LaShonda Morgan at Ashland Plantation by Nordette N. Adams

Originally published by Scalawag Magazine, the poem "LaShonda Morgan at Ashland Plantation" has been posted here in 2026 by the poet herself, Nordette N. Adams. The poem is ekphrastic and inspired by the work of Chandra McCormick, a gifted black, female Louisiana photographer. 

Nordette N. Adams is currently working to revive her website, her411.com aka WirtingJunkie.net. In the meantime, learn more about her via her411.com where eventually links will be updated.

National Slave Ship Museum: A fully-functioning slave ship sailing the Mississippi to entertain you, how about that?

Today I find myself in a bit of an emotional quandary. The National Slave Ship Museum, a project that I thought had died quietly already, appears to be alive and well. According to a local station, the New Orleans City Council approved last night a proposal to build this museum. But raising my eyebrow at this questionable endeavor proposed for the New Orleans Riverfront is not what troubles me. What's really tearing me up is that I must write my objections about a project that is the dream of an elder and a fellow lover of Black History in Louisiana, and encourage him to do no harm.

The National Slave Ship Museum is the dream of black, “amateur historian” Lloyd Lazard, 74. He first proposed the project in the mid-90s, going so far as to lobby the Department of the Interior and gain a thumbs up, reports New Orleans City Business, and he's been at it ever since. I applaud this kind of tenacity, but what will happen after Mr. Lazard passes on?

In 2005, the proposal for the museum was included in a riverfront revitalization plan for New Orleans (.pdf). In 2013, the key players stepped forward again and registered National Slave Ship Museum, Inc., with the state of Louisiana as a non-profit corporation. Antoinette Harrell-Miller of Kentwood, Louisiana, a genealogist, is listed as a director. Clifton James of the Urban Design Research Center, the architect who designed the proposed complex that's pictured above, is listed as its agent along with Lazard.

I'm not against museums about slavery or any attempt to educate the public about this sordid era of American and world history. Also, I'm glad that a group of black Louisianans have taken the initiative to stand up for Black History amid idealizations of the past fostered in this state.

My concern is that this project sounds like something that could easily devolve into a garish, Disneyesque-knock-off theme park (Epcot not Magic Kingdom). If not so grand as Disney, then maybe it will be the colorful Yeehaw! of Opryland in Nashville. So, one minute a slave ship, the next a party on deck with a brass band. I mean, this is New Orleans.

On the Council's approval of the plan, WVUE reports:

“The proposed $170 million museum will include a life-size interactive slave ship built inside a new five-story building and a riverfront park with an amphitheater and two replica African villages.

The museum complex will also include a Creole Caribbean African restaurant, an herb and vegetable garden, a DNA lab, an exhibit and meeting space.

As a part of the museum experience, visitors will have the opportunity to travel aboard a fully functioning replica slave ship that will sail to Natchez, Miss., and Scott's Bluff in Baton Rouge, located near Southern University.” (emphasis added by me)

Does this sound like a museum that will educate the nation about the loss of thousands of lives during the Middle Passage and the enslavement of millions of Africans around the world through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? Or does it sound more like a Fantasy Land complete with riverboat rides?

A "fully-functioning replica slave ship" sailing down the Mississippi River with tourists would be an abomination.

The loss of black lives under the slave trade and the enslavement of black people in America should be treated with the same solemnity and sacred care shown victims remembered with the United States Holocaust Museum not the brashness of a theme park passing for museum.

The people involved in this project (Lazard, Harrell-Miller, James) seem to be sincere, community-oriented people and activists. Lazard wants to not only feature American slavery but slavery around the world. Still, their vision for a museum about the dehumanizing horrors of the slave trade feels short-sighted and distorted. As you may grasp, this vision to approach slavery as consumable amusement "museum" is the root of my objection.

Louisiana has a problem reconciling with its slavery history. The tourism industry here repeatedly prefers to sugar coat or blatantly lie about slavery's atrocities, and it sounds like this proposed venture will be no different. For instance, one article at the Uptown Messenger, after mentioning that Lazard sees a vision similar to the World War II Museum and the Holocaust museum (or the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center), continues with this quote from someone else who may be involved:

“One component of it is incredible horror and destruction, but they’re mostly places of hope and victory and heroes,” said Michael Mayer, a West End boat builder.

Well, that's just what America needs given its current dysfunction on race and the Black experience, a slave ship museum that lets visitors leave feeling they've been in a place of hope surrounded by victory and heroes. Instead of grasping the depravity and horror of it all, folks can stroll along with their children saying, "See that! Everybody's overcome. Slavery all worked out for the mutual good."

I hope that's not what Mr. Mayer meant, but that's what I envision happening. How would that outcome be helpful?

Also, any comparison between the Underground Railroad and a slave ship is ludicrous. Through one black people seek self-determination; through the other they are chattel.

This project calls to mind that slave-ship video game that turned out to be a promotion for a slavery documentary. Thinking it was real, people protested, wondering who would want to interact with slavery as entertainment.

And another thought arises: How strange that the white man who turned Whitney Plantation into a slave museum painstakingly ensured visitors could not leave comforted and thinking "it's all good," but with this proposed slave ship museum we see a group of seemingly sincere black people bending over backwards to make a slave ship experience enjoyable, to fashion black suffering as an attraction. Is it possible this project needs a dash of white guilt?

I can't help but feel this project has probably mushroomed into a toxic cloud of imprudence since Lazard first shared his dream.

Gena Haskett of Los Angeles, writing on Facebook, also cannot fathom how such a presentation of the Middle Passage and slave trade would be acceptable to anyone concerned about education and African-American history.

"Will they re-create the rapes, the physical abuse and the tossing overboard of sick and dying Africans? Sea water and feces are not good smells to have near a restaurant. I have more questions but I'm feeling queasy from the ones I just presented. Not good. Not good at all to base it on abduction ships."

New Orleans, my hometown, has a rich history that includes being a major port through which slaves came from Africa, and as anyone can gather through the state of Louisiana’s plantation tourism, the enslavement of Africans was big business throughout the state. But this plantation and slavery tourism has always been painful and problematic.

With the exception of the Whitney Plantation exhibit that focuses on the lives of slaves instead of the "genteel" lives of their masters, the cruelty and horrors of slavery have been largely sanitized by the local tourism industry. Certainly this sanitizing has served not to tell the public the truth but to glorify and mythologize the antebellum South.

