Return to Prytania

“Sorry, already taken,” the site genie simpers again. I have already submitted every stupid user name I can invent, old addresses, siblings’ nicknames, all those aliases we need as our cyber-umbilicals.

With a cleansing breath I empty my frustrated mind. In floats a lovely word: “Prytania.” I enter it, and the site cheers, “It Rocks!”

But now I am paying no attention. I’m remembering Prytania Street. Frenchman, Annunciation and Tchoupitoulas Streets. Desire, Rampart, and Gentilly. Where the peeling, multicolored shotgun houses sit by the great sliding brown river.

New Orleans.

I’ll tell you about my first time there. As I lay beside my mother in a narrow bed, my father leaned over to kiss us. Everything about him was in perfect order. His Army Air Corps captain’s uniform had not a wrinkle, the shirt carefully pinched into a single pleat at each side where he had tucked it into his trousers. His black hair was sleekly combed back. I am sure that he smelled good, slightly astringent and clean, like pressed laundry. My mother wore a nightgown with white lace forming a V along the top. The hospital sheet, folded back smooth and tight, came across her body just below the breasts. My parents had joined their right hands with odd formality, like two dignitaries, but their expressions were full of tenderness.

I have no idea who took the little photograph I hold, now curling its crenulated white margins inward. It surely could not have been a grandparent; the trip from Alabama would have been unthinkably extravagant that wartime year. My tiny dark eyes seem to study the photographer. My parents are seeing only each other.

Is it possible that I could remember sucking milk from my mother’s pink nipples? If not, why do I have this magnified vision of them, big as rosy saucers, with thumb-sized papillae? A redhead, mama had fair skin and roseate nipples. I inherited my father’s black hair but got her complexion.

Although I was born there, my parents always said they absolutely did not conceive me in New Orleans. More likely in Carlisle Barracks or Keesler Field. I have had to take their word for it, zygotically speaking. But how I conceive myself is another matter, and New Orleans is my soul’s rootstock.

As a girl in Alabama I loved having been born in Charity Hospital, not some boring hospital named for the stupid town a person lives in. I loved it that for “County of Birth” on my school papers my mother would neatly print “Orleans Parish.” I knew it made me very special. Nobody around here even knew what a Parish was!

It is said that at age four, propped by my daddy on a tall stool at Felix’s Oyster Bar, I consumed some legendary quantity of half-shell oysters, I am tempted to say several dozen. I remember that. At least my body remembers it: the cold salty tang, the squirting lemon, the sweet slippery rush of the mollusk down my throat. Sucking the last of the oyster juice out of each empty shell. And my delighted parents, laughing and laughing.

Nowadays I repeat this story to the shuckers who prise open their heaps of scabby bivalves behind the bar at Felix’s. Prompted, they always say, sure, they remember me. And pour me another Sazerac.

After the storm, dreading what I might see, it was more than two years before I could make myself return to New Orleans. Needing a businesslike excuse I signed up to attend a large conference in a giant hotel and went by myself.

Like everybody else, I’d seen the pictures. I knew Charity Hospital was no more. And I’d heard a lot about the city being “Back in Business.” But what for God’s sake might that mean? As sad as a dispirited, beaten down New Orleans would be, a plasticized theme park of a place would be unbearably worse.

I walked my feet to blisters. I rode a bus all over the 9th ward and took pictures of gutted houses with spray-painted numbers showing how many dead humans and animals had been found there. I rambled (Didn’t I ramble?) through the Quarter. People were still practicing saxophones on doorsteps, instrument cases lying open and seeded with some little currency.

And I rode down Prytania. At one end, a restored old mansion was for sale for five million dollars. Ten blocks away, the hind end of a FEMA trailer jutted from the wall of a mostly collapsed gray frame house. A woman sitting beside it in her white plastic chair waved her cigarette at me.

The trailer’s top and sides were draped with Mardi Gras beads. A huge flag -- purple, green and gold-- flapped from a pole.

Completely covering the end of the trailer that faced on Prytania, someone had spray-painted a tremendous crimson heart.

From Rome, A Stone

“While the family of a 9-year-old incest victim’s abortion is excommunicated, the perpetrator never even made it to the ecclesial radar screen. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority of bishops and the dawn of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.” Mary E. Hunt

An eighty-pound, nine-year-old girl in Brazil is impregnated with twins by her stepfather’s rape. Her doctors advise abortion, explaining that her tiny body will not carry to term without horrible damage or death. The Catholic church, having failed to block the abortion in court, excommunicates the girl’s mother.

The case has caused a furor. Abortion is illegal in Brazil except in cases of rape or when the mother's life is in danger, both of which apply in this case. Legality is not what counts in this human and spiritual tragedy. Mary Hunt of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) lays it out masterfully.

Here are excerpts from Hunt’s piece, printed in full at:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/humanrights/1206/rdpulpit:_excommunicating_the_victims/

“The details of the case are grim. The little girl went to the hospital with stomach pains only to discover that she was four months pregnant. By any measure, the family involved is in big trouble. The father is gone, the mother has at least two children, one of whom is handicapped, and the stepfather is a sexual predator…

“The pregnancy happened because an adult male assaulted a girl child; an oft-told story, tragic every time. The mother endeavored to do the best she could in a bad situation… But the Roman Catholic Church used the tragedy to make a theo-political point...

“It is sickening and morally repugnant to realize that abortion, in this case the most humane solution to a terrible problem, is the cause of excommunication while sexual abuse is not. Something is seriously wrong with this picture, and it is the Roman Catholic Church...

“My sadness in this case comes not only from what has been done in the name of God to people who are living a nightmare, but from what might have been done to help. Sexual abuse, especially incest, is hard to stop. But once perpetrated it need not be made worse by ecclesial sanction...

“A proper pastoral response would include: support for the pregnant child as she lives through an abortion; care for the mother who is responsible for the child and the rest of the family; protection for the family from the stepfather whose arrest may trigger backlash behavior; sensitive work with the other daughter who has also been sexually abused; HIV and venereal disease testing for the girls and the mother; economic support for the family; counseling for the family, the community, even the neighbors and parishioners who have been affected by this trauma; prayer and pastoral attention, including reception of the sacraments according to the family’s wishes. They need a spiritual community more than ever. Instead they got excommunication.

“‘Is there anyone among you, who if your child asks for bread, will give a stone?’ (Matthew 7:9). Apparently there are several in Rome and Brazil...

“I believe that this case serves as further proof that the jig is up for Catholic clerics who dare to excommunicate a mother who has already suffered enough while they continue to embrace priest pedophiles and the bishops who hide their crimes. Let this case signal the end of any credible claim to authority such bishops might make, and the beginning of a new era when local communities determine their own members. I daresay the world will be a safer, kinder place.”