The
man was sitting on the hotel bench, staring straight ahead.
We
were in the small town of Kinder, Louisiana, several days into the
Katrina evacuation; to see someone sitting on a bench outside the
hotel, or on a couch inside the hotel, and staring straight ahead
was not unusual. But this man had struck me from the first meeting
as being a little odd, and it wasn't because he was, as he had told
me, an Elvis Impersonator, thank
you very much. Still, not wanting to be rude, I told him hello
as I passed, only to hear him answer, through his fog, "He fell."
I
stopped, and that was all the encouragement Elvis needed to continue.
"The man in the wheelchair fell," he said. "The Man-with-No-Legs
fell."
He
didn't have to add that last detail; at that moment, there was only
one man at that Best Western who was wheelchair-bound. Actually, the
wheelchair was a scooter, like the kind you see advertised over and
over on television, promising freedom and mobility to senior citizens,
and a better life in general for many others. He was not all that
old, but he was without legs and, as I watched him effortlessly maneuvering
through the breakfast buffet every morning in the hotel lobby, it
was easy to believe in that better life. As he pointed to this hot
item and that, steam rising from the metal containers, his wife would
pile the plate high with biscuits and sausage, and then follow him
back to a table where he glided to a stop.
"I
picked him up," Elvis continued, and this seemed to be what shocked
him the most. It wasn't so much that the man in the scooter had been
rolling along, his mind perhaps in the same place all our minds were
- home - when he suddenly
fell that bothered him. What was disturbing to Elvis was that he had
had to lift the double amputee, and with the help of another man at
that.
This
was no simple let-me-help-you-sir; the scooter had wiped out, and
the man had fallen suddenly and loudly. The lobbyfolk
had panicked, then watched as the two able-bodied ones locked their arms
around the amputee's sizeable trunk. The stumps flailed crazily. And
as Elvis and the other man tried to ignore this humiliation, they
sheepishly maneuvered to support the man from underneath his struggling
body.
"Ya
done good," I said, and walked on to
my car. I did not want to encourage conversation; I wanted to leave.
I wanted to go to the library, to sign up for my 30-minute allotment
of Internet time with all the other Katrina evacuees who were staying
in that small town. I didn't want to talk to Elvis or anyone else
at the moment. Life was coming at me in overpowering waves, and my
toehold on sanity was tenuous. At one moment it was the first week
of the fall semester, and I was greeting a class of new faces, ever
so ready to lead them though freshman comp; the next moment I found
myself in a circus bustling with an assorted cast of refugees that
featured Elvis as head clown and a man darting about in an Amigo as
the star attraction. I am not supposed to be here, I kept telling
myself, time and time again. This
isn't happening.
But
it was.
***
I
had decided to base that composition-and-rhetoric course around the
theme of Freakery, an off-center topic sure
to keep students awake in class, and perhaps the occasional night.
"Step
right up!" I had barked at them - freshmen all and science majors,
many. "For the next fifteen weeks we will be reading about the
strange and the unsettling! The bizarre and the heartbreaking! We
will be seeing films about people who have to be seen to be believed,
living lives most of us cannot imagine...and will be writing about."
Learning
sideshow lingo and reading chapters from a book on how "human
oddities" once displayed themselves (or were displayed by others)
in order to make a living wouldn't teach them how to write, but it
would give them something to write about.
Viewing a documentary and a movie would not clue them into the mystery
that surrounds comma usage, but I could work on their transitions
and organization skills as those essays were written.
One
of the main attractions would be Tod Browning's Freaks, a movie that bombed at the box
office and horrified many. While
Depression Era audiences surely watched it for its shock value, later
viewers would come to appreciate it as a documentary of sorts of sideshow
acts. The freaks perform their "bits" - rolling cigarettes
with lips, eating dinner with their feet, all while slogging through
choppy dialogue. The film also offered a slice of sideshow
life. Yes, this vision had been sanitized and glamorized, but at the
film's heart the lifestyle is preserved: the new-to-town otherness,
the cramped reality of trailers, the fellowship found in a circumstantial
community, the townies who stared and crossed
themselves.
Teaching
this course at a Historically Black University, I had a majority of
African American students. I certainly did not have to explain marginalization
to them; as a white woman born and bred in Suburbamerica, I knew this was one area
of
their lives that I could only imagine, as sympathetic as I might be.
In this case, though, they were clearly members of the physically
privileged and mentally blessed majority. Yes, the majority, not the
"normal." I
wanted them to eschew that word when considering the stories of the
malformed, limbless, and conjoined. I wanted them, when researching
the lives of sideshow performers, to see past the caprice of nature
and (at that moment in medical time) the inability of man, to the
real people. To help them
in this matter, I assigned other issues to consider.
ESSAY
OPTION 1
Throughout
the film, Freaks,
are countless references to manhood in the story between the love
triangle of midget Hans, circus strongman Hercules, and Big Top beauty
Cleopatra. Using details from the movie, write an essay about what
the film seems to be saying overall about what it is to be "a
man." Remember, the details you note should support your thesis
statement.