So, despite the most likely good intentions of the people involved to date, I am concerned that the proposed National Slave Ship Museum ultimately will fall into this same kind of minimizing that trivializes the hellish lives of the enslaved or turn the tragedy of the Middle Passage into some kind of amusement park ride.

I am also concerned that in the end the slave ship museum will be little more than a money-making operation no matter its “non-profit” status now, and so it will become just another way black bodies are exploited by the local, state, and Federal governments as well as major corporations. Nonetheless, I am not asking simply that this museum project end.

I am asking for national dialogue and complete transparency in the process, including sourcing, research, staffing, management, and funding. Also, since it’s called the National Slave Ship Museum, I ask that that the national community be made more aware of the plans. We need a deeper discussion about whether this is project is on the right road and much broader oversight. New Orleans, after all, is not the guardian of the legacy of slavery alone nor may it alone presume to speak for the millions killed or crippled by the slave trade.We are, after all, still living with its damage.

But how did this slave-ship museum project get this far? Why didn't one of our black city council members declare, "Hell no! On our ancestors' graves and again, no! Not like this. Never like this."

Please sign the petition demanding that the New Orleans City Council sends this museum's planners back to the drawing board. Click here and sign.

"Prison is big business" -- Angela Davis, P.3 Artists, and former prisoners say at Xavier University event (video)

On Tuesday this week, renowned activist Angela Davis, along with other panel members, discussed and presented information on slavery and the prison industrial complex. Davis is introduced at the 53:20 time mark. She opens commending the exhibition on Angola at the Ogden Museum.

One of the reasons we should recognize a connection between slavery and the prison industrial complex, says Ms. Davis, is the evidence that racism is driving the prison industrial complex. Louisiana's prison system reflects this trend which is global. Even in Australia, the Aboriginal people make up a disproportionate percentage of the prisoners. Then she discusses the evolution of the prison industrial system in America.

Saying she did not have time to go into detail about the connection between slavery and the prison system, she recommends the book Texas Tough  by Robert Perkinson. According to Amazon.com, the book is "a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, explains how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became a template for the nation."

But why is it that the United States imprisons more people than any other nation? That's a question to ponder after listening to the video.

She quickly touches Ferguson, Katrina, and disaster capitalism as well. Then she focuses on the capitalization of producing surplus bodies by taking away programs that steer people away from prison and the privatizing public programs, such as public education.

Her most important point, she says, abolishing the prison system and the aftermath of slavery. But don't miss the 30-minute question-and-answer period.

The first half of the video focuses on the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. Located on a former plantation and named for an area in Africa from where about half of the nation's slaves came, Angola appears to be trapped in time. A former Confederate major bought the property and turned the slave quarters into prison cells.

So, it seems as though Louisiana whites in power made a statement early about where it intended to put its black population. That's my thought, not theirs explicitly.

One of the speakers, Henry James, is a man who was freed through DNA evidence and advocacy after being wrongfully convicted of rape. He was sentenced to life in prison and served 30 years before the Innocence Project and others proved his innocence.

Former prisoner Carmen Demourelle also spoke. She's a straight-talker.


Xavier University - Slavery: The Prison Industrial Complex from Jason Berry on Vimeo.

Here is the description straight from the video's information text.

Slavery, The Prison Industrial Complex, a Panel Discussion with P.3 Artists Keith Calhoun and Chandra McCormick. Xavier University, Qatar Pharmacy Pavilion, Qatar Auditorium, Room 112A & B (1 Drexel Drive)
Panelists: Angela Davis, Political Activist, Scholar, Author
Keith Calhoun, Artist
Chandra McCormick, Artist
Carmen Demourelle, Former Prisoner
Henry James, Exonerated Former Prisoner
Norris Henderson, Former Prisoner, Public Defender, Political Activist
Moderator: William P. Quigley, Law Professor and Director of the Law Clinic and the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University, New Orleans
This round-table discussion examines the failed systematic machinery of mass imprisonment and the combined efforts under way to abolish it. The discussion includes prominent activists, artists who have documented the Angola Prison for years, and former prisoners—who provide a first-hand viewpoint. The participants come together to both inform the public and discuss strategies for change while reminding us of the crucial, invigorating and ever-present affinity between activism and art.

Twitter's tripping over Raven Symone's colorless approach

On twitter, folks have been tripping over a statement actress Raven Symone made in her recent interview on the Oprah Winfrey Network. The Disney-groomed star has declared herself colorless. Oprah, great mother to the misguided, tried to warn Symone that she'd take some heat for her assertion, but the younger woman didn't care.

And Oprah's probably already let it go because she knew the furor was coming. Look at how the Queen of TV hugs the former Cosby Show star in the picture below, showing the girl lots of love. Don't be mad. I'm not. Raven Symone and the rest of us need all the love we can get. But Symone, in this case, may need more because she's swallowed a chunk of racist propaganda and doesn't know she's in danger of choking.

E! Online quotes the conversation:

"I'm tired of being labeled," she said. "I'm an American. I'm not an African American; I'm an American."

"Oh, girl," a surprised Winfrey said. "Don't set up Twitter on fire...Oh, my lord. What did you just say?"

"I mean, I don't know where my roots go to," Raven explained. "I don't know how far back they go...I don't know what country in Africa I'm from, but I do know that my roots are in Louisiana. I'm an American. And that's a colorless person."

She says that she connects with Caucasian, Indian, Asian, and Black. I do wonder where she thinks the Black comes from, though, if not Africa.

Despite being "from Louisiana," Symone apparently has forgotten that there's a term for being of mixed ethnicity down here. It's called "Creole." (Side note: Beyonce's family also has Louisiana Cajun/Creole roots.)

But even within that category, people still make a distinction. There's "Black Creole" and "White Creole."

So, what people hear when a person of African descent talks like Symone's talking is this: "I don't want to be Black." And they're not being unfair when they say that's what they hear. Notice that Symone did not specify first that she would not like to be labeled any of those other "races" or ethnic groups with whom she connects. And she didn't sound as though she merely has a philosophical or spiritual objection to being "labeled" a specific "color." She said she was "tired" of it, which indicates irritation, frustration.

