Chapter 1
A Tale of Two Cities
Time was good then, with Theresa and Slavey and excellent Oliver. Slavey and Oliver tacked those bottle-caps to their gymmies and danced, danced in the street. Theresa, she sang in doorways. Me, I just tagged along. They let me.
Rain or shine, we worked and played anywhere. It’s funny how kids love rain, other folks complaining and telling them they don’t have enough sense to get in out of it. Kids just get out there in it, get soaked with the thought of catching a cold just a vague curiosity. The rain, however wild, lays a cool calm, helps things shine
So time was good in New Orleans, with all that rain there. It was good then, as it had been before, at other times in the centuries of that settlement. It was wild and free and sad and it all shined in hearts, hearts like excellent Oliver’s and Slavey’s and Theresa’s and mine. Sometimes we didn’t know what to do, in all that rain.
We lived in the projects, in the one where Storyville used to be. But that’s not as bad as it may sound, that being then and this being now. Storyville was gone, little left of it anywhere, except in history and minds like Oliver’s Earth father’s, remembering the Storyville days when King Oliver’s trumpet lorded over even the child Satchmo.
And the projects were new then, no crack-heads yet pillaging the plumbing for scrap metal to sell. Satchmo, Louis Armstrong, the Dixieland trumpeter, named maybe for a French king, maybe for the sun king Louis XIV who gave this world ballet, or maybe for the crusader king Louis IX for whom the cathedral in New Orleans is named, maybe trumpeted best why we were here and how Storyville might never end, as an introduction to a recording of his of a song about “What a Wonderful World” Earth is.
“It ain’t the world that’s so bad,” said Satchmo. “It’s what we’re doing to it.”
Huey Long, governor of Louisiana, calling himself the king fish, built the projects as a democratic project of his Democrat political party, and he built Charity hospital also for the poor of New Orleans. Later, whatever the initial spirit, the projects and the hospital would be left to go to hell in a hand basket. But, then, in our Louisiana childhood, the projects were new, and full of hope. Economic equality seemed dawning, evening up everyone with us poor. Maybe to bring us into the fold.
And, of course, we didn’t see ourselves as poor, as hardly any child thinks he or she is poor, all children finding themselves the centers of their lives, in the middle of all classes. And, by God, we were in fact middle-class, in the middle of New Orleans, in the middle of America, in the middle of history, unfolding around us. We sang and danced in our chains in the middle of America’s music. And we were on our way to Motown, upstream from downriver. The music carried us like wind and rain.
We had come far. We travel the universe doing what we can do on planets and in other kinds of places where things are headed toward hell in a hand-basket. We had been to Earth several times, I as Lao-tzu to try to bring peace to the Mongol warlords, Slavey as Muhammad to send faith in life to the Philistines, Oliver as Moses to bring the same to the children of Israel. Theresa had been Joan of Arc, to do the same for the French, and of course did well. It was she who chose to land in New Orleans this trip, having been la pucelle d’Orleans. She was curious about the French of Tom Paine’s common sense.
Slavey and Oliver also had French memories to test. They had worked together as Orlando and Oliver with Charlemagne, trying to temper Slavey’s inspiration of the Saracens against the followers of Joshua. Slavey and Oliver were always getting killed, and they always did well. Theresa didn’t like dying, and she did well.
So we were a diverse group, come to try again to bring peace to this diverse world. And the song Theresa most liked to sing in those doorways, as the tourists of the French Quarter threw coins into a beer-box at her feet, was “Amazing Grace”. And she loves also how it sounds on the pipes, having also been a friend to Scotland’s Catholic queen Mary, never queen of England, never at peace, ever England. Theresa knows the songs of peace and the pipes of war, as Slavey and Oliver know they acquired their tap-dancing skills marching, to Roncesvalles, to death.
Now they knew they had some maybe-more-serious singing-and-dancing to do, and they knew that New Orleans was the rainiest city in the United States of America. We were here now for a hundred-years-war more brutal than the one Theresa had ended in France, and so we all thought it appropriate to launch our current crusade in this French-founded rainy city. But, democratic, we discussed the selection.
“Seattle’s world-fair space-needle gets more rainy days,” offered Oliver.
“But, in New Orleans,” argued Slavey, “when it rains, it pours.”
“And here on Earth,” answered Theresa, “a hard, hard rain is about to fall.”
When I showed Theresa the account I’ve given here one more millennium later, she pointed out the anachronism that
And the tide seems the same now, this one millennium later, as it was then. It seems to me that Katrina came but a moment after 9/11, while Enron and Anderson were in between, and we were gone again by then. But a winner never quits, because a quitter never wins. So, again, we were here.
