by Paula Morris
“There are more than six thousand blighted properties in the city right now,” her father told them. “Some were ruined by the flood waters after the levees broke, but some were in a bad state for years. It’s a difficult issue, because people feel really strongly about it.”
“They think all the houses should be fixed up?” Ling asked.
“That would be ideal, but it’s not really possible. Not here, not anywhere. But some people, naturally enough, don’t want to see their neighborhoods decimated, with all the old properties pulled down and replaced with something new that doesn’t have any character or history.”
“That sounds pretty sensible to me,” Ling said. “I think I’m on their side.”
“But,” warned Rebecca’s father, “there are other equally sensible people who don’t want their streets ruined by boarded-up buildings, or houses that are dangerous and decrepit. They don’t want their kids playing there. They want to live in a neighborhood where they can feel proud and safe and happy, not one that looks empty and unloved.”
Empty and unloved, Rebecca thought, thinking of Frank, and his sad-eyed expression.
“How do you think people feel here?” Ling asked him. “Here in Tremé, I mean.”
“I think a lot of people probably feel both things,” Rebecca’s father said. “They don’t want the neighborhood stripped bare, with all its history removed. All its soul. But you don’t want to feel as though you’re the only one who cares. You don’t want to live in a place that’s been left to rot or fall down around you.”
Rebecca thought of what Lisette had said to her, the day they walked together to Tremé. Rebecca had been talking about the way people knocked down old buildings and just swept the past away. “The past doesn’t go away,” Lisette had told her. “You just can’t see it anymore.” They were standing right here on St. Philip Street, just as she and her father and Ling were doing today.
Rebecca looked at the three falling-down houses. Soon those houses would be gone, and their histories — everyone who’d lived and died there — would be invisible.
“You buying that house?” Someone was shouting at them from the steps of the next house. It was an old black lady, her face poking around her screen door.
“No, ma’am,” Rebecca’s father said. “We’re just looking.”
“Looking to buy another house around here?”
“No, ma’am,” he said again, walking toward the lady’s steps. She pulled the screen door closer, like a shield.
“Good. We don’t need any more people like you coming here and buying up our houses. How can our children afford to live here when you trying to make it like the Quarter?”
“I hear what you’re saying, ma’am, but really — we’re just tourists.”
“Tourists?” She humphed. “The man who owns that house now, he’s no different from a tourist. Here five minutes at Mardi Gras, and you never see him out sweeping the street. Only time you ever hear from people like him is when they’re calling the police, complaining the second line’s making too much noise. Complaining when the kids practicing after school! They want the pretty house, but then they decide everyone else in the street too ugly.”
“I’m real sorry about that, ma’am.” Her father looked quite chastened, as though he were a kid caught doing something wrong.
The screen door closed, and then opened again. This time a teenager stood in the doorway, and Rebecca recognized him right away.
“You’re Raphael, right?” Rebecca asked. “We were with your aunt on Sunday. In the car on Rampart Street?”
“I remember,” he nodded, smiling. “I’m Raf. My aunt is the only person who calls me Raphael.”
“Raf,” repeated Rebecca, smiling back at him. “I’m Rebecca, and this is my friend, Ling. And this is my father, Michael Brown.”
“Maw-maw, they friends of Aunt Viola!” Raf called into the house. He stood for a moment, a mischievous grin flickering on his face, then stepped out onto the small porch.
“My grandmother says you all should go ahead and buy the house next door, but don’t go calling the police when someone plays their trumpet too loud!”
Rebecca laughed, liking Raf immediately.
Raf explained he was on his way back to school, so they agreed to walk together to Basin Street High. Raf and Ling strolled ahead, Ling asking a million questions a minute.
“It didn’t sound like Raf’s grandmother was too pleased we fixed that house up,” Rebecca whispered to her father. “Or maybe she just doesn’t like the people who bought it.”
