Down on the Batture

Joe Louis

- 87 Joe Louis Joe Louis is telling me about the slate fights. “Wind blew them off the roof,” he says.“We’d get a bunch and stand at the end of the street yelling to the kids on the next block.” Then the missiles started to fly. “You could curve them, you know,” he demonstrates, his wrinkled hands twisting in the air,“make’em go left and right, sneak up on you sideways.” He got hit in the eye once and shows me his scar, a small ridge of white against black skin. I show him my scar, cut right through my eyebrow. Throwing dirt bombs, I tell him. Joe Louis grew up by the levee on General Ogden at the parish line, a street so derelict one end has no pavement still, and the houses look like river shanties moved inland a block and left askew. “It’s a bad place, man,” he says, shaking his head,“but we had some times.” He starts telling me about making popguns from the chinaberry trees, and I find myself torn between two worlds, the familiar adventure of our childhoods and the fact that he is black and didn’t grow up like me in northern New Jersey but along the Mississippi River before the days of integration and not long after the time you could find the dead bodies of black Americans swinging from the batture trees. “You got to find yourself a piece of cane,” he is telling me,“because they are hollow and just the chinaberry size.” But I am still in no-man’s-land here, stuck on the fact that he is telling me my own story, only we used tubes from vacuum cleaners and shot out soda cartridges we took from the trash bin behind Pride’s Drug and - 88 Joe Louis Fountain, he growing up black on the batture of New Orleans, the horror show of the American South. I don’t know what I expected ; I saw kids playing all over Korea at the end of the war there, carefree games in shot-up towns and fields still occupied by rusting military vehicles, but slavery down here was different. For one thing, it went on for 250 years. I am listening to Joe Louis explain his trigger mechanism, which was quite ingenious. It popped a load of chinaberries from where we are sitting to, he searches for a marker, that drum out there, pointing to a floater which has come down river and swept into the eddy, revolving around and around as if having its own discussion about whether to come ashore or ride on towards the Gulf. But my mind is on the slave auctions, which migrated en masse to New Orleans after Congress finally shut down the import business in the early 1800s. The traffic continued, of course, on ships carrying contraband from the Caribbean—slaves were Jean Lafitte’s stockin -trade—and on wagons and barges from the north, slaves and the children of slaves brought in for lawful sale in the lobby of the St. Charles Hotel and on the scaffolds of a dozen open markets in town. They were also available, like prostitutes or a good horse, from every bartender and hotel concierge. The lion’s share of the nation’s slave trade, just the recorded trade, was transacted on the streets, squares, and back alleys of New Orleans. The risks were obvious. The South’s ultimate nightmare erupted just north of here, along the Mississippi, in 1811. The signals had been coming in for several years. In October 1804 Governor Claiborne received word of an “insurrection conspiracy” in Natchitoches, implicating thirty slaves and alleged Spanish and Indian instigators, which served to explain the phenomenon.To right-thinking people of the day, it would not occur to slaves to rebel on their own; theirs was a peaceable kingdom .Two months later the governor sent troops to quell“a spirit of insurrection” in Pointe Coupee Parish, uneasily closer to New Orleans . Twenty-three blacks involved were put onto a flatboat that floated south, stopping at each riverside town to hang one from a - 89 Joe Louis tree. The following year a slave plot was discovered in New Orleans itself, reportedly aimed at killing all local officials and declaring home rule.Toussaint L’Ouverture and the revolution in Haiti hung over the region like a pall. Then, in January...