I've got to quote Jesus here, "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks" because I've observed that whenever people make statements like hers in this so-called "post-racial" era, they focus on eliminating the Blackness label not Whiteness, which shows what's really in their hearts or on their minds even if they don't know it.

However, this is not just a Raven Symone issue. Many of the light-skinned "Black" Creoles of the past down here, those who appeared racially ambiguous said for the longest the same kind of thing Symone did. They declared that they are a group in between. Nonetheless, if you read the histories of such discussions, rarely is anyone decrying that they have sometimes been mistaken for White and want people to also acknowledge their Blackness. Almost always what angers them is that someone has called them "Colored, Negro, Black, or African-American."

Here I acknowledge that many light-skinned Black people do not think that way. I'm just making this point about "Black" Creole complaints because it's a fact that some take pride in their French, Spanish, and Native American roots but actively seek to distract attention from their African roots.

Symone is also not alone in her age group with this attitude. I've run into multiple 20-somethings, all of them dark brown to nearing blue black, who have said, "I'm not African-American! I'm an American." All of the Black 20-somethings that I've heard say this are educationally privileged, meaning they have college degrees.

Our education system is doing a poor job if these young people don't see the implications of the "Don't call me African-American. I'm just an American" statement. And they really think it's a perfectly logical assertion that shows how fair-minded and enlightened they are, as one young lady's tweet illustrates.

Raven Symone's intention was to say that she wants to be seen more than just her skin color and sexuality. She wants to be seen as EQUAL.
— Sabrina Ann (@SsabrinaAnn13) October 6, 2014

I get it. I get it. These young people want to feel accepted in America and for who they are, which is more than their physical appearance or ancestral origins. This desire to be accepted for who we are does not go away as we age. I do hope, however, that with age a sociological and political maturity arises in people that let's them see how short-sighted and insular that statement reveals them to be, not so much in terms of how they feel about themselves, but in whether they care about perpetuating the subjugation of African peoples, their descendants, and other oppressed groups.

Also, this "I'm colorless" mantra is not strictly an American phenomenon. Two years ago, a woman whose parents came to America from the Dominican Republic wrote on Blogher, "I'm Not Black. Why Do You Care?" I don't think I commented on that post, but I'll say here now, "I don't care what she calls herself," but I do care about how these kinds of statements feed into the racist rhetoric that to be of African descent, to be Black, is to be undesirable.

Generally, I don't argue with young people who make these kinds of statements. I try to cut them slack when it comes to opening their mouths and revealing their youthful ignorance. Symone and other people who are insufficiently-educated on global race matters and history are African-Diaspora illiterate. They are unaware that they are victims of Euro-American cultural brainwashing.

When I say African Diaspora, I'm referring to the dispersal of Africans from Africa as well as their displacement and oppression brought about by slavery, colonization, and segregation. Being Diaspora literate helps people understand Black culture on its own terms. When combined with the practices of critical literacy, Diaspora literacy can help people dissect and decipher rhetoric within texts categorized as academic or scientific as well as those that are political and "historical." These literacies encourage readers to examine the rhetorical methods these texts employ to perpetuate dehumanizing societal beliefs or persuade action against specific ethnic, religious, or gendered groups. In other words, people who are Diaspora and critically literate can see the bullshit being shoveled down society's throat that keep its members believing lies about Africa and its peoples.

Scholarship, scientific inquiry, policy proposals, and historical texts, no matter how much the authors declare themselves objective, have the world views of their authors embedded in them either boldly or subtly. Honest researchers, however, fight the human tendency to favor data that favors what they already believe or to ignore information that contradicts their beliefs.

 A good example of scholars failing to resist that tendency would be the work of archaeologists who either consciously or subconsciously accepted white supremacist rhetoric about sub-Saharan Africans and therefore denied for more than a century that the "Kushites overthrew the ancient Egyptians." With this denial, they perpetuated negative stereotypes of sub-Saharan Africa as a land without language, skill, or culture.

And even literary texts, such as Conrad's Heart of Darkness, have ideological pillars that should be examined. For more about racist tropes in that book, see Chinua Achebe's Hopes and Impediments.

All that said, Symone and other miseducated people can believe whatever they choose to believe and live under whatever philosophy that helps them sleep better at night or love themselves adequately. I, however, prefer to live with truth even if it means I endure some restless nights. Living with the truth furthers hope that one day we will all be free and live in a country of sincere inclusiveness not imprudent erasure. Denial of the truth hinders that day's arrival. People don't solve problems they can't see.

So, herein lies the truth: To deny or try to bury your African heritage knowing you are of African descent is to co-sign white supremacist policies and doctrines that oppress people of African descent. This denial flows from internalized racism and magnifies self-hatred.

To shun being called African-American or gay when you are Black and gay and to also make the statement, "I just want to be equal" or "I'm just American" is to cooperate in your own oppression. Such statements logically imply their inverse, which is people of African descent and people other than straight cannot be considered equal or American.

The question is if race, color, sexual orientation really don't matter to you and you know you have Black roots and are gay, why does it bother you that people refer to you as either?

The question is if you mean no disrespect to your African genes, why go out of your way to bury references to the African in you?

This instinct to bury Blackness makes you complicit in Black erasure, genocide, both physical and psychological. In other words, when you publicly promote the color-blind, gender-blind, or sexuality-blind approaches to solving social justice issues or, supposedly, to promote harmony, you are doing the opposite. You are complicit and a potential collaborator with the very systems you supposedly want to condemn.

We have keep having to review these elementary principles. Why can't there just be a book we give people when they show their ignorance on this topic? Don't answer that. I know the answer.

Nonetheless, just as Raven Symone is "tired of being labeled . . . African-American," I'm tired that people keep making statements that disparage being of African descent. The next time someone does an interview and they've got these issues about Blackness, I hope they'll keep it to themselves, and one day, maybe, when they wake up, they can attend remedial classes and figure out not who the hell they are but who do they want to be. For all our sakes, I hope it's someone more concerned about how the oppressed are treated than they are about being "labeled" a member of the oppressed

Each new generation of historically oppressed peoples must be educated to critically assess the targeted, dehumanizing propaganda of hegemony or that generation will unwittingly dance down a path to its own slaughter.

Race is a social construct, true, but the same world that constructed it has neither abolished its construction nor is it willing to let us demolish it without a fight. Race may not be real, but perception is everything. Race as construct, therefore, is real. Declaring alone "there is no spoon" does not topple the power that created the illusion of the spoon.

