I’ve never had the good fortune to live there, but it is my favorite city in the world. I love to visit.
My first proper visit was spent staying with a friend, Kat, for a few days. I took myself to the Audubon Zoo, where I saw white tigers for the first time. I got a keychain of white tigers and used it for about 20 years, until just a few weeks ago.
By angela n. from Washington, DC – Audubon Zoo, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81793543
I wandered around the Garden District, struck by the lushness.
I moseyed through the French Quarter, and fell in love with the small shops filled with what seemed to me esoteric and strange things. Not the souvenir shops, but the ones on the quieter streets, far from bustling Rue Bourbon, that cater to the witchy crowd. Later, I’d realize most of that was tat, too, but it was at least not the kind of stuff you found everywhere.
It was the first place I encountered musicians just playing music in the public spaces. Not a concert in an auditorium, just on the street, or in the park, or wherever, seemingly spontaneously. They call it busking here in the UK; I’m not sure if there’s a name for it in the US. But musicians, solo and in groups, spring up everywhere in New Orleans, like weeds through the cracks in the sidewalks (but far more welcome). Music wafts over you everywhere you go in the French Quarter, just like the scent of magnolia and lush greenness drifts around you as you meander through the Garden District.
In the French Quarter, I first heard jazz as it should be heard: with heart and soul. Wandering down Rue Bourbon in the evening, jazz spills out of every fifth or sixth door. The musicians on stage aren’t playing like I learned to in band – reading the notes and executing them flawlessly – they’re infusing feeling into the music. Even though much of it is instrumental. This was an eye-opener for me.
I sat down in one of those places and admired the band. Jamil Sharif and his band were playing. I bought his CD; I still have it and I still play it. For many years afterwards, I would think that When the Saints Come Marching In on that album referred to the football team, the New Orleans Saints. (No, I did not have a religious upbringing; why do you ask?)
New Orleans is where I fell in love with Spanish Moss. It calms the whole area: first, you slow to look up at it more closely. You may have read or heard about it before, or even seen it in a movie, but now here it is, and it’s actually real, and what is it, anyway? You wander slowly, or stop, and really look at it.
Then, your eye sweeps across the landscape and you see more of it. You realize that it beards the trees, making them look like old men before their time. It puts you in mind of mortality, age, peace, wisdom. And you stroll through the park, or down the street, a bit more thoughtfully, a bit more reflective.
Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on 29 August 2005. The date is burned in my memory. I was living and working in northwest Louisiana at the time. I was working as a front desk clerk at a hotel, so I met the evacuees. I also knew some personally. Later, after we saw the scale of the damage, we called them refugees. I wept. I still weep sometimes.
My youngest brother was in the Air National Guard at the time, based just south of New Orleans. He did his duty in the Superdome. He also went door to door, marking those terrible Xs on houses. So many people hadn’t been able to evacuate; hadn’t had anywhere to go, or any way to get there, or any way to get back; hadn’t had anywhere to go where they could take their pets; and so on. And, of course, I don’t think anyone really predicted just how terrible it would be – I’m not sure if anyone expected so many levee failures.
Kat didn’t evacuate. She’s originally German, naturalized to the US. She’s no-nonsense and fearless, and later would tell me it was white roof city for awhile, but it was all fine. Jesse and Nita both evacuated from St Bernard Parish. Later, they would wonder whether they could claim twice on their insurance since their homes flooded fully, twice. (They didn’t try; that’s just the sort of comment you make to friends while you’re processing it all.) Jesse had done things like moving his game console and other things to the top shelf of the entertainment unit in the living room before he left, expecting a bit of flooding, but that the top shelf should be fine. His home was in the area that got 14 feet of water.
Some of the evacuees staying at my hotel were functionally illiterate. They had stacks of forms to fill out for FEMA to try to piece their lives back together. I helped as best I could.
We all watched the drama on the bridge with horror, where people were stranded for days. We all felt so utterly helpless in the face of such total devastation. I’d driven on that bridge. It’s very high up, and they were stuck there because there was that much water. It was all unreal, too real, and just terrible.
