by Dessa
I’d been bracing for the nausea to roll in, but stayed steady in my Chuck Taylors. When I’d given up meat years before, I’d done so for moral reasons, after watching a college professor present a logical proof for vegetarianism on the chalkboard. The thrust of the argument was: it’s wrong to cause needless pain. Animals raised for harvest live in uncomfortable, painful conditions. And we could totally subsist on pasta and salad. But this animal had it pretty good, I thought. He never saw it coming. The pain argument didn’t really hold here. I decided it’d be alright to eat the meat my mother raised; I would eat Burger.
I didn’t know it then, but pain can be difficult to detect in cattle. My mom, now with years of experience, has explained to me that, “Prey animals tend not to show pain—that would make them an easy mark for a predator.” To discern which animals might be suffering from injury or illness, she has to be the steward capable enough to see through their stoicism. And she can do that now—she can do all sorts of cool farmer stuff like gauging a bull’s fertility by assessing the “testosterone hump” on his back or calculating how much feed hay she’ll need based on the ambient air temperature. She’s president of the board, in fact, of the country’s largest organic farming conference. But in the moments after that first slaughter, I was just worried maybe she’d feel like she’d hired a hitman in a threadbare T-shirt to assassinate her guy Burger.
I stole a quick glance, looking for some small clue as to how she might be holding up. She was a tough read, standing in her work boots, mouth set. Her crow’s feet were evident in her sternness; she’s lucky to have the good kind that sweep gracefully, like they were done by a calligrapher.
Most of us, I think, suspect we know our loved ones better than they know us. Maybe that’s borne of collective conceit, a compliment to our own powers of perception. But I think there are acres of my mother that I don’t have access to. She’s always been affectionate with me and Maxie, but also private. And proud. In her corporate life, she maintained an impenetrable firewall of professionalism. Big displays of emotion could make you ineffectual, she said. Even at home, she was sensitive to roles: she’d often put down my whining with “I’m not your friend, I’m your mother.” I’ve inherited some of that thinking from her: I don’t like to talk in public about my problems until I’ve solved them, don’t like to share rough demos. I go to great lengths not to appear vulnerable or overtly emotional in my professional transactions. Even with my mom, I minimize my vulnerability when I can: I remember sitting in her sewing room as a girl, making my first bra out of black Lycra and elastic to spare myself the embarrassment of having to ask for one. But in the lyrics and the essays I write, I blow most of the doors open. It’s not that I have a particular interest in confessional art—it’s just that true stories are boring if you skip all the embarrassing bits. My mom posts my new music on her Facebook page, and every once in a while she includes a caption, something like, Oh you got me with this one my girl, so I know that something in the lyric resonated with her. But of course she’s not writing emotional rap music about her own life that would allow me to peek over the fence of our relationship and into the parts of her that are not involved in mothering me. If she ever talks out loud and at length about her biggest hurts and fears, I think it’s probably while saying her prayers.
When a friend in Minneapolis found out about my mother’s farm, she’d rushed to tell me about her own farming childhood; her parents’ barn was charged with emotion—lambing season was full of cooing, the slaughter full of tears. That surprised me a little. I’d expected most farmers would be calloused to their work. But love and loss are always natural partners. On a farm, you can start loving whenever you like, but you will be losing at 9 A.M. on the first weekday in September. There are two schools of response to that prospect: to delay the loving as long as possible, to lessen the pain of the losing, or to start loving immediately to get as much of it in as you can before the losing starts. I was pretty sure, though, that my mom’s perspective wouldn’t be so sentimental—more informed by the Farmers’ Almanac than Charlotte’s Web.
My mother says she doesn’t love the cows. And I believe her. But I know there is something that she feels, some connection. If seeing Burger butchered caused her pain, she didn’t show it. She was watching, learning, set to excel in her new role.
“That’ll be sixty-five dollars,” Slaughter Guy announced. I tried to keep my face expressionless on hearing this alarmingly low number. How on earth did they make a living killing for that?