Blackness and how we perceive Africa and peoples of African descent is also a construct in terms of the qualities and attributes society assigns to Blackness and African. Reshaping negative perceptions does not rest in denying who created those perceptions and how they continue to have power over people's lives.

Self-ascribed colorlessness or declarations of color-blindness are manifestations of human dysfunction not progress. But if you don't get what I'm saying, then maybe you'll get it when Jane Elliot explains it here. Ironically, she said what she said on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

All that said, let's leave Raven Symone to her own devices. When you have fame and money in America, you can live in whichever bubble you choose, even the ones that contribute to the oppression of others and keep you blind. Let her live in her imaginary colorless world.

Black Teen,14, Killed for Allegedly Wielding BB Gun (video)

Tuesday evening, Houma, Louisiana, deputies shot and killed 14-year-old Cameron Tillman when the teen opened a door while allegedly holding a BB gun. The shooting occurred less than 24 hours before an Ohio grand jury declined to indict police officers who shot to death John Crawford III, a black man who was holding a BB gun in a Walmart that he found on the store's shelves. He was talking on the phone when he was killed.

The deupty shot Tillman four times. WDSU reports a spontaneous memorial for the slain youth grows outside the house in which he was shot. His blood still stains the floorboards.

According to the Associated Press, the stories about what happened Tuesday evening differ. The Terrebonne Parish Sheriff's office tells their version; teens who witnessed the killing tell another.

". . .  the sheriff says, he [Tillman] flung open a door brandishing a BB gun made to look like a Sig Sauer .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol. Relatives of other teens who were there when Cameron Tillman was killed Tuesday evening say that's not true. (AP)

Witnesses say Tillman was not holding the BB gun, and the gun was on a table in the middle of the room when the deputy fired first directly at Tillman and then fired more shots through the door when Tillman quickly shut it. The teens say that the deputy did not announce himself, and that Tillman opened the door because he thought it was a friend.

Perhaps taking a page from how the police handled the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Sheriff Jerry Larpenter defends the shooting and has not yet identified the seven-year police force veteran who killed Tillman, reports the Houma Courier:

"He knocked on the door and said 'Sheriff's Office, come out.' A very short time after, Tillman threw the door open brandishing that gun toward the officer. The officer feared for his life, and, unfortunately, the individual was shot four times," Larpenter claims. "He (Tillman) turned that gun toward the deputy, and that deputy had to shoot or assume he would be shot." (via Courier)

The police were called by a neighbor who reported seeing young men brandishing weapons, says the sheriff's office. (I don't fault people for calling when they see groups of people with guns, but I also know that Louisiana has some of the loosest gun laws in the country, and since the teens were indoors, I wonder what the neighbor saw.)

The Associated press reports that Larpenter is no longer giving interviews.

Unfortunately for this nation and young Tillman's family, we've all seen this show before. When will we stop the encores?

In related news, Police Chief Tom Jackson apologized via video today to the family of Mike Brown Jr. for how long Brown's body was left in the street, and he said he's realized that some African-Americans mistrust the police department and he hopes to do better.

An Angel for New Orleans (Video)

In 2005, Rahkyt aka Mark Rockeymore, produced the music and audio for this poem, "An Angel for New Orleans" by Aberjhani, after Aberjhani recorded the recitation. Nordette Adams created the video this weekend in recognition of the 9th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Recent clips have been added at the end to acknowledge the city's progress since that tragic day, August 29, 2005.

Bobby Jindal's Big Oil conflict of interest: Louisiana governor signs bill to stop lawsuits against oil companies

Two days ago I rolled my eyes at Gov. Bobby Jindal because of his appearance on Duck Dynasty. The man goes out of his way to identify with the extreme Right. Today I bare teeth at the man as he kisses Big Oil's behind again.

WWL-TV reports, "Despite the urging of the state attorney general, the New Orleans city council and several academicians that he should veto the bill, Governor Bobby Jindal has signed SB 469, which prevents a lawsuit that was filed by the New Orleans levee board against big oil companies. . . . The Louisiana Oil and Gas Association cheered Jindal’s decision."

Really? Really, Bobby.

I knew his initial move to postpone signing the bill to listen to scholars and here from the state Attorney General was mere pacification theatrics. As I wrote in 2010, Jindal loves Big Oil. He loves it so much that as far as I'm concerned his signing SB 469 was a conflict of interests.

It's too bad we don't have a way for governors to recuse themselves from signing bills in some situations. Too bad there's not a way for some impartial official to step in on such matters. However, in Louisiana, when it comes to oil, where would we find an impartial leader?

At the Cenlamar blog, Lamar White also returns to 2010 and the BP spill while discussing SB 469, reminding readers that they should be outraged. He also quotes various legislators and activists who say that BP lobbied against SB 469.

Well, of course BP lobbied against the bill. But they probably didn't have to lobby Bobby. He's been on his knees for them so long that they only blow him kisses.

Related: 

•  "Flashback: Jindal Tells How He Grew Up with Oil Industry and that Threat to Environment is Balanced in Louisiana" 
•  "Finally, Mainstream Media examines Jindal's BP Oil Spill Crisis Response"

Man jumps into Lake Pontchartrain, saves Causeway driver

As I drove across the Causeway Friday above Lake Pontchartrain in the middle of a rainstorm, I considered the possibility of my car careening over the rail due to an out-of-control-vehicle (that's a thing here, wondering whether you'll go over guard rail while crossing some body of water), and I thought, "Nobody would rescue me in this kind of weather."

Cars flipping over the Causeway guardrail happens more often than I care to contemplate. Apparently yesterday, a driver's truck went over the side into the lake, and this is what happened. As Alvin Pike was driving to work, "the pickup truck in front of him suddenly hit the [Causeway's] left guardrail and careened back to the right side of the bridge," reports the Times Picayune." So, Alvin stopped his car, halted other drivers, and jumped into the lake to save the man. Great story! Pike's so modest. Like most heroes he says anybody else would have done the same.

According to the New Orleans Advocate, the driver was reaching for his cell phone when he lost control of his truck. Um, I would definitely not reach for a cell phone while driving over the lake. Bluetooth's the way to go.

