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 citys 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. Its taken a decade to begin to
understand Atlantas curse and why her lips are pursed, along Memorial Drive.