Will Nash joined the Middlebury faculty in 1995, Deb Evans in 1996. Nash is director of African-American studies and a member of the American Studies Program. His book, Charles Johnson's Fiction (2002), treats the works of contemporary African-American novelist Charles Johnson. He is currently studying black Chicago artists' responses to the political and social upheavals of the 1960s. Nash teaches courses on representations of race in American literature and culture and courses on 19th- and 20th-century American literature. This fall Will teaches one of the Wonnacott first Year Seminars on Blues in American Culture; he welcome a chance to teach a course that combines two of his greatest passions.
After teaching in the Writing Program, Deb Evans joined what is now the American Studies Program and the Department of English and American Literature. Her current project is a study of representations of white-Native American interracial unions in 19th-century American literature. She regularly teaches courses on regionalism and on gender in American literature; this fall she teaches ENAM 206, Nineteenth Century American Literature, featuring all the greats (Poe, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, etc, and a few of the lesser knowns to keep things interesting).
Deb, Will, and their daughter Hadley moved to the Wonnacott Commons Head residence in July 2004. Hadley, seven, begins second grade this fall and is an avid Middlbury ice hockey fan with an artistic soul. You'll see her art work and hear her song stylings when she visits the Wonnacott office; although she is a devotee of musicals, she is first and foremost a fan of her father's faculty band, The Doughboys.
From the Commons Heads
"Report From New Orleans," by Will Nash
[This past January, Will taught a J-term course on "Katrina and Its Aftermath." After a month studying the region from an interdisciplinary perspective, he and the group of 12 students traveled to New Orleans to help with hurricane relief efforts. The following article is based on those experiences.]
Betcha a dollar I can tell you where you got your shoes—
Got your shoes on your feet, and your feet on the street
In New Orleans
Those lines are from a New Orleans rhyme that streetwise children sometimes use to milk money from unsuspecting tourists. On January 21st, after 3 weeks of preparation in the classroom, we finally had our feet on the street in New Orleans. Our classroom experience might not have made us streetwise, but we were certainly not tourists--at least we didn't want to see ourselves that way. We were there—14 of us in all—to learn something about the city's history and culture and to do relief work with a group called Common Ground.
Before getting down to business, however, we had to find common ground with the Middlebury alumni and parents who'd be hosting us for dinner that night at Antoine's, a five-star restaurant that is something of an institution in New Orleans. It was quite a night—unbelievable food served in a room decked with the trappings of the Krewe of Proteus, one of the old-line Mardi Gras groups that represents the elite of New Orleans society, and good conversation with people who were eager both to hear about what's new at Middlebury and to tell us their Katrina stories. It was strange to sit amidst the opulence when we had come so far to confront devastation, to be sure, but we decided that this was nevertheless a useful part of the experience. We knew the irony of this as a starting point, but that was hardly all we gleaned from the evening. After all, our fellow diners offered us personal information to add to what we'd learned from our readings and lectures—and with that to add to all of the advance work, surely we were ready to begin.
And yet, in that moment, there were myriad ways in which we were not ready. That became achingly clear the following day, when we took a drive around some of the most damaged areas of the city; everything that I had read, every image that I had seen on the news in the last 5 months paled in the face of mile after mile of ruined houses. Then our guide took us inside one of his friend's homes. In that moment, the large, impersonal wreckage took on another tone for me as we viewed the ruined belongings of one family. I remember looking down and seeing a framed black-and-white photo behind shattered glass and a coating of mud and thinking about the boxes of treasured photos in our house that I'm going to get to organizing "someday." What would I do if we lost them? To be frank, I'm not sure that I'd even know specifically what we'd lost, as there are too many images in those boxes to keep track of. For these people, it would be easy to know what they'd lost—everything. And then it occurred to me—if I went into any house on that block, or if I went into any house in the 9th Ward, or in St. Bernard parish, I'd find the same sorts of things. People from homes like these were the people we'd come to help. What connection could we make with them?
We found an answer working with homeowners who wanted their houses gutted—a process that involves hauling out all of the ruined possessions in the house and then stripping the walls down to the studs, so that a follow-up crew can come in and wash everything with bleach, which kills the pervasive mold that is one of the great perils lurking in the flood-damaged houses. We donned protective clothing (Tyvek suits, respirators, goggles, boot covers, and gloves) and gathered our tools. Out in St. Bernard Parish, an area ravaged not only by floodwaters but also by massive amounts of oil spilled when tanks owned by the Murphy Oil Company ruptured, we worked with an African-American couple, David and Lucia, to clean out their home so that they could reclaim and rebuild it. As we shoveled out their ruined belongings, as we cut a hole in their daughter's waterbed so that we could drain it and make it moveable, and as we hauled out appliances and pulled down sheetrock, David kept smiling—his talk was all of the lumber he was planning to order and the speed with which he'd rebuild. Lucia, on the other hand, was depressed, telling us to throw everything away, that all she had was bad memories.
It was clear that there was more here for her than she could see—because she had ties to this community that were bearing her up in the midst of this tragedy. Across the street from her ruined house was another home, already gutted, with a FEMA trailer in the driveway and a flag pole in the front yard. Atop that pole were two flags—a Marine regimental insignia and a Confederate flag emblazoned "Heritage Not Hate." The owner of the house, the trailer, and the flags, was a heavy-set white Cajun man we knew only as Mike. It was from Mike's trailer than David and Lucia had emerged when we first arrived, and it was to Mike's driveway that David came with their vanload of supplies as they prepared to begin their cleanup process. Whatever assumptions I had about how they might see each other because of that Confederate flag melted in the warmth of their genuine bond. It was Mike who welcomed them back, who shared David's laughter, and who said something I couldn't hear that made Lucia smile for the first time since I'd met her. I don't know when or how their friendship began, whether the storm had brought them together or reinforced an existing bond—I only know that they reminded me that one can't ever safely make assumptions about who someone is based on how they look. And with that reminder came a sense of our place in this process.
In almost the same moment, one of the Middlebury group called my attention to Mike's stereo; the Allman Brothers were singing "People can you feel it? Love is everywhere…." With that, I understood the deeper significance of gutting those houses, of how that experience gave us our common ground. More than we were tearing anything down, we were building something up. We were recognizing our places in what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the "inescapable web of mutuality" that binds all people together and that makes us each responsible for others' needs.
As another of my favorite writers, Thich Nhat Hanh, has it "After seeing, there must come acting. Otherwise, what use is the seeing?" One lasting thing that I got from this trip, and that I think my fellow travelers did too, was a deep sense of how important seeing and acting can be—and what rewards can come of these things for the communities that undertake them. Equipped with that awareness, we also know that whatever work we will be doing to help clean up the mess of Katrina is only beginning.