Hitler was on the horizon, threatening to undo anything we had ever tried to do, and ending him would not give peace to all. Racism was also rampant in this United States republic, and religious bigotry promised to respond to Hitler with more religious bigotry here where the Pilgrims had landed, and to spread it more to what human inhabitants here call the holy land.
So we agreed on New Orleans, a city built by oppression and freed by music, and used to rain. If music could sooth the wild beasts, maybe it could calm the crazy humans who had invented it. Theresa selected this city for the hope of our parents in the project. We learned from them how to feel this time. And we learned from the levee.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Theresa whispered.
“Tell anyone what?” I asked, looking sideways at her dark eyes gazing forward over the river, not focusing on the other side, as ours seldom did.
“That we’re from outer space,” she answered.
“Ah,” argued Oliver. “You can tell them.”
“Yeah,” agreed Slavey. “Nobody cares.”
“Yeah,” added Oliver. “Nobody’d believe us, anyway.”
“That’s why we can’t tell them,” Theresa answered. “They’d lock us up in a loony bin, or try to! Wouldn’t that narrow our focus?”
Theresa always answers. She always has the answers. You should have heard her singing in those doorways. You should have seen her.
It wasn’t raining on this one day, but the grass on the levee was damp from dew as we sat there planning our invasion, the Sunday morning sun saying all its promises. The irony was in that we knew we’d live forever. One peace at a time.
“I liked being Lao-tzu,” I said. “You know, just going with the flow, letting things be right. I think I’ll say that, when I accept the presidential nomination.
“’I’m a quiet man,’ I’ll say. ’A quiet man.’”
“Yeah,” Theresa answered. “But we have a lot of work to do before then.”
“And somebody has to blow some horns,” added Oliver.
“More than that,” offered Slavey.
The river said nothing. The levee held it back, as Theresa held us to the grindstone. It’s a tough job, saving this world is, and we had to start now, by making some friends. Racism was rampant in this republic, and Hitler was on the horizon.
We would need much help, many folks professing from the heart.
And the first friend I made this landing was by accident, a fortuitous circumstance of my being whiter than my companions and so often away from them in day-to-day passings. One afternoon, as I sat alone on the Moonwalk, named not for the moon but for a mayor of New Orleans, I met Tolstoi’s ghost.
Yes, Tolstoi, Count Lev Tolstoi, the author of War and Peace. You’ll have to forgive my spelling, if you’re accustomed to seeing the name spelled Leo Tolstoy. I like to transliterate phonetically and was very happy when English-speaking Americans at last began calling the capital of China Beijing instead of Peking. Maybe someday more of them will call my book the Dao De Jing instead of the Tao Te Ching. It’s about using your voice more and your wind less.
Lev was still walking on Earth instead of going to Heaven, because he was ashamed of himself. Life and death are weird on Earth, even beyond the fact that Earth is the only place in the universe where death exists. Lev had lived a long and wonderful life on Earth and died in a stupid way, trying to commit suicide without dying. So now he was a ghost, dead but still hanging around on Earth.
Like the author of the American Declaration of Independence, Lev had owned slaves, called serfs in Russia. And, like that other author, Lev had written promoting the betterment of all human life. But Lev’s thinking and writing wasn’t why Lev was a ghost. Jefferson had done the same, and Jefferson wasn’t a ghost.
Why? Because he wasn’t like Lev! Lev had not made his serfs an exception to his hopes of better life for all humankind. Also unlike Jefferson, Lev not only had specified his human chattel as a special concern in his writings, but also had done positive deeds for them. Among those deeds was building a school for the serfs particular to him on the land they worked for him. So Lev was no hypocrite.
Lev was a ghost because he had renounced the best of his life, his novels and his wife. His book War and Peace, while being replete with confusion and contradictions like the Bible, stands similarly partly because of the contradictions as a gift to all life on this planet. Besides being a Zen sort of thing, it offers negative examples like Moses’ stiff-necked people, and the hope of positive spirit, large heart.
But worse than renouncing his novels was renouncing his wife. No one paid much attention to his renouncing his writings, but his wife could hardly have paid little attention to his renouncing her. For her, it had been love before sight, having first fallen in love with him on reading his first book, Childhood. She had memorized much of it, and she met him when she was hardly more than a child. So the 36-year-old man married the girl half his age. A little like Andre and Natasha, in War and Peace.
