala on chicken buses—repurposed American school buses painted in neon colors, packed with people, produce, and sometimes live animals. They were called chicken buses because chickens were allowed aboard, but what they really carried was necessity. I spent weeks moving between villages, shooting photographs with my Nikon FE: people whose lives bore little resemblance to the one I could always return to.

One night in Antigua, I connected with a self-proclaimed “tribe of travelers,’’ made up of Europeans and Asians, at a bar named Picasso Bar where we shot tequila into the night. I was the only American but our common language was English. We met there again a couple nights later where I had bragged about “crashing a Mayan wedding,” flipping through photos at a bar, expecting admiration. Instead, a French woman named Lela looked at me steadily and said, “You Americans are so entitled. They are not animals in a zoo.”

Her words sliced through my defenses, leaving me exposed in a way I hadn’t anticipated. I faltered, mumbling something about how I admired their traditions and wanted to share them with others. She exhaled sharply and shook her head.

Her critique spurred a lively conversation, and I had nowhere to hide. I had thought of myself as an observer, a documentarian, but in that moment I saw my gaze for what it was. Another form of privilege. I moved through foreign places with certainty, assuming access without question. Assuming permission without asking.

The conversation turned ugly. It was the summer after Operation Desert Storm, with Panama still fresh in people’s minds and American power newly asserted. I had no rebuttal. Central America was still unstable in ways I could hear and feel. I saw soldiers on roads that were never quite empty, wars officially over but still standing guard. For the first time, being American made me uncomfortable -- not abstractly, but in a room where everyone knew exactly what that power had cost.

Lela was relentless but precise, detailing the long history of colonial exploitation in places like Guatemala. The others chimed in, raising their glasses in mock celebration -- “To privilege!” “To democracy, as long as it’s American!” Their voices, edged with humor but weighted with truth, left me pinned in my seat.

I sat there, silent, my face burning, not with indignation, but with the slow, creeping realization of assumptions I’d never questioned as a proud American.

I left the bar stripped bare. Only later would I understand her bluntness as a gift. At the time, it felt like a slapdown.

I mistook that reckoning for vigilance.

Military force no longer startled me. Decades before National Guardsmen patrolled U.S. city streets, I had been shocked. In Honduras, I saw tanks for the first time, rolling through the mountains where I taught, soldiers standing rigid in their hatches, rifles angled outward. Order was enforced, not assumed.

I told myself I understood the risks. I told myself awareness was enough.

It wasn’t.

After shooting tequila with the so-called tribe of travelers, a German man offered to walk me home. I declined. I wanted to be alone after the humiliation. I walked back to my hospedaje on the wrong side of town. The streets were empty, the air thick with wood smoke and damp earth. I grew nervous when I noticed the guards who usually patrolled the corners were gone. Then I heard footsteps. Then I saw the guns. Then the ground.

They were young -- boys, really. Masked and efficient; I could tell by their eyes.

“Lo siento mucho,” he whispered. “Somos obligados.”

I’m sorry. We are obligated.

Obligated to whom, I wondered. The cartels, the police, their families, the guerrillas?

They took my camera, my film, my journal, losses I still grieve. When I begged for my passport, they handed it back without hesitation. That was the moment the hierarchy became clear. I knew my American passport would save me almost anywhere, and that I had been taking risks I didn’t fully earn.

The next day, the American embassy bought me a bus ticket out of Guatemala and back to Honduras.

On that long ride, stripped of everything but my passport and the clothes I was wearing, I began to understand my freedom of movement as a product of American history, not personal virtue. I had mistaken my camera for permission, curiosity for innocence. I moved through other people’s lives backed by a country that had long claimed access abroad -- through force, money, and moral certainty. I could teach without training. Photograph without asking. And when it became uncomfortable, I could leave, protected by the same power that had shaped the place I was passing through.

Without my camera, I began to see more clearly: the women bent over fields with babies on their backs so I could drink coffee back home; artisans whose months of labor were haggled down by tourists like me; the landfill outside Guatemala City where children scavenged for food, an image that unsettled me more than my childhood memory of food stamps. I understood then that my shame back home had been a privilege.

By the time I returned to Escuela El Alba to teach, I knew what no classroom had taught me. That empire doesn’t always arrive with guns and bombs. Sometimes it arrives with accents, contracts, cameras, and promises of order.

When Trump says he will “govern” Venezuela and take its oil, I hear the same certainty I once carried through Guatemala, the belief that power grants the right to take, that resources are simply there for the taking, that someone else’s country is a problem you’re entitled to solve.

I think of Denis, of those boys in Antigua whispering apologies, of Lela’s steady gaze. I think of how easily power explains itself when it belongs to you.

Imperialism sometimes arrives with soldiers and bombs. But imperialism is not always loud. Sometimes it is calm. Sometimes it is polite. Sometimes it hands you your passport and sends you safely home.

And you accept it, long before you ever think to ask why it was yours to take.

Trujillo, Honduras 1991

So instead of forcing meaning where I couldn’t find it, I told myself to drop the whole thing. Then I woke this morning to my friend Darlene’s post about her favorite sentences from The New York Times, and voilà! I found something to write about for the new year: the people who, over the years, have said things that stopped me mid-complaint, mid-fear, mid-story I was telling myself. Not advice. Not slogans. Just sentences that landed with enough force to quietly rearrange how I saw my life, and what a new year might actually be for.

On Dieting

For a long time, dieting was at the top of my resolutions list.

One day, I passed over the fried chicken at a local counter because I said I was “too fat.” The old man behind me cut in.

“Baby,” he said, “you ain’t fat. You’re Louisiana healthy!”

When I said the same thing to a friend, she didn’t hesitate to put in her two cents.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what they’re going to write on your tombstone. Cheryl Gerber was a great person, but she could have lost a few pounds.”

Both statements were true.
Both made me laugh hard enough to let it go and enjoy that delicious fried chicken.

But the sentence that became a metaphor for my life came later.

At a kid’s birthday party, I declined a piece of cake because I was “on a diet.” The mother handed me the plate anyway and said, through tight lips, “Eat the damn cake.”

I did.

And later I realized she wasn’t talking about cake at all.

On relationships

In the ‘90s, King Richard was a fixture at Kaldi’s Coffee House on Decatur, reading tarot cards and doling out life advice.

One afternoon, I was complaining about my relationship. I didn’t have a good reason to break up. I just felt stuck.

“Is he abusive?” King Richard asked.

“No!” I said quickly.

“Is he controlling?”

