Synthesis BB, 1983, Author: Ida Kohlmeyer © The Estate of Ida Kohlmeyer. Courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art: A gift from Arthur Roger

Some children took "Once Upon a Time..." into their dreams before going to bed, while others used "On an ancient land..." Everyone is an invitation, a story spinner device to travel to a foreign country-soft Lullaby in their own right. However, in my memory, I know that there is no better spell to summon an ancient place: "Let me get that jar down..." 

The "pot" is sunny yellow enameled cast iron with a heavy matching lid. Similarly, the pot in question is more like a deep pan with a removable wooden handle, which is only used twice a year to prepare a specific main dish. I call it simply "okra pot".

There are no family recipes on paper. not one. Sometimes when I reveal this, I know people think I am shy. But my mother did not write them down. Her mother, my grandmother, and my grandmother's sister, nor my aunt who was a witch in front of the fire. I learn like them-through repetition. trial. "Guessing" and internal arithmetic. Feel the memory pushing you forward. These women just "put down that pot" in their respective sunny Los Angeles kitchens. After some whispers and some laughter—and the busy rhythm of cutting onions, bell peppers, and celery—someone, usually my mother, began to explain Open the lyrics to sing a faded, hazy song in a language that is both familiar and unrecognizable. 

Gardez, M'sieu Banjo, Misi Banjo Comme il est bien, taillè —traditional 

Everything is up; intertwined: the scent of flour and fat baked into a batter; the mellow notes of my mother's waltz, floating in Creole, take us elsewhere only a few times a year. I haven't been to a place, but I will know, to love: New Orleans. 

Many years after my grandmother and aunt Zeng passed away, I realized that when my mother cooks in this special pot, the walls and floors will disappear. We are elsewhere, neither in the present nor in the past, but together: in her Play with Lee Dorsey or Paul Gayten and his band in the damp New Orleans bedroom; listen to Dave Bartholomew and Antoine "Fats" Domino on the front hall radio on the front porch. My mother’s voice trembles as these tunes move up and down. Some of them have lyrics stitched together. As she explained, it’s an allusion, but what I hear is "in your window." I imagined sly phrases and sparkling diced notes floating in the white perforated curtains of their narrow wooden house in the seventh district. I need to absorb this. Practice makes perfect. 

Lawdy, lawdy, lawdy 

In these ceremonies, my family is not unique. Over time, I noticed a subject, a puzzling cliché. Many of my older relatives and their friends — and friends of friends — moved to Los Angeles in order to get here — but spent a lot of time trying to replicate a certain feeling of where they left. Even though they have lived in Southern California for decades, they have always called this place home. The stare of the middle distance who lives at home. They put their story as close as a picture of sweetheart in a locket. Many of my mother's friends have been uprooted from their own very special south (rural, urban, deep)-these places have left a mark on their spirit. I can hear their history in the rhythm of their speech, the music in the dialect, and the procrastination; I can even suck my teeth or roll my eyes in different ways.

Their states of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee are fully displayed in backyards or city park gatherings throughout the Los Angeles Basin-picnics and fry, picnics and barbecues, where people trot away from their birthplace Iconic power or sides, from mustard eggs and baobabs to Sock-it-To-Me cakes and luxurious stone fruit tarts, dotted with aromatic peaches and apricots picked from the backyard trees. All of this: Respect for the past and gratitude for the "paradise" they came here all the way; Los Angeles where they gritted their teeth.

The floral tablecloth was fluffed and then flattened in place on the picnic table, announcing that the serious business of the day was about to begin. Women and men occupy their ceremonial places behind smokers or shabby pan grills. The adults moved freely, fiddling with the tableware, setting up the auxiliary table, staggering, and had to bend down and use their sharp teeth to warn us restless children in a low voice: Either help or stand up from my feet! So help me!

In the background is brewing its own indispensable existence: the portable electronic tube magnifying turntable. On its main axis is stacked a hodgepodge of 45s and LP alternately, all of which are carefully selected like representative side dishes. These records brought by the guests also claim to be from a remote place of origin. The South also appears vividly in this way: in this group, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana are the most common. In these food exchanges, it was obvious that no one tried to cross the south; no one escaped completely. No one has left everything behind. Not really. Try your best.

Maybe that story is tailed and you feel heavy or sad or regrettably incomplete. Maybe the situation will flip a coin for you-"Stay or Go". Or now, faced with difficult choices, maybe you would rather just remember relatives and kinship. Reconvening with other people who have gone through similar journeys, and those who understand the difficult arithmetic of compromise, they found that this is the place where happiness blooms: in the ceremony of connecting and sharing a very special Afro-American South souvenir, they have gone Took so many miles of memories. This is another way of expressing grace. 

After a while, the music circling on the turntable began to perform magic. Sometimes the sound will quiet down, and the music will occupy the center of the stage. Folk songs and blues, as well as the joyous sparks of jumping and swinging, remind people of old ballrooms, high school proms, porch parties, and after-get off work basement parties. These tunes-across genres, across generations-are layered and sometimes complex scenery in themselves. 

But at these parties, my mother's music is not on the main axis. I should say, on the contrary, my mother's record in Louisiana is not. She does have a collection of the 45s and LPs that she is proud of, and a wide variety of vibrant cha-cha and merengue, bebop and West Coast jazz, and runs through r&b. She especially likes singers-Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simon, Carmen McRae-their voices sound like the accent of a big city, and those with earrings and evening dresses embodies a fascinating The woman with the pulse of the city, in the end, beckoned to her. 