Then she bore him a baker’s dozen children, nearly half of them while he was writing War and Peace. She loved him, and he loved her, and you can see it in how he writes of women, especially in the early pages of War and Peace. He writes of them as glowing, and especially the little pregnant princess. But somehow he forgot what he had seen. He forgot how he had felt. He forgot himself.
He attributes little intellect to women in that book, and that might be the best reason to renounce it, if any reason is just. But it is clear that he saw women’s beauty and clear that he loved his young wife, and it is clear that he dumped her when she’d reached the age at which United States women can retire. And he dumped her not for another woman, but for his intellect, to be alive alone.
“Until the day I die, she will be a stone around my neck,” he wrote in his late writings in despair of death, and so he died trying to leave her. On that nonsense way, he fell sick of it and died, and so he found there is no death. His wife died and went to Heaven, while he was hiding in New Orleans. In shame of what he’d done, he didn’t even see her off.
Her name was Sophia! How more ironic can one get than to leave a woman named for wisdom to be alone with ones own? So here I was, sitting beside the ghost of Lev Tolstoi on a bench on the moonwalk, as the two of us watched the freight-ships passing in this great American port. Surely none of those freighters carried more freight than Lev’s heart.
“What brings you to New Orleans?” I had to ask.
“Well,” answered Lev, “It’s a long story.”
“A little, please?” I needed to hear.
“It’s history,” he answered. “It’s the French.”
“The French,” I wondered, and I begged him to go on, and I beg your indulgence to listen to this tirade before we go on to more mundane or less historic things that play better in films and books and news-media, stuff new as our friendship with Norma Jean and Lev’s meeting Billy the Kid, the assassinations of the Fits, etc.
“Look what they have done,” continued Lev. “I guess I should start with Vallon-pont-d’Arc, with those graceful and gracious cave-paintings of horses, the earliest historical record of their joie de vivre. But the mess started about thirty millennia later, when William the Conqueror stormed across what we strangely call the English channel to conquer even the language of the Anglos there then. Such power, such spirit.”
Lev talked as he wrote, eloquently and prolifically, with little pause in thought.
“The spirit was so powerful that three centuries passed before the poetic power of Chaucer gained back a semblance of the old English language and moved it on to the language of Shakespeare. Such power, such spirit! But for what?
“It’s as though the conqueror had left his home behind to be conquered. Three centuries before William conquered England, Charles Martel and his grandson Charlemagne had saved Europe from the Saracens, the invading Islamic hordes. The older Charles had hammered them back from Tours, and the younger had given France its national poem by the spirit of Orlando and Oliver at Roncesvalles, and nearly made of the Roman Church the Church of France. But, three centuries after the spirit of Guillaume le Conquerant, France needed a nineteen-year-old girl for protection from England.
“What happened? I surely do not know! But I know that France had even lost the spirit of its art. Shakespeare showed the world that the confines of ancient drama Aristotle had pointed out shouldn’t be treated as rules, but French dramatists were treating them as rules three centuries after their faith-filled child warrior la pucelle d’Orleans had burned at the stake to give France back its spirit. They call her now Sainte Jeanne, the patron saint of their nation. But where’s her spirit?”
Of course, I considered telling the old dead count that I knew a reason he did not, why he should wish to be in N’Awlins now. But I wanted to hear how he saw his own story, and he was well into it on that bench atop the levee. He talked a little bowed, his grand old hands on his trousered knees beneath his long grey beard. The water almost rippled from his glare, as he gazed into the river.
“Then there’s this nation,” he continued.
“Six centuries after William conquered England, the dance-master of the French sun-king Louis XIV did for dance what Shakespeare had done for drama. Louis loved it, as he loved the art that went into his glittering palace with its glancing hall of mirrors and its glorious gardens, all aglow with some of the old spirit. But his country hardly carried it forward. We did better in Russia with his dance.
“Our great czar Peter, trying to imitate the glory he thought was Western Europe, earned Petrograd the nickname Window to the West, but there’s much irony in that title. The sun-king’s dance-master’s name, the name of the inventor of the dance ballet, the dance more beautiful than any human motion except coitus, was Beauchamps. The name in French means beautiful fields, fields like the Elysian ones, les Champs Elysees. “Champ” is also the source of the English word “champion”.
“And that conquering dance went far afield, becoming three more centuries later a champion of the third world war, the Cold War. And that’s where I come in, I a precursor of communism, I a verbal revolutionary and champion of all the people, and especially the poor. I died just before that revolution, the end of the czars and the brand of nobility that gave me my title Count. So I did not live to see its failure, through failure in spirit of my own country. And so I’m here.