Until February 2005, I’d lived for a time in El Dorado, Arkansas, which is as tiny as it sounds. The population was about 30,000. (If you’re in the UK, particularly England, know that because population density is so much higher here in the UK, population numbers don’t really mean the same thing in the US and UK; a town of 30,000 in the US feels more like a hamlet of closer to 10,000 in England.) It had a downtown – a few blocks, with a single 6-story building and all the rest 2 stories. There was a square there. I’d sat there at some point – I don’t remember why now. New Orleans was a city of 500,000 at the time, plus however many thousands of tourists on any given day.
In late December 2005, I ventured down to New Orleans for the first time since Katrina had hit. It was a brief visit; I think just a few hours. Much work was underway, but of course, with few habitable places to house builders, it was all very slow for a very long time. That is, much of the area was still quite a mess. I remember seeing a whole swimming pool that’d been lifted out of the ground and was sitting in the wrong place entirely. Whole neighborhoods looked like the storm had only just passed through. My heart broke all over again.
I sat in Jackson Square writing some post cards (a favorite activity of mine). This was previously a bustling, busy square in the heart of the tourist district. There had been artists, musicians, tour guides, plus lots of individuals passing through. Sitting there in that moment, it felt like downtown El Dorado. There were just a handful of people. There were no tour guides convening their parties. There were no buskers, no artists offering to draw a caricature of you while you sat, no palm readers. Just a handful of individuals, passing through or sitting a spell. I’ll never forget how unreal it all felt.
In 2007, I started falling in love with the person who I’d later marry. We met on IRC, a very old kind of chat room. We’d been friends for years before that, and then it started blossoming into something more. We decided to meet in the flesh – and I had him fly into New Orleans, so he, too, could experience this city I love. It had thankfully recovered much more by spring 2008.
He got off the plane with a splitting migraine, so the brass-heavy welcome band in the luggage hall was not at all welcome to him. I greeted him with purple, green, and gold Mardi Gras beads. He still has those, and puts them in a special place every year when we decorate for Mardi Gras.
Despite the rocky start between him and New Orleans, I think he came to love it, too. Together, we wandered along the very broken sidewalks in the French Quarter. I hadn’t noticed them before, but this time I was nursing a concussion, so was being a bit more cautious.
We took a cemetery tour, and the guide asked us each what we were doing in New Orleans. There were people there on business, squeezing in a bit of sightseeing, and people visiting friends or family. I answered that we were being tourists. He thanked us, genuinely. New Orleans needs tourists. Its economy largely depends on tourists.
Together, we found a rather large band playing outside the Foot Locker – honestly, it looked like they were all in high school marching band, complete with sousaphone. My own high school band was excellent, routinely bringing home top scores at tough competitions. But we were technically excellent. It’s really hard, I think, to get a 200+ piece band to play with feeling. This smaller ensemble – perhaps 5-10 players (size varied each night) – was much more able to play with feeling, and to play jazz. It was really enjoyable, and they drew quite a crowd. We saw them a few times while we were there, and were delighted to see them there again when we visited a year later.
I showed him the neat esoteric shops in the French Quarter, and the lush Garden District, complete with some very interesting architectural decisions. I took him to Café du Monde for beignets, and he marveled over the 4″ stack of powdered sugar on top of the beignets that were served. We visited the aquarium, and we went to Jackson Square. It was, thankfully, once again, vibrant and lively.
We went to Mother’s for the first time. I wasn’t impressed – turns out to be an over-hyped place mostly for tourists, I think. But it was Chris’ first exposure to biscuits & gravy. (With crawfish, because why not – this visit included so much crawfish for Chris; it’s where he fell in love with it.) Much later, I realized that biscuits are entirely different to Brits, and asked him what he expected to be served when I’d told him to get that. He shrugged and said he was pretty confident it wouldn’t actually be those dry, cardboard disks called biscuits in the UK, doused in Bisto. (It isn’t.) He was just open to finding out what I was so insistent he should try. 🙂
We found a shop called Sucre, specializing in sweet treats. You can smell the sugar as you walk in the door. And you probably smell of sugar when you leave. It’s pervasive. It’s the kind of shop your diabetic friend needs to wait outside while you nip in – else they get a contact sugar high just stepping into the shop, without even eating anything. Its walls are lined with beautiful works of art, all sweet edibles.
