Stories that beat the algorithm
Courtney Desiree Morris' wild, crazy and powerful trip through New Orleans
Apologies, due to a scheduling error, I’m sending this week’s Sunday Reading out on a Monday. Thanks for bearing with me!
Last Monday, I was invited to participate in a conversation about the future of journalism and AI. The room was filled with smart and thoughtful people who care about this industry and who don’t simply shut down or start hyperventilating at the first mention of ChatGPT. (Such responses aren’t totally unreasonable in the face of generative AI but also aren’t especially helpful.)
I learned a lot listening the those around me discuss a future that none of us can entirely imagine. Will we all have the equivalent of a personal robot that provides us entertainment through browsing (hi TikTok) or search (“Hey Siri”)? Will journalists and authors eventually focus exclusively on fact-gathering, delivering their information to language models that write up stories—stories that then are summarized into a couple sentences for the reader? Will news articles even be a relevant format in this highly customized, personalized future?
As we discussed the different methods for delivering facts and improving information access, I admit I found my mind began to wander to some of my favorite essays at Stranger’s Guide and how, for me, their impact came because the author imbued the piece with a sense that it had to be written—and that as a reader, I could nonetheless access a small portion of the creative energy involved in writing it.
Courtney Desiree Morris’ piece below takes place largely in 2018, before Covid and before the wars in Ukraine, in Gaza and so many other places too. Yet the piece examines the ways joy can exist amidst loss, pain and injustice. It’s never felt more relevant to me, as I try to work, parent and do laundry while acknowledging so much brokenness. Every time I read Courtney’s words, I marvel at the craft involved in telling this story, the work, skill and talent required.
I don’t know what generative AI holds for the future of our industry (though I do have thoughts that might make their way into a different newsletter). I know a lot will change—and so much has changed already. And we may lose many of the articles that now run on homepages.
But essays like the one below are experiences unto themselves, long-form pieces that transport you to a new place or vantage point. Stranger’s Guide exists to hold space for such pieces from around the world.
I’ll conclude by noting that this work is hard and that the ecosystem that supports it is a fragile one. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you again. If you’re not, please consider joining—we count on reader support to do this work. And while I can’t promise anything, we’re working on getting everyone a free robot.
—Abby Rapoport
“Pulpit.” Sanctuary at the Mount Zion Baptist Church. Mossville, Louisiana. 2016. All photographs from the series Solastalgia by Courtney Desiree Morris.
“Acid Church,” Courtney Desiree Morris, Stranger’s Guide: New Orlenas.
It is really easy to fall in love with New Orleans. Especially when you are on drugs.
Ask me how I know.
“I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for acid. Acid saved my life.”
Alli Logout is a bona fide rockstar. A café con leche, butterscotch woman—down South, we’d call them a yellow bone—with a blonde Afro that floats around their head like a golden cloud. They are the ferocious frontperson of a rock group called Special Interest. The first time I saw them perform at the WITCHES party during Mardi Gras weekend, they roared through the crowd on a motorcycle wearing nothing but combat boots, a black thong, fishnets, a black bikini top and topped with a black feather cape and a Pocahontas wig. Then they climbed onstage and roared into the microphone, “Sodomy and LSD!”
That’s how you start a night in New Orleans off right.
• • •
We are standing in a backyard smoking cigarettes at a house party somewhere between the Seventh Ward and Bayou St. John. The party is winding down. The early morning air feels cool and good on my skin. Emotionally, I feel empty.
It’s been a hard night. It’s been a hard day. A day that started 200 miles away from New Orleans in Lake Charles, Louisiana at my grandmother’s house.
When I come into her bedroom that morning, she is already awake, propped up on a bunch of pillows watching some evangelical preacher on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and humming gospel songs to herself. I walk over to her bed, plant a kiss on her forehead and pull up a chair next to her.
“Good morning, Miss Bobbie. How you feeling?”
“Pretty good, baby. My arm’s a little bit sore this morning, but you know I’m feeling pretty good.”
Now that I am closer, I catch the faint odor of urine wafting up from the sheets, and I wince. I don’t like the idea of my grandmother stuck in bed sitting in her own piss.
“Hey Mamma, you ready to take a shower?”
“Yeah baby, that sounds good.”
“Alright then, honey, let’s get you out of these dirty clothes.”
I get up and slide my right arm behind her back; once she is upright, I slide her gently to the edge of the bed until her tiny feet are grazing the floor. Then I slide my arm behind her once more as she leans back so I can pull off the adult diaper she wears to bed each night. It is soaked with urine.
“This thing ain’t chafing you, Mamma?”
“No, baby, I’m fine.”
