Amnesia and Excess
It’s the end of February in New Orleans, and the magnolia trees are blooming. As I bike along the city’s potholed streets, the purple flowers are my unlikely guarantors that the wet chill of New Orleans winter is finally over.
"Minutes after the last float rumbles by, a line of men in orange sweatshirts or fluorescent yellow vests advances, armed with shovels and heavy-duty bags."
Turning onto St. Charles Avenue, a different bloom catches my eye; vibrant multicolored beads droop from the branches of the boulevard’s live oaks. One week after Mardi Gras, this alien bloom is all that remains of the city-wide celebration and round-the-clock revelry.
During the two weeks of parades that lead up to Mardi Gras, an estimated $1 million worth of beads are bought and thrown. New Orleans natives will tell you that it’s bad luck to pick up beads that land on the ground. In the wake of each parade, then, as the crowds drift away with their booty around their necks, the streets are piled high with discarded beads and beer cans. This is what remains of the “greatest free party on earth”, in the words of Sgt. Lesley Hill-Peters.[1]
Hill-Peters is spokesperson for the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office. According to her, “someone picking up after you” is all part of the fun; revelers are required to do nothing but have a good time. So who cleans up the city’s messes? Local prisoners, released into the sunshine for a few hours to make thousands of pounds of garbage disappear. Minutes after the last float rumbles by, a line of men in orange sweatshirts or fluorescent yellow vests advances, armed with shovels and heavy-duty bags.
The inmates who clean up the city’s excesses consider it a fair trade. Many, like Steve Angelle, an inmate of Terrebone parish since September 2009, welcome the opportunity to work outside in the sunshine. On Ash Wednesday, Angelle woke at 3 am to eat breakfast, then began an eight-hour shift of shoveling with 44 other inmates. He considers himself fortunate, an opinion echoed by Sgt. Rodney Martin of the local Sheriff’s Office. Martin noted that some inmates “get lucky and find a dollar bill or larger on the ground”. Says Angelle: “It’s a privilege being out here instead of locked up between four walls.”
Mardi Gras parades offer some insight into the appetites and accountability of the City That Care Forgot. Here we determine if something is trash or treasure based on whether it lands in our hands or at our feet. We step on and over whatever we deem worthless. And we’re invited to leave our messes for someone else to take care of.
In my work with Resurrection After Exoneration, I deal with discards: men, not beads. I work with men who were kidnapped from their homes, interrogated by the police, and detained in jail or on bond until trial, when they were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison or death. I deal with innocent men who spent decades dreaming of how they would live life if they were ever freed. I deal with these men once they’re released into free-fall; exonerees, by virtue of their finally-proven innocence, are ineligible for the paltry reentry services covering the 15,000 Louisiana citizens released yearly from state and local prisons.
Exonerees are our justice system’s most obvious failures; their existence reminds us both of human fallibility and human frailty. We are made uncomfortable by exonerees because they are the detritus of our social systems. No one reaches out to catch them when they’re released. They drop to the ground unnoticed. And we sweep them out of sight, embarrassed, and expect that despite their deeply seared traumas, exonerees should be able to become ‘normal’ again.
I work with one exoneree – an innocent man who spent nine years on death row – whose first instinct, whenever he goes out into the public sphere, is to take his young daughters with him. He does this because he believes that one day he’ll be arrested again for another crime he didn’t commit. And when that time comes, he wants his daughters there as alibis. How can we expect normalcy from someone who’s been so personally and so profoundly damaged?
These words I’ve just written – they’re a lesson I’ve learned and taught to others over the past 18 months. And yet sometimes I forget. I want exonerees to be normal, to take responsibility for their actions and make thoughtful, practical life decisions. I want them to take full advantage of their unlikely freedom, and not be hampered by memories of rape, and grief, and watching their friends walk to their deaths. I want to blame their failures on a state that treats some of its citizens like garbage; and yet sometimes, in my frustration, I simply blame these discarded men.
Hubert H. Humphrey said in 1947 that “The moral test of government is how it treats those…who are in the shadows of life”. Whether the purpose of incarceration is rehabilitation, segregation, or punishment, it casts a shadow that remains long after a prisoner’s release. At Mardi Gras, we let some of these shadowed beings like Angelle out to clean up after us; we expose them to the sunlight for a few hours. They are the custodians of our amnesia and our excess. And the garbage, as always, gets swept away.
[1] All direct quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from Matthew Pleasant’s February 18, 2010 article in the Houma Today, entitled “Local inmates clean up Mardi Gras aftermath”.
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Tina said:
Amazing piece! Your writing is so beautiful and poignant and really gets the point across. I like the quote, \exonerees are our justice system’s most obvious failures\- one, because they are not always treated as such and are blamed for their own misfortunes, and two, because clearly our justice system fails other people too. It fails kids by putting them into jail with adults, it fails convicts by dooming them to lives of unemployment even after they have done their time, it fails the poor and the minorities by imprisoning a disparaging percentage of them for crimes that all people commit. It fails people for not giving them justice or for \correcting\ them at all, rather throwing them on the ground and sweeping them away.
Do Lee said:
Very well done, Ora. I hope you will try to have this fine essay published where more people will read it. May I suggest that you submit it to university law school publications for a start (ex: the Stanford Law and Policy Review) or to the ACLU, or to your local Center for Peace and Justice; you will be doing a service. Warm regards, from Rachel Lee’s aunt, Do (Athens, Greece)
Naomi Kaufman said:
Wonderful essay. Thank you for reminding us of the huge injustices that have not been worked out in the jail system. Poignant and generally sad. Thank you for the work that you do. Would that we all took into account other people’s histories and perspectives before judging them.