Thrown-away Child

it from church, and that’s nothing. Lot of your Negro preachers, they swipe calinda from schoolbooks. They take what been disrespected by white folks as nothing more than a immodest dance where the womens line up on one side afld mens on the other and then everybody come together wriggling wild to the beat of bamboo drums, and they go turn it into just another simple black church holy-roly deal. Fact is, calinda mean more, a lot more.“
    “Such as?”
    “Number of things. Calinda teach that mens and womens no matter what got the power to make new life. Even if they existing slave-dead the power’s inside them- Calinda’s the idea that lowdown divided-up folks got real power when they get all excited and come together—power ain’t nobody able to deny.“
    “Some people would call that subversive.”
    “They be damn right. That’s how come they just about clean steal away the memory of calinda —’cause it’s subversive. That’s typical, though. Black folks born and raised here in New Orleans been robbed of just about everything in life, starting with history class at grade school. Louisiana school teach the type of history that’d be a wonderful thing if only it was true.“
    “How did you learn about danse calinda?”
    “There’s certain ones keeping memory alive for those who care to know.”
    “Certain... misfits?”
    “It start out years ago in Jim Crow days we had a little set-apart society during Mardi Gras. They don’t want coloreds in they damn parade back then, see. Even today they only got these Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club fools wear grass skirts and bones in they noses. So we start up our little alternate festivities. Mutants, Orphans, and Misfits we call ourselves, sort of a sorry joke on history. We just get together at Congo Square like the slaves we come from, we drink beer and down around.”
    “This MOMS outfit, it’s still around?”
    “Oh, yeah. It’s still about mis-fitting, only even more so than years back. Now it’s about a lot of our young black men realizing they sentenced to life on the outside of society with no options whatsoever— deluding help from black folks. Ain’t enough they orphaned and misfit, now they been made into mutants, see. MOMS ain’t a joke today.”
    “What is it?”
    “Disease and true crime, I call it. Never going to be rubbed out by inventing a new medicine pill or building new prisons neither. Lot of prison cells already occupied by the exact wrong people. And even if they was a pill, it wouldn’t be sick people need to take it. It’d be the so-called healthy ones need pills to turn they hearts human.” Joe Never Smile paused to sip coffee. “You think I be talking riddles?”
    “I think you’re talking about the crime of poverty.” Joe nodded his head. Then he pushed himself up from his chair and crossed the kitchen to where he kept coats and hats and an assortment of walking canes pegged to a wall. “Come on with me, son,” he said, taking down a cane. He chose the thickest one, the one with a curved handle wrapped up in a hundred rubber bands or so. Warm as it was, he also slipped on a coat.
    He led me back through the hallway to the front porch. He locked the door behind him. Without a word, I followed the father of us all down off the porch to the sidewalk. We walked east along Crozat to the corner of Basin.
    Joe chattered as we walked. “I can’t never leave the house no more without a stick. Doc say I’m all-over brittle, like to crack up like a china vase if I was to fall down. He tell me, ‘You got a crick in your git-up now, you surely ain’t ought to be working with horses.’ Say I got to give up on my funerals. Ain’t that the shits?” He raised his big cane up over his head, like an Irish warrior swinging a shillelagh. “This here old thing with the extra rubber band grip, Doc say I got to take it with me when I got to go outside, lean on it like it was my leg. I calls it my dumper.“
    “Where are we going?” I asked.
    “On a sentimental journey.”
    We turned north on Basin, keeping to the cemetery wall. Eventually, Joe Never Smile led me through the sexton’s gate. This was after a twenty-minute stroll that would have taken five were I alone.
    I sneaked a look at my wristwatch. Joe Never Smile apparently had eyes in the back of his head. “This about the last place you got to worry what time it is, son.”
    Joe started off toward some distant spot in the cemetery he knew well enough to ignore most