“Well,” Rebecca’s father said, “gentrification improves neighborhoods, but it also changes them. House prices go up, rents go up, and the people who live here, maybe for generations, can’t afford it anymore. What makes Tremé a distinctive neighborhood may disappear altogether.”
“Becca — I was just telling Raf about the second line we saw here on Sunday,” Ling called over her shoulder. “I can’t believe some people complain about them.”
“Haters always trying to close things down,” Raf told them. “The police don’t want to give permits. TV news people saying that there’s a shooting or a stabbing, or people jumping on cars, and the whole thing has to end. My other grandmother, she says that as well. She says Sundays are for church, not running with second lines. ‘One minute they dancing, next they drinking, next they fighting.’”
“Are they really dangerous?” Rebecca asked Raf.
“Sometimes there’s trouble,” he admitted, shrugging his shoulders. “But sometimes there’s trouble at a Mardi Gras parade, and nobody ever says they should be stopped. Anywhere you have people, you have trouble. And sometimes people just looking for a time and a place to make it.”
Rebecca thought about Toby Sutton, lying in wait for her somewhere in this city. At least, she thought, he wouldn’t think to look for her in Tremé.
The ghost girl on Rampart Street was nowhere to be seen, Rebecca was very relieved to observe, when they crossed back into the Quarter. She and Ling were signed up to start work later that afternoon, though even Ling’s enthusiasm waned when they were told it was less about gardening and more about clearing rocks and digging up weeds.
A police car sped by, this one with its siren on.
“You girls have to promise me not to go wandering off,” said Rebecca’s father. “I don’t even like you walking over there by yourselves this afternoon.”
“It’s not far!” protested Rebecca. Her father still thought they were little girls.
“This city has the highest per-capita murder rate in the country,” he said, grim-faced. “And not all the guys you see in Tremé are going to be friendly high school students like Raf. Some of them may want to sell you something, and some may just want to take whatever you have on you.”
“Dad!” Rebecca protested, and Ling looked shocked.
“Mr. Brown,” she sputtered, “I’m sorry, but that sounds like … like racial profiling!”
Rebecca’s father kept walking.
“It’s common sense, I’m afraid. Wherever you have poor neighborhoods, in any city in the world, you have a whole lot of people who don’t want to be poor. Some will get jobs to earn money, some will get it any way they can. It’s human nature.”
They walked in silence for a while down Orleans Avenue, until Ling asked if New Orleans really had the highest murder rate in the country. Rebecca’s dad nodded.
“Wow. This city is messed up,” said Ling.
“I guess,” Rebecca conceded. For some reason she felt the need to defend New Orleans. “Most cities have their problems, though.”
She was surprised at how protective and territorial she felt sometimes toward New Orleans. Rebecca wondered if it was because she’d gone through so much here. What happened last year here had been bewildering and frustrating and difficult, and ultimately, really frightening. But when difficult things happened to you, she realized, they became a part of who you were — like a battle wound, something that s
howed you’d survived.
After her father went back to work, while Ling was busy Skyping with her mother, Rebecca made her way back to the corner of Rampart. She was relieved to see that the creepy dark-haired guy — ghost? — wasn’t anywhere to be seen today.
All it took was a few minutes of pacing, holding her cell phone up to one ear as a pretext for lurking on the corner, to lure Frank. In the blink of an eye, he materialized by the fire hydrant, smiling at her eagerly.
“I was just down the street,” he told her. “Keeping an eye out for you. Delphine told me she saw you last night.”
“Delphine?” Rebecca was confused, then remembered the beautiful ghost girl with the curls. “Oh! You mean the girl who lives in this house? The girl on the gallery?” Rebecca was so curious she almost forgot to keep her cell phone clamped to her ear. This was her alibi, after all. People in the street talking to themselves looked crazy. People in the street talking into cell phones were a dime a dozen.
“Pretty, isn’t she?” said Frank, and the hazy look in his eyes made Rebecca suspect that Delphine was someone special to him. “I told her you were helping me, and that’s why she let you see her. Usually she keeps to herself.”
