Over the first week of March, the Intervarsity chapter from my School sent a group down to New Orleans on a mission trip called ServeUP. While many interesting, remarkable, and perhaps even extraordinary things happened there, one event in particular burrowed into my mind. The people I experienced this with believe that this story had to be told. This is the story of our encounter with the man who lived on Desire Street.
Desire Street
There are moments in one’s life when you can feel your life change. No matter what has happened before the moment, what events transpired to get you there, no matter what men or angels pushed and pulled your feet or heart so that you are held on this patch of earth by its ponderous pull, that is all besides. What matters is that you are there. These were the wondering thoughts that raced through my head as my feet walked down the wooden steps of decked stairs that reached into the sky. While I descended from that Sinai, I looked up and beheld the clouds, and thought of the clouds in the eyes of the man I had just left. They were the first thing that I had noticed about his face. The streaks of white in his hair and the marking lines of age drew the eye to where a broad flaring nose met a laden brow, to those eyes. There were clouds in the man’s eyes. Not clouds of storm or rain, but rather clouds of a bright sunny day, the kind every child longs to reach up and touch. The first one was nearly completely white, both iris and pupil veiled by the punishment for hard years of sight. The second eye was not quite so definite, but rather showed a glimmer of the most brilliant blue, over which a softer cloud drifted. But these eyes, though blinded, were not without purpose, and still translated the will of a defiant stare that permeated space like a hammer’s blow. And that is how I first saw Mr. Harold Brown.
Mr. Brown was leaning on the balconied top platform of his second story home, looking past the trees and the cars, and the highways filled with the noise of pedantic urgency, past the very horizon itself. And though all may guess what his blind eyes saw, none can tell what he was looking for. Nor what he found. But at the command of the swinging drawl of his New Orleans accent, the broken pieces of his tale began to find their place. To say that the storm affected him would be nearly an outright lie. He was marked by the storm. No, he was marred by the storm. what life he had before was swept away and discarded into the filth and squalor of the city streets. He remembered the thunderous boom as the levees that held back the water in the canal broke, erupting in aqueous armageddon. He sees it again and again countless night with an eye more vivid than those in his face and for every night the last ten years has not slept. He can still hear the crash and the bang, and feel the rocking of his house shaking him. He still is haunted by the terror of the disastrous storm, the bodies floating in the water, stinking and bloated. And he remembers the houses that went unchecked for weeks after, with deceased sitting in the homes until the soldiers came in and one by one kicked down doors and marked the houses with bright spray paint. Date of inspection. Body count. And as he spoke, two girls and I stood with him on that mountain top, listening. In our hands, we held buckets and brushes and hammers and nails, but in our hearts we held a wonder, an awe of the storm and the man before us that faced it.
The wood creaked a sighed as Mr. Brown turned around, leaned his back against the railing, and held his face towards the sun. A warm breeze tousled his hair and jostled the collars of his shirt, waving the short sleeves of the boy and girls that stood with him there. And with his hands making strong gestures to the open air in front of him, he recounted the New Orleans of the past, telling of the music and the spirit. Even though he still lives where he has lived much of his life, there is nothing left of the city he once knew and loved. Before the storm hit, Desire Street was filled with commerce and life, but now the grocery story next to his house is just a vacant lot, and the health clinic that once thrived in the next lot over lies fallow in disrepair, the building across the street now the lurking place for heroin dealers. The lower ninth ward was never rich, and many of them couldn’t afford to leave when the storm hit, so with little money to live and no money to run, they stayed. And they watched as lives were swept away. But slowly, as sure as the standing water that filled the streets ebbed away, the people did too. Swaths of land were bought out for near nothing by corporations that coveted the area for its proximity to nearby railroads, shipping canals, and major roads. Lot after lot surrounding Mr. Brown’s was fenced and leveled. Now bulldozer pupils watched with envious eyes at the newly built home inhabited by an old man, waiting. The smoke rising from the machines told the secrets, the hum of the backhoe engine betrayed the tales of corporate payoffs and sly dealings that poisoned the land there against people, evading their return. And there he stood, with his back to the expanse of flat nothingness that threatened to consume him and his mind lingering in better times. After the storm, contractors emerged to fulfil the needs of the people. But the words spoken and deals made meant nothing. They bled those who were most financially destitute dry. What money those hit by the storm had saved or given them by the government quickly filled the contractors’ hands and were exchanged for useless work or nothing at all. Nothing besides promises that rang hollow in the still air.
Mr. Brown had lost fifty thousand dollars to these thieving men. His grandchildren, hearing of this, were outraged. And promising retribution, asked after the people that did this to him. But he did not betray them. He was at peace to abide in the fact that that what judgement came to them would come from God. His soulful kindness was contagious. He told of his grandson who was an artist and had once sold a painting for thousands of dollars. With the money, he bought his mother a van and a brother a car, and when Mr. Brown asked what he had bought for himself, he replied that he hadn’t. Helping his mom and making his brother happy were worth more to him than keeping the money for himself. Mr Brown talked about his old life, those days where he drove the now rusting truck besides his house. He used to be the sole supplier of fish to every market in the area. Now, most times he leaves his house are for reasons to do with his health. The first time we had seen Mr. Brown, he was returning from his stay in a hospital, where they had done preliminary procedures in preparation for his upcoming cornea transplant. When asked, Mr. Brown told us about the medical bills, and how he was virtually paying everything out of pocket, but if he could only get back just a bit of his sight, it would be worth it to him. The money of this world meant nothing in comparison to redeeming what God had given him and living just a little more cloudlessly again. Here he paused, still, standing with his back against a blue sky.
And though he was sprinting through years in his memories, hours could have crept by while we were on that mountaintop. Feeling the pull of obligation from the world beneath our feet, I asked to pray for him. The circle joined and he began to speak, his old head bowed in pious conference. And though he, the one with more years than us three combined, he who had lost everything to angry wind and wrathful waves, he who found no rest at night, he who could not see anything beyond the clouds in his eyes, he prayed not for himself or those closest to him, not for his children nor his brothers, he prayed only for those whom his calloused hands touched. To God he spoke nothing for himself, but for us, the students from another face of the country. When the prayer ended, and the moment of heed had passed, we looked up to find that rain had fallen from his clouds, sliding down the lines in his cheeks and chin onto the decking and the the world below. That his how I remember Mr. Harold Brown. The man who had seen the storm and heard the waves but now listens to the swishes of our brushes and the resounding knocks of our hammer blows, the man who had lost unfathomable amounts to both lies and storm but asks for nothing back, the man who though his body poor was so rich in spirit, the man with clouds in his eyes and love in his heart, Mr. Harold Brown.
