Brass Brackish Howl

Terence Blanchard by his Youngest Daughter

My father was 3 years old when Hurricane Betsy made landfall. 9 September 1965. I was 5 when Katrina made hers. This August will mark the 20th anniversary of that hurricane and I am contending with how it turned my lung water brackish. I imagine Betsy did the same for my father. That category 4 that surged the lake and flooded the lower ninth. He says all he remembers is someone picking him up and putting him in a boat. I imagine him heat stricken and a little fussy, watching his neighbors wail and wade through the muck. Their skin, slick and glistening. Clothes rippled in the flood. He speaks about how he only remembers the pirogue and his mother trying to get the wet clothes off of him once they made it to someone’s house. “Come on boy, those people aren’t worried ‘bout you,” she said. He would’ve had the youth of his father’s face trapped in amber, been quiet as the eye of the storm. I only know because I see this face in my nephew’s. Most photos of my dad in his youth were lost in the storm of mine.

It seems we are flooded and breathless creatures. Our first witness to God’s will being the hurricane. It’s our season in hell, June to November. When we count raindrops in our stretched hands. When we can almost hear A Tale of God’s Will softly lap against the levees. When the water has a particular hum and the birds will tell you when to hightail it out of town. The rest of the year is a barrage of whoops through humid air. In September everyone breathes shorter, perks their ears up to hear the echoes of hurricanes past.

My father never had time to develop a voice outside of the hurricane howl. His disposition speaks to that. He is fairly quiet, then booming with raucous laughter. Slaps the table when he’s excited. He has the griot embouchure to extrapolate from his ribs to his lips. Most of my life there has been water in my lungs, dirty, storm-steeped. I try to write to get it out. I pull my lips back and bare my canines in the mirror. Cool air on my teeth. I howl. I write. I howl. I drink. I howl. I shower. I howl. And all that comes up is muck.

I imagine my father plays the trumpet because that same water is in his lungs too. Katrina, Betsy, Camille, and Andrew whistling their sorrowed song to him. It’s best heard in songs like “The Water”, that wailing breath ricocheting out of him. The album it appears on, A Tale of God’s Will, was written for those affected by Hurricane Katrina. Scoring Spike Lee’s documentary series When the Levees Broke, it is a requiem of devastating proportions. It’s the sound of the city lamenting. Toxic waters seeping into everyone’s pores, babies growing slack in the hot sun, the stench of mildew wafting from every building, children floating in refrigerators, corpses rising from their burial sites, hundreds of people missing, even more never returning their feet to our sloughed soil. His howl, the conjuring of all of this, is imbued in every chord.

The trumpet normally evokes the heraldic howl. “I was drawn to the trumpet because it sounds like a human voice,” says my father while we sit at the kitchen table. I have been home for a week after being gone for over a year. In that time, I have routinely heard his trumpet’s voice waft out of bars, art galleries, book stores, and movie theaters. There’s something to living across an oxygen-rich ocean yet inescapable from his air. In London I am writing about breath studies. The relationship between me and my body through the lens of “aqueous-ness” and the etymology of the term “Unda” from Latin. How my poems are plethysmographs. My father’s breath studies regard the curvature of air jettisoning through gold-plated brass. He likens breathing to “singing you can’t divorce yourself from”. His Breathless album was a reaction to Eric Garner’s last words “I Can’t Breathe”. He performs the album fervently, the howling trumpet begging the world to let us breathe.

Our breath is rebellious. Often when my father plays trumpet, it looks like the force of the wail takes over his equilibrium, forcing him back into a sway on stage. He reels in this rhythm, his howl building pressure outside his body. The room always feels like its full of static. This kind of command requires a touch of alchemy: harmonies wrapped in alloy. To play the trumpet is to pull apparitions through brass. The air takes shape in your lungs then skates through the slides and out the bell. It curls in your ears so you can almost feel the spirits of Katrina reclaiming their last breath. The ghostly touch, threatening tarnish, uplifts the trumpet and pulls tears from your eyes. If you let the tear fall, you will give yourself back to the gulf after Betsy, Camille, Andrew, and Katrina have all evaporated back into the Earth.

When I speak of river muck I am meeting my father at the water’s edge. Where he is tarnished and I am dissolving. Our work is the practice of howling and gulping, baptism and burial, getting out of the mud and wading back in. “The same thing we use to cleanse ourselves—” he pauses. What cleans, drowns. “The water had its own path to take.” We were in the way. “It’s like we were all baptized,” when it rains. The delta holds this ritual. “That bayou floor has been there for that long and what is the story that mug can tell.” Aqueous griots, we are.  “We are the new stewards of what it can tell.” He has his estuary to swim and while I am still navigating mine, they emerged from the same source. Perhaps his is more brackish and mine is briny, requiring more robust gills. 

The more air you take, the more you can say. “You take in a lot of air to improvise and you never know how long your idea will last, better to have more air than ideas so you can always express yourself.” His brassy, brackish howl is simply how he contends with breathing.

My howl is not the work of direct-voice. There are no ghosts slipping through tubes of brass. Only catfish breaths and the possession of the jaw. I have inherited the liberation of movement. When my howl takes over, I am a formless thing making space in dark muck. I am breathing lungless, heaving oxygen molecules in from my muddy environment. The exchange seems laborious in its alchemy, but this is the work of waterlogged air.

My howl is the antithesis of anapestic prose. It is not crafted harmonies and syncopation. It is soaked in an irreverent slosh. the guttural ululations buried deep in my tonsils from these tempestuous prenatal scars. It’s me trying to enunciate in a frequency only heard by bottom dwellers and lampriformes.

My howl is this survival: Breathe for those who can no longer. Aerate the water so that we may go on. Count in fours. Imagine a box, fill it with air, open it underwater. Repeat until you feel earthbound again. Talk about how we are slowly being eroded by a flood we can no longer see. Teach each other how to swim. Use that paddling rhythm to make music or tell a story.