It’s been a while since I wrote about Mama Jennifer, the manager of the Community Book Center in New Orleans, and for years my check on the community pulse on issues of history and policy in the city. This week I flew her up to speak to my class, and true to form, she said things (and quoted literature) that really challenged the way I’ve been thinking. Here’s Mama J’s thoughts about despair and hope, North Camden and Richard Wright:
When I write about local knowledge, it is most often Jennifer Turner that I picture in my head. At first interaction, she is almost possible to understand. Part of that is almost in comprehensively thick New Orleans accent, the nonsensical colloquialisms, and her penchant for citing so many books that it is impossible to believe she has actually read them all.
She has. And over the past half decade, Mama J’s observations have often come back to me as I write up my own work. They’re now central to my research (and her pithy sayings dot my articles). So I wanted to share what she had to say about Camden because I have a feeling I’ll feel the same way when I look back and her reflections here:
The first thing Mama J said to my class was, “North Camden has so much potential, but it has to know it’s history.” Everywhere we went in the city, she kept referring to the potential of North Camden, despite everyone’s protestation to the opposite. The toughest neighborhood in the toughest city in the country, and all she could do was rave about it. When pushed, she said, “they have so much history. Look at the buildings. Look at the culture. Look at the people.”
It was halfway through the class, when quoting (I believe) Richard Wright, that I started to see what was going on in her head. She said that Richard Wright told us that we needed to avoid despair.
And in her own little way, Mama Jennifer was contributing to that fight against despair. She was providing a way out of it, the same way that she has seen be so influential in her own community in New Orleans.
To go forward, Mama J asked us to go back. To combat despair, she emphasized the power of history. When she saw North Camden, she didn’t see the same neighborhood that policemen barricade off on the 4th of July so suburban families didn’t accidentally drive through on their way back from fireworks. Mama J saw vibrant neighborhoods, tight nit communities, and institutions that had been the anchors of decades past.
When she left my class I promised myself I’d do two things: I’d read Richard Wright and I’d try to see Camden through her eyes.
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