Maybe I should keep a life vest on the font seat of my car. I was surprised to learn how many of the regular Causeway drivers carry them.

Vampire Diaries' Ian Somerhalder shares spotlight with pups in Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws Parade (Video)

For all you young women and girls in love with Ian Somerhalder, I'll agree with you that the young actor is hot, but my feelings for him are more that of the older woman smiling at you screaming over him. In the video above you'll see a Times Picayune interview with the Vampire Diaries star. He was the king of the Mystic Krewe of Mardi Paws parade in Mandeville yesterday, March 9, five days after Mardi Gras. The parade features dogs in costume, and despite Somerhalder's hotness, the dogs stole the show.

I'm aware of this actor, even though I've only seen the Vampire Diaries once. I remember him in Lost, and I track him sometimes in my peripheral vision because he's from Convington, Louisiana, across the Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Mainly, I notice him in the news because my dog receives medical care through the Humane Society in Covington, which is next to Mandeville. Somerhalder supports the shelter, so sometimes there's a banner with his name on a wall in appreciation or maybe pictures of him at an event. (Yes, I drive all the way to Covington for pet care, long story.)

I've been so out of the loop of local events lately that I didn't even pay attention to which celebrities were in parades this Mardi Gras. (My daughter filmed parts of Bacchus for me, including King Hugh Laurie.) I didn't expect to see Somerhalder on a float at the Endymion parade when I went last Saturday, March 1, the weekend before Mardi Gras. Of course, when I go to parades, I'm more interested in the bands anyway.

Somerhalder was Endymion's Grand Marshall. Even though I videoed him, I didn't recognize him. All I saw was a float with musicians on it that had the Vampire Diaries sign on the side. Later when I looked at the video, I saw the star.

He wasn't sitting in his GM seat, and that's why I missed him when the float went by. One of the musicians was in the seat instead, leaning over the side while Somerhalder was standing closer to the crowds, giving one of the musicians a hug. He didn't turn around until the float had moved past me.

My video was not even worth uploading to YouTube. I only uploaded it to illustrate how fast his float went by. But there's better video on YouTube of Somerhalder at Endymion, such as this one here. But f you want to see the heartthrob speeding by my lens, here it is. Just remember that I've warned you, there's not much to see.

A bridge falling into a lake? This is not something we want to think about in New Orleans (video)

One of the most common fears in the New Orleans area is the fear that a bridge will collapse while you're on it or that you'll lose control of your car and end up in the a bayou or lagoon. Given what I just read at the Huffington Post, the possibility that a bridge will collapse is not the far-fetched.

While I'm not afraid to drive across the lakes, rivers, and bayous around here, I'll admit that sometimes while driving across a bridge, the image of it falling out from beneath my car has crossed my mind on occasion. So, this picture of a bridge collapsing that links to an HP's article about infrastructure problems is disconcerting.

The article at HP says, "From roads and bridges to power plants and gas pipelines, American infrastructure is vulnerable to the effects of climate change, according to a pair of government reports released Thursday." The article says that scientists at a Department of Energy facility compiled the research. I used to work at a DOE facility, and I guarantee you that its scientists are not playing around. According to the report, they predict that if the country doesn't do something to address the vulnerable points of its infrastructure, then our nation will experience a "cascading system failure" over the next few decades resulting from destructive weather events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

It also talks a great deal about power outages, but it's bridge failures that draw the attention of people living around so much water. Nevertheless, the news that the nation's bridges are crumbling is nothing we haven't heard before, right? What makes this report different is its focus on how climate change will exacerbate that problem.

Here is a 2009 CBS story on our crumbling infrastructure. Not much has improved since then. Just this past November, President Obama visited New Orleans and talked about the need for the USA to repair its ports, highways, and bridges. He said that one in nine bridges are structurally deficient in the country.



I know that this information will scare quite a few people, and it should, but those who have fears about crossing water will be more afraid and that's no small number. Often I see in my blog stats people surfing to my post about the Causeway asking Google, "How can I get to New Orleans without crossing Lake Pontchartrain?" They mean the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway Bridge, of course. As its history page tells us, "The Causeway spans 24 miles and is the longest bridge over water in the world."

Unfortunately if you're looking for ways to get to New Orleans without crossing a body of water, you're out of luck unless you want to drive an extra hour or two. The city is almost an island, so somewhere along the way you're likely to cross a body of water to get to it.

But if you're coming from Mississippi, you can go through Hammond and drive around the lake taking I-55 down to Highway 51 to I-10 East. If you're coming from the Texas, you can take I-10 into the city and miss the Causeway, but you'll have to cross the Bonnet Carre Spillway over water and swamp. Coming from the Alabama and Florida, you'll have to drive all the way around Lake Pontchartrain, taking I-12 to Highway 51 to I-10.

Other than to offer alternate routes, all I can say is take a sedative, get someone else to drive, and good luck. But please remember this issue when it's time to vote for mayors, governors, congressional representatives, and the next president. If the candidate's not promoting plans to fix this mess, then the candidate's unprepared for the future.

All that said, there was a freak accident on the Causeway in 1964. A barge hit the bridge, tore off a chunk, and a Trailways bus plunged into 15 feet water. Six people died. I haven't seen a barge on Lake Pontchartrain since I moved back in 2007.

Sacrificing Children for the Love of Guns: Sorrow, Anger, ACTION!

Look at this picture, part of several released by the New Orleans Police Department on May 13. Is that a small child running alone from the shooter? So young, so small, and already he's had to learn to escape a bullet.

The man is aiming a gun into a crowd attending a New Orleans Mother's Day Second Line Parade. He and his partner wounded 19 people. Another person was injured when she fell. Suspects have since been arrested for the shooting along with alleged gang members, accomplices after the fact. Somebody shoots; somebody gets arrested. Most people think that's all there is, but I keep thinking about that anonymous child, running and what's ahead for him.

Children who must learn to deal with gun violence as a part of daily life get lost in our windy debates about everything else that we deem more important. For instance, did you know that First Lady Michelle Obama was speaking passionately about young people who face the threat of gun violence when that heckler hijacked the moment this month?

Someone's always ready to steer the discussion away from the futures of children negotiating gun violence. Oh, you want talk about gun violence in your community? Let's talk about the individual's responsibility and single mothers instead. Oh, you want to talk about gun laws saving lives? Let's discuss the second amendment and my individual right to bear arms instead. Let's discuss everything but real people hurt by gun violence.

