Louisiana Restrooms are a Safe Space

My time in Louisiana was short, but as a girl from the rolling, green hills of New England, it felt as if I were spending ages in another country. I think that’s the first, most important thing you learn when you travel across the US: we are all tenants in a large apartment complex, stuck together by circumstance. I don’t need you assuming that’s a bad thing. Many of the best people I’ve met were neighbors; people who, like me, lived there for reasons that were not autonomous. It often boiled down to finances, immigration, job relocations, but what stemmed from it came both neighbor and sometimes life-long friend. So, my point being: while I felt as if the very memory of my favorite snow-covered hills was burning beneath this southern, bayou sun, I was happy to be there.

Closer to Beaumont than the state of Louisiana, I know that the “Bienvenue en Louisiane” sign with its fleur-de-lis symbol is less than an hour away and that Houston is long behind us. I chance a glance at the passenger seat and find Camden sleeping peacefully, and chance one more glance in the mirror and find our gray, short-haired kitten following his lead. Her paws are curled over her eyes to block the sunset while Camden’s own eyes are shielded by the visor. I’m the only one to face forward and greet that Louisiana sun.

It takes about five hours to drive line to line, and if you have a fear of water or long bridges, this is not the route for you. As I awaited that long anticipated Atchafalaya Basin Bridge, or the pit stop in Baton Rouge, or even just a gas station, my brain scattered across an array of my own personal cultural touchpoints for Louisiana. Zora Neal Hurston’s ethnography studies and her time as mentee of Marie Laveau in Mules and Men; Lil Wayne and the 17th Ward; my countless Houstonian middle school students whose parents are climate refugees from Hurricane Katrina; Louis Armstrong’s blues and jazz and JD Jubilees’s bounce; and even my guilty pleasure, Lestat from Interview with the Vampire. My information did not start or end here, but until we visit it, a place is often just a series of ideas. 

We had to start this particular cross country road trip after I got out of work at 5pm, so for this trip, I understood Louisiana as a long state that we just had to get through. Our road trip circumstance was far from ideal—a freeze was set to hit the South in less than twelve hours. We had to get through Louisiana, and get through it fast. The story goes like this: frantically pulling over to the nearest gas station, the night dark and heavy in between major cities, with blood dripping down my forearm and wrist. Quickly swinging the car door open, tears stinging my eyes. Disoriented with the innate fear of being far, far from home.

It was my fault. I had been sure that our new kitten, Percy, would be okay outside of her crate if I sat in the backseat with her. (She had been cooped up for hours and that is hard for any first time mother to watch!) Things were okay until a passing truck—brighter and louder than usual—passed right by her tiny little face as it was curiously pressed against the window. The battle that ensued was one sided—Percy bouncing around frantically, animalistically, her claws finding my forearm and digging into the flesh. It took quick thinking and stead-fast reflexes for Camden not to swerve, and I tried my best to get her back into the carrier. The adrenaline did not pass even once she was back in her crate, especially when I felt the trickle of something warm down my forearm. The bruising was already forming along the slices down my arm, and there were other deep holes around my wrist.

Never one to stay calm in any sort of health scare, I begged Camden to pull over. My brain cycled through every story of cat scratch fever story I had ever head. Before I I could process much more, Camden found us at a gas station.

“Stay with her,” I told him, and then I was out of the car and at the gas station doorway in seconds.

The transition from hours of highway darkness to fluorescent lights stopped me in my tracks. The gas station was quiet—silent, even. The calmness of the tiny building seemed out of place for the amount of adrenaline pumping through my body, and so I could only freeze and stare at the few heads that turned to look at me. There was an elderly man in blue jeans and white t-shirt, placing a 6-pack on the counter. There was a girl with two long braids wearing spandex (despite the winter) and holding an energy drink in one hand.  There was a young man with a backpack and a bag of Takis in line for Subway. Cajun accents mingled with soft gas station music and the scent of fresh, hot coffee. There were others, too, but it was these few details that I captured like a camera. Something about stress and memory, maybe. I bent my head, sure that I looked like something out of a horror film, and fled to the restroom sign. I was secure in some cultural internalization of my own northern upbringing that I would be, most likely, left alone.

Once in the refuge of the bathroom, I stretched my arm across the abyss of the sink. Red, warm droplets landed on the white, cold tile of the counter and floor. I needed to rinse and I needed to clean—with more than soap—but one step at a time. And so I rinsed, and rinsed, and thanked everything I wasn’t the type to pass out at the sight of blood. I thought about my kitten—my daughter—and worry gripped me. How far were we to an animal hospital? No, we couldn’t turn back without getting stuck in storms, or missing Christmas entirely—thank God I wasn’t one to spiral or panic or catastrophize—

“Now, you a’ight there, dear?”

I turned my head quickly to find the speaker. I must have looked manic, but her eyes were steady. Concerned, but steady. She was short with dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin, and must have been a few decades older than me. The door opened and in came the girl with the spandex and energy drink. She didn’t even look for a stall, but instead caught my eye and walked over. She was tall and thin with two long, strawberry-blonde braids stretching down to her waist. She looked me up and down and then to the older woman. “She wit you?”