“I did not live to see Stalin run Balanchine off to America’s freedom. I did not see the dancers follow that choreography, Nureyev and the others, one after another. No, I did not live to see communism sing its swan-song, but I did live to see that gift from France flourish through Petipa and Tchaichovski, through Swan Lake and the ghost Giselle, through the Sleeping Beauty.
“So, asleep in spirit or not, France has given greatly to this earth, and I haven’t mentioned now the greatest gift of her failure of spirit. France gave the United States of America their revolution, their freedom.
“And I don’t mean Thomas Paine. His common sense was about as common as Karl Marx’s, circular logic that would spiral into dirt if left to stand on Earth with no props. Benjamin Franklin’s mission to the court of Louis XVI recruited a whole lot more from France than Paine and Lafayette. The Marquis’ troops and other support cost the French treasury, and accordingly all the French people, dearly. So, one of the greatest heroes of the American Revolution was Marie Antoinette.”
“That must be a good point,” I said to Lev. “Explain it, please.”
I had heard all this before, but I wished to hear it from this ghost.
“It’s like the importance of my books I didn’t recognize,” he said, looking askance at me and then up at the sky and back down to the river and sighing. “Marie had no notion of what she was doing. When, in her callousness, she said the saying for which she’s most famous, she left her people to so much suffering and angered them so much by her saying it, that she inherited the revolution, against herself.
“’Let them eat cake,’ she said, when the people of Paris marched to Versailles to demand the bread they lacked because their king and queen had chucked much more of their treasury across the Atlantic than the sun-king had spent on that palace.
“So, the revolution that began in America on the 4th of July 1776 began in France on the 14th of July thirteen years later. Vive la France!
“Those people of Paris stormed the Bastille, the political prison that had oppressed them all, demanding and getting much more than bread. So, in that weird way, France owed well the gift she gave to New York’s harbor. The lady Liberty stands for both nations. But France screwed up again.
“Napoleon, Robespierre, the reign of terror. Many persons besides Marie Antoinette lost their heads at Robespierre’s guillotine, and Napoleon tried to conquer the world, taking everyone’s freedom. What the French people thought they had won in their revolution, thousands of Russia’s people had to pay for, without gaining theirs. The Pierre in my War and Peace is wrong at the start.”
“Pierre, named French for Peter, from the Latin word for stone, named for the saint who sank like a stone in the Sea of Galilee for lack of faith, the disciple who denied knowing his teacher three times before the dawn of his teacher’s crucifixion, the foundation on whom Jesus said his church would be built, the rock of the Roman Catholic church, stood in a drawing-room. Educated in Western Europe, my child of adultery Pierre stood amid Russians speaking French, in a Petersburg drawing-room.
“I described him as candorless as he praised Bonaparte, while Bonaparte was doing all he could to subjugate all the world and then especially Russia, while Russians were dying to keep him from it. When I said the cause of Napoleon’s imperialism was the first French corporal, I didn’t mean the Little Corporal, Napoleon. I meant the first leader who followed Napoleon’s orders. I meant the candorless sheep like Pierre.”
“Is that why you renounced your work?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Lev answered. “It was from fear of death, exactly. I looked at my characters and the real people around me, and I thought of all the noble notions I could figure, and none felt important to me, in thought of death. I renounced my works because I could not feel that anything I knew or could do or think was important, in thought of death. Rational or not, from fear of death, I feared all possibility of error.
“And no it is not rational. Reason tells me that where is life can be no death, that where is beginning can be no end, that all is eternal. But alone at night, alone although with Sophia beside me, I felt outside her gentle sleeping breath. I felt that I would die for doing any wrong. And I felt no right to do. So I tried to undo all. All I had done.”
“Dostoevski,” I said to him, “said that anyone would prefer to death life in an arshin of space. I don’t know what an arshin is, but I don’t know death either.”
“I do,” said the count. “And neither is much.”
“Lev,” I asked, “in any language, War and Peace is more than a thousand pages. Can’t you say all that succinctly, for the simple souls that live on Earth?”
“No,” he answered. “That’s why I renounced it. Everyone must make choices. In life, in war or peace, many ways exist to fight that fear. You can have the peace of family and die a loved grandfather, or you can abandon yourself to death’s possibility by swinging your sword against everything in sight. You can live and die by the ethics of a morality of yours or others, or you can live and die by refusing to make a choice. You can call what you do religion or conscience or redemption or vengeance. You can do anything you like, anything like you. I can’t decide for anyone. I just offered options. You know yours. In your heart. They’re there.”