I wrote about the Mother's Day shooting last month at BlogHer.com and victims of gun violence who are not necessarily riddled with literal bullets themselves, such as mothers who've lost children in shootings. Somebody said on Twitter that the post shows how we're all six degrees from a bullet. If you read the post, you may sense my frustration.

What bothered me most when I was asked to write about the shooting was my suspicion that few people would care about New Orleans gun violence, despite children being involved.  A mass shooting in a community like Newtown always gets more attention than gun violence where frequent shootings have become as unremarkable as wall paint. Also, many Americans, especially many American politicians, appear to feel "not my city, not my neighborhood, not my problem."

But it's not like the Newtown shooting stood alone. In the last 12 months the nation has also witnessed major mass shootings at a movie theater and a temple. Despite these horrors and the carnage of smaller shootings with multiple victims, some pro-gun politicos point to a recent Pew report that says gun violence has declined in the past two decades as though thousands of gun-related deaths each year are acceptable collateral damage for the nation's love affair with guns. "Our weaker laws work," they say. "Free more guns, lock up more people."

Well, I live in Louisiana, a state where we lock up more people than anyplace else and where leaders have not seen a tough crime or loose gun law they don't love. On May 30, for example, our state legislature passed a bill to give gun owners lifetime concealed weapon permits. Meanwhile, Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) has proposed a bill in Washington to stop some felons from ever receiving food stamps and to prevent poor people from receiving cell phones.

Louisiana has the worst gun murder rate in the nation. According to one report, "Between 2001 and 2010, 4,519 people were killed by guns here, more than a thousand more losses than U.S. combat troops suffered during the Iraq War."  These numbers get personal fast. Last year I looked up and discovered I knew three people shot in my city in the same year, and neither I nor members of my family are involved with drugs or gangs. So, something is wrong.

Despite gun-lobby talking points to the contrary, there is a correlation between stricter gun laws and lower rates of gun violence. This fact seems like common sense to me. In the meantime, while the powerful duel coolly with statistics, we watch people die because in our real, passionate world, people don't duel with statistics. They duel with guns. So, those fighting stricter gun control have blood on their hands.

In Louisiana, our leaders implement punitive rather than preventive policies. They uphold tough sentencing laws and are proud to have one of the highest incarceration rates in the nation. Voters continue to elect representatives who take a "let the bullets fly" approach to gun control despite our also having the highest rate of children killed with guns. Still, as prison budgets swell, education and health care budgets shrink.

When I see that picture of a child running from bullets on the streets of New Orleans and consider how my state addresses our gun violence crisis, I think our priorities are upside down. It's possible, too, that we are crazy, doing the same things but expecting different results. And I know that whatever Louisiana has been doing regarding guns, this nation needs to do the opposite.

This post is part of the project, "Sorrow, Anger, ACTION! — A Gathering of Voices Against Gun Violence," organized by MomsRising, PICO Network, UltraViolet, Children's Defense Fund and the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

The truth about sinkholes and Bayou Corne disaster, CBS News reports (Video)

Sinkholes fascinate and terrify me. They have for years, long before I heard about the story of the man whose bedroom was sucked into one in Florida in February. So, when I see a story about sinkholes on the news or online, I have to watch or read, and lately, if the report is about sinkholes in general, like the video posted above, I wait to see whether the reporter covers the mess we've got here in Louisiana right now at Bayou Corne in Assumption Parish.

While sinkholes generally are a natural phenomenon, the Bayou Corne sinkhole was caused by human error related to the extraction of brine by Texas Brine from the Napoleon Salt Dome's caverns. The company has agreed to pay settlements to residents who've lost or will lose their homes. It's possible, according to a Texas Brine engineer, the sinkhole may keep expanding for another year.

The Bayou Corne disaster also reminds me of another Louisiana incident related to salt domes, the Lake Peigneur drilling catastrophe of 1980. The Lake Peigneur disaster was the result of a Texaco oil drilling miscalculation near a salt dome. The video below explains what happened there.

Samoyed in St. Tammany Parish for Adoption (Video)

This is Snow Ball, a 1.5 year old Samoyed. I saw him for adoption at the St. Tammany Humane Society Shelter in Covington, LA, on February 15, 2013, when I took my Lab in for a check-up.

Bobby Jindal: Race, Health Care, and Hipocrisy

Today I saw an article at the Huffington Post with the headline, "Bobby Jindal: GOP Should 'Stop Being The Stupid Party'." The article includes the following statement:

Jindal told Politico Republicans should “stop being the stupid party” by working to embrace a larger group of constituents rather than becoming the party of "big anything."

As I read this statement and more of Jindal's rhetoric, smoke started to puff from my ears. For me, Bobby Jindal is one of the GOP's poster children for offensive comments and non-inclusive policies. He's alienated his share of people of color and people in poverty; he's embraced GOP ideology that identifies it as "the party of Big Business" and crippled government.

For instance, Bobby Jindal is blocking the expansion of Medicaid in Louisiana, a move that will prevent those in poverty from receiving adequate medical care. He has put policies in place that allow only those whose incomes fall below $5000 per year to qualify for Medicaid. And this move is part of some Republican governors strategy to thwart implementation of the health care law. See CBS News, "Is a $5000 Salary Too Much for Medicaid?"

In August, CBS published the article linked above about the GOP governors' obstructionism, and here we are in November, after President Obama's re-election and Jindal has not changed his mind: Consequently, anti-poverty activists have been begging Jindal to rethink his inhumane political position. According to NOLA.com, "Jindal hadn't responded Thursday (Nov. 8) to multiple requests for comment about whether he'd change his stance." To my knowledge, he still has not commented or indicated that he's open to a new direction.

I recall as well (since Jindal is calling the GOP stupid for not being more inclusive) that four years ago, Bobby Jindal praised the late Jefferson Parish sheriff Harry Lee in a public speech. Black people here in Louisiana and anyone else who followed the racism-tinged actions taken during Hurricane Katrina's aftermath knew what Jindal was up to with his praise of Lee. He was identifying with "good ole boy," Louisiana racially oppressive government.

So much for inclusion, Bobby, and I'm not sure you know what that word means, anyway.