She’s being polite, but she’s lying. Nothing chafes the skin worse than piss. I used to get annoyed at these omissions, but I know that she doesn’t like us to worry or to seem needier than she actually is. Even now as she is dying, she is terrible at asking for help. I sigh. We are alike in so many ways.
I prop her back up, then turn around to grab the metalwalker tucked away next to her dresser. As I do this, I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror. She looks vulnerable and awkward sitting naked on the bed. I hurry back and place the walker in front of her. She grabs the handles and pulls herself forward. As she shifts her weight from the bed to the walker, she begins to pant as she struggles to find her balance.
“You good Mamma?”
“Yeah, baby. I’m good.”
She leans forward and begins to waddle towards her bedroom door. I position myself behind her just in case she begins to look too wobbly. I can feel her shivering as we walk the short distance down the hall to the bathroom. My uncle has already turned on the portable heater in the bathroom. I begin to sweat immediately when we step inside, but my grandmother continues to shiver. She complains about being cold all the time since she started the chemotherapy treatments.
She parks the walker up against the side of the sink while I turn on the hot water in the tub. Then we begin the awkward dance of maneuvering her into the bathtub. The narrow bathroom is not designed to accommodate an elderly, overweight, ill woman and an adult granddaughter trying to bathe her. I pull the detachable showerhead from its cradle. As the warm water pours out of the shower head I move it over my grandmother’s body, watching the water stream down over her shoulders, her wide breasts, sliding into the folds of her back and stomach, down her thighs and calves. Her body reminds me of the Venus of Willendorf. I linger over her neck, shoulders and back ‘cause I know she likes that, and she sighs quietly.
“Girl, that hot water feels good.”
“Yeah, I bet it does, Miss Bobbie,” I say and we both laugh.
In the beginning, she is still strong enough to soap up her own washcloth and scrub her upper body. By the end, when she is too weak to lift her arms, I take the rag and scrub her down like a baby, pulling the soapy rag around her neck, washing her armpits. The easy part finished, I turn my attention to her genitalia.
“Alright, Mamma. I gotta get in there and clean out your pocketbook.” At this, her face breaks into a toothless cackle.
In the beginning, I knew she was embarrassed having her grown granddaughter wiping her ass and soaping up her private privates. But I learned that if I breezed through it like it was no different from cleaning her armpits, then she would feel less embarrassed—and honestly, after the first two or three times, it really started to feel just like that. She leans back and spreads her legs, and I go to work, wiping between the folds and making sure she smells clean and fresh. After I rinse her off, she rolls her body to the side, exposing her bottom. She holds one cheek up while I scrub her behind vigorously until I am satisfied that she is clean.
“Alright, sugar. We done with that.”
I towel her off, help her out of the tub and get her back to her room. I powder her down, put on a fresh diaper, slide a pair of stretchy cotton sweatpants onto her and help her push her arms through a soft gray sweatshirt.
When she is dressed, she takes her walker and slowly makes her way to the living room. I follow her with a jar of Miracle Gro hair grease, a comb and a brush. Once she is settled, I slide myself between the recliner and the wall and gently begin parting her thick, gray hair with the comb. Even with the chemo, Bobbie got a full head of beautiful wavy hair. I cut pathways through her hair with the widetooth comb and then grease each row. She doesn’t need much product—her hair lies down with just a little bit of grease and water. After I wet her hair, I take that brush and pull it through and over her hair until it shines like polished silver. Once it’s smooth to the touch, I take her hair and twist it into a simple bun on top of her head and then secure it with a few bobby pins. I reach into my pocket and fish out some gray pearl earrings I bought at Wal-Mart for her. I place these in her ears and step back to admire my handiwork. She looks so good I can’t keep it to myself.
“Damn, Bobbie, you still got it.”
She laughs, smiles at me, blushes and then waves me away like she’s shooing away a foolish young suitor.
“Go on now, girl!”
• • •
“Domestic.” Mossville. 2016.
Ostensibly, I am in Louisiana to do research on environmental racism and my family’s displacement from Mossville, a small, historic freedmen’s community just north of Lake Charles. At least, that is what I told the Ford Foundation when they awarded me a fellowship to pursue the project. I spend entire days poring over old documents in the Frazar Archives at McNeese University, flipping through ancient, dusty ledgers of property records in the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court tracking the history of black land ownership and dispossession and interviewing my relatives and the small diaspora of former Mossville residents scattered across east Texas and southwest Louisiana. Southwest Louisiana is a forgotten pit stop on Cancer Alley, a marshy petrochemical landscape of oil refineries and natural gas processing plants.
