![]() ![]() The gate closes, ill-fitting wood scraping, and we are inside. The man across the street rubs one hand down his black-vested chest and tips his hat. A white man with a bushy mustache stands on the porch of a home, his hands shoved in his pockets, watching us being herded. I look back at the two-story houses and stone businesses. There is a gate at the center of the fence, and as it swings wide, the sound of someone wailing in the enclosure swoops outward. Haphazard roofs, tiled and patched, show over the top. ![]() “Move,” the Georgia Man says, shouting us deeper into this warren of a city until he stops outside a wooden fence high as two women standing on each other’s shoulders. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over an invisible horizon into their ruin. I try not to, but I still search for more head wraps, more quick walkers with averted eyes who wear deep, brilliant colors. Phyllis watches them until they disappear around a tree-lined bend. “ Allons-y.” One of the boys trips, but she bears him up with her hand on the back of his collar. She hurries them to a trot that matches the horses pulling the wagons. ![]() The boys stare at us, their eyes wide and wondering, and the woman, who must be their mother, grabs the closest by his shoulder and herds the boys in front of her. Three boys, heads shaved, follow behind an olive-skinned woman in a cream head wrap. Phyllis sneezes and wipes her nose on her arm. A handful of women snake by their head wraps are bright and glittering as jewels, and they look everywhere but at our bound line: stooped, bleeding, and raw from the long walk. I slide close to Phyllis, lean away from the caravan of wagons rumbling past. They are fair as I am, some of them even fairer, as milk-hued and blue-veined as the white women in their bonnets and hats. Some of the women cover their hair in patterned, shimmering head wraps, and they walk through the world as if every step they take is their own. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over an invisible horizon into their ruin.īut some brown people look like they ain’t stolen. I know they are bound by the way they stand all in a row, not talking to one another, fresh cuts marking their hands and necks. Some stand in lines at the edge of the road, all dressed in the same rough clothing: long, dark dresses and white aprons, and dark suits and hats for the men, but I know they are bound by the white men, accented with gold and guns, who watch them. Some walking in clusters together, sacks on their backs or on their heads. White women with their heads covered usher children below awnings and through tall, ornate doorways. White men wearing floppy hats coax horses down rutted roads turned to shell-lined avenues. The air smells of burning coffee and shit. Long, dark canals cut the city at every turn. The grandest are laced with wrought iron and broad balconies: great stone palaces rising up and blotting out the sky. After we cross, there are more houses, one story, narrow and long, and then two stories, clustered close together, sometimes side to side, barely space for a person to stand between them. This river is wordless, old groans coming from its depths. The boat that carries us over this river is big enough that all the women fit. When the hand opens, there is a river, a river so wide the people on the other side are small as rabbits, half-frozen in their feed in the midmorning light. We leave the lake and the stilted houses behind the trees reach, swaying and nodding on all sides, and us in the middle of a green hand. We walk down into New Orleans, and each step is a little falling. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. ![]()
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