Sheryl St. Germain

Essays

Allemande

     New Orleans was built about three hundred years ago on an island of cypress swamp teeming with snakes and alligators at the spot where the Mississippi River comes closest to Lake Pontchartrain. By the early 18th century, when the first of the French and German immigrants who would start our family in the New World made their homes here, New Orleans, drained, was a city bounded on three sides by swamps, and the fourth by a river. At high tide the river would flow through the streets as naturally as blood does through veins.

     As a result of the swampy soil, all houses to this day must have pilings driven seventy feet to reach bedrock before construction can begin. Our cemeteries are above ground, since we learned early on that floods would simply cause coffins to rise and drift away like some macabre flotilla. Not all the rural areas surrounding New Orleans can afford to bury their dead above ground, though, and just a few years ago I saw footage on the local news of coffins from a cemetery near Sunset, Louisiana floating down flooded streets. One of the coffins housed my friend's Uncle Louis, a jovial, hard-drinking man who had died of cirrhosis. My friend remarked, after watching his uncle's coffin bob across his television screen amidst a backdrop of half flooded homes and trees, that he was sure Uncle Louis would've liked the ride.

     The soggy ground was called "flottant" or "floating land" by the settlers, whose shovels struck water at eighteen inches depth. Because of the waterlogged land, it is extremely rare to find any cellars below ground in New Orleans. Perhaps because we've learned you can't hide or store anything in the ground, not our vegetables or even our dead because the water will bring them up again, we've also learned to put everything on the table. We're not like Westerners, laconic, reticent, never speaking of how we feel. We say everything. We tell everything. Within five minutes of meeting people from here you may know more than you ever wanted to know about their personal lives, details about divorces, sexual intrigue, abortions, deaths, just tossed off like they're talking about the weather. I've sometimes embarrassed myself in a conversation with a non-Southerner by getting excited about something and revealing too much about myself. You can tell by the subtle movement in a person's eyes that you've gone too far, and there's no way for you to retreat and unsay what you've said. This is a quality of openness-of flooding, if you will-I find impossible to change in myself, and I've come to understand this nakedness as a mask of a sort, nakedness a shield for nakedness. After all, if it appears you have revealed all, no one will be curious about what you have not revealed. This condition-I'm not sure I'd want to call it a quality-of openness also leads to a love of that condition in others, and I've found myself drawn to those who can respond to that openness with openness. Another way of saying this would be to say I value the condition of intimacy, and in that I am not unlike many other Southerners.

     I'm also drawn to art and writing that cultivates a sense of deep intimacy. In writing this kind of intimacy can be seen most clearly in memoir, where, if the reader doesn't feel something akin to intimacy with the narrator, the work fails to move. In art, the luminous self-portraits of Frieda Kahlo are beautiful examples of the excruciating power of intimacy. In music, Bach's Suites for Solo Cello. One cannot listen to Bach's Suites without the feeling that the cello is singing to you alone, the single, richly varied cello a whisper, the confidential song of a dark angel. The stylized dances that make up the movements of the Suites offer a stout form within which that sometimes terrifying, sometimes joyous intimacy might be contained.