“So you were friends with her back when — you know, you were alive?”
Frank shook his head. “She’s been here much longer than I have. You know, she went to school with Lisette.”
Rebecca felt her heart leap at the sound of that familiar name. “She was a friend of Lisette’s?”
“Yes. She used to ask me about Lisette all the time.”
“But why didn’t Delphine see her? Lisette walked right along Rampart Street every year.”
“Delphine only haunts at night,” Frank explained.
“Ahh,” Rebecca exhaled. So that was why she saw Delphine last night but not today. Really, the ghost world had more rules than Temple Mead Academy.
“One of the ghosts by the cemetery,” Frank said, lowering his voice as though Delphine were around to hear it, “told me that when Delphine was alive, a box of candied fruit was delivered to the house, meant for her mother. But Delphine was greedy, and stole one. The candies were poisoned, so she died. I don’t know if that’s the true story. You don’t like to ask, do you? Especially if you have to shout up three floors.”
“I guess.” It was odd to think about ghosts gossiping among each other, speculating about how another ghost died. Another way the ghost world was like Temple Mead. “I wonder why they wanted to poison her mother.”
“All I know is that Delphine had three sisters, and that her father was a rich Creole with a plantation up on the Cane River….”
“Creoles!” Rebecca had another brainwave. “Maybe she’ll know something about the family who lived on Esplanade. You know — the Moussons? The artist’s cousins? So we can figure out who should get the locket.”
She was about to tell Frank that she had an idea of how to spell the name now, but remembered just in time that he couldn’t read or write.
“Maybe.” Frank didn’t sound persuaded. “She died years before I arrived here — sometime in the 1850s, it was. So I don’t think she would know much. She’s always stuck up there on the gallery. I think I’m the only person she speaks to. The only ghost, that is.”
Frank smiled again, a secret smile. Rebecca felt a little pang, something that almost felt like jealousy. She couldn’t possibly be falling for a ghost. That would be ridiculous.
“Um, so — doesn’t this Delphine ever come down from the gallery?” Rebecca burbled. She had to pull herself together.
“She tells me that if I ever really need her, she will,” Frank said, gazing up at the now-empty gallery. “Perhaps if she could help find the locket, it would make up for the candy she stole. Then she wouldn’t be a ghost anymore, either.”
It seemed to Rebecca that poor Delphine had already paid a very high price for stealing a piece of candy, and maybe this was just wishful thinking on Frank’s part. She checked the time on her phone: She and Ling had to report for duty at the school in twenty minutes.
“I have to get back,” she told Frank. “But I wanted to tell you — I’m going to be in Tremé again this afternoon, at the high school that backs onto St. Philip Street …”
“St. Philip Street? That’s where the house is! The house with the locket.”
“Really? So — well, OK. Maybe later you could —”
“I’ll see you there,” Frank interrupted, and promptly disappeared. Rebecca had wanted to ask him about the dark-haired man she’d seen lurking here on Sunday afternoon, but it was too late.
Rebecca immediately saw the differences between the Big Sweep on Sunday and the Basin Street High after-school cleanup. Here, there were no team T-shirts, high fives, or promises of barbecue. Instead, there were a few dozen high school kids, mostly still in their uniform of blue Polo shirts and pants, some of whom appeared to have been drafted in because they were on detention.
The teacher in charge, Mr. Boyd, preferred shouting to speaking, and clearly had a very low opinion of that afternoon’s motley crew of workers.
“Working for your school is a privilege!” he roared. “I want to see smiling faces and calloused hands! Anyone not giving one hundred percent will find themselves back here on Saturday giving two hundred!”
Ling and Rebecca exchanged a worried glance.
“We not on detention,” one older boy pointed out, gesturing to his group of friends. “We just volunteers.”
Mr. Boyd stared at him so long and so hard, Rebecca thought he was willing the poor kid’s head to explode.