“God, no. He’s a gardener. A baker. An artist. A liberal. He couldn’t care less what I do.”

“Why were you attracted to him in the first place?” he asked.

“Because he was the opposite of my first boyfriend, who was controlling.”

King Richard looked me dead in the eye.

“So,” he said, “your first boyfriend is still controlling you.”

The sentence hit like a slap, sharp and unexpected. I didn’t argue or laugh it off. I just sat there and soaked it in, letting it rearrange me.

In the days after Katrina, I faced a life-altering decision that required real sacrifice. I was willing to take in my three-year-old nephew but was my partner? Mark, newly free for the first time since he was twenty-one, had just finished raising young children.

I agonized for weeks over how to tell him. He could sense something was terribly wrong, something beyond Katrina itself.

When I finally said it out loud, he didn’t hesitate.

“You just have to take care of whatever lands in your path.”

That sentence is how I knew I had to marry him.

On Taking Risks

My dad was a gambler, always betting on longshots for the bigger payoff, but he was also raised Amish/Mennonite, with a work ethic that didn’t believe in shortcuts. I’ll never forget when he said, “Sometimes the longshot pays off, but you still have to shovel the shit.” He believed just as firmly that slow and steady wins the race. It has taken me a lifetime, and a lot of shoveling shit, to understand what he meant.

On youth

On my 25th birthday, I was living in Honduras, eating at a restaurant on the side of a dirt road. I was complaining to my friend that I felt ugly. The bleach in the water, used to kill cholera, had turned my hair orange. I’d chipped my front tooth on a mango pit. My legs started showing cellulite and, in my mind, looked like yucca trees.

I hadn’t even noticed the old woman behind the counter until she spoke, her gray hair pulled into a severe knot, her skin browned and creased like crumpled wax paper. Her wrinkled hands rested on the counter as she listened, then said gently:

“You are in the flower of your life. Everyone is beautiful when they are young.”

I didn’t believe her then.

I sure do now.

On aging

My mother, a raspy-voiced, sailor-talking poet who never minced words, turned 60, the year I am now. I asked her how it felt to be so old. “It’s great,” she said, exhaling smoke into the air. “You don’t give a rat’s ass about the stupid shit anymore.” She was right. I just wasted a lot of years caring about the wrong shit.

On opportunity

When my friend and mentor Bonnie Warren heard me agonizing that I didn’t have enough money or time off work to bring my nephew to Paris, as I had promised, she said quietly:

“The window of opportunity closes fast.”

I charged the tickets on a credit card. I lost a few jobs.

The memory of my thirteen-year-old nephew taking in Paris from a sixth-floor window overlooking Notre-Dame -- before it burned.

Priceless.

On positive thinking

Ahead of the HBO series Treme, I was assigned to photograph trumpeter Kermit Ruffins. I asked him, exuberantly:

“Kermit, did you ever in your life believe you’d be playing yourself in a series about your own neighborhood on HBO?”

Without missing a beat, he said, “Oh, I always knew.”

That sentence taught me more about positive thinking than any self-help book ever could.

On capturing attention.

And then there was Mel Rose, the town floozy.

Just weeks into my first job at a small-town convenience store, a cowboy walked in straight out of Urban Cowboy and my knees buckled. He came every Friday night, but he never noticed me.

After witnessing my awkward exchange, Mel, with teased blonde hair and red spandex, leaned across the counter to collect her Virginia Slims Menthols, and whispered, “Sugar, next time he comes in, hand him his Skoal, look him in the eye, and don’t let go until he looks back.”

The next Friday night, I did just that. And he became mine.

I’d spent my life observing. Mel taught me how to step into the frame.

On paying attention:

There was so much I didn’t understand when I was young. So much I still don’t. But through it all, I still hear Ernie K-Doe -- the Emperor of the Universe -- voice booming from the Mother-in-Law Lounge, offering the clearest instruction New Orleans ever gave: “Understanding ain’t the most important thing in the world. The most important thing… is paying attention.”

Invaluable advice for a photographer.

On Persistence and Resistance

I made a few New Year’s resolutions last year, but only one stuck: I read a lot of books.

Last night, I finished “The Nightingale,” published in 2015, but it seemed to be written for this moment in time. It’s a story of two sisters in France during WWII, whose courage shows up quietly, through resistance, endurance, moral steadiness, and love carried forward under impossible pressure.

There were many lines worth underlining, but the one that stayed with me wasn’t even from the novel itself. It was the epigraph, attributed to Winston Churchill: “When you are going through hell, keep going.”

It struck me as the only resolution that really matters. Not a promise to improve or transform, but a commitment to persist, to hold your ground, and to keep choosing decency and care, even when no one is watching.

If I make a resolution this year, it’s that one.

#athousandwordsandphoto

Walter Cronkite must be rolling over in his grave.

CBS, once the gold standard of American broadcast journalism, pulled a Kimmel and it backfired. A 60 Minutes investigation into migrant abuses at a notorious prison in El Salvador was reportedly suppressed under new leadership, framed as upholding “editorial integrity.” But when the segment later aired in Canada, the cost of that decision became visible. The truth, it turns out, has a way of finding the light.

CBS is likely to feel the heat today. Because when you dance with the devil, the flames catch up with you.

I know. Because it happened to me.

I know what it feels like to betray your journalistic soul when faced with tough ethical decisions. I know what it feels to convince yourself that compromise is survival, and to realize too late that you’ve crossed a line you once believed you never would.

When I was young, I wanted to be a journalist with a strong ethical compass. Someone who believed facts mattered. Someone who believed truth should never be adjusted to suit power. Someone who believed that when the moment came to stand up to an editor, I would recognize it instantly and do the right thing.

I carried that idealism with me into my first couple of jobs, confident that when the test came, I would pass it.

But the truth is, when that moment arrived, I failed miserably. And it haunts me to this day.

Very early in my career, I had picked up a small freelance job as an assistant editor at the Jefferson Times & Democrat, a periodical covering governmental affairs in the conservative suburbs of Jefferson Parish. It wasn’t glamorous, but the mix of desk work and field assignments allowed me to sharpen my reporting, editing, and photography skills while rubbing elbows with parish officials and community leaders.

Most of the copyediting was routine, utilizing what I had learned in college. But what I really looked forward to were the photo assignments, my new passion.

One of my first shoots was of a newly built playground in Metairie, not far from where we had lived when I was little. It was feel-good story -- a public improvement, children at play, proof that tax dollars had been put to good use. What could possibly go wrong?