My mom reached for her checkbook. A hybrid feeling hit me, both tender and proud. Everyone, including me, had tried to dissuade her from this ambition. And she’d persisted. My mom was badass. Also, there was a satisfying symmetry to it: Mom was born in the Bronx to become a rancher and I was born on the plains to become a rapper.
My mom cut the check, free now to tend to the remaining herd. I was free to return to the city and re-up on Claritin. Burger would spend the next weeks in a meat locker, waiting for an appointment with the butcher.
Slaughter Guy, presumably, would head to another farm to earn the next sixty-five. I wondered what he was like in his personal life—if all these years of slaughter had crystallized some understanding of death and loss unclouded by a civilian’s sympathies. What had he said to his son when the family dog died? If his wife left him, would he announce, “No use crying on it” and then go slaughter something with his usual blasé? And after all his years in the trade, would he anticipate his own dispatcher, cued by some familiar scent? I would bet good money that Slaughter Guy did not like doctors, sanctimonious with their scythes small enough to fit in the breast pocket of a crisp, white coat. Maybe he’d submit with less resistance than the rest of us to the summoning bell.
Daylight in New Orleans
—
This is a classic work-hard, play-hard hand.” Miss Kristen read my palm by the light of her iPhone 6s. We sat tucked together into a corner of Hex: Old World Witchery in New Orleans. She’d pulled a curtain around us for privacy, creating a dim office roughly the size of an airplane bathroom. My palm, illuminated by her screen, was like a tiny, spotlit stage. Miss Kristen had blunt-cut bangs, like mine. She wore a black top with a low, scoop-neck collar and billowy sleeves. Her purple glitter nail polish was chipless, but based on the crescent of bare nail between cuticle and paint line, I’d guess it’d been six days since the last coat.
I do, in fact, consider myself a work-hard, play-hard sort of girl. But I’m pretty sure that’s as easily divined from the lines around my eyes as it is from the lines on my palm.
I am a woman in her midthirties with dark hair, olive skin, and a gap in my teeth wide enough to swipe a credit card. I’ve spent many years now as a touring performer, rapping and singing on the road. The benefits of the job are easy to guess: you get to travel the world with your friends, make music you believe in, dress anyway you like. Sometimes you get fan mail or free drinks or a standing ovation. There is, however, an adventure tax. Unless you live with other, non-touring people, you may not be able to keep pets, houseplants, or perishable food items. You will probably miss birthdays, weddings, and possibly the funerals of people you love. While a national tour can hit forty cities, you might not actually see much of them. The indie musicians I know spend most of their daylight hours in transit when they’re touring. We lunch at roadside fast-food joints, stand in line behind one another at gas station bathrooms, then roll into town just in time for load-in. By the time the stage is set, the museums are long closed; the bookstores and thrift shops are settling up for the night too. It’s easier to crowd surf than to get a walk-in haircut on tour. Work and play are both hard, and sometimes hard to tell apart.
Miss Kristen tucked a Tarot card into the crease where my fingers met my palm. All my fingers joined my hand in a neat line, except the pinky, whose seam sloped toward my wrist. “That’s called a dropped Mercury.” It indicated a propensity to tamp down my own desir
es, give too much to others.
Well, who doesn’t want to hear that her biggest flaw is generosity? And the implicit prescription for self-indulgence—that’s gotta play well with anyone visiting the French Quarter. People come for the party: cocktails in to-go cups, late music, rich food, boys, girls.
Travel was important to me; she could tell as much from the striping on the side of my hand. “There’s a lot of chaining on your heart line.” Miss Kristen’s nail traced the arc of hatch marks that meant I didn’t have a clean romantic trajectory.
Well, that was uncontestable. I thanked Miss Kristen and took her card. She asked for a positive review on TripAdvisor.
* * *
—
I started touring through New Orleans almost ten years ago, playing venues like One Eyed Jacks, House of Blues, and Tipitina’s. Most of my experience of the city has been nocturnal. If I spliced all of my waking hours in New Orleans into a continuous reel, it would play like footage from an arctic observatory in the dead of winter—many hours of darkness, then a flash of sunlight before the next twenty-hour night began.
