#815 Leo Walks Home- Fatima Shaik
Fatima Shaik has a knack for creating environment. It makes you sense everything around the characters. She writes about New Orleans, and if you have ever been there, as soon as you read one of these stories, you can feel, see, and smell everything that she does.
This story is just another biographical take about the life of a New Orleans citizen. Leo has lived his whole life in this neighborhood. He survived a boyhood polio surgery in a white hospital and has lived a somewhat normal life. His neighborhood friends calling him “crip” gives him a sense of belonging more than the loneliness of being cooped up in bed watching the season change through the window.
He lives as normal a life as you can, seeing the world for what it is. He will outlive his wife who will die way too early, but at least they got to dance slowly. He is a man from New Orleans, and that should be good enough for anybody.
“A few of his relatives had run away from New Orleans, thinking that people in other places would be perfect…Leo knew better. He was once crippled, and now he was whole, even though he could hardly walk straight. Everyone was a cripple in some way at one time or another.”
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