At the playground, I noticed a group of kids on the swing set so I asked a young mother if I could photograph her son, a boy about six years old. She was delighted. Excited even. She smoothed his shirt, cleaned his face with her spit-dampened thumb, and gave the swing a gentle push, clearly proud that her child would appear in the paper.

I was very new to photography and was having a hard time catching the image. I crouched low and panned back and forth, struggling at first to catch the motion of the swing. After several missed frames, the boy finally came into focus, centered perfectly, his face lit up with a wide, toothless grin.

I knew immediately I had the photograph I needed. As the image appeared under the red glow of my darkroom, I couldn’t have been prouder.

The next day, brimming with confidence, I delivered the image to my editor. His reaction caught me off guard. His expression hardened as he looked at the print.

“You’ll need to reshoot this,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “It’s adorable.”

He didn’t offer a technical critique or suggest an alternative framing. Instead, he explained, without hesitation, that “the taxpayers of Jefferson Parish would rather see a white child using the new playground.”

I remember standing there, stunned and disgusted, realizing that this was one of those moments people talk about later, the kind where you either draw a line or cross one.

I wish I could say I quit on the spot but I didn’t.

I went back and reshot a white child.

I told myself the decision belonged to my editor. I told myself I was just a freelancer trying to stay afloat. I told myself the job was temporary and that I would leave once I had other work.

They were hollow excuses, and I knew it even then.

The guilt set in immediately. I thought about the boy’s mother and how pleased she had been, how likely she was to tell friends and family that her son would appear in the paper. I imagined her opening it later and seeing the white child staring back at her. I wondered what she thought, what she would say to her son, and what lesson he would quietly absorb from that substitution.

So when John Dickerson resigned from CBS, it did not just sadden me. It became a reckoning for what I failed to do so long ago.

Even though I reshot the image, I kept the first photograph. I wrote on the back what I could not say out loud, a private record of a decision I knew I would carry forever.

I hope the reporters whose work is silenced choose to leave or stand up for the truth, as John Dickerson did, and as Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa warns in How to Stand Up to a Dictator, before silence becomes a reckoning they carry for the rest of their lives.

At 60 Minutes, an investigative segment was pulled before it aired. At the Jefferson Times & Democrat, one photograph of a child was quietly swapped for another. The stakes were different, but the calculus was identical. A story existed. A photograph existed. And someone decided the truth was less important than the audience’s comfort. Or a president’s.

I have made many mistakes in my career, but none as quietly haunting as this one. I did not know then where photography and journalism would lead me. I only understood that the exchange I had made could not be undone, and that the rest of my life would be spent trying not to repeat it.

Democracy is fragile. It depends on journalists -- regardless of rank, platform, or proximity to power -- refusing accommodation and holding the line even when doing so feels impractical, isolating, or costly.

And that’s the way it is.

Except on the nights All in the Family came on.

That was our family’s favorite show. On those nights, Andre let the dishes soak and joined us in the living room, singing the theme song, “Those Were the Days,” in her deep, raspy voice. It was the opposite of Edith Bunker’s high-pitched tone. The only thing the two women really had in common was that they stayed at home.

I often wished my mother were more like Edith. She was soft, warm, endlessly patient. But that was not who Andre was. She was more like Archie Bunker, only without the irony.

Like Archie, she clung to a past that seemed better only because it had been easier for people like her. “Those were the days,” she would say, meaning before Woolworth lunch counters were integrated, before Ruby Bridges, before Audubon Park closed its swimming pool rather than allow Black children to swim.

I, on the other hand, was the Meathead, though I was too timid to speak up. I didn’t yet have the language or confidence to dismantle racism, but I knew it felt wrong. Even so, fear often kept me silent. Fear of being judged, of being ostracized, of being labeled a troublemaker, or worse, a liberal.

What I didn’t understand then was how much Rob Reiner, through Meathead, was teaching me anyway. Week after week, he modeled how to speak with certainty, how to be mocked and dismissed and still keep going. From him, I learned that challenging racism wasn’t about having perfect words; it was about refusing silence, even when it cost you comfort.

It wasn’t until college that I began to channel my Meathead out loud.

One day, Andre casually used the n-word as part of a phrase. She no longer used it as a noun, she insisted defensively, as if that somehow softened it.

“Ma, you really can’t say that,” I told her. “It’s hateful and hurtful.”

“Who does it hurt?” she snapped. “Do you see any Black people around here?”

“Besides a whole race of people, it hurts me,” I said. “It feels worse than fingernails on a chalkboard.”

She laughed.

That laugh stung. It exposed the gulf between what I was learning and what she refused to see.

“You think you’re so smart because you’re in college,” Andre said. She had dropped out in the seventh grade. “I may not be educated, but I know about the First Amendment, and I can say whatever the hell I please.”

On my way out the door, I threw one last line over my shoulder. “By the way, you can’t say ‘Jew ’em down’ either!”

It wasn’t eloquent or measured. But it was a glimpse of my real self, cutting through the fear that had wrapped itself around me in my mother’s presence since childhood. Still, I never seemed to get through to her.

Around that same time, I got the opportunity to interview Carroll O’Connor for my college magazine.

MGM was filming the pilot for In the Heat of the Night nearby. I wandered onto the set just as O’Connor finished a scene and instinctively raised my camera.

“Quiet, please,” the producer shouted.

I wanted to vanish. But O’Connor winked and walked over.

“No profiles, please,” he said gently. “My chin is too fat.”

I had braced for Archie, the bombastic, crude, hostile bigot. Instead, I met a refined, soft-spoken man with piercing blue eyes and a calm demeanor. Did I detect a slight Irish accent?

“Call me Carroll,” he said.

He talked about being a terrible student, about working on his college paper in Montana, about joining the Merchant Marines and later studying literature in Ireland. Acting had satisfied him, he said, but he had always wanted to be a writer.

“Like you,” he said. “But acting is storytelling, too.”

When I asked about the show he was starring in and producing, he explained that In the Heat of the Night centered on a racist Southern police chief forced to work alongside a Black deputy and that created some tension.

“So,” I joked, suddenly nervous, “are you a bigot or do you just play one on TV?”

He didn’t laugh.

He explained that while racism shaped Chief Gillespie, the character struggled with it. “Archie is ignorant,” he said. “The chief is not. He’s a tough old bird, but he tries to deal with his racism. Archie never saw a need to change.”