The
texts were in the bookstore; the film was ready to roll. Life, for
the next fifteen weeks was all set. And,
on the hot afternoon of August 26, 2005, I
announced the first reading assignment to a group of
people I would never see again.
*
At
that Best Western, two hours and one tragedy away from the flooded
university, there was confusion, tears, and questions. I
had evacuated with my parents, and at that moment my own children
were with their father. How to handle joint custody during a diaspora
was not something covered in Divorce 101. Hurricane 100 had taught
about booking a hotel room for longer than a few days in the case
of longterm evacuation, but we evidently had been absent that
afternoon; the Best Western was our second "home" only a
few days into the disaster. It
was a good fit, that place: it was only about an hour from where my children
were staying, and my parents could find amusement at the nearby casino.
As for me, when I wasn't at the library I would find myself floating
around the downstairs lobby. There, evacuees ate chips and candy,
desperately tried to call others (the calls to the 504 area code were
not going through on a regular basis), and passed along insider information
when word of any sort came through. We were all desperate for news.
CNN blared images of the Interstate and the Superdome, but none of
that helped us. None of us lived there. We lived in houses as ordinary
as our lives had been up to that moment.
There
were people from all over the Metropolitan New Orleans area in that
lobby - people from Orleans Parish itself but also people from Jefferson,
St. Bernard, and St. Tammany parishes. Before August 29, 2005, we
would have claimed these differences, but at that moment, as we watched
reporters squint into the camera and declare the city we loved was
dead, we were all New Orleanians. We were
blessed by the ritual that is Mardi Gras
each winter. Our collective joy hung on the score of a Saints game
each fall, and roux coursed through our veins year round. But
among our particular gathering of evacuees, a people distinguished
by creased trousers, wrinkled t-shirts, lined brows, and red-rimmed
eyes, one man stood out. And that was the Amigo Man.
The
Amigo Man had two grown sons, who were also part of our evacuee village.
Bobby was a trucker. If camouflage doesn't lie, then Jim was a hunter
of sorts; if nothing else, he was one schooled in self-reliance.
He had cooked a Crockpot of roast beef in his hotel bathroom
and brought it down to the lobby to share.
"You
sure you don't want a sandwich?" Jim asked a woman who shook
her head no as she sprinted toward the elevator. She was the Funyun
Woman, the one always chomping on a bag of the crispy rings while
talking about her son, the architect, and his young family. They had
evacuated to Texas and she was thinking about joining them, maybe.
She talked a lot to the Rubber Thong Sandal People, a married
couple who liked to compare Katrina's path to that of 1965's Hurricane
Betsy.
When
Jim asked me if I wanted a sandwich, I, too, declined the offer. His
brother laughed and said, "Nobody wants yer
damn roastbeef, brah!"
"I've
already had lunch," I explained. I wasn't too sure that I would
have called it lunch. Time had no meaning and meals were timeless
at that point. I looked at the clock on the wall: 1:15. Tuesday.
I should have been in my office at that moment, eating plain tuna
from a packet with flatbread crackers from the nearby healthfood
store. The store had only been open a month or so when the storm hit.
I wondered if that store had been flooded. Or looted.
I
mentioned that I was planning on heading back to Jefferson Parish
later in the week to check on my home; the parish president had said
residents who were in a position to do so could come back briefly
to gather their things and bury spoiling food. Jim told me of their
drive back to the New Orleans area the day before, and his talk was
peppered with rumors of National Guard commandeering vehicles or gas.
"But we didn't have no problems," he said. "Ya
got a gun?"
Bobby
and Jim were large men, manly men, the type that drive big Ford trucks,
go hunting, don't put up with much, and not only had a gun or three
but kept that gun by the bed. They likely learned this from their
father, a man I imagined had lost his legs
in a war, or maybe a factory accident. I could picture him, legless
or not, in the blind with his boys on a cold November morning as mist
rose from the bayou, sipping thick coffee from a thermos, frosting
the air with his breath, wordlessly awaiting the flap of mallard wings.
*
ESSAY
OPTION 2
Throughout
the film, one character who makes perhaps the biggest splash is the
"half-boy" Johnny Eck, who scampers about on gloved hands.
Using details from the film, write an essay about Johnny's role in
Freaks. Does his contribution
to the story go beyond his shocking appearance?
I
had first seen that B movie as a college student. The likes of Diane
Arbus, Joey Ramone, and a multitude of creative others over the past 50-some-odd
years had also seen the movie in their early adult years, and I liked
the idea of showing this oddity to my students in a sort of rite of
passage.
This
sense of cult ritual was lost on them; however, for many it was their
maiden voyage to the world of black-and-white film.
In
the dark, we would have watched the grainy story of Hans, the midget
who is duped by the beautiful, "normal" Cleopatra.
The film hits its climax when Hans, in retaliation for Cleoplatra's
plan to slowly poison him, mars her beauty and castrates her Strongman
lover. He does this, of course, with the help of his sideshow buddies:
the armless, the legless, the Freaks. My
students cheer at this point, and clap loudly when Hans suddenly produces
a gun.
