© 2015 Michael Otieno Molina

From New Orleans to Atlanta

Excerpt from the prose-poetic novel, Mass Transit Muse

By Michael Otieno Molina

When we arrived, what had been Elysian Fields, New Orleans became Memorial

Drive, Atlanta.

Memorial Drive -- haunted by memorialized confederates, ghost soldiers on the

trails of slaves railing against their captive plight into night. Memorial Drive: a dividing

line in the “city too busy to hate,” a city that separates at fault lines that trace to quakes like

the 1906 riot of race when Atlanta reverberated with postbellum rage and chose the birth

of a nation in its postpartum fate. In the quiet since, a cold war is contained, insulated by

economics. Discrete deals between the city’s grey elite in backrooms where they trade

neighborhoods for a tenth of influence, public schools for public faces in places of power,

a black bourgeoisie bold between columns of white power structure… a privileged

minority of the black majority precisely placed to placate the masses, to avoid another

rupture.

It is the south, gorgeous Atlanta, where a universe of trees burst with hidden streams

that soothe heat like phoenix tears resurgent in the gleam of glass towers, magnificent as

antlers on a buck, where hilly, radiant seasons bloom as flowers, and offer a rhythm that

frees one from feeling stuck, that breeds in one a sense luck, where change is always around

a bend in time, where struggle can turn to hustle and be the breath of a success that ends in

rhyme.

We were welcomed to Atlanta, the Elysian fields of the South, an ornate gothic

steeple teetering atop the Southern Dream. Along Memorial Drive, on one side you can

see a tide of wealth rise through the hip of Cabbagetown, up the funk of Little 5 to crest in

the mansions of Inman Park and up, up into the mirrored glitter of Midtown skies. Along

Memorial Drive, on the other side, it looks like Katrina hit Normandy, a barren beachhead

littered like a little Vietnam with hollowed out, broken brick ranches, graffiti castles, and

a haunted high rise that litters the sky.

When we New Orleans gypsy cousins flooded Atlanta in caravans, she extended a

hand of Christian charity, and then clutched her purse. It’s taken a decade to begin to

understand Atlanta’s curse and why her lips are pursed, along Memorial Drive.