Feet on the Street by Roy Blount Jr. Read Free Book Online Page A

of view of an oyster,
whose life was all digestion suspended by ice now open to light not knowing it light yet knowing it the better for the flood of it once, just once, not knowing love nor lust nor even affection but just this fond violation of privacy by light, and knife, and now again dark, and digestion.
    If Faulkner ever wrote anything about oysters, I couldn’t find it. Neither New Orleans nor my resolutions ever work out orderly. But in these times of culture-clash entanglements, when subjectivity vis-à-vis objectivity has become so vexed an issue, we might well dwell for a moment on the oyster. Why is Lewis Carroll’s “Walrus and the Carpenter” such a lasting monument to cold-bloodedness?

    â€œI weep for you,” the Walrus said:
    â€œI deeply sympathize.”
    With sobs and tears he sorted out
    Those of the largest size.

    Because who can honestly put himself in an oyster’s place? A fish has a face, a snail a pace. An oyster, without its shell, is all morsel.
    â€œCanst tell how an oyster makes his shell?” the Fool asks King Lear as he is being rendered homeless by his folly and his daughters. “No,” says Lear. Can a grape coat itself in bark, a baby generate armor out of itself? An old man survive on his own?
    Eating a raw oyster is like exchanging a soul kiss with the sea. But not much like it. We may think of Dickens’s sanctimonious Mr. Pecksniff, and certain attempts to jog his memory:

    â€œThe name of those fabulous animals (pagan, I regret to say) who used to sing in the water, has quite escaped me.”
    Mr. George Chuzzlewit suggested “Swans.”
    â€œNo,” said Mr. Pecksniff. “Not swans. Very like swans, too. Thank you.”
    The nephew . . . : “Oysters.”
    â€œNo,” said Mr. Pecksniff, . . . “nor oysters. But by no means unlike oysters; a very excellent idea; thank you, my dear sir, very much. Wait. Sirens! Dear me! Sirens, of course.”

    My memory is jogged by oysters. New Orleans madeleines. In Felix’s, especially, they make me think of my friend Slick Lawson, photographer, who lived in Nashville but hailed from Louisiana and loved New Orleans—maybe even more than I do, because he could stay up longer. I’d stagger off to bed and he’d go find the bar where the waiters went after work.
    Over the years Slick and I went out into the Alabama woods, to observe the Ku Klux Klan; and into the hills of Hazard, Kentucky, to interview an opponent of strip mining (Slick was delighted when the man said, “You know who owns this property here? Doris Day”); and to Paris and the palace of Versailles to chronicle one of the many political escapades of Edwin Edwards, then the roguish governor of Louisiana, now in prison. In 1981, Slick and I went to New Orleans for the orphans.
    Parade
magazine, for whom we had covered the Klan, wanted us to do a heartwarming Christmas story on orphans. Sounded like a refreshing change from hanging around with Klanfolk, who had made us feel like taking a Lysol bath. My mother was an orphan. She had recently died. Slick and I were both fathers of children of broken homes.
    And we wanted, as always, to go to New Orleans. We figured we’d go to New Orleans and eat, drink, and—New Orleans had everything else, why not orphans?
    We ate, we drank, and we discovered that orphans, strictly speaking, were an outmoded concept. The line of would-be adoptive parents was so long that almost any small American child left legally parentless would be snapped up. There were, however, plenty of troubled children who had been taken into custody by the state because their parents had abandoned, neglected, or abused them. These children weren’t candidates for adoption because their wretched parents hadn’t given up their rights to them. Nor had the kids given up their longing for the parents.
    Some of these children could be placed temporarily with foster parents,