As a kid, I always knew we had arrived when I saw the clusters of pine trees along I-10 and could taste the metallic, toxic air. Now, nearly 30 years later, I drive through the region and try to imagine what Black social life might have been like in this place before the arrival of the refineries more than 80 years ago. Or 200 years ago, when indigenous Atakapa peoples maintained their small, migratory settlements along the shores of Prien Lake before first the Spanish and then the French and then the British and white American settlers arrived and decimated their communities with disease, Christianity and alcohol. I go to Mossville to remember a history I do not fully know.
Mossville is a small place: an unincorporated town located just north of the industrial Port of Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana. Varying accounts of the town’s early formation suggest it was founded as early as the 1790s, potentially making it one of the oldest free Black communities in the South. The town flourished during Reconstruction as a safe haven for recently freed Blacks looking to escape the racial terror of the emergent Jim Crow social order. But since the 1930s, the community has been home to a cluster of petrochemical plants whose operations have irreversibly contaminated its air, soil and water. 14 petrochemical companies currently surround Mossville, including an oil refinery, a coal-fired power plant, several vinyl manufacturers and a chemical plant in a town that is approximately five square miles in area. In the 1940s, southwest Louisiana became a critical site in the international petrochemical industry. Today, its proximity to natural gas and oil fields in Texas and northern Louisiana as well as the Port of Lake Charles and the Gulf of Mexico, about 30 miles away, make the region a strategic location for the industry. The petrochemical industry drives the state’s economy; in 2019, it generated $73 billion of the state GDP and supported 249,800 associated jobs. But that wealth has come at a high cost, one that has been disproportionately borne by the people of Mossville.
In 2011, then-Governor Bobby Jindal announced that Sasol, a South African multinational petrochemical corporation, would begin construction of an ethane cracker complex that extended farther into the town than any of the plants in the area—actually, right across the street from the cemetery where my grandmother is now buried along with all her people. The ethane cracker facility breaks down natural gas into smaller molecules that are used to make ethylene, a chemical product used in a variety of everyday consumer products including cosmetics, detergents, adhesives, packaging materials and plastics used in laptops, cell phones, IV drip bags and faux leather vehicle interiors. Following the announcement of the expansion, Sasol launched a voluntary buyout program that left only 62 residents in the community.
But aside from the research, the truth is that I am really in Lake Charles to see my grandmother. Barbara Jean Freeman has a lot of names. Her husband and her sisters called her Bobbie. Her neighbors called her Mrs. Freeman. Her children called her Madear. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called her Mamma, in a slight Anglicization of the French, maman. She was born in 1933 in the town of Westlake, just east of Mossville. Her father was from Westlake but her mother’s people, the Williams family, lived in Mossville and were among the founding families. She was a small child when the first plant, the Cities Services Corporation oil refinery, opened. She died in 2019, three years after the Sasol buyout.
In the summer of 2014, I was driving with my husband as we made a cross-country move from Houston, Texas to State College, Pennsylvania when my grandmother called. The news was not good. She had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which quickly spread to first one lung and then the other. The cancer was tough, but Bobbie was tougher. When I saw her a few months later and asked her how she was feeling, she was defiant and unequivocal: “I’m gonna kick this cancer in the ass.” She proceeded to do just that. But by the time her cancer came back a few years later, things were different. It didn’t take long to notice how tired she was, how slowly she moved. I began to understand. This time, the cancer was going to kick her ass, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
So I began going home to my grandmother and Lake Charles and Mossville as often as I could. Each time I came, I sat with my grandmother and asked her about her life: about growing up in Mossville, the arrival of the plants, her memories of life under Jim Crow, stories about her ancestors. At first, she was self-conscious about the camera recording her every word. But then she became used to it and started dropping dimes.
So I was not altogether surprised when I arrived in Lake Charles in October 2018 and she told me that her doctor had delivered more bad news: the latest round of chemotherapy had not yielded any results. Her cancer was terminal. When he asked her if she wanted to try another round of chemotherapy, she was as resolved as she had been four years earlier. “Why spend money when it’s not doing any good? So let’s just sit this out and do nothing.”
As she speaks, I listen quietly, hearing everything she isn’t saying. My people are deeply religious. My grandmother reads her Bible every morning, talks to God every day. She reminds me that Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” My grandmother is dying. Her speech is deliberate and certain. There is no fear. She is at peace and ready to face her Maker. My heart sits like a brick in my chest, and as she speaks, I feel a small knot tighten in my throat. The weight of her pending death feels like more than I can bear. I had planned to go to New Orleans the following day. Now, I am unsure if I should leave her. She is nonplussed. “No, baby. Go and see your friend. Have a good time. I’m not leaving yet.” She smiles. “I will see you when you get back.”