What
is it to be a man....
"What
is it to be a freak?" I always asked as the credits rolled and
the lights popped to life. Physical deformities aside, this always
led to a discussion of what is it to be the outsider, to have permanent
stranger status. The side shows rolled into town, stayed for a while,
then left; it is no accident that travelling performers are called
gypsies. When strangers
arrive, townies gawk. How can they not? Curiosity is always roused
by the new and different, and if there is a bit of the there-but-for-the-grace-of-god
element thrown into the mix, all the better. Who can turn away?
But
instead of asking students to consider one thing or another, I found
myself asking questions of another sort. The calendar had not rolled
along as usual. I did not show the film. Rather, I found myself wandering
around a small town I would likely have never have visited had I not
been seeking refuge. I was part of a community of people who were
not local, had only come for a while (though who knew how long that
while would be), who were looked at and then quite pointedly not looked at everywhere they went.
The
town was throbbing with evacuees, but they were not everywhere. I
recalled a meal I took at a Huddle House. Crying when the pancakes
arrived, I stared at the wall next to me. It was the only place I
could look without meeting the glances, shifting suddenly, of locals:
I was, after all, a Katrina Refugee. It would be another week or so
before I would come to realize, upon seeing a televised fundraiser,
that I was part of a group that the world called Katrina Victims.
At
that moment and in that Huddle House, I was the Crying Woman, and
a far cry from Picasso's Dora Maar. I gobbled
and paid and got the hell out of there.
I headed for the place where furtive glances did not grow into
stares when opportunity allowed. In the Best Western lobby, I was
among my kind.
*
If
it weren't for the fact that I was sleeping on the floor of my parents'
hotel room, and
for the fact that said room was stuffed with bags and belongings,
some set atop an ice chest packed with drinks and meats and a new
bottle of mustard, and some, like the box stuffed with crackers and
granola bars, cookies and bread, resting on the imitation oak desk,
and others, like the slender metal trashcans, overflowing as they
were with the ripped boxes and torn bags of another drive-through
lunch, edging the wall, I could fool myself into thinking I was on
a little vacation.
Forget
the fact that I spent most of my time in the lobby, and the only place
I visited was the library, and that I spent half my time worrying
and the other half crying, I could have convinced myself still, in
that oddest of already perverse moments, that I was on a jolly holiday.
After all, sunlight beamed through clean windows, and outside
those windows a pool beckoned. The pastel and patterned bedspread
had that stiff scratchy feel of hotel comforters; the towels were
replaced daily. And the lobby was usually a-bustle with the comings
and goings of strangers. The latter was particularly true in the morning
when the buffet tables were filled, then emptied.
One
morning, as I was looking for a place to sit and eat my breakfast,
a woman motioned me over. "Looking for a spot? We got one here."
And
at that moment, I met the Amigo Man. He didn't have to tell me his
name as I sat next to him with my grits and white gravy. The name
was right there, on the hand-tooled leather plate fastened to the
front of his scooter.
Hans.
"My
sons got that for me," he said, laughing. "Got
it for me after I got out of the hospital." As I ate,
Hans explained how he had lost his legs to smoking. It had killed
his circulation. He had gone into the hospital for two months to save
his legs, and then spent another two learning to live without them.
Dishes
cleared away, second doses of coffee warming white cups, we chatted.
He and his wife had learned that their Northshore
doublewide had been spared. "My boys checked it out," he
told me. I mentioned having met his sons the day before, and he beamed
as he spoke about them, telling me what a handful they had been when
they were young.
"Oh,
but you kept those two in line," his wife said.
"Yeah,
still do," he said. He slapped the table. "One time, those
two..." he started. It was a story that started with a prank
and was sure to end with "a whippin',"
and Hans, relieved of the burden of an unknown fate, happily leaned
forward and held forth.
Though
I nodded and looked attentive, I felt a daze coming on. The voices
on the television mingled with the story Hans was telling and I could
make head nor tails of either. I was there,
but I was not. I was safe, but I was clearly not OK. What
is it to be a man? I wanted to ask, not him but my class as we
spoke of another Hans, and of another legless man. But here I was,
in a room crowded with the Katrina Refugees, the Katrina Displaced,
the Katrina Victims, a raw and wandering bunch whose fates had been
cruelly determined by the caprice of nature and the inability of man.
I
looked around the room. I did not see any young people about. Where
were my students now? Had they waded through water to safety? Were
they stranded? Were they staying with their parents, or maybe distant
relatives? Had they made their way to other Best Westerns, the comfort
of instant villages and the discomfort of sympathetic eyes?
What
is it to be a freak? I would have asked that question on
a day very like today, but not like today at all.
What
is it to be a freak? I paused to consider how I would have
answered that question myself on August 26, 2005. I do not know. I
do not know what I would have said, but the answer would have been
formed in a vacuum of innocence and tempered by well-intentioned sympathy.
What
is it to be a freak? Innocence is a kind term for inexperience. But sympathy is only that: just sympathy.
My god. I would answer that question so very
differently now.
