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... In which Hazlitt LeFleur is Sold into Slavery ...
On a Tuesday morning in late summer, Hazlitt LeFleur, a Person of Color, was finding out the answer to the question What Is the Most Virulently Racist City in America. He'd thought it was LA or Detroit, Atlanta or Jackson, BirminghamSelma or Pulaski, Tennessee. That was before he ended up getting evicted from his Mid-City apartment, taken into custody, and Sold into Slavery in the middle of Armstrong Park, which is named after a trumpet player who used to smoke pot and think to himself what a wonderful world, and hey! For him, it was! But it was neither that or even a half-decent day for Hazlitt LeFleur, who was the Casualty of a Martini Party in the Upper Garden District three days before in which Preston Foley, a local businessman and former Comus Krew dude who triple-K'd part-time in nearby Covington, caught himself a buzz and went around whispering to people, "Hey! Did you know there was still somewhere you could go to buy yourself a Knee-gah!" with a little upturn on the second syllable, see, "GAH!", like that, y'know. Well, they hadn't known. But then they did. Because Foley'd up and told 'em. He was a shipping magnate.
This is not to say that Preston Foley, a lifelong member of the New Orleans Athletic Club as well as a certain Gentleman's Club on St. Chuck Ave., was utterly useless to Society in town. Fucking far from it. See, he was the guy that got the White Crane shipped in to the Mississippi River docks, the little hidden ones in next-door Jefferson Parish, out of Orleans' eye, since he didn't want to have to pay the requisite Drug Trafficking Graft Waiver Charge, much less apply for a licence for it at City Hall or some shit. But that White Crane, man, that was said to make the Mexican Brown they sold in the Faubourg Marigny look like a goddamn allergy shot. It arrived in Jefferson and made its way to Nola Proper and to Baton Rouge and Houston, especially, sometimes even Florida, and it was said to make you feel like your body was able to fly, man, and you'd not have an ounce of body fat on you, either, and although once bitten you didn't give a goddamn Billy Squier tape about anyone or anything, it was worth it! Yeah! White Crane. Don't leave Nola without it.
Problem is, the shit was really the White Man's Burden, because since you never worked, you'd of course need someone to work for you, and it was ironic as all hell because Armstrong Park, where Hazlitt LeFleur was sold at action to a certain J. Kilty Smith, Addict, was among the first places in which slaves were freed in America. But vengence was swift and it was not pretty. That was along about the time Fenton Rochilieu, a honkey-assed Art Teacher, was sold with an insidious smile to a certain local Nonprofit Organization, where he was reamed up the butt repeatedly in retribution for the injustice a member of his race (who was, Truth be Told, 1/32nd Black) had doled out to LeFleur. Funny thing was, Rochilieu was a specialist in the work of Jacob Lawrence, people like that. But that's where he really fucked up, it's said.
Me, I don't know who was right or who was wrong one way or the other about it. I suppose it's all a matter of degree. Like the Saints buying Ricky Williams, the good-looking football dude. Williams was from Texas. That's where Earl Campbell used to live, and Earl Campbell'd make more money if he were playing today than was outlined in the shitty contract the Saints and that peckerwood coach who used to coach for the Bears gave him. But the Saints aren't really from New Orleans because they all live in Mandeville, which is just a few miles from Covington, where David Duke, the ex-Wizard, lives. But Michael Jordan now owns the Wizards, see? In a racist city, to boot. See the point I'm making here? So thank God New Orleans was brought together by those senseless missle strikes by the town of Algiers. And yet there's no Color on the New Orleans Brass Hockey Team! Or the Opera, the one that sings the one about that German Nazi-assed bookworm motherfucker who sold his soul to Mephisto to land himself some young pussy! I've seen all this at work, in New Orleans, with my own three eyes and BTW, all the 'tutes I, Kermit Broadmeyer have fucked have been White as the Crane on the River.
But the German dude who wrote that book that opera's about, now what a sell-out Hoor. Goatey, that's his name. Fucking Oreo cockwipe. My case is rested, and the Crane's in the Veins of all the Goth Chicks on Decatur Street. The ones who paint themselves black.
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