Community, From City to Village; A Profile On Nan Parati

In North Carolina in the middle of the 20th century, Nan Parati grew up as the child of two first generation hippies. Her brother’s first memory was protesting the Vietnam war in front of the post office. She saw constant examples of being an active community member from her parents, (who were very much involved in civil rights and “moving people forward”, according to Nan), and grew up with those ideals on her mind. “We were always involved in community actions”, Parati says. “That became our thing, and that became my thing.”

In accordance with the core value of moving people forward, Parati was an education major, and began teaching German English education in a high school, but this job was more short-lived than she had planned. Only a year and a half in, what was supposed to be a two-week vacation to New Orleans to visit a friend turned into a much longer stay. By the time Nan got off the train in the city, she felt that she had found her new home, and set about making it such.

In 1983, she was living in New Orleans and working at a place called the Whole Food Company. In a 2022 interview profile with PostGenre, Parati shared that she was actually fired from both the produce and cheese sections in the span of two weeks. In a last ditch effort, after hearing that the store’s signwriter was leaving, Nan asked if she could take that position claiming “I knew that was the job I was supposed to do”. It worked out, and she ended up becoming the Whole Food Company’s head of advertising. Just a few years later this job would turn out to lead to a connection with the New Orleans Jazz Festival, and a much longer career in entertainment and signmaking.

Not too long after she started working at the Jazz Fest in New Orleans, Parati said “I remember standing there one day as the gates opened, and I watched people just racing in so excited, and I thought in that moment you know what? My favorite thing in life is delighting people.” This translated, says Nan, years later to when she began working at the Green River Festival in Greenfield Massachusetts, which she was only planning to do for one year. In a devastating turn of events, while she was working in Massachusetts the 2005 hurricane Katrina wiped out Nan’s home in New Orleans. Despite this major life change, she made the best of it and found herself intrigued by the small town of Ashfield Massachusetts. While staying with a friend who lived in this tiny rural village Nan got to see first hand the way that people live, and while it was in stark contrast to the buzzing world of New Orleans, there was a beauty to it.

“At that point I had been about 20 years in the festival and show business, and I was touring with people like Jimmy Buffet you know, really big stuff, but it bugged me that everything was temporary.” Parati stated while describing the fleeting nature of putting on a show, and how many things get carelessly thrown away. “I was staying with a friend in Ashfield while I worked on the festival, and I was looking around, and I was thinking wow these people really pay attention to what they do. They grow their own food, they make things happen. I thought, these people really think about their lives, these people touch their lives, and they’re in control of their lives in a way that I wasn’t.” Nan considers herself very lucky, she says, that if she did have to lose her house in a hurricane, at least it was hurricane Katrina. Katrina being the first large scale climate disaster in the United States in a long time, victims of its damage received large portions of insurance money. Nan used that money to buy Elmer’s; a picturesque little building on Main street in Ashfield. She sent out a survey in the local newspaper and asked the town what they would like it to be, and people wrote back saying they would really like a breakfast restaurant. “And it’s funny, I don’t even cook!” says Nan. “I hate cooking, but again what I wanted to do was delight people. I really wanted to have them have a place that would make them happy. And that's what Elmer’s came to be.”

Parati has always said that doing this kind of thing is the “glitter” in her veins. When asked how she sees her community give back to her, she told a story that took place in her 30’s, back in New Orleans. She had just broken up with a boyfriend and was looking for a relatively inexpensive place to live, and some friends of hers were living in a studio apartment just outside the French quarter and invited her to move in with them. Shortly after Nan moved in, her friends (unrelated to Nan’s arrival) made the decision to move out, but Nan stayed. As she was getting to know the neighborhood, she realized that she was the only white person in this very low income, all black neighborhood. The very racially divided and racist nature of the deep south at that time contributed to a relationship between Nan and her neighbors that she claims she would not have found anywhere else. Parati elaborated, “The first thing that happened was I met this nine-year-old kid who started kinda teaching me about the world, and about ‘this is how we live compared to how you live’, and I listened to him.”

“At that time, in that area, a black person could get arrested for just about anything.” Nan stated. Her neighbors would come to her door and ask her to go get their kid or their husband out of jail. “Nan, dress up white” they would say, and go get him out. And Nan would. She would go down to the police station and simply her “whiteness”, she said, was enough to get most arrest situations dissolved. It wasn’t as if she got nothing in return, however. “I lived in that neighborhood for fifteen years, and my neighbors would make sure that people wouldn’t break into my house because people who knew I lived there would sometimes say ‘oh i’m going to break into her house’, and then my neighbor would say ‘no you’re not, no you’re not, she helps with my child.’”, Nan recounted. “There was a woman; she was a crack addict, and I found this out years later, but she would just sit on my stoop all night long and make sure no one messed with me. So, we all helped each other out in the ways that we could. It was such an amazing, valuable thing.”