Plaquemines Parish : Some Words
Joe MF Wilson
“Matt’s the guy that first picked me up late at the airport,” is what many EC volunteers can truthfully say, and I can too. Matt’s in my view the role model, the force of action, the epitome, from breakfast to sleep. Luke’s the angel and the ascetic and sometimes the chameleon. Maria’s the Mother. Amelia’s the saint. And then there’s so many more. So much more and less and to all of them. So much good and nasty bits of bad. I will mention Mark— the founder and the killer, the leader and the supporter through thick and thin --- a Politician of our age, whose misusage of persuasive words were critical to my arriving in Louisiana in the first place, and to my being asked to never enter Diamond again. Mark will always get more blame and more credit than he deserves, and that’s okay.
I sometimes feel like I am or was an utter failure to EC, and the bit of truth of this feeling is a big part of why I partly think you shouldn’t be reading this, shouldn’t think I have the right, shouldn’t trust me or my usage of words, my views, my motives, my openness and unsuredness at this moment. I said wrong things sometimes, thought wrong things, did wrong things, know of wrong things. Some secrets, some shared already, some forgotten, some with undeterminable effects.
Like the time a girl told me about her mother— girl around age 8, who had been misbehaving in front of me a lot more lately (asking for more attention, or new attention, or something different), who asked me to sit on a log to talk, or maybe I asked because of a problem. A girl whose name I remember and hide. Whose summer camp experience I remember and count among our handful of success stories. A girl whose school couldn’t put up with her for six hours a day, and so would kick her out early some days, and so she’d show up to our community center ready to read or help us early. Anyway she was telling me about her mother-- a current bout with cancer, a wish to move some place safer and calmer, a chance to see her only on weekends. She was seeking my forgiveness for something I think, and explaining how this was why she wasn’t joining our weekend activities. She was choosing me to confide in and trust just this once. For many kids, once is all it takes, for better or for worse.
Right in the middle of this poignant after-school moment Bette Midler showed up. To assess. Her extra-well-dressed escorts called to me to come introduce myself, give her “the tour”.
But I couldn’t get up from the log. At first. So awkwardly and delayedly in the case of making a proper greeting and introduction, but coldly and suddenly in the case of a child confiding into you on a larger-than-life-scale moment for them, I eventually got up. And I was tired and dirty-dressed besides that, and I felt like the strangers and the familiar faces in the very well-known international nonprofit who were escorting Midler were growing very upset with me for not handling this better, and I was getting upset with myself and with them for judging me and for partly causing this situation and for being part of it. So Bette* and I had a taut handshake, then I tiredly played with some kids near a tree, not feeling all too good. Nor all right. But not feeling wrong or bad either. I’ve got something like the root of a tear, or the leaf of a tear behind my eyeballs now. This is part of guilt, part of burnout, part of the justification and self-validation, part of the hero, part of the truth, part of what happens when I think about Louisiana. Nothing like close to all.
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