Dry Bones

I saw an angel yesterday.

It was the weekend before Mardi Gras and he was masking as the prophet Ezekiel. He was shaking a tambourine over Lafon Street.

The angel was the very image of my grandfather: an old papershell-pecan colored man dancing in pin stripes. One foot glided over shards of glass, and one hand gripped a circlet of stretched goatskin. He brushed those tin rattles against his thigh and raised the ancient noisemaker to the skies. Standing on my cousin's doorstep, he banged and shouted: "Can these bones live?"

And right away, I knew that he meant New Orleans. And instantly, I knew that it wasn't Ezekiel. Not my grandfather, and not the priest who saw the chariot; not the Jewish prophet and not the Louisiana sharecropper that I never knew. Can these bones live? No, those are God's lines, not Ezekiel's. It was God who cried out "Dare me, will you? Dare me to resurrect these bones!"

"Hineni Angel," I called, "Here I am and all. But is this the best that you can do? The East needs more than a song and dance man; the Lower Nine earned more than a tambourine. And where are you going to get second-liners in this wilderness? The bones, they sent to St. Gabriel. The live ones, they packed off to Houston."

But angels? They are single-minded. That woman-drum, he gave to me and he went stepping on. Now what am I supposed to do with it, tell me? And who is there to hear me play?