“So, I think,” I said, “you’re saying people should follow their hearts. Does that mean that anyone who follows one’s heart is right, no matter what happens from it?”
“Yes. I’m saying exactly that. The whole trouble is that too few people follow their hearts. Too many lie straight into themselves. And they call it intelligence.”
And he went silent, lifting his old gray ghostly head and gazing no longer into the river, but across it. The sun was setting behind us over the roofs of the French Quarter, and the saxophone-player at the entrance to the moonwalk seemed to me as silent as the river, although he still played as people quietly dropped coins and dollars into his saxophone-case on the boardwalk. So I thought I understood the answer to my question of the count, but I wished to be sure.
“I beg your pardon, Count,” I said, in all the grandeur I could muster from my then nine-year-old human frame. “But I’m still not exactly sure what brings you to New Orleans. I’m not exactly sure. Not exactly.”
“Oh,” said the author of War and Peace. “I’m here for a little quiet, and I’m not through fighting yet, and I’m too old to join the French Foreign Legion. I need to battle for my soul and be a little ordinary for a while, and I’m not alone in the battle here. Marie Laveau still slips from her tomb in Saint Louis cemetery from time to time, you know. And there are some vampires, although the werewolves usually stay by the bayous. Besides, I like hanging out in the bars. It isn’t all about the French.”
And he didn’t stay in New Orleans anyway. He helped me out from time to time and was very helpful in my friendship with Mikhail Gorbachev and all that Cold War business, and he surprised me a little in being somewhat helpful in my friendship with Yasser Arafat and the craziness in Canaan. Being a ghost, Lev traveled light, and he went wherever he thought he could help.
At the end of the century, after our last effort of that millennium on Earth, Theresa and I took him home for a visit. He was very pleased to meet Saint Joan, and then we sent him on to Heaven. To true Sophia, and their children.
Yes, we had selected New Orleans as our launching point because of Theresa, for her having been Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans. But, for what we had to do, Theresa had to be born in the cotton south. So her mother this trip gave berth to her in Alabama.
Alabama had a culture of corruption. It didn’t have the cotton culture of Mississippi or more western states. But it had plenty enough hate and indignation to be the primary district of confederacy, as Washington had become the District of Columbia, if confederacy is a right word for bigotry.
Theresa arrived ahead of the rest of us, because at the time we didn’t know the rest of us would be needed. Theresa arrived just before what Earthlings came to call World War I, and not because of that slaughter but because of what was happening inside the United States of America, despite its official dedication to liberty and justice for all it had reaffirmed by its civil slaughter for emancipation a half-century earlier.
Hitler hadn’t yet reared his ugly head, and strife in Canaan then was more between England and France than between Israelites and Philistines, at least as far as most Earthlings could see. Some of our space-personages might well have paid more attention, but the situation there then wasn’t very noisy, relatively. It wasn’t nearly as noisy as when Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, or as the World Wars would make it.
The fight for Canaan that had been between the Israelites and the Philistines in the second millennium before Bob came to Earth was now mostly between those newer colonists and more diplomatic than warlike, with the economic health of Jews and Muslims mostly played as idealistic pawns in the struggle of those two failing empires for their own economic health. The mandate that resulted was relative peace.
We had no notion of what Hitler was up to. We couldn’t keep track of every little brat in the universe. Since before papacy, European rivalries had always set situations for some little brat to rise up as a catalyst to capitalize on the disorder. But the disorder disintegrated any efforts to predict which brat might find a place. Racism, however, had much focus in America then. So Theresa quickly found her place.
She was born into this world that trip in the tiny Alabama town named Pine Level. We thought it appropriate, the level of a pine being high, or low if hewn into a box. Like Joan’s, Theresa’s body wouldn’t be boxed, but instead would be scattered to flow with a river, into the wide deep sea. But pinecones were like something Bob had said when he was here: “Except a corn of wheat fall to the earth and die, it remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
And the people of Theresa’s little Methodist church in Pine Level understood that point of view and taught her to sing of it in Sunday school: “Deep and wide, deep and wide. There’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.”
They sang from their church in their fight against the great white whale, as Ahab had railed from the rail of his ship, also with conspicuous despair: “It’s a wide, wide world, and a deep unsounded sea.”
But, in their acquiescence, they didn’t imagine names like Moby Dick, and they didn’t call the white whale great.
They called their nemesis the white-man, and they prayed for him as they prayed for themselves.
Small words, simple souls, grand spirit.