Nineteen Origins

Origins in seventy-five words or less from Dr. Chris Schaberg and his Contemporary Nonfiction Students:

Madeline Ditsious, Breanna Henry, Kimberly Pollard, Charles Anicich, Angelle Lemoine, Halle Gugsa, Mae Bennett, Christopher Schaberg, Olivia Delahoussaye, Maya Krauss, Analene McCullough, Emily Livingston, Benjamin Ebert, LillieMarie Johnson, Zach Atchley, Alexandro Lopez, Alliyah Gauthier, Jacelyn Dill, Tyler Turner

In our Contemporary Nonfiction class at Loyola University New Orleans this semester, we’ve been sampling the introductions (or opening chapters) of a wide range of books published over the past couple years. We’ve dipped into memoirs and auto-theory, prose poetry and collected fragments, cultural criticism and nature writing. Mondays and Wednesdays, we discuss the texts on Zoom. On Fridays we write on a collaborative document together, posing questions and venturing insights concerning our weekly readings.

A few weeks ago we read the beginning of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. This book orbits around the possibilities and strictures of Black feminism in contemporary culture—all done with a sociologist’s analytical eye and the prose of a deft storyteller. The first paragraph of Thick accomplishes so much in 73 words:

As readers we hear her voice, see a vivid place, and glimpse the socio-economic undercurrents and ruptures that will give shape to the broader contours of the book. On that Friday we quietly channeled McMillan Cottom’s intense opening focus, and we wrote our own one-bite auto-ethnographies in 75 words, side-by-side. Assembled, they read as a psycho-geographic kaleidoscope in essay form.

I’ve always felt misplaced in terms of my origin. I was born in Colorado but at the age of four, I moved to Louisiana. My parents were born and raised in the northeast and most of my family remains there. Sometimes I cannot tell if I feel more like a Cajun or a Yankee, or even a Westerner. My origins have always been muddled for me and I can never align myself with just one. 

 *

August 21, 2001. I was made in the Southwest part of Houston to a Rastafarian father and a confused mother. I grew up in a broken home, but I didn’t know any better. What was home to my sister and I was never home to my mother. It was more like a bandaid for her loneliness that had lost its adhesive. That was before my mom found God. Or, I guess, before God found her. 

 *

Pawpaw had a real-leather belt for each grandkid, kept them in the glass-door gun case in his workshed, half-sunk in the mud out by the canal, twelve yards from the porch he built and later rebuilt, when in August one bad plank tripped my sister and she wound up with seven stitches (same summer: the marsh caught fire and the stink stayed for days). He never made a meal himself until they found Grandma’s tumors. 

 *

Summertime in Harlem is a magical experience. The sun is shining through the buildings, the basketball courts are filled with the cries of foul and “We got next,” while the mixture of bachata, reggaeton, and rap battle for airtime dominance. The icee pushcart attendees who know the neighborhood kids by name shout out “Coco, mango, cherry” like a siren’s call while you try to decide with friends which sounds tastier: a chopped cheese or pizza.

 *

I’m from the deep South, that is, Louisiana right in the toe of the boot. I’m from a place that says “y’all” too much and where Tony Chachere’s has to be in every dish. I’m from using Lent as an excuse to have a crawfish boil, and where “how’s ya mom an ‘em?” is a good conversation starter. Around here, snoballs are a delicacy, and half of our stores “ain’t dere no more” since Katrina.

* 

I'm from a school, in the middle of bumfuck VA, where anything went—for teachers anyway. As for students, talk in the wrong tone, expelled. Make-out with a boy, expelled. Everyone was there for a reason, girls who've escaped the terrorism of Boko Haram, children of diplomats. Teachers called it the great commission reversed, I despised that. A synchronization of comedy and tragedy, a place where laughter and quality food were more valuable than precious stones. 

 *

I was always a misfit. Never truly belonging to one place. I have the soul of New Orleans deep within me and it travels with me wherever I go. At age five, Katrina attacked my city, misplacing me. My home and my sense of self were destroyed. We evacuated to Houston and attempted to build, from the foundation up, a new life. Home has begun to feel like a feeling within, rather than a location.