I told him All in the Family was my parents’ favorite show. That my mother and I argued about race and politics much like Archie and Meathead. I told him about the time my mother ran screaming through the living room when Sammy Davis Jr. kissed Archie on the cheek in the famous episode.

“That look on your face — I mean on Archie’s face, was priceless,” I said. “I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack.”

O’Connor smiled, then grew serious. He leaned in and looked right through me with those intense ocean blue eyes.

“Did you ever notice,” he asked, “that Archie rarely smiled? Or had anything nice to say?”

He paused.

“His bigotry was keeping him from enjoying his life, like a poison inside him,” he said. “His father passed it down to him, so he didn’t realize anything was wrong. But it was poisoning him all the same.”

Was that why Andre was so bitter? Was her racism poisoning her? Poisoning me?

The next time I went home, Andre couldn’t wait to hear about my interview with her favorite TV star. So, I told her exactly what he had said.

I braced for her usual rebuttal. Instead, she said nothing. She lit another cigarette, inhaled, and slowly exhaled the noxious smoke.

For the first time, she didn’t argue. That silence didn’t fix everything. But it interrupted something.

And sometimes, that’s where change begins.

.

And the truth is, it took a fabled coffeehouse, a homeless tarot reader, a barista with a generous smile, and a wise Greek friend who helped me shake it loose.

One day, on my way to my shift at the Gumbo Shop, I stopped in at the fabled bohemian Kaldi’s Coffee House for a high dose of caffeine in the form of their tasty mocha frosted coffee. Rebecca, the blonde barista with the megawatt smile, let me hang a few of my photos to sell.

Every day, on my way to sling gumbo to hungry tourists, I stopped in to see if any of them had sold. And every day, I walked out disappointed, wondering if I would ever realize my dream. The frustration built. My anger started spilling out.

One evening, I was on Teresa’s iron-laced balcony on Ursulines Street with her new deep-thinking Greek boyfriend, Vangelis, when it all came loose. I bemoaned the influx of young drifters flooding New Orleans in droves -- clogging the sidewalks with their dogs and guitars, hassling me for my hard-earned tips as I walked home after an eight-hour shift.

“I wish I could just quit working and hang out all day like them, panhandling and contributing nothing to society, while I have to sling gumbo when all I want is to become a photographer,’’ I said.

The moment the words left my mouth, I felt ashamed. The sentiment wasn’t far from the one that made headlines last week.

Vangelis looked at me with a slow, disappointed shake of his head as if I had disappointed Socrates himself.

“When you start thinking like dat,” he said in his thick accent, “you going to be an old stick in da mud. You don’t know what they will contribute. One of dem may be the next great songwriter. Or poet.”

Ouch. That stung. The last thing I wanted to be was an old stick in da mud in Vangelis’s eyes. I carried my shame home that night and cried myself to sleep.

The next day, desperate for clarity, I turned to the last person anyone would expect: King Richard, a fixture at Kaldi’s who read tarot cards for strippers and anyone else down on their luck. I had never been a stripper, but I was absolutely down on mine, approaching 30, still waiting tables, watching my dream of becoming a full-time photographer dim.

We called him “King” Richard because he spoke in a British king’s English, though he wasn’t British and wasn’t royal. He was an African American homeless man who brushed his thick black hair straight back, wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, and covered his fingers with silver rings carved into mythical figures. His face was striking -- a strong angular jaw, paper-white teeth -- and I used to tease that he looked like the “Black Lionel Richie with Elvis hair.”

I anxiously waited for a stripper to collect her fortune, then slid into the chair across from Richard and confessed what I’d said on the balcony and how ashamed I felt, how Vangelis’s words had lodged themselves in my ribs. Richard didn’t flinch. He kept flipping through Gambit, the alternative weekly that arrived at Kaldi’s on Sundays. Only when I finished did he finally look up, calm and certain, seeing more in me than I saw in myself. What he told me next would change the course of my career.

“You should do a story on these kids for Gambit,” he said.

“They already have a staff photographer,” I said. “I’ve tried.”

“Do it on spec. What’ve you got to lose?” he replied. Then, tapping the paper lightly as if revealing a prophecy:
“Some of these kids are very smart. You might even find that poet.”

I told King Richard that the dirty, grimy kids who often looked strung out frightened me. Instead of dismissing my fear, he walked outside with me and introduced me to Data, who seemed to be the leader of the “tribe” of self-proclaimed gutter punks that hung out in front of Kaldi’s. His face was a spectacle of piercings -- three silver tusks jutting from below his bottom lip over a tattooed chin -- and around his neck hung teeth and bones from some small animal.

My upbringing in a rural Louisiana church hadn’t prepared me for any of this. “Your body is a temple of the Lord,” my mother would say, as she hypocritically inhaled toxic nicotine. Nothing in my childhood told me how to stand comfortably in front of someone who had turned his own body into a canvas of rebellion and survival.

Over the next few weeks, I photographed and interviewed a dozen gutter punks who roamed Decatur Street and gathered at “Hippie Hill,” an outdoor amphitheater across from Jackson Square. They revealed a subculture powered by vodka, panhandling, and getting high, yet threaded with surprising flashes of intelligence, humor, and sharp self-awareness.

None of them was the songwriter or poet Vangelis had suggested I might find, but I did discover something startling: some were remarkably bright, carrying traumas far heavier than my own, expressing themselves through artful tattoos, piercings, and their transient community. And surprisingly, a few of them held conservative beliefs. That revelation jolted me. What else could I be wrong about?

As I documented their stories -- of abuse survived, of philosophies built around living off the wastes of society, of creating meaning from the margins -- something fundamental shifted inside me. These gutter punks weren’t simply fringe dwellers. They were a diverse, complicated, often brilliant group whose lives defied every stereotype I had lazily absorbed.

This story became the first of many that would reshape my understanding of people different from myself.

With King Richard as my consultant, I produced my first feature-length story and pitched it to Gambit.

A month later, in the echoing walls of Kaldi’s, where the aroma of freshly brewed coffee mingled with the anticipation of my first cover story, I eagerly awaited the arrival of Gambit. Rebecca and Richard, my biggest fans -- my only fans -- shared in the excitement. My hands trembled as I clutched the newspaper from the delivery man. The morning sunlight streamed through the enormous café windows, casting a warm glow on the headline, in bold type, above my full-page photo -- “Gutter Punks: Photographer Cheryl Gerber Goes Inside the World of the French Quarter Tribes.”

Seeing my photograph and name on that cover felt like the air had shifted. But the deeper shift was internal: the realization that my judgment had blinded me long before my camera ever could.

