DAY 13
DOTHAN
The drive is easy. I know that New Orleans is near… my Mecca!
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As I cross Alabama, I think about its exceptionally high prison population. Small road signs send stern messages and set the mood, like this ad in a gas station illustrating a threatening policeman and announcing “the cops are watching you” to discourage malicious activity. Or perhaps these two almost identical cars that are in front of me at a red light… One is brand new and the other all rusty, the game being: “Can you identify a “black person’s” car and a “white person’s’car”?
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Music escapes from cars. It’s hot, the windows, of especially rotten cars, are open. The terms “nigger” and “nigga” repeated to oblivion in hip-hop lyrics suddenly appear under a new light. A kind of pavement thrown in the ambient belief that claims that “it’s all behind us”. But that would be too easy and inaccurate.
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People tell me stories of diplomas that cost $60,000 (in student loans) to end up in under-qualified paying $10 an hour, which is not the floor. To pay the debt off will take 6,000 hours of work, without counting the compounding interest, about 3 and half years of full-time work… before one can begin to eat and be housed properly. I am here to visit a distant cousin of a Houston friend of mine. He lives in the black neighbourhood of Dothan, a small sleepy town, that I imagine boring at first glance.
As for many others in the new world, his journey has been tumultuous: I seem to recall that he says that he was a preacher, then an actor and now municipal gardener.
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I know that he’s doing a favour for my friend by accepting me, this doesn’t really have the feel of a real encounter. His wife is away, she will return as soon as I leave. Perhaps she was trying to avoid me.
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The house is solid and quite bare. They just moved in. They are not from here. They were born in the North, and have just moved here a year ago from Los Angeles where they lived in Compton, a dangerous neighbourhood. He’s happy that his children are here now. It’s the Deep South, yes, with all the connotations, but it’s much less violent here.
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The children are super well-behaved, in the “Southern way”: obedient and cool. The son addresses his father in terms of “Yes, Sir”. The father is warm and friendly.
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I’m back on the road and I have decided to take pictures to serve as notes to remind me of things seen, and sensations experienced. The photos aren’t meant to be exhibited. I also record the music that is the soundtrack of this journey upon which I am now fully embarked.