easy to lose track of yourself. I don’t mean in an existential way, I mean in a way that impinges on other people’s lives.
2
Guineps—those big vines of grapelike fruit whose thick skin you peel back to reveal the delicately flavored plumlike innards. The carnival parade in Crown Heights, the beef patties and the colorful flags of the different islands, the soca music and the reggae. It was these seemingly trivial things we’d made small talk about that now revealed their enormous importance.
The story was “too confusing,” Kendrick had said. When I got back to New Orleans, it occurred to me how susceptible I’d been to that phrase, “too confusing,” how credulous I’d been about his claim that he was innocent. It was one of the reasons I felt trepidation about calling his mother, though I’d told him I’d try to do that. What I mean is that I didn’t know if my credulity was anything more than soft-heartedness. It also made me uncomfortable to discover, after returning from Angola, that in some way I had been perceiving Kendrick’s story as a version of my father’s story. It was something out of a movie—not even a realistic movie, I’d written about the aftermath of my father’s murder. There was the grief over the young man they’d all had a special liking for, and then there was the sense that his death would never seem real, that the sudden violence was so incongruous with his personality that the two could not be held in the mind at the same time. I saw that I could have used some of these same words to describe my impression so far of Kendrick. It was complicated (“too complicated”). The word death, of course, would have to be replaced with incarceration. The connection was the word incongruous, the way that what had happened in both my father’s life and Kendrick’s seemed unrelated to who they seemed to be as people. I tried to explain some of this to Kendrick’s mother, Sonia, when we finally spoke on the phone, but the phone made it hard to discuss anything very seriously, and so we decided to meet in person near where she worked, up the river from New Orleans in Ascension Parish, for her schedule was too busy to meet anywhere else.
I took I-10 toward Baton Rouge, past the airport, the suburbs, the long stretch of Lake Pontchartrain, then the Atchafalaya Swamp with the bony gray trunks of bald cypresses piercing through the bright green tupelos. It was not an unpleasant drive, but it was long enough that Sonia often slept between her shifts at the house of a coworker friend. She was a lab technician for a petrochemical company, working twelve-hour stretches that for four weeks were in the daytime and for the next four weeks in the night. She’d been a bank teller for several years, she’d told me on the phone, but after Katrina that job had disappeared, so now she commuted to this lab almost two hours from home, occasionally supplementing the income she made there by cleaning houses back in New Orleans so she could buy Kendrick clothes and send him money for extra food from the commissary and also so she could afford to visit him. I got off the interstate and the industrial corridor began—fertilizers, reagents, vinyl, polyethylene. I thought of the brief, inadequate note I’d sent to Kendrick a few days before, one of a series of thank-you cards I’d written to the people I’d interviewed, placing them in little envelopes that I left unsealed so they could be screened by the prison administrators. Having stuffed these cards into a manila envelope, I sent them to the assistant warden, Cathy, asking her to please distribute them for me. She’d told me the administration wanted to keep “all interaction between [me] and the inmates under its supervision.” If I wanted to go back and do more interviews, then I couldn’t write letters—the administration would not “support pen pal relationships.”
Dear Kendrick,
Thank you for talking to me the other week. I hope we can follow up more sometime soon. You were one of the first people to give me his story and I will always be grateful for what you told me. In the meantime, I still like conch, even if you St. Lucians prefer to call it lambi.
About two miles down Ashland Road, I came upon the main Shell plant, acres of depopulated furnaces, storage tanks, metal tubes, scaffolding, pipes—the illegible machinery of ethylene manufacturing—the vast sprawl of it reminiscent of Angola. (I learned later that like Angola it had been built on a former slave plantation.) I got lost somewhere on the river levee and had to check the map on my phone, then called Sonia for directions. There were a few cattle in the fields, most of the houses in ruins, the rest an agglomeration of trailers or plain wooden shacks. There was a church with three crosses in front made of rusted sheet metal attached to iron scaffolding, the sheet metal torn away in shreds. I eventually found Sonia’s friend’s house down another road, beyond a gas station and store, the Yousef Quick Stop. When she opened the door, she was dressed in a pale blue lab coat, and she kept talking with someone on her cell phone as she showed me in. The house had a purplish gray sectional sofa and a flat-screen TV that was turned up so loud I didn’t know how she could have been having a phone conversation over it. It gradually occurred to me that she was so accustomed to having the TV on that it didn’t register to her that it was actually on.
“I told you Girl Ville, Girl Ville,” she said after she hung up.
“You’re right, I know,” I said. “I didn’t understand.”
She was saying “Carville,” not “Girl Ville”—Carville was the town we were in. I hadn’t been able to make out this simple statement over the phone because of her Saint Lucian accent. I looked at the living room, which had the sterility of a model home, or perhaps more aptly of some of the guest facilities I’d seen at Angola. Sonia had been washing some spare lab coats in the laundry off the kitchen and now, as she went to put them in the dryer, she asked if I wanted anything to drink but I told her no, I’d brought some mineral waters for us—they were in my bag, along with my notebook and pen and a copy of the book I was planning to give her, my book about my father. It was, of course, what had led me here, as I’d explained when we first talked on the phone, telling her the story of my connection to Deborah and how it had brought us together to the passion play at Angola. Sonia had remarked on the element of fate in all this, though I was still reluctant to look at it that way, to feel grandiose in that way. Like many people, she didn’t know what to say about my book when I presented it to her. We were back in the living room, sitting on the sofa, the mineral waters on the coffee table before us, and she held the book in her hands like a family album, as if trying to take in what it must mean to me. To suggest we might have something in common because of my father’s death felt slightly wrong to me, but I also felt I had to explain again why I was there. Tears had started to well at the edges of her eyes when I mentioned Kendrick, the tears distorted and accentuated by the fact that she was dressed for work in her boxy coat. I thought of her son, his “Weimaraner eyes,” as Deborah had called them, and I remembered something I’d written in the book Sonia was now holding: My father could be quiet. There was something he held in reserve, a mystery about him, even a romance, but there wasn’t crookedness, there wasn’t criminality. The connection I kept seeing between Kendrick and my father gave me an uncomfortable sense of distance from the moment I was in now, as if I were watching Sonia and myself on a screen, insufficiently attentive to the fact that in her mind her son was the victim of the most horrible injustice. She placed the book on the sofa beside her, then reached for a tissue from the box on the coffee table. I told her we didn’t have to do this if she didn’t want to, but she said no, she wanted to, and when I asked if she was sure, she recoiled slightly, as if a little indignant that I didn’t understand.
“I invited you here,” she said. “Not many people ever asked me about this. I invited you because it’s good to talk.”
She showed me a Polaroid of her and Kendrick taken at the prison on his last birthday, standing with their arms around each other before a painted backdrop of a waterfall surrounded by steep mountains with rounded crests like those in China. She looked completely different in the picture, dressed in a neat beige suit with pearl earrings, rings on her fingers, her hair and makeup freshly done. Kendrick, in a white T-shirt and jeans, peered into the camera with the solemn pride of a figure in a nineteenth-century daguerreotype. She told me a little about what their visits
