Where I Was “Miss April”

I like to think of New Orleans as the intersection of South Broad Avenue and Toledano Street at 10 a.m., me in my car with the sunroof rolled back and all the windows wide open to let in the dust and the honking and the rumble of men and women on their way to work or nowhere at all. To my right, a SPUR gas station sold a gallon for $2.45; to my left, people waited for cheap bus rides in the relentless sun, and a seafood shop sold steamed crabs, juicy and tasting of the sweetest saltwater.

The rays beat down through the sunroof, baking the black, fake leather car seats. I wrapped the heavy humidity around me, the steam that fogged sunglasses and suffocated tourists and made night feel like day, the heat that stewed up corruption and poverty and gunshots and death, murders tallied day by day.

It was all the bad stuff, I wrote home to a friend in sterile Cincinnati, that made the city so good.

Between that blessed morning minute at Broad and Toledano and the smooth, cool moment when I passed the corner again from the opposite side, I played the intern at The Times-Picayune.

Hemingway and O. Henry used to pick at the paper’s typewriters, and once upon a time, reporters would slide into the darkroom to sip a little bourbon. Or so one reporter told me. The aging newsroom displayed its two Pulitzers between the escalators, right where you couldn’t miss them. In the cafeteria, I ate the sweet butter biscuits that ladies pushed to me, saying, “Sugar” or “Miss April,” small names dropped into my hand with my pennies and dimes.

Sometimes my task was to seek the families of murdered men, a wrinkled police brief and a taped-over map to guide me. On one of my better days I found the dead man’s girlfriend standing at the site of the night’s fatal gunshots, her hands on her hips, scrutinizing the spot where the body had been found, half on sidewalk, half on grass. The scene had been swept clean of everything except an empty bag of Fritos.

Beyond the sidewalk, the mother sat inside her home, the lights off and the windows shaded, surrounded by sisters and aunties and photos. She had little cash and many duties; she made plans to take in the babies her boy had sired and the girlfriend he had left behind. I fell in love with women like her, women with solid waists and turbaned heads, hands you could hold onto.

This is what she did not say: that perhaps her boy had holstered a gun, tried to rob a man or two. It was on the books. But none of that mattered, not in New Orleans.

Back in my car, I picked up a peach from the driver’s seat and hit the gas on a story 10 minutes down the highway, letting the wind blow everything else all away.

One Saturday in August, I was going to show two friends from Kansas City everything in New Orleans, everything, I threatened. We pulled on floaty skirts and parked my little car just off Julia Street in a part of the city where art galleries had just begun to take over panhandler territory. The street was closed and the galleries were open ’til past nightfall. We walked through shining white halls and laughed at serious paintings, batting the air with cheap church fans.

Then we came to Camp Street. Around the corner from the intellectual chatter, there was a place where I had reported, a homeless shelter.

“No,” my friend said. “I want happy things.”

We walked on to buy dinner on the street, eating free madeleines passed down the long line.

All the maps of the city were skewed so drivers could make sense of the streets, which did not run east-west or north-south but toward or away from the Mississippi River, which wrapped around the southeast corner of the city.

By Aug. 20, I had memorized the maps. Early that afternoon, I began to leave. I turned the radio off, fearing that I might drown out the beautiful street noise, the rumble of old tires bumping over potholes.

I did not pass my 10 a.m. intersection, that corner where the smell of steamed crabs and the silence of bus-waiting workers collided. Instead I drove past my neighborhood’s bright blue archway—Fountainebleau Drive, it says—which, last I heard, was still standing. Fearing that if I stopped, I would stop and stay forever, I sped onto I-10, past the office highrises and across the water and finally into Mississippi.

Gulfport, Biloxi, Orange Beach: these Southern towns were all the same. A day later I sped through Alabama, farther north, farther from the place I had come to call home.

All summer I had cut and taped my stories to white sheets, preserving them so that I could mail them to other newspapers on other coasts. I kept them in a discarded purple plastic bag. Last night I dared to open it, leaf through the careful sheets, each dated and paginated. My thumbprints were engraved in the tiny pieces of tape I had used to fasten the flimsy paper.

I found the story from that hot-sun day when I spoke with that mother on the doorstep of her cool, dark home. Her name was Shirley Seecharran. She was 41. She said this: “I’m just going to bury him. There’s nothing else I can do.”

I put the pages back, carefully, and hid the bag on my bookshelf.

April H. N. Yee ’08 is a History and Literature concentrator in Lowell House.