 *

I wish I could say I’m from the woods but that came later. I arrived in a blizzard in a suburb of Lansing; the doctor had to take a snowmobile to get to my birth. I have no memories of that house. We moved 17 times before I graduated from high school, ping-ponging around southern Michigan and parts of Connecticut before finally ending up in northern Michigan, in the woods that I really call home.  

* 

I was raised in Denham Springs, Louisiana for the first decade of my life. It isn’t really urban, and I don’t know if rural is the right descriptor either. I can remember the small woods behind the house; the woods with the slim creek running through it. The wildlife living in those woods always seemed to be off, just like the rest of the area. It was whimsical and also the furthest thing from it. 

 *

The family I was born into isn’t the one I love and consider home. In a small town in Guatemala lived my birth mother who gave me up for adoption. I found my way into my mother’s arms at a year old, and was raised on the beautiful island of Hawai’i. It was an absolute dream come true. Instead of pavement, I had sand, and instead of malls, I had the ocean. I was happy. 

 *

Born in a suburb area outside of New Orleans, my origin is complicated. My mom is from Los Angeles, and my dad is from Alabama, and they met here in Louisiana. We moved around Metairie and New Orleans often when I was little, and then Hurricane Katrina sent us to Texas for almost a year. But we returned, and we thrived, like the city we love and the amazing people who fought to save it. 

 *

Kansas City is a city! I have to repeat this to my friends from college every time we talk about home. It's where I am from and it's where I learned to play, write, dance, and be myself. I can make fun of it but you can’t. It is my home and you will never learn about everything it has to offer until you take the time to visit. Kansas City is a good city. 

 *

For the first 19 years of my life, I suffered under the illusion that I was from St. Louis. How this mirage of surety manifested I cannot judge. Only, I seem to remember being told I was born there, though that’s now of little significance. I am from the piss-stained, crumbling cobbles of Decatur, the headlight of that temptress of a train drawing nearer through the milky fog of another drunken night on the river. 

 *

I’m from the city—well, as city as the Bus Boycott can be described. My Dad moved here at birth and met my Mom at Alabama State University. My Mom’s side is from Mobile and when she took a year off because my grandmother was dying, my Dad visited and spent days at the hospital talking to my grandmother before having to drive back up. And that’s when my Mom knew she was in love. 

*

Deep in a paved over swamp lies a place named Windsor. Residing there are the Courts of Bedford and Saxony, with Stonehaven connecting the two. Windsor is tucked away, protected by a leaky tunnel, precarious bridges, and a general unimportance to anybody’s life other than those who live there. I fled Windsor early one morning to find something in the “North,” but returned to the South disheartened and spent. My home is now near Kenner.  

*

Coffee, flannel, and grunge make up an unholy triumvirate in the minds of most Seattleites. Tucked away in the upper left corner of the map, it’s not a place that gets a lot of attention. Most pay us no mind beyond the outdated 90s tropes and a vague awareness that the Starbucks cups and Amazon packages endemic to modern life find their origin there. Frankly, I prefer it like that. 

*

They say that everything’s bigger in Texas. As prideful and gluttonous as we may be, don’t let the southerners fool you! Everything’s big so that you can feel small. The noxious gases that good old overpopulation creates does something to our brain cells. Californians love to get their noses in our barbecue. Our bodies adapt to the uncontrollable electrical grid and the sun scorches us because of our spoiled judgment. 

*

Southern Baptist churches and football fields larger than the local skyrises. Oklahoma is the place I call home, begrudgingly nonetheless. My first kiss underneath the ‘Friday night lights’ and my first song sang in the church across from the Chinese buffet. This was my home, and what is home if not the first place you run from? I hurt my knee when I was 14, and it throbs every time I cross the state line. 

*

New Orleans is me. I am New Orleans. I have experienced the city at its lowest point. With the thousands of lives lost and the millions of dollars in property damage caused by Katrina, I have seen the city rebuild itself countless times. The unwavering denial to stay down is something that has instilled itself into my DNA and has shaped me into the person I am today. The city will always be within me.