But the songs she sang in the kitchen, what she learned on the radio, or the recordings played on the front hall recorder, have disappeared: she "gave Bessie" her little collection. Later I learned that Betsy is not a bully, let alone a person, but a weather event. The hurricane of 1965 flooded my grandfather's shotgun house. In a hurry, he took away piles of irreparable things—records, clothes, photos, and yearbooks—and threw them away before telling her. She left many adolescent souvenirs in that small bedroom, which is a hidden space and also a sewing room for my grandmother and great-grandmother. This is a big injury, even if she didn't say it out loud, she never really got rid of it. So while these Los Angeles parties will celebrate this moment, vividly here and now, the turntable will become the New Orleans of Memphis and Gulfport, Beaumont and others. Later, the sky will turn violet. If my brother and I are quiet enough, we can eavesdrop on conversations from other people’s disappearing areas.

Now, when I relive these moments, what makes me feel strange is that even without many physical records, I have no memory of missing anything. There are music scores on the piano bench, and a jazz radio station on Sundays. I used to work on New Orleans r&b tunes, regularly rotating Muddy Waters, Bobby “Blue” Bland and BB King. But mainly my mother is singing her own New Orleans "Hot Parade"-Johnny Adams, Anne Laurie, Paul Getten, Archibald, and of course Fatty-using her own frequency broadcast. This is also the first time I understand New Orleans; its geography; its rhythm; and its peculiar sorrowful color. 

When my mother left for Los Angeles in the mid-1950s to start a college music scholarship, she happened to be on the train with one of her "popular parade" artists, band leader Paul Getten. Just getting rid of the hustle and bustle of the spotlight, he just performed a dance in New Orleans where my mother participated. There are fewer seats than specified. The two of them sat in the window seats of the Sunset Limited in the quarantined Jim Crow car and got rid of the last insult: Gayten was on the way to the West Coast show, and my mother was waiting on the way to her first Los Angeles address. Watching her—as my relative said, “Through the Pearl Gate of Los Angeles.” I imagined the two of them passing through the invisible but rock-solid Mason-Dickson in that wobbly car. Line and enter their infinite future. 

I was born in Louisiana and I like its sound...I live in California and the people are very friendly, but they don’t know Louisiana...-Percy Mayfield

Music and souvenirs collected by the author's mother.

What kind of person we become depends on what we discard and keep. We remember the necessities that we cannot carry with us. After my mother passed away in 2009, I organized her relics for several years, and this idea permeated me. -White snapshot, her high school diploma, my grandmother's old fabric. However, what puzzles me is that a weather-proof storage box full of music (cassette tapes and CDs) is separate from her main collection and is always placed next to the console stereo in the living room. I read with anxious fingers-a bunch of classical music, jazz, modern R&B, and then a bunch of New Orleans music, some of which are still compressed: Professor Longhair, Dave Bartholomew, Dr. John, Allen Toussaint, Louis Prima, John Ni Adams. Just reading the title brought her into the room. I heard the blues and "blues" that made me blush. 

At first, I was at a loss. Everything should be over, right? However, carefully observing the familiar record store stickers and price tags, I began to piece together the method, time and some reasons. In my teenage years, when I established my own collection series-Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind and Fire-she was just beginning to rebuild her collection. There must be something for her to walk side by side with me, to kill time, to relive the person her age at my age, to make her both excited and happy. 

I don't know how much effort she put in to fill these loopholes, and I don't know how much it means to her to own physical objects and documents. Is she homesick more than I thought? Or, I think it’s more likely that the act of collecting is more about building something that can be delivered. Maybe this is insurance, a promise to the future, we, her children, will not forget her south, but more importantly, we will find a way back there.

I turn to the right and you find a bright light that leads you to my blue heaven. You find a comfortable place, a cozy room with a fireplace, a small nest, and a place where roses bloom-fatty dominoes 

When my mother boarded the westbound train and dreamed of the future, I knew she thought she would not leave home forever. Therefore, New Orleans never felt the tension of the past in her heart. Now, as an adult, when I wander through her old New Orleans neighborhood at dusk, my ears are trained to the music wafting from the bedroom window, or I find myself attracted by the second-line neighborhood beats on Sunday afternoon , It's as if I have never been here-in this lasting moment.

Finding this secret hiding place is simply magic. I took the prize—tied up carefully like a passenger—through town and returned to my home in sunny Los Angeles, where I now also pay close attention to the yellow jar. Everything is waiting for me: when I am ready to let the floor and walls collapse; when I want to go back to the past. I can be here and there at the same time. I know that longing will not disappear. It is passed, a kind of inheritance, like a cache of records, like a recipe you must keep in mind, like the dialect you grew up in. You can summon it whenever you need it, from deep, big and small, bitter and sweet.

Lynell George is a journalist and essayist based in Los Angeles. She is the author of three non-fiction books: No Crystal Stairs: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso), After/Picture: Los Angeles outside the frame (Angel City Press), and a handful of Earth, Hugo Award finalists , A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press). Her class notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whiskey A Go Go: The Complete Recordings won the 2017 Grammy Awards.

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