In the years following Hurricane Katrina, I visited New Orleans many times to help in the cleanup and recovery. Often, I chaperoned groups of teen volunteers. When I did, those trips always evolved into incredibly uplifting and life-affirming experiences.
They always became about the people.
One person I met was Katy Reckdahl, a reporter for the Times-Picayune. While Katrina was lashing the Gulf Coast in August of 2005, Katy was giving birth to her son, Hector, at Touro Infirmary in New Orleans’s Garden District.
After meeting Katy, I read some of her archived articles, including one titled, “Talking Trash.” It was a feature about Cornelius Washington, a sanitation worker in the French Quarter who sang, danced, and performed tricks—“a wizard of trash cans.”
I had to learn about him.
Sadly, Cornelius passed away not long after Hurricane Katrina. But with Katy’s help, I located his mother, Ms. Mary Wiley. Ms. Mary still lived in the tiny town of Waterproof, Louisiana, where she’d raised Cornelius.
Ms. Mary and I spoke on the phone several times. She sent me a letter, too, a handwritten letter filled with memories of Cornelius. Whenever I read it, it was as if the Cornelius I’d seen in video clips—the baldheaded man with the big hoop earring and the New Orleans drawl—was reading to me.
Cornelius’s story has the flavor of folktales and folk heroes like John Henry, and by incorporating repetition, alliteration, and exaggeration, I have tried to honor those qualities in the telling. Still, it must be said that while Cornelius was certainly a showman, he may not have twirled lids like tops or clapped them like cymbals. He had signals and calls, but they weren’t the exact ones described here. The garbage bags he threw into his hopper probably didn’t land in perfect pyramids. Nor did the destruction following Katrina rise as high as the steeple atop St. Louis Cathedral. And though he was celebrated and beloved in his neighborhoods, he was not called Marvelous Cornelius.
But he deserves to be.
On so many levels, Cornelius symbolizes what the city of New Orleans is all about—the energy, the spirit, the magic, the people. That’s what brought all those volunteers to the Crescent City, and inside each one was a little bit of Marvelous Cornelius.
To find out more about the real Cornelius Washington and to learn how to write your own story in the American folk tradition, visit www.chroniclebooks.com/CorneliusWashington.