Published October 6, 2019

The image above is from “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise,” the sequel to Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” In them, Lee looks at New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then again five years later. I took the photo with my phone’s camera when the scene tickled an old memory. It speaks to a still-untold story.

Those steps, disconnected from the dwelling they once led to, were somewhere in New Orleans, probably in the 9th Ward, and they reminded me of similar remnants in my hometown about 220 miles to the west, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. In both places, homes were often raised off the ground because of low elevation and the likelihood of flooding. (The photo just above at left is from April 2019, taken in front of the home in Lake Charles I grew up in. The home behind the steps at the end of the walkway is still there. The name of the street is Tulane, coincidentally the name of a private university and an avenue in New Orleans.)

The standalone steps in Lake Charles were on one of its major thoroughfares, Enterprise Boulevard, on the cusp of North Lake Charles, by then a predominantly black part of the city. White flight to the south opened up opportunities for some black people to move into newer neighborhoods, and the boulevard where those steps were located was in transition from being a busy artery for commercial and residential traffic toward an uncertain future.

Until being invited to have lunch with a new friend at a popular soul-food restaurant nearby, I’d had few occasions to drive that stretch. I once traveled northbound on it for an assignment for my hometown paper, and on the way I offered to give a ride to a woman who was standing on the corner, appearing distressed and scattered. She directed me to a residence a few blocks away, but not before asking me if I knew what comme ci comme ca meant. I was raised around French-speaking adults, including my parents and other relatives, so I knew the meaning of those words, but I was trying to navigate my way through streets unknown to me, and I wasn’t sure that I’d heard her correctly, so I said no, what does it mean? “It means big dick,” she said. It began to dawn on me why she might have been standing on that corner, and what type of house we might be headed to, and I told her that I had somewhere to be, and when I dropped her off, that I hoped she’d have a safe, good night.

(Now that I think about it, in the same decade in the same city, I gave two other rides to women who asked me for them, including one well after midnight as I was finishing my side gig, a paper route. The house we went to, in South Lake Charles, had a red porch light. The other woman asked if I wanted to come in so she could thank me properly, but there was no red light at this Mid City house, so maybe she had milk and cookies? Anyway, I had forgotten about those women until I started writing this piece. I hope life turned out to be better and safer for them than I imagined at the time.)

My memory is not what it used to be, but I know that for years, I wanted to write a short story or essay about those steps I passed a few dozen times in my decades of living and driving in my hometown. Sometimes old black men were sitting on them, but no one other than passersby was near them for my first and last glimpses of the steps. Time passed, and life happened, and I wrote thousands of stories for a number of newspapers and magazines, but I never wrote about those lonely steps.

To do so would have required a certain creative freedom in a specific part of a brain that was fighting demons and wrestling with identity, and always working on the next story, or the one after that, but with different writing muscles and different thought processes. I’m not sure my reporter’s mind was ready to find the story where those steps led, and it probably isn’t now, either. But when those steps in New Orleans appeared in Spike Lee’s documentary, photographing them was a way for me to bookmark them as a reminder for some later date. I don’t think we’re there yet.

At various times, those steps in my hometown were, in my mind, a place to sit and rest; or to gather and talk about what used to be, or what might have been, with a break here and there; they were a portal to another dimension in a sci-fi story beyond my ability to write; or left there in the impossible hope of once more building around them; or existing only in the mind of a bedeviled writer cursed or blessed with seeing what others could not. In at least one version, they remained because lovers had agreed to reunite there years after a forced parting, and a man returned there every day for the rest of his life, ever hopeful. In another imagined draft, the structure that once belonged to those steps reconstituted itself wherever the lost lover was trapped, haunting her with the close-but-yet-so-far pain that would be her eternal hell. Most of these barely formed stories were sad, and sometimes tragically so.

It’s obvious now why I never wrote any of those versions. Newspaper writing is one thing (and for too much of my career, I didn’t have the kind of editing that would have helped me become a better writer in that world). Creative writing is different. My efforts to enter that world were met with a dismissive reminder that it was not the same as journalism, that it was a world where the students were “trying to create art in the tradition of the masters,” and the implication was clear: that it was beyond my reach. It’s to my regret and shame that I took that rejection to heart and didn’t continue to pursue creative writing. But spending 40-50 hours a week working on stories for the newspaper also didn’t leave me much mental energy for even more hours of putting nouns in front of verbs. I wanted to write lines that soared, and I just didn’t think I had it in me.

(I laugh at myself a lot these days, which I think is healthy, and right now I am doing so as I imagine you thinking, “Carly, did it ever occur to you to just ask around about those steps?” Yes, but only about 10 minutes ago. It was never about doing the work of a journalist and reporting the story. It was always about doing the work of a different kind of writer and creating a story, armed only with the mental image, life experience and my imagination. I have to say, though, I’d love to someday know the stories behind the steps in Lake Charles and the ones in New Orleans!)

For now, there’s no story. Today my writing is still bloated and unfocused, often rambling without direction. A few years ago, I started down the path of doing the work to try to fix that, and it was a disaster. I didn’t take subsequent steps toward cleaner, leaner storytelling, and my mind is no closer to knowing what to say about those steps on Enterprise Boulevard.

Sometimes when I think of them, I imagine forces of nature making the frames they once fronted break off piece by piece and fly away. How to put together words that take flight and let you see it happening is something I hope one day to attempt.

Until then, I will leave you with two videos, both with songs about flying away, both recorded in New Orleans. The first is from “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.”

The other is nine years old but has been making the rounds again on social media.