After years of frequent but brief visits, I know most major American cities the way that I know my postman. I know that in Pittsburgh they say yinz instead of y’all. I know that the thrift stores in DC are full of diplomats’ dresses, barely worn. In Atlanta, there’s a speakeasy that charges one hundred dollars for a martini—because it’s rimmed in cocaine. New Orleans, to my knowledge, is the only city in which I might have performed on a stage below sea level. That’s a metabolic boon for a vocalist. In Colorado, by contrast, the altitude can wreak havoc on a rap show. If you don’t pace yourself, it’s easy to end up gasping and exhausted halfway through the set, with a five-drink slur from three light beers. On Doomtree’s last pass through Aspen, the club kept an oxygen tank side-stage so we could get a decent lungful between verses.
This time I wasn’t in New Orleans for a gig. I’d arrived alone to write an article for the New York Times Magazine—my first big-league writing assignment. I’d get to see what the city looked like open, with kids and commuters, sun and sober pedestrians. I’d get to select my own meals and eat them sitting down, in a chair I wasn’t belted into.
My flight landed midday and a split screen opened in my head, with the routine I’d be running if I were on tour. I ate lunch on Frenchmen Street at the time of day I’d usually still be on the road with the rest of the crew, waiting my turn to plug my phone into the cigarette lighter adapter. At dusk, I stood on the wooden footbridge in Louis Armstrong Park—an hour when I’d normally be unloading bins of merch from the van. At eight I’d usually be standing on the tops of my own boots, changing into show clothes in the bathroom, but instead I was on the St. Charles streetcar, headed uptown to attend a concert myself.
I arrived at the Maple Leaf Bar too early; techs were still wiring the stage. I’d never performed there, only read about the venue as a reliable spot to catch solid local players. The bar was simple—dim and well-worn—while the rest of the street looked comfortable: an upscale grocer, a well-lit head shop, a gym offering aerial yoga. I ducked into the sushi spot next door, feeling a little lame about eating Japanese in New Orleans.
The man who sat beside me at the bar had curly hair and a ruddy complexion. He had a cleft chin when he was straight-faced. Smiling, it ironed itself out. He was Cajun, I’d learn, and looked to be in his forties. His name was Doug and he was a drummer.
We did what musicians do when they meet each other—we recited our respective tour routings and discographies until we found a point of intersection. We landed on Dave Pirner of Soul Asylum. Doug had rehearsed with him; I’d been considered for an opening slot on a tour that didn’t quite pan out. We traded notes on clubs (Doug liked the Dakota in Minneapolis) and favorite cities (we’d both been blown away by Istanbul). Later I’d try to remember what his hands looked like, if he had travel lines like me.
By his tally, Doug had played 110 tours through Europe. On his first trip, “All I knew was the term Europe”—he gestured at an imaginary map—“I didn’t even know what was in there.” A couple of hours into the flight he’d flagged down an attendant to ask, Excuse me, are we almost there? I laughed.
For Doug, the musical capital was clearly New Orleans. It was here, he explained, where all pop music really started. “The Nola groove is based on that clave,” the Afro-Cuban beat. This was the home, he said, of “skeleton rhythms.” I told Doug I’d never heard that term. He was graceful, but I think for him my ignorance of the phrase was akin to a purportedly professional musician who’d never seen a piano. Aah, I see—it’s like a harp, laid flat to be played by typewriter?
As he described the roots of New Orleans music—the Creole influence, the Sunday songs in Congo Square during the slave era—Doug leaned forward on the bar, like a bad card player with a good hand. Almost every New Orleans musician I met was like that: reverent, eager to recount the lineage of the sound. Musicians are usually self-promoters, more likely to give you a download card than a cultural history lesson.
