University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations Dissertations and Theses Fall 12-18-2015 From the Back of a Bus Named Desire Brenda D. Quant University of New Orleans, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td Part of the Nonfiction Commons Recommended Citation Quant, Brenda D., "From the Back of a Bus Named Desire" (2015). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 2118. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/2118 This Thesis is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Thesis in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. 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From the Back of a Bus Named Desire A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the University of New Orleans in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing by Brenda Dyer Quant B.A. University of New Orleans, 1968 December, 2015 © 2015, Brenda Dyer Quant ii Table of Contents Part One Cloak of Darkness ............................................................................................................................1 Lessons in South America ...............................................................................................................3 The Resistance ...............................................................................................................................15 Running While Black .....................................................................................................................29 Part Two Desire Lines ...................................................................................................................................34 The Problem We All Live With .....................................................................................................41 Missa Luba .....................................................................................................................................60 Elementals ......................................................................................................................................66 Part Three The Trail of Rice ............................................................................................................................72 A Peck of Dirt ................................................................................................................................91 Dueling With Martin ....................................................................................................................106 On the Treaty of Paris, the Book of Negroes, and Harry Washington ........................................123 Part Four The Heart is a Muscle ..................................................................................................................144 Everyday Ekphrasis .....................................................................................................................150 Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................162 Vita ...............................................................................................................................................183 iii PART ONE Cloak of Darkness The New Orleans Recreation Department used to provide separate and unequal playgrounds for the city's children. Before they were desegregated in 1963 as a result of a lawsuit, there were over 100 playgrounds for whites and only 19 for blacks. My family did not live near any of the black playgrounds, and we were not allowed to set foot in Bunny Friend Park, the white playground on Desire Street, in walking distance from our house. Holy Redeemer Church, our black Catholic Parish (a distance of five white Catholic Churches away from our neighborhood), was across the street from Washington Square, another white-only playground. It was a well-kept park with lots of trees, swings, a wading pool, cement paths and benches. When I was about 10 years old, Mama and I left church one Tuesday night after Novena and circumnavigated Washington Square to get to the Desire bus stop at the corner of Dauphine Street and Elysian Fields Avenue. The buses were slow at night. We knew we were in for a wait. We'd been standing at the bus stop for only a few minutes when my mother suggested I break the law. There was no one around. It was dark. The large, spreading live oaks in and around the park blocked out much of the streetlight. We were standing just a few feet away from the park entrance. "Go swing on the swings until the bus comes," Mama said. I was the happiest criminal in New Orleans that night. I tested every swing, looking for the best fit, and thought about the little white behinds that would sit in them the next day, behinds that would never suspect that their swings had been violated during the night. I pushed off with the stealth of a cat burglar, pointed my toes at the treetops, and swang with the intensity 1 of an Olympic athlete. I ignored the building fear of what might happen to Mama and me if we were caught. She stood watch at the bus stop, my mother, occasionally glancing nonchalantly in my direction, but looking natural, as if she were just another colored lady waiting for a bus on a dark corner. This was my first criminal act in life. And Mama was my co-conspirator. What happens to a child whose mother suggests, sanctions, and acts as lookout for her own daughter's crime? I became a repeat offender. A habitual swing thief. I swang on the white-only swings every Tuesday night for the nine weeks we attended Novena that year. I was never apprehended and I am reported to be still at large, hiding out somewhere in New Orleans. 2 Lessons in South America Gravity: First meaning—A force that acts as a bookmark on an uncertain world. When I was a child, I held a deep subconscious assumption that we lived inside of the earth. This was a basic underlying fact of life that didn't need pondering any more than I would have pondered air. The adults didn't talk about this given fact of subterranean life any more than they would remind the children to keep breathing. It was just understood. Inside this ball, we had everything we needed to sustain life. The sun and the rain clouds, the moon and stars, the animals, the growing things. Everything. God was in there with us. One day, someone told me that we live on the outside of the world, on top of the earth, on the surface of the planet. This was the most lucid moment I had experienced up to that point in my life. Suddenly, I was unable to place myself in the cosmos. I must have had some notion of the universe because suddenly I could feel its immensity bearing down on me, and all of my awareness went instantly into fear. We had no protection, no ceiling, no roof, nothing to seal us off, seal us in. We were not curled up and cozy under a big quilt, but totally exposed. What prevented us from being hurled off the face of this whirling ball? Nothing. All of my comfort was drained away in an instant by this stark new reality, this rebirth trauma. I knew I would never feel safe again. I would have to live with uncertainty from then on. It would have to do. 3 Gravity: Second meaning—Weight. Walking to school was dangerous for grade-schoolers on this inside-out world in the New Orleans ninth ward. North Dorgenois Street was the shortest route to Johnson Lockett Elementary School, and there were perils along the way. We had been warned by older children to avoid a certain house on North Dorgenois Street, the house where a witch lived. I remember seeing her in her yard a few times—a middle-aged white lady in a loose-fitting cotton house dress. She cast spells on children, pinning her eyes on them and making weird hand twitches. We always crossed the street at the corner where she lived so as not to tread on the sidewalk in front of her house. Any gesture was a threat, and a sighting of the witch always made us take off running before she could turn us into frogs and spiders. Crazy Bill was a roaming threat. He could come out of nowhere on his bicycle and chase a child down for some evil purpose. A nearly mythical figure, he was a black teenager who could turn up anywhere in the neighborhood, his long legs pumping the pedals of his fast bicycle. Our only defense, we were told by other children, was to not speak to him or look at him, stay as far away from him as possible, and for God’s sake, don’t call him Crazy Bill. That was the one thing that was sure to enrage him and cause him to chase you down. My older brother, Joe, was walking with some friends one day when there was a sudden Crazy Bill sighting. One of the boys yelled out, “Hey Crazy Bill,” and the chase was on. The boys scattered and Crazy Bill could only pursue one of them. He chose my brother. Joe made it home intact but severely winded and angry with the friend who had yelled out. On our trek to school, North Dorgenois Street took us the length of