Decades later, walking my dog on the Esplanade neutral ground under a full moon, I came across a man tucked into a sleeping bag, writing in a notebook. He wasn’t asking for anything. Not money. Not attention.

I asked if he was a writer.

A story for another time, but he turned out to be the poet laureate from a very prominent university.

And I remember thinking:
Vangelis was right.
The poet exists.
He always did.
I just hadn’t been looking.

It hit me then how the whole journey began, with my own narrow judgment, deciding who mattered and who didn’t, not far from the kind of thinking that later came out of Trump’s mouth.

But photographing those kids, and meeting a poet on the neutral ground years later, taught me the same lesson twice:

The camera wasn’t out of focus.
I was.

The sweltering trailer had turned into an oven, our air-conditioning rationed to save on the electric bill. Our new country friend, Roxanne, had hatched a scheme for us. “Let’s put a purse out on the highway, attached to a fishing line. When someone stops to pick it up, we yank it!” That was the gist of it.

We set the trap on Hwy 22 under cover of night. When the first driver screeched to a halt and jumped back into his car empty-handed, we laughed so hard our bellies ached. For a moment, it felt like country life might actually be fun.

My nine-year-old little brother Arnold insisted on planting the next bait. As he carefully set the trap, we waited, each passing minute feeling like an eternity. The air grew thick around us as mosquitoes and wasps buzzed above our heads.

A big pickup truck appeared, slowing to a stop. The engine shut down. A man slowly exited the driver’s side. He walked into the headlights, and we immediately recognized his silhouetted figure: that big head of slicked-back hair, the tight plaid shirt tucked into his polyester slacks, the round belly, the fancy alligator-skin cowboy boots.

My sister Teenie and I held our breaths as he bent down to pick up the bait, worried about yanking the purse from this guy, but Arnold didn’t pick up on our apprehension. The purse slipped from the man’s grasp.

Teenie whispered, “oh shit.”

Mr. Floyd, the justice of the peace who notarized the recent bill of sale for our trailer, didn’t flinch. He got back in his truck, threw it in reverse, and backed down Hwy 22 until his headlights disappeared into the black. We laughed, nervously, sensing something amiss.

Five minutes later, we heard those same tires roar back toward us.

We froze.

The purse lay untouched. We ducked even lower. His boots hit the pavement -- two slow, deliberate steps. Then silence. The kind that makes your skin crawl.

Then I heard the chilling and unmistakable sound I’d only heard on Gunsmoke. He cocked his rifle.

Suddenly, I felt a bullet split the still air and the weeds. Before we could react, he cocked the rifle again and sent out another blast. A sudden burn stung my shoulder.

“FUUUUUUCK!!!” I screamed.

And the forbidden word didn’t just slip from my lips. It was loud and long, piercing the humid silence, resounding across the street to where my other younger siblings, were huddled with Roxanne.

Teenie didn’t know I’d been hit, but she knew something serious had happened, because until that moment, I had never said a curse word. Ever.

Andre, our mother, despite being religious, grew up in the then-rough Irish Channel and used the word “fuck” so much that I thought it was normal until I was old enough to stay overnight at friends’ houses, where moms used words like “flip” or “fudge.” Not Andre, though. Fuck lingered in the air wafting atop her smokes -- her own sort of ex-communicated Catholic prayer for when times were rough -- reminding us that she answered to no one but God, and we answered to her. “Do as I say, not as I do,’’ she’d say when we pointed out her hypocrisy.

Floyd hurried back into the truck and disappeared again into the night. Once he was no longer in view, we all jumped up out of the weeds onto the blacktop and hightailed it home with bare feet slapping the hot asphalt surface, pattering like horse hooves at the Fairgrounds racetrack, interrupting the otherwise quiet night.

We ran breathlessly into the trailer, and I dashed past Andre to the bathroom to check my gunshot wound. There was no blood, but it burned like fire. Teenie examined my shoulder. It was my first wasp sting. Whew. I was relieved, but only momentarily. I was as afraid Andre as I was of burning in hell.

“What the fuck did y’all do now?” she barked in her deep gravelly voice. “For fuck’s sake, y’all better not lie or I’ll knock y’all into the middle of next week.’’

“Nothing happened,” I lied. Andre’s eyes narrowed under her thick, furrowing eyebrows, like an alarm signaling danger. Those tiny slit eyes could peer beyond the surface, and I didn’t want to find out how hard a hit it would take to knock me into the future.

So I told my dad. Being his first-born, I was the apple of his eye. On the rare occasions Andre insisted he spank us, he barely tapped us and we’d fake-cry for her benefit. Then we’d giggle down the hallway.

This time, Dad didn’t laugh. He was uncharacteristically angry. He grabbed his keys and sped off. Later we learned he confronted Floyd, who claimed he was only trying to scare us. That he aimed at the opposite side of the street. That he didn’t see all the kids.

If Andre and hell weren’t enough, I now had new fears. The message was clear: small towns didn’t need laws to keep order. Control belonged to the men with power and guns, and the rest of us, even kids, were expected to stay in line.

Decades later, I felt that same chill shoot down my spine while photographing white supremacists waving Confederate flags around the Jefferson Davis statue. I was nervous as I pointed my camera at a man with an assault rifle, my finger trembling as I pressed the shutter. Then, out of nowhere, a dump truck roared down Canal Street, music blasting, red and black flags whipping, a giant hand-painted sign flapping wildly in the wind:

FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM.

It made me laugh and cry at the same time. Vulgar. Righteous. The exact right volume for a city that has never whispered its truth.

Because sometimes “fuck’’ isn’t just a word. It’s a prayer, especially in New Orleans, where prayers are loud, messy, sweaty, danced, shouted, and carried down the block on a tuba.

So here’s my prayer now, as a grown woman, a photographer, and a witness:

May New Orleans remember exactly who the hell we are.
May we lift our neighbors the way they lifted this city after the water came.
May the dump trucks roll again if they must, like our secular saints on four wheels.
May we meet ICE at the parish line with the same fire we used to face down the men who fought to keep those monuments standing.
And may the right words -- however vulgar, however sacred -- rise up like a brass band refusing to quit.

I’m not afraid of my mother anymore, and I’m not afraid of burning in hell either. Like Andre would’ve said: “Fuck all y’all.”

