Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [39]
They used to bury dogs on First Street. Holes in the road made that easy. While in Holtz Cemetery the high water table conveniently takes the flesh away in six months and others may be buried in the same place within a year. So for us you are here, not in Holtz with the plastic flowers in Maxwell House coffee tins or four inch plastic Christs stuck in cement or crosses so full of names they seem like ledgers of a whole generation.
The sun has swallowed the colour of the street. It is a black and white photograph, part of a history book.
House of Detention. Three needles lost in me. Move me over and in the fat of my hip they slip in the killer of the pain. And open my eyes and the nurse is there, her smiling rope face and rope neck. Awake Bolden? Nod. Look at each other and then she is off. No conversation. I can’t sing through my neck. Every three hours I walk to the door for then she will come in carrying the needle in her sweet palm like an egg. Roll and dip and lose it in the bum. Go to sleep now. Nod. 7 am. I am given a bath. I sit up and she comes over unbuttons me at the back, pulls it over my shoulders. You see I can’t use my arms. She pours the cold soap onto my chest and rubs hard across the nipple and hair. Smiling. Good? Nod. And then pulling my white dress farther down and more cold soap in the circle of my crotch. As she leans against me there is the red morning on her face. Everyone who touches me must be beautiful.
Bolden’s hand going up into the air in agony.
His brain driving it up into the path of the circling fan.
This last movement happens forever and ever in his memory
Interview with Lionel Gremillion at East Louisiana State Hospital.
Bolden’s mother, Alice Bolden, wrote twice a month. Called him ‘Charles’.
He died November 4, 1931, at the hospital.
His sister Cora Bolden Reed was notified when he died.
Geddes and Moss, Undertaking and Embalming Co. of New Orleans, took care of the body. Nov. 4, his sister sent telegram —‘PLEASE DELIVER REMAINS OF CHARLES BOLDEN TO J.D. GILBERT UNDERTAKING CO. BATON ROUGE TO BE PREPARED FOR BURIAL’.
Burial in unmarked grave at Holtz Cemetery after being brought from the Asylum through Slaughter, Vachery, Sunshine, back to New Orleans.
Reverend Sede Bradham, Protestant Chaplain at the Hospital, worked at the hospital in his youth. He had seen Bolden play in N.O. ‘Hyperactive individual. When he blew his horn he kept walking around on the bandstand … had tendency to go to a window to play to outside world.’
Dr Robard: ‘He acted as a patient barber. Didn’t publicly proclaim himself as a jazz originator.’
Wasn’t much communication between whites and blacks and so much information is difficult to find out. No black employees here.
Gremillion theorizing: ‘He was a big frog, he had a following. Had a strong ego, his behaviour was eventually too erratic. Extroverted and then a pendulum swing to withdrawal. Suspiciousness. Paranoia. Possibly “an endocrine problem”.’
Patients sometimes brought up by boat along Mississippi to St Francisville.
Typical Day:
Rose early. Summer 4.30 am. Winter 5 am.
If a person was in a closed ward he was returned there after breakfast. Bolden was probably in open and closed wards. If open ward he was given duties. His assigned duty was to cut hair. Lunch 11.30.
Recreational facilities: volleyball, softball. Dances twice a week.
Cold packs for the overactive. Place was noisy.
4.30 – 5 pm. Supper.
In bed by 8 pm.
Some isolation blocks. ‘Untidy Wards’ for old patients who couldn’t control bowels. ‘Closed Wards’ for escapees, deteriorated psychopaths. Violent Wards’ for unmanageables.
Am walked out of the House of D and put on a north train by H.B. McMurray and Jones. Outside a river can’t get out of the rain. Passing wet chicory that lies in the field