“My daddy volunteered in the Korean War,” Mr. Boyd said in a low voice, which sounded even more dangerous than his shouting. “Do you think that meant he didn’t follow orders at all times? DO YOU THINK HE TALKED BACK TO THE SERGEANT?”
“No, sir.” The boy hung his head, and some of the girls tittered.
“The only volunteers we have today are our two UN observers here.” Mr. Boyd gestured with his clipboard at Ling and Rebecca.
Everyone else looked at them. The range of expressions ran from bemused to hostile. Rebecca felt her face burning up, and she looked around for Raf and his friend Junior. At least they were smiling.
“I know you think you’re do-gooders,” said Mr. Boyd, looking from Rebecca to Ling. “But this is no spring-break picnic. No MTV here, filming you dancing on a beach. So, no working for an hour then taking pictures of yourself in a cheerleading pyramid. Got it?”
Rebecca’s tongue was frozen to the roof of her mouth, but Ling surprised her by answering right away.
“Yes, sir!”
“I need workers, not shirkers. I got enough trouble on my hands with American Idol here.” He glowered at Junior, whose smile instantly disappeared. “So you, Uptown Girl!”
Rebecca realized he meant her.
“You I want ground-clearing on St. Philip with American Idol. If he starts singing, hit him with a rake. And you, Miss Thing!” He nodded at Ling. “I’ll start you over there with the Baton Rouge crew, and then you’ll be troubleshooting as I see fit. Go, go, go!”
Ling waved a nervous good-bye to Rebecca and scuttled across the school yard after Mr. Boyd.
“Those girls came down here from Baton Rouge?” Rebecca whispered to Raf. They looked as though they were all wearing the Basin Street High uniform.
“No, they’re just baton twirlers who march with the band. Ling’ll be all right — Mr. Boyd likes them. It’s the detention girls he’s really hard on. He calls them the Jailbirds. And the boys on detention are the Angolese, because he says they’ll end up in Angola Penitentiary if they don’t change their ways.”
“What does he call you?”
“Kermit, like Kermit Ruffins, because I play the trumpet. And because I’m green. Junior is American Idol because he thinks he’s gonna be a star. Brando over here is Stanley. We don’t really understand that one.”
Rebecca didn’t get it, either, but she knew that it was
best not to ask questions of Mr. Boyd. She followed Raf toward a broad grassy verge where houses possibly used to stand. Now it was a sprawling patch of weeds and tangled vines. A large tarpaulin was spread over a section of land already cleared, and Raf’s friend Brando, who was tall and thin, his hair almost shorn off, explained the drill. They had to pull out or dig up everything growing here and throw it onto the tarpaulin or into a trash bag.
Uprooting these giant weeds proved harder than it looked, even though the soil was damp from the recent rain. Rebecca soon found herself on hands and knees, stabbing into the ground with a metal fork and trying to twist up the roots. It was like twirling oversized spaghetti, though the smell was much earthier. Raf worked alongside her, tugging at roots with his hands.
“Have you always lived in Tremé?” she asked him, keeping her voice low in case Mr. Boyd was patrolling nearby.
“Yes. But we don’t call it Tremé so much,” Raf told Rebecca, nodding up at Brando and Junior. “My grandparents call it that, but we say we’re from the Sixth Ward. When we play down on Jackson Square or Bourbon Street, we call ourselves the Sixth Sense. That’s what we write on Junior’s hat, anyway. Don’t know if anyone sees it.”
“You always go down to the Quarter to play?”
“That’s where the tourists are at. They don’t come up here into the Sixth or the Seventh Ward. I think the police drive up and down Rampart Street to keep us out of the Quarter and to keep the tourists in.”
Rebecca nodded, absorbing that. “Do you play on Bourbon Street?” she asked.
“Jackson Square or Royal Street. On Bourbon it’s too loud, with all the music coming out of the bars. There’s always someone up onstage pretending to be Jimmy Buffett. You want to hear real New Orleans music, you need to be out on the street.