#fuckICE #fuckTrump #fuckwhitesupremacy

As I scanned those old frames, most untouched for more than thirty years, it felt less like reviewing film and more like unlocking a sealed room inside myself. The younger version of me who appeared there was stubborn, broke, determined, and carrying a camera like it was a passport into a world I desperately wanted to understand. I was twenty-something with more curiosity than skill and more heart than sense.

At first glance, I was mortified. Whole rolls were severely underexposed or out of focus -- proof that I had learned photography on the fly. I wondered if I should’ve said yes to this invitation at all. I remember lamenting to my friend and mentor, photographer David Richmond, that all I had were “snapshots.” He didn’t hesitate. “Maybe so,” he said, “but you take the best snapshots. They have heart.”
I didn’t know then that heart was the only credential New Orleans ever really cared about.

And the truth is, I didn’t just have a lot to learn about photography. I didn’t understand the culture I was photographing. I didn’t grasp the spiritual history of second lines or the centuries of mutual aid behind the Social Aid & Pleasure Clubs. I didn’t know the history of the Black Masking Indians or the sacred lineage embedded in their beadwork. I didn’t realize Mardi Gras wasn’t a party so much as a spiritual practice stitched by survival and resistance. I thought I was photographing parades; in reality, I was witnessing a living archive move through the streets, guided by traditions older and deeper than anything I could name.

New Orleans teaches simply by existing. All you have to do is pay attention – the lesson I was taught over and over again.

In the early 90s -- before I had any real footing or understanding -- I had the rare privilege of working with Michael P. Smith, the quiet, watchful master of New Orleans documentary photography. Looking back, I realize that encounter was the spark: the moment I recognized what I wanted to do, even if I didn’t yet have a clue where to begin.

Michael taught me that documentary work rests on two things: curiosity and humility. “Don’t just photograph the event,” he told me once, after an Indian gently blocked my camera at my first Super Sunday. “Pay attention to how people express themselves without words.” His practical wisdom was just as sharp: photograph the young because you never know who they’ll become; photograph the old because they may not be here long; and always photograph hairdos and T-shirts because nothing marks time more honestly.
He wasn’t just teaching me photography. He was teaching me to see what I hadn’t noticed before.

The 90s became my apprenticeship -- the streets and bars my classroom. It was the decade I spotted my husband at three in the morning at Benny’s Bar, a dive where the cold draft blowing through the cracks chilled you faster than the beer and the floors felt like quicksand under your feet.

It was the decade Gambit gave me my first real break. I photographed “gutter punks” panhandling on Decatur, the same kids I used to resent when they asked me for money on my way to the Gumbo Shop, back when all I wanted was to be a photographer. But they ended up teaching me to stay open. They were rough and raw, but generous in a way the world rarely bothered to see. They trusted me before I trusted myself. And when Gambit ran that story, for the first time I didn’t have to sling gumbo to make ends meet. I could finally call myself a photographer.

And it was at Gambit that I met Ronnie Virgets, the gravel-voiced chronicler of the city. He was my first and only centerfold, and the man who taught me to love New Orleans in full sentences. Photographing him felt like being handed a decoder ring. Ronnie understood that the sacred and the ridiculous lived side by side. “How can you stop when your heart says go?” he once wrote -- a line that inspired me to keep going when I wanted to quit. A thousand times. Through him, I learned that contradictions weren’t flaws but lifeblood -- proof that New Orleans breathes through humor, heartbreak, spectacle, and soul simultaneously.

All of this was happening in the last decade before smartphones and social media altered how people saw themselves. Back then, people didn’t pose for narratives because they were the narrative. There were no filters, no curated identities, no performance for invisible audiences. Just unfiltered life happening in the street.

Ruthie the Duck Lady held down Decatur Street, cigarette dangling, ducks waddling behind her. She didn’t perform for attention. She simply existed in a way that demanded the city make room for her. The Lucky Bead Lady cursed with theatrical flourish. Coco Robicheaux anchored Frenchmen Street like a mystical sentinel. They were my teachers long before anyone online tried to tell us how to live.

And then there were the quieter, slower lessons. In the 90s, I photographed Richard Ford while he lived in the French Quarter writing Independence Day. I had no idea I was photographing a future Pulitzer Prize winner; I only noticed how intensely he observed the world around him. Years later, at his Garden District Book Shop signing, someone asked why he moved back to New Orleans. “Because New Orleans gives you permission to be anything you want,” he said.

Ain’t that the truth. What struck me most, looking back through those negatives, was how many people I photographed in the 90s are still doing what they love -- tending the flame of this city in their own corners of it. There’s Kermit Ruffins, playing like the mayor of every block he steps onto. There’s Chef Susan Spicer, still stirring New Orleans into every dish she touches. There’s Katy Reckdahl, still reporting with the same sharp curiosity and quiet tenacity she had as a young journalist, holding this city accountable with grace and grit. Darryl Montana is still bringing Black Masking Indian culture forward, beat by beat, bead by bead, stitch by stitch. The Andrews family -- born with brass in their DNA -- still showing up, showing out, and lifting the whole community with every note. And José Torres-Tama is still fusing protest and performance art, painting immigrant struggles into the New Orleans narrative and refusing to let the city forget who rebuilt it and who keeps it alive.

And then there’s Creola Jackie Moon -- my sweet Jackie -- who led the Jetsetters the day I photographed her in 2018 for Cherchez La Femme. At the book launch, she grabbed my arm and insisted we walk to Molly’s for the “after-party,” like we’d known each other forever. But the real miracle came only recently, while scanning my old negatives: there she was in 1992, leading the second line with that same unmistakable, defiant air -- chin high, eyes blazing, claiming her space in the street long before I even knew how to name what I was seeing. The miracle wasn’t just finding her in that old frame; it was realizing our paths had crossed all those years ago, two women moving through the same city, unaware of the future moment when our lives -- and our work -- would circle back to one another. Seeing her again, young and fierce and already fully herself, felt like discovering a hidden thread running back through time, binding the New Orleans I first stumbled into with the one that still surrounds me today.

But the 90s weren’t easy in the Big Easy. New Orleans was the murder capital of the world. Crime and community lived on the same block. I lived on Barracks Street then, just a few blocks from the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen. When the unfathomable murders happened in 1996, the fear felt immediate and close. You didn’t need the news to tell you something terrible had happened; the neighborhood itself went still, the way it does when collective grief settles in.

But here’s what mattered: we didn’t wait for the National Guard or the state for rescue. We gathered in Jackson Square for vigils. We protested. We packed City Council meetings and demanded our leaders get to work -- and they did. When I look at the photos from those nights, I see David and Roselyn out front, street musicians turning their voices into a lifeline, leading thousands of us through “Amazing Grace” until it felt like the whole city was singing itself back together. In the end, it wasn’t force or fear that carried us through. It was grace.