We rode the streetcar and found a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant. Neither of us had had Vietnamese food before, but this was so delicious and so delicate. We will now seek out Vietnamese food wherever we can. Where we live, we can only find pho, which is very good, but such a tiny sliver of the cuisine. We have only a few (quite labor-intensive) Vietnamese recipes in our collection so far. I’d love more.
It was over a month after Mardi Gras, but we still saw remnants of it in our wandering, like this Mardi Gras tree.
We wandered the whole length of Magazine Street on a very hot and sunny day, arriving at a restaurant called Semolina at the end of it. We collapsed in the air conditioning, and both ordered a pasta dish. It was one of the best meals we’d ever had. We promptly found a recipe online, and now Roban is a staple special meal that we have every year around this time – might be Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, or New Year’s Day (but not all three). When we can, we have it with crawfish, just as we had it there on Magazine Street. This year, Sainsbury’s (which is usually so good, and is the only place we can find crawfish these days, even if they call it crayfish) let us down, so we had shrimp roban instead. It works well with shrimp, chicken, and crawfish – mixed or individually. It’s a creamy pasta dish – you start by making alfredo sauce, and then you add more cream and blackened redfish seasoning. We’ve just this year finally exhausted our supply of Paul Prudhomme’s blackened redfish seasoning that we’d brought with us from our last US trip a decade ago, but thankfully found a copycat recipe for that, too, and it works well.
On another visit, after my brother started living there, we spent some time with him. The Semolina on Magazine Street was no longer there, but we went to another location. They still had roban on the menu, but it wasn’t as good as the one in our memory. I’ve been reading recently about how much else goes into taste beyond just what’s on the plate. I believe it. The whole day of fun exploration of all those little shops, the sun, the heat, then the relief of the a/c, all of it played into how wonderful that meal was. With that much cream, roban is always tasty, but it will probably never be quite that good again. That’s okay. Some memories are simply meant to be treasured, rather than recreated.
I know that I see New Orleans through rose-colored glasses because I don’t live there. I know it has its share of problems. Perhaps more than its share.
I also know how I feel when I’m there. I feel alive, electrified. Engaged. Happy. Open. Curious. Enthralled. At ease. Ready to laissez les bon temps rouler.
New Orleans – at least my rose-tinted version of it – is forever in my heart, in my soul. It embodies for me good times, exploration, new sounds, and vibrancy.
*
A few days ago, a fucking terrorist attacked New Orleans. He killed many people with his truck, and planned to kill many more with bombs planted all over the city. Right in the heart of good times central, bon temps Bourbon Street, during New Year’s celebrations.
This morning, I’ve read the list of those identified so far who perished through streaming tears, checking to see if any of the friends I’ve lost contact with were there. (I checked in with my brother as soon as I saw the news a few days ago. He’s fine.)
Thankfully, I don’t know any of the dead. I didn’t know any of the dead from Hurricane Katrina, either, but I wept for them and their survivors, too.
Even after not having set foot in that city for so long; even despite never having lived there; even though I don’t think I personally know anyone directly afflicted by this tragedy; nevermind all of that: it feels as though my heart has been ripped out of my chest and stomped on.
I guess that’s because the city has part of my heart and soul.
Knowing the scale of the attack that was planned, and having already seen this city I love so much go through such terrible devastation not that long ago, I feel as though an elephant is crushing my chest, unable to breathe. I guess this is the point of terrorism – to try to suck the joy out of life. The empowerment. The fun.
New Orleans will bounce back, of course. There will be the jazz funerals, the mourning. And then, the tourists will be welcomed back. I’m sure law enforcement will be more vigilant. Carnival starts in just a couple of days – the Mardi Gras season runs from 12th Night, 6 Jan, to Mardi Gras itself, which is 4 March this year. There will be crowds, beads, parades, debauchery, and bon temps.
But just right now, I could use a hand getting this elephant to move.