“Oh—no,” I jumped in, starting to feel flustered. For one thing, I had not anticipated a meeting, especially not one where I was crouched sideways across a faucet. My face burned when they came closer. 

“You need to clean that with some neosporing, or some’n,” the spandex girl began as if we were long acquainted, as if we had come into this gas station together.

The older woman seemed to have other concerns. Her eyes squinted at me. “How that happen?”

I pushed myself up and scanned for some type of towel dispenser and before I realized there was none. The older woman asking the questions handed me a roll of toilet paper.

“Thanks.” I pressed it to my forearm. “It was my cat.”

“Who?”

“My—my cat.”

The spandex girl let out a snort and the older woman hummed. “Pauvre bête. Look, child. If you in any type of trouble, go on out that back door,” she said quickly, then started going into details about nearby motels and gas stations and places to get cash. Anxiety bubbled back up from my chest and into my throat and out of my mouth.

“Ma’am,” I said, something I had picked up after a few years living in Houston. I even let out a forced laugh, as if this would ease her concerns. “It’s nothing like that. Thank you, though.”

Once, when home alone in my apartment in Houston, a man tried to break in. Luckily, he’d had nothing more than a lock pin, but when I called the police, they failed to give me any urgency, any updates, and then hung up the phone before knowing if the man was gone. The sound of the call going dead in my ear, my foot pressed against the door, and a knife in my hand. No, it was my next door neighbor who answered the call, coming over and wielding a bat. Screaming, and then the man was gone. When I relayed the story to my coworkers the next day, they all shrugged. “Yeah,” they said simply. “You can’t rely on 911. Buy a gun. Always call your neighbors.”

Neighbors.

I looked at the two women. I didn’t know their names or where they were from, really. But I knew I was standing in one of the most impoverished states in the country, with some of the lowest life expectancy rates and some of the highest number of hospitals controlled by private equity. I knew the crime rate was one of the highest in the country, and much like Houston, a call to the police would do nothing except maybe bring in more harm. I knew about the beautiful parts of this state from years living next door, from the crawfish boils during field days at our middle school and the unique Cajun and Creole cuisine blends that my student’s grandmas gifted me for lunch. Flashes of flat land filled with a basin of water, broken up by bald cypress trees that burst from the surface. Spanish moss hanging from live oaks—grandiose in its haunting beauty on a gray day and grandiose as it flickers sunlight through the greens of the live oak. The blend of languages and expressions that many of my coworkers and students spoke, born out of generations of mixed heritage and pidgins. In so many ways, this region had come to show me the best of what humanity could be: a constant dance and fusion of cultures. And as I thought about all that Louisiana had come to mean to me just by being its neighbor, I also knew the ugly. I couldn’t ignore the statistics. And in that bathroom with the older woman and spandex girl, one last statistic carried to the front of my mind: Louisiana, for all the good and bad, remained the deadliest state for a woman to live in.

My neighbors looked back at me, and they saw someone in her early twenties. They saw blood down the arm of a girl surrounded by miles of forest and swamp. They saw that it was just before midnight. They saw reality.

“Thank you,” I told them again, one last time, wishing I could convey everything I felt in that moment but knowing we had to keep on driving. That while so many were left to the remoteness of the bayous, I was just passing through. And as I left the bathroom, I heard them start up in their own conversation, and although I couldn’t make out much, I knew it probably sounded something like: sad, or they’re never ready to accept it, or hope she gets out before she’ s dead.

My footsteps echoed on the concrete. The air was sticky and humid. The otherwise dark and remote location was lit by the warm glow of the station. My eyes traveled across the lot and watched the few of us who had taken refuge, either for a small coffee break, like the man climbing back into his tractor trailer, or for gas, like the young woman scrolling on her phone, leaning against her tiny, faded red truck with chipped paint and a dented door, or for snacks, like the old man limping out with his beef jerky.

But I also noticed the things I hadn’t before: the two young men piling up their backseat with gallons of water; the worker wrapping the outdoor pipes with rags as a cigarette hung out of her mouth; the armful of canned goods that a mother and her daughter carried urgently to their car.

“We need to drive,” I said as a way of greeting, opening the car door.

For us, the remoteness was an adventure. For us, the station was a stopping point. A fun game to be played as we raced against a snowstorm and climate disaster that would freeze the deep south. So lost in my own race, I stopped and wondered for the first time where all these people would be in twenty-four hours. I wondered how I had ever begun this drive thinking about Cajun food and Lestat and Hurston. I wondered about my students. I wondered if my neighbors would be safe.

Randi Rogers is excitedly wrapping up her final year as an English student at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has a concentration in Creative Writing, a passion that she discovered at a very young age, and that has remained with her as she grew and began to pursue the craft professionally. She is celebrating her first official publication through Product Magazine, and working toward many more in the future. She has a deep love for art, though storytelling is what truly fuels her, and she hopes to create a space for representation and social critique through her writing. Randi dedicates her success to the support of her incredible partner and loving friends, all of whom deeply inspire and encourage her.