And isn’t that what paying attention really is?

Attention binds us to one another -- not in theory, but in practice. Attention is refusing to let neighborhood institutions like Mona Lisa or The First and Last Stop disappear when newcomers try to evict them. Attention is people chasing David Duke out of Jackson Square when he crashed a Take ’Em Down march. Attention is showing up for the funeral of someone you didn’t know because their life mattered. Attention is checking on immigrant neighbors who rushed in when we needed them most, because now they need us.

Back then, before cameras pointed inward, people lived their truth in public. That decade -- the last before screens rose between us -- shaped my understanding of humanity as much as it shaped my photography. It taught me that the city reveals itself to anyone willing to look.

And through it all, I still hear Ernie K-Doe -- “The Emperor of the Universe” -- cape swirling, voice booming from the back of Mother-in-Law Lounge, offering the clearest and most enduring instruction this city ever gave:

“Understanding ain’t the most important thing in the world.
The most important thing… is paying attention.”

And maybe, thirty years from now, when we look back at the images from this moment, we’ll finally understand not only what the world was trying to show us -- but what we wanted to show the world.

.

New Orleans has never been a single-track city -- not in its seasons, not in its sorrows, and definitely not in its holidays. Anywhere else, Thanksgiving is a tidy, one-day Norman Rockwell affair. But New Orleans doesn’t do tidy, and it certainly doesn’t do Rockwell. I already knew that, but I was reminded of it when my in-laws came down from upstate New York one year and we took them to the Fair Grounds on Thanksgiving Day. My mother-in-law looked around at the outrageous hats, the cigar smoke, and the raucous crowd cheering on horses before noon and said, “You people sure do things differently down here.”

She wasn’t wrong. But the truth is, I can’t think about Thanksgiving without thinking about the Fair Grounds.

Maybe I feel this more than most because I grew up at the New Orleans Fair Grounds. Not the glossy, crazy-hat Instagram version we see today, but the gritty, cigarette-scented, moldy concrete basement of my childhood. The men weren’t wearing bowties and bowler hats. They wore their week-long worries. And my dad was no exception. He wasn’t there for glamour; he was there for the gamble, always scanning the racing form for the miracle win he believed was just one race away.

Some kids spent Saturdays at the Audubon Zoo or City Park. I spent mine learning to read a racing form before I could read fractions. But I learned other things too, the kind that stay with you longer than arithmetic ever will.

These days, I think about those Saturdays more than ever, about the lessons I still lean on: gratitude for where I came from, hope for a last-minute miracle, and grit to survive everything in between.

The Fair Grounds was my first classroom in New Orleans paradox -- a place where people with no money bet like they were rich, where people with money drank like they were broke, and where everyone, no matter who they were, believed that the next race might change everything. Isn’t that New Orleans? A city fueled by hope, heartbreak, luck, chaos, and music -- all of it colliding on one long, endless track.

My dad didn’t win very often, and it wreaked a lot of havoc in our home. When I finally learned how to read the racing form with confidence, I tried to convince him to pick a real contender instead of the hapless colt he was leaning toward—the one that had never won a race.
“That horse has heart,” he’d say. Maybe it did. But what I eventually figured out was that he only bet the longshots because longshots paid big. So I grew up cheering for the hopeless causes. And maybe that’s why New Orleans -- and underdogs everywhere -- feel so much like home to me.

I adored my dad, win or lose. I adored the light in his eyes as the announcer’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers and his horse began gaining on the favorite. I adored the way he’d grip his racing form so tightly it wrinkled, slapping his leg and shouting, “Come on with that seven horse!”

And yes, I remember the heaviness in his shoulders after a loss, the way he’d walk away tearing up his losing tickets, walking away empty-handed to face the inevitable wrath of my mother. My heart broke for him. But he kept going back, week after week, year after year, because sooner or later, his longshot would come in.

One of those highs came on a bright, crisp afternoon after a long streak of losses. My siblings and I were starving, that kid-kind of starving where you’d eat your own shoelace if it had a little mustard on it. We begged for a hot dog, and Dad gave his usual answer: “After the next race.”

So we asked him to let us watch outside in the grandstand instead of the dark, clammy basement with the flickering TVs and hollering grown men. He finally relented, and we burst into the sunshine like we’d been uncaged. The air smelled like popcorn, horses, and hope.

We were still hungry, but the roar of hooves kept our minds off our stomachs, until Dad’s horse lost again.

Then the tote board lit up in giant red letters: FEBRUARY 8, glowing like a sign straight from heaven, or a warning from hell.

My stomach dropped, not from hunger this time but from fear. We’d forgotten our mother’s birthday. We once forgot Mother’s Day and never heard the end of it.
We tore down the stairs yelling, “Daddy! It’s Mom’s birthday!”
He looked at us like he’d seen a ghost -- scared, conflicted, already calculating the damage – before dropping his eyes back to the racing form.

“One more,” he said.

So we watched. Held our breath. And somehow, as if waiting for this exact moment, Dad’s longshot broke from the pack and crossed the finish line first. Dad jumped up hollering, us cheering, and the next thing we knew we were racing toward McKenzie’s for those promised donuts, then on to Lakeside Mall to buy Andre a necklace, saving her birthday with a last-minute miracle only the racetrack, and my father, could deliver.

Turns out she enjoyed her quiet afternoon more than the necklace. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that the longshot came through when we needed it most.

And maybe that’s the lesson this Thanksgiving -- a lesson New Orleans can offer the rest of the country. Because right now, we are hungry for a miracle.

And if there’s one thing New Orleanians understand, it’s miracles. Even after that abysmal, migraine-inducing game against Atlanta Sunday, we can’t forget the moment that lives in our bones: the first game back in the Superdome after Katrina, when a lone player from Special Teams came streaking through the line on a play that still feels like myth. The stadium didn’t cheer; it rose, as if an entire city lifted itself from the ashes at once. We don’t remember the stats; we remember the feeling of hope hitting us like lightning.

Those are the days when New Orleans comes in like a 99-to-1 longshot and takes the whole race.

And that brings me to what New Orleans has to teach America this Thanksgiving. Right now the country feels bruised, divided, exhausted -- stuck at the starting gate. So many people feel like the odds are impossible, the future bleak, the whole race rigged. But New Orleans knows something America needs to remember. A single moment can change everything.

