Southern Legitimacy Statement: Spent my entire life living in a town being constantly expanded upon where I can’t remember ever being a time where a highway wasn’t being constructed over my house or a night sleep without the muffler of an ATV waking me up. But I can remember nights of High School football where after the game a brigade of lifted trucks encircled a cookout, target practice being heard out in the distance, and weekend trips out to the sticks to meet up with family.
A City’s Lagniappe History Of Old And New People
Thick, bright, booming, rays of sunshine had burst through the morning fog, as the sky began to drench itself in the infant hues of pink that now flourish in the graveyard of orange tones from the night which once ruled the sky. Even with the potholes festering within the streets and litter within the gutters, Basin Street while wholly engulfed in the rays of sun, shone a decadent morning beauty. On the corner of such a street was St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. A true landmark of the city, an apple to many’s eye that under its gaze somehow grew soiled, and decayed to an uneasy state of dismay in which its gates that once boasted of excellence in mortality sank within the soft, pulpy mud of the grounds. Shining from these gates is a tailored marmalade-coloured suit wrapped around the body of a man, cajun and tall. He towers over the street’s early morning passerby and the faults in the sidewalk, of which there are many. His stint of mourning has ended, owing to the family matriarch’s passing, who lived in the confines of this great city for 90 years, never leaving whilst her great-grandson has just sold the family home on Frenchmen Street to a real estate firm, as he closes the gates behind him, he has his belongings packed and begins the start of a new life up north. For the first time since nightfall, the man lifts his head up at the sky which now radiates a full rose-colored glow at the dawn of a new day. Rushing towards St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 to not be late for his first shift as a vendor on the street, a new man in a new city whose, short, stout, and brandishes a loose Salmon colored sports coat with khakis; bullies his way down the street. His shoe’s tip grazes the asphalt of the road and with a strong, new found, momentum throwing him forward, his foot catches a crack in the sidewalk. Now in freefall he’s unable to stop the full-force swing of his body, he reaches his hands out as if he’s begging, this is to no avail of breaking his fall. He slams his head into the closed gates of the cemetery knocking him unconscious as the gates hurl open with him now face first on the muddy entrance grounds. He is sadly not the only man face down in the grounds of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1.
