Reclamation Part 2

This is the second installment about “Reclamation,” a response poem to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright.” Part 1 is here.

We moved around a lot when I was young—by the time I started second grade I’d been in four schools in two states—but when we got to Slidell, we stayed. We moved there in the middle of my fifth grade year and I stayed until two years after I graduated from high school, right before I got married for the first time. For about another six months it’ll hold the record for the longest I’ve ever lived at a single address, assuming nothing happens to our current house (please don’t let anything happen to our current house).

When I think of Louisiana as home, it’s generally the Slidell memories I pull from even though I spent more time combined in and around Hammond, and a bunch more important life-changing kinds of things happened to me there than ever did in Slidell. That’s the magic of childhood, though. Those memories imprint in a special way.

Of course, the Slidell I knew hasn’t been there in a long time. I moved away in 1989 to get married and didn’t really go back very often. Why would I? Most of the people I’d gone to high school with had gone off to college, and besides, I was still a Jehovah’s Witness, so those people weren’t supposed to be my friends. They could become friends if I converted them but that’s what it would take. Otherwise, they were just people who could tempt me into ungodly behavior and make me miss out on everlasting life in a paradise earth after Armageddon came and wiped out the current wicked system of things and it just wasn’t worth taking the chance. I was in a new congregation and I could make new friends there and be a good Christian husband and so on.

But Slidell is still deep in me, for better and worse.

We lived in a trailer park at the end of Cousin (pronounced COO-zan) Street where it turned into Possum Hollow Road. It’s still there, according to Google Street View. It was nice as trailer parks go, small, quiet, clean. My sister and I were the only kids in the trailer park most of the time because the owner, Mrs. Bishop, basically didn’t rent to people with kids most of the time. Our parents impressed upon us that the reason we’d been allowed to move into this park is because on the day we interviewed with Mrs Bishop, we’d come straight from the Kingdom Hall so we were dressed properly, and while the adults talked, my sister and I sat quietly and watched tv and didn’t fight or cause a ruckus.

I feel like I need to talk a little about Slidell’s geography, at least when it comes to where I lived. Here’s a map of my neighborhood.

See that loop with the word Possum? That’s the trailer park. That blue line is a canal that led, eventually, to Lake Pontchartrain. To get to school, my sister and I would cross the canal, take a left at Park Drive, and stand in the driveway of the corner house to catch the bus.

If you look closely, you can see that Park Drive is basically two loops. It was a mini-subdivision called Park Place. What you don’t see on the map is the 6 foot chain link fence that ran from the canal around the back of that little neighborhood so as to keep people from crossing through a vacant space from Daney Street, a space that was originally supposed to be a through street—might have been a connection at some point, though that would have been before we moved there—but was not anymore.

It should not surprise you to learn that the people on the side of the fence I lived on were predominantly white and on the other side of the fence were Black. And the white people who lived on those two loops tended to be better off financially than the white people who lived on Cousin Street, or in the trailer park, though no one there was what you could call upper class, or even upper-middle. This was a working class neighborhood that white people moved out of when they started doing better.

Now I didn’t understand any of this as a kid. I didn’t even really understand it as an adult until I moved away and started reading about structural racism and redlining and then recognized it from my own experience. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote about it a lot in Chicago and Baltimore but really once you’ve seen the outlines, you see it everywhere. I see it here in Des Moines in the way I-235 ran right through the black neighborhoods and in how the school assignments have been drawn so that there’s an elementary school that’s 90% Black in a city that’s only 11% Black. And it’s there in the six-foot chain link fence that separated one of the Black neighborhoods in Slidell from the white subdivision nestled in a little corner next to it.

Now I feel certain that my parents didn’t choose that trailer park because of that separation. They chose it because there weren’t many trailer parks in Slidell and it was clearly the nicest one. The others—the ones we went to when knocking doors with our Watchtower magazines—didn’t have paved streets or sidewalks, didn’t have rules about what you could keep in your driveway, Most people in them were renters, sometimes by the week. None of this should be a surprise either. The term “trailer-trash” has had pretty wide usage for a while now. My parents were looking for a quiet place to live, and they found it at Bishop’s.

Slidell is named after John Slidell, a member of the Confederacy. He was originally from New York, but moved to Louisiana when he was young. He represented Louisiana in the House and Senate and then when Louisiana seceded, he was appointed by the Confederacy as an envoy to France in an attempt to get them to support the South in the war. He was captured by the Union in what would come to be known as The Trent Affair but later released. He went to France but basically failed to get anything from the government for his efforts because the French refused to do anything without the support of the British. I don’t know how many times that has happened historically, but it feels rare. He did manage to get a $15 million loan from Emile Erlanger & Co, (run by his son-in-law) and a ship named “Stonewall.” That’s a fun little Wikipedia diversion if you’re interested. Slidell never returned to the US after the war. He lived in Paris, and eventually the Isle of Wight, where he’s buried.

Slidell the place, in short, has little to do with John Slidell the person. It was established during the construction of the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad (known to Wikipedia and others as The N.O.N.E. Line, which I find hilarious). Slidell got its name because Baron Erlanger financed the railroad which formally established the town and named it after him.

We didn’t learn any of this in school, to be clear. All we ever heard was that Slidell was named after John Slidell, who’d been a diplomat during the Civil War. My guess is that’s because he wasn’t someone you could hang a Lost Cause narrative on. He wasn’t a Southerner, he didn’t fight in the war, he didn’t try to rebuild the white-only power structure. If it weren’t for his son-in-law, almost no one would remember him. He’s a footnote, an answer to a trivia question.

That’s why, when I was writing this section of Reclamation I didn’t name him, and so by extension I didn’t name the town I grew up in. When it comes to the town and the people who I lived beside and with and among, who it’s named after doesn’t really matter.

And yet the attitudes of the people like Slidell and the Confederates and the Lost Causers and their progeny had and still have huge effects on where and how the people in that town and so many others like it both in the south and elsewhere are able to live and thrive. I get so frustrated by those who argue we can’t teach this history to kids because it’s going to make them feel bad to talk about the very real effects of structural racism because it’s the same stories I heard and didn’t hear when I was a kid. It shouldn’t have taken me almost forty years to recognize the importance of that chain link fence that separated my classmates and me, a fence that didn’t need to be there in the first place.

Here’s part 2 of Reclamation

One morning, early, I woke up and there

she was. Our land. More than a hundred years

ago someone built a house on that hill

and still it stood, the oldest place I’d seen

in my young life. Maybe the oldest in this town

named after a man who tried to sell

the British on the Confederate States

of King Cotton raised and baled by slaves,

this town he never set foot in, this town built

well after he died. This land he never

came home to after the war, these people

he never asked forgiveness of, who said

his name each day, claimed it as home

for children and grandchildren, who built

the roads I walked to school each day

where no teacher ever spoke this history.

As always thank you for reading this far. I plan to publish the rest of these on a semi-regular schedule, with pieces on other poems interspersed between them. I have writing plans for the winter break!

I’d love to hear about the places you have close attachments to, especially when you recognize how nostalgia clashes with the realities of those places, and how you navigate that. Would you share them in the comments?