In my own career, race and music have always been linked, and often uncomfortably. My mother is Puerto Rican, but I’m light enough to be ambiguous, or to be mistaken for completely Caucasian. When someone asks what I do for a living at a dinner party, and I answer, a corporate type will usually cross his arms in a half-assed B-boy pose and ask, Like, rapper-rapper? If he happens to be wearing a cap, he will turn it backward at this point. When I confirm—yes, a rapper-rapper—the guy will often recruit a friend to the conversation to share in his astonishment. I will readily concede that I don’t look the part (particularly if I’m wearing either bangs or glasses) and, yes, incongruencies are interesting. But I often get the very strong sense that part of this guy’s flabbergastedness is due to the fact that I’m socially polished and well educated—traits he doesn’t expect from rappers. And maybe, by extension, traits he wouldn’t expect from young black men in street wear. On the other hand, I don’t have license for much righteous indignation. I didn’t grow up immersed in rap culture, wearing out N.W.A cassettes and tagging my notebooks. I grew up dyeing my hair with Manic Panic, listening to Liz Phair, and writing cryptic, depressive poetry. There’s a long history of white performers earning money while black innovators go uncompensated. I look white and benefit from it. I talk like an academic and I’m asked to deliver paying speeches because of it. So what’s the right way for a fair-skinned artist to share her talent, without coopting—what do I owe, to whom, and in what coin can I pay? It’s a question that feels more important and more difficult every year.
Doug had to head home but wanted to make sure I’d be seeing the show at the Maple Leaf. He pointed to a handsome, older black man down the bar in finely framed glasses. “That’s the legendary George Porter Jr.,” he said, “of the Meters.” The legend looked over, and I gave a shy wave. I felt a little bloom of teenage excitement—a bunch of classic hip-hop tracks sampled the Meters. In present company, sushi suddenly felt like a perfectly New Orleanian meal. I leisurely finished my salmon roll at the time of night I’d usually be counting into microphones.
Ninety minutes later, the Maple Leaf was full and moving. I wallflowered with a bottle of beer. There were people who couldn’t keep time, people who could really dance, and jazz dudes who could keep time so well, and in such complicated subdivisions, that it just looked like they couldn’t dance. My corner of the floor was populated by tourists in Velcro sandals, club girls in banging four-inch heels, a slim woman in suede loafers, a middle-aged guy dancing in hiking shoes. That seemed like an unusually wide array of footwear at a concert; I pretended to drop my pen to get a better look. This club is like Noah’s ark from the ankle down, I thought. Shoes are flags of cultural membership; shows I’d been to were usually dominated by black boots and Vans—hipster standard issue. But maybe a city run by pirates, psychics, and jazz gods didn’t have much use for hipsters; there was no mainstream t
o rail against.
The keyboardist tapped the side of his rig and shot a glance to the back of the room. My reflex was to jog to the soundboard: Can we get more keys in the monitors? But of course this was not my show—and the musicians onstage were the last people to need an intermediary.
During his solo, the drummer’s sticks moved faster than the flash rate of the LED stage lights. They blurred, becoming two arcs of blonde wood at his sides, like the wings of a snow angel.
At this time of night, I’d usually be onstage myself, just a few songs into the evening. I’d have a mic in my right hand, a whiskey at my feet, and I’d be just starting to get airborne—moved by the music, along with everyone else. I haven’t always been a strong performer, but I’ve become one: I know how an arched eyebrow can color a phrase, how an outstretched arm can widen my presence on a large stage, how a crowd can be deputized to stop a fight peacefully, how long to pause after a joke (if you don’t allow time for the laugh to take form, you’ll snuff it out with your next line). I can sense the perimeter of the spotlight, and I know that if I leave that coin of light, the people in the back cannot see my facial expressions and their attention will turn to the next brightest point onstage. And I know when it’s time to let it all go, and just sing, however it might look.
Outside the Maple Leaf, a hard rain started. I stood under the awning outside to watch it come down and catch some secondhand smoke. The first notes of a slow song reeled people back inside, leaving conversations and cigarettes half-finished. I followed. There’s a trick you might have seen before, where a rowdy musician plays a sad song in the middle of a set. And because the scale in your heart has already been calibrated to the ruckus, the weighing pan will spring up in those quiet moments, painfully light. And your throat will hurt, constricted by the intensity of a feeling you hadn’t known to brace for.