Related: Lee Atwater on Southern Strategy

As Isaac waters rise in LaPlace, a family flees to the attic (video)

Music producer Marcus Anderson, Jr., captured on video the waters rising in LaPlace, Louisiana, around his family's home. He had to move his family to the attic. I hope he monetized this video because it appears they've lost everything as have many other Southeastern Louisiana families. Source YouTube and NOLA.com.

Do you hear the Shakespearean cadence in this young woman's poetry?

Happy National Poetry Month!



While surfing for something about Louisiana-born poet Yusef Komunyakaa, I came across a interview at Well&Often Press: The Love Child of Frida Kahlo and DMX: An Interview with Safia Elhillio. It included video of Elhillio performing her spoken word poem "Questions for John Coltrane, from his saxophone." The interview, conducted and written by Kameelah Janan Rasheed, came up in my search because its author includes Komunyakaa's name in the first paragraph, and what a paragraph it is:

Somewhere between forced iambics, obligatory revolutionary regalia, exaggerated movements, and strangely timed inflection, I decided that spoken word was the unfortunate anachronism that all responsible citizens had the responsibility to contain and neutralize. I’d much prefer to sit with a stack of Harryette Mullen or Yusef Komunyakaa than subject myself to another smoke filled back room with a dreaded man, lathered in shea butter, yelling at the audience about African queendom or performing a not so cleverly disguised poem about his girl’s multiple orgasms.

I read more, "Enter Safia Elhillo. Safia’s performance pulled me back into the world of spoken word," and so, I had to watch Safia's performance on video; I can certainly see and hear why this young spoken word poet would appeal to a reader who prefers "book poetry." Her poetic register has the definite imprint of Shakespearean cadence and diction, of a literary canonical pastiche; the her delivery style also echoes that of actors reciting that most English famous bard. I wonder whether or not she was inspired by the name of John Coltrane's birthplace, Hamlet, North Carolina. She is from the Sudan.

Louisiana Studio Wins at Oscars for Best Animated Short (Video)

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore won best animated short last night at the Oscars. (You can see the winning film in the video above.) It was created at Moonbot Studios in Shreveport, La., by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg. According to the AP, the studio held its own Oscar party last night, and that same article describes the film as follows:

The 14-minute long film follows Mr. Morris Lessmore during the aftermath of a storm in New Orleans. Through the power of stories and books, he finds happiness. It beat four other short films in the category including Pixar's "La Luna."

The Shreveport Times reports the following statements from Joyce and Oldenburg given after the pair won.

"Look, we're just these two swamp rats from Louisiana," Joyce said in his acceptance speech. " We love the movies more than anything. It's been a part of our lives since we were both kids."

"It's been a part of our DNA since we were children, and it's made us storytellers," Oldenburg added.

The video below documents the reactions of the folks at Moonbot when they found out their work had been nominated.

Oscar Nomination Announcements - Moonbot Studios from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Downloading Dad: The Search for Places of Origin Continues

When my father, age 91, told me a few weeks ago that a woman, born Augustine Lemieux Stevens (a.k.a. Gussie), had died, I shuddered for moment in a spasm of grief. I grieved not because I knew Ms. Gussie but because I did not know her.

Born on September 13, 1911 in Vacherie, Louisiana, of St. James Parish, she lived near him when he was a child growing up in that rural town. Vacherie sits on River Road, next to the Mississippi. It is in an area of small farms and sprawling historic plantations, such as Oak Alley. Vacherie is a place of sugar cane and rice fields, of Br'er Rabbit and of the slavery/Antebellum South tourism industry.

Ms. Gussie died on October 7, 2011, so she lived almost a month past her 100th birthday. According to my cousin, she was still cognitively sharp and had worked in her garden almost until her death. My cousin said she and her sister would marvel sometimes when they drove by and saw Ms. Gussie nearing a hundred years old out in the ditch in front of her small house, pulling weeds.

I chided my dad mildly for not telling me of Ms. Gussie's existence sooner, before she passed away. With knowledge of her her passing, I grappled again with my fear that the ordinary black history in Louisiana and my personal family history, the stories of everyday working men and women, are also passing away, slipping farther from my grasp daily and the grasp of the rest of America.

My family is one of many families that lost during Hurricane Katrina tangible and intangible pieces of their history--photographs, family bibles, and other official forms of identification that tie us to our past and the sad or silly stories that elders, some undone through the storm displacing them, no longer tell. I may think about these matters more or be more stricken with a sense of loss because in 2008, my mother, our family historian, died after suffering from Alzheimer's for at least eight years. I suspect she may have suffered longer, may have had other signs and symptoms that she hid from us because she feared losing her memory; my mother had watched her own mother wrestle with what was more often called senility back in the 80s, and the terror of being a bright woman trapped in a thorny thicket of dementia haunted her.

Not hearing of Ms. Gussie until after she died illustrates the challenge black historians and genealogists in particular face as they race to collect stories, artifacts, and wisps of memory that yellow and decay in a senior citizen's home or live in the collective consciousness of our elders left alone or in retirement homes or who wait forgotten with a caregiver who has also been forgotten. Too often these artifacts and memories--shoved into cobwebbed closets and minds--will never receive the attention and respect they deserve. A younger and ignorant person may toss out the dusty Bible heavy with strange odors or ignore the story told and retold by an aged and irritating aunt: old people and their mutterings in our youth-obsessed culture are rarely deemed important unless with them come shiny objects that look like something an antique dealer or pawnbroker may appraise and match to monetary value.

I was disturbed, for instance, to learn in October that years ago the great-niece of one of my maternal grandmother's aunts, had misplaced the family Bible. In it was a genealogy going back to Africa, kept by the great-aunt, a childless woman.

Years before her death, this great-aunt had shown a great-nephew--one of my distant cousins who started doing genealogical research in the 1970s--this family Bible. She had told him also that her father--my great-great-grandfather, Tony Green Mott of Alabama--had been a runaway slave from South Carolina. As the story goes, Tony ran away after his master sold his parents. Apparently, he had learned from his own grandfather on the plantation that his family came from Africa's Gold Coast. The cousin who had been doing the research, but who has had a stroke since he began the work, thinks the family's African country may have be Ghana, but he's unsure. He said it perturbed him that the young niece had no clue about the family Bible's location: "Didn't she know how important that was?"

For the past two years I have actively pursued information about both sides of my family, in particular I have been seeking more information about my grandmothers, both paternal and maternal, and so, I have been interrogating family members as they and I have time. Anyone involved in genealogical research can attest that tracking our mothers, grandmothers, aunts' histories through official documents proves difficult; women's names change through marriage and rarely are their names on property deeds. Nor do they show up often in military records. A conversation with Ms. Gussie may have provided me a hint about my paternal grandmother's family, a suggestion of where she came from because no one alive now seems to know. Her origins have been a mystery for as long as I remember, a topic my father and his siblings did not discuss often because their mother--my grandmother--was half white, a potential passe blanc, fair enough to pass for a white person if she had so chosen, some say, but she never tried to pass.

I have stories about possible relations who visited my grandmother when my father was young, but many of these people went by nicknames and were known to my father only as children tend to know older adults, by titles with names such Aunt Veve or Uncle Sweet--rarely a legal name that may appear in a census record or on a baptismal certificate. Therefore, talking to Ms. Gussie, whose memory was intact and who was nine years older than my dad and had grown up across the street from him in the 1920s when my grandmother was still a relatively young woman, may have given me exactly the kind of information I needed.

Perhaps I would have gotten a name from Ms. Gussie that would help me dig a little deeper and find more clues about not only my grandmother's origin but also about the relatives of her husband--my grandfather. His father, my dad's grandfather, was born a slave. I know his legal, post-slavery name, but I have been curious about why people also called him Pop Dadon--or was it Dada? I have to take Cajun and Creole accents into consideration when I am told names and nicknames from Vacherie.

Among Louisiana slave records, there is a slave who insisted on being called "Dada," his African name. Who was he? Such mysteries abound in black families trying to unearth their roots back to the boats that brought their ancestors from Africa through the middle passage to the United States of America. Almost everywhere we look fog rolls off the Atlantic, obscuring conclusions.

Nevertheless, nearly each day I find out new information about my father. Parts of his past pop from his mouth at the oddest moments. Sometimes he speaks after seeing something in the news that means nothing to me. Sometimes a story erupts with while he's eating a sandwich or sorting his mail and has no clear segue. The anecdote may be one I have never heard such as the one he told me a few months when I asked him about his service in World War II. He was in Italy when Mouth Vesuvius blew, news to me, but he told my younger brother this years ago,, it turns out.

Two days ago he told me about his adventures as a teenager in Vacherie's rice fields. I have a friend who has been writing about rice cultivation technology, which came to the American South via African slaves, and she had told me less than a month ago how she wished she could find someone who knew something about the old technology. I advised her to find someone who owned a farm when humans still harvested the majority of the rice, someone who knew what rice farming was like before rice cultivation was mechanized. It never occurred to me that my dad may have been the person she should talk to.

So, after he mentioned, unbidden, what is was like to harvest rice, I asked him about the fields' irrigation system. He told me about water being piped from the Mississippi River into the rice field ditches and that when the ditches overflowed, the water seeped into the fields. "You can't grow rice without water," he told me.

He also talked about how he would itch after dealing with the rice and about the danger of encountering cotton mouth snakes. He avoided that part, which required that the field worker stand in water and reach down into leaves where a snake may be hiding. He also said that nobody in Magnolia, a black area in Vacherie, ever bought rice. They would just collect fresh rice from whatever the fields' owners left behind in the collection area.

He told me as well that the workers were paid about 45 cents per day. However, the "old Creole" (could have been a Cajun) that paid them wasn't too swift, and maybe the old man could not tell some of the black workers apart, and so some days the workers would return to the pay line and get paid two or three times.

Photo from USA Today's article on Louisiana's African-American history trail. I posted that picture of a slave's room because I know from my father as well as the writings of Ernest Gaines that while my dad lived in a house that his father bought in the Magnolia section of Vacherie, as late as the 1960s some black people in rural Louisiana still lived in the slave quarters on old plantations.

Poem: The Reflection in Our New Backyard Pond (Hurricanes)

The Reflection in Our New Backyard Pond
By Nordette N. Adams

'Twas the season of hurricanes, when all through the land,
creatures called "Whodats" scurried and ran
to Home Depot, to Lowe's, to Sam's and to Rouses
for candles and canned goods and fixin's for houses.

They tuned in TVs to local news stations,
dreading the word, "evacuation."
They counted their children and grandparents, too,
and hit ATMs and banks for their loot.

In New Orleans, where people love Jazz,
the second line stopped to fill cars with gas.
Folks checked radios and contraflow maps
while little ones dozed in afternoon naps.

Come Papa, come Mama, come Parran and Nannan,
come bébé, come boo, come cher and come tout,
come, let's prepare for some new hurricane,
and comfort our hearts so we remain sane.

They bow heads, remembering one called Katrina,
the nightmare that left them stronger but leaner.
And still they choose this land by the Gulf:
They love hard and hope; they live and they cope.

© 2011 Nordette N. Adams

Be Careful What You Say to Census Workers

I'm joking. I don't think today's census workers would ever write down what this census work did in 1880. Check what's listed as Joseph Jean Baptiste's occupation.



Also notice how neat the handwriting is on the snippet of the screenshot from the original document. I doubt this guy was walking and writing at the same time.

Mr. Jean Baptiste was most likely a farm worker living on the Laura Plantation or St. Joseph Plantation in Vacherie, Louisiana. Most of the white people listed on the form are Waguespacks. While slavery was technically over, it's quite possible Joseph Jean Baptiste never spoke to the census worker himself and an overseer or somebody from the "big house" gave the census worker the information. But if that worker did talk to this black man himself, I can only imagine how that conversation went.

In addition, here in Louisiana census workers often ran into people who could only speak French, and so, sometimes what made it to the census form was not accurate for that reason. But it's quite possible the man himself said "drunkard" out of his own mouth.

Last semester I read Ernest Gaines's collection of short stories, Bloodline, in a class. I recommend the short story of the same title about the passing away of old plantation life and the complexities of the Laurent family to anyone who wants to see how the effects of paternal and overt racism as pathology worked itself out on the plantations of River Road. However, it's also a class issue. No census worker would have dared write anything so negative about one of the plantation owners even if he'd come upon him dancing naked in a drunken stupor on the veranda.

I found the census record at FamilySearch.org.