As Ken Burns shows in The American Revolution, history wasn’t shaped by the empire in charge, but by the underdogs who dared to rise up against the British. What stayed with me about the PBS series wasn’t the cannons or the uniforms. It was the unlikely coalition of Americans — Black and white, immigrant and native-born, believers of every kind, standing shoulder to shoulder, despite the odds that said they never should have won anything at all.

History turns on moments like that.
One shot heard ’round the world.
One impossible blocked kick in the Superdome.
One longshot horse coming from behind.

So this year, I’m keeping my trifecta close -- gratitude for the road behind me, hope for the miracles I can’t yet see, and grit for the miles still ahead. Because New Orleans has shown me, time and time again, that the longshot finds its stride when you least expect it. And sometimes the dark horse is worth betting on.

The sweltering trailer had turned into an oven, our air-conditioning rationed to save on the electric bill. Our new country friend, Roxanne, had hatched a scheme for us. “Let’s put a purse out on the highway. When someone stops to pick it up, we yank it!” That was the gist of it.

We set the trap on Hwy 22 under cover of night. When the first driver screeched to a halt and jumped back into his car empty-handed, we laughed so hard our bellies ached. For a moment, it felt like country life might actually be fun.

My nine-year-old little brother Arnold insisted on planting the next bait. As he carefully set the trap, we waited, each passing minute feeling like an eternity. The air grew thick around us as mosquitoes and wasps buzzed above our heads.

A big pickup truck appeared, slowing to a stop. The engine shut down. A man slowly exited the driver’s side. He walked into the headlights, and we immediately recognized his silhouetted figure: that big head of slicked-back hair, the tight plaid shirt tucked into his polyester slacks, the round belly, the fancy alligator-skin cowboy boots.

My sister Teenie and I held our breaths as he bent down to pick up the bait, worried about yanking the purse from this guy, but Arnold didn’t pick up on our apprehension. The purse slipped from the man’s grasp.

Teenie whispered, “oh shit.”

Mr. Floyd, the justice of the peace who notarized the recent bill of sale for our trailer, didn’t flinch. He got back in his truck, threw it in reverse, and backed down Hwy 22 until his headlights disappeared into the black. We laughed, nervously, sensing something amiss.

Five minutes later, we heard those same tires roar back toward us.

We froze.

The purse lay untouched. We ducked even lower. His boots hit the pavement -- two slow, deliberate steps. Then silence. The kind that makes your skin crawl.

Then I heard the chilling and unmistakable sound I’d only heard on Gunsmoke. He cocked his rifle.

Suddenly, I felt a bullet split the still air and the weeds. Before we could react, he cocked the rifle again and sent out another blast. A sudden burn stung my shoulder.

“FUUUUUUCK!!!” I screamed.

And the forbidden word didn’t just slip from my lips. It was loud and long, piercing the humid silence, resounding across the street to where my other younger siblings, were huddled with Roxanne.

Teenie didn’t know I’d been hit, but she knew something serious had happened, because until that moment, I had never said a curse word. Ever.

Andre, our mother, despite being religious, grew up in the then-rough Irish Channel and used the word “fuck” so much that I thought it was normal until I was old enough to stay overnight at friends’ houses, where moms used words like “flip” or “fudge.” Not Andre, though. Fuck lingered in the air wafting atop her smokes -- her own sort of ex-communicated Catholic prayer for when times were rough -- reminding us that she answered to no one but God, and we answered to her. “Do as I say, not as I do,’’ she’d say when we pointed out her hypocrisy.

Floyd hurried back into the truck and disappeared again into the night. Once he was no longer in view, we all jumped up out of the weeds onto the blacktop and hightailed it home with bare feet slapping the hot asphalt surface, pattering like horse hooves at the Fairgrounds racetrack, interrupting the otherwise quiet night.

We ran breathlessly into the trailer, and I dashed past Andre to the bathroom to check my gunshot wound. There was no blood, but it burned like fire. Teenie examined my shoulder. It was my first wasp sting. Whew. I was relieved, but only momentarily. I was as afraid Andre as I was of burning in hell.

“What the fuck did y’all do now?” she barked in her deep gravelly voice. “For fuck’s sake, y’all better not lie or I’ll knock y’all into the middle of next week.’’

“Nothing happened,” I lied. Andre’s eyes narrowed under her thick, furrowing eyebrows, like an alarm signaling danger. Those tiny slit eyes could peer beyond the surface, and I didn’t want to find out how hard a hit it would take to knock me into the future.

So I told my dad. Being his first-born, I was the apple of his eye. On the rare occasions Andre insisted he spank us, he barely tapped us and we’d fake-cry for her benefit. Then we’d giggle down the hallway.

This time, Dad didn’t laugh. He was uncharacteristically angry. He grabbed his keys and sped off. Later we learned he confronted Floyd, who claimed he was only trying to scare us. That he aimed at the opposite side of the street. That he didn’t see all the kids.

If Andre and hell weren’t enough, I now had new fears. The message was clear: small towns didn’t need laws to keep order. Control belonged to the men with power and guns, and the rest of us, even kids, were expected to stay in line.

Decades later, I felt that same chill shoot down my spine while photographing white supremacists waving Confederate flags around the Jefferson Davis statue. I was nervous as I pointed my camera at a man with an assault rifle, my finger trembling as I pressed the shutter. Then, out of nowhere, a dump truck roared down Canal Street, music blasting, red and black flags whipping, a giant hand-painted sign flapping wildly in the wind:

FUCK OFF NAZI SCUM.

It made me laugh and cry at the same time. Vulgar. Righteous. The exact right volume for a city that has never whispered its truth.

Because sometimes “fuck’’ isn’t just a word. It’s a prayer, especially in New Orleans, where prayers are loud, messy, sweaty, danced, shouted, and carried down the block on a tuba.

So here’s my prayer now, as a grown woman, a photographer, and a witness:

May New Orleans remember exactly who the hell we are.
May we lift our neighbors the way they lifted this city after the water came.
May the dump trucks roll again if they must, like our secular saints on four wheels.
May we meet ICE at the parish line with the same fire we used to face down the men who fought to keep those monuments standing.
And may the right words -- however vulgar, however sacred -- rise up like a brass band refusing to quit.

I’m not afraid of my mother anymore, and I’m not afraid of burning in hell either. Like Andre would’ve said: “Fuck all y’all.”

#fuckICE #fuckTrump #fuckwhitesupremacists

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