Sonny's Corner - Floods and all that

"Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in the autumn of 2006. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.

Two Nebraskans recently returned from the Bayou Country. Their reflections are being presented in "Sonny's Corner," our monthly series on civil rights and justice issues, because Prairie Fire takes the position that Katrina is overwhelmingly a story that falls into that category. We believe that to call Katrina primarily a public works story is fundamentally flawed thinking. Thousands of Katrina victims were living on the edge of a survival economy. They were supported by a complex web of neighborhoods relying on a unique gumbo of family, church, climate and geography. They were invisible to all but themselves. Katrina tore that asunder. The roles that brick and mortar and the US Army Corps of Engineers are playing are only a tiny slice of the solutions needed to resolve the hurricane's survivors' unimaginable and horrific plight. Read on and care. Resolve to do something. -Publisher

By Sally Herrin

You can’t imagine the happiness it is to me to be accosted by a Gentleman of Color of the old school, apparently insane in the nicest possible way and spilling over on a Sunday morning with the Spirit of the Lord and the love of all Creation, including the Brothers and the Sisters, including even me.

This never happens in Nebraska. It is a sign I have come home again to the South, a place I love and lived in a long time, and never fail to appreciate, and still fail to understand.

I take him for a person displaced by the floods following Hurricane Katrina, and I am right for once. He is wearing a new black Continental Airways T-shirt. At 5:45 a.m., the weird light of the hotel corridor expresses what I believe I know about chaos theory.

I am waiting for the restaurant to open, to spend my Northwest Airlines voucher on eggs and juice and toast.

“Isn’t it a beautiful world?” he begins.

“It sure is,” I say and look up from my book.

“ISN’T It a great God we love?” he insists.

“It surely is,” I say, and I close my book. Bring it on, I think happily. Thank you, Jesus.

“And didn’t the God of Love send us here just to care for one another?”

“Yes, for a fact.”

“Then why, oh why,” he begs, rolling his eyes—I cannot help but notice—in different directions at different speeds, “Why, oh why doesn’t the President do Something for the Poor?”

I shake my head in sorrow and disbelief.

He looks up and down the empty corridor. Its walls are waxing and waning almost imperceptibly in the artificial light.

“Bad times, oh, terrible times are coming upon us,” he says, confidingly. “The waters and the lands of the Earth are rolling in their beds. It has to be. It has GOT to be because it’s written down in the Book of the Lord.”

“Global warming,” I agree.

“Earthquakes. Floods and all that mess.”

He sizes me up with his good eye. “Jesus is not a Man who is Coming Back,” he says provocatively.

“No?”

“That’s OUR job. That’s who we are supposed to become. Jesus has to Come Back in our hearts. We have to do like He did.”

“That’s how we build the Kingdom of Heaven right here on earth,” I offer.

“Do you know who Phillis Wheatley was?” he asks, abruptly.

I do know who Phillis Wheatley was. I am an English teacher at a community college. Phillis Wheatley was an African slave whose Colonial mistress taught her to speak, read and write English. Wheatley mastered the language and then some. Phillis Wheatley became a poet, and she published the first book by an African in the New World and the first book by a woman anywhere bankrolled by a group of women.

“I am her great-great-great grandson,” he says, fumbling with his good hand for his boarding pass. He thrusts it at me, and I read “WHEATLEY” hand-printed in red Sharpie.

He has had a stroke, and about a year out he is walking with a hitch and a halt, but his laugh is right and his speech is colloquial. Too many nights leaning on the speakers in a blues bar in my younger days leave me deafening in my 50s, and over breakfast I can’t quite catch what he says, maybe twice. He changes the subject each time, annoyance plain in his face. He is obviously by nature a fluent man, used to being understood.

He is a reading teacher. He was inspired to go into teaching by his junior high school teacher. He recites a poem this teacher wrote 40 years ago for his class when they graduated. The poem is sententious and has a flavor of Kipling.

When he sees my Northwestern voucher, his opinion of me and my advantages cools quickly. “You KNOW why you missed your connection?”

I am embarrassed. “It was a mechanical problem.”

“It was a scab problem. Northwest mechanics out on strike.”

“What was I thinking?”

He snorts delicately. “How’s your food?”

It is a gracious gesture. I am allowed to redeem myself, a bit. Food is not a light topic among Southern folks, peckerwoods like the Herrins of Pulaski County, Kentucky, and Creoles of the first water like the Louisiana Wheatleys.

Soon we are talking about our best recipes. We do not talk about our mamas—we are not drinking together, or flirting anymore, we are just having breakfast—but we talk about our mamas’ recipes and how they made coffee and cornbread.

He travels, a lot. He has grown children and nieces and nephews in several towns around the South—Atlanta, Houston and Alexandria, where he has bought himself a small house. Flights are often overbooked, and he is first to volunteer to get bumped for later flights, in return for open tickets to destinations of his choice. “I get around,” he admits.

He has already had offers for his land in the Ninth Ward. His house is gone, bulldozed with several other blocks. “I’ll never go back,” he says. “Not to live. What is there to go back to?”

Related: